Luca Ferrari：Bending Spoons 背后的操作系统

好的，今天我们请来了 Luca Ferrari。我想请他上节目已经很久了，因为他经营着 Bending Spoons，这是一家非常迷人的公司。它有点像私募股权整合公司，但本质上是一家科技平台公司，而且非常独特。我找不到任何其他与之类似的公司。他的思维方式、构建方式和 CEO 风格都非常独特。希望你们喜欢。好的，Luca，欢迎来到 Long Strange Trip。感谢你的到来。

Okay, today we have Luca Ferrari on. I wanted to have him on for a long time because he runs Bending Spoons, which is this fascinating company. It's like a little bit of a private equity rollup company, but it's really a tech platform company and it's unique. I can't find any other company that sort of rhymes with it. He is very unique in the way he thinks and the way he builds and the way he CEOs. Hope you like it. Okay, Luca, welcome to Long Strange Trip. Thanks for coming on.

感谢邀请。我很荣幸。

Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

好的，我想现在大多数听众都听说过 Bending Spoons，但我怀疑他们是否理解这个模式以及其中的魔力。所以，如果你不介意的话，用两三分钟给我们讲讲它是如何运作的，以及它有什么特别之处。

Okay, I think by this point most of the listeners have heard of Bending Spoons, but I doubt they understand the model and what the magic is. So, if you wouldn't mind educating us like two three minutes on how it works and what's special about it.

好的，当然。公司建立的整个核心理念是：如果我们能构建一个机器、一个系统，使我们能够比几乎任何人都更好地运营数字科技业务，那么我们几乎可以保证通过收购长期高效地复利资本。原因是，如果许多企业一旦整合到我们的系统中（我们称之为平台）后，比由其他人作为独立公司运营时表现更好，那么我们就应该能够向人们提供有吸引力的价格，这样他们就会把企业卖给我们，而我们仍然为股东带来高回报。这就是背后的思路。当然，困难的部分是构建那个系统、那个平台，以便我们能比几乎任何人都更好地运营这些业务，而这正是我们在过去 13 年里倾注心血的事情。因此，我们努力打造一支优秀的团队、强大的文化、强大的专有技术、大量专有数据，我们所做的就是收购这些企业，将它们深度整合到这个平台中。所以我们有一个共享的研发、营销和行政团队，可以在所有业务之间灵活流动。我们基本上将被收购的企业重新平台化，使它们基于相同的技术基础。有投资者曾称之为操作系统。我认为这是一个很贴切的比较或比喻。然后我们对它们进行深度改造。我们可以重建组织、重写大部分代码库、重新架构云基础设施。我们尝试推出有用的新功能、修复漏洞、提升性能、重新思考货币化和营销，所以有一个连续收购的组成部分，你会在私募股权中看到，也会在像伯克希尔·哈撒韦或 TransDigm 这样的公司中看到。与私募股权相比，最大的区别在于我们不是基金，我们从不……我们用自己的资产负债表收购，我们从未出售过重要业务，未来也不打算出售，所以我们买入是为了永久持有和运营。另一个非常大的区别，肯定是相对于私募股权，当然也是相对于伯克希尔这样的公司，就是我们深度改造这些业务并将它们全部整合在一起。所以它们被大大简化了，有点像从一家公司变成一个安装在同一基础上的产品。这就是模式。到目前为止我已经做了 13 年。

Yeah, sure. So we I mean the entire thesis on which the company is built is that if we can build a machine a system whereby we can operate digital technology businesses better than almost anybody else then we are pretty much guaranteed to be able to compound capital efficiently for a very long time through acquisitions. And the reason is that if a lot of businesses are basically better off once they're integrated into the system what we call our platform than being operated as standalone companies by someone else then we should be able to offer prices to people that are appealing and so they will sell their businesses to us and we still deliver a high return for shareholders. So that's the thinking behind it. Of course the difficult part is to build that system that platform so that we can operate these businesses better than almost anybody else and that's what we have poured our hearts and minds into over the past well 13 years technically. And so we have tried to have an amazing team of people strong culture powerful proprietary technologies lots of proprietary data and what we do we buy these businesses we integrate them very deeply into this platform. So we have a shared R&D, marketing, G&A team that can fluidly move across all of our businesses. We basically replatform the acquired businesses so that they based on the same technological foundation. Some investor at some point called it an operating system. I think it's a pretty apt comparison or metaphor. And then we transform them pretty deeply. So we can rebuild the org rewrite big chunks of the codebase, rearchitect cloud infrastructure. We try to launch useful new features fix bugs improve performance rethink monetization and marketing so there is a serial acquire component that you will find in private equity you'll find in companies like Berkshire Hathaway or TransDigm the big difference certainly vis-à-vis private equity is that we are not a fund we never you know we buy off our balance sheet we've never sold a material business we don't intend to sell one in the future so we buy to hold and operate forever. And the other very big difference is definitely vis-à-vis private equity but also certainly you know the Berkshires of the world is that we transform these businesses pretty deeply and we integrate them all together. So they're much simplified a bit like they go from being a company to being a product installed on the same foundation basically. So that's the model. I've been doing it for 13 years at this point.

是的，进展非常顺利。你们上市了。市值大概是多少？

Yeah, it's going remarkably well. You went public. What's roughly the market cap?

嗯，几个月前 IPO 时，我认为股权价值是 180 亿美元。

Um, at the time of IPO a few months ago, $18 billion, I think, equity value.

恭喜。我是这个模式的超级粉丝。它真的很独特。我脑子里把它比作伯克希尔·哈撒韦，但它让我想起我 20 多岁时，我为一家叫 PTC 的美国科技公司工作，他们把我派到日本，在我很年轻的时候建立日本业务。我的办公室就在三菱总部里面。所以我与三菱总部的人打交道，但涉及所有不同的部门。它感觉更像三菱或三星，而不是像大型私募股权公司或伯克希尔。你会怎么描述它？

Congratulations. I'm a huge fan of the model. It's really unique. I was comparing in my head to Berkshire Hathaway, but it reminds me when I was in my 20s, I worked for a US tech company called PTC, and they moved me to Japan to set up the Japanese operations when I was very young. And my office was inside of Mitsubishi headquarters. And so I dealt with Mitsubishi headquarters people, but like all the different divisions. It feels more like Mitsubishi or Samsung than it does like some big PE firm or like Berkshire. Is that how do you how would you describe it?

是的，我对那些公司不太了解，所以不能确定。但独特之处在于我们买入是为了永久持有和运营。所以我认为这排除了私募股权公司。然后是非常深度的整合。根据我的经验，大多数连续收购的公司大多试图让它们相对独立地运营。至少这是我看到的。我们采取完全相反的方法，我们确保它们拥有相同的技术基础，大致相同的核心团队，可以灵活流动去追求研发机会，当这些机会耗尽时我们再抽调。然后，许多连续收购者大致保持这些公司原来的样子，而我们则从头开始彻底改变它们，这非常耗时且具有挑战性，但好处是，光明的一面是我们通常能带来非常高的回报。所以我不知道，我认为我真的不知道有哪家公司这样做，但是

Yeah, I don't know those companies that well, so I can't say for sure. But again the distinctive features are we buy to hold and operate forever. So I think that kind of strikes out PE firms. And then again this very deep integration. Most companies that acquire other companies serially in my experience try to run them somewhat separately for the most part. At least that's what I've seen. We take the completely opposite approach where we make sure they have the same technological foundation broadly speaking the same core team that moves fluidly across to go after R&D opportunities and we draw when those are exhausted. And then we a lot of serial acquirers keep these companies broadly speaking the same way they were before we change them completely from the ground up and it's very time-consuming and challenging but the upside the bright side of that is we generally deliver very high returns so I don't know I think I don't really know of any company that does it this way out there but

这有点像独一无二的，我同意这有点像独一无二的。Luca，魔力在于挑选还是运营，你会给多少百分比？

It's kind of an end of one I agree it's kind of an end of one is the magic Luca in the picking or in the operating and what percentage would you give it?

不，我的意思是几乎完全在于运营。我会说，我描述的平台，没有它我们就无法做到我们所做的。所以，我愿意认为我们在选择正确的业务方面已经相当擅长，但如果你能使用我们的平台，实现高回报相对容易，因为例如，我们一直享受着异常优秀的人才流入。去年我们收到了 80 万份申请，只雇佣了不到 300 人。所以当你拥有出色的工程师、设计师、产品经理、总经理时，就更容易从头开始重新思考一项业务并更成功地运营它。任何经营过数字业务的人，可能任何业务，但肯定是数字业务，只要经营足够长时间，都会告诉你，员工数量并不那么重要，重要的是人的优秀程度和你建立的文化。

No, I mean it's almost completely in the operating. I'd say the platform I describe we couldn't do what we do. So, I'd like to think we've gotten pretty good at selecting the right businesses, but it's relatively easy to deliver high returns if you have access to our platform because, for example, we have been enjoying exceptional an inflow of exceptional talent. We got 800,000 applications last year, we had hired fewer than 300 people. So when you have amazing engineers, designers, product managers, general managers, it's much easier to take a business and rethink it from the ground up and run it much more successfully. Anyone who's run a certainly a digital business, probably any business, but certainly a digital business for a sufficiently long period of time will tell you that headcount matters not a lot, but it's just how good the people are in the culture you've established.

所以当你能够接触到这种水准的人才时，你可以用 20 个人运营一家别人需要 200 人才能运营的企业。仅这一点就能同时带来成本效率和更快创新、更快改善变现的机会。举个例子，这就是我们相对于那些作为独立公司运营的企业的优势之一。过去十年，我们投入了大量资源来打造强大的专有技术，几乎覆盖了运营一家数字企业所需的一切。它们原生集成在一起，让一切都变得高效得多、快得多。如果我以独立方式运营其中一家企业，我肯定没有资源去构建这些技术，甚至不知道从哪里开始。所以这也算是一种作弊码。所以毫无疑问，运营部分远比挑选重要得多。但显然，我们还是会尽量挑得好。既然能做好，为什么要做差呢？

And so when you have access to this caliber of people, you can run a business with 20 people that someone else would need 200 people for. And so that alone will give you both cost efficiencies and opportunity to innovate faster, improve monetization faster. So that's an element, for instance, of our advantage vis-à-vis these companies being run as standalone businesses. We have invested a lot over the past decade in building powerful proprietary technologies to do pretty much everything you need to run a digital business. They're natively integrated with one another, and they just make everything so much more effective and faster. If I were to run one of these businesses on a standalone basis, I certainly wouldn't have the resources to build these technologies. I wouldn't even know where to start. And so that's also kind of a cheat code. So definitely the operational part is far more important than the picking. But we try to pick well, obviously. Why do it poorly if you can do it well?

Luca，我们想聊聊招聘。我最近大部分时间都和 CEO 们在一起，每个人都在谈高人才密度、成为人才磁铁，很多人早期做到了，但随着规模扩张，就不可避免地稀释了。你似乎把人才密度这个理念几乎工业化了，而且你有一些非常独特的方式来吸引申请、吸引兴趣，也就是漏斗顶端的兴趣筛选。我们就聊聊漏斗顶端，聊聊筛选流程，把时钟拨回到你们还默默无闻的时候。没人听说过你们，没有雇主品牌，没有主动上门的兴趣。你是怎么让人才飞轮转起来的？

And Luca, let's just—I want to click on the hiring. So I spend most of my time with CEOs these days and everyone talks about having high talent density, being a talent magnet, and a lot of them pull it off early, but as it scales, it kind of inevitably waters down. You seem to have almost industrialized this talent density idea and you have some very unique ways of pulling in applications, pulling in interest, the top of the funnel of qualifying the interest. Let's just talk about the top of the funnel and talk about the qualification process and talk about it like—roll the clock back when you were nobody's. No one had ever heard of you. You had no employer brand. You had no inbound interest. How did you get the talent flywheel kind of rolling?

是的，我们基本上相信，如果你有一个可行或可能可行的战略，那么几乎最重要的就是你为执行这个战略所投入的人才，以及文化——也就是游戏规则、人们如何互动、他们选择做什么以及怎么做。这些领域几乎从一开始就是我们痴迷的地方。你说得对，一开始你一无所有。所以这就是创始人或早期团队成员需要做好的事情，基本上就是以小博大。我记得早期至少头两三年，我至少 50% 的时间，可能更多，都花在招聘和其他与人才相关的事情上。我和另外几个人设法找到了最优秀毕业生的名单——当时我们基本只在意大利招聘。现在我们是国际化的，但当时一些最好的意大利大学——我们设法找到了毕业生名单，然后追踪他们，我记得给几百人打过电话，还不太得体地骚扰了一些人，直到他们同意加入我们。后来我们建立了一个相当庞大的招聘团队。现在我们有了科学家、研究员，我们对待人才管道中的筛选，可能类似于量化交易员挑选股票的方式。我们寻找所有信号，然后根据未来表现来检验这些信号，判断它们是否有预测性，或者哪些信号组合有预测性，并不断迭代。这是一个非常严谨和复杂的系统。目前我们在每份申请中评估数百个信号。所以，在相同的雇主品牌和吸引申请的能力下，这能帮助你做出可能好得多的选择。而且一半的游戏也在于吸引非常优秀的申请，因为如果只有天才来申请，那么组建优秀团队就更容易。所以我认为我们的模式在这方面有一种不公平的优势。我们发现很多工程师、设计师、产品经理非常喜欢这样一种想法：他们可以在同一家公司工作，比如说花九个月帮助重建 Vimeo 的视频基础设施，然后花六个月重新思考 AOL 的广告，再花一年构建平台技术，所有这些都在同一雇主、大致相同的同事、相同的文化下进行。他们建立的业绩记录不会像换雇主时那样被稀释——显然换雇主会失去很多，你必须重新建立信誉。所以这是一个非常强大的吸引力。另一个吸引力是，因为我们从一开始就如此系统化、毫不妥协地追求极高的人才密度，当然也要与我们在每个时间点对候选人的吸引力相匹配。一旦这一点到位，它就是一种强大的手段，既能留住卓越表现，又能吸引更多这样的人，因为当人们发现自己喜欢同事时，他们永远不会离开。我们基本上没有令人遗憾的流失。去年我们的核心团队成员——spooners——的令人遗憾的流失率是 6%。相信我，大科技公司一直在试图挖人。所以并不是缺乏机会。同样，这些人会告诉以前的同学或其他人之类的，哦，这里太棒了，你应该申请。所以这让你的生活更轻松，但在公司历史后期达到非常高的人才密度是非常困难的。你需要从一开始就建立它，并且完全痴迷于此，永不放弃，即使这意味着在很长一段时间内招聘的人数远少于你想要的，即使这意味着与那些正在做出贡献的人分道扬镳，仅仅因为你认为你有更好的人。这非常痛苦，因为我们这里没有人是反社会人格，而且和大多数公司一样，你不喜欢告诉一个完全不错的贡献者他们应该另谋高就。而且你短期内会失去好的能力，去追求未来惊人的能力。所以这些事情很难做，但如果你持续做，我认为你会发展出一个非常强大的飞轮。

Yeah, so we basically believe that if you have a strategy that works or can work, then almost all that matters is the talent you deploy toward the execution of that strategy and the culture—meaning the rules of the game, how people interact with one another, what they choose to do and how. Those are the areas we've obsessed over pretty much since the beginning. Now, you're right. I mean, you start with nothing. And so that's what founders or early team members need to do well. That's basically punching above their weight. I remember early on spending at least 50% of my time, probably more for at least the first two, three years, on recruiting among other talent-related things. And I and a couple others managed to find the lists of the best graduates—at the time we hired pretty much only in Italy. Now we're international, but some of the best Italian universities—we managed to find the lists of graduates and we kind of tracked them down and I remember calling hundreds of them, poorly harassing a few until they accepted to join us. And later we built a pretty substantial talent team. These days we have scientists, researchers, and we treat the selection of talent within our pipeline probably similarly to how a quantitative trader would pick stocks. So we look for all signals and then test signals against future performance to determine whether they're predictive or what combinations of signals are, and keep iterating. It's a very rigorous and sophisticated system. At this point we assess hundreds of signals in each application. So that helps you select potentially dramatically better given the same level of employer brand and ability to attract applications. And half the game is also attracting very good applications, because if only geniuses apply, then it's easier to build a good team. And so there I think we have a kind of unfair advantage with our model. We found that a lot of engineers, designers, product managers absolutely love the idea of being able to work at a company where they can say spend nine months helping rebuild, say, Vimeo's video infrastructure and then six months rethinking advertising on AOL and then maybe a year building a platform technology, all with the same employer, broadly speaking with the same colleagues, with the same culture. The track record they're building does not get diluted as when you change employer—obviously a lot of that is lost. You have to reestablish credibility. And so that's a very powerful point of attraction. And the other one is because we've been so systematic and uncompromising on having extremely high levels of talent density pretty much from the beginning, of course, compatibly with our appeal to candidates at each point in time. Once that's in place, it's a powerful means of retaining excellent performance and attracting more of those, because when people find that they love their colleagues, they never leave. We have essentially zero regrettable churn. We had 6% regrettable churn of spooners, the members of our core team, last year. And trust me, there are poaching attempts from big tech all the time. So it's not for a lack of opportunities. And equally these people will tell their former fellow students or whatever, oh, it's amazing here, you should apply. So it makes your life easier, but it's very difficult to get to a very high level of talent density late in a company's history. You need to establish it from the beginning and just be completely obsessed with it and never give up, even when it means hiring way fewer people than you'd like to for prolonged periods of time, parting ways with people who are being helpful just because you think you have better people. It's quite painful both because we are—nobody's a sociopath here—and as in most companies, you don't like to tell someone who's a perfectly good contributor that they should look for another job. And also you're losing good capacity in the short term to look for amazing capacity down the line. So those are difficult things to do, but if you do them consistently, I think you develop a very powerful flywheel.

听起来你有一个数据科学类型的团队，在查看所有主动申请并寻找信号。哪些信号与成功相关性最强？R 方很高。然后，超过那个阶段之后，我猜会有人工面试。有哪些问题能挖掘出你所寻找的、可能不那么明显的东西？

Sounds like you get kind of a data science type team that is looking at all the inbound and is looking for signals. What are the signals that are most strongly correlated with success? The R squared is high. And then once you get beyond that, I assume there's a human interview. What are the questions that tease out what you're looking for that maybe aren't obvious?

是的。所以我们对细节相当保密。

Yeah. So we are fairly secretive about the details.

我猜你从我的量化交易员那里也得到了类似的回答，那是我之前打的比方。不过不是的，我可以分享一些。人们的申请材料里有一些明显的信号。比如他们的GPA，它不是特别强的指标，但有一定帮助。他们毕业的大学。我觉得人们会惊讶于哈佛或斯坦福毕业对绩效的预测力有多弱。人们会想，哦，你肯定是个天才。不，实际上，是的，你可能比其它大学毕业的人稍微强一点，但并没有强那么多。而且我们经常发现，人们往往会因为更有优越感、把自己看得太高，而失去一些那种潜在的原始天赋优势。但它仍然有预测力。在其他条件相同的情况下，哈佛毕业的人会比不太知名大学的人表现稍好一些。所以其中一些可能算是比较明显的。还有很多并不明显。我可以分享一个相对有预测力的。这个结果出现时我很惊讶。我们发现，如果一个人在青少年时期政治活跃，但到了二十出头就不再活跃，这往往与一个人的驱动力、创业方法和心态高度相关，而这些是备受重视的品质。我们的解释是，如果你17岁，学校已经不够了，你觉得自己需要做更多。这显示了主动性，显示了生产力，显示了一种不满足于现状的层次，这通常是健康的。但如果你到了25、26、30岁还在做这件事，那意味着这很可能是一项人生使命，这完全没问题，但很可能与你的工作、你的职业作为首要优先级不相容。你的工作很可能要让位于你的政治抱负。

I guess you got a similar answer from my quantitative trader again, that was my metaphor earlier. But no, I can share some of this. There are some obvious signals in people's applications. Their GPA, for example, it's not super strong but it's helpful. The university they graduated from. I think people would be surprised by how poorly graduating from Harvard or Stanford predicts performance. Like people think, oh, you must be a genius. No, actually, yeah, you're probably a little bit stronger than people graduating from other universities, but not so much stronger. And often we find that people tend to lose some of that potential raw talent edge by being a bit more entitled and thinking too highly of themselves. But it's still predictive. All else being equal, someone from Harvard will do a little bit better than someone from a less well-known university. So some of those are probably somewhat obvious. There are many that are not. One I can share is relatively predictive. I was surprised when this came up. We found that if someone is politically active as a teenager but ceases to be in their early 20s, that tends to correlate highly with someone's drive and entrepreneurial approach and mindset, which are highly valued qualities. The way we've explained it is that if you are 17 years old and school is not enough, you feel like you need to do more. That shows agency, that shows productivity, that shows a level of not settling for the status quo, that's generally healthy. But if you still do that when you're 25, 26, 30, it means it's probably a life mission, which is perfectly fine, but likely incompatible with your job, your career being top priority. Your job probably takes a backseat to your political aspirations.

你怎么找到这种信号？你是在面试里问他们这个问题吗？还是去翻他们以前的 Instagram？这种信号到底是怎么在过程中冒出来的？

How do you find that signal? Do you ask them that question in an interview? Do you look through their old Instagram? Like how does that signal even arise in the process?

好在人们认为简历里得写上领导力经历，因为那能帮你拿到咨询公司之类的工作。所以我们遇到的大多数人，如果真有这方面的经历，都会写上一些比较重要的内容。但无论如何，我们在流程的后续环节——不管是面试还是笔试——都会问一些明显能让人分享这类经历的问题。说到这里，我就要讲另一件你可以做的事了，那就是你不应该被动地接受申请材料里呈现出的任何信号。你可以非常主动。我们发现，在我们这里，很多最好的信号来自实操测试，也就是我们让候选人做或经历的那些环节。所以你可以通过这种方式来引出信号。面试，在筛选流程的所有典型环节中，至少以我们的经验来看，是最差的预测指标。但如果你给面试官极其精确的问题，要求他们必须问，并且告诉他们要用完全一样的方式去问，然后确保答案被记录下来并单独评估，那你就能让面试变得还算靠谱。几乎完全没用的做法是，让一个人去跟另一个人聊，基本上没有指导方针，或者只有一个大致的议程，然后跑来跟你说我喜欢这家伙、我不喜欢这家伙。那基本上就是噪音。所以如果你把面试结构做得非常严密，并且尽量把面试的实际执行和对回答的评估分开，那它就能有一定的预测力。

Thankfully, people think they need to include leadership experiences in their CVs because that gets you a job at a consulting company or something. So most people we find would include something significant in that area if they did it. But in any case, we do ask later in the process, whether it's an interview or written assessments, questions that would very clearly lend themselves to people sharing this sort of thing. And with this I'll get to the other thing you can do, which is you shouldn't be passive in accepting whatever signals are present in someone's application. You can be very proactive. We find that a lot of the best signals in our case come from the practical tests, the things we do or ask candidates to go through. And so you can elicit signals that way. Interviews are, of all the typical elements in a selection process, at least in our experience, they are the worst predictors. But you can make them decent if you give interviewers extremely precise questions they need to ask and you tell them to ask them exactly in the same way and then you make sure that the answers are recorded and assessed separately. What's completely useless pretty much is having someone talk to someone else with essentially no guidelines or just a high-level agenda and then tell you I like the guy, I didn't like the guy. That's noise pretty much. So if you structure it a lot and you try to separate the actual conducting of the interview from the evaluation of the responses, then it can be somewhat predictive.

我可以跟你讲讲 HubSpot 在销售端解锁的一套很好的流程，我们靠它把内部销售团队从 10 个人扩展到了一千个人。当时很多——我们其实跟你们挺像的。我们有一个更好的——那时候想进 HubSpot 比进哈佛还难。所以我们有大量的主动投递，我们会看所有的简历，专门找那些上州立大学的人，比如佛蒙特大学、威斯康星大学。我们不看哈佛和 MIT，我们找的是那种练过某项运动、有运动细胞、有竞争心的人。而且我们不会想太多。我们不用标准方式面试他们。我们只是说，如果这人看起来差不多是这种类型，那就给他半小时。我们给他半小时，跟一个人聊。那个人会做的是设置一个角色扮演。所以我来当 HubSpot 的员工，你来当潜在客户。我把场景设好，然后让你向我推销，我给你 12 分钟来卖给我。就是向我推销随便什么东西，我一边听，一边给你抛异议。结束之后，我会给你反馈，Luca，告诉你做得怎么样。我给你一分钟想一想。然后我们再做一遍一模一样的事。如果这个人吸收了这个反馈，而且推销做得还过得去，我们就会做几个盲调背调。砰，我们就雇了他。这套东西最后真的帮我们实现了规模化。我们没做那种常规面试，这在销售端真的管用，因为我有点同意你的看法。

Can I tell you about HubSpot unlocked on the sales side a good process for doing this where we scaled our inside sales from 10 to a thousand, where lots of—we're kind of like you. We had a better—it was harder to get into HubSpot than Harvard. So we had lots of inbound and we would look at all the resumes and we would look for people who went to a state school, you know, went to University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin. We weren't looking for Harvard and MIT and we look for person who had done a sport who was athletic and competitive. And we didn't think too much about it. We didn't interview them in a standard way. We just said if they look kind of like this, let's give them a half an hour. And we give them a half an hour with a person. And what that person would do was set up a role play. So I would be the HubSpot employee, you'd be the potential. I'd set it up and then I'd have you sell to me and I give you 12 minutes to sell to me. So selling me whatever and I'm hearing, I'm giving you objections. We finish it. Then I would give you feedback, Luca, on how you did. I give you a minute to think about it. And then we do the exact same thing again. And if the person absorbed that feedback and did a half-decent job at the pitch, we would do a couple blind references. Boom, we hired them. That actually really ended up scaling for us. We didn't do the normal interviews that really worked on the sales side because I kind of agree with you.

我还想问你的另一件事，但它只是些盲目的引用，就像那个在你的信号里到底在哪里？

The other thing I wanted to ask you about, but it's just blind references like where is that in your signal?

是的，我们把这一步放在最后做。嗯，所以不，我们其实不做盲推荐。我们做背景调查。我们不做盲推荐，因为这在意大利是违法的。所以，你不能那样问，于是我们想，好吧，那就用一个在各司法管辖区都行得通的方法。尽管我知道在美国你可以打电话问别人，哦，这个团队成员表现怎么样？但我们做背景调查的方式是——由候选人提供几个名字。我们会尽量引导他们，好吧，给我那些跟你共事过、有充分接触的人。我们会尽量针对某人最重要的几段经历，至少各找一个人，如果可能的话最好是他们的经理，但最终这由候选人自己决定。我们也会把这类背景调查面试设计得相当结构化，我们发现它们是有预测力的，但同样，你得用科学的方法来做。如果你只是随便让某个人拿起电话打过去，那几乎总是正面的。你知道，很少有人会给你那些会批评他们的推荐人名字，所以你的问题必须非常具体，并且要求对方做出严格的评分判断。比如说，我们会问他们，好吧，在你共事过最多的20个人里，大概这样说吧。我就——你会说这个人是其中最优秀的，还是前五名？然后你再追问几个后续问题，确保这个回答背后有一点实质内容。你会发现，那些真正热情的人，往往会告诉你，嗯，是高于平均水平。

Yeah, we do that as the very last step. Well, so no, we don't do actually blind references. We do references. We don't do blind references because they're illegal in Italy. So, you can't ask and so we figured, okay, let's just have a method that works across jurisdictions. Even though I know in the US you can call people and ask, oh, how was this team member? But, we do references is the—it's the candidate who presents a few names. We try to guide it toward okay give me people who you know had plenty of exposure. We try to get at least one person for at least the couple of biggest experiences someone had so they and ideally their manager if possible but ultimately it's their call and we structure those interviews with references quite a lot as well and we find that they can be predictive but again you need to be scientific about it. If you leave it to someone picking up the phone and calling then almost always it's positive. You know very rarely do people give you names of people who will criticize them and so you need to be very specific in your questions and ask to make hard grading decisions. For example, we ask them, okay, of the 20 people you have worked with the most, say something like this. I'm just—would you say this person is the best or top five? And then you try to ask a few follow-up questions to make sure there's a little bit of substance behind that response. And you find that people who are enthusiastic, often they will tell you, well, it's above average.

然后你会说，等等。听起来这个人是个天才，你告诉我他可能排在第 8 位（总共 20 人）。这不错，但你可以让它有预测性，不过你需要先付出努力并建立结构。好的，我喜欢这个建议。当人们对我做盲推荐时，我收到很多。我认为当他们问“这是为你工作过的最好人选吗？”时，这很聪明。嗯，不是。然后他们说“为什么？”好的，这就打开了话题。我想谈谈你。你是我采访的第 20 位 CEO。真的很有趣。老实说，我创办这个播客时的论点是，我会找出共同点，每个人都在做什么，然后我会写下来。我会把它标准化。事实是，根本没有共同点。每个人做法不同，没有剧本，而且剧本现在变化特别快。我最近两次采访就是例证。我采访了 Kshi 的 TK，他和他的联合创始人，我忘了，有 200 名员工。没有管理层级。他们都向那两个人汇报。他在播客中称之为混乱管理。我上次采访的是 Data Bricks 的 Aliot，他有 8 个直接下属。非常结构化。他的直接下属团队，他每周和直接下属开三次会。他每季度有一次 QBR，然后每季度有一次异地战略会议。所以像两极，但都做得非常好。你在这个谱系中处于什么位置？

And you're like, hold on a sec. It sounded like this person was a genius, and you're telling me it's maybe ranked eight out of 20. It's nice, but you can make it predictive, but you need to put in the effort and the structure before you get there. Okay, I love that advice. I get a lot of blind references when people do that to me. I think it's brilliant when they ask, is that the best person that's ever worked for you? Well, no. Then they say, why? And okay, that opens things up. I want to talk about you. You're the 20th CEO I've interviewed. It's been really fun. And honestly, my thesis when I started this podcast was I'm gonna figure out the common thread, what everyone's doing, and I'm going to write it down. I'm going to standardize it. The truth is there's not even close to a common thread. Everyone does it differently and there is no playbook, and the playbooks are changing extra fast right now. My last two interviews are emblematic of it. I interviewed TK from Kshi and he and his co-founder have, I forget, 200 employees. There's no levels of management. They all report to those two. And he referred to it in the podcast as management by chaos. My last interview was with Aliot from Data Bricks and he's got eight direct reports. It's very structured. His direct report team, he has three meetings a week with his direct reports. He has a QBR once a quarter and then he has an offsite strategy session once a quarter. So like polar opposites both doing extremely well. Where do you fit in that spectrum?

大概在中间。我认为这些通常，比如更正式的管理方法，它们的影响被大大高估了。我认为在一个公司的结果中，几乎所有的结果都取决于你的战略，人们有时称之为产品市场契合，但也取决于你的模式，而这压倒性地驱动了结果。我总是问自己，对我来说，一个企业是好企业，如果即使管理平庸，也许不是糟糕但平庸，它也能做得很好。所以这是第一件事。第二件对我重要的事是人才水平和文化，文化真正是，你如何做决策？什么重要？什么不重要？我们重视什么？我们不重视什么？然后其他一切，汇报线，你是否使用 OKR 或保持流动和非正式，控制幅度。我确信它在边际上确实重要，让事情好一点或差一点。而且我确信不同的解决方案会根据涉及的人而最优，因为最终经理、CEO 是某种领导者，或者应该是，而相同的战略、相同的工作方式取决于你拥有的人力资本。不同的人反应不同，取决于你试图培养的文化。但我认为在合理范围内，这不会造成巨大差异，也许像正负 10% 的影响。所以我认为你最好痴迷于，首先战略，但一旦到位，然后是你建立的人才质量和企业文化。所以如果那个 200 人的组织是混乱的，超级高，我不认识他们，但假设超级高的人才密度，一种商业导向、理性、努力工作的文化，即使理论上多一点结构可能有帮助，我认为人才和文化将大多胜过任何这样的差距或缩小任何这样的差距。反之亦然，也许在另一个极端，多一点流动性和灵活性，但如果你有非常好的人和一种为业务利益而完成工作的伟大文化，人们不会因为多一点结构而卡住。所以我没有太多思考这些事情。我确信它们不是最重要的，老实说，在商业卓越中。

Probably somewhere in between. I think these things are generally, like, more formal approaches to management. I think they are greatly overestimated in the impact. I think in a company's outcome, almost all of the outcome depends on essentially your strategy, what people sometimes call product market fit, but also the modes you have, and that's overwhelmingly what drives it. I always ask myself, to me a business is a good business if it would do well even if management was mediocre, maybe not awful but mediocre. So that's the first thing. And the second thing that matters to me is talent levels and culture, which culture is really like, how do you make decisions? What matters? What doesn't? What do we value? What do we not value? Then everything else, reporting lines, whether you have OKRs or you keep it fluid and informal, span of control. I'm sure it does matter on the margin, making things a bit better, a bit worse. And I'm sure different solutions would be optimal depending on the people involved because ultimately a manager, a CEO is some sort of a leader or should be, and the same strategy, the same approach to working with others depends on the human capital you have. Different people react differently, on the culture you're trying to foster. But I think that within reason that doesn't make a huge difference, maybe like a plus minus 10% kind of impact. So I think you're much better off obsessing over, well, first and foremost the strategy, but then once that's in place, the quality of the people and the culture you establish. So if the 200-person organization is chaotic, super high, I don't know them, but assuming super high talent density, a culture of business orientation, rationality, hard work, even if a little extra structure theoretically could be helpful, I think the talent and the culture will mostly trump any such gap or close any such gap. And vice versa, maybe in the other extreme a little bit more fluidity and flexibility with ADL, but if you have very good people and a great culture of let's get it done for the benefit of the business, people will not get stuck because there is a little extra structure. So I haven't thought a lot about these things. I'm convinced they're not the most important thing, to be honest, in excelling in business.

引人入胜。当我还是 CEO 时，我试图随着业务扩展而变得更好和进化。我得到了很多反馈，其中我几次得到的反馈是，Brian，你是一个非常好的领导者，但一个非常糟糕的管理者。你在这上面处于什么位置？

Fascinating. When I was a CEO, I tried to get better and evolve as the business scaled. And I got a lot of feedback and one of the pieces of feedback I got a couple times was, Brian, you're a very good leader and a very bad manager. Where are you on that?

我不知道。我得到很多反馈。我不认为有人根据这两个原型或职位描述来评价我。

I don't know. I get a lot of feedback. I don't think anyone rated me on those two against those two archetypes or job descriptions.

来点自我反思怎么样？

How about a little self-reflection here?

我不认为……是的，我不确定我是不是一个好领导者或好管理者，老实说。我通常觉得我很幸运能和非常优秀的人一起工作，我倾向于更自我意识，质疑自己是否做得足够，是否达到期望。所以我倾向于看到半空的杯子。所以我的本能反应是我可能两者都不差。如果我说我认为我很烂，那就不真诚了。但我可能会给自己评为两者都还行，但不一定很棒。如果我理解你的暗示，我可能是一个比管理者更好的领导者。我认为我通常在设定一个有意义的愿景和令人信服的愿景，并相当好地沟通方面做得不错。如果我作为领导者成功了，那主要是通过我所谓的仆人式领导，就像超级努力工作，尽可能帮助别人。我不认为我是那种 William Wallace 式的领导者，有人做宏大的演讲，每个人都热血沸腾，心潮澎湃，然后每个人都去工作。但当你和那些言行一致、身处一线、尽力而为的人一起工作时，我认为你往往会受到启发。所以也许是那种人。我试着成为那种人。我不认为我是一个伟大的管理者。我不认为我擅长一对一会议或类似的事情。

I don't think... Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm a good leader or a good manager, to be honest. I generally feel that I'm pretty privileged that I work with very good people and I tend to be more self-conscious and question whether I'm doing enough and living up to expectations. So I tend to see the glass half empty. So my instinctual reaction would be I'm probably not terrible at either. I would be disingenuous if I told you I think I suck. But I would probably rate myself something like okay at both but not necessarily amazing. I'm probably a better leader than manager if I understand what you're hinting at. I think I've generally done okay at setting a vision that made sense and a compelling vision and communicating that reasonably well. If I've succeeded as a leader, it has been mostly through what I would call servant leadership, like just working super hard and helping people as much as I could. I don't think I'm the kind of William Wallace kind of leader, someone making a grand speech and everybody gets their hot and gets their hearts pounding and everybody gets to work. But when you work with someone who walks the talk and is in the trenches and does their best, I think you tend to be inspired. So maybe that kind of person. I try to be that kind of person. I don't think I'm a great manager. I don't think I'm the best at running one-on-ones or anything like that.

好的。我过去常对自己说的一件事是，实际上我从 Eleanor Roosevelt 那里得到这句话。我想保持头脑在云端，但脚在地上。我的意思是，我想成为，好吧，一个初级 William Wallace，描绘未来的图景，让每个人都对我们要去的地方感到兴奋，眺望地平线。但脚踏实地，就像，天哪，有很多问题，我们必须处理所有这些该死的问题。我的杯子非常半空，我花了很多时间有点消极地看待问题。你在 Eleanor Roosevelt 的这句话中处于什么位置？

Okay. One of the things I used to say to myself is actually I got this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt of all people. I wanted to keep my head in the clouds but my feet on the ground. And by that I meant I wanted to be okay, a JV William Wallace painting a picture of the future, getting everyone excited about where we're going, looking over the horizon. But being on the ground, it's like, holy crap, there are a lot of problems and we have to deal with all these freaking problems. And my glass was very half empty and I spent a lot of times a little negative looking at the problems. Where are you in the Eleanor Roosevelt quote?

我想给自己一点鼓励。我认为如果我有一件事做得相当好，那就是能够看到大局。

I want to give myself a little pat on the shoulder. I think if there's one thing I tend to do reasonably well is being able to see the big picture.

所以，你知道，我猜就是那种“云端思考”的感觉。也许我不擅长用宏大的演讲来表达，但我觉得我很擅长理解实质——什么重要，什么不重要，机会在哪里，逻辑上我们应该做什么，什么只是噪音。我过去一直非常亲力亲为，深入细节，在战壕里。我认为这是作为创业者和 CEO 想要拥有的好品质。我不认为这在人群中很普遍，但在创业者和 CEO 中相当常见。我认为这很强大，因为如果你没有大局观，你就无法真正制定出制胜的方向性战略——除非别人把它带给你，但那总是有风险的。你不能指望那会发生。正如他们所说，希望不是战略。但如果你不深入细节，不在战壕里，双脚不牢牢踩在地上，那么我认为你不太可能正确地支撑那个大局观。你不太可能激励你的同事。很少有人喜欢和那些身处象牙塔、不亲自动手的人一起工作。这真的无法扩展。我认为这不好。你无法评估他人、指导他人，因为到某个时候你其实对工作一无所知。所以我确实相信你需要两者才能成功，并找到某种平衡。我发现按顺序安排这些活动比试图并行运行更容易。所以我试着有一些时间，我非常在云端思考，好吧，大问题或大机会是什么，你应该如何着手，更像一个架构师。然后有很长一段时间，我进入执行模式，从头到脚都是泥，只是把事情做完，血汗和泪水。我认为同时做到两者相当困难，但你可以按顺序做到两者。

So, you know, I guess head in the clouds kind of thing. Maybe I'm not the best at articulating it with a grand speech, but I think I'm pretty good at understanding the substance—what matters, what doesn't, where the opportunity is, what logically we should be doing, and what's just noise. I think I've historically been very hands-on in the details, in the trenches. I think it's a good quality that you want to have as an entrepreneur and CEO. I don't think it's super widespread in the population, but it's quite commonly found in entrepreneurs and CEOs. I think it's quite powerful because if you don't have the big picture, you can't really set a directional strategy that's the winning strategy—unless someone else brings it to you, which is always dicey. You can't count on that happening. Hope is not a strategy, as they say. But if you're not in the details, in the trenches, feet firmly planted on the ground, then I think you're unlikely to be able to inform that big picture properly. You're unlikely to be inspiring to your colleagues. Very few people like working with people who are in an ivory tower, who don't get their hands dirty. It doesn't really scale. I think it's not good. You're not in a position to assess others, to coach others, because you don't really know anything about the work at some point. So I do believe you need both to be successful, and finding some sort of equilibrium. I find it's easier to sequence those activities than trying to run them in parallel. So I try to have times where I'm very much in the clouds thinking, okay, what are the big problems or big opportunities, how should you go about them, and be more of an architect. And then long stretches where I just get into execution mode and I'm, you know, mud head to toe just getting stuff done, blood, sweat and tears. I think it's quite difficult to be both at the same time, but you can be both in sequence.

我们来谈谈指导（coaching）吧。和我类似，我从未担任过一家拥有数千名员工的上市公司的 CEO，我是一路摸索过来的，有时我真的觉得自己没资格指导一些高管。你有过那种感觉吗？与此相关的是，我合作的许多 CEO，他们内部有一个非常有才华的人，正在上升期。他们应该押注那个人，还是找一个见过这部电影、有一点经验的人？就像现在整个硅谷都在发生这种事。我们应该招聘——押注那个人——还是应该让这个人押注那个正在上升期、真的没见过接近这部电影的人？

Let's talk about coaching for a second. Similar to me, I had never been CEO of a company with thousands of employees in public, and I was figuring out as I went along, and sometimes I just didn't feel qualified to coach some of my executives. Do you ever have that feeling? And also related to that, so many of the CEOs I'm working with, like they have a very talented person internally. They're on their way up. Should they bet on that person or find someone who's seen the movie before and has a little bit of experience? Like that's happening everywhere across Silicon Valley right now. Should we hire the bet—they were done that person—or should we make the person bet on the person who's on their way up and really hasn't seen anything close to this movie?

关于指导，我和我共事的人在一起时，有时确实不够格当教练。在 Bending Influence，我们的假设是，我们的管理者应该始终能够解决或建议解决直接下属遇到的所有问题。我们只是认为，任何一个人都可能在某些事情上指导任何其他人，他们应该这样做，无论汇报关系如何。我认为一个好的管理者通常是非常聪明、善于解决问题的人。所以至少他们能提供通才式的支持。他们应该能提供情感支持，并准备好亲自动手。但归根结底，作为某人的管理者并不意味着你总是更有能力为他们解决问题。像你、像我们这样的企业需要这么多技能，显然你需要分而治之。无论如何，我从来不太喜欢——我的意思是，我们确实重视经验，但我认为我们比大多数人重视得少得多。我相信，是的，曾经做过有帮助，但有几个大的“但是”。第一个是世界变化很快。所以我不完全确定七年前做过某事的人——那是否仍然那么适用。而且有一个巨大的风险，人们会对新环境视而不见，因为他们以前那样做过，他们会试图粘贴他们以前应用的任何解决方案。所以也许你买到了一些好处，但你也买到了很多坏处。我不确定对于像 Bending 这样的公司，两者哪个更强。此外，我们有一种——据我所知——独特的文化，我们发现每次我们雇佣非常有经验的人，他们都难以适应。我们非常亲力亲为，没有政治，彻底坦诚，每个人都需要承担自己的责任，而这并不容易转化。通常在大科技公司成功的人往往有不同的领导风格，这在那些公司可能非常理想。我不知道，但在 Bending 不是。所以我们还需要考虑文化变革的成本，有时这甚至不会发生，如果发生了，也需要很长时间。最后但同样重要的是，我发现通常人们随着经验增加会失去动力。所以你需要考虑，是有一个有 20 年经验但，我不知道，动力 6 分的人更好，还是有一个有 2 年经验但动力 10 分的人更好。我发现后者往往更好。这取决于情况。所以我们通常不太看重经验。我们偶尔也雇佣有经验的人。我们更倾向于招聘——

So on coaching, I'm certainly inadequate as a coach at times with people I work with. I think at Bending Influence we work on the assumption that our managers should always be capable of solving or advising on a solution across all problems that are experienced by the direct report. We just think that any one person may be able to coach any other person on some things, and they should do so regardless of reporting lines. I think a good manager would generally be someone very smart, a good problem solver. So at least they can provide kind of generalist support. They should be emotionally supportive and ready to get their hands dirty. But ultimately, being someone's manager doesn't mean you're always better positioned to solve a problem for them. There are so many skills needed in a business like yours, like ours, that obviously you need to divide and conquer. In any case, I've never been a big fan of—I mean, we do value experience, but I think we value experience a lot less than most people. I believe that yes, the being-there-done-that helps, but there are a few big buts. The first one is the world changes pretty fast. So I'm not exactly certain that someone who did something seven years ago—that still applies all that well. And there is a huge risk that people will be blind as to the new context because they did it that way, and they will just try to paste whatever solution they applied before. So maybe you buy some good, but you also buy a lot of bad. I'm not sure which of the two is stronger for a company like Bending. Also, we have such a—as far as I can tell—distinctive culture that we found that every time we hired someone very experienced, they struggled to adapt. We're so hands-on, no politics, radically candid, everybody needs to carry their own weight, and it doesn't translate well. Often people who have been successful at large tech companies tend to have a different style of leadership, which may very well be optimal at those companies. I don't know, but it's not at Bending. So we also need to account for the cost of that cultural change, which sometimes doesn't even happen, and if it does, it takes a long time. And last but not least, I find that generally people lose motivation as they gain experience. So you need to consider whether it's better to have someone with 20 years of experience but, I don't know, six out of 10 motivation, or someone with two years of experience but 10 out of 10 motivation. I find often the latter is better. It depends on the situation. So we're generally not big on experience. We have hired experienced people occasionally. We prefer to hire—

随着公司规模扩张，这一点改变了吗？你对此改变主意了吗，还是说你其实没有？

Has that changed as you've scaled? Have you changed your mind at all on that, or you're like, actually no?

是的。有意思。

Yeah. Interesting.

没有。

No.

我可能错了。看，我们尝试过。并不是我们从不雇佣有经验的人。我们雇佣过一些有经验的人，取得了巨大成功。并不是我们对此完全封闭。不，我们继续投资于学生、应届毕业生或有两三年经验的人，我们认为我们可以真正帮助他们塑造技能和职业文化，以我们认为从长远来看最能服务于他们和公司的方式。而且在竞争激烈的劳动力市场中，人才和经验之间存在权衡，经验我们可以提供给你。我们只需要耐心一点。人才我们无法提供。所以我们更注重人才而非经验。所以综合考虑，我们对此很满意。我们不一定会改变它。

And I may be wrong. Look, we have tried. It's not that we never hired experienced people. We have hired some experienced people with great success. It's not that we were completely close-minded regarding that. No, we keep investing in students or new graduates or people with a couple years of experience, where we think that we can really help them mold their skill set and professional culture in the way that we believe will best serve them and the company in the long run. And also there is a trade-off between talent and experience in a competitive labor market, and experience we can provide it to you. We just need to be a little bit patient. Talent we can't. And so we focus more on talent than experience. So all considered, we're happy with this. We wouldn't change it necessarily.

但我们有时确实会遇到棘手的情况，比如我们派一位 25 岁的首席工程师之类的人去被收购的公司，基本上就是我们这边的负责人，而那些有 20 年经验的人会想：这家伙到底知不知道自己在干什么？我认为我们的过往记录一直表明，他或她确实知道。但我能理解，这比派一位 50 岁、有 30 年经验的人来说同样的话要难推销得多。人们更容易默认那个人是有能力的。

But we have encountered difficult situations sometimes where maybe we have a 25-year-old lead engineer or something showing up at an acquired company and essentially being the person in charge on our end, and people with 20 years of experience thinking, does this guy even know what he's doing? And I think our track record consistently shows yeah, it does, or she does. But I can see how it's a more difficult sale than if we had a 50-year-old person with 30 years of experience come in and say the same things. It's much easier to assume that person is competent.

我和你们收购过的几家公司的创始人聊过，其中一位说接替他的人 25 岁，另一位说接替他的人 27 岁。他们似乎并不为此困扰，但我觉得这挺有意思的。我好奇的是，假设那个 25 岁的人接管了，比如说 Mirror 或者你们正在收购的某家公司。你要找的那个来掌管全局的人，你在他身上看重什么？有没有某种特定的品质？我知道你们会让他们轮岗，但假设这是第一次上手。你在找什么？

I've spoken to a couple of the founders of companies you acquired, and one of them said the person that replaced them was 25 and the other said the person who replaced them was 27. They didn't seem bothered by it, but I thought that was kind of interesting. What I'm curious about is, let's just say that 25-year-old that takes over, I don't know, Mirror or whatever company you're buying. What are you looking for in that person who's going to run that show? Is there a certain quality you're looking for? I know you rotate them around, but let's say it's the first go at it. What are you looking for?

是的。而且说清楚，我们不会把一个人放到那个位置上，除非我们已经在更小规模的事情上考验过他。所以一般来说，这个人是之前带过团队或经营过较小业务的。但没错，也可能只有三四年经验，非常非常资浅。总的来说，我们看重的是聪明，以及我们所说的“极端主人翁意识”。对我们来说，聪明，很明显，就是你学得非常快，而且我们有证据证明这一点，并且你能持续进行高质量的推理。所以当你提出一个方案或诊断一个问题时，你说出或写下的东西始终很有道理。答案有很多种，但你的分析总是理性、准确、逻辑严密。我们认为这在几乎所有岗位上都通用。第二，我们希望你有极端主人翁意识，意思是你要极其在意成为或成为世界上做得最好的人，为团队和公司带来尽可能最大的贡献。你几乎对此狂热。所以当你遇到障碍，或发现自己的技能有短板时，你会拼命去克服它。当然，之后我们还会看更具体的技能。但我们发现那两点占了 80%。当这些品质在很大程度上具备时，你非常非常有可能成功，前提是你能稍微沟通一下，你人不错，不是那种，那些卫生因素。但核心的杀手级特质就是这两点。

Yeah. And we wouldn't put someone in that position who we haven't tested in a smaller version of it, to be clear. So it's generally someone who led a team or a smaller business before. But yes, it could be someone with just three or four years of experience, very, very junior. Well, on a high level, we look for smart and what we call extreme ownership. Being smart for us, I mean pretty obviously, is you learn very quickly and we have evidence of that, and you're consistently capable of high-quality reasoning. So when you propose a solution or you diagnose a problem, consistently what you say or write makes a lot of sense. There's many of all the answers, but your analysis is always rational, accurate, logically sound. We think that works across the board and in almost any position. Two, we want you to have extreme ownership, which means you are absolutely, you care tremendously about being or becoming the best in the world at your job, bringing the greatest possible contribution to your team and the company. You're almost fanatical about that. So when you find an obstacle or you identify a shortcoming in your skill set, you'll be hellbent on overcoming that. But then of course we look for more specific skills. But we find that that's 80% of it. When those are in place in big ways, those qualities, you're very, very likely to succeed, assuming you can communicate a little bit, you're a nice, you're not an, those hygienic factors. But the core killer features are those two.

那当它不奏效时，比如你派那个 25 岁的人去掌管，结果，怎么说呢，出现了免疫系统式的排斥，或者他们就是力不从心。到底是哪里出了问题？

And when it doesn't work, so you put in the 25-year-old to run it and, I don't know, there's an immune system rejection or they just weren't up to it. What is it that falls down?

这种情况发生得很少。我只能想到一两个案例。但发生的时候，我认为主要是两种情况之一。第一，这个人虽然非常非常优秀，也可能是我们误判了那些品质，但到目前为止并不是因为这个，至少对我们的总经理来说，我们没见过这样的案例。我们看到的是，要么是我们基本上没有足够重视一个人领导他人的能力，也就是沟通、一定程度的常识和同理心，所以他们是非常聪明的问题解决者。他们以每小时 100 英里的速度推进，但他们没能注意到某人状态有点不对、遇到了问题。他们没有在正确的时间说正确的话，这基本上制造了一种敌意，或者至少是摩擦，最终让他们作为领导者难以为继。另一种情况是，组织里有足够多的人，出于各种原因，觉得自己更有能力，虽然这个人很棒、超级友善、有同理心、善于沟通，但这些人就是过不去心里那道坎：我经验丰富得多，我没法，哪怕只是形式上，我没法被这个人领导。这种情况非常罕见，但我记得发生过一次。你看，在那里我们可以做两件事之一。我们要么把这些拒绝领导的人调走或分道扬镳，要么换掉领导者，这取决于具体情况哪种更合理。

I think when that's happened, very rarely. I can only think of one or two cases. But when that's happened, I think it's been primarily one of two things. One, the person, while very, very good, so it could also be that we misjudged those qualities, but so far it hasn't been because of any such, we haven't seen any such case, at least for our general managers. What we've seen is either the person, we basically we didn't pay enough attention to a person's ability to lead others, call it communication, a certain level of common sense and empathy, and so they were incredibly smart problem solvers. They moved 100 miles an hour, but they failed to notice when someone was a little bit off, had an issue. They didn't say the right thing at the right time, and that basically created a level of hostility or at least friction that ultimately made them untenable as leaders. The other case was where enough people in the org, for all sorts of reasons, felt more competent, and although this person was great and super nice and empathetic and communicative, these people couldn't get over the fact that, oh, I'm so much more experienced, I cannot, even if just formally, I cannot be led by this person. That's been very rare, but I can remember once one such case where that occurred. And look, there we could do one of two things. We either move or part ways with these people who reject leadership, or we change the leader, and it depends on the context which of the two makes more sense.

你们怎么培养这些人？你们真的会培训他们、培养他们、辅导他们，还是说他们很聪明，自己会搞明白，你把他们扔进去，他们就行？

How do you develop these people? Like do you actually train them, develop them, coach them, or it's like they're smart, they're going to figure it out, you kind of throw them into it and they're good?

是的，我们有培训材料，但总的来说，我认为 90% 的结果取决于你把他们扔进泳池的深水区。你给他们远超合理范围的责任，然后让他们身边围绕着出色的同事。我们发现，我们主要是通过与出色的人共事来学习的。几乎总是，你身边有些人在某些方面比你强。所以如果你试着模仿那些好的特质，你就会从中学到东西。而且他们在某些方面也会很糟，如果你注意到这些弱点，你就能避免自己掉进同样的陷阱。所以责任的大小和身边人才的水平，是我们发现最能推动成长的两件事。但没错，这里那里有一点正式培训，加上积极的辅导，肯定能额外增加那 10% 到 20%。

Yeah, we have training materials, but broadly I think 90% of the outcome depends on you throw them into the deep end of the pool. You give them way more responsibility than seems reasonable, and then you surround them with amazing colleagues. We find that we learn primarily by working with amazing people. Almost invariably some of the people around you will be better than you at some things. And so if you try to emulate those good traits, you'll learn from those. And also they will suck at some things, and if you notice the weaknesses you can avoid falling into the same trap yourself. So the level of responsibility and the level of talent around you are the two things that we find drive growth the most. But yeah, I mean, a little bit of formal training here and there and active coaching certainly adds that 10-20% extra for sure.

我可以告诉你，在我这段历程中帮到我的一件事。我们决定对我做一次 360 度评估，这是个好主意。我的联合创始人主动请缨，这有点奇怪，因为他非常内向。他说：“我怎么才能不跟其他人类说话就把这事办了？”于是他做了一次净推荐值调查。第一个问题是，从 1 到 10 打分，你有多大可能推荐 Brian 担任 HubSpot 的 CEO？第二个问题是，你为什么给这个分数？然后发给了大约 25 个人，董事会、客户、员工，结果大家写得跟小说似的。我是说，他们真的写了很长的小说。他花了一些时间，做了相关性分析，给我看了直方图，非常有帮助。然后他做了件聪明的事，针对每一个特质，他都有，针对每个特质就像：“这是一个特质。”然后他会摘出人们关于这个特质的原话。所以这让我真切地意识到，好吧，那是一个特质。前 10 页，我翻着报告，我想特质、特质。我搞定了。我当 CEO 棒极了。我完全拿捏了。第 11 页才是 bug 开始的地方。

I can tell you the one thing that helped me on my journey. We decided we're going to do a 360-degree review for me, which was a good idea. And my co-founder volunteered, which is a strange thing because he's really introverted. And he's like, "How do I do this without talking to other homo sapiens?" And so he did a net promoter survey. First question is, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Brian as the CEO of HubSpot? And number two is why did you give that number? And then sent it out to like 25 people, the board, customers, employees, and like people wrote freaking novels. I mean, they really wrote long novels. And he spent some time, correlated it, showed me the histogram, very helpful. And then he did something clever like for each feature, he had, for each feature be like, "Here's a feature." And he would pull out direct quotes on what people said about the feature. So it really hit home to me that, okay, that's a feature. In the first 10 pages, I'm going through the report and I'm like feature, feature. I got this. I am fantastic at the CEO. I have this absolutely nailed. Page 11 is where the bug started.

那很痛苦。里面的直接引语对我改进非常有帮助。顺便说一句，我的一个顿悟是，有些功能其实是 bug。人们不喜欢那个。我当时非常热情，有时会对事情特别兴奋，所以第一年我试图修复所有 bug，然后第二、三、四年我就想，我要挑一两个 bug 来改进。你个人是如何获取反馈并改进的？你又是如何与你的团队一起做的？

And that's painful. And the direct quotes in there, it was incredibly helpful to help me get better. One of my ahas, by the way, was some of the features were bugs. You know, people didn't like that. I was really passionate and sometimes I get really excited about things, and so the first year I tried to fix all my bugs, and then second, third, fourth year I'm like, I'm going to pick one or two of the bugs that I'm going to work on. How do you personally go about getting feedback and getting better, and how do you do that with your folks?

是的。所以我们非常重视反馈，就像你刚才描述的那样。我们内部有一种叫做“彻底坦诚”的做法，基本理念是，当你看到好的或坏的事情时，你应该总是告诉别人，只要你不是因为发泄而分享，而是因为你相信他们有可能改进，或者团队可能受益，或者公司可能受益，你就应该分享。不要担心你说的话是否准确、措辞如何、是否会伤害感情。如果可以，当然尽量友善，但这不如诚实重要。当然我们并不完美。不是每个人都能做到，也不是一直都能做到，但我们努力营造这样一种环境，让意见和观察能够非常快速、大量地流动。所以这是一个很好的学习来源。

Yeah. So we're big on feedback, as you just described. We have something called radical candor internally, where basically the idea is you should always tell people when you see something good or bad, as long as you don't share that because you're venting, but because you believe there's a chance that they could improve, or the team could benefit, or the company could benefit. You should share. Don't worry about the accuracy of what you're saying, the wording, whether you hurt feelings. Obviously try to be nice if you can, but that's secondary to being honest. And so it's of course we're not perfect. Not everybody does it, not all the time, but we try to have this environment where opinions and observations flow very quickly and abundantly. So that's a very good source of learning.

面对面。你让每个人都面对面地做。

Face to face. You make everyone do it face to face.

是的，我们尝试这样做。但我们的建议是，如果是当面发生的，就立即说出来。即使在会议上当着所有人的面。不要拖延。直接说出来。再次强调，要尊重、有同理心，但就是直截了当。如果是通过异步沟通（比如在 Slack 上）注意到的，那你可以给他们发消息之类的，这其实是次要的，只要你做了并且完全坦诚。所以这很有帮助。然后我们每年有一次，有点像你描述的那样，我们会基于一群评估者给出更结构化的反馈，不是 25 个，而是根据人不同，大概 6 到 10 个。此外，这也适用于我。我也尝试每年至少确定一个主要的改进点。我经历过完全相同的事情，我有五个，然后我发现在年中时太多了。如果这些改进很有挑战性，五个就太多了。所以，我尝试每年有一个，努力在这方面变得更好。

Yeah, we try. But our recommendation is to, if it happens in person, say it immediately. Even in front of everybody in a meeting. Don't delay. Just say it. Again, respectfully, empathetically, but just straight up. If it's something that you notice through asynchronous communications such as on Slack, then you can send them a message or whatever, like it's really secondary as long as you do it and you're fully candid. So that helps a lot. And then we have once a year we have something a little bit like what you described, where we'd give more structured feedback based on a bunch of assessors, not 25, but more like six to 10 depending on the person. Additionally, and so that applies to me as well. I try to also once a year identify at least one major point of improvement. I went through exactly the same thing where I had five and then I figured halfway through the year it's too many. If these are challenging to improve, five is too many. So, I try to have one per year that I try to get a lot better at.

你现在的那一个是什么，Luca？

What's your one right now, Luca?

我恰好是那种——我之前告诉过你，我不记得我用的确切词语，但我想传达的信息可能是，我现在生活中感到的最大特权，而且我已经有段时间了，就是我能与之共事的人的质量。我不是随便说说——我真的这么认为。我真的相信是这样。我极其欣赏他们的技能、才华和贡献，但我很不擅长大声说出来。我也对自己非常挑剔。明确地说，我通常晚上收工时，通常对自己感到失望。所以，并不是——我对自己和对别人一样。也许对自己更挑剔，我愿意这么认为。但总之，重点是即使是我最尊敬的人，我也很少告诉他们他们有多棒。所以我决定，我需要更好地告诉他们我有多感激他们，再次以完全诚实的方式。你知道，这并不是虚伪，只是说出我潜意识里知道但不太留意的事情。所以我尝试更多地这样做。我认为这半成功半失败，但肯定比过去有所改进。

I happen to be someone who—I told you earlier that I don't remember exactly the words I used, but the message I was trying to convey is probably the greatest privilege I feel I have in my life right now, and I've had it for a while, is the quality of the people I get to work with. I don't mean it—and I really mean it. I really believe it to be the case. And as I appreciate their skills and talents and their contribution tremendously, I'm awful at saying that aloud. I'm very critical of myself too. To be clear, I generally at night when I call it a day, generally I'm disappointed in myself. Okay. So, it's not—I'm the same way toward myself as I am to others. Maybe more critical of myself, I'd like to think. But so, anyway, the point is even people I hold in the highest esteem, I rarely tell them how amazing they are. And so I decided that I need to be better at telling them how much I appreciate them again in a fully honest way. You know, it's not like this is not being hypocritical, just voicing what I know unconsciously, but don't really linger on. So I've tried to do that a lot more. I think it's been a half a success, half a failure, but certainly an improvement over past levels.

我几乎每年都得到完全相同的反馈。我会，我就像——有句老话说，你应该对每一个纠正给出五条正面反馈。我绝对是相反的，指出这一点。

I had the exact same feedback all pretty much every year. And I would and I'm like—and there's a saying in some old school saying that you should give five pieces of positive feedback to every one kind of you know correction. I was definitely the opposite point that out.

让我们把六个位置都用来纠正。

Let's use all six slots for corrections.

我差不多就是这样。所以我努力改进。我稍微好了一点。有一段时间，我会在周五下午安排 15 分钟的时间来给予赞美，强迫自己去做。所以我理解你。大多数 CEO 都有同样的——很多 CEO 也从团队得到反馈，说他们的信任圈很小。他们信任四个人，所有事情都通过这四个人，其他人感觉他们很疏远。你有这种感觉吗？

I was pretty close to that. And so I worked on that. I got slightly better. And there's a point where I would put like a 15 minute slot on Friday afternoon like give compliments to force myself to do it. So I hear you. Most CEOs have that same—a lot of CEOs also get feedback from their teams that their trust circle is just small. They trust four people and they run everything through those four people and everyone else feels like they're very arms length. Do you get that?

不，实际上我没有得到这个反馈。我们在那方面相当分散。没有——我们甚至没有执行团队或领导团队。没有明确的——我的意思是人们可以重建它，说好吧，我认为领导产品的人应该在里面之类的。但我们从来没有——我们很多年前有过。我们放弃了，因为我们发现那个群体的精确定义根本没有帮助，因为它会导致一些不应该参与讨论的人仅仅因为他们是执行团队的一部分而参与进来，然后一些人因为你知道我们需要在执行团队层面讨论而错过讨论。所以现在我们只是，好吧，你让任何需要参与的人参与，不管头衔或地位——执行团队，我们不需要执行团队。是的。

No, actually I haven't gotten this feedback. We are quite distributed in that way. There's no—we don't even have an executive team or a leadership team. There's no clear—I mean people could reconstruct it and say okay I think whoever leads product should be in there and whatever. But we never—we did have it many years ago. We dropped it because we found the precise definition of that group didn't help at all because it would lead to some people being involved in discussions who shouldn't be involved just because they're part of the executive team and then some people missing in discussions because you know we needed to have a discussion at the executive team level. So now we're just okay you involve whoever needs to be involved no matter let's say the title or the standing—the executive team we don't need an executive team. Yeah.

有趣。那么，它是如何组织的？比如如果你做，假设你在做战略务虚会，你想思考大事，做一些内省。谁在那里？

Interesting. So, how is it organized? Like if you do, let's just say you're doing strategy offsite where you want to think big things and do some naval gazing. Who's there?

我会邀请我认为能贡献最多或收获最多的人。有时邀请一个总体上我——我认为这不仅是我，而是公司。我们讨厌会议，讨厌大型会议。但有些情况下，邀请一个不会对会议有贡献的人仍然可能是好事，如果你认为他们能学到东西。仅仅为了让某人自我感觉良好而邀请他们从来不是一个选项。它必须是有用的。我会尝试邀请我认为能贡献最多的人。我得想想那些人是谁。有些名字浮现在脑海中，但也取决于具体的战略部分或角度，像我们买不同的人。

I would invite people I think can contribute the most or take away the most. Sometimes invite someone who in general I'm—and I think this is not just me but the company. We hate meetings and we hate big meetings. But there are cases where inviting someone who won't contribute to the meeting could still be a good thing if you think they can learn something. Inviting someone just so they feel good about themselves is never an option though. It has to be useful. I would try to invite the people who I think could contribute the most. I would have to think about who those people are. Some names come to mind but also depending on the precise say part of the strategy or angle like we buy different people.

Luca，听起来你没有一个组织架构图。你更像 Kali。没有“我向 Luca 汇报”这回事。

Luca, you it doesn't sound like you have an org chart. You're more like Kali. There's no I report to Luca.

不，我们有。我们实际上有。这是一个算法。所以，我们有两个——基本上是一个矩阵组织，有职能和团队。职能负责事情如何做，你知道，硬技能。我简化了，团队负责我们做什么。

No, we do. We do actually. It's an algorithm. So, we have two—it's basically a matrix organization with functions and teams. Functions being in charge of the how things are done, you know, the hard skills. I'm oversimplifying and teams being in charge of what we do.

所以，比如目标，我们努力让 Ben 成功。然后每个人都有职能负责人和团队负责人。所有一切都汇聚到一个单一节点，目前就是我。但基本上就是当时担任 CEO 的那个人。所以这是一种相当具体的组织形式，我们用它来自动化很多东西。但我们提醒人们，它只在有用的范围内有用。它绝不是——人们不应该觉得被它限制，它相当流动。我们有很多情况，某人当了一段时间负责人，然后又回去做个人贡献者。

So, like the objectives, what we're trying to accomplish to make Ben successful. And then every person has a functional lead and a team lead. And it all flows to a single node, which currently would be me. But it's basically whoever the CEO is at that point in time. So there is a pretty specific form of org, and we use it to automate a lot of stuff. But we remind people that it's only useful to the extent that it's useful. It's in no way—they should feel limited by it, or it's quite fluid. We've had many cases where someone is a lead for a while, then goes back to being an individual contributor.

你说了一句很有意思的话：当时担任 CEO 的那个人。一年前我有机会和 Jess Wong 聊过，他有一种独特的风格，他有 60 个直接下属，和你类似，他会公开给出直接反馈，正面和负面的都有。他不做一对一。我问他，如果、当你有一天退休，接替你位置的人会继承并沿用那套体系吗？他说：“哦，不。绝对不。这套东西是专门为我打造的。这是我做事的方式。别人应该进来把它彻底重写。”你说“只要你还是 CEO”，你是什么意思？你同意 Jensen 吗？

You said something interesting: whoever is the CEO at that point in time. I had a chance to chat with Jess Wong a year ago, and he's got a unique style where he's got 60 direct reports, and similar to you, he gives direct feedback, positive and negative, in public. He doesn't do one-on-ones. And I asked him, like, when—if and when you ever retire, will the person who replaces you inherit that and use that system? And he said, "Oh, no. Hell no. This is kind of built for me specifically. It's the way I work. Somebody else should come in and completely rewrite it." You said, "As long as you're CEO," what did you mean by that? And do you agree with Jensen?

是的，绝对同意。我的意思是，看，就像我之前说的，这几乎就像你在执教或经营一支运动队。我觉得如果你说，赢球的方式就是这这那那，无论队里有什么人，这是唯一或最好的赢球方式，那你就是个傻瓜，对吧？所以球员很重要。所以是的，我的意思是，如果、当我们更换 CEO，我会鼓励她或他去看看是否有必要做出改变。我的意思是，如果他们喜欢现状，不必改变任何东西，但同样，如果他们觉得改变能改善情况，也应该可以自由地改变。

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, as I said earlier, it's almost like if you're coaching or running a sports team. I think you'd be a fool saying, well, the way to win is this and that, and that's the only way to win or the best way to win no matter the people you have on the team, right? So the players. And so yes, I mean, if and when we change our CEO, I would encourage her or him to see whether any change is warranted. I mean, they don't have to change anything if they like it the way it is, but equally they should feel free to change things if they thought that would improve things.

好。从和你的交谈来看，你是一个非常注重第一性原理的人。感觉你对传统智慧有相当大的怀疑。我当年也有点这样。传统智慧在哪些方面是对的，而你却做了——也许你当时想，“这是错的。我们要重新思考，”但啊，它其实还行。我们就该照别人做的做。

Okay. Just from talking to you, you're a very first principles person. It feels like kind of a big skepticism of conventional wisdom. I was sort of the same way back in the day. What is conventional wisdom right about that you do that maybe you were like, "This is wrong. We're going to rethink it," but ah, it's on our wheels. We should just do what everybody else does.

你知道，我们试图从零开始建立这家公司。是的，质疑一切，不是因为我们觉得自己更懂，而是因为我们相信这一点。所以我们有这样一个雄心：建立有史以来最成功的公司之一，同时完全清楚我们很可能不会成功。但我们认为，如果标准就是那么高，我们要达到那种雄心水平的唯一机会就是做一些不同的事。如果你模仿别人在做的事，你注定会大致平庸。我的意思是，好一点，差一点。所以我们甚至懒得去理解传统智慧是什么。我们只是试图，对每个重要问题，在我们特定的情境和愿景下找到最优解。所以是的，我不知道。我相信传统智慧里有很多东西是有道理的。我不知道，比如对人友善。我想这个我同意。

You know, we've tried to build this company from the ground up. Yeah, questioning everything, not because we thought we knew better, but because we believe that. So we had this ambition of building one of the most successful companies of all time, knowing full well that we would very likely not succeed. But we thought that if that was the—how high the bar was going to be, the only chance we had to achieve that level of ambition was to do something differently. If you emulate what everybody else is doing, you're guaranteed to be approximately mediocre. I mean, a little bit better, a little bit worse. And so we never even bothered understanding what conventional wisdom was. We just try to, for each important problem, we just try to find the optimal solution given our particular context and vision. So yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there are plenty of things in conventional wisdom that makes sense. I don't know, like being nice to people. I guess that I agree.

有一件挺有意思的事，人们总是问我，AI 原生公司似乎和 ChatGPT 之前创立的公司运作方式有点不同。你以简化事情而闻名。所以我想听听这个。很多人同时在做好多事。比如第二年就走向国际。第三年就开始——收购业务。事情进展得快多了。HubSpot 花了八年的事，人们头几年就做完了。而在 HubSpot，我是个大力倡导简化的人。我甚至给自己弄了一顶“不”帽子。

One thing that's kind of interesting that people ask me about all the time is AI native companies seem to be running a little bit different than companies founded before ChatGPT. You're kind of famous for simplifying things. So I want to hear about that. A lot of people are just doing a lot of stuff at once. Like in year two they're going international. In year three they're starting—they're acquiring a business. Like things are just moving so much faster. Stuff that took HubSpot eight years people are doing in the first couple years. And in HubSpot, I was a big simplification guy. I even got myself a no hat.

哦，那太棒了。

Oh, that's awesome.

我去开一个大会。HubSpot 的好处是，大家总有很棒的想法。我们应该做这个。而我总是——我们绝对是一家更可能死于暴食而不是饥饿的公司。所以我给每个人都买了这个，“不”帽子。事情似乎在变化。我注意到这些公司，他们戴着“是”帽子，做了很多事，而且还真做成了。你对此有什么反应？

I go to a big meeting. And good thing about HubSpot, everyone always got great ideas. We should do this. And I would always—we're definitely a company that was much more likely to die of overeating than starvation. And so I bought this for everyone, the no hat. Things seem to be changing. I've noticed these companies like they're wearing yes hats and they're getting a lot done and they're pulling it off. What's your reaction to that?

做一个激进的简化者确实是一个制胜策略。因为复杂性意味着成本，意味着更慢、总体更差。但完美的平衡取决于你的具体情境。显然，如果你要在 1800 年建立一家企业，没有技术，没有互联网，没有——劳动力市场效率低得多。显然当时你应该选择做的事情比 1990 年代合理的要少得多。所以有了现代技术和 AI 以及我们学到的东西，在同样的资源下我们能做更多，我并不惊讶。但我认为作为一般规则，倾向于更少而不是更多，即使在今天也非常非常有用，特别是因为我认为，有些公司做成了，并不意味着他们选择了正确的道路。我们不知道如果他们只做三件事而不是四件事，砍掉最小、最不重要的那件，会做得有多好。也许最大、最重要的那件会好 35%，更大，也许净收益是正的。所以，你知道，我们很重视——我们实际上有一个价值观，或者说品质，我们称之为“不懈简化”。我们以此衡量自己，我们要求——

It's really a winning strategy to be a radical simplifier. Because complexity means costs, means being slower, being worse generally speaking. But the perfect balance depends on your particular context. Obviously, if you were to build a business, let's say in the 1800s with no technology, no internet, no—probably labor market that was way less efficient. Clearly you should at the time you should have chosen to do a lot less than would have been reasonable in the 1990s. And so with modern technology and AI and what we've learned, I'm not surprised we can do more given the same, let's say, resources than we could in the past. But I think as a general rule, leaning less rather than more is a very, very useful thing even in this day and age, particularly because I think the fact that some of these companies are pulling it off doesn't mean that they've chosen the right path. We don't know how well they would have done had they done three rather than four things and dropping the smallest, least important one. Maybe the biggest, most important one would have been 35% better and bigger, and maybe it's a net positive. So, you know, we're big on—we have a value actually, or quality, that we call relentless simplification. We measure ourselves against and we demand—

你们衡量自己。这很有意思。

You measure yourself. That's fascinating.

是的，衡量——我的意思是，我们以此评估自己。它不是——坦率地说，它不是非常可量化的。但我们希望人们每次——规则是这样的：每次有人建议我们应该增加复杂性，无论是流程中的一个步骤、一个功能、一个团队、给团队增加人手，随便什么，系统的任何元素，举证责任都在提出建议的人身上。那些认为这是个坏主意的人不需要费心提供任何证据，他们没事。所以如果我们选择推进，就需要非常明确的证据表明它有意义，或者它必须是可回退的，而推动这项举措的人需要随后判断它是否明确成功，否则就很快回退。

Yeah, measure—I meant like we assess ourselves against it. It's not—and frankly it's not very quantifiable. But we want people to, every time—so the rule goes like this: every time someone recommends that we should add complexity, whether it's a step in a process, a feature, a team, headcount to a team, you name it, any element of the system, the burden of proof is on those making that recommendation. Those who believe it's a bad idea don't need to bother bringing any proof, they're fine. And so if we choose to go forward, there needs to be very clear proof that it makes sense, or it has to be revertible, and the people who drive the initiative need to then determine whether it was a clear success, and otherwise revert it pretty quickly.

规则的另一部分是，我们需要保持警觉，质疑那些已经存在一段时间的复杂性，因为作为人类，我们会对其视而不见。任何这样做的人都应该受到赞赏，即使这很烦人：天哪，我们又在质疑这个流程或这个政策了。但没错，如果你有更好的技术，AI 是惊人的。作为一个在 2010 年 AI 创业失败的人——我的意思是我不是在 2010 年失败。我们 2010 年创立，2013 年失败。显然我相信技术的力量。我们今天能比 20 年前做更多事情，我并不惊讶。

And the other part of the rule is that we need to stay alert and question complexity that's been there for a while because we become blind to it as human beings. And anyone who does that should always be applauded even if it's a nuisance: oh my goodness, again we're questioning this process or this policy. But yes, if you have better technology, AI is amazing. And as someone who failed with an AI startup in 2010 — I mean, I didn't fail in 2010. We started in 2010, failed in 2013. Clearly I believe in the power of technology. I'm not surprised we can do a lot more today than we could 20 years ago.

你决定把公司设在米兰。我们当时在波士顿。我觉得在波士顿有一些大的优点和大的缺点。很多人认为你无法在硅谷之外创建一家伟大的公司。那显然不是我。你的——你为什么选择米兰？在硅谷之外建公司的优点和缺点是什么？你个人是否觉得因为你在米兰，所以你不是酷小孩？

You decided to base a company in Milan. We were based in Boston. I felt like there were some big pluses and big minuses to being in Boston. A lot of people think you just can't create a great company out of Silicon Valley. That's obviously not me. What is your — why did you do Milan? What are the pluses and minuses of building outside the valley? Do you personally feel like you're not a cool kid because you're in Milan?

你知道，我其实根本不在乎酷不酷。一个买下像 AOL 这样公司的人不可能在乎酷。如果说有什么，或者也许我确实在乎，但我认为不酷才是酷。你选吧，但只能是其中之一。我不确定。

You know, I actually couldn't care less about coolness. Someone who buys a company like AOL cannot possibly care about cool. If anything, or maybe I do care, but I think that the uncool is cool. You choose, but it's one or the other. I'm not certain.

优点是什么，缺点是什么？我的论点是旧金山是世界上最适合创业的地方，但天哪，在那里扩张太难了。它太贵了，以至于没有多少忠诚度。就是很难扩张。你的论点是什么？

What are the pluses and what are the minuses? Like my thesis is San Francisco is the best place in the world to start a company, but holy crap is it hard to scale there. It's so expensive that there's not a lot of loyalty. It's just darn hard to scale. What's your thesis on it?

是的，我的意思是，看，我没有在旧金山建过公司，所以我不能确定。它给我的印象是，如果你拥有地球上最酷、潜力最高、资源最好的公司，我想那就是我们想要建公司的地方。你可以在那里比任何其他地方更快地吸收最多的人才。如果你更像是一个中等项目——顺便说一句，按硅谷标准，中等已经是很高的门槛了——那么在那里可能比在许多其他地方更难。无论如何，我们选择了意大利，米兰。今天，我们是一家国际公司。目前我们在意大利以外招聘的人比在意大利多得多，包括现在在美国越来越多。我想我们可能会在明年在那里开设办公室。但没错，我们故意在意大利米兰创办了公司。实际上，我和我的联合创始人当时在丹麦，我们在那里完成了工程学业，并创办然后关闭了我们的 AI 初创公司。我们有两个主要原因。一个是极其商业化和自私的。基本上就是你描述的，我们认为意大利，6000 万人口，优秀的教育，相对较少的杰出公司，当然几乎没有新兴科技公司，在人才方面对我们来说可能是双赢的。我们带来了很多雄心。我们认为一个很有意义的想法，一个我们认为令人兴奋的项目，这样很多人本来会被降级去加入一家劣质企业或移居国外，但他们的家人在那里。他们喜欢那里，实际上可以留下来并拥有一切——既有一份令人兴奋的工作，又能和家人在一起。所以我们认为我们能够基本上用同样的钱建立一个更好的团队，或者用更便宜的价格建立一个同样好的团队，我认为这已被证明是真的。而且是一个显著的优势。另一个原因更具传教士精神。我相信，而且我认为我的联合创始人也相信，我们今天当然也相信，如果知识、机会、财富分配得更均匀一点，世界总体上会更好。我认为有一两个像硅谷这样的中心比别处高一个档次是完全没问题的，甚至可能是好事。我认为世界可能需要这样才能实现最大繁荣。但我认为如果差距变得巨大，基本上所有重要的事情都发生在一两个地方，那是一个非常大的问题，包括从长远来看对住在那些地方的人也是如此。所以我们想尽自己的一份力，做出 1% 的改变，展示你可以在一个不太可能的地方建立一家世界级的公司，拥有巨大的雄心，意大利显然是其中之一，但我们是意大利人。这很容易。我们更了解文化。所以就是这样。我们不后悔。我认为这是一个好的举动。你永远无法对生活进行 A/B 测试，所以我不能肯定地说如果我们在硅谷开始，我们会做得更差，但我确实怀疑这对我们来说是一个更好的选择。

Yeah, I mean, look, I haven't built a company in San Francisco, so I can't really tell for sure. It does strike me as a place if you have the coolest, highest potential, best resourced company on the planet. I think that's where we want to build it. You can probably absorb the most talent the fastest there than anywhere else. If you are more of a middling project, and by the way, middling by Silicon Valley standards is a pretty high bar, then it may be harder there than in many other locations. In any case, we chose Italy, Milan. Today, we're an international company. We're hiring way more people outside of Italy than in Italy at this point, but including now more and more in the States. I think we'll probably open an office there in the next year. But yes, we started it in Milan, Italy, on purpose. We actually were in Denmark with my co-founders where we had completed our engineering studies and had launched and then shut down our AI startup. We had two main reasons. One was extremely commercial and selfish. Basically what you described, we thought Italy, 60 million people, excellent education, relatively few amazing companies, certainly very few if any up-and-coming tech companies, could be a win-win for us in the talent. We brought a lot of ambition. We thought an idea that made a lot of sense, a project that we thought was exciting, and so a lot of people would otherwise be relegated to joining an inferior business or moving abroad, but they had their family there. They loved it there, could actually stay and have everything — both an exciting job and stay with their families. And so we thought we'd be able to build a better team basically for the same dollars or an equally good team for cheaper, which I think has proven to be true. And a significant advantage. The other reason was more missionary. I believed and I think my co-founders did too, and we certainly believe so today, that the world in general is a better place if knowledge, opportunity, wealth are a little bit better distributed. I think it's totally fine and probably even a good thing that you have one or two hubs like Silicon Valley that are one notch above. I think the world probably needs that to achieve maximum prosperity. But I think if the gap becomes immense and basically everything that matters happens in one or two places, it's a really big problem, including for the people who live in those places in the long run. And so we wanted to do our part, make a 1% change by showing you can build a world-beating company, massive ambitions in an unlikely place, Italy being one of many clearly, but we are Italian. It was easy. We understood the culture better. So that was it. And we don't regret it. I think it was a good move. You can never A/B test life, so I cannot definitively say that we would have done less well had we started in Silicon Valley, but I do suspect that this has been a better choice for us.

我的最后一个问题，我采访了三位创始人，不是采访，我打电话给三家你收购的公司的创始人，他们三个人都说了同样的话。他们说：‘你具有异常高的诚信。’我不一定经常听到关于 CEO 这样的评价，在准备这些通话时也不常听到。你有一些生活原则吗？它们是什么？我们可以从你身上借鉴什么？

My last question, so I interviewed three of the founders, didn't interview, I called three of the founders of companies you acquired, and all three of them said the same thing. They said, 'You are exceptionally high integrity.' I don't hear that a lot about CEOs necessarily and I don't hear that a lot in preparation for these calls. Are there some principles around that you live by and what are they and what can we borrow from you?

哦，我不知道是否值得借鉴由你决定，但这不是权宜之计。这是一个道德问题。所以道德是非常个人的。在我成年早期某个时候，我决定我永远不会——我的意思是，我可以对此透明。不是这样，在我二十出头的时候，我欺骗了当时的女朋友，我感到非常羞愧。有时我认为犯一个大错误比合理化你应该如何行事是更好的学习方式。我对自己感到如此羞愧，以至于我向自己承诺永远不说谎，但也永远不遗漏人们应该知道的重要事情，即使这对我有害。所以我试图将这一点扩展到生活的所有方面。我怀疑，尽管短期内有时代价高昂，但从长远来看往往会得到回报。我非常高兴——你分享这个反馈让我很开心。我不知道你跟他们谈过，但我很高兴你谈了，我很高兴他们说了这些，而不是称赞我的外表之类的，因为

Oh, I don't know that it's up to you to determine whether it's worth borrowing, but it's not a point of expedience. It's a moral point. So that morality is very personal. At some point early in my adult life, I decided that I never — so I mean I can be transparent about it. It's not so in my early early 20s I cheated on my girlfriend at the time and I was so ashamed. Sometimes I think making a big mistake is a better way of learning than rationalizing how you should conduct yourself. I was so ashamed of myself that I made a promise to myself to never lie but also never omit something important that people should know even if it's to my detriment. And so I've tried to extend that to all aspects of my life. I suspect that although it's sometimes costly in the short run, it tends to pay off in the long run. I'm very glad — you just made my day sharing that feedback. I didn't know you talked to them and but I'm glad you did and I'm glad they said that over praising my looks or something because

不，因为这真的很重要。

No, because it really matters.

不，玩笑归玩笑，这对我真的很重要。这是我为自己设定的生活使命，成为那种你可以信任的人，告诉你事情的真相。至少是我认为的真相。是的，我认为从长远来看，当你成为一个可以被信任的人时，这确实会有回报。更容易拥有美好的生活，结交好朋友，建立持久而重要的关系。你知道做生意，就像人们会来找你说：‘好吧，我们想出售。我们相信你们。’

No, jokes aside, it really matters to me. It's a life mission I settled for myself to be that kind of person you can trust is telling you things as they are. At least as I think they are. And yeah, I think it does pay off in the long run when you become known as someone who can be trusted. It's easier to have a good life, make good friends and relationships that last that matter. Do you know do business, like people will come to you and say, 'Okay, we're looking to sell. We believe you guys.'

你的话是有分量的。所以但这并不是出于寻求权宜之计。这对我来说真的只是一个道德问题。在这方面它非常主观。

Your word means something. And so but it's not a it's it doesn't come from a place of seeking expediency. It's really just a moral point for me. And it's very subjective in that regard.

我喜欢这一点。我就说到这里。祝贺你打造了真正特别的东西。祝你在迈向万亿美元的旅程中好运，我的朋友。

I love that. I'm going to leave it there. Congratulations on building something really special. Good luck to you on your journey to a trillion dollars, my friend.

我们会尽力。谢谢。很荣幸。谢谢你邀请我，Brian。

We'll do our best. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Brian.

感谢。

Appreciate it.

好的。我觉得 Luca 真的很有趣。他的公司做得非常好，而且这个人特立独行。就接着结尾那里说。我的意思是，对 CEO 来说，诚信真的是一个被低估的东西。你就是你的话。你可能名声很好，但你做一件蠢事，就可能崩塌。所以，我喜欢这一点。我喜欢他说，我从不撒谎，也从不隐瞒重要信息。他本可以就这么说，我会觉得那是一堆废话，但他收购的三家公司都说了同样的话。这让我想起我上次采访 Data Bricks 的 Ali Goi 时，他说作为 CEO 最糟糕的就是回避冲突，如果你在与人交谈时从不承认重要信息，你就会产生冲突。所以这在我脑海中强化了这一点。

Okay. I thought Luca was really interesting. His company's doing really well and the guy beats to his own drummer. Just to stick on the ending there. I mean, for CEOs, integrity is really an underrated thing. Uh, you are what your word is. You've got a great reputation probably, but you do one stupid thing and you can kind of have that crash down. So, I like that. I like that he's like, I never lie and I never omit important info. And he could have just said that and I'd be like, that's a bunch of BS, but I had three of the companies he acquired kind of say the same thing. It reminds me of my last interview with Ali Goi from Data Bricks where he's like the worst thing you can be as a CEO is conflict averse and like if you're never going to admit important information when talking to someone, you're going to have conflict. And so that just sort of reinforces that in my mind.

我觉得其他真正独特的地方是他招聘的方式在很多不同层面上都非常独特。我的意思是，他非常注重漏斗顶端以及如何引进人才。非常注重他的雇主品牌。这与 HubSpot 有相似之处。我们有一位叫 Katie Burke 的女性，她实际上是营销人员，我们让她负责人力资源，她非常擅长，她像做营销一样对待它，比如我们如何创造一个飞轮？我们如何吸引人才并创建一个真正的雇主品牌，现在她实际上是 Harvey 的 COO。但我认为这对扩张中的公司非常重要。创建一个招聘品牌。非常擅长招聘，我认为很重要。他有一整个数据科学团队，研究数百或数千个信号，试图找到合适的候选人，听起来他在这个过程中做了很多有趣的事情。听起来他做的最不有趣的事情之一就是面试本身。我有点同意。就像我面试时，现在每个人都擅长面试。所以相对于其他信号，我对此打折扣。所以我觉得那相当有趣。

Other things I really thought were unique was like the way he does hiring is really unique along a lot of different levels. I mean, he's very conscious about the top of his funnel and how he brings people in. is very conscious about his employee brand. This does rhyme with HubSpot. We we had a woman named Katie Burke who who she was a marketer actually that we moved into run HR and she was excellent at it and she treated it like marketing like how do we how do we how do we create a flywheel? How do we pull people in and create a real employee brand and now she's the COO actually at Harvey. Uh, but I think that's really important for scaling companies. Create a a hiring brand. Getting very good at hiring, I think, is important. He's got a whole darn data science team looking at hundreds or thousands of signals, trying to find the right candidates, and sounds like he does lots of interesting things in that process. One of the least interesting things it sounds like he does is the interview itself. I kind of agree with that. Like when I interview, everyone's good at being interviewed now. And so I discount that a little bit relative to other signals. So I thought that was I thought that was pretty interesting.

我的意思是，他对人才非常执着。你知道，他在这期播客上说过。我听过他在其他时候也说过，你就是不能降低标准。而随着公司扩张，他们不可避免地会降低标准。听起来他并没有，他坚持这一点，这导致了很多痛苦和很多人长时间工作。但他坚持这一点。而且，你知道，他谈到了我经常从 CEO 那里听到的古老争论。我应该招聘经验还是潜力？他公司规模相当大，但他仍然完全倾向于潜力而非经验。我认为他的管理团队，除了创始人之外，可能都是 20 多岁，潜力很高，这对他有效。我不是说这就是答案。我认为对一些人来说经验很重要。他还收购了很多公司，采用 PLG 类型的销售模式，你知道，不一定是企业销售，也许一些经验可能有用，但这就是他的观点。他大谈特谈团队，但有一次他说，实际上如果你的战略真的很好，你可以有一个平庸的团队，我觉得这有点让我头疼。然后他还谈到，当他收购一家公司时，更多的是他的挑选还是他的运营，所以是运营。你知道，他是一个非常优秀的运营者。我认为现实是你必须在所有这些方面都非常出色。你需要有一个非常引人注目的战略，相对于竞争对手独特，并且对潜在客户有吸引力。你需要成为一个出色的运营者，你需要有一个出色的团队。这些事情真的没有捷径。总之，这就是 Luca。我觉得他非常有趣和聪明，我希望你喜欢。

I mean he's pretty obsessive on talent. He you know he said it he said it on this pod. I've heard him say it other times like you just can't drop the bar. And like as companies scale they they inevitably do drop the bar. And it sounds like he really hasn't and he's stuck on that and it causes a lot of suffering and a lot of people working very long hours. Uh but he he sticks with that. Um, and you know, he weighed in on the the age-old battle that I hear from CEOs all the time. Should I hire for experience or slope? And he's at a pretty big scale and he's still like full-on slope over experience. I think his management teams probably other than his founders are all in their 20s uh, and have high slope and it's working for him. I'm not saying that's the answer. I think for some people experience matters. also buys a lot of companies in the in like the PLG type sales motion where you know it's not necessarily enterprise sales or maybe some experience might be useful but that's where he comes in on that he talks so much about team team but then at one point he's like actually you can have a mediocre team if your strategy is really good which I thought hurt my head a little bit and then he also talked about when he buys a company is it more his picking or his operating so operating you know he's a really good operator I think the reality is you have to be really good at all of that stuff. You need to have a really compelling strategy and that's unique relative to your competitors and is compelling to your potential customers. You need to be an amazing operator and you need to have an amazing team. There's not really any shortcut on any of that stuff. Anyway, that's Luca. I thought he was really interesting and smart and I hope you liked it.