埃文·斯皮格尔：从内向者到 Snapchat 亿万富翁

你在 25 岁时成为全球最年轻的亿万富翁。马克·扎克伯格曾向你出价 30 亿美元。那确实是决定命运的一天，但我们决定单干。你有没有哪一天怀疑过那个决定？埃文·斯皮格尔是 Snapchat 的联合创始人，Snapchat 是全球最大的社交媒体平台之一。他把阅后即焚的消息变成数十亿美元的帝国，重新定义了我们的在线连接方式。埃文，你不常上播客，对吧？

You became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25. You've got Mark Zuckerberg offering you $3 billion. That was a fateful day for sure, but we decided that we'd rather go it alone. Was there ever a day where you doubted that decision? Evan Spiegel is the co-founder behind one of the world's biggest social media platforms, Snapchat. He turned disappearing messages into a multi-billion dollar empire, redefining how we connect online. Evan, you don't do many podcasts, do you?

我几乎不做公开演讲，但我想多分享一些。那么，让我们回到早期。我小时候是个内向的人，喜欢动手做东西。在学校里，我自己组装了一台电脑。一旦你开始意识到表面上看起来很复杂的东西其实没那么难，你就会开始想，你还能造出什么。这最终让我在 21 岁时创立了 Snapchat。我当时在斯坦福读本科，我们以 425 万美元的估值筹集了 48.5 万美元。真是一笔好交易。但那时有很多应用会迅速走红，然后又逐渐消失。很多人告诉我们应该卖掉它。他们说你们只是在来回发送照片，这怎么能长期增长？但 Snapchat 的增长至少可以说是非典型的。它像病毒一样传播，每月达到 7500 万用户。

I don't do much public speaking at all, but I want to share a bit more. So, let's go back to those early days. I was an introvert growing up and I loved to build stuff. At school, I had built my own computer. And once you start realizing that things that look really complicated on the surface aren't that difficult, you start wondering, you know, what else you can build. So, that led to building Snapchat at 21. I was in undergrad at Stanford and we'd raised $485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation. What a deal. But back then there were a lot of apps that would get popular really quickly and then sort of fade away. And a lot of people told us that we should sell it. They said you're just sending photos back and forth. How is this going to grow for the long term? But the growth of Snapchat was atypical to say the least. It was like this virus and it was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis.

所以我想知道，你对成功的基本原则有什么建议吗？

So I wondered if you had any advice on the fundamental principles of success.

人们对自己所做的事情有多在意，以及快速行动的能力，是成功的预测因素。在 Snapchat，我们有一个非常小的设计团队，只有九个人，他们不断产生大量的想法、产品和功能，因为 99% 的想法都不好，但 1% 是好的。

How much people care about what they do and the ability to move quickly is the predictor of success. And at Snapchat we have a really small design team. It's nine people who are constantly generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features because 99% of ideas are not good, but 1% is.

我想知道斯坦福教了什么，因为培养出一些世界顶级企业家的成功率非常高。有很多非常好的经验。第一点总是让我有点惊讶：53% 的定期收听本节目的人还没有订阅。所以，在我们开始之前，我能请你帮个忙吗？如果你喜欢这个节目，喜欢我们在这里做的事情，并且想支持我们，一个免费简单的方法就是点击订阅按钮。我向你承诺，如果你这样做，我和我的团队会尽一切努力，让这个节目每周都变得更好。我们会听取你的反馈，找到你希望我采访的嘉宾，并继续做我们正在做的事情。非常感谢你，埃文。当你回顾早年经历，试图理解那些在事后看来相互关联的点时，我想，正如史蒂夫·乔布斯所说，那些点是什么？

I want to know what they teach at Stanford because the success rate of creating some of the world's preeminent entrepreneurs is really high. There were a lot of very good lessons. The first one is this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much, Evan. When you look back over your earliest years and you try and make sense of the dots that connected in hindsight, I guess, as Steve Jobs once said, what are those dots?

我父母做了几个决定性的选择，我认为影响巨大。一个是从不让我看电视。他们不想让我把时间花在那上面，但同时允许我买任何我喜欢的书。那对我来说是非常有塑造性的经历。读书时，你需要大量运用想象力，在脑海中描绘人物，这非常有帮助。因为不看电视，我有很多空闲时间，所以我喜欢做东西。小时候，我会在客厅里搭一个假旅馆，让父母来体验入住。我在家可以尽情发挥想象力，父母从不因为我弄得家里乱七八糟、搬动椅子来表达自己和做东西而责备我。

There were a couple fateful choices that my parents made that I think had a huge impact. One was that they never let me watch TV. They didn't want me to spend my time doing that, but at the same time would allow me to get whatever book I wanted. And that was a really formative experience for me. Reading a book you get to use your imagination a lot to try to paint the characters in your own mind and that was really helpful. And because I wasn't watching TV I had a lot of time on my hands, so I liked to build stuff. When I was young I would make a little fake hotel in our living room and have a guest experience where my parents could come and try to stay at our hotel. I got to use my imagination a lot at home and my parents never made me feel bad about turning the house upside down, moving chairs around to express myself and make stuff.

你小时候觉得自己合群吗？

Did you feel like you fitted in when you were a kid?

一点也不。我小时候比较内向。所以，我觉得这有时让我更难感到合群。

No, not at all. I was more of an introvert growing up. So, I think sometimes that made it harder for me to feel like I fit in.

那你是什么时候开始接触电脑的？

And when did computers come into the picture for you?

我想我第一次接触电脑，天哪，大概是在幼儿园或一年级左右。我的教父带来了一台早期的 Macintosh 电脑给我们家看，我试用了 Kidpics 之类的软件。后来在学校里，我经常去计算机实验室。我非常想要一台自己的电脑。所以最大的突破是我妈妈说，如果你自己组装一台电脑，你就可以拥有它。我们不会让你联网，但如果你自己组装，你就可以玩。所以到了六年级，有一位老师帮我拿了所有需要的零件，把它们组装成一台电脑。我认为把这些零件拼起来、开机、让 Windows 运行起来的过程，让我明白了为什么从外面看那个机箱、那个盒子会显得那么复杂，对吧？你还没打开它看到里面。我觉得它可能看起来很令人困惑或复杂，但一旦你意识到把它组装起来并开始使用并不难，那种感觉真的很有力量。

I guess I was exposed to my first computer. Gosh, probably kindergarten, first grade, maybe around that period of time. My godfather brought over one of the early Macintoshes to show our family and I got to try out things like Kidpics and stuff like that. Then later on in school, I went to the computer lab a lot. I really wanted my own computer. So the big breakthrough was when my mom said, if you build your own computer, you can have it. We won't let you connect it to the internet, but if you build your own computer, you can have it to play with. So by sixth grade, I had a teacher who helped me take all the different pieces you need and put them all together to build a computer. I think the act of putting together these pieces, turning it on, getting Windows up and running, just made me realize why it seems so complicated on the outside when you're just looking at that tower, that box, right? You haven't yet opened it up and seen what's inside. I think it can seem really confusing or complicated but as soon as you realize it's not that hard to put it all together and get started, there's something really empowering about that feeling.

那种感觉教会了你什么？

What does that feeling teach you?

我认为现在更是如此，因为如果你上 YouTube，几乎可以学会做任何事情。但一旦你开始意识到表面上看起来很复杂或令人困惑的东西其实没那么难，你就会开始想还能造出什么、创造什么，或者还能如何尝试那些从外面看似乎不可能，但实际上并不难的事情。

I think this is much more the case now because if you go on YouTube you can learn how to do pretty much anything. But once you start realizing that things that look really complicated or confusing on the surface aren't that difficult, you start wondering what else you can build or create, or how else you can experiment with something that seems impossible from the outside, but really it's just not that hard.

你在学校被欺负过，对吧？是六年级还是之后？

And you got bullied in school, right? Was it sixth grade that you got bullied or was it sometime thereafter?

是的，中学对我来说不是最轻松的时期。

Yeah, middle school was not the easiest time for me.

为什么？

Why?

正如我提到的，我有点难以融入。我不像其他同学那样参加很多活动，比如运动之类的。我打过一点网球。但我觉得，不和朋友一起运动，午休或放学后花大量时间在计算机实验室，这些因素加在一起让我在社交上感到有些孤立，而这对很多孩子来说都是一个棘手的时期。

As I mentioned, I sort of had trouble fitting in. I didn't do a lot of activities that some other schoolmates did like sports and stuff. I played a little bit on the tennis team. But I think the combination of not really playing sports with friends, spending a lot of time in the computer lab at lunch or after school, just led to me feeling a bit socially isolated at what is a tricky time for lots of kids.

你小时候是什么样子的？你自信吗？

What were you like as a kid? Were you confident?

我不知道我是否对自己本身自信，但我绝对对自己的想法自信。

I don't know if I was confident in myself per se, but I definitely was confident in my ideas.

我愿意为自己认为不同的想法挺身而出，也愿意探索当时看来不受欢迎的想法，因为我觉得那很重要。我跟我爸聊过，他最近一直住在我家，我问他：“你觉得我成长过程中有什么故事可以讲？”他说：“哦，你应该讲讲。你绝对是个反叛者。”我问：“反叛者是什么意思？”他说：“你不记得你写了那篇揭露数学课程的文章吗？你采访了所有老师、孩子和家长，写了一整篇揭露文章，指出数学课程如何可以改进。”在那个环境下，那件事也许最好不提，但学校很支持我，让我发表了。我觉得他们创造了一个允许孩子挑战权威的环境，这让我明白挑战权威是可以的。

Like I was willing to take a stand for ideas that I thought were different or I was willing to explore ideas that didn't seem popular at the time because I thought it was important. I was talking to my dad, who has been staying with us for a while, and I asked him, 'What stories do you think I could tell about growing up?' And he said, 'Oh, you should tell them. You were definitely like a contrarian.' I asked, 'What do you mean by contrarian?' He said, 'Don't you remember you wrote that article that was like an exposé of the math program? You basically interviewed all these teachers, kids, and parents, and wrote this whole exposé about how the math program could be better.' It was sort of maybe better left unsaid in that environment, but the school, to their credit, supported me and let me publish it. I think they created an environment where kids could challenge authority, which was something I learned was okay.

我想这也是我遇到的很多像你这样的人的一个原则：他们不介意挑战常规。在你人生的某些时刻，你会做出一些可以说是反常规的赌注。我在你的故事里到处都能看到这一点，但显然，回顾过去，这在你很小的时候就与生俱来了。你不怎么做播客，对吧？

I guess that's a principle as well of many of the people that I meet like you: they're okay with pushing against convention. In certain moments in your life, you make these decisions which one would say are contrarian bets. I can see them all over your story, but clearly that was something innate in you from a fairly young age as you look back. You don't do many podcasts, do you?

我几乎不怎么公开演讲。不过，这是我 2025 年的新年决心。所以，走着瞧吧。我正在努力多分享一些。

I don't do much public speaking at all. It's a 2025 New Year's resolution for me, though. So, we'll see. I'm trying to share a bit more.

为什么？

Why?

我认为让人们了解我们的公司、我们的立场以及我们做决策的原因非常重要。其中一部分就是让大家了解我和 Bobby。我 13 年前创办了这家公司，一路上我们做了很多不同的选择。但我觉得，如果我们不说出来，没人会知道。所以，分享我们的决策方式、设计理念等等，对我们来说真的很重要。

I think it's really important that people understand our company and what we stand for, why we make the decisions that we do. Part of that is getting to know me and Bobby. I started this business 13 years ago, and we have made a bunch of different choices along the way. But I think unless we talk about them, nobody knows. So it's really important for us to share how we make decisions, our design philosophy, and that kind of thing.

总的来说，现在做 CEO 是一个非常有趣的时期。即使是在 10 或 15 年前，那些许多人使用和喜爱的知名公司的 CEO 们也不会做播客。他们可能会发新闻稿，由营销团队负责公关。但现在，领导力透明度发生了巨大转变，领导者被期望成为透明人。我认为不仅如此，媒体已经重新聚焦于个人。人们感兴趣的是个人，他们才是拥有传播力的人。所以重心已经从企业这样的实体转移到了个人角色和讲故事的人身上。那么，你上了大学——你去了斯坦福大学，一所了不起的大学——最终在斯坦福攻读产品设计。为什么在你人生的那个阶段选择了产品设计？这门课程吸引你的是什么？

It's a really interesting time to be a CEO generally. Even 10 or 15 years ago, CEOs of major companies that so many people use and love weren't doing podcasts. They might release press releases, and their marketing team would run the comms. But there's been this big shift towards leadership transparency, where leaders are expected to be glass boxes. I think even beyond that, media has really reshaped to focus on individuals. Individuals are what people are interested in; they're the ones who have distribution. So the center of gravity has shifted away from the entity like the business to focus more on the individual characters and storytellers. So you went off to university—you went to Stanford University, which is an incredible university—and you went to ultimately try and pursue product design at Stanford. Why did you choose product design at that stage in your life? What was it that was calling you about that course?

产品设计最酷的地方在于它的基本概念：你不需要等待灵感从天而降，或者被闪电击中。你可以通过倾听人们的声音、与他们共情、为他们提出的问题制作解决方案原型，然后带着这些方案回去问他们“你觉得怎么样？这能解决你的问题吗？”来系统地创造新想法。所以，对我来说，能够把我对制作东西的热爱与这个制作对人们有用的东西——创造新产品的过程结合起来，这真的让我很兴奋。产品设计学院是由一位非常有远见的人创立的，他叫 David Kelly。我有机会上过他的课，那真是一次不可思议的经历。

What's really cool about product design is the basic concept: you don't need to wait around for an idea to fall out of heaven or get struck by lightning. You can systematically create new ideas by listening to people, empathizing with them, prototyping solutions to the problems they share with you, and then iterating on those solutions by bringing them back to them and saying, 'What do you think? Does this solve your problem?' So for me, to be able to combine my love of making things with this process for making things that could be useful to people—making new products—that was really exciting to me. The product design school was created by a really visionary guy named David Kelly. I had the opportunity to take a class from him, and it was really an incredible experience.

对于像我这样完全不知道这门课教什么的人来说，产品设计是什么？是因为我脑子里想的是设计实体产品吗？

What is product design for someone like me that has no idea what they teach in such a course? Is it because my head says like designing physical products?

斯坦福的产品设计学院很大程度上是围绕实体产品展开的，当然。现在它远不止于此，但当时我在那里的时候，它隶属于机械工程系，非常侧重于实体产品、理解材料，但所有这些都属于一个框架：我们如何理解人们面临的问题，如何与他们共情，然后如何设计出解决这些问题的方案。

A lot of the product design school at Stanford is oriented around physical products, of course. Now it's so much more than that, but when I was there at the time, it was under the mechanical engineering department, very oriented around physical products, understanding materials, but all part of this framework of how do we understand the problems that people are facing, how do we empathize with them, and then how do we design solutions that solve those problems.

你在这段时间也学到了创业精神吗？因为我想你在大二的时候上了一门关于创业和风险投资的课，对吧？

Did you learn entrepreneurship through this time as well? Because I think in your sophomore year you took a class on entrepreneurship and venture capital, right?

是的，那真的是一个转折点。那门课叫“创业与风险投资”，基本上是一系列案例研究，由企业家们来讲述他们创建企业的故事和学到的经验教训，然后是开放问答。我听到了他们精彩的故事，并向他们提问，这对我来说非常鼓舞人心。

Yeah, that was really a game changer. That class, called Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, is a series of case studies basically led by entrepreneurs who come in and present the story of creating their business and lessons learned, and then it's an open Q&A. I got to listen to their amazing stories and ask them questions, and that was super inspiring to me.

你记得从那些课上学到的任何东西，最终在想法、理念或其他方面对你非常重要吗？

Do you remember anything you took away from those classes that ended up being really important for you in terms of an idea or a philosophy or anything?

我认为我在斯坦福和那门课上学到的最重要的东西是专注于追求真正巨大的机会。在洛杉矶长大，这里非常不同：我觉得我接触到的很多商业社区更关注现金流——这个业务能多快盈利，我们如何能非常可预测地做到这一点，我们能产生多少现金？在斯坦福，商业文化完全围绕这个机会有多大。这是一个巨大的机会吗？这个机会足够大吗？因为如果你不去追求可能触及数十亿人的东西，那就不那么有趣了。这对我来说是一种完全不同的思维方式，再加上风险投资的方法，即早期投入大量资金并快速扩张，然后在实现规模和大众采用之后再建立业务。

I think the biggest thing that I took away from my time at Stanford and from that class was the focus on going after really, really big opportunities. One of the things that's so different growing up here in LA: I think a lot of the business community that I was exposed to is more focused on cash flow—how quickly can this business turn a profit, how can we do that really predictably, how much cash are we going to generate? At Stanford, the business culture is entirely oriented around how big that opportunity is. Is that a huge opportunity? Is that opportunity big enough? Because if you're not going after something that could reach billions of people, that's not that interesting. That was a totally different way of thinking for me, combined with the venture capital approach, which is really to invest a lot of money early and scale quickly, and then build out the business later after you've achieved scale and mass adoption.

我一直想知道斯坦福教什么，尤其是与商业相关的，因为培养出一些世界顶尖企业家的成功率真的非常高。所以你是说其中一个关键理念就是远大的抱负。

I've always wondered what they teach at Stanford, especially as it relates to business, because the success rate of creating some of the world's preeminent entrepreneurs is really, really high. So you're telling me one of the key ideas is big ambitions.

是的。而且我认为这很有道理，因为创业太难了；成功的概率太低了。

Yeah. And I think it makes sense because it's so hard to create a business; your odds of success are so low.

所以，追求一个真正宏大的目标非常重要。这样如果你成功了，最终就能在彩虹尽头获得巨大的机会。我心里想，嗯，如果目标真的非常非常大，那么失败的可能性可能也会上升。所以，你知道，我可以开一家咖啡店，对吧？我成功的几率还算不错。但如果我要去打造一个新的社交网络——这种事只有疯子才会做——那么我成功的概率是多少呢？十亿分之一吧。

So it's really important that you go after something really big. So that if you're successful that at the end of the day there's a huge opportunity at the end of the rainbow. So in my head I go, well, if it's really really big, then the chance of failure is probably going to go up. So you know, I could open a coffee shop, right? And my chance of success is pretty decent. But if I go after building a new social network, which is something only a psychopath would do, then my odds of success are what, one in a gazillion.

不过，我认为科技业务令人兴奋的地方在于它的规模化方式。所以，和你开咖啡店的例子不同，一旦你构建了一个优秀的服务——比如我们一次性地打造了 Snapchat——它就能扩展到全球 8.5 亿人，对吧？而你要想扩大咖啡店业务，就得在每个街角都开一家新店。所以，我认为一旦你开始从规模化潜力以及打造能触达数十亿人的产品或服务的潜力来看待世界，它真的会改变你识别出的机会，或者你想构建的东西。

I think what is exciting though about the technology business is the way that it scales. And so I think what's different than your coffee shop example is once you build a great service, once we build Snapchat one time, it can scale to 850 million people around the world, right? Whereas you'd have to go build a new coffee shop on every street corner to scale the business. And so once I think you start seeing the world in terms of the potential to scale and the potential to build a product or service that can reach billions of people, it really changes the opportunities you identify or the things that you want to build.

有意思。那么，我们大多数人，尤其是在英国，通常不会考虑建立有潜力达到巨大规模的企业，部分原因是我们没有像你们这里那样，在打造伟大的独角兽科技公司方面拥有那么扎实的技术记录。我认为欧洲的一个真正挑战是每个国家的市场都非常小。所以，我觉得非常有趣的是，当我与欧洲的创业者交谈时，他们往往非常专注于先在自己的国家发展，并把那个市场作为跳板。但欧洲所有国家都相当不同，有不同的文化和语言。所以，有时创业者会花太多时间试图在欧洲发展，而不是像我在一些公司看到的那样。例如，在澳大利亚，他们在一个岛上。这些创业者首先想到的是：我如何在美国发展？我如何在中国发展？我如何在一个真正巨大的市场发展并快速达到规模？然后我就可以再投资，在欧洲或其他更难发展的国家发展。

Interesting. So the question that most of us, especially in the UK, we often don't think about building businesses that have the potential to reach huge scale, in part because we don't have as much of a robust technical track record in terms of building great unicorn tech companies in Europe as you guys do over here. One of the real challenges in Europe is how small the different markets are in each country. And so I think what's really interesting is when I talk to entrepreneurs in Europe, oftentimes they're very focused on growing first in their country and using that market as a stepping stone. But all the countries in Europe are quite different. They're different cultures and different languages. And so sometimes entrepreneurs can spend too much time trying to grow in Europe rather than what I've seen out of some companies. In Australia, for example, they're on an island. The first thing that these entrepreneurs are thinking about is like, how do I go grow in the US? How do I go grow in China? How do I go grow in a really really big market and get to scale really quickly? And then I can go reinvest and grow in Europe or grow in other countries where it might be more difficult to grow.

说得太对了。想想我的投资组合，里面有大约 40 家不同的公司，几乎每一家，无一例外，都采取了“先攻克英国，然后再去搞定美国”的做法。但在向美国过渡的过程中，他们遇到了无数挑战，比如在这里成功的成本有多高——营销成本，如果他们是零售业，进入 Target 或 Walmart 有多难。此外，创始人最终在英国建立了自己的生活、家庭，这意味着他们后来无法真正连根拔起并搬到美国。所以，他们中的大多数尝试美国市场，浪费大量资金，被烧得焦头烂额，然后逃回来，我已经看到这个故事一遍又一遍地上演。

That is so true. Thinking about my investment portfolio, there's about 40 different companies there and almost every single one of them, without exception, has adopted the approach of 'we'll crack the UK first and then we'll go and figure out the US.' But in that transition to the US, they encounter tons of challenges with how expensive it is to succeed here, like marketing costs here, if they're in retail, how difficult it is to get into Target or Walmart here. Also, the founders end up building their lives, their families in the UK, which means that the founders can't really uproot and move to the US later in the journey. So, most of them try the US, waste a ton of money, get burnt, run back, and I've seen that story play over and over again.

当你考虑打入这些国际市场时，你会派遣核心团队成员去那里吗？

When you think about penetrating these international markets, do you send core team members there?

通常，我们在 Snapchat 的做法实际上是跟随增长。也就是说，寻找那些人们已经开始使用产品、已经喜欢它、并给我们大量反馈的国家，然后我们会派人去那里，或者想办法利用这股势头，确保产品本地化得当，确保我们与当地创作者合作，使内容具有相关性。但我认为，因为我们的服务基于沟通，Snapchat 除非你和朋友一起使用，否则它真的不起作用。你们必须一起使用。我们寻找的就是那种朋友之间用它来交流的势头，然后想办法在此基础上构建内容生态系统或增强现实之类的东西。

Oftentimes, what we've done with Snapchat is actually follow the growth. So looking for countries where people have already started using the product, already love it, are giving us a bunch of feedback, and then we'll send folks there or we'll figure out how to build on the momentum or make sure it's localized properly, make sure we're working with local creators so that the content's relevant. But I think, because our service is based on communication, Snapchat doesn't really work unless you're using it with a friend. You got to use it together. What we look for is just that momentum where friends are using it to communicate with one another and then figure out how to build on top of that with the content ecosystem or augmented reality and those sorts of things.

你的第一个失败的想法是什么？

What was your first idea that failed?

哦，嗯，有过……我是说，我曾经做过一个橙汁机。但我认为最大的失败是 Future Freshman。鲍比和我——我非常幸运遇到了鲍比。他住在斯坦福我们兄弟会的走廊对面，我们都有对制作东西的热爱。所以我们之前做过几个有趣的社交想法，但我们决定投入大量时间的一件事是 Future Freshman，它旨在帮助孩子申请大学。这是我们有过直接经验的事情，所以我们对这个过程有多困难感同身受。我们有兄弟姐妹也在申请大学。所以我们花了大约 18 个月构建了一个功能齐全的网站。你可以选择你想去的学校，它会汇总所有的论文题目和要求，让申请变得非常容易。但到那 18 个月结束时，很明显我们很难获胜。我们面对一家叫 Naviance 的公司，他们有自己的软件套件，而且他们有一个非常好的主意：他们去找全美各地高中的大学辅导员，说：“嘿，告诉大家使用 Naviance，确保你的学生和家长使用我们的平台。”所以他们通过所有不同的学校获得了大量分发。显然，你会使用大学辅导员推荐的平台，而不是两个斯坦福孩子做的应用。所以我们有真正的分发劣势。然后我们还意识到，即使我们非常成功，每年获得一百万申请四年制大学的学生，我们第二年还得再获取另一百万学生。所以我们意识到，要建立一个大型企业真的很难，我们真的应该尝试一些不同的东西，最重要的是，尝试构建一些不需要花 18 个月就能得到很好反馈的东西。所以，尝试构建一些非常简单的东西，让人们可以尝试，并且我们可以更快地收集反馈。

Oh, well, there were... I mean, I made an orange juicer at one point. But I think the biggest failure was Future Freshman. Bobby and I — I was really fortunate to meet Bobby. He lived across the hall from me at our fraternity at Stanford, and we shared this love of making stuff. So we had worked on a couple social ideas that were interesting, but the one thing we decided to spend a lot of time on was Future Freshman, which was designed to help kids apply to college. It was something that we'd had direct experience with, so we could empathize with how difficult the process is. We had siblings who were also applying to college. So we spent about 18 months building a full-featured website. You could select the schools you wanted to go to, it would aggregate all the essay questions and requirements and make it really easy to apply. But it was very clear by the end of that 18 months or so that it was going to be really difficult for us to win. We were up against a company called Naviance, which had their own software suite and they had a really good idea: they went to all the college counselors around the US in high schools and said, 'Hey, tell everyone to use Naviance, make sure your students and parents are using our platform.' So they got a lot of distribution through all the different schools. Obviously you're going to use the platform that's being recommended by your college counselor, not an app made by two kids out of Stanford. So we had a real distribution disadvantage. And then we also realized that even if we were wildly successful and we got the million students a year who applied to four-year colleges, we would have to then reacquire another million students the next year. So we had this realization that it was going to be really hard to build a big business, and that we really ought to try something different, and most importantly try to build something that wouldn't take 18 months to build before we got great feedback. So to try to build something really simple that people could try and that we could collect feedback on faster.

所以这里有两个要点。你怎么知道什么时候该放弃？你已经总结了一些原则，但即使在商业中，我认为这也很困难，因为你可能会收到大量负面反馈，但这并不一定意味着这个想法你应该放弃。

So two points there. How do you know when to quit? You've kind of assembled a couple of principles there, but even it's I think it's difficult in business because you can be getting lots of negative feedback but that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is something that you should quit.

我认为最重要的是看业务的基本结构。在 Future Freshman 的案例中，我们有两个根本问题：一个是分发，另一个是我们每年都要重新获取客户。这些都是很难克服的结构性问题。所以我认为当你看到这样的结构性问题时，就是放弃的信号。但如果反馈是关于执行或产品功能的，那就不同了。你可以迭代改进。

I think the most important thing is to look at the fundamental structure of the business. In the case of Future Freshman, we had two fundamental problems: one was distribution, and the other was that we had to reacquire customers every year. Those are structural issues that are very hard to overcome. So I think when you see structural problems like that, it's a sign to quit. But if the feedback is about execution or product features, that's different. You can iterate on that.

也许这意味着你应该转型、迭代或继续前进。但你是怎么知道哪些迹象告诉你该放弃那个业务的？

Maybe it means you should pivot or iterate or just keep going. But how did you know what were the stars that align that told you to quit that business?

我认为对我们来说，是我们不够热爱这个产品。我觉得如果你真的热爱产品，热爱你正在构建和做的事情，你几乎可以克服任何困难。Snapchat 早期就是这样。我们热爱构建和使用产品，整天和朋友一起用。所以我们真的对它有一种依恋，这种依恋是我们在 Future Freshman 上从未有过的，因为我们自己并不申请大学。所以我们没有那种最终在 Snapchat 上建立起来的与产品的连接。

I think for us it was that we didn't love the product enough. I think if you really love the product, you know, and you love what you're building, what you're doing, you can fight through just about anything. I mean, that was really the case with the early days of Snapchat. We loved building, using the product. We were using it all day with our friends. So we could really, we just had an attachment to it that we never really developed with Future Freshman because we weren't applying to college. So we didn't have that same connection with the product that we ended up developing with Snapchat.

那为什么这一点如此重要？就是对你正在构建的东西的热爱和激情？

And why does that end up mattering so much? That like love and passion for the thing that you're building?

因为我认为，对你所构建的东西的热爱和激情，以及对你共事的人的热爱和激情，正是让你能够克服创业过程中所有挑战的东西。我觉得如果你不爱自己做的事——我绝对热爱我所做的事、我们合作的团队、我们创造的产品以及我们服务的社区。我认为没有这种热爱，事情会变得很难。

Because I think that's what, you know, the love and passion for what you're building and the love and passion for the people you're working with, like that's what allows you to get through all the challenges that come when you try to build a business. I think if you don't love what you're doing, I mean, I just absolutely love what I do and the team that we get to work with and of course the products that we make, the community we serve. And I think without that just love for what you do, it can be hard.

你提到的另一件事是，你觉得应该追求一个不需要花 18 个月或两年时间才能推向市场的业务。对于正在听、可能花了好几年在卧室里完善一个尚未上市的产品创业者来说，为什么这个洞察对你下一个创业项目如此重要？

And the other thing you said was you felt that you should go after a business that didn't take like 18 months, like two years of your time to build before you got it to market. Why is that for entrepreneurs that are listening that maybe have spent years perfecting something in their bedroom that hasn't gone to market yet? Why was that insight so important to you for your next venture?

我认为尽快尽早从客户那里获得反馈至关重要，哪怕只是在餐巾纸背面画个草图，说“嘿，我在想这个，它大概长这样，你觉得这个主意怎么样？”因为除非你能把东西摆在人们面前让他们使用，否则很难知道你的想法好不好。这几乎是产品设计课程的基本规则之一，但我们当初大概故意忽略了——你应该快速原型化并尽快获得反馈，以确保方向正确。即使在早期，Snapchat 之前叫 Picaboo，更侧重于消失消息。我们很快发现人们对这个不感兴趣。他们想用图片交流，用图片说话。所以当我们把应用命名为 Snapchat 时，我们解释说它比通过短信发送照片快 10 倍。人们说：“哦，我想要那个，那是我每天都会用的东西。”所以，在早期通过一个只花了几个月创建的应用版本获得反馈，真的非常有趣。

I think getting that feedback from your customers as quickly and early as possible is critical, even if it's on the back of a napkin. And like, "Hey, here's what I'm thinking. This is what it's going to look like." What do you think about that idea? Because it's very hard to know whether or not you have a good idea unless you can put something in front of people and have them use it. I mean, that's almost one of the cardinal rules of the product design program that you, I guess, we willfully ignored, which is that you should really rapidly prototype and get feedback as quickly as possible so that you know you're on the right track. I mean, even in the early days, Snapchat before it was called Snapchat was called Picaboo. It was more focused on disappearing messages. Very quickly we learned that wasn't interesting to people. They wanted to communicate with pictures. They wanted to talk with pictures. So when we called the app Snapchat, we explained that it was 10 times faster than sending a photo via text message. People were like, "Oh, I want that. That's something that I'll use every day." And so it was just really interesting to get the feedback really early on with an initial version of the app that took a couple months to create.

我认为这是一个非常有趣的观点，很多创始人没有意识到，即使是像你这样的公司，也是从一个几乎总是错误的初始假设开始的。但当你听到这些故事时，你听到的是“我在地下室有了一个想法，然后去追求它，最后它变成了一个价值十亿美元的业务”。但其中有一种谦逊和认识，即你最初的想法可能大错特错，你的工作不是要正确，而是要成功，这是两件不同的事，对吧？

I think this is a really interesting point that a lot of founders don't realize that even companies like yours, they start with an initial hypothesis which is nearly always wrong. But kind of when you hear these stories, you hear like had an idea in my basement and then pursued it and then it became a billion dollar business. But there's something in the like humility and the realization that your initial idea might be wildly off and that your job isn't to like be right, it is to be successful and they're like two different things, right?

我完全同意。而且我认为这个挑战——我记得很久以前在一次《名利场》派对上，纪念品是一个打火机，一面写着“导演永远是对的”，另一面写着“顾客永远不会错”。我认为这始终是商业中有趣的挑战：你必须忠于自己的愿景、构建产品的原因和理念，但与此同时，你的客户是你服务的人，最终他们对产品的感受就是对的，无论你是否同意。

I totally agree. And I think the challenge—someone, I think this was like one of those Vanity Fair parties a million years ago. The souvenir was a lighter and on one side it's like "The director is always right" and on the other side it's like "The customer is never wrong." And I think that's like always the interesting challenge with a business: that you have to stay true to your vision, the reason why you're building a product, your philosophy, but at the same time, your customers are the people you serve and ultimately how they feel about your product is right, whether or not you agree with it.

那么，你是如何从 Future Freshman 过渡到下一个业务的？从那里开始的旅程是怎样的？那时你已经遇到了你的联合创始人 Bobby。你是如何转向 Snapchat 这个想法的？

So, how did you get past Future Freshman to your next business? What was the journey from there? So, you'd met your co-founder at that point, Bobby. And how did you then move over to the idea of Snapchat?

我认为非常有帮助的一件事是我在开普敦做了一个学期的海外学习。退一步并在那里给了我一些关于我们正在做的事情的视角。我在那里时仍在做 Future Freshman，但它确实给了我更多视角。我想我只是意识到这将会非常困难，而且我并不真正热爱我们正在做的事情。我们必须找到别的东西。

I think one of the things that was really helpful is that I did a semester abroad in Cape Town. And I think taking a step back and being there sort of gave me perspective about what we were working on. I was still working on Future Freshman while I was there, but it really gave me more perspective. And I think I just realized this is going to be really hard and I don't really love what we're doing. We got to find something else.

那更多是一种感觉吗？就像一种“我不喜欢每天做这件事、打开邮件、思考这个问题”的感觉？

Was that more than anything a feeling you had? Like a feeling of just I'm not enjoying doing this every day, opening my emails, thinking about this problem.

是的。我认为倾听这些感受非常重要。是的。我们非常擅长不倾听它们。我想是因为父母和其他压力，对吧，让你继续做某件事。

Yeah. I think it's so important to listen to those feelings. Yeah. We were very good at not listening to them. I think because parents and other pressures, right, to continue doing something.

那么你是如何从开普敦那里，到 Snapchat 这个想法的？

So then how did you get from there, from being in Cape Town, to the idea for Snapchat?

嗯，我从开普敦回来，搬进了斯坦福的一个宿舍。我有个朋友 Reggie，之前住在我们兄弟会，也住同一个宿舍。我们在一起玩，有一天他说：“哥们，我真希望能发一张会消失的照片。”我说：“这是个超级有趣的想法。”我们查了一下，当时有几个其他应用在做类似的事情，但它们非常注重安全，不太注重乐趣。所以那是个超级有趣的想法。而且你很快就能看出它足够简单，我们可以快速构建并快速获得反馈。我认为当时我们做了几个重要的设计选择。一个是打开直接进入相机。我们真的想成为分享瞬间最快的方式。当时，iPhone 有一个快门动画，你点击相机打开它，打开相机要花很长时间，超级慢。哦，还有一个大开关，你必须在相机和视频之间选择，对吧？所以使用相机有很多摩擦。所以我们决定直接打开相机。

Well, I came back from Cape Town. I moved into a dorm at Stanford. One of my buddies who had been Reggie, one of my friends who had been living in our fraternity before, was also in that same dorm. So we were hanging out and one day he was like, "Man, I wish I could send a disappearing photo." I was like, "That's a super interesting idea." And we looked it up. There were a couple other apps that were doing some similar stuff at the time, but they were very security focused. They weren't really focused as much on fun. So that's a super interesting idea. And you could see really quickly that it was simple enough that we could build it and get feedback really quickly. And I think there were a couple important design choices that we made at the time. One was opening to the camera. We really wanted to be the fastest way to share a moment. And at the time, the iPhone had like a shutter animation. So you would tap the camera to open it and it would take forever to open up the camera, super slow. Oh, and there was a big toggle. You had to choose between the camera and video, right? So there's all this friction in using the camera. So we decided we're going to open to the camera.

我们决定去掉那个动画，让你能直接捕捉眼前正在发生的事，在瞬间消失之前。所以，我认为这是我们做出的一个非常重要的选择。当然，还有那个选择：让人们自己决定对方能看到自己的快照多久，但前提是对方随时可以截图。这可能是我们在最初那天收到的最重要的反馈之一。我们构建了应用的原型，我把它带到了我的设计课上。这是一个新应用，叫 Pikaboo。你可以设置一张会消失的照片。你知道，这和社交媒体非常不同。社交媒体关乎永久性，你试图看起来受欢迎，收集点赞、评论和漂亮的照片。那是你生活中 1% 的瞬间。而这是 Snapchat，或者说当时的 Peek-a-boo。这是 Peek-a-boo，它是为另外 99% 的瞬间准备的。对吧？所有那些你不好意思发给你所有朋友，但想和你的好朋友或家人分享的瞬间。每个人都觉得：“这永远行不通，因为对方总是可以截图。这毫无意义。”所以，它不会消失。你可以截图。我认为其中一个重大发明——这也是为什么我觉得获得这些反馈如此重要——那年夏天晚些时候，当 Bobby 和我在我爸爸家工作时，我们发明了一种检测是否有人截图的方法。然后我们会发回一个小通知，说：“嘿，你的朋友截了图。”我认为这正是让这项服务有趣的部分原因：你可以设置照片为你的朋友显示多久，但如果他们想保存，他们可以截图，但你会知道他们保存了。我认为这是产品早期反馈循环的一部分，帮助人们在使用它进行图片消息传递时感到舒适。

We're going to get rid of that animation and you're going to be able to go straight into capturing what's happening in front of you before the moment disappears. So, that I think that was a really important choice that we made. And then of course the choice to let people choose how long they wanted to let someone see their snap, but with the caveat that you could always take a screenshot. And that was probably one of the most important pieces of feedback we got in the initial day. So we built the prototype of the app. I took it to my design class. Here's this new app. It's called Pikaboo. You can set a photo that disappears. You know, this is really different than social media. Social media is all about permanence and you're trying to look popular and collect all these likes and comments and pretty pictures. You know, that's the 1% of moments in your life. And here's Snapchat. This is or Peek-a-boo at the time. Here's Peek-a-boo. This is for the other 99%. Right? All the other moments that you might be embarrassed to post to all your friends, but that you want to share with your best friend or, you know, your family. Everyone's like, "This is never going to work because you can always take a screenshot. This makes no sense." So, it doesn't go away. You can take a screenshot. And I think one of the big inventions and that's why I think it's so important to get this feedback. One of the big inventions that we made later that summer when Bobby and I were working out at my dad's house, we invented a way to detect if someone had taken a screenshot. And so we would send a little notification back that said, "Hey, you know, your friend took a screenshot." And I think that was part of what made the service fun that, you know, you could set how long it would appear for your friend, but if they wanted to save it, they could take a screenshot, but you would know that they saved it. And I think that was one of sort of the early feedback loops of the product that helped make people feel comfortable using it for picture messaging.

从你和 Reggie 那次关于让照片消失的对话，到你意识到 Snapchat 会成为一个大事件的那一刻，这段旅程有多长？这个时间差是多久？

How long was that journey between you having that conversation with Reggie about wanting photos to disappear and the moment when you knew Snapchat was going to be a big deal? How long is that gap?

我想大概要到下一个学年吧。那年夏天，Bobby 和我去了我爸爸家，在这项服务上做了很多工作，把它改名为 Snapchat，在和朋友们一起使用时得到了很多反馈。每个人都想要：“嘿，我能加个标题吗？我能画点东西吗？”因为在最初版本里，它只是一张照片。但由于人们用它来交流，我们需要添加标题和绘画等功能。所以，Snapchat 大概在 2011 年 9 月上线了应用商店。可能直到那年秋天晚些时候，甚至到 2012 年初，我记得我坐在教室后面。我们有一个快照计数器，统计所有发送过的快照总数。早期只有几百或一千。我刷新页面，数字不会变。但到了 2012 年初，每次我刷新快照计数器页面，数字都会增加，一次跳一两个或十个。所以很明显，人们在使用这项服务并交流。那时我就想：“啊，这很有趣。不仅我们和朋友们喜欢它，还有更多人在使用它。”

I would say it took until maybe certainly the following school year for me. So over that summer, Bobby and I went to my dad's house, worked a lot on the service, renamed it Snapchat, got a lot of feedback when we were using it with our friends, everyone wanted like, "Hey, can I add a caption? Can I draw on it?" Because in the original version, it was just a photo. But because people were using it to communicate, we needed to add things like captions and drawing. So, I think Snapchat launched in the app store about September of 2011. And it probably wasn't until late that fall, maybe even into the beginning of 2012 that I remember sitting in the back of my classroom. And we had a snap counter that would count the total number of snaps ever sent. In the early days it was like hundreds or a thousand. I'd refresh the page and the number wouldn't change. But by the beginning of 2012, every time I refreshed the snap counter page, the number would go up and it would jump by one or two or 10. So it was clear that people were using the service and communicating. And that's when I was like, "Ah, this is fun. Not only are we loving it with our friends, but there are more people using it too."

你刚才提到，你利用身边的人——你的朋友——来给你反馈，告诉你下一步应该添加什么功能。你说人们想在上面写字，想添加标题。作为创始人，这一定很难，因为你总是收到大量反馈，要求改变很多事情。你怎么知道哪些是好的反馈、应该实施，哪些是干扰或坏反馈？你是否有一个必须使用的框架？

One of the things you said there is that you were using people around you, your friends, to give you feedback on what features you should add next. You said people wanted to write on and they wanted to add captions. As a founder, that must be quite hard because you're getting lots of feedback to change lots of things all the time. How do you know what to filter as good feedback that you'll implement versus a distraction or bad feedback? Is there a framework at all that you have had to deploy?

所以，我认为所有反馈都是好反馈。所有反馈都有价值。我认为关键是你如何处理它。例如，以标题工具的使用为例。我们本可以添加一个非常笨拙的标题工具，使用起来很慢，就像社交媒体那样，你在照片底部添加标题，点击它，加标签之类的。我们决定实现标题的方式是让人们更容易交流：你只需在拍照后点击照片。所以，你拍下照片，点击，键盘就会弹出。有一个小标题栏，它仍然让你能看到背后的照片，而不是像附在照片下面那样。它就在照片上方。然后一旦你按回车，你就可以跳到选择发送给哪些朋友的页面。所以，我认为比听到“嘿，我想要一种方式在快照中添加标题或表达更多”的反馈更重要的是，我们实现这个反馈并设计出快速易用的东西，这就是为什么那个黑色标题栏现在成了 Snapchat 的代名词，并且闻名世界。

So, I think all feedback is good feedback. All feedback is valuable. I think what you do with it is what matters. So, for example, let's take the use of the caption tool for example. We could have added a super clunky caption tool that took forever to use that was like social media where you add the caption at the bottom of the photo and tap it and hashtag stuff. The way that we decided to implement captions to make it easier for people to communicate is all you have to do is tap on the photo right after you took it. So, you'd snap take the photo, tap, the keyboard would pop up. There was a little caption bar that still allowed you to see the photo behind it instead of it being sort of attached to the photo below it. It was right on top of the photo. And then as soon as you hit enter, you could jump to the page where you select which friends you wanted to send it to. So I think what was more important than hearing feedback of, "Hey, I want a way to add a caption or express more in the snap," the way that we implemented that feedback and designed something really fast and easy to use is why that black bar caption is now synonymous with Snapchat and is well known around the world.

所以从想法到第一次融资，大概是一年时间。跟我讲讲这个过程。你融了多少钱？当时业务在用户和下载量方面是什么情况？

So it was a year from the idea to the day when you raised capital for the first time roughly. Talk me through that. So how much did you raise about raising the capital and what was the business like at that time in terms of users and downloads?

是的，我不记得确切的用户统计数据，但非常有帮助的是我们有一年的数据。如果你回想一下，当时有很多应用像昙花一现，它们会很快流行起来，然后又逐渐消失。风险投资者会跳进这些应用，然后应用变得非常流行，然后又淡出。所以当我们融资时，对我们帮助很大的一件事是我们有一年的数据，基本上可以展示：嘿，当人们开始使用这个产品与朋友交流时，他们会一直用下去，因为它真的很有趣，而且比基于文本的消息交流更好。视觉交流比文本交流更有趣、更强大、更具表现力。一旦人们学会如何使用，他们就会持续使用。这对那些担心这只是另一个昙花一现的服务的投资者来说非常重要。

Yeah, I don't remember the exact user statistics, but what was really helpful is that we had about a year of data. So, if you remember back then there were a lot of apps that were sort of like a flash in the pan, like they would get popular really quickly and then sort of fade away. And so, venture investors would kind of jump into these apps and then the apps would get really popular and then kind of fade. And so when we were raising money, one of the things that really helped us is we had a year's worth of data to basically show, hey, when people start using this product to talk to their friends, they keep doing it because it's really fun and it's better than text message based communication. Visual communication is way more fun, more powerful, more expressive than text-based communication. And people use it consistently once they learn how. And that was really important to the investors who were worried is this just another flash in the pan type service.

嗯，所以我们当时真的只是用大概三到五页幻灯片来展示数据。你还记得早期从投资者那里得到的反馈吗？我觉得这很重要，因为所有创始人都会收到那种邮件，告诉他们自己做的事情没什么前途。

Um, so, so we really just led I think we had like three maybe five slides of just the data. Um, do you remember feedback you got from investors at that early stage? I think this is important because all founders are going to get the email that tells them that they're not on to something.

是的，我觉得最大的反馈就是：嘿，这看起来像是那些非常强大的大型科技公司会直接抄袭的东西，而且你知道，跟它们竞争非常困难。所以我们不太确定是否要投资一个跟这些巨头对抗的项目。

Yeah, I think the biggest piece of feedback was just like, hey, this seems like something that these really big powerful tech companies are just going to copy and um, you know, it's they're really tough to compete with. So, you know, we we're not really sure we want to invest in something that's going up against these really really big powerful tech companies.

我觉得这话有一定道理，确实很有先见之明。因为无论如何，打造一个社交网络应用的成功概率极低。我们开始录制前也说过，你得几乎有点妄想才能相信自己能做到。

I mean, there's some wisdom in that. Certainly a lot of foresight in that one. Yeah. Because the odds anyway of building a a social networking app are extremely low. It's we were saying before we started recording that you've got to be almost like delusional to think that you can.

我觉得那时候也是，Snapchat 是在 Facebook、Twitter、Instagram 等等之后才出现的，所有这些服务都更早。当时人们还相信网络效应意味着你无法竞争，对吧？谁的网络最大谁就赢，别人都没法竞争。所以就有这种担忧：如果其他竞争对手大得多，还有网络效应，你怎么增长和竞争？这是一个很大的反馈。然后还有另一群人，他们根本不理解这个服务是什么，所以也不太感兴趣。

I think at that time too, you know, Snapchat came last after Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, like you name it. All of those services had come first. And so I think the idea that like, you know, and that was still at the time when people believed that network effects meant that you couldn't compete, right? Whoever has the biggest biggest network is going to win. No one else is going to be able to compete. And so I think there was that concern that, you know, oh, if these other competitors are much bigger and they have network effects, how are you ever going to grow uh grow and and compete? So that was a big piece of feedback. And then I think there was just a whole other group of people who didn't really understand what the service was um and so weren't that interested.

但 Lightseed 的 Jeremy 联系了我们。他的头像是一张他和奥巴马的照片。我当时想：“哦，好吧，这应该是真人。”现在有了 AI，你永远不知道，但那时候我想：“好吧，应该是真的。”所以我们见了他们，他的一位合伙人——他女儿用 Snapchat 而且很喜欢——所以他们理解这个服务是什么，以及她怎么和朋友用，最后他们投了 48.5 万美元，估值 425 万。

But Jeremy at Lightseed reached out. He had his profile picture was a photo of him with Obama. Uh and I was like, "Oh, okay. Must be like a real you." Now with AI, you never know. But but back then I was like, "Okay, must be legit." So we met up with them and and one of his partners that uh I guess his daughter used Snapchat and loves Snapchat and so they understood the service and what it was about and how she was using with her friends and so they ended up investing $485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation.

事后看来真是笔好交易。当时你们有多少用户？

What a deal in hindsight. How many users did you have at the time when you raised that capital?

我猜大概 10 万左右吧。估值大约是 400 万，425 万。

Uh I would have guess about a h 100,000 or something like that. And the valuation was $4 million roughly. 4.25.

在第一年，直到你筹到那笔钱之前，你有没有怀疑过 Snapchat 会成功？为了更好理解这个问题，你几乎得加上一个目标或野心。所以我假设你希望它成为一家公司，也觉得它可以。你怀疑过吗？第一年发生过什么吗？

In that first year up until the point that you raised that money, did you ever doubt that Snapchat was going to work? And I guess to understand the question a bit more, you almost have to add a goal or ambition to it. So, I'm presuming you wanted it to be and thought it could be a company. Did you ever doubt that it would be? Was there anything that ever happened in that first year?

有一次我们意外导致 Snapchat 基础设施宕机了三天，服务完全停了三天。其实是出了点故障，我们花了三天才修好。当时我们想：完了。我们该怎么办？服务已经宕了三天，这是个通讯服务，人们没法跟朋友聊天了，还会有人用吗？但当我们重新上线后，人们又开始用了。这给了我们更大的信心，让我们知道我们有一个人们真正喜欢用的产品。

There was one moment where we accidentally took down the Snapchat infrastructure for three days. So the service stopped working entirely for three days. Actually it something broke and it took us three days to fix it. And we were like we're we're done. I mean what are we going to do? You know uh the service has been down for three days. It's a messaging service you know. Uh so people haven't been able to talk to their friends like is anyone going to use it? Um, and when we turned it back on, people just started using it again. And that gave us a lot more conviction and that, you know, we had a product that people really just loved using.

它是怎么增长的？是营销活动还是自然增长？

How and why was it growing? Was it a marketing campaign or was it organic?

我们唯一看到有效的方式就是朋友之间互相使用，告诉朋友，并想学习怎么用，因为用照片交流是件新鲜事。以前人们不用图片聊天，甚至对照片的看法也是：照片是用来保存珍贵时刻的，或者家庭照之类的。当时刚走出数码相机时代，要插到电脑上上传照片。所以我认为这是一个巨大的行为转变：人们意识到，哇，一张图胜过千言万语。现在我可以瞬间在手机上拍下来，几百毫秒内发给朋友，我们可以用图片聊天，而不仅仅是用图片保存记忆。

The only thing that we ever saw work was, you know, friends using it with friends, telling their friends about it and wanting to, you know, learn how to use it because communicating with photos was a new thing. I mean people were hadn't been talking with pictures before and even the way people thought about photos it was like a photo is for saving a precious moment right like that's or like a family photo like that's really how people were thinking about photos at the time you weren't able like that was just coming out of the digital camera like plug it into your computer and upload the photos era. So there was this massive, I think, behavioral change of people realizing like, wow, like no, a picture is worth a thousand words. And now that I can take it instantly on my phone and and send it with my friend in, you know, uh, a couple hundred milliseconds, like we can talk with pictures and instead of just use pictures to save memories.

我觉得我们真的不记得了。我们居然不记得，是不是很疯狂？其实也没过多久。我知道，但我们就是忘了。就像你说的，我心想：对，你当时没法发张照片给朋友聊天。我试着想当时有什么应用能做到，结果一个都没有。但现在我暴露年龄了，真糟糕。不，这太疯狂了。我们忘了，因为现在每个应用都这么普遍了。我想他们最终是从你这里学到的，抄袭了你。

I don't think we really remember that. Isn't that crazy that we don't remember? It wasn't that long ago. I know, but we just don't remember. Like, as you were saying, I was like, Yeah, you couldn't like send a photo to your friend to talk. Yeah. I was like I was trying to think of the app that I could have used back then to do that and there just like isn't one. Yeah. But now I'm dating myself, you know. It's terrible. No, that's crazy. We We forget that because it's so common place now on every app. You You can And I guess they they ultimately got that from you. Copied that from you.

我有一张早期的照片。你记得这张照片吗？哦，太棒了。这张照片真棒。这是什么照片？你在哪里？在做什么？那是谁？

I've got this photo um from the early days. Do you remember this photo? Oh, this is awesome. This picture is great. What is this picture? Where are you? What are you doing? Who is that?

这其实是我们的第一个办公室，很棒。它叫威尼斯蓝屋，地址是 Oceanfront Walk 523 号。实际上，在我爸家的情况已经到了临界点。我记得有七八个人住在那儿。有一天晚上，他当时的女友、现在的妻子进来，看到我们一个队友睡在沙发上，盖着她买给他当圣诞礼物的毯子，她就说：我觉得我们受够了。所以我们得找个办公室搬出去。我们去威尼斯吃晚饭时路过一栋旧蓝屋，上面挂着出租牌子。我们想：哇，这太酷了，我们可以在威尼斯海滨步道上的海滩边有个办公室。我们打了电话，他们每平方英尺要价高得离谱，我们当时付不起，但后来等了一段时间，把租金谈下来不少，就搬进了蓝屋。我觉得蓝屋最好的地方是，威尼斯海滨步道是加州甚至世界上最受欢迎的旅游目的地之一，每年有超过 1000 万人来。我们在外面挂了一个大大的幽灵标志——我们的应用图标，整天都有人过来跟我们聊应用、给反馈、或者需要账户帮助。所以我们完全沉浸在来自世界各地的 Snapchat 用户中，他们想跟我们聊。最后有点过头了。

Well, this was actually our first office, which was great. It was called the Blue House in Venice, 523 Oceanfront Walk. And actually, you know, things sort of uh had had reached a breaking point at my dad's house. I think there were seven or eight of us living there. You know, one one night, his girlfriend at the time, now wife, came in and one of, you know, one of our teammates was like sleeping on the couch with a blanket she had bought him for Christmas and she was just like, I think there's like we've had enough here. So, we we had to get an office uh and and move out. And we were going to dinner in Venice and we walked past this old blue house and it had a four lease sign on it. We were like, "Wow, this would be wild. We could have an office on the beach on the Venice boardwalk." Um, let's let's call them. And we called them. They wanted a crazy amount per square foot in rent. We couldn't afford at the time, but we ultimately waited uh a bit longer and and were able to to negotiate that down quite a bit and moved in to the Blue House. And I think the best thing about the Blue House was that the the Venice Boardwalk is one of the most popular destination tourist destinations in the in California, maybe even in the world. I mean, it's more than 10 million people a year come to the Venice Boardwalk. And we had a big ghost logo, our big app icon outside and all day long people would come up and talk to us about the app or give us feedback or need help with their account. And so we were just immersed in people from all over the world who were using Snapchat and wanted to come talk to us about it. ult ultimately became like a little too much.

但一开始，就在那条海滨步道上和那么多人在一起，真是太棒了。那么蓝房子能容纳多少人？

But in the beginning, it was just so amazing to be right there on the boardwalk with so many people. And so how many people could fit into the Blue House?

我觉得最大容量是 20 多人。搬走的时候大概有 20 多人，可能 30 人。相当挤，我都在桌子底下和人碰脚了。我们挤得很紧。

I think at max capacity it was 20 something. I think we were 20-some people by the time we moved out. Maybe 30. It was pretty cramped. I mean, I was playing footsie with people under the table. We were pretty smooshed.

那时候你们有多少用户，才会有人走上步道来聊天？那时候你们肯定很受欢迎。我猜得有几百万人了吧。

And how many users did you have at that time for people to be coming up on the boardwalk and having conversations? You must have been pretty popular at that point. It must have been millions, I would guess.

是的。

Yeah.

显然那时候你已经从大学辍学了。跟我讲讲那个决定吧，因为我知道应用在增长，但要从一所名校辍学，肯定不是个轻松的决定。

And you'd dropped out of university by that point, obviously. Tell me about that decision, because that's not... I know the app's growing and everything, but to drop out of a prestigious university can't be a super easy decision.

我真的觉得别无选择。我的学分不够毕业。我读的是产品设计和工程专业，还有很多课要完成。而且我们刚从投资者那里融了 48.5 万美元，我整天都在忙着通过那些课——当时我大概修了 20 个学分——同时还要打理公司。我实在没法同时做两件事。所以我想，希望有一天能回去。后来我确实回去了，2018 年拿到了学位，这很棒。但我就是没法同时兼顾。

I really felt I had no choice. I didn't have enough credits to graduate. I mean, I was doing the product design program, the engineering program. I had a lot more classes that I had to finish. And ultimately we'd raised $485,000 from investors, and I was spending all day trying to pass these... I was taking I think 20 credits at the time, and trying to work on our business. I just couldn't do both at the same time. So I was like, hopefully one day I'll be able to go back. I actually did end up going back and got my degree in 2018, which was awesome. But I just couldn't do both at the same time.

你为什么回去拿学位？

Why did you go back and get your degree?

我真的不想以后跟孩子们争论，他们说：‘但是爸爸，你辍学了，你没有学位。为什么我需要？’我认为大学可以非常有价值，不是对每个人都适用，但它对我的人生产生了巨大影响。所以我想能够向孩子们展示这有多重要。

I really did not want to have that debate with our kids where they're like, 'But dad, you dropped out. You don't have a degree. Why do I need one?' I think colleges can be really valuable. It's not for everybody, but it made a huge impact in my life. So I wanted to be able to show how important that is to our kids.

我之前在想，我们刚才聊到大学。你上大学的时候世界不一样了。现在你有四个儿子，最大的好像 14 岁。如果他想像爸爸一样，比如说他想追随你的脚步，根据现在的世界，你会建议他在 21 岁之前学些什么吗？如果他想像你一样，你会推荐他学什么专业或拿什么学位？

I was thinking earlier when we were talking about college, university. The world was different when you went to university. And you've got these four boys now, the oldest I think is 14 years old. If he wants to be like dad, say he wanted to follow in your footsteps, is there anything else based on how the world is currently that you'd be advising him to learn before the age of 21? Are there any topics or degrees that you would be pushing him towards now if he wanted to be like dad, if that was his decision?

我认为当今最重要的事情之一就是培养创造力。我的意思是，创造力是真正的 X 因素，尤其是在 AI 时代，对吧？所以，培养创造力，找到发展这些技能的方法。比如 Flynn，他 14 岁，非常喜欢画画，而且画得惊人地好。有时候他会想：‘画画能当职业吗？’但他没意识到，画画只是他表达创造力的方式。画画是锻炼大脑肌肉的起点，让你能想象出别人看不到的东西。这是他用来表达脑中想法的一个工具、一项技能。但我认为锻炼那块肌肉、那种创造力非常重要。我觉得创造力正变得越来越稀缺，因为我们的社会很大程度上围绕着可衡量的东西运转。创造力很难衡量，所以在结果不确定的情况下，很难有决心去投资培养创造力。但这正是我会鼓励他或很多人去做的事。我们生来就有创造力，生来就有表达自己的能力。只是随着时间的推移，我们停止了练习，或者变得害怕表达自己。

I think one of the most important things today is really nurturing creativity. I mean, I think creativity is really the X factor, certainly in the age of AI, right? And so, I think nurturing creativity, finding ways to develop those skills. For example, Flynn who's 14, he loves drawing. He's unbelievably talented at drawing. And I think sometimes he's like, 'Well, I don't know if there's a career in drawing,' but I think sometimes he doesn't see that drawing is just the way that he's expressing creativity. Drawing is the beginning of that journey of exercising those muscles in your brain that allow you to visualize something that other people don't see. And that's one tool, one skill he can use to express what's in his brain. But I think exercising that muscle, that creativity is so important. I think creativity is just becoming more and more rare ultimately because so much of our society is oriented around things we can measure. Creativity is so hard to measure, and so I think it can be really tough to find the dedication to invest in developing creativity when it's uncertain what the outcome is. But that's really what I would encourage him or so many people to do. We're all born creative. We're all born with this ability to express ourselves. And it's only over time I think that we stop practicing that ability or we become fearful of expressing ourselves.

在那个年纪，我们都会想职位头衔，对吧？我们会想自己应该瞄准什么头衔，比如医生、律师等等，而不太考虑积累有用的长期技能。我女朋友的弟弟现在正绞尽脑汁想选一个未来 60 年的职位头衔。我就说，不是这样的，你知道吗？而且世界变化这么快。更合理的做法是掌握一些能迁移的基本技能。再说了，职位头衔本来就挺荒谬的。早期的时候，任何加入团队的人，我们都会随便编个头衔，跟实际工作毫无关系。

We think through job titles at that age, don't we? We think what's the job title that I should be aiming at. So doctor, lawyer, etc. versus we don't necessarily think as much about collecting useful long-term skills. I'd say I've got my girlfriend's little brother now who's racking his brain trying to pick a job title for the next like 60 years of his life. I'm like, it doesn't work like that, you know? And the world is changing so quickly now as well. It probably makes more sense to try and get some fundamental skills that will translate. Plus, job titles are totally ridiculous anyway. In the early days, we would just make up anyone who joined the team, we would just make up their title. It would have nothing to do with anything.

是啊。团队小的时候职位头衔很荒谬，对吧？一般来说也是这样。因为我觉得人们用头衔来锚定地位。但最终，巨大的影响力、创造力和好主意可以来自任何地方。组织越围绕层级来运作，就越不关注真正重要的事：如何确保好主意从各处涌现、被发掘并得以实现。

Yeah. Job titles are ridiculous when the team is small, right? Just in general, right? Because I think people anchor to job titles to confer status, right? And I think ultimately, amazing impact, creativity, great ideas come from anywhere, right? And the more that you focus your organization around hierarchy, I think the less you're focusing on the right things, which are how are we making sure great ideas are coming from anywhere, getting surfaced, and being built.

但事情变大之后，层级就出现了，我们需要流程和汇报线。你怎么抵御这种趋势？

But hierarchy comes into place when things start to get big and we need to put processes and reporting lines in place. How do you defend against that?

嗯，我觉得你触及了所有公司最终都会面临的根本问题。有一本很棒的书叫《Loonshots》，我非常喜欢，它直接讨论了这个问题。作者 Safi Beall 发现，大公司一旦变得非常大，要服务大量客户，就需要建立组织基础设施，这最终会带来层级。但那些持续创新、长期非常成功的公司，也拥有非常小、非常扁平、完全没有层级的团队，他们专注于创新和尝试新事物。最终，真正成功的公司会找到一种方式，在支持客户、需要运营严谨和关注指标的大型组织，与尝试疯狂想法的小团队之间建立关系。他举了很多例子。美国赢得二战的方式之一，就是有一群疯狂的科学家在尝试雷达之类的新东西。

Well, I think you're getting at the fundamental problem that all companies end up having. And I think there's a great book called Loonshots which I really love that actually gets at this issue directly. And basically what the author Safi Beall found was that essentially very big companies, once they get a lot larger, they have a lot of customers to serve, they need to build all this organizational infrastructure, and ultimately that comes with hierarchy. But the ones that continue to innovate, that are very successful at innovating consistently over long periods of time, also have very small, very flat teams that don't have any hierarchy at all that are really, really focused on innovating and on trying new things. And ultimately, the companies that are really successful find a way to build a relationship between the huge organization that is supporting all these customers and needs to be operationally rigorous and metrics focused, and this very small group of people who are trying crazy things. And he gives a lot of examples. One of the ways that the United States was able to win World War II, they had these crazy group of scientists that were trying new things like radar and stuff like that at the time.

但他们随后把这些想法带到军方——一个庞大、高度结构化、层级分明的组织——并问：“你们觉得这个怎么样？你们怎么玩？你们的想法是什么？你们的反馈呢？把这个带上战场，放到飞机上，看看会发生什么。”然后再把反馈带回那个非常非结构化、扁平化的小型发明家和科学家团队。通过真正关注组织这两部分之间的关系，公司最终能学会如何建立牢固的联系，并持续创新。那么，你在 Snapchat 是怎么做的？

But then they were taking those ideas, bringing them to the military, which is a huge, very structured, hierarchical organization and saying, "What do you guys think about this? How can you play with this? What are your ideas? What are your feedback? Take this into battle. Put it on an airplane. See what happens." and then give that feedback back to this very unstructured, flat, small group of inventors and scientists. And by really focusing on the relationship between those parts of the organization, ultimately companies can figure out how to build a strong relationship between the two and then innovate over time. So, how have you done that at Snapchat?

在 Snapchat，我们的设计团队非常小，可能出乎大家意料——实际上只有九个人。团队完全扁平化，没有花哨的头衔，每个人都是产品设计师。团队的工作方式完全围绕“做出东西”展开，这就是全部工作。事实上，入职第一天，我们每周会有一次设计评审会，持续几个小时。第一天你就必须展示一些东西，所以你必须做出点什么并呈现出来。这带来的效果非常有趣且强大：当然，入职第一天你对公司正在做什么毫无头绪，完全不知道情况，怎么可能想出好主意？几乎不可能。但你必须第一天就展示一个想法。于是，第一天你最害怕的事就发生了：大家坐在一起，看着一个并不怎么好的想法——有时还不错，但通常不怎么样。我认为这恰恰打开了创造力的大门，因为你已经经历了最糟的情况：你失败了，想法不好。而最终在我们设计团队里，99% 的想法都不好，但 1% 是好的。我们非常信奉一个理念：产生好想法的最佳方式就是拥有大量想法。所以团队不断产生海量的想法、产品和功能。我们的最终任务是找出那些真正优秀的，然后最重要的是，在这个不断产出的小团队与规模大得多的工程组织和产品组织之间建立牢固的关系——他们也有各种精彩想法，也在以各自的方式创新——并在两者之间构建一个飞轮，让我们能持续推出大量新产品并不断改进它们。

At Snapchat, we have a really small design team. I think it would surprise people. It's nine people really. It is totally flat, so there's no fancy titles. Everyone is a product designer. The way the team works is very focused around making things. That's the entire job. In fact, your very first day when you start, we have design critiques once a week for a couple hours. Your very first day you have to present something. So you have to make something and present it. And what that does, I think is really interesting and powerful, is that ultimately, of course, on your first day when you have no context for what the company's working on, no idea what's going on, how on earth are you supposed to come up with a great idea? I mean it's almost impossible. But you have to show an idea your first day. And so ultimately on your very first day your worst fear has come true: we're sitting there all together and we're looking at an idea that's ultimately not that great. I mean sometimes they're pretty good but ultimately not that great. And that, I think, opens the door to creativity because you've already experienced it. You already failed. The idea wasn't good. And you know what ultimately happens on our own design team is that 99% of ideas are not good but 1% is. And we really abide by that concept that the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. So the team is just constantly generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features and that sort of thing. And ultimately our job is to try to figure out what the great ones are and then, most importantly, build a strong relationship between this little team that's coming up with all this stuff all the time and our much bigger engineering organization, our bigger product organization who also have all sorts of amazing ideas and are also innovating in their own way, and build a flywheel between the two where we can ultimately make a lot of new products and then consistently make them better.

这里有很多让我非常好奇的问题。第一个是：你们会衡量那个小设计团队产出的想法数量吗？

So many questions there that I'm very curious about. The first one is: do you measure the amount of ideas that that small design team are producing?

不会，但我知道什么时候需要更多。

No, but I do know when we need more.

好的，明白了。所以你有一种直觉。团队小，你能保持紧密联系。那么，当更大的组织有自己的激励、自己的规划周期、自己的自尊心——就像所有人一样——你如何让大组织与小设计团队合作？你如何让他们协同工作？

Okay. Okay. Fine. So, you've got a sort of an intuitive feeling. It's a small team. You can stay close. And then how do you get the bigger organization to cooperate with the smaller design team when the bigger organization have their own incentives, they have their own planning cycles, they have their own egos as all humans do. How do you get them to work together?

对我们来说，桥梁组织大概是我们的产品组织。他们真正帮助连接了工程团队和设计团队。很多方面其实反映了早期 Bobby 和我的关系：我更偏设计，虽然有点工程背景，学过一些计算机科学，但主要侧重设计；而 Bobby 是一位了不起的计算机科学家，他在学校学数学和计算机科学，但也热爱设计。所以我们之间有一种非常强大的关系——我可以和他讨论新想法和设计，他可以谈工程约束。比如，当我们发明“点击拍照、长按录像”这个概念时——当时这意义重大，能帮助人们更轻松地使用相机。现在每部智能手机的相机都是点击拍照、长按录像。但实现这个设计所需的工程复杂性，我们真的深入讨论并解决了，因为设计和动画的运作方式，以及你手指的按压方式，都直接影响我们在视频流和静态图像捕捉之间的切换。正是这种对话最终催生了一个新产品，一个人们可以用的新功能。所以我们大量复制了这种模式，并持续在整个组织内建立这种关系——通过真正的对话、理解和相互欣赏，无论是设计还是工程，而产品组织常常在其中起到促进作用。

For us, the bridge organization is probably our product organization. And they really helped connect the dots between the engineering folks and the design folks. And a lot of this stuff actually mirrors the relationship that Bobby and I had in the very early days where I was more design focused. I had a bit of an engineering background and had taken some CS, but I was more design focused. And Bobby is an unbelievable computer scientist, right? He took math and computer science at school, but he also loved design. And so we had this really powerful relationship where I could talk with him about new ideas and design and he could talk about the engineering constraints. So when, for example, we were inventing this notion that you would tap to take a photo and hold to record a video — at the time that was a really big deal to help people more easily use their cameras. Now every camera on a smartphone is tap for photo, hold for video. But the engineering complexity required to enable that design was something we really talked about and worked through because the way the design and the animations had to work and the way you held your finger really mattered with the way we were flipping between the video feed and capturing a still image. And it was that dialogue that ultimately resulted in a new product and a new thing that people could use. So we mirrored a lot of that and tried to build that relationship across the organization constantly over time where there is a real dialogue and an understanding and an appreciation both for design and engineering, often facilitated by our product organization.

关于那个小设计团队，你说你们每周有一次评审会。评审会是什么？

In terms of that small design team, you said you have a critique session once a week. What is a critique session?

就是大家一起看作品，仅此而已。人们分享新作品。花几个小时看过去一周团队产出的所有新想法和新设计。可以是任何东西，真的任何东西。通常它们围绕解决某个问题。回到产品设计理念：我们试图解决什么问题？如何与我们的社区共情？比如，创作者在 Snapchat 上发帖遇到障碍，他们阅读故事回复的方式令人困惑，或者某些功能不正常。我们如何让它更简单？然后我们就会看一大堆想法。

So it's just where we look at work. That's all we do. People just share new work. So for a couple hours we'll just look at all the new ideas and new designs that have come out of the last week from that team. And these can be anything. Really anything. Oftentimes they're oriented around solving a problem. So kind of coming back to that product design philosophy: what problem are we trying to solve? How can we empathize with our community? Okay, our creators are having friction posting to Snapchat. It's confusing the way that they're reading their story replies or that's not working the right way. How can we make that easier? And then we'll just look at a ton of ideas.

还有，你说有八九个人。他们是各自独立工作，还是作为一个团队协作？

And are these — you said there's eight or nine people. Are they working in isolation within that team or are they working as one team?

他们经常互相反馈，也经常以小组形式共同处理项目，但会定期全体集合。

They very often are getting feedback from one another. Oftentimes are tackling projects together in small teams, but all come together on a regular basis.

我很喜欢你提到的这个观点：你发现关键是要有更多想法，而不是试图找到一个完美的想法。更多想法，更多反馈。

I love this point you were making about the key thing that you've discovered is that the game is more ideas, not trying to find a perfect idea. More ideas, more feedback.

对。更多想法，更多反馈。你提高失败率，获得更多反馈。这确实与人们创业时的想法相反——他们以为关键是要有完美的想法。

Yeah. More ideas, more feedback. You increase your failure rate, you get more feedback. It does kind of go contrary to what people think when they're building a business. They think the game is to have the perfect idea.

但那些都是从未创过业的人。

But those are all people who've never built a business before.

没错。

Yeah.

因为最终你会学到一些东西，对吧？你会意识到自己并不擅长猜测。是的。而且我认为最终你必须最大化你的学习速度。我的意思是，这至关重要。最大化你的学习速度。

Because eventually you learn something, right? You learn that you're not that good at guessing. Yeah. And I think ultimately you have to maximize your rate of learning. I mean that's that's just critical. Maximize your rate of learning.

让我们回到早期那些日子。你在那间办公室里。当你想到那张照片里属于最初大约 20 个人的那些人时，事后看来，招聘有多重要？

Let's go back to those early days. You're in that office. When you think about the people in that photo that were part of the first sort of 20, how important in hindsight is hiring?

我认为招聘就是一切。就是一切。这些人真的非常出色。我的意思是，至今很多情况下仍是亲密的朋友。而且有趣的是，有一个时刻我意识到大卫、丹尼尔、鲍比以及其他几位最初的工程师，他们也都是音乐家。那一刻非常有意思，因为早期在 Snap 从事工程工作的人创意无限、才华横溢。这是一个有趣的顿悟时刻，因为我认为人们常常把学科分开看待，比如设计师在那里，工程师在那里。而我认为，真正的魔力恰恰在于这些学科的结合或交叉，或者那些真正热爱并欣赏两者的人，尤其对于一家渴望在所做的一切中充满创意的公司而言。

I think it's everything. I think it's everything. And these were really just wonderful people. I mean still, in many cases close friends. And I think interestingly, there was a moment I realized David, Daniel, Bobby, and a couple other of our original engineers, all of them were musicians as well. And it was really interesting this moment because the early folks who were working on the engineering side of Snap were unbelievably creative and unbelievably talented. And it was an interesting aha moment because I think often times people think of the disciplines as separate, like oh there's designers and then over there there's engineers. And I think so much of the magic actually is when those disciplines combine or cross over, or people who really love and appreciate both, especially for a company that's aspiring to be creative absolutely in everything that it's doing.

关于招聘这一点，你在早期犯过任何招聘错误吗？

On this point of hiring, did you make any hiring mistakes in those early days?

哦，当然。

Oh absolutely.

那些错误是什么？不一定是人，而是框架出了问题，或者你招聘这些人的方式？是什么导致了这些错误？

And what were those mistakes? Not necessarily people, but the frameworks were off, or the way that you hired these people? What caused the mistakes?

我认为在早期，我们有时会过度看重错误类型的经验，如果这说得通的话。所以我们非常想做的一件事就是引进那些经验丰富的领导者，他们管理过更大的团队。这就像，如果我们想建立一家大公司，就必须找到那些管理过大公司和大团队的人。于是，早期加入我们团队的一位工程负责人，我想他之前在亚马逊管理着一个大约 300 人的团队，然后来到 Snapchat 管理一个 8 人团队。但我们确实在提前思考，如何招聘那些能真正帮助我们在这里扩展并打造出真正庞大事业的人。我认为这种对领导经验和规模化领导经验的关注非常有价值。而在早期，价值往往较低的反而是那些拥有非常具体领域专长的人。有些人来面试时会说，我觉得你们应该添加点赞功能，因为其他每个平台都有点赞。如果你们加了点赞，人们就会更多地使用你们的服务。他们并没有带着同样的开放心态和好奇心去思考：为什么 Snapchat 要与众不同？为什么你们没有点赞和评论？你们对服务的思考方式有何不同？我该如何改变、成长并适应你们的思维方式，以帮助你们更快成长？所以现在，我们在面试过程中始终寻找的一个特质就是适应能力。拥有过往经验很棒，但问题在于你如何将这些经验应用到新的环境中，改变并调整你看待事物的方式，转变你的视角，以满足我们业务的需求——我们的业务与其他业务不同。

I think occasionally in the early days we almost overindexed on the wrong types of experience, if that makes sense. So one of the things we really wanted to do was bring in people who were very experienced leaders who had run much bigger teams. That was like, if we want to build a big company, we got to find people who have run big companies and big teams. And so one of the early engineering leaders who joined our team, I think he was coming from working on a team of 300 or something like that at Amazon, to coming to a team of eight at Snapchat. But we were really thinking ahead about how we can hire people who can actually help us scale here and build something really big. And I think that sort of focus on leadership experience and experience leading at scale was really valuable. I think what was oftentimes a bit less valuable in those early days was almost more people who had very specific domain expertise. So there were people who would come into an interview and be like, well I think what you guys should do is add likes because every other platform has likes. So if you just add likes then people will use your service more, and not really coming with the same open-mindedness and curiosity about why is Snapchat doing it differently? Like why don't you have likes and comments? How are you thinking about the service differently, and how could I change and grow and adapt to the way you're thinking about it to help you grow faster? And so I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability. It's amazing to have prior experience, but the question is how do you apply that prior experience to a new context and change and adapt the way that you see things, change your perspective, to be able to meet the needs of our business, which is different than other businesses.

其他因素是什么？如果你现在要打造一个完美的 Snapchat 员工，他们的个性会是什么样的？他们的心理特质，他们的属性。

What are the other factors? If you were to make a perfect Snapchat employee now, what would their personality be? Their psychology, their attributes.

我们有三个价值观和三个领导力行为。三个价值观是：善良、聪明、有创造力。这从一开始就是我们的价值观，因为鲍比和我当时就在讨论，我们想和什么样的人一起工作？善良、聪明、有创造力。就这样。但自那以后——我们可以多花点时间谈谈这个——我认为随着时间的推移，真正引人入胜的是学到，顺便说一句，10 年前人们在工作场合根本不谈论善良。我的意思是，人们会反应说，抱歉什么？不善良？善良、聪明、有创造力？为什么是善良？我们发现，善良与创造力之间的关系极其重要，因为除非人们觉得提出疯狂的想法很自在，除非他们觉得如果自己说出一个新想法而它其实并不那么好时，不会被人嘲笑，而是会得到支持，对吧？除非你拥有那种支持性的文化，否则很难有创造力。所以我们逐渐认识到，哇，善良实际上是创造力的关键要素，如果你想拥有一种创意文化的话。总之，善良、聪明、有创造力。聪明，不言自明。然后关于领导力行为，我们有三个我们寻找的领导力行为或特质。

We have three values and three leadership behaviors. Three values are kind, smart, and creative. That's been the values since the very beginning really, because Bobby and I were just having a conversation like what kind of people do we want to work with? Kind, smart, creative. Like great. But since then, and we can spend some more time talking about this, I think what was really fascinating over time was to learn, and by the way 10 years ago people were not talking about kindness at work. I mean people would be like sorry what? No kind, no kind smart creative, like why kindness? What we found was that the relationship between kindness and creativity is really really important because unless people feel comfortable coming up with crazy ideas, unless they feel comfortable that if they say they have some new idea and it actually isn't that great that they're not going to be laughed at, that they'll be supported, right? Unless you have that sort of supportive culture, it's very hard to be creative. And so we learned over time that actually wow kindness is the essential ingredient if you want to have a creative culture. But anyways, kind, smart, creative. Smart, pretty self-explanatory. And then when it comes to leadership behaviors, there's three leadership behaviors or attributes we look for.

我想在“善良”这一点上暂停一下。你区分一个人是“nice”（客气）和“kind”（善良）吗？因为在你的环境中，你也提到你们会进行这些批评会议，给人们提供关键反馈，如果文化变得过于“kind”，那难道不会抑制创新和反馈吗？

I just want to pause on that point of kind. Do you make a distinction between someone being nice and being kind? Because in your environment, you also mentioned that you do these critique sessions and you're giving people critical feedback, and if a culture gets a little bit too kind, then isn't that going to inhibit innovation and feedback?

我们总是区分“kind”和“nice”。有几个例子可以帮助说明。首先，我认为告诉别人他们牙缝里有东西是真正的善良。你牙缝里有东西，你想知道，对吧？这可能会让你感到尴尬。当然，作为指出这一点的人，也有点尴尬。如果你只是想表现得客气，你会假装什么都没发生，然后说，哦，很高兴见到你，之类的。但如果你是真的善良，想帮助那个人，你会说，你知道吗，你牙缝里有东西，你得处理一下。我认为这有助于区分客套和真正的善良，以及真心想帮助别人。另一个很好的例子是，如果有人在工作中真的很挣扎，或者他们在成长上遇到困难，或者在 Snap 履行职责时遇到困难，客气的做法可能是让他们感觉好一点，哦，别担心，我相信会没事的。而善良的做法是真正帮助他们成功，对吧？比如，嘿，这行不通是因为你做了 X、Y、Z。这里有一些方法可以让你换个角度思考。

We always differentiate between kind and nice. There are a couple examples that I think help with that. So for one, I think it's really kind to tell somebody that they have something stuck in their teeth. You have something stuck in your teeth, you want to know about it, right? It might make you feel awkward. Certainly as the person pointing it out, it's a little awkward. If you want to just be nice, you pretend nothing is going on and you just say, oh, nice to meet you, whatever. But if you're really being kind and you want to help that person, you say, you know, you got something stuck in your teeth. You got to take care of that. And I think that helps distinguish between niceties and being kind and really wanting to help somebody. I think another great example is if somebody's really struggling at work or they're struggling to grow or they're struggling to perform their duties at Snap, the nice thing to do is maybe just make them feel good about it. Oh, don't worry, I'm sure it'll be okay. The kind thing to do is really help them succeed, right? Say, hey, this isn't working because you're doing X, Y, and Z. Here are some things to do to think about that differently.

领导力价值观。你说过有三个领导力价值观。好的，有三个。第一个是 T 型领导力。我们经常谈论 T 型领导力。我们的意思是，你在某个领域有深厚的经验和专长，同时对整个业务有广泛的理解，并且有能力与不同类型、不同思维方式的人建立联系，因为你需要将你的专长与业务的所有不同领域连接起来，才能真正作为领导者产生影响。我认为这几乎是当今经营企业的标志之一——没有团队，基本上不可能做成任何有趣的事情，对吧？当今世界运作的方式非常复杂，拥有深厚专长的人非常重要，但他们必须将专长应用到所有其他跨职能领域，所以他们必须熟悉这些领域，并且有能力与不同观点或不同专长领域的人相处。

Leadership values. You said there's three leadership values. Okay, there's three of them. The first one is T-shaped leadership. So, we talk a lot about T-shaped leadership. What we mean by that is that you have a real depth of experience, a depth of expertise in a given area and then a real breadth of understanding of the business overall and an ability to connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways because you need to be able to connect your expertise to all the different areas of our business to really drive impact as a leader. I mean, I think that's one of like almost the hallmarks of running a business today is it's basically impossible to do anything interesting without a team, right? The way that the world works today is very complicated and it's really important that you have folks who have deep expertise but then they have to apply it to all these other cross-functional areas you know so they have to have a familiarity with it and an ability to relate to people with different viewpoints or other areas of expertise.

那么，当我们推行这些领导力原则时，你是在说，要成为 Snapchat 的领导者，你需要具备这三样东西，还是说 Snapchat 的每个人都需要这三样东西？我们认为每个人都是领导者。所以我们确实广泛地应用它。但当然，我认为在我们考虑招聘或引进新领导者时，这是我们与人们讨论的重要内容。

So, as we proceed with these leadership principles, are you saying that in order to become a leader at Snapchat you need these three things, or are you saying everybody at Snapchat needs these three things? We think everyone is a leader. So, we do apply it broadly. But, of course, I think it's really important as we're thinking about hiring or bringing in a new leader that this is something that we talk to folks about.

那么，如果有人不太符合 T 型，有点像 I 型，他们能做些什么来变得更 T 型一点吗？

So, if someone's not quite T-shaped, if they're a little bit I-shaped, is there something they can do to become a bit more T-shaped?

是的，这可能是比较容易的一个，对吧？如果你能在深厚专长的基础上，与舒适区之外或业务不同领域的人接触，培养好奇心和理解力，这有助于发展那种广泛的理解。我认为更难的是，如果你是一个通才，没有那种深厚的技能或专长领域，那么很难为团队带来足够的价值，对吧？我认为这就是人们对中层管理概念感到沮丧的地方，对吧？就像，哦，这个人只是对很多事情略知一二，但并不能真正帮我解决这个问题，因为他们不了解细节。他们并不真正理解如何帮助我成长或解决这个棘手的技术问题。所以我认为这就是专长领域如此重要的原因，因为如果你对你工作的领域了解不多，就很难激励与你共事的人。

Yeah, that's almost maybe the easier one, right? If you can build on a real depth of expertise by engaging with folks maybe outside of your comfort zone or in different parts of the business and build that curiosity and understanding, that helps develop that breadth of understanding. I think what's harder is if you're a generalist and you don't have that deep skill set or that deep area of expertise, it's really really hard to bring enough value to the team, right? And I think that's where people get frustrated with the idea of middle management, right? Where it's like, oh, this is just a person who knows a little about a lot but can't really help me solve this problem because they don't really know the details. They don't really understand how to help me grow as an individual or solve this tough technical problem. And so I think that's why that area of expertise is so important because it's so hard to inspire people that you're working with if you don't know a lot about the area that you're working in.

那么，现在在 Snapchat，以及当你们只有十个人在卧室或你父亲家里时，都需要成为 T 型领导者吗？它一直都很重要，还是规模变大后的产物？

And do you need to be a T-shaped leader at Snapchat now and when there was 10 of you in the bedroom or in your dad's house? Has it always been important or is that a function of being bigger?

这是个好问题。我希望我们当时能更仔细地思考我们寻找的领导力价值观和特质。我认为，当你在一个 10 人或 20 人的团队中工作时，你不会过多考虑哪些领导特质对我们真正重要。更多的是关于我们如何生存到明天？但我认为，随着时间的推移，当我们了解到哪些领导者在 Snap 真正成功时，我们能够审视这些特质，然后说，好的，这些是能够在这里真正成功并为我们的业务带来巨大价值的领导者。

That's a great question. I wish we had been more thoughtful about the leadership values and characteristics we were looking for back then. I think, when you're working on a team of 10 or a team of 20, you're not thinking as much about what leadership characteristics are really important to us. It's more about like how do we survive tomorrow? But I think over time as we learned what leaders were really successful at Snap, we were able to look at those attributes and say, okay, these are the leaders who can really succeed here and drive a lot of value for our business.

在我们继续讨论第二和第三点之前，如果现在的 Evan 能回到过去，找到那个管理着十人团队的 Evan，把他拉到一边说：“听着，这里有一些关于领导力和建设团队的建议，你需要知道。我现在能给你的最关键的 advice，这也是给所有正在为潜在的大公司打基础的创业者们的，你会在他耳边低语什么？”

Before we move on to the second two, if this Evan could have gone back to the Evan that was running a team of 10 and he could have pulled him aside and said, "Listen, here's some advice that you're going to need to know about leadership in building this team. The most critical advice I could give you at this time, and this is for all the entrepreneurs out there that are building as they're laying the foundations of a potentially very big company right now, what would you have whispered in his ear?"

我会说：“一切都会好起来的。”真的吗？一切都会好起来的。我认为有时人们过于关注做出正确的决定，而不太关注如果错了如何修正。我想我会更强调的是，当你收到新信息时，你改变主意的速度有多快？如果你最初没有做出正确的决定，你解决问题的速度有多快？这就是在早期创业中至关重要的反馈循环。这关系不大。显然，有些决定关乎生死存亡，它们可能会给企业带来大问题。但大多数决定并非生死攸关。更重要的是做出决定，然后如果错了，就修正它。我认为，当你错了时，修正的部分最值得关注，以及你如何识别谁是你优秀的领导者，谁是团队中真正有才华的人，因为他们会很快指出，我认为我们做得不对。我认为我们应该走这条路，这条我们第一次可能没有考虑过的路。我认为在组织中说出这样的话需要勇气，而不是只说：“哦，我们做得很好。”

I would have said, "Everything's going to be okay." Really? Everything's going to be okay. I think sometimes people are too focused on making the right decision and not as focused on fixing it if they're wrong. And I think what I would have put more emphasis on is just how quickly are you changing your mind when you receive new information? How quickly are you fixing a problem or a mistake if you didn't make the right decision in the first place? And that's the feedback loop that is so mission-critical to building a business in the early days. It has very little to do. Obviously, there's existential decisions, and those can create some big problems for your business. But most decisions are not existential decisions. And the more important thing is to make a decision and then if you're wrong, fix it. And I think it's the when you're wrong, fixing it part that deserves most of the attention and also how you can identify who your great leaders are, who really talented folks on the team are because they're very quick to point out, I don't think we did that right. I think we should take this path, this other path that we maybe hadn't considered the first time. And I think it takes courage to say that in an organization rather than just say, "Oh, we're doing a great job."

是的。当你回到过去，你犯了一个错误，事后看来你做错了什么，你是否知道……因为我想起我第一次创业做学生公告板时，我会收到反馈，反馈说你这点错了，你需要改变。有时我内心知道，但我太害怕而不敢行动。所以我有点像自我欺骗，继续走下去。我认为很多创始人都会这样。我知道这一点，因为他们会来找我，在我的投资组合里说：“啊，Steve，我们雇了这个人，他已经干了一年了，就是不行。”我就想：“你为什么告诉我？”他们在拖延，回避谈话，但他们显然知道。显然知道不对。你这么说很有趣，因为每当有人来问我那种关于人的建议，比如“你觉得我们该怎么办？”你知道，我觉得听起来你已经下定决心了。

Yeah. And when you're back there and you've made a mistake, there's something you've done wrong in hindsight, did you know in your because because one of the things that I think of when I was a first-time founder building a student notice board was I would get feedback and the feedback would be saying you're wrong about this. You need to change. And I think at sometimes there was a part of me that knew, but I was like too scared to act upon it. So I kind of like gaslit myself to just keep going. And I think a lot of founders do that. I know this because they come to me in my portfolio and they say, "Ah, Steve, there's this guy we've hired and he's been there now for a year and he's just not cutting it." I'm like, "Why the are you telling me?" And they're procrastinating avoiding the conversation, but clearly they know. Clearly they know it's not right. It's funny you say that because anytime someone comes to ask me about that type of people advice, like, "What do you think we should do?" You know, do you think that I'm like sounds like you've already made up your mind.

所以，我认为根据反馈采取行动非常重要，如果发现自己犯了错，不要害怕迅速调整方向。但正如你所说，这很难做到，有时值得看看你的赌注是否奏效。你不想让团队反复折腾、不断改变主意。所以，有时候在改变之前，还是值得先坚持一会儿。

So yeah, I think it is really important to act on that feedback, not be afraid to change direction quickly if you realize you made a mistake. But as you point out, it's hard to do, and sometimes it is worth seeing if your bet plays out. You don't want to thrash the team and change your mind all the time. So sometimes it is worth seeing things through a little bit before you change.

你还有什么想对那个在你父亲家里、更年轻的自己说的吗？

Is there anything else you would have said to that younger Evan in that advice at your dad's house?

在那个时候，在我们扩展到数千人之前，我认为我们本可以更清楚地定义文化——友善、聪明、有创意——并在扩张之前真正将其融入团队。因为我们面临的最大挑战之一是，当我们从 20 人发展到 2,000 人时，我们基本上从各种不同的公司引入了各种不同的文化。我们引入了亚马逊派——他们非常喜欢六页文档。我们引入了谷歌派——他们非常注重共识决策。我们也引入了来自 Meta 的一批人。我认为我们太慢于明确我们的价值观是什么，以及这在实践中、在行为上意味着什么。如果我们更早、更快地做到这一点——比如在评估绩效时，我们看我们的价值观：友善、聪明、有创意。我们附带了具体的行为，这些行为实际上是有研究支持的。我们做了一整项研究来了解哪些行为真正与绩效和这些价值观相关。这给了人们一个非常清晰的框架，让他们知道在 Snap 应该如何表现以及我们独特的文化。有一个时刻，我觉得我们正在失去对文化的控制，我对我们的公司和团队不满意。我记得我在向一个朋友抱怨。我说：‘老兄，我就是不喜欢。我不喜欢我的工作。我不喜欢我们公司变成的样子。’她看着我说：‘那就去修好它。’我说：‘好主意。’公司变化和增长得太快了，很难坚守我们的价值观。但我把那个建议牢记在心，开始和团队一起努力修复——明确价值观，明确行为，提高标准，并说：‘嘿，如果你不喜欢友善、聪明、有创意这套，没关系。还有其他公司有不同文化，但这对我们来说真的很重要。’

At that point, before we had scaled to thousands of people, I think we could have been much more clear on the culture — the kind, smart, creative piece — and really embedded that in the team prior to scaling. Because one of the biggest challenges we confronted was, as we went from 20 people to 2,000 people, we basically imported all these different cultures from all sorts of different companies. We imported an Amazon contingent — they really love their six-page documents. We imported a Google contingent — they're very focused on consensus-based decision-making. We imported a contingent from Meta as well. And I think we were too slow to be really clear about what our values were and what that looked like in practice, what those behaviors looked like. I think if we had earlier and faster — so when we're evaluating performance, we look at our values: kind, smart, creative. We have specific behaviors attached to that that are actually research-backed. We did a whole study to understand which of those behaviors are really tied to performance and those values. But that gives people a really clear framework for the expectations for how to behave at Snap and our unique culture. There was a moment in time where I felt like we were losing control of our culture, and I wasn't happy with our company and the team. I remember I was complaining to a friend of mine. I was just like, 'Man, I just don't like it. I don't like my job. I don't like what our company's become.' And she just looks at me and says, 'Then fix it.' And I was like, 'Great point.' It had changed and grown so quickly that it was really hard to stay true to our values. But I took that advice to heart and started trying to fix it with our team — getting really clear about the values, getting really clear about the behaviors, holding a higher bar, and saying, 'Hey, if you're not into the kind, smart, creative thing, that's okay. There are other companies with different cultures, but that really matters to us here.'

你希望早期就有一本文化圣经吗？我在想实际层面：创始人在那个阶段、团队还小的时候，应该怎么做才能防止像你那样文化变得有点大杂烩？

Do you wish you had made a culture bible in the early days? I'm thinking practically: what should a founder do at that stage with a small team to prevent what happened to you in terms of the culture becoming a bit too pick and mix?

我认为与其说是文化圣经，不如说是如何将你的价值观应用到招聘流程、晋升流程以及员工是否继续留在公司。我们太慢于将这些价值观嵌入绩效评估中。所以我认为如果我们更快地说：‘嘿，这些是我们的价值观和我们所代表的东西。这在实践中是这样的。如果你不符合，这里不是你的合适归宿。’那会更快地塑造文化，因为人们立刻会看到：‘哦，哇，如果他们真的重视价值观，并且要求不符合的人离开，那么我最好接受这些价值观，或者找一个更适合我个性的文化。’文化对创始人来说似乎不是优先事项。我认为它非常重要，但很难理解它意味着什么。很多人告诉我：‘你真的要专注于文化，专注于文化。’我说，文化是什么意思？它实际上就是人们的行为方式。我的意思是，这就是我们所说的：你的公司里可接受的群体行为或规范是什么？所以我认为，与其用这个大的文化词汇——我听到很多，但不明白它如何与我们的业务战术性地连接——当我们与创始人交谈时，我们应该更具体地说明人们如何通过日常行为践行公司的价值观。而这基本上是由组织的激励机制决定的。因为你刚才说的是你引入了激励结构：你要么被淘汰，要么被晋升，并且对此非常认真。但艰难的对话来了：‘嗯，那个人是超级明星，但他们并没有真正践行我们的友善价值观。’而 Bobby，我认为在这方面做得很好。Bobby 说：‘Evan，没有所谓的天才混蛋。如果你真的很聪明，你怎么可能是个混蛋？’我的意思是，这——你会说：‘天哪，我喜欢这个。’所以我认为这个概念——如果你真的那么聪明，你怎么可能对人刻薄？——确实指导了我们建设团队的方法，并在那些时刻给你清晰度，比如：‘哇，但他们那么聪明或有才华。’是的，但如果他们那么聪明有才华，为什么不能对人友善呢？

I think it's less about the culture bible and more about how you apply whatever your values are to your hiring processes, to your promotion processes, to whether or not people still work at the company. We were too slow to embed those values in our performance evaluation. So I think if we had been way faster at just saying, 'Hey, these are our values and what we stand for. This is what it looks like in practice. And if you're not living up to that, this isn't the right home for you.' That would have helped shape the culture a lot faster, because immediately people see, 'Oh wow, if they're serious about their values and they're asking people to leave if they won't live up to them, well then I better get on board with the values or find another culture that fits my personality better.' It just doesn't seem like a priority to founders, culture. I think it's such a priority, but it's hard to understand what it means. I had so many people telling me, 'Really, you got to really focus on the culture, focus on the culture.' Like, what do you mean by culture? It's actually just how people behave. I mean, that's really what we're saying: what is the collection of group behaviors that are acceptable or norms in your company? So I think instead of using this big culture word, which I was hearing a lot but not understanding how it was tactically connecting to our business, when we're talking with founders, we should just be more specific about how people are living the values of their company every day through their behaviors. And that's dictated essentially by the incentives of the organization. Because what you said is you basically introduced incentive structures: you're going to be exited or you're going to be promoted, and getting really real about that and serious. But the tough conversations come where it's like, 'Well, that person's a superstar, but they're not really living our kindness value.' And Bobby, I think, was so great on this. Bobby is like, 'Evan, there's no such thing as a brilliant jerk. If you're really brilliant, how could you possibly be a jerk?' I mean, it just — and you're like, 'Damn, I love that.' So I think this concept that if you're really that smart, how could you possibly be a jerk to people? That really informed our approach to building out our team and gives you that clarity in those moments where you're like, 'Wow, but they're so smart or so talented.' It's like, yeah, but if they're that smart and talented, why can't they just be kind to people?

早期你得到的最糟糕的建议是什么？我们谈了一些好建议和你现在会给出的好建议，但有没有什么看起来很合理但实际上很糟糕的建议？

What was the worst advice you got in those early years? We talked about some of the good advice and the good advice you'd give now, but was there any really bad advice that you got that seemed to make sense but was terrible advice?

我认为早期很多人告诉我们，我们应该卖掉公司。我的意思是，有一个尴尬的时刻。

I think a lot of people in the early days told us that we should sell it. I mean, there was one embarrassing moment.

我记得我提前几分钟加入了一个与律师的电话会议，他们不知道我也在线。他们正在讨论这个东西基本上要归零了。那是在早期，他们说这只是一时热潮。我就说，嘿，你们是在开玩笑吗？他们不知道我加入了，因为我早到了一两分钟。所以早期确实有很多怀疑的声音，很多人说，趁现在还能卖就赶紧卖吧。你正在与很多大玩家在一个非常艰难的行业竞争，你不知道人们是否会继续喜欢这个产品。但我认为他们忽略的是我们对未来的愿景。他们只看到了公开的部分。我们当时正在开发各种令人惊叹的新产品，这让我们对未来以及我们打造人们真正喜爱的产品的能力充满信心。但从外部看，当你看到 Snapchat 时，你会觉得人们只是在来回发送照片。这怎么能成为一门生意？怎么能长期增长？

I remember I joined a conference call early with some of our lawyers and I don't think they knew I had joined. They were talking about how this thing is basically going to zero. This was in the early days, like it's just a fad. And I'm like, oh hey guys, are you joking? They didn't know I was on the call because I joined a minute or two early. So I think there was a lot of skepticism in the early days and a lot of people who said, hey, sell now while you can. You're competing in a really tough industry with a lot of big players and you don't know if people are going to continue to love this product. But I think what they missed was our vision for the future. They only saw what was in the public. We were working on all sorts of amazing new products that give us conviction in the future and our ability to make products that people really love. But from the outside, when you look at Snapchat, you think, people are just sending photos back and forth. How is this ever going to be a business? How is this ever going to grow for the long term?

但你确实在 23 岁时收到了马克·扎克伯格来自 Facebook 的一个非常著名的收购要约。那确实是一个决定性的日子。它是怎么开始的？是邮件、电话，还是有人介绍？

But you do end up getting an offer, a very famous offer when you're 23 years old from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. That was a fateful day for sure. How does that begin? Is it an email, a phone call, an introduction?

我想最初是一封邮件。我们后来见过面，他们对我们的业务感兴趣。当时他们正在开发一个叫 Poke 的竞品。他们跟我们聊，说他们在探索这个领域，问我们怎么看，也许我们想加入 Facebook。我记得他们刚收购了 Instagram，大概是一年前左右。我们的看法是 Instagram 在那笔收购中被严重低估了，最终他们放弃了一个巨大的机会。Instagram 卖了 10 亿美元，是吗？

I think it was an initial email. I think we met at some point and they were interested in what we were doing. At that time they were working on a competitor called Poke. They were kind of talking with us, hey, we're exploring this space, what do you think? And maybe you want to join Facebook. I think they had just acquired Instagram too, probably like a year earlier or something like that. Our view was that Instagram had been wildly undervalued in that acquisition and ultimately they gave up a massive opportunity. Instagram was sold for a billion, was it?

对，10 亿。WhatsApp 大概是 190 亿。

Yeah. A billion. And WhatsApp was 19 billion roughly.

嗯，我想是的。

Yeah, I think so.

你当时 23 岁。Facebook 的马克·扎克伯格给你开出了很高的价格。我听说他们出价 30 亿美元。

You're 23 years old at that point. You've got Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, offering you a lot of money. I heard that it was $3 billion they offered.

嗯，我们从未公开讨论过，但确实如此。

Yeah, we never talked about it publicly, but yeah.

是这个数字吗？

Is that the number?

严格来说不是那个数字，但公开报道是这么说的，我们就按这个说吧。

That's not technically the number, but it's what's been reported publicly, so we can go with that.

好的。但你确实收到了要约？

Okay. But did you get an offer?

确实有过关于合作形式的认真讨论，但最终当我们与董事会和投资者沟通后，我们决定还是单干。

There was a real conversation about what it would look like and to join forces, but ultimately when we talked with our board and our investors, we decided that we'd rather go it alone.

所以我很好奇，作为一个 23 岁的年轻人，如果有人出价 30 亿美元收购你创办的应用——你说当时你可能还住在你父亲家里，或者在那个蓝色办公室。你就在你父亲家里，有人出价 30 亿美元买你的应用。你拥有什么智慧让你能够拒绝？

So I'm trying to understand as a 23-year-old if someone offers me $3 billion for an app that I've started — you said you're probably still at your dad's house or in the blue office at that point. You're in your dad's house and someone's offering you $3 billion for an app. What wisdom do you have that enables you to turn that down?

我希望我能说那是智慧。但我想只是因为鲍比和我热爱我们正在做的事情。我们热爱我们的工作。我们相信它的未来，最终我们也说服了投资者，我们的机会随着时间的推移会大得多。所以我认为这就是我们做出这个决定的信心来源。

I wish I could say it was wisdom. I think it was just that Bobby and I loved what we were doing. We loved what we were working on. We believed in the future of it and ultimately we were able to convince our investors as well that our opportunity was much bigger over time. So I think that's what gave us the confidence in making that decision.

你有没有见过马克，或者跟他谈过这件事？

Did you ever get to meet with Mark or speak to Mark about it?

见过。我认识马克很久了。

Yeah. I've known Mark for a long time.

他很想买吗？

Was he keen to buy it?

我们有过一些有趣的对话，讨论我们在 Facebook 工作会是什么样子。我不想对那些对话不敬，不想说错话，但他非常有战略眼光，非常善于识别——当时他们有一个软件，可以识别快速增长的应用，以便进行收购。

We had some interesting conversations about what it could look like for us to work at Facebook. I want to be so sensitive to those conversations. I don't want to speak out of turn, but he's very strategic and very good at identifying — at the time they had a piece of software that was identifying fast growing apps so that they could pursue them for acquisitions.

我对这些事情如何发展非常感兴趣。这听起来几乎像电影里的情节，你接到像马克·扎克伯格这样建立了庞大帝国的人的电话，感觉就像被从你父亲家里召唤去见他。我猜你是亲自去 Facebook 办公室见他的。

I'm so interested to see how those things play out. It almost sounds like something you'd see in a movie where you get this call from someone like Mark Zuckerberg who's built this massive empire and you almost feel like you get summoned from your dad's house to come and meet him. You went to Facebook's offices to meet him, I'm guessing in person.

我记得有一次我去了那边。他过来在谢丽尔位于圣莫尼卡的公寓见了我们。谢丽尔在那里有一套公寓。我想那就是我们第一次见面的地方——鲍比和我见了他。

I think at one point I went up there. He came and met us at Cheryl's condo in Santa Monica or something like that. Cheryl had a condo there. I think that's where we first met — Bobby and I met him.

他有没有告诉你，如果你不卖，他就会复制你的产品？

Did he tell you that he was going to copy you if you didn't sell?

他只是解释说他在开发 Poke，用于图片消息之类的。

He just explained that he was working on Poke and that it was for picture messaging and that kind of thing.

我猜你当时不想加入大公司。

I'm guessing you didn't want to join a big company at that point.

与其说是不想加入大公司，不如说我们从根本上想建立一家不同的企业。如果你回头看看我们的第一篇博客文章，我们谈到想要提供一种社交媒体的替代方案。我们觉得社交媒体是关于漂亮和完美，而我们想要一种与朋友交流的有趣方式。公司的精神、价值观和愿景是如此不同。很难想象作为那个组织的一部分，我们还能以我们热爱的方式继续做我们热爱的事情，因为他们的方向完全不同。

It was less about not wanting to join a big company. I think fundamentally we wanted to build a business that was different. If you go back to our first blog post, we talked about wanting to offer an alternative to social media. We felt that social media was about being pretty and perfect, and we wanted a way to communicate with our friends that was fun. The company ethos, the values, the visions were so divergent. It was very hard to imagine that we could keep doing what we loved in the way that we loved doing it as a part of that organization because they're just oriented in a very different way.

你有没有哪一天怀疑过那个决定？

Was there ever a day where you doubted that decision?

没有。一刻也没有。

No. Not even a moment.

一刻也没有。

Not a moment.

没有。

No.

董事会都支持吗？

Were all of the board supportive?

是的。所有投资者都支持。他们本来可以赚很多钱。但他们在早期一轮融资中做了一件非常聪明的事，大概在那时或之前，鲍比和我每人得以出售了 1000 万美元的股票。所以我们每人有 1000 万美元，我们觉得，哇，我们成功了。我们永远有钱了。这让我们可以放手一搏。那时你会想，就这么干吧。所以没有那种“哦不，我买不起房子，养不起家”的感觉。我们想，每人有 1000 万美元，干吧。

Yeah. All of our investors were supportive. They would have made a lot of money. But they did something very smart early on in a prior financing round around that time or before then, where Bobby and I were each able to sell $10 million of stock. So we each had 10 million bucks and we were like, wow, we made it. We have enough money forever. That allowed us to just swing for the fences. At that point you're like, let's just go for it. So there wasn't that feeling of, oh no, I'm not going to be able to buy a house or have a family. We were like, we each got 10 million bucks. Let's go for it.

这对那些考虑套现的创始人来说也是一个教训。

There's a lesson in there as well for founders who are considering taking some off the table.

我今天早上还收到一位创始人的语音留言，我今早回复了她。

I got a voice note from a founder actually listening to it this morning and I responded to her this morning.

我有个朋友，她的公司在 2020 年市场顶峰时准备 IPO，董事会和投资者都告诉她这会是个十亿美元级别的生意，让她继续冲。她来找我，问我能不能买她一些股份。我看了看这家公司，估值是 2.5 亿——抱歉，是 2.5 亿，不是 250 万，数字差很远。而她身边的投资者告诉她值另一个价。四年后的今天早上，她给我发了一条语音，说：“谢谢你，Steven，虽然我们最后没做成交易，但你让我意识到我可能被灌输了一个故事。”我们聊完之后几个月，她卖掉了一些股份。后来 2020 年市场崩盘，她说如果当时没套现一部分，现在公司挣扎、市场变了，她会疯掉。她四年后发语音感谢我种下了那个念头。我听说你也有类似经历——你套现了一些钱，这改变了你的决策框架。但你也永远不知道未来会怎样。

A friend of mine whose business was I think it was at the top of the market in 2020 was set for an IPO and her board and investors and everyone was telling her that it's going to be a billion dollar business and that she should carry on going. She approached me and asked me if I would buy some shares off her. I took a look at the business and I valued it at a quarter of a million sorry a quarter of a billion so 250 million very different numbers. And her investors around her were telling her it was worth something else. So she had sent me a voice note which is now 4 years later this morning saying thank you for that Steven because although we didn't end up doing a deal with you, you put this idea in my head that I could be being basically having a story sold to me. So what I ended up doing a couple of months after our conversation is I sold some shares and obviously you know what happened in 2020 with the markets and eventually everything comes crashing down and she says I would be losing my mind now because the company's struggling and obviously the markets have changed if I hadn't have taken some off the table. And she was sending a voice note four years later to say thank you for putting that seed in their head. And I hear the same with you. I hear that you took some money off the table. It changed your decision framework. But also you just never know.

是的。而且我认为，正如你所说，你必须小心不要把这些情况看作零和博弈——要么做大，要么冒全盘皆输的风险，或者卖掉公司。其实有很多创造性的解决方案，让创始人既能套现一部分、照顾家庭，同时还能全力冲刺、打造大企业。风险投资人非常认同全力冲刺的理念。成长型投资者可能随着公司变大而没那么激进，但风险投资人追求的是 10 倍、100 倍的回报。所以，找到一种适合创始人的模式，让他们既能照顾家庭又能全力冲刺，我认为是很有价值的做法。

Yeah. And I think you have to be, to your point, you have to be careful about approaching these situations as like zero sum, like either we're going to go big or with the risk that we'll lose it all, or we'll sell the company. I think there are all sorts of creative solutions that allow founders to take some money off the table, take care of their families, and still swing for the fences and build a big business. And venture capitalists are really aligned with the swing for the fences philosophy. Growth investors maybe less so as the business gets bigger, but when you have venture capitalists, I mean, they're looking for 10x, 100x return. So I think to find a formula that works for founders that allows them to take care of their families but also swing for the fences is a valuable approach.

你和马克是朋友吗？你说你认识他。

Are you and Mark friends? You said you know him.

我上次见他是在去年的参议院听证会上。

Last time I saw him was at the Senate hearings I think last year.

那些听证会看起来挺有意思的。改天我也该试试。

Those look fun. Should try it sometime.

没门。绝对没门。

No chance. No chance.

到 2014 年，你 24 岁时，40% 的美国成年人每天都在用 Snapchat。到 2015 年，Snapchat 月活用户达到 7500 万。那时候，作为 CEO 和创始人，你的生活是什么样的？那是 2015 年。你在 25 岁时成为全球最年轻的亿万富翁，推出 Snapchat 仅四年后，当时净资产估计为 40 亿美元。

By 2014, when you were 24 years old, 40% of US adults were using Snapchat every day. And by 2015, Snapchat was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis. At that point, what's life like for you as a CEO, as a founder? This was 2015. You became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25, just four years after launching Snapchat with an estimated net worth of $4 billion at the time.

生活挺不错的。我在 2014 年遇到了我的妻子，这对我来说是一个转折点。为什么是现在？她是一位了不起的女性，给了我巨大的稳定感和大量支持。她非常关注健康，这是她真正热爱的事情。所以我基本上每天都和一个健康教练住在一起。在创业过程中拥有这样的稳定和支持系统，真的非常有帮助。

Life was pretty good. I met my wife in 2014, which was a game changer for me. And why now? She's an incredible woman and really gave me a huge sense of stability and a massive amount of support. She really cares about wellness. That's something that she's really passionate about. So it's like I live with a wellness coach basically every single day. And to have that sort of stability and support system while going through building our business was just profoundly helpful.

你是怎么做到的？当你驾驶一艘火箭飞船时，如何管理一段恋爱关系？

How do you manage that though? How do you manage a romantic relationship when you are piloting a rocket ship?

我认为其中一个非常有帮助的因素是，她自己也非常有成就。她有自己的生意，叫 Core Organics，是一个有机护肤品品牌。所以她非常理解创业的艰辛，一直非常支持我的工作以及我对工作和团队的投入。所以我认为这反而让我们更紧密，而不是把我们分开。我觉得这很有意思。我和很多人聊过，他们有时会说：‘嘿，我的关系因为工作太多而紧张。’我发现，在那些对话中，他们通常是在自己工作不那么忙的时候遇到配偶的。他们是在 10 年、15 年、20 年前遇到配偶的，那时他们的事业刚刚起步。我认为，当你有一份更大的工作、时间被完全占据时，配偶可能会说：‘还记得我们刚认识时你没那么忙吗？你陪我更多。’而从我遇到我妻子的那一刻起，我们俩都在拼命工作。所以，我们都一直工作来支持事业、家庭、做我们热爱的事情，这种期望从一开始就融入了我们的关系。

I think one of the things that was really helpful is she's incredibly accomplished herself. She has her own business that she is working on called Core Organics, which is an organic skincare business. So she really understands that it's hard to be an entrepreneur and was always really supportive of my work and my commitment to my work and our team. And so I think that was almost something that brought us together, not something that pushed us apart. And I think it's interesting. I talk to a lot of people who sometimes say, 'Hey, my relationship's been under strain because I'm working so much.' And what I realize when I have those conversations with people is very often times they met their spouse when they weren't working as much. They met their spouse 10 years ago, 15 years, 20 years ago, when they were just getting started in their career. And I think it can be difficult when you have a much bigger job and it's all time consuming and your spouse is like, 'Remember when we first met and you weren't working all that much? You were spending more time with me.' From the minute I met my wife, we were both working flat out. And so I think this expectation that we both work all the time to support our business, support our family, do what we love to do was kind of just built into the relationship.

但你们怎么腾出时间见面呢？是否需要建立一些机制，确保你们不会整天都待在办公室？

But then how do you make time to see each other? Do you need to put systems in place to make sure that you're not just both at the office the whole time?

几年前我们开始做的一件事非常有帮助，就是设立周日家庭日。永远是家庭日。这意味着所有人都在家。如果孩子们想邀请朋友来玩，完全没问题。但他们不会去朋友家，而是大家在一起。把这段时间专门留给家人，真的非常重要。

One of the things that's really been helpful that we started doing a couple years ago is just having Sunday family day. Always family day. And that means everyone's at home. So if our kids want to have friends over or whatever, that's totally fine. But they're not going to their friends' houses or everyone's together. And just dedicating that time to our family is really important.

她在给你反馈方面扮演什么角色？

What role does she play in giving you feedback?

哦，哇。她给的反馈非常坦诚。这是一种天赋，对吧？是天赋。而且她热衷的领域和我不同，所以她能在不同的方面给我反馈，或者提出我根本不会考虑的事情。

Oh wow. She gives very candid feedback. Which is a gift, right? It's a gift. And I think she's really passionate about areas that are different than what I'm passionate about. And so she's able to give me feedback in different areas or things that I really wouldn't even consider.

有没有什么她给你的严厉反馈，你可以和我分享？

Is there any tough feedback that she shared with you that you can share with me?

你知道，我有时的一个挑战是我说话语气可能很严厉。即使我说的话本意是想帮忙或友善。我父亲是诉讼律师，母亲是税务律师。我从小听父亲在电话里进行非常激烈的对话。所以在工作模式下，我可能非常直接。我认为这没有帮助。当你语气尖锐或咄咄逼人时，人们不想听。所以她总是鼓励我，说你可以用稍微不同的方式说同样的话，人们就会听进去。

You know, I think one of the challenges that I have sometimes is I can have a very harsh tone. Like even if what I'm saying is really trying to be helpful or kind or whatever. I was raised by my dad who was a litigator, my mom was a tax lawyer. I grew up listening to my dad have very intense conversations on the phone all the time. And so in business mode, I can be very direct. And I don't think it's helpful. And I don't think people want to listen when you have a sharp or aggressive tone. And so I think she's always just encouraging me like, hey, you could say the same thing but in a slightly different way. And people will hear it.

你知道吗，我女朋友也这么跟我说，因为我有时候没法从工作中切换出来，Steve。你在家也会收到邮件和短信，我女朋友走过来跟我说什么，我回应的方式几乎就像在办公室一样。我得说她总是对的，因为我语气里带着我手头事情的情绪，想让她别打扰我。这是我们俩都需要改进的地方。真疯狂，Matt 在家说话的方式也这样。100%。还有同理心和善意。你有四个孩子，我还没有。所以对我来说，这是在 Snapchat 这艘火箭船、感情关系之上又多了一份责任，现在还有四个孩子。

You know, my girlfriend says that to me because I think sometimes I fail to context switch out of work, Steve, to then and you know, because you'll be getting emails and texts at home sometimes and my girlfriend might come up and she might say something and the way I respond is almost how I would respond as if I was at the office, but and it just and I have to say she's always right because there is a part of my tone which I think was conveying the emotion I was feeling from the thing I was doing to her to try and con to get her to leave me alone. This is something we can both work on. It's crazy. It's crazy that Matt is so much at home the way you say something. 100%. And having an empathy and a and a kindness. Um, and you you've had four children as well, which is something that I've not had. So, for me, that's an extra responsibility on top of the rocket ship of Snapchat, the relationship, and now four kids as well.

是的，但这是世界上最棒的事。我是说，有孩子是世界上最好的事。地球上真的没有比这更好的了。我还没找到任何接近的体验。为什么？因为你和孩子之间的爱与连接，是你从未体验过的。非常深刻。

Yeah. But it's the greatest in the world. I mean, the greatest thing in the world to have kids. really literally nothing better on the planet. I mean, I have not found anything close. Why? Because the love and connection that you have with your children is unlike anything else that you'll ever experience. I mean, it's it's profound, you know.

你们俩是怎么平衡四个孩子、事业和感情的？

How do you both juggle the four children, the businesses, the relationship?

我觉得 Miranda 可能比我平衡得更好。她非常投入地花时间陪伴我们的孩子，这对她来说很重要，对我也很重要。多年来，我花了很多时间找到那些极其成功的人，问他们：你是怎么培养出优秀孩子的？你那么成功，是怎么做到的？我从大概一百次对话中得到的基本结论是：真正投入、能亲自花时间陪伴孩子、与孩子互动的父母，往往与孩子有非常丰硕的关系，孩子也成长得很好。让我心碎的是，有那么多父母无法直接一对一地陪伴孩子——或者对我来说是一对四——因为这似乎是关键：与父母的连接和在场。

Well, I think Miranda probably juggles it better than I do. I think um and she's really committed to spending time with our children. I mean that's something that's so important to her and it's important uh to me. I don't think you know I I spent a lot of time actually over the years just I found people who are extremely successful and just like asked them like hey how do you raise great kids like you've been extremely successful. How'd you do it? And my basic takeaway from like a hundred of these conversations was basically that parents that are actually committed that can spend that time with their kids and do it themselves, engage with their kids themselves, they tend to have really fruitful relationship with their kids, and their kids seem to turn out really great. And I it breaks my heart that there are so many parents that can't spend that direct one-on-one time with their kids or I guess in my case one on four time uh with with their kids because that seems to be kind of the key ingredient is that connection with your parents being there.

你是企业主还是做市场营销的？如果是，请听好我们节目赞助商 LinkedIn 带来的宝贵机会。我投资了大约 40 多家公司，虽然它们行业不同，但都面临一个挑战——也许是营销中最关键的挑战：让品牌触达正确的受众。我们可能都遇到过在社交媒体上刷到完全不相关的广告。LinkedIn 现已拥有超过 10 亿专业人士的网络，其中包括 1.3 亿决策者，这意味着你可以按职位、资历、行业甚至公司收入精准定位买家。所以，别再浪费营销预算在错误受众上，现在就开始通过 LinkedIn 瞄准正确人群。因为你是我们社区的一员，LinkedIn 为你下一次广告活动提供 100 美元额度。前往 linkedin.com/diary 领取。网址是 linkedin.com/diary。当然，条款和条件适用，仅限 LinkedIn 广告。

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我看了你的 LinkedIn 页面，看了你的简介。你知道我要说什么吗？我想我知道。是的。你的 LinkedIn 简介上写的是 Meta 的产品副总裁吧？这不是我的玩笑吗？

I saw your LinkedIn page. I saw your bio. Do you know what I'm going to say? I think so. Yeah. In your LinkedIn bio, it says that you're the I think VP of product at Meta. Is it not my joke?

我们借用了这个玩笑，我想最初是 Cara Swisser 说的。但现在他们复制了阅后即焚、故事、一切功能，还有我们在增强现实上做的很多东西，当然现在他们说在做眼镜，而我们已经做了十多年。我想我已经赢得了那个头衔。我不知道。

We uh we uh have appropriated that joke from I think Cara Swisser who who originated it. But I think now that they've copied ephemeral messaging and stories, everything, you know, a lot of the stuff we've done in augmented reality, of course, now they say they're working on glasses, um which, you know, we've been working on for over a decade. I think, um I think I've I think I've earned that that title. I don't know.

那一定让你很恼火，因为那会让我很恼火。我可以坐在播客里说我现在不会在意，但事实是那会让我恼火。你刚告诉我，有很多人费尽心思去想这些创意，他们有成百上千个想法，你努力找到一个，然后向世界展示，世界说“这很有趣”。你知道想出这个点子的人，你就坐在他旁边。

That must piss you off because that would piss me off. Like I can sit on a podcast and I can say now I wouldn't be bothered. You know, the thing is that blah blah blah blah blah. But no, that would piss me off because you just told me that there's a lot of people that are going to great creative lengths to think of these ideas. They're having thousands of ideas. You're you're fighting to find one and then you have that moment where you present it to the world. The world says, "This is interesting." You you know the guy that came up with it. You sit next to him.

最令人恼火的一点是，他们挪用我们的发明，制造出让人感到不快乐、自我感觉糟糕的产品。去年有一项完全独立的荷兰研究，我们没有参与，还有一项澳大利亚研究，比较了 Instagram、TikTok 和 Snapchat。研究结论是，Snapchat 没有负面的心理健康影响，而 Instagram 和 TikTok 有负面影响。事实上，荷兰的研究发现 Snapchat 实际上促进了幸福感，也有助于增进人际关系。所以真正令人沮丧的是，当人们以为他们复制了我们的一些功能，产品就一样了，或者效果相同，但我们的产品设计方式截然不同——它旨在支持你与亲密朋友和家人的关系，最终支持你的幸福感。我们绝不想让任何人认为，在 Instagram 上使用故事就等于 Snapchat。尽管他们偷了产品名称或某些功能，但 Snapchat 的整体设计可以对人们的生活产生非常积极的影响，而 Instagram 的用户感受不到这一点。

One of the things that's incredibly irritating about it is they repurpose our inventions to make products that make people feel unhappy and bad about themselves. One of the things that was so fascinating just in the last year there was a study out of the Netherland totally independent study out of the Netherlands. we weren't involved. Another one out of Australia and it was comparing I think like Instagram, Tik Tok and Snapchat and it it basically found that Snapchat there there are no negative they the study determined there were no negative health imp me mental health implications of using Snapchat but there were negative mental health implications of using Instagram and Tik Tok and in fact I think the study in the Netherlands found Snapchat actually promotes well-being and helps uh promote your relationships as well and so I think what's really frustrating is when people think because they've copied some of our features that the products are the same or that they do the same thing when our product is designed in a way that's very different that's designed to support your relationships with your close friends and family and ultimately is something that supports your your well-being and so what we never want anyone to think is if they're using stories on Instagram that that's the same as Snapchat and you know even though they stole the the the name of the product or the way that you know some of some of the functionality of it the way that Snapchat is designed on the whole is something that can have a really positive impact in in people's lives And that's not something that people feel when they use Instagram.

当他们刚开始复制你们的核心功能比如故事功能时，你有没有考虑过给 Mark 发邮件、发消息或打电话？

Did you ever consider sending Mark an email or like a message or a phone call when they first started copying some of your core features like the story feature?

没有，我们没有那样做。我真的很欣赏 Kevin Systrom 的一点是，当他们复制故事功能时，他们不再假装自己在做不同的事。像 Poke 这样的东西，他们试图把它伪装成自己的创作，说“我们做得有点不同”。但故事功能，他们就没再装了。

No. No, we we didn't do that. I think, you know, one of the things that I really admire about Kevin Cyrum is when they copied the the stories feature, they they stopped pretending that they were doing anything different. I mean, with with things like Poke, they tried to sort of pass it off as their own creation. Oh, we're do, you know, doing it a little bit differently. with, you know, with stories.

凯文·斯特罗姆公开说：‘嘿，我们认为这是一个非常棒的功能。这是一个非常棒的产品，我们要把它抄过来放到 Instagram 里，而且我们觉得你会喜欢的。’至少这种坦诚是值得钦佩的。当有人像这样窃取你的创意时，你会感到不公吗？

Kevin Systrom came out and just said, 'Hey, we think this is a really great feature. This is a really great product and we're going to steal it and put it in Instagram and we think you're going to love it.' And the honesty at least was admirable. Do you feel a sense of injustice when someone steals your idea like that?

完全没有。我是说，这有点像——你肯定知道那句老话：‘伟大的艺术家剽窃。’我认为我们这个行业的一个特点就是人们不断相互启发。很早的时候，我去拜访字节跳动，当时他们只有今日头条，一个本质上基于 AI 和 ML 的新闻推送应用。看到那之后，我深受启发，我们对产品做了重大改变。我们把所有创作者和发布者的内容与朋友的故事分开，并说：‘不像社交媒体那样根据朋友的点赞或评论来展示内容，在 Snapchat 上我们将采用 ML 驱动的推荐。’所以你会看到朋友的内容，但还会有另一个由创作者和发布者组成的世界，根据你的兴趣和热情来推荐。所以我确实认为从其他公司和企业汲取灵感是创新的一部分。这是游戏的一部分。但这确实告诉我们，如果我们要创新、要开发新产品，就应该做那些极难复制的东西——需要很长时间才能复制、非常难做到的事情。因为如果你去攻克真正困难的事情，这些大公司就很难直接抄袭。

No, not at all. I mean, that is sort of the — I'm sure you know the saying, 'Great artists steal.' I think one of the things about our industry is that people are constantly being inspired by one another. In the very early days, I went to visit ByteDance when they only had Toutiao, a newsfeed app essentially, but it was backed by AI and ML. When I saw that, it was really inspiring to me, and we made a big change to our product. We actually separated out all the creator and publisher content from stories from friends, and we said, 'Unlike social media where you're seeing content based on what your friends like or comment on, on Snapchat we're going to do ML-driven recommendations.' So you'll have content from your friends, but then you'll have this whole other world of content from creators and publishers recommended based on your interests and passions. So I do think drawing inspiration from other companies and businesses is part of innovating. It's part of the game. But it definitely showed us that if we're going to innovate and make new products, we ought to make things that are really difficult to copy — that take a long time to copy, that are really hard to do. Because if you go after really difficult and hard things, it's much harder for these large companies to just copy them.

我想到了很多我认识的创始人，他们创办了各种企业——从 T 恤公司到播客——都面临别人抄袭创意的问题。有时他们反应很激烈，在社交媒体上发帖说：‘看，这个人抄袭了我们’，然后@那个品牌。你会给那些被抄袭的创始人什么建议？

I'm thinking about so many founders I know that have started businesses — from a t-shirt company to a podcast — and they're dealing with people copying their ideas. Sometimes they react really badly, take to social media, post and say, 'Look, this person copied us,' and tag the brand. What advice would you give to founders that are being knocked off?

我认为非常重要的是，要尽快从仅仅是一个产品或功能，演变成一个平台或生态系统。我的意思是：如果拿早期的故事功能来比较，人们只是互相发布故事，复制这个功能相对容易——你可以很快写出代码，现在用 AI 可能更快。但看看我们在增强现实方面所做的：我们有 Lens Core，这是我们自己的 AR 渲染引擎，可以在手机和眼镜上运行。我们有 Lens Studio 这个工具，一个非常复杂的工具，开发者可以用它来构建这些 AR 体验。我们有数亿人在手机上使用这些 AR 体验，还有数十万开发者制作所有这些 AR 体验。当你拥有这种非常复杂、难以复制的技术，以及一个由开发者、创作者和热爱这些 AR 体验的社区组成的生态系统时，就很难复制开发者为我们平台创建的四百万个镜头，或者将 Snapchat 上享受 AR 的数亿人迁移到一个新平台。尤其是在科技行业，你越快从功能或产品演变为真正的平台，我认为长期价值就越能创造出来。

I think it's really important to very quickly evolve from being just a product or a feature to becoming a platform or an ecosystem. What I mean by that is: if I compare the early days of stories, where people just posted stories for one another, it's relatively easy to copy that feature — you can code that up pretty quickly, probably with AI now very quickly. When I look at what we've done with augmented reality, we have a Lens Core, our own rendering engine for AR that runs on the phone and on our glasses. We have a tool called Lens Studio, an incredibly sophisticated tool that developers use to build these AR experiences. We have hundreds of millions of people using these AR experiences on the phone, and hundreds of thousands of developers making all these AR experiences. When you have that sort of very complicated technology that's hard to copy, and an ecosystem of people using it — both developers and creators and our community who love those AR experiences — it becomes very hard to copy the four million lenses that developers have created for our platform, or move the hundreds of millions of people enjoying AR on Snapchat to a new platform. Especially in the technology business, the faster you can evolve from being a feature or a product to a real platform, I think that's where the value is created over the long term.

所以这几乎是一种关系：构建和创造某样东西的难度和复杂程度，与它被复制的容易程度成反比。

So it's almost this relationship between how hard and complicated the thing was to build and create is inversely correlated to how easy it is to copy.

我想是的。然后还有生态系统的规模，即有多少人在使用它——几乎更像一个市场——这使得迁移市场的双方都非常困难。

I think so. And then how much of an ecosystem it is in terms of other people using it — almost more like a marketplace — it makes it very difficult to migrate both sides of the marketplace.

你认为现在存在的科技公司——那些万亿美元级别的、大型社交平台——是垄断企业，应该被拆分吗？因为最初有很多呼声要拆分这些公司，而你，可以说，是垄断力量能够突然介入、复制、模仿、窃取和创新的受害者。

Do you think that the technology companies that exist now — those trillion-dollar ones, those big social platforms — are monopolies and should be broken up? Because there was a big call originally to break these companies up, and you've been, I guess you could say, victim to the strength of a monopoly being able to swoop in, copy, replicate, steal, and innovation.

我认为关于它们是否是垄断企业，更重要的是我们认为接下来会发生什么。如果你还记得，有一段时间大家都认为微软要统治世界了。他们陷入了很多反垄断立法、调查和诉讼。最终，也许是因为被诉讼分散了注意力，但也因为他们当时对业务的看法，他们错过了整个移动周期。我认为现在人们在看谷歌，问谷歌是否也在经历类似的时刻。谷歌正面临很多这样的反垄断调查。例如，ChatGPT 伴随着 AI 的出现，是否真的会让谷歌的核心业务更难竞争？考虑到监管和诉讼周期的长度——你谈的是 10 年以上——政府是否认为它是垄断企业几乎不那么重要了，因为他们似乎也做不了太多。所以对于小型科技公司来说，更重要的是思考我们可以研究和开发哪些根本性的创新和技术，最终帮助我们发展业务，也许有一天能让这些大公司措手不及。

I think what matters more about whether or not they're monopolies is what we think is going to happen next. If you remember, there was a period when everyone thought Microsoft was going to take over the world. They were caught up in a lot of antitrust legislation, inquiries, and lawsuits. Ultimately, maybe as a result of being distracted by the lawsuits, but also just a function of how they thought about their business at the time, they missed the entire mobile cycle. I think people are looking at Google right now and asking if a similar moment is happening for Google. Google is subject to a lot of these antitrust inquiries. Is ChatGPT, for example, coming along with AI actually going to make it a lot harder for Google's core business to compete? Given the longevity of the regulatory and litigation cycle — you're talking 10-plus years — it almost doesn't matter so much if the government thinks it's a monopoly or not, because there's not much it seems like they're able to do about it. So what matters a lot more for small technology companies is thinking about what fundamental innovations and technologies we can work on and develop that can ultimately help us grow our business and maybe one day catch one of these larger companies on a back foot.

我们想谈谈这个。但关于抄袭的最后一个问题是：如果你处在马克·扎克伯格的位置，你会抄袭 Snapchat 吗？

Want to talk about that. But my last question on copying was: if you were in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes, would you have copied Snapchat?

我认为考虑到他们的市场地位，这是一个非常有效的策略。他们基本上拥有巨额现金储备。我认为他们现在每年投资 200 亿美元用于 AR 眼镜和一些 VR 项目。AR 眼镜项目很大程度上是在复制我们一直在做的事情。除此之外，他们还有数百亿美元用于各种其他投资，包括复制 ChatGPT 以及大语言模型的所有进展。

I think given their market position, it's a very effective strategy. They basically have an enormous cash pile. I think they're investing $20 billion a year right now just into the AR glasses stuff and some of their VR stuff. The AR glasses stuff is largely copying what we've been doing. And then outside of that, they have tens of billions of dollars in all sorts of other investments, including copying ChatGPT and all the progress on large language models.

所以，我认为如果你达到那个规模，产生那么多现金，那么将资本分散到各种赌注上，等着看哪些公司成功、它们做出了什么，然后投入大量资金，希望那些公司无法规模化，这是一种相当有效的策略。在这一系列抄袭中，有没有哪一天对你来说特别艰难？你能回忆起最艰难的一天吗？

So, I think it's quite an effective strategy if you're at that scale generating that much cash to just, you know, deploy that capital across a bunch of different bets and wait and see what companies are successful and what they make and then try to throw a ton of capital and hoping that those companies don't get to scale. Was there a hard day for you amongst all of this copying? Was there a hardest day that you can recall?

当 Instagram 故事功能刚推出时，有很多担忧认为 Snapchat 基本上会过时。他们非常成功地宣传了有多少人在使用故事功能，我们收到了很多问题和压力，问 Snapchat 是否还能成功。我认为当时人们没有意识到，大家使用 Instagram 主要是为了内容创作者和网红之类，而他们使用 Snapchat 主要是为了朋友和家人。所以我们一直专注于这个朋友和家人的使用场景，而这并不是 Instagram 所追求的。他们更关注网红，我认为 Snapchat 开始增长正是因为那些网红。如果你还记得，DJ Khaled 和一些早期的快拍，有网红开始加入 Snapchat 只是为了使用故事功能，对吧？他们以不同于我们最初为朋友和家人设计的方式使用它。我认为这才是真正引起 Instagram 注意的原因。所以，当人们说“Snapchat 怎么生存下去”的时候，真的很令人沮丧，因为他们不明白 Instagram 上的故事和 Snapchat 上的故事用途完全不同。

There was a lot of concern when Instagram stories first launched that Snapchat would essentially be obsolete and you know they did a very good job talking about how many people were using stories and we got a lot of questions and pressure about is Snapchat ever going to succeed and people didn't I think they realized at the time that folks were using Instagram mostly for content creators and influencers and that sort of thing and they were mostly using Snapchat for their friends and family and so we had really focused on this friends and family use case that was not really what Instagram was going after. They were much more focused on influencers and I think it was really only because Snapchat had started growing with those influencers. If you remember, DJ Khaled and some of those early snaps, there were influencers who were starting to join Snapchat just to use stories, right? To use it differently than how we had initially designed it for friends and family. And I think that's what really got Instagram's attention. So, it was really frustrating in those moments where people were saying, well, how's Snapchat going to survive because they didn't understand that stories on Instagram is for a totally different purpose than stories on Snapchat?

你一定预见到了，因为人们开始泄露说有个新功能要来了。我当时经营一家社交媒体公司，有黑客可以查看代码库，看到即将推出的功能，然后泄露到博客上。所以作为团队，你在管理一群人的情绪，而这些人都在听说行业里最大的玩家即将推出你核心功能的一个版本。作为领导者，你如何管理大家的情绪？

You must see that coming because people start leaking that there's this new feature coming. I was running a social media business at the time and there were hackers that can kind of look into code bases and see what features are about to come and then it's leaked out to the blog. So as a team you're managing the emotions of a group of people and that group of people they're all hearing that the biggest player in the game is about to launch a central feature of your proposition. How does the leader manage the emotions of the people through that?

嗯，我认为这可以成为激励团队的事情，对吧？如果世界上一些最大的公司验证了你正在做的事情，如果你以这种方式看待，那真的可以激励人心。所以，我认为与其说“哦，不，游戏结束了，我们不如关门放弃”，不如说“这确实证明我们走在正确的道路上，我们在打造人们喜爱的产品，这些产品引起了世界上一些最大、最强大公司的注意。”让我们在此基础上继续努力。让我们继续打造全球数十亿人都会使用的产品。我认为最终，关于你是否能招聘和留住真正有才华、有创造力的人这一点，如果你在 Snap 做设计师，你创造的东西不仅被 8.5 亿多 Snapchat 用户使用，还被使用各种其他产品的数十亿人使用，因为人们从我们的设计团队和他们的作品中获得如此多的灵感，我觉得这很酷。

Well, I think that can be something that is energizing for a team, right? If you have some of the biggest companies in the world validating what you're working on, that can be really energizing if you approach it that way. So, I think rather than just saying, "Oh, no, it's game over, we might as well shut the thing down and give up." I think if you say, "This is really evidence that we're on the right path here, that we're building products that people love, that they're getting the attention of some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world." You know, let's build on that. Let's continue to go build products that billions of people all over the world will use. And I think ultimately to this point of, you know, can you hire and retain really talented, creative people. I think it's pretty cool if you're a designer at Snap that the things you're making are not just used by the 850 million plus people that use Snapchat, but billions of people that use all sorts of other products because people get so much inspiration from our design team and what they build. I think that's pretty cool.

我认为 Snapchat 有一个几乎突然出现的用例，这是我昨天才想到的，就是你在某个时候必须对应用上的成人内容做出决定。OnlyFans 现在已经建立了一个庞大的业务，他们基本上就是做成人内容的。在某个时候，你一定被投资者或用户质疑过，你是否会允许成人内容出现在平台上，因为那可能会是一个不断增长的用户群。

One of the use cases that emerged pretty much out of the blue, I think, for Snapchat was, and this is something I was only thinking about yesterday, is you at some point have to make a decision about adult content on the app and OnlyFans have built this massive business now, and they're basically in the adult content business. At some point you must have been challenged on that by investors or by users whether you were going to allow adult content to be on the platform because that would have been presumably a growing user base.

有意思。是的，我们主动扫描色情内容并将其删除。我的意思是，这违反了我们的内容准则。我们这样做已经很久了。所以，是的，这不是我们思考核心业务的方式。而且我也认为，当你思考自我表达时，自我表达的重要性，你所处的环境真的很重要，对吧？这就是为什么我们有内容准则，因为我们希望人们感觉他们处于一个可以表达自己的环境中。我认为关于不同内容准则、有或没有内容准则的讨论非常有趣，因为我认为人们忽略了更广泛的观点。如果你有一个没有内容准则的平台，上面充满了人们互相大喊大叫、说非常刻薄或冒犯性的话、或者发布大量色情内容，这对大多数人来说是非常不舒服的，对吧？那很不舒服。你会说，“呃，这个平台可能不适合我。我可能不觉得在这里表达自己很舒服，因为我看到的所有东西都不太合适，或者不符合我的价值观。”所以我们很早发现的一件事是，如果你想创建一个让人们感到舒适地表达自己、舒适地与朋友和家人交流的平台，拥有内容准则非常有帮助，因为它意味着内容体验让人感觉更舒适。

Interesting. Yeah, we proactively scan for pornography and remove it. I mean it's against our content guidelines. We've been doing that for a really long time. So yeah, I mean that's just not how we think about our core business. And I also think, when you think about self-expression, the importance of self-expression, the environment that you're in really matters, right? And that's why we have content guidelines because we want people to feel like they're in an environment where they can express themselves. And I think some of the conversation about different content guidelines or having content guidelines or not having them has been really interesting because I think people are missing the broader point. If you have a platform with no content guidelines and it's full of people yelling at each other or saying really mean or offensive things or posting a lot of pornography, that's a really uncomfortable thing for most people, right? That's uncomfortable. You say, "Uh, this maybe this platform isn't for me. Maybe I don't feel comfortable expressing myself here because all the stuff I'm seeing isn't really appropriate or aligned with my values." And so one of the things we discovered really early on is if you want to create a platform where people feel comfortable expressing themselves, feel comfortable communicating with their friends and family, having content guidelines is really helpful because it means that the content experience is one that feels more comfortable.

但人们不会说这是审查吗？我现在想到马克·扎克伯格发布的视频，关于 Meta 改变其审核系统，搬到得克萨斯州，意识到我认为他说他们在审核员方面过度偏向左翼政治。所以很多右翼内容被审查了。对于这种“我们不想审查人们”的内容审核论点，你怎么看？

But isn't that people would say well that censorship? I'm thinking now of the video that Mark Zuckerberg released about Meta's change to their moderation systems moving to Texas realizing that I think he said that they'd overindexed with their moderators in terms of left-leaning politics. So, a lot of the right-leaning content had been censored. What do you make of that argument for content moderation that we don't want to censor people?

我认为这是对第一修正案及其适用方式的误解。如果我们看看我们的国家，至少在美国，第一修正案真正关注的是政府与内容创作者或内容发布者的互动方式，它说，政府干涉个人或发布者的自我表达是不可以的，对吧？这是不允许的。但第一修正案也规定，平台或个人可以选择他们想要推广或在其平台上展示的内容类型。这是第一修正案的一部分。你不能强迫《华尔街日报》刊登这篇文章或那篇文章，或者接受来自世界各地任何作者的任何文章。

I think it's a misunderstanding of the First Amendment and how it applies. If we look at our country, the way, at least here in the United States with the First Amendment that really focuses on the way that the government interacts with content creators or content publishers and it says, hey, it's not okay for the government to interfere with individuals or publishers self-expression, right? That's not allowed. But one of the things the First Amendment also does is say, platforms or individuals can make choices about what sort of content they want to promote or want to have on their platform. That's part of the First Amendment. You can't force the Wall Street Journal to put this article or that article or accept any article from any author all around the world.

《华尔街日报》作为一份报纸，可以决定它想在版面上收录哪些作者。这是我们国家受第一修正案保护的言论表达的一部分。所以整个审查的概念并不适用于那些实际上是私营企业的公司，它们拥有第一修正案赋予的权利，来决定其平台上有什么内容。它们可以选择：我们对任何内容都开放，什么都可以，没问题。似乎有些平台正在做出这样的选择。但像我们这样的其他平台会说：‘嘿，为了在我们的平台上拥有健康的讨论氛围，为了确保人们在浏览我们平台上的内容时感到舒适，我们不希望人们看到色情内容、暴力内容或仇恨言论。这些内容不会让人感觉良好。我们实际上想确保这些内容不在我们的平台上，因为它们不符合我们的准则。’这可能是某些研究显示人们在使用 Snapchat 时感觉更好的原因之一，因为他们不会在使用 Snapchat 时遇到非常暴力的内容。

The Wall Street Journal as a paper can decide what authors it wants to include on its pages. And that's part of the protected First Amendment expression we have in this country. So this whole notion of censorship doesn't apply to companies that are private businesses that actually have a First Amendment right to decide what content is on their platform. And they may want to decide: we're open to literally anything, anything goes, no problem. And it seems like some platforms are making that choice. But other platforms like ours say, 'Hey, in order to have a healthy set of discourse across our platform, in order to make sure people feel comfortable when they're viewing content on our platform, we don't want people to come across pornography, for example, or violent content or hateful content. That's not something that makes people feel good. And we actually want to make sure that content isn't on our platform because it doesn't comply with our guidelines.' And that may be one of the reasons why in some of these studies it shows that people feel better when they use Snapchat because they're not encountering really violent content when they're using Snapchat.

是否存在一个问题：如果你的地理基地位于洛杉矶或加利福尼亚，那么你的内容审核视角会非常左倾，而如果你位于一个红州，那可能就不代表世界？还是你根本不在乎？你只是认为，好吧，这些是我们公司的价值观？

Is there an issue that if you're geographically based in Los Angeles or California, then your content moderation perspective is going to be very left-leaning versus if you're based in a red state and that might not be representative of the world? Or do you just not care? Did you just think, well, these are our values as a company?

我不这么认为，因为我觉得说“极端暴力不是我们想在平台上看到的东西”并不是政治性的。我认为这是一个基于价值观的决定。或者说“我们不想向社区提供色情内容”。我不认为那是政治选择。我认为这是一个基于价值观的决定。所以，我认为不幸的是，在我们现在的文化中，实际上有一种强烈的诱惑，要把那些其实很常识性的东西政治化。因此，我认为我们必须避免这种诱惑，转而关注人们正在做出的价值观或商业选择。

I don't think so because I don't think saying extreme violence is not something we want on our platform is political. I think that's a values-based decision. Or saying we don't want to service pornography to our community. I don't think that's a political choice. I think that's a values-based decision. So, I think unfortunately right now in our culture, there's actually a real temptation to politicize things that are actually quite common sensical. And so I think we have to avoid that temptation and instead focus on what are the values or the business choices that people are making.

你认为为什么 Meta 收紧了他们的审核政策？

Why do you think Meta have rolled back their moderation policies?

我不确定。我认为有一个时刻他们似乎得到了很多支持来做这件事。我认为这对他们在欧洲来说会很有挑战性，例如那里有很多关于禁止仇恨言论或恐怖主义内容的规则和法规。我认为看看他们如何应对会很有趣。当然，不审核内容要便宜得多。审核内容需要花钱，这也可能是一个考虑因素。

I'm not sure. I think there's a moment in time when they seem to have a lot of support to do it. I think it'll be challenging for them in Europe for example where there's a lot of rules and regulations about prohibiting things like hate speech or terrorist content. And I think it'll be interesting to see how they navigate that. It's certainly a lot less expensive to avoid moderating content. It costs money to moderate content and that could be a consideration as well.

如果不审核内容，参与度会上升吗？

If you don't moderate content, does engagement go up?

这是个好问题。我看到一些报告和研究显示，如果内容被审核，参与度可能会下降。当然，有研究表明，由于人类的原因，负面内容在社交媒体上传播得更远更快。但在这个具体案例中我不确定。

That's a great question. I've seen some reports and studies that show that if content is moderated, engagement can go down. Certainly there are studies that show that negative content spreads much further and faster on social media for human reasons. But I'm not sure in this particular instance.

你对社交媒体格局感觉如何？在过去六个月里变化太大了。甚至不到六个月，我想说自从埃隆·马斯克收购了 Twitter（现在叫 X）以来，已经 12 个月了，几乎就像多米诺骨牌效应一样，在内容审核、社交媒体上的声音类型、围绕审查和言论自由的这场大运动方面都发生了连锁反应。还有社交媒体的分裂，很多人现在离开某些平台，转向 Blue Sky 和 Threads，你知道几年前 Rumble 是唯一一个大的右倾平台，现在我不知道，似乎一切都在我们眼前变化。

How are you feeling about the social media landscape? It's changed so much in the last six months. It's just not even six months, I'd say 12 months since I think Elon bought Twitter, now called X, that it's almost like this domino effect has happened in terms of content moderation, in terms of the types of voices on social media, in terms of this big movement around censorship and free speech. There's also been this splintering of social media where lots of people are now leaving certain platforms and going to Blue Sky and Threads and you know Rumble was the only sort of big right-leaning platform just a couple of years ago and now I don't know it seems like it's all changing before our eyes.

老实说，我不太在意这些。对我来说，这感觉更像是某种延续，至少以 Meta 为例，因为他们基本上就是社交媒体市场。他们的选择真正有趣的地方在于，他们倾向于跟随政治风向。所以，当拜登担任总统时，马克对此非常公开，他们做了很多非常主动的内容审核。显然，当时白宫要求他们非常主动地这样做。而现在看来，随着新政府的上台，新政府对内容审核有不同的做法，Meta 正在跟随这一点。所以，我长期以来从 Meta 身上看到的主要是，他们非常愿意在政治格局中周旋，并跟随政客的引导。

I don't read too much into it to be honest with you. To me, it feels like more of a continuation of almost, at least in the case of I think we can use Meta as the example just because they are essentially the social media market. And what's really interesting about their choices is what they've tended to do is sort of follow the political winds. So, when Biden was president, and Mark's been very public about this, they did a lot of very proactive content moderation. And that was something that apparently I guess the White House at the time was asking them to do very proactively. And now it seems like, with the new administration, this new administration has a different approach to content moderation and Meta is following that. And so what I've seen mostly from Meta over time is that they're quite willing to sort of navigate the political landscape and follow the lead of politicians here.

这是值得钦佩的吗？

Is that something to be admired?

不，我认为当你是一家如此庞大而强大的公司时，这绝对是一种生存主义做法，对吧？你知道，如果你看看 Meta，他们现在与政府有那么多诉讼。政府正在审查他们业务的许多不同方面。所以当你达到那个规模，并且由单一创始人控制时，我认为这是一种生存本能，意味着根据谁在白宫，你改变你的政策。

No, I think it's a definitely a survivalist approach for sure when you're such a large and powerful company, right? You know, if you look at Meta, they have so much litigation with the government right now. The government is scrutinizing so many different aspects of their business. And so when you're at that scale and you're controlled by a single founder, I think it's a survivalist instinct that means that depending on who is in the White House, you change your policies.

你对美国未来四年感到乐观吗？

Are you optimistic about the next four years in America?

我对我们的国家非常乐观。我非常热爱我们的国家。我认为我们全国的美国人都有一种不可思议的精神，使我们能够共同克服非凡的挑战。最近的新冠疫情，更早的比如第二次世界大战，我们不仅作为一个国家，而且更广泛地在全世界团结起来，对抗轴心国的恐怖。我认为我们的国家在非常关键和重要的时刻以非常有力的方式团结起来，这让我深受鼓舞。

I'm incredibly optimistic about our country. I love our country so much. I think that Americans across our country have an incredible spirit that has allowed us to overcome extraordinary challenges together. More recently the COVID pandemic, you know, longer ago, things like World War II, where we came together not only as a country but more broadly in the world to confront the horror of the Axis powers. I think our country in very critical and important moments comes together in really powerful ways and that's something that inspires me.

你说你最大的孩子 14 岁了。他现在正处于面临越来越多加入社交媒体的压力的年龄。你会让他加入 Instagram 吗？

Your oldest child is 14, you said. He's at that age now where he's going to be getting increasing pressures to join social media. Are you going to let him join Instagram?

他在用 Snapchat。他在用 Snapchat。当然也在用 YouTube 和 Roblox，他非常喜欢。所以这就是目前的情况。

He's on Snapchat. He's on Snapchat. Certainly on YouTube and Roblox, which he likes a lot. So that's sort of the current situation.

你一定考虑过这个问题。目前有很多关于社交媒体对孩子的影响的讨论，焦虑，所有那些关于比较和变得更加孤立的负面事情。你和你的妻子、孩子、家人就未来的社交媒体使用达成协议了吗？

You must have thought about this. There's so much conversation at the moment around the impact that social media has on kids, anxiety, all of the sort of toxic things around comparison and becoming more isolated. Have you developed an agreement with your wife, with your kids, with your family about social media usage going forward?

我认为总的来说，我们的观点是，你知道，我们的每个孩子都非常不同。

I think in general our view, you know, each of our children are so different.

他们会以不同的方式成长。所以，我不认为一刀切的模式是正确的做法。我认为这完全取决于每个孩子在任何特定时刻的状态，他们是谁，他们想做什么。我想真正鼓励他们思考的一件事是隐私，尤其是作为年轻人。我认为很多年轻人在很小的时候就发布大量公开内容，非常重要的是要慎重做出这类决定，因为一旦你公开了某些东西，就再也收不回来了。而且我认为，在我们谈论技术时，关注健康、建设性的使用方式非常重要，比如 Flynn 14 岁时可以用技术保持与朋友和家人的联系。对我们家来说，真正的分水岭时刻是直到新冠疫情之前，我们都不允许 Flynn 拥有手机。我们真的不允许他用电脑。疫情发生时，他必须与朋友保持联系。他必须与朋友保持连接。我们知道这对他的健康至关重要，对吧？我认为我们面临的挑战是年轻人经历的剧烈反差，因为在整个疫情期间，他们被告知只能通过电脑和朋友聊天。只能通过电话和朋友聊天，对吧？然后疫情结束后，他们从成年人那里听到的很多是：远离手机。根本不要用手机。我认为这两种极端都不正常。作为父母，我们思考了很多关于什么是与技术的健康关系。当然，我们希望你出去越野跑，和朋友一起玩，或者去散步，去商场，只是聊天。但我们知道，当 Flynn 不在朋友身边时，当他们分散在世界各地，或者放学后试图见面时，使用技术是有帮助的。给朋友发消息是有帮助的。所以我认为我们必须找到这个平衡点，说：培养一种健康、充实的生活方式，涵盖你所有的兴趣、爱好和热情，然后如果你想用手机与朋友保持联系，或者看娱乐内容，或者玩游戏放松，那也是健康的。即使 Finn 说：“爸爸，我想看 TikTok。”那可能就太过分了。我们说，因为 TikTok，我自己甚至都不用 TikTok，因为我听说它就像人们的可卡因，他们每天在上面无意识地刷三四个小时。如果 Finn 回家说：“爸爸，我想用 TikTok。”你会说不。我们可能会说不。我们历史上说过不，尽管他并没有真正坚持这个问题。

They're going to develop in different ways. So, I don't think a one-size-fits-all model is the right approach here. I think it really depends on where each of our kids are at any given point and who they are and what they want to do. I think one thing I would really encourage them to be thoughtful about is their privacy, especially as young people. And I think there are a lot of young people at a very young age posting a lot of public content, and I think it's very important to be thoughtful about those sorts of decisions because once you've posted something publicly, you can't get that back. And I think it's really important, as we talk about technology, that we focus on the healthy and constructive ways that Flynn, for example, at 14, can use technology like staying in touch with his friends and family. I think the real watershed moment for us as a family was up until the COVID pandemic, we didn't allow Flynn to have a phone. We really didn't allow him to use a computer. When the pandemic happened, he had to stay in touch with his friends. He had to be connected with his friends. We knew that was vitally important for his well-being, right? And I think the challenge we have is almost the whiplash that young people are experiencing because throughout the pandemic, they were told you can only talk to your friends on the computer. You can only talk to your friends on the phone, right? And then coming out of the pandemic, what they're hearing a lot from adults now is stay off your phone. Don't use your phone at all. I think both extremes are unusual. For us as parents, we think a lot about what's a healthy relationship with technology. Of course, we want you to go run cross country and hang out with your friends, or go for a walk, go to the mall, and just talk. But we know when Flynn's not with his friends, when they're spread out all over the world, or after school trying to meet up, it's helpful to use technology. It's helpful to message your friends. And so I think we have to find this right balance of saying, cultivate a healthy, engaged lifestyle with all of your interests, your hobbies, your passions, and then if you want to use your phone to stay in touch with your friends or watch entertaining content or play a game to relax, that's healthy, too. Even if Finn says, 'I want to watch TikTok, Dad.' That might be a bridge too far. We say, because TikTok, I don't even use TikTok myself personally, because from what I hear, it's like crack cocaine for people, they're just on there for like three or four hours a day scrolling mindlessly. If Finn came home and said, 'I want to use TikTok, Dad,' you'd say no. We would probably say no. We have said no historically, although he hasn't really pressed the issue.

TikTok 本来要被禁，然后特朗普突然出现，似乎挽救了局面。这是好事吗？作为 Snapchat 的 CEO，你是否有一部分希望它被禁，因为那样可能会有更多人过来用 Snap？你有没有想过这个？

TikTok was going to be banned and then Trump swooped in and seemed to save the day. Is that a good thing? As a CEO of Snapchat, was part of you hoping that it was banned because then maybe more people would come over and use Snap? Did you think about that?

我认为如果它们被禁，对我们的业务会相当有利。我认为更大的图景是，作为一个国家，就我们与中国的关系而言，我们必须弄清楚哪些领域的企业可以在美国和中国之间合作开展业务，哪些领域不能。你可能知道，许多科技公司由于各种原因无法在中国运营。也许他们没有许可证，或者不被允许运营等等。但它们可以在美国运营，这里有一个开放的市场，一个自由市场。我认为作为国家，我们现在必须非常深思熟虑，因为成为一个开放市场一直是美国的巨大战略优势。自由贸易之类的东西极大地支持了我们的经济增长。但我们现在到了一个时刻，我认为我们需要深思熟虑，并说对于某些国家，某些领域的自由贸易非常有意义。所以，如果我们谈论的是儿童玩具或尿布，或者任何你能想到的东西，对吧？那就放开吧。这对两国都有好处，两国都可以在这些领域做生意。但当涉及到其他领域时，比如信息服务，或者可能是关键矿产，可能是某些类型的药物化合物或成分。这些领域两国无法合作，因为最终它们有非常不同的目标、意识形态和对未来的愿景。我认为商界现在的问题是，在这方面没有足够的清晰度。所以政府能创造的清晰度越多，说美国和中国合作可以达成一致：嘿，我们同意这些领域是开放的，这些领域我们将竞争，不会合作。这将有助于商界，因为我认为最令人沮丧的是，想象一下现在一个中国企业家正在建立一家非常成功的公司，然后美国政府说，嘿，考虑到我们国家、我们的价值观以及我们与中国的战略关系，这行不通。

I think it would be quite good for our business if they were banned. I think the bigger picture that we really have to figure out as a country and in terms of our relationship with China is to figure out the areas where businesses are going to collaborate and do business across the United States and China and areas where they are not. So you're probably familiar, many technology companies cannot operate in China for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don't have a license, they haven't been allowed to operate, etc. But they are allowed to operate here in the United States where we have an open market, a free market. And I think we have to be very thoughtful at this point in time as a country because being an open market has always been a massive strategic advantage for the United States. It's something that free trade and things like that have been massively supportive of our economic growth. But we're now at a moment where I think we need to be thoughtful and say with some countries, free trade in some areas makes a lot of sense. So if we're talking about kids toys or diapers or you name it, right? Let it rip. That's good for both countries and both countries can do business in those areas. But when it comes to other areas, like information services, or maybe it's critical minerals, maybe it's some types of pharmaceutical compounds or ingredients. Those are areas where the countries aren't going to be able to collaborate because ultimately they have very different goals, ideologies, visions for the future. And I think the issue that the business community has right now is there's not enough clarity in that regard. So the more clarity the government can create and say, the United States and China working together can say, hey, we agree these areas are open for business and these areas are areas where we're going to compete and we're not going to collaborate. That would help the business community because I think what's so frustrating, imagine being a Chinese entrepreneur right now building this really successful company and then the US government saying, hey, given our country and our values and the strategic relationship we have with China, this is not going to work.

听起来特朗普想买下它，这是一个非常有趣的建议，而且令人担忧，因为它开创了一个先例，可能像 Snapchat 这样的应用，英国可能会决定：听着，我们不知道是否能信任你，因为你是美国人，所以我们想买下英国版本，以便你能让 Snapchat 在英国运营。这可能会在世界各地开创一个令人担忧的先例。

It sounds like Trump wants to buy it, which was a very interesting suggestion, and it's worrying because it sets a bit of a precedent that potentially an app like Snapchat, the UK might decide, listen, we don't know if we can trust you because you're an American, so we want to buy the UK version in order for you to have Snapchat be in the UK. That could set a worrying precedent around the world.

我认为已经有一些早期的迹象，人们非常关注数据本地化等等。这差不多就是我的观点，我认为我们需要非常清楚，与哪些国家我们将有开放的数据和贸易自由流动，哪些国家在某些领域可能无法有效运作。

I think there's already some early flavors of that with folks really focused on data localization and whatnot. And that's sort of my point around I think we need to get really clear about with which countries are we going to have open free flow of data and trade and which countries there are areas where that might not work as effectively.

Snapchat 最终上市了。经营一家上市公司至少可以说是困难的，因为股价可以上下波动，实际上与你正在做的事情和你正在构建的东西无关，它更多地反映了更广泛的市场、人们的情绪和氛围，但作为 CEO，你必须管理这一切。我想这并不容易。

Snapchat eventually goes public. Running a public company is difficult, to say the least, because the share price can go up and down really irrespective of what you're doing and what you're building, and it's really a reflection of the broader market, people's emotions and vibes, but you have to manage that as a CEO. Not easy, I imagine.

你知道，很多人警告过我们上市的事。他们说会有很大的压力要注重短期导向之类的事情。季度审查对我们的业务来说将是一个挑战。

You know, a lot of people warned us about going public. And they said there was going to be a lot of pressure to be short-term oriented and this sort of thing. That the quarterly scrutiny would be challenging for our business.

归根结底，我认为从私营公司转型为上市公司是充满挑战的，两者截然不同。但现在我确实认为，围绕季度业绩的纪律性和严谨性——即有效预测业务并与实际进展对比——能帮助公司以更高效的方式运营。因此，这种审视对领导团队和整个公司的业务管理都大有裨益。然而，困难之处在于长期投资和创新。例如，当前利率大幅上升，人们因此以更高的贴现率折现现金流，导致各行各业都极度关注盈利能力。我们知道，对于长期创新而言，一致性至关重要。你不能像开关一样随意开启或关闭创新，或中断对新产品的投资，这样做非常困难且具有破坏性。因此，尽管我们做出了关闭一些项目的艰难决定，但我们仍在这一时期保持较高投资率，即使这意味着股价可能更低，因为高利率改变了人们对现金流的折现方式。所以我认为，真正的挑战在于如何在困难时期或利率大幅上升时持续投资。

Ultimately, I think the transition from being a private company to a public company was challenging. It's quite different. But now I really think the discipline and the rigor around the quarterly performance, the need to forecast your business really effectively and then compare how you're tracking to your forecast, helps the company run in a much more effective way. So that sort of scrutiny can be really helpful for the leadership team and the broader team in terms of running the business. Now, where it can get difficult is when it comes to long-term investment and innovation. So, for example, right now interest rates have gone way up. Folks are discounting cash flows at a much higher rate as a result. And so there's a huge focus on profitability for many businesses across all sectors. What we know is true for long-term innovation is that consistency really matters. You can't just flick a switch and turn on and off innovation, turn on and off investments in new products. It's very difficult and disruptive to do that. And so we've made a decision through this period of time, even though we've made some really difficult and painful decisions to shut down some of our projects, we're still investing at a higher rate right now through this period of time, even though we know that that means that our share price might be lower because people are discounting our cash flows differently due to higher interest rates. So I think that's when it gets challenging, the actual reality of continuing to invest through challenging periods of time or periods where interest rates have gone way up.

当我设身处地为你考虑时，我会想到作为一家上市公司，你几乎无所不能，可以追逐任何目标。但正如你刚才提到“痛苦”这个词时所说，你终究要做出选择，专注于某件事。即使在我目前经营企业的层面，我也发现最难的事情——尤其是当你有些创意时——就是选定一件事，并对其他所有事情说“不”。我研究过你的理念，知道“说不”和“专注”是你领导风格的核心，也是你作为企业家的思维方式。请讲讲那些你不得不放弃自己不想放弃的东西的痛苦时刻。

When I think about sitting in your shoes or sitting in your seat, I think about all the things you could do as a public company. I think you could do anything, like you could go after any game, and at some point, as you kind of said there when you used the word painfully, you're going to have to make a decision to focus on something. And even at the level I'm at with the businesses I run and so on, I find the hardest thing for me is, especially when you're somewhat creative, etc., is to pick something and to say no to everything else. And I've looked at your philosophy and I know saying no and focus is so central to your leadership style, but also how you think as an entrepreneur. Tell me about those painful moments where you had to kill something that you didn't want to kill.

是的，有很多这样的时刻。那条建议对我们帮助很大，尤其是在公司早期。我们的一位早期风险投资人曾说：“嘿，Evan，你必须非常擅长说‘不’。”他说：“你几乎没有任何资源”——当时我们团队只有四个人——“而且随着公司发展，你会收到大量请求。人们会想合作、采访或做其他事情。如果你能擅长说‘不’，并专注于你的社区和客户，这就是秘诀。”多年来，这种专注确实帮助了我们。但正如你所说，有时我们不得不重新聚焦或评估业务领域。一个很好的例子是迷你游戏。我们有数百万人使用我们的迷你游戏，大家都很喜欢。那是一个很棒的平台，你可以在 Snapchat 内玩实时多人游戏。但最终，很明显它不会成为我们的一项大业务，至少在当时不是。因此，我们不得不做出痛苦的决定，关闭迷你游戏业务。

Yeah, there are a bunch. That piece of advice was so helpful to us, especially in the early days of our business. One of our first venture investors was like, 'Hey Evan, you got to get really good at saying no.' He said, 'You have almost no resources' — I think we were a team of four people at the time — 'and you're going to get all this inbound because the company's growing. People are going to want to do partnerships or do an interview or whatever. If you can just get really good at saying no and stay focused on your community, stay focused on your customers, that's the secret.' And that focus has really helped us over the years. But as you point out, there have been times where we've had to refocus or reassess areas of our business. I think one good example is mini games. We had an amazing hundreds of people using our mini games, and people loved them. It was an amazing platform. You could play real-time multiplayer games together inside of Snapchat. And ultimately, it was just clear that that was not going to be a really, really big business for us, at least at that time. And so we had to make the really painful decision to shut down our mini games business.

那么，你如何决定该追求什么？现在有这么多新技术、热词：AI、AR、VR、头显、可穿戴设备等等。你如何确定哪个赌注值得下？

So how do you think about what to go after? There's all these new technologies. There's these buzzwords. There's AI now. There's AR. There's VR. There's headsets. There's wearables. There's all these things. How do you decide what bet is your bet?

这是个很好的问题。在某种程度上，直觉很重要，但反馈同样关键。这就是为什么，例如，我们去年发布的第五代 Spectacles，目标就是尽快交到开发者手中，以便我们倾听和了解。比如，你想用 Spectacles 构建什么？有哪些工具可用？缺少什么？你认为什么会很有趣？因为我们从实际用户那里学习得越快，就能越快改进产品并找到产品市场契合点。

I think that's a really good question. That is to some degree where intuition plays an important role, but it's also where feedback plays a really important role. And that's why, for example, with our last generation of spectacles that we announced last year, the fifth generation of spectacles, our goal was just to get it into developers' hands as quickly as possible so that we can listen and hear. Okay, so what sort of things do you want to build with spectacles? What tools are available? What isn't there? What do you think would be really interesting? Because the faster that we can learn from people actually using our product, the faster we can make it better and find that product-market fit.

这非常重要。而且你也不知道世界需要多久才会朝着你下注的方向充分改变。想想 Google Glass，大概是十年前吧，人们说：“好了，我们都要戴眼镜了。”Google 推出了 Google Glass，但它似乎很快就销声匿迹了。然后 Meta 收购了 Oculus，我们以为现在大家都会戴 VR 头显了，但至今仍未真正实现。所以，你可以下注，可能判断正确，但可能早了 15 年。我认为在科技领域必须非常谨慎，因为事情变化缓慢，然后突然加速。ChatGPT 显然就是如此，对吧？人们觉得这项新技术横空出世，但实际上他们已经研究了近十年，一直在持续进步。所以我认为，只要你找到自己坚信能产生积极影响、让人们以引人入胜的方式使用的东西，有时需要耐心，但有时你也可以发明新事物来缩短时间线。因此，我们的团队经常思考：在当前轨迹下，这可能需要很长时间，但如果我们换个思路，或者发明一些新技术来加速实现愿景——比如帮助人们分享叠加计算于世界的体验的眼镜——那也很有趣。

That's so important. And you also don't know the time horizon for when the world will sufficiently change in the direction that your bet has been placed. I think about Google Glass, which was I don't even know when it was, like a decade ago that people were saying, 'Okay, we're going to be wearing glasses.' And Google had this Google Glass thing and it just seemed to vanish and disappear. And then I think about when Meta bought Oculus and we thought, okay, no, so this is now when everyone's going to be wearing VR headsets, and it's still kind of not really happened. So you could make a bet, you could be right, but you could be 15 years off. You have to be very careful in technology, I think, because things change slowly and then they change very quickly. And I think that was certainly the case with ChatGPT, right? People felt like, wow, this new technology came out of nowhere, but no, they've been working on it for what, a decade? I mean, consistently trying to make progress. And so I think, as long as you find something that you really believe can make a positive impact that people can use in a really compelling way, you're right that sometimes you have to be patient, but other times you can invent new things that bring that timeline in. And so I think a lot of times our team is thinking about like, okay, sure, on the current trajectory that could take a really long time, but what if we thought about it differently or invented some new piece of technology that could help us accelerate our vision to glasses that help people share these experiences that overlay computing on the world? And that's part of the fun too.

Meta 推出了雷朋眼镜，我听说过，还看过视频，感觉又在抄袭 Snapchat。这让你生气吗？

And Meta launched the Ray-Ban ones which I've heard about. I think I watched a video of it, which seem to be again copying Snapchat. Did that piss you off?

唯一让我沮丧的是，Luxottica 的人大概在 2017 年就找过我们。

The only thing that frustrated me was that the Luxottica guys had actually come to us probably back in 2017.

那是谁？

Who's that?

Luxottica 就是生产雷朋的公司。

Luxottica is the company that makes Ray-Ban.

他们在 2017 年找到我们，说：“哇，你们用 Spectacles 做的事太棒了，我们很喜欢，应该找个方式合作。”于是我们当然跟他们聊了我们正在做的一切。然后他们就沉默了，决定不跟我们合作，后来显然又跟 Meta 一起做了这件事。所以，我觉得最终就是这样。我认为，在经营企业和真正理解人们如何做生意方面，你能学到很多，这让你看清世界。对创业者来说，重要的是要知道，如果他们有一个真正有吸引力的想法和一项出色的服务，他们就能竞争，就能建立起真正有竞争力的企业，即使面对像 Luxottica（眼镜领域的巨头）或 Meta 这样的巨无霸看似不可能。我希望 Snapchat 能成为一个保持独立并与这些大公司竞争的榜样。

They had come to us in 2017 saying, 'Wow, it's so awesome what you guys are doing with Spectacles. We love it. We should find a way to partner.' So, we talked with them of course all about everything that we were doing. And then they went radio silent and decided not to partner with us and then obviously resurfaced doing this with Meta. So, I think ultimately as a is something like that. I think ultimately you know you learn a lot I think growing a business and really understanding how people do business and I think it shows you a lot about the world and I think it's so important for entrepreneurs to really know you know that if they've got a really compelling idea they've got an amazing service that they can compete that they can build really compelling businesses even though it seems impossible with such giant you know companies whether it's Luxottica which is the giant in the glasses space or or Meta um that I think Snapchat hopefully can be, you know, an example of a company that's been able to stay independent and compete with these really, really large businesses.

人工智能已经成为过去几年里最受热议的技术，这在很大程度上要归功于 ChatGPT。你如何看待人工智能的未来，它将如何从根本上改变人与人之间的联系？你有四个儿子，你一定在思考我们之前聊到的未来工作类型。有一种说法是，律师、会计师这类知识型工作将不复从前。甚至当你想到你的孩子将如何接受教育时——你最小的孩子才一岁——他们会去学校，还是去大语言模型那里？你是如何看待那个未来的？你害怕吗？

Artificial intelligence has become, I mean, the most talked about technology over the last couple of years as it's in many respects, thanks to ChatGPT. How are you thinking about the future of artificial intelligence in terms of how it's going to fundamentally change human connection? You've got four boys. You must be thinking about, you know, we talked about earlier the kind of jobs that are going to exist in the future. There's a big narrative saying that knowledge jobs like lawyer and accountant aren't going to be the same. In fact, even when you think about how your kids are going to be educated, your youngest child is one year old. Are they going to go to a school or are they going to go to a large language model? Like, how are you thinking about that future? Are you scared?

我真的很喜欢你跳到教育这个话题，因为我认为它非常强大。即使从我自己的经验来看，我在短时间内学习如此惊人的事物并将不同想法联系起来的能力，这真是一个用于发现和学习的不可思议的工具。所以，我迫不及待想让我们的孩子使用这类工具。我确信 Flynn 已经在某种程度上用了，但作为思考伙伴，AI 简直太强大了。所以，我认为特别是对创意人士来说，它应该是一个难以置信的强大工具，可以迭代、获得反馈、探索不同的想法和选项。甚至当我写东西卡住，觉得“嗯，这感觉不对”的时候，我就会说：“给我，你能给我 10 个选项吗？”它对头脑风暴、找到合适的词非常有帮助。

I really love that you jumped to education because I think it's so profoundly powerful. I mean, even in my own experience, my ability to learn such amazing things in such a short period of time and connect different ideas together, it's an incredible tool for discovery and for learning. And so, I can't wait for our kids to, you know, use these sorts of tools. I'm sure Flynn does to some degree, but as a thought partner, AI is just incredibly powerful. So, I do think especially for creative people, it should be an unbelievably powerful tool to be able to iterate, to get feedback, to explore different ideas, explore different options. Even when I'm writing something and I'm stuck on like, yeah, this just doesn't feel right. And I'm like, give me can you just give me 10 options? It's really helpful to brainstorm, to find that right word.

前几天我用 ChatGPT 或其他程序时就在想，我是不是会变得更不擅长写作，因为这东西现在替我做了。写作是一种极好的思考和理解的方式。那么，我是不是会变得更不擅长理解事物，因为我现在把逻辑思考的过程交给了电脑，而过去我必须自己深入思考我想表达的东西。我不知道。我认为显然人们继续写作会非常重要，而且我的初稿常常是在纸上写的，对吧？所以我认为那很重要，但对我来说更大的问题是，AI 是否能帮助人们更善于提问，因为最终，提出一个好问题并有人能帮你回答，是学习的关键。我认为，拥有一个好老师、好导师或好父母的最大福气，就是你能提出各种好问题，并得到答案。所以，如果我们现在处于一种真正关乎提出正确问题并反复练习的模式，如果这能训练我们更有效地提问，那将是一件大事。

I was wondering the other day when I was using ChatGPT or one of the programs a couple of days ago. I was wondering if I'm going to get worse at writing because this thing's now doing it for me. And writing is such a wonderful way to think and understand. So therefore, am I going to get worse at understanding things because I'm now deferring the process of thinking through something logically to this computer, whereas back in the day, I would have to really think deeply about what I was trying to say myself. I don't know. I think it's going to be really important that obviously people continue to write and oftentimes my first draft is on a piece of paper, right? So I do think that that is going to be important, but I think the bigger question for me is whether or not AI will help people get better at asking questions because ultimately asking a great question and having someone who can help answer it is the key to learning. I mean, that's I think, perhaps the greatest blessing of having a great teacher or a great mentor or a parent is that you get to ask all sorts of great questions, right? And get those answers. And so I think if we're now in a modality that really is all about asking the right question and doing that really repeatedly, if that can train us all to ask questions more effectively, that would be a very big deal.

有意思。我没想过这个。我不知道自己是不是在变得更好。我真的不知道。这是因为新技术总是有权衡。我们在社交媒体上看到的问题是，我们往往要等 15 年、20 年后，当它真正露出丑陋面目时才发现这种权衡，因为它起初很慢，然后突然加速。所以我想知道，你现在是否在拐角处或地平线上张望，思考我们一头扎进某个东西的权衡——就像社交媒体让某些事情变得更好、更快、更便宜、更容易，但带来了意想不到的后果。

Interesting. I've not thought about that. I don't know if I'm getting better. I don't really know. It's really because there's always a trade-off with new technology. And the problem as we saw with social media is we often don't discover the trade-off until 15 years, 20 years time when it's really reared its ugly head cuz it's slow then it's fast. So I'm trying to understand if you're looking around the corner or looking over the horizon now to think through the trade-off of us hurtling into something which just like social media made something better, faster, cheaper, easier but came with an unintended consequence.

我认为，总的来说，从历史上看技术的演变，这类基础性技术确实具有颠覆性，但最终会带来巨大的积极和有益影响。如果你看看像互联网这样的基础技术，或者像汽车、飞机这样的基础技术，我认为它们能真正改变世界的轨迹，最终让人们的生活变得更好。我认为关键将是我们如何共同应对这种变化，这需要深思熟虑。而且，从很多方面来说，这类技术变革的好消息是，它始终由人主导。我觉得人们几乎过度关注新技术的发展，而没有充分考虑人类采用曲线的实际情况。我们如何让这东西更容易使用、更容易理解、更容易融入人们的生活和工作流程？所以，我认为对于像 AI 这样的大型基础技术，很多工作将更多地围绕人类如何与之互动、解读它、理解它如何融入他们的生活。

I think generally speaking as we have looked historically at the evolution of technology these sorts of foundational technologies you're right that they've been disruptive but they ultimately have massively positive and beneficial effects. I mean I think if you look at a foundational technology like the internet, a foundational technology maybe like the motor vehicle, an airplane, these are the sorts of foundational technologies that I think can really change the trajectory of the world and ultimately make people's lives better. I think the key will be how do we navigate that change together and that'll be something that will be really important to do thoughtfully. And I think in many ways the good news about this sort of technological change is it's always governed by people. I mean folks I think almost overly fixate on new technology developments and don't think enough about what is actually the human adoption curve look like? How are we making this something that's easier to use, easier for people to understand, easier for people to integrate into their lives, into their workflows. And so, I think a lot of the work for a big foundational technology like AI is going to be much more around how humans are interacting with it, interpreting it, understanding how it fits in their lives.

如果你大部分时间都坐在电脑前，你可能会想听听这个。最近一些脑成像研究发现，手写能激活大脑中与创造力和批判性思维相关的更多区域。但在数字工作场所，很容易失去手写的认知优势。所以，我想向你介绍 GoodNotes，一个将两者结合的解决方案。我使用 GoodNotes 已经很久很久了，远在他们成为本播客赞助商之前。在过去几年的每一次录制中，我坐在这里，面前的 iPad 上用的就是它。

If you spend most days on your computer, you'll probably want to hear this. Some recent brain imaging studies have found that handwriting fires up more parts of the brain associated with creativity and critical thinking. But in digital workplaces, it's easy to lose the cognitive edge of handwriting. So, I want to introduce you to GoodNotes, a solution that combines both. I've used GoodNotes for a long, long time, well before they became a sponsor of this podcast. It's what I'm using every single time I'm sat here in the D of Sio on the iPad in front of me during every recording that I've pretty much ever done in the last couple of years.

它存放着我的研究笔记，我可以实时批注，也能在嘉宾说话时随手记下新想法。在录音室外，我在会议中用脑暴时用它标注设计概念，并与团队捕捉其他洞见。GoodNotes 就像我的第二大脑，是帮助我激发原创想法和更锐利思考的工具。他们内置的 AI 还能让我在这些想法上继续构建。对于协作工作，你的团队可以购买商业许可证，或者你自己购买也行，每年只需 9.99 英镑。他们还为我们的社区提供 30 天免费试用。只需访问 goodnotes.com/doac 即可开始。

It holds my research, which I can annotate in real time, as well as jot down new ideas as they come to me as the guest is talking. Outside of the studio, I use it to mark up design concepts in meetings whenever I'm brainstorming and to capture other insights with my team. GoodNotes is like my second brain. It's the tool that helps me to unlock original ideas and sharper thinking. And their built-in AI lets me build on those ideas, too. For collaborative work, your team can get a business license or get it yourself. It only costs £9.99 a year. And they're offering our community a 30-day free trial. Just head to goodnotes.com/doac to get started.

无论我在世界哪个角落，似乎每个人都在喝抹茶。而你喝的那杯抹茶，很有可能就是由我投资了七位数的一家公司生产的，这家公司也是本播客的赞助商，叫 Perfect Ted，因为它们是 Blank Street Coffee、Joe in the Juice 等众多咖啡馆全球使用的品牌。你不仅可以在咖啡馆买到 Perfect Ted 抹茶，现在还可以用我面前这些调味抹茶粉，在家几秒钟内以更便宜的价格制作。Perfect Ted 抹茶是仪式级品质，源自日本，口感顺滑，天然微甜，不像我以前尝过的那些苦涩的草味抹茶。Perfect Ted。如果你曾告诉自己不喜欢抹茶，那很可能是因为你还没试过我们的 Perfect Ted 抹茶。你可以在英国的 Tesco、Sainsbury's、Holland and Barrett、Waitrose，荷兰的 Albert Heijn，美国的亚马逊找到 Perfect Ted 抹茶，或者访问 perfectted.com 选购全系列产品，使用优惠码 Steven40 首单可享 40% 折扣。

No matter where I am in the world, it seems like everyone is drinking matcha. And there's a good chance that that matcha you're drinking is made by a company that I've invested more than seven figures in who are a sponsor of this podcast called Perfect Ted because they're the brand used globally by cafes like Blank Street Coffee and Joe in the Juice and many, many more. Not only can you get Perfect Ted Matcha in cafes, but you can now also make it at home much cheaper in seconds using our flavored matcha powders that I have here in front of me. Perfect Ted Matcha is ceremonial grade and sourced from Japan. It is smooth. It is naturally sweet, not like those bitter grassy matchas that I tried before. Perfect Ted. And if you are one of those people that have told yourself you don't like matcha, it's probably because you haven't tried our Perfect Ted Matcha. And you can find Perfect Ted Matcha in the UK in Tesco, Sainsbury's, Holland and Barrett and in Waitrose or Albert Heijn if you're in the Netherlands and on Amazon in the USA or get the full range online at perfectted.com where you can get 40% off your first order with code Steven40.

从公司生命周期来看，Snapchat 现在处于什么季节？你知道，你们经历过创业阶段，在父亲卧室里那种拼劲十足、快速成长的时期。然后搬进了蓝色办公室，经历了爆发式增长，完成了 IPO。那么到 2025 年的今天，Snapchat 处于什么季节？如果要用诗意的方式描述当前业务的心理状态，你会怎么总结？

What season is Snapchat in in terms of its company's life? You know, like you were in that startup phase, you're in your dad's bedroom phase where you're scrappy and you're growing quickly. Then you went to the blue office, you know, the meteoric growth, you had the IPO. What season is Snapchat in as we sit here today in 2025? How would you like to summarize it if you had to poetically describe the psychology of the business now?

从某些方面来说，感觉我们正从长达两年的寒冬步入早春。过去两年非常艰难，我们不得不重建整个广告平台，改变市场策略，真正帮助广告主取得更大成功，同时也要为创作者做很多类似的工作。我们看到了巨大的增长，上个季度创作者发帖量同比增长了大约 40%，Snapchat 上每月有 10 亿条公开帖子。这也是我们大力投资的领域。但过去两年确实充满挑战。所以，我几乎会说，也许是非常非常早的春天，你开始看到一些绿芽，霜冻正在融化。

I mean, in some ways, it feels like we're emerging from like a two-year winter into an early spring. The last two years have been really challenging. We had to rebuild our entire ad platform, change the way that we go to market, you know, really help advertisers find more success and at the same time do a lot of that for creators as well. We've seen a tremendous growth in terms of, you know, I think last quarter the creators posting grew something like 40% year-over-year. There was a billion public posts a month on Snapchat. And that's an area we've invested in a lot as well. But it's been a very challenging last two years. So, I would almost say maybe like very very early spring you're starting to see uh you know some some green shoots but you know um and the frost is melting.

自从当年和马克·扎克伯格那次谈话之后，你收到过收购要约吗？现在还有人试图收购这家公司吗？

Have you had any acquisition offers since that conversation with Mark Zuckerberg once upon a time? Do people still try and buy the company like these days?

没有。考虑到公司的投票结构，鲍比和我持有投票权股票，而非投票权股票是公开交易的。一般来说，有时人们会说：“嘿，如果你们哪天想退休什么的，记得考虑我们。”但就正式提出收购要约而言，鉴于我们的公司结构，这没什么意义。

No. I think given the voting structure of the company, you know, Bobby and I have voting stock and non-voting stock is what's publicly traded. I think generally, you know, sometimes people will say, "Hey, if you guys ever, you know, want to retire or something, keep us in mind." But I think in terms of kicking an offer over the sill or something that doesn't make a ton of sense given our company structure.

我在阅读你管理 Snapchat 的方式时，另一个让我钦佩的是设立“议事圈”这个想法。哦，太棒了。哇。好吧。你能给我讲讲这个吗？因为我可能想借鉴一下。我不该这么说。请尽管用。好的。

Another thing that I admired when I was reading about the way you run Snapchat is this idea of having a council. Oh, amazing. Wow. Okay. Can you tell me about this because I might want to steal. I shouldn't. Please take it. Okay. Good.

议事圈是我从我小时候上的学校——十字路口艺术与科学学校——偷来的，那是一所非常独特的学校。他们在十字路口学校就有议事圈。基本上从中学开始，你会和大约 10 到 12 个同学聚在一起，坐成一个圆圈，有三条规则：发自内心地说话，发自内心地倾听，以及保持自发。这本质上是一种轮流讲故事的方式，大家围着圆圈轮流发言，内容可以很简单，比如周末过得怎么样，或者上周的“玫瑰、花蕾和刺”（即好事、期待的事和难事）。它创造了一个机会，让人们互相倾听，因为你们轮流发言，同时也能以非常不同的方式了解彼此。我在中学时就看到了它的力量。中学对我来说是一段艰难的时期，但在议事圈里，我能够以一种深思熟虑的、可能更深入的方式与同学建立联系，这是你在办公室饮水机旁做不到的。所以，当我们最终来到洛杉矶，住在蓝色房子里时，我们面临的一个重大决定是是否要把公司从洛杉矶搬到湾区。压力很大，因为所有科技人才都在湾区，对你们来说，为了人才搬到那里非常重要。于是我们召集团队，举行了第一次议事圈，每个人围坐一圈分享想法：我们应不应该留在洛杉矶？他们对此感觉如何？他们怎么想？那次谈话的结果非常清晰，我们甚至不需要做决定。很明显，我们相信洛杉矶，想留在洛杉矶，团队认为这对我们的业务、我们的身份、甚至我们招聘人才的方式都非常重要，因为人们必须真正承诺搬到洛杉矶才能成为公司的一员。那是我们第一次在 Snap 使用议事圈，我看到了它在工作环境中的有效性。后来业务变得更大，与新人或公司不同部门的人建立联系变得更加重要，议事圈就成了一个非常有用的工具。所以在 Snap，我们有议事圈引导师，他们的工作就是主持这些议事圈。现在很多公司对此感兴趣，我们也帮助培训其他公司，或者为他们提供会议，帮助他们凝聚团队成员。

Council is something that I stole from the school that I went to growing up called Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, which is quite a unique school. And one of the things that they have at Crossroads is a council. And you know, basically starting in middle school, you get together with a group of let's call it 10 or 12 classmates and you sit in a circle and there are three rules. It's you know, speak from the heart, listen from the heart and be spontaneous. And it's essentially turn-based storytelling where you go around the circle and you know it can be anything as simple as like how was your weekend or you know what's a rose bud and a thorn from you know the last week and it really creates an opportunity for people to listen to one another because you're taking turns going around the circle but also you get to know people in a very very different way. I saw how powerful it was in middle school. Middle school is a tough time was a tough time for me, but in council I was able to connect with my classmates in a really thoughtful and maybe deeper way that you wouldn't just kind of around the water cooler or whatever at the office. And so for us ultimately when we came to LA and we were in the blue house, one of the big decisions we were confronting at the time was whether or not we should move the company from LA to the Bay Area. And there was a lot of pressure, you know, hey, all the tech talent is in the Bay Area. It's really important for you guys to be up there for the talent. And so we just got our team together and had our first council and everyone went around the circle and shared their thoughts. Should we stay in LA or not? How did they feel about that? What did they think? And what was so clear coming out of that conversation we didn't even need to make a decision. It was just obvious that we believed in LA and wanted to be in LA and the team thought it was actually something really important to our business, to our identity, to actually the way that we hired talent because people had to really commit to moving to LA to be a part of the company. So that was the first time we used council at Snap and I saw how effective it was in the workplace setting. Then as the business got a lot bigger and it became much more important to connect with people who were new to the company or worked in a different area of the company, council became just a really useful tool for doing that. And so at Snap we have council facilitators whose job is to run these councils and now many more companies are interested in doing this and we also help train companies or offer sessions for other companies to help bring their team members together.

它的本质是什么？就是让某个部门的一个小团队围坐在桌子旁，让每个人都发自内心地说话、发自内心地倾听，并且保持自发。

What is the essence of it? It's just get a small team in a certain department around a table and let everybody speak from the heart, listen from the heart and be spontaneous.

而且通常不是围坐在桌子旁，而是坐在地板上围成一个圈，这我认为有助于营造那种感觉。你知道，当你围坐成一圈时，每个人的位置都是平等的，我认为这非常重要。正如你提到的，公司里有很多层级。我觉得在公司里，当每个人都看到那个圈里的座位时，感觉真的很不一样。每个人的声音都很重要，每个人的声音都会被听到。无论是说‘哇，那个周末真难熬’，还是‘其实我过得很棒，和妻子出去吃了晚餐，太棒了’。我认为人们会找到新的连接点，否则可能不会发现这些。

And it's usually not sitting around a table. It's usually sitting on the floor in a circle, which again I think helps create that feeling. You know, when you're sitting in a circle, everyone is situated equally, which I think is a really important thing. As you mentioned, companies have a lot of hierarchy. I think it feels really different in a company when everyone sees that seat around a circle. And everyone's voice is important and everyone's voice is heard. You know, whether it's just saying, 'Wow, I you know, that was a really tough weekend' or 'Actually I had an amazing time. I went out to dinner with my wife. It was fabulous.' And I think people find new points of connection that they maybe wouldn't have found otherwise without it.

有意思。作为领导者，在那些情况下，你怎么知道是该听从团队还是不该听从团队？因为对创始人来说，这听起来风险很大——我不是说你会这样做——但靠共识来运营公司，也就是确保每个人都同意某件事。我们在后疫情时代也看到了这一点，围绕远程工作的争论中，一些公司最初允许所有人远程，后来很多公司又要求回到办公室。如果你问团队，他们可能不会都说‘我们回办公室吧’，但作为 CEO，你必须做出决定。目前 Snap 的远程政策是什么？我们平均每周在办公室超过四天。这是政策规定还是实际发生的情况？

Interesting. As a leader, how do you know in those situations whether to listen to your team or not to listen to your team? Because it sounds quite risky for a founder, I'm not saying this is what you do, but for a founder to run their company on consensus, i.e. making sure everybody agrees on something. And we're actually seeing this in the post-pandemic world with this whole remote work debate where some companies originally were okay everybody's going to be remote and then it went back to a lot of companies are like no come back into the office. I mean if you ask a team they're probably not going to all say let's run back to the office but as a CEO you have to make a call. And what is the remote policy with Snap at the moment? We are more than four days a week in the office on average. Is that by policy or is that just what's happening?

这是政策规定，也是实际发生的情况。

That is by policy and also what's happening.

好的。你在这件事上动摇过吗？疫情期间有没有某个时刻，你觉得自己再也不会回办公室了？

Okay. And did you ever move on that? Was there ever a moment in the pandemic where you thought during the pandemic I thought I would never go back to the office.

我当时想，进入疫情前，我总是在孩子醒来前起床，在他们睡着后才回家。有那么一刻，我心想：我到底在干什么？我几乎见不到孩子。我该怎么办？然后疫情来了，就像奇迹一样。我心想：天哪，我每天都能见到孩子了。我醒来就能看到他们。而且我实行开放政策，如果我在家办公，孩子们随时可以进来。只有一次出了问题，一个儿子全裸着拿着两块奥利奥走进来，这促使我考虑回办公室。但我真的认为对孩子来说，如果我在家，我不应该把自己关在办公室里。你可以随时进来，带着任何东西，我会帮你。有时这意味着他们在会议中长时间坐在我腿上。但无论如何，疫情期间有一段时间，我心想：我为什么要回办公室？我和家人在一起。但我认为，疫情期间我们能够高效远程协作的那种激情和团队合作，之所以成为可能，是因为我们之前有很长时间的面对面合作。我们建立了信任，建立了默契，我们多次共同制定长期路线图，这些都是在面对面时产生的，这支撑了公司度过那段时期。我逐渐意识到文化开始瓦解。当人们独自远程、分散在世界各地时，他们学习文化的速度会变慢。我真的很担心如果我们不在一起，我们持续创新的能力——这对我们的业务至关重要——会受到影响。所以最终，尤其是在奥利奥事件之后，我们认为回办公室非常重要。

I was like, you know, going into the pandemic, I was waking up before our kids woke up. I was getting home after they were asleep. There was a moment I was like, what am I doing with my life? I'm never seeing our kids. What am I going to do? And the pandemic happened and it was like a miracle. I'm like, oh my god, I get to see our kids every single day. I get to wake up and see our kids. And I have an open door policy. If I'm working from home in my home office, our kids can come in anytime. It was only a problem once when one of our boys came in fully nude with two Oreos, which actually prompted me to consider going back to the office. But I really thought it was important for our kids that, hey, if I'm at home, I'm not like shut away in my office. You can come in anytime, you know, with anything and I'll help you out. Sometimes it meant they spent a lot of time sitting on my lap in meetings. But in any case, there was a period of time in the pandemic where I was like, why would I ever go back to the office? I'm here with my family. But I think that the adrenaline and the teamwork that happened during the pandemic when we were all able to work together really effectively remotely was only possible because we had been working together physically for such a long period of time. We had all of that trust built. We had all that shorthand built. We had that many times long roadmaps of ideas we had come up with to get physically together and that really sustained the company through that period of time. And it became clear to me that the culture was starting to fray. People don't learn the culture as quickly when they're alone and remote, separated all around the world. And I was really worried about our ability to consistently be creative, which is so important to our business, if we weren't physically together. So ultimately, especially after that Oreo incident, we thought it was pretty important to get back to the office.

这个决定反响如何？

How was that received?

我们尝试做的一件事是给团队成员一个相当长的缓冲期。我们很早就做出了决定，然后给了团队成员相当长的时间。我认为对于有特殊情况的人，大概是六到九个月。我们会批准例外，随着时间的推移，这让人们能够调整自己的生活。有时他们在别处租了或买了房子，需要搬回我们的一个中心办公室。所以我们想给人们足够的灵活性来做到这一点，而不是让他们某天早上醒来就说‘回办公室’。那样不太体贴。

One of the things that we tried to do that helped team members is just give a pretty long runway. We made that decision pretty early on and then gave team members quite an extended period of time. I think it was like six or nine months for folks who had extenuating circumstances. We would grant exceptions and over time that allowed people to adapt their lives. Sometimes they'd rented a house or bought a house somewhere else and needed to move back to one of our hub office locations. And so, we wanted to give people enough flexibility to do that, not just have them wake up one morning and say, 'Come back to the office.' That's not super thoughtful.

对于现在正在听我们对话的创业者，他们处于旅程的最初阶段，思考着各种各样的事情和问题，产品不奏效，客户在抱怨。当你思考作为创业者成功的、可跨行业迁移的原则时，你心中是否已经定义了那些在任何努力中成功的原则？我们已经谈了一些，比如文化和招聘。你还有什么智慧心得，认为像我这样的创业者应该作为成功的基本原则来深思？

For any entrepreneurs that are out there now listening to our conversation and they're at the very beginning of their journey and they are thinking about so many different things, so many different problems, their products aren't working, their customers are complaining. When you think about the principles of being successful as an entrepreneur that are transferable across all industries, have you defined what those principles are in your mind to be successful in any endeavor? We talked about some of them already. We said about culture, we said about hiring. Is there anything else that you've come to learn in your wisdom that entrepreneurs like me should be thinking a lot about as fundamental principles of success?

对我来说，最大的区别在于你在乎的程度。我日复一日地见到创业者和做生意的人，你在乎你的业务、你的团队、你的客户吗？我认为那些真正成功的创业者就是这样。他们愿意多走一步，而这种在乎可以来自不同的地方，对吧？可以是人们想对世界产生的影响，可以是人们真正想发明的东西，可以是他们对客户的爱以及看到客户脸上的笑容。但人们对自己所做之事的在乎程度，在我看来是成功的一个很大预测因素，甚至可能是最重要的预测因素。

To me, it seems like the biggest differentiator is how much you care. I mean that just seems day in and day out as I meet entrepreneurs and people working on businesses. How much do you care about your business, your team, your customer? And those are the entrepreneurs I think that are really successful. They go that extra mile and that care can come from different places, right? It can be about the impact that people want to make in the world. It can be about something that people really want to invent. It can be their love of their customers and seeing the smile on their customers' faces. But how much people care about what they do seems to me to be quite a large predictor, if not the predictor of success.

会不会在乎得太多？

Can you care too much?

我不这么认为。

I don't think so.

不过那么在乎听起来压力很大。我记得你在书里谈到……

Sounds stressful though caring that much. I thought in your book you talk about...

别谈我的书。

Don't talk about my book.

我不是不同意，我只是在唱反调。你的书里有一点我很喜欢，你说‘嘿，人们对压力的理解是错误的。’我觉得这非常有力。我希望更多人能这样谈论它，因为我觉得……总之，你写了它，你甚至不需要……

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just playing devil's advocate. That's one of the things I loved about your book is you said, 'Hey, people are thinking about stress wrong.' Which I thought was really powerful. Like I wish more people talked about it that way because I think you know... Anyways, you wrote it. You don't even need to.

不，但这是个好问题。我本来想问你的是，作为你，压力很大，你有没有管理压力的技巧，尤其是经营一家上市公司？我只是觉得这很疯狂。

No, but it's a good point. Something I was going to ask you about is the stress of being you and do you have techniques to manage that stress, especially running a public company? I just think it's psychotic.

嗯，我觉得好笑的是——这是我最近几天试用戒指时发现的一个搞笑结果。我终于攒够了天数，它给了我一个压力分数之类的，而我白天根本不觉得有压力，这和我对工作的感受非常一致。我不觉得工作有多大压力。我觉得很多事都变得非常平常了，因为你知道，多年来我们发展了业务，遇到了各种疯狂的情况，到现在这已经是日常了。

Well, what I thought was hilarious. So, this has been one of my hilarious findings from my ring over the last couple of days trying it out. I finally had enough days that it like gave me a stress score or whatever, and I'm just not stressed during the day, which really lines up with like how I experience work. I don't find work to be very stressful. I think a lot of it has become very normal because you know over the years we've grown our business and encountered all sorts of wild situations that at this point it's just a daily normal thing.

嗯，你会庆祝吗？当你有职业上的高光时刻，比如推出一个新功能并且反响很好，你会非常开心吗？

Um, do you celebrate? Do you get really happy when you have professional moments where I don't know, you launch a new feature and it's well received. Do you get really happy?

不会，这是我需要改进的地方，尤其是庆祝团队成就。比如，你知道，多给一些真正积极的反馈。这不是我特别擅长的事，尤其是在以结果为导向的目标上。当我看到一个好主意，一个很棒的新想法时，我会非常开心和兴奋。我喜欢那样。但是，你知道，对我来说，一些大的公司里程碑，比如社区的增长，很酷。前几天我和一个人聊天，他们说：“你们应该在有十亿用户的时候开个派对。”我说：“天哪，真是个好主意。”就像那样。我怎么没想到呢？嗯，所以我觉得我们应该庆祝这类事情。

No, it's something that I need to work on, especially celebrating our team as well. Like I, you know, just providing more of that really positive feedback. That's not something I do a ton, especially around outcome focused goals. When I see a great idea, if I see a great new idea, then I get really happy and excited. I love it. But, you know, to me, uh, you know, some of these big corporate milestones, like the growth of the community is cool. I was talking to someone the other day. They were like, "You should throw a party when you guys reach a billion people." I was like, "Oh my god, what a great idea." Like that. Why didn't I think of it? Um, so I think we should celebrate things like that.

我在想这是否有一种防御成分，因为我最近和很多创始人聊过，他们告诉我，随着时间的推移和成熟，他们几乎在混乱中培养出了一种平静，情绪不会大起大落。他们中有些人向我论证，如果你因为外部事件而情绪高涨，那么当坏事发生时，你就不可能不情绪低落。所以创始人几乎变得有些冷漠。这对我来说会是个大问题，因为创造产品很大程度上是关于与人连接、倾听他们并与之共情。所以我绝对不能在任何情况下切断我的情绪反应。

I wonder if there's an element of defense to this because I was speaking to a lot of founders recently and they were telling me how they've over time and with maturity, they almost just developed this calm within all the chaos where they're not moved up or down. And some of them make the case to me that if you are moved up by something that happens externally, it's impossible therefore not to be moved down when something bad happens externally. So founders develop this almost like coldness to them. That would be a real problem for me because so much of creating products is about connecting with people and listening to people and being able to empathize with them. So like I absolutely under no circumstances can cut off my emotional response.

我觉得，你知道，我选择那些让我真正开心的事，比如和孩子们在一起，或者哈特前几天数学考得很好，我说：“太棒了。”你懂我的意思吗？我对此超级兴奋。但我想，就你的观点而言，我确实后悔没有庆祝一些伟大的时刻。你知道，有时候作为创业者，当一切都在上升、向右、进展顺利时，你总是想：“会出什么问题？”你知道，可能出什么问题？所以你不会想着庆祝那个伟大时刻，因为你想着第二天，或者你可以做些什么不同的事来确保业务持续增长。我认为打破那种“会出什么问题”的思维很重要，实际上它很有帮助。那种偏执可能很有用。但庆祝那些时刻很重要。所以这是我们聊天的一个好收获。

I think, you know, I pick the things or, I you know, the things that make me feel really happy are things like being with our children or something or, you know, Hart did really well on his math test the other day and I was like, "Awesome." You know what I mean? I got super excited about that. But I think to your point, one of the things I do regret at some point is not celebrating some of those great moments. I think, you know, sometimes as an entrepreneur when everything is like going up to up and to the right and going super well, you're always like, "What's going to go wrong?" You know, what could go wrong? And so you don't think about celebrating that great moment because you're thinking about, you know, the next day or or what you could be doing differently to make sure the business can keep growing. And I think breaking out of that like, you know, what could go wrong, which actually is quite helpful. That paranoia is probably pretty helpful. But celebrate those moments is important. So that's a good takeaway from our chat.

对你来说，有没有最艰难的一天？作为 Snapchat 的 CEO，你最具挑战性的一天是什么？

Was there a hardest day for you? A day when you were challenged the most as the CEO of Snapchat that comes to mind when I say that?

我认为一些最艰难、最痛苦的日子是当我们不得不改变公司结构时，比如裁员。我觉得对团队成员有巨大的责任感，所以当我们让他们失望时，那些日子是最糟糕的。当然，在很多情况下，对他们来说更糟，但作为领导者，当我们不得不做出那样的决定时，我感到的羞耻感真的很糟糕。

I think some of the hardest days, the painful days have been when we've had to make changes to our company structure, things like layoffs. I mean I feel like just a huge sense of responsibility to our team members and so when we let them down like that, you know that's those days are the worst. I mean that's you know of course in many cases worse for them and I you know but as a leader the sense of shame I feel when we have to make a decision like that that's you know that's sucks.

你是否有过冒名顶替综合征？因为我想，你推出一个社交媒体通讯应用的概率，就像我们之前说的，十亿分之一之类的，我不知道，这太惊人了。我猜不是十亿，因为并没有十亿个这样的应用，但概率确实对你很不利。所以当它发生并爆发，成为全球性的大应用时，难道没有冒名顶替的感觉吗？

Do you ever have imposter syndrome because I think about the odds of you the odds of launching a social media communications application as we said earlier like a billion in one or something great I don't know this it's staggering and I guess it's not a billion there's not been a billion of them but the odds are just against you. So when that happens and it explodes and it becomes this major global app, is there not any feelings of imposter syndrome?

我不喜欢“冒名顶替综合征”这个词，因为它听起来不太好。而且我认为冒名顶替综合征实际上是一件好事，因为它意味着你觉得还有更多东西要学，对吧？所以对我来说，当我面对任何情况、任何会议或我们在世界上做的任何事情时，我总是想：我还能在这里学到什么？显然，这是一个真正倾听、学习、弄清楚如何成长的机会。所以我从不想觉得“哦，我搞定了”。我总是想：我还能学到什么？我能做些什么不同的事？我如何成长？我认为有时我们称之为冒名顶替综合征，这并没有太大帮助。我们应该告诉人们：嘿，如果你觉得自己还有很多要学，那是好事。如果你觉得经营一家大公司并不完全正常，那也是好事。也许对不同想法或做事方式保持开放是件好事。

I don't like the word imposter syndrome because it doesn't sound very nice. And I think imposter syndrome is actually a good thing in the sense that it means that you feel like there's more to learn, right? And so like for me, you know, as I approach any situation or, you know, any meeting or, you know, anything that we're trying to do out in the world, I'm always trying to think like what else could I learn here? I obviously, you know, this is an opportunity for me to really listen to learn to figure out how I can grow. And so like I never want to feel like, oh, I you know, I've got this. I always want to feel like what else could I learn? What could I be doing differently? You know, how could I grow? And I think sometimes when we call it imposter syndrome, that's not super helpful. I think we should be telling people, hey, it's a good thing if you feel like you've got more to learn. It's a good thing if you feel like, hey, maybe this isn't totally normal to be running a big company, right? Maybe it's a good thing to stay open to different ideas or ways of doing things.

如果今天 Snapchat 消失了，Evan 最终会做什么？

If Snapchat goes away today, what does Evan end up doing?

创办一家新公司。我可能会继续我们作为家庭所做的很多回馈工作。我的意思是，我认为整个 Snap 经历中最大的福气就是能够回馈。嗯，你知道，我们作为家庭做了很多。我们通过 Snap 和 Snap 基金会做了很多。对我来说，那将是我余生希望讲述的故事。

Starting a new company. I would probably continue a lot of the work that we've been doing as a family to give back. I mean, I think that's been like the greatest blessing of this whole SNAP experience is being able to give back. Um, you know, we've done a lot as a family. We've done a lot with SNAP and the Snap Foundation. And like that to me is like, you know, hopefully the rest of my life is that story.

你不想再创办一家科技公司吗？

You wouldn't want to start another tech company?

一百万年也不会。

Never in a million years.

真的吗？没机会？

Really? No chance.

没机会。为什么？嗯，太难了。太难了。我告诉过你这是疯狂的。我本可以在你开始时就告诉你。你应该问我的。

No chance. Why? Um, it's way too hard. Way too hard. I told you it was psychotic. I could have told you that when you started it. You should have asked me.

每当我遇到连续创业者，我都会想：“什么？”你说很难是什么意思？我问过这个问题。我停顿了一下，因为我今天早上在 Instagram 和 Snap 上发了帖子，说这有多难，以及没人谈论这个。所以当你作为创始人经历困难时，你会照镜子，觉得问题出在自己身上。你懂我的意思吗？你会想：“哦，这证明我不够格。”但真的，我是说，你为什么这么说？因为听起来你有创伤后应激障碍。

Whenever I meet a serial entrepreneur, I'm like, "What?" What when you say it's hard? I asked this question. I paused on it because I actually posted about this on my Instagram and my Snap this morning about how hard it is and how nobody talks about that. And so when you experience the hardship as a founder, you kind of look in the mirror and think it's you. Do you know what I mean? You think, "Oh, this is evidence of my inadequacy." But it really I mean, why do you say that? Because it sounds like you have PTSD.

不，我觉得更像是你说的那种——如何把压力转化为积极的东西，对吧？

No, it's more I think like the hard kind of to your point about how do you turn stress into something positive, right?

困难是件好事，因为让这件事既有趣又充满挑战的，正是你必须改变和成长的速度。那才是真正难以置信的困难，对吧？你知道，四个人的公司和一百人的公司完全不同。当我们支持一百万人时的业务，和支持八亿五千万用户时的业务也不一样。在这段时间里必须改变那么多、成长那么多，那才是困难所在。因为你必须强迫自己改变和成长，思考如何适应，成为公司六个月后需要的那个人——那必然和今天的我不同。

The hard is a good thing in the sense that like what makes it so fun but also so challenging is the rate at which you have to change and grow. Like that is what has been so unbelievably hard, right? That you know the business at four people is really different than the business at 100 people. The business when we're supporting a million people is different than the business supporting 850 million people using our service. And to have to change so much over that period of time, to have to grow so much over that period of time, like that's what's hard. Like, because you just have to force yourself to change and grow and think about what you you know, how do I how do I need to adapt to to be the the person that our business needs six months from now, which inevitably will be different than than who I am today.

那么，你觉得你能一辈子经营 Snap 吗？

So, do you think you could run Snap for the rest of your life?

那当然是一种荣幸。我是说，我很乐意。也许你会离开 Snap，然后觉得无聊，再创办一家新公司。谁知道呢？

I would certainly be an honor. I mean, I'd love that. Maybe you'd leave Snap and then you'd get bored and then you'd start some new company. Who knows?

我们播客有一个结束传统，上一位嘉宾会给下一位嘉宾留一个问题，不知道留给谁。留给你的这个问题很有意思。感觉我可能以前问过，但你必须尽力回答。你曾经克服过的最困难的事情是什么？

And we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you interesting. Feel like I may have asked this before, but you're going to have to do your very best. What is the hardest thing you ever had to overcome?

是的，我觉得最困难的事情——也许这正好承接我们刚才聊的——我克服过的最困难的事情就是我自己，对吧？我一直在每个阶段强迫自己成长、改变、变得不同、进化，以满足我们业务、社区或家庭的需求。我认为，那就是与自己的斗争，每天成为更好的自己。那确实很难。

Yeah, I think that the hardest thing, maybe this is a good segue from what we were just talking about. The hardest thing I've ever had to overcome is myself, right? I've constantly had to force myself at every stage to grow and change and be different and evolve to meet the needs of our business and our community or my family. And I think, you know, that that's the that's the the battle with yourself to become a better version of yourself every day. That that that's a tough one.

自我意识。你刚才说的时候我就在想，作为 CEO 的自我意识，以及如何培养它——因为当有那么多事情依赖你的觉察时，这非常重要。所以我不知道你作为领导者如何看待自我意识，以及是否有任何系统帮助你培养这种意识，并且是有效的。

Self-awareness. I was thinking about that as you were just saying that about the idea of self-awareness as a CEO and how you develop that because it's such an important thing when there's so much counting on you being aware. So I don't know how you think about self-awareness as a leader and if there's any system you've had to cultivate that awareness that's been productive.

我很高兴你提到这个。我认为这非常具有挑战性，而且随着业务增长和作为领导者的成长，它会变得越来越难，因为你变得更忙了。所以更难去真正调频、与人建立联系，以你需要的方式理解他们的真实感受或想法，并建立信任关系，让他们觉得可以告诉你这些。随着公司壮大，人们会非常专注于筛选你接收的信息。所以你不断收到很多报告，这些报告把领导者和他们的团队描绘得非常正面。你必须主动打破这种局面，因为我认为组织会默认这样做。突然间，他们只会确保你收到的信息是让他们看起来很好的，因为他们想成功。这完全可以理解。但我认为你必须做很多工作来打破它，深入组织内部，直接与人交谈。我认为没有替代品。我希望有，但真的没有比四处走动和人聊天更好的方法了。我发现这在我们的组织中是获取优质信息非常快的一种不可思议的方式。然后你作为 CEO 会看到，有人在准备演示文稿，他们会说：“哦，这个演示文稿大概六周后能到你手上。”但当然，我现在就可以给你看一点。因为作为 CEO，日历安排、业务评审之类的事情，所有信息最终都会以比公司初期更慢的方式流动。所以，我认为花时间与人建立联系、形成信任关系非常重要。主动打破围绕你形成的信息系统——如果你不刻意去获取其他信息来源，那真的很关键。然后，我认为同理心和直觉也很有帮助，因为有时人们不愿意说出真实感受，只有当你注意到他们眼神或情绪中的某些东西时，你才会问：“那是你真实的感受吗？我们是不是应该换个方式做？”我认为真正理解他人感受、为他们创造分享观点的空间，这非常非常有价值。

I love that you said that. I think um it's so challenging and it becomes harder and harder I think as the business grows and you grow as a leader a because you become busier. So it's harder to tune in and really connect with people right in the way that you really need to to understand how they really feel or what they're thinking and to create a trusted relationship so they feel like they can tell that to you. As the company grows, you know, I think people become very focused on curating the information that you're receiving. So you're constantly getting a lot of reporting that you know shows leaders and their teams in a very positive light. And so you have to think about proactively breaking that because that will be the default that the organization I think will do. All of a sudden they will just try to make sure you're receiving information, right? That that shows them in a in a great light because they want to be successful. It makes perfect sense. But I think you have to really do a lot of work to break that and to get out deeper in the organization and just talk to people and I think there's no substitute. I wish there was, but there's really no substitute to just walking around and talking to people. And I found that that's an unbelievable way in our organization to just get great information really quickly. And then you see as a CEO, someone's working on a presentation, they're like, "Oh, yeah, this presentation will get to you in like six weeks, you know." Um, but yeah, sure. I can show you a little bit bit of it right now. You know, because the way that uh you know, calendars work as a a as a CEO and business reviews work and that sort of thing, all this sort of information, I think, you know, ends up flowing in a way that's just slower than it than it did in the in the beginning of the company. So, I think, you know, really taking the time to connect with people and form those trusted relationships. Uh being really proactive about breaking the information system that will form around you, right, if you're not more deliberate about going and getting other sources of information. That's that's really important. And then you know I think just you know that empathy and intuition really helps because sometimes people feel uncomfortable saying how they really feel and it's only because you know you just notice something in their eye or their affect or whatever it is that you're like is that you know is that really how you feel you know we should or should we really be doing this differently and I think you know the ability to really understand how how people feel and create a space for them to actually share their perspective it just you know is so so valuable.

你有没有发现自己对团队有点不耐烦？因为我经常这样。我总是想让事情进展更快。也许作为组织领导者，你有一种特权，可以打破一切来推动事情，但办公室里的实习生可能觉得他们没有那个权限。但作为领导者，紧迫感、速度——你提到要提高组织的学习速度。你作为领导者会感到不耐烦吗？

Do you ever find yourself feeling a little bit impatient with your team? Cuz I get this a lot. I'm always trying to make things move faster. And I think maybe there's a point of privilege where as the leader of an organization, you know, you can just break everything to make things happen, but maybe the intern in the office doesn't feel like they've got that permission, but urgency as a leader, speed. You talked about increasing the learning speed of the organization. Do you ever feel impatient as a leader?

我极其不耐烦。我觉得这刻在我的 DNA 里。我父亲就受不了等待——如果你想惩罚他，就让他排队，他会暴跳如雷。对他来说，排队的念头就会让他发疯，因为他是一个非常不耐烦的人。我想我也有点那种不耐烦。

I'm extraordinarily impatient. Like, and I think it's in my DNA. I mean like my father would not like the idea of waiting like if you want to just like punish my father you put him in a line for anything like he will go ballistic like it's just like he the thought of waiting in a line for him would just drive him crazy because he's a very impatient person. I think I have some of that some of that impatience.

你知道，如果我问你的团队成员，埃文作为领导者是什么样的，你觉得他们会怎么说？

You know if I asked your team members what's Evan like as a leader what do you think they'd say?

哦，天哪。嗯，我不知道。他们可能都有不同的看法，因为我真的试图通过展现自己不同的侧面来激发团队成员的最佳状态。我对每个人不是同样的领导方式——那会很糟糕。我认为领导力很大程度上在于为每个人找到最能激发他们独特能力的沟通风格。所以，我与我们的 CEO Derek 互动的方式，不同于与首席品牌官 Betsy 互动的方式，也不同于与设计团队互动的方式。这很重要。

Oh my goodness. Um I don't know. They might all have different perspectives because I really try to like bring out the best in our team members by showing different parts of myself. I'm not the same leader to every individual. That would be terrible. Uh I think so much of being a leader is trying to figure out for each individual and each person what sort of communication style will bring out the best in them and their unique abilities. So, you know, they engage the the way I engage with our CEO, Derek, is different than the way I engage with Betsy, who's our chief brand officer, is different than the way I engage with our our design team. And that that's important.

如果我问他们你擅长什么，他们会怎么说？

If I asked them what you're good at, what would they say?

嗯，我觉得我擅长几件事。

Um, I think I'm good at a at a couple things.

我觉得自己很擅长真正理解人的需求和愿望，并想办法将其反映到我们的产品中。很多时候，我喜欢和团队进行一种竞赛——工程人员经常喜欢跑 A/B 测试，对吧？他们会跑四个 A/B 测试，然后选出表现最好的那个，比如针对一段文本字符串。如果要在应用里放一段文字，他们会写四个不同的版本。而我很喜欢做的事情是，看看我能不能写出那个不用跑测试就能赢的版本。那种对人们会如何反应的直觉，什么对他们来说有意义，什么在通过我们的产品和功能进行沟通时是清晰的——我觉得这是我能为团队带来的东西。部分原因是我已经做了 13 年，每周甚至几乎每天，都和团队一起努力，想清楚什么能引起我们产品用户的共鸣。所以我在这方面挺擅长的。

I think I'm quite good at really understanding human needs and wants and figuring out how to reflect that in our product. Oftentimes, one of the competitions I like to have with our team is that a lot of times in engineering, people like to run A/B tests. They'll run four A/B tests and pick the one that performs best, like for a text string or something. If they want to put text in the app, they'll write four different variants. What I really like to do is figure out if I can write the variant that will win the A/B test without them having to run it. That intuition of what people will respond to, what makes sense to them, what's clear in terms of communicating through our product and features — I think that's something I can offer the team. Part of that is just because I've been doing it for 13 years, every week or almost every day, working with our team to figure out what will resonate with the people that use our products. So I think I'm good at that.

我还觉得，也许回到我之前的观点，我真的很努力去激发人们最好的一面。如果我把工作做得很好，人们会说，‘哇，我没想到我能做到’，或者‘我不知道我能做到’，或者‘我不知道自己是个很有创造力的人，但你让我意识到我其实很有创造力。太酷了，谢谢。’怎么做到的呢？我认为通常是给人们勇气和空间去发挥创造力，同时向他们展示创造力的不同应用方式。比如，一个律师可能会想，作为律师我怎么能有创造力呢？但如果你和律师聊一聊，就像我们公司早期做的那样，说：‘现在的问题是，所有这些隐私政策写得毫无意义。如果我们发挥创造力，写一份人们能理解的隐私政策，那不是很酷吗？我们怎么能用不同的方式解决这个问题，并建立一套不同的期望？’然后人们会说，‘哇，这很有意思，我们试试看。’他们做了之后就会说，‘哦，我确实有创造力。我们可以用不同的方式解决这个问题。我们不需要像其他人那样再写一份隐私政策。我们可以努力用通俗的语言来表达，这样会更好。’所以，向公司里各种团队成员展示他们的工作如何能够为我们的社区或广告合作伙伴服务，并发挥创造力——这是我希望带给团队的。

I also think, maybe to my earlier point, I really work hard to bring out the best in people. Hopefully, if I've done my job really well, people say, 'Wow, I didn't think I could do that,' or 'I didn't know I could do that,' or 'I didn't know I was a really creative person, but you showed me that I'm actually a really creative person. That's so cool. Thanks.' How? I think oftentimes it's by giving people the courage and the space to be creative, and also showing them the different ways that creativity applies. For example, a lawyer might think, how could I be creative as a lawyer? But if you have a conversation with a lawyer, as we did early on in our business, and say, 'The problem today is all these privacy policies that are written make no damn sense. What if we were creative and actually wrote a privacy policy that people could understand? Wouldn't that be cool? How could we solve this problem differently and have a different set of expectations?' Then people say, 'Wow, that's interesting, let's try doing that.' And they do it, and they're like, 'Oh wow, I am creative. We can solve this problem differently. We don't need to just have another privacy policy like everybody else. We can work really hard to put it in human terms, and that would be better.' So I think showing all sorts of team members across our company the way that their work can be creative in service of our community or our advertising partners — that's something I hope to bring to our team.

反过来，你不擅长什么？如果我问他们所有人，我说：‘Evan 不擅长什么？’

And conversely, what are you not good at? If I asked all of them, I said, 'What's Evan not good at?'

几乎其他所有事情。我是说，这就是挑战所在。肯定有一些定义性的特质——如果你之后问我的团队，他们会告诉你我不擅长什么。他们会告诉你我擅长什么，但也会告诉你我不擅长什么，而且他们会完全一致。他们会达成共识。不，我是认真的。在我们业务的几乎每个领域，无论是人力资源、法律还是财务等等，我肯定远非最好。我们的团队成员在他们各自的领域都非常有才华，而我天生就不太擅长那些事情。所以对我来说，真正的秘诀——或者不是秘诀，而是我多年来一直努力的重点，就像很多创业者一样——就是问自己：‘我怎么能把更多时间花在我擅长的事情上？’与团队合作，尝试创造新产品，发挥创造力，然后身边有一个团队，他们在其他所有事情上都比我强得多，我根本不可能比他们更好。尤其是作为一个更年轻的 CEO，我认为这一点可能更重要——能够有那种自我意识和谦逊，说‘我不知道所有答案’。

Almost everything else. I mean, that's the challenge. There's got to be some defining traits that you're like — if you ask my team after this, they'll tell you what I'm not good at. They'll tell you what I'm good at, but they'll also tell you what I'm not good at, and they'll all agree. They'll have total consensus. No, but I do mean that seriously. In almost every area of our business, whether it's HR or legal or finance, whatever, I'm certainly far from the best. Our team members are extraordinarily talented at what they do across our business, and by nature I'm just not very good at those things. So I think for me, the real secret — or not a secret, but the focus of what I've tried to do over the years, as so many entrepreneurs do — is say, 'How can I spend more of my time doing what I'm good at?' Collaborating with our team, trying to create new products, be creative, and then have a team around me that's so much better at everything else that I couldn't possibly be better at. Especially as a younger CEO, I think that's probably even more important — to be able to have that self-awareness and humility to say, 'I don't know all the answers.'

因为你创办这家公司时才 21 或 22 岁，所以你以前从未经营过一家上市公司。所以我认为，对于像你这样处于那个阶段的人来说，谦逊可能更加重要。

Because you started this company at what, 21 or 22 years old, so you've never done running a public company before. So I think humility is probably even more important for someone like you at that stage.

有趣的是，这恰恰是战略优势，对吧？20 岁，什么都不知道，所以你可以问任何问题而不会显得像个白痴，这是世界上最好的礼物。我几乎总是房间里最年轻的人，这真是一种福气，因为每个人都会说：‘哦，你在做什么？’‘哦，一个应用。很酷。’然后我就会说：‘是啊，实际上，你介意跟我聊聊准备公司上市的最佳方法吗？’人们就会说：‘当然可以。’所以我认为，能够利用那种天真作为快速学习的基本优势，是非常重要的。

Interestingly, it is the strategic advantage, right? To be 20 years old and to not know anything, so that you can ask any question and not look like an idiot, is the greatest gift in the world. I was almost always the youngest person in the room, and that was such a blessing because everyone's like, 'Oh, what are you working on?' 'Oh, an app. That's cool.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, actually, would you mind talking to me about the best ways to prepare your company to be public?' And people are like, 'Sure.' So I think being able to use that naivete as the fundamental advantage to be able to learn quickly is so important.

但你现在失去那种优势了吗？

But have you lost that now?

希望永远不会。我是说，这就是全部——我喜欢做的就是保持好奇心，不断提问。

Hopefully never. I mean, that's the whole thing — what I love to do is the curiosity, the asking questions.

Evan，这是我的最后一个问题。基于你所知道和所做的一切，对于正在听这次对话的创业者来说，最重要的一个问题是什么？这个问题能帮助他们，而我没有问到。

Evan, this is my last question. What is the most important question for entrepreneurs that are listening to this conversation now, based on everything that you know and have done, that will help them that I didn't ask?

我认为他们应该真正问问自己，是否热爱自己正在做的事情。如果他们真的热爱，那就会成为支撑他们一路走下去的动力。但有很多人被困在创业或工作中，并不真正热爱自己所做的事，他们还没有找到如何将自己的特殊天赋以适用于商业世界的方式发挥出来。我认为生活中很大一部分就是努力弄清楚那件我热爱、能激发出我和我的才华最佳状态的事情是什么。而且我认为，不放弃追求这一点至关重要。

I think they should really ask themselves if they love what they're doing. And if they really love what they're doing, that will be the fuel that will carry them the whole way. But there are so many people who are trapped building businesses or in jobs that don't really love what they do, who haven't found how to use their special gifts in a way that applies to the business world. I think so much of life is trying to figure out what is that thing that I can do that I just love, that brings out the best in me and my talents. And I think not giving up in pursuing that is just so important.

Evan，非常感谢你。非常感谢你今天来做客。我知道你不太做播客，所以你能来和我坐在这里，我倍感荣幸。希望这不是一次令人紧张的经历。我玩得很开心，谢谢你帮我实现 2025 年的决心。我会努力取得一些进展。我很好奇，你生活中是谁一直在推动你多出来露面？因为肯定有这么一个人。

Evan, thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing this today. I know you don't do a ton of podcasts, so I was particularly honored that you'd come and sit here with me. And hopefully it wasn't a nerve-wracking experience. I had a lot of fun and thank you for helping me with my 2025 resolution. Going to try and make some progress here. I'm so keen. I'm so keen to know who in your life has been nudging you to get out there more, because there must be someone.

不幸的是，和所有人一样，这就是我屈服的原因。

Unfortunately, like everybody, which is why I've caved.

那么，非常感谢你，能更深入地了解你和你的思考方式真是太棒了。感谢你让所有收听这场对话的企业家、创始人们获得了智慧。我确实鼓励你多做这类分享，因为我们中有太多人对创业者的起起落落以及中间的一切充满好奇，尤其是在这个以光速变化的世界里打造像你这样的公司。所以，认识你、了解公司的思考方式，以及能从你的经历中学习，对我们所有人来说都是一份真正的礼物。我现在非常兴奋要去试试这些眼镜了。太棒了，我们开始吧。

So, well, thank you so much and it's so wonderful to get to know you more and understand how you're thinking about all of these things. And thank you for the wisdom that all of the entrepreneurs, the founders, the listening to this conversation have gained from you. And I do encourage you to do more of this kind of thing because there's so many of us that are so curious about the ups, the downs and everything in the middle of being an entrepreneur, building a company like you have in a world that is changing at absolute light speed. So it's a real service to all of us to get to know you, to get to know the thinking of the company. But also to be able to learn from the experience you've had. And I'm really excited now to go and try these spectacles. Awesome. Let's do it.

我们推出了这些对话卡片，它们售罄了。我们再次推出，又售罄了。我们又推出一次，再次售罄，因为人们喜欢和同事、朋友、家人一起玩这些卡片。我们还有大量用户把它们当作日记提示。每次有嘉宾来《CEO 日记》，他们都会在日记里为下一位嘉宾留下一个问题。我和一些世界上最了不起的人坐在这里，他们在日记里留下了所有这些问题。我按深度把它们从 1 到 3 分级。1 级是入门问题。而 3 级，如果你看背面，这是一个 3 级问题，会变成更深层的问题，建立更多连接。如果你把卡片翻过来扫描二维码，就能看到谁回答了这张卡片，并实时观看他们回答的视频。所以，如果你想获得这些对话卡片，请访问 thediary.com 或查看下方描述中的链接。热度。热度。N。

We launched these conversation cards and they sold out. And we launched them again and they sold out again. We launched them again and they sold out again because people love playing these with colleagues at work, with friends at home, and also with family. And we've also got a big audience that use them as journal prompts. Every single time a guest comes on the diary of a CEO, they leave a question for the next guest in the diary. And I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world. And they've left all of these questions in the diary. And I've ranked them from one to three in terms of the depth. One being a starter question. And level three, if you look on the back here, this is a level three, becomes a much deeper question that builds even more connection. If you turn the cards over and you scan that QR code, you can see who answered the card and watch the video of them answering it in real time. So, if you would like to get your hands on some of these conversation cards, go to the diary.com or look at the link in the description below. Heat. Heat. N.