你非要有斯坦福MBA文憑 才能開發出一款約會應用嗎

The estimated cost of an MBA for a single student who lives off campus at Stanford University is slightly more than $212,000. Add to that tidy sum the opportunity costs of quitting a job at Google that paid about $75,000 a year, and your all-in cost for the Master of the Universe degree comes to a formidable, if not mind-numbing, number: nearly $390,000.

在校外居住的學生就讀斯坦福大學（Stanford University）MBA的成本，大約超過212,000美元。再加上從谷歌（Google）辭職所產生的每年約75,000美元的機會成本，攻讀這種被戲稱爲“宇宙之王”的學位的總成本累計接近390,000美元，這樣一筆龐大的費用，恐怕會令許多人目瞪口呆。

That’s the kind of hole Amanda Bradford dug for herself when she graduated from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business just three months ago. So what is she doing with that world-class education?

三個月前剛剛從斯坦福大學商學院畢業的阿曼達o布拉德福德，便爲自己挖了這樣一個大坑。那麼，她接受如此頂級的教育是要做什麼？

She is launching an app on iTunes. Not just any app, mind you. It’s yet another dating app, a Tinder-like application for super picky people who want to meet other super picky people. In a world cluttered with the likes of OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and Zoosk, there are more than 200 entries listed under dating apps on iTunes alone.

她正在iTunes上發佈一款應用程序。注意，這可不是一款普通的應用。這是一款約會應用，類似於交友應用Tinder，專爲超級挑剔的人找到同樣挑剔的約會對象。如今同類產品多如牛毛，比如OkCupid、Coffee Meets Bagal、Hinge、Plenty of Fish和Zoosk等，僅iTunes上便有200多款約會應用。

Do we really need another app for people who can’t get dates on their own? And does it really take an MBA from Stanford to launch an app company?

在這樣的情況下，我們真的有必要爲那些靠自己無法找到約會對象的人再推出一款新應用嗎？成立一家手機應用公司，真的需要有MBA學位嗎？

Probably not. But none of that seems to have deterred 29-year-old Bradford, whose resume at least makes her prime dating material on what she is calling The League. Among other things, the app allows would-be daters to see the educational and work backgrounds of The League’s members, hooking them into the LinkedIn profiles and Facebook pages of users.

可能並不需要。但這並沒有讓29歲的布拉德福德打消念頭。至少，在這款被她稱爲The League的應用上，布拉德福德的履歷可以讓她成爲優質約會對象。這款應用允許想要約會的人查看The League會員的教育和工作背景，誘導他們進入用戶的LinkedIn個人資料和Facebook頁面。

A glimpse of Bradford’s CV would lead most to wonder why she would waste her time with an app in a highly crowded field. After all, she graduated in 2007 from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in information systems, a somewhat rare young woman with a STEM credential. Bradford then landed a job as a sales engineer and later account executive at . After a three-year stint there, she moved to one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley: Google, first as a “pre-sales engineer” and finally in a business development role, working with Google product and engineering teams. Bradford even spent nine months at Sequoia Capital, the high-flying Silicon Valley venture capital firm, as an investor.

布拉德福德的簡歷會讓大多數人產生一個疑問——她爲什麼浪費時間，在一個高度飽和的領域裏開發一款應用？畢竟，她在2007年畢業於卡耐基梅隆大學（Carnegie Mellon），取得了信息系統專業的學位，而能取得STEM（科學、技術、工程與數學）學位的女性可謂鳳毛麟角。畢業後，布拉德福德成爲一名銷售工程師，後來在企業雲計算公司擔任客戶經理。在這家公司工作三年之後，她又前往硅谷最熱門的公司之一：谷歌，最初擔任“售前工程師”，後來進入業務開發部門，與谷歌的產品和工程設計團隊共事。布拉德福德甚至還在硅谷著名的風險投資公司紅杉資本（Sequoia Capital）做了9個月的投資者。

You’d think someone with that kind of resume, topped by a Stanford MBA no less, would think up a more substantive business than a dating app. Last year, a record 18% of Stanford MBAs founded companies, but few of those startups were created to do launch an app.

你肯定會想，有如此了不起的履歷，再加上毫不遜色的斯坦福大學MBA學位，一個人應該想出更實質性的業務，而不是一款約會應用。去年，斯坦福大學MBA學生創立公司的比例達到創紀錄的18%，但幾乎沒有幾家初創公司是專門開發一款手機應用的。

Nonetheless, the path to app-dom was clear when Bradford and her first-year classmates downloaded Tinder and became increasingly intrigued–and appalled–by what they saw.

然而，布拉德福德與一年級同學當初下載Tinder的時候，便已經明確了進入手機應用行業的目標。因爲這款應用讓她們越來越着迷，越來越震驚。

“We would send each other the most horrifying Tinder pictures we’d seen that day, guys doing asinine things, half-naked people,” Bradford says in an interview at her San Francisco office. And though she and her friends would laugh about the awful material on the dating app, she was struck toward the end of 2013 by something else: just about everyone she knew was using it.

布拉德福德在位於舊金山的辦公室接受採訪時說道：“我們會在彼此之間發送當天看到的最恐怖的Tinder圖片，男孩子們做的蠢事，以及人們半裸的照片。”雖然她和閨蜜們時常嘲笑這款約會應用裏糟糕的約會對象，但在2013年底，另外一件事卻令布拉德福德感到震驚：幾乎所有人都在用它。

“What I saw was a huge consumer behavior shift in my demographic,” Bradford says. “Guys and girls in my network who I’d never seen on a dating app … all of a sudden had this Tinder app installed on their phones. It was kind of this fun thing that everyone in my generation was doing.”

布拉德福德說道：“我發現同齡消費者的行爲發生了巨大的轉變。我交往的男孩和女孩以前從來不會選擇約會應用……但突然之間，所有人都在手機上安裝了Tinder。我的同齡人都在使用這款軟件，這是一件有趣的事。”

But she saw problems with Tinder. There was the sleaze factor. There were millions of users, making it hard to sort out who might be compatible. Also, dating apps had a stigma, “this reputation for a one night stand, or a hookup,” she says. Furthermore, getting on such an app made a user’s search for love—or whatever—public. Many successful people didn’t want their personal and professional brands potentially tainted by association with a dating app.

不過，她也看到了Tinder的問題所在。這款應用上存在一些不端行爲。Tinder有數以百萬計的用戶，篩選出一位能夠共處的約會對象並不容易。此外，約會應用都有一個污點，“通常都以一夜情或約炮著稱，”她說道。此外，使用這種應用會讓一個人尋找愛情或其他任何對象的過程公開化。許多成功人士不希望與約會應用有任何關係，以免自己的個人和職業品牌受到影響。

“There was this kind of mismatch: the more successful you were, the less likely you were to be on a dating app,” Bradford says.

布拉德福德說道：“現在有一種不匹配的現象：一個人越成功，就越不可能使用約會應用。”

The light switch was thrown. Instead of creating another app for the masses to clutter with offensive comments and tasteless photos, she would create an alternative to be populated by “a high caliber community” of smart, well-educated, successful people.

於是她產生了靈感。她沒有選擇爲大衆開發另外一款充斥着無禮言論和粗俗照片的手機應用，而是要創建一款面向“高素質人才社區”的約會應用，這些人都受過良好教育，是精明的成功人士。

With The League, most new membership will come via referrals, and the app will use an algorithm to evaluate applicants’ educational and professional qualifications. The app will have privacy settings to regulate who sees a member’s profile, barring, for example, colleagues. “You don’t have to worry about being the talk of the water cooler at work,” Bradford says.

The League的大多數新會員將來自老會員推薦，該應用會通過一種算法對申請者的教育與職業等級進行評估。這款應用還將提供隱私設置，限制會員資料的訪問權限，比如禁止同事查看。布拉德福德說道：“你不必擔心會成爲公司同事閒聊時的話題。”

While many people, no doubt, have wished for a better dating app or thought about creating one, Bradford’s position at Stanford put her in a spot to do something about it. “The Stanford ecosystem is very, very supportive,” she says. “I’ve never been to a more entrepreneurial place. Half my classes were on entrepreneurship, and launching a company, and how to start a company—it’s in the water there. I went to a ton of people for advice, from faculty, to speakers on campus, to alums, to people on campus who had done startups.”

肯定有許多人希望有一款更優秀的約會應用，或考慮自己創建一款這樣的應用，而斯坦福大學爲布拉德福德提供了先天的優勢，讓她能夠把這個想法付諸實施。她說道：“斯坦福大學非常支持我。我從來沒有見過創業氛圍如此濃厚的地方。我有一半同學正在研究創業或者正在創建公司，想知道如何創業——在斯坦福你會身臨其境。我向許多人徵求意見，包括老師、演講嘉賓、校友以及曾經創業的同學。”

She applied successfully to get into the Stanford Venture Studio, a facility in which graduate students from all disciplines can test and develop business ideas, take part in group sessions, get advice from successful entrepreneurs and alumni, and practice pitching.

她成功加入了斯坦福創業工作室（Stanford Venture Studio）。來自不同學科的研究生都可以在這個工作室測試和開發商業創意，參與小組座談會，向成功的創業者和校友取經，練習推銷技能等。

Bradford refined her idea by pitching it to BASES, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. And she sought constant feedback from her girlfriends, who were members of her target market of smart, up-and-coming young people. Her Stanford friends, she says, were “very instrumental in shaping the product and feature set.”

布拉德福德通過向斯坦福大學創業學生商業協會（Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students，BASES）推銷，對自己的創意進行不斷完善。她還可以從閨蜜們那裏得到持續的反饋，她們都是聰明進取的年輕人，也是這款應用的目標羣體。她說道，她在斯坦福大學的朋友“在產品成形和功能設置方面給我帶來了很大啓發。”

During a Stanford independent study course, Bradford built the app’s wireframes, essentially blueprints. She created the technical specifications. But when she outsourced prototype development to India, she ran into difficulties, as she found no effective way to create the prototype without working side-by-side with other developers.

在斯坦福大學的獨立研究課程期間，布拉德福德構建出手機應用的線框原型，並開發出應用的技術規格。但在將原型開發外包給印度時，她卻遇到了麻煩，因爲如果不能與其他開發者並肩工作，很難創建應用的原型。

Ultimately, she joined forces with Derrick Staten, who received a BA in International Relations from Stanford, but has expertise in mobile operating systems and experience in venture capital.

最終，她選擇與德里克o斯塔恩合作。斯塔恩獲得了斯坦福大學國際關係專業文學學士學位，並擁有手機操作系統開發的專業知識，以及爲風投工作的經驗。

Now, the two are putting the final touches on the app and continue to gather would-be members onto a waiting list. They hope to launch within weeks, first in San Francisco and eventually in up to 10 major U.S. cities.

現在，兩人正在對應用進行最後修正，並繼續收集潛在會員信息。他們希望在數週內上線，首先在舊金山，然後推廣到美國10個主要城市。

Will it be worth her big investment in a Stanford MBA? Who knows. But she’s already getting plenty of publicity. Sex, after all, sells. And sex among elites may sell even better.

布拉德福德爲斯坦福大學MBA付出了鉅額成本，換來的結果就是一款新的手機約會應用，這是否值得？目前還沒有人知道答案。但她現在已經得到了許多人的關注。畢竟，與性愛相關的產品總可以大賣。而能夠解決精英性愛問題的產品似乎更有市場。