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.在校外居住于的学生就读于斯坦福大学（Stanford University）MBA的成本，约多达212,000美元。再行再加从谷歌（Google）请辞所产生的每年大约75,000美元的机会成本，修读这种被戏称为“宇宙之王”的学位的总成本总计相似390,000美元，这样一笔可观的费用，难道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?三个月前刚从斯坦福大学商学院毕业的阿曼达o布拉德福德，之后为自己凿了这样一个大坑。

那么，她拒绝接受如此顶级的教育是要做到什么？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上公布一款应用程序。留意，这可不是一款普通的应用于。这是一款约会应用于，类似于交友应用于Tinder，专为超级老实的人寻找某种程度老实的约会对象。

如今同类产品多如牛毛，比如OkCupid、Coffee Meets Bagal、Hinge、Plenty of Fish和Zoosk等，仅有iTunes上之后有200多款约会应用于。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，我们知道有适当为那些靠自己无法寻找约会对象的人再行发售一款新的应用于吗？正式成立一家手机应用于公司，知道必须有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.有可能并不需要。但这并没让29岁的布拉德福德打消念头。

最少，在这款被她称作The League的应用于上，布拉德福德的简历可以让她沦为优质约会对象。这款应用于容许想约会的人查阅The League会员的教育和工作背景，诱导他们转入用户的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.布拉德福德的履历不会让大多数人产生一个疑惑——她为什么浪费时间，在一个高度饱和状态的领域里研发一款应用于？却是，她在2007年毕业于卡耐基梅隆大学（Carnegie Mellon），获得了信息系统专业的学位，而能获得STEM（科学、技术、工程与数学）学位的女性堪称凤毛麟角。

毕业后，布拉德福德沦为一名销售工程师，后来在企业云计算公司salesforce.com兼任客户经理。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，最初兼任“售前工程师”，后来转入业务研发部门，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知名的风险投资公司红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）做到了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.你认同不会想要，有如此真是的简历，再行再加毫不逊色的斯坦福大学MBA学位，一个人应当想到更加实质性的业务，而不是一款约会应用于。去年，斯坦福大学MBA学生创办公司的比例超过创纪录的18%，但完全没几家初创公司是专门研发一款手机应用于的。

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iTunesTinder的时候，之后早已具体了转入手机应用于行业的目标。因为这款应用于让她们更加著迷，更加愤慨。“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.布拉德福德在坐落于旧金山的办公室拒绝接受专访时说：“我们不会在彼此之间发送到当天看见的最可怕的Tinder图片，男孩子们做到的蠢事，以及人们半裸的照片。”虽然她和闺蜜们经常取笑这款约会应用于里差劲的约会对象，但在2013年底，另外一件事却令其布拉德福德深感愤慨：完全所有人都在用它。

“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：“我找到同龄消费者的不道德再次发生了极大的改变。我恋情的男孩和女孩以前从不不会自由选择约会应用于……但忽然之间，所有人都挥机上安装了Tinder。我的同龄人都在用于这款软件，这是一件有意思的事。

”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，她也看见了Tinder的问题所在。这款应用于上不存在一些不端不道德。Tinder有数以百万计的用户，检验出有一位需要相处的约会对象并不更容易。此外，约会应用于都有一个污点，“一般来说都以一夜情或大约炮闻名，”她说。

此外，用于这种应用于不会让一个人找寻爱情或其他任何对象的过程公开化。许多成功人士不期望与约会应用于有任何关系，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：“现在有一种不给定的现象：一个人就越顺利，越大不有可能用于约会应用于。”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.于是她产生了启发。

她没自由选择为大众研发另外一款弥漫着责备言论和嘲讽照片的手机应用于，而是要创立一款面向“高素质人才社区”的约会应用于，这些人都接受较好教育，是聪明的成功人士。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杨家会员引荐，该应用于不会通过一种算法对申请者的教育与职业等级展开评估。这款应用于还将获取隐私设置，容许会员资料的采访权限，比如禁令同事查阅。

布拉德福德说：“你不用担忧不会沦为公司同事闲谈时的话题。”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.”认同有许多人期望有一款更加杰出的约会应用于，或考虑到自己创立一款这样的应用于，而斯坦福大学为布拉德福德获取了先天的优势，让她需要把这个点子付诸实施。

她说：“斯坦福大学十分反对我。我根本没见过创业氛围如此浓烈的地方。我有一半同学正在研究创业或者正在创立公司，想要告诉如何创业——在斯坦福你不会身临其境。

我向许多人印发，还包括老师、演说嘉宾、校友以及曾多次创业的同学。”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.她顺利重新加入了斯坦福创业工作室（Stanford Venture Studio）。

来自有所不同学科的研究生都可以在这个工作室测试和研发商业创新，参予小组座谈会，向顺利的创业者和校友玄奘，锻炼促销技能等。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）促销，对自己的创新展开不断完善。

她还可以从闺蜜们那里获得持续的对系统，她们都是聪慧星舰的年轻人，也是这款应用于的目标群体。她说，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给了相当大灵感。

”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国家研究课程期间，布拉德福德建构出有手机应用于的线框原型，并研发出有应用于的技术规格。但在将原型研发外包给印度时，她却遇上了困难，因为如果无法与其他开发者并肩作战工作，很难创立应用于的原型。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.最后，她自由选择与德里克o斯塔恩合作。

斯塔恩取得了斯坦福大学国际关系专业文学学士学位，并享有手机操作系统研发的专业知识，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，两人正在对应用于展开最后修正，并之后搜集潜在会员信息。他们期望在数周内上线，首先在旧金山，然后推展到美国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代价了巨额成本，换取的结果就是一款新的手机约会应用于，这否有一点？目前还没有人告诉答案。但她现在早已获得了许多人的注目。

却是，与性爱涉及的产品总可以大买。而需要解决问题精英性爱问题的产品或许更加有市场。

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