视频信息
- 标题: 斯坦福：YC创业课 - 第05集：商业策略与垄断理论
- BV号: BV1oWKpzoE1Z
- 时长: 50分17秒（3017秒）
- 作者: 常春藤中英字幕课
- 原始链接: B站视频
视频摘要
Peter Thiel在斯坦福YC创业课上分享了其核心商业哲学：创业应追求垄断而非竞争。他提出企业价值公式为创造的X美元价值 × 获取的Y%比例，X与Y相互独立。他通过对比美国航空业与Google的利润率与市值，强调完全竞争与垄断的本质差异。Thiel指出企业普遍存在两类谎言：垄断者伪装成激烈竞争者以规避监管，非垄断者则夸大市场独特性以吸引资本。他建议创业公司从小市场起步，通过同心圆模式扩展。垄断企业需具备专有技术（至少10倍改进）、网络效应、规模经济与品牌四大特征。其最反直觉的核心观点是：真正的价值来自持久垄断，而非短暂竞争优势，因此应追求成为最后一个行动者，而非第一个行动者。
核心要点
- 竞争是给失败者的：Thiel的核心论断，创业应瞄准垄断、避免竞争，完全竞争行业利润被竞争吞噬殆尽
- X与Y独立变量：企业价值由创造的X美元价值与获取的Y%比例共同决定，两者相互独立，需同时兼顾
- 企业谎言二分法：垄断者假装处于激烈竞争以规避政府监管，非垄断者夸大市场独特性以吸引投资，两者方向相反
- 小市场起步策略：成功企业多从极小市场开始（如Amazon书店、Facebook哈佛），通过同心圆模式逐步扩展市场
- 持久垄断四特征：专有技术（至少10倍改进）、网络效应、规模经济（软件零边际成本优势）、品牌
- 最后行动者价值：公司价值85%来自未来现金流，应追求成为某类别最后的公司而非首个行动者
- 垂直整合垄断：复杂垂直整合结构（Tesla、SpaceX）比单一技术突破更难被复制，能创造持久竞争优势
- 竞争心理盲点：人类有从众本能，盲目竞争让人忽视真正重要的问题，应寻找无人走的大铁门而非拥挤的小门
视频全文转录（中英双语）
以下为完整中英双语转录，已加标点。英文在前，中文在后，逐段对照。
由 Groq Whisper 转录 → M2.7 B 方案整文标点 + 分段 → M2.7 段号保留翻译 → 逐段对照。
[段 1]
All right. Good afternoon. Today’s speaker is Peter Thiel. Peter was the founder of PayPal and Palantir and Founders Fund and has invested in most of the tech companies in Silicon Valley. And he’s going to talk about strategy and competition. Thank you for coming, Peter. Awesome. Thanks. Sam, thanks for inviting me. Thanks for having me. I sort of have a single idée fixe that I’m completely obsessed with on the business side, which is that if you’re starting a company, if you’re the founder, entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly, and you want to always avoid competition. And so, hence, competition is for losers, something we’ll be talking about today. I’d like to start by saying something about the basic idea of when you start one of these companies, how you go about creating value.
[译文 1]
好的。下午好。今天的主讲人是Peter Thiel。Peter是PayPal、Palantir和Founders Fund的创始人，投资了硅谷大多数科技公司。他将谈论战略和竞争。谢谢你到来，Peter。太棒了。谢谢。Sam，谢谢你邀请我。谢谢你款待我。我在商业方面有一个单一的固定观念（idée fixe），我对此完全痴迷，那就是如果你要创业，如果你要作为创始人、企业家创办一家公司，你总是要瞄准垄断，你总是要避免竞争。因此，竞争是给失败者准备的，这是我们今天要讨论的内容。我想首先谈谈关于创办这些公司时的基本理念，以及你如何创造价值。
[段 2]
And there’s this question, what makes a business valuable? And I want to suggest that there’s basically a very simple formula that you have a valuable company if two things are true. Number one, that it creates X dollars of value for the world. And number two, that you capture Y percent of X. And… Y percent of X. And the critical thing that I think people always miss in this sort of analysis is that X and Y are completely independent variables. And so X can be very big, Y can be very small, X can be of intermediate size, and if Y is reasonably big, you can still get a very big business. So to create a valuable company, you have to basically both create something of value and capture some fraction of the value of what you’ve created.
[译文 2]
那么有这么一个问题，是什么让一个企业有价值？我想说的是，基本上有一个非常简单的公式——如果你满足两个条件，你就拥有一个有价值的企业。第一，它为世界创造了X美元的价值。第二，你获取了X的Y百分比。Y percent of X。而我认为在这个分析中人们总是遗漏的关键点是，X和Y是完全独立的变量。所以X可以非常大，Y可以非常小；X可以是中等规模，但如果Y足够大，你仍然可以得到一个非常大的企业。所以，要创建一个有价值的企业，你基本上必须既创造一些有价值的东西，又获取你所创造价值的一部分。
[段 3]
And sort of just to illustrate this as a contrast, if you sort of compare the U.S. airline industry with a company like Google on search, if you sort of measure by the size of these industries, you could say that airlines are still more important than search. If you just measure it, say, by revenues, there was $195 billion in domestic revenues in 2012. Google had just north of $50 billion. And certainly, sort of on some intuitive level, if you were given a choice and said, well, do you want to get rid of all air travel or do you want to get rid of your ability to use search engines, the intuition would be that air travel is something that’s more important than search.
[译文 3]
而且简单作为一种对比来说明，如果你把美国航空业和像Google这样的公司在搜索方面进行比较，如果你按这些行业的规模来衡量，你可以说航空业仍然比搜索更重要。如果你只按收入来衡量的话，2012年国内收入为$1950亿美元，Google刚刚超过$500亿美元。当然，在某种直觉层面上，如果你被给予一个选择，说你想消除所有航空旅行还是想消除你使用搜索引擎的能力，直觉会认为航空旅行比搜索更重要。
[段 4]
And this is, of course, just the domestic numbers. As you looked at this globally, airlines are much, much bigger than Google is. But the profit margins are quite a bit less. They were marginally profitable in 2012. I think the entire 100-year history of the airline industry, the cumulative profits in the U.S. have been approximately zero. Companies make money, they episodically go bankrupt, they get recapitalized, and you sort of cycle and repeat. And this is reflected in the combined market capitalization of the airline industry is maybe something of the U.S. airline industry, something like a quarter that of Google. So you have a search engine much, much smaller than air travel, but much more valuable. And I think this reflects these very different valuations on X and Y.
[译文 4]
当然，这只是国内数据。从全球来看，航空公司的规模比Google大得多。但利润率却低得多。2012年勉强盈利。我认为整个航空业100年的历史，美国的累计利润大约为零。公司赚钱，会周期性地破产，然后进行资本重组，如此循环往复。这从航空业的总市值可以看出，美国航空业的市值大约只有Google的1/4。这样一来，搜索引擎虽然比航空出行小得多，但价值却高得多。我认为这反映了X和Y两种业务截然不同的估值。
[段 5]
So, you know, if we look at perfect competition, you know, there are some pros and cons to the world of perfect competition. On a high level, this is what you study in Econ 1. It’s easy to model, which I think is why econ professors like talking about perfect competition. It somehow is efficient, especially in a world where things are static because you have all the consumer surplus gets captured by everybody. Politically, it’s what we’re told is good in our society, that you want to have competition, and this is somehow a good thing. Of course, there are a lot of negatives. It’s generally not that good if you’re involved in anything that’s hypersensitive. If you’re involved in anything that’s hyper-competitive because you often don’t make money.
[译文 5]
所以，你看，如果我们看完全竞争，你看，完全竞争的世界有优点也有缺点。从高层次来说，这是你在Econ 1中学的内容。它很容易建模，我认为这就是为什么经济学教授喜欢讨论完全竞争。它在某种程度上是有效的，特别是在一个静态的世界中，因为所有的消费者剩余都被每个人获得了。从政治角度来说，它被告诉我们社会中的好东西，你想要有竞争，而这在某种程度上是件好事。当然，也有许多负面因素。如果你涉及任何高度敏感的领域，它通常不太好。如果你涉及任何高度竞争的领域，因为你往往赚不到钱。
[段 6]
I’ll come back to this a little bit later. So I think at one end of the spectrum, you have industries that are perfectly competitive. And at the other end of the spectrum, you have things that I would say are monopolies. And they’re much more stable. Longer-term businesses. You have more capital. And if you get a creative monopoly for inventing something new, I think it’s symptomatic of having created something really valuable. And so I do think this, you know, the sort of the extreme binary view of the world I always articulate is that there are exactly two kinds of businesses in this world. There are businesses that are perfectly competitive, and there are businesses that are monopolies.
[译文 6]
我稍后会再回到这个话题。所以我认为，在光谱的一端，是完全竞争的行业。在光谱的另一端，是你可能会说的垄断。它们要稳定得多。更长期的企业。你有更多的资本。如果你因为发明了新东西而获得了创造性的垄断，我认为这说明你创造了真正有价值的东西。所以我的确认为，你知道，我一直在阐述的极端二元世界观是，这个世界上恰好有两类企业。一类是完全竞争的企业，另一类是垄断企业。
[段 7]
And there’s shockingly little that is in between. And this dichotomy is not understood very well because people are constantly lying about the nature of the businesses they’re in. And this is why, in my mind, this is the most important, it’s not necessarily the most important thing in business, but I think it’s the most important business idea that people don’t understand, that there are just these two kinds of businesses. And so let me say a little bit about the lies that people tell. And so you basically, the basic, if you sort of imagine that there was a spectrum of companies from perfect competition to monopoly, the apparent differences are quite small. The apparent differences are quite small because the people who have monopolies pretend not to.
[译文 7]
令人震惊的是，两者之间几乎没有中间地带。这种二分法并没有被很好地理解，因为人们一直在隐瞒自己所在行业的本质。这就是为什么，在我看来，这虽然不一定是商业中最重要的事，但我认为这是人们最不理解的重要商业理念——企业只有这两种类型。让我来说说人们所撒的谎。基本上，如果你想象一下，企业从完全竞争到垄断是一个光谱，那么表面的差异其实很小。表面的差异很小，因为那些拥有垄断地位的人假装自己没有。
[段 8]
They will basically say, you know, and it’s because you don’t want to get regulated by the government, you don’t want the government to come after you, so you will never say that you have monopolies. So anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that they’re in incredible competition. And on the other end of the spectrum, if you are incredibly competitive, and if you’re in some sort of business where you will never make any money, you will be tempted to tell a lie that goes in the other direction, where you will say that you’re doing something unique that is somehow less competitive than it looks because you will want to differentiate, you’ll want to try to attract capital or something like that.
[译文 8]
他们基本上会说，你知道，这是因为你不希望被政府监管，不想让政府找你麻烦，所以你永远不会说自己是垄断者。而在另一个极端，如果你处于激烈的竞争中，而且如果你所在的行业永远赚不到钱，你就会倾向于说一个方向相反的谎言，你会说你正在做一些独特的事情，这些事情看起来竞争性并没有那么强，因为你会想要差异化，你会想要尝试吸引资本或诸如此类的东西。
[段 9]
So if the monopolists pretend not to have monopolies, the non-monopolists pretend to have monopolies, the apparent difference is very small, whereas the real difference, I submit, is actually quite big. And so there’s this distortion that happens because of the lies people tell about their businesses and the lies are sort of in these opposite directions. Let me drill a little bit down further on the way these lies work. And so, you know, the basic lie you tell as a non-monopoly is that we’re in a very small market. The basic lie you tell as a monopoly is that the market you’re in is much bigger than it looks. And so typically, if you want to think of this in sort of set theoretic terms, you could say that a monopoly tells a lie where you describe your business as the union of these vastly different markets and the non-monopolist describes it as the intersection.
[译文 9]
所以，如果垄断者假装自己没有垄断，而非垄断者假装自己有垄断，表面上的差异很小，但我认为，实际上的差异实际上相当大。因此，由于人们对自家企业的谎言，产生了这种扭曲，而且这些谎言是朝着相反方向的。让我进一步深入探讨这些谎言是如何运作的。所以，你知道，作为一个非垄断者，你说的基本谎言是：我们的市场非常小。作为垄断者，你说的基本谎言是：你所在的市场比表面看起来的要大得多。通常，如果你想用集合论的方式来思考，你可以说垄断者说的谎言是，把你的企业描述成这些完全不同的市场的并集（union），而非垄断者则把它描述成市场的交集（intersection）。
[段 10]
So that, in effect, if you’re a non-monopolist, you will rhetorically describe your market as super small. You’re the only person in that market. If you have a monopoly, you’ll describe it as super big, and there’s lots of competition in it. So some examples of how this works in practice. So I always use restaurants as the example of a terrible business. And this is always sort of my ideas. Capitalism and competition are antonyms. Someone accumulates capital. A world of perfect competition is a world where all the capital gets competed away. So you’re opening a restaurant business. No one wants to invest because you just lose money. So you have to tell some idiosyncratic narrative, and you’ll say something like, Well, we’re the only British food restaurant in Palo Alto.
[译文 10]
这样，实际上，如果你是一个非垄断者，你会用修辞手法把你的市场描述得非常小。你是在那个市场中的唯一一个人。如果你拥有垄断地位，你会把它描述得非常大，而且里面有很多竞争。所以这里有一些实际运作的例子。所以我总是用餐馆作为糟糕生意的例子。而这总是我的一些想法。资本主义和竞争是反义词。有人积累资本。完美竞争的世界是一个所有资本都被竞争掉的世界。所以你要开一家餐馆。没人想投资因为你只会亏钱。所以你必须讲一些独特的故事，你会说这样的话，嗯，我们是Palo Alto唯一一家英式餐厅。
[段 11]
So it’s British, Palo Alto, and of course that’s too small a market because people may be able to drive all the way to Mountain View or even Menlo Park, and there probably are no people who eat nothing but British food, at least no people who are still alive. And so that’s sort of a fictitiously narrow market. There’s sort of a Hollywood version of this where the way movies always get pitched is: You know, okay, it’s like a college football star, you know, joins an elite group of hackers to catch the shark that killed his friend. Sorry. And so that’s, now that is a movie that has not yet been made. But the question is, is that the right category, or is the correct category just another movie?
[译文 11]
所以它是英国市场，帕洛阿尔托（Palo Alto），当然这个市场太小了，因为人们可以一路开车到山景城（Mountain View），甚至到门洛帕克（Menlo Park），而且可能没有人只吃英国食物，至少没有还活着的人。所以这是一个虚构的、过于细分的市场。好莱坞版是这样的，电影总是这样被推销的：你知道，好吧，就像一个大学橄榄球明星，加入一个精英黑客小组，去抓那条杀了他的朋友的鲨鱼。抱歉。所以这是一个尚未拍成电影的点子。但问题是，这是正确的类别吗，还是正确的类别只是另一部电影？
[段 12]
In which case, there are lots of those. It’s super competitive, incredibly hard to make money. No one ever makes money in Hollywood doing movies. It’s really, really hard. And so you always have this question about: Is it real? Does it make sense? Does it have value that one should ask? And, of course, there are startup versions of this where you, and the sort of the really bad versions, you just take a whole series of buzzwords—sharing, mobile, social apps—you combine them, and you have some kind of narrative. And whether or not that’s a real business or not is generally a bad sign. So it’s almost this pattern recognition when you have this rhetoric of these sort of intersections.
[译文 12]
在这种情况下，这种例子有很多。这个行业竞争极其激烈，赚钱难上加难。在好莱坞拍电影几乎没人能赚到钱。真的非常非常难。所以你总是会问这样的问题：这是真的吗？合理吗？值得一问吗？当然，在创业圈也有这种情况，而且是最糟糕的版本：你只需要把一系列流行词汇——sharing、mobile、social apps——组合在一起，就能编出一个故事。这到底是不是真正的生意，通常是个坏信号。所以当你在谈论这些交叉领域时，这几乎成了一种模式识别。
[段 13]
It generally does not work. The something of somewhere is really mostly just the nothing of nowhere. It’s like the Stanford of North Dakota. Um. Stanford of North Dakota. One of a kind, but it’s not Stanford. So let’s look at the opposite. The opposite lie is if you are, let’s say, the search company that’s down the street from here and has about a happy 66% market share and is completely dominant in the search market—Google almost never describes itself as a search engine these days. And instead, it describes itself in all these different ways. So it sometimes says it’s an advertising company. So if it was search, you’d say, wow, it has this huge market share. That’s really, really crazy.
[译文 13]
一般来说这不管用。某地的某物实际上大多只是无处之空。这就像北达科他州的斯坦福。嗯。北达科他州的斯坦福。独一无二，但不是斯坦福。所以让我们看看相反的例子。相反的谎言是，如果你是一家搜索公司，就在这条街的拐角处，拥有大约66%的市场份额，在搜索市场完全占据主导地位——Google现在几乎从不称自己为搜索引擎。相反，它用各种不同的方式来描述自己。所以它有时说自己是一家广告公司。所以如果它是搜索，你会说，哇，它拥有如此巨大的市场份额。这真的非常疯狂。
[段 14]
It’s like an incredible monopoly. It’s a much more robust monopoly than Microsoft ever had in the 90s. Maybe that’s why it’s making so much money. But if you say it’s an advertising market, you could say, well, search advertising is $17 billion, and that’s part of online advertising, which is much bigger. And then all U.S. advertising is bigger. And then by the time you get to global advertising, that’s close to $500 billion. And so you’re talking about 3.5%, so a tiny part of this much larger market. Or, if you don’t want to be an advertising company, you can always say that you’re a technology company. And so, sorry, let me see. And so the technology market is something like a $1 trillion market.
[译文 14]
这就像一种令人难以置信的垄断。这是一种比微软在90年代所拥有的更强大的垄断。也许这就是为什么它能赚这么多钱。但如果你说这是一个广告市场，你可以说，搜索广告是170亿美元，而这只是在线广告的一部分，后者要大得多。然后整个美国广告市场更大。然后到全球广告市场时，接近5000亿美元。所以你谈的是3.5%，只是这个更大市场的一小部分。或者，如果你不想成为一家广告公司，你总是可以说你是一家科技公司。所以，抱歉，让我看看。科技市场大约是1万亿美元的市场。
[段 15]
And the narrative that you tell us, Google, in the technology market is, well, we’re competing with all the car companies with our self-driving cars. We’re competing with Apple on TVs and iPhones. We’re competing with Facebook. We’re competing with Microsoft on office products. We’re competing with Amazon on cloud services. And so we are in this giant technology market where there’s competition in every direction you look. And no, we’re not the monopoly the government’s looking for, and we should not get regulated in any way whatsoever. And so I think one has to always be super aware that there are these very powerful incentives to distort the nature of these markets one way or the other. So the evidence of narrow markets in the tech industry is—if you basically just, if you look at sort of the, some of the big tech companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon—they’ve just been building up cash for year after year, and you have these incredibly high profit margins.
[译文 15]
而你，Google，在科技市场上给我们讲的故事是，我们在用自动驾驶汽车与所有汽车公司竞争。我们在电视和iPhone上与Apple竞争。我们在与Facebook竞争。我们在办公产品上与Microsoft竞争。我们在云服务上与Amazon竞争。所以我们处于一个巨大的科技市场中，无论你朝哪个方向看都有竞争。而且，不，我们不是政府要找的垄断者，我们不应该受到任何方式的监管。所以我认为人们必须始终非常清醒地意识到，这些非常强大的激励会以一种或另一种方式扭曲这些市场的性质。因此，科技行业中窄口市场的证据是——如果你基本上只是看看一些大型科技公司，Apple、Google、Microsoft、Amazon——它们年复一年地积累现金，而且你拥有这些难以置信的高利润率。
[段 16]
And I would say that one of the reasons the tech industry would say that one of the reasons the tech industry in the U.S. has been so successful financially is because it’s prone to creating all these monopoly-like businesses. And it’s reflected by the fact that these companies just accumulate so much cash, they don’t even know what to do with it beyond a certain point. And so let me say a few things about how to build a monopoly. And I think one of the sort of very counterintuitive ideas that comes out of this monopoly thread is that you want to go after small markets. If you’re a startup, you want to get to a monopoly. You’re starting a new company.
[译文 16]
我会说， tech 行业会认为美国 tech 行业在财务上如此成功的原因之一，是因为它善于创建这些类似垄断的企业。这反映在这样一个事实上：这些公司积累了如此多的现金，超过一定程度后甚至不知道该怎么处理这些钱。那么让我说几点关于如何打造垄断的看法。我认为从这个垄断话题中得出的一个非常反直觉的观点是，你想追求小市场。如果你是 startup，你想获得垄断地位。你正在创办一家新公司。
[段 17]
You want to get to a monopoly. Monopoly is you have a large share of a market. How do you get to a large share of a market? You start with a really small market, and you take over that whole market. And then, over time, you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles. And the thing that’s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one, because that’s typically evidence that you somehow haven’t defined the categories correctly. And it normally means that there’s going to be too much competition in one way or another. And so I think almost all the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.
[译文 17]
你想要获得垄断。垄断就是你在一个市场中占有很大份额。如何获得一个市场中的很大份额？你从一个非常小的市场开始，然后占领整个市场。然后，随着时间推移，你找到以同心圆的方式扩展市场的方法。一个总是犯的大错误就是在第一天就追逐一个巨大的市场，因为这通常意味着你在某种程度上没有正确定义品类。而且这通常意味着无论以何种方式都会存在太多竞争。所以我认为硅谷几乎所有成功的公司都有某种从小市场开始然后扩展的模式。
[段 18]
And, you know, if you take Amazon, you start with just a bookstore. We have all the books in the world. So it’s a better bookstore than anybody else has in the world when it starts in the 90s. It’s online. There’s things you can do you can’t do before. And then you gradually expand into all sorts of different forms of e-commerce and other things beyond that. You know, eBay, you start with Pez dispensers, you move on to Beanie Babies, and eventually it’s all these different auctions for all these sorts of different goods. And what’s very counterintuitive about many of these companies is they often start with markets that are so small that people don’t think that they’re valuable at all when you get started.
[译文 18]
而且，你知道，如果你看看Amazon，它最初只是一家书店。我们拥有世界上所有的书。所以在90年代起步时，它比世界上任何其他书店都要好。它是线上经营的。有一些以前做不到的事情现在可以做到了。然后你逐渐扩展到各种不同形式的电子商务，以及更多其他的东西。你知道，eBay一开始卖的是Pez糖果盒，然后发展到Beanie Babies，最后变成各种不同商品的各种拍卖平台。很多这类公司最反直觉的一点是，它们通常从非常小的市场起步，以至于在刚起步时，人们根本不认为这些市场有任何价值。
[段 19]
The PayPal version of this was, you know, we started with power sellers on eBay, which was about 20,000 people. When we first saw this happening in December of ‘99, January 2000, right after we launched, there was a sense that these were all — it was such a small market, it was terrible. We thought these were terrible customers to have. It’s just people selling junk on the Internet. Why in the world do we want to be going after this market? But there was a way to get a product that was much better for everybody in that market. And we got to something like 25%, 30% market penetration in two or three months. And you got some walk-in, you got brand recognition, and you’re able to build a business from there.
[译文 19]
PayPal 的情况是这样的——我们最初是从 eBay 上的大卖家开始起步的，当时大约有 20,000 人。1999 年 12 月、2000 年 1 月，我们刚推出产品后第一次看到这种情况发生时，有一种感觉就是——这个市场太小了，简直糟糕透了。我们觉得这些客户真是太难伺候了。不过就是些在互联网上卖杂货的人。我们到底为什么要去开拓这个市场呢？但如果我们换一种方式，就能为这个市场中的所有人提供好得多的产品。结果在两三个月内，我们就达到了大约 25%、30% 的市场份额。而且你还吸引了一些上门客户，建立了品牌认知度，然后你就能够从那里开始发展你的业务了。
[段 20]
So I always think these very small markets are quite underrated. The Facebook version of this I always give is that the initial market at Facebook was 10,000 people at Harvard. It went from zero to 60% market share in 10 days. That was a very auspicious start. The way this gets analyzed in business schools is always, That’s ridiculous. It’s such a small market. It can’t have any value at all. And so I think the business school analysis of Facebook early on, or of PayPal early on, or of eBay early on is that the markets were perhaps so small as to have almost no value. And they would have had little value had they stayed small, but it turned out there were ways to then grow them concentrically, and that’s what made them so valuable.
[译文 20]
所以我一直认为这些非常小的市场被严重低估了。关于 Facebook 的例子，我一直说的是，Facebook 最初的市场是 Harvard 的 10,000 人。它在 10 天内从零增长到 60% 的市场份额。这是一个非常好的开端。商学院对此的分析总是：太荒谬了。市场太小了。根本没有任何价值。所以我认为商学院早期对 Facebook、PayPal 或 eBay 的分析是，这些市场可能太小了，几乎没有价值。如果它们一直保持小规模，它们确实没什么价值，但事实证明有办法让它们同心圆式地增长，而这正是它们变得如此有价值的原因。
[段 21]
Now, I think the opposite version of this is always where you have super big markets. And there’s so many different things that went wrong with all the cleantech companies in the last decade. But one theme that ran through almost all of them was they all started with massive markets. In every cleantech PowerPoint presentation that one saw in the years 2005 to 2008, which was sort of the cleantech bubble in Silicon Valley, started with, We’re in the energy market, we’re in a market that’s measured in hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. And then once you’re sort of a minnow in a vast ocean, that’s not a good place to be. That means that you have tons of competitors, and you don’t even know who all the competitors are.
[译文 21]
现在，我认为相反的情况总是出现在超级大的市场里。过去十年里，所有清洁技术公司都有很多问题，但几乎所有公司都有一条共同主线，那就是它们都以巨大的市场为起点。在2005年到2008年期间，也就是硅谷清洁技术泡沫时期的每一份清洁技术PPT里，开篇都是这样的：我们身处能源市场，我们所在的是一个价值数千亿美元或数万亿美元的市场。然而，一旦你变成浩瀚海洋中的一条小鱼，那里就不是一个好的立足之地。这意味着你面对着大量的竞争对手，而你甚至不知道竞争对手都有谁。
[段 22]
And so you want to be a one-of-a-kind company where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem. You don’t want to be the fourth online pet food company. You don’t want to be the 10th thin-film solar panel company. You don’t want to be the 100th restaurant in Palo Alto. Your restaurant industry is a trillion-dollar industry. So if you do a market-size analysis, you’d conclude restaurants are a fantastic business to go into. And it’s often large markets. Large existing markets typically mean that you have tons of competition, which is very, very hard to differentiate. So the first very counterintuitive idea is to go after small markets, often markets that are so small people don’t even notice them.
[译文 22]
所以你想成为一家独一无二的公司，在一个小型生态系统中独树一帜。你不想成为第四家在线宠物食品公司。你不想成为第十家薄膜太阳能电池板公司。你不想成为帕洛阿尔托的第一百家餐厅。你的餐饮行业是一个万亿美元的产业。所以如果你做市场规模分析，你会得出结论：餐饮是一个非常好的创业领域。但它通常是大市场。大型现有市场通常意味着你有大量竞争对手，这使得差异化非常、非常困难。因此，第一个非常反直觉的想法是瞄准小市场，往往是那些小到人们甚至注意不到的市场。
[段 23]
They don’t think they make sense. That’s where you’ve got to put your hold. And then if those markets are able to expand, you can scale into a big monopoly business. There are several different characteristics of these monopoly businesses that I like to focus on, and there’s probably no sort of single formula to it. And I always think that in technology, there’s always a sense that the history of technology is such that every moment happens only once. And so the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t build a social network. The next Larry Page won’t be building a search engine. The next Bill Gates won’t be building an operating system. And if you’re copying these people, you’re not learning from them.
[译文 23]
他们不认为这些有意义。这就是你需要坚持的地方。然后如果那些市场能够扩张，你就能扩展成一家大型垄断企业。这些垄断企业有几个不同的特征是我喜欢关注的，而且可能没有某种单一的模式。我一直认为在科技领域，总有一种感觉是，科技史是这样的——每个时刻只会发生一次。所以下一个 Mark Zuckerberg 不会去建立社交网络。下一个 Larry Page 不会去建立搜索引擎。下一个 Bill Gates 不会去建立操作系统。如果你是在复制这些人，那你就不是真正在向他们学习。
[段 24]
And so there are always these very unique businesses that are doing something that’s not been done before that end up having the potential to be a monopoly. The opening line in Anna Karenina is that all happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way. And the opposite is true in business, where I think all happy companies are different because they’re doing something very unique. All unhappy companies are alike because they fail to escape the essential sameness that is competition. And so one sort of characteristic of a monopoly technology company is some sort of proprietary technology. My sort of crazy, somewhat arbitrary rule of thumb is you want to have a technology that’s an order of magnitude better than the next best thing.
[译文 24]
因此，总是有这些非常独特的企业，它们做着前所未有的事情，最终拥有成为垄断企业的潜力。《安娜·卡列尼娜》的开篇写道：幸福的家庭都是相似的，不幸的家庭各有各的不幸。在商业领域，情况恰恰相反——我认为所有幸福的公司都是不同的，因为它们做着非常独特的事情；所有不幸的公司都是相似的，因为它们无法摆脱竞争的本质雷同。因此，垄断型科技公司的一个特征就是某种专有技术。我这条有点疯狂、有些武断的经验法则就是：你需要拥有一项比次优方案好一个数量级的技术。
[段 25]
So Amazon had over ten times as many books, maybe not that high-tech, but you figure out a way to sell ten times as many books in an efficient online way. You know, for PayPal, the alternative was using checks to send money on eBay. It took 7 to 10 days to clear. PayPal could do it more than 10 times as fast. So you want to have some sort of very powerful improvement in some order, maybe an order of magnitude improvement on some key dimension. Of course, if you actually come with something totally new, it’s just like an infinite improvement. So I would say the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked. And so that’s like maybe not infinite, but it’s sort of definitely an order of magnitude or more of an improvement.
[译文 25]
所以亚马逊有超过十倍多的书籍，也许技术没那么高端，但你想出了一个方法，以高效的在线方式销售十倍多的书籍。对于PayPal来说，替代方案是在eBay上用支票汇款。需要7到10天才能结算。PayPal的速度可以快十倍以上。所以你想要在某个方面有某种非常强大的改进，也许是某个关键维度上数量级的改进。当然，如果你真的带来了全新的东西，那就像是无限的改进。所以我会说iPhone是第一台真正能用的智能手机。所以这也许不是无限的，但肯定至少是数量级或更多的改进。
[段 26]
So I think the technology is designed to give you a massive delta over the next best thing. I think there often are network effects that can kick in that really help. The thing that’s very tricky about network effects is that they’re often very hard to get started. And these lead to monopolies over time. And so even though everyone understands how valuable they are, there’s always this incredibly tricky question: why is it valuable to the first person who’s doing something? Economies of scale is if you have something with very high fixed costs, very low marginal costs, that’s typically a monopoly-like business. And then there’s this thing called branding, which is sort of just this idea that gets lodged in people’s brains.
[译文 26]
所以我认为技术的目的是让你与次佳选择之间拉开巨大的差距。我认为网络效应经常能够发挥作用，真正起到帮助作用。关于网络效应，有一点非常棘手，那就是它们通常很难起步。这些随着时间的推移会导致垄断。所以即使每个人都明白它们有多大的价值，但总有一个极其棘手的问题：为什么它对第一个做这件事的人有价值？规模经济是指如果你拥有的东西有非常高的固定成本，非常低的边际成本，那就是典型的类似垄断的业务。然后还有一种东西叫做品牌效应，它就是这样一个观念，根植在人们的脑海中。
[段 27]
I never quite understand how branding works, so I never invest in companies where it’s just about branding, but it is, I think, a real phenomenon that creates real value. I think one of the things that’s very striking is that software businesses are, for some reason, very good at some of these things. They’re especially good at the economies of scale part because the marginal cost of software is zero. And so if you get something that works in software, it’s often significantly better than the existing solution. And then you have these tremendous economies of scale. And you can scale fairly quickly. So even if the market starts small, you can grow your business quickly enough to stay at the same size as the growing market and maintain the sort of monopoly power.
[译文 27]
我从未完全理解品牌塑造是如何运作的，所以我从不投资那些仅仅是关于品牌塑造的公司，但它的确，我认为是，一个创造真实价值的真实现象。我认为非常引人注目的一件事是软件企业出于某些原因非常擅长其中一些事情。它们特别擅长规模经济这部分，因为软件的边际成本为零。所以如果你在软件领域做出了有效的产品，它通常比现有解决方案好得多。然后你拥有这些巨大的规模经济。而且你可以相当快速地扩展。所以即使市场起步很小，你也可以足够快速地发展你的业务，以跟上不断增长的市场规模，并保持这种垄断力量。
[段 28]
Now, the critical thing about these monopolies is it’s not enough to have a monopoly for just a moment. The critical thing is to have one that lasts over time. And so Silicon Valley is always the sort of idea that you want to be the first mover, and I always think it’s in some ways the better framing is you want to be the last mover. You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable. Microsoft was the last operating system, at least for many decades. Google is the last search engine. Facebook will be valuable if it turns out to be the last social networking site. And one way to think of this last mover value is this idea that most of the value in these companies exists far in the future.
[译文 28]
现在，关键的是这些垄断企业，仅仅拥有片刻的垄断是不够的。关键是要拥有能够持续很长时间的垄断地位。所以Silicon Valley总是有这种观点，即你想要成为第一个行动者，而我始终认为更好的表述方式是你想要成为最后一个行动者。你想成为某个类别中最后的公司。这些才是真正有价值的。Microsoft是最后一个操作系统，至少在几十年的时间里是这样。Google是最后一个搜索引擎。如果Facebook最终成为最后一个社交网站，它将会很有价值。思考这种“最后行动者”价值的一种方式是，这些公司的大部分价值存在于遥远的未来。
[段 29]
If you do sort of a discounted cash flow analysis of a business, you have sort of all these profit streams. You have a growth rate. The growth rate’s much higher than the discount rate. And so most of the value exists far in the future. I did this exercise at PayPal in March of 2001. We had been in business for about 27 months. And we sort of had, you know, the growth rate was 100% a year. We were discounting future cash flows by about 30%. And it turned out that about three quarters of the value of the business as of 2001 came from cash flows in years 2011 and beyond. And whenever you do the math on any of these tech companies, you get to an answer that’s something like that.
[译文 29]
如果你对企业做折现现金流分析，你会发现有各种利润流。你有一个增长率。增长率远高于折现率。因此，大部分价值存在于遥远的未来。2001年3月，我在 PayPal 做了这个分析。当时我们已经运营了大约27个月。当时我们的增长率大约是每年100%。我们用大约30%的比率对未来现金流进行折现。结果表明，截至2001年，该企业约四分之三的价值来自2011年及以后的现金流。每当你对这些科技公司进行计算时，都会得出类似的结果。
[段 30]
So if you are trying to analyze any of the tech companies in Silicon Valley, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, any emerging Internet companies, all the ones in Y Combinator, the math tells you that three-quarters, 85% of the value is coming from cash flows in years 2024 and beyond. It’s very, very far in the future. And so one of the things that we always overvalue in Silicon Valley is growth rates and we undervalue durability because growth is something you can measure in the here and now and you can always track that very precisely. The question of whether a company is still going to be around a decade from now, that’s actually what dominates the value equation and that sort of is a much more qualitative sort of a thing.
[译文 30]
所以如果你想分析硅谷的任何科技公司，Airbnb、Twitter、Facebook，任何新兴的互联网公司，Y Combinator 里的所有公司，数学告诉你，四分之三，也就是 85% 的价值来自于 2024 年及以后的现金流。这在非常非常遥远的未来。所以我们在硅谷一直高估的一件事是增长率，而低估了持久性，因为增长是你可以现在就衡量的东西，而且你可以始终非常精确地追踪它。一家公司十年后是否还会存在这个问题，实际上才是主导价值等式的关键，而这类事情更多的是一种定性的东西。
[段 31]
And so if we went back to this idea of these characteristics of monopoly, proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale. You can think of these characteristics as ones that exist at a moment in time where you capture a market and take it over. But you also want to think about, are these things going to last over time? And so there’s a time dimension to all these characteristics. So network effects often have a great time element where, as the network scales, the network effects actually get more robust. And so if you have a network effect business, that’s often one that can become a bigger and stronger monopoly over time. Proprietary technology is always a little bit of a tricky one.
[译文 31]
所以如果我们回顾一下这些垄断特征，即专有技术、网络效应和规模经济，你可以把这些特征看作是存在于某一时刻的，当你占领并接管一个市场时。但你也需要思考，这些东西会随着时间持续下去吗？因此，所有这些特征都有一个时间维度。网络效应通常有很大的时间要素，随着网络规模的扩大，网络效应实际上会变得更加稳固。所以如果你拥有一个网络效应业务，这通常是一个可以随着时间推移变得更大更强的垄断。专有技术总是一个有点棘手的问题。
[段 32]
So you want something that’s order of magnitude better than the state of the art in the world today. And that’s how you get people’s attention. That’s how you initially break through. But then you don’t want to be superseded by somebody else. So there are all these areas of innovation where there was tremendous innovation, but no one made any money. So, you know, disk drive manufacturing in the 1980s. You could build a better disk drive than anybody else. You could take over the whole world, and two years later someone else would come along and replace yours. And in the course of 15 years, you got vastly improved disk drives, so it had great benefit to consumers, but it didn’t actually help the people who started these companies.
[译文 32]
所以你需要一个比当今世界最先进技术领先一个数量级的产品。这就是你如何吸引人们注意力的方法。这就是你如何初步突破的方法。但接下来你不想被别人超越。所以在所有这些创新领域，虽然创新巨大，但没有人真正赚到钱。比如说，1980年代的磁盘驱动器制造业。你可以制造出比任何人都更好的磁盘驱动器。你可以占领整个世界，但两年后竞争对手就会冒出来取代你的产品。在15年间，磁盘驱动器得到了极大改进，对消费者有很大好处，但实际上并没有帮助这些公司的创始人。
[段 33]
And so there’s always this question about having a huge breakthrough in technology, But then, also being able to say, Explain why yours will be the last breakthrough, or at least the last breakthrough for a long time, or will you make a breakthrough and then you can keep improving on it at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up? So if you have a structure of the future where there’s a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you’re working on, that’s great for society. It’s actually not that good for your business, typically. And then economies of scale, we already talked about. So I think this last mover thing is very critical.
[译文 33]
所以关于能否在技术上取得巨大突破，总是有这样一个问题：但你同时也要能够解释，为什么你的突破将是最后一次突破，或者至少是相当长一段时间内的最后一次突破；又或者，你能否实现一个突破，然后以足够快的速度持续改进，让任何人都无法追上？因此，如果未来的结构中存在大量创新，其他人在你所从事的领域中不断提出新想法，这对社会来说是好事。但通常来说，这对你的业务并不是那么有利。此外，规模经济，我们之前已经讨论过了。所以我认为这个"最后行动者"的概念非常关键。
[段 34]
I’m always tempted, you know, I don’t want to overdo the chess analogies, but, you know, the first mover in chess is someone who plays white. White is about a one-third of a pawn advantage, so there’s a small advantage to going first. You want to be the last mover who wins the game. And so those are the Capablanca lines—you must begin by studying the end game. And I do think that’s, I wouldn’t say that’s the only thing you should study. I think this sort of perspective of asking these questions, Why will this still be the leading company 10, 15, 20 years from now? is a really critical one to try to think through. Let me sort of, I want to go in two slightly other directions with this monopoly versus competition idea.
[译文 34]
我总是忍不住想引用国际象棋的类比，我知道我不想过度使用这些类比，但是在国际象棋中，先手就是执白的一方。执白大约有三分之一兵的微弱优势，所以先手有小小的优势。你想成为赢得比赛的最后落子的人。所以这就是卡尔波夫的路线——你必须从研究残局开始。我不认为这是你唯一应该学习的东西。我认为这种问这些问题的视角——为什么这家公司10年、15年、20年后仍然会是领先的公司？——是一个非常关键的问题。让我稍微换个方向，从垄断与竞争这个理念上再谈两点。
[段 35]
And I think this is the central idea in my mind for business, for starting a business, for thinking about them. And there are some very interesting perspectives I think it gives on the whole history of innovation, and technology, and science, because we’ve lived through 250, 300 years of incredible technological progress in many, many different domains—steam engine to railways to telephones, refrigeration, household appliances, the computer revolution, aviation, all sorts of different areas of technological innovation. And then there’s sort of an analogous thing that one can say about science, where we’ve lived through centuries of enormous amounts of innovation in science as well. And the thing that I think people always miss when they think about these things is that because X and Y are independent variables, some of these things can be extremely valuable innovations, but the people who invent them, who come up with them, do not get rewarded for this.
[译文 35]
并且我认为这是我心中关于商业、关于创业、关于思考这些问题的核心思想。我认为这为整个创新史、技术史和科学史提供了一些非常有趣的观点，因为我们经历了250、300年来在许多许多不同领域令人难以置信的技术进步——从蒸汽机到铁路到电话，从制冷到家用电器，从计算机革命到航空，各种不同的技术创新领域。然后关于科学也有类似的情况，我们同样经历了几个世纪的大量科学创新。我认为人们在这些事情上总是忽略的一点是，因为X和Y是自变量，有些东西可能是极具价值的创新，但发明它们的人、提出它们的人却不会因此得到回报。
[段 36]
Certainly, if you go back, you need to create X dollars in value, you capture Y percent of X. I would suggest that the history of science has generally been one where Y is 0% across the board. The scientists never make any money. They’re always deluded into thinking that they live in a just universe that will reward them for their work and for their inventions. And this is probably the fundamental delusion that scientists tend to suffer from in our society. And even in technology, there are sort of many different areas of technology where there were great innovations that created tremendous value for society. But people did not actually capture that much of the value. And so I think there is this whole history of science and technology that can be told from the perspective of how much value was actually captured.
[译文 36]
当然，如果你回顾过去，你需要创造X美元的价值，你获得X的Y百分比。我认为科学史总体上一直是Y为0%的历史，全面覆盖。科学家们从未赚到任何钱。他们总是被误导，以为他们生活在一个公正的宇宙中，会因为他们的工作和发明而得到奖励。这可能是科学家在我们的社会中容易遭受的根本错觉。即使在技术领域，也有许多不同的技术领域，那里曾有伟大的创新，为社会创造了巨大的价值。但人们实际上并没有获得那么多价值。因此，我认为科学和技术的整个历史可以从实际获得多少价值的角度来讲述。
[段 37]
And certainly there are entire sectors where people didn’t capture anything. So you’re the smartest physicist of the 20th century. You come up with special relativity. You come up with general relativity. You don’t get to be a billionaire. You don’t even get to be a millionaire. It just somehow doesn’t work that way. The railroads, incredibly valuable. Most of them just went bankrupt because there was too much competition. Wright Brothers, you fly the first plane, you don’t make any money. And so I think there is a structure to these industries that’s very important. And I think the thing that’s actually rare are the success cases. So it’s actually… When you really think about the history in this 250-year sweep, why is it almost always 0%?
[译文 37]
当然，有些行业人们完全没有获得任何收益。所以你是20世纪最聪明的物理学家。你提出了狭义相对论。你提出了广义相对论。你还是成不了亿万富翁。你甚至成不了百万富翁。事情就是这样不按那种方式运作。铁路，非常有价值。但大多数都破产了，因为竞争太激烈了。莱特兄弟，你们让飞机首次飞行，你们却赚不到钱。所以我认为这些行业有一种结构非常重要。我认为真正稀有的其实是成功案例。所以当你真正思考这250年跨度中的历史时，为什么几乎总是0%？
[段 38]
It’s always 0 in science. It’s almost always 0 in technology. And so it’s very rare where people made money. You know, the late 18th, early 19th century, the first industrial revolution was the textile mills. You had the steam engine. You sort of automated things. And you had these relentless improvements. That people improved efficiency of textile factories, of manufacturing generally, at a clip of 5% to 7% every year, year after year, decade after decade. You had 60, 70 years of tremendous improvement from 1780 to 1850. But even in 1850, most of the wealth in Britain was still held by the landed aristocracy. The workers didn’t make that much. The capitalists didn’t make that much either. It was all competed away.
[译文 38]
科学领域永远是 0。技术领域几乎也永远是 0。所以人们真正赚到钱的情况是非常罕见的。18 世纪末、19 世纪初，第一次工业革命是纺织厂。你有了蒸汽机。某种程度上实现了自动化。还有这些不断持续的改进。人们把纺织厂、整体制造业的效率每年以 5% 到 7% 的速度提升，年复一年，十年代复十年代。从 1780 年到 1850 年，你有了 60、70 年的巨大进步。但即使到了 1850 年，英国大部分财富仍然掌握在土地贵族手中。工人们并没有赚到那么多钱。资本家也没有赚到那么多。所有利润都被竞争掉了。
[段 39]
There were hundreds of people running textile factories. It was an industry that just the structure of the competition prevented people from making any money. And so I think there are, in my mind, there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history of the last 250 years where people have actually come up with new things and made money doing so. One is these sort of vertically integrated complex monopolies, which people did build in the second industrial revolution at the end of the 19th and started the 20th century. And so this was like Ford. It was the vertically integrated oil companies like Standard Oil. And what these vertically integrated monopolies typically required was this very complex coordination.
[译文 39]
当时有数百人在经营纺织厂。这个行业的竞争结构本身就让人根本无法赚钱。所以我认为，在我看来，在过去250年的整个历史中，人们真正创造了新事物并因此获利的情况，大致只有两个广泛的类别。一类是这种垂直整合的复杂垄断企业，人们确实在第二次工业革命期间，也就是19世纪末20世纪初建立了这样的企业。比如Ford（福特）。还有像Standard Oil（标准石油）这样的垂直整合石油公司。而这些垂直整合垄断企业通常需要的是这种极其复杂的协调能力。
[段 40]
You got a lot of pieces to fit together in just the right way. When you assembled it, you had a tremendous advantage. This is actually done surprisingly little today. And so I think this is sort of a business form that, when people can pull it off, is very valuable. It’s typically fairly capital intensive. We live sort of in a culture where it’s very hard to get people to buy into anything that’s super complicated and takes very long to build. But when I sort of think about my colleague Elon Musk from PayPal’s success with Tesla and SpaceX, I think the key to these companies was the complex, vertically integrated monopoly structure they had. So if you sort of look at Tesla or SpaceX, if you ask, was there sort of a single breakthrough?
[译文 40]
你需要把很多碎片以恰到好处的方式拼凑在一起。当你组装好它时，你就拥有巨大的优势。实际上，今天这样做的人少得令人惊讶。所以我认为这是一种商业形式，当人们能够成功做到时，是非常有价值的。它通常是相当资本密集型的。我们生活在一种文化中，在这种文化中，很难让人们接受任何超级复杂且需要很长时间才能建立的东西。但是当我想起我的同事 Elon Musk 在 PayPal 成功后在 Tesla 和 SpaceX 的成功时，我认为这些公司的关键是它们拥有复杂的垂直整合垄断结构。所以如果你看看 Tesla 或 SpaceX，如果你问，是否有一个单一的突破？
[段 41]
I mean, they certainly innovated on a lot of dimensions. I don’t think there was a single 10x breakthrough in battery storage or, you know, maybe working on some things on rocketry. But there was no sort of single massive breakthrough. But what was really impressive was integrating all these pieces together and doing it in a way that was more vertically integrated than most of their competitors. So Tesla, you also integrated the car distributors so they wouldn’t steal all the money, as has happened with the rest of the car industry in the U.S. Or SpaceX, you basically pulled in all the subcontractors where most of the large aerospace companies have single source subcontractors that are able to sort of charge monopoly profits and make it very hard for the integrated aerospace companies to make money.
[译文 41]
我的意思是，他们在很多方面确实创新了。我认为在电池储能方面没有单一的 10x 突破，或者，嗯，也许在火箭技术方面有一些工作。但并没有一种单一的、巨大的突破。但真正令人印象深刻的是把这些环节整合在一起，并以一种比大多数竞争对手更加垂直整合的方式进行。Tesla，你同样整合了汽车经销商，这样他们就不会偷走所有的钱，就像美国其他汽车行业已经发生的那样。或者说 SpaceX，你基本上把所有分包商都拉进来，而大多数大型航空航天公司都有单一来源的分包商，这些分包商能够收取垄断利润，使得整合型航空航天公司很难盈利。
[段 42]
And so vertical integration, I think, is sort of a very underexplored modality of technological progress that people would do well to look at more. And then I think there is something about software itself that’s very, very powerful. Software has these incredible economies of scale, these low marginal costs. And there is something about the world of bits as opposed to the world of atoms where you can often get very fast adoption. And the fast adoption is critical to capturing and taking over markets because even if you have a small market, if the adoption rate is too slow, there’ll be enough time for other people to enter that market and compete with you. Whereas if you have a small to mid-sized market and have a fast adoption rate, you can establish dominance before competitors can react.
[译文 42]
因此，垂直整合，我认为是一种非常未被充分探索的技术进步模式，人们应该多加关注。其次，我认为软件本身具有非常非常强大的特性。软件具有这些难以置信的规模经济效应，以及较低的边际成本。与原子世界相比，比特世界有着不同的特性，在比特世界中你往往能够获得非常快速的采用。而快速采用对于占领和接管市场至关重要，因为即使你只占据了一个小市场，如果采用率太慢，就会有足够的时间让其他人进入这个市场并与你竞争。然而，如果你占据了一个中小型市场，并且拥有快速的采用率，你就能在竞争对手做出反应之前建立主导地位。
[段 43]
You can take over this market. And so I think this is one of the reasons Silicon Valley has done so well and why software has been this phenomenal industry. And what I would suggest, what I want to leave you with is there are sort of these different rationalizations people give for why certain things work and why certain things don’t work. And I think these rationalizations always obscure this question of creating X dollars in value and capturing Y percent of X. So the science rationalization, we’re always told, is that the scientists aren’t interested in making money. They’re doing it for charitable reasons, and that you’re not a good scientist if you’re motivated by money. And I’m not even saying people should always be motivated by money or something like this, but I think we should be a little bit more critical of this as a rationalization.
[译文 43]
你可以接管这个市场。所以我认为这正是硅谷如此成功、软件成为如此惊人产业的原因之一。我想建议的是，我想告诉你们的是，人们会给出各种不同的理由来解释为什么某些东西成功了，为什么某些东西没有成功。我认为这些理由总是模糊了"创造X美元的价值"和"获取X的Y百分比"这个问题。所以关于科学的理由，我们经常被告知的是，科学家对赚钱不感兴趣。他们这样做是出于慈善动机，如果你被金钱驱动，你就不是一个好科学家。我并不是说人们应该总是被金钱驱动或什么的，但我认为我们对这些理由应该更加批判性地看待。
[段 44]
We should ask, is this a rationalization to obscure the fact that Y equals 0% and the scientists are operating in this sort of world where all the innovation is effectively competed away and they can’t capture any of it directly. And then the software distortion that often happens is because people are making such vast fortunes in software, we infer that this is the most valuable thing in the world being done full stop. And so if people at Twitter make billions of dollars, it must be that Twitter is worth far more than anything Einstein did. And what that sort of rationalization tends to obscure is, again, that X and Y are independent variables, and there are these businesses where you capture a lot of X, and there are others where you don’t.
[译文 44]
我们应该问，这是不是一种理性化，用来掩盖Y等于0%的事实，科学家们正生活在这样一个世界里，所有的创新都被有效地竞争掉了，他们无法直接获取其中的任何成果。然后经常发生的软件扭曲是因为人们通过软件赚了这么多钱，我们就推断这就是世界上最有价值的事情。所以如果Twitter的人赚了几十亿美元，那Twitter一定比爱因斯坦做的任何事情都更有价值。而这种理性化往往掩盖的是，X和Y是独立变量，有些企业能获取大量X，有些则不能。
[段 45]
And so I do think the history of innovation has been this history where the microeconomics, the structure of these industries, has mattered a tremendous amount. And there is sort of this story where some people have made vast fortunes because they were in industries with the right structure, and other people made nothing at all because they were in these sort of very competitive things, and we shouldn’t just rationalize that way. I think it’s worth understanding this better. And then finally, let me come back to this sort of overarching theme for this talk, this competition is for losers idea, which is always this provocative way to title things because we always think of the losers as the people who are not good at competing.
[译文 45]
所以我确实认为创新的历史一直是这样的历史，微观经济学、这些产业的结构，一直非常重要。而且有这样一种情况，有些人赚了大钱，因为他们所在的产业有着正确的结构，而另一些人完全没有赚到钱，因为他们所在的行业竞争非常激烈，我们不应该简单地这样合理化。我认为了解这一点很有价值。最后，让我回到这次演讲的总体主题，这个“竞争是给失败者的”观点，这总是一种挑衅性的方式来命名，因为我们总是认为失败者是那些不擅长竞争的人。
[段 46]
We think of the losers as the people who are slow on the track team in high school or who do a little bit less well on the standardized tests and don’t get into the right schools. And so we always think of losers as people who can’t compete. And I want us to really rethink and revalue this and consider whether it’s possible that competition itself is off, that we’re sort of, it’s not just the case that we don’t understand this monopoly competition dichotomy intellectually. So this is what I’ve been talking about, why you wouldn’t understand it intellectually, because people lie about it, it’s distorted, we have all these the history of innovation rationalizes what’s happening in all these very, very strange ways.
[译文 46]
我们把失败者想象成那些在高中田径队中速度较慢的人，或者那些在标准化考试中表现稍差、没能进入理想学校的人。所以我们总是把失败者看作无法竞争的人。我希望我们真正重新思考和重新评估这一点，并考虑竞争本身是否有问题的可能性——我们似乎……问题不仅仅是我们在智识上不理解这种垄断与竞争的二分法。所以这就是我一直在说的，为什么你在智识上无法理解它，因为人们对此撒谎，它被扭曲了，我们所有的这些创新历史以各种非常非常奇怪的方式合理化正在发生的事情。
[段 47]
But I think it’s more than just an intellectual blind spot, I think it’s also a psychological blind spot where we find ourselves very, very attracted into competition in one form or another. We find it reassuring if other people do things. The word ape already in the time of Shakespeare meant both primate and imitate. And there is something about human nature that’s deeply memetic, imitative, ape-like, sheep-like, lemming-like, herd-like. And it’s this very, very problematic thing that we need to always think through and try to overcome. And there is always this question about competition as a form of validation where we go for things that lots of other people are going for. And it’s not that there is wisdom in crowds.
[译文 47]
但我认为这不仅仅是知识上的盲点，我认为这也是心理上的盲点，我们发现自己以某种形式非常、非常容易被竞争所吸引。如果别人也做同样的事，我们会感到安心。ape这个词在Shakespeare时代就同时指灵长类动物和模仿。人类本性中有一种深刻的模仿性、传染性的东西，像猿一样、像羊一样、像旅鼠一样、像群居动物一样。这正是我们需要始终深思熟虑并努力克服的非常、非常成问题的事情。总是存在竞争作为验证形式的问题，我们追求很多人都在追求的东西。而这并不是说人群是智慧的。
[段 48]
It’s not when lots of people are trying to do something that that’s proof of it being valuable. I think it’s when lots of people are trying To do something that is often proof of insanity. There are 20,000 people a year who move to Los Angeles to become movie stars. About 20 of them make it. I think the Olympics are a little bit better because you have a, you know, you can sort of figure out pretty quickly whether you’re good or not, so there’s a little bit less uncertainty. Pretty quickly whether you’re good or not, so there’s a little bit less of a dead weight loss to society. You know, the sort of educational experience at a place, the pre-Stanford educational experience, there’s always sort of a non-competitive characterization.
[译文 48]
当很多人试图做某件事时，这并不能证明它是有价值的。我认为当很多人试图做某件事时，这往往是疯狂的证明。每年有20,000人搬到洛杉矶想成为电影明星。大约20个人能成功。我觉得奥运会稍微好一点，因为你可以很快弄清楚自己是否擅长，所以不确定性少一些。很快就能知道自己是否擅长，所以对社会来说死重损失会少一些。你知道，一个地方的教育体验，在斯坦福之前的教育体验，总是有点非竞争性的特征。
[段 49]
I think most of the people in this room had machine guns. They were competing with people with bows and arrows, so it wasn’t exactly a parallel competition when you were in junior high school and high school. There’s always a question: does the tournament make sense as you keep going? And so there is always this question: if people go on to grad school or postdoctoral educations, does the intensity of the competition really make sense? There’s the classic Henry Kissinger line describing his fellow faculty at Harvard that the battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small, describing sort of academia. And you sort of think on one level this is a description of insanity. Why would people fight like crazy when the stakes are so small?
[译文 49]
我觉得房间里的大多数人都装备着机枪。他们是在和那些拿着弓箭的人竞争，所以在初中和高中阶段，这并不是一场势均力敌的竞争。总会有这样一个问题：随着不断深入，这场tournament还有意义吗？所以总是存在这样的问题：如果人们继续读grad school或postdoctoral educations，这种竞争的激烈程度真的合理吗？Henry Kissinger有句经典的话，用来描述他在Harvard的同事们：战斗之所以如此凶残，是因为赌注太小，这基本上就是在描述academia。从某种程度上，你会觉得这是在描述一种疯狂。为什么当赌注如此之小时，人们会拼命争斗？
[段 50]
But it’s also, I think, simply a function of the logic of the situation. When it’s really hard to differentiate yourself from other people, when the objective differences really are small, then you have to compete ferociously to maintain a difference of one sort or another that’s often more imaginary than real. There’s always sort of a personal version of this that I tell where I was sort of hyper, hyper-tracked. I, you know, my eighth grade, junior high school, hyper, hyper-tracked. I, you know, my eighth grade junior high school yearbook, one of my friends wrote in: I know you’ll get into Stanford in four years as a sophomore. I sort of went into Stanford four years later, at the end of high school.
[译文 50]
但我认为，这也不过是形势逻辑的必然结果。当很难让自己与他人区分开来，当客观差异确实很小时，你就不得不激烈竞争，以维持某种或另一种差异，而这种差异往往更多地是想象出来的，而非真实存在的。我总爱讲一个自己的版本，那时候我被极度分轨分流。你知道，我八年级初中的时候，被极度分轨分流。你知道，我八年级初中年鉴里，有个朋友写道：我想你四年后能以大二学生身份考进Stanford。我大约四年后，也就是高中毕业时，进入了Stanford。
[段 51]
Went to Stanford Law School. You know, ended up at a big law firm in New York where from the outside everybody wanted to get in. On the inside everybody wanted to leave. And you had, and it was this very strange dynamic where after I sort of realized this was maybe not the best idea and left after seven months and three days, one of the people down the hall from me told me, It’s really reassuring to see you leave, Peter. I had no idea that it was possible to escape from Alcatraz, which, of course, all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But so much of people’s identities got wrapped up in winning these competitions that they somehow lost sight of what was important, what was valuable.
[译文 51]
去了斯坦福法学院。你知道的，后来去了纽约一家大律师事务所，在那里，从外面看每个人都想要进去。但在里面每个人都想要离开。而且这是一种非常奇怪的动态，在我意识到这可能不是个好主意之后，我在七个月零三天后离开了，走廊那边有个人告诉我：“看到你离开真的很令人欣慰，Peter。我根本不知道从Alcatraz逃出来是可能的”——当然，那里你所要做的就是走出前门然后不回来。但太多人的身份都被包裹在赢得这些竞争之中，以至于他们不知怎么地忽视了什么是重要的，什么是有价值的。
[段 52]
You know, competition does make you better at whatever it is that you’re competing on. Because when you’re competing, you’re comparing yourself with the people around you. You’re figuring out: how do I beat the people next to me? How do I do somewhat better at whatever it is they’re doing? And you will get better at that thing. I’m not questioning that. I’m not denying that. But it often comes at this tremendous price that you stop asking some bigger questions about what’s truly important and truly valuable. And so I would say that don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone’s trying to rush through, and maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one’s taking.
[译文 52]
你知道，竞争确实会让你在你所竞争的领域做得更好。因为当你在竞争时，你会把自己和周围的人比较。你在思考：如何打败身边的人？如何在他们正在做的事情上做得更好一些？然后你确实会在那件事上变得更好。我不是在质疑这一点。我也不是在否认这一点。但这往往要付出巨大的代价——你会停止问一些更重要的关于什么才是真正重要、真正有价值的问题。所以我想说，不要总是走那扇每个人都想挤进去的小门，不如绕过街角，走那扇没人走的大宽门。
[段 53]
Thank you very much. I guess we have time for, do you want to take a few questions? Oh, yeah, people want to take a few questions. We have a few minutes time. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I’d say the question I always try to focus on is: what is the actual market, so not what’s the narrative of the market, because you can always tell a fictional story about a market that’s much bigger or much smaller, but what is the real objective market? So it’s always, Yeah, you always try to figure it out, and you realize people have incentives to powerfully distort these things. Yeah? So which of the aspects of monopolies that you mentioned would you say have suffered more than like Google or Excel?
[译文 53]
非常感谢。我猜我们还有时间…你想接受几个问题吗？
哦，是的，大家想提几个问题。我们还有几分钟时间。好，请说吧。
嗯，我想说我一直试图关注的问题是：实际的市场是什么，而不是市场的叙事是什么，因为你可以讲一个关于市场的虚构故事，无论市场更大还是更小，但什么是真正的客观市场？所以…是的，你总是试图弄清这一点，而你意识到人们有强烈的动机去扭曲这些事情。对吧？那么你提到的那些垄断方面，你觉得哪些比 Google 或 Excel 等遭受了更多（影响）？
[段 54]
Well, they have network effects with the ad network. They had proprietary technology that gave them the initial lead because they had the PageRank algorithm, which was sort of an order of magnitude better than any other search engine. You have economies of scale because of the need to store all these different sites, and at this point you have brands. So Google has all four. Maybe the proprietary technology is somewhat weaker at this point, but definitely it had all four and maybe three and a half out of four now. Yeah? How does this apply to Palantir? And second, what’s it like? Second is what? What’s with the iPhone? Oh, that’s sort of a set of companies that are doing different copycat payment systems on mobile phones.
[译文 54]
嗯，他们在广告网络上拥有网络效应。他们拥有专有技术，这给他们带来了初始优势，因为他们有PageRank算法，这比其他任何搜索引擎都好出一个数量级。由于需要存储所有这些不同的网站，你有规模经济，到这个时候你有了品牌。所以Google拥有全部四个（优势）。也许专有技术在这个时候已经有些弱了，但肯定曾经拥有全部四个，现在可能三点五个。是吗？这如何应用到Palantir？第二，它是什么样的？第二是什么？iPhone怎么样？哦，那是一组公司，它们在移动电话上做不同的模仿支付系统。
[段 55]
There’s Square, there’s PayPal. They just have sort of different shapes. That’s how they differentiate themselves. One is a triangle, one is a square. And so, you know, maybe at some point the apes will run out of shapes or something like that. But I think Palantir, we started with a focus on the intelligence community, which is a small sub-market. You had a proprietary technology that used a very, very different approach, where it was focused on the human computer synthesis rather than the substitution, which I think is the dominant paradigm. So there’s a whole set of things I would say on the market approach and the proprietary technology. Yes? We have design thinking methodology and lean startup thinking, which is used to mitigate risk by not creating things that people don’t want.
[译文 55]
有Square，有PayPal。它们只是有某种不同的形状。这就是它们自我区分的方式。一个是三角形，一个是正方形。所以，你知道，也许在某种程度上猿猴会用完所有的形状或者什么的。但我认为Palantir，我们最初专注于情报社区，这是一个小型子市场。你们拥有一种专有技术，使用了一种非常非常不同的方法，它专注于人机融合而不是替代，我认为替代是主导范式。所以关于市场方法和专有技术，我可以说出一整套东西。是吧？我们有设计思维方法和精益创业思维，用来通过不创造人们不想要的东西来降低风险。
[段 56]
But how do young innovators have inspiration to create complex systems that last? Can you repeat the question? Yeah, so the question is: what I think about lean startups, iterative thinking where you get feedback from people versus complexity that may not work. So I am personally quite skeptical of all the lean startup methodology. I think the really great companies did something that was somewhat more of a quantum improvement that really differentiated them from everybody else. They typically did not do massive customer surveys. The people who ran these companies sometimes, not always, suffered from wild forms of Asperger’s, so they were not actually that influenced, not that easily deterred by what other people thought or told them to do.
[译文 56]
但年轻创新者如何获得灵感来创建持久的复杂系统？你能重复一下问题吗？好的，问题就是：关于 lean startups，我认为如何？迭代思维（iterative thinking）是让你从人们那里获得反馈，但面对可能行不通的复杂系统。所以我个人对所有的精益创业方法论（lean startup methodology）持相当怀疑的态度。我认为真正伟大的公司做的是某种相当于是量子跃迁式（quantum improvement）的改进，这真正让他们与其他人区分开来。他们通常不会做大规模的客户调查。经营这些公司的人有时候，不是总是，患有某种极端的阿斯皮格尔综合症（Asperger’s），所以他们实际上并不会那么受影响，不会那么容易因为别人的想法或别人告诉他们该做什么而退缩。
[段 57]
So I do think we’re way too focused on iteration as a modality and not enough on trying to have a virtual ESP link with the public and figuring it out ourselves. I would say that, let me see, I would say that the—I’m not quite— The risk question I think is always a very tricky one because there are, you know, it’s not—it’s often, I think it’s often the case that you don’t have enough time to really mitigate risk. If you’re going to take enough time to figure out what people want, you often will have missed the boat by then. And then, of course, there’s always the risk of doing something that’s not that significant or meaningful.
[译文 57]
所以我确实认为我们过于关注迭代这种模式，而没有足够地尝试与公众建立虚拟的ESP链接并自己弄清楚。我会说，让我想想，我会说那个——我不太—— 风险问题我认为总是非常棘手的，因为你知道，这并不是——通常是——我认为是这样的：你没有足够的时间来真正降低风险。如果你要花足够的时间去弄清楚人们想要什么，你通常会错过最佳时机。然后，当然，总是存在做不太重要或没有意义的事情的风险。
[段 58]
So, you know, you could say a track in law school is a logistic— a track in law school is a low-risk track from one perspective. It may still be a very high-risk track in the sense that maybe you have a high risk of not doing something meaningful with your life. So we have to think about risk in these very complicated ways. I think risk is sort of this very complicated concept. Yes? So you started with the last move, your advantage, but then doesn’t that imply that there’s already a complicated game with it? The chess piece on the chessboard? Yeah, so there’s always this terminology thing. So I would say that there are categories in which people sort of are bundled together.
[译文 58]
所以，你知道，你可以说法学院的一个track是一个logistic——从某个角度来看，法学院的track是一条低风险的track。它仍然可能是一条非常高风险的track，因为从某种意义上来说，你可能面临无法做一些有意义的事情的高风险。所以我们必须以这些非常复杂的方式来思考风险。我认为风险是一种非常复杂的概念。是的？所以你从最后一步开始，你的优势开始，但难道这不暗示已经有一个复杂的game在其中了吗？棋盘上的chess piece？是的，所以总是有这种terminology的问题。所以我想说的是，有一些categories，人们被bundled在一起。
[段 59]
I would say the monopoly businesses were, in effect, They really were a big first mover in some sense. You could say Google was not the first search engine. There were other search engines before. But on one dimension, they were dramatically better than everybody else. So they were the first one with page rank, with sort of an automated approach. Facebook was not the first social networking site. My friend Reid Hoffman started one in 1997. They called it SocialNet, so they already had the name Social Networking in the name of their company seven years before Facebook. Their idea was that it was going to be this virtual cyberspace where I’d be a dog and you’d be a cat, and we’d have all these different rules about how we’d interact with each other in this virtual alternate reality.
[译文 59]
我想说的是，这些垄断企业实际上在某种意义上确实是重要的先行者。可以说，Google不是第一个搜索引擎。在此之前就已经有其他搜索引擎了。但在一个维度上，它们比其他所有公司都要出色得多。所以他们是第一个使用Page Rank、采用某种自动化方法的公司。
Facebook不是第一个社交网站。我朋友Reid Hoffman在1997年就创办了一个。他们把它叫做SocialNet，所以早在Facebook出现前七年，他们的公司名称中就已经有了"Social Networking"这个词。他们的理念是，这是一个虚拟赛博空间，我可以扮演一条狗，你可以扮演一只猫，我们会有一套完全不同的规则来规定我们在这个虚拟的另类现实中如何互动。
[段 60]
Facebook was the first one to get real identity. So I’d say I hope Facebook will be the last social networking site. It was the first one in a very important dimension. People often would not think of it as the first because they’d sort of lump all these things together. I have one more question. Okay, one more question. Let’s take one here. If you’re theoretically someone who worked at Goldman Sachs out of college and left out of six months and is now studying computer science at Stanford, how would you recommend rethinking sort of that competitive thing? You know, I don’t have a great, I’m not great at the psychotherapy stuff, so I don’t quite know how to solve this.
[译文 60]
Facebook是第一个获得真实身份的（社交平台）。所以我想说，我希望Facebook是最后一个社交网站。在非常重要的维度上，它是第一个。人们通常不会认为它是第一个，因为他们倾向于把所有这些东西混为一谈。我还有一个问题。好的，再问一个问题。让我在这里选一个。如果你理论上是一个从大学毕业后在Goldman Sachs工作，六个月后离开，现在在Stanford学习计算机科学的人，你会如何建议重新思考那种竞争心态？你知道，我不太擅长心理治疗那一套，所以我不太清楚如何解决这个问题。
[段 61]
There are these very odd studies they’ve done on people who go to business school. There’s one they’ve done at Harvard Business School where it’s sort of the anti-Asperger personality where you have people who are super extroverted, generally have low convictions, few ideas, and you have sort of a hothouse environment. You put all these people in for two years, and at the end of it, they systematically end up, the largest cohort systematically ends up doing the wrong thing. They try to catch the last wave. In 1989, everyone at Harvard tried to work for Mike Milken. It was one or two years before he went to jail for all the junk bond stuff. They were never interested in Silicon Valley or tech except for 1999-2000 when they timed the dot-com bubble peaking perfectly.
[译文 61]
有一些非常奇怪的研究，是针对读商学院的人做的。有一项是在Harvard Business School做的，说的是一种反Asperger人格类型，那里的人超级外向，通常缺乏坚定信念，没什么想法，而且处于一种温室般的高压环境。你把所有这些人放进去两年，到最后，他们系统性地——最大的那个群体系统性地——做错事。他们试图抓住最后一波浪潮。1989年，Harvard的每个人都试图为Mike Milken工作。那是在他因为垃圾债券那档子事入狱前一两年。他们从来对Silicon Valley或科技不感兴趣，除了1999-2000年，那时他们完美地踩准了dot-com泡沫见顶的时机。
[段 62]
They did, and then, you know, 05 to 07 was housing, private equity, stuff like this. So I do think this tendency for us to see competition as validation is very deep. I don’t think there’s any sort of easy psychological formula to avoid it, so I don’t quite know what sort of therapy to recommend. But my first starting point, which is only maybe 10% of the way, is to never underestimate how big a problem it is. We always think this is something that afflicts other people. So it’s easy for me to point to people in business schools or people at Harvard or people on Wall Street. I think it actually does afflict all of us to a very profound degree.
[译文 62]
他们确实这样做了，然后，05到07年是房地产、私募股权之类的。所以我确实认为这种把竞争视为认可的倾向是非常深层的。我不认为有什么简单的心理公式来避免它，所以我不太清楚该推荐什么样的疗法。但我的第一个起点，这可能只是前进道路上的10%，就是永远不要低估这个问题有多大。我们总是认为这是折磨别人的东西。所以我很容易指出商学院的人、哈佛的人或华尔街的人。我认为它实际上确实以一种非常深刻的程度折磨着我们所有人。
[段 63]
We always think of advertising as things that work on other people. Who are all these stupid people who fall for all those ads on TV? They obviously work to some extent, and they work to a disturbing extent on all of us, and it’s something we all should work to overcome. Thank you very much. Thank you.
[译文 63]
我们总是把广告看作是对别人起作用的东西。谁是那些会掉进电视广告陷阱的傻子？它们显然在一定程度上有效，而且以一种令人不安的程度对我们所有人有效，这是我们所有人都应该努力去克服的。非常感谢。谢谢。
Source: bilibili BV1oWKpzoE1Z