要读透可能需要一辈子
2015-04-20
作者知识丰富，举例丰富，思路整理和论证角度非常独到，是一个标准成功CEO的风采。虽然道理很浅显，但要读透可能需要一辈子。
1. The challenge of the future
“what important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
The author’s answer is, most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. The single word for horizontal progress is globalization----taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere(1->n). The single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress is technology.
What a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
2. Party like it’s 1999
It’s true that there was a bubble in technology. The late 90s was a time of hubris: people believed in going from 0 to 1. Too few startups where actually getting there, and many never went beyond talking about it. But people understood that we had no choice but to find ways to do more with less.
To build the next generation of companies, we must abandon the dogmas created after the crash. That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true. The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
The following principles that opposite to the lessons from dot-com crash are probably more correct:
1) It is better to risk boldness than triviality
2) A bad plan is better than no plan
3) Competitive markets destroy profits
4) Sales matters just as much as product
3. All happy companies are different
Monopoly lies:
Goolge PR: We face an extremely competitive landscape in which consumers have a multitude of options to access information.
Competitive Lies:
Non-monopolists exaggerate their distinction by defining their market as the intersection of various smaller markets: British food and restaurant and Palo Alto. But the question is, whether there are people in Palo Alto who would rather eat British food above all else. It is very possible they don’t exist.
Competitive markets destroy profits.
All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
Creative monopoly means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.
4. The ideology of competition
Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new.
According to Marx, people fight because they are different. To Shakespeare, by contrast, all combatants look more or less alike. Consider the opening line from Romeo and Juliet:”Two households, both alike in dignity.” They grow even more similar as the feud escalates. Eventually, they lose sight of why they started fighting in the first place.
In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lost sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.
Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
If you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you are already more sane than most.
5. Last mover advantage
Escaping competition will give you a monopoly, but even a monopoly is only a great business if it can endure in the future.
Technology companies often lose money for the first few years: it takes time to build valuable things, and that means delayed revenue. What does a company with large cash flows far into the future look like? Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics:
1) Proprietary technology(10x improvement, not 2x incremental improvement);
2) Network effects: a product is more useful as more people use it, e.g. Facebook. Paradoxically, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Even the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.
3) Economies of Scale: have the potential for great scale built into its first design. Twitter already has more than 250 million users today. It doesn’t need to add too many customized features in order to acquire more, and there is no inherent reason why it should ever stop growing.
4) Branding: Just copy Apple’s branding strategy won’t work. The other monopolistic advantages are less obvious than Apple’s sparkling brand, but they are the fundamentals that let the branding effectively reinforce Apple’s monopoly.
Building a monopoly:
Start small and monopolize;
Scaling up; Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets, e.g. Amazon, eBay(not successful on non-auction e-commerce)
Don’t disrupt: as you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt, avoid competition as much as possible. Don’t see yourself through older firms’ eyes.
Last mover advantage:
You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. It’s much better to be the last mover----to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche market and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. To succeed, you must study the endgame before everything else.
6. You are not a lottery ticket
Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.
Forget “Minimum Viable Products”---ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world. When the first iPod was released in 2001, industry analysts couldn’t see much more than “a nice feature for Macintosh users” that “doesn’t make any difference” to teh rest of the world. Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.
A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery.
7. Follow the money
The power law: for whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. Or say, never underestimate exponential growth.
The investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible. The kind of portfolio thinking embraced by both folk wisdom and financial convention, regards diversified betting as a source of strength. The more you dabble, the more you are supposed to have hedged against the uncertainty of the future. But life is not a portfolio.an entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and hope that one of them works out well.
If you do start your own company, you must remember the power law to operate it well. The most important thins are singular: one market will probably be better than all others(Chapter 5), One distribution strategy usually dominates others(Chapter 11). Time and decision-making themselves follow a power law, and some moments matter far more than others(Chapter 9).
8. Secrets
Classic trichotomy of the easy(conventions), the hard(secrets), and the impossible(mysteries).
The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers.
The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking. When you find one, tell the people who would be your conspirator, and no more.
The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.
9. Foundations
A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed. Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on--- if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example---are very hard to correct after they are made. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
Founding matrimony
Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together---otherwise they are just rolling dice.
Ownership, possession, and control
It’s not just founders who need to get along. Everyone in your company needs to work well together.
Ownership: who legally owns a company’s equity?
Possession: who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis?
Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs?
A typical startup allocates ownership among founders, employees, and investors. The managers and employees who operate the company enjoy possession. And a board of directors, usually comprising founders and investors, exercises control.
Keep the board small.
On the bus or off the bus
Cash is not king
Vested interests: early employees usually get the most equity because they take more risk, but some later employees might be even more crucial to a venture’s success.
Extending the founding: founding lasts as long as a company is creating new things, and it ends when creation stops. If you get the founding moment right, you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distant future toward the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success. You might even extend its founding indefinitely.
10. The mechanics of Mafia
Recruiting conspirators
Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?
There are two kinds of good answers: answers about your mission and answers about your team.
Answers about mission: not why it’s important in general, but why you are doing something important that no one else is going to get done. Also, you should be able to explain why your company is a unique match for him personally.
You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.
What’s under Silicon Valley’s hoodies
From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way. It didn’t matter what people looked like or which country they came from, but we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed with the mission.
Do One Thing
On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work. Defining roles reduced conflict.
11. if you build it, will they come?
It takes hard work to make sales look easy.
Sales is hidden.
No matter how strong your product----even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately----you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.
Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. Customer Lifetime Value must exceeds Customer Acquisition Cost.
In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale---and the more it makes sense to spend it. Distribution methods can be plotted on a continuum:
Complex Sales; Personal Sales; Distribution doldrums; Marketing and advertising; Viral marketing;
The power law of distribution: if you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you are finished.
Selling to non-customers------employees and investors. Clamor and frenzy are very real, but they rarely happen without calculated recruiting and pitching beneath the surface. Selling your company to the media and has a public relations strategy is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else. Any prospective employee worth hiring will do his own diligence; what he finds or doesn’t find when he googles you will be critical to the success of your company.
12. man and machine
Computers are complements for humans, not substitutes. The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.
Globalization means substitution. Technology means complementarity.
Complementary businesses: e.g. automatic detection algorithms in PayPal.
Humans and computers together could achieve dramatically better results than either could attain alone. LinkedIn empowers recruiters. If LinkedIn had tried to simply replace recruiters with technology, they wouldn’t have a business today.
Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
As we find new ways to use computers, they won’t just get better at the kinds of things people already do; they’ll help us to do what was previously unimaginable.
13. Seeing green
Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the 7 questions that very business must answer:
1. The engineering question
Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
2. The timing question
Is now the right time to start your particular business?
3. The monopoly question
Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
4. The people question
Do you have the right team?
5. The distribution question
Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?
6. The durability question
Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
7. The secret question
Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
Tesla is 7 for 7. Paradoxically, the challenge for the entrepreneurs who will create Energy 2.0 is to think small.
14. The founder’s paradox
Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.
Stagnation or Singularity?
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.
Whether we achieve the Singularity on a cosmic scale is perhaps less important than whether we seize the unique opportunities we have to do new things in our own working lives. Everything important to us----the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment-----is singular.
Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better----to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only be seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
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