How to earn a billion dollars

如何赚到十亿美元

June 2026 (This is based on a talk I gave at the Oxford Union.) Since this is apparently the future prime ministers’ club, I’m going to tell you about something it would be good if more politicians understood: I’m going to tell you how people become billionaires. I hope this will be useful to you even if you don’t plan to go into politics. Those of you who don’t become prime minister can become billionaires instead. 2026年6月（本文基于我在牛津联盟发表的一次演讲。）既然这里显然是未来首相的俱乐部，我想告诉你们一些如果更多政客能理解会很好的事情：我将告诉你们人们是如何成为亿万富翁的。我希望这对你们即使不打算从政也有所帮助。你们中那些没能成为首相的人，反而可以成为亿万富翁。

The reason I know about this topic is that 21 years ago Jessica and I started something called Y Combinator. If you haven’t heard of Y Combinator, it’s a cross between an investment firm and a school for startup founders. Since we started it in 2005 we’ve funded about 6500 companies. 我之所以了解这个话题，是因为21年前，杰西卡（Jessica）和我创办了一个名为 Y Combinator 的机构。如果你没听说过 Y Combinator，它介于投资公司和创业者学校之间。自2005年创办以来，我们已经资助了约6500家公司。

Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I’ve spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline. 创办一家成功的初创公司是成为亿万富翁最常见的方式，所以实际上，过去21年里我一直在培训人们成为亿万富翁。到目前为止，大约有30人做到了，而且还有更多人正在路上。

So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it’s impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it’s possible. It’s hard, but it’s possible. 所以你可以想象，上个月当一位美国政客说“赚到十亿美元是不可能的”时，我有多么震惊。我感觉就像一位滑冰教练听到有人说“完成三周半跳是不可能的”一样。当然是可能的。这很难，但确实可能。

She wasn’t saying, of course, that it’s impossible to become a billionaire. Obviously that’s possible. Nor was she talking about the distinction between income and capital gains. She wasn’t making a point about accounting. What she meant was that it’s impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way. 当然，她并不是说成为亿万富翁是不可能的。显然那是可能的。她也不是在讨论收入和资本利得之间的区别，也不是在谈论会计问题。她的意思是，如果不做坏事——不以某种方式作弊——就不可能变得那么富有。

A couple days later I was talking to the founder of a startup I’d funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a founder, what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn’t been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she’d built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn’t exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth. 几天后，我与一位我资助的初创公司创始人交谈。我像往常一样，在见到创始人时先问她的增长率是多少。她说上个月是93%。我指出，这意味着她的净资产也以每月93%的速度增长。她正以惊人的速度变得富有。然而，她并没有做任何坏事。她的初创公司增长如此之快，仅仅是因为用户喜欢她构建的产品。所以她能从自己的经历中感受到那位政客错得有多离谱。她没有剥削任何人。事实上恰恰相反，她的初创公司增长如此之快，是因为她和她的联合创始人拼命工作以让用户满意，结果用户们都在向朋友推荐。这就是指数级增长的来源。

Later that day I was talking about her case online, and someone replied that having a few million and growing at 93% a month was radically different from being a billionaire. I suspect many people would agree with this statement. But it turns out not merely to be false, but false in a very illuminating way. 那天晚些时候，我在网上谈论她的案例，有人回复说，拥有几百万且每月增长93%，与成为亿万富翁有着天壤之别。我怀疑很多人会同意这种说法。但事实证明，这不仅是错误的，而且这种错误本身就极具启发性。

So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number. I know this may seem contrived, but I promise it will be useful for you. I’m going to have you do the most common kind of calculation I do as an investor, and the experience will bring home to you what startups are all about. 所以我想请大家帮个忙。请拿出你们的手机计算一个数字。我知道这看起来可能有些刻意，但我保证这对你们会有用。我将让你们做我作为投资者最常做的一种计算，这种体验会让你们深刻理解初创公司的本质。

If we interpret his statement in the most conservative way and assume that a few means 2, her company has to grow 500x for her to become a billionaire. So we are going to calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 500x. 如果我们以最保守的方式解读他的话，假设“几百万”意味着200万，那么她的公司必须增长500倍，她才能成为亿万富翁。所以我们要计算一下，以93%的增长率增长500倍需要多少个月。

To do this we want to calculate the log base 1.93 of 500. The easiest way to do that is to go to Google search, which lets you do calculations right in the search box. So go to Google search and type log(500, 1.93). If you typed that right, the answer you get is about 9.45. 为此，我们需要计算以1.93为底的500的对数。最简单的方法是使用谷歌搜索，它允许你在搜索框中直接进行计算。所以去谷歌搜索并输入 log(500, 1.93)。如果你输入正确，得到的答案大约是9.45。

That is how many months of 93% growth it takes to become a billionaire, starting from 2 million. A couple million and 93% growth are not, in fact, radically different from a billion. They’re nine and a half months apart. 这就是从200万开始，以93%的增长率达到十亿资产所需的月数。事实上，几百万加上93%的增长率与十亿并没有天壤之别。它们之间只差了九个半月。

Now you see why, when I meet a founder, the first thing I ask about is their growth rate. 现在你们明白为什么我见到创始人时，问的第一件事就是他们的增长率了。

But I don’t want anyone to accuse me of using unrealistic numbers, so let’s take a more conservative growth rate. Let’s see what happens at 15% a month. That’s not rare at all. I constantly encounter startups growing at 15% a month. 但我不想让任何人指责我使用不切实际的数字，所以让我们采用一个更保守的增长率。看看每月15%的增长率会发生什么。这一点也不罕见。我经常遇到每月增长15%的初创公司。

If your revenues grow at 15% a month, how much more will you be making 5 years from now? To calculate that, we need to find 1.15 to the 60th power (since 5 years is 60 months). So go to Google again and this time type 1.15^60. The answer should be about 4384. Meaning in 5 years your startup will be making 4384 times as much. If you’re currently making ten thousand a month, in five years you’ll be making about 44 million a month, or 526 million a year. And at that point, if you own as much of the company as founders typically do, you will be a billionaire. 如果你的收入每月增长15%，5年后你会赚多少钱？要计算这个，我们需要求1.15的60次方（因为5年是60个月）。所以再次去谷歌，这次输入 1.15^60。答案大约是4384。这意味着5年后你的初创公司收入将是现在的4384倍。如果你目前每月赚一万，五年后你每月将赚约4400万，或者一年赚5.26亿。到那时，如果你像典型的创始人那样持有公司股份，你就会成为亿万富翁。

In the real world, growth rates tend to slow down a bit. A very successful startup will probably be growing faster than 15% a month in year 1 and slower than 15% a month in year 4. But you end up in about the same place. If you start a startup in your early twenties, it’s definitely possible to be a billionaire by the time you’re thirty. Hard, but possible. 在现实世界中，增长率往往会放缓。一家非常成功的初创公司在第一年可能增长得比每月15%快，而在第四年则比15%慢。但最终结果差不多。如果你在二十出头时创办一家公司，到三十岁时成为亿万富翁绝对是可能的。很难，但可能。

I wanted you to feel this by doing the calculation yourselves, because now you understand one of the reasons people start startups. Exponential growth is like magic. It generates outcomes that seem impossible. And that’s why some politicians distrust it. They don’t understand the math of exponential growth, so when they see people becoming what seems to them impossibly rich, they assume they must have cheated. 我希望你们通过亲自计算来感受这一点，因为现在你们理解了人们创办初创公司的原因之一。指数级增长就像魔法。它能产生看似不可能的结果。这就是为什么一些政客不信任它。他们不理解指数增长的数学原理，所以当他们看到人们变得在他们看来“不可能地富有”时，他们就认为这些人一定是作弊了。

But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don’t have to cheat to become a billionaire. You’ve seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues. If it’s impossible to make a billion dollars without cheating, which of those two numbers is impossible? It’s certainly not impossible to grow at 15% a month without cheating. Startups do that all the time. And how long you can continue to grow at that rate depends on the size of the market. Obviously for you to grow 4000x, there has to be at least 4000x… 但现在你们至少通过亲自计算明白了，要成为亿万富翁并不需要作弊。你们已经亲眼看到计算中只有两个数字：增长率和持续时间。如果说不作弊就不可能赚到十亿美元，那么这两个数字中哪一个是不可能的呢？每月增长15%而不作弊当然不是不可能的。初创公司一直在这样做。而你能以这个速度增长多久，取决于市场的规模。显然，要让你增长4000倍，市场规模至少得有4000倍……