Hey, prime members, you can listen to business wars, add free on Amazon music. Download the app today.
嘿,亚马逊会员们,你们可以在亚马逊音乐上无需广告地收听 Business Wars 。今天就下载这个应用程序吧。
One, two, three. One, two, three. Here we go, Bob! Team Bob Bob! Let's go, it's on you! Hi, Bob! You guys did a fly!
一、二、三。一、二、三。来了,鲍勃!鲍勃团队,加油!轮到你了,鲍勃!嗨,鲍勃!你们好帅啊!
June 2019, Hong Kong Central Business District. Protesters outside a tall glass government building are chanting and shouting slogans like Hong Kong never give up and waive the evil law. They're a million strong and they are angry. They're wielding umbrellas, a symbol of the pro-democracy movement.
Demonstrators are incensed by a new security law that would allow China to extradite Hong Kong residents to mainland China. Activists fear the law would not only allow Beijing to tighten its grip on Hong Kong, but would also be used to snuff out opposition.
The police have cordoned off the government building, but more people crowd the street pushing against the metal barricades. It doesn't take long before all hell breaks loose. Police fire rubber bullets at protesters, an officer dressed in head to toe black riot gear runs forward and lobs a canister of tear gas into the crowd. Another officer yanks back the arms of a young activist and forces him into handcuffs.
An onlooker pulls out her phone and records the arrest, then she clicks share. The footage should go live to the world on TikTok, the latest hot social media app. But despite TikTok's 1 billion users, no one will ever see her video. Bite dance, the company that owns the app, seems to have made sure of that.
Journalists alleged the company is set up monitoring of pro-democracy content coming out of Hong Kong, and they're allegedly yanking any content deemed controversial. Suspiciously few videos of Hong Kong's protest show up.
Bite dance is walking a delicate line. To protect its credibility, the company has to surface some feeds from the protest, but there can't be so many that it might offend Beijing, or the Chinese government could shut down the whole operation.
TikTok has become one of the most popular apps around the world, and it was created by a Chinese entrepreneur. But now, it's trapped in no-man's land. Caught between China's anti-democracy politics and a society desperately searching for an outlet for free speech. But despite these constraints, it poses a serious challenge to its American counterpart, Instagram.
Hi, I'm Sarah Hagi, co-host of Wondering's podcast, Scample Insurs. In our recent two-part series, Three Weddings and a Funeral, we dive into the story of a German con man who built an entire life on fake names, lies, and schemes, and the unlikely true-kind twist that brought this decades-long charade crashing down. Listen to Scample Insurs on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.
From Wondering, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. In our new series, we follow the battle between the social media apps TikTok and Instagram, platforms that change the way we live and interact. Where once we only photographed recorded special occasions, now our daily existence is captured and performed from perfectly curated meals to goofy viral dances.
TikTok will have to keep the Chinese government happy to survive, but a new threat is also on the horizon from Silicon Valley, highly competitive technocrats who have no qualms about copying or acquiring their rivals in order to bury them.
July 2010, Toto Santos in Baja California, Mexico. The turquoise sea gently laps at the white sand as Kevin Sistram walks along the shore with his girlfriend Nicole Schewitz. At 6'5", Sistram towers over Schewitz. The 26-year-old software engineer may be on a beach getaway, but like many Silicon Valley techies, he's always working.
He's pondering his startup, an app called Bourbon. Users check in at whatever coffee shop or bar they're visiting, and the app updates their friends. Then the user can post a photo of the location. Lately, he's barely sleeping, pouring all of his waking life into the app, and yet Bourbon only has 100 users. The app's not taking off, and it's time to move on.
But Sistram and his co-founder Mike Krieger have raised half a million dollars from investors. They've hardly touched that money yet, which means they still have enough cash to pivot to a new idea. He turns to Schewitz.
I know I'm not supposed to bring up work right now, but I have to talk this new idea through with you. Man, you really know how to rock a vacation, don't you? Fine, let's hear it.
Mike and I have been thinking of focusing on photos. Schewitz looks up at her boyfriend, squinting into the sun.
迈克和我一直在考虑专注于照片。施维茨抬头看着男友,眯起眼睛看着太阳。
I think that's a good idea. I love the photos on Bourbon, but I don't know if I'd post any.
我觉得那是个不错的主意。我喜欢Bourbon上的照片,但我不确定我是否会发任何照片。
Oh, why not?
哦,为什么不呢?
Well, my photos aren't that good.
嗯,我的照片不是很好啦。
Oh, come on, they're great! Schewitz laughs.
"噢,拜托,它们很棒的啊!" Schewitz 笑着说。
Thank you. But they're not as good as Greg's. The iPhone 4 camera kind of sucks.
谢谢您。但它们不如Greg的好。iPhone 4的相机有点儿烂。
Greg is a friend of Sistram's and another user of Bourbon. But Sistram knows there's a secret to how Greg gets his pictures to look that way. And it's not his camera. Well, Greg uses a bunch of filter apps to make them look good. Schewitz pauses and cocks her head to the side.
Maybe you should add filters then. It's an aha moment for Sistram. More people will share their photos if they look cool and eye-catching. And if more people start sharing photos, maybe more people will start using the app.
Back at their bed in breakfast, Sistram heads straight for his laptop. In college, Sistram had used a Holga camera, which takes square film photos instead of rectangular ones. This gives Sistram a brainwave. He'll make the pictures on his app square to stand out from the competition. But how can he make the photos look better?
Sistram thinks again about the Holga camera. It often created saturated images with rich colors. Sometimes there were light leaks where sunlight got onto the film. So he starts designing a filter that will mimic the same effects.
By the end of the day, Sistram has his first filter. He calls it X-Pro 2. It ups the contrast in saturation, making pictures look brighter and more flattering. It also adds a focus to the center of the frame by darkening the edges of the photo. Krieger, his partner, has already made a test out for posting photos. Its catchy code name is, well, code name.
Sistram and Shuots walk to a taco stand. He snaps a photo of a dog they spot along the way. He applies the X-Pro 2 filter and uploads it to code name. Sistram doesn't know it yet, but he has just taken the very first Instagram.
What happens next will change the fate of his startup dreams and turn Sistram from a nobody into Silicon Valley's latest vunderkin.
接下来发生的事情将改变他成功创业的命运,让Sistram成为硅谷最新的瑰宝。
October 6, 2010. Sistram and Krieger are sitting in a dimly lit warehouse at an old pier in San Francisco Bay. They're at dog patch labs and industrial co-working space. It's a little after midnight and the desks are empty. Sistram and Krieger are putting the finishing touches on their new app. They've ditched Bourbon altogether. Instead, they're focused solely on a photo sharing platform. They call it Instagram, a mashup of instant camera and telegram.
Krieger is hunched over his laptop, tapping away. On screen is the control panel for the Apple App Store. He pushes his fingers through his dark brown hair and readjusts his glasses. His fingers hover for an instant over the keyboard. Then he presses enter. Okay, it's live in the App Store. Sistram bends over Krieger's shoulder to appear to screen.
In the corner, a ticking counter lets them see each time the app gets a new download. Both men are too nervous to talk. Suddenly, they get a bite. There's one. A few seconds pass. There's another. They keep watching. The downloads keep coming.
A few days ago, Krieger and Sistram sent out 100 download invitations to tech journalists and influential Silicon Valley people. One of their most avid users is Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. He's also invested in their app. Much of Instagram's functionality is cribbed from Twitter. You can like a photo, follow people and use hashtags to find similarly tagged images. And you don't need anyone's permission to follow them either. It's an open network so you can track celebrities and friends alike. Dorsey's been posting photos from the app to drum up interest. It seems to be paying off.
As the downloads continue to climb, Krieger and Sistram are amazed. 1,000, 2,000, 5,000. It's way more than the number of people they invited. Where are all these people coming from?
Krieger appears at a spreadsheet of the email addresses used to sign up. They're from Germany. Hong Kong. Cities around the globe. Sistram is ecstatic.
Wow, this isn't just a San Francisco thing a few of our friends are downloading. We're reaching the whole world. He and Krieger hug and decide to call it a night. On the subway train home, Sistram sees a guy using Instagram. He's amazed. Someone is actually using their app in the wild.
The sun is well up by the time he walks through his front door, but then he gets a call from Krieger. Kevin, the system's down. No way. Instagram is running on one database in one computer in Los Angeles. In less than 24 hours, it's been downloaded 25,000 times. Now the system handling all the photos is overloaded.
Sistram puts Krieger on speakerphone and opens up Twitter to see if anyone has noticed yet. Damn it. There are a bunch of tweets complaining we're just another startup that doesn't know how to scale. They're right. We don't. But Sistram is devastated. We built this awesome thing and completely messed it up. If people can't post because the servers are down, they're never going to come back to Instagram.
Sistram hangs up and scrolls through the contacts in his iPhone. Who can he call? His thumb pauses over the name of Adam D'Angelo, a former chief technology officer from Facebook. He met D'Angelo at a party years ago and figures it's worth a shot..
Sistram 掛斷電話,翻滾著 iPhone 聯絡人。他可以打哪個電話?他的拇指停在了 Adam D'Angelo 的名字上,這位前 Facebook 的首席技術官。他多年前在一個派對上遇到過 D'Angelo,覺得這是值得一試的機會。
Sistram gets lucky. D'Angelo spends 30 minutes on the phone with him. He walks Sistram through what Instagram needs to do to get back up and running.
Krieger and Sistram switch to a different service that makes it easy to buy more server space. Forgiving users return to the platform. But Instagram's problems are far from over.
Fall 2011. Instagram's San Francisco office. Krieger's alarm is going off. Again. Sistram looks up at Krieger. The pair have an alarm on their phones that alerts them whenever the servers are overloaded. Lately, the alarm goes off a lot. They get to work.
It's only been a year since launching, but Krieger and Sistram's app has been downloaded 10 million times. They still don't have the headcount or server power to keep up. Sistram insists he only wants to hire people who really care about Instagram, which means he and Krieger are still fixing things themselves. Servers used to go down every four or five hours. Now it happens every 15 minutes. Krieger and Sistram are exhausted.
They haven't had a weekend off in months. They carry their laptops around with them wherever they go. Now Sistram's phone is showing an unknown number with a Menlo Park area code. He picks it up.
It's Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley. The pair met years before when Sistram was still at Stanford. But he and Zuckerberg are hardly friends. Sistram raises his eyebrows and gestures to Krieger. Krieger looks up from his laptop where he's desperately trying to get the servers back up and running.
The API is the program that lets Instagram integrate with Facebook. Hardly something Zuckerberg needs to be checking up on himself. Sistram is suspicious, but he keeps talking.
API 是一个程序,让 Instagram 可以与 Facebook 集成。这不是 Zuckerberg 需要亲自检查的东西。Sistram 感到怀疑,但他继续说话。
Oh yeah, everything's great with it. Thanks for asking.
哦,是的,一切都很好。感谢你问候。
Sistram and Zuckerberg make small talk. And after a few minutes, they hang up. Krieger grills Sistram right away.
Sistram and Krieger have been getting a lot of calls from prestigious VC firms eager to invest in the company. But no one of Zuckerberg's stature has been ringing. Yet. Sistram is about to get a lot more casual friendly calls from Zuckerberg.
Meanwhile, another entrepreneur is planting the seeds for an app that will one day take the world by storm.
另一位创业者正在播下一种可能有朝一日会席卷全球的应用程序的种子。与此同时,其他的事情也在发生。
2012 Beijing, China. Zhang E-Ming is sitting in his apartment near Beijing's Qinghua University. He's 29 years old with buzzed black hair and half-rime glasses. The smell of braised ribs and rice wafts through the air as he stares at his laptop's black screen. It's filled with strings of code. The cursor blinks expectantly.
Zhang's been working as an engineer at different tech companies and he's always noticing the same thing. Customers don't know what they want. Well, what if you serve them what they want before they even know they want it? It could be a news article, a travel deal, a meme, doesn't matter. The point is to keep a tight grip on their attention.
So he writes a program using AI to serve up aggregated news articles from different publishers. He calls the company Totiel, which means headlines in Mandarin. The program learns what users want to read by tracking what they click on and how long they spend on each article. Then it customizes news for the user.
It's not serving up cute videos yet, but the way the program learns what users like to feed them more of that juicy content will be the foundation of TikTok. Zhang will go on to start several more companies and each will become a building block for his blockbuster app. But right now, Zhang can't get his mind off something more immediate. Across the Pacific, he's noticed users are fixated on Instagram. An app full of images, not news. He finds that enticing.
April, 2012. It's a Thursday afternoon in Instagram's San Francisco office. Sistram and Krieger are huddled to one side whispering while their 13 employees click away at large open desks. This building used to be Twitter's headquarters. And Twitter has just made Krieger and Sistram a very exciting proposition.
500 million. Silicon Valley might be the only place where they'll hand out that kind of cash to dudes in their 20s.
硅谷可能是唯一一个会给20多岁的小伙子们这样大笔钱的地方,大概500亿美元的规模。
Krieger bites his lip. What do you think we should do?
克里格咬了咬嘴唇。“你认为我们该怎么办?”
Before they can even ponder this, Sistram's phone rings. He recognizes the number.
在他们甚至思考这个问题之前,Sistram 的手机响了。他认出了这个号码。
Hi Mark.
你好,马克。
Zuckerberg speaks in his usual measured tone.
扎克伯格用他平常的稳健语气说话。
Kevin, I've been thinking. I want to buy Instagram.
凯文,我一直在思考。我想要购买Instagram。
Sistram has been expecting this call. He takes a deep breath and listens.
Sistram一直在等待这个电话。他深吸一口气并倾听。
"I'll pay double whatever you were valued at this round. Why did you come over?"
我会付你当前估价的两倍。你来干什么了?
Sistram looks around. Even though he's been expecting an offer, he can't believe he's in Mark Zuckerberg's dining room. Zuckerberg's been wooing Instagram for the past six months, calling casually out of the blue to check in. And now, he says exactly what Sistram wants to hear.
Sistram nods. He's not ready to give up control over Instagram unless...
Sistram点了点头。除非有必要,否则他不愿放弃对Instagram的控制。
...unless the price is right. He cuts to the chase and shoots for the moon.
他会直截了当地讲价,而且还追求极致。除非价钱合适,否则他不会轻易妥协。
"Okay, let's talk numbers. How about two billion?"
好的,让我们来谈谈数字。两百亿怎么样?
Zuckerberg laughs.
扎克伯格笑了。
"Come on Kevin, I said double your current valuation. Not quadruple. Let's do one billion."
"凯文,加油啊。我说的是把你们现在的估值翻倍,不是四倍。我们来达到十亿的目标吧。"
Krieger and Sistram's app is only 18 months old. But it also has 30 million users. A hefty number given how young the company is. On the other hand, Instagram is just a mobile app with no desktop version and no revenue. One billion dollars is a crazy amount, far above the typical Silicon Valley price tag. But to Zuckerberg, Instagram's fast growth could be a lifeline for Facebook.
The Behemoth Company has seen its own user acquisition slow. Plus, Instagram has a young audience that Facebook covets. And Zuckerberg has been eyeing another social media upstart that's attracting young people and droves. Snapchat. Teaming up with Instagram seems like a way to hedge against the competition.
For Sistram, it feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity.
对 Sistram 来说,这就像是一生中难得的机会。
"Can I have some time? I need to call Mike?"
我可以用一些时间吗?我需要给Mike打电话。
"Of course."
当然啦。
Zuckerberg retires to the living room to watch Game of Thrones. Meanwhile, Sistram works the phone from the dining room. He calls Krieger, then dials his lawyers and investors. A short while later, he's ready to give Zuckerberg his answer.
Zuckerberg stands up and shakes hands. The Facebook founder is taking no chances. He fast-tracks the process, getting the deal hammered out and signed over the weekend.
Zuckerberg thinks he spurred Facebook's momentum and outwitted Snapchat. But he's unaware that over the horizon, another more intoxicating app is incubating its own threat.
Hey there, I'm Josh Muccio, host of The Pitch, a show where real-on-pronuers pitch real-tech investors for real money. And this season gets a little saucy.
We meet founders pitching everything from a better catch-up to a solution for one of the biggest problems today. Energy.
我们会见到创始人推销各种各样的事情,从更好的聚会到解决今天最大的问题之一——能源。
In the future, the vehicles in Garage is going to be like a giant power plant that could be used to reinforce a power grid, substitute fossil fuel power plants, and allow more renewable energy on the network.
New episodes every Wednesday. See in the Pitch Room.
每逢周三,我们都会推出新的一集。快来到演示室观看吧!
December 2012, Menlo Park, California.
2012年12月,在加利福尼亚州门洛帕克。
Sistram and Krieger are in their office on Facebook's campus. It's a giant room with a large glass garage door. They've been here for three months, but they're still settling in.
Sistram has two different monitors in front of him, one open to Twitter. He spots a tweet from an Instagram user, or rather a former Instagram user. It reads, "I'm deleting Instagram. They now own your photos. Hashtag read the terms of service."
He mutters under his breath. "Why are they talking about it?"
他喃喃自语道:“他们为什么要谈论这件事呢?”
Sistram quickly scans the photo attached to the tweet. It's a screenshot of Instagram's recently updated terms of service. And it says, people's photos could be used in advertisements. The text makes it sound like Instagram and its parent company Facebook have the right to license people's photos royalty-free and without telling them. It's a detail Sistram breezed over when he approved the amended terms of service. Facebook insisted Instagram update their terms to better match those of their new parent company. But now users are protesting.
Soon after, Instagram reverts to its old terms of service. But Sistram will not quickly forget how Facebook encouraged him to make a change that infuriated his users. He and Krieger will need to pay closer attention.
By now, Instagram has more than 150 million monthly users and many of them are young people. It's one of the most popular apps in the world. But just as it's asserting its dominance, a Quarkier app is gaining traction. Vine. Rather than just the still photos Instagram specializes in, Vine loops six second videos. It's full of jackass style goofy pranks and quick cuts of teenagers having a good time. In other words, the complete opposite of the polished filtered aesthetics on Instagram.
There's also incoming competition from Snapchat where people send direct messages back and forth to each other. Instagram responds by adding their own 15 second videos. They follow that up by introducing direct messages. But Instagram is not the only one paying attention to the ascend to video.
Spring 2014, California. A Chinese developer named Alex Zhu is sitting on a train. He's traveling from San Francisco to Mountain View, California. At 35, he's way older than the high school students who fill the car. Zhu is currently working at a software company, but he's been trying his hand at his own education startup. It's not going anywhere. He's looking for something new.
Zhu watches the teenagers with interest. Some of them are listening to music. Some are taking selfies. Some are on Snapchat and Vine. Then it hits him. What if he could combine the selfie and music with social media and roll it all into one? Zhu likes Vine, but he thinks its videos are too brief. At six seconds, they're just too short for advertising or sponsored content to stick. Zhu opens up his laptop. He starts writing the code for a 15 second video app featuring clips that loop and can be set to songs.
On the next episode, we go back to System and Krieger's fateful meeting on Stanford's campus and the move that earns them both millions. At the same time, TikTok's founder launches software that gets his Chinese customers clicking.
Hey, prime members, you can binge every episode of Business Wars, Add Free, on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen Add Free with Wondery Plus, an Apple Podcast. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey.
From Wondery, this is episode one of TikTok vs Instagram for Business Wars.
这是Wondery推出的《商业大战:TikTok vs Instagram》第一集。
A quick note about recreations you've been hearing, in most cases we can't know exactly what was said. Those scenes are dramatizations. But they are based on historical research.
I'm your host, David Brown. Natalie Roba-Med wrote this story. Karen Lo is our senior producer and editor, edited and produced by Emily Frost. Sound designed by Kyle Randall. Kate Young is our associate producer.