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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.
在校外居住的学生就读斯坦福大学（Stanford University）MBA的成本，大约超过212,000美元。再加上从谷歌（Google）辞职所产生的每年约75,000美元的机会成本，攻读这种被戏称为“宇宙之王”的学位的总成本累计接近390,000美元，这样一笔庞大的费用，恐怕会令许多人目瞪口呆。
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?
三个月前刚刚从斯坦福大学商学院毕业的阿曼达o布拉德福德，便为自己挖了这样一个大坑。那么，她接受如此顶级的教育是要做什么？
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上发布一款应用程序。注意，这可不是一款普通的应用。这是一款约会应用，类似于交友应用Tinder，专为超级挑剔的人找到同样挑剔的约会对象。如今同类产品多如牛毛，比如OkCupid、Coffee Meets Bagal、Hinge、Plenty of Fish和Zoosk等，仅iTunes上便有200多款约会应用。
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?
在这样的情况下，我们真的有必要为那些靠自己无法找到约会对象的人再推出一款新应用吗？成立一家手机应用公司，真的需要有MBA学位吗？
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.
可能并不需要。但这并没有让29岁的布拉德福德打消念头。至少，在这款被她称为The League的应用上，布拉德福德的履历可以让她成为优质约会对象。这款应用允许想要约会的人查看The League会员的教育和工作背景，诱导他们进入用户的LinkedIn个人资料和Facebook页面。
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 salesforce.com. 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.
布拉德福德的简历会让大多数人产生一个疑问——她为什么浪费时间，在一个高度饱和的领域里开发一款应用？毕竟，她在2007年毕业于卡耐基梅隆大学（Carnegie Mellon），取得了信息系统专业的学位，而能取得STEM（科学、技术、工程与数学）学位的女性可谓凤毛麟角。毕业后，布拉德福德成为一名销售工程师，后来在企业云计算公司salesforce.com担任客户经理。在这家公司工作三年之后，她又前往硅谷最热门的公司之一：谷歌，最初担任“售前工程师”，后来进入业务开发部门，与谷歌的产品和工程设计团队共事。布拉德福德甚至还在硅谷著名的风险投资公司红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）做了9个月的投资者。
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.
你肯定会想，有如此了不起的履历，再加上毫不逊色的斯坦福大学MBA学位，一个人应该想出更实质性的业务，而不是一款约会应用。去年，斯坦福大学MBA学生创立公司的比例达到创纪录的18%，但几乎没有几家初创公司是专门开发一款手机应用的。
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，布拉德福德与一年级同学当初下载Tinder的时候，便已经明确了进入手机应用行业的目标。因为这款应用让她们越来越着迷，越来越震惊。
“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.
布拉德福德在位于旧金山的办公室接受采访时说道：“我们会在彼此之间发送当天看到的最恐怖的Tinder图片，男孩子们做的蠢事，以及人们半裸的照片。”虽然她和闺蜜们时常嘲笑这款约会应用里糟糕的约会对象，但在2013年底，另外一件事却令布拉德福德感到震惊：几乎所有人都在用它。
“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.”
布拉德福德说道：“我发现同龄消费者的行为发生了巨大的转变。我交往的男孩和女孩以前从来不会选择约会应用……但突然之间，所有人都在手机上安装了Tinder。我的同龄人都在使用这款软件，这是一件有趣的事。”
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.
不过，她也看到了Tinder的问题所在。这款应用上存在一些不端行为。Tinder有数以百万计的用户，筛选出一位能够共处的约会对象并不容易。此外，约会应用都有一个污点，“通常都以一夜情或约炮著称，”她说道。此外，使用这种应用会让一个人寻找爱情或其他任何对象的过程公开化。许多成功人士不希望与约会应用有任何关系，以免自己的个人和职业品牌受到影响。
“There was this kind of mismatch: the more successful you were, the less likely you were to be on a dating app,” Bradford says.
布拉德福德说道：“现在有一种不匹配的现象：一个人越成功，就越不可能使用约会应用。”
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.
于是她产生了灵感。她没有选择为大众开发另外一款充斥着无礼言论和粗俗照片的手机应用，而是要创建一款面向“高素质人才社区”的约会应用，这些人都受过良好教育，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的大多数新会员将来自老会员推荐，该应用会通过一种算法对申请者的教育与职业等级进行评估。这款应用还将提供隐私设置，限制会员资料的访问权限，比如禁止同事查看。布拉德福德说道：“你不必担心会成为公司同事闲聊时的话题。”
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.”
肯定有许多人希望有一款更优秀的约会应用，或考虑自己创建一款这样的应用，而斯坦福大学为布拉德福德提供了先天的优势，让她能够把这个想法付诸实施。她说道：“斯坦福大学非常支持我。我从来没有见过创业氛围如此浓厚的地方。我有一半同学正在研究创业或者正在创建公司，想知道如何创业——在斯坦福你会身临其境。我向许多人征求意见，包括老师、演讲嘉宾、校友以及曾经创业的同学。”
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创业工作室（Stanford Venture Studio）。来自不同学科的研究生都可以在这个工作室测试和开发商业创意，参与小组座谈会，向成功的创业者和校友取经，练习推销技能等。
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.”
布拉德福德通过向斯坦福大学创业学生商业协会（Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students，BASES）推销，对自己的创意进行不断完善。她还可以从闺蜜们那里得到持续的反馈，她们都是聪明进取的年轻人，也是这款应用的目标群体。她说道，她在斯坦福大学的朋友“在产品成形和功能设置方面给我带来了很大启发。”
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.
在斯坦福大学的独立研究课程期间，布拉德福德构建出手机应用的线框原型，并开发出应用的技术规格。但在将原型开发外包给印度时，她却遇到了麻烦，因为如果不能与其他开发者并肩工作，很难创建应用的原型。
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.
最终，她选择与德里克o斯塔恩合作。斯塔恩获得了斯坦福大学国际关系专业文学学士学位，并拥有手机操作系统开发的专业知识，以及为风投工作的经验。
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.
现在，两人正在对应用进行最后修正，并继续收集潜在会员信息。他们希望在数周内上线，首先在旧金山，然后推广到美国10个主要城市。
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.
布拉德福德为斯坦福大学MBA付出了巨额成本，换来的结果就是一款新的手机约会应用，这是否值得？目前还没有人知道答案。但她现在已经得到了许多人的关注。毕竟，与性爱相关的产品总可以大卖。而能够解决精英性爱问题的产品似乎更有市场。
