马克·平卡斯谈“已验证更好新”：成功产品创意的框架

如果你真有雄心，就烧掉你的简历。你对如何打造优秀产品有着惊人的逆向思维。你的直觉 95%是对的，但你的想法 75%是错的。我们见过太多创始人固执地、英雄般地坚持一个失败的想法。你怎么知道这只是你走错了路？如果你在问你的产品是不是 A 级，那它就不是 A 级。当你手握闪电瓶，当你拥有真正的信号，一切都会顺利。大多数产品都是已有事物的更好版本。谈谈如何克服抄袭的心理障碍。这几乎是一种道德套利。你成为创始人、创业者是因为你想成为创新者，但你却要像做《Farmville》那样去赢得印第安纳州护士们的心。你不是要赢得同行的奖项和尊重。从消费者的角度定义你的雄心。打造一款消费者社交应用，很少有人成功并做出持久的东西。我们对社交的需求远不止潜在需求，它已经失去了兴奋感。人们自豪地告诉你他们不用 Instagram，他们不怀念派对。如果你想重塑社交，就去找鸡尾酒会所在的地方。我们看到一个精彩的鸡尾酒会时就知道，你会觉得‘哦，真高兴我在这儿’。今天，我们都泡在 Claude 和 GPT 上，但没有鸡尾酒会。我给听众的挑战是：想办法让它热闹起来。今天我的嘉宾是 Mark Pincus，Zynga 的创始人，他可以说是历史上创造了最多成功消费产品的人，在 Zynga 内外有十几个。过去 5 年，他一直在写一本书，总结了他关于打造成功消费产品所学到的一切。书名是《Life at the Speed of Play》，几周后出版，非常好读。在书的推荐语中，OpenAI 联合创始人 Sam Altman 说，今天打造优秀产品的唯一瓶颈是知道该创造什么。Mark 是这方面的专家。读完这本书并进行了这次对话后，我完全同意。在他的书和这次对话中，Mark 分享了一个非常巧妙且反直觉的框架，用于产生成功的产品创意。为什么少一点雄心往往是产生最有雄心想法的途径。为什么你需要在希望杀死你之前杀死希望。为什么你的直觉通常正确，但你的想法通常错误。还有他养育五个孩子的心得。等等等等。这一集适合每一个正在打造产品或考虑创业的人。在开始之前，别忘了访问 lennisprod.com，免费获得一年全球最热门、最精良的 AI 产品，仅限 Lenny 通讯订阅者。现在，有请 Mark Pincus。

If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. Your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea. How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following? If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. Most products are better versions of things that existed before. Talk about how you get over that hump of copying. It's almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, but you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana like for Farmville. You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer. Building a consumer social app, very few people have successfully done it and built something durable. We have beyond a latent demand for social. It's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel you're like, 'Oh, I'm so glad I'm here.' Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. Today my guest is Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history, over a dozen both within Zynga and before Zynga. And over the past 5 years, he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks, and it is so good, and it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create. Mark is an expert at this. And after reading this book and having this conversation, I could not agree more. In his book and in this conversation, Mark shares a really clever and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for coming up with successful product ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas. Why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you. Why your instincts are usually right, but your ideas are usually wrong. Also, what he's learned about raising kids. He's got five. And so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking about starting a company. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennisprod.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Mark Pincus.

非常感谢你来到这里，欢迎来到播客。我一直是你的忠实听众。哦，哇。我很兴奋终于能来了。

Thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. I've been a big listener. Oh, wow. And I'm excited to finally be on.

我很兴奋终于请到你了。你刚出了一本书，和这期播客差不多同时发布，书名是《Life at the Speed of Play》。我想聊的太多了。我想从你开发的这个框架开始，叫做‘Proven Better New’，这个框架基本上是为了帮助你产生和完善产品创意以及创业想法，从而增加你的想法是好主意并且能成功的概率。这是一个非常巧妙的想法，简单却深刻。我想花些时间讨论这个。所以首先，给我们一个这个框架的概述，它是什么，人们如何用它来产生想法。

I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book. It's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. There's so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed called Proven Better New, and the framework is basically designed to help you come up with and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your idea is a good idea and that it will work. It is such a clever idea, such a simple idea with so much depth. I want to spend a bunch of time on this. So first of all, just give us kind of the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas.

当然。这个框架我们在 Zynga 早期就采用了，它几乎成了我们的信仰，是 Zynga 产品管理的核心原则和引擎。它对这本书如此重要，以至于在写书的四年中有三年我们都把书叫做《Proven Better New》，但后来我觉得这个名字太干巴巴了，我喜欢‘Life at the Speed of Play’这个概念，我们可以聊聊，这是书的大框架。但‘Proven Better New’是我从创办 Zynga 以来一直秉持的产品核心理念，那就是我们都有直觉，这些人类层面的直觉几乎总是对的。然后我们把想法加在直觉之上，这些想法通常是错的。我的经验法则是：你的直觉 95%是对的，你的想法 75%是错的，最多 25%是对的。‘Proven Better New’框架就是基于这个理念，然后说：好吧，我们该怎么办？我们来隔离你的创新区域。隔离你直觉中的那个东西，然后围绕它测试很多很多想法，让我们为正确的理由失败，而不是错误的理由。比如在 Zynga，我们看到新游戏发布。Sid Meier，你知道，游戏设计教父，最受尊敬的游戏设计师。他在 Facebook 上推出了一款社交文明游戏，我们想，‘哦天哪，终极游戏设计师来了。’游戏发布 10 分钟后，Zynga 的产品经理就发邮件分析说：‘它一上线就死了，因为他的首次用户体验点击太多、太糟糕，没人会看到他的伟大游戏设计。’就连 Sid Meier 也栽在了 Zynga 最初级的产品经理都理解的、在 Facebook 平台上引导新用户的最佳实践上。但因为他没有完美复制那个，没有做‘已被证明正确’的事，他的创新就没人看到。

Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion and the fundamental core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zynga. And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book we called it Proven Better New but then I was like oh that's too dry a name and I love this concept of Life at the Speed of Play which we can talk about but is the bigger gestalt to the book. So, but Proven Better New is this core philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zynga, which is that we have these instincts like in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% or at best right 25% of the time. The framework of Proven Better New takes that philosophy and says okay what do we do with that? Okay let's isolate your innovation zone. Let's isolate that thing you have in your gut and let's just test many many ideas around that and let's fail for the right reason not the wrong reason. It might be I mean at Zynga we'd see new game launches. Sid Meier's like the you know godfather of game design who's the most revered game designer. He came out, I think, a social civilization on Facebook and we thought, 'Oh god, here comes like the ultimate game designer.' And 10 minutes after the game came out, the Zynga PMs emailed around their analysis and they said, 'It's dead on arrival because his first time user experience was so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever going to see his great game design.' Even Sid Meier tripped over what were understood by the most junior product managers at Zynga was the best of breed approach to onboarding a new user to the first-time user experience on the Facebook platform. But because he didn't perfectly copy that, he didn't do the proven right, his innovation never got seen by anybody.

本集由本季赞助商 Work OS 呈现。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Vercel、Replit、Sierra、Clay 以及数百家其他成功公司有什么共同点？它们都由 Work OS 驱动。如果你正在为企业打造产品，你一定感受过集成单点登录、SCIM、RBAC、审计日志等大公司所需功能的痛苦。Work OS 将这些交易障碍转化为即插即用的 API，拥有专为 B2B SaaS 打造的现代开发者平台。我投资的每一家开始向上市场扩张的初创公司最终都与 Work OS 合作。这是因为他们是最好的。

This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, Work OS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by Work OS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, 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 SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with Work OS. And that's because they are the best.

无论你是种子期初创公司，试图拿下第一个企业客户，还是正在全球扩张的独角兽，Work OS 都是实现企业级就绪和释放增长的最快路径。它本质上就是企业级功能的 Stripe。访问 works.com 开始使用，或者直接上他们的 Slack，那里有真正的工程师等着回答你的问题。WorkOS 让你通过愉悦的 API、全面的文档和流畅的开发者体验更快地构建。今天就前往 workos.com，让你的应用企业级就绪。

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 workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today.

所以‘成熟、更好、创新’的重点是，先把所有成熟的东西摆到台面上。如果你想打造 AI Snapchat 或 AI 相机——我现在看到很多这样的 AI 相机——没问题。先从你不创新的部分开始。比如图标，或者相机的工作方式。找到那些已经证明是最佳实践的地方，无论是苹果、Snapchat 还是 Instagram，合法地复制它们，最好还有点品味。我们可以讨论好的复制和坏的复制，但首先要成为成熟领域的专家。先拿到成熟领域的博士学位。我想说的是，在我们成为现有最佳移动相机的世界级专家之前，我们还没有资格在相机上创新。

And so the point of proven better new is to say let's take all the proven off the table. If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now, AI cameras. Fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on. You're the icon. Maybe just the way a camera works. Look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally and with hopefully some taste. We can get into like great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say we don't we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist.

而‘更好’通常是我们找不到的。‘更好’往往是非常小的增量改进和创新。‘更好’是那种现有用户中十个人里有十个都会说‘是的，这更好’的东西。是十个人里十个，不是你。你认为的‘更好’其实叫‘创新’，对吧？我们以为的‘更好’其实是‘创新’。我们通常对‘创新’太雄心勃勃了。所以‘更好’可以是：现在免费了、无需下载、你能用数据证明它更好、而且每个用户都会同意。通常它非常微小，是打磨，是那些重度用户、核心用户最能注意到的细节。

And then better is usually we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations. And better is something that 10 out of 10 of your existing users of that product would say yeah. 10 out of 10 not you. What you think is better is called new, right? What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new and so better could be it's now free. There's no download. There's something that you can both statistically show works, you know, is better and every user would say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polish and it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most.

以我们的游戏《Words with Friends》为例，它本质上是 Scrabble，但如果只是 Scrabble，为什么它能大获成功，拥有 1400 万日活用户，而 Scrabble 本身却没有？一定有什么‘更好’和‘新颖’的地方。它对移动端的打磨就是‘更好’，而‘新颖’是什么？那个写在盒子背面的、能吸引人们下载尝试的新点子是什么？在《Words with Friends》里，是社交。你的朋友通过 Facebook 图谱直接关联，他们就在那里等着和你一起玩——这是一个新点子。但即使是这样，你觉得‘我当然想要’，可能十个人里也不会有十个人说‘是’。我们必须接受，那个新点子很可能会失败。它是人们尝试的理由，但很可能失败。

And in our game, Words with Friends, you know, it was Scrabble, but if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't right? There must have been something, you know, better and novel about it. But it had such a polish for mobile was the better and the new. What's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's going to get people to download and try it? And in the case of Words with Friends, it was social. It was your friends are just attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. You know, even that which you'd think of course I want, you might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes. And we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail.

如果我们正确运用‘成熟、更好、创新’，产品在市场上成功的几率会大得多，不会因为错误的原因失败。如果我们一开始就假设‘创新’很可能不对，并且我们还有另外四个新点子准备测试，那么我们就会以不同的方式推进。我真的觉得，如果你正确运用‘成熟、更好、创新’，它就像一台时间机器。因为如果我能回到 2003 或 2004 年，对马克说：‘老兄，你都不知道自己有多正确。’比如，你的一种直觉将来会成就一家 1.6 万亿美元的公司，而你比他们领先一年，对吧？你比一家 1.6 万亿美元的公司领先一年。我不会告诉你是哪家，我不会完全作弊，但我只想告诉你，这里面还有另一个答案，你可以追求，价值 1.6 万亿美元。哦，顺便说一句，你的 Tribes 想法就是 Reddit，它后来成了一个完整的公司行业，你知道的，列表。

And if we do proven better new right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right, and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we just prosecute it in a different way. And we really it's I like to think if you do proven better new right? It's like a time machine because what if I could go back to Mark, you know, 2003 and four and say, 'Dude, you don't even realize how right you are.' Like, one of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once, and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. That's, you know, I'm not going to tell you which. I'm not going to totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you there's something there's another answer in this that you could pursue that would be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, by the way, your Tribes idea that's Reddit that becomes a whole company industry, you know, listings.

所以，在 Tribe 的某个时刻，我知道我的指标不行了。我们的 30 天留存率很糟糕，我们就像一艘正在下沉的快艇。如果我当时有这种态度——我要尝试更多点子，我要环顾四周——因为当你做‘成熟、更好、创新’时，你也会环顾四周，寻找市场上已经验证的热点，然后去测试——那么我成功的几率会大大改变。

So, there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working. Our D30 retention was terrible. We were sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas. I'm going to look around me like if you're doing proven better, you're also looking around you for what's what are you finding heat that's proven in the market that you can also go test and you know I would have massively changed my odds of success.

好的，这里信息量很大。我来总结一下我对这个框架的理解，它非常棒。如果你仔细想想所有成功的产品，有多少实际上遵循了这个框架——无论是有意还是无意——这很惊人。我听到的步骤是：成熟——列出市场上已经验证有效的东西，人们喜欢这个领域的哪些方面；更好——做出不仅更好，而且十个人里有十个都会说‘妈的，我会换这个，这更好’的东西；然后加上一些没人尝试过的新东西，增加一点变化。我觉得你在书里有很多例子，比如 Slack 和 Threads。还有，如果你想想 iPhone 和 iPod，你可能不会那样想它们，但基本上 iPod 之前有音乐播放器，他们把它做得更好，并添加了一些新东西。

Okay, there's so much here. So just to summarize how I think about this framework which is so good like if you start to really think through all the products that have succeeded and how many of them actually follow this whether they are conscious or not it's wild so kind of the steps that I hear is so proven better new proven is make a list of the things that are proven to be working already in the market things people love about this sort of space better is make something that is not just better but that 10 out of 10 people will say f yeah I would switch at this is better and then add something new that nobody's tried before that adds a little wrinkle and I think a little bit like you have a bunch of examples in the book Slack and threads there's also like if you think about the iPhone and the iPod like you don't think you don't think about them that way but basically the iPod there was a music player they made it better and they added some new stuff and

是的，在世界上。

Yeah, in the world.

我在 TED 大会上，当时 MIT 的一个团队在演示他们的触摸屏，他们用了一块巨大的白板，还有一张桌子。史蒂夫·乔布斯对此非常着迷。我看着他，他整个时间都和那个团队在一起，痴迷于他们的触摸技术。我不知道那是不是他第一次看到，但我知道他着迷了。所以，他的新点子就是触摸屏。那是唯一的新点子。

I was there at the TED conference when this team from MIT was demoing their touchscreen and they did it on a gigantic whiteboard and Steve Jobs was obsessed with it. They had a whiteboard and they had a table with it and I watched him and he spent the whole time there with this team obsessing over their touch. I don't know if that's the first time he saw it, but I know he was obsessed with it. Like, okay, there's his new idea is a touch screen. It's only new idea.

嗯，我想说‘成熟’被严重误用了。多年来我发现，创始人开始用‘成熟、更好、创新’来为一个错误的想法辩护，他们说：‘看，马克，我在做成熟的东西。成熟就是这款 90 年代流行的游戏。’他们挑了一些东西，结果反而害了自己。他们没有真正使用‘成熟’。我们必须精确。我们必须从像素级别思考这个体验。‘成熟’是指在这个平台上、针对这个受众、这个体验。你可以把以前验证过的东西作为新点子的好来源，但如果它不在这个平台上，那就不算‘成熟’。

Um, and I want to say proven gets so misused and that what I've found over the years with founders is that they start to use proven better new to justify a wrong idea and they're like, 'Look, Mark, I'm doing Proven. Proven is this game that was popular in the 90s.' Proven is and they pick something that and it's to their own detriment. They're not using proven. You we have to be precise. We have to think at the pixel level of this experience. Proven is on this platform for this audience for this experience. And you can look to what's been proven before as great sources of new ideas, but it's not if it's not on this platform, it's you know, it doesn't count as proven.

然而，产品工艺的大师们都在做‘成熟、更好、创新’——不管他们是否这么称呼——而且他们做得如此美妙，以至于没人意识到它借鉴了什么。Slack 就是一个很好的例子，因为我认为 Slack 可能只是‘成熟’和‘更好’，没有‘创新’，这甚至更好——如果你能做出一个成功的产品的话。我不想听起来反创新，但你知道，人们不喜欢改变。

And yet the masters at this product craft do proven better new whether they call it that or not and they do it at such a beautiful level that nobody even thinks no one realizes what it's derivative of and and Slack was a great example because I think Slack might have just been proven and better and no new and that's even better if you can get a if you can have a successful product and I don't want to sound anti-innovation but you know people don't like change.

所以，如果你采用他们喜欢的行为，但让它更容易获得或更有趣，就像 Slack 那样，人们会更喜欢。这个框架中有一种“复制”的线索，会让很多人反感。谈谈你认为人们忽略了什么，以及你如何克服这种“这实际上在大多数情况下是正确的做法”的心理障碍。

So if you take a behavior they like but you make it much more accessible or something much more fun about it like in the case of Slack, people love that even more. There's this thread of copying that comes through this framework that will turn a lot of people off. Talk about what you think people are missing and how you get over that hump of like this is actually the right approach in most cases.

从彼得·蒂尔的角度看，这几乎是一种道德套利，因为作为产品人，我们内心深处有一种东西。你成为创始人、企业家，是因为你想成为创新者，所以创新之路从复制别人的作品开始，感觉像是一种打击。而且我们在学校被教导复制就是作弊。所以我们有很多理由对复制产生道德抵触。但这也在某种程度上让那些不那么自我的人更容易获得机会。我喜欢说，而且我对 Zynga 的产品经理说过，如果你真的雄心勃勃，就烧掉你的简历。如果你从消费者的角度而非同行的角度定义你的雄心，你不是为了赢得奖项和同行的尊重。你是在努力赢得印第安纳州护士们的心，就像 FarmVille 那样。你会以不同的方式定义创新，你不会担心是否要借鉴最好的想法，只要它们能服务于给她一个她更喜欢的体验。所以，如果你只是复制，她没有理由选择你的产品，对吧？但如果你拿了她喜欢的东西，并让它好了一点点，她可能会更喜欢，而不是你给她展示一个她从未见过、醒来时也没意识到自己想要的东西。我认为这门艺术在于你以一种她甚至没有意识到的方式去做，因为我认为消费者的品味也抵制单纯的复制。如果电影、电视节目、书籍感觉太衍生，没有增加重要和新颖的东西，那就会违背消费者的品味。但最好的产品制造者，我喜欢引用 Craigslist 的 Craig Newmark，他花了两年时间在 Craigslist 列表中添加照片。我当时想，他住在我附近，他和我的狗 Zynga 比和我更亲近。他在社交上有点笨拙，和狗更亲近。我试图通过狗和他交朋友。所以他坐下来和我聊天，他在工作，我问：“你在做什么？”他说：“我花了两年时间在列表中添加照片。”我说：“两年是什么意思？”他说：“嗯，我真的想确保人们喜欢它，并且照片以正确的方式出现。我不知道。老实说，我甚至不明白他两年做了什么，但如果你开车穿过旧金山去买别人的沙发，你为什么不想看照片？那不是更好吗？在他看来，这是新的。”我说，这就是世界级的产品制造者，因为他明白我们对每天依赖的产品有一种所有权感。当它们改变时，我们会生气。即使改变是好的，我们也会生气，因为我们通过模式识别更快地生活。我们不想思考这些事情。如果通过添加照片，他移动了文本的位置呢？如果你浏览列表，现在文本在折叠线以下呢？一个初级产品经理可能会把整个东西做成图片，而没有意识到人们最喜欢的是能够快速看到文本，他们试图比较他们已经知道的沙发的价格。我不知道。

In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product person. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, and so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we were taught in school copying is cheating. So there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But that also makes that opportunity in some ways more available for people who have less ego involved. And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zynga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. If you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. You're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana like for FarmVille. You're going to define innovation differently and you're not going to worry about whether you're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her an experience that she loves more. So if all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And I think the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it because I think consumer taste also resists just a copy. If movies, TV shows, books, if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it could go against consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark on Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. And I was like, and he lived in my neighborhood, and he was friends with my dog, Zynga, more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially, and he connected more with the dog. And I tried to be friends with him through the dog. And so he would sit and talk to me and he was working on I was like, "What are you working?" And I said, "I've been working for two years on adding photos to listings." I'm like, "What do you mean two years?" He's like, "Well, I really want to make sure that people like it and that the photos come up in the right ways. I don't know. I honestly don't even understand what he did for two years, but if you're driving across San Francisco to buy someone's couch, why wouldn't you want to? Why isn't that better? In his mind, it was new." And I'm like, that's a world-class product maker because he gets that we feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day. And we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition. And we don't want to think about these things. And what if by adding photos to his listings, he moved where the text was? And what if you rifle through listings and now the text is below the fold, you know, and a junior product maker might make the whole thing a picture and not realize that what people liked most was being able to see the text real quick and they were trying to compare prices on the couch they already knew that I don't know.

是的。你说话的时候我在想，所有最好的产品是什么？它们都只是现有产品的复制和演变，还是有多少是完全全新的？我环顾四周，比如 iPhone，之前就有手机，它们吸收了优秀元素，让它们变得很棒。我的 Yeti 水瓶，之前就有好用的水瓶，然后他们添加了一些东西让它更好。Chrome，我不知道。我只是环顾四周，有趣的是，一旦你开始从这个角度思考，大多数产品都是以前存在的东西的更好版本。然后我在想，作为一个产品团队，你经常做什么？你去看看竞争对手，看看他们所有的流程，这是他们在做的，这是有效的，看看所有这些好主意，然后在此基础上构建。所以我认为很容易对这个“复制”这个词感到反感。但仔细想想，无论如何，大多数产品最终都是这样构建的。

Yeah. I'm thinking as you're talking, I'm just thinking what are all the best products and are they all just kind of copies and evolutions of existing products or how many are just completely brand new? And I'm looking around like the iPhone, that was, you know, there were phones before and they kind of took the elements of what was great, made them awesome. My Yeti water bottle, like there were water bottles that worked and then they added things to make it better. Chrome, I don't know. I'm just like looking around, it's so interesting how once you start to think about it through this lens, most products are better versions of things that existed before. And then I'm thinking about as a product team, what do you often do? You go look at the competitors, look at all their flows, here's what they're doing, here's what's working, look at all these great ideas, and then you build on that. So I think there's like it's easy to get turned off to this idea of like the word copy. But as you think about it, this is mostly how products end up getting built anyway.

嗯，关于这一点有很多可说的，我们完全可以花整个播客来讨论，我也没问题，或者专门做一集，因为我有很多想法。一方面，我想到了 Nikita，我想你请过他，我喜欢他在 TBH 上的故事。这是一个完美的例子，他在别人的产品中找到了经过验证的东西。那是我第一家公司 Freeloader。我在 Netscape 浏览器和 Internet Explorer 浏览器中发现了一个隐藏的功能：离线浏览。我的整个产品就是离线浏览，但他们把它作为一个隐藏的高级用户功能。我看到了那个时刻的天才之处，因为带宽太慢了，我想，“哦，我们可以围绕这一个功能做一个完整的产品。”Nikita 看到了他完美的产品隐藏在他产品的阿拉伯语版本中，他说，“天哪，他们做到了。”所以我认为，当我们能在别人的产品中看到已经验证的东西，但他们对此有错误的想法时，那就是金子。这是其一。然后回到你的问题，是否每个产品都是衍生的，每个产品都来自经过验证的更好东西，我的答案是否定的。我在书和课程中稍微谈到了这一点。但问题在于，一开始我们所有人都要选择走哪条路？我认为，如果你走纯粹创新的路，从一块空白白板开始，不看任何其他产品，那就像 Rovio 做出《愤怒的小鸟》那样。他们做了 45 款游戏，每一款都完全不同。

Well, there's so much on this that we could literally spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with, too, or do a whole episode just on this because so much comes up for me. On the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on, and I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. That was my first company, Freeloader. What I found was in the Netscape browser and in the Internet Explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing, but they had it as this buried power user feature. And I saw the genius in that for that moment because bandwidth was so slow that I was like, "Oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature." Nikita saw his perfect product buried inside an Arabic only version, right, of his product and he said, "Oh my god, they nailed it." So I think when we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product but they have the wrong idea around it, that's gold. That's one. And then to your question of is every product derivative, is every product from proven better, my answer is no. And I talked about this a little bit in the book and in my course. But the question is at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? And I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard. Don't look at any other products, that is kind of the Rovio getting to Angry Birds. They made 45 games. Every single game was totally different.

据我所知，他们并没有从之前的失败或市场中吸取教训。他们的第 45 次尝试是《愤怒的小鸟》，结果大获成功且富有创新。但那种几率就像野猫钻井一样。你想要那样的几率，还是想成为 OMG Pop 那样？故事类似但路径相反。OMG Pop 创造了热门游戏《Draw Something》，Zynga 收购了他们。2012 年，他们在应用商店连续 60 天排名第一。但 OMG Pop 当时已经山穷水尽。他们尝试了完全创新的东西，前所未有，结果彻底失败。现在他们急需一个爆款。所以他们采用了“已验证的更好新”策略。他们说：‘我们要借鉴这款已验证的游戏，把移动端已经成功和病毒式传播的元素全部用上。’他们完美复制了我们《Words with Friends》的回合制系统，做出了一个巨大的成功。

Not as far as I could tell learning from the previous failures or the market. Their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds, and it was a hit and innovative. But the odds are like wildcat drilling. Do you want those odds, or do you want to be like OMG Pop? Similar story but opposite path. OMG Pop created the hit game Draw Something, and Zynga bought them. They were the number one game and app in the app store for 60 days in 2012. But OMG Pop was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative, never seen before, and it failed completely. Now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit. So they did Proven Better Newly. They said, 'We're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that is already working and viral on mobile.' They perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends and made a massive hit.

我喜欢这个道德套利的概念。这真是一种思考方式。

I love this idea of moral arbitrage. That's such a way of thinking about this.

彼得·蒂尔，你知道的。非常。是的。所以有很多有趣的线索与此相关。其中之一是你有所有这些关于如何打造出色产品的逆向观点。一个是“少一些野心”。谈谈为什么这实际上是构建更具野心产品的绝佳视角。

Peter Thiel, you know. Very. Yeah. So there are so many fun threads that connect to all this. One is you have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. One is be less ambitious. Talk about why that's a really good lens to actually build more ambitious products.

我现在正在重新学习这一课。我想说这里面有很多悖论。我反复学到的一点是，如果我们一开始对要构建的产品过于雄心勃勃、过于有远见，那么我们很可能会错过产品市场契合，因为我们不会从一个足够小、足够谦逊的地方开始。这些产品的起点通常小得令人尴尬。许多巨大的热门产品或系列都是从如此谦逊、毫无野心的起点开始的。Facebook 最初只是一个在哈佛看帅哥美女的应用，对吧？讽刺的是，我的职业生涯就是一波一波的。我从一个非常谦逊的起点开始，只想找到任何产品市场契合。我的前两家公司 Freeloader 和 Support.com 取得了超出想象的成功。它们都始于非常小、非常谦逊的前提。之后我觉得自己无所不能。我知道埃隆是例外。部分原因是他能筹集到神奇无限的资本，这有帮助，而且他根本不会从谦逊的地方开始。但对于我们这些凡人来说，成功之后我们往往觉得下次需要做更大的事。这是人的本能。我们想更有野心。所以当我创办 Tribe，看到社交网络，LinkedIn 刚刚起步，我看到了巨大的机会，我试图用 Tribe 做所有事。那真的很有野心，我没有选择一个用例。Tribe 内部有好几个功能都有效。城市部落的想法很成功。人们喜欢它。但我太有野心了，所以我们失败了。然后我深受打击，在深渊里待了很久，非常渴望出来，所以当我创办 Zynga 时，我做了一件小得令人尴尬的事。我的意思是，作为一个 41 岁、多次成功的创始人，本可以去做一些重要的事，我做了什么？我做了一个 Facebook 应用。一个扑克游戏。甚至不是 Facebook 应用。就是一个扑克游戏。人们觉得我没有尊严。他们说：‘马克，世界上有那么多你可以做的事。’但我的野心降到了 1000 英尺的高度，而不是 10 万英尺。这就是成功的关键。我在很多产品创始人身上都看到了这一点。这几乎让新创始人比多次成功的创始人更有优势，因为我们的绳子太长，容易把自己吊死。在找到产品市场契合之前，很容易凭借一个大愿景筹集资金和招募团队。但世界不在乎你的履历。这对所有观众来说是好消息。每个人都有同样的机会。在很多方面，如果你处于更谦逊的位置，你就有更好的机会。所以悖论是：你越有野心，就越应该谦逊，越应该愿意从更小的地方开始。

I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say there are so many paradoxes in this. One that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious and visionary at the outset about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product-market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place. It might usually be that the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble, non-ambitious places. Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard, right? The irony for me is that my career has gone in these waves. I started in a very humble place of just wanting to get to any product-market fit. I had bigger success than I imagined in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with very small, humble premises. Afterwards, I felt like now I can do anything. I know Elon is the exception to the rule. Part of it is he can raise magical unlimited amounts of capital, which helps, and he does not start in humble places at all. But for the rest of us mortals, after success we tend to feel the need to do something bigger next time. That's human instinct. We want to be more ambitious. So when I got to Tribe and saw social networking, LinkedIn was just starting, and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with Tribe. It was really ambitious, and I didn't pick one use case. There were multiple inside Tribe that worked. The idea of urban tribes worked. People loved it. But I was too ambitious, so we failed. Then I was so humbled and in this abyss for so long, so desperate to get out, that by the time I got to Zynga, I did something embarrassingly small. I mean, to be a 41-year-old multi-time successful founder who could go do something important in the world, what did I do? I made a Facebook app. Like a poker game. Not even a Facebook app. I mean a poker game. People thought I had no dignity. They were like, 'Mark, there's so much you could do in the world.' But my ambition came down to like a thousand-foot altitude, not 100,000-foot. And that was the key to success. I see this with so many product founders. It almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product-market fit. But the world doesn't care about your resume. That's the good news for everyone watching. Everyone has the same chance. In a lot of ways, if you're in a more humble place, you have a better opportunity. So the paradox is the more ambitious you are, the more humble you should be and the smaller place you should be willing to start.

你在这方面的一个见解是，作为初创公司，你的优势就是少一些野心。因为扎克伯格需要做得非常大，因为收入已经很高了。他们做的任何事都需要是数十亿美元的商业机会。而作为初创公司，你不需要那样做。最终，这恰恰是你发现一些最伟大想法的方式。

One of your insights along these lines is that this is your advantage as a startup: to be less ambitious. Because Zuck needs to go really big since the revenue is already so high. Anything they take on needs to be a multi-billion dollar business opportunity. As a startup, you don't need to do that. And this is how you end up discovering some of the biggest ideas in the end.

是的。愿意去追求这些小小的线索，当它们还不成熟、还不是一门生意、还处于非常早期的时候。如今许多成功的公司都是从那里起步的。

Yeah. Being willing to pursue these little threads when they're flaky, when they're not a business, when they're so much earlier. And so many of the successful companies today started there.

是的。有没有什么例子？哪一两家公司是从非常没有野心的起点开始的？

Yeah. Is there an example that comes to mind? What's a company or two that started very unambitious?

我喜欢 Bolt.new 的故事，它去年真的火了。我非常喜欢，以至于我直接给创始人发了冷邮件，因为我印象太深刻了。

I love the story of Bolt.new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much I cold-emailed the founder because I was so impressed.

是的。他们默默无闻地钻研自己感兴趣的东西，然后开源了。我觉得他们几乎无法继续商业开发了。然后有一天他们意识到：等等，如果我们把这些网络栈、这个我们一直在网上运行的虚拟机，实际上把它加入一个 AI 编程助手，我们现在就有了比别人更好的东西。我认为那真是一个很棒的故事。他们热爱一件事，并坚持了下来。

Yeah. And they toiled in obscurity on something they were into, and then they open-sourced it. I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development. Then they had this realization one day: wait a second, if we take these web stacks, this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web, but we actually add that to an AI coding copilot, we now have something that's better than what anybody else has. I think that was just a great story. They were passionate about one thing and stuck with it.

是的，Eric 上过播客。我们聊过这个。

Yeah, Eric was on the podcast. We talked about that.

哦，他印象很深。在很多方面，Slack 也是，它曾经很谦逊。Stewart 一直试图创办游戏公司，结果却变成了意想不到的大热门公司。我们看看他接下来会做什么。现在他可能资本雄厚，这次可以继续做游戏公司了。

Oh, he was so impressed. In a lot of ways Slack also, you know, was humbled. Stewart keeps trying to start game companies, and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies. We'll see what he does next. Now has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time.

但我想你说的对，他可能会再次尝试不再谦逊，去做大。

But I think to your point, he might try again to unhumbled go big.

是的。但每次都是这样，对吧？所以他开始了一个面向大众市场的 MMO 的大想法，我也很喜欢，但真的很难。他们在这方面受挫，以至于说：‘好吧，等等。我们工程师用的这个小东西。’

Yeah. But each time, right? So he started a big idea for like the mass market MMO, which I've also loved but really difficult. And they were humbled in that enough to say, 'Okay, wait. There's this little teeny thing that our engineers use.'

这正是我想问的，就是你给出的另一条建议：在希望杀死你之前先扼杀希望。谈谈这是什么意思，因为你很多建议都是快速扼杀坏点子。所以先聊聊这个，然后我很好奇，要意识到一个想法是坏的需要什么条件？你什么时候决定，好吧，这是个 B+，我们继续前进？

That's exactly where I wanted to go, which is this other piece of advice you give: kill hope before hope kills you. Talk about what that is, because so much of your advice is kill your bad ideas quickly. So just talk about that and then I'm really curious to know what it takes to realize an idea is bad. When do you decide, okay, this is B+, let's move on?

我不知道这句话是不是我原创的，但我很喜欢。在希望杀死你之前先扼杀希望。信念和希望是有区别的。希望是没有根据的信心。希望只是一种祈祷，但它不是基于你的亲身经历、你与产品的互动、用户使用产品的体验以及数据。我认为太多创始人和团队抱着希望继续前进，指望下一个版本能创造奇迹。我认为最好的产品制造者是在收集胜利，而不是下注。他们早就知道了。如果你和布莱恩·切斯基聊他的发布，他早就知道那会是个爆款。他不是通过发布来测试人们是否喜欢。我谈过发布 MVP（最小可行产品）和最大可发布产品之间的区别。因为如果我们依赖希望，我们就会走向 MVP。'可行'这个词是我们需要和希望一起扼杀的，因为希望就来自可行。如果它可行，它可能成功。尽早进入市场学习和发布一个你相信（而不是希望）会成功的产品是有区别的。保持清晰并做出这个区分很重要。AI 今天是一个危险的工具。它太强大了，以至于危险。这意味着我们可以用更少的时间和金钱得到一个可行产品——也许 3 个月而不是 3 年。这是一种危险的毒品，因为我原以为我们会用 AI 来构建令人难以置信的测试机器、失败机器，一周内测试的想法比你行业一年测试的还多。你怎么能一天测试 100 个想法而不是三个月测试一个？我认为 AI 更多地被用来在三个月内构建一个想法，而不是一天内构建一百个想法。那会是什么样子？我喜欢说，在我们知道它是正确的产品之前，先把它完全做错。在你确定它正确之前先做错。如果你能直接做对，那很好，但不要因此放慢速度。如果我们一开始就说，'好吧，我今天能相信什么？我相信这是个错误的产品。'你会怎么做不同？你不会浪费三个月去构建错误的产品。我宁愿浪费一天或一周去构建错误的产品。重点是学习。它是否足够好以获取信号并测试我的想法？我们通常可以拆解并用错误的方式测试这些部分。很多时候可能是一个广告。我简直不敢相信有多少团队在推出产品之前甚至没有测试过广告。那是事后才想到的。在 Zynga，这让我震惊。讲一个故事：当我们推出 FarmVille 的第一个扩展包时——这后来成为巨大的业务驱动力——我记得是 FarmVille English Countryside。团队来找我说，'我们有 1000 万美元的广告预算，我们会在发布前开始投放广告。'我说，'等等，你每天有 2500 万到 3000 万用户使用你的产品，但你却要在其他地方投放'即将推出'的广告？你有这些活跃用户。如果你只是在游戏板上放点东西呢？而且，如果你不只是开始产品营销，而是仍然进行产品测试，看看什么最受欢迎呢？如果你开始把不同艺术形式的 English Countryside 锁定在游戏板上，看看有多少点击量呢？开始测试外观、感觉、营销信息。同时，当人们点击时，显示'即将推出。点击这里成为预用户。点击这里提前两周获得访问权限。'结果每个人都点击了，因为那是游戏板上的一个变化。它既为我们指明了正确的营销方向，也指明了产品的正确变体。但意想不到的结果是，我们开始向人们出售'你和朋友'的钥匙，最终卖出了价值 1900 万美元的钥匙，用于提前访问新的扩展包。

I don't know if I get credit for making up that quote, but I love it. Kill hope before hope kills you. There's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just a prayer, but it's not founded in anything from your lived experience, your experience with your product, people experiencing your product, and the data. I think too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release will do something magical. I think the best product makers are collecting winnings, not making bets. They already know. If you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it. I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP. 'Viable' is the word we need to kill along with hope, because viable is where hope comes from. If it's viable, it might make it. There's a difference between getting to market early to learn and launching a product you believe, not hope, will be a hit. It's important to be crisp and make that distinction. AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money—maybe 3 months instead of 3 years. That's a dangerous drug because I thought we'd be using AI to build incredible testing machines, failure machines that test more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing 100 ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred ideas in a day. What would it look like? I like to say we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. Build it wrong before you know it's right. If you can build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that. If we start off saying, 'Okay, what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product.' What will you do differently? You won't waste three months building the wrong product. I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. The point is to learn. Is it good enough to get signal and test my idea? We can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. So often it could be an ad. I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before launching. It's an afterthought. At Zynga, it blew my mind. One story: when we launched our first expansion pack for FarmVille—which became massive business drivers—I think it was FarmVille English Countryside. The team came to me and said, 'We have a $10 million ad budget and we're going to start running ads before launch.' I said, 'Wait, you have 25-30 million people a day using your product, but you're going to put ads elsewhere for coming soon? You have these people engaged. What if you just put something on the game board? And what if you don't just start product marketing, but you're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat? What if you start putting different art forms of your English countryside locked on the game board and just see how many clicks you get? Start testing the look, feel, marketing message. At the same time, when people click on it, it says 'Coming soon. Click here to be a pre-user. Click here to get access two weeks before anybody else.' It turned out everybody clicked on it, because it's a change on your game board. It gave us direction on the right marketing and the right variant of the product. But the unintended consequence was we started selling keys to people for you and a friend, and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys to get early access to the new expansion pack.

所以我们把原本只是事后诸葛的广告，用来激发人们对产品的兴趣，变成了能给我们产品方向和收入信号的东西。很多时候，你可以把一个现有产品中原本用于营销的东西，变成一种稀缺性和热度驱动的功能，从而推动收入或其他重要指标。因此，我们使用 AI 的方式应该是把它当作一个测试机器、一个失败机器，以及一种氛围编码、云端编码的方式，但目标是构建产品的最低可行循环版本，以便从中获得反馈信号。

And so we took something that was going to be afterthought advertising, try to drum up interest in this product and turn it into something that gave us signal and direction on the product and revenues. And so often, you know, you can have an existing product, but you can turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and heat driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to vibe code, Claude Code, but build the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on.

太棒了。我想问一个可能很多人听到你说话时会想到的问题。对于很多产品构建者来说，当他们想到 Zynga 时，他们并不会觉得这是他们想构建的产品。你们构建的产品范围很广，有像 Farmville 和 Cityville 这样的，我觉得会让一些人反感。然后还有像 Poker、Words with Friends、Mafia Wars 这样的，我觉得人们会觉得‘哦，太棒了，我喜欢’。你能谈谈这个吗？

Awesome. I want to ask about something that I think might be on people's minds as they hear you talk. For a lot of product builders, when they think Zynga, they're not like this is the product I want to build, you know, and there's a spectrum of products you guys have built. There's like Farmville and Cityville and all these things that I think turn some people off. Then there's like Poker, Words with Friends, Mafia Wars that I think people are like, 'Oh, that's amazing. I love that.' Can you just speak to that?

当然。如果我要解读你说的产品让人反感，有趣的是你这么说，因为 Farmville 和 Cityville 在安装量、参与度、留存率和收入方面是我们最大的成功。而 Words with Friends 和 Poker 更持久，因为它们成功过渡到了移动端，其他游戏没有。这是另一个故事了。但我觉得你想说的是，Zynga 在很多方面是自己成功的受害者。我们的游戏病毒式传播太厉害，占据了 Facebook 的信息流，以至于你玩这个游戏的朋友开始打扰不玩的你。这很公平。但我想说的是，我认为从一开始人们对 Zynga 就有误解，我们之所以成功，是因为我们在 10 次大型游戏发布中创造了 8 个巨大成功。我们的成功率很高。不是因为我们擅长病毒式传播，而是因为我们专注于两件事，我认为我们比任何人都做得好。我们有很多竞争对手，很多抄袭，但我们仍然保持胜利。所以不可能仅仅是因为我们更垃圾或更擅长病毒式传播。

Sure. I think if I'm unpacking that when you say that the products turn people off, it's funny you say that because Farmville and Cityville were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues. Now Words with Friends and Poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and the other games didn't. That's a whole other story. But I think the part you're getting to is that Zynga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success. Our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it. And that's fair. But what I would say, I think what's misunderstood about Zynga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created eight massive hits out of 10 mass large game launches. We had a very high hit rate. It wasn't that we were good at virality. It was that we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else. And we had lots of competitors, lots of copying and we still managed to keep winning. So it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality.

首先，我们有一个核心使命和焦点，那就是通过游戏连接世界。戈登和我一直回到这个我热爱的想法，我希望正在观看的创始人和产品制造者能和我一起思考：我们如何增加更多的维度？我喜欢这个我称之为‘大胆节拍’的想法。就是如何把一个已经变得无聊的东西，比如扑克，增加一个全新的维度？通过增加社交、真实身份，让你在社交网络中，在鸡尾酒会上，现在我们给你一种在游戏中结识新朋友或改善关系的方式。为什么那么多人，尤其是中年女性，喜欢 Farmville 这些游戏？因为她们有这种爱好，但她们不是独自在做。她们和好朋友一起做，结交新朋友。在游戏中，我们最成功的功能是合作玩法。有让你送礼和为朋友做有价值事情的功能。所以我们把游戏称为投资、表达和连接。你可以做一些让你看起来有创意的事情。我喜欢说人们不想有创意，他们想感觉有创意。所以我们让你感觉有创意，在别人看来有创意。这就是今天 Midjourney 为我做的。然后我们让你表达自己，并围绕它与人连接。

First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games. Gordon and I kept coming back to this idea that I love and I want your founders, product makers watching this to join me in thinking about: how can we add more dimensionality? I love this idea of what I call a bold beat. It's how do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring, like poker, and add a whole new dimension to it? By adding social, by adding real identities, by giving you this, you're doing social networking, you're in this cocktail party, and now we're giving you a way to actually meet new people or improve your relationships in a game. The reason why so many people, especially middle-aged women, loved Farmville and these games was because they had this kind of hobby, but they weren't doing it alone. They were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. And in the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There were things that let you do gifting and do things of value to your friends. And so we called the games invest, express, and connect. You could do something that made you seen as creative. I like to say people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative. So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. It's what Midjourney does for me today. And then we were letting you express yourself and connect with people around it.

然后从机械指标层面来看，我们的核心指标是留存率，而不是病毒式传播。我们成长了。我们比所有人都持久，因为我们有最好的留存率。我认为我们是世界上唯一一家追踪第 365 天留存率的消费者公司。我不认为今天还有人在追踪。我在书里谈到过。我认为这是给创始人的礼物。我相信世界上最有价值的公司，统计上这是真的，它们有最高的第 365 天留存率。你能针对第 365 天留存率来构建吗？是的。我们不能等到第 365 天。我们可以找到第 365 天留存率正面和负面的早期指标。如果你的第 1 天和第 30 天留存率低，你可能不会有高的第 365 天留存率。所以这些是相关的。但反过来也可能：第 30 天留存率很高，但第 365 天留存率为零，这是大多数产品的情况。如果你不考虑为什么有人会在一年后使用这个产品，如果你没有这种心态，结果当别人尝试我们的产品时，他们也会那样想。他们会想，这值得投入吗？无论是游戏还是相机，我一年后还会用吗？我应该告诉朋友吗？我值得投入吗？我值得给它我的信息吗？我认为这是一种心态。我喜欢说基于病毒式传播的公司，有很多，比如 BeReal，我们见过这些，它们是正在下沉的快艇。它们试图开得比下沉速度快。它们试图让更多人进来。你要么开得更快，更快地舀水出去，也就是试图让人们回来，要么堵住船上的洞，要么造一艘没有洞的更好的船。所以我们在游戏和网络中追踪留存率，并不断思考这个问题。

Then if you think at a mechanical metric level, our core metric was retention, not virality. We grew. We outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about it in the book. I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, statistically this is true, they have the highest day 365 retention. Can you build against day 365 retention? Yes. We can't wait till day 365. We can find early indicators of a positive day 365 and a negative day 365 retention. If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have high day 365. So those are correlated. But you can have the opposite: very high day 30 and zero day 365, which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that way too. They think, is this worth investing in? Whether it's a game or a camera, am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this? Should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me? And I think there's a mentality to that. I like to say viral-based companies, and there have been many, like BeReal, we've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking. They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster, which is try to get people back, or plug the hole in the boat, or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. So we were tracking both in our games and our network: what was the retention? And we were constantly thinking about that.

我认为从 Zynga 的成功中可以学到的两件事是：有一个强大的创新愿景，并将其转化为团队每周的工作。我们甚至建立了一个至今无人使用的指标。这是一个彩蛋，如果这段没被剪掉，还有人听的话。我们建立了一个叫 ASN 的指标，它代表我们测量的东西：你的活跃社交网络。所以我们看你与朋友或其他玩家有多少次往返互动。意思是，你走了一步，他们回了一步。你送了礼物，他们回赠了礼物。我们发现，如果你的 ASN 从零增加到一，那么下个月我们再见到你的概率是 80%。如果我们让你达到四，那么接下来 30 天中有 22 天见到你的概率是 80%。所以我们实际上可以针对这个指标进行构建和创新。

I think the two things to take away from Zynga's success in my opinion that I hold is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week. And we even built a metric that's still not used by anyone. This is an Easter egg if anyone doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening. We built a metric called ASN, and it stood for what we measured: what was your active social network. So we looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player. Meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back. You gifted them and they gifted you back. And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. And so we could actually build and innovate against that metric.

我们来聊聊打造一款面向消费者的社交应用。这非常难。很少有人成功做到并建立起持久的东西。我们在播客里经常讨论这个。感觉在消费者领域，什么都行不通。就是火一阵子然后就死了。而你可能是打造社交消费产品最多的人。大概有十几个成功案例。理论上，AI 显然会改变游戏规则。你认为在今天的世界里，要想让某个东西再次成功，需要具备什么条件？

Let's talk about building a consumer social app. Very hard. Very few people have successfully done it and built something durable. We talk about this on the podcast a bunch. It's like nothing works in consumer. Like it works for a little bit and then dies. And you've maybe built more social consumer products than anyone. Like there's like a dozen that have worked. AI obviously changes the game in theory. What do you think needs to be true for someone for something to work again in today's world?

你可能同样惊讶，我们在社交和消费领域看到的东西太少了。似乎人们已经放弃了社交应用能火起来的想法。我时不时会看到这种情况。他们放弃是有充分理由的，因为没有任何东西被证明有效，也没有任何东西在起作用。所以我首先会想：是否存在潜在需求？仅仅因为某个类别今天不存在，并不意味着我们作为消费者不想要它。事实上，最好的机会往往恰恰相反。2007 年我创办 Zynga 时，电子游戏是一个 230 亿美元的业务。但我已经不玩游戏了。我认识的人里也没人玩游戏。它甚至不是网络上的十大活动之一。我当时认为存在潜在需求。我喜欢游戏。我喜欢和家人一起玩，但我没法让人们和我一起玩游戏。投入太大，太难了。要说服别人和你一起玩游戏，简直像在碎玻璃上爬行。真的，我让我那些狂热的游戏迷侄子们和我一起玩《国家的崛起》，我们给他们装了两台机器，给我装了两台，我们在一台机器上开着 FaceTime，然后玩游戏，我们连上了游戏服务器，就玩了一次。我当时想，这太费劲了，虽然好玩，但只玩了一次。我说我的前提是对的。我相信这可以而且应该成为一种大众市场活动。我相信成年人想让自己有理由去玩，但我必须让它变得非常容易获得，非常便宜，对用户要求很低。免费。甚至不仅仅是免费，因为当时游戏并不免费。买一个游戏要 60 美元。所以我让它免费，我说，我要做一个你已经知道的游戏。点击三次就能进入。我只要求你花 5 到 15 分钟，你会偶然发现它。就像面包屑一样。你不会特意去漫画书店，但如果漫画出现在报纸上，我们就会读。所以我当时相信存在潜在需求。事实上，今天游戏是一个 2800 亿美元的行业。而且我仍然认为存在潜在需求。再次，我不玩游戏。我认识的人除了我的侄女侄子外没人玩游戏。但它却是这么大的生意。所以我实际上认为游戏领域还有另一波巨大增长，因为它已经这么大，却又这么无聊，成年人都不玩，或者它一定很大，但我认识的人都不玩。所以，关于社交和消费，我相信我们不仅有潜在需求，我们实际上已经在网上社交了。我们在用 Snapchat、Instagram 和 TikTok，但我认为它已经失去了那种兴奋感。我经常思考兴奋感。比如，它还有热度吗？你上 Instagram 是感到兴奋，还是有点像在吃薯片？这些是正能量、负能量还是空热量？我认为有趣的一点是，我们看了净推荐值（NPS），发现当人们退出 Facebook 和 Instagram 时，他们的 NPS 从+35 降到了-35。人们有一种刚戒烟的感觉。人们会自豪地告诉你他们不用 Instagram，对吧？他们并不怀念那个派对。他们会说：“哇，我戒掉了。”所以，我认为这是互联网上最大的未被探索的机会。我非常有信心，有人会在智能体式 AI 时代重新发明这种社交体验。但他们要怎么做呢？我猜他们会再次给我们带来生产力。他们会让一部分我们曾经拥有的东西回归。人们忘了 Facebook 给了我们巨大的社交生产力。我们能够与 300 或 1000 个朋友保持联系。LinkedIn 给了我们巨大的生产力。它们现在仍然如此，但它们开始偏离那种生产力，进入浪费时间的领域，因为它们想要更多参与度和更多广告，而 LinkedIn 可能现在也有广告了，但当然，Instagram 嫉妒 TikTok。所以它们开始那样做。因此，我认为我们可以从这种体验中获得一种新的阶梯式生产力提升，我们的智能体让我们能够更好地与关心的人保持联系，同时又不那么浪费时间。我还要说，社交有一个方面，我称之为鸡尾酒会。那对我来说是最大的直觉源泉。我思考那个鸡尾酒会，思考它在哪里发生，或者它想要在哪里发生，以及我们如何添加东西。我们喜欢主持鸡尾酒会，如果我们不主持，我们也喜欢参加。当我们看到一个很棒的鸡尾酒会时，我们就能认出来。你知道它，你感觉到它。你会想：“哦，我真高兴我在这里。”它从一种义务感——我在这个派对上，这是生日派对——变成几乎贪婪的感觉，比如我爱这个派对，我爱我遇到的人。在一个很棒的鸡尾酒会上，你得到了什么？你经常得到很好的线索。

It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in social and consumer in general. It seems like people have kind of given up on the idea that a social app could take off or be viral. And I see them every so often. And they've given up for good reason because nothing's proven and nothing's working. So I like to think first is there latent demand? So if just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite. And in 2007 when I started Zynga, video gaming was a $23 billion business. But I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web. And I thought there's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing with my family, but I can't get people to play games with me. And it's too much investment. It's too hard. It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. Literally, I got my nephews who are intense gamers to play Rise of Nations with me and we set up two machines for them and two for me and we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game and we were on a game server and we did that one time and I was like that is a lot of effort and it was fun but we did it once and I said my premise was okay. I believe this could be and should be a mass market activity. I believe adults want to give themselves permission to play, but I got to make it so accessible, so cheap in terms of what it asks for them. Free. Not just free even, which it wasn't. It was $60 to go buy a game. So, I made it free and I said, I'm going to make it a game you already know. Three clicks and you're in. And I'm going to ask five to 15 minutes of you, you know, to do this and you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. You're not going to, like I say, we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read them. So, I believed there was a latent demand. And in fact, today, gaming is a $280 billion industry. And I actually think there's latent demand. Again, I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews. And yet it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth waiting in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it or they must be some it's very big but none I know. So okay so social and consumer I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social we are being social right online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok, but I believe it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Like, is there a heat in it? Like, are you excited to go get on Instagram or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips? Like, are these positive calories or negative calories or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35. There's people have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram, right? They're not missing the party. They're like, "Whoa, I got off that." So, I think so. So I think all that to say I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I mean I think I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent this social experience for the agentic AI age. They're but how are they going to do it? You know, I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again. That they're going part of what we got. People forget Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or a thousand friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity. They still do, but they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of wasting time because they wanted to engage more and have more ads and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but but definitely, you know, Instagram had TikTok envy. So, you know, they started doing that. And so I think there is a new step function of productivity that we could be getting in that experience that our agents are letting us stay even more in the loop with the people we care about or you know but not wasting our time as much. So and I'll also say this there's a side of this I call this social thing the cocktail party. Okay, that's that's the big instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party and I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen and how how do we add things to the We'd love to host the cocktail party and if we're not, we'd love to be at it. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You know it. You feel it. You're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm here." And it's moves from like obligatory. I'm at this party, it's the birthday party to almost like greed, like I love this party, I'm love the people I'm meeting. And what do you get at a great cocktail party? You often get great leads.

所以那个鸡尾酒会，对我来说是从 Napster 开始的，当时我们所有人都突然连接在一起，而那个巨大的线索就是音乐文件。但后来 Facebook、LinkedIn，我们得到的是更好的线索生成。那是我们时间上更好的生产力。在那之前，我们会去 Google 或 Craigslist 找线索，但信号噪声比很高。而现在我们就像，‘天哪，我可以在 Facebook 上找到约会对象。’而且这确实是个好线索。我在 Facebook 上有过不错的约会。所以我想对人们说的是，如果你想重塑社交，就去找鸡尾酒会在哪里，或者你可以自己主办，然后思考线索生成是如何发生的。我说‘线索生成’可能听起来很奇怪，但 LinkedIn 是什么？LinkedIn 就是从线索生成开始的。所有的生产力、价值都始于今天这个鸡尾酒会中的实用性。顺便说一句，对于 Zynga，我说，我要去参加鸡尾酒会。每个人都在社交网络上闲逛。我要在中间投放游戏，给他们一个新的维度在游戏中社交，因为他们想待在 Facebook 上。我想给他们更多事情做。今天，我们都泡在我们的 Claude、GPT 上，但没有鸡尾酒会。所以我给人们的彩蛋是，这是一个安静、孤独的鸡尾酒会，就像社交网络之前的网络一样。我给你们听众的挑战是，想办法让它热闹起来，想办法让那个鸡尾酒会变得社交化且具有社交生产力，你很可能会在那里找到金子。

And so that cocktail party that for me it started with Napster when all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file. But then Facebook, LinkedIn, what we were getting was better lead generation. That was better productivity for our time. Before that, we would go to Google for a lead or Craigslist. And it was a lot of noise to signal. And now we're like, "Oh my god, I could get on Facebook and find a date." And it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Facebook. So what I would say to people is look, if you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is or you could host, and then think about how lead generation is happening. It might sound weird when I say lead generation, but what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn started with lead generation. All the productivity, the value started in the utility of being in this cocktail party today. And by the way, with Zynga, I said, I'm going to go to the cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks. I'm going to drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension to network in the games because they want to be on Facebook. I want to give them more to do. Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. So my Easter egg to people is it's a quiet, lonely cocktail party like the web was before social networking. And my challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy, figure out how to make that cocktail party social and socially productive, and you will probably find gold there.

我想回到你的话题，你的问题是，你怎么知道一个想法是 B+，对吧？

I want to come back to your thread on your question was how do you know when an idea is a B+, right?

是的。

Yeah.

好的。

Okay.

我喜欢这个问题，嗯，你怎么知道它是 B+？我想对你说的是，你怎么知道你和对的人在一起？就像你在约会。你约会的经历是什么？我的经验是，当我和对的人在一起时，我知道。我不会问‘这是对的人吗？’而是‘是的，我爱这个人。这就是我要找的人。’那是最棒的感觉。我希望每个人都能体验到。当你和一个 A- 的人在一起时，你实际上是在和一个 B+ 的人在一起。你在问‘这会是那个对的人吗？’你就像，你知道，奥修说过，如果你在两条路之间犹豫不决，那么两条路都是错的。你知道，你两只脚各踩一条船。如果你在问你的产品是不是 A，那它就不是 A。你充满了希望。你希望它是 A。这并不意味着你没有机会把它变成 A，但第一个智力上的诚实是承认，好吧，它不是。然后，嗯，你怎么知道？你怎么得到它不是的验证？你没有它是的验证。当你拥有瓶中的闪电，当你拥有真正的信号时，一切都会奏效。从轶事上讲，你热爱你的产品。你沉迷于它。你把它展示给朋友，他们也喜欢它。你的指标显示它有效。我的意思是，我们需要问 GPT 是不是那个东西吗？我们说过‘哦，GPT 是那个东西吗？我不确定’吗？你知道，我们就像‘不，我靠它生活，它让我梦想做新的事情。’对吧？所以，我想说困难的部分是，你知道，你拿一个 B+ 怎么办？首先，我们能不能在智力上诚实，承认它是 B+？然后我们拿 B+ 怎么办？我们直接扼杀它，重新开始？还是用它来学习？力量在于知道它是 B+。这是第一点：好吧，这不是那个东西。现在，我拿它怎么办？它是一种学习的方式吗？我有没有看到接近这个的例子是那个东西？我能不能找到任何被证明或接近被证明的东西？当我们意识到它不是那个东西时，我们寻找更多的事情去做，这是一个非常艰难的教训。两周前，我第四次终止了我的地球项目。好吧，我建造我版本的元宇宙已经 20 年了。正是它引领我创立了 Zynga。我把我想象的元宇宙称为‘游戏速度的生活’。无论如何，随着 AI 的发展，我们正越来越接近那个目标。顺便说一句，我定义元宇宙，我归功于里德·霍夫曼的这个定义，是模糊虚拟与现实的界限。而我们的生活方式无论如何都在朝那个方向发展。所以我们变得越来越‘元宇宙化’。它不是进入另一个逃避现实的沉浸式世界。而是虚拟和现实完全融合在一起。但我一直从游戏的角度切入，我变得‘原生’了，但不是好的那种。你知道，我太想证明我能构建这种体验，以至于我在构建一个游戏引擎，一个基于浏览器的游戏引擎。但我没有找到产品市场契合。我太雄心勃勃了。我没有追求一个小想法。我追求的是一个非常大的想法。这非常困难，我在投入四年时间和 2500 万美元在这个版本上之后终止了它。而在那之后的两个星期里，我比过去四年受到了更多灵感的启发。所以，终止一个 B+ 项目是有力量的，甚至更多，你知道，终止一个 D 项目。

I love the question on well, how do you know if it's a B+? And what I would say to you is how do you know if you're with the right person? Like you're dating. What was your experience dating? And my experience has been that when I'm with the right person, I know it. I'm not asking, is this the right person? I'm like yeah. I love this person. This is my person. And that's the best feeling ever. And I hope everyone can experience that. When you're with the A minus person, you're with the B+. You're asking, could this be the one? You're like, you're and you know, Osho said if you're torn between two paths, they're both wrong. You know, you have feet in two canoes. If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. And you're full of hope. You hope it's an A. It doesn't mean you might not have the chance to turn that into an A, but the first point of intellectual honesty is to say, okay, it's not. And then, well, how do you know how are you getting validation that it's not? You don't have the validation that it is. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. It's anecdotally, you love your product. You're addicted to it. You show it to friends and they love it. Your metrics show that it works. I mean, did we have to ask if GPT was it? Did we say, "Oh, is GPT it? I'm not sure." You know, we're like, "No, I'm living on that and it's making me dream of new things to do." Right? So, I'd say the hard part about this is, you know, what do you do with a B+? First, can we be intellectually honest that it is a B+? And then what do we do with a B+? Do we just kill it and start all over again? Do we use it to learn? The power is knowing it's a B+. That's the first point is okay, this is not it. Now, what do I do with that? Is it a way to learn? Do I see examples that are near this that are it? Can I find anything proven or near proven? When we realize it's not it, we look for more things to do and it's such a hard lesson. Two weeks ago, I pulled the plug on my Earth project for like the fourth time. Okay, I've been building my version of the metaverse for 20 years. It's what led me to Zynga. I call the metaverse that I want life at the speed of play. We're getting closer and closer to that anyway with AI. And by the way, I define the metaverse, I give Reed Hoffman credit for this definition, as blurring the lines between the virtual and the real. And that is where our lives are going anyway. So we're getting more and more metaversian. It's not being in this other escape to immersive world. It's that the virtual and the real completely blur together. But I kept coming at it from the game side and I went native, not in the good way. You know, I got so into wanting to prove I could build this experience that I was building this game engine, web browser-based game engine. And I was not getting product-market fit. I was being too ambitious. I was not going for a small idea. I was going for a really big idea. And it was really hard and I pulled the plug on it after four years in and $25 million in just this one version of it. And in the last two weeks since then, I've been more inspired around ideas than I have been in four years. So there is power in pulling the plug on a B+ and even more, you know, on a D.

我想讨论一下‘深渊’，你在书中经常谈到它，说它是好想法的源泉。但我想在这个话题上谈谈分销。这个播客中经常提到的一个问题是，随着 AI 让构建东西变得如此容易，最大的挑战之一变成了分销。这始终是一个挑战，一直很难，现在比以往任何时候都难，因为市场上不断有太多事情发生。有太多东西试图吸引你的注意力。所有渠道都充满了付费和 SEO。你对创始人有什么建议？你认为一家初创公司要脱颖而出需要具备什么条件，因为现在太难了？

There's a whole discussion I want to have about the abyss, which you talk a lot about in the book of how that's such a source of good ideas. But I want to touch on distribution just as we're on this thread. Something that's come up a lot on this podcast is just how with AI making it so easy to build stuff, one of the biggest challenges becomes distribution. Always been a challenge, always been hard, harder than ever because there's so much happening in the market constantly. There's so much trying to get your attention. All the channels are full paid and SEO. What's your just like advice to founders? What do you think needs to be true for a startup to break out because it's so hard now?

让我们从谈论消费者分销开始，这方面我更了解。

Let's start with talking about consumer distribution which I understand better.

是的。

Yes.

有一个问题我们需要退后一步真正探讨，那就是：AI 是一个新平台吗？我认为它还不是一个新平台。它是一项重要的技术。我们有一个新的门户通向它，比如 GPT 或我们使用的任何 AI 聊天。但在我看来，它不是一个平台。传统意义上的平台是硬件平台。嗯，在消费者端，它肯定还不是一个硬件平台。人们正在尝试探索，但还不是。然后它至少变成了一个界面平台，无论是 Windows 界面、浏览器界面还是开放的社交网络。而在移动端，它既是硬件也是界面。我们还没有到那一步。我相信我们会到达那里。我不知道怎么到达。我有一些想法，但我们还没有到那一步。承认这一点很重要，并说我们仍然处于移动和网络时代。我们仍然使用浏览器。即使我们在这个聊天应用里，它也不是其他应用、体验和开发者的平台。

There's a one question we got to back up and really explore which is: is AI a new platform? And I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology. We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever chat we use AI chat. But it's not in my mind a platform. A platform in the traditional sense of it was a hardware platform. Well, it's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. People are trying to explore that, but it is not yet. And then it became at least an interface platform whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up. And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. We're not at that point yet. I believe we will get there. I don't know how. I have ideas, but we're not there yet. And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. We still use a browser. And even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers.

有可能。我希望它成为平台，但还不是。我们大概处于通往平台的半路上。我们正处于一个发现期。在消费层面取得突破的新技术会解锁发现，这非常重要。发现意味着，当我们刚拿到手机时，我们一直在安装新应用。现在，我们几乎从不安装新应用。平均每个用户每月安装的应用数为零。所以，很重要的一点是，我们不仅不在发现期，而且即使有发现，也无法持久。去年应用商店发布了大约 4 万款新游戏，但没有一款进入前十，甚至没有一款能维持在前 25 或前 50。所以你的胜算很低。因此，现在不是高信心推出消费产品的理想时机。我们必须承认这一点。这使得社交和游戏等消费类别几乎不值得投资。它们仍然有投资，但非常困难。现在做专业消费者或企业级产品要容易得多。这是有原因的，因为我们看到这些公司的 ARR（年经常性收入）增长非常快。所以我确实认为现在是做消费创意的好时机，你问到了分销。分销对任何消费商业创意都至关重要，是核心。它不能是事后才想到的。不是‘我造出最好的捕鼠器，他们就会来’。分销必须成为你产品的一部分，深深融入战略，并从一开始就得到验证。如果你只是构建产品，希望他们会来，希望它会病毒式传播或口口相传，那是希望策略，不是信念策略。这并不意味着你不应该继续实验。现在正是实验的好时机。事实上，一年后试图在市场上获得同样的东西，成本会高出一百倍，因为噪音会多一百倍。一旦有了分销，竞争就会蜂拥而至。但当分销如此破碎时，它对你的产品和战略就更加核心。我们看到很多成功的公司采用专业消费者方法，瞄准他们的重度用户、大客户，那些足够关心、愿意提前花钱来维持业务的人，远在我们能触及大众消费者之前。

It could be. I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And that we're kind of like halfway to a platform. We are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't ever install new apps. You know, the average app installs per user per month is zero. So, it's really important to think about that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, it doesn't stick. You know, there were something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the app store and zero became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. So, your odds are bad. So it's not an ideal moment to be launching consumer with high confidence. And that's just something that we have to acknowledge. And it makes consumer categories like social and games almost not investable. They're still getting investment, but it's very hard. It's much easier to be prosumer or enterprise now. For good reason because we're seeing those companies scale revenue ARRs very quickly. So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas, and you asked about distribution. Distribution is just so crucial and core to any consumer business idea. And it can't be an afterthought. It's not 'I'm going to build the best mousetrap and they're going to come.' Distribution has to be part of your product and baked into the strategy deeply and proven from the beginning. And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, that's a hope strategy, not a belief strategy. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep experimenting. Now is a great time to experiment. In fact, it'll be a hundred times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because there'll be a hundred times more noise. And once there is distribution, there'll be a flood of competition. But when distribution is this broken, it is even more core to your product and your strategy. I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a prosumer approach, that go after their power users, their whales, the people who care enough to find it, care enough to spend money on it upfront to sustain a business long before we can get out to consumer.

Gary Tan 有一个很棒的想法，我在这里重复一下，因为我这周非常喜欢它：如果我们进入一种‘智能即服务、免费 token’的心态，并认为我们今天购买的 token 数量在一两年后基本上会免费，token 供应会大幅增加。我们的需求也会增加，但如果今天我们就开始基于免费 token 重新构想消费服务，我认为这是一个非常有趣的创新领域。这听起来可能像是一个.com 商业计划。我记得为我的狗 Zynga 订购猪耳朵，并想给 VC 们写感谢信，因为它们比 Petco 便宜，对吧？那不是个好商业计划。所以亏本赠送 token 不是好商业计划，但它可能成为一个非凡的业务，因为.com 的问题在于猪耳朵的价格不会下降，配送成本也不会下降，但 token 的价格会下降。所以我认为这是另一个有趣的洞见，我对此很感兴趣，我认为创始人会用这个做出非常有趣的事情。因为游戏行不通，高级游戏和高级应用必须使用 AI，即使你想花钱，也会遇到 token 限制。所以今天绕过这个限制可能会解锁真正有趣的创新。

There is a great idea that Gary Tan had that I'll repeat here because I loved it so much this week: if we get in the mindset of basically intelligence on tap, free tokens, and if we think that the amount of tokens we're buying today will basically be free in a year or two, that the token supply is going to go up so much. Our demand will too, but if today we start building re-imagining consumer services based on free tokens, I think that's such an interesting innovation zone. It could sound like a dot-com business plan. I remember ordering pig ears for my dog Zynga and wanting to send thank you notes to the VCs because they were cheaper than at Petco, right? That's not a good business plan. So giving away tokens at a loss isn't a good business plan, but it might be a phenomenal business because what the dot-com thing had wrong was the price of pig ears wasn't going to come down or delivery wasn't going to come down, but the price of tokens will. So I think that's another kind of Easter egg of an insight that I'm intrigued by, and I think founders are going to do something really interesting with it. Because games don't work, premium games and premium apps that have to go and hit the AI, even if you wanted to spend on it, you're hitting token limits. So getting around that today might unlock really interesting innovation.

我还有一个关于社交鸡尾酒会的彩蛋想法。我喜欢智能体在中间撮合我们社交关系的想法。回到线索生成、约会、工作、一般列表，但我喜欢智能体拥有我们的背景，知道我的背景和你的背景。我们有一个膜，我称之为社交膜。这个智能的信任膜。它越来越聪明，知道何时动态改变这种信任或改变它从我们这里获取的注意力水平，就像一个出色的幕僚长。它可以向我们双方透露比它知道的更少的信息。比如你在马林，我说‘Lenny，我们聚聚吧。’你说‘Mark，我很乐意。’那么，好吧，让我们的社交秘书来处理。在任何给定的周末，你的兴趣和我的兴趣存在不对称。我们如何在不伤害彼此感情的情况下进行撮合？AI 和智能体可以在我们之间进行一些非常有趣的撮合，以提升我们双方的效率。它们找到让我们聚在一起的方式，而不会陷入你看到我在你周六的日程上，而你想陪孩子的尴尬境地。

I also have another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. I love the idea of the agent being in the middle and brokering our social relationships. Getting back to lead gen, dating, jobs, general listings, but I love the idea that the agent has our context and knows my context and your context. And we have this membrane. I call it the social membrane. This intelligent membrane of trust. And it gets smarter and smarter at knowing when to dynamically change that trust or change that attention level that it's going to take from us, like a great chief of staff. And it could share less information with both of us than it knows. It could be you're in Marin and I'm like, 'Lenny, let's hang out.' You're like, 'Mark, I'd love that.' So, okay, let's have our social secretaries work on that. There's going to be an asymmetry in your interest and my interest in any given weekend and hanging out. And how do we broker that without hurting one of our feelings? There are some really interesting spaces that the AI and the agent can broker between us in ways that start to give us both productivity. They find ways for us to get together without getting in a bad place of you see me on your calendar for Saturday and you want to be with your kids.

我喜欢你分享的这些想法。我听到的总是这个想法：为什么我们不能直接‘这是我的日历，这是你的日历，我们找个时间’。问题在于你不想让人觉得你无所事事，像个最无聊的人。你不想让对方知道。

I love all these ideas you're sharing. What I'm hearing there is this always this idea of why can't we just here's my calendar, here's your calendar, let's just find time. And the issue there is you don't want to ever feel like you don't want to look like you've got nothing going on and you're the most boring person. Like you don't want the other person to know.

完全对你开放。

It's totally open available to you.

是的，没错。

Yeah. Exactly.

更糟糕的是，你不想它给你安排一个你并不想参加的会议……

And even worse, you don't want it to schedule you for a meeting that was not...

是的，没错。回到分销部分，我听到的是我们可能正处于一个新分销平台的边缘，一种让人们发现你的方式。但还没有实现。

Yeah, that's right. Just to close the loop on the distribution part, what I'm hearing is like we might be on the verge of a new distribution platform, a way to get out and for people to discover you. It's not there yet.

我对此介于信念和希望之间，因为我没有足够的证据去相信，但它对我来说比单纯的希望更有可能。我认为目前各大 LLM 之间在编程方面存在明显的竞赛和竞争。我认为它们会重新赢得消费者、专业消费者和开发者的心。它们对开发者的心感兴趣，但首先它们在编程领域竞争。但我认为，无论如何，我们最终会有一个面向消费者的 AI 应用和智能体平台。

I'm somewhere between belief and hope in this because I don't have enough evidence to believe it, and it's a little more likely to me than just hope. I think right now there's an obvious race and competition around coding between the major LLMs. I think they're going to get back to consumer and prosumer and developers' hearts and minds. I think they are interested in developers' hearts and minds, but first they're competing on this coding front. But I think where we will get to in one way or another is that there will be some kind of consumer-facing platform for AI apps and agents.

我能看到很多面向消费者的智能体式服务，我觉得消费者会想要，但如果它们只是埋没在移动应用商店里，消费者就找不到。我认为这对 OpenAI、Claude、Grok 都有好处，他们应该希望这些面向消费者的智能体式服务应用出现，并搭载他们的 LLM 取得成功。越是对 OpenAI 独特实例化的服务，就越能提升他们的消费者价值主张。举个例子，我心目中的头号彩蛋是，应该有一个智能体式旅行代理。这是一个完美例子，说明存在潜在需求，而我们之所以没有，是因为提供它在经济上不合理——我们不愿付足够的钱。我相信，如果我给你一个免费的 24/7 旅行代理，随时为你服务，了解你的旅行背景，了解你，并且能实际预订——不只是预订旅行，最宝贵的是当你在旅途中时，它能随时帮你重新预订航班，实时处理你的旅行后勤，而现实往往做不到。这对我们所有人都很有价值，但无法实现，因为旅行代理无法谋生。他们拿不到足够的佣金，我们也不愿付足够的钱。互联网的发展让我们得到了更好的交易，但下一个增长领域可能仍包含交易，但我认为更重要的是获得出色的服务。这是我的主要例子。如果有人今天做出了最好的旅行代理，我们也许能发现它，但这条路很难。但如果它专门嵌入到 OpenAI 或 Claude 中，并让我清楚地看到我从 GPT 中获得了价值，而不仅仅是 AI 聊天带来的通用价值——我现在越来越难区分了，我甚至不知道我是在问 Claude 还是 GPT——所以他们在某个时候会通过编程来区分，这有真正的价值，是一门了不起的生意，但在消费者层面，他们并没有太大的区分度。

I can see so many consumer-facing agentic services that make so much sense to me. I think consumers will want them, but they're not going to get them if they're just buried in the mobile app store. I think it's going to be in OpenAI's interest, Claude, Grok, to see these consumer-facing agentic service apps happen and be successful with their LLM baked in. The more it's uniquely instantiated to OpenAI, the more it drives their consumer value proposition. One example, my number one Easter egg, is I think there should be an agentic travel agent. A perfect example of a place where there is latent demand, and the only reason we don't have it is because it doesn't make economic sense to offer it because we won't pay enough. I believe if I offered you a free 24/7 travel agent that was always there for you, knows your travel context, knows you, and will actually book—not just book travel, but the most valuable part is when you're in the middle of a trip, be ready to rebook your flight and be on top of your travel logistics as they happen, often failing. That's valuable to all of us, but not available because travel agents couldn't make a living. They weren't getting enough commissions, and we weren't ready to pay enough. The internet has grown through us getting a better deal, but the next area of growth probably will include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services. That's my prime example. If someone built the best travel agent today, maybe we'd find out about it, but it's a tough road. But if it was specifically baked into OpenAI or Claude and gave me a clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond the generic value from AI chat—which I'm having more and more trouble differentiating; I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or GPT—so at some point, they differentiate on coding, which is real value and an amazing business, but they're not differentiating much at the consumer level.

是的。对我来说，问题是：他们会不会自己去做？如果他们正在构建这个 AGI，为什么还需要别人来做？他们可以自己做所有事情。所以我觉得有趣的是，看他们是想要吞掉整个市场，还是与其他初创公司友好相处。

Yeah. To me, the question is: are they just going to do it? Why do they need anyone to do it if they are building this AGI? They could just do all the things. So I think it's going to be interesting to see if they want to eat the entire market of everything or play nice with other startups.

是的，那会很有趣。我们过去有微软的例子。微软是一个残酷的垄断者，一个残酷的平台。他们吞噬了周围的一切。然后在我们这里，我们在 Facebook 上也看到了。他们不关心的两个领域是音乐，因为知识产权问题很麻烦，以及游戏，因为他们不想雇佣艺术家。其他一切他们都吸收了。我想换个方向，谈谈你那些关于扩大公司规模、管理人才、招聘和与人合作的精彩建议。其中一个是让公司里的每个人都成为 CEO。谈谈这个经验。

Yeah, that is going to be interesting. We can see past examples with Microsoft. Microsoft was a brutal monopoly, a brutal platform. They ate everything around them. Then with us, we saw it on Facebook. The two areas they didn't care about going into were music, because it was really painful with IP rights, and games, because they didn't want to hire artists. Everything else they did absorb. I want to go in a different direction and touch on all these really amazing nuggets of advice for scaling a company, managing people, hiring people, working with people. One is this idea of making everybody a CEO at your company. Talk about that lesson.

我所有的管理原则都是出于绝望。我不喜欢管理人。我说，你管理人一天，就是工作了一天。作为产品制造者，这是必要的恶，因为我们不能放弃，让别人当 CEO，因为那样优先级会乱，团队不必听我们的，我们变成了反馈而不是方向。那是一条失败的路。所以我们必须是 CEO。但问题是如何让我们花最多时间做我们喜欢的事，最少时间做我们不喜欢的事？我开始领悟到的更大原则是，所有管理就是如何让人们在不在场时做正确的事。所以我想，好吧，如果我给他们一座山去攻占，如果我让他们成为 CEO，真正的 CEO——他们有运营控制权，有自由度以他们想要的方式攻占那座山，他们可以给我一个计划、一个预算，然后在那范围内做任何事。我发现我不需要管理他们。他们不会回来问我问题。某些人真的想当 CEO。我还发现这对人们非常有激励作用。这对我也有激励作用。我总是说，只要我领导团队，我就是团队的一员。那么我能雇佣其他像这样的人吗？我喜欢说，当我为别人工作时，我是一个受挫的专家证人。那些人是成为 CEO 的最佳人选。他们有点自以为是，认为他们有正确答案，我们会看看他们是否真的有。所以我们让他们真正成为 CEO，他们积压了所有需求去证明他们是对的。那是一件美好的事。所以我喜欢这个让每个人都成为 CEO 的原则。我们在硅谷正朝着这个方向走，即取消中层管理。Brian Armstrong 说每个人都应该是个体贡献者。每个人都应该管理很多人。对我来说，最好的 CEO 就像最好的球员，做他们擅长的事，不把时间浪费在管理上。

All my management principles I got through desperation. I don't like managing people. I say every day you're managing people is a day of work. It's a necessary evil for us as product makers because we can't abdicate and just have someone else be CEO, because all of a sudden the priorities get messed up, teams don't have to listen to us, and we're now feedback, not direction. That's a failing path. So we have to be a CEO. But then the question is how do we get to spend the most time doing what we love and the least time doing what we don't? The bigger principle I started to get to was that all of management is just how do we get people to do the right thing when we're not in the room. So I was like, okay, if I give them a hill to take, and if I make them a CEO, make them a real CEO—they have operating control, degrees of freedom to take that hill however they want, and they can give me a plan, a budget, and then do whatever they want within that. What I found was I didn't have to manage them. They're not coming back to me with questions. Certain kinds of people really want to be a CEO. What I also found was it was incredibly motivating for people. It's motivating to me. I always say, I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team. So can I hire other people like that? I like to say I was a frustrated expert witness when I worked for other people. Those are the best people to turn into a CEO. They're a little bit of a know-it-all, they think they have the right answers, and we're going to find out if they do. So we let them actually be a CEO, and they have all this pent-up demand to go and prove that they were right. That's a beautiful thing. So I love this principle of make everyone a CEO. We're kind of going there in Silicon Valley with this idea of getting rid of middle management. Brian Armstrong was saying everyone should be an individual contributor. Everyone should be managing a lot of other people. That's really to me the best CEO is like the best player at the position, doing the thing they're great at, and not wasting their time on management.

你提到了专家证人的概念，你还有一个建议是贴近底层。我喜欢这个通用建议。谈谈你是什么意思，为什么这对一个人的职业生涯很重要。

You mentioned this idea of an expert witness and you also have this nugget of advice of staying close to the metal. I love this general advice. Talk about what you mean there, why that's important for someone in their career.

它们是相辅相成的。我们在二十多岁时开始职业生涯，非常贴近底层，意思是我们是个人贡献者，致力于获取一手数据并构建实际产品。通常我们在战壕里，战壕里的人通常最接近数据，最接近正确答案，但他们也通常最远离决策。这就是我所说的专家证人综合症，因为你被“成年人”叫到证人席，你为你深信不疑的正确答案辩护，然后你被解雇，他们做出决定，然后你必须处理后果，你知道，不同意但承诺。如果我不同意是因为我是对的，而现在我承诺要收拾你的烂摊子，因为你错了，那该怎么办？

They go together. We start our careers in our 20s very close to the metal, meaning we are individual contributors and we are working on getting the primary data and building the actual product. Usually we're in the trenches, and the people in the trenches are usually closest to the data, closest to probably the right answer, but they're also usually furthest from making the decision. That's what I call the expert witness syndrome, because you're called to the stand by the adults and you plead for what you passionately believe is the right answer, and then you're excused, and then they make a decision, and then you have to deal with the consequences, and you know, disagree and commit. What if I'm disagreeing because I'm right, and now I'm committing to clean up your mess because you're wrong?

这就是为什么我们很多人成为创始人，因为我们厌倦了那种位置。你也更贴近一线。当你成为 CEO、成为创始人时，我认为我们必须小心一个悖论：保持贴近一线。我相信最好的产品 CEO 都沉浸在细节中。你知道所有关于史蒂夫·乔布斯的故事。当我听说他坚持亲自挑选会议室的毯子时，我印象非常深刻。我也试图拥有那种心态，去微观管理那些真正重要的像素级细节。我和 Discord 的创始人有过一次很棒的对话，他们也得出了同样的结论：他们需要成为一个倒金字塔。他们说：‘我们意识到，我们把最重要的产品决策——用户体验——外包给了最缺乏经验的人，而他们每天都在做这些。’我们决定把它颠倒过来，说：‘作为创始人，我们需要成为产品的第一英里和最后一英里。’我们必须是那个拍板的人。我们最好的时间利用方式就是做出这些改变产品用户体验的微小决策。所以对我来说，这就是贴近一线。布莱恩·切斯基相信用不可扩展的方式做事，亲自和团队一起手工完成。有很多关于杰夫·贝佐斯和扎克伯格的故事，他们最看重的事情就是每周花两天时间深入团队一起工作。这很有道理。如果你是公司里最好的产品制造者，我们希望你在场上。我们希望把你放在冰面上。我们不希望你花时间跟投资者交谈、管理团队和扩张规模。

And that's why many of us become founders, because we're just sick of being in that position. You're also closer to the metal. And when you become a CEO, when you become a founder, part of the paradox that I believe we have to be careful about is that we stay close to the metal. And I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutiae of the details. You know, all the stories about Steve Jobs. I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting in the conference rooms. And I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small pixel-level details that matter. And I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord, and they came to this conclusion too, that they needed to actually be an inverted pyramid. And they said, "We realized that we outsource, we delegate the most important product decisions, the UX, to our least experienced people, and they're doing this every day." And we decided to turn that upside down and say, "We as founders need to be kind of the first and last mile for the product." And we have to be the ones who bless it. Our best use of our time is making these minute decisions that change the product user experience. And so to me, that's being close to the metal. Brian Chesky believes in doing things in non-scalable ways and doing it himself with the team by hand. There are so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg of the thing that mattered most: they would go and work two days a week deeply with the team on it. And it makes sense. If you're the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field. We want to put you on the ice. We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors and managing and scaling.

是的。埃隆也以这点闻名。你在书里也有类似的说法：微观管理是美好的。你应该尽可能长时间地进行微观管理。

Yeah. Elon is famous for this too. You have this line in the book along these lines: micromanagement is beautiful. You should micromanage as long as you can.

我相信这一点，我在创建 Zynga 时也这样做了，甚至到了过分的程度。我的意思是，当我们有 50 名员工时，我们有一个持续两小时的站会，我把每个人的名字都放在一个电子表格里，记录他们昨天应该做什么、今天要做什么，然后我一个一个地问：‘好了，你完成了吗？其他人能确认他完成了吗？好的，你今天要做什么？’我完全进行了微观管理，但我们的效率高得多。然后我一直保持微观管理，因为我觉得，如果你能待在房间里，就待在房间里，假设你是最好的玩家。所以，是的，我认为现在说这个不像 20 年前那么反主流了。但在我创建 Zynga 的时候，我们不得不为微观管理或期望团队取得巨大成果之类的事情道歉。我很高兴看到这现在越来越被接受，更接近最佳实践了。

I believe that, and I did that building Zynga to a fault. I mean, we got to a point that I had all the way to 50 employees, we had a standup call that would go on for two hours, and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet, and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're going to do today, and I go through name by name and say, "Okay, did you get that done? Can everyone else verify they got that done? Okay, what are you going to do today?" And I completely micromanaged, but we were much more effective. And then I kept micromanaging things as I'm like, if you can be in the room, be in the room assuming that you are the best player. So yeah, I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was 20 years ago. But when I was building Zynga, we had to apologize for things like micromanaging or expecting massive results from our teams. And I think I'm happy to see that that's becoming kind of accepted as closer to best practices today.

但我关于管理的观点是：让人们在你不场时做正确的事。首要原则是：尽可能待在房间里，只有当你无法同时出现在所有房间时才去授权。然后所有这些管理原则只是不同的策略，试图让人们在你不场时做正确的事。我喜欢这些不可扩展的想法，它们实际上以正确的方式扩展了你作为产品制造者想做的事情。其中一个我喜欢的想法是技术助理和教学医院的概念。你如何把你的‘吸血鬼之血’传递给其他人？就像你对产品有燃烧的使命和激情，你如何把它传播给其他人，让他们在组织中传播？首先，让他们和你一起待在房间里。所以教学医院的想法是：好吧，我在做产品管理会议时，尽可能多地把人带进房间，让我的激情、想法和方法也传播给他们，这很有效。然后从团队中抓一个人，让他做你的技术助理。让他跟着你六个月或十二个月，让他成为你的迷你版，那个二十多岁时的你，那个专家证人，有点万事通的样子。然后让他跟着你，学习、吸收你所做的一切，并给他项目来测试他。然后希望你已经创造了一个迷你版，现在可以把他放在其他地方一个更大的角色上。事实上，亚马逊的安迪·贾西，S-team 的每个人都曾是贝佐斯的技术助理。所以这个想法实际上是可以扩展的，而且你几乎是免费得到了它。

But my point about management is to get people to do the right thing when you're not in the room. The first principle is: be in the room if you can be, as much as you can be, and then only delegate when you get to the point that you can't possibly be in all these rooms at the same time. And then all these management principles are just different strategies to try to get people to do the right thing when you're not there. And I love these non-scalable ideas that actually scale what you're trying to do as a product maker in the right way. And one of the ones I love is this idea of tech assistants and this idea of a teaching hospital. How do you pass the vampire blood of you to other people? Like you have this burning mission and passion around your product. How do you spread that to other people and have them spread it in the organization? The first thing is put them in the room with you. So the idea of this teaching hospital was: okay, I'm just going to put as many people as I can in the room while I'm doing these product management meetings and have my passion and ideas and approach spread to all of them too, and that worked. And then grab someone from the ranks and make them your tech assistant. Have them just follow you around for six months or 12 months and make them the mini-me, the person who is you in your 20s who was the expert witness, a little bit of a know-it-all. And start having them follow you around to pick up, learn, absorb everything you do, and give them projects to test them. And then hopefully you've created a mini-me that you can now put in a much bigger role somewhere else. And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the S-team used to be someone who had been the tech assistant to Bezos. So that idea actually scales, and you kind of get it for free.

我喜欢‘传递你的吸血鬼之血’这个说法。天哪。也许这本书里还有一个与此相关的金句：CEO 的第一要务就是正确。谈谈这个吧。

I love this phrase of transferring your vampire blood. Oh man. Maybe one last nugget from the book along these lines is you have this line: just the number one job of a CEO is to be right. Talk about that.

嗯，这是我从贝佐斯那里偷来的另一个观点。但如果让我选择 CEO 做的一件事，我会选择‘正确’。所以即使你运营船或工厂不那么好，我宁愿你选择了正确的产品、正确的战略，而不是你在执行、激励或管理方面非常出色。因为身处正确的水域比拥有正确的船更重要。一艘好船在干涸的湖床上哪儿也去不了。所以我寻找人们身上的这一点：他们正确吗？那是最好的简历。我能看到你在某件事上是正确的。我在团队中也寻找这一点。我不太在意你的风格、方法或个性是否合适。我会接受那些正确但不合群的人。我想要那些真正聪明、知识诚实的专家证人。你身边正确的人越多，他们就越能进球得分。

Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I got to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy, than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing. Because being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat. And a great boat in a dead lake bed isn't going anywhere. And so I look for that in people: are they right? That's the best resume. I could see that you were right about something. And I look for that in the team. And it's less do I like your style or approach or personality fit. I'm like, I'll take misfits who are right. I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest. And the more people you have around you who are right, they're putting balls in the net.

我想也许以一个关于你的孩子和育儿的问题来结束。在准备这次对话时，我和很多了解你的人聊过，每个人都评论说你是一位多么出色的父亲，你在生活的这一部分投入了多少时间。我一直想向那些在这个 AI 时代为人父母、而且是优秀父母的人问一个问题。有很多东西我想问，但让我从这里开始：你在教他们什么，或者帮助他们发展什么，你认为在这个我们正在进入的疯狂 AI 世界里，这对他们很重要？

I want to maybe end with a question about your kids and parenting. I talked to a bunch of people that know you well in preparation for this conversation, and every single person commented on just how wonderful a dad you are and how much time you put into that part of your life. And a question I've been trying to ask folks that are parents and great parents in this AI era. There's a lot of stuff I want to ask about, but let me start here: what's something that you are teaching them or helping them to develop that you think is going to be important to them in this crazy world we're entering of AI?

谢谢你问这个。我认为我最大的角色、工作和对世界的贡献就是努力培养善良的人。

Thank you for asking about this. I think it's my greatest role and job and service to the world is trying to grow good humans.

所以我真的投入了很多，认真对待，也从中收获了很多。我喜欢说我在培养自己最好的朋友，到目前为止确实如此。有几个原则和理念对我作为家长来说很重要。我自然而然地践行它们，并且看到它们随着时间的推移是有效的。第一个原则是，我有五个孩子，每个都是截然不同的个体。我有一个特殊需求的儿子，情况相当严重；我们一岁大的宝宝有基因突变，可能也会是神经多样性儿童。所以跨度很大。我 15 岁的女儿们是双胞胎，但性格完全不同。我发现第一个原则就是接纳他们本来的样子。对待孩子，我们可能会居高临下地跟他们说话，或者把他们当大人对待，但这两种都不对。我们必须以他们所处的水平与他们互动，但要以人对人的方式，找到合适的方法。一旦我们接纳了他们本来的样子，就能把他们带到令人惊讶的成熟境地，可能远超他们那个年龄应有的水平。比如我的双胞胎女儿——她们很小的时候我就开始和她们玩数学。疫情期间，我教她们“爸爸数学”，因为我觉得她们的学校不具备在线教学的能力。我教她们和她们的朋友爸爸数学，只是想培养她们的数学思维。我不知道她们应该学到什么程度——她们当时五年级——但我只是开始教她们如何用有趣和好奇的方式对待数学。后来我们发现，我实际上教完了八年级的数学，而我和她们当时都不知道。这很酷。

So I really put a lot into it and take it seriously, and I get so much out of it. I like to say I'm growing my best friends, and so far it's true. There are a couple principles and philosophies that have been important to me as a parent. I do them naturally and I see they work over time. The first one for me is that I have five kids, and every one of them is such a different version of a human. I have a special needs son who's fairly extreme, and our new one-year-old baby has a gene mutation and may end up being very neurodivergent. So you have this wide range. My 15-year-old girls are twins and completely divergent from each other. This first principle I've found is meeting them where they are. With kids, we can kind of talk down to them or treat them like adults, and neither is right. We have to engage with them at the altitude they're at, but as human to human, and find a way to do that. Once we meet them where they are, we can bring them to surprisingly sophisticated places that may be way beyond where they're supposed to be at that moment. For example, my twins—I started playing with math with them when they were really little. During the pandemic, I taught 'daddy math' because I saw their school wasn't equipped for online homeschooling. I taught them and their friends daddy math, just trying to teach them a math brain. I didn't know where they were supposed to be—they were in fifth grade—but I just started trying to teach them how to approach math in a fun and curious way. Later we found out I taught them all the way through eighth grade math, and I didn't know it and they didn't know it. That was cool.

谈到这在 AI 时代如何应用，我觉得我们正处于一个百年周期的大规模生产式教育的末期，这种教育旨在灌输最多的知识，提高平均分，每年培养 2000 万毕业生之类的。它是工厂式的，最初为工厂服务，后来为知识工作者服务。知识工作正在消失——它在变化——但我们仍在教授知识教育。我为我的孩子感到遗憾。我对大一点的孩子所做的，就是教他们批判性思维，而不是别的。我说：‘我不在乎你们是否上大学’，这对他们来说有点难，因为他们是有成就欲的人。我在乎的是你们培养批判性思维，并找到一种方式对世界上的其他人有用。我的女儿卡门，她也是神经多样性——她有 ADHD 和阅读障碍——她创立了一个叫 Comfy Fancy 的运动衫品牌，还成立了一个针对神经多样性初中生的团体叫 Neurosparkley。她把可能成为问题或缺陷的东西，变成了连接和帮助其他孩子的方式。我很自豪看到这一点。我作为家长感到的失调是，我的孩子身处一个试图让他们为上好大学和成为知识工作者做准备的教育体系，但我知道那套游戏已经结束了。那么我希望我的孩子做什么呢？我试图教他们看清事情背后的深层本质。当一个成年人试图说服你某事，当一个老师持有你不同意的观点时，试着理解为什么。他们的动机是什么？他们从何而来？他们的生活经历是怎样的？我试图教他们提出更好的问题，而不是知道更多的答案。

In terms of how this applies in the age of AI, I feel like we're at the end of a hundred-year cycle of mass-produced education, which was about getting the most knowledge in, raising everyone's averages, educating 20 million graduates a year or whatever number. It was factory-produced, first for factories, then for knowledge workers. Knowledge working is going away—it's changing—but we're still teaching knowledge education. I feel badly about it with my kids. What I've tried to do with my older kids is teach them critical thinking more than anything. I say, 'I don't care if you go to college,' which is a little hard for them because they're achievers. I care that you develop critical thinking and find a way to be useful to people in the world. My daughter Carmen, she's also neurodivergent—she has ADHD and dyslexia—and she created a brand of sweatshirts called Comfy Fancy, and also a group for neurodivergent middle school kids called Neurosparkley. She's taking something that could be a problem or deficit and making it a way to connect and help other kids. I'm proud to see that. The dissonance I feel as a parent is that my kids are in an educational system trying to prep them for a good college and to be knowledge workers, but I know that game is over. So what do I want my kids doing? I try to teach them to look at the deeper meta of what's going on. When an adult is trying to convince you of something, when a teacher has a point of view you don't agree with, try to understand why. What's their agenda? Where are they coming from? What's their lived experience? I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions, not know more answers.

至于这如何延伸到他们的网络使用，以及我试图提倡和劝阻什么，我提倡的是如何在你所做的事情中具有创造性，而不是消费性。所以你在线上或线下能做什么是创造性的——真正向世界输出新东西——因为这样你才能得到回报，而不是消费，不是被动地消费内容和体验。有时这奏效——我看到他们这样做——有时则不。这就是我试图应对的方式。我还试图让他们到 16 岁都没有手机，没有智能手机，但我坚持到了 14 岁。我给他们买了翻盖手机，他们在 Niantic 实习，参与 Pokémon Go 的工作。他们构建了首次用户体验——做得非常好。我想他们为此用了智能手机，现在也还在用。所以尽管我努力了，但没完全做到。

In terms of how that spills into their online use and what I try to promote and discourage, I try to promote how can you be generative in what you're doing and not consumptive. So what can you do online or offline that is generative—actually putting something new out in the world—because that's how you're going to get something back, not consuming, not being a passive consumer of content and experiences. Sometimes it works—I see them doing that—and sometimes it doesn't. That's how I'm trying to navigate this. I also tried to make it till they were 16 with no phones, no smartphones, and I got to 14. I got them flip phones, and they had internships at Niantic working on Pokémon Go. They built a first-time user experience—it was really good. I think they used smartphones for that, and they still have them. So even though I tried to make it, I didn't.

对于我大一点的女儿们，我保持着一个不断更新的谷歌文档，记录人生哲学以及我对她们反复说过的话。我会说：‘好吧，我要把这个写下来，配上故事，保存在这个文档里给她们。’谁知道她们会不会用，但她们确实开始重复其中一些，所以我知道她们读了。其中一条是‘没什么是针对你的’。永远不要觉得事情是针对你的。如果你假设没什么是针对你的，那么 20 次里有 19 次你可能是对的。而第 20 次，正因为这个假设，你可能也处理对了。另一条是‘不要做受害者’。世界不是发生在你身上，而是发生在你周围。我们是由我们对世界的反应来定义的，而不是由发生在我们身上的事件。所以我试图把这些教给她们。最大的两个是青少年，我身处其中，也在学习。我还有两个小的——一个一岁，一个四岁——每晚都和我一起睡。

For my older girls, I keep a running Google doc of life philosophies and anything I say to them as a quote I say over and over. I'm like, 'Okay, I'm going to write that up with stories and keep it in this document for them.' Who knows if they'll use it, but they do start to repeat some of them, so I know they read it. One is 'Nothing's personal.' Don't ever take anything personally. If you assume nothing's personal, you're probably right 19 out of 20 times. And the 20th time, you probably handled it right because of that. Another is 'Don't be a victim.' The world doesn't happen to you; it's happening around you. We're defined by how we react to the world, not by the events that happen to us. So I'm trying to give them these. They're teenagers with the older two, and I'm in it and learning. I've got two little ones—a one-year-old and a four-year-old—who sleep with me every night.

哦，天哪，你太忙了。我觉得这显然是你下一本书的内容——这些人生哲学。我觉得这些对人们，对人类，对成年人来说都很有用。

Oh man, you're busy. I feel like it's clearly what your next book is going to be—these life philosophies. I feel like these are useful for people, for humans, for adults, I mean.

是的。我想写一本关于育儿书，说我关于育儿的一切知识都是从我的狗 Zingga 那里学来的，因为我在有孩子之前养了她，她就像一个人。我给了她明确的界限、自由和爱，而她相信自己是一个人。

Yeah. I wanted to write a book on parenting saying everything I know about parenting I learned from my dog Zingga, because I had her before I had kids and she was like a person. I gave her clear boundaries and freedom and love in between, and she believed she was a person.

那么，在我们结束之前，你还有什么想分享的吗？

So, is there anything else you wanted to share before we wrap up?

过去 30 年，我在写人生之书时，最让我产生共鸣的一点是——我花了很长很长时间，直到 41 岁创办 Zing，才终于找到并说出我的“为什么”。我认为对我们所有人来说，找到它非常重要。我们可能要做很久，才能真正说出那个“为什么”。但我的答案是，我想创造一个互联网宝藏。就像当人们说，马克，我怎么知道你会为下一件事努力？你已经财务自由了，或者你是董事会里的有钱人等等。我会说，我还没完成我的使命。我喜欢问：我们的灵魂在死前需要做什么？或者至少与之保持一致？我需要致力于什么，并知道自己为此倾尽所有？那就是建造一个互联网宝藏——一个我们无法想象没有它、也记不起没有它的生活是什么样的服务。我相信作为产品创造者，这是最伟大的抱负，也是我们能给世界的最好的东西。我的朋友 Bing Gordon 说，总有一天这些宝藏会进入史密森尼博物馆。我认为他说得对。我认为在这个时代，作为产品创造者，我们最大的机会就是建造这些数字摩天大楼，让下一代无法相信有人曾生活在没有它们的世界里。这就是我的抱负，也是为什么我还在像钻木取火一样努力，并且写书。

The thing that I've gotten that's resonated most in writing in my book of life for the last 30 years, it took me a long, long time. It took me until I started Zing at 41 to finally identify and articulate my why. And I think for all of us, it's so important to get there. And we might do for a long time before we actually can say the why. But I figured out that mine was I talk about in the book is I want to create an internet treasure. Like you know when people say Mark how do I know that you're going to work hard on this next thing or you know you're post economic or you're a board rich guy or whatever. I'm like well I haven't done my thing yet. I like to like what is what does our soul need to do before we die or at least to be in integrity with it? What do I need to be working on and know that I gave everything I had against it? And it's to build an internet treasure which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world. And my friend Bing Gordon says, you know, one day those treasures will be in the Smithsonian. And I think he's right. And you know, I think it is the greatest opportunity that we have as product makers in this era is to build this digital skyscrapers that the next generation can't believe anyone ever lived without. And so that's my ambition and why I'm still like rubbing sticks together and writing books.

说到这个，为了帮助人们建造自己的互联网宝藏，你的书很快就要出版了。我想大概是在这期节目播出的时候。告诉大家在哪里能找到它。你还想分享关于这本书的其他内容吗？

Uh speaking of that, to help people build their own internet treasure. Your book is coming out very soon. I think around the time this episode comes out. Uh tell people where to find it. Uh anything else you want to share about the book?

就在这儿。

It's right here.

嗯，你有一本。我刚拿到一本。

Well, you have a copy. I just got a copy.

不知怎么有两本。

Two copies somehow.

两本是因为你很重要。嗯，我们希望你能读两遍。或者送给朋友一本。所以，我想说《游戏速度的生活》是我试图分享我的战术和哲学的书。我希望有人能借鉴我的想法，并把它发扬光大。我们都在一场对话中，我喜欢这个播客，喜欢你主持的这个鸡尾酒会。我们都在努力推动产品制作的哲学和工艺向前发展，我们都在边做边学。我希望我的书能成为一本参考书，也希望它读起来轻松有趣，因为我读很多书都很痛苦。

Two because you're important. Uh, we hope you read it twice. Um, give it out to a friend. So, uh, I would just say that Life of the Speed of Play is my it's I'm trying to share my my playbook and philosophies and I I'm hopeful that somebody uh will steal from my ideas and and take it further and and we're all kind of in a conversation and I love this podcast and and you hosting this cocktail party and we're We're all trying to move the the philosophies and the craft of product making ahead and and we're we're all learning as we go and and I hope that my book uh can be something referenceable and I hope it's easy and fun to read because I have pain reading a lot of books.

它确实很容易读。不太长，而且非常简短。所以，做得很好。

It is actually very easy to read. It's like very not that long and it's very uh bite-sized. So, great job with that.

哦，太好了。

Oh, good.

嗯，马克，非常感谢你来到这里。感谢你与我们分享所有这些智慧。

Um, Mark, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for sharing all this wisdom with us.

谢谢。这很有趣。实际上，我为这本书做过一些播客，但在大多数播客上我不想谈论书的内容，而在这个节目上我谈了。我试图只去那些我想谈论的地方，这也是我在书中试图做到的。所以，就这样吧。

Thanks. This is fun. This is actually I've done some podcast about the book and I didn't want to talk about the content of the book on most of the podcasts and on this one I did and I'm trying to I'm trying to only go into places, you know, that that I want to talk about, you know, which I try to do in the book, too. So, there we go.

谢谢你激励我想谈论产品。这是我的荣幸。谢谢，马克。再见，各位。非常感谢你们的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这真的能帮助其他听众找到这个播客。你可以在 lennispodcast.com 找到所有过往节目或了解更多信息。下期节目再见。

Thank you for inspiring me to want to talk about product. My pleasure. Thanks, Mark. Bye, everyone. 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.