Peter Thiel: Successful Businesses are Based on Secrets | WIRED - YouTube

So I'm David Ryan, editor of Wired, and it's an amazing honor to introduce Peter, who has a fabulous new bestseller out, Zero to One. And Peter is a busy man. He has a number of lives that all run at the same time. He is managing partner of the founders fund. The Clarium Capital, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir, makes good investments like $500,000 for 10.2% of a new company called Facebook in 2004. And when he tweets, he only ever tweets once, he gets 60,000 followers pretty much straight away.

我是《连线》杂志的编辑大卫·瑞安，很荣幸向大家介绍彼得，他的新书《从 0 到 1》已经成为畅销书。彼得是个非常忙碌的人，同时扮演着多重角色。他是创始人基金的管理合伙人，Clarium Capital的合伙人，PayPal和Palantir的联合创始人。彼得还做出了一些非常成功的投资，比如在2004年以50万美元投资Facebook，获得10.2%的股份。当他在推特上发声时，即使只发一条推文，也能马上吸引6万名粉丝。

Now we have big expectations for this evening because everywhere Peter has spoken in the last week or so about his new book. He's generated headlines, and the headlines include, you know, Twitter's horribly mismanaged. There's a lot of pot smoking there. Apple must innovate more. Technology stalled in 1970. The Wall Street Journal competition is for losers. And I think my favorite one from Fortune, Peter Teal disagrees with you. So I'm expecting Peter to tear apart some of my questions. But first, please could we welcome him and give him the stage to talk about Zero to One. Thank you very much.

现在我们对今晚充满了期待，因为彼得在过去一周左右的时间里都在各地谈论他的新书。他引起了很多头条新闻，这些新闻包括：推特被糟糕管理，那里有很多人吸大麻；苹果必须创新更多；技术停滞在1970年；《华尔街日报》的竞争对手是失败者。我最喜欢的一个来自《财富》杂志：彼得·蒂尔不同意你的观点。所以我期望彼得会对我的一些问题进行激烈的讨论。但首先，请大家欢迎他，并给他舞台讲述《从零到一》。非常感谢。

Well, after that introduction, I'm actually quite nervous about saying anything at all here since I feel like I'm being recorded and it may come back to haunt me in all kinds of strange ways. In writing a book about entrepreneurship, one of the, this, and teaching, it came out of a class that I taught at Stanford in 2012. And one of the challenges in teaching that entrepreneurship or writing about it is that I think people tend to sort of write books, business books that make one of two kinds of mistakes.

好的，在经过这样的介绍之后，我实际上相当紧张，不敢再说任何话，因为我觉得自己正在被录音，可能以后会以各种奇怪的方式回到我身上。在写一本关于创业的书时，其中一个——这本书和教学——来源于2012年我在斯坦福大学上过的一门课。而关于教授创业或写这方面的书，一个挑战是，我认为人们往往会写出两种类型的商业书籍，并且会犯两类错误。

There's one where it's sort of, you tell all these war stories. It must be like, this is what I did at PayPal in 1999. It's how we combined email and money. And this is how this all worked. And that's not terribly relevant to people who are interested in starting new businesses or learning from that. And then I think the other end of the spectrum, you have these business books which I think are sort of pseudo-scientific. It's like this formula and you do follow these five steps and you will have a successful company.

有一种就是，你会讲一些过去的故事。就像是，“我在1999年的PayPal做了什么，这是我们如何结合电子邮件和资金的方式。” 但这些对那些想要创业或者从中学习的人来说，不太相关。 另一个极端就是一些商业书籍，我认为它们有点伪科学的感觉。就像是“按照这个公式，遵循这五个步骤，你就会拥有一家成功的公司”。

I think that approach also does not work for a similar reason, which is that I think every moment in the history of business and the history of technology happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not be starting an operating system company. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg would not be starting a social network. If you are copying these people, you're not learning from them. And so the theme of my book is that what's actually important is the things that make these companies singular and different.

我认为这种方法也不行，原因类似，因为我认为商业历史和科技历史上的每一个时刻都只有一次。下一个比尔·盖茨不会再创办一个操作系统公司。下一个拉里·佩奇不会再创建一个搜索引擎。下一个马克·扎克伯格也不会再创办一个社交网络。如果你只是模仿这些人，你并没有真正从他们身上学到东西。因此，我书中的主题是，真正重要的是让这些公司独特和与众不同的东西。

And the chapter is entitled, this opening line from Anna Karenina which says, all happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way. And I think the opposite is true of business. All happy companies are different. All unhappy companies are alike in that they've failed to escape the sameness that is competition. This was the title of one of the chapters, all happy companies are different. It got, when the Wall Street Journal excerpted it and published it, they retitled that to competition is for losers, which is a somewhat punchier way of putting that idea.

这一章的标题取自《安娜·卡列尼娜》的开头一句话："幸福的家庭都是相似的，不幸的家庭各有各的不幸。" 我认为在商业领域正好相反。所有成功的公司各有特点，而所有失败的公司则相似，因为它们未能摆脱竞争中的同质化。这一章的标题是“所有成功的公司都各有特点”。《华尔街日报》在摘录并刊登这部分内容时，将标题改为“竞争是失败者的游戏”，这样说更为简洁有力。

And I try to get at this uniqueness question through these various contrarian questions I think are good to ask. The business one I always is like, what great company is nobody building? The more intellectual version of this question that I think makes for always a terrific interview question is, tell me something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on. And this is a shockingly hard question for at least two different reasons.

我尝试通过一些不同寻常的问题来探讨这个独特性问题，并认为这些问题很值得去问。关于商业方面的问题，我总是会问：“有什么伟大的公司是目前没有人去创建的？” 而更为智识性的版本是：“告诉我一些你认为是真的，但几乎没有人和你意见一致的事情。” 这个问题令人惊讶地难回答，至少有两个不同的原因。

First reason is that we've been taught that truth is conventional. The truth is just simply what people agree on. And so it automatically sounds like you have to be really brilliant and it's really hard to discover some new truth that is hit her toe, unsuspected. But it's also very difficult because of just the social context in which these questions get asked.

第一个原因是，我们从小被教导真理是约定俗成的。也就是说，真理只是大家达成共识的东西。所以，听起来好像你必须非常聪明，才能发现一种之前没人想到过的新真理。但这也很困难，因为这些问题的提出和讨论总是受社会环境的影响。

So if you're answering it and the interviewer says, yes, I believe that all along, that's by definition a bad answer. And a good answer is one, the person asking it does not agree with or does not want to hear. And it requires a certain amount of courage. And we live in a world which I think courage is an even shorter supply than genius. So what I want to try to do in my brief comments now is I'm just going to give a few answers. My book is just a whole series of answers to that question, the things I believe to be true that most people don't agree with me on.

所以，如果你回答了问题，而面试官说“是的，我一直都这么认为”，那就说明你的答案不好。而一个好的答案是面试官不认可或者不愿意听的答案。这需要一定的勇气。在当今社会，我认为勇气比天才还要稀缺。所以，我现在想做的，就是简单介绍几个答案。我的书其实就是对这个问题的一系列回答，都是我认为的真理，而大多数人并不同意我的看法。

But I'll give three quick answers to it tonight in my comments and then we'll go to the questions. So first one, and this sort of flows out of this idea that you want all happy companies to be different and unique. Most people think that capitalism and competition are synonyms. I believe they are antonyms. You know, a capitalist, someone who accumulates capital, a world of competition is a world where all the profits are competed away.

但今晚我会在评论中给出三个简单的回答，然后我们再进入提问环节。首先，第一个回答，源自这样的想法：你希望所有成功的公司都是不同且独特的。大多数人认为资本主义和竞争是同义词。而我认为它们是反义词。一个资本家，就是积累资本的人，而一个充满竞争的世界则是一个所有利润都被竞争消耗殆尽的世界。

And so if you're an entrepreneur or a founder, you always want to be building a monopoly. You do not want to be doing something where you're in cutthroat ferocious competition. A restaurant is a terrible business to go into. It's super competitive and extremely non-capitalistic. People never make money opening restaurants. And I sort of give Google as the example of a company at the other end of the spectrum where you have enormous profits and you've had new sort of serious competition in 12 years ever since they definitely distance themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft back in 2002.

所以，如果你是一个企业家或创始人，你总是希望建立一个垄断地位。你不想从事一个竞争激烈、残酷无情的行业。开餐馆就是一个很糟糕的生意。这个行业竞争非常激烈，极不具备资本主义特征。开餐馆的人基本上都不赚钱。我举谷歌作为例子，它处在光谱的另一端，拥有巨大的利润，而且自从2002年谷歌与雅虎和微软拉开距离以来，12年内几乎没有遇到新的严肃竞争对手。

And I think one of the things that these breakthrough zero to one companies have is that they do things where when you do something new, you are in this sort of happy place where you're not sort of directly competing with too many people and then you have a product that you are offering the world that does not yet exist. And that's what makes these franchises so extremely valuable.

我认为这些从零到一突破性公司的一个特点是，他们做一些新的事情，这让他们处在一个愉快的境地，他们不会直接与太多人竞争，因为他们提供的产品是世界上还不存在的。而这正是使这些公司非常有价值的原因。

I think this question of competition and monopoly, there's sort of many different reasons. It's sort of I think very under appreciated. You know, sort of there's always this nuance where the people who have monopolies generally don't talk about it. And the people who are in perfect competition pretend that they have something special. So if you're running Google, your talking points are we're not a search company but we're a technology company and we're competing ferociously with Apple on the phone and with Facebook on social and Microsoft on office and we're building cars and we're competing with the car companies and we're just sort of like competition everywhere and we're not the monopoly the government is looking for.

我认为关于竞争和垄断的问题，有很多不同的原因。这问题其实是很被低估了。你知道，通常有这样一种细微的区别，那些拥有垄断地位的人一般不会谈论这一点。而那些处于完美竞争中的人则假装自己拥有一些特别之处。所以，如果你在经营谷歌，你的说辞会是：我们不是一家搜索公司，而是一家技术公司，我们在手机上与苹果展开激烈竞争，在社交网络上与脸书竞争，在办公领域与微软竞争，我们还在制造汽车并与汽车公司竞争，我们几乎在每个地方都在竞争，我们不是政府所寻找的垄断者。

And then if you say try to open a restaurant in London, you would say you're trying to get investors to invest in your restaurant. You will say something like well this is a completely and the investors will say well I don't want to invest in a restaurant, it's a bad business, it'll lose money. And you'll say no this is a completely different restaurant, it's one of a kind. It's the only French Nepalese fusion cuisine in London and like South Paddington or wherever in some small area of London. And so you will again artificially define what you're doing in a way that's very different.

然后，如果你说要在伦敦开一家餐馆，你会说你正在寻找投资人投资你的餐馆。你可能会这样说：“这是一个完全不同的餐馆”，而投资人会说：“我不想投资餐馆，这是个糟糕的生意，会赔钱的。” 你会说：“不，这是一家完全不同的餐馆，是独一无二的。它是伦敦唯一的法式尼泊尔融合餐厅，位于南帕丁顿或者伦敦某个小区域。” 于是，你又会人为地将你所做的事情定义为非常不同的。

I think this question always gets obscured by the people inside these businesses and that's why it's this very important idea that's much bigger than we think it is. But I think it's also we also get trapped in competitive cycles for sort of a psychological reason. It's often we often find it reassuring to be in crowds to do things that lots of other people are doing. And the word ape already in the time of Shakespeare meant both primate and to imitate. And there's something about human nature that's disturbingly lemming like sheep like, ape like, herd like.

我觉得这个问题总是被这些行业内部的人所迷惑，这就是为什么它是一个非常重要但我们常常低估的想法。但我也认为，我们被竞争循环困住，也是出于某种心理原因。很多时候，跟随大众、做别人都在做的事情会让我们感到踏实。而且在莎士比亚时代，“ape”这个词既指灵长类动物，也有模仿的意思。人性中有某种类似旅鼠、羊群、类人猿的群体特质，这有点令人不安。

And this is always a dangerous sort of behavior pattern when you're starting a business because when you're in a crowd it's the crowd of people you're competing against. And I've been a sort of very big critic of the higher education system because I think that sort of encapsulates this ideology of competition in its purest form where you have to compete on all these sort of tests and jumping through all these hoops.

这是一种非常危险的行为模式，特别是在你创业的时候，因为你所处的人群实际上是与你竞争的人群。我一直是高等教育制度的强烈批评者，因为我认为这种制度以最纯粹的形式体现了竞争的理念，你必须在各种考试中竞争，经历各种考验。

You get to the same sort of short list of elite universities in the US then you go into the same short list of elite jobs. And a lot of it gets driven by people not really asking what are they doing, why is it important. But when you're focused on competition you're always focused on beating the person next to you. And you do get better at the thing you're competing on. Like if you're in a high school swimming team you'll swim a little bit faster than you otherwise would have swam.

你进入了美国的精英大学的同一个短名单，然后进入了精英工作的同一个短名单。许多时候，大家并没有真正问自己在做什么，为什么这很重要。而当你专注于竞争时，你总是专注于击败你身边的人。这样的话，你确实会在你所竞争的领域变得更好。就像你在高中游泳队里，你会比原本游得稍微快一点。

But you often lose sight of what's truly important and truly valuable. And this sort of this autobiographical part of this book where if I had to give advice to my younger self. I was hyper-tracked. I was in eighth grade junior high school. One of my friends wrote in my yearbook that I would surely get to Stanford in four or five years time and that's what happened. And then I went to Stanford Law School and then I sort of got tracked into sort of a big law firm in Manhattan where from the outside everybody was trying to get in on the inside everybody was trying to leave. And after, I left after seven months and three days one of the people down the hall from me told me it was very reassuring to see me leave. He had no idea that it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. Which was of course, all he had to do was go out the front door. But it was again, so much of people's identity was wrapped up in winning these various competitive dynamics that they could not think about this. So if I gave advice to my younger self it would be to really think hard why was I doing these things? Was I engaged in, was I doing these things because I genuinely wanted to do them or was it simply a sort of a prestige status game that I was playing which, and I think if I was honest that there was way more of that going on and there's I think a lot of that going on with a lot of us that we should always think hard about doing less of.

但你常常会忽视真正重要和真正有价值的东西。这本书有一部分是我的自传性质的内容，如果我要给年轻时的自己一些建议：我曾经非常明确我的目标。在八年级的时候，我的一个朋友在我的年鉴上写道，我肯定会在四、五年内进入斯坦福大学，而这也确实成真了。然后我又去了斯坦福法学院，之后进入了曼哈顿的一家大律师事务所。从外面看，每个人都在努力进来，但在里面，每个人都在想着离开。我在工作了七个月零三天后离开了。有一个和我在同一走廊的人对我说，看到我离开让他感到很安心。他之前完全不知道还能从“恶魔岛”逃脱。其实他只需要通过前门走出去就行了。但这再次说明，很多人的身份认同都被各种竞争动态所包裹，他们无法思考这些问题。因此，如果我要给年轻时的自己一些建议，那就是要认真思考我为什么要做这些事情？我是因为真的想做这些事，还是只是在玩一种追求地位和名誉的游戏？如果我诚实一点，我会承认其实更多时候是后者。我认为我们许多人都有这种情况，我们应该始终认真考虑，少做这种事情。

And second contrarian idea I'll throw out is I think the sort of a conventional view is that there are not that many answers left to this question. What's true that nobody agrees with you on? We believe that all these truths have already been discovered in the past. And maybe there's still some things but they're just about impossible to figure out. So there are conventions that we understand, there are mysteries that nobody can figure out. But I by contrast think there still are a lot of things left on intermediate level. There are a lot of things that I call secrets which are truths that are hard but possible to discover. And I think there is always a secret at the core of every great business.

其次，我想提出一个相反的观点。通常的看法是，这个问题的答案已经不多了。比如“有什么是真理，但没人同意你的？”我们通常认为这些真理早已在过去被发现了。也许还有一些事物，但几乎不可能弄清楚。我们理解现有的常识，还有一些没有答案的谜团。但相比之下，我认为还有很多介于两者之间的东西。我称之为“秘密”，即那些难以发现但可以被发现的真理。我认为，每个伟大企业的核心总有这样的一个“秘密”。

There's some sort of research program or some area that people are really really focused on. They think about really hard and it sort of advances their thinking to the point where they get an understanding about something that other people do not yet have. At PayPal we were very interested in sort of the crypto currencies and encryption technology and currencies. Could they be intersected? Could you build a new digital currency? This was a question that animated us tremendously. We didn't quite succeed in building one at PayPal even though we had t-shirts that said that we're going to be the new world currency. We didn't quite succeed in that goal. But that sort of an in-depth substantive focus actually did help us think really hard about how do you architect a new payment system, how do you do certain things differently, and it was a key part of inspiring us. I think there are sort of many secrets left. This is something we generally do not understand. It's not obvious where one should look.

有某种研究项目或领域，让人们非常非常专注。他们深入思考，到达其他人还没有的理解。比如在PayPal，我们当时非常感兴趣加密货币和加密技术，以及货币之间的互相作用。我们在思考是否能创造出一种新的数字货币。这是一个让我们非常激动的问题。虽然我们在PayPal最终没有成功开发出这种数字货币，尽管我们有宣传T恤上写着“我们要成为新的世界货币”，我们未能实现那个目标。但这种深入和实质性的专注确实帮助我们深入思考如何设计一个新的支付系统，如何不同地处理一些事情，并且激励了我们。我认为还有许多这样的秘密存在，这是我们通常不了解的，但也不清楚应该去哪儿找。

If you were living in the 17th or 18th century you could look at a map and there were empty spaces left on the map and you could come and explore and go and discover those places. So there was sort of a natural geographical sense in which there were secrets left. In the 19th century there were still places in the periodic table of elements that were empty and you could sort of do some basic chemistry and find some secrets. There is sort of a sense that maybe geography or chemistry are fields that are basic chemistry and geography or fields that are closed. But I think most fields are not like that. I think most fields are still ones where there is tremendous amount of innovation possible.

如果你生活在17或18世纪，你会看到地图上还有空白区域可以去探索和发现。所以在地理上，还有一些秘密等待发掘。到了19世纪，元素周期表中还有一些空位，通过基础化学研究可以找到一些秘密。也许你会觉得地理或化学这些领域已经基本上封闭了，不再有新的发现。但是我认为，大多数领域并非如此。我认为大多数领域仍然有大量创新的可能。

Certainly this is true in the computer field where we have seen massive innovation in recent decades in the world of bits, computers, internet, mobile internet, that whole ensemble. I think we have seen less innovation in the world of atoms, transportation, energy, clean energy, biomedical, biotech, space travel, all the kinds of things people thought about in the 50s and 60s. But I think it is not because there is some law of nature that it is hard to innovate or impossible to innovate in these areas. There is sort of this cultural change where we haven't tried as much. There is a lot of this has a self-fulfilling character. If you think that you can't find a secret then you are not going to try and you will not look and you will not be a person who ever finds one.

当然，这在计算机领域是显而易见的。在过去的几十年里，我们在比特世界、计算机、互联网、移动互联网等方面看到了巨大的创新。然而，我认为在物质世界中，我们的创新较少，比如交通、能源、清洁能源、生物医学、生物技术、太空旅行，以及人们在五六十年代所想象的一切。但我认为这并不是因为某种自然法则使得在这些领域进行创新变得困难或不可能。这更像是一种文化变化，我们没有付出足够的尝试。很多时候，这种情况会自我实现。如果你认为你找不到一个秘密，那么你就不会去尝试和寻找，你也就永远不会成为找到秘密的人。

And so failure, pessimism can have a self-fulfilling character as conversely if you think there is a lot to be discovered, progress can accelerate and more things can happen. So second, sort of contrarian truth that I believe to be true is that there are actually are many secrets left to be discovered. Third, third idea and this one is maybe a little bit bigger picture. I think that in a successful 21st century, this century is going to be a great and peaceful century. I think there are two big trends that have to continue.

因此，失败和悲观情绪可以具有自我实现的特性。相反，如果你认为还有很多东西可以被发现，那么进步可以加速，更多的事情就会发生。所以，第二个有点反常理但我认为是真理的是，实际上还有很多秘密值得我们去发现。第三个想法，可能更宏观一些。我认为要在21世纪取得成功，这个世纪将是一个伟大而和平的世纪，有两个主要趋势必须继续。

There is a trend of globalization and a trend of technology. I think it is always important to think of these two things as very different. Globalization involves copying things that work, horizontal growth, extensive progress going from one to N. And I always draw globalization on the x-axis. Technology involves doing new things going from zero to one vertical or intensive progress. I always draw it on a y-axis. I always set up that contrast because I think there is a tendency for people to define technology and globalization as synonymous. I think it is worth thinking of these as very different vectors of progress.

全球化和技术的发展趋势是不同的。我认为，始终将这两者区分开来非常重要。全球化是指复制已经成功的事物，是一种横向的增长，从一到多的扩展。我通常将全球化画在横轴上。技术则是指创新，从无到有，是一种纵向或密集的进步。我通常将技术画在纵轴上。我总是这样对比，因为我觉得人们往往会把技术和全球化等同起来。我认为应当将它们视为截然不同的进步方向。

And if we sort of think about the last 200 years, there have been many periods where we have had one or the other or both, which underscores how they are different. The 19th century, you have tremendous amounts of globalization and technological progress. You had both in the 19th century. 1914, after World War I starts, globalization goes into reverse. And there is less trade. The world becomes less connected. Iron curtain goes down. Parts of the world more or less are completely cut off. And it does not really resume until Kissinger goes to China in 1971.

如果回顾过去的200年，会发现有许多时期我们经历了其中之一或两者兼有的现象，这说明了它们的不同点。19世纪，全球化和技术进步都取得了巨大的成就。那个时候两者并存。但是到了1914年，一战爆发后，全球化出现了倒退，贸易减少，世界变得不那么紧密相连了。铁幕落下，世界的一部分与外界几乎完全隔绝。直到1971年基辛格访华后，这种局面才真正开始改变。

We have had the last four decades of enforocious globalization. Technology has been, we had a lot of progress in 1914 to 1971. Since 1971, I would argue it has been more limited and with stress on the computer side. So we have had an era of globalization without technology and, sorry, technology without globalization and then globalization without technology that has characterized the last 100 years and have been cut across to the century that came before.

过去40年来，我们经历了激烈的全球化进程。从1914年到1971年，我们在科技方面取得了很大的进展。但自从1971年以来，科技进步变得相对有限，尤其是在计算机领域。所以，我们经历了一个没有科技的全球化时代，然后是一个没有全球化的科技时代。这种趋势不仅贯穿了过去的100年，还影响到了更早的世纪。

It's sort of a shift from the 50s and 60s today is in the way we talk about the world. In the 50s or 60s, you would have said that the world was divided into the first world and the third world. The first world was the place where accelerating change was happening. The third world was the place that was sort of permanently screwed up and broken. Today we speak of the developing and the developed world. The developing world is that part of the world that will copy the developed world and it's sort of this convergence theory of globalization.

这和平时没什么区别。

China is the epitome of it. It has a very straightforward plan for the next 20 years. It's just going to copy everything that works in the West. It'll skip a few steps, but it has a very straightforward plan ahead of it. But this developing, developed dichotomy while sort of pro-globalization is also implicitly anti-technological because it tells us that we are living in the part of the world that is developed, that is done, that is finished, where nothing new is going to happen, that's stagnant, where we can expect nothing to change, where we can expect the younger generation to do no better than their parents, maybe worse. I think this is a conception of our world that we should resist very strongly.

中国就是这种现象的典范。它有一份非常清晰的未来20年计划，它将复制西方所有成功的做法。虽然会跳过一些步骤，但它的计划非常明确。然而，这种将国家分成发展中和发达国家的二分法，虽然看起来有助于全球化，但实际上却隐含着一种反技术的倾向。因为这种分类告诉我们，我们生活在一个已经发展完毕的、已经定型的地方，这里没有新的东西会出现，是停滞不前的，我们不能期待有什么变化，年轻一代不会比他们的父母做得更好，甚至可能更糟。我认为，这是一种我们应该强烈抵制的世界观。

I think we should not even accept the idea that we're living in the developed world, that we're living in some sort of end of technology era. And so I think we should always return to this question, how do we go about developing the developed world? Thank you very much. I was going to ask you which important truth to very few people agree with you on, but I think you've answered my question. There's a big theme in the book. Number of interviewers actually still ask me that even after I give a talk similar to this one, so you paid way more attention. I stopped. There's so much we can focus on in the book, but there's a theme that comes up repeatedly which is the value of the monopoly business.

我认为我们不应该接受“我们生活在发达世界”这样的观念，也不应该认为我们生活在某种技术发展的终点。所以我认为我们应该不断回到这个问题上来：我们如何进一步发展已经发达的世界？非常感谢。我本来是想问你，有哪些重要的真理很少有人同意你的看法，但我觉得你已经回答了我的问题。这是书中的一个大主题。实际上，即使在我做了类似的演讲之后，很多采访者仍然会问我这个问题，所以你比他们更加专注。我停顿了一下。这本书里有很多值得我们关注的内容，但一个反复出现的主题是垄断企业的价值。

You talk about the history of progress as a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Yet, if you look over the last century, monopolies haven't always acted in the most enlightened way. They haven't always benefited the consumer as governments would have hoped and governments have often had to come in and regulate. Isn't this a bit of a pure view of the value of a monopoly? Well, so there's always, you have to always distinguish looking at this from the inside and the outside. So from the point of view of someone starting a business, from the point you have found or an entrepreneur, you want to always build a monopoly. It's always great to have one from the inside. It gives you way more cushion. You can do all sorts of things much better. I think it can be a more ethical company. When Google says don't be evil, on one level it's a marketing ploy. But on another level, you don't have to care about nothing but money in a company where you're making so much of it. On the inside, I think you always want to have a monopoly.

你提到了进步的历史就是更好的垄断企业取代现有企业的历史。然而，如果你看看过去的一个世纪，垄断企业并不总是以最开明的方式行事。它们并不总是像政府所期望的那样惠及消费者，政府常常不得不介入并进行监管。这种对垄断价值的看法是否有些过于理想化？ 嗯，你总是需要区分从内部和外部来看待这个问题。从创业者或创始人的角度来看，你总是希望建立一个垄断。从内部来说，拥有垄断地位总是好的。它给你更多的缓冲空间，你可以把各种事情做得更好。我认为这也可以成为一个更有道德的公司。当谷歌说“不作恶”时，在某种程度上这是一种营销策略。但从另一个层面来说，在一家利润丰厚的公司里，你不必只关心钱的问题。从内部来看，我认为你总是希望拥有垄断地位。

From the outside, from the point of view of society, the question are monopolies good or bad. And I think they are, I agree with the critique of monopolies in a stagnant world where it's like the Parker Brothers board game and the monopolist is just a rent collector or a toll collector. But I think that if you have a dynamic world where people are inventing and creating new things, these are actually positive. So when Apple builds a smartphone that just works, it has a monopoly on the iPhone for many years and I think it still has somewhat of a monopoly in various ways today. And that's a good monopoly because it created something that did not exist before. And the common sense way to differentiate good from bad monopolies in lines are a little bit fuzzy.

从外部，从社会的角度来看，问题是垄断是好还是坏。我认为它们是好的，我同意对垄断的批评，尤其是在一个停滞不前的世界里，垄断企业就像帕克兄弟的棋盘游戏中的角色，只是一个收取租金或通行费的存在。但我认为，如果你有一个动态的世界，人们不断发明和创造新事物，这些垄断实际上是积极的。所以，当苹果公司开发出一款智能手机，它多年垄断了iPhone市场，今天在某些方面也仍有一定的垄断地位。这是一个好的垄断，因为它创造了一些以前不存在的东西。区分好垄断和坏垄断的常识方法有些模糊。

But the common sense way is just do consumers think it's a good thing or do they think it's a bad thing? They might think the post office is a bad government structured monopoly whereas Apple would be seen as a good one. But is it healthy for the wider economy if a single company like Facebook owns so much data on people's preferences, that real-time knowledge based on what we're doing mobile and they can set the rules. They're more powerful than governments. And I certainly much prefer Facebook to tone the data than the government. I think that I think you have to draw all these distinctions. There's an important debate about privacy. They're important questions about how and draw these lines.

但常识的做法是，消费者认为这是件好事还是坏事呢？他们可能认为邮局是政府管辖的垄断机构，而把苹果公司视为一个好的垄断企业。但如果像Facebook这样的一家公司掌握了大量关于人们偏好的数据，这种基于我们移动设备使用的实时信息，且它们可以设定规则，这对更广泛的经济健康是否有益呢？它们比政府还强大。而且我肯定更愿意让Facebook掌握数据而不是政府。我认为我们需要厘清这些区别。关于隐私问题有重要的争论，关于如何划定界限有重要的问题。

But I think the Facebook product has created a lot of value in the world. It's made the world more connected. It's helped people stay in touch with their friends. And I think it's been an enormous net plus to people all over the place. I think so, yeah. Every startup in its pitch talks about it's going to come and disrupt a sector. You say in the book that disruption is a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything trendy and new. Well, I certainly go after all these different categories. I'm always skeptical of anything that gets used this much nonstop by people. So the disruptive person in elementary school gets sent to the principal's office.

但我认为Facebook产品在全球创造了大量价值。它使世界变得更加互联，帮助人们与朋友保持联系。我觉得对全球各地的人来说，这都是一个巨大的净增值。我是这么认为的。每个创业公司在推销时都会说要颠覆一个行业。你在书中说，颠覆是一个自我祝贺的流行词，指的是任何时尚和新奇的事物。确实，我对这些不同类别都有所批评。我总是对那些被人们不停使用的词汇持怀疑态度。所以，在小学里捣乱的学生会被送到校长办公室。

Disruptors are people who look for trouble. They typically find it. Napster was a classically disruptive business that sought to take on the music industry. And it's had this disruptive name. What do you nap? You nap some music. You nap a kid. And so there's always a sense where disruption already starts by thinking of itself in competitive terms. You're defining yourself against somebody. And I think you don't want to take your bearings from breaking things, but rather from building things. So we have to go for an entirely new market. I think those are the best companies or ones that go for broadly new markets.

破坏者是那些寻找麻烦的人。他们通常能找到麻烦。Napster是一个典型的颠覆性业务，试图挑战音乐行业。它有一个充满颠覆性的名字。你“nap”（抓取）音乐，也可以“nap”（抓取）孩子，因此总有一种感觉，颠覆从一开始就带有竞争的思维方式。你在以与某人为对立来定义自己。我认为我们不应该通过破坏来确定方向，而是应该通过建设来确定。因此，我们必须追求一个全新的市场。我认为最好的公司是那些开拓全新市场的公司。

Certainly if you go after an existing market, that's where you're going to get the most ferocious resistance, the most intense competition. PayPal went after online payments. Visa and MasterCard were not altogether happy because it was a new market they thought they perhaps should have owned. But it was not like we were taking away business directly from them. In some ways we were actually expanding the universe of payments they'd been enabled. And so at the end of the day, they didn't come after us nearly as much as they would have had we say tried to disrupt their business in some direct way.

当然，如果你进入一个已有的市场，你会遇到最激烈的抵抗和最强的竞争。PayPal涉足的是在线支付领域。Visa和MasterCard并不完全高兴，因为这是一个他们认为本应属于他们的新市场。但我们并没有直接抢走他们的生意。某种程度上，我们其实在扩大他们原本的支付领域。最终，他们并没有像我们直接试图颠覆他们业务那样强烈地反对我们。

So why didn't PayPal become the default payment mechanism? Why didn't PayPal become Bitcoin? Well I think payment mechanisms and currencies are related, but quite different sorts of things. So I think PayPal set out to build a new world currency. We did build a rather powerful internet payment system. Bitcoin I think at this point is somewhat the opposite. It has actually created a new currency at least on the level of speculation. And the payment system part of it's actually rather lacking where it's hard to transact in bitcoins. People will do it for things that are illegal and they can't buy otherwise. But for legal payments it's actually quite hard to do. So I think the opposite of a set of things from that which PayPal had. It's quite hard.

为什么PayPal没有成为默认的支付机制？为什么PayPal没有成为比特币？我认为支付机制和货币是相关的，但又是完全不同的两件事。我认为PayPal一开始是想建立一种新的世界货币。我们确实建造了一个相当强大的互联网支付系统。而比特币，我认为在这一点上恰好相反。它实际上创造了一种新货币，至少在投机层面上是这样。而支付系统方面却相当欠缺，用比特币进行交易很难。人们会用比特币去做一些非法的、其他方式无法购买的事情。但对于合法支付，用比特币其实是相当困难的。所以这是与PayPal完全相反的一套东西。真的很难。

In general I think a currency is a much harder thing to build than a payment system because it requires a much larger network effect. It's much harder to buy into it. When I was a Dabirami, the prop I would always use when I was a CEO at PayPal was hold up a $100 bill in front of an audience and it would be like hypnotic. Everybody would want it. There's sort of this network effect to money. It's very difficult to create a new currency because you're competing with an existing very large network already. There's a lot of people in the valley that are putting big money into Bitcoin businesses thinking this is going to be the one. Are you not excited? I am still a little bit more skeptical because they've not gotten the payment system part of it to work.

总的来说，我认为打造一种货币比建立一个支付系统要难得多，因为货币需要更大规模的网络效应。让人们相信一种新的货币要困难得多。当我还在Dabirami时，作为PayPal的CEO，我常常会在观众面前拿出一张100美元的钞票，这通常会有催眠般的效果，大家都会想要它。这种影响力就是货币的网络效应。创建一种新货币非常困难，因为你要与一个已经非常庞大的现有网络竞争。现在硅谷有很多人在大力投资比特币业务，认为它会成为未来的主流货币。你不感到兴奋吗？我还是有些怀疑，因为他们还没有让支付系统这一部分真正运作起来。

But I think that's the, if you said what would make me more bullish on Bitcoin, it's if there were more legal payments happening on it. So when you meet entrepreneurs, what personal characteristics do you define in those that you think are going to be the big success stories? Well I think these zero to one companies, they're generally not solo efforts. It's always a bit of a team effort of people working together. You want a great business idea, you want a great technology, you want very talented people. One of the very critical questions is how well do these people actually work together.

但我认为，如果你问我什么会让我对比特币更看好，那就是如果在比特币上进行的合法支付更多了。那么，当你遇到创业者时，你觉得哪些个人特质是成功故事的关键？我认为这些从零开始的公司通常不是单枪匹马的努力，而是团队协作的结果。你需要一个伟大的商业想法，你需要先进的技术，你需要非常有才华的人。其中一个非常关键的问题是，这些人合作得有多好。

And because I think the most common cause for failure is the people just don't get along and sort of blows up internally, way before it gets destroyed externally by external competition so people internally don't get along. And so a question I always like to ask is the prehistory question. How did you meet, how long have you known each other, all those sorts of questions. Bad answers are things like we met a week ago at an entrepreneurial networking event. We both wanted to start companies and that's sort of like saying we got married at the slot machines in Vegas. You might hit the jackpot, probably a very bad idea.

因为我认为导致失败的最常见原因是内部人员无法和谐相处，事情在被外部竞争破坏之前已经在内部爆发了。所以我总喜欢问一个关于历史的问题。你们是怎么认识的，认识了多久，等等。如果回答是我们在一周前的创业网络活动认识的，然后决定一起开公司，这就像是在拉斯维加斯的老虎机旁结婚一样——你可能会中大奖，但更可能是个很糟糕的主意。

The good answers are things like we met and we've been working for a number of years, friends for many years, there's some complementarity, maybe one of us is focused on the technology side, the other person is focused more on the business side. So that's a good answer. I don't know if you noticed the correlation between very successful tech businesses, particularly coming from the valley and people with let's say limited social skills. There is a spectrum. Are these the sorts of true correlations that you see? There is a curious correlation where some sort of mild form of Asperger seems to be linked with a lot of these companies.

好的回答可能会是这样的：我们认识很多年了，一直在一起工作，已经是多年的朋友，我们的技能互补，比如一个人专注于技术，另一个人更侧重于商务方面。这是一个不错的回答。我不知道你是否注意到，在非常成功的科技企业，尤其是来自硅谷的企业中，创始人与其说是拥有高超的社交技巧，不如说是社交能力有限的人之间存在某种相关性。这之间有一个光谱。你是否也观察到了类似的相关性？有一种有趣的现象，似乎有轻度阿斯伯格综合症的人与这些公司之间有某种联系。

And I think we should always flip that around and think of this as like really an indictment of our society and ask the question what is it about our society where people who are socially well adapted are subtly talked out of all their original ideas before they even have them because they pick up on all these social cues and they can sense, oh this is a little bit too weird, this is a little bit too strange, it's not quite respectable, what do people think of this? And you are talked out of your truly original and creative ideas before they are even fully formed. You're picking up on all these social cues and they lead you to give up on them. So I think there is some sort of dynamic like this.

我认为我们应该反过来思考这一点，把它看作是对我们社会的一种批判，并提出一个问题：为什么在我们的社会中，那些社交能力很强的人在想出自己的原创想法之前，就被各种社会暗示所劝阻了？因为他们能察觉到，这个想法有点太奇怪了，不太符合主流价值观，人们会怎么想？于是，你那些真正原创和有创造性的想法还没成型就被放弃了。你不断接收到这些社会暗示，导致你放弃这些想法。所以我认为确实有这样的情况存在。

They've done this study at Harvard Business School, which you can think of as a very non-Asperger like place where you have people who are super well adapted socially, they're very extroverted, they don't have very strong convictions generally. And they are sort of in this hot house environment for two years where they talk to one another about what they will do for the rest of their lives. And the sort of conclusion at the end of the two years is that the largest cohort generally goes into trying to catch the last wave, which is always somewhat of a mistake. In 1989, everybody wanted to work for Michael Milken, it was one or two years before he went to jail for all the junk bomb trading.

哈佛商学院做了一项研究。你可以把这地方想象成一个非常“非-Asperger”风格的地方，这里的人非常适应社交环境，超级外向，通常没有很强的信念。他们在这种温室环境中待两年，互相讨论自己未来要做什么。两年结束时，得出的结论是，最大的群体通常会尝试追赶最后一波浪潮，而这总是有点错误。在1989年，每个人都想为迈克尔·米尔肯工作，但那是一到两年之前，在他因为所有垃圾债券交易进监狱之前。

People were never interested in technology or Silicon Valley except in 1999, 2000 at the top of a dot comania when they all moved to Silicon Valley. 2005 to 2007, it was all real estate and private equity. And so I do think there is some very odd dynamic like that. So what mistakes are we in the tech world making now? You know, there are probably, well, there are many categories of mistakes that we're making. You know, certainly one broad category that flows from my monopoly thesis is that you often want to look at small markets. If you want to get, to be a monopoly, you have to get to a large markets chair. So you want to go after small initial markets. You know, Facebook initially went after the 10,000 people at Harvard. It went from 0 to 60 percent market share in 10 days. And that was a very auspicious start. And then you sort of grew out in concentric circles.

人们从来不怎么关注科技或硅谷，除了1999年和2000年那段互联网热潮的巅峰时期，当时大家纷纷涌向硅谷。2005到2007年，大家的关注点又转向了房地产和私募股权。因此，我认为这里面存在一种非常奇怪的动态。那么，我们在科技领域现在犯了什么错误呢？你知道，可能有很多种类的错误。一个主要的错误类别，基于我的垄断理论，是你通常需要关注小市场。如果你想要形成垄断，就必须在一个大市场中占据大份额。因此，你需要先瞄准一些初期的小市场。例如，Facebook最初仅面向哈佛大学的1万名学生，它在10天内就占据了60%的市场份额，这是一个非常好的开端，然后它逐步扩大，像同心圆一样扩展。

PayPal, our initial market was eBay power sellers. There were about 20,000 of them. And we got to about 30 percent market share within about three months. Again, a very good start. The opposite end of the spectrum, you know, one of the sort of one of the big red flags in any presentation I get is where the first slide says we have a big market. And this was a mistake that all the clean tech companies in the last decade made where the first slide was we have a we're in the energy market. It's measured in hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. And we are a tiny minnow in a vast ocean. And what that means is that you have to not just beat the other nine thin film solar panel companies, but then you have to also beat the other 90 other types of solar panel companies. And then you have to beat the wind companies and the fracking companies. And then you have Chinese manufacturing come out of nowhere. And so you're sort of minnow in a vast ocean, not what you want to be.

PayPal，我们的初始市场是eBay上的大卖家，约有两万个左右。我们在大约三个月内达到了30%的市场份额，这是非常不错的开端。在另一个极端，我在任何展示中看到的一个显著警示信号，就是第一张幻灯片上写着“我们有一个大市场”。过去十年里，所有清洁技术公司普遍犯的一个错误就是，他们的第一张幻灯片上写着“我们在能源市场，这个市场的规模以数千亿或数万亿美元计算，而我们只是大海中的一条小鱼”。这意味着，你不仅要打败其他九家薄膜太阳能电池公司，还要打败其他90种类型的太阳能电池公司，然后还要击败风能公司和页岩气公司，更别提从无到有冒出来的中国制造商。这样一来，你就成为在广阔海洋中的一条小鱼，这绝不是你想要的局面。

I think the phrase you use is most clean tech founders would have been better off opening a new vegan restaurant in Palo Alto. But you do talk about it. They're both trillion dollar mark. Restaurant mark is also a trillion dollar, trillion dollar mark. But then it does come down to timing because there's a lot of very effective clean tech businesses now. One of them is SolarCity, Elon Musk's business and his cousins, which you have invested in. And is it about choosing the timing? Well, I think it's you have to get a number of things right. So I think you have to get the monopoly question right. You have to get the timing question right. You have to get, you know, there's a piece. I think you want to have some secret that you understand that other people don't. You want to get the team right. So there are a whole set of these things that come together.

我认为你所说的是，大多数清洁技术的创始人如果去帕洛阿尔托开一家新的素食餐厅会更好。但你也提到，餐饮市场和清洁技术市场都是万亿美元的市场。这确实与时机有关，因为现在很多清洁技术企业都非常成功，比如SolarCity，这是一家由埃隆·马斯克和他的表兄弟创立的公司，你也投资了这家公司。这是否与选择时机有关系？我认为这需要在多个方面都做对。你需要搞清楚垄断问题，需要选对时机，要有一些其他人不了解的秘密武器，还需要有正确的团队。因此，这些因素需要综合在一起。

You know, I think Tesla is a very impressive company that has worked incredibly well. And in some sense, they actually started with what was sort of a relatively small market, electric sports cars were actually a smaller market than the energy market as a whole. It was still a pretty big market. It was still non-trivial to raise the roughly half billion dollars in capital it took. But it was about as, it did about as, it was a small market that was about as big as you could possibly be. Elon Musk, your co-founder at PayPal, as well as producing very cool electric cars and solar panels is sending space rockets up eventually to Mars. Yes, just the space space in the short term. How do we get more Elon Musk's? You know, it's, it's, I, you know, it's always, I don't, I don't know if there's a simple formula for this.

你知道，我认为特斯拉是一家非常令人印象深刻的公司，表现得非常出色。从某种意义上说，他们一开始进入的是一个相对较小的市场，电动跑车实际上比整个能源市场要小。但这个市场依然相当大。筹集大约5亿美元的资本并不容易，这依然是一项非同小可的成就。但这个相对较小的市场已经是当时最大的了。埃隆·马斯克，你在PayPal的联合创始人，除了生产非常酷的电动汽车和太阳能面板外，还在发射最终将到达火星的太空火箭。是的，只是在短期内聚焦于太空领域。我们如何培养更多的埃隆·马斯克呢？你知道，这始终是个问题，我不知道是否有一个简单的公式来解答这个问题。

We had, it's, you know, the PayPal business was actually quite successful in producing a series of these entrepreneurs that have been about the 220 people who were involved with PayPal in 2002 in Silicon Valley. There have been about $7 billion plus companies started by them. So, Elon's Tesla and SpaceX, I was involved in starting Palantir. Friend Reed Hoffman started LinkedIn, YouTube, YouTube, Ziamir, Yelp. And, and so there's always this question, what was it about PayPal that was so conducive to this? And it's always hard to know because whenever you have just like a sample size of one, it was one company that sort of happened, you know, it's always hard to really be too scientific about it. But, but one of the variables that I think may have been very important was that the lesson people learned inside PayPal was that it was hard but possible to build a great business.

我们曾经，你知道的，PayPal这个业务实际上在培育一系列企业家方面非常成功。2002年在硅谷与PayPal相关的有大约220人，他们中已经创办了好几家市值超过70亿美元的公司。比如Elon的Tesla和SpaceX，我参与创办了Palantir，朋友Reed Hoffman创办了LinkedIn，还有YouTube、Yelp等公司。所以，人们总是会问，是什么让PayPal如此有助于培养创业者？这个问题总是难以回答，因为当你只有一个案例的时候，这样一个公司发生的事情总是很难用科学的方法来解释清楚。不过，我认为其中一个非常重要的因素可能是在PayPal内部，人们学到的一个重要教训就是：建立一个伟大的企业虽难但可行。

So we had a lot of ups and downs. There were a lot of challenges, but at the end it was a very successful exit to eBay. I think the lesson people learn in most of the companies they're involved in is very different. They're either in companies where things fail and the lesson they learn is that it's impossible to build a great business. So if you work in a failed company, you will typically the next time around try to do something less ambitious. You may succeed, but it will be a lesser business because you will aim for something smaller. Or if you're in a super successful company where everything just worked seamlessly from day one, a Microsoft or a Google, you will learn the lesson that it's easy. And I think to build a great business, which I think is just as toxic as the lesson that it's impossible. And so I think most people end up finding themselves in context where they learn that it's easy or impossible to build great businesses. And these are equally mistaken lessons. I think the intermediate one and the intermediate mindset that it's hard but possible is a critical component to it.

我们的公司经历了很多起起落落，遇到了很多挑战，但最后成功地被eBay收购了。我认为，人们在大多数公司中的经历和收获是不同的。如果你在一个失败的公司工作，你会学到的教训是建立一个伟大的企业是不可能的。所以下次你可能会选择一个没那么有野心的项目，虽然可能成功，但成就也会小一些。而如果你在一个非常成功的公司工作，一切从一开始就顺风顺水，比如微软或谷歌，你会觉得创办一家伟大的公司很容易。我认为，这种认为建立伟大企业很容易的观念，跟认为不可能建立一个伟大企业一样有害。因此，大多数人最终会陷入一种认为建立伟大企业要么很容易，要么根本不可能的误区。这两种观点都是错误的。我认为，中间的观点和心态，即“虽然困难但仍然可能”，是一个关键因素。

Pretty much every major city around the world now is trying to become the local Silicon Valley consultant making a fortune teaching innovation to governments. How reproducible is the success story of the Valley? You're in London now. We have a lot of very, very successful companies. You take London seriously as a tech center? Well, I'm always skeptical of copying things. So I think just like you shouldn't try to copy Microsoft or Facebook, copying Silicon Valley is probably also the wrong idea. One reason it's the wrong idea is we don't even actually know what makes Silicon Valley work. Maybe it's the weather, maybe it's non-compete agreements are not enforced in California, maybe it is. There are these crazy network effects, all kinds of different explanations one can give. So even if we wanted to, I'm not sure we even know what makes it work. And then I think more fundamentally when you're copying something, you already are setting yourself up to be defined in a lesser way. If you're the Oxford of Iceland, that's not quite Oxford. And so in a similar way, calling things, you know, there's some way you don't want to define yourself in a way that's derivative. The something of somewhere is often the nothing of nowhere.

几乎全球每个大城市现在都在努力成为本地的硅谷，顾问们通过教政府创新而大发横财。那么，硅谷的成功故事有多大可复制性呢？你现在在伦敦，我们有很多非常非常成功的公司。你认为伦敦是一个认真的科技中心吗？我对复制任何东西总是持怀疑态度。所以我认为，就像你不应该试图复制微软或Facebook一样，复制硅谷可能也是错误的想法。一个原因是，我们甚至不知道硅谷成功的真正原因。也许是因为气候，也许是因为加州不执行竞业禁止协议，也许是其他一些原因。有各种各样的解释可以给出。因此，即使我们想复制，我也不确定我们是否知道其成功的关键所在。而且更根本的是，当你在复制某样东西时，你已经注定会被定义得不如原版。如果你是冰岛的“牛津”，那就不是真正的“牛津”。同样地，把自己定义为某地的某某，在某种程度上往往会使你变得没那么出色。所谓“某地的某某”经常最终成为“无所不在的虚无”。

I think that instead what one should try to do is think really hard, what are the kinds of things that could be done, say in London, better than anywhere else in the world? I think one of the things that, so I think for example, we're investors in transfer wise and I think it's doing great as a company. And I think there's perhaps a lot of innovation in the area of financial technology that could take place in London because this is a finance center. It's a natural thing that London can do much better than Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is not a global financial center. London I think is also better than New York, by the way, since New York's very self-hating. People hate the finance industry in New York in a way in which they don't hate it as much in London. So if you start a financial technology company in London, this would be a cool thing to do. It would not be considered a cool thing to do in New York. You also invest in, I think, in DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company. You have sort of eccentric British technologies that get developed too. It's just a company that Google bought for 400 million pound and they haven't released a product. So it's the Manhattan Project for AI. That was and remains the goal of DeepMinds. They assembled a phenomenal, phenomenally talented team. And I think there are things like that that work quite well. But there's no reason that innovation in general has to happen only in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley does have some advantages, but it probably also has disadvantages. The network effects that help Silicon Valley, I think also in some cases, probably lead to more lemming-like and crowd-like behavior, which I think is so problematic.

我认为，人们应当努力思考，在伦敦可以做哪些事情比世界上其他地方做得更好？举个例子，我们是TransferWise的投资者，我觉得这家公司发展得不错。伦敦作为一个金融中心，或许在金融科技领域可以引发很多创新，这是伦敦相比硅谷能做得更好的天然优势。硅谷并不是一个全球金融中心，而伦敦在这方面也比纽约强，因为纽约人对金融行业有很大的反感，而在伦敦这种反感没有那么严重。所以，如果你在伦敦创办一家金融科技公司，这是一件很酷的事情，而在纽约可能就不会被视为酷。 另外，我们还投资了人工智能公司DeepMind，这是一家有些古怪的英国科技公司，被谷歌以4亿英镑收购，但他们还没有发布任何产品。DeepMind的目标相当于人工智能领域的曼哈顿计划，他们组建了一支极其有才华的团队。我认为类似的事情也能在伦敦很好地开展。没有理由认为创新只能在硅谷发生，尽管硅谷确实有一些优势，但它也可能有劣势。硅谷的网络效应可能会导致更趋同和跟风的行为，这是一种问题。

Do you worry about what artificial intelligence will do to us, to our ability to earn a living? I think I'm of the view that strong AI is still quite a long ways off. If we ever were to get artificial intelligence, if we were to build computers that are as smart as human beings in every way, this would be a momentous event. This would be a significant extra-trustrails landing on this planet. And if aliens landed, the first question would not be about the economy and what does it mean for your job. The first question would be political. Are they friendly? Are they unfriendly? And so I think to even frame it as a question about jobs is to understate the importance or seismic nature AI would represent. I think short of strong AI, however, I think people are way too worried about computers in this economic sense. I think we live in a society that's generally, we live in a financial and a capitalistic age. I sort of argued elsewhere that I think we do not live in a scientific or technological age. And most people in the US, Western Europe, really don't like science. They don't like technology. They're biased against it in all sorts of ways. It's true of people. It's true of the politicians. It's true of the governments. It's true of the culture. Easy way to see this is you just look at all the Hollywood movies that basically show technology that doesn't work, that kills people, is destructive. You can choose whether it's the Matrix or Terminator or Avatar or Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. You'd never want to go to Mars, even to outer space. You'd be much happy. You'd be happy you're being back on some muddy island somewhere on this world. And that reflects the sensibility of most people that the future is something to be feared and that we should try to prevent. That's why I think people who are involved in the scientific or technological worlds are the counterculture in our society today. And it's sort of a very unusual perspective to think that the future is something to hope for.

你是否担心人工智能会对我们产生什么影响，会影响我们谋生的能力？我认为强人工智能还需要很长时间才会实现。如果我们真的得到人工智能，如果我们能制造出在各方面都和人类一样聪明的计算机，这将是一个具有历史意义的事件。就像外星人登陆地球一样。这时我们首先关注的不会是经济或者你的工作意义何在。首先的问题会是政治性的：他们是友好的吗？还是不友好的？所以我认为，如果仅仅将其归为就业问题，实际上是低估了人工智能的重要性或巨大的影响力。 但我认为，除了强人工智能外，在经济方面人们对计算机的担忧过于夸张了。我认为我们生活在一个金融和资本主义时代。我在其他地方也提到过，我认为我们并不是生活在一个科学或技术的时代。大多数美国人和西欧人实际上并不喜欢科学，也不喜欢技术。他们对其有各种偏见。这不仅适用于普通人，也适用于政治家、政府和文化。一个简单的例子就是你看所有好莱坞电影，基本上都是展现失灵、杀人或毁灭的技术。不管是《黑客帝国》还是《终结者》亦或是《阿凡达》或《极乐净土》。我前几天看了《地心引力》这部电影，让人觉得你永远不想去火星，甚至不想去外太空。你会更快乐，更高兴待在世界上的某个泥岛上。这反映了大多数人认为未来是值得恐惧的，我们应该尽量避免。 这也是为什么我认为，今天那些从事科学或技术领域的人是我们社会中的反主流文化。他们持有一种非常不同寻常的观点，认为未来是值得期待的。

So roundabout answer. So I think this idea that today's computers are replacing people is just another one of these technological angst narratives we have. I think it's not true. I think computers and people are fundamentally different. They're good at really different things. They're fundamentally complementary, not substitutes. The much bigger challenge for the middle class in the developed world comes from globalization because people in India, people in China are actually not that different from us. They can substitute for our labor. And that's where the substitution is taking place. I don't think we should stop globalization, but we should have some problematic aspects. I think technology has far fewer. You also think that technology can help fight aging. How much can we solve this problem in our lifetimes? We've made a lot of progress over the last 150 years. The maximum life expectancy in 1840 was 46 years among Swedish women. Today it's something like 87, 88 years. Life expectancy has gone up by about two and a half years a decade. So every day that you survive, your life expectancy goes up by five or six hours. I think that, and so there's always been this debate between the mathematicians who extrapolated these curves and the biologists who always argued that you weren't going to make any more progress you're about to hit the wall. I would tend to side with the mathematicians over the biologists. I think we can do a lot more. I don't think we're going to solve, you know, we're going to find sort of a single magic pill that makes people live forever. I think it will be a lot of specific walking and tackling. But I think we could make a lot of progress on cancer. I think there's no reason that we could not cure Alzheimer's or dementia. One out of three people at age 85 has dementia. I think we could be doing a lot more. And it's always, again, I think it's outrageous that our culture is so complacent about these things. And, again, I think there's room for a lot of progress in these areas.

我来稍微绕一下回答。我认为，关于现代计算机正在取代人的说法，只是我们面对科技进步时又一次产生的焦虑感罢了。我觉得这不是真的。计算机和人类是根本不同的，它们擅长的领域完全不同。其实它们是互补的，而不是替代的。对发达国家中产阶级来说，更大的挑战来自全球化，因为印度和中国的人实际上和我们差别不大，他们可以替代我们的劳动力，真正的替代正是发生在这里。我不认为我们应该停止全球化，但我们应该关注其一些问题。我认为技术引发的问题要少得多。 你也认为科技可以帮助对抗衰老。我们在有生之年能在这一问题上取得多大进展？在过去的150年里，我们取得了很大进展。1840年，瑞典女性的最大预期寿命是46岁。今天已经达到了87或88岁。预期寿命每十年增加大约两岁半左右。所以，每活一天，你的预期寿命就会增加五六个小时。我认为，数学家们会通过外推曲线得出结论，而生物学家们总是在争辩，我们不会再取得进展，我们即将碰壁。在我看来，我更倾向于支持数学家。我们可以做很多事情。我不认为我们会发现某种神奇药丸让人永生，但可以通过具体的研究和处理来实现。我们在癌症研究上可以取得很大进展。我认为，我们完全有理由治愈阿尔茨海默病或痴呆症。在85岁的人群中有三分之一患有痴呆症。我认为我们可以做得更多。我觉得我们的文化在这些问题上过于自满，这令人难以接受。我相信，这些领域中还有很大的进步空间。

So when you hear of supporters of the singularity, people like Ray Kurzwell talking about being able to defeat aging, the body can live forever. What do you think? Well, I think this has been a core animating idea of the entire modern scientific project. The search for the water of life that the alchemists had was as great as for the thing that would transmute everything into gold. They were actually, the alchemists were more interested in living forever than in finding the thing that substituted everything for gold. It was Francis Bacon, the new Atlantis. This is the whole project of modern science. And so it's hard to know how much we can change the world from a place where life is nasty, brutish, and short. But I think the moral thing is to push it as far as we possibly can in the other direction.

所以，当你听到奇点支持者，比如雷·库兹韦尔（Ray Kurzweil）在讨论能够战胜衰老，身体能够永生时，你会怎么想？我认为，这其实是整个现代科学项目的核心驱动理念。炼金术士对生命之水的追求和他们寻找能够将一切转化为黄金的物质一样重要。实际上，炼金术士比起寻找黄金更感兴趣的是永生。这也正是弗朗西斯·培根（Francis Bacon）的“新大西岛”这一理念的体现。这整个就是现代科学的项目。因此，我们很难知道我们能在多大程度上改变这个“生活残酷、短暂”的世界，但我认为在道义上，我们应该尽可能朝着相反的方向努力推进。

I know there are all sorts of arguments on the other side. People say that death is a natural part of life, to which I always respond, that I think it is at least as natural for us to be fighting death. And I think that we have this modality where we are either accepted or denied. I think most people are serving the schizophrenic mode where they accept death and deny it at the same time. And what acceptance and denial, however, have in common is they're both modes of thinking that stop you from doing anything. It's going to happen or there's nothing you can do about.

我知道有各种反对的观点。有人说死亡是生命自然的一部分，对此我的回应是，我认为与其说死亡自然，不如说我们抗争死亡是自然的。我觉得我们有一种方式，可以接受或拒绝死亡。我认为大多数人都处于一种矛盾的状态，他们既接受死亡又否认死亡。而接受和否认的共同点在于，它们都是让你停止行动的思维模式。认为要么死亡是必然的，要么你对此无能为力。

It's not going to happen or it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it. Those modes tell you that you shouldn't do anything. And I think we should be spending more time fighting it. I'm quite upset that we're not having an argument actually. I feel like I'm missing out on the Peter Thiel experience who are not shouting me down. You're a man with political views. You have stronger views about education and other things. Let me just imagine with you that you're suddenly in the White House. It's not going to happen. Let's just imagine. I almost think thought experiments are very treacherous things though.

这不会发生，或者它会发生，而你无能为力。这些观点告诉你不应该做任何事。而我认为我们应该花更多时间去对抗它。我非常不满的是，我们竟然没有展开争论。我觉得我错过了体验彼得·蒂尔大声反驳我的经历。你是个有政治见解的人，对教育和其他事情有很强的看法。让我和你一起想象一下你突然坐在了白宫里。这是不可能发生的。只是想象一下。我差不多认为思维实验是非常危险的事情。

But let's just say you could change the rules. It doesn't mean I'm mayor of the United States. I'm kissing babies all day long. What would you like to change? What would be tough for you? How far can we play the slot experiment? What would you want to change in how America is run? Well, you know, my single issue is that we have to make more progress in science and technology. And I don't think the government can do that much on this because it's so hostile to these things. It reflects the population that's hostile.

但是，假设你可以改变规则。这并不意味着我是美国的市长，整天亲吻婴儿。你想改变什么？什么对你来说是困难的？我们可以在这个假设中走多远？你想在美国的治理中改变什么？你知道，我最关心的是我们在科学和技术方面必须取得更多进展。我不认为政府能在这方面做太多，因为它对这些事物持敌对态度。这反映了民众的敌对情绪。

To get best we can hope that the government gets out of the way of stopping this sort of progress. There was a time in the past when the government was able to coordinate things and do things. I don't think we're living in that sort of a society anymore. The U.S. was able to build a nuclear bomb in three and a half years in a project organized by the government, or you could put someone on the moon in the Apollo program in the 1960s. These sorts of things would be utterly inconceivable today.

要取得最好的结果，我们希望政府不要阻碍这种进步。过去，政府曾经能够协调和完成很多事情。我认为我们现在已经不再生活在那样的社会了。美国曾经在政府组织的项目中，仅用三年半的时间就建造了核弹，或者在20世纪60年代的阿波罗计划中让人类登上月球。今天，这些事情是完全难以想象的。

You know, a letter from Einstein to the White House would get lost in the mail room. People say, you know, who is this crazy scientist who thinks you can do this completely different sort of a thing? And so I think the best role for government in our world is somewhat more limited because I looked at this the other day. There are 535 congressmen and senators in the U.S. and by a generous count maybe 35 of them have a background in science or engineering. And the rest of them are like in the Middle Ages. They don't know that solar panels don't work at night or windmills don't work when the wind is not blowing. And so I think we can't have that great a hope for how much innovation can happen from government if that's how it's constant.

你知道吗，一封来自爱因斯坦写给白宫的信可能会在传达室里丢失。人们会说，这个疯狂的科学家是谁，居然认为可以做出这么不同寻常的事？所以我认为政府在我们的世界中的最佳角色应该更有限一些，因为我最近查了一下，美国有535名国会议员和参议员，按最乐观的计算来说，也许只有35人有科学或工程背景。其余的人就像中世纪的人一样，他们不知道太阳能板在晚上不起作用，风车在没有风的时候也不能运转。因此，如果政府的组成是这样的，我们不能对政府在创新方面寄予太大的希望。

Now again, if we can change everybody in the government, that's now we're again playing with a very crazy thought experiment though. Governments are trying to map the brain though. Obama's got a big project. The Europeans have a big project. Look, there's a lot of funding that goes to various kinds of ideas. But the politicization of the funding I think has often had this counterproductive effect. You know, in much of science I worry that there's been a sort of Gresham's law at work where the people who are nimble in the art of writing grant applications to governments have replaced the eccentric people who are the truly great scientists.

现在，再说一次，如果我们能更换政府里的所有人，那就是在进行一个非常疯狂的思想实验了。政府目前正在尝试绘制大脑的地图。奥巴马有一个大项目，欧洲人也有一个大项目。看看，各种各样的创意都得到了很多资金支持。但我认为，资金的政治化往往产生了适得其反的效果。你知道，在很多科学领域，我担心一个类似于格雷沙姆定律的现象正在发生：那些擅长写政府资助申请的人取代了那些真正杰出但行为古怪的科学家。

And so the eccentric university professor is a species that I think is going extinct very fast because of the sort of Gresham's law dynamics. Yes, there's a lot of money going to projects. The projects that get funded are consensus projects. The experiments that get done are experiments that everybody thinks will work. The experiments that everyone thinks will work are ones that I think rarely advance science at all. The interesting experiments are ones that no one thinks work and that actually end up working with those are very hard to fund politically. So you've been backing a sea-steading organization to try and create a new kind of nation. How's that going? That still has a long ways to go. It's a small project I got involved in. It always generates enormous interest because I think people do have a sense that the frontier is somewhat closed and there's something odd and that there's no longer a place you can go to in this world where you can start a new community or a new society. And so even talking about doing something as speculative as building communities on platforms on the ocean naturally generates an enormous amount of conversation. I think figuring out ways to reopen the frontier is very important. It's not clear we can do it geographically because the land surface is fully covered. Outer space is still pretty far away. But I think the frontier is this place where new things happen. There's a certain logic to California being the place where so much innovation happened. It was the place where the geographical frontier ended. He went west to go to the frontier. The frontier ended in California. And even though it's geographically, you know, we are finished exploring it, it is still the place where a lot of new things happen.

所以，我认为那些古怪的大学教授这一物种正在迅速灭绝，原因可以归结为类似格雷沙姆定律的动态。是的，很多资金都投入到了项目当中。但是，得到资助的项目往往是共识项目。大家认为那些能够成功的实验大多是一些并不真正推动科学进步的实验。真正有趣的实验是那些没人看好却最终成功的实验，而这些实验在政治上却很难获得资金支持。所以，你一直在支持一个旨在创建新型国家的海上社区组织，目前进展如何？那还需要很长的时间去实现。我参与的那个项目很小，但它总是能引起极大的兴趣，因为人们感到当前的边界似乎已封闭，再也找不到一个可以建立新社区或新社会的地方。因此，哪怕只是讨论在海洋平台上建设社区这样一种看似不切实际的构想，也会引发大量的讨论。我认为，探索重新开放边界的方法非常重要。地理上，我们可能很难做到，因为陆地表面已经被完全覆盖。外太空则还有很遥远的距离。但我认为，边界是那些新事物产生的地方。加利福尼亚成为创新发生地是有一定道理的。地理边界在此终结。西进开拓边界，最终在加州结束。尽管地理上的探索已经结束，但这里依然是许多新事物发生的地方。

So on the FOUNDUS fund website you famously say that we wanted flying cars instead we got 140 characters. What have you got against Twitter? You have to always put this in some context. So I think that Twitter has a great business model. It's in some ways such a good business model. And when you have an monopoly like Twitter has on the service they built out, you often don't have to run your business in quite as operationally tied away as you would if you were say opening a restaurant or something like that. So I think Twitter is a great business. But there is always a sense that it's not enough to take our civilization in the next level. And this is always sort of the idea that we need to do things not just in the world of bits. We should also be trying to do more things in the world of atoms. The narratives we always tell in our media are ones of specific failure, linked to general failure or specific success linked to general success. And so it would be Twitter is a great business and therefore look at how much is happening in technology. And I think we need to consider that it's a specific success that's perhaps obscuring a lot of general failures. The cell phones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old, that we live in these old cities where transportation systems are maybe from the 19th or early 20th century where a lot of stuff has not changed in a very long time. And so I think Twitter itself is a great company. It's not enough to take us to the next level. It's always as often gets framed as a critique of the Twitter founders. Why couldn't they have built something like flying cars? And I think that's very unfair because they did build a great company and we shouldn't blame them. And so the blame is on all of us for not working on these other things. There is a startup in Slovakia that we just featured in Y called Aeromobile that is making a flying car. What do you think when you see Uber valued at $17 billion and WhatsApp bought for $19 billion and Snapchat worth somewhere above $10 billion, what do you think about the valuations?

在FOUNDUS基金网站上，你著名地说过“我们想要飞行汽车，却得到了140个字符。”你对Twitter有什么意见呢？必须把这个放在一定的背景下来看。我认为Twitter有一个很好的商业模式。某些方面，它的商业模式非常出色。当你拥有像Twitter这样的服务垄断时，你往往不需要像经营餐馆那样精细运营你的业务。因此，我认为Twitter是一个很棒的企业。但总有人觉得这还不足以将我们的文明提升到下一个层次。这也引出了我们需要不仅仅在虚拟世界里有所作为，还应该在物质世界中有所创新的想法。 我们的媒体叙事总是将具体的失败与整体的失败联系在一起，或者将具体的成功与整体的成功联系在一起。所以，尽管Twitter是一个成功的公司，但我们不能因此认为整个科技行业都取得了巨大进展。我认为我们需要意识到，这样的个别成功，可能掩盖了很多广泛的失败。智能手机不仅让我们对周围环境分心，也让我们忽略了我们的环境其实非常陈旧的事实——我们生活在这些古老的城市中，交通系统可能还是19世纪或20世纪早期的，很多东西都很久没有改变了。 所以，我认为Twitter本身是一个很棒的公司，但它不足以带领我们迈向下一个层次。这常常被解读为对Twitter创始人的批评，为什么他们没能造出类似飞行汽车的东西。我认为这是不公平的，因为他们确实创建了一家伟大的公司，我们不应该责怪他们。因此，这个责任在于我们所有人没有致力于其他这些事情。 我们刚刚在Y中介绍了一家斯洛伐克的初创公司Aeromobile，它正在制造飞行汽车。当你看到Uber估值170亿美元，WhatsApp被以190亿美元收购，Snapchat估值超过100亿美元时，你有什么看法？

There is always this recurrent question whether we have a bubble in technology like we had in the late 90s. I tend to think that there is no bubble in tech because these bubbles are psychosocial phenomena in which you get the entire public involved. And the public has largely been absent this time around. The IPOs are happening very, very late. They're far fewer of them than they were in the late 90s. And so you do not have the sort of public frenzy around technology that you had in 99, 2000. If I had to identify a bubble today, we had a bubble in tech in the 90s, we had a housing finance one in the last decade, the obvious place where the bubble exists today is in government and it's in government bonds probably. What a government is sort of buying up with all the money they're printing. So I think that the place that are bubble, in some ways the interest rates that are set by the government touch everything, but the center of the bubble are probably things that are most like government bonds. It's government bonds, corporate bonds. Maybe it's parts of the housing market that are very linked to fixed income.

总有人反复问，当前的科技领域是否存在像90年代末那样的泡沫。我倾向于认为科技领域目前没有泡沫，因为这种泡沫是涉及整个公众的心理社会现象。而这次公众基本上缺席。首次公开募股（IPO）发生得非常晚，数量也比90年代末少得多。因此，现在没有像1999年或2000年那样的科技热潮。如果要说现在有什么泡沫，我们在90年代有科技泡沫，在上一个十年有住房金融泡沫，而现在最明显的泡沫存在于政府和政府债券中。政府正在用印出来的大量货币购买这些债券。所以我认为，泡沫所在的地方在某种程度上是由政府设定的利率影响的，而泡沫的核心可能是最像政府债券的东西，包括政府债券、公司债券，或许还有一些与固定收入密切相关的住房市场。

Maybe it's parts of the equity market that behave like fixed income. So it's stocks that pay high dividends or it's these sort of value stocks where you have very predictable cash flows. Whereas the tech stocks are primarily valued on growth, which is a very different variable. I personally have about three quarters of my net worth tied up in the liquid tech stocks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. And I actually think that it's one of the best places to hide from this massive government bubble that exists everywhere else. So I think there is a bubble. It's not in tech. It's in government. And I invest in tech in order to hide from the bubble in government. What is the one that you wish you'd invested in that you missed? Well, there always are many misses that one has. But I think sort of the missus that really, that count as misses are ones where you spend some time talking to the company. You have a real conversation. You really think about it.

也许股市中的某些部分表现得像固定收益产品。因此，这些股票会支付高股息，或者是那些有着非常可预测的现金流的价值股。而科技股主要依赖于增长来评估，这是一种非常不同的变量。我个人有大约四分之三的净资产投资在硅谷及其他地方的流动性科技股上。我实际上认为这是躲避其他地方存在的大规模政府泡沫的最佳地点之一。所以我认为确实存在泡沫，但不是在科技领域，而是在政府领域。我投资科技股是为了躲避政府的泡沫。 你有哪些错过的投资机会让你遗憾？你总会有很多错过的，但真正认为错过的机会往往是那些你花时间与公司谈过，有过真实对话并认真考虑过的。

So I missed out on the series A-Round at YouTube. I missed out on the series A-Round at Zinga. I had lots of conversations with Mark Pinkerson, who I had known him for many years and was very close to doing it. But far bigger missed than those two was not doing the series B-Round at Facebook. And I think it's sort of very instructive sort of set of mistakes that happened. On the, we've done this, I was a seed investor to the series A-Round. August of 2004 had sort of a post money evaluation of 5.6, 5.7 million. And Facebook was just growing very fast. Sort of eight months later, they sort of got this financing round. The Washington Post was offering $50 million. And then Excel, Venture Funds, Silicon Valley came in.

所以，我错过了YouTube的A轮融资，也错过了Zynga的A轮融资。我和马克·平克森有过很多次交流，我们认识很多年了，我几乎就要做这件事了。但比这两者更大的遗憾是没有参与Facebook的B轮融资。我认为这个系列的错误非常具有教育意义。我们做过这件事，我是A轮融资的种子投资者。2004年8月，Facebook的投后估值大约是560万到570万美元。Facebook当时增长非常快，大约八个月后，他们获得了一轮融资。华盛顿邮报当时出价5000万美元，随后硅谷的Excel风险投资基金介入。

It was much higher valuation at 85 million. It was 12 times the price per share of the first round of no little dilution. But it was much higher valuation in just eight months. And as this conversation with Mark, it was like, why don't you do this whole round? I kind of like you. And I said, I think it's like, it's gone up so much. And it felt like we had really maximized the valuation. And part of the psychology was that on the inside, it didn't feel like things had changed that much. You had this horrible graffiti art on the wall of the office. There were sort of, it was still only eight or nine people. So every day that you went to the office, it actually felt like it was the same company you had been at the day before. It was true there were these charts where things were moving in a very happy, north and north, easterly direction.

估值高达8500万美元，比第一轮的股价高出12倍，而这一轮几乎没有稀释股权。但短短八个月内，估值就达到了如此之高。在与马克的对话中，他问我为何不进行整个融资轮次。他表示挺喜欢我的。而我回答说，估值已经涨了这么多，感觉我们已经把估值提升到极致了。一部分原因是从内部来看，感觉变化并不大。办公室的墙上还有糟糕的涂鸦，团队还是只有八九个人。因此，每天上班时，感觉公司的状态和前一天没有太大区别。虽然确实有图表显示公司在稳定上升，但日常的变化并不明显。

But these were abstractions that people I think didn't fully get in a way. And so whenever you have these massive up rounds in companies led by smart investors, almost as a rule of thumb, they are undervalued. And I've done this back testing on this where the steeper the up round, the greater the undervaluation. And it's because when these companies have momentum, people underestimate the momentum. They underestimate when things change, they underestimate how much things have changed. And it's not just true of the outside investors, it's also true of the people on the inside. I course corrected on this in the series Sea Round in Facebook, which was at 525 million pre just one year later. And so it was like 5x again. And it was sort of this question, what did I do wrong? And I think it was like, okay, this makes no sense at all. This is a really crazy valuation. But I'm going to still invest because there's something about the momentum that people are missing. And that was actually around that I'm very glad to have participated in. How did it work out? Well, Facebook is worth more than 550 million, which is the post money on that round today. Just last question for me before I revoke my monopoly position and invite the room to ask some questions. What does Facebook become long term? I have to always be a little bit careful what I say about Facebook since I'm on the board of directors there. But I think it is a founder led company, which means that it's very focused on innovation, on continuing to develop a lot of new things broadly in this social networking space. I'm generally the most bullish on the founder led companies in Silicon Valley, Amazon, Google, Facebook, jobs, did a phenomenal job when he came back to Apple. And there is a certain amount of freedom that founders have, that the politician slash CEO people that often get brought in to run these companies simply do not have. So we have two rules for the questions now. The first rule is it must have a question mark at the end. And the second rule is it must be a genuine question about Peter, not some of your own projects. And anybody who disobeys gets put on a floating country somewhere off California. If we could have the lights up a little and there are people with microphones, and if you would like to ask Peter a question, raise your hand. And there's a hand that's just shot up over there. And we can have another microphone somewhere at the back of the day. Cheers.

但是，我认为这些只是人们无法完全理解的抽象概念。所以，每当有聪明的投资者带领公司进入大规模融资轮时，几乎可以说，它们总是被低估的。我对此进行了回测，发现融资轮越陡峭，低估的程度就越大。原因是，当这些公司势头强劲时，人们低估了这种势头。当情况发生变化时，人们低估了变化的程度。这不仅仅适用于外部投资者，对内部人员也是如此。我在Facebook的C轮融资时对此进行了调整，当时仅仅一年后，估值从5.25亿美元跃升至大约5倍。于是问题来了，我哪里做错了？我觉得这根本不合理，这真是一个疯狂的估值。但我仍决定投资，因为我觉得大家忽略了某种势头。我很高兴参与了那轮融资。结果如何？如今Facebook的价值远超5.5亿美元，这是那轮融资后的估值。 在我让大家提问之前，最后一个问题：从长远来看，Facebook会变成什么样子？由于我在Facebook的董事会，所以讨论这个问题时需要谨慎。但我认为作为创始人领导的公司，Facebook非常注重创新，不断在社交网络领域发展新事物。总体而言，我对由创始人领导的硅谷公司最为看好，比如亚马逊、谷歌、Facebook，乔布斯回归苹果后也做得非常出色。创始人拥有某种自由，这种自由是通常被引入担任公司CEO的职业经理人所不具备的。 提问的两个规则：第一个问题必须以问号结尾；第二个问题必须是关于Peter的，而不是你自己的项目。任何不遵守的人将被送到加利福尼亚外的海上漂流国家。请把灯光调亮一些，会有人拿着麦克风，如果你有问题要问Peter，请举手。那边有一只手举起来了，还有一个麦克风可以放在房间后面。谢谢。

I'm quite interested because you obviously started speaking, and the books mainly about zero to one about making, you know, a completely new market in which to fill. I wanted to get your opinion on the kind of the business model behind Rocket Internet, because of course they're the complete opposite of we just completely copy and imitate at speed. Well, I don't think it's a technology company. I mean, it's a globalization play. It's about copying things that work and sort of copying them elsewhere in the world. And so it may work. It, you know, it's, you have to, I think there are some tough questions about how is Rocket different from idea lab, which was sort of had this incubation model that blew up famously in the late 90s. I think the argument Rocket would make that is different, is that it has a formula, that it's just repeating mechanically. And I think it's a play on globalization. I'm not interested that much in globalization. I think it's important, but I'm much more interested in technology. But I think investors have to evaluate it as a globalization place, like investing in McDonald's and China or something like that. There's a question over here. And then another hand on this slide. I've got a mic here if that's OK. My name's Katie. I'm from Nine Others. And thank you very much, Peter. I really appreciate your time speaking to us. I think we've all been inspired by your book and by your story. And what I'd like to know is what inspires you. Where do you go to to find inspiration from what you read or who you meet or places you visit and that sort of thing? Well, it's always really bad at answering these sorts of personal questions. But I think it's I find tremendous inspiration from just all the terrific people that I get to work with. There's a dynamism to that that's incredibly motivating and inspiring. And I think there are all these ways in which one can be pessimistic about certain trends and certain things in our societies. But I think there is sort of a very powerful anecdote and the sort of indomitability of the human spirit that is sort of an enormous part of the of the tech scene in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

我很感兴趣，因为你显然已经开始谈论了，这本书主要是关于从无到有，关于创建一个全新的市场。我想听听你对Rocket Internet这种商业模式的看法，因为他们完全相反，他们只是快速地复制和模仿。我不认为这是一家技术公司，我认为这更多是一种全球化战略，是关于将有效的东西复制到世界其他地方。这可能会奏效，但我认为有一些难题必须回答，比如Rocket与Idea Lab有何不同？Idea Lab在90年代末有这种孵化模型，最后著名地失败了。我想Rocket的辩解是他们有一个重复机械化的公式，我认为这是一种全球化策略。我自己对全球化并没有太大兴趣，我认为它很重要，但我对技术更感兴趣。但我认为投资者必须将其视为一种全球化策略，比如投资在中国的麦当劳之类的。这里有人提问，然后另一侧还有一只手。我有麦克风，如果可以的话。我叫凯蒂，来自Nine Others，非常感谢你，彼得，非常感谢你花时间与我们交流。我想我们都被你的书和你的故事激励了。我想知道什么激励了你。你从阅读什么书、遇见什么人、参观什么地方等获取灵感？我总是很差劲地回答这些个人问题，但我认为我从我合作的所有优秀人群中找到了巨大的灵感。这种动态性非常激励人。我认为我们可以对某些趋势和社会中的某些事情感到悲观，但我觉得科技界，尤其是在硅谷等地，人类精神的坚韧不拔是一种强大的解药。

Is there a microphone with somebody here? Hi, Peter. One question. Why you are so sure that the next innovation way will be in the state? If necessity is a model of innovation, I think that is a more interesting story in Japan also. The flash and already trapped for 20 years. Good infrastructure and robotics. Fujima tragedy, geopolitical problems. So what about Japan? Well, I think Japan is very interesting. There's definitely a logic. I generally think the place to look is the developed world because that's the place where people need to do new things.

这里有谁有麦克风吗？你好，彼得。我有个问题。你为什么这么确定下一个创新浪潮会出现在美国呢？如果说需求是创新的驱动力，我认为日本也有很多有趣的故事可以讲。比如日本已经在某些领域领先了20年，有很好的基础设施和机器人技术，还有像福岛悲剧和地缘政治问题这些挑战。那么，日本呢？我觉得日本非常有趣，确实有理由关注它。但我一般认为应该关注发达国家，因为那些地方是人们最需要进行新的尝试的地方。

The developing world, they can just copy stuff. So I do think you look at US, Scandinavia, Northern Europe, UK, Israel, and then Australia, Canada, New Zealand. And then I think certainly Japan is a very interesting one. It's culturally not a place where people typically start companies. So the idea of doing something new in a small company is a modality that does not exist. So I think there may be a lot of innovation in Japan, but it may strangely happen in more and larger companies than in smaller companies. That would be my guess. But I think it's very interesting and it's definitely still the third largest economy in the world.

发展中国家可以简单模仿现有的技术和模式。我认为可以看看美国、斯堪的纳维亚、北欧、英国、以色列，然后是澳大利亚、加拿大和新西兰。另外，我认为日本也是一个非常有趣的例子。从文化上讲，日本并不是一个人们通常会创办公司的地方，因此在小公司中做一些新的尝试这种模式并不存在。所以，我认为日本可能会有很多创新，但这种创新可能更多发生在大公司而不是小公司。这只是我的猜测。但我认为日本非常有趣，并且它仍然是世界第三大经济体。

And it's weirdly very off the radar. How much of you are investing are you doing outside the US? The bulk is in the US. It's always, it always ends up, there's always sort of some connection we have to the people where they come strongly recommended in one way or another. But we've done some things here in the UK. We've done a few things in the rest of Europe. We've done some things in Israel. We've done some things in Australia, New Zealand. So we've done some things all over. Does somebody have a microphone on this side?

而这件事奇怪地不太引人注目。你们在美国之外的投资有多少？主要投资还是在美国。总是会和一些人有某种连接，他们会以某种方式强烈推荐。但是我们在英国也做过一些投资，在其他欧洲国家也做过一些，在以色列也有，在澳大利亚和新西兰也有。所以我们在各地都有一些投资。这个方向有人有麦克风吗？

I was going to say you said that, you know, when we're aspergers, it's the key to innovation. And Facebook is taking all this data and curating a social experience. And it's almost rewarding people to kind of continue to socialize. So how does that, they take all that data and make people innovate again? I mean, you've got a huge community listening to you. And you're kind of curating their social experience. But are you necessarily helping that population innovate for themselves? And how do you sort of take their data forward and do something more exciting, like maybe what Google's doing and continue to kind of innovate society rather than reward it for sort of gaming social psychology?

我原本想说，你提到的那些关于我们有阿斯伯格综合症的观点，就是创新的关键。而 Facebook 正在收集所有这些数据，并精心策划一种社交体验，几乎是在鼓励人们持续社交。那么，他们如何利用这些数据再次推动人们进行创新呢？我的意思是，你有一个庞大的社区在聆听你的声音，而你在策划他们的社交体验。但是，你真的在帮助这一群体自己进行创新吗？你如何利用他们的数据，做一些更令人兴奋的事情，比如谷歌正在做的，继续推动社会创新，而不是仅仅奖励那些操纵社交心理的行为？

Well, I think there are sort of all these different parts. I think I certainly do think that if you are constantly getting feedback on your ideas and discouraged from having unconventional ideas, that is a big problem. I'm not convinced that that's fundamentally what happens on Facebook. But I think it's a problem that we have in society in general. And it's something that we all need to work on overcoming. And it's very unfair to blame it on any single company. I would say, I don't think Facebook's doing it. But it's unfair because I think this is a problem that's endemic to society. We live in society. We're sort of social beings on some level. And so we always take our cues from the people around us and often get talked out of our good ideas from the people around us. So this is a very deep problem.

嗯，我觉得这个问题有很多方面。我确实认为，如果你不断地收到对你想法的反馈，并被阻止提出非传统的想法，这是个大问题。但我不认为这是在 Facebook 上根本发生的情况。而且，我认为这是整个社会的普遍问题，我们都需要努力克服。这是一个非常不公平的现象，把责任归咎于任何一家企业。我认为 Facebook 并没有这样做，因为这是社会固有的问题。我们生活在社会中，本质上是社会性动物，所以我们常常会根据周围人的反应来行动，而周围人也常常让我们放弃好的想法。所以，这是个非常深层次的问题。

There's probably space for two more questions and there was somebody over here. Hi, there. I was just wondering if you could actually describe your first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. You know, he was 19 years old. He was very introverted and rather quiet at the time. He still is somewhat introverted. It seemed like we'd done a lot. My friend Reed Hoffman and I had done a lot of homework on the whole social networking space. Reed had started a company called SocialNet all the way back in 1997, seven years earlier. And so we thought about this a lot. So it actually didn't depend that much on what happened in the meeting at all. We were going to invest just about no matter what. So we had the meeting for an hour and then we wrote the check.

还有可能再回答两个问题，这边有人举手。你好，我想问一下，你能不能描述一下你第一次见到马克·扎克伯格的情景？你知道，当时他只有19岁，非常内向，并且话不多。现在他依然有点内向。我们好像早就做了很多准备，我和我的朋友Reed Hoffman对整个社交网络领域做了很多调查。Reed早在1997年就创办了一家叫SocialNet的公司，比这次见面早了七年。所以我们对此考虑了很多。实际上，这次见面对我们的决定几乎没有影响。不管怎样，我们都准备投资。所以我们见了一小时面，然后就签了支票。

But we had done our homework beforehand. I think the odd question about Facebook that's very hard to get a handle on it is why nobody in Boston invested between February of 04 and August 04 when I met them in Silicon Valley. And I have this sort of crazy theory that there's always sort of, always are these competitive dynamics people get caught up in that are very unhealthy. And I think one version of it is that older people often don't want younger people to do better than themselves. And so if you're, I think there were these venture capitalists in Boston that were personally annoyed at how well Zuckerberg was going to do. And it sort of stopped them in a way from making the investment. What I told Zuckerberg when I made the investment was that I sincerely hoped that he would be far wealthier and far more successful than I had ever been. And I'm very glad that happened.

但我们事先做了功课。我认为关于Facebook的一个奇怪问题是，为什么在2004年2月到我在硅谷见到他们的2004年8月之间，波士顿的没人投资。我有一个有点疯狂的理论，总有这么一种竞争动态，人们被卷入其中，这对他们非常不健康。我觉得其中一个原因是，年长的人往往不希望年轻人比自己做得更好。所以我觉得，当时波士顿的那些风险资本家对扎克伯格会取得的巨大成功感到个人的不满，这在某种程度上阻止了他们进行投资。我告诉扎克伯格的是，当我做出投资决定时，我真诚地希望他能比我更富有，更成功。我很高兴他做到了。

I interviewed Reed Hoffman who was given the chance to lead the first round of investment. He was working with Sean Parker and Sean Parker said, I got these guys working at this place called the Facebook.com And Reed nobly said, well I think there might be a conflict of interest for me, but I'll introduce you to my friend Peter.

我采访了里德·霍夫曼，他曾有机会领导第一轮投资。他当时和肖恩·帕克一起工作，肖恩对他说，“我有一群人在一个叫TheFacebook.com的网站工作。”里德很坦诚地说，“我觉得这可能会对我构成利益冲突，但我可以把你介绍给我的朋友彼得。”

So I asked Reed, does he regret that? How does he fill now? He said, well, the money I don't regret, but I regret not having the chance to work with an entrepreneur. Like Mark. Last question. Peter, fascinated by your comments on education and I'd love some of the points you made around secrets.

于是我问里德，他后悔吗？他现在感觉如何？他回答说，嗯，我不后悔那些钱，但我后悔没有机会和像马克这样的企业家合作。最后一个问题。彼得，你关于教育的评论让我很着迷，我也很喜欢你提到的一些关于秘密的观点。

And really, you know, how we're going to try and take civilization to the next level. My question is really what's your view on MOOCs being the facilitator of that? Opening up the new pioneer. So it's always a little bit tricky if one has too many companies of a given category. So you don't want to be the fourth online pet food company or the tenth thin film solar panel company. And so I think there is this challenge of how are they differentiated from one another, what will really work.

实际上，你知道，我们要如何推动文明迈向下一个层次。我的问题是，你如何看待大规模在线开放课程（MOOCs）在其中所扮演的角色？开启新的前沿领域。这总是有点棘手，如果在某个特定领域有太多公司存在。比如你不想成为第四家在线宠物食品公司或第十家薄膜太阳能公司。因此，我认为这里的挑战在于，它们如何彼此区分开来，究竟什么才会真正奏效。

And so I always think that if we describe it at the level of MOOCs, we maybe haven't defined the problem properly. But I do think, you know, I do think we're at a point where the universities are going to change radically. It is an extremely corrupt system we have at this point. We have an education bubble in the US. We have a trillion dollars of student debt.

所以，我一直认为，如果我们把问题只限定在大规模开放在线课程（MOOCs）的层面上，可能还没能真正定义问题。但我确实认为，现在大学将会发生根本性的改变。目前我们的教育体系极其腐败。美国有一个教育泡沫，学生债务已经高达一万亿美元。

To the first approximation, this has gone to pay for a trillion dollars worth of lies about the value of the education people have received. And it's not all obvious yet, though, what's going to replace this or how it's going to change. I'm somewhat skeptical that it will be replaced by any sort of single unitary system. I have this fellowship for young people to start companies.

大致来看，这些钱基本上都用来宣传教育价值的谎言，金额高达一万亿美元。然而，目前还不清楚将会有什么东西来取代这种模式，或者这种情况会如何改变。我对此持怀疑态度，认为不会有一种单一的系统来替代它。我创立了一个奖学金项目，支持年轻人创业。

And my claim is not that everybody should do this. I don't think everyone should become an entrepreneur. I think there is no one size fits all. So I think the future will be much more heterogenous, much more diverse in terms of what people do. And what's really anomalous is the sort of unitary tracking where you have to go to an elite college, you go to Yale or you go to jail.

我的意思并不是说每个人都应该这样做。我并不认为每个人都应该成为企业家。我认为没有一种方式适合所有人。所以，我认为未来人们的职业选择会更加多样化，更加丰富多彩。真正不正常的反而是那种单一的轨道，比如你必须上名牌大学，不然就只能一事无成。

There's nothing else you can do, you know. And so I think the universities are perhaps in the same place as the Catholic church was in 1500-14. If we go back 500 years where you have sort of this monolithic way, this universal way of body of knowledge of teaching things. The difference between the Yale and the Harvard political science faculties are probably no greater than the differences between the Dominicans and the Franciscans.

你知道的，你没有其他办法了。所以我觉得大学现在的处境，可能就像1500-1514年的天主教会。如果回到500年前，当时有一种统一的、普遍传播知识的方式。耶鲁大学和哈佛大学政治学系的差异，可能不比当时多米尼加修会和方济会之间的差异大。

We've all kinds of small debates within this context. We have a system of indulgences that's costing more and more to support this priestly or professorial class of people. We are told that it's the only way to salvation. You must get a diploma to be saved. If you do not get a diploma, then you will go to hell. And I think the message that I have that's like the 16th century reformers, that's a somewhat troubling message, is that you have to work out your salvation on your own. You have to save yourself.

在这种背景下，我们针对各种小问题展开了辩论。我们有一个豁免制度，养活这些神父或教授等职业的人，花费越来越多。我们被告知，这是获得救赎的唯一途径。只有得到文凭，你才能得救。如果没有文凭，你就会下地狱。而我想传达的信息，类似于16世纪的改革者们，即一个引人深思的信息是：你必须自己去争取救赎。你要自己拯救自己。

And I believe that is the truth, but it's a somewhat uncomfortable one. So Peter has agreed to sign some books at the back outside here. What you must then do is read the book because it's a great, tightly written book, and then you need to start a monopoly. Because otherwise tonight's wasted. Please can we thank Peter Teal. Thank you.

我相信这是事实，但有点让人不舒服。所以，Peter同意在外面的后面签一些书。你们必须做的是读这本书，因为它写得很好，很紧凑，然后你需要开始实现垄断。否则今晚就浪费了。请大家感谢Peter Teal。谢谢大家。