Jeetu Patel 如何像全球最大初创公司一样运营思科

今天，我与 Cisco 总裁兼首席产品官 Jeetu Patel 对话。我们将讨论 Jeetu 如何将创始人心态带入 Cisco，全力投入 AI，他们处于核心的大规模数据中心建设内部正在发生什么，然后我们会聊聊创始人能从 Jeetu 不可思议的个人经历中学到什么。Jeetu，非常感谢你来。

Today, I'm talking with Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer. We're going to discuss how Jeetu is bringing a founder's mindset to Cisco, going all in on AI, what's happening inside the massive data center build out that they're at the center of, and then we'll talk about what founders can learn from Jeetu's incredible personal story. Jeetu, thanks so much for being here.

谢谢邀请。很高兴见到你。

Thanks for having me. It's great to see you.

你有着不可思议的背景，从在印度长大、在 Sizzler 餐厅端盘子，到成为全球最大公司之一的总裁，但在我们聊这些之前，我想谈谈今天的 Cisco、你独特的角色以及你在那里做的事情。

You have this incredible background from growing up in India, waiting tables at Sizzler to ending up as the president of one of the world's largest companies, but before we talk about all that, I want to talk about Cisco today and your unique role and what you're doing there.

我对自己的角色的理解是，我只要确保我们帮助打造世界上最好的产品，让所有客户都能大规模使用。不过 Cisco 做的事情比我的角色更有趣，我们把自己看作淘金热中卖铲子和镐头的公司。我们是 AI 时代的基础设施公司，身处当下这场大规模运动之中，这是一次长期转变，我们要确保提供正确级别的基础设施，让 AI 能按你想要的方式运行，并且安全可靠地运行。

The way I think about my role is I just make sure that we help build the best products in the world that all of our customers can use at scale. What Cisco does though, which is even more interesting than what I do, is we think about us as the picks and shovels company during the gold rush. We are the AI infrastructure company for the AI era during this massive movement that's going on right now, which is a secular shift, and we want to make sure that we provide the right level of infrastructure so that AI just runs the way that you want it to, and it runs securely and safely.

我很喜欢你对 Cisco 的这个描述——AI 时代的铲子和镐头，显然四年前你不会这样描述 Cisco。所以这一切都是最近发生的。这是一家已经在巨大规模上运营的大公司的转型。在这样的规模和这样的时间框架内，进来并尝试转型一个组织是什么感觉？

And that description of Cisco, which I love, picks and shovels for the AI era, clearly you would not have described Cisco that way four years ago. So, all of this is recent. This is a transformation of a very large company that was already operating at an enormous scale. What has it been like to come in and try to transform an organization at this scale and that sort of time frame?

你知道，我认为在公司发生这种大规模转变时，通常领导者得到了不应得的赞誉，而真正做事的人没有得到足够的认可。但现实是，我一行代码都没写。我们做这件事时，是团队做的。但我们做的是确保我们设定了正确的方向，把正确的人招到正确的岗位上，确保我们有正确的机制来弄清楚我们要追求哪些市场，并让每个人都觉得自己能赢。

You know, I think in these massive kind of shifts that happen in companies, typically the leaders get an undeserved level of credit and the people that do the work don't get enough of the credit. But the reality is I didn't write a single line of code. When we were doing this, it is the team that did that. But what we did was we made sure that we actually set the right direction, hired the right people in the right jobs, made sure that we had the right kind of mechanisms to figure out what markets we're going to go pursue and do it with everyone feeling like they can win.

你能讲讲你是怎么来到 Cisco 的，以及你在那里做什么吗？

Can you tell the story of how you ended up at Cisco and what you're doing there?

我来到 Cisco……我之前在 Box。我为 Aaron Levie 负责产品，他本人就是创始人。所以，当我来到 Box 时，我的整个思维模式再次得到强化，因为我多年前创办了自己的公司，然后去了 EMC。EMC 是一家非常大的公司。我当时想，“哦，这太公司化了。”然后我去了 Box，我想，“好吧，这可以很有趣，因为你可以像我以前经营自己公司时那样运作。”我认为有两种人。一种是很好的职能领导者，他们喜欢待在自己的领域里。别在我的领域里告诉我该做什么。我也不会告诉你该在你的领域里做什么。另一种是经营过某种业务的人，他们把自己视为业务的所有者，完全习惯于随时插手别人的业务。我倾向于后一种。所以，我个人觉得，当你采用这种创始人模式的方法时，它非常适合战时，非常适合市场正在经历转变、事情以非常快的节奏变化的时候，你要做的就是确保不要完全疏远那些可能不在创始人模式的人，并帮助他们理解好处：如果你真的进入创始人模式，我们实际上可以以与迄今为止完全不同的频率运作。这就是我们在 Cisco 开始做的事情，我觉得我告诉我的同行和公司里的每个人，我觉得我是 Cisco 的晚期联合创始人。我晚了 36 年才加入，但我觉得我拥有这家公司，这是我的公司，如果外面有人想搞垮公司，小心点，因为我会确保为它而战。我们必须确保我们为 craftsmanship 和公司所代表的东西感到非常自豪。一切都是你的工作。所以如果销售方面出了问题，我会去和那边的人谈谈。营销方面出了问题，我会去和那边的人谈谈，我完全期望他们来挑我业务的毛病。

So, I ended up at Cisco... I was at Box. I was running product for Aaron Levie, who was a founder himself. And so, my entire kind of mental model got reinforced again when I came to Box because I had started my own company years ago and then I went to EMC. EMC was a very large company. I'm like, "Oh, this is like very corporate." And then I went to Box I'm like, "Okay, this can be fun because you can actually operate just like I used to operate with my own company." And I think there's two kinds of people. There's folks that are very good functional leaders and they love being in their lane. No one tell me what to do in my lane. I'm not going to tell you what you do in your lane. And then there's people who've run some kind of business and they think of themselves as owners of the business and they are completely comfortable poking in other people's businesses all the time. And I tend to be of that ilk. And so, I personally feel like when you have this founder mode approach, it's very good for wartime and it's very good for a time when the market's going through a shift, things are moving at a very fast clock speed, and what you have to do is you just have to make sure that you don't completely alienate the people who might not be in founder mode, and kind of help them understand the benefit that if you do go in founder mode, we can actually operate at a very different frequency than what we've been operating so far. And so that's what we started doing at Cisco, and I feel like I tell my peers and everyone in my company, I'm like, I feel like I'm a late-stage co-founder of Cisco. I was 36 years late coming in, but I feel like I own the company, and this is my company, and if anyone from the outside tries to screw the company, beware, because I'm going to make sure I fight for it. And we got to make sure that we take a lot of pride in the craftsmanship and what the company stands for. Everything is your job. And so if something's not working well in sales, I'll go talk to the people over there. Something's not working well in marketing, I'll go to talk to the people over there, and I fully expect them to come poke holes in my business.

这是你喜欢在 Cisco 引进前创始人的原因之一吗？

Is this one of the reasons why you'd like to bring in former founders at Cisco?

你知道，我也认识到并欣赏那些有系统思维的资深运营者的价值。因为如果 Cisco 的每个人都是创始人，那就乱套了。

You know, I also recognize and appreciate the value of seasoned operators who are systems thinkers. Because if you had everyone at Cisco who was a founder, it'd be a show.

是的。

Yeah.

所以你必须确保取得良好的平衡。我们做法是……我试着称之为三分之一规则。所以我的领导团队中三分之一是知道如何驾驭 Cisco 的人，是大规模运营者。第二个三分之一是我从外部、从竞争对手、从市场引进的人，他们非常懂市场。他们可能不知道如何驾驭 Cisco，但他们是系统思考者，并且大规模运营过。然后第三个三分之一是我们收购的公司的联合创始人和 CEO。但对这些人，我们给他们的职责范围比他们卖给我们的公司更大。

So you have to make sure that you get a good balance. So the way we've done it is we have a... I try to call it a rule of thirds. So a third of my leadership team are people that know how to maneuver Cisco, that are at scale operators. The second third are people that I bring in from the outside, from competition, from the market, that are very market in. That might not know how to maneuver Cisco, but they're systems thinkers, and they've operated at scale. And then the third third are co-founders and CEOs of companies that we've acquired. But those people, we give them charters that are larger than the company that they sold us.

你之前说这种运作方式在战时尤其重要。你觉得 Cisco 处于战时吗？

You said earlier that this way of operating is especially important in wartime. Do you feel Cisco is in wartime?

我觉得 Cisco 现在正处于战时，因为从产品角度看，我们实现了最成功的转型之一。我认为我们现在正处在 AI 基础设施的竞争中。三四年前没人会认可我们这一点。但如果你展望未来三、五、七年，我们面前的机会相比我们以前经历的任何事情都如此巨大。我们必须确保能够利用所有这些机会。这意味着我们必须以……我喜欢告诉我的团队，我们应该像世界上最大的初创公司一样运作。

I feel like Cisco is in wartime right now in the sense that we have made one of the most successful turnarounds that you've seen from a product perspective. I think we are now squarely in the AI infrastructure game. Which is something that no one would give us credit for three or four years ago. But if you look forward the next three or five, seven years the amount of opportunity that exists in front of us is so massive compared to anything that we've experienced before. That we have to make sure that we can capitalize on all of that. And that means that we have to operate at... I like to tell my team internally we should operate like the world's largest startup.

这意味着你必须在速度与规模之间取得平衡。如果只追求速度，那你就只是一家初创公司。如果只追求规模，那你就只是一家大公司。如果你想成为世界上最大的初创公司，就必须兼具速度与规模。

That means you have to operate at speed but with scale. If you just operate at speed, then you're just a startup. If you just operate at scale, then you're just a large company. If you want to operate as the world's largest startup, that has to be with speed and scale.

未来几年，要抓住这个机会，你需要做对哪些关键的事情？

What are the key things you need to get right in the next few years to seize that opportunity?

让我们假设现在只有不到 2% 的人在以某种高级用户的方式使用智能体。再想想，今天生产出来的全部基础设施都在被消耗。我们基础设施短缺。只有不到 2% 的人使用智能体，我们就已经供不应求了。

Let's assume right now that we have sub 2% of humans that are using agents in any kind of power user capacity. And think about the fact that the entirety of infrastructure that gets produced today is getting consumed. We are short on infrastructure. We are supply constrained with only sub 2% of the people using agents.

想象一下，当 25%、30%、40%、50% 的人开始使用智能体时，你需要的基础设施规模将与我们现在的规模完全不在一个量级。我们要确保能帮助解决这个问题。这是第一个问题。

Imagine when 25, 30, 40, 50% of the people start using agents. The amount of infrastructure you're going to need is going to be at a very different scale proportion than we have right now. And we want to make sure that we can help solve that problem. That's problem number one.

第二个问题是这些智能体——事实上，这周非常有意思——因为这些智能体会失控。有时它们可能真的有自己的想法。实际上，越来越难区分一个智能体的行为意图是来自对手的影响或投毒，还是智能体只是认为这是正确的事，然后勤勤恳恳地去执行你的 /goal 命令。

Problem number two is these agents — in fact, this week was a very interesting week — because these agents are going to go rogue. At times they might actually have a mind of their own. It's actually harder and harder to distinguish between when an agent is operating with intent because of an adversary influencing the agent or poisoning the agent, or an agent just thinks it's the right thing to do and they're just diligently going out and following your slash goal command.

回形针优化器问题。

The paperclip optimizer problem.

没错。

Exactly.

是的。

Yeah.

所以我们必须具备某种安全、安保和可观测性的能力。这就是我们要解决的第二个大问题——我们要确保 AI 对每个人来说都是安全可用的，而且这不会成为一种持续的恐惧，导致人们不敢使用 AI。事实上，我认为恰恰相反。如果你不使用 AI，你会更不安全。这是真的，因为大多数攻击都是以机器规模发生的，所以你也必须以机器规模来防御。

And so what we have to have is you have to have some kind of safety, security, and observability capabilities in place. And so that's the second big problem that we want to solve — we want to make sure that AI is safe to use for everyone and that that doesn't become this constant fear because of which people don't use AI. In fact, I think it's the other way around. If you don't use AI, you'll be less safe. And that is true because most of the attacks are happening at machine scale, so you have to have the defenses at machine scale as well.

所以，我们是世界上最大的网络公司之一，提供基础设施。我们也是世界上最大的安全公司之一。我们要确保做到这一点，同时通过 Splunk，我们也是世界上最重要的机器数据公司之一。

So, we're one of the largest networking companies in the world that provide the infrastructure. We're also one of the largest security companies in the world. We want to make sure that we do that, and we're also one of the most significant machine data companies in the world with Splunk.

哦，没错。

Oh, that's right.

所以，这三者的结合应该能为我们提供所需的所有底层设施，使我们能够成为 AI 时代关键基础设施公司的关键基础设施。

And so the combination of those three should give us all of the underlying apparatus that's needed so that we can become critical infrastructure for the critical infrastructure companies for the AI era.

你们在 AI 上全面投入，既投资 AI 和数据中心市场，也把 AI 引入 Cisco 以提高一切效率。我真的很想了解，在 Cisco 这样规模的公司采用 AI 是什么样子的。

You've gone all in on AI both in terms of investing in the AI and data center market, but also in terms of bringing AI into Cisco to make everything more efficient. I'm actually really interested to learn what it looks like to adopt AI at a company the size of Cisco.

不能围绕效率。目标不是效率。目标是能够走出去，确保我们从 AI 产生的原创洞见中受益，让我们解决以前做梦都想不到能解决的问题。这与仅仅提高 20% 的速度或确保减少人员完全不同。

It can't be around efficiency. The goal is not efficiency. The goal is to be able to go out and make sure that we benefit from the original insights that AI generates that allow us to solve problems we could have never dreamt of solving before. Which is very different from just get to be 20% faster at doing this or make sure that you have less people.

事实上，我强烈认为，随着我们前进，我们实际上需要更多工程师，而不是更少。因为每次我看到 AI 出现阶跃式改进，我都会看到一个瓶颈出现，那是人的瓶颈。你知道，编码自动化了，代码审查就成了瓶颈。代码审查自动化了，判断该构建什么、不该构建什么就成了瓶颈。所以，我确实觉得我们需要更多人。

In fact, my strong assumption is moving forward that we will actually need more engineers, not less, as we move forward. Because every single time I've seen a step function improvement in AI, I've seen a bottleneck that's emerged that's a human bottleneck. You know, coding is automated, code review becomes a bottleneck. Code review is automated, judgment on what to build and what not to build becomes a bottleneck. So, I do feel like we're going to need to have more people.

但有趣的是，让 32,000 名工程师和公司其他员工，第一，尝到甜头，第二，不害怕使用它反而会给自己设下陷阱、可能丢掉工作。相反，我们做了完全相反的事。我们向员工保证：如果你不使用 AI，你就会丢掉工作。

But what was interesting was getting 32,000 engineers and the rest of the company to, one, taste the honey, and two, not be fearful of the fact that if you use this, then you're going to actually be creating a trap for yourself where you might lose your job. Instead, what we did was we did something completely opposite. We guaranteed our employees that if you don't use AI, you will lose your job.

所以，这是一种非常不同的解决问题的方式。这个说法其实并不太有争议，因为想想今天，如果有人不会用 PC 或不会用互联网，你会雇他们做知识工作吗？你绝不会。所以，说如果你正看到一种长期转变，如果有一个庞大的平台将被 AI 重构，那么任何不使用它的人就不会那么重要，这并不太有争议。

And so, it was a very different way to approach the problem. That wasn't a very controversial statement to make because think about today, if you have someone that didn't know how to use a PC or didn't know how to use the internet, would you ever hire them in a knowledge worker job? You would never. So, it's not that controversial to say that if you are seeing a secular shift and if there's this massive platform that's going to get refactored with AI, then anyone not using it is just not going to be that relevant.

所以我们一直相信，未来只会有两种公司和两种人。一种是对 AI 非常熟练、灵巧的人，另一种则是会为相关性苦苦挣扎的人。所以我们非常明确地告诉大家，如果你恰好属于第二阵营，因为你不使用 AI，那么 Cisco 很可能不适合你。

And so, we always believed that there's going to be only two kinds of companies and two kinds of people. Ones that are very fluent and dextrous with AI, and the others that are going to be really struggling for relevance. And so, we just made it very, very clear for people that if you happen to be in that second camp, because you're not using AI, chances are that Cisco's the wrong place for you.

因此，你应该做的是全力投入，我们会给你所有工具和支持让你全力投入。最初，我们实际上给每个人无限量的 token。就是说，“开始用吧。”因为我的想法是，你必须先——就像骑自行车。你必须先熟悉某件事，然后才能擅长它，然后才能变得高效。

And therefore, what you should do is go all in, and we will give you all the tooling and all the support to go all in. And initially, we actually gave everyone unlimited tokens. To say, "Just start using it." Because the way I think about it is you have to get — it's like riding a bicycle. You have to first get familiar with something, then you have to get good at it, and then you can become efficient with it.

是的。

Yeah.

但如果你一开始就追求效率，你永远不会熟悉，也永远不会擅长。所以我们开始这样做。最初遇到了很多人的抵制。头几个月很艰难。

But if you try to go efficiency first, you'll never get familiar or you'll never get good. And so we started doing that. Got a lot of initial resistance from a lot of folks. The first few months were rough.

对我来说，关键时刻是——我团队里有一位工程师，是一位工程负责人。最了不起的人之一。他总是持怀疑态度。他总是告诉我，“Jeetu，那些想法太疯狂了。我觉得永远不会实现。”有一天晚上他打电话给我，他极其真诚地对我说，“嘿，我只想让你知道，我错了。你是对的。模型现在的进展速度太快了。”

And the seminal moment for me was — I have this one engineer who's an engineering leader on my team. One of the most amazing people. And he is always a skeptic. He's always going to tell me, "Jeetu, those ideas are crazy. I don't think it's going to ever happen." And he called me one day in the evening, and he was as sincere as he could be, and he said to me, "Hey, I just want to let you know I was wrong. You were right. The models are moving at a pace now."

我有些优势，因为，你知道，Kevin Wheels 在我们的董事会，而且我认识生态系统内的一些人，每次我和初创世界的人交谈，我得到的数据都和内部得到的大不相同。

And I had some benefit because, you know, Kevin Wheels on our board, and I had some — I knew some people within the ecosystem that every time I talked to someone in the startup world, I was getting a very different set of data than I was getting internally.

所以 Will 最后对我说，“现在已经发展到我们重构了大约 50 万行代码，我们能够把它重构到大约 10 万、12 万行代码左右。所以是 5 倍的改进，而且我们能在两周内做到。”

And so Will says to me finally, "This is now moved where we have now taken and refactored like half a million lines of code, and we were able to refactor it into like 100, 120,000 lines of code or something. And so 5x improvement, and we were able to do that within like 2 weeks."

两周，是的。

2 weeks, yeah.

你说得对，这件事确实会发展得非常快。所以我不能只考虑我们今天有什么，我必须考虑三个月后它会变成什么样，不是一年后，是三个月后。然后假设那个未来，今天就开始做出改变。但其次，我也非常焦虑，因为这对很多人来说可能意味着很多坏事，我们可能不得不对员工队伍做出很多调整。

You're right that this is actually going to move really fast. So I can't just think about what we have today. I have to think about where this is going to be in 3 months from now, not a year from now, 3 months from now. And assume that and start making the changes today. But second, I'm also feeling very anxious about the fact that this might mean a lot of bad things for people, and we might have to make a lot of changes in our staff.

嗯。

Mhm.

而我想，或者我们其实可以激励所有人，确保我们都能因为使用这项技术而变得更好。然后它就不断累积。我们实际上成了 OpenAI 和 Codex 的第一个设计合作伙伴。他们给了我们一些全职员工。直到今天，我想现在每两到三周，我都会和整个工程领导团队以及他们的全职员工坐下来，讨论过去两周哪些做对了、哪些做错了。大家都很清楚，我绝不会放过这件事。我认为在大公司里，有些事你必须自上而下推动。大多数事情很难自上而下，但少数你视为信仰的事情，你必须自上而下，必须确保你对此毫不松懈，AI 就是其中之一。

And I'm like, or we can actually motivate everyone to make sure that we can all get better as a result of the use of this. Then it just kept compounding. We actually became the first design partner with OpenAI and Codex. They gave us some FTEs. And to this date, I think it's every two or three weeks now, I sit down with my entire leadership team of engineering and then their FTEs, and we talk about what went right and what went wrong in the past 2 weeks. And it was just very clear to people that I'm just not going to let this one go. And I think in large companies, there's a few things where you have to go top-down. Most things it's going to be pretty hard to go top-down, but a few things that you think are religion, you have to go top-down and you have to just make sure that you're unrelenting on those, and AI was one of those.

我们都看到了 AI 对软件开发有多大的变革作用，但思科做很多硬件开发。你在硬件开发方面也看到了同样的影响吗，还是说那仍然是未来的事？

We've all seen how AI is transformative for software development, but Cisco does a lot of hardware development. Are you seeing the same impact on the hardware development side, or is that still in the future?

是的。

Yep.

思科做软件、硬件和芯片。它们各自的采用周期不同。在硬件方面，你开始看到一些好的设计模式正在出现。但还远不如软件那么多。软件，节奏非常快。芯片方面，团队有一种刻意不全力投入的倾向，因为他们非常担心要确保数据和知识产权不外流，否则不知不觉别人就复制走了。

So, Cisco does software, hardware, and silicon. And each one of them have a different kind of adoption cycle. So, on the hardware side, you're starting to see good kind of design patterns that are starting to emerge now. But it's not quite as much as software. Software, the clock speed is really fast. Silicon, there's a level of intentionality of not going all in by the team because they're very concerned about making sure that the data and the IP does not leave and then before you know it someone else has replicated it.

对。

Yeah.

没错。

Right.

所以在芯片方面，我们走得稍微慢一些，但现在我认为随着模型变得更好、开放权重模型的出现、拥有自己的基础设施，所有这些，我觉得情况会改变，但我们必须压缩芯片的周期时间。我们这行有意思的地方在于我们是全栈的，对吧？我们做芯片、做光子学、做系统硬件、软件，整个栈。栈的每个元素和层级都有不同的规划周期。芯片是 5 年的规划周期。我今天做的事，必须确保我知道 5 年后大规模生产会发生什么，然后今天做出相应的投资。

And so on the silicon side, we had gone a little bit slower, but now I think with the models getting better, with open weights models being there, having our own infrastructure, all of that, I think it's going to change, but we have to compress the cycle time for silicon. The thing that's interesting in our business is we are a full stack, right? We build silicon, we build photonics, we build systems hardware, software, the entire stack. Each one of the elements and layers of the stack have a different planning cycle. So, silicon is a 5-year planning cycle. What I do today, I have to make sure that I know what's going to happen for at-scale production 5 years from now and then make the appropriate investments today.

这太疯狂了。在 AI 领域你怎么可能做到？AI 才只有 3 年历史。

That's bananas. How can you possibly do that in AI? AI is only 3 years old.

想想整个制造周期，不只是芯片，而是从芯片到系统到 SDK 再到推向市场。你必须确保提前开始，因为要造芯片，你必须先构建芯片的知识产权，比如 SerDes 和所有这些部件。这些实际上需要提前构建。所以芯片有一个必须发生的先后顺序，不可能在短时间内完成，你不能只说 12 个月内造出一块芯片。你可以造出一块芯片，只是它不会那么好。硬件往往是 18 到 24 个月的规划周期，有时因为供应链可能到 30 个月。因为我们考虑的是为非常大的产量做规模化。再到软件和操作系统，那是 12 个月的规划周期，也许 18 个月。然后到模型、智能体和应用，现在你进入了 3 个月的规划周期，也许是每周的规划周期。我们必须确保这种协同设计的全栈实际上让所有这些东西和谐运作。如果你作为一家公司能搞清楚这一点，你就拥有非常战略性的护城河，因为你能够搞清楚所有这些不同层级如何从知识产权上很好地协同工作。这对其他人来说非常难以做到和复制。

Think about the entire manufacturing cycle of not just the silicon, but silicon to systems to SDKs to taking it out to the market. You have to make sure that you start because in order to build the silicon, you have to build the IP for the silicon like serdes and all of those pieces. Those take actually, you have to build them up ahead of time. So, there's a sequencing that needs to happen in silicon that cannot happen within a matter of, you can't just say go build a chip in 12 months. You can build a chip, it just won't be that good. Hardware tends to be 18 to 24-month planning cycle, maybe 30 months in some cases because of supply chain. Because we think about we're doing this at scale for very large volumes of units. You go to software an operating system, that is a 12-month planning cycle, maybe 18-month planning cycle. Then you go into models and agents and apps. Now you're into a 3-month planning cycle, maybe a weekly planning cycle. And we have to make sure that that co-designed full stack actually has all of those things working in harmony. And if you can figure that out as a company, you have a very strategic moat in the sense that you've been able to figure out all these different layers that work well together from an IP. That's very hard for other people to do and replicate.

既然 AI 已经来了，有没有可能加快这些周期？

Is it possible to speed up the cycles now that AI is here?

绝对可以。所有周期都会被压缩。但我说规划周期，不只是指建造需要多长时间，我指的是从想法到大规模生产并带来数十亿美元营收。

Absolutely. All of them will get compressed. But when I say planning cycle, I don't just mean how long does it take to build? I mean from idea to at-scale production with billions of dollars in revenue.

说到芯片、硬件和整个供应链，我想谈谈数据中心的建设，因为正在发生一件不可思议的历史性事件。我们建造的东西比一代人建的还多，而你正处在中心。你能谈谈思科在这场巨大的数据中心建设中扮演的角色吗？

Speaking of chips and hardware and this whole supply chain, I want to talk about the data center build out because there's this incredible historic event happening. We're building more stuff than we built in a generation and you're at the center of it. Can you talk about the role that Cisco is playing in this huge data center build out?

在数据中心建设中，顺便说一句，大家都知道 GPU 扮演的角色。当时的情况是，当你刚开始看到这些 Transformer 出现时，这些 Transformer 能装在一块 GPU 上。所以训练运行相当简单，然后参数变多了，那些 GPU 需要扩展，于是你在一个服务器里有八块 GPU，所以你现在进入了一个服务器，但这些 GPU 都在一个服务器内互连。然后是服务器机架。GPU 在一个服务器机架内互连，协同工作，就像一台巨大的机器在运转。然后，机架开始扩展到行，因为你现在有多行机架需要在一个大型数据中心内联网。这需要所谓的横向扩展网络，而不仅仅是用于机架级扩展的纵向扩展网络。而现在，由于有如此巨大的电力限制和电力短缺，你无法总是把所有电力带到数据中心所在的地方。所以，你要去电力可用的地方。因此，你可能会有相距数百公里的数据中心，它们需要像一个完整的逻辑单元一样工作。

So, in data center build outs, by the way, everyone knows the role GPU plays. And what had happened was when you just started seeing these transformers come about, these transformers would fit on a single GPU. And so, the training runs would be pretty simple and then you had more parameters and those GPUs needed to scale and so, you had eight GPUs within a server and so, you now went into a server, but those GPUs were all interconnected within a server. Then you had racks of servers. GPUs got interconnected within a rack of server working coherently. Like one kind of giant machine with things going. And then, racks started scaling to rows because you now had multiple rows of racks that needed to be networked together within a large data center. And that required what they call scale out networking, not just scale up networking for rack level scaling. And now, what you have is because there's such a huge power constraint and power shortage, you can't always bring all the power to where the data center is. So, what you do is you go to wherever the power is available. And so, you might have data centers that are hundreds of kilometers apart that need to then work like one completely logical unit.

哦。两个相距数百英里的不同物理数据中心，需要联网在一起，就像在同一栋楼里一样。

Oh. Two different physical data centers separated by hundreds of miles that need to be networked together as if they were in the same building.

就像在同一栋楼里。就像同一台计算机。

As if they were in the same building. As if they were the same computer.

哇。

Wow.

这需要一整套不同的网络技术，叫做跨域扩展网络。在数据中心内部，你可能用横向扩展网络。在机架内部，你用纵向扩展网络。我们主要专注于横向扩展和跨域扩展。

That requires a whole different family of networking called scale across networking. For within a data center, you might have scale out networking. And for within a rack, you have scale up networking. We are largely focused on scale out and scale across.

我们不仅做芯片和连接 GPU 的交换机托盘，我们还做光子学，也就是光学部分。两年前，我们开始向超大规模厂商销售用于 AI 工作负载的产品。当时我们想给市场一个指引，说我们会拿下 10 亿美元的订单。结果第一年我们就做到了 23 亿。

And we do not just the silicon and the switch trays for connecting the GPUs together, but we also do the photonics, which is the optics. We started our business selling to hyperscalers 2 years ago for AI workloads. And we thought we'd give the market this tree of guidance and said we'll do a billion dollars in orders taken. We ended up at 2.3 billion in year one.

所以第二年，我们说：“那就翻倍吧。别做 23 亿了，做 50 亿。”去年，也就是一个月前刚结束的那个 Q4，我们最终做到了 90 亿。

So the next year, we said, "Well, let's double it. Instead of 2.3, let's do like 5 billion." Last year, which was a Q4 that just ended a month ago, we ended up at 9 billion.

哇。

Wow.

这两年你都把原本已经很乐观的预测翻了一倍。

Both years you doubled the very optimistic projections that you made.

是的。所以我们基本上是在两年之内从零做到了 93 亿。

Yeah. And so we basically went from zero to 9.3 billion in a matter of 2 years.

哇。

Wow.

对吧？这就是这个行业的发展速度。我们还有大量的市场份额要去争取。这是一门复杂的生意，营收 630 亿美元，有数百种产品，我们必须确保以正确的方式去运作。

Right? And so that's the speed at which this is moving. We still have so much share to go out and capture. It's a complicated business, 63 billion dollars in revenue. Hundreds of products that we have to kind of make sure that we maneuver in the right way.

但 90 亿相对于 630 亿的总盘子来说，对一个全新的业务线已经相当可观了。

But the 9 billion out of the 63 billion total is like quite material for a brand new business line.

90 亿是订单。转化成营收还需要一段时间，不过是的。

9 billion in orders. That takes a while to get to revenue, but yeah.

我明白了。是的，懂了。

I see. Yeah. Got it.

但你说得对。它开始变得有意义了。这很令人兴奋，因为你正身处其中。这个市场太大了。一吉瓦的容量，建造成本大约在——以前是 350 亿美元，现在接近 500 亿美元——这就是建一吉瓦数据中心容量的成本。其中大约 10% 到 15% 是网络。大部分在 GPU 上。但这里面有巨大的复杂性——你得把外壳建起来，还得拿到电力许可。你走进一个数据中心，就会深刻感受到它有多复杂——当你在提示框里输入“给我一个披萨食谱”，背后要发生多少事情，才能在一两秒内把结果送到你面前？

But you're right. It's starting to get to be meaningful. And it's exciting because you're right in the thick of things. And the market is so huge. A gigawatt of capacity would cost about anywhere between — it used to be 35 billion, now it's like close to 50 billion dollars — is what a gigawatt of data center capacity would cost to build. And about 10 to 15% of that tends to be networking. Largely it's in the GPU. But there's a huge amount of complexity in — you know, you have to build out the shell and you have to build out the power permits for that. And you walk into a data center, it impresses upon you how complicated — when you make a query on your prompt to say give me a pizza recipe, what happens behind the scenes to get that to you within a second or two?

因为建设规模如此极端，有些人怀疑我们是不是建得太多了。是吗？

Because the build out is so extreme, some people have wondered whether we're overbuilding. Are we?

绝对不是。我来告诉你为什么。人们试图把这件事——首先，在 AI 领域没有先验。所以我确实从根本上相信，人们犯的一个大错误就是总是回到自己过去的经验。我认为在 AI 领域最重要的技能之一就是“反学习”，因为你过去的经验可能是一个巨大的负担。但人们通常会试图把这件事类比成互联网泡沫时期。天哪，当时建了那么多基础设施。当时发生的情况是，你在建设基础设施，然后指望需求能追上供给。而现在，无论你建多少基础设施，它几乎立刻就被消耗掉了。所以没有追赶的时间——尽管增长呈指数级、看起来像一条垂直线，你仍然是供给受限的。所以从这个角度看，我不认为存在巨大的过度建设。事实上，我认为情况恰恰相反。如果目前不到 2% 的人在使用智能体，而这些智能体又如此消耗资源——平均而言，一个智能体在执行完全相同的任务时，对网络带宽的消耗比人类高出 450%。现在想想数以万亿计的智能体。

Categorically not. Let me tell you why. And people try to equate this — Firstly, in AI, there are no priors. So I do fundamentally believe that — and this is one of the big mistakes people make — is they keep going back to an experience they've had. I think one of the most important skills to learn in AI is unlearning, because your past experience can be a huge liability. But people typically will try to equate this to the dot com boom days. Oh my goodness, there was so much infrastructure build out that happened. What was happening during that time is you were building out infrastructure and you were hoping that demand would catch up to the supply. Right now, no matter how much infrastructure you're building, it's getting consumed almost instantly. So there's no catch up time — you're supply constrained despite the exponential growth that looks like a vertical line. So I do feel like from that perspective, I don't think that there is a huge overbuild. In fact, I think it's the other way around. If sub 2% of the people are using agents and these agents are so consumptive — on average an agent is 450% more consumptive on network bandwidth than a human would be for conducting the same exact task. Now think about trillions of agents.

对。

Right.

现在想想，你的大部分任务都由智能体来完成，它们必须确保不断丰富上下文。你有一个技能文件，一个 markdown 文件。你知道，你有 Gary 的那套 G stack，它会不断地来回交互。会有大量的来回交互发生。

And now think about most of your tasks getting conducted by agents where they're going to have to make sure that they keep enriching context. You have a skills file, you have a markdown file. You know, you've got the G stack from Gary and it's going to keep going back and forth. Like there's going to be a lot of back and forth that happens.

那会是大量的 token。

It's going to be a lot tokens.

是的。

Yep.

是的。说到智能体，我听说你最近成了使用个人智能体的粉丝。我很好奇——你使用智能体的情况是什么样的？

Yeah. Speaking of agents, I heard that you've recently become a fan of using your own personal agents. I'm curious what is — what is your usage of agents look like?

我已经用了一段时间了，但 Instinct 对我来说是一个力量倍增器，这也就是 4 天前的事。我处理邮件很糟糕。真的很糟糕。大概 5 天前，我有 171,762 封邮件之类的。其中 146,000 封是未读的。

So I've been using it for a while, but Instinct was the force multiplier for me and this is just like 4 days ago. I suck at email. Really suck at email. Like I had 171,762 emails or something just like 5 days ago. 146,000 of them were unread.

好吧。

Okay.

我用了 Instinct。我赌了一把，说：“你知道吗？我要把我的个人邮箱访问权限给它。我现在有 200 封邮件。”

I used Instinct. I took the leap of faith and said, "You know what? I'm going to go give it my personal email access. I have 200 emails."

哇。它把你的整个收件箱都清空了。

Wow. It blasted through your entire inbox.

它把所有事情都处理好了。它告诉我该做什么。它真的会移动邮件。它用正确的方式归档。如果我需要什么，它会把它调回来。它实际上还帮我汇总了来自所有来源的新闻。我之前感觉——尽管我其实不怎么处理邮件，但我潜意识里有一部分一直感到不堪重负。现在我感觉好多了，哇，我掌控住了。现在我突然开始查邮件了。我心想：“我为什么要查邮件？”

It took care of everything. It told me what to do. It actually moved things. It archived them in the right way. If I needed something, it would bring it back. It actually summarized my news for me from all the sources that I was getting. I was feeling — even though I didn't really do email that much, there was a part of me subconsciously that was feeling overwhelmed. And I just feel better that wow, I'm on top of that. Now all of a sudden I'm checking email. I'm like, "Why am I checking email?"

嗯。

Mhm.

因为当你只有三封邮件的时候，查邮件是件很有趣的事。

Because it's fun to check email when you have three emails.

这真的又回到了数据中心建设永远不够的那个点上，因为想想处理 14 万封邮件并搞清楚该怎么处理它们需要多少 token。

It really ties back to the point about the data center build out never being sufficient, cuz like think about the tokens to go through 140,000 emails and figure out what to do with them.

完全同意。这就是我觉得——某种程度上很不幸的是，人们会夸大其词——“天哪，这是个泡沫。一切都在……”——其实两个条件可以同时成立。你会有一个长期的结构性转变，它将从根本上彻底改变人们的生活方式。而这需要大量的基础设施。同时你也会有一些估值非常虚高的公司。因为时不时地，像这样任何一次大规模的平台转移，都会伴随着大量的实验，而其中只有少数会胜出。不是所有都会赢。所以，估值上会有一些泡沫，但在我看来，这并不构成泡沫。泡沫是指那个结构性转变本身受到质疑。我认为很难去论证这一点。

Totally. This is where I feel like I just don't think it is unfortunate in some way that the level of exaggeration that happens on — oh my goodness, this is a bubble. Everything's going — like you might still have like two conditions can hold true. You will have a secular shift where this is going to completely fundamentally change the way that people live. And that's going to require a lot of infrastructure. And you will also have some companies that are very frothy in valuation. Because from time to time, any kind of massive platform shift like this, you will have a ton of experimentation that goes on and only a few of those are going to win. Not all of them win. And so, there will be some frothiness in the valuation, but that does not constitute in my mind a bubble. A bubble is if that secular shift itself is questioned. I think it's very hard to go out and argue for that.

所以，最近有新闻说——OpenAI 的智能体失控了，攻破了 Hugging Face 和其他地方。你对现在 AI 安全领域正在发生的事情有什么看法？另外，这对在大型、关键任务型企业中部署 AI 有什么影响？

So, it's been in the news recently this — OpenAI agents went rogue, compromised Hugging Face and other places. What are your thoughts on what's happening with AI safety now? And also, how does that play into like deploying AI at a large, mission-critical enterprise?

是的，我觉得这是个很好的问题。我现在想说的一点是，它将成为我们这个时代、未来几年的决定性话题，因为约束和基础设施曾经是个大问题。我们之前讨论了很多，比如，算力够不够？这仍然是个问题。

Yeah, I think it's a great question. One of the things that I would say right now is it is going to be the defining topic of our time right now in the next few years, because the constraint and infrastructure was a really big deal. And we were talking about a lot about, you know, is there compute available? That's still a problem.

但一个更大的问题是，我能否信任这些我将把所有工作乃至个人生活都委托给它们的系统。在我看来，可信委托与不可信委托之间的差别，就是市场领导地位与彻底破产之间的差别。所以我认为我们必须确保真正跨过这道坎。而这需要很多条件。思科正在大力确保我们能提供一个完整的智能体安全平台并推向市场，从对模型输入内容的完全可见性，到非人类身份的身份管理、清点你环境中运行的智能体，再到对模型本身进行验证，其中包括算法红队测试，比如：你能越狱这个模型吗？如果你真的越狱了，问了一个你不希望它回答的问题，或者让智能体执行了一个你不希望它执行的动作，你如何拦截它，并确保在运行时动态地施加护栏？整套机制我们都会提供，包括安全侧，也包括可观测性侧。我们把它们融合在一起，我认为这是我们这个时代最重要的问题之一。

But a much larger problem is whether I can trust these systems that I'm going to delegate all my work to, and all my personal life too. The difference between trusted delegation and untrusted delegation is the difference between market leadership and complete abject bankruptcy in my mind. So I think we have to make sure that we actually get through that. And that requires a bunch of things. Cisco is working a lot on making sure that we can provide a whole agentic security platform that we're making available to the market, everything from having full visibility into what goes into a model, to identity for non-human identities and inventorying what agents are running within your environment, to actually doing validation on the models themselves, which includes algorithmic red teaming to say, can you jailbreak this model? And if you do jailbreak it and you ask a question that you didn't want it to have a response to, or if you have the agent conduct an action that you didn't want it to conduct, how can you intercept that and make sure that dynamically at runtime you can enforce guardrails? That entire apparatus we actually make available, including the security side but also the observability side. And we fuse it together, and I think that's one of the most important issues of our times.

你们不仅内部在做，还真的把它做成产品，这非常酷。

It's very cool that you're building it not just internally but you're actually going to build it as a product.

不，我们把它作为产品推向市场。事实上，我们有一个叫 AI Defense 的产品，它是这一切的核心基础，我们一年半前发布的。它表现异常出色，我们只需要确保把它推广到越来越多的场景。而且那还只是为聊天时代做的。所以我们最初是为模型做的，然后扩展到智能体。所以现在我们拥有的是对智能体的全天候动态监控。你知道，如果你向一个智能体申请退款，它不应该给你三倍于你买那双鞋所付金额的钱。而这在零售行业是经常发生的事。所以我们收购了一家叫 Galileo 的公司。有来自 DeepMind 和 Uber 的人加入，那些人做得非常出色。他们属于 Splunk 团队，在这方面做得很好。

No, we have it as a product to make it available in the market. In fact, we have a product called AI Defense, which is the core foundation of that, that we launched a year and a half ago. It's doing exceptionally well, and we just need to make sure that we get to more and more of it. And that was only done for the chat era. So we did that initially for the model and then we extended that to agents. And so now what we have is dynamic monitoring of agents at all times. And you know, if you ask an agent for a refund, it shouldn't be giving you three times the amount that you paid for the pair of shoes. And that's something that happens all the time in the retail industry. So we acquired a company called Galileo. There were folks from DeepMind and Uber that came along, and those folks have done a great job. They're part of the Splunk team and they've done a great job on that.

你能带我们回到你早期的职业生涯，帮我们理解你在哪里长大、做过哪些早期工作，如何让你如今处于这样一个能产生如此变革性影响的独特位置吗？

Can you take us back to your early career and help us understand how growing up where you did and the early jobs that you worked led you to be in this unique position to have such a transformative impact now?

现在回头看，我非常幸运。当时看起来并不觉得幸运。但我父亲是个高风险的骗子。他就像伯尼·麦道夫。他会骗人钱财。到了某个时候，我住在印度变得很危险，有人想绑架我。他有个情妇。那个情妇自杀了。我不想留在那里。

When I look back now, I was very fortunate. At the time it didn't seem like I was very fortunate. But my dad was a high-stakes con man. He was like Bernie Madoff. He would swindle people for money. At some point it got dangerous for me to live in India, and there were people who were looking to kidnap me. He had a mistress. That mistress had committed suicide. I didn't want to stick around.

天哪。

Oh my goodness.

你知道，我人生的那一段可以拍成电影。所以我决定——他对我母亲非常虐待，而我和母亲非常亲近。所以我们俩都逃了出来，她决定住在一个不公开的地方，我说：“让我出去看看美国，看看能不能考察一些学校之类的。”就来到了这里。

You know, it could make a movie out of that part of my life. And so what I decided to do — he was very abusive to my mother and I was very close to my mother. And so both of us escaped and she decided to live in a place that was undisclosed and I said, "Let me just go out and check out America and see if I can check out some schools and all of that." Came over here.

你是？

Are you?

我当时 19 岁，1991 年。所以我来到这里，我叔叔让我暂住了一段时间，我在一家叫 Sizzler 的高级餐厅端盘子。平均小费一美元。你知道，那段时间发生了几件奠基性的事情，真正给了我思维上的重构，因为我在学校里是个糟糕的学生。我并不是那样，而且我是家里的异类，因为我很多表亲学业都非常聪明，而我不是。所以我一直有这种自卑情结。我过去口吃，所以我总是保持安静。我接电话时连“你好”都说不出来，所以发生了所有这些事情。然后我开始端盘子，我想：“砰。你必须想办法让人开心，否则你赚不到钱。”然后我来了——你知道，我在这里读本科时，遇到了这家叫 DocuLabs 的公司，他们想给我一个实习机会，因为我的教授对我说：“嘿，你可能想在这里实习。”她是我在学校里的导师，她很棒。所以她做了介绍，我得到了一份实习工作。几个月后，创始人来找我，说：“嗯，我最初的投资者要离开了。我们要把他买断。”我说：“哦，我想加入。”他们说：“嗯，我们每个人出 25 万美元。你可以出 25 万美元，就能加入。”我去找了我认识的一个 banker，我问他：“我需要 25 万美元。”他说：“你为什么需要 25 万美元？”我说：“我要买下这家公司。”他说：“你买下公司后打算做什么？”我说：“我要经营它。”记住，我不是这家公司的创始人。我是个实习生。

I was 19 at the time, 1991. And so I came here, my uncle put me up for a while, waited on tables at a fine dining establishment called Sizzler. Average tip of a dollar. And you know there were a few seminal things that happened during that time that really gave me a mental reframing because I was a terrible student in school. I wasn't really that, and I was a black sheep of the family in the sense that a lot of my cousins were all very smart academically and I was not. And so I always had this kind of inferiority complex. I used to stutter and so I would always stay quiet. I couldn't say hello when I picked up the phone and so there were all of these kind of things that were happening. And then I started waiting on tables and I'm like, "Boom. You have to figure out a way to entertain or you will not make money." And then I came — you know, when I was over here, I was in undergrad. I came across this company DocuLabs and they wanted to give me an internship because my professor said to me, "Hey, you might want to get an internship here." She was my mentor in school and she was great. And so she made an introduction and so I got a job as an intern. Like a few months later, the guy comes to me, the founder, and says, "Well, my original investor is going to leave. We're going to buy him out." I'm like, "Oh, I want in." And they're like, "Well, each one of us is putting in a quarter million dollars. You can put in a quarter million dollars and you can have in." I went to one of the people I knew and he was a banker and I asked him, "I need a quarter million dollars." And he said, "Why do you need a quarter million dollars?" I'm like, "I'm going to buy this company." He goes, "What are you going to do when you buy the company?" I'm like, "I'm going to run it." Now, remember, I wasn't a founder of this company. I was an intern.

你是个实习生。你当时还在上大学。

You were an intern. You were still in college at the time.

我刚——我第一笔贷款是 1 万美元，第二笔贷款是 25 万美元。但我第一笔贷款时，我还在上大学。我拿的是最低工资。

I had just — the first loan I took was 10,000, and the second loan I took was 250,000. But the first loan I took, I was still in college. I was minimum wage.

是的。

Yeah.

对吧？我说：“给我一些钱，我会还给你。”他说：“10% 的利息。”我经营那家公司 17 年。现在它大概是一家不到 500 万美元的公司。

Right? And I said, "Give me some money, and I'll pay it back to you." He said, "10% interest." I ran that business for 17 years. And now it's like a sub $5 million company.

你在那里待了 17 年。

You stayed there for 17 years.

从某些方面说，那是我职业生涯中最大的错误。不是因为公司不好，而是因为商业模式与我在生活中想做的事情不一致。有时候，你知道，我们的 CEO Chuck 告诉我，他说：“Jeetu，一旦你真正上市，你就不能那么大地改变你的商业模式。你的商业模式就是你的商业模式。改变商业模式需要付出很多努力。”但当你在服务业时——这是一家市场研究公司，属于服务业——而我热爱软件，我热爱硅谷，我过去常来这里，我曾在俄罗斯山有一间公寓，我会来这里，我就是被硅谷的人们迷住了。

It was in some ways my biggest mistake in my career. Not because the company wasn't good, it's because the business model did not align with what I wanted to do in life. And sometimes, you know, our CEO, Chuck, tells me, he's like, "Jeetu, once you actually go public, you can't alter your business model that much. Your business model is your business model. It takes a lot of effort to alter your business model." But when you're in a services business — this was kind of a market research company in a services business — and I loved software, and I loved Silicon Valley, and I used to come here, and I had an apartment in Russian Hill for a while, and I would come here, and I'd just be enamored with the people in Silicon Valley.

我当时想：“我想和这些人一起工作，因为他们在 Windows 开始按钮上所做的决定将影响数十亿人，我想成为那样的人，你懂吗？”但我从未真正从中获得那种满足感。但我因为自尊心而留在那里。这是我要给创始人的另一个教训。我留在那里是因为我有这种自尊心：我永远不会为别人工作。这是我自己的公司。我是我自己的老板。我不想为别人工作。这是我犯的最大错误。

And I'm like, "I want to go work with these folks because the decision they make in that start button in Windows is going to be affecting billions of people, and I want to be that person, you know?" But I never really was getting that same level of satisfaction from that. But I stayed on there because of ego. And this is the other lesson I'll give to founders. I stayed on there because I had this ego that I will never work for someone else. This is my own company. I'm my own boss. I don't want to work for someone else. Biggest mistake I made.

嗯。

Mhm.

因为驱动我决策的是自尊心，而不是学习。所以，最终我决定去 EMC 工作。在 EMC 雇用我的那个人现在仍然是我的教练。我们当时在吃晚饭。

Because ego drove my decision, rather than learning driving my decision. So, finally, I decided to go work at EMC. And the guy who hired me at EMC is still my coach. And we were having dinner.

EMC，大公司。

EMC, huge company.

大公司。6 万人。对吧？我从大约 25 人一下子到 6 万人。他雇我当 CTO。我们在吃晚饭。就像这样隔着桌子，我说——他叫 Rick Devine——我说，Rick，你得给我更多薪水，因为我有 17 年的经验。他说，G3，你没有 17 年的经验。你只有 1 年的经验重复了 17 次。来为我工作吧。第一年我会给你 17 年的经验。我从他身上第一年学到的东西比我自己经营 17 年学到的还多。那绝对神奇。那段时间我讨厌为他工作。但后来我们离开后，我去了 Box，有一个人——我认为她是我生命中的联合创始人。她是我运营主管。没有她我不会接受任何工作。她和我总是会想，Rick 在这种情况下会怎么做？我们一直这样问自己。所以，那是一位很棒的导师。然后我去了 Box。在 Box，我在那里期间把业务从 2 亿做到了 8 亿。最后我负责所有产品。然后我打算去一家风扇公司做广告。和 Cisco 完全无关。我接受了那份工作，但他们打算给 Jesse（当时和我一起）的 offer 对她来说不合适。她是我生命中的联合创始人。没有她我不会去任何地方，因为她一直陪着我。所以，我想，好吧，我得想想该怎么办。然后纯属偶然，Chuck 第二天打电话给我。他说，嘿，你应该考虑来这里。

Huge company. 60,000 people. Right? I'm going from like 25 people to 60,000 people. He's hiring me as a CTO. And we're having dinner. Like this across the table and I'm like his name is Rick Devine and I said, Rick, you got to pay me more cuz, you know, I've had 17 years of experience. He said, G3, you don't have 17 years of experience. You have 1 year of experience 17 times over. Come work for me. And in the first year I'll give you 17 years of experience. I learned more from him in the first year than I did in the 17 years running my own business. It was absolutely magical. I hated working for him during that time. But after we left and I went to Box, there's this person that I is my co-founder in life I think of. Like, you know, she is she's my head of operations. I don't take a job without her. Her and I would always be like, what would Rick do at this point? And we kept asking ourselves that. And so, that was a great mentor to have. Then I went to Box. Box, we took that business from 200 to 800 million during my time there. I ran all product by the end of it. Then I was going to go run advertising for a fan company. Not at all anything to do with Cisco. I accepted the job, but the kind of offer they were going to give to Jesse, who was with me, was not the right offer for her. And she was my co-founder in life. Like, I was not going to go anywhere without her because she stuck with me the whole time. And so, I'm like, okay, so I need to figure out what to do. And literally happenstance, Chuck calls me the next day. And says, hey, you should probably think of coming here.

我告诉他：“嘿，听着，我真的已经接受了这份工作。”他对我说：“那家公司有没有你都会做得很好。但如果你来 Cisco，发展轨迹将取决于你所做的事。”然后他很快，在 9 天内给了我们两个 offer。所以，你知道这家公司愿意以非常快的节奏工作。我问他的问题是：“你会给我多少自由，让我完全痴迷于产品？”他说：“是的，我很乐意让你痴迷于产品。”我们做到了，不知不觉中，Cisco 成了我职业生涯中成长最大的地方，可能是在过去 6 年里。

And I told him, I'm like, "Hey, look, I'm really I've really accepted this job." And he said to me, he's like, "That company will do well with or without you. But if you come to Cisco, the trajectory will be shaped based on what you do." And then it was like so old, he gave us two offers within 9 days. So, you knew that the company was willing to work at a very fast clock speed. The question I asked him was I'm like, "How much freedom are you going to give me to just be very product obsessed?" And he said, "Yeah, I would love you to be product obsessed." And we did that, and before you know it, like, you know, Cisco became the place where I think I got some of my in my career, the largest amount of growth I've had is probably in the past 6 years.

你会和那些像你 19 岁时一样的人分享哪些教训？也许是在印度长大，或者在山谷之外的地方，他们是从外部向内看。

What are some lessons that you'd share with, you know, someone who is like you at 19 or so, perhaps even growing up in in in in India or some place outside of of the valley where they're not where they're they're looking in from the outside.

我想第一个教训是，你的上限通常受限于你自己的雄心，而不是其他任何因素。通常不是你的能力。我是一个智力非常普通的人。我没有名校的学位。但我比任何人都更渴望。所以，我仍然比我共事的大多数人更渴望。不是因为他们不渴望，而是因为我觉得我不想让他们失望，所以我会继续努力，没有人能说我没有投入时间。我认为第一件事就是投入时间。想得非常大，有非常大胆的雄心。因为想象力往往会比我们以为的更限制我们。你知道，如果你的目标只有这么大，你很可能永远到不了这里，但如果你的目标在那边，而你到了这里，那已经相当不错了。所以，这是一个非常重要的维度要记住。第二点是商业是一项团队运动。为你能够建立的长久关系感到自豪，在这些关系中你实际上让他人因为你的作用而成功。我认为这会走得很远。如果你从 19 岁就这么想，天哪，你拥有的优势是巨大的。然后我通常告诉创始人的第三个领域是复利的力量。你只需要今天比昨天好 1.27%。一年内你就好 100 倍。如果你这样做 10 年，那就相当不错了。在 10 年，从大局来看，当你 19 岁时感觉很长。就像 Sam Altman 曾经写过一篇博客，“日子很长，但几十年很短。”我每年都读。这是一篇很棒的博客文章。这是最好的博客之一。Jeff Bezos 会说，创始人以 20 年窗口思考的能力与以 3 个月窗口思考相比，会实质性地改变你决策的质量。如果你想想我们都尊敬的真正伟大的企业家，想想 Jensen，想想 Elon Musk。他们没有人被指责以非常短期的窗口思考。我的意思是，他们长期坚持。唯一的区别是，在商业模式真正合理时坚持，但不要像我那样，在一个实际上不符合你雄心的业务中坚持，因为我经营的那个业务，对生意来说很棒。但要去改变世界却很糟糕。我想去改变世界。你知道，那不是适合改变世界的业务。但是，如果你想做一个好的生活方式业务，让它为你的家庭提供良好的生活，那太棒了。继续做。那很好。顺便说一句，这些都不是错误的答案。只是我的雄心与那个业务的模式不匹配。这是你必须记住的另一件事：你的雄心是否与你现在实际在做的事情一致？当你 80 岁回首时，你会说：“你知道吗？我对我这样度过时间感觉很好。”我认为这是我们应该不断问自己的问题。对于年轻人，我总是告诉他们，时间会过得非常快。我从未想过我会 55 岁。你知道，我从未想过我会被称为叔叔。

I think the the first lesson I would say is your upper limit is typically bound by your own ambition rather than any other kind of factor. It's not generally your ability. I'm a very averagely intelligent person. I didn't have a fancy degree from a fancy school. But I was hungrier than everyone else. And so, I still I'm hungrier than most people I work with. Not because they're not hungry, but because I just feel like I don't want to let them down, and so I'm just going to keep keep going at it, and there's no one who can tell me that I'm not putting in the time. And that I think is the first thing is put in the time. Think really big, and have very bold ambitions. Because if your imagination like imagination can tend to curtail us much more than we give it credit for. You know, if you have your goal that's this big, chances are you'll never get here, but if you have your goal that's over here, and if you get here, that's pretty good, you know. And so, that's a pretty important dimension to keep in mind. The second one is business is a team sport. Take pride in longevity of relationships that you can build where you have actually made other people successful as a function of you. And that I think will go a really long way. And if you think that way from the time you're 19, boy, the advantage that you have is tremendously high, you know. And then the third area that I usually tell founders about is this notion of power of compounding. Like, you just have to get 1.27% better today than yesterday. And within a year you're 100x better. And if you do that for 10 years, like that's pretty good. In 10 years in the grand scheme of things, it feels like a long time when you're 19. Like Sam Altman had this blog he had written once, "The days are long, but the decades are short." I read that every every year. It's an amazing blog post. It is one of the best blog Jeff Bezos will say like the ability for someone for a founder to think in a 20-year window versus 3-month window changes the quality of decisions you make materially. And if you think about the the the really big entrepreneurs that we all respect, think about Jensen, think about Elon Musk. None of them were accused of thinking in very short-term windows. I mean, they grinded it out for a long time. The only difference is grind it out when the business model actually makes sense, but don't do it like what I did and grind it out in a business which doesn't actually fit your ambitions, because my business, the one that I ran, was great for business. It was terrible to go change the world. I wanted to go change the world. You know, that's the wrong business to be in to go change the world. But, if you wanted to be a good lifestyle business and have it be a thing that provided well for your family, fantastic. Keep doing that. That's great. And by the way, none of those are wrong answers. It just happens to be that the one that I my ambition did not align with the with the model of the business. Which is the other thing you have to keep in mind is does your ambition align with what you're actually doing right now? Where you are going to get fulfilled when you look back when you're 80 and say, "You know what? I feel very good that this is how I spent my time." I think that's a question we should keep asking ourselves and for the younger folks, I always tell them time's going to pass by so fast. I never thought I'd be 55. You know, I never thought I'd be called uncle.

我从没想过自己会有孩子。也从没想过她会说：“爸爸，你老了。”

I never thought I would have a kid. And I never thought that she would say, "Dad, you're old."

还秃顶。

And bald.

所以，这些事有时会让你变得非常谦卑，让你必须确保不把时间视为理所当然，而是把时间花在真正重要的地方。

And so like those things sometimes give you a lot of humility that you have to make sure that you don't take time for granted and spend the time in the places that actually really matter.

对于创业者，或者那些加入像思科这样的组织并试图像你那样进行转型的人，你有什么建议？

What advice would you have for entrepreneurs or for people who are coming into an organization like Cisco and trying to transform it the way that you did?

我给你们讲个故事。我从离开印度后就再没回去过。1991 年，我离开了。我父亲 2004 年去世。他去世前，我只回去看过他 48 小时。但之后我一直没回去，直到 2017 年。所以，从 1991 年到 2017 年，实际上我在印度待的时间并不多。我带着女儿去了那里。我们去了泰姬陵。有个导游，叫 Raj。他带我们参观泰姬陵。这家伙看起来像个很棒的产品。他对自己的产品了如指掌，也就是他推销的泰姬陵体验。但后来人们不断走过，他居然会用不同的语言脱口而出，普通话、德语、法语、西班牙语，所以有一次我说：“哥们，你会说多少种语言？”他给了我一个离谱的数字，大概 12 或 14 种语言之类的。我说：“这太疯狂了。”他说：“嗯，你知道，我想尊重来这里的人，因为他们来了，我不该自以为是地认为他们会说我的语言。我应该说他们的语言。”这很高尚。显然他很聪明，哥们。我心里想：“这家伙比我当时在 Boxed 共事过的任何人都聪明，比任何与我共事的人都聪明。”他大概每天赚 10 美元。我坐在这里，在硅谷。为什么？因为我碰巧有一个平台，而他没有。对吧？我有教育的平台，有美国的平台，有科技的平台，有一个给我机会的平台，而他没有得到。所以，无论他多聪明，无论他多努力，他都很难脱颖而出。如果你碰巧被赋予了平台，我对人们唯一的请求就是不要浪费它。作为创始人，我们都可以把一切看作半空的杯子，这些都是我们没有的东西。但是，天哪，我们都生活在最特殊的时代之一。如果你 19 岁，或者处于职业生涯的早期，在这个 AI 运动的时刻，你知道有多少 50 多岁的人，如果能回到 19 岁，他们愿意付多少钱吗？这是科技界活着的魔法时刻。这是真正对世界产生影响的好时机。如果你花时间与 YC 联系在一起，我认为这是最优秀的组织之一，这就是为什么我喜欢与你们合作，你要是不拼命努力、尽你所能，那就太傻了，不是为了别的，不是为了赚钱，而是因为当你老了，你对整个社会的影响会如此令人满足，值得去做。如果你碰巧把公司卖给了大公司，不要对大公司变得愤世嫉俗。去学习大公司教你的东西，因为所有那些大公司在某个时候都是初创公司。如果你成功了，你最终也会成为大公司。不要贬低大公司。实际上，要学习如何让大公司以一定的胆识运作。然后你也能从中受益。带着极大的好奇心去，无论你走哪条路，但要知道你被赋予了平台。世界上 80 亿人中，很少有人能像我们一样被赋予这样的平台。

I'll give you the story. So, when I hadn't gone back to India from the time I left India. In 1991, I left. My dad died in 2004. I'd gone to see him for 48 hours once before he died. But then I hadn't gone back until 2017. So, for any kind of practical purpose from 1991 to 2017, I hadn't spent that much time in India. I took my daughter there. We went to the Taj Mahal. And there's this tour guide. His name is Raj. He's showing us the Taj Mahal. The guy seemed like a really good product. He knew every single detail about his product, which was the experience he was selling about the Taj Mahal. But then people would keep walking by and he would actually bust out in different languages, Mandarin and German and French and Spanish and so at some point I'm like, "Dude, how many languages do you speak?" He gave me like some ridiculously large number, like 12 or 14 languages or something like that. And so I said, "That's crazy." He's like, "Well, you know, I want to honor the people that come here because they come here and I should not be presumptuous enough to think that they're going to speak my language. I should speak their language." I mean, that's very noble. Clearly he's smart, dude. I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, "This guy is smarter than anyone I used to work at Boxed at the time, anyone that I work with." He's making probably $10 a day. I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley. And why is that? Because I happen to have a platform and he doesn't. Right? I have a platform of education, I have a platform of America, I have a platform of tech, I have a platform that just gives me the affordance of opportunity that he didn't get. And so, no matter how smart he was, no matter how hard he's working, he's having a hard time breaking away from the pack. If you happen to be afforded a platform, my only ask of people is don't squander it. And as a founder, we can all look at all the things as glass half empty and these are the things that we don't have. But man, we are all living in one of the most special times. And if you're 19 or in the earlier part of your career in this moment in time during the movement in AI, do you know how many people in their 50s, how much money they would pay to go back to being 19 if they could? This is a magical time to be alive in tech. This is a great time to actually make an impact on the world. And if you are spending your time associated with YC, which is one of the finest organizations I think, which is why I love working with you folks, you would be nuts not to just bust your tail and do everything you can not for any other reason, not for making the money, but because the impact you'll have on society at large will be so gratifying when you're older that it'll be something that's worth doing. And if you happen to sell your company to a large company don't get cynical going to a large company. Go learn things that the large company teaches you because all those large companies at some point in time were startups. And if you are successful you will eventually be a large company. And don't diss large companies. Actually learn how to make large companies operate with a level of chutzpah. And then you'll actually be able to benefit from that as well. And go in with an extreme level of curiosity and regardless of which way you go, but know that you're afforded the platform. And very few people in the world look at the 8 billion people, very few people are afforded a platform like we have.

Gigi，这是一个非常鼓舞人心的结束语。非常感谢你加入我们。

Gigi, that's such an inspiring note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us.

谢谢邀请我。非常棒。

Thank you for having me. It was great.