Snap 与 Discord 产品负责人 90 分钟无滤镜产品建议

我问过你，有哪些反直觉的经验教训，是违背常见创业智慧的？

I asked you, what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned that go against common startup wisdom?

我现在不再受任何企业公关团队的约束，所以我可以稍微放开一点。

I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now, so I can let it rip a little bit.

你喜欢像设计恐怖组织一样设计团队。一个好的恐怖组织本质上具备两点。一是它有一种意识形态文化，每个人都明白自己为什么做正在做的事。然后它有一个非常非常清晰的组织结构，明确谁可以被信任做出哪个决定。

You like to design teams like a terrorist organization. A good terrorist organization essentially has two things. One is it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing. And then it has a very very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision.

你喜欢花时间把你最优秀的人用到极致，而不是去提升普通的人。

You like to spend time writing your best people into the ground versus improving the average people.

如果你看到有人溺水，你会想救他们。我做的恰恰相反。如果某人很强并且表现出色，我只会给他们越来越多的绳子让他们自己上吊。

If you see somebody drowning, you want to save them. I did the absolute opposite. If somebody is strong and crushing it, I'm just handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with.

我知道你相信的一点。大多数产品经理都很糟糕，并且常常对公司净负面。

Something that I know you believe. Most product managers are bad and are often net negative to the company.

伟大的产品经理正在离开这个体系。他们成为创始人。他们成为高管。这个职业的设置方式使得中位数产品经理实际上可能相当糟糕。

The great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders. They're becoming executives. It's kind of set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.

Snap 因为长时间不招聘产品经理而相当出名。

Snap is quite famous for not hiring PMs for a long time.

基线是我们应该能够在没有任何产品经理的情况下运营这个产品。所以，这个人必须提供比没有人更多的价值。

The baseline is we should just be able to operate this product without any product manager. So, this person has to provide value over nobody.

感觉产品经理的一个有趣新技能是抵制 AI 添加到你的产品中的东西。

Feels like an interesting new skill for PMs is pushing back on things AI adding to your products.

我认为我亲眼看到 Evan 个人拒绝的好主意，比我在几乎所有其他消费创业公司发布中看到的都要多。锻炼那种说不、克制的肌肉，可能是你能锻炼的少数品味肌肉之一。如果博物馆把所有藏品都挂在墙上，那么策展人什么也没做。

I think I saw Evan personally say no to better ideas than I've seen almost any other consumer startup launch. Exercising that kind of muscle of saying no of restraint is probably one of the few muscles of taste you can exercise. If a museum has all of their collection on the walls then the curator hasn't done anything.

今天的嘉宾是 Peter Sellis。Peter 是产品经理社区的传奇人物。他是 Snapchat 的第一位产品经理，在那里花了七年时间打造了历史上最令人愉悦和受欢迎的产品之一。最近，他是 Discord 的产品负责人，帮助其显著增长。现在他处于两份工作之间，这意味着他终于能够来到播客，没有公关团队，没有 PR 团队，这意味着他能够特别诚实和真实地分享他所看到和学习到的一切，并且他很兴奋地分享。我们涵盖了很多内容，从最好的团队如何像恐怖组织一样组织，到管理 Nikita Beer 是什么感觉，为什么大多数产品经理真的很糟糕，为什么 Snapchat 尽管拥有十亿月活跃用户却难以建立真正庞大的业务，而且这不是你所想的，以及更多。这一集充满了太多黄金内容，这就是为什么它这么长。我无法停止深入挖掘 Peter 不断提出的东西。非常感谢 Jack Brody 和 Shiram Krishnan 为这次对话建议主题和问题。在我们开始之前，别忘了查看 lennisproduct.com，免费获得一年最热门、最精美制作的 AI 和非 AI 产品，专供 Lenny 的新闻通讯订阅者。有了这个，我为你带来 Peter Sellis。

Today my guest is Peter Sellis. Peter is a legend in the PM community. He was the first PM at Snapchat where he spent seven years building one of the most delightful and popular consumer products in history. More recently, he was head of product at Discord, which he helped grow significantly. And now he's between gigs, which means he was finally able to come on the podcast without a comps team, without a PR team, which means that he's able to be especially honest and real about everything that he's seen and learned and has been excited to share. We cover so much ground from how the best teams are organized like terrorist organizations, what it's like to manage Nikita Beer, why most PMs are really bad, why Snapchat has struggled to build a truly massive business in spite of having a billion monthly active users and it's not what you think and so much more. This episode is full of so much gold and that's why it went so long. I couldn't stop digging into stuff that Peter kept bringing up. A huge thank you to Jack Brody and Shiram Krishnan for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennisproduct.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI and nonAI products in the world available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Peter Sellis.

Peter，非常感谢你来这里，欢迎来到播客。

Peter, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

谢谢，Lenny。感觉我们认识彼此已经很久了，但我，嗯，是的，我真的很兴奋能来这里。

Thank you, Lenny. It's uh it feels like it's been a long time coming uh that you and I have known each other, but I'm I'm um yeah, I'm really excited to be here.

呃，你以前从未做过播客。你一直在产品领域。你已经在外这么久。我很荣幸你选择这样做。你为什么避免播客？你为什么决定最终做这个播客？

Uh you've never done a podcast before. You've been in product. You've been out there for so long. I'm very honored you chose to do this. Why have you avoided podcasts? Why have you decided to finally do this podcast?

你知道，这不是避免播客。我真的只是在避免你。不，我开玩笑的。呃，你知道，我总是，我想有两件事要完全坦率地告诉你。很多时候，尤其是早期，因为你在这么多有影响力的人和青少年中有如此出色的分布，呃，当我看到有人上 Lenny 的播客时，我想，那个人可能即将被解雇，他们上节目，他们在为下一个角色推销自己。嗯，这可能是其中一种看法。我想，他们为什么不只是埋头苦干？嗯，现在我想，当我退一步看，嗯，你知道，很多我合作过的人和我有机会领导的团队，我想我通常做的一件事是每天在工作中非常真实地出现。你可以称之为没有过滤器，随你怎么叫。我很多说的话和做的事，我想可能更适合关起门来。但呃，正如你和我现在聊过的，我呃，处于不同角色之间。呃，所以我现在不再受任何企业公关团队的约束。所以呃，是的，我可以，我猜我可以稍微放开一点。

You know, it's not it's not avoiding podcasts. I've really just been avoiding you. No, I'm kidding. Uh it's been um you know, I always I I think there are two things to be totally frank with you. A lot of times when I saw especially early on um because you have such wonderful distribution among so many influential people and teens uh when I saw somebody going on Lenny's podcast I was like a that person's probably about to get fired and they're they're going on and they're they're pimping themselves out for like their next role. Um which was like maybe one view of it. I was like why aren't they just grinding? Um, now I think I I think uh when I when I kind of take a step back, um, you know, a lot of the people I've worked with and a lot of teams I've had kind of the opportunity to lead, I think one of the things that I I generally do is show up uh pretty authentically every every day uh at work. There's you can call it no filter, you call it whatever you want. And a lot of the stuff that I I say and do, I think it's probably better suited for for behind closed doors. But uh as as as you and I have have chatted about now, I'm uh uh between different roles. Uh so I'm I'm no longer beholden to any uh any corporate comms team right now. So uh yeah, I can I guess I can I can let it rip a little bit.

好的。太棒了。这些是最好的对话。没有公关人员参与。没有公关人员。

Okay. Amazing. These are the these are the best conversations. No PR people involved. No coms people.

是的。也没有什么要推广的。我没有书要出，没有其他播客，没有合作。是的。

Yeah. Nothing to promote either. I have no book coming, no other podcast, no collaboration. Yeah.

哇。只是纯粹的纯粹的 alpha。

Wow. Just pure pure alpha.

只是纯粹的，是的。即将放出一些纯粹的 alpha，宝贝。

Just pure Yes. About to drop some pure alpha, baby.

本集由我们的季度呈现赞助商 WorkOS 赞助。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Replit、Sierra、Clay 以及数百家其他成功公司有什么共同点？它们都由 WorkOS 提供支持。如果你正在为企业构建产品，你已经感受到了集成单点登录、SKIM、Arbback、审计日志以及其他大公司所需功能的痛苦。WorkOS 将这些交易障碍转化为即插即用的 API，拥有专为 B2B SAS 构建的现代开发者平台。实际上，我投资的每一家开始向高端市场扩张的初创公司最终都会与 WorkOS 合作。那是因为他们是最好的。无论你是试图获得第一个企业客户的种子期初创公司，还是全球扩张的独角兽，WorkOS 都是成为企业就绪并解锁增长的最快途径。它本质上是企业功能的 Stripe。访问 works.com 开始，或者直接联系他们的 Slack，那里有真正的工程师等待回答你的问题。WorkOS 允许你通过令人愉快的 API、全面的文档和流畅的开发者体验更快地构建。前往 works.com 让你的应用今天企业就绪。

This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign on, SKIM, Arbback, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SAS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seedstage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit works.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to works.com to make your app enterprise ready today.

我想谈的第一件事，在我们讨论要谈什么时突出的，是呃你思考设计团队的方式。你向我描述的方式是你喜欢像设计恐怖组织一样设计团队。

The first thing I want to talk about, something that stood out in our jamming on what to talk about is uh the way you think about designing teams. The way you described it to me is you like to design teams like a terrorist organization.

是的。是的。我可能应该稍微修改一下这个说法。

Yeah. Yeah. I should probably workshop this one a little bit.

这大概就是那种更适合关起门来说的例子。不过，当我和 Discord 的首席人力官聊到这件事时，我觉得她既惊恐又好奇——某种程度上，得感谢她没有一上来就评判我。我认为这本质上来自我的两个核心信念。第一，协作其实有一种隐藏成本，没有人真正把它内化得很好。意思是，你永远不会听到任何公司的高管说“别协作了”。对我来说，这本身就是个警示信号。协作伴随着惊人的协调成本。而协调成本基本上保证了你的速度会和系统里最慢的那个节点一样慢。所以我有时会试着激进地把协作的成本内化掉。

This is probably an example of the one that's better for behind closed doors. But yeah, when I actually talked to the chief people officer at Discord about this, I think she was simultaneously horrified and intrigued, in a way — credit to her for not judging me right off the bat. I think it comes from essentially two primary beliefs from me. One is that there's actually a hidden cost to collaborating that no one really internalizes extremely well. Meaning, you'll never hear any executive at any company be like, "Stop collaborating." And to me, that's kind of a warning sign. Collaboration comes with incredible coordination costs. And coordination costs essentially assure that you're moving as slow as the slowest node in the system. So I try and aggressively internalize the cost of collaboration sometimes.

然后第二点，和这个分开来看，尤其是在高增长公司——你的播客的很多听众都渴望进入这类公司——产品经理应该处于这样一个位置：他们做的决策，是创始人六个月前会做的决策，肯定也是一两年前会做的。这些是创始人自己会做的决策。所以，先把暴力放一边——我不是说我把团队设计成搞暴力的。但一个优秀的恐怖组织本质上具备两样东西。第一，它有一种意识形态文化，每个人都明白自己为什么在做正在做的事。第二，它有一个非常非常清晰的组织结构，规定谁可以被信任做哪个决策。我认为，创造这样一种文化——有一个非常清晰的、几乎宗教级别的意识形态目标，整个团队把战略几乎当成一种宗教——再加上一种组织结构，让人们明白谁是直接责任人，谁在某个事情上是单线程负责的，谁是那个可以问责的人，随便你用哪个 MBA 术语——我认为这两者的结合可以被利用起来，让你不需要过度协作，同时又能确保达到你想要的结果，就像你协作过一样。

And then the second thing, separately from this, is that at high-growth companies especially — and so many of the people who listen to your podcast aspire to be at these types of companies — product managers should be in a position where they're making decisions that the founders would have made, like, six months ago, definitely a year or two ago. These are decisions that the founders themselves would have made. So, set aside violence for a moment — I'm not saying that I designed my teams for violence. But a good terrorist organization essentially has two things. One, it has this ideological culture where everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing. And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision. I think creating a culture where there's a very clear, almost religious-level ideological goal — the strategy is almost like a religion to the entire team — and an organizational structure where people understand who the directly responsible individuals are, who's single-threaded on something, who's the throat to choke, use whatever MBA-ism you want — I think the combination of those two things can be leveraged in a way such that you don't need to over-collaborate and you can be assured of achieving the results that you wanted as if you had collaborated.

所以我认为，这个伟大的意识形态设定由哪些部分组成——比如我关注的很多方面，因为我认为在高增长公司里，当创始人仍然掌权时，产品负责人往往真的是他们愿景的一个载体。在 Snap 和 Discord，我都有幸与创始人共事，我试着去吸收、内化他们的愿景，然后创造一些可以被使用和重复的小短语和语言，它们本质上是整个战略的捷径，或者几乎像是提喻。所以，是的，我可以再深入讲，但这就是我大致思考的方式。显然，给它贴上品牌标签——你知道，我把它设计得像一个恐怖组织——至少能引起人们的注意。但也许我需要再打磨一下这个说法。

So I think the components of what is this great ideological setup — a lot of things I focus on, for example, because I think often the head of product at high-growth companies where the founders are still in charge — the head of product is really kind of a vessel for their vision. Both with Snap and at Discord, where I had the privilege of working with the founders in both cases, I tried to take and absorb and internalize their vision and then create small phrases and language that could be used and repeated, that were essentially shortcuts or almost like synecdoches of the whole strategy. So yeah, I could go more into that, but that's kind of how I think of it. And obviously giving it branding that, you know, I'm designing it like a terrorist organization at least gets people's attention. But maybe I need to workshop that a little bit.

不，你不需要。这太完美了。这正是我希望这场对话会有的样子。所以，为了非常清楚地说明我们想保留的恐怖组织的要素。第一是自主性这个理念，本质上是信任更下层的人，以防领导者被抓或失联。所以基本上是给链条更下层的人更多自主权。第二是有一个非常清晰的使命意识形态，可以这么说，这样每个人都高度一致，决策也快，诸如此类。

No, you don't. This is perfect. This is exactly what I was hoping this conversation would be. So just to be very clear about the elements of the terrorist organization that we want to keep. One is this idea of autonomy, essentially kind of trusting people further down in case the leaders get caught or are incommunicative. So basically giving more autonomy to folks further down the chain. And then two is having a very clear mission ideology, you might say, so that everyone's very aligned and decisions are quick and that kind of thing.

是的。是的。而且说清楚，我并不是一开始就说“我要建一个恐怖组织”。那我可能——

Yeah. Yeah. And to be clear, I didn't start with "I'm going to build a terrorist organization." That I may—

顺便说一句，我打赌你建了一个很棒的。

I bet you built a great one, by the way.

那会是个很棒的。但当我思考我想从正在构建的组织中得到哪些要素时，我不禁注意到，外面有些组织就是这样运作的，而它们恰好是恐怖组织。所以，是的，这引出了很多有趣的阅读清单。我觉得 Peter Sellis 的产品阅读清单现在几乎像是一份禁书清单了。

That would be a great one. But when I thought about the elements of what I wanted from the organizations I was building, I couldn't help but notice that there were organizations out there operating like this, and they just so happen to be terrorist organizations. So yeah, that led to a lot of interesting reading lists. I think the Peter Sellis product reading list is almost like a banned book list at this point.

这很有意思，因为我听过很多人描述说你想建立一种邪教，而这和那个没什么不同，因为你知道邪教在把事情做成方面非常高效。

It's interesting because I've heard many people describe you want to build a cult, and this is not that different, because you know cults are very effective at getting stuff done.

并不是——是的，culture 这个词里没有 cult 就拼不出来。所以我认为，是的，它和那个没什么不同。我认为邪教有些要素更关乎领导邪教的那个人，而恐怖组织更关乎一种更高的力量，或者像宗教或意识形态。所以这就是为什么我更倾向于那个。但是的，我认为你可以读一些邪教的资料，然后一直推到倒数第二个时刻，就是他们做出那件让他们作为邪教闻名的事情之前。你大概能学到很多。老实说，那里面有很多 alpha。

It is not— Yeah, you can't spell culture without cult. And so I think yeah, it is not very different from that. I think there are elements of a cult that are more about the person leading the cult, whereas terrorist organizations are more about a higher power or like a religion or ideology. So that's why I tended more towards that. But yeah, I think you could read up on a couple of cults and then just take it all the way to the penultimate moment, like before they do the thing that makes them well known as a cult. And you probably could learn a lot. Honestly, there's a lot of alpha in that.

说到更高的力量，关于你的一个有趣事实是，你管理过 Nikita Bier，他上过这档播客，是最受欢迎的几期之一，相当有个性。他最近在 X 担任产品负责人，我想大概有一年。很少有人和 Nikita 共事过。我很好奇，真正管理 Nikita、和 Nikita 共事是什么感觉。

Speaking of a higher power, a fun fact about you is you managed Nikita Bier, who came on the podcast, one of the most popular episodes of the podcast, quite a character. Was head of product for X recently, for I think a year. Very few people have worked with Nikita. I'm curious what it was like to actually manage Nikita, work with Nikita.

是的，Nikita 曾在 Discord 我的团队里。我们收购了他的创业公司。他在 Discord 团队待了将近一年多，还带来了一些非常出色的工程师。我觉得管理 Nikita——“管理”这个词用得非常宽松。我觉得很像——是的，你没法管理 Nikita，你只能试图控制他或引导他。我常把他比作——我是说，Nikita 是个很棒的个性，也是产品领域真正的操盘手，几乎独一无二。我对他做的很多事情都非常尊重。我常把他想成《飓风营救》系列电影里的 Liam Neeson。就像，是的，如果你女儿被绑架了，他有一套非常特殊的技能，他会动用那些技能，而那些技能非常难得，在某些情况下非常有用。但当你需要他抚养女儿，或者买点杂货之类的，他只会把杂货店里所有人都杀掉之类的。

Yeah, Nikita was on my team at Discord. We acquired his startup. And he was on the team at Discord for almost or over a year, with some phenomenal engineers that came along with him. I think managing Nikita — that's a very loose term, use of the word "manage." I think much like — yeah, you don't manage Nikita, you only seek to control him or direct him. I liken it a lot to — I mean, Nikita is an awesome personality and just actual operator in the product space, like pretty much one of one. And I have a ton of respect for a lot of the stuff that he does. I think of him a lot like Liam Neeson in the Taken movie series. Like, yeah, if your daughter gets kidnapped, he has a very special set of skills and he's going to employ those skills, and those skills are very hard to come by and very useful in certain situations. But then when you need him to raise the daughter or buy some groceries or stuff like that, all he knows how to do is just kill everybody in the grocery store or something like that.

对于团队里有这样的人，你怎么看？很多人说要给不同的人非常明确的角色，有时候你就是需要这样的人。

How do you feel about having folks like that in your team? A lot of people talk about having very distinct roles for different people, and sometimes you need someone like that.

我认为，能够建立一个可以吸纳这类人才的组织，是至关重要的。如果你有产品组织无法驾驭那种非常“尖刺型”的人才，我会把它视为一种失败状态。Nikita 把这一点推到了极致。你记得他在 Intro 上做那件事的时候吗？有一次我想跟他约个一对一——顺便说一句，他是向我汇报的——但我约不到他。所以我就说，哥们，你要是再不回我私信，我就上 Intro 去预约你，这样我现在就能跟你一对一了。

I think it's essential to be able to create an organization that can adopt that type of talent. I view it as a failure state if you have product orgs that can't handle really spiky talent. Nikita took it to extremes. You remember when he was on Intro doing that thing? At one point I was trying to get a one-on-one with him—who, by the way, reported up into me—and I couldn't get him. So I was like, dude, if you don't answer my DMs, I'm going to go on Intro and book you so I can just have a one-on-one with you right now.

幸好我们没走到那一步。他回复了。我记得我在大概四个不同的通讯软件上找过他，才联系上他。但没错，我认为这种驾驭“尖刺型”人才的能力，这种打造能够吸纳那些从产品角度来说未必是完美朝九晚五员工的人才的团队的能力——从管理风格上来说，我非常仰慕菲尔·杰克逊，公牛队和湖人队的教练。我认为他能够把类型迥异、平时根本合不来的人才融合在一起，打造出这些常胜之师，而且他既当过球员又当过教练，在两个不同的地方都做到了，还融合了东方哲学、西方哲学，把所有这些结合在一起——我认为从领导风格的角度来看，他是过去半个世纪最有意义的领导者之一。

Luckily we didn't get to that. He answered. I think I hit him up on like four different messaging apps before I got a hold of him. But yeah, I think this ability to handle spikiness, to build teams that can adopt the type of talent that isn't necessarily the perfect nine-to-five employee from a product perspective—I look up a lot, from a management style perspective, to Phil Jackson, the coach of the Bulls and the Lakers. I think his ability to mesh talent of very different types that literally does not get along otherwise, to create these winning teams, to have done it both as a player and as a coach in two different places, to use philosophies from eastern philosophies, western philosophies, to combine all this stuff—I think he's one of the most meaningful leaders from a leadership styles perspective of the last half century.

而我认为产品这件事，尤其是涉及消费者和任何需要更多创造力和品味的东西，我倾向于把很多产品负责人看作更像是在出专辑的乐队。你可以喜欢一个乐队，但有时候他们会出一张烂专辑。而作为粉丝，在那段时间你会怎么做？你还继续当粉丝吗？你还听那张专辑吗？你会陪他们熬过去吗？还是只听听老歌？这差不多就是我对合作过的很多“尖刺型”产品经理的看法。就像，天哪，有时候他们确实搞砸了一张专辑，但如果我仍然相信他们作为艺术家的能力，我就会继续支持他们。

And I think the thing about product, especially when it comes to consumer and anything that involves more creativity and taste, is I think of a lot of product leaders more like bands putting out albums. You can love a band, but sometimes they have a dud album. And what you do with the band as a fan during that time—do you stay a fan? Do you still listen to the album? Do you ride it through? Do you just listen to the old stuff? That's kind of how I think of a lot of the spikier product managers that I've worked with. It's like, man, sometimes they whiff on an album, but if I still believe in them as an artist, I'll stick with them.

回到 Nikita，但换个方向：他上播客时说过一句话，说他很荣幸能上一个关于产品管理的播客，尽管他不相信产品管理是真实存在的。有趣的是，他后来成了 XEX 的产品负责人。但这联系到我知道你相信的一件事，那就是大多数产品经理都很差，而且往往对公司是净负面的。谈谈这个，以及你为什么认为中位数水平的产品经理其实并不好。我觉得这在零利率时代可能是个反主流观点，但现在它似乎正在成为主流，即对产品管理提出更高的标准。

Coming back to Nikita but going in a different direction: when he came on the podcast, he had this line that he's honored to be on a podcast about product management as someone that doesn't believe product management is real. And it's funny that he went on to be head of product at XEX. But this connects to something that I know you believe, which is that most product managers are bad and are often net negative to the company. Talk about that and why you think the median PM is not actually good. I feel like this might have been a contrarian take during the ZIRP era, but now it's kind of bleeding into the mainstream of holding a higher bar for product management.

确实很有趣。你请过 Whatnot 的首席产品官 Tom 说过类似的话，我同意他说的很多内容。顺便说一句，我认为他手下一些最资深的产品经理其实是我在 Snap 团队时的前 Snap 产品经理，这很棒，因为这某种程度上验证了很多这一点。但没错，现在我们是一群自我厌恶的产品经理，靠当产品经理赚了一大笔钱，现在却说，哦，产品经理很糟糕。不过，我认为这其实有一个数学上的解释。

It is funny. You had Tom, the CPO of Whatnot, say something similar, and I agreed with a lot of what he said. By the way, I think some of his most senior PMs are actually former Snap PMs from my team at Snap, which is great because it kind of verifies a lot of this. But yeah, now we're a bunch of self-hating PMs who've made a bunch of money being PMs and are now like, oh, PMs are bad. But no, I think there's actually a mathematical explanation for this.

首先，我认为任何一门手艺——当你处于任何正态分布技能的顶端时，你就在分布的尾部。所以对于产品管理来说，如果产品管理的技能在人群中是正态分布的，那么实际成为产品经理的人都在分布的右侧。你把这部分切掉，它就变成了幂律分布。而对于任何幂律分布，中位数都会远低于平均值。大多数人都在左侧。

First of all, I think any craft—when you're at the top end of any skill that is normally distributed, you're at the tail end of the distribution. So for product management, if the skill of product management is normally distributed across a population, the ones who are actually product managers are all the way on the right-hand side of the distribution. So you lop that off and it becomes a power distribution. And for any power distribution, the median is going to be far below the average. Most people are on the left side of it.

我认为这在产品管理领域被过度放大了，原因有两个。第一，尤其是在零利率时代，它基本上成了科技行业里非技术背景的人最赚钱的职业。所以一旦它的定义非常主观——这也是为什么你的播客多年来对人们如此有价值的部分原因，因为他们会问：“我需要做什么才能成为产品经理？”——而一旦你入了行，你的薪酬基本上就像在技术阶梯上一样。所以你留在其中的动机非常强。如果你非常擅长，你作为产品负责人培养的技能几乎完美适用于其他高管职位，比如整体领导角色，或者自己创业。所以你在分布的右侧——优秀的产品经理正在离开这个系统。他们成为创始人、成为高管等等。而在分布的另一侧，任何在行内的人都在想尽办法留下来。所以分布变得越来越偏向这样。我认为在零利率时代你看到了这一点，也有相关的梗图之类的，也许现在有了一些修正。但没错，我认为从数学上讲，这个职业的设置就是中位数产品经理实际上可能相当差。

And I think this actually gets excessively emphasized within product management for two reasons. One, especially during the ZIRP era, it became essentially the most lucrative career in tech for nontechnical people. So once it has a very subjective definition—which is part of the reason why your podcast has been so valuable to people over the years, because they're like, 'What do I need to do to be one?'—and so once you're in it, you're being compensated essentially as if you're on a technical ladder. So you have a very high incentive to remain part of it. If you're very good at it, the skills you develop as a product leader are almost perfect for either other executive roles, like overall leadership roles, or starting your own company. So you're on the right side of the distribution—the great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders, they're becoming executives, etc. And on the other side of the distribution, anybody who's in is doing anything possible to stay in. So the distribution becomes more weighted like this. And I think during ZIRP you saw this and there were memes about it and stuff like that, and maybe there's been some correction. But yeah, I think mathematically it's kind of set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.

你觉得情况在变好吗？还有，你觉得有没有这样一种情况——我经常思考，很多人说产品经理很烂，没用。我发现通常是因为他们只是没跟优秀的产品经理合作过，而很多人确实没跟优秀的产品经理合作过。所以当很多人都在跟你描述的这种平庸的产品经理合作时，整个职业就显得糟糕、听起来也糟糕。你怎么看？

Do you feel like it's getting better? And do you think there's something—I think about a lot that a lot of people say that PMs suck, they're useless. And I find that that's usually the case because they've just not worked with a great PM, and a lot of people haven't worked with great PMs. So it kind of makes the whole profession look bad and sound bad when a lot of people are working with these mediocre PMs, as you describe. Thoughts there?

是的，我认为你说得完全对。我也注意到了这一点。我觉得现在世界上很多事情都可以用某种形式的“中智”梗来解释。但没错，我认为你说得完全对。

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I've also noticed this. I feel like so much in the world right now is explained by some form of the midwit meme in some way or another. But yeah, I think you're exactly right.

我认为这是这种分布的二阶效应，它支配着整个职业。我确实认为情况在变好，因为当很多人提到零利率时代时，我真的觉得当利率下降，意味着机会成本更低。所以当机会成本更低时，人们就会做比如多招一个人这样的事。但这些机会成本我认为比被内部化的要高，因为一些我们开始谈论的东西——很多这些成本并没有被内部化。

That is a second-order effect of this kind of distribution that I think governs the whole profession. I do think it's getting better, because when a lot of people reference the ZIRP era, I truly feel like when interest rates go down, that means opportunity costs are lower. And so when opportunity costs are lower, people are doing things like just hiring that extra person. But these opportunity costs I think are higher than are internalized, because of some of the stuff we started talking about — a lot of these costs are not internalized.

所以我一直——我们可以聊聊这个——我一直非常专注于开发一套评估产品经理的系统，不只是评估这个人，而是评估这个人和他们当时所在的位置，以确保团队实际上是净正向的。根据我的经验——我们可以聊聊其中一些方法——最终的结果是，我真的没怎么听到优秀的工程师抱怨产品经理，因为优秀的工程师，第一，他们知道如何让产品经理顺从他们的意愿。他们从产品经理那里得到他们想要的用处；第二，他们就是不容忍糟糕的产品经理。所以他们不会被分配到或者不会和糟糕的产品经理一起工作。

And so I've been — and we can talk about this — I've been really focused on developing a system for evaluating product managers, not just the person but the person and the place that they are at that time, to make sure that the team is actually just net positive. And in my experience — and we can talk about what some of those methods are — the way this kind of ends up is that I really don't hear great engineers complain about product managers that much, because great engineers, a, they know how to bend product managers to their will. They get the use out of them that they want, and b, they just don't put up with bad ones. So they don't get assigned or they don't get to work with bad product managers.

我觉得讽刺的是，在中间或者马蹄铁理论中，非常糟糕的工程师也不抱怨产品经理，因为他们知道他们可以躲在产品经理的决定后面之类的。所以真正抱怨的只是中间的那些人。

I think ironically in the middle or the horseshoe theory of things, really bad engineers also don't complain about product managers, because they know they can just hide behind their decisions and stuff like that. So it's really just the ones in the middle that are complaining.

我确实想问一下 Snap。我觉得这是一家没有达到我认为 Evan 和所有人想象中潜力的公司。我想主要原因——我请过 Evan 上播客——就是它针对的用户很难变现。这是 Snap 未能成为更大成功的核心原因吗，还是有更多原因？

I do want to ask about Snap. I feel like it's a company that hasn't lived up to the potential of what I think Evan and everyone imagined it could be. I imagine the main reason — and I had Evan on the podcast — is just the users that it's going after are just hard to monetize. Is that kind of the core of what has kept Snap from becoming a bigger success, or is there more to it?

我会尽量客观，Lenny，因为这是我一生工作的一部分，也许我确实有点耿耿于怀。是的，我会尽量客观。所以我会从变现角度，至少从广告变现角度，说两件，也许三件关于 Snap 的事，然后我们可以聊聊——他们在 Snapchat Plus 上取得了很大成功，订阅产品总体表现不错，但广告才是互联网消费者变现真正神奇的产品市场契合。这有很多数学上的原因。

I'll try and be as objective as possible, Lenny, because this is a little bit of my life's work and maybe I do have some level of chip on my shoulder. Yeah, I'll try and be as objective as possible. So I'll say two things, maybe three things about Snap from a monetization perspective, at least an ads monetization perspective, and then we could talk about — they've had a lot of success with Snapchat Plus and subscription products in general are doing well, but ads are truly the magical product-market fit of consumer monetization on the internet. And there are a lot of mathematical reasons why that's true.

从广告角度看，有三件事阻碍了 Snap，我认为公司——我们仍然在讨论——是我们可能应该得到比现在更多的认可，但我理解为什么我们没有。第一，是的，用户群非常年轻。Snap 早期以极高的比例吸引了 Z 世代，现在甚至我认为还有 Alpha 世代，因为他们从 Roblox 之类的平台毕业。而且在美国和国外，17 岁和 18 岁之间以及 18 岁和 21 岁之间的广告 CPM 有一个阶跃变化，简直是一个可疑的不连续点。

And there are three things that hold back Snap from an ads perspective that I think the company — we still kind of talk about — is we deserve a little bit more credit maybe than we get, but I understand why we don't. The first is yes, the user base is extremely young. Snap appealed to Gen Z at an excessive rate early on, now even I think Gen Alpha as they graduate from Roblox and stuff like that. And there is a step change, like literally a suspicious discontinuity in advertising CPMs between 17 and 18 and between 18 and 21 in the United States and abroad.

如果你未满 17 岁，关于如何跟踪、衡量和定位广告的规则极其严格，这是合理的，为了保护青少年。这意味着从这个群体推动 ROI 本质上比 18 岁、21 岁和 24 岁的人要困难得多。你可以说青少年影响他们的父母之类的，但关键是要考虑这些只是更难衡量，而围绕难以衡量的东西构建效果产品更难。所以，是的，从这个角度看，Snap 的受众绝对不如 Pinterest、Instagram 或 Twitter 有价值。

If you're under 17, the rules around how you can track and measure and target ads are extremely constraining, and justifiably so, to protect teenagers. That means that it's essentially much harder to drive ROI from this group of people versus an 18-year-old, versus a 21-year-old and 24-year-old. And you can say all you want about, oh, teenagers influence their parents, blah, blah, blah. The key thing to think about is those are just harder to measure, and it's harder to build performance products around things that are hard to measure. And so, yeah, Snap's audience is definitively less valuable from that perspective versus a Pinterest or an Instagram or a Twitter.

第二件事是，几乎你见过的所有非搜索广告业务，每个展示广告产品都打开到你放置广告的屏幕。有很多关于注意力的研究，从数学上讲，你会获得印象的地方需要最大化以用于广告，而 Snap 打开的是相机。这使它作为产品很棒，对吧？就它作为捕捉瞬间并与朋友分享的最快方式的能力而言，但在那个流程中——拍摄快照并发送给朋友的核心流程——没有任何逻辑上适合广告的位置。

The second thing is almost every ads business you'll ever see that isn't search-based, every display ad product opens to the screen where you put the ads. There's a lot of studies around attention and just mathematically where you're going to get the impressions where you need to maximize that for advertising, and Snap opens the camera. And that makes it awesome as a product, right? In terms of its ability to be the fastest way to capture a moment and share it with your friends, but in no part of that flow — the core flow of taking a snap and sending it to your friends — is there a logical place for an advertisement.

它不是一个基于信息流的产品，也不是一个消费导向的产品。它是一个创作导向的产品，一个视觉创作导向的产品。而且并没有很多针对这一点的广告格式。我们在 Snap 做了很多实验。可能我最大的失败之一就是推动相机变现的能力。这太难了。就像我们——我搞不清楚，或者我无法批准能搞清楚的团队。所以，从最初的那一点来看，这是一个对广告非常不利的环境。

It is just not a feed-based product and it is not a consumption-oriented product. It is a creation-oriented product, a visual creation-oriented product. And there don't really exist a lot of advertising formats that go after this. And we experimented with this a lot at Snap. And probably one of my biggest failures was the ability to drive camera monetization. It was just too hard. Like we — I couldn't figure it out or I couldn't greenlight the teams that could figure it out. And yeah, so it's a very hostile environment for advertising from that initial thing.

然后它的核心是一个消息应用。目前消息应用并没有真正好的广告产品。我认为即使某些消息应用通过订阅或企业账户变现——人们总是会举一些亚洲聊天应用的例子。你剥开来看，从每花费时间的美元角度看，这些都没有做得那么好。这些都没有特别擅长变现。消息应用是不可思议的实用工具，作为投资组合的一部分非常棒。但 Snap 试图非常快速地在一个价值较低的受众、一个非常艰难的广告格式、一个更实用而非消费导向的服务上建立一个数十亿美元的广告业务。

And then at its core, it's a messaging app. And there aren't really great ad products for messaging apps right now. I think even the monetization of certain messaging apps via subscription or via business accounts — and people will always cite some of the Asian chat apps as examples. You peel it back and from a dollars per time spent perspective, none of these are doing that well. None of these are exceptionally great at monetizing. Messaging apps are incredible utilities, incredible to have as part of a portfolio. But Snap was trying to build a multi-billion dollar ads business very quickly on a lower value audience, a very tough format for ads, and a service that was more utilitarian than consumption-oriented.

哇，这太迷人了。我认为重要的是要注意 Snap 正在做——它是一个数十亿美元的业务。我想有十亿月活跃用户，你知道，所有青少年都在用。就像——

Wow, that was fascinating. I think it's important to note Snap is doing — it's like a many multi-billion dollar business. I think a billion monthly active users, you know, like all the teens use it. It's like —

从大局来看，它非常成功。只是每个人都以为它会大得多，像下一个 Facebook。

Like in the scheme of things, it's very successful. It's more just everyone thought it was gonna be much, much bigger, like the next Facebook.

我认为它真的——如果你把 Snap 作为一个产品剥开来看，它——再次，我的一些信息可能过时了，我并没有真正查看，但它在几乎所有西方国家都是青少年中排名第一的消息应用，比如 21 岁以下人群的渗透率达到 70% 到 100%。

And I think it really — if you were to peel apart Snap as a product, it's — again, some of my information is dated and I haven't really looked at it, but like it's the number one messaging app among teenagers in almost every western country, like 70 to 100% penetration of people under 21.

这是他们的默认地图。在这个群体里，它比 Apple 或 Google 地图用得还多。我觉得对大多数人来说，它是最受欢迎占星应用。它绝对是最常用的相机。所以想象一下，如果有一家控股公司，一家简版伯克希尔·哈撒韦，旗下拥有排名第一的相机应用、排名第一的通讯应用、排名第一的地图应用、排名第一的占星应用、排名第一的内容——因为我想 TikTok 会是内容消费第一，这也是广告业务问题的一部分——但如果你拆开看，你会觉得，这消费产品战绩简直逆天。而这一切功劳都不归我，对吧？这是那个元老设计团队，他们打造了我们这一代一些最热门的产品。

It's their default map. It gets used more than Apple or Google Maps by this group. I think it's the most popular astrology app for most of these. It's definitely the most common camera. So imagine if you're like, hey, there's a holding company. There's a Jenzie Berkshire Hathaway that has the number one camera app, the number one messaging app, the number one maps app, the number one astrology app, the number one content — because I guess TikTok would be the number one content consumption one, which is part of the problem with the ad stuff — but you peel it apart and you're like, that's an insane consumer product track record. And none of this credit goes to me at all, right? This is the OG design team that cranked out some of the biggest hits of our generation.

但从广告产品的角度看，也许我耿耿于怀的是，Snap 起步晚于 Twitter、Reddit、Pinterest。它比除 Twitter 外的所有公司都更早上市。尽管起步更晚，它却比它们都更快达到 40 亿美元广告营收。而 Snap 是什么？Twitter 是全球市政厅，地球上最有价值的人都在 Twitter 上发言。Pinterest 字面上就是一个你告诉它你想买什么的地方，对吧？这些都是做广告的绝佳场所。那当时 Snap 以什么闻名？我不知道。我不想让你的播客品牌不安全，但我们可以聊聊当时 Snapchat 以什么闻名。

But I think from an ads product perspective, maybe yeah, the chip on my shoulder is like Snap started after Twitter, after Reddit, after Pinterest. It went public before all of them except for Twitter. It was quicker to four billion in ads revenue than all of them despite starting later. And like, what is Snap? Like Twitter is a global town hall. All the most valuable people on the planet are talking on Twitter. Pinterest is literally a place where you tell it what you want to buy, right? These are really great places for ads. What was Snap known for at the time? I don't know. I don't want to make your podcast brand unsafe, but we can talk about what Snapchat was known for at the time.

屏幕上会消失的照片。

Disappearing photos on screen.

它仍然能够扩张广告业务，我觉得这相当迷人。但没错，这是一家迷人的公司。考虑到此后美国再没出现过日活 1 亿的消费产品，它仍然值得研究。

It was still able to scale this ads business, which I think is pretty fascinating. But yeah, it's a fascinating company. And I think just given the dearth of 100 million DAU consumer products that have been started in the United States since then, it still kind of deserves to be studied.

是的。Evan 上播客时我指出，我认为它是最后一个成功推出的大型社交消费产品，那是 12 年前了，我想，除了 TikTok，但 TikTok 不算真正的社交，更像是内容媒体。

Yeah. When Evan was on the podcast I pointed out that I think it was the last big successful social consumer product to launch, which was 12 years ago, I think, other than TikTok, which is not really social. It's more of a content media sort of thing.

是的。Discord。Discord 严格来说始于 2015 年。

Yeah. Discord. Discord technically started in 2015.

好吧。

Okay.

但非常非常小众，对吧？就像世界上最大的小众是游戏。但没错，氛围很不一样。

But very, very niche, right? Like the world's biggest niche is gaming. But yeah, quite a different vibe.

也许最后一点想法。我很好奇你的看法。你几乎可以说，这是一个更多产品经理会有帮助的例子，因为它的设计和体验如此精美，令人愉悦，人们喜爱并上瘾，但只是货币化和商业基本上没解决。你会认为这正是产品经理该介入的地方，所以我好奇这是否是一个障碍，即参与的产品经理数量少。

Just like maybe a final thought here. I'm curious to get your take. You could almost argue that this is an example of more PMs would have been helpful because it's such an incredibly beautifully designed product and experience and so delightful and people love it and are hooked on it, but it's just the monetization and the business basically was not solved. And you would think that's where PMs would come in and so I wonder if that was a hindrance, the low number of PMs involved.

我认为 Snapchat Plus 这个订阅产品，如果更早推出——订阅产品很难，因为围绕它们的数学相当残酷。本质上，对于订阅产品，时间是你的敌人。

I think that Snapchat Plus, the subscription product, if it had launched earlier — subscription products are tough because the math around them is pretty brutal. Essentially, time is your enemy with subscription products.

轮到你了。

Turn.

是的。你做的任何事情都需要很长时间才能显现影响。所以我认为 Snapchat Plus 实际上相当成功，它的执行方式有很多非常棒的地方，但我有时会想，如果它四年前推出，现在会怎样。因为对于通讯工具——你在 Discord 和 Nitro 上也看到这一点——与 Spotify 或 Netflix 这样的内容产品大不相同。你首先习惯于每天使用产品并获得很多价值，那时你才会看到订阅产品的价值。而不是一开始就订阅，对吧？你不会第一次打开 Snapchat 就说，‘哦，我肯定需要每月付 20 美元或 5 美元买点什么。’所以时间就像队列，渗透率随时间缓慢增长，但通常增长相当线性。所以是的，如果 Snap 四年前推出这个产品，广告业务快速扩张的压力可能会小一些。广告业务扩张压力小，就能在内容消费方面和体验上有更多自由，也许能更好地与 TikTok 竞争。我不知道。这是个大智慧的系统思维。

Yeah. Anything you do takes a lot of time to matriculate in terms of impact. So I think Snapchat Plus has actually been quite successful and there's a lot of how it's been executed that's really great, but I sometimes wonder if it had been launched four years earlier, where it would be. Just because with messaging utilities — and you see this with Discord and Nitro as well — much different than content products like Spotify or Netflix. You first become acclimated to using the product daily and getting a lot of value out of it, and that's when you see the value of the subscription product. Not right when you start, right? You don't open Snapchat the first time and say, 'Oh, I definitely need to pay 20 bucks a month or five bucks a month for something.' And so time is kind of like the cohorts essentially, penetration grows slowly over time, but grows quite linearly usually. And so yeah, if Snap had had this product out four years ago, there might have been less pressure on the ads business to scale as quickly as it does. Less pressure on the ads business to scale as quickly allows for more freedom on the content consumption side of things and the experience, and allows them maybe to compete more with TikTok. I don't know. It's a big brain systems thinking.

天哪，系统思维，这大概是本播客连续第七次用到这个词了。

Man, systems thinking, that's like the seventh time in a row that term has been used in this podcast.

其中一次——是 Netflix 那次吗？

One of the — was it the Netflix one?

是的，关于这个。

Yeah, about this.

那是个大话题。

That was a big one.

是的，有时人们说系统思维，然后就去买那本书。

Yeah, sometimes people say systems thinking and then they go out and buy that book.

是的，带着那个弹簧玩具。

Yeah, with the slinky.

是的，就像我现在是系统思考者了。

Yeah, it's like I'm a systems thinker now.

实际上，系统思维最被低估的方面是拥有数学背景，能够用数学术语描述系统，真正用存量和流量以及不同的概率分布——这是双峰分布还是正态分布——来映射它，并且能够用数学方式沟通系统如何运作。因为否则，我认为这是一个著名的方法，非常 MBA 式，但讽刺的是它有点用。我想它来自丰田之类的，比如五个为什么，你会说，哦，什么是五个为什么？一定是超级惊人的系统同步方法。显然只是问五次为什么，然后你就能追根究底。而我觉得，这就是大多数人所说的系统思维，我认为他们基本上只是在说，我问了五次为什么，然后我找到了第一性原理。

Actually, the most underrated aspect of systems thinking is having a mathematical background to be able to describe the system in mathematical terms, to actually map it out in terms of stocks and flows and different probability — is this bimodal or is this normally distributed — and just being able to mathematically communicate how a system works. Because otherwise, I think it's this famous method, it's a very MBA-ish type thing, but ironically it kind of works. I think it came out of Toyota or something, like the five whys, and you're like, oh, what's the five whys? Must be this super amazing system syncing method. It's apparently just asking why five times, and then you get to the bottom of things. And I'm like, that's how the majority of people when they say it's systems thinking, I think they're basically just saying like I asked why five times and I got to the first principle.

太棒了。我本来想请你帮助人们理解什么是系统思维，因为这是一个宽泛的术语，很难真正理解。所以我喜欢这个答案。所以你发现基本上只是问为什么，这实际上是培养系统思维、真正思考大局的一个非常有效的方法。

That is awesome. I was gonna ask you to help people understand what is systems thinking because it's this broad term that is hard to really know. And so I love this answer. So you're finding basically just ask why is that is actually a really effective way to develop systems thinking to actually think about the bigger picture.

是的。但我希望也许不是读那本弹簧书，而是更多像 Jay Forrester 的系统动力学，你知道，来自 1970 年代的制造业之类的东西，然后我认为只是对系统如何运作的数学理解，就像如果你必须建模它。

Yeah. But I would love it if maybe rather than reading the Slinky book, there was more like Jay Forrester system dynamics, you know, from the manufacturing kind of stuff from the 1970s, and then I think just like a mathematical understanding of how the system works, like if you had to model it.

是的，我本来想问基本上——

Yeah, I was going to ask basically —

就像创建一个电子表格模型，如何——

Just create like a spreadsheet model of how —

没错。是的。是的。

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

我觉得这可能会非常清晰。其实没关系。所以这是理解系统思维的一个很好的方法。把它建模出来，放进电子表格里，有哪些变量，什么输入，什么输出，有哪些杠杆。

I think it could be very clarifying. That's actually okay. So that's a really good way to understand systems thinking. Model it out, put in a spreadsheet what are all the variables, what comes in, what comes out, what are the levers.

是的，是的，有哪些杠杆？

Yeah, yeah, what are the levers?

那些杠杆背后的分布是什么。是的，我觉得即使电子表格除了放在你的共享驱动器里之外没有任何进展，它也能让人非常清晰。

What are the distributions behind those levers. Yeah, I think it can be very clarifying even if the spreadsheet goes nowhere other than your shared drive, like it can be very clarifying.

喂给你的智能体。我正要快速说一下 Snapchat plus，我最喜欢的故事部分是 Instagram 推出了 Instagram plus，这就像另一个经典的 Snapchat 故事。

Feed your agent. I was going to say real quick on Snapchat plus the my favorite part of the story is that Instagram launched Instagram plus it's just like another classic Snapchat story.

是的，早期我记得有一个 snap，看到 Instagram 如此激进地抄袭，真的很有趣，他们实际上在抄袭我们一些最糟糕的功能，比如那些不起作用的功能，只是因为我认为他们只是假设我们接触的一切都会变成金子。

Yeah, there was early on I remember a snap it was like so funny to see how aggressively Instagram was copying that they were actually copying like some of our worst features like ones that weren't working just because I think they just like assumed everything that we were touching was turning to gold.

是的，然后有些功能在 Instagram 上就是没那么成功，比如地图之类的，那需要时间，但说到 stories，从抄袭的角度来看显然非常有效，你很难说 Instagram 上的版本现在不是更好。就像 Instagram 对这个格式所做的，它真的非常适合这个产品。那个团队由一群伟大的设计师驱动，当他们开始从第一性原理思考，并且有 Adam（他也上过播客）那样的品味时，从人机交互的角度来看，那个产品架构得很好，我认为在很多层面上都真的很令人钦佩。我一直试图远离 Snapchat，但随着你分享更多，我有很多新问题出现。我和 Evan 聊天时提到的一件事是，看到每个人抄袭 Snapchat 15 年或不管多久。他的结论基本上是软件不再是远程的。你必须专注于其他事情。他描述这就是为什么他花这么多时间在硬件上。这是他的答案，还有产品的生态系统和网络效应。对此有什么想法？

Yeah and then there are some features that on Instagram just don't make as much like the map and things like that that will take time but when it comes to stories which was obviously extremely effective from a copying perspective you'd be hard-pressed to say anything but the version of it on Instagram is now much better. Like what Instagram has done with that format like it really suits the product super well. And that team is powered by a bunch of great designers and when they start thinking from first principles and with the taste that Adam who was also on the pod has like it's a that product is well architected from a human computer interaction standpoint in a way that I think is actually like really admirable on many levels. I keep trying to move away from Snapchat, but I have so many I have new questions come up as you share more. Something that came up in my chat with Evan about this is like seeing everybody copying Snapchat for 15 years or however long it's been. His takeaway basically is software is no longer remote. You have to focus on other things. He described that's why he's spending so much time on hardware. It was his answer and also just like the ecosystem and the network effects of a product. Thoughts on that?

我对 Evan 怀有极大的敬意，我认为他基本上在几乎所有事情上都是对的，只是有些东西早了点。也许早期所有事情都是这样。甚至像头像、AI 之类的东西，基本上我们当时做的所有设备上的 AR，当时更多地被称为机器学习，但采用了某种形式的机器智能，这在当时非常前卫。所以，当他说这样的话时，可能有些道理。我认为很多人对 Snap 感到沮丧，因为它没有财务能力来支持他想要做的那种硬件开发，看起来是这样。而且在货币化方面仍然没有很好的答案，显然我承担了很多责任。但从那种护城河的角度来看，就像他说的，我看了播客。是的，我有点认为他是对的，但也许投资者或世界不想给他空间在某些方面是对的。这有

I have tremendous respect for Evan and I think he's essentially been right on almost everything just early on some stuff. Maybe early on everything actually too. Even stuff like avatars like AI like essentially all of the like on-device AR that we were doing was at the time it was more just called machine learning but like employed some form of machine intelligence that was like super out on guard at the time. So, I think when he says something like this, there's probably some truth to it. I think a lot of people are frustrated with Snap because it doesn't have the financial profile to be able to support the type of hardware development that he wants to do, it seems. And that like there still isn't like a great answer on the monetization front for which like obviously like I bear like a lot of responsibility. But from that kind of like moat perspective, like what he said, I watched the pod. Yeah, I kind of think like he's right, but that the like maybe investors or the world doesn't want to give him the space to be right in some ways. Which has

是的。是的。它有艺术家的气质，你知道，就像被拒绝的艺术家气质，或者边缘艺术家气质，我觉得还有很多事情，它实际上让我想起，现在有很多关于品味之类的讨论，很难描述，但我在 Snap 学到的一件事是，我想我亲眼看到 Evan 对更好的想法说不，比我在几乎任何其他消费者创业公司发布时看到的都要多。这让我想到，作为这些高增长公司的创始人的产品负责人，我的目标总是把他们变成几乎最好的博物馆，世界上最富有的博物馆策展人，无论产品中有什么，都只是整体收藏的一小部分。这是策展人认为适合这个时代和社会的东西。我认为，了解某人品味的一种方法是在面试他们时，问问他们构建但从未发布的东西。不是他们测试后得到不好结果的东西，而是他们 literally 拿在手里的原型，然后说世界还没准备好，或者这个东西还没准备好。如果他们有很多高质量的想法放在架子上，锻炼那种说不的肌肉，克制，可能是最容易的，是你能锻炼的少数品味肌肉之一。如果一个博物馆把所有收藏都挂在墙上，那么策展人什么都没做。所以，是的，我经常思考这个，因为 Evan 可能是最擅长的。这是一个非常有趣的见解，尤其是现在，因为 AI 非常不擅长从设计和产品中移除东西。它总是添加，它不会说，‘嘿，也许我们应该删掉这部分。’所以，这很有趣，现在这如何连接到，我们一直谈论 AI 的品味，这是其中一个有趣的元素，即随着 AI 在构建和设计过程中扮演更大角色，善于理解什么该移除。

Yeah. Yeah. It has like artist vibes, you know, like rejected artist vibes or or on the outskirts artist vibes, which like I think there's still so many things like it actually reminds me like there's so much talk these days about taste and things like that and so hard to describe things like but one of the things that I learned at Snap is like I think I saw Evan personally say no to better ideas than I've seen almost any other consumer startup launch. And it kind of made me think of like this like my goal as like a product leader for founders like at these high growth companies was always to like turn them into almost like the best museum, the richest museum curators in the world where like whatever is in the product at any one time is just a small slice of the overall collection. It's whatever that curator thinks is right for this time and place in society. And I think if like one way you can kind of like get at somebody's taste is when you're interviewing them is just ask them about some of the things they built that they never shipped. Not that they tested and got bad results for but like that literally they held it in their hands the prototype and they're like the world's not ready for this or like this thing is not ready. And if they have a lot of high quality ideas that are on the shelf, exercising that kind of muscle of like saying no of restraint is probably one of the easiest like one of the few like muscles of taste you can exercise. If a museum has all of their collection on the walls, then the curator hasn't done anything. And so yeah, I think about this a lot because Evan is yeah, probably the best at it. That is such an interesting insight, especially these days because AI is very bad at removing things from designs and from products. It always adds it doesn't say, "Hey, maybe we should cut this piece." And so it's so interesting how this connects now to the there's like the we talk about taste all the time with AI and this is like an interesting element of that of get being good at understanding what to remove as AI becomes a bigger part of the building process and designing process.

是的。是的。我认为这将是困难的，这是 AI 难以复制的硬技能。我认为总的来说，现在它显然在代码层面。它正在达到设计层面。在某些情况下，它在视频和照片层面。最终可能甚至会达到物理层面。但它真的会让任何人都能成为创作者。我们过去见过这种情况，对吧？降低创造力的门槛不仅使现有创作者能做更多，而且使那些原本被限制或无法进入竞技场的人能够进入。但这将给创造值得人类关注的东西带来很大压力。在某种程度上，我想知道过去是否有类似的情况。我们得想想。

Yes. Yeah. This will be hard I think to this is a hard skill for AI to replicate. I think like in general it seems like at right now it's obviously at the code level. It's getting to the design level. It's in some cases at the video and the photo level. It'll eventually maybe even get to physical level as well. But it's really going to empower anybody to be a creator. And we've seen this in the past, right? Like lowering the threshold for creativity not just enables the existing creators to do more but enables people who were otherwise kind of like bounded out or restricted from entering the arena to enter it. But this will put a lot of pressure on essentially creating stuff that deserves human attention. In a way that I wonder if there are some analogies to this in the past. We'll have to think about it.

感觉对产品经理来说，一个有趣的新技能是抵制 AI 添加到你的产品中的东西。工程师们会说如果我们有这个会怎样。所以现在甚至不是 AI 的问题。基本上是产品团队要削减东西。总之。

And it just feels like an interesting new skill for PMs is pushing back on things AI adding to your products. Engineers are like what if we had this whatever. So it's like it's not even on AI right now. It's on the on the product teams basically to cut stuff. Anyway.

是的。是的。

Yeah. Yeah.

也许这个缺点——如果每个借贷播客的结论基本上都是“是啊，世界可能只是需要更多产品经理”，那会挺搞笑的。疯了。

Maybe the con — it'd be pretty funny if the conclusion of every lending podcast is basically, yeah, the world might just need more PMs. Crazy.

天哪。

Oh man.

本期节目由 Mercury 赞助。现在有了 spend，银行业务变得截然不同。我成为 Mercury 客户已经很多年了。我把所有商业银行业务都转到了 Mercury。老实说，我不能再满意了。这就是在线银行由产品人而非银行家打造时的感觉。现在有了 spend，你可以给团队发放个人卡，按人或按团队设置消费限额，并自动从 Gmail 或短信中拉取报销收据。你甚至可以让你的 AI 智能体拥有自己的卡，设定自己的限额和政策。大多数创始人的起步方式都一样：一张卡全公司共用。它能用，直到不能用。有人超支，收据不见了，你花两天时间试图弄清楚谁花了什么、为什么花。Spend 是直接内置于 Mercury 的费用管理工具。你团队的所有卡、预算和报销，都与商业银行服务放在同一个地方。无需追讨，无需手动审核，无需月底手忙脚乱。结果是团队可以快速行动，创始人不再是瓶颈。了解更多并注册请访问 mercury.com。Mercury 是一家金融科技公司，不是 FDIC 保险银行。银行服务由 Choice Financial Group 提供，FDIC 成员。IO 卡由 Patriot Bank 发行，FDIC 成员，依据 Mastercard International Incorporated 的许可。

This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking now with spend. I've been a Mercury customer for so many years now. I switched all my business banking to Mercury. And honestly, I could not be happier. It's what online banking feels like when it's built by product people, not by bankers. And now with spend, you can give your team individual cards, set spending limits per person or per team, and have expense receipts automatically pulled in from Gmail or over text. You can even give your AI agents their own cards with their own limits and policies. Most founders start out the same way, one card used by everybody at the company. It works until it stops working. Someone goes over, a receipt disappears, you spend two days trying to figure out who spent what and why. Spend is expense management built directly into Mercury. All your team's cards, budgets, and reimbursements. All live in the same place as your business banking. No chasing, no manual reviews, no end of month scramble. The result is a team that can move fast and a founder who is no longer the bottleneck. Learn more and get signed up at mercury.com. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided to Choice Financial Group in column A members FDIC. The IO card is issued by Patriot Bank and a member FDIC pursuant to a license for Mastercard International Incorporated.

这里有几个元素，我认为把 Snapchat 和 AI 联系起来了。看到了 Snap 的广告体验，以及它如何发展，并没有像人们可能想象的那样壮大。特别是 ChatGPT 正在探索广告。我想其他 AI 工具也会。对这个机会有什么想法？你认为这对这些公司来说实际上是一个巨大的商业机会，还是你认为他们没有理解那里的实际业务？

There's a couple elements here that I think connect Snapchat and AI. Having seen the ads experience of Snap and where that has gone and not become as big as people may have thought. ChatGPT in particular is exploring ads. I imagine other AI tools will. Thoughts on that opportunity? Do you think that's actually a massive business opportunity for these companies or do you think they're not understanding the actual business there?

我仍然赞同 Eric Seufert 那一派的观点，认为广告是互联网的产品市场契合。我仍然认为，从变现的角度来看，有很多原因——同样是数学上的——可以解释为什么这是真的，以及为什么我认为订阅产品之类的东西在消费者方面相对于广告来说被高估了。当我观察 OpenAI 在广告方面的做法时，他们正在快速推进所有广告基础设施，这正是你在 Discord 会想要做的。我称之为后发优势。因为我们已经学到了很多，而且我们在在线广告方面已经处于某个阶段。真的，Meta 和他们的团队从 2010 年到 2020 年应该为此获得大部分功劳。驱动现代广告市场和拍卖的东西基本上是一个已解决的问题，而 OpenAI 正在快速推进所有这些组件。我确实认为，这个机制——数学机制，本质上类似于修改过的 VCG，即 Vickrey-Clarke-Groves 拍卖机制。这种数学机制是在甚至像 ChatGPT 这样的聊天环境中构建广告拍卖的正确方式。我的意思是，我认为 Meta 的创新不仅仅在于最高出价者——我极度简化了——但不仅仅是最高出价者获胜，而是广告和广告主对用户的有机价值应该被纳入他们的出价中，这样作为广告主，你本质上必须支付更多才能触达那些可能不想被触达、或者更难触达、或者可能与你不太相关的人。这也很棒，因为它允许你在一个统一的拍卖中混合内容——有机内容和广告内容——以美元作为最终的共同分母。我说这对聊天有好处的原因，不一定是这里的有机价值重要，比如你在内容流中有多喜欢一个广告，而是在聊天中，这可能会被信任所取代或增强。如果你把它归结为非常简单的东西，就像嘿，我应该买什么 X？我应该买什么麦克风？在那一刻，我们必须决定：我应该给你客观答案吗？我应该给你一组答案吗？我应该受到那些想出现在你面前的广告主多大的影响？我认为我应该受到多大影响的机制，本质上应该是我在权衡多少信任。你有点看到我们在这方面有点失败，我不想——我真的不想针对任何人，因为我知道构建这类东西有多难——但有点像亚马逊搜索，那里的广告赞助体验。并不是说它威胁到了产品。亚马逊是一个如此伟大的产品，但亚马逊的伟大产品是什么？是选择性和次日达之类的。当你搜索某样东西时，在到达第一个结果之前有 16 个广告，你会想，“哦，糟糕，那是不是在微妙地影响我对系统的信任？”所以这就是为什么我实际上认为 OpenAI 正在快速推进所有正确的东西。而压力将在于他们如何在拍卖机制中数学地实例化它，以长期最大化信任。因为信任最大化可能与用户留存相关，如果不是因果关系的话，也与广告主价值相关。然后另一方面，这可能是一个格式问题，比如这种格式在聊天中是什么样子？我们还会是——如果它是语音呢？我们不知道。所以我认为现在对于产品经理和设计师来说，最酷的工作之一可能是在 OpenAI 添加格式。那将是一个——那就像是广告领域的社会级工作。所以，是的，我认为看到他们如何在这方面努力会非常有趣。是的，也许我要说的另一件事是，我有点失望他们直接为顶级用户推出了无广告体验。我觉得广告实际上可以对 OpenAI 的每个部分都有增益，你知道，不是像编码之类的，而是实际的聊天，比如让我们把工作和编码放在一边。而且这么早就放弃你最有价值的用户。我有点失望，但我理解人们为什么这样做。

I still subscribe to like the Eric Seufert side of the world of like ads are the product market fit for the internet. And I still think that from a monetization standpoint there's a number of reasons again mathematical for why that is true and why I think like subscription products and things like that are kind of overrated versus ads from a consumer side of things. When I look at what OpenAI is doing from an advertising perspective, they are speedrunning all of the ads infra that it is exactly what you would want and do at Discord. I call this like last mover advantage. Because like we've learned so much and we're at like a certain place with online advertising. And really Meta and the team there from like 2010 through 2020 really deserves I think most of the credit for this. Like what drives a modern ads marketplace and auction is essentially like a solved problem and OpenAI is speedrunning all of the components of that. And I do think that the mechanism the mathematical mechanism which is essentially like a modified VCG I think Vickrey-Clarke-Groves kind of like auction mechanism. This mathematical mechanism is the correct way to build an ads auction in even like a chat environment in ChatGPT. And what I mean by that is I think where the innovation came from from Meta was not just that like the highest bidder and I'm oversimplifying like crazy but like not just that the highest bidder wins but that the organic value of an advertisement and an advertiser to that user should be factored into their bid such that you essentially have to pay more as an advertiser to reach people who may not want to be reached or may be harder to reach or may not necessarily be as relevant to you. And this also is great because it allows you to mix both content, organic content and advertising content on a similar in a unified auction with dollars as essentially the ultimate denominator. And the reason that I say that this is good for chat is not necessarily that organic value is what's important here, like how much you like an ad or not in a content feed, but in chat it probably feels like this could be replaced or augmented with essentially trust. Like if you boil this down to something very simple it's just like hey what X should I buy? What mic should I buy? And in that moment we have to decide like should I give you the objective answer? Should I give you a set of answers? And how influenced should I be by a set of advertisers that want to get in front of you? And I think the mechanism by which how influenced I should be should essentially be how much trust I'm trading off. And you kind of see us failing at this a little bit probably and I don't want to I don't like I really don't want to pick on anybody because I know how hard it is to build these types of things but like a little bit on Amazon search in terms of like the ads the sponsored experience there. It's not like it's not threatening the product. Amazon is such a great product but what is the great product of Amazon? It's like the selection and the next day shipping or whatever. Like it is getting a little crazy when you search for something and you have 16 ads before you get to the first thing and you're like, "Oh shoot, is that like subtly influencing my trust in the system?" And so that's why I actually think like OpenAI is speedrunning all the right stuff. And where the push is going to come to shove is how they instantiate it mathematically in their auction mechanism to maximize trust over the long term. Because trust maximization will probably be correlated with user retention if not causal and with advertiser value. And then on the other side of it, it's probably a format question like what does this format look like in chat? Are we still going to be what if it's voice? Like we don't know. So I think like one of the coolest jobs right now for a PM and designer would probably be like add formats at OpenAI. That'd be a that's like a societal level job in advertising right now. And so, yeah, I think it'll be really interesting to see how they work on that. Yeah, maybe one other thing I'll say is like I was kind of disappointed that they jumped right to an ad-free experience for the top tier. I feel like ads could actually be really additive to every part of the OpenAI, you know, not like coding and things like that, but like actual chat, like let's set aside work and coding. And like lpping off your most valuable users so early. I was a little disappointed, but I understand why people do that.

听你谈论这个真的很有趣，尤其是你刚才喝了一口伏特加。

It is so fun to listen to you talk about this as you take a swig of your vodka right there.

听你聊广告生态系统真的很有趣。这显示出你懂得多少，以及这件事有多深。我觉得我们可以做一整集来聊这个。可能现在不需要这么做，但这太棒了。显然，你花了很多时间思考广告。我现在还感觉到 OpenAI 需要立刻雇用你来帮他们解决这个问题。

It's so fun to hear you talk about the ads ecosystem. It shows how much you know and how deep this goes. I feel like we could do a whole episode on this. Probably don't need to do that right now, but it's amazing. Clearly, you've spent a lot of time thinking about ads. What I'm also feeling now is OpenAI needs to hire you immediately to help them with this.

是啊，是啊，是啊。我想我是自由身，所以你知道，这也许是我上播客的别有用心。

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess free agent, so you know, this is maybe that's my ulterior motive of the pod.

这就是面试。嗯，我觉得你通过了。

This is the interview. Well, I think you've passed.

好的。我想聊点别的。我们之前聊到该把时间花在什么地方，我问你，在你的职业生涯中学到过哪些反直觉的教训，违背常见的创业智慧、常见的领导力智慧。你分享了四个，我想逐一过一遍，听听你的看法，因为它们太棒了。好。第一个是，你喜欢把时间花在把你最优秀的人用到极致，而不是提升普通的人。

Okay. I want to go to something else. We were chatting about what to spend time on and I asked you what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned over the course of your career that go against common startup wisdom, common leadership wisdom. There are four you shared and I want to just go through them and get your take because they're awesome. Okay. So, the first is you like to spend time writing your best people into the ground versus improving the average people.

当然。

Sure.

我意识到你把这个写出来。就像他在建立恐怖组织，他所做的就是把他最好的人用到死。

I'm realizing you write this out. It's like he's building terrorist organizations and all he does is ride his best people into the ground.

这将成为这集的标题。

Going to be the title of the episode.

是啊。是啊。你会需要像有一个康复小组，像为彼得·塞利斯工作过的产品经理的治疗小组。

Yeah. Yeah. You're going to need to like there's going to be like a recovery group like a therapy group of PMs that worked for Peter Sellis.

不，你们俩可能都在担心这个。

No, you're both probably worried about that.

他们都坐在 Discord 里聊天。

They're all sitting in Discord chatting.

是啊。哦，但愿别是 Discord 群组。哦，天哪。

Yeah. Oh, god forbid it's a Discord group. Oh, Jesus.

是的，我认为这其实源于整个 VORP 的概念。一旦你把某人放在某个位置上，也有很多陈词滥调，对吧？比如如果你想快速完成某件事，就交给最忙的人。但我觉得这不一定反直觉。它违背的是人性，对吧？就像你看到有人溺水，你想救他们。而我做了相反的事，完全相反。我只是有点，也许是因为，你知道，在我们开始播客之前，我在谈论姓名决定论，即你的名字会塑造你是谁，还开玩笑说也许我需要成为销售员，因为我的姓是塞利斯。但也有这个 MBA 彼得原理，即人们被提升到他们无能的程度，这绝对可以描述我的职业生涯。但这就是我试图做的。就像如果某人很强并且表现出色，我就给他们越来越多的绳子让他们上吊。我尽可能用力地推他们，直到他们崩溃。因为归根结底，对我来说最大的领导原则之一是我会在公开场合，在高管面前等，永远为我的团队成员辩护。我从不批评他们。所以那些持续做出好决定的人，我只想给他们加载更多决定，直到我开始看到他们做出糟糕的决定。我认为有很多自我强化或自我实现的预言，当你自信并且事情进展顺利时，你能够做更多。所以，是的，我想我试图真正展示我相信人们。当我不相信时，是的，也许这只是个人问题。我只是没有很好的机制来帮助人们改进。所以我基本上让他们自己失败，这可能让作为领导者的我很难共事。也有点悲哀。我认为当你采用这种管理哲学时，你需要控制的是，不关注某人并不意味着他们失败。就像我多年来雇用了很多人，特别是如果我和他们合作过多次，我会想，我知道你知道该做什么，所以去做吧。我就让他们执行。但是的，你知道，花时间在你的赢家身上，骑你的赛马，如果你想快速完成某件事，就交给忙人，不管那些愚蠢的陈词滥调是什么。是的，我试图相当积极地追求这一点。

Yeah, I think this actually kind of flows from the whole VORP thing. Once you have somebody in a position and there are a lot of tropes around this too, right? Like if you want something done quickly, give it to the busiest person kind of thing. But I think it's not necessarily counterintuitive. It's counter to human nature, right? Like if you see somebody drowning, you want to save them. And I did the opposite, absolutely opposite. I just kind of, and maybe it's, you know, we were right before we started the podcast, I was talking about nominative determinism where your name kind of creates who you are and joking that maybe I need to be a salesperson because of my last name is Celis. But there's also this MBA Peter principle where people are promoted to the level of their incompetence which definitely could describe my career. But that's kind of what I seek to do. It's like if somebody is strong and crushing it, I'm just handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with. And I'm pushing them as hard as possible to the point of breaking. Because at the end of the day, one of the biggest leadership principles for me is that I will always defend the people on my team in public, in front of execs and stuff like that. I never criticize them in front of others. And so people who are making consistently good decisions, I just want to load them up with more decisions till I start to see them make bad ones. I think there's so much self-reinforcement or self-fulfilling prophecy of when you have confidence and when things are going well, you're able to do more. And so, yeah, I think I like try and really show that I believe in people. And when I don't, yeah, maybe this is just a personal thing. I just don't have a really good mechanism for helping people improve. So I essentially let them fail on their own, which could be pretty frustrating for me as a leader to work for. And somewhat sad. I think the thing you need to control for when you adopt this type of management philosophy is that not paying attention to somebody doesn't mean they're failing. Like there are a lot of people that I've hired over the years, especially if I've worked with them multiple times, where I'm like, I know you know what to do, so go do it. And I just let them execute. But yeah, it's, you know, spend time with your winners, ride your racehorses, give a busy person something to do if you want it done quick, whatever the stupid trope is. Yeah, I try to pursue it pretty aggressively.

对我来说有道理。有很多说法。有些比其他的更友善。你另一个反直觉的观点是，协作很多时候是相当糟糕的时间利用。你之前谈过这个，但还有什么要补充的吗？

Makes sense to me. And there's many ways to say it. Some are kinder than others. Another contrary take you have is that collaboration is a pretty bad use of time a lot of times. You talked about this earlier, but is there anything more to add there?

我认为当你建立团队并谈论团队的原则或信条之类的，如果你发现自己在说没有人能不同意的话，要么那些不是好的原则或信条，要么它们可能需要被挑战。是的，我认为协作很多时候属于这个范畴。但是的，我想我们谈过我的理由。

I think when you're building a team and you talk about the team's principles or tenants or whatever, if you find yourself saying things that no one can disagree with, either those aren't good principles or tenants or maybe they need to be challenged. And yeah, I think collaboration kind of falls under this umbrella a lot of the time. But yeah, I think we talked about kind of my reasoning there.

好的。你另一个反直觉的观点是，增长通常来自业务的核心。

Okay. Another contrarian take you have is that growth typically comes from the core of the business.

是的，我的意思是这个教训我在 Snap 和 Discord 都学到过几次。这并不是说没有那些关于扩展到新市场之类的绝妙增长策略。但我认为网络效应导向型企业的本质是它们想要隐式增长。所以你能更有效地推动增长的方法是专注于那些基本上已经在使用或想要使用产品的人，为了产品本身的目的或某种衍生的类似用途，并让它变得更容易、更高效、更相关等等。

Yeah, I mean this one was learned a couple times both at Snap and at Discord. And this isn't to say that there aren't these wonderful growth strategies about expansion into new markets or things like that. But I think the nature of network effect oriented businesses is that they want to grow implicitly. And so what you can do to drive growth much more effectively is focus on people who are essentially already using or wanting to use the product for what it's for or some kind of derivative like nearby of that and just making it much easier, much more performant, much more relevant, etc.

你可以这样想，我们用的是非常八年级的数学。如果你想要——而且我认为几乎每个消费产品，也许这也是一个争议性观点，都需要为日活跃使用做优化。很少有东西——最终你需要把一切都绑到人们自然的生活和周期上。天是真实的。周可以是真实的，但不一定——你不会想——没有很多事是你每周定期、非常高效地去做的，但你醒来——昼夜节律是真实的。很少有事情是按月做的，比如很多 B2B 的东西、付账单等等。我猜有一些生物性的事情是按月发生的；我们可以深入聊那个。但日活跃使用，甚至小时活跃使用，我认为对几乎每个消费产品都是必不可少的。这个想法是，如果你考虑的是日活跃用户，如果你面向的是一个每月用一次产品的人，你需要 30 个这样的人才能等于一个每天用的人。这是非常非常基础的数学。所以我认为很多最有效的消费产品都有极高的 DAU/MAU 比率。因此，很多增长可以来自本质上把这个比率移动几个基点，而不是去获取一堆新的月活跃用户，然后看他们是否留存。顺便说一句，DAU/MAU 只是一种留存形式。留存可以是任何周期。它就是下一天：鉴于你今天用了，你明天用的概率是多少？

I think the way you could think about this is we're using very eighth-grade math. If you want to — and I think almost every consumer product, maybe this is also a controversial take, needs to be optimizing for daily active use. There are very few things — eventually you need to tie everything to people's natural lives and cycles. Days are real. Weeks can be real, but they're not necessarily real for — you don't think about — there aren't a lot of things you do on a weekly regimen regularly really effectively, but you wake up — the circadian rhythm is real. Very few things are done on a monthly basis, like a lot of B2B stuff, paying bills, etc. I guess there are some biological things that happen monthly; we could get into that. But there's something about daily active use, or even hourly active use, that I think is essential for almost every consumer product. And the idea is, if you're thinking about a daily active user, if you're going for somebody who uses the product once a month, you're going to need 30 of those to equal somebody who uses it daily. That's very, very basic math. And so that's why I think a lot of the most effective consumer products have extremely high DAU/MAU ratios. And so a lot of growth can come from essentially moving that ratio just a few basis points versus trying to go acquire a bunch of new monthly active users and seeing if they retain. And by the way, DAU/MAU is just a form of retention. Retention can be any period. It's just the next day: given you use it today, what's the probability you're going to use it tomorrow?

所以在 Snap，那里的教训来自 2018 年那次灾难性的重新设计，那是我印象中 Snap 整体 DAU 唯一一次环比持平。之后我们激光般聚焦的是性能，尤其是在 Android 上。对于已经在用这个应用的现有用户，只是让它变得快得多、性能好得多。这带来了一场几乎像是增长复兴的时期，持续了好几年。

And so at Snap, the lesson there came from that disastrous redesign in 2018, which was the only time I think that Snap's overall DAU actually flattened out quarter over quarter. And what we laser focused on after that was performance, particularly on Android. Existing people who are already using the app, just making it much, much faster and more performant for them. And that led to almost like a growth renaissance that went on for multiple years.

在 Discord，我认为这甚至更有争议，因为当时 Discord 对很多人来说在大流行期间、加密期间、AI 期间等等都是某种东西。所以当时，Midjourney 是在 Discord 上构建的，而 Midjourney 非常出色，就是那么酷的一家公司、产品，一切。外面很多人就说：“哇，这是一个时刻。Midjourney 对 Discord 一定很重要。”从用户角度或日活跃使用，比如指标角度，如果我给你看——你甚至可以在网上看，对吧？——Discord 随时间的使用情况，你根本挑不出 Midjourney。人们使用 Discord 的原因是在玩游戏之前、之中和之后与朋友联系。我们在 2024 年做的是让团队完全聚焦于这个想法：我们如何成为你和朋友一起玩有意的多人游戏的最佳场所。结果发现，尽管 Discord 在技术上——技术团队非常出色——而且在语音等方面近乎完美，我们仍然可以做一些事情，让和朋友玩游戏之前和之后变得更好。当我们聚焦游戏时，当时每个人都觉得，每个玩多人游戏的人，尤其是在 PC 上，他们已经有 Discord 了，对吧？他们已经在用了。基本上 100% 渗透率，对吧？不，有很多原因让你只是处于边缘，决定不加入语音，决定用游戏内语音，决定改用 FaceTime 给朋友打电话，不管是什么。随着我们让 Discord 变得更好，随着我们聚焦性能，我们实际上能够推动一些最快的——我想，如果不是最快的话——增长。而且我没有分享任何非公开的东西，比如自大流行以来——显然，Discord 在大流行期间爆发了。而这是通过聚焦每个人都已经说我们 100% 渗透的东西，也就是有意的多人游戏玩家。

At Discord, I think it was even more controversial because at the time, Discord had been something for a lot of people during the pandemic, during crypto, during AI, etc. So at the time, you had Midjourney being built on Discord, and Midjourney was phenomenal, just such a cool company, product, everything. And a lot of people on the outside were just like, "Wow, this is a moment. Midjourney must be huge for Discord." From a user perspective or daily active use, like a metric perspective, if I were to show you — you can even look at this online, right? — like Discord's use over time, you wouldn't be able to pick out Midjourney. The reason people use Discord is to connect with their friends while playing before, during, and after playing games. And what we did in 2024 was completely focus the team around this idea of how can we be the best place for you and your friends to play intentional multiplayer games together. And it turns out, even though Discord is technically — the technical team is phenomenal — and it's near perfect in some ways when it comes to voice and things like that, there were still things we could do to make it better before and after playing games with your friends. And when we focused on gaming, which at the time everybody was like, everybody who plays multiplayer games, especially on PC, they already have Discord, right? They already use it. It's basically 100% penetration, right? No, there were a lot of reasons that you were just on the edge and you decided not to join voice, you decided to use the in-game voice, you decided to call your friend on FaceTime instead, whatever it was. As we made Discord better, as we focused on performance, we were actually able to drive some of the fastest, I think, if not the fastest growth. And I'm not sharing anything that's not public, like since the pandemic — obviously, Discord exploded during the pandemic. And this was by focusing on the thing that everybody already said we had 100% penetration of, which was intentional multiplayer gamers.

从那里开始，你有很多选择，对吧？有很多东西看起来像多人游戏。加密看起来像多人游戏，对吧？强烈的协调成本、时间敏感等等。老实说，软件开发看起来像多人游戏。你可以基于那个核心构建很多东西。但通过聚焦和朋友一起玩游戏的人，我们实际上能够识别出很多能把某人从使用 Discord，比如 30 天里用 10 天或 20 天，提升到 11、12、13 天的事情。当你考虑那些口袋并提升人们的——比如最近 7 天里用满 7 天——那实际上是巨大的增长。我想我是从 Meta 那里偷来的，他们又一次写了关于增长的伟大剧本。所以聚焦那个——核心消费群体——我认为在 Snap 和 Discord 两个例子里，最终都非常非常积极。

Now from there you have a lot of options, right? There are a lot of things that look like multiplayer gaming. Crypto looks like multiplayer gaming, right? Intense coordination costs, time-sensitive, etc. Honestly, software development looks like multiplayer gaming. There are a lot of things that you could build off of that core. But by focusing on people who play games with their friends, we were actually able to identify a lot of things that brought somebody from using Discord, you know, 20 or let's say 10 days out of the 30 to 11 to 12 to 13. That's actually monster growth when you think about those pockets and moving up people's — like last seven out of seven days. I think I stole that from Meta, who once again wrote a great playbook on growth. And so focusing on that — like the core consumer base — I think it just ended up being so, so positive in both the Snap and Discord examples.

这对试图增长产品的人来说是一个非常重要的教训。对我来说，TL;DR 是：香蕉摊里总是有钱。

This is a really important lesson for people trying to grow a product. The TL;DR to me is: there's always money in the banana stand.

就像我们之前聊的建立一个恐怖组织。这是一个很好的例子，说明一个短语如果能写进战略文件，你就能赋予它价值，比如“香蕉摊里总是有钱”，对吧？回到你的核心用户，确保对他们来说它是完美的。第一，香蕉摊里总是有钱。我认为在 Discord，它有异常积极的外部性，因为世界上最直言不讳、最挑剔、老实说最聪明或高智商的用户群就是游戏玩家。老实说，你以为你为那些对你的产品挑剔、注重细节的人构建了——除非你为游戏玩家构建过，否则你没有。能够转身说我们专注——比如这是 Reddit 上的一个 bug 帖子，告诉我们哪里出问题了。我们不在乎它多小，多大。我们会修。它有一种令人难以置信的定位感，就像我们在为这个社区交付。我真的认为这就是为什么 Discord 如此出色，在这个特定细分领域无与伦比，因为它如此激光般聚焦于：如果你和朋友一起玩游戏并且你在乎它，这个产品将会——那个办公室里有人会永远为你把它做到完美。

Like we were talking earlier about building a terrorist organization. That's a great example of a phrase that if you could ascribe in a strategy document, you could scribe value, like "there's always money in the banana stand," right? Return to your core users, make sure it's perfect for them. Like, one, there was always money in the banana stand. I think at Discord it had exceptionally positive externalities because the most vocal, critical, honestly like intelligent or high-IQ user base in the world are gamers. Honestly, like you think you've built for people who are critical about your product, who are detail-oriented — unless you've built for gamers, you haven't. And to be able to turn around and say we are focused — like here's a bug thread on Reddit, show us what's messing up. We don't care how small it is, how big it is. We will fix it. It had this unbelievable positionality of like we are delivering for this community. And I honestly think this is why Discord is so, so great and so without peer in this specific niche, because it's so laser focused on: if you play games with your friends and you care about it, this product is going to — there are people who sit in that office who will make it perfect for you forever.

所以这就引出了一个问题：什么时候押注新东西、尝试新事物才有意义？因为，你知道，一直只是不断打磨那个已经奏效的产品市场契合点，并不总是有意义的。

So this begs the question: when does it make sense to bet on something new and try new things? Because, you know, it doesn't always make sense to just continue refining and refining the one piece of product-market fit that's worked.

对大家有什么建议，尤其是针对消费者领域，什么时候在核心之外下注仍然合理？

Any guidance to folks, and this is for consumer in particular, any guidance for when it makes sense to still make bets outside that core?

是的，我认为有两种渐进式的思考方式。一种是把产品中真正出色、人们为之而来的核心要素提炼出来。比如 Snap，可能是相机；Discord，是语音。然后你寻找其他细分市场、其他用户群体，看看这些核心要素对他们是否有用。这很像 MBA 风格，你知道，2x2 矩阵那种。我认为这是一种方法，而且老实说你应该一直评估，因为那很容易。

Yeah, I think there are two really incremental ways to think about it. One is if you boil down the core things about your product that are really great that people come to it for. So for Snap, maybe it's the camera. For Discord, it's voice. And then you look to other niches, other cohorts for which that could be useful. That's like a very MBA style, you know, 2 by 2 type of thing. That's I think one method to do that and you should honestly always be assessing that because that's an easy one.

然后我认为第二点是，最大的礼物之一就是当人们以你未曾预料或未曾规定的方式使用你的产品时，因为他们为了用产品做想做的事而绕了额外的弯子。也就是说，你提供的东西好到让他们愿意绕弯子。比如 Discord，很多都围绕社区，以及人们如何用它组织越来越大的社区，而不是 20 人的游戏好友群。当人们这样做时，他们本质上是在用脚投票。他们在告诉你，我想用这个产品做这个。你能做什么让它对我更容易一点？所以这算是那种方式的版本，但更像是扩展到下一个东西。这更像是思考同心圆。就像，好，我们搞定了核心。我们怎么扩展？我感觉我在这里做手势会被做成表情包，但有用。

And then I think the second thing is like one of the greatest gifts is when people use your product in a way that you didn't expect or didn't ordain because they're going through extra hoops to do what they want to do with the product. So whatever you're offering is so good that they're going through hoops to do that. And like for Discord for example, a lot of it centered around communities and how people were using it to organize larger and larger communities as opposed to the 20 person gaming friend group. And when people are doing that, they're essentially voting with their feet. They're telling you like, I want to use this product for this. What can you do to make it a little bit easier for me? So it kind of is a version of that, but it's like expanding to the next thing. And that's more like thinking about concentric circles. It's like, okay, we got it at the core. How do we expand? I feel like I'm doing something with my hands here that's going to be me'd, but work.

我们懂了。抱歉。好，我不说了。

We got it. Sorry. Okay, I'll stop.

但我觉得另一种，更像 Snapchat 的、更具创新性的思考方式是，更多地审视公司为何而建的哲学，然后完全不受当下束缚地思考未来，不从当下做增量，更像是未来投射，像反向预测而非正向预测。然后说，好，现在分享一个瞬间的最佳方式是掏出手机，把相机对准它并录制。这非常受现有技术的限制。如果我们设想未来，什么才是最佳方式？比如某事刚发生，或者我的孩子刚迈出第一步，我在演唱会，我刚在街上看到很好笑的东西，分享那个瞬间给朋友的最佳方式是什么？我认为这会引导你想到，哦，可能是眼镜之类的东西。所以这种反向预测方法，我认为是每个人都想做的。根据我的经验，很少有人有这种白纸般的创造力，完全不受当下束缚地思考未来。大多数人，甚至非常有创造力的人，喜欢对当下进行混音。或者我觉得现在大多数产品经理去参加死藤水之旅或去日本旅行什么的，然后回来就说，我解决了。但很少有人我认为非常擅长这种版本。

But I think then the other, the more Snapchat-like, the more innovative way to think about it is more to look at your company's philosophy around why it was built and then think about the future totally unencumbered by the present, like no incrementality from the present, more like future casting, like backcasting instead of forecasting. And be like, okay, right now the best way to share a moment is to pull out your phone and aim the camera at it and record. Like that's very constrained by the existing technology. If we were to envision a future of what's the future look like to be the best way, like something just happened or my child just took its first steps, I'm at a concert, I just saw something really funny on the street, like what's the best way to share that moment with my friends? I think that's what leads you to something like, oh probably glasses or things like that. So this backcasting method I think is what everybody wants to do. In my experience there are very few people that have this type of blank sheet creativity to think about the future totally unencumbered from the present. Most people, even really creative people, like remix versions of the present. Or I think these days most product managers go on an ayahuasca journey or travel to Japan or something and then come back and they're like, I've solved it. But very few people I think are very good at this version of it.

我认为很大一部分原因是你找到了产品市场契合，有些东西在起作用。你几乎把找到有效东西的幸运视为理所当然。可能很容易想，哦，我们现在会找到下一个东西。但很少有人做到。Airbnb 其实是个很好的例子。除了最初的想法，没有什么在大规模上成功过。基本上还是同样的核心想法。你知道，我在那里工作了很长时间，除了你刚才描述的那样，继续让核心体验更好、更多供给、更多需求，没有什么显著影响增长轨迹。

And I think a big part of this is you found product market fit, something's working. You almost take for granted how lucky you are that you found something that works. And it may be easy to think, oh, we'll find the next thing now. And very few people do. Airbnb is actually a really good example of this. Like nothing beyond the original idea has worked in a big way. It's still basically the same core idea. And you know, I've worked there for a long time and nothing has significantly impacted the growth trajectory other than just exactly what you just described, continuing to make the core experience better, more supply, more demand.

所以，我认为这是一个非常深刻的观点，值得人们领会。

So, I think this is a really profound point for people to take in.

这样你也可以让团队更精简，之类的。最大的风险是，有点像我认为是纳西姆·塔勒布的梗，像感恩节火鸡生命中的一千零一天，就像是的，一切越来越好，直到某个东西出现，比你做的 literally 好 10 倍，一夜之间把你归零。

It's also like you can keep teams leaner this way, things like that. The biggest risk is it's kind of like that I think it's a Nassim Taleb meme of like a thousand and one days in the life of a Thanksgiving turkey where it's just like yeah everything's getting better and better and better until something comes along that's literally 10x better than what you're doing and it takes you to zero overnight.

嗯

Um

防范这一点，我没有什么，如果我知道如何防范那样的黑天鹅事件。是的，我认为

And guarding against that I don't have any, if I knew how to guard against black swan events like that. Yeah I think

你会去做金融。

you'd be in finance.

是的，肯定去做金融。我其实觉得，你知道，我们刚才聊到，SpaceX 可能其实是个好例子，一家在某种程度上防范这一点的公司。

Yeah definitely be in finance. I actually think like this, you know, we were talking a little bit like SpaceX is probably a good example actually of a company that like guards itself against this in some ways.

好。多说点。我知道你妻子在 SpaceX 工作，所以你对 SpaceX 如何运作以及那里什么有效有非常独特的见解。

Okay. Say more. I know your wife works at SpaceX, so you have a really unique insight into what how SpaceX works and what has worked there.

是的。是的。不，不，不，没有内幕信息。我是第二方，你不是第一方，但你知道，是的，我每晚睡在一个 SpaceX 工程师旁边，所以那有帮助。嗯，是的，你只需要这样做。但不，我认为 SpaceX 是现在最伟大的美国公司。世界上最伟大的公司。真的在每个层面都非凡。我更多是在说 SpaceX，像 xAI 等也在做疯狂的事，但就像那样。我认为最好的例子，我所说的防范未来，我不认为任何公司能接近 SpaceX 在这里所做的，最近有个例子，literally 我认为就在上周，完美地体现了这一点，他们基本上宣布了某种版本，他们正在淘汰 Falcon 9，这是他们的主要发射系统，世界上有史以来最伟大的发射系统，可重复使用，每公斤到低地球轨道到地球同步轨道成本最低，地球上每个国家都愿意放弃 GDP 来拥有这项技术，能够发射和重复使用火箭，而他们正在淘汰 Falcon 9，这就像科尔特斯级别的抵达时烧毁船只，因为他们本质上在说，为了在未来达到我们的愿景，我们需要像 Starship 这样更重型的运载火箭，所以你知道，从几年后开始，因为他们有客户之类的，你将不能再购买 Falcon 9 的搭乘。我不认为这对所有事情都适用，但你知道，他们逐渐基本上在暗示 Falcon 9 是过去。顺便说一句，Falcon 9 对地球上其他每个国家民族国家来说都是未来。它是它是它是不可思议的机器。

Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no like no inside information. I'm like a second party, you I'm not first party, but you know, yeah, I sleep next to a SpaceX engineer every night, so that helps. Um yeah, that's all you have to do. But no, I think like SpaceX is the greatest American company right now. Greatest company in the world. Like truly phenomenal on every single level. And I'm talking more about SpaceX like xAI and all also doing insane stuff, but like just that. And I think the best example what I mean by like guarding against us the future I don't think any company does anything close to what SpaceX does here and there's a recent example literally I think in the last week of this perfectly where they essentially announced some version of they are taking the Falcon 9 which is their primary launch system the greatest launch system in the world ever by far reusable most cost effective kilograms to lower earth orbit to geostationary orbit that every country on the planet would give up their GDP to have this technology to be able to launch and reuse rockets and they're sunsetting the Falcon 9 and this is like Cortez level burn the ships upon arriving because they're essentially saying like in order to reach our vision in the future we need like a heavier lift launch vehicle that is Starship so you know starting in a few years cuz you know they have customers and things like that you'll no longer be able to buy rides on the Falcon 9. I don't think this is for everything, but you know, they're gradually basically telegraphing that like the Falcon 9 is the past. By the way, the Falcon 9 would be the future for literally every other country nation state on the planet. It's the it's the it's it's incredible machine.

是的，我认为埃隆建立了一种文化，就像，你知道，克莱顿·克里斯滕森已经去世了，但他可能会为此流下喜悦的泪水，因为避免了创新者的窘境——仅仅因为我们拥有最好的东西，我们就完全愿意建造会与自己竞争、让我们所建造的东西变得无关紧要的东西。我希望我能更深入地了解是什么驱动了这一点，也许不仅仅是埃隆或整个组织，但我在那里从上到下目睹的是，你交谈的每个人都会说：“是的，这将会很棒。”就像，“是的，我们要做这个。”这绝对是文化的一部分。也许是邪教般的文化，他们能做到这一点，尽管从纸面上看，现在作为一家上市公司，这看起来有点疯狂。所以，是的，我认为这实际上是 SpaceX 一个被低估的部分，就是他们能够烧毁船只，专注于下一步。

And yeah, I think this is the like Elon has built this culture that like, you know, Clayton Christensen is dead, but like he probably would shed a tear over how happy it would make him about avoiding the innovator's dilemma where it's just like just because we have the thing that is the best, we're completely willing to build the thing that will compete against ourselves and make the thing that we built irrelevant. And I wish I had more insight into what drives that beyond maybe just Elon or that whole organization, but like what I've witnessed top to bottom is like everybody you talk to there is like, "Yeah, it's going to be awesome." Like, "Yeah, we're going to do this." Um like it's definitely part of the culture. Maybe the cult that they can do this even though on paper and now as a public company it like kind of looks insane. Um, and so yeah, I think that's like actually a really underrated part about SpaceX is their ability to essentially burn the ships and focus on what's next.

这让我回到了我们对话最初关于建立恐怖组织的讨论。特别是使命，SpaceX 的使命显然是让人类成为多行星物种，到达火星。有了这个使命，我完全可以理解他们可能是如何倒推的：为了做到这一点，我们需要更大的火箭，继续在这里投资没有意义。所以对我来说，他们如何做出这些决定非常清晰。

This to me comes well back to the original beginning of this conversation building an or like a terrorist organization. Uh in particular the mission like clearly the mission of SpaceX make uh humanity multi-planetary get to Mars and with that mission I can totally see how they may be working backwards from in order to do this we need this larger rocket it makes no sense to keep investing here. So to me it feels very clear how they go about making these decisions.

是的。我认为埃隆的两大公司 SpaceX 和特斯拉还有另一个特点。我对 Neuralink、Boring Company 等了解较少。但你看网站，现在我不知道在哪里，但他们基本上发布了 10 年计划。SpaceX 正在做的事情没有一件不是他们 10 年前没谈过的。特斯拉也谈到了他们想用最初的 Roadster 做什么，来资助 Model S，再资助 Model 3，某种程度上产品路线图是公开的，对吧？作为一名产品负责人，我渴望达到那种自信水平，就像，哟，我们要做一些如此激进和雄心勃勃的事情，我们可以直接告诉你我们要做什么，因为如果你认为你能做得比我们好，欢迎尝试。但这就是一个你可以发布并转化为产品路线图的使命，说你要做，做你说要做的，然后说，是的，复制我们，在特斯拉的情况下，哦，这是专利。

Yeah. I think there's another thing about both of Elon's like major like SpaceX and Tesla. I know less about like um Neuralink Boring Company, etc. But like you look and like on the website, I mean now I don't know where it is, but like they publish essentially like 10-year plans. Like nothing SpaceX is doing is is not something that they didn't talk about 10 years ago. Um, like Tesla talked about exactly what they wanted to do with the with the initial roadster to fund the S to fund the three like the in some ways like the product roadmap is is published, right? And that's like as a product leader like I aspire to that level of swag where it's just like yo, we're going to do something that's so aggressive and so ambitious that we can just tell you exactly what you're going to do because if you think you can do it better than us, like you're welcome to try. But like this um yeah that that's like uh yeah that that's a mission right that you can publish and and turn into a product roadmap say you're going to do it do what you're going to say and then say like yeah copy us and in the Tesla case like oh here the patents too

对，我正要说他们发布了所有特斯拉电动相关的专利。

Right I was just going to say they released their yeah all the patents for the Tesla electric stuff

是的，所以是下一个层次。

Yeah so next level

这太有趣了，过去几个月这个播客的一个主题是系统思维，另一个实际上是雄心，以及它现在对公司 and 初创企业有多重要，因为 AI 让构建变得容易多了。你只要告诉它构建这个东西，它就做了。这意味着雄心的水平必须不断提高。这就像人们必须养成的新习惯，因为我们天生并不那么雄心勃勃。我们还没有进化到尝试看似不可能的事情。感觉我们现在作为构建者需要学习这项技能。

It's so interesting so one meme across this podcast over the past couple months has been systems thinking the other has actually been ambition and how much that matters now with companies and startups because AI is making it so much easier to build. You just tell it build this thing, it does it. Uh, and what that means is the level of ambition has to keep going up. And that's like a new habit people have to build because we're not naturally that ambitious. We haven't evolved to try things that seem impossible. And it feels like we need to learn that skill now as builders.

是的。我认为现状之所以是现状是有原因的。就像，无论你使用什么框架，局部最优与全局最优，或者机会成本，基本上都是在试图建立一种肌肉，帮助你获得勇气，让明天看起来不像今天。这对大多数人类来说实际上并不自然。世界上有很多系统旨在阻止你这样做，就像世界不一定想要改变。所以，需要强大的推动力来克服那种静态摩擦，即你今天所处的位置。这不仅仅是位置，而是向量，对吧？就像猎鹰 9 号是向上向右的。但是，好吧，我不想要实际的位置。我甚至不想要速度。我不想要速率。我想要加速度。为了获得加速度，我需要冲量，对吧？我需要三阶导数，我想。我需要推动它。是的，这并不自然。能够定期和反复这样做的人，但不仅仅是破坏性的，总是要求更多等等。我认为随着史蒂夫·乔布斯的精神变得流行，这变得很时髦，但能够在组织内，尤其是大型组织内做到这一点的人相当罕见。

Yeah. I think there's like the status quo is the status quo for a reason. like the like whatever again whatever framework you're using local versus local optima versus you know global optima like you know uh opportunity cost like it's all basically just trying to build a muscle to help you gain the courage to just like make tomorrow not look like today. And that's actually just not natural for most human beings. And there are a lot of systems in the world uh designed to to stop you from doing that like like the world doesn't necessarily just like want to change. And so yeah, it takes like an a powerful nudge to beat that uh kind of like static friction of of where you are uh today. And it's not it's not just it's not like it's not just the position, it's the vector, right? Like like again the Falcon 9 is is up and to the right like this. Um, but it's like, okay, I don't want the I don't want the actual position. I don't even want the speed. I don't want the velocity. I want the acceleration. And like, in order to get that acceleration, I need impulse, right? I need the third derivative, I guess. Like, I need to push it. And uh, yeah, this is just not natural. And people who can do that regularly and repeatedly, but not just like disruptively all the time, like, you know, just always asking for more, blah, blah, blah. I think it became very trendy as like Steve Steve Jobs's kind of like um ethos grew but like yeah the types of people who can do that within an organization especially a large organization are pretty rare.

我刚请了 Tara 来播客。她曾负责 ChatGPT 的产品工作，尽管他们总是调动人员。我不知道她现在是什么角色。她指出，现在 PM 的工作实际上越来越是提升团队的雄心，提醒他们我们可以做得更大。怎样才能想得更大？这个想法的千倍会是什么？

I just had Tara s on the podcast. She's had a product for chat GBT work although they're always shifting people around. I don't know what her role is these days. Uh and she pointed out the job of PMs now actually more and more is to elevate the ambition of the team to remind them we could go bigger. What would it take to think bigger? What would a thousandx of this idea be?

是的。是的。我的意思是，如果你能可信地反复做到这一点，

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's again like if you can do that credibly repeatedly,

你知道，不仅仅是出现在会议上说：“如果我们做得更多会怎样？”

you know, not not just by like showing up to meetings and be like, "What if we did more like

如果我们做得更快会怎样？

what if we did it faster?

是的。没错。就像，不，我明白了。是的。我是白人男性，灰白头发，你知道，有花哨的学位。我可以走进任何会议说：“你有没有想过做得更快？”就像，好吧。就像，我为什么不直接问你有没有想过打自己脸？就像，是的，也许吧。哦，天哪。所以技能就是说出那样的话，但不要让自己被打脸。

Yeah. Exactly. Like no, I got Yeah. I have got white male, gray hair, uh, you know, fancy degrees. I can just come in any meeting and be like, "Have you thought about doing this quicker?" Like, okay. Like, why do I just Have you thought about punching yourself in the face? Like, yeah, maybe. Oh man. So that's the skill is saying that but in a way that doesn't get you punched in the face.

是的。是的。公平地说，我被打过几次脸。你不会天生就有这样的鼻子。你被打过几次脸。

Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, I've been punched in the face a couple of times. You don't you don't get a nose like this naturally. You get you get punched in the face a couple times.

这是真的吗？你真的被打过脸？

Is this for real? Is that a real thing that you got punched in the face?

我被打过几次，因为我嘴巴不停。但是，有没有什么故事可以分享？

I have gotten the kicked out of me a couple of times because I run my mouth non-stop. But uh is there is there a story there you can share?

还是说这个不能讲？

Or is that off?

那是更古老的历史了。我们喜欢把这些事情抛在脑后，Lenny。拜托。

That's that's more ancient history. We like to move past these things, Lenny. Come on.

我觉得那里有创伤。我们需要深入。我们需要揭露。好的。最后一个话题。当我们开始这个播客时，你告诉我有一些 celicisms。你用什么词？什么短语？Cellisms。

I feel there's trauma there. We need to get in. we need to uncover. Okay. Um, final topic. You when we were starting this podcast, you told me there's some celicisms uh out there. Things that you how do you what's the word you use? What's the phrase? Cellisms.

Celicisms。你经常与人们分享的东西，成为与你共事的人知道的事情。

Celicisms. Things that you often share with folks that kind of become a thing that people that work with you know.

还有我们没有覆盖到的吗？你觉得有哪些反复出现的建议、框架，甚至是你学到的经验，你认为对人们来说很重要、可能有所帮助的？

Are there any that we haven't covered? Things that you think are kind of recurring pieces of advice or frameworks or even lessons you've learned that you think are important for people to hear that might be helpful.

我觉得没有太多。我的意思是，有几个已经提到了。我想我们在谈论广告时，有一个我可能——我不知道我是否应该获得原创功劳，但我经常使用——就是这样一个想法：广告是一个如此残酷、肉搏战、非常以收入目标为导向的产品领域，很容易变得非常短期导向。而其中一件事——这可以追溯到建立你想要的组织类型的意识形态内容——我们多年来真正关注的，无论是 Snap、Discord，甚至我咨询过的一些广告公司，就是对于广告，你真的想要长期贪婪。这是我们使用的一个短语，长期贪婪是一个有趣的短语，但它实际上背后有一个数学认识——这又不是火箭科学——但明天广告的长期收入本质上与你今天为广告商带来的 ROI 有因果关系。所以你需要关注——你的重点应该放在推动广告商 ROI 上。问题是，推动 ROI 最简单的方法实际上是减少分母——所以你可以降低价格。在现代拍卖中，价格是输出，不是输入。但强大的学习是，我长期发展这项业务的方式，我长期实现目标的方式，我看到由于留存和增加预算而带来的复合增长——比如一些 SaaS 产品的净收入留存——本质上是通过今天为人们提供 ROI，即使以潜在的短期收入为代价。所以这种思维，这个短语允许——为——一种否则可能变得非常艰难的思维提供了空间。人们说，"哦是的，这是长期思考。"再次，我把它带回到——在你的职业生涯中，你会遇到长期思考实际上非常非常艰难的时候。很多时候会是在你是一家上市公司时，比如当你错过数字时，比如如果某些事情不发生，你可能不得不裁员。能够有一个意识形态设置，你可以用它作为掩护来长期思考。这就是长期贪婪的含义：我们不是慈善机构，我们不是因为我们想让人开心而免费赠送这些东西。我们赠送这个——我们赠送这个。我们今天让这发生，因为我们知道他们明天会回来，甚至更大。是的，那个真的非常非常有效。

I don't think there's too many. I mean, I think a few of them came up. I think when we were talking about ads, one that I might have—I don't know if I deserve original credit for this, but I've used it quite a bit—is this idea that ads is such a cutthroat, hand-to-hand combat, very revenue goal-driven product area that it's very easy to become very short-term oriented. And one of the things—and this hearkens back to the ideological stuff from building the type of organization you want—that we really focused on over the years, both Snap, Discord, and even some of the companies I've advised on the ad stuff, is like with ads you really want to be long-term greedy. And that was a phrase we used, and long-term greedy is a funny phrase, but it was actually backed by essentially the mathematical realization that—which again, it's not rocket science—but like long revenue tomorrow for advertising is essentially causally related to the ROI you drive for advertisers today. So you need to focus—your focus should be on driving advertiser ROI. The issue is that the easiest way to drive ROI is actually to decrease the denominator, the—so you could lower prices. Right now in modern auctions, price is an output, not an input. But the powerful learning there is that the way I will grow this business long-term, the way I will hit my goals long-term, the way I see compounding growth because of retention and increasing budgets—like net revenue retention for some of these like SaaS products—is essentially by delivering ROI for people today even at the cost of potentially short-term revenue. And so this type of thinking, this type of phrase allowed for—gave space for—a type of thinking that otherwise can get pretty tough. And people say like, "Oh yeah, it's thinking long term." Again, I'll take it back to—there you're going to encounter times in your career where thinking long term is actually really, really tough. And a lot of this time will be when you are a public company, like when you are missing numbers, when like you may have to do a layoff if certain things don't happen. And to be able to have an ideological setup for which you can use it as cover to think long term. And that was what long-term greedy was: like we're not a charity, like we're not giving this stuff away because we want to make people happy. We're giving this—we're giving this away. We're making this happen today because we know they'll come back tomorrow even bigger. And yeah, that one was really, really effective.

我认为另一件事是，在 Snap 和 Discord，我们都创造了核心产品价值这个概念，这——这与我的 DAO 评论有关——就像你需要从理论或概念层面以及指标层面来定义，某人每天回到你的产品意味着什么。所以比如 Snap 当时是：Snap 是与你在乎的人分享瞬间的最快方式。所以就是快、分享瞬间、你在乎的人，你实际上可以分解：快是什么意思——比如加载时间；分享是什么意思——比如你打开相机快速分享；你在乎的人是什么意思——专注于最好的朋友——你实际上可以分解这个东西。所以你有与最好的朋友分享瞬间的最快方式。所以如果你在消费者方面构建产品路线图，你会想，哦我们应该做这个吗——它是否帮助我们成为与最好的朋友分享瞬间的最快方式——有点牵强的联系——也许那不是我们应该优先考虑的。我认为 Discord 是：在玩游戏之前、期间和之后与朋友交谈和闲逛的最佳方式。所以就是，你知道，交谈、闲逛、游戏之前、期间、之后。你可以分解这个东西。我们实际上有指标定义，我认为这些是专有的内部指标，但我们有我们正在寻找的指标定义。那些指标定义进入了增长手册，进入了不同的技巧——比如，好的，这影响 CPV 吗？以及每个人都分享的整个意识形态语言——你可以让新的数据科学家入职——我认为让人们非常非常快地加入这个项目。

I think the other thing was like at both Snap and Discord, we created this concept of core product value and this was—and this is related to my DAO comment—was like you need to define both from a theoretical or conceptual level as well as a metrics level like what it means for somebody to come back to your product every single day. And so like Snap I think at the time was like Snap is the fastest way to share a moment with the people you care about. So it's like fast, share a moment, people you care about, and you could actually break down what does fast mean—like time to load—what does share mean—it's like okay you're opening to the camera with sharing quickly—what does people you care about mean—focus on best friends—like you could actually break this thing down. And so you had fastest way to share moment with your best friends. So if you're building a product roadmap on the consumer side and you're like oh should we work on this—is like well does it help us be the fastest way to share a moment with your best friends—kind of tenuous link to that—like maybe that's not what we should prioritize. I think Discord was like the best way to talk and hang out with your friends before, during, and after playing games. So it's like, you know, talk, hang out, games before, during, after. Like, you can break this thing down. And we actually had metrics definitions, which I think are kind of proprietary internal, but we had metrics definitions that we were looking for. Those metrics definitions made their way into the growth books, into the different hacks—like, okay, does this impact CPV? And this whole ideological language that everybody shared—you could onboard new data scientists—I think got people on the program really, really fast.

这些太棒了。核心产品价值这个想法是一个很好的框架方式——它就像把使命与业务的杠杆结合起来。基本上这里的想法是，想出一个描述使命的短语，恰好也与我们的业务增长方式相连接。而且感觉三个组成部分在这里是一个一致的模式。

These are awesome. This idea of core product value is such a nice way to frame it—it's like combines mission with like the levers essentially of the business. And basically the idea here is come up with just like a phrase that describes the mission that happens to also connect with how we grow this business. And it feels like three components is a consistent pattern here.

是的。三分钟三分钟。是的。也许这就像三的法则。是的。是的。但你的描述方式完全正确。而且你不能过度依赖其中一个，对吧？比如如果只是指标，对人们来说有点无意义。如果只是一个短语，它不会每天被数据科学家、产品经理和工程师付诸行动。所以两者兼有，并围绕它构建一个故事，并反复讲述这个故事——比如在 Snap 的核心产品价值，我们实际上有一个入职演示，我连续七年每周或每两周向每一位新员工展示——那是关于这个的，因为那是邪教的一部分，对吧？这就是我们如何交付核心产品价值。这就是为什么人们在面对大量替代品和一群野蛮竞争对手时，每天选择 Snapchat。我认为 Discord 也是如此。

Yeah. Three minute three minute. Yeah. Maybe it's just like a rule of threes. Yeah. Yeah. That's but the way you characterize it is exactly right. And like you can't overly rely on one or the other, right? Like if it's just metrics, it's kind of meaningless to people. If it's just a phrase, it doesn't get actioned day-to-day by data scientists, product managers, and engineers. So having both and building a story around that and telling that story repeatedly—like for core product value at Snap, we actually had an onboarding presentation which I delivered to every single new hire for seven years straight every week or every other week later—that was about this because like that was part of the cult, right? Like this is how we deliver core product value. This is why people choose Snapchat every single day in the face of tons of alternatives and a bunch of savage competitors. And I think the same goes for Discord.

而工作就是想出那个实际上清晰、简单、连接所有这些事情的短语。我想象这并不容易。

And the work is coming up with that phrase that actually is clear, simple, connects to all these things. Not easy, I imagine.

以及那些与留存有因果关系的指标。

And the metrics that are like causally demonstrated with retention.

那些也很难。

Those that's tough, too.

我觉得没有数据科学家喜欢和我一起工作，因为我会说，"嘿，伙计们，我们必须弄清楚这个。"

That I think no data scientist likes working with me because I'm like, "Hey guys, we got to figure this out."

有趣。好的。你在我们聊天时提到的另一个观点是，一个伟大的 PM 是一个矛盾修辞。

Interesting. Okay. One other take that you mentioned when we were chatting ahead of this is this idea of how a great PM is an oxymoron.

是的。

Yeah.

我不禁想，这也许就是为什么这样的人如此难找，因为你看到的是过度曝光——基本上就是这三种。我打赌你其实可以从你请来的那么多优秀产品领袖的访谈中综合出这一点，但确实存在这三种矛盾体。PM 内心有三对狼。第一对是：要成为一个真正优秀的 PM，你必须非常自信，而很多时候这近乎傲慢，尤其是在某些层级。所以这必须与某种谦逊相平衡——非常认真的谦逊——你如此自信地认为我们做的事是正确的，我们对这条路有信念，同时个人层面也相信我的贡献会被认可。我可以站出来，把功劳准确地给到应得的人。那位在最后一刻做出改动、带来巨大不同的设计师。那位通宵达旦、为了合作伙伴活动按时交付的工程师。我认为这也与成为一位伟大的领导者有关。但拥有谦逊和对细节的关注，知道该把功劳给谁，其实来自这种自信：你知道无论怎样，PM 都会得到过多的赞誉。所以我认为这是第一对。

I can't help but think this is maybe why it's so hard to come by some of them, because you see an overexposure—there are basically these three. I bet you could actually come up with this from a synthesis of so many of the amazing product leaders you've had on here, but there are these three oxymorons. There are two wolves inside of the PM three times. One is: to be a really good PM, you kind of have to be really confident, and that borders on arrogance a lot of the time, especially at certain levels. And so that has to be balanced with some form of humility—really serious humility—where you are so confident that what we're doing is the right thing to do and that we have conviction on this path, and also personally that I will be recognized for my contribution. I can go out there and give credit to exactly who deserves it. The designer who made that last-second change that made a huge difference. The engineer that stayed up all night to get the thing out on time for the partner event. I think this also ties to being a great leader. But having the humility and the attention to detail to know who to give credit to actually comes from this sense of confidence that PMs are going to get too much credit no matter what. So I think that's the first one.

第二对，我非常喜欢，也真的会在面试中测试——我不是最好的面试官——就是你想要这样的人：他们极其有条理，非常流程驱动。他们理解好流程的价值，不多不少，等等。同时又对模糊性极其自在，几乎到了蔑视权威的程度，几乎像病态的需求回避。所以就是：我为每件事都有清单，但如果必须扔掉重做，我也很自在。我认为这两匹狼——如果你能通过一些故事或例子展示出来，那对候选人来说太有吸引力了。就像，是的，我对模糊性很自在，但这并不意味着我不有条理或讨厌流程。这也是那种很时髦的说法：哦，流程没用。但我喜欢同时拥有这两匹狼的人。

The second one, which I really like and really try to test for in interviews—and I'm not the best interviewer—is you want these people who are extremely organized and very process-driven. They understand the value of good process, not too much, not too little, etc. And then are just super comfortable with ambiguity, almost to the point of despising authority, almost like pathological demand avoidance. So it's like: I have a checklist for everything, but I'm also comfortable if I have to throw it out and redo it all the time. And I think these two wolves—if you can demonstrate that through some stories or examples, that's so attractive to me in a candidate. It's like, yeah, I'm really comfortable with ambiguity, but that doesn't mean I'm not organized or that I hate process. Another one of those things where it's really trendy to just say, oh, process is useless, but I like somebody who has both those wolves.

然后我认为最后一对更明显一些，但我合作过的许多优秀 PM 真的总是在心里有某种长期思考。他们就是知道他们希望世界在 6 个月、一年、两年后是什么样子。他们有耐心，他们知道系统要运作需要哪些积木就位。但在日常基础上，他们的行动偏好简直有点烦人，你知道吗？他们就是非常擅长为整个公司设定节奏的人。就像，当他们早上醒来，公司就醒了，小组醒了，团队醒了，不管是什么。是的，我认为这种紧迫感和行动偏好与长期思考的结合——是的，这就是我的三个矛盾体，每个伟大 PM 内心的三对狼。

And then I think this last one is a little more obvious, but a lot of the great PMs that I've worked with really just always have some form of long-term thinking in their mind. They just know how they want the world to look 6 months, a year, two years from now. And they're patient and they know what building blocks need to come into place for the system to work. But yet on a day-to-day basis, their bias for action is just borderline annoying, you know? They're just such good people at setting the pace of the entire company. Like, when they wake up in the morning, the company wakes up, the group wakes up, the team wakes up, whatever it is. And yeah, I think that combination of urgency and bias for action with long-term thinking—yeah, those are my three oxymorons, the three pairs of wolves inside every great PM.

对伟大 PM 的精彩描述。这样思考太酷了。Nquille Singal 上过播客几次，他谈到——这是不同的思考方式——但他谈到阴影。你有一个超能力，但然后有阴影。知道那的缺点是什么。这是不同的东西，但我喜欢这个。这只是思考什么是伟大 PM 的一种非常有趣的方式。

Amazing description of what makes a great PM. Such a cool way to think about it. Nquille Singal was on the podcast a couple times and he talks about—it's a different way of thinking about it—but he talks about the shadow. You have a superpower, but then there's the shadow. Know what the downside of that is. It's a different thing, but I love this. It's just a really interesting way to think about what is a great PM.

好的，在我们进入非常激动人心的闪电轮之前，还有最后一件事。我想带我们去反主流角，这是一个播客的常驻环节，我觉得你在这里会有一些好东西。问题就是：你相信什么大多数其他人不相信的事？

Okay, one final thing before we get to a very exciting lightning round. I want to take us to Contrarian Corner, which is a recurring podcast segment where I feel like you're going to have some good stuff here. The question is just: what's something you believe that most other people don't?

如今反主流很难。反主流很时髦，这很讽刺。所以也许我应该随大流。我能把这个分成轻辣、中辣、重辣吗？

Being contrarian is tough these days. It's very trendy to be contrarian, which is ironic. So maybe I should just be conformist. Can I break this into light spicy, medium spicy, heavy spicy?

喜欢这个。来吧。

Love that. Let's do it.

好的。我的轻辣——我不认为每个人都会不同意，但有些人会——我认为尤其是作为产品经理，我觉得我们没时间深入所有事，但我认为你做出的最重要的职业决定是你的伴侣是谁，比如你和谁结婚，你个人和谁共度时光。我认为这既有成长也有很难量化的连锁效应。你听再多 Lenny 播客并内化，也无法与找到一个伟大的伴侣相比，他会帮助你、支持你、帮你成长，并在智力上成为你的共鸣板。所以我认为这大概是我的轻辣观点，因为我认为很多人会在某种程度上同意。

Okay. So my light spicy—I don't think everyone would disagree with this, but some—I think as a product manager in particular, I don't think we have time to go into everything, but I think the most important career decision you make is who your partner is, like who you marry, who you spend your time with personally. I think this has both growth and just knock-on effects that are really hard to quantify. And there's no amount of Lenny podcasts you can listen to and internalize that will match finding a great partner who will help you, support you, and help you grow, and be kind of intellectually a sounding board for you. So I think that's probably my light take, because I think a lot of people would agree to that to some degree.

我知道我的超辣观点。那个我还没想。中辣——这和我博物馆策展人的评论有点相关。我认为很多我在品味上仰慕的人——也许只是因为我在洛杉矶，但我很在意艺术之类的东西，比如我背后的艺术——我注意到，尤其是在富人当中，有品味的人和被视为粗俗之类的人之间的区别是：有品味的人会在其他人之前一步停下来。比如，也许他们在某个趋势中收藏艺术，但然后他们意识到当事情——不管那句老话是什么，跳鲨鱼——或者当事情达到某个水平，就像，好了，现在是时候停下来寻找新东西了。我认为你还没发布的东西，你建造、尝试、握在手中并喜爱但还没带给世界的东西，我认为在某种程度上是对此的测试。所以是的，我不知道那是不是超级反主流，但我认为你可以衡量很多——有伟大品味的人似乎就是知道什么时候接受某件事并对其充满热情，然后有点

I know my super spicy one. So that one I don't think of. On the medium spicy—this is kind of related to my museum curator comment. I think a lot of people who I look up to in terms of taste—and maybe it's just being in Los Angeles, but I care a lot about stuff like art, art behind me, stuff like that—I've noticed that the difference, especially in wealthy people, between those who have taste and those who are seen as gauche or something like that is: the ones with taste kind of stop one step before everybody else does. Like, maybe they're collecting art in a certain trend, but then they realize when things are—whatever the old phrase is, jumping the shark—or when things are hitting a certain level where it's like, okay, now is the time to stop and look for something new. And I think that what you haven't shipped, what you've built and tried and held in your hands and loved but haven't brought to the world, I think is kind of a test for that in some ways. So yeah, I don't know if that's super contrarian, but I think you can measure a lot—it's like people with great taste seem just know when to take something and get passionate about something and then kind of

当它变得尴尬时。

When it gets cringe.

是的。是的。让它——是的。也许尴尬就是那个词？是的。放手吧。

Yeah. Yeah. Let it—Yeah. Maybe cringe is it? Yeah. Let it go.

我最辛辣的一个观点，我们把它放回播客的开头。为什么我现在做这个播客？你和我认识很久了，在群聊里，一直聊天。这个观点可能取决于我的雇主，我甚至不确定我是否会很舒服地说出来。我认为，要为某些人群、某些用户真正创造伟大的消费产品，你为其中一些产品配备的产品经理和设计师——这些产品经理有一些不可剥夺的特质，是无法学习的，无法获得的，而这些特质对于创造真正伟大的消费产品至关重要。我指的是字面意义上的性别、种族、民族、社会经济背景。我的意思不是，哦，如果你想为年轻黑人男性创造产品，你就需要雇佣年轻黑人男性。我不是那个意思。我只是说——我不知道我有多舒服地举例——但我确实认为，作为一个社会，我们不习惯承认这一点，但关于人们如何被抚养长大、他们的生理特征等等，有些东西使他们更适合从事某些消费产品的工作，因为大多数消费产品的核心——尼基塔也谈到这一点——是在触及马斯洛需求层次的某些部分。为了真正理解这些需求，我认为某些人的背景、成长经历等使他们更擅长这一点。这并不意味着你可以为此招聘。这并不意味着你可以以貌取人，诸如此类。这就是为什么这是一个如此辛辣的观点——在许多情况下，它甚至不一定可操作。但嗯，也许我就说到这里，免得我暴露自己。

My spiciest one, and we'll bring it back here to the start of the podcast. Why am I doing this podcast now? You and I have known each other, been in group chats, chatted all the time for a long time. This one's probably a take where I don't even know if I'd be super comfortable saying it depending on my employer. I think that to truly create great consumer products for certain cohorts of humans, of users, the product managers and designers that you put on some of those products—there are certain inalienable traits about those product managers that cannot be learned, cannot be acquired, that are essential to creating truly great consumer products. And by that I mean literally gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background. And what I mean by this is not, oh, if you want to create a product for young black men, you need to hire young black men. I don't mean stuff like that. I just mean—and I don't know how comfortable I am giving examples—but I do think that we are not comfortable as a society admitting this, but there are certain things about how people are brought up, who they are biologically, things like that, that suit them to better working on certain consumer products because at their core, most consumer products are—and Nikita talks about this too—are hitting against certain parts of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And in order to understand those needs really well, I think there are certain people with backgrounds, upbringings, etc., that make them better at that. That doesn't mean you can hire for it. That doesn't mean you can judge a book by its cover, things like that. And that's why it's such a spicy take—it's not necessarily even actionable in many situations. But yeah, maybe I'll leave it at that before I give myself away.

是的，真正辛辣的版本会像是那个网格，这里是你需要为这种类型产品配备的人，但我们不会去那里。在我们进入非常激动人心的闪电轮之前，还有什么我们没有触及的吗？你还有什么想分享的吗？在我们进入激动人心的闪电轮之前，你有什么想加倍强调的吗？我们涵盖了很多内容，所以可能没有——

Yeah, like the real spicy version would be like that grid of here's who you need for this type of product, but we're not going to go there. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that we haven't touched on? Anything else you wanted to share? Anything you want to double down on before we get to exciting lightning round? We covered a lot of ground, so there might not—

不，我认为我们涵盖了很多内容。真的很棒。

No, I think we covered a ton of ground. It's really great.

好吧，彼得，就这样，我们到了非常激动人心的闪电轮。我有五个问题要问你。你准备好了吗？

Well, Peter, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

好的。我向我们的观众和听众承认，我没有为这些做准备，我想这就是闪电轮的意义所在。

All right. I will admit to our viewers and listeners that I have not prepared for these, which I guess was the point of the lightning round.

这就是重点，除了最后一个问题，其他问题对每个人都是一样的。

That is the point except they're the same questions to everybody except the last one.

好的，酷。所以没有——不会太意外。

Okay, cool. So there's no—it's not too much of a surprise.

好的。那么我喜欢这些问题。好的。

Okay. Then I love these questions. All right.

好的。我喜欢人们没有准备的时候。

Okay. And I love it when people aren't prepared.

嗯，好的。你发现自己最常向别人推荐的两三本书。

Uh okay. Two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people.

我会把标题搞砸一点。《如何在崛起的亚洲暴富》和《当天才失败时》。

I'm going to butcher the title a bit. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and When Genius Failed.

哦，没听说过这些？太棒了。

Oh, haven't heard of these? Amazing.

然后第三个——所以《如何在崛起的亚洲暴富》。《当天才失败时》是关于 1998 年底长期资本管理公司的兴衰，导致了其中一次崩盘或几乎避免的崩盘。然后我的第三本，我实际上给了很多消费产品经理，是麻省理工学院物理学家艾伦·莱特曼的《爱因斯坦的梦》。

And then the third one—so How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. When Genius Failed is about the fall and the rise and fall of Long-Term Capital Management in late 1998 caused like one of the crashes or nearly averted crashes. And then my third one, which I actually give to a lot of consumer PMs, is Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, the physicist from MIT.

非常独特的选择。我以前在播客上没听过这些。最近你真正喜欢的电影或电视节目。

Very unique pick. I haven't heard these on the podcast before. Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed.

所以我不看电视，我很少——我没有以前看那么多电影了。我曾经是个大电影迷。所以，如果我可以把这个转向更贴近我内心的东西，游戏，我认为如果你没有——如果你不玩游戏，电子游戏，你应该试试去年的年度游戏《光与影：33 号远征队》。只是一个来自法国的精彩独立工作室，构建了一个故事，音乐和声音就像卢浮宫级别的美，真的提醒你游戏是一种艺术形式，也许我们作为一个社会还没有意识到如何欣赏。我认为背后的人是非凡的，我认为他们制作的东西是惊人的。

So I do not consume TV and I rarely—I haven't watched as many movies as I used to. I used to be a big movie buff. So, if I could flip this to something that was closer to my heart, gaming, I think if you haven't—if you don't play games, video games, you should give last year's game of the year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a shot. Just a wonderful indie studio out of France that constructed a story with music and sound that is just like Louvre-level beauty and really reminds you that games are a form of art that maybe we still as a society haven't yet realized how to appreciate. And I think the people behind it are phenomenal and I think what they produce is amazing.

哇。我想看你玩这个的 Twitch 直播。那会多有趣啊？那可以是我们的后续。那是在桌面上还是像游戏机上的东西？

Wow. I want to watch a Twitch stream of you playing it. How fun would that be? That could be our follow-up. Is that on desktop or is that like a console thing?

它也在游戏机上可用，但我认为最好可能是在桌面上体验最好。我认为它在 Mac 和 PC 上都能运行。

It's available on console as well, but I think best probably best experience on desktop. I think it works on Mac and PC.

太酷了。我认为这是第一个被推荐的游戏。我喜欢这一轮与大多数不同。现在最喜欢的有趣的 AI 产品。

So cool. I think that's the first game recommended. I like how different this round is than most. Favorite interesting AI product right now.

总的来说，很多 AI 产品仍然感觉像我们在向墙上扔意大利面。我会采取更——我听到几个人实际上在播客上提到参考这个。我发现最改变我工作流程的是 Hex。这是我第一次明显地发现自己立即以不同的方式做事。这是唯一有效的多人 AI 体验之一。就像字面上我和 Discord 的联合创始人斯坦，在会议中在一个 Hex 线程中与 Hex 互动，同时我们在会议中讨论并获取数据等等。显然，像延迟和推理时间之类的东西仍然是个问题，但我发现那个产品真的非常棒，真的改变了——真的让我感觉自己像个超级超级人类。

In general, a lot of the AI products still feel like we're throwing spaghetti at the wall. I'll take a more—and I've heard a couple people actually mention reference this on the pod. The one that I found that changed my workflow the most at work was Hex. It was the first time that I just markedly found myself doing something differently immediately. And it was one of the only multiplayer AI experiences that worked. Like literally me and the co-founder of Discord, Stan, in a meeting in a Hex thread interacting with Hex as we were having discussions in the meeting and getting data back and things like that. Obviously like latency and inference time and stuff like that is still an issue, but I find that product to be really really great and really changed—really just enabled me to feel like a super super human.

我喜欢这些答案中的每一个，我认为没有人说过。最后两个问题。你有没有一个最喜欢的座右铭，你经常发现在工作或生活中有用？

I love how every one of these answers I don't think anyone's ever said. Two final questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often find useful in work or in life?

有一句名言，我会搞砸，因为我没有把它放在面前。那是约翰·斯坦贝克在《伊甸之东》中的，我想，关于时间的流逝。我通常对时间的流逝很着迷，因为我生活中的人，无论是个人还是职业上的，我一直被他们迷住，就像我只想花更多时间。就像我爱上了这些人。他们常常似乎漂浮在时间中，对时间的感知与普通人非常不同。斯坦贝克的这句话——是关于当你经历更多或更少时，时间如何不同地流逝。本质上，这句话是，持续时间没有路标——抱歉，时间没有路标来披挂持续时间。

There's this quote that I'm going to butcher because I don't have it in front of me. That is from John Steinbeck in East of Eden, I think, about the passage of time. And I'm just generally obsessed with the passage of time because the people in my life, whether it's been personal or professional, who I've just always been literally infatuated by, like I've just wanted to spend more time. Like I've fallen in love with these people. They oftentimes seem to float through time and perceive time very differently than normal people. And this quote from Steinbeck—it's about how time passes differently when you experience more or less. And essentially the quote is that like duration has no signposts—sorry, time has no signposts upon which to drape duration.

从无到无，根本不算时间。我真的很想把完整的原话找给你，因为这 literally 就是那种让你感叹“人类怎么可能写出这种话？太美了”的东西。但没错，从无到无，根本不算时间。所以哪怕一生布满悲剧的伤痕——本质上就是去做，对吧？就是走出去，认识新的人，去体验，因为让时间流逝变慢的最好方式，本质上就是拿它去做点什么。所以我觉得自己在时间上挺慷慨的，无论是花时间陪人，还是尽快去做我想做的事，因为你永远不知道会发生什么。而那些以好的方式真正显得流逝缓慢的时光，正是你经历了很多的时光。所以“从无到无，根本不算时间”这个想法，对我来说既无比可怕，又充满动力。

From nothing to nothing is no time at all. I really want to get the full quote for you, because it's literally one of those things where you're like, "How could a human write this? It's so beautiful." But yeah, from nothing to nothing is no time at all. And so a life that is even scarred with tragedy — essentially just do it, right? Just get out there, meet new people, experience things, because the best way to slow the passage of time is essentially to do something with it. And so I'm pretty generous, I think, with my time, and how I spend it with people, and just trying to do things that I want to do as soon as possible, because you just never know. And those time periods that really seem to pass slowly in a good way are the ones where you've just experienced a lot. And so this idea that from nothing to nothing is no time at all is so scary and motivating to me.

太美了。又是一句从没人分享过的话。最后一个问题。我看了你的 LinkedIn，看了你的职业经历。有意思的是，你一上来就是产品负责人。那是你在一个叫——的公司里的第一个产品岗位。

That is beautiful. Again, a quote nobody has shared before. Final question. So, I was looking at your LinkedIn, looking at your career history. Funny enough, you were head of product immediately. That was your first product role at a company called—

我做过一小段时间的产品经理，但——

I was a product manager for a little bit, but—

好，好。你在 LinkedIn 上把这段略过了。那是一家叫 Ustream 的公司，你把你的职位描述为“柴犬小狗直播的产品负责人”。我们得听听更多。

Okay. Okay. You've overlooked that in your LinkedIn. So, it was a company called Ustream, and you described your role as product leader for the Shiba Inu puppy cam. We need to hear more.

对，对。Ustream。Ustream 是家特别有意思的公司。它是最早的直播公司之一，和 LiveStream——那家公司真的就叫 LiveStream——以及 Justin Kan 的 Justin.tv 并列。那算是直播的黄金时代，最初是靠更高的带宽之类的东西才成为可能。我们有时会聊失败——Ustream 本质上是个失败，因为我们本该聚焦游戏。Justin.tv 聚焦游戏，后来变成了 Twitch 等等。但关于 Ustream 有一件事——我快速说一下，我知道这是快问快答环节——Ustream 的头号产品顾问，那是 2009 年，是 Josh Elman。那就像是我做产品的起步，17 年前，能有一位 Josh Elman 这样的导师，学产品真的非常了不起。而 Ustream 真正的第一位产品经理是 Matt Schlick，他好像是高中辍学来做这个产品的，2008、2009 年。Matt 刚把 Moltbook 卖给了 Meta，那算是给智能体的社交网络。所以他算是 OG 级别的社交黑客之一。看到他实现这些真的很棒。但没错，Ustream 因为柴犬小狗直播而大火，就是有人拿了个罗技摄像头对准一窝刚出生的柴犬小狗，24 小时不间断地直播这些小狗长大、疯玩等等。我们本该学到点什么——当时其实有三个 24 小时直播。我记得有柴犬小狗直播。然后有老鹰直播，展示爱荷华州 Decorah 的雏鹰出生。然后还有 Jason Calacanis 的 24 小时直播。他是唯一一个负担得起直播的人——他的这个 Weekend Startups。

Yeah. Yeah. Ustream. Ustream is a funny, funny company. It was one of the first live streaming companies, alongside LiveStream — the company actually called LiveStream — and Justin.tv with Justin Kan. It was kind of a golden age of live streaming that was first enabled by essentially higher bandwidth and things like that. Sometimes we talk about failures — Ustream was essentially a failure because we should have focused on gaming. Justin.tv focused on gaming and became Twitch, etc. But one thing about Ustream — I'll tell you really quick, I know it's lightning round — the number one product adviser to Ustream, this is 2009, was Josh Elman. That was like my come up in product, 17 years ago, having a mentor who was Josh Elman, which was really phenomenal to learn product. And then the actual first product manager at Ustream was this guy Matt Schlick, who had dropped out of high school, I think, to work on the product, 2008, 2009. Matt just sold Moltbook to Meta, the kind of social network for agents. And so he is like one of the OG social hackers. So it was really awesome to see him realize that. But yeah, Ustream became really popular from the Shiba Inu puppy cam, which was somebody taking a Logitech camera and aiming it at a litter of new Shiba Inu puppies and 24/7 just streaming these puppies growing up, acting crazy, etc. And we should have learned — there were actually three 24/7 cams at the time. I think there was the Shiba puppy cam. Then there was the Eagle cam that showed the birth of baby eagles in Decorah, Iowa. And then there was Jason Calacanis on just like 24/7 broadcast. He was the only person who could afford like a broadcasting — his this weekend startups.

所以是两件美好的事和一件丑恶的事。不，我开玩笑的。但没错，柴犬小狗直播——关于它有很多可学的。人们把它当背景。工作时把它放在背景里，戴着耳机听这些小狗，非常抚慰人心。我们收到好多邮件，人们说“这救了我的命”之类的。所以——

So two beautiful things and one hideous thing. No, I'm just kidding. But yeah, the Shiba Inu puppy cam — there was a lot to learn about that. People use this as their background. Just to have it in the background while they worked, on their headphones just listening to these puppies was very soothing. And we got so many emails from people being like, "This saved my life," blah blah blah. So—

对，对，真的很好玩。直播至今仍算是个没被攻克的产品品类。技术上仍有挑战，成本也高，等等。但从消费者角度，我从中学到了很多。

Yeah. Yeah, it was really fun. Live streaming is still kind of an uncracked product category. Still technically challenging, quite expensive, etc. But I learned a lot from a consumer standpoint from that.

太厉害了。还有——你 LinkedIn 上显示你在一家孵化了 Dollar Shave Club 和 Liquid Death 的公司工作过。这个我们就不展开了。Peter，你刚才简单提到你在时间上很慷慨。我非常感谢你抽时间来。我们聊了这么多。这是我做过的最长的几期之一，这很能说明有多少可聊的、你有多少可分享的。所以，谢谢你来到这里。

Incredible. There's also — on your LinkedIn you worked at a company that incubated Dollar Shave Club and Liquid Death. We're not going to get into that. Peter, you mentioned briefly a second ago how generous you are with your time. I really appreciate you making time to be here. We got through so much. And this is one of the longer episodes I've done, which says a lot about just how much there is to talk about and how much you have to share. So, thank you for being here.

对，能聊这些真的很棒。我其实没有在很多场合对外表达过这些，我觉得这很能说明你、你的播客以及你的读者和观众。我想你大概比任何人都更塑造了这个职业的样子，以及它这些年来如何变得更好。所以我真的很感激这段时间。我感激每一位收听的人。

Yeah, it's so great to talk about some of this stuff. And I haven't expressed it externally in a lot of ways, and really I think it says a lot about you and your podcast and your readership and viewership. I think you've probably done more than any person to really shape what this career looks like and how it's improved over the years. So I'm really grateful for the time. I'm grateful for everybody who listened.

最后一个问题。听众怎样才能帮到你？

Final question. How can listeners be useful to you?

我觉得如果人们听完这期播客，大概能了解到——不一定是那些反主流的观点，而是我思考产品的一些方面，也许和典型的硅谷出身的产品负责人有点不一样。对，如果他们觉得有什么产生了共鸣，或者不同意某一点想纠正，或者有意见，或者只是对某一点很着迷，我都很想听。我就是很想听——我喜欢听，我喜欢对东西提出异议。我喜欢听这类东西。

I think if people listen through this podcast, they probably got an idea of not necessarily the contrarian takes, but just some of the aspects of how I think about product that are maybe just a little bit different than the typical product leader that came up in Silicon Valley or something like that. And yeah, if they feel like something resonates with them, or that they disagree with something and want to correct it, or they'd have beef with it, or they just like something fascinated them about it, I would love to hear about it. I would just love to hear — I love hearing, I love disagreeing with stuff. I love hearing about stuff like that.

好。如果大家想跟你唱反调，我们会把你的社交账号指给大家。Peter，非常感谢你来到这里。

Sweet. And we'll point you to your socials if folks want to disagree with you. Peter, thank you so much for being here.

谢谢你邀请我，Lenny。真的很感激。大家再见。

Thank you for having me, Lenny. Really appreciate it. Bye everyone.

非常感谢你的收听。如果你觉得有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你常用的播客应用上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这能真正帮助其他听众找到这个播客。你可以在 lennispodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多。下期见。

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.