亚马逊网站

他还会有一系列其他可能不太好的名字，包括relentless.com（ relentless.com）。

He would have a series of other potentially bad names too, including relentless.com.

Relentless.com（ relentless.com），现在仍然跳转到亚马逊。

Relentless.com, which still goes to Amazon.

跳转到亚马逊。

Redirects to Amazon.

是啊。据说他和麦肯齐都非常喜欢relentless.com这个名字。这可能是完全错误的，所以别太当真。但我在想这是不是对DE Shaw的一种微妙嘲讽，就像在说'我要去当企业家了，永不停歇'。如果我在曼哈顿的豪华摩天大楼里工作，肯定不会用'永不停歇'这种词。

Yeah. Supposedly, he and Mackenzie both really liked relentless.com. This may be completely false, so, like, you know, don't hold me to this. But I wonder if that's a little subtle dig at DE Shaw of, like, I'm gonna go be an entrepreneur, relentless. Like, I wouldn't be relentless if I were in a cushy skyscraper in Manhattan.

这不是一个以客户为中心的名字。

It's not a very customer centric name.

确实不是。

No. It's definitely not.

这更像是'我要向你们这些竞争对手发起进攻'的感觉。

It's very much like, I'm gonna come at you competitors.

嗯，这正是我在想的。这个名字到底是怎么来的？

Well, that's what I'm wondering. Like, where did that come from?

没错。我的意思是，你可以用这个词来形容杰夫的性格，但作为企业名字确实很奇怪。

Yeah. I mean, you would you would use it to describe Jeff's personality, but it's an odd name for the business.

确实如此。最终，朋友们说服他们‘Relentless’听起来有点阴森。据说杰夫开始在字典里查以A开头的单词。我不确定他是否专门查A开头的词，如果是的话他很聪明，因为A开头的名字排在前面。

Definitely. So eventually, friends convince them that relentless sounds kind of sinister. And the story goes, Jeff starts looking in the dictionary at a words. Now I don't know if he was specifically looking at a words. If so, he was very smart because a names are names starting with the letter a.

他确实是这么做的，因为像雅虎这样的门户网站、目录网站都是按字母顺序排列的。

He actually was because sites like Yahoo, like portal sites, directory sites listed alphabetically.

完全同意。就像我们在Acquired节目里受益匪浅，这是我们的制胜法宝。

Totally. I mean, this is like we've been such a beneficiary of this at Acquired. This is our secret sauce.

播客是旧互联网最后的遗迹。

Podcasts are the the last vestige of the old Internet.

没错。因为雅虎上的内容是按字母排序的——哦，我们待会儿会聊雅虎——他浏览A开头的名单时看到了亚马逊。完美。地球上最大的河流，亚马逊网站上最丰富的选择。

Totally. Because things are listed alphabetically on, oh, we will talk about Yahoo. He's looking at a names, and he's going through the list and he sees Amazon. Perfect. Earth's largest river, Earth's largest selection on amazon.com.

从A到Z，还能更完美吗？简直完美。现在他们只差最后一件事——此时已聘用了谢尔，他正搬往西雅图。

A to z, how could it be any more perfect? So perfect. So they just need one more thing. They've hired Shell at this point. He's moving up to Seattle.

他们著名地在贝尔维尤租了房子。你前几天还骑车经过那儿对吧？

They rent a house in Bellevue famously. You actually biked by it the other day. Right?

我确实去了。当时就在附近，正在听《互联网历史播客》的一期精彩节目，嘉宾是我们节目的老朋友布莱恩·麦卡洛。他采访了谢尔，聊到早期杰夫·麦肯齐住的那栋房子。他们把车库改造成了办公室，那是亚马逊的第一个办公地点，谢尔就坐在那个车库里编程。我查了下地址发现离我只有几个街区，当时就想必须骑车去看看。

I did. I was in the neighborhood, and I was listening to, great podcast on the Internet history podcast with friend of the show, Brian McCullough. He was interviewing Shell about the early days about this, you know, house that Jeff McKenzie lived in. They have the garage retrofitted to be an office, Amazon's first office, and Shell is programming sitting in that garage. And I looked and it was like a few blocks from me, and I was like, I gotta ride by.

你给我发了照片，我简直羡慕死了。

You texted me the photo. I was so so jealous.

虽然感觉有点冒昧，毕竟现在有人住在那里，但这确实是具有世界历史意义的地标。

Which felt wrong. You know, someone lives there and all that, but it is a historical landmark in the world.

反正你又没去敲门。

Well, you didn't go knock on the door.

没，确实没有。

No. But no.

嗯，我觉得这样挺好。他们现在只缺一样东西——资金。要知道杰夫和麦肯齐在D.E. Shaw干得很出色。

Yeah. I think that's fine. So they just need one more thing, which is capital. You know, Jeff and McKenzie had done great at D. E.

所以他们投入了9.5万美元启动资金。谢尔自己投了5000美元。这让我想起沃尔玛那期节目——天啊，让员工真金白银投资公司实在太明智了。杰夫父母迈克和杰基又投了10万美元，这样他们就有了20万美元。

Shaw, so they put in $95,000 to start. Shell himself puts in $5,000. This takes me back to the Walmart episode and gosh, so smart of, like, having your employees actually invest dollars in the business. Jeff's parents, Mike and Jackie, put in another $100,000. So they have $200,000.

够了。他们又雇了几名工程师与谢尔合作，开始搭建网站。杰夫则着手与英格拉姆、贝克和泰勒建立合作关系。麦肯齐负责所有簿记工作，可以说是公司的首位首席财务官。杰夫，这很有趣。

That's enough. They hire a couple more engineers to work with Shell, start building out the site. Jeff goes and starts working on relationships with Ingram and Baker and Taylor. Mackenzie's doing all the bookkeeping and is sort of like the first CFO of the company. Jeff, this is fun.

还有，这让人联想到山姆·沃尔顿。你读过他专门去波特兰参加图书销售课程的故事吗？

Also, echoes of Sam Walton. Did you read about this how he goes down and takes a course in book selling down in Portland?

是的，太棒了。是在全国书商或图书零售商协会吧？完全正确。

Yes. That was awesome. At, the National Booksellers or Book Retailers Association. Right? Totally.

呃，真聪明。我猜这就是他开始在行业内建立人脉，让贝克&泰勒和英格拉姆重视他的方式。太厉害了。

Ugh. So smart. I assume that's how he starts to build relationships in the industry and get Baker and Taylor and Ingram to take him seriously. So great.

没错。这里值得特别指出——我们刚才轻描淡写地说谢尔被聘用后开始编程。实际上他们当时做出了一系列非常有趣的技术选择，而谢尔最终被证明是最佳人选。

Yep. It's worth pointing out at this point. So, you know, we sort of glazed over like, alright. Shell gets hired and he starts programming. There's very interesting set of technology choices that are made here, And Shell turns out to be the perfect hire.

杰夫非常幸运。如果没有谢尔，我认为今天的亚马逊可能不会存在，早期团队包括杰夫本人都普遍承认这点。但当时其实没有详细规划。我记得杰夫自己编写了第一个HTML网页，就是那个白色背景、带有亚马逊河流图案的页面——比正式logo还早。当他向谢尔描述构想时，谢尔基本就是'好的'。

Jeff got very lucky. I don't think Amazon would exist today if it weren't for Shell, and I think that's sort of a widely acknowledged thing among the early team, including Jeff. But there's not really, like, a spec. Jeff, I think, coded up the first HTML web page himself, that sort of white one with the a, with the Amazon River running through it that predates the logo. But when he starts describing it to Shell, Shell's pretty much like, okay.

酷。我知道要构建什么了。这将是个线上商店——当时这类网站还很少见。总之是个能在线购物的网站。很好。

Cool. Like, I know what to build. It's gonna be a store, and there's not like a lot of these yet. But like it's a website where you can buy stuff online. Great.

他就这么开始写代码了。这里有几个有趣的点，其中之一就是数据库的技术选型。你知道他们最终会选择哪种数据库作为标准吗？因为Shell之前并不是搞数据库的。

And he just sort of starts coding. And there's a couple interesting things here. One of which is the technology choice of databases. And do you know what database they would eventually sort of choose to standardize on? Because Shell was not a database guy before this.

我忍不住想说Oracle。绝对是Oracle。

I'm tempted to say Oracle. Definitely Oracle.

有意思。当时是二选一的竞争，Shell基本上就是：好吧，酷，我该采购哪款数据库软件呢？选择是Sybase和Oracle。

Interesting. It was a bake off between two, and Shell basically was like, okay. Cool. What database software am I gonna procure? And the choices were Sybase and Oracle.

而Sybase没有回复Shell的电话，所以他就选了

And Sybase did not return Shell's call, and so he chose

Oracle。天啊。这简直是神预言。作为一家企业技术公司，忽视初创企业就是在自找麻烦。

Oracle. Oh my god. Talk about freaking foreshadowing here. Like, if you are an enterprise technology company, you ignore startups at your own peril.

完全同意。我超爱这个故事。

Absolutely. I love that story.

哇，这太棒了。

Oh, that's amazing.

这里还有几件有趣的事情。任何当过产品经理或工程师，在工程产品团队或商业技术团队工作过的人，都会对这种感受有所体会。要知道，当时的互联网还非常非常简陋——无论是速度、图形界面、用户体验还是信任度（尤其是信用卡支付方面），都完全不是今天人们所认知的互联网。那时人们还不习惯在网上输入信用卡信息。

There's a couple other interesting things here. And anybody who's been a PM or an engineer working on, an engineer PM team or a business guy tech guy team will sort of know this feeling. And remember, the Internet at this point is just very, very pathetic. Like, it's just not the Internet as you think about it today in terms of speed or graphics or interface or trust or anything, especially trust around credit cards. Like people were not yet comfortable entering credit cards on the Internet.

事实上，更多人反而愿意通过电子邮件发送信用卡信息——尽管这种方式同样不安全。他们确实收到了大量客户用邮件发来的信用卡资料。为此他们设计了一个方案：客户只需在订单中输入信用卡前五位数字，然后致电客服，工作人员会核对剩余数字。但杰夫告诉谢尔：人们会希望通过两种方式访问商店。

In fact, more people were comfortable entering credit cards via email even though it was no more secure. They actually got more people emailing them their credit card information. And they had a way in which you could do stuff like enter just five digits of your credit card and then call us, and then we would get the rest of it from you and match it up with the five you had entered on your order. But Jeff tells Shell, hey. People are gonna wanna access this store via two different methods.

一种是当时方兴未艾的网页端，另一种是人们似乎更信任的电子邮件。所以需要搭建两个商店入口——邮件版和网页版。但谢尔基本忽略了邮件方案，他认为：'我深耕技术领域，不认为商店会以邮件形式存在。'

One of them is the web, which is, of course, up and coming. The other of which is email, which people seem to trust a lot. So build two storefronts, one that's accessible via email and one that's accessible via web. And Shell kinda just ignores the email thing. He's like, I'm in this technology a lot.

幸好他从网页端着手是正确的。等他们真正搭建起来时，杰夫对邮件商店的兴趣已经消退。但当时这个构想就像海报宣传语——'通过电子邮件浏览购物如何？'——这恰恰反映出早期网页体验之差，人们甚至不确定网页是否比邮件更优越。

I don't think it's gonna be an email based store. And it's a good thing that he started with web. And by the time they had sort of gotten that stood up, it was clear that Jeff had sort of lost interest in the email based store. But it was almost like a posterist type approach where they're like, what if you could browse and buy from your email? That's how crappy the web was is it wasn't clear that that was a better form factor than email.

在布拉德的书中，我感觉这非常符合早期杰夫的管理风格：'我们必须做这个'，然后有些项目你真得执行，有些则可以被暂时搁置...最后大家会明白什么才是正确的选择。

In Brad's book, I get the sense that that's very typical of early Jeff management style of, we gotta go do this. And then, you know, some of them, like, you actually gotta do it. Then some of you are like, well, if I ignore this for a little while Yeah. Oh, we're gonna do the right thing here.

通过早期工程师的访谈可以明显发现，他们使用的'前端/后端工程师'术语与当今含义不同。如今前端指客户端JavaScript（在浏览器执行的代码，当时根本不存在），后端指服务器端。但在早期亚马逊，前端意味着面向消费者的技术，后端则是面向仓储系统的技术。

Yeah. It also became clear in listening to a lot of these interviews with early engineers that they use the word front end engineer and back end engineer differently than we do today. Today, we say front end and back end, it means front end being like client side JavaScript, typically stuff that executes in your browser, which of course did not really work or exist then. And back end meant server side. But what was clear at Amazon in the early days was front end meant consumer facing and back end meant warehouse facing technology.

实际上所有代码都在服务器端运行——那时甚至还没有cookie技术。因此谢尔不得不发明一种方法，让用户在不依赖cookie的情况下保存收藏夹和购物车。在没有cookie或会话机制的年代，他创造了一个极其精妙的引擎来实现这个功能。

And it was basically all server side. In fact, there weren't even cookies yet. And so Shell had to basically invent this way for users to maintain favorited items or a shopping cart without leaving a cookie. And so how do you do that without cookies or sessions? He invented this really insane engine.

这基本上是一个名为Obidos的渲染引擎，如果有人了解南美洲地理的话

It's basically a rendering engine called Obidos, which if anybody knows their South American geography

是亚马逊河的支流，对吧？

It's a tributary to the Amazon. Right?

没错。对于那些记得早期浏览亚马逊网站的人来说，你会看到类似amazon.com/exec/obidos/某某某的网址。

Yeah. And for people who remember browsing Amazon in the early days, you'd go to like amazon.com/exec/obidos/somethingsomethingsomething.

噢，我完全没注意过这个。太棒了。

Oh, I definitely didn't do this. This is awesome.

它曾是URL的一部分。Obidos的功能是能在URL后附加ID并传递这些参数，这样后端——用现在的说法——服务器就能匹配信息。比如这位顾客刚把某商品加入购物车，就能动态生成包含该商品的新页面。这也为后来'你可能还喜欢'、'类似商品'或'个性化推荐'等功能奠定了基础。

It was a part of the URLs. And so what Obidos did was it could append IDs to the URL and pass them through so that the back end, as we know it in today's parlance, so that the server could match up. Oh, this customer just added this other thing to their cart. And so dynamically generate a new web page for them that includes that other thing in their cart. Or what would go on to be include, you may also like or similar products or recommended personalized products.

哇，太酷了。

Oh, so cool.

这是最早让亚马逊成为动态网页应用的技术，无需使用cookie，仅通过URL传递这些ID。全部由Shell构建的这个Obidos动态网页服务引擎实现。

This was the very first thing that allowed Amazon to be like a dynamic web application without the use of cookies, and it was just passing these IDs through the URL. And it was all this obidos sort of dynamic web serving engine that Shell built.

我太喜欢了，太喜欢了。这太酷了。没错。所以，是的，谢尔说得太对了。

I love it. I love it. That's so cool. Yeah. So, yeah, Shell is like you're so right.

就像，他是这份工作的最佳人选。是的。他是个经验丰富的软件系统构建老手，能在互联网上运作。那时候能胜任这事的人可不多。

Like, he was the right guy for the job. Yep. This was a grizzled sort of veteran of building software systems that could work on the Internet. There were not many people who could do that at that point in time.

不。实际上，在招聘启事中，我想贝索斯会写‘有网站经验者优先，但不强制’。因为那时候既没有网页开发者，也没有网页应用。你会这样想：嘿，我需要一个能写C代码，然后想办法让它与生成的HTML对接的人。

No. And in fact, in job postings, I think Bezos put things like experience with websites would be a bonus, but not required. Because, like, there weren't web developers because there weren't web applications. You would think about it like, hey. I need someone who can write some c code and then figure out the glue to make it so that that interfaces with the HTML that gets generated.

但这一切在当时都是全新的。

But that was all sort of, like, brand new at the time.

是的。太神奇了。谢尔和早期加入的工程师团队一起合作，他们很快就——

Yeah. Amazing. So Shell and the early team of engineers that they bring on working together, they get

就搭建出了一个测试版，速度非常快，真的超快。

a beta built, like, pretty fast, really fast.

1994年杰夫和麦肯齐离开DE Shaw后，他们在贝尔维尤的车库里花了几个月理顺一切。1995年4月，他们发布了网站的测试版，给亲友们发链接试用：‘可以买任何你想要的书’。谢尔的朋友约翰·温赖特在1995年4月3日完成了第一笔交易，买了本道格拉斯·霍夫施塔特写的《流体概念与创造性类比》。

It was '94 when Jeff and Mackenzie leave DE Shaw, and then it takes a few months to figure all the stuff out in the garage in Bellevue. In April 1995, they ship a beta version of the site. They send out a link to friends and family, like, try it out. You can buy any book you want. Shell's friend, John Wainwright, makes the first purchase on 04/03/1995, A book called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter.

道格·霍夫施塔特太棒了。他写了《哥德尔、埃舍尔、巴赫》。哦，这本书超级酷。总之，它探讨了意识的本质，这类话题可以留到改天再聊。

Doug Hofstadter is awesome. He wrote Godel Escher Bach. Oh. It's super cool. Anyway, it's all like about the nature of consciousness and like a carve out for another day.

没错。但作为在亚马逊上的第一次购物，既超级酷又非常符合极客气质。

Yeah. But super cool and very apt geeky first purchase on amazon.com.

这再次说明了当时对亚马逊及其发展趋势感兴趣的是哪类人群。

Again, illustrating who the types of people who are interested in Amazon and the movement at the time were.

是的。之后不久，1995年7月16日，他们向公众开放了网站。我现在完全理解马克·安德森说的话了，他说自己竟然错过了。我是说，马克算是这波浪潮的发起者之一，所以他指的是上一波浪潮。

Yep. And then shortly after that, 07/16/1995, they launched the site to the public. I totally understand now what Marc Andreessen was saying when he was like, I freaking missed it. I mean, I guess Marc was part of starting this wave. So he was talking about the previous wave.

但现在回头看，我觉得我们完全错过了，本。我有错失恐惧症，你也有。是啊，这种事今天绝不会再发生了。

But, like, me now looking back, I'm like, we freaking missed it, Ben. I have FOMO. You have FOMO. Yeah. This would never happen today.

他们一推出，人们就来了。大家爱死它了。简直是一炮而红。

They launched it, and people came. People loved it. Like, it freaking worked immediately.

没错。它很快从只有冷门极客想要的东西，变成了用户体验足够好、普通人迅速接受并从中获得实际价值的平台。它的增长不是靠一堆机器人互相刷数据营造出的虚假繁荣。机器人。

Yeah. Yeah. And it went very quickly from, like, a thing that obscure nerds wanted to this has a good enough user experience where regular people are using it quickly and deriving real value. It's not just like it had growth rates of a bunch of bots interacting with each other, and therefore the volume looks high. Bots.

这些都是真实用户，他们与早期采用者仅一步之遥，正在解决自己此前遇到的实际问题，完全依靠口碑传播。事实上，我记得有数据显示，在公开上线的整整第一年里，他们营销支出为零，所有关注都来自媒体主动邀约，因为他们做的事对大众市场消费者而言既新奇又实用。

This is very real people who are one or two clicks out from the early adopters solving real problems that they had before, and it's just everybody telling their friends. In fact, I think there's a stat the entire first year after the public launch, they spent 0 marketing dollars, and it was all word-of-mouth at inbound media inquiries because what they were doing was so novel and so useful to the mass market consumer.

哦，媒体主动邀约。明白了。他们上线后，前两周就创造了2.5万美元营收，但这纯粹靠用户口口相传——现在根本不可能复制这种模式。两周2.5万美元啊。

Oh, inbound media inquiries. Okay. So they launch it. In the first two weeks, they do 25,000 in revenue, but it's just people telling their friends, I can't do that today. Like, $25,000 in revenue, like, in two weeks.

现在你推出个新产品，根本没人会用。而他们上线两周后，竟收到了大卫·费罗和杨致远的媒体邀约，对方说：'听说你们的亚马逊网站很酷，介意我们把它放在雅虎首页推荐吗？'

You launch something today, nobody's gonna use it. And then they get an inbound media inquiry two weeks after they launch it from David Filo and Jerry Yang saying, hey, we heard about the your site, Amazon. It looks pretty cool. Do you mind if we feature it on our home page?

杰夫当时反应是：等等，你们的首页？我记得很多人都会访问那个页面。

And Jeff's like, wait a minute. Your home page, I think a lot of people go to that.

要知道当时的yahoo.com才刚诞生——1994年大卫和杰里还是斯坦福研究生时创建了网页指南，刚在1995年3月完成公司注册，拿到红杉资本投资，把项目转型成正式企业。

And that was the brand new at that point, like, literally brand new yahoo.com. David and Jerry, of course, had started their guide to the web when they were at Stanford grad students the year before in 1994, and they had just incorporated, raised money from Sequoia Capital, turn it into an actual business, and created Yahoo only in March 1995.

哇。

Wow.

所有事情都在同一时间爆发。可以想象这是首个在雅虎首页带'a'字母标识的图书购买入口——典型的增长黑客策略。总之他们收到了那封邮件。

It's all happening all at once. Gotta assume it was the first place to buy books featured on the front page with the letter a on yahoo.com. Growth hack. So, apparently, they get the email.

他们是否已经完成了种子轮融资，那笔百万美元的天使轮投资？

And had they raised their seed round, their million dollar angel round yet?

不，不，不。所以你对Shell的所有了解，哦，现在这一切都说得通了。我以为他只是保守，但他很清楚自己在做什么。

No. No. No. So, all that context you had on Shell, oh, this makes so much more sense now. I thought he was just being conservative, but he knows what he's doing.

他们收到邮件后都在讨论该怎么办，而Shell说，伙计们，我觉得我们还没准备好。我认为我们无法应对即将发生的事情。

They get the email and they're all talking about what to do and Shell's like, guys, I don't think we're ready for this. I don't think we can handle what's about to happen here.

因为他只在那些不太成功的初创公司待过。是的，他让事情运转起来，考虑的是某个规模，但没想过百万级别的规模。

Because he's only been at startups that didn't really work. Yes. He made stuff functional, and he was thinking of a certain scale, but he wasn't thinking, like, million scale.

当然，Jeff就是Jeff，他像在说‘管他鱼雷呢’，全速前进。我们要做这个。我们要答应雅虎。于是他们做了。接下来的两周内，也就是上线仅四周后，他们已经向全国50个州和全球45个国家的人卖出了书。

Of course, Jeff being Jeff is like, damn the torpedoes, like, full speed ahead. We're doing this. We're gonna say yes to Yahoo. So they do it. Within the next two weeks, so we're just four weeks after launch here, they have sold books to people in all 50 states in the country and 45 countries around the world.

在那两周结束时，他们每周的销售额达到了2万美元。

They're by the end of those two weeks, they are doing 20,000 in sales a week.

就书而言。这些东西每本大概20或30美元。

On books. These things cost, like, 20 or $30 each.

人们不读书了，你知道吗？是啊，像巴诺书店和Port这样的地方，人们都不读书了。他们全靠DVD和CD赚钱。

And people don't read books. You know? Yeah. There's Barnes and Noble and Port like, people don't read books. They made all their money on DVDs and CDs.

没人读书了。我们，你、我和这个圈子的人，我们读书，但我们只是极少数。

Nobody reads books. We, you and me and the acquired community, like, we read books, but we're a vast minority.

大多数美国人一年只读一本书。我觉得这差不多是人均年阅读量的中位数了。

Most Americans read one book a year. I think that's, like, the mode of number of books per year per person.

完全正确。所以网站对公众开放的前半年，他们用20万美元的亲友投资，在六个月内实现了50万美元的收入。

Totally. So that first half year that the site is live to the public, they do half a million dollars in revenue in six months with the $200,000 in friends and family funding.

最初的洞察力简直完美契合了市场需求，一炮而红。就像优步或推特那样，你有个点子，做出来，正好就是人们想要的。

The initial insight is, like, pretty perfect product market fit right out of the gate. I mean, it's one of these situations. It's like an Uber or a Twitter where you have this idea and then you put it up, and then that's exactly the thing that people want.

我相信这样的时代会再次来临，可能以某种形式。但我必须强调，现在这种情况不会发生。真的，我都感到错失恐惧症了。

I'm sure there will come an age again like this, but in some way shape or form. But I can't stress enough that this does not happen today. Right. I'm feeling the FOMO.

问题是，大卫，你当时能意识到这个机会吗？

The question is, David, would you have recognized it?

没错，关键就在这儿。

Right. That's the thing.

我们都必须对自己保持理智上的诚实。就像我们会想，如果是在1993年而非1996年就相信互联网将改变世界，我们是否真的会与这些人交往并像他们那样坚信不疑。

We all have to be intellectually honest with ourselves. We're like, would we be hanging out in these circles with these people and truly believing like they did, not in 1996 that the Internet was gonna be a thing, in 1993 that the Internet was gonna be a thing.

是的。我们在某种程度上解决了这个问题，我想并非刻意通过播客，而是通过收购。对，某种程度上。我们遇到了类似的浪潮。

Yep. We sorted this a little bit, not intentionally with podcasting, I think, and acquired. Yeah. A little bit. We got a similar type wave.

确实。不过说实话，根据你我几年后的所作所为来看，我认为如果我们当时不是年幼的孩子，确实会具备参与其中的性格特质和兴趣。

Right. Honestly, though, judging by what you and I were doing a few years later, I do actually think we would have had the personality characteristics and the interests if we were not young children at this time to be

参与其中。

In on this.

卷入这一切。

Caught up in all this.

哦，没错。

Oh, yeah.

某种程度上，我正经历着强烈的错失恐惧症，比如，天啊，要是能早出生五到十年就好了。

In some ways, I'm feeling the massive FOMO of, like, god, if I was just born five or ten years earlier.

是啊。没错。我是说，这就是我们的现状。我想很多听众也是如此。

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's this is who we are. And I imagine who many of our listeners are too.

没错。我猜如果你会听三小时的播客，那你就是那种想从网上某个陌生人手里买冷门书的人，或者不得不打电话报信用卡号的人。

Yeah. I imagine if you were listening to three hour podcasts, then you're the type of person who wanted to buy an obscure book from someone on the Internet, or you had to call in your credit card number.

整个基础设施正在彻底崩溃。

The infrastructure is just completely falling apart.

不过他们在基础设施上确实做对了一件事——因为很快，他们就成为了甲骨文有史以来流量最大的实例。甲骨文的人都说，天啊，我们帮不了你。没人遇到过每秒这么高的读写量，让我们专门为你开发个新版本吧。但很明显的是，Shell团队当时是在极低抽象层级上构建系统的。

One thing they did do right in the infrastructure though because by the way, very quickly, they became Oracle's largest ever instance by traffic. The Oracle people were like, oh my god. We can't help you. No one else is seeing this many reads or writes per second, so let us make a new version for you. But one thing that was very clear is that Shell and the team were building things at a very low level of abstraction.

他们基本上是在比汇编语言高一级的层面构建一切。大部分代码用C语言，部分用Perl，但几乎没用高级语言或框架。尽管当时技术很糟糕——带宽匮乏，计算资源极其稀缺——但在推出书评和协同过滤功能（比如'购买此商品的顾客还买了'推荐）时，你必须做到极致高效。算法至关重要，而编写这些算法的底层语言环境同样关键。

I mean, they were building everything in basically a click up from assembly. Most of the stuff was in c, some of it was in Perl, but they're not really writing in high level languages or using sort of high level frameworks. So even though the technology at the time sucked, I mean, there was no bandwidth, compute was really, really, really hard to come by. You had to be unbelievable efficient as you're starting to roll out things like and I know we'll get to this reviews and the collaborative filtering stuff where it was like, may also like people who bought this also bought. The algorithms mattered a lot, but the environments that you were writing them in, the low level languages were really important.

没错。他们基本上能充分利用早期互联网技术，那时带宽和计算资源还远未达到适合大众开发应用的水平。

Yep. And they basically could take advantage of these early Internet technologies before the bandwidth and compute was really ready for most people to develop applications for them.

完全正确。我某种程度上指的是技术，基础设施中的技术。我更多指的是车库。关键在于为什么这在Deesha内部行不通。很明显你不能做代发货。

Totally right. I guess I sort of meant technology to some extent, the tech in infrastructure. I meant more like the garage. Here is the kicker of why this never would have worked within Deesha. It's super clear you can't do drop shipping.

亚马逊必须自己处理物流才能实现这一点。

Amazon's gotta handle the logistics themselves to make this work.

他们当时的做法是不立即持有库存。他们先从其他书店零售订购，然后转售，并承担差价作为概念验证。但后来他们转向了这种模式：一接到订单就直接从分销商那里订购，但显然要花很长时间才能实际送达客户手中。

And the way they were doing that was not to take inventory at the time. They were ordering retail first from other bookstores and then reselling it and just eating the margin as the proof of concept. But then they were moving to this world where they would just order from the distributor as soon as they got an order, and it was taking obviously forever to actually get that to the customer.

分销商有最低起订量。所以他们订购了大箱货物送到车库。

The distributors had minimum order sizes. So they were ordering big boxes of stuff coming to the garage.

你知道那个变通方法吗？假设他们订购了一本畅销书，很快就能达到8/10。假设最低起订量是10本，他们会等到再凑两本。

Do you know the hack? Let's say they ordered a popular book where pretty quickly you could get to eight out of 10. Let's say the minimum order size was 10. They'd wait to get two more.

我记得是10本。

I think it was 10.

没错。这样他们就能向分销商下单了。变通方法是：如果是冷门书且知道永远凑不到10本，他们会拿那一本书，再订9本明知缺货的书。系统会允许下单，因为可以发10本书。然后当然他们会收到'这本书缺货'的拒收通知。

Yeah. And that way they could place an order with the distributor. The hack was if it's sort of an obscure book and they know we're never gonna get to 10, they would take that one book and they would order nine of a book that they knew was not in stock. The system would let them make the order since 10 books could be shipped out. And then, of course, they would get the rejection of, hey, this book's out of stock.

这就是他们的变通方法，让分销商真的把他们想要的那一本单独寄过来。

So that was their hack to make it so the distributors would actually send them the one copy of the one book that they wanted.

我们谈论的销售规模，车库里有大量箱子进进出出。是的。所以他们很快在王国附近的一个工业区租了仓库。开始用临时工充实人手。最出名的是他们告诉劳务公司'给我们派些怪人来'。

The sales levels we're talking about, there's a lot of boxes coming and going out of the garage. Yes. So quickly, get a warehouse in So to in this kind of industrial neighborhood down by the kingdom at that point in time. They start staffing it up with temp workers. Famously, they tell the staffing agency to quote, send us your freaks.

这句话被原封不动地

Which made it through

刊登在文章里，当然，这种标题党内容立刻成了众人关注的焦点。

to print in an article, and, of course, that was the sort of clickbait thing that everyone anchored on.

当时正值西雅图的垃圾摇滚时代。所以这些垃圾摇滚乐手演出结束后都在亚马逊仓库打工。超酷的。没错，最出名的是D.

This was the era of grunge in Seattle. So all these grunge club musicians are, like, working in Amazon warehouses after their gigs. Super cool. Yep. Famously, Nick Lovejoy from D.

E. Shaw的尼克·洛夫乔伊。他想出了打包台的主意。这后来成了亚马逊的传奇。起初他们真的就是在地上跪着重新组装、打包发货。

E. Shaw. He comes up with the idea of packing tables. This becomes like Amazon lore. At first, they're literally just reassembling, you know, and doing shipping just like on their hands and knees on the floor.

然后他说，我们应该弄些桌子，这样就不用趴在地上干活了。

And he's like, you we should get some tables to do this up above the floor.

是的。关于'Send Us Your Freaks'这件事，Brian McCullough对Jane Slade做过一次精彩采访，正是她在采访中引用了'Send Us Your Freaks'这句话。她解释说，因为当时劳务派遣公司给他们派来的基本都是专业人士，这些人期望使用现代化工具。而在亚马逊，底层软件系统不仅服务于基础设施。

Yeah. And on the Send Us Your Freaks thing, there's this great interview with Jane Slade that Brian McCullough did where she's the one who gave the quote in that interview about Send Us Your Freaks. And she said that because the temp agency was, like, sending them all these people that were basically professionals. They would expect to use modern tools. And at Amazon, the low level software thing wasn't just for their infrastructure.

他们甚至要求客服人员使用Unix终端输入命令。当客户咨询'我的订单在哪'时，所有操作都要通过命令行完成。Jade用这个例子向劳务派遣公司说明我们需要什么样的人——如果应聘者指望用现成的高级工具完成工作，那这些人对我们基本没用。

They expected their customer service people to, like, use Unix terminals and write commands. So that would someone write right in, and they're like, where's my order? Like, everything's on command line. And so Jade's using that to try to articulate to the temp agency, here's the profile of person that we need because all these people are kinda useless to us if they expect a bunch of very good tools to do their job.

我之前不知道这个背景，太有意思了。这些看似老派的故事，其实正是亚马逊开始构筑竞争优势和护城河的起点。我们稍后会谈到eBay，但这就像沃尔玛对抗凯马特等对手的故事。

I didn't know that context. That's awesome. What's cool here is these are quaint stories, but this is the beginning of the competitive advantage and the moat that Amazon starts to build. And we're gonna talk about eBay in a minute here. But it's just like the Walmart story and fighting against Kmart and other people.

如今的亚马逊正在打造自有的电商物流供应链体系，这是全球独一份的创举。沃尔玛没有，凯马特没有，巴诺书店也没有。它们都有出色的物流系统，但都是为'全国数千家门店配送8万种图书'设计的。而亚马逊构建的是'服务全球数百万客户'的配送网络。

Like Amazon now is building a native logistics supply chain and distribution for ecommerce that they are gonna own and operate that nobody else, literally nobody else in the world is doing this. Not Walmart, not Kmart, not Barnes and Noble. Nope. They all have their own incredible logistics systems, but they're tuned for I've got this book superstore of 80,000 titles, and I've got thousands of them across the country. Amazon's building distribution for I have millions of customers across the world.

本质上每笔订单都是独特的组合。每次都需要把不同书籍的全新组合放进箱子，这完全不同于沃尔玛'每天从配送中心按大致固定的品类给门店补货'的组合优化问题。

And basically, no two orders are the same. So I always need to put a unique brand new combination of books into a box every single time. That is a totally different combinatorial problem to solve than the Walmart thing of, hey. We need to make sure that a truck goes from this distribution center to this store once a day with about this stuff and, you know, maybe there could be a little variance. It's completely new.

所以亚马逊必须经历彻底失败，针对自身需求发明新方案，然后突然成为互联网时代的行业标杆。打包工作台就是个绝佳范例——我们的仓库需要这个，但沃尔玛体系的老派配送中心根本用不上。而这种创新会重复上万次，不断产生复合效应。

And so Amazon needed to fail completely, invent something new tailored to their use case, and then suddenly be the industry leader for the way you do that thing on the Internet. And packing tables is such a great first paradigm of, oh, our warehouses will need these, but other distribution centers in the Walmart land and that old school world don't. Yep. And that would just happen 10,000 times, again, compound and compound and compound.

有趣的是，沃尔玛、巴诺和亚马逊的供应链存在巨大差异。eBay显然不会搞什么打包工作台。为此他们需要更多资金，于是Jeff开始进行首轮种子融资——就是我们早期节目里和Tom Alberg详谈过的那次。

Well, what's cool is like, yeah, there are big differences between the Walmart supply chain and the Barnes and Noble supply chain and Amazon. EBay sure as hell isn't building packing tables. Yep. So they need some more money to capitalize all this. So Jeff goes out to raise that first seed round that we did the whole episode with Tom Alberg about back in early acquired days.

汤姆就是最棒的。

Tom is just the best.

汤姆确实是最棒的。我重听了那期节目，当时我在想，哦，这期可能会很糟糕，因为那是非常早期的收购阶段。结果完全不是，内容非常值得一听。这很大程度上是因为汤姆是个不可思议的嘉宾，他不仅友善，而且极其真诚，亲身经历了整个过程。

Tom is the best. I relistened to that episode, and I was thinking, like, oh, it's gonna be terrible because this was, like, very early and acquired. It's so not, and it's very listenable. And most of that is because Tom is an unbelievable guest. He's kind, and he also is so earnest, but lived the whole thing.

我是说，他确实...嗯...早期就投资了亚马逊，在那轮500万美元融资中投了100万，并作为董事会成员一路追随杰夫直到2010年代末期。

I mean, he was Yeah. An early check-in Amazon in that $1,000,000 on $5,000,000 post money round and stayed the course with Jeff all the way through the late twenty tens as a board member.

没错。他是亚马逊历史上除杰夫之外任职时间最长的董事会成员。太酷了。他们当时从西雅图一群本地商人那里筹集了100万美元，汤姆就是其中一员，也是对公司参与度最高的人之一。

Yeah. Longest serving board member in Amazon history other than Jeff. So cool. So they raised that $1,000,000 round from a bunch of kinda local business folks in Seattle, of which Tom is one and one of the most involved in the company.

尼克·哈诺尔，还有这里的一群本地商人。

Nick Hanauer, a bunch of local business folks here.

1996年时，记得他们在1995年存活的那半年创造了50万美元营收。而1996年他们的营收达到了1570万美元。这就像抓住了老虎尾巴——你必须飞速增长才能实现这种跨越。想想1995年12月的年化营收基数...

So in 1996, remember they did half a million in revenue for the half year of 1995 that they were alive. They do 15,700,000.0 in revenue in 1996. They have a tiger by the tail here. You would have to be accelerating so much to go from Right. Whatever the run rate was in December '95.

所以他们第一年实现了约15倍增长，但这是从50万美元基数开始的15倍，并非从零起步。

So they about 15 x ed in their first year, but they 15 x ed off a base of 500,000. It's not like off of nothing.

是啊。他们并不是从，比如说，五增长到一百之类的。

Yeah. They didn't go from, like, five to a 100 or something like that.

当我看到SaaS公司时，我简直惊呆了。你们翻了四倍？这简直闻所未闻。是啊，优秀的公司能翻三倍。

When I'm looking at SaaS companies, I'm like, oh my god. You quadrupled? That's, like, nearly unheard of. Yeah. Good companies triple.

然后你仔细一看，发现他们从2万美元的年度经常性收入增长到了10万美元。

And then you look at it and it's like you went from 20 k ARR to a 100 k ARR.

没错。这真是，哇，半年内从50万增长到第二年1570万。好吧，那是1996年的事。

Right. And this is, yeah, wow. 500 k in six months to 15 point 7 the following year. Okay. So that's 1996.

那是1996年。随着这种增长趋势，显然越来越多人开始关注。我们可以去听完整期节目，但汤姆在我们那期节目里讲过这个故事。我这里直接引用汤姆的话：'有天晚上6点左右下班回家，我妻子问，你认识一个叫约翰·杜尔的人吗？'

That's 1996. So as this rise is happening, obviously, more and more people start paying attention. And we can go listen to the whole episode, but Tom tells the story on our episode with him. I'll just quote from Tom here. So I come home one night after work at, like, 6PM or something, and my wife says, do you know some guy named John Doerr?

我说，'呃，其实我认识。'她说，'他每隔十五分钟就打一次电话，一直说要立刻跟你通话。'汤姆后来说，这正是约翰的伟大特质之一——他的执着。这告诉我们如何自我推销并展现诚意。当然，这位就是凯鹏华盈的传奇人物约翰·杜尔。

And I said, well, actually, I do. And she said, well, he calls every fifteen minutes and keeps saying he needs to talk to you now. And then Tom says, it was one of John's great strengths, which is his persistence. Tells you something about how to sell yourself and show your interest. And, of course, that is the legendary John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins.

已经过去很多年了，红杉、Benchmark和安德森·霍洛维茨等机构涌现了许多我们视为传奇的风险投资人。而在那个历史时期，约翰·杜尔被公认为当之无愧的史上最佳。

It's been many years, and so there's lots of names of key folks at Sequoia and at Benchmark and at Andreessen Horowitz that we think of as, like, wow, these incredible venture capitalists. John Doerr was pretty widely known to be the greatest of all time at this point in history.

他就像是当今风投界和创始人群体中所有明星人物的集合体。如果把所有这些明星特质汇聚到一个人身上，那就是当时的约翰·多尔。由此可见约翰的影响力有多大。嘿，就是那种拼劲和坚持。尽管他是传奇人物约翰·多尔，但他每隔十五分钟就给汤姆打电话，甚至打给汤姆的妻子来获取交易线索。

He was like all of today's all stars in venture capital within the industry and among founders. If you aggregate all of those all stars into one single person, that would have been John Doar at that point in time. So this shows you how much clout John had. Well, hey, just the hustle, the persistence. Even though he was the legendary John Doerr, he's calling Tom, like, every fifteen minutes, calling Tom's wife to get a lead on the deal.

亚马逊最终选择了Kleiner领投他们的A轮融资，以6000万美元的投后估值获得了800万美元投资。

Amazon ends up choosing Kleiner to lead their series a, $8,000,000 at a $60,000,000 post money valuation.

我记得他们当时是在与General Atlantic竞争。

And I think they were competing against General Atlantic.

包括亚军General Atlantic在内的多家机构。这笔交易有些特殊结构，Kleiner的条款清单并非完全干净。具体结构我记不清了，但汤姆在我们节目中提到过。他们是纽约的公司，General Planning那种风格。

Many firms, including General Atlantic, which was the first runner-up. Now there was some structure to the deal, so it wasn't like a clean the Kleiner term sheet was clean. Clean. I don't remember exactly what the structure was, but Tom refers to this on our episode. They were a New York firm, you know, General Planning.

但他们给出的估值接近翻倍，我想。哇。而亚马逊和杰夫最终选择了约翰和Kleiner，就因为他们是约翰和Kleiner。还有个有趣的花絮：约翰拿下这笔交易的方式——这算是他当时的惯用策略。太棒了。

But they were offering, like, double the valuation, close to double, I think. Wow. And Amazon and Jeff went with John and because they were John and Kleiner. And there's a fun little sidebar of John wins the deal, and this was kinda his playbook at the time. Great.

听着，我会参与其中，但我准备派这位优秀的助理加入你们的董事会。这会很棒。风投至今还在用这招。杰夫对此不太满意，就去找汤姆商量：我该怎么处理这事？

You know, I'm gonna be involved, but I've got this great associate who I'm gonna put I'm gonna put on your board. And it's gonna be great. VCs still do this today. Jeff wasn't too happy about this, so he goes to talk to Tom. Like, what should I do about this?

他们头脑风暴后想出了主意。杰夫回电给约翰说：很抱歉，我本来非常想和Kleiner Perkins合作，但看来我们要选择General Atlantic了。如果你不加入我的董事会，那对我来说就失去吸引力了。

And they brainstorm, they come up with an idea. And Jeff calls John back and he's like, I'm really sorry. I really wanted to work with Kleiner Perkins then, but I guess we're gonna be going with General Atlantic. If you're not gonna join my board, that was really the appeal for me.

你知道吗？约翰说，他不清楚自己有多少精力。我现在参与的董事会太多了。他手上有哪些公司来着？网景？

You know? And John's like, don't know the bandwidth. I'm on too many other boards right now. He's got, what, Netscape?

网景、康柏、太阳微系统、Intuit。这还是谷歌之前的事。我们马上会谈到谷歌，但他现在有点忙。

Netscape, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Intuit. This is before Google. We will definitely talk about Google in a minute, but he's a little busy.

这些都不是小公司。但是

Nothing to sneeze at. But

这个项目实在太热门了，而且杰夫非常有说服力，所以约翰还是抽出了时间。我想他现在应该很高兴当初决定加入董事会。是的。于是他们从Kleiner那里筹集了这笔资金。杰夫做了两件事。

this was such a hot deal, and Jeff was so persuasive that John made time. And I think he's probably glad that he made time to join the board. Yep. So they raised this money from Kleiner. Jeff does two things.

这是700万美元吗？

And this was 7,000,000?

800万美元。

8,000,000.

800万美元。那么到目前为止，公司已经筹集了900万美元的资金。

8,000,000. So so far in the lifetime of the company, he's raised $9,000,000.

略多于9，因为有亲友资金注入。整个贝索斯家族在09/02投入。实际上更接近9.04美元，因为不仅是杰夫父母杰奎和迈克，他的兄弟姐妹也在克莱纳轮融资前追加了投资。这就是我们节目开头暗示的——天啊，迈克和杰奎肯定做了笔超棒的投资。

A little more than 9 because there was the friends and family money. The Bezos family as a whole 09/02. It was actually more like $9.04 because the Bezos family as a whole, not just Jeff's parents, Jackie and Mike, but also his siblings put a little more money in before the Kleiner round. So that was what we were alluding to at the beginning of the show of, gosh, man, Mike and Jackie, they must have done some good investing.

这很有趣，因为贝索斯的兄弟姐妹们获得了史上最成功的投资回报之一。这证明风险投资就是门路、门路、还是门路。

Which is funny because, like, that's Bezos' siblings having some of the greatest investment returns of all time. It proves venture capital is access access access.

噢，我等不及要聊杰夫·贝索斯和麦肯齐如何致富了。还得再等一小会儿。再等一小会儿。

Oh, I cannot wait to talk about how Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie got wealthy. Gotta wait just a little bit longer. Gotta wait a little longer.

好吧。好吧。

Alright. Alright.

杰夫在完成克莱纳轮融资后做了两件事。虽然没记下原话，但当时公司内部人士说，杰夫把克莱纳和约翰·杜尔的认可视为给自己和公司打了一针强心剂。

So Jeff does two things after he raises the round from Kleiner. I didn't write down the quote, but somebody who was involved in the company at that point said something like, Jeff viewed this stamp of imprimatur from Kleiner and John Doerr as like a shot of steroids into himself and the company.

这无疑壮大了他的愿景。他将其视为一面冲锋旗帜——冲啊！冲啊！现在你可以制定更宏大的计划了。

It certainly emboldened his vision. He sort of used this as, like, someone waving the flag of, like, go. Go. Go. Like, you should feel free to have a much, much more ambitious plan now.

杰夫，我认为他不是那种人

Jeff, I don't think is the kind of person

谁曾觉得自己需要许可，但就他确实感到需要许可或认为正确做法是快速扩张而言，这正是他将其奉为座右铭的举动。

who ever felt like he needed permission, but to the extent he did feel like he needed permission or that the right thing to do was to get big fast, which is one thing that he does that he makes that the motto.

这句话后来真的成了座右铭，还被印在公司年会的T恤上。

Which literally became the motto, which printed on T shirts at the company holiday party.

没错。快速扩张。是的。随着约翰加入董事会，这对他来说绝对是关键一步。同时他还做了个重要任命，聘请了公司首位专业首席财务官乔伊·科维。

Yeah. Get big fast. Yep. Decline around, and John joining the board was absolutely that for him. So he also makes a critical hire, which is the first official professional CFO into the company, Joy Covey, to come on at this time.

她最初毫无兴趣。这位成就惊人的天才人物聪明又充满好奇心，但住在加州。她不愿搬去西雅图，兴趣寥寥。直到与杰夫会面后，她彻底改变了主意。

Who originally had zero interest. This is another person who unbelievably accomplished, really brilliant, curious, but she lives in California. She's not gonna move to Seattle. She's only marginally interested. But Jeff and she meet, and she's completely turned around.

她当时心想：天啊，我必须和这个人共事。这简直是有史以来最棒的商业模式。

She's like, oh my god. I have to work with this guy. And, my god. This is the best business model of all time.

我猜约翰在这件事上起了作用。据我所知，约翰的超级能力之一就是招募人才——不仅擅长达成交易，还善于帮公司招贤纳士。乔伊的故事确实令人惊叹。

And I'm sure John had something to do with this. My understanding from the history is that, like, one of John's real superpowers was recruiting. It was winning deals, obviously, but helping companies recruit too. Yeah. Joy's story is just amazing.

她高中辍学却最终成为注册会计师，在加州CPA考试中取得了史上第二高分。后来还同时就读哈佛商学院和哈佛法学院。她的人生本朝着一个方向发展，而亚马逊里像这样经历非凡的人比比皆是。

She dropped out of high school and then ended up becoming a CPA. She took the CPA exam in California and got, I think, like, the second highest score in history, the history of the exam. Ended up going on to both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. She dropped out of high school. Her life was going in one direction, and there's so many people like that involved in Amazon that are Yeah.

就像这些关于毅力的非凡故事一样。

Just like these incredible stories of perseverance.

众所周知，我们用过去时谈论乔伊，因为她不幸在2013年的一场自行车事故中离世——她被汽车撞倒。这位才华横溢又善良的人过早离世实在令人痛心。关于乔伊，我们要继续聊聊那封亚马逊信函，就是1997年她与杰夫合写的那封致股东信原件，想必很多人都读过。当然，当我们讨论亚马逊如何壮大的策略时，会重点谈到他们把每一分利润都重新投入业务扩张的做法。

As a lot of folks know, we're talking about Joy in the past tense because she sadly passed away in 2013 in a bicycle accident. A car hit her. So absolutely tragic, brilliant, kind person who the world lost too early. Just to keep going on Joy a little bit, we're gonna talk about the Amazon letter, which many of you have read, that original 1997 letter to shareholders, which she wrote with Jeff. And, of course, as we talk about Amazon, really the playbook of how they got big, we'll talk a lot about them reinvesting every single dollar of profit they had to plow it back in to grow the business.

这固然归功于杰夫，但很大程度上也是乔伊·科维的创见。可以说她是这个战略的共同架构师。

That is, of course, attributable to Jeff, but is in large part a Joy Covey invention too. I mean, she was really the sort of co architect of that strategy.

在布拉德撰写《万货商店》期间，她与他共度了许多时光。就在事故发生前，她给布拉德写了这封邮件，随后不幸离世。布拉德将全文附在书末，我在此引用部分内容。乔伊对布拉德说：'我回想起早期岁月，杰夫展现的清晰愿景、发展潜力和价值观。再看2013年的亚马逊，回顾这些年与他的几次谈话...'

She spent a lot of time with Brad as he was writing The Everything Store. She wrote him this email right before she had the accident and tragically passed away. And Brad publishes the whole thing at the end of the book, and I'll just quote from it here. Joy's telling Brad, I think about the early days and the level of clarity, vision, potential, and values that Jeff brought. And then I look at Amazon today, this is in 2013, and reflect on some conversations I have had with him in the intervening years.

从他当年的构想到今天的亚马逊，几乎可以画出一条直线。虽然中途有些小波折和迂回，但确实没有哪家公司能像这样完美践行创始人的原始理念。就像他射出一支箭，然后沿着那道弧线前行。我认为杰夫是最具能力的创始人之一，亚马逊这头巨兽仍处于早期发展阶段。

It is easy to draw a straight line from the vision he had back then to the Amazon of today. There were a few little wobbles and detours in places, but really, I don't know any other company that has created such a juggernaut that is so consistent with the original ideas of the founder. It's almost like he fired an arrow and then followed that arc. I think Jeff is one of the most capable and effective founders ever, and I think the Amazon juggernaut is still in its early stages.

她在2013年的这个判断完全正确。

Which she would have been right about in 2013.

天啊。这期节目不会讲到2013年，但她在2013年说这话时太惊人了——当时亚马逊市值已达1200亿美元。没多少人...

Oh my god. We're not gonna get to 2013 in this episode, but that was a crazy thing to say in 2013. Amazon was a $120,000,000,000 market cap company when she said that. Not many people

本可以这么说。亚马逊就像是一幅不可思议的罗夏墨迹测验图。一种视角认为它射出一箭后便笔直追随箭矢前行。另一种视角则是他们尝试了无数失败的项目，却擅长从错误中汲取教训并迅速调整。亚马逊推出的产品中唯一立即实现完美市场契合的

would have said that. Amazon's just this incredible Rorschach test. There is a way to look at it where it is he shot an arrow and then followed the arrow straight. There's another way to look at it, which is they tried way more things that did not work than ones that did, but were unbelievable at learning from the mistakes and quickly following them. The only thing that Amazon launched that had perfect product market fit right away

就是亚马逊网站本身。

Was amazon.com.

亚马逊网站是最初的构想。之后所有业务都像在迷宫中暴力求解——尝试某条路径，发现行不通就立即撤回。

Was amazon.com, was the original idea. And then everything else was a brute force algorithm for finding your way through a maze, where it's just like, try this pathway. Oh, crap. Nope. Back up.

撤回、撤回、再撤回，调整转向。亚马逊通过试遍所有门径的暴力方式，最终找到了成功之路。

Back up. Back up. Back up. Refine turn. Amazon brute force their way to success a lot in just finding out where all the doors were by trying all of them.

没错，这个比喻非常精妙。

Yep. That is a great way to put it.

值得强调的是1994到1997年这段上市前的时期。尽管如你所说有Kleiner Perkins的背书，尽管总部设在微软所在的西雅图，尽管产品市场契合度极高——年收入实现惊人的15倍增长（不是用户量而是实打实的营收），客户留存率持续攀升。每个业务指标都在尖叫：天啊！互联网正在疯狂发展，而书店在大多数工程师眼中根本算不上有趣的互联网项目。

It is worth highlighting this period of time, this '94 to '97, this pre going public time, even though they had the imprimatur, as you put it, David, of Kleiner Perkins, and even though they were located in Seattle near Microsoft, and even though they had this product market fit, an unbelievable fifteen x year over year growth in revenue dollars, not like usage, revenue, and customer retention was increasing. Like, every single metric of the business is like, oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. The Internet is going crazy, and a bookstore actually doesn't look like an interesting thing on the Internet to most engineers.

因此他们确实面临招聘难题——那些渴望构建下一代技术的优秀工程师更倾向加入开发网页应用的公司，比如搜索引擎，甚至像稍后会提到的eBay。从很多方面看，构建实时拍卖的后端系统和优质体验其实是更复杂的计算难题。

So they actually had a recruiting problem where talented engineers who were like, oh my god. This is a really interesting next generation technology that I wanna build on, are much more interested in working at other companies who are building web applications. Things like search engines, even things like you mentioned eBay that we'll get to here in a second. Yeah. That's a much in many ways, a much harder computational problem of building a good experience and back end system for facilitating a real time auction.

市场平台。是啊。还有倒计时功能。那个在线书店业务看起来有点无聊，所以他们招聘特别困难。

Marketplace. Yeah. And countdowns. And the online bookstore thing seems kinda boring, and so it's remarkably hard for them to recruit.

《万物商店》里有几句埃里克·施密特的精彩语录。嗯。埃里克·施密特，前谷歌CEO。这段话太棒了。都是些勉强又带刺的对亚马逊和杰夫的赞美。

There are a couple great Eric Schmidt quotes in the everything store. Mhmm. Eric Schmidt, of course, former CEO of Google. This is so great. And they're, like, so, like, begrudging backhanded compliments to Amazon and Jeff.

其中一段是关于AWS的。他说，'卖书的家伙居然搞懂了计算机'

But one of them is talking about AWS. He's like, the book guys figured out computer

科学。然后

science. And

当然，我们讲这个故事时，杰夫那家伙早就懂计算机科学了，你知道的，早在

then of course, we're telling this story, Jeff freaking knew computer science, you know, back in the

哦，他从第一天就在对抗这种刻板印象。他想让公司成为科技企业。所有人都说你们就是个零售商，再细分点就是个卖书的。他却坚持'我们是科技公司'，硬是靠意志力把公司打造成了科技企业。现在没人会说'哦他们是零售商'或'他们是某类特定零售商'了。

Oh, and he was fighting that narrative from day one. He wanted it to be a technology company. Everyone was like, you're a retailer, and even one click down, you're a book retailer. He's like, we are a technology company, and he sort of, like, willed them being a technology company into existence. And I don't think anybody now is like, oh, they're a retailer or, oh, they're any specific category of retailer.

大家都会说：没错，他们是家统治级的科技公司。

They're like, yeah. They're a dominant technology firm.

是啊。现在他大概希望人们会说，别担心亚马逊。对吧？好了，回到故事上来。

Yeah. Now he probably wishes that people were like, oh, don't worry about Amazon. You know? Okay. Back to the story.

所以乔伊在96年底加入，就在Kleiner投资轮之后。而杰夫这么做，绝对是因为他想这么做，而且符合'快速扩张'的策略。也许这也是对他新任高潜力CFO的一种考验，想看看她到底有多大能耐。他说，我们现在就要上市。

So Joy joins right at the end of '96, right after the Kleiner round. And Jeff, definitely because he wanted to do it and, you know, is consistent with get big fast. Maybe it was also sort of like this test for his new high potential CFO. Like, I'm gonna see what she's really made of. He's like, we're gonna go public now.

要知道，汤姆在我们采访中也提到过这点。部分原因是资本市场开放了。收入增长疯狂，互联网热潮刚开始升温。

Now. You know, Tom talked about this too in our interview with him. Part of it was the capital markets were open. The revenue growth was insane. Like, the .com mania is just starting to heat up.

强者愈强，诸如此类。杰夫还认为这对公司来说是个绝佳的营销机会，他完全正确。他们在主流媒体获得的曝光度，尽管约翰·多尔加入了董事会，但普通人根本不关心约翰·多尔、风险投资或初创企业。不像今天约翰·多尔是硅谷传奇，但那时硅谷还很小。亚马逊需要吸引全球各地各种类型的数百万人。

Strength leads to strength, all of that. Jeff also thought that it would be a great marketing event for the company, and, like, he was totally right. You know, the amount of coverage they got in mainstream media, they went from even though John Doerr had joined the board, the average person didn't give a crap about John Doerr, venture capital, or startups. It was not like today John Doerr was a legend in Silicon Valley, but that was a very small place. Amazon needed to appeal to millions of people of all types all over the country in the world.

没错。事实证明他们在长尾图书这个概念上确实做对了。很少有人会想要长尾中的某一本特定书籍，但大多数人都会想要长尾中的某些东西。所以他们最初的产品市场契合点来自于：我们能快速轻松地为你订购特殊书籍，而且购买体验基本上和买《哈利波特》这样的畅销书一样。

Yep. And it turned out they did get something right in this notion of, like, long tail books. There's very few people who want one particular book in a long tail, but most people want something in a long tail. And so their product market fit sort of originally came from, we can get you special order books quickly and easily, and your user experience in buying them will be basically the same as buying in Harry Potter book, you know, a bestseller.

这在《万物商店》中有所暗示。亚马逊网站吸引主流美国的一个功能是，你可以购买那些你不一定愿意走进商店、亲自从邻居那里订购的东西。

This gets sort of alluded to in the everything store. And a function of amazon.com that was appealing to mainstream America was buying stuff that you wouldn't necessarily want to walk into a store and order yourself in person from your neighbors.

就像每一项新技术一样。

Like every new technology.

就像每一项新技术一样。我们就说到这里吧。

Like every new technology. Let's just leave it at that.

是的。还有一点值得注意的是，他们识别书籍的方式源于1996年《华尔街日报》一篇关于该公司的开创性报道，那篇文章带来了巨大流量。简直像是雅虎事件的加强版。更惊人的是他们在1995年就统计到，当时网络已吸引了超过10万家零售商入驻——要不是后来Shopify出现，我根本想不到这竟在1995年就发生了。

Yes. And the other thing to point out about them identifying books is there's this seminal Wall Street Journal piece about the company in 1996 that drives a lot of traffic. It's like the Yahoo event on steroids. And they have this really interesting stat, which is in 1995, the web attracted more than 100,000 retailers, which I would not have guessed that happened until, like, Shopify. But apparently, that happened in 1995.

有些零售商甚至豪掷百万美元打造炫目网站，然而去年全球网络零售总额仅3.24亿美元，平均每家零售商销售额刚过3000美元。亚马逊正是找准了品类和运营模式，才能成为独占鳌头的电商平台。要知道这可比宠物网和eBay都早，甚至早于Cosmo.com和eBay。

With some spending more than a million dollars each on eye popping sites, yet worldwide retail sales on the web amounted to just 324,000,000 last year, which averages out to slightly more than 3,000 in sales per retailer. So Amazon nailed a category and an operational model where they were able to be, like, the one dominant ecommerce site. And, know, this predates pets.com. This predates eBay. Cosmo.com, eBay.

他们几乎是最早的弄潮儿，属于第一波互联网企业，在多方面都做得极为出色。简·斯莱德有句名言说得妙：'当时没有成熟的前辈能指导我们。每次引进客服软件或数据库软件供应商时，实施代表看着数据总是一脸懵：什么？我们的软件其实帮不上忙。'

They were almost the earliest. They were of the first wave and just nailed it on a bunch of vectors where and there's this great quote from Jane Slade. There were no grown ups that could help us. Every time they would bring in a vendor for, like, customer service software or database software or anything, the implementation reps would just look at all the numbers and be like, what? Our software actually can't help you.

因此他们不得不自主研发大量系统，因为当时他们是唯一成功运用互联网达到这种规模的大型零售商。确实如此。

And so they had to build a lot of this stuff in house because they were basically the only successful big retailer of this scale using the Internet. Yeah.

就像我们在沃尔玛特辑里学到的，如果现成的基础设施无法满足酿酒需求——想让啤酒更美味，就必须自建生产线。绝对是这样。

Like we learned on the Walmart episode, if the infrastructure off the shelf for what you need to do to make your beer doesn't exist, if you wanna make your beer taste better, you gotta build your own infrastructure. For sure.

好了听众朋友们，现在该聊聊我们另一家心仪的企业Statsig了。自上次报道以来，他们有个激动人心的新进展：完成了C轮融资，估值达到11亿美元。

Alright, listeners. It's time to talk about another one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Since you last heard from us about Statsig, they have a very exciting update. They raised their series c, valuing them at $1,100,000,000.

确实。重大里程碑。祝贺团队。时机也很有趣，因为实验领域正变得异常活跃。

Yeah. Huge milestone. Congrats to the team. And timing is interesting because the experimentation space is, really heating up.

没错。那么为什么投资者对STAT SEG的估值超过十亿美元？因为实验已成为全球顶尖产品团队产品栈中的关键组成部分。

Yes. So why do investors value STAT SEG at over a billion dollars? It's because experimentation has become a critical part of the product stack for the world's best product teams.

是的。这一趋势始于Web 2.0时代的公司，如Facebook、Netflix和Airbnb。这些公司面临一个问题：如何在员工规模扩张至数千人的同时，保持快速、去中心化的产品和工程文化？实验系统就是这个答案的重要组成部分。

Yep. This trend started with web 2 dot o companies like Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb. Those companies faced a problem. How do you maintain a fast, decentralized product and engineering culture while also scaling up to thousands of employees? Experimentation systems were a huge part of that answer.

这些系统让这些公司的每个人都能获取全球产品指标，从页面浏览量到观看时长再到性能表现。每当团队发布新功能或产品时，他们都能衡量该功能对这些指标的影响。

These systems gave everyone at those companies access to a global set of product metrics, from page views to watch time to performance. And then every time a team released a new feature or product, they could measure the impact of that feature on those metrics.

因此Facebook可以设定一个公司级目标，比如增加应用使用时长，然后让各个团队自行探索实现方法。将这种做法扩展到数千名工程师和产品经理身上，就能实现指数级增长。难怪实验现在被视为必备基础设施。

So Facebook could set a company wide goal like increasing time in app and let individual teams go and figure out how to achieve it. Multiply this across thousands of engineers and PMs, and boom, you get exponential growth. It's no wonder that experimentation is now seen as essential infrastructure.

没错。如今顶尖产品团队如Notion、OpenAI、Rippling和Figma同样依赖实验。但他们不再自建系统，而是直接使用Statsig。而且Statsig不仅用于实验——过去几年里，它已添加了快速产品团队所需的所有工具，如功能开关、产品分析、会话回放等。

Yep. Today's best product teams like Notion, OpenAI, Rippling, and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation. But instead of building it in house, they just use Statsig. And they don't just use Statsig for experimentation. Over the last few years, Statsig has added all the tools that fast product teams need, like feature flags, product analytics, session replays, and more.

所以如果你想帮助团队的工程师和产品经理加速开发并做出更明智的决策，请访问statsig.com/acquired，或点击节目说明中的链接。他们提供非常慷慨的免费套餐、5万美元的初创企业计划，以及适合大公司的实惠企业合约。只需告诉他们是本和大卫推荐你的。

So if you would like to help your team's engineers and PMs figure out how to build faster and make smarter decisions, go to statsig.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. They have a super generous free tier, a $50,000 startup program, and affordable enterprise contracts for large companies. Just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

好的。乔伊在1996年加入。杰夫当时说，我们现在要上市了。于是1997年，他们提交了上市申请，主承销商不是高盛，不是摩根士丹利，而是德意志银行。有人可能会说这是超级银行家弗兰克·夸特罗尼和比尔·格利主导的IPO。

Okay. So Joy joins at the 1996. Jeff's like, we're gonna go public now. So 1997, they file to go public with lead underwriters, not Goldman Sachs, not Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and some might say it's Uber bankers, Frank Quatrone and Bill Gurley Yes. Leading the IPO.

太酷了。我们在做亚马逊IPO那期节目时问过汤姆：为什么杰夫和亚马逊选择了德意志银行，而不是那些金字招牌——你知道的，选高盛或摩根士丹利永远不会出错？汤姆的回答是：如果你认识夸特罗尼和格利，你就会知道答案就是他们俩。

So cool. And we asked Tom on the Amazon IPO episode that we did. Why did Jeff and Amazon choose Deutsche Bank over the gold plated, you know, never get fired for choosing Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley? And Tom's answer was, well, if you knew Quatrone and Gurley, you would know that the answer is Quatrone and Gurley.

没错。当然，弗兰克·夸特罗尼后来在Catalyst完成了一系列令人印象深刻的交易，而比尔·格利也成为了未来的比尔·格利。不过这些都是他银行职业生涯中的事。

Yes. And, of course, Frank Quatrone has gone on to do bunch of very impressive deals at Catalyst, and Bill Gurley became future Bill Gurley. So yes. But this is in his banking career.

当他们提交上市申请后、实际上市前，正如杰夫所预见的，这引起了大量关注——这大部分是件好事。

Now when they file to go public, but before they actually do go public, just like Jeff was envisioning, this attracts a lot of attention, and that's mostly a good thing.

他在营销策略上是正确的。这是向消费者证明他们合法性的重要方式，让更多人放心在互联网上输入信用卡信息等等。

He's correct on the marketing exercise. This is a big way to legitimize them to consumers. It enables many more people to feel comfortable typing their credit card on the Internet, things like that.

诸如此类。还有另一件事最终也成了好事——虽然当时不是。这引起了巴诺书店创始人兼CEO里吉奥兄弟的注意（他们分别担任CEO和董事长）。他们早就知道亚马逊的存在。

Everything like that. And also this other thing ultimately is a good thing too. Not at the time. It attracts the attention of the Riggio brothers who are the founders and CEO and chairman, separately CEO and chairman of Barnes and Noble. You know, they knew about Amazon.

就像，无所谓嘛。亚马逊？互联网？我们根本不用担心。结果突然之间，西雅图有家小公司提交了上市申请。

Like, whatever. You know, Amazon, Internet, like, you know, we don't need to worry about that. Well, all of a sudden, there's a little company in Seattle is filed to go public.

并宣称是全球最大的书店。

And is claiming to be Earth's largest bookstore.

是啊。他们觉得这听起来不太对。我想到的是像Borders这样的书店。Barnes and Noble很棒，但Borders才是巨头。不过从沃尔玛那期节目我们知道，Borders已经退出市场了。

Yeah. They're like, that doesn't sound right to us. I just think of like Borders. Like, yeah, Barnes and Noble is great, but Borders was the big thing. But now we know from the Walmart episode, Borders was out of the game.

Kmart收购了他们，

Kmart had acquired them and

没错。

Yep.

创始人已经离开了。Louis Bordert也离开了。

The founders had moved on. Louis Bordert moved on.

去创办Webvan。

To start Webvan.

去创办Webvan。太棒了。太棒了。

To start Webvan. So great. So great.

这难道不疯狂吗？

Isn't that crazy?

巴诺书店曾是行业巨头。当亚马逊申请首次公开募股时，里吉奥兄弟飞往西雅图与杰夫共进晚餐。杰夫带上了汤姆。因为汤姆不仅是位杰出的人、提供宝贵建议、是我们俩的导师，他早年还曾是律师——一位非常知名的企业律师。

Barnes and Noble was the juggernaut. Now the Riggio brothers, when Amazon files for an IPO, they fly out to Seattle and they schedule a dinner with Jeff. Jeff brings along Tom. Because Tom, in addition to being just wonderful human, great advice, mentor to both of us, he was a lawyer earlier in his career. He was like a very high profile corporate lawyer.

所以他具备参加这场晚餐所需的技能。是的。里吉奥兄弟的父亲是纽约出租车司机兼半职业拳击手，曾两次击败洛基·格拉齐亚诺。两兄弟中的领头人莱恩，算是哥哥，虽然名义上读过纽约大学，但说白了他们是'社会大学'毕业的。他们的经商方式截然不同。

So he's got the right set of skills to bring to this dinner. Yes. So the Riggio brothers, their father was a New York City cab driver and a semi professional boxer who twice defeated Rocky Graziano. Len, the kind of lead of the two of them, I think the older brother, he technically did go to NYU, but, like, let's just say they went to the University of Hard Knocks. Their way of doing business is very different.

还有件事必须讨论。我觉得你完全不知道——记得上期节目我们聊过博德斯书店、凯马特、Webvan这些疯狂案例吗？Kiva机器人正是从Webvan分拆出来的，后来被亚马逊收购...

Also, we gotta talk about this. I I don't think you have any idea. Do you know, just like we talked about last episode about the whole crazy, you know, Borders, Kmart, Webvan, Kiva came out of Webvan, which, of course, Amazon acquired and

就是Kiva Robotics机器人公司。

is Kiva Robotics.

没错。这段历史太精彩了。你知道里吉奥兄弟从巴诺书店分拆出了什么吗？我说的不是Nook电子书或巴诺官网。你绝对猜不到。

Yep. Incredible history. Do you know what the Rizzio brothers spun out of Barnes and Noble? I'm not talking about the Nook or barnesandnoble.com. You're never gonna guess this.

不，其实这完全说得通。

No. It actually makes sense.

GameStop。不可能吧。真的吗？

GameStop. No way. Really?

我是认真的。好吧。其实是Software Etcetera。

I'm dead serious. So okay. It was actually Software Etcetera.

我得看看这两家公司的股价。

I gotta look at the stock price of both of these.

GameStop是Software Etcetera合并后的产物，后者是从Barnes and Noble和Babbage's软件分拆出来的。还记得当年的Babbage's吗？

GameStop is the merger of Software Etcetera, which spun out of Barnes and Noble and Babbage's software. Remember Babbage's back in the day?

听起来有点耳熟。

Sounds vaguely familiar.

他们曾是电子游戏和电脑软件零售商。对，就是GameStop。该死的GameStop。

They were like a video game and computer software retailer. Yeah. GameStop. Freaking GameStop.

天啊。好吧。从市值角度看，你觉得现在的Barnes and Noble教育公司怎么样？

Oh my god. Okay. What do you think Barnes and Noble Education Inc is from a market cap perspective today?

也许是5亿？

Maybe 500,000,000?

1.43亿。

143,000,000.

好的。今天GameStop的行情如何？

Okay. What's GameStop today?

103亿。对。完全是根据我面前这个内在价值模型计算出来的。

10,300,000,000.0. Yeah. Built purely from an intrinsic value model that I have here in front of me.

股票啊，宝贝。

Stonks, baby.

我猜巴诺教育公司就是那个大企业巴诺书店？他们的股票代码是bned。

I assume Barnes and Noble Education Inc is Barnes and Noble, the big company? B n e d is their ticker.

我觉得他们可能申请过破产。我不太确定。

I think there might have been a bankruptcy in there. I'm not sure.

是的，有道理。如果没有某种资本重组或其他情况发生，我认为不会跌得这么惨。确实。

Yeah. That makes sense. I don't think you end up cratering this far without some kind of recapitalization or something happening. Yeah.

说到巴诺书店的崩溃，这顿晚餐可没帮上忙。这两个，你知道的，典型的纽约硬汉，他们就像在问：你从哪来的？这个西雅图的书呆子。去听听我们和汤姆的那期节目吧，他的性格可不是那种虚张声势的纽约客。

Well, speaking of Barnes and Noble cratering, this dinner didn't help. So, these two, like, you know, tough New York guys, they're like, where are you coming? This nerd out in Seattle. Like, go listen to our episode with Tom. His personality is not blustery, you know, brash New Yorker.

知道吗？我敢肯定Radio那帮人来赴宴时心里想着：我们要彻底碾压这些书呆子。结果呢？他们可没得逞。所以晚餐后他们就灰溜溜回家了。

You know? Like, I'm sure the Radios came to this dinner and they were just like, we're gonna freaking crush these, you know, geeks. Oh, boy, did they not. So they go home after the dinner.

那顿晚餐算是委婉表达'我们想收购你们'，还是含蓄威胁'我们要把你们赶出市场'？

And the dinner was sort of like a soft we wanna buy you, or was the dinner a soft we're gonna run you out of business?

两者都有。大概就是：'嘿，我们听说过你们。知道我们是巴诺书店吧。'

It was both. Yeah. It was, hey. We've heard about you. You know we're Barnes and Noble.

对吧？'我们一直在考虑进军互联网。我们要做了。可以收购你们来做我们的互联网业务，或者直接碾碎你们。'我觉得晚餐就是这么个走向。

Right? And, you know, we've been thinking about doing the Internet. We're gonna do it. We could buy you and you could be our Internet thing, or we could crush you. I think that's how the dinner went.

顺便说，1996年那篇让世人警醒的《华尔街日报》文章标题是《华尔街奇才发现互联网售书利基》。我总会回想起用'华尔街奇才'来形容杰夫·贝索斯。其实...

And by the way, the 1996 Wall Street Journal piece that did wake the world up to this was titled Wall Street whiz finds niche selling books on the Internet. I always think back on the Wall Street whiz for Jeff Bezos. Well and actually,

Rizzio兄弟所言，正是众人所想。因此当亚马逊上市时，并非一次成功的IPO。他们在1997年5月15日定价，以4.38亿美元市值融资5400万美元，结果首日交易就下跌。

what the Rizzio brothers are saying, this is what everybody thinks. So when Amazon does go public, it's not a great IPO. They price on 05/15/1997. They raised $54,000,000 at a 438,000,000 market cap, and then they trade down on day one.

他们以每股约17美元的价格上市。我记得首日交易就下跌了。在互联网泡沫破裂时，股价最终跌至每股5美元左右。

It was like $17 a share that they went public at. And then I think they trade down on day one. They would eventually trade all the way down to like $5 a share in the .com bust.

不过后来股价会火箭式反弹。他们经历了起伏然后违约。是的。但Forrester Research的负责人，你知道那家大型研究公司，他们写了份关于亚马逊和行业的报告。

Well, it would rocket back up. They went through the wave and then default. Yes. But the head of Forrester Research, you know, the big research firm, they write a note about Amazon and the industry.

标题叫'亚马逊玩完'。他们用'亚马逊玩完'作为标题，内容是...

Called amazon.toast. They title it amazon.toast, and it's

不是因为eBay。不是因为那些乱七八糟的。不是因为互联网泡沫破裂。而是因为他们认为巴诺书店会干掉亚马逊。哦天哪。

not because of eBay. It's not because of blah blah blah. It's not because of the .com crash. It's because they think Barnes and Noble's gonna kill them. Oh, boy.

那么Riggio兄弟在做什么？他们回到纽约后做了两件事：一是启动了一个代号为'图书掠夺者'的新项目，公司内部的新举措。

So what are the Riggio brothers doing? They go back home to New York and they do two things. One, they launch a new project, new, you know, initiative within the company with the code name Book Predator.

以免有人产生误解。

In case there was any confusion.

为避免大家对其意图产生误解，他们打算通过新版barnesandnoble.com击败亚马逊。另一招是起诉亚马逊——他们选在亚马逊IPO定价前三日宣布诉讼，这对他们时机绝佳，对亚马逊却糟透了。狠辣至极。于是有了那份'亚马逊要完蛋'的备忘录。他们起诉的理由，本，正如你所说，是亚马逊宣称拥有全球最大的图书库存。

In case there's any confusion about what the intent of this is and that they're gonna kill Amazon with the new barnesandnoble.com. The other thing they do is sue Amazon, and they conveniently for them or inconveniently for Amazon announced the lawsuit three days before the IPO prices. Brutal. Hence, the Amazon dot toast memo. And they sued them for, Ben, what you said of Amazon claiming to have Earth's largest selection of books.

我觉得诉讼理由简直像在说：'你们连实体店都没有，顾客怎么亲自挑书？'

And I think the suit is like, well, you don't have a store. You can't go select the books.

这种较真太烦人了。

That's so pedantic and annoying.

正如我所说，IPO后情况不佳，股价下跌。但几周后，亚马逊作为上市公司发布了首份季度财报：1997年第二季度盈利2800万美元。

So like I said, the IPO happens. It's not great. The stock trades off. But couple weeks later, Amazon does their first quarterly financial reporting as a public company. They report q two nineteen ninety seven earnings of $28,000,000.

要知道他们前一年整年才赚1570万，现在单季度就2800万

Remember, they only did 15.7 the whole year before. They did 28,000,000 that

，简直难以置信。

quarter. Unbelievable.

于是华尔街立刻转向，股价飙升。1997全年营收逼近1.5亿美元，是前一年的整整10倍。

So Wall Street reverses course. The stock takes off. For the full year of 1997, they do just a hair under a $150,000,000 in revenue. So that's 10 x the year before.

天啊，以那种基数实现10倍增长，尤其是在即将上市时。我是说，这正是让投资者疯狂的东西。你可以看到它如何迅速成为热门股票。

Oh my god. 10 x ing on that kind of base, especially right when you're going public. I mean, this is the stuff that makes investors go nuts. You can see how this very quickly becomes a darling stock.

当我之前说巴诺书店要推出'图书掠夺者'并击败亚马逊时，我的反应是'好吧'。什么叫'好吧'？这开启了一种模式。如果亚马逊的杰夫、乔伊、麦肯齐和壳牌等人只是说声'好吧'而不采取行动，那就是狂妄自大。但这是亚马逊，他们知道这是个问题。

Now when I said that Barnes and Noble was gonna launch Book Predator and beat Amazon, I was like, okay. What do I mean by okay? This starts a pattern. It would be hubris of Jeff and Joy and Mackenzie and everybody and Shell at Amazon to just say okay and not do anything about it, but this is Amazon. And they know this is a problem.

他们知道自己能击败对方，但必须付诸行动，而且清楚路径。杰夫奉《美国制造》为圣经。是的，他了解沃尔玛的故事。

They know they can beat them, but they have to go beat them, and they know what the path is. Jeff made in America is like his bible. Yes. He knows the Walmart story.

顺便说一句听众们，我们原本没打算讲沃尔玛的故事。这其实本应是本季第一集的内容，但在研究亚马逊时我们发现杰夫对沃尔玛策略的借鉴之多，于是决定先讲那个故事。

By the way, listeners, we weren't gonna do the Walmart story. We actually were gonna do this as the first episode of the season, and we got into researching Amazon and realized how much Jeff respected and borrowed from the Walmart strategy. And we're like, I guess we gotta tell that story first.

接下来有几个他与沃尔玛互动的时刻，他会带着那本写满潦草笔记、做满标记、翻得卷边的《美国制造》去给相关人士看。对方表示拒绝时，他会说'山姆是我的英雄，我不是书呆子，我完全理解我们的战略'。

There are a couple moments coming up where he interacts with Walmart, and he brings along his copy, his, like, scrawled in notes and marked up and dog eared copy of Made in America to, like, show these people who we're gonna talk about. They're like, no. Like, I Sam is my hero. I'm not just some geek. I understand what we're doing here.

正因读过《美国制造》，杰夫明白自己能击败巴诺书店。但方法是通过建立电商专属的配送体系、物流和供应链，而非实体店那套。就像沃尔玛能为超级购物中心建立专属配送网络——这与克瑞斯吉公司为凯马特提供的配送体系截然不同。杰夫认为他们也能做到，但必须亲力亲为。

Yeah. And so Jeff, because of this, because he's read Made in America, he knows that he can beat Barnes and Noble. But the way to do it is through distribution, by building native distribution, logistics, supply chain for ecommerce, not for physical stores. And it is different enough that just like Walmart could build native distribution for their network of Walmart supercenters, and that was very different than the Kmart coming out of Kresge distribution that they were piggybacking off of. Jeff's like, we can do the same thing here, but we have to do it.

我知道必须这么做，但凭我个人能力做不到。不过我认识能办到的人。于是在97年初，他们联手行动。据布拉德说，这完全是双方共同努力的结果，约翰·杜尔可能也参与了。

And I know we need to do it, but I can't really do it. But I know some people who can. So in early ninety seven, he enjoyed together. I think according to Brad, it was very much a joint effort of both of them. Probably John Doerr was involved too.

他们开始前往本顿维尔进行招聘之旅。

They start traveling to Bentonville on recruiting trips.

拉拢和挖角。

Canvas and poach.

为了拉拢和挖角。然后他们锁定目标

To canvas and poach. And they they zero in

里克·多尔泽尔？

on a target. Rick Dollzel?

他们的头号人选。

Their number one draft pick.

里克·多尔泽尔。我认为他们在上市前就一直在争取他，但他最终是在上市后才加入的。

Rick Dollzel. And I think they had been courting him before the IPO, but he didn't end up joining till after.

招募里克加入的过程长达一年。有一次，他实际上已经承诺加入，后来又反悔了，对此他内心非常矛盾。

It was like a year long recruitment process to get Rick to join. And at one point, he actually commits to joining and then backs out, and he was really conflicted about this.

我是说，他在本顿维尔社区人脉极广，是沃尔玛的重要人物。

He I mean, he's super plugged in in the Bentonville community. He's an important part of Walmart.

他不仅在本顿维尔社区根基深厚。实际上，里克曾是沃尔玛IT部门的二把手。就像我们上期聊到的，乍听这话你可能会想：沃尔玛IT的二把手？那是谁啊？才不是呢。

Not only was he deeply embedded in the Bentonville community. So Rick was technically the number two person in IT at Walmart. And as we talked about last episode, you naively might hear that sentence and be like, number two person in IT at Walmart. Like, who's that? No.

沃尔玛曾是家了不起的科技公司，尤其在分销供应链物流方面，他们是全球顶尖的。

Walmart was a amazing technology company, and especially distribution supply chain logistics. They're the best in the world.

当时他们已是全球最大的计算机化物流分销企业，运营着自有卫星网络来联通所有门店，这套系统已运行了十几年。后端技术非常令人印象深刻。

At this point, they had been the largest computerized logistics distribution company in the world and operated their own private satellite network to communicate amongst all their stores and had been doing that for a dozen years. A very impressive back end technology.

他们是美国首个拥抱科技的大企业，宣称这将成为核心战略。而里克就是落实这一切的副手，是亲力亲为的执行者。所以杰夫、乔伊、约翰和董事黛西都觉得：若能招揽他，就是关键所在。于是他们展开了长达一年的招聘流程。

They were the first big corporation in America to adopt technology and say, that is going to be, like, the heart of what we do. And Rick was the lieutenant who implemented it all. He was the hands on guy doing it. So Jeff and Joy and John and the board, Daisy, were like, if we can get this guy, he's the key. So they go through this year long recruitment process.

正如我所说，他们一度说服了里克加入，结果他回电反悔说：不，我不干了。他之所以回电，是因为沃尔玛历史上第三任CEO李·斯科特听闻后，私下对里克说：里克，你在这里前途无量，未来可能成为沃尔玛CEO，你现在正犯个大错。

Like I said, at one point, they convince Rick to join and then he calls him back and he's like, no. I'm not gonna do it. He calls them back because Lee Scott, Walmart's CEO, the third CEO of Walmart in history, takes Rick aside when he hears this and he's like, Rick, you've got a future here. You could be a future CEO of Walmart. You're making a big mistake.

首先他说你正犯大错，其次他指出——这点他完全正确——听着：我们研究过亚马逊那帮人。沃尔玛可不是巴诺书店，我们清楚他们的动向。他说：我们了解他们在那边怎么做分销。

A, he says you're making a big mistake, and b, he says, which he's totally right on, he's like, look. We've studied these Amazon guys. Walmart is no Barnes and Noble. They know what's going on. He's like, we know how they're doing distribution over there.

他们一旦发展到任何规模，尤其是今年肯定会达到的时候，就会撞上南墙。那边会全盘崩溃。你心知肚明。你了解游戏规则。要是去了就是职业自杀。

They're gonna hit a brick wall when they get to any kind of scale, which clearly they're gonna get to this year. It's gonna all fall apart over there. You know that. You know how this works. You would be committing career suicide if you go

接下这份工作。这本来就是场豪赌。不过最终获得了巨大回报，很大程度上是因为里克出色完成了使命。但跳槽的风险确实存在。

take this job. Which that was the risk. I mean, it paid off in a huge, huge way largely because Rick was very successful at doing what needed to be done. But that is for sure the risk of making the jump.

最终亚马逊的杰夫、乔伊等人说服了里克跳槽。于是在97年初IPO前夕，他加入了。此时杰夫已确信胜券在握。正如布拉德在《万货商店》中写的，贝索斯早就预言巴诺书店难以在线上竞争中有大作为。

Eventually, Amazon, Jeff, and Joy, and everybody, they convinced Rick to make the jump. And so right before the IPO in early ninety seven, he joins. And Jeff knows they're gonna win at this point. So Brad writes in the Everything Store. Bezos had predicted that Barnes and Noble would have trouble seriously competing online.

事实证明他是对的。里吉奥家族不愿在相对次要的业务上亏损，也不想抽调精兵强将去做可能分流实体店利润的事。更何况他们成熟的物流体系本就是为实体店大批量配送设计的。转型做小额个人订单配送不仅耗时费力，还错误频出——但对亚马逊来说这不过是日常。

And in the end, he was right. The Riggios were reluctant to lose money on a relatively small part of their business and didn't want to put their most resourceful employees behind an effort that would siphon sales away from the more profitable stores. On top of that, their company's distribution operation was well entrenched and geared towards servicing physical stores by sending out large shipments of books to a certain number of locations. The shift from that to mailing small orders to individual customers was long, painful, and full of customer service errors. For Amazon, that was just daily business.

关键来了。里克一人加盟就已是重磅消息，他还从沃尔玛挖来了十几位高管。当他正式接受offer时，沃尔玛直接宣布与他断绝关系。保安押送他离开办公室的场面，事后看反而是沃尔玛的败笔——这更激发了内部员工的好奇心。

There we go. So Rick, he alone joining is, like, huge. He also airlifts about a dozen executives out of Walmart to come join him. So when he finally does officially accept the offer, Walmart's like, you're dead to us. And so he gets escorted out of his office by security, the whole thing, which in retrospect was a mistake by Walmart because that just makes everybody more curious inside Walmart.

大家会想：'天啊，里克本可以当沃尔玛CEO，却跑去那家公司管IT？我得看看他们到底在搞什么名堂。我要追随里克。'

Like, dang, Rick. He could have been CEO at this place, he just went to go be head of IT at this company and see I better go find out what they're doing. Like, I wanna follow Rick.

此时的亚马逊正从'怪才们邮寄冷门书'的草根文化，快速蜕变为'NBA城市'般的商业帝国。他们开始引进资深高管，启动顶级商学院招聘计划，还不断从沃尔玛挖人。沃尔玛啊。

And at this point, Amazon is well underway from transforming of a culture of misfits and geeks who wanna be able to ship rare books online to, like, NBA City. This is where they're getting experienced executives. They're really turning on the recruiting engine from top business schools. And Walmart. And Walmart.

看待亚马逊大致有两种不同的角度。在这档节目中，我们更侧重于商业层面——包括那些令人难以置信的现金流动态（稍后会讨论），如何争取到投资者想要的投资者，以及持续对增长进行再投资。

There's sort of two different ways to look at Amazon. And I think on this show, we focus a lot on the sort of business side of it where there's the unbelievable cash flow dynamic that we'll talk about. There's the whole get the investors investors you you ask ask for. For. There's the constant reinvesting in growth.

但截至目前，当你聆听谢尔·卡平的那些访谈，或阅读早期工程师格雷格·林登的博客文章，或是格伦·弗莱希曼的所有采访，就会发现核心在于：适配尚未成熟的技术，成为互联网领域的先行者和巨头，与不合群者同行。1998到1999年间，94至97年那批人大量离职，随着多尔泽尔和他的团队以及NBA式人物的入驻，他们宣告：模式已经跑通，这不再只是关于猎奇书籍的探索。

But up to this point, you know, when you listen to these interviews with Shell Capin or reading all the stories on Greg Linden's blog, who is an early engineer, or all the interviews Glenn Fleishman has given, it really is about adapting technologies that were not really ready yet, being the first and biggest, and being with misfits on the Internet. There was a big exiting of the sort of '94 to '97 crowd in '98 and '99 as Dalzell and his people and all the NBA sort of come in to say, okay. It's working, and it's not just about this quest for odd books.

没错。我其实会把多尔泽尔和沃尔玛团队归为三类关键人物之一。亚马逊的成功需要三类人：技术派（早期的谢尔和极客们，后来逐渐发展为世界级技术团队）、MBA派（我们稍后会谈）、以及沃尔玛派。

Yep. I actually would put Dalzell and the Walmart crew. I think there are three key categories of people that were necessary for Amazon to succeed. There were the technologists, Shell in the early days and the freaks and geeks, but then that evolved into a world class technology organization over time. There were the MBAs that we're gonna talk about in a minute.

比如安迪·贾西、杰森·基拉尔、哈里森·米勒、杰夫·布莱克本，还有沃尔玛系——里克·多尔泽尔、杰夫·威尔希（虽非沃尔玛出身但作风相似），这些后端零售物流分销人才。必须三者兼备才能成就这番事业。

The Andy Jassies, the Jason Kylars, the Harrison Millers, the Jeff Blackburns, and then there were the Walmart people. The Rick Dollssell, Jeff Wilhee didn't come from Walmart, but he's very much cut from that cloth. The back end retail logistics distribution people. And you really needed world class, all three of those to make this work. Yeah.

在分销与供应链方面，1998年末有十几位沃尔玛高管加入亚马逊。沃尔玛曾起诉亚马逊窃取商业机密，最终和解无赔偿，但伤害已造成——沃尔玛的基因直接注入了亚马逊。

So on the distribution and supply chain front, more than a dozen Walmart executives come over to Amazon. In late nineteen ninety eight, Walmart sues Amazon for trying to steal trade secrets. The case settles with no damages, but there was damage. It happened. That DNA came right out of Walmart and right into Amazon.

确实。公平地说，正如我们提到的，他们构建的是亚马逊供应链，这与沃尔玛供应链是两码事。

Yep. And to be fair, like we said, it's a different thing than the Walmart supply chain that they're building. It's the Amazon supply chain.

这一点他们最初认识不足。亚马逊在提升分销能力时经历了许多试错——尽管心知肚明，他们仍照搬沃尔玛模式，用典型的亚马逊方式：在迷宫中野蛮冲撞，从错误中学习，掉头转向。但正是需要撞上南墙，他们才得以突破。

Which they didn't realize enough of at first. There was all sorts of false starts in Amazon getting good at distribution because even though they knew better, they sort of were copying the Walmart playbook, and they were doing the classic Amazon thing. They were brute forcing their way through the maze, learning from mistakes, backing up, turning left, and going the other direction, but they needed to go bump into that wall to do it.

是的。所以当DelZelle过来和所有沃尔玛的人一起时，他们在西雅图有个仓库。他们就像在说，不。不。不。

Yep. So when DelZelle comes over and all the Walmart folks, they had the warehouse in Seattle. And they say like, no. No. No.

你们不需要仓库。你们需要的是配送中心。因为配送中心才是沃尔玛的模式。那就是沃尔玛。我们是最早的配送中心。

You don't want a warehouse. You want a distribution center. Because a distribution center, that's the Walmart model. That's Walmart. We're the first distribution centers.

就是说，你们需要更高级的东西。所以他们从1998年西雅图的一个仓库扩展到六个配送中心。西雅图的仓库变成了其中一个。特拉华、内华达、乔治亚，还有肯塔基州的两个。注意到它们都选在靠近人口大州但又不直接在这些州内的位置。

Like, you want something more sophisticated. So they go in 1998 from the one warehouse in Seattle to six distribution centers. The Seattle warehouse becomes one. Delaware and Nevada, Georgia, two in Kentucky. You notice they're going to all these states that are, like, close to big population states, but not in the states.

没错。但后来实际上是Wilkie提出，不。我们不要配送中心。我们要的是履约中心。这就是如今亚马逊的模式。

Yes. But then it actually was Wilkie later who said, no. We don't want distribution centers. We want fulfillment centers. And so that's what Amazon is today.

根本区别在于我们不是把一堆商品配送到商店，而是直接完成终端客户的订单。

And there is a fundamental difference of we're not distributing a bunch of goods to stores. We are fulfilling end customer orders.

面向终端客户，每一单都是独特的，我们需要优化系统让每一笔订单都像首次处理那样完成。完全正确。某种程度上是不可预测的。我是说总量可预测，但个体层面不行。

To end customers, every single one uniquely, and we need to optimize them to make every single order happen for the very first time it's ever happened Totally. In a sort of unpredictable way. I mean, predictable end mass, but not on an individual level.

多年来没人意识到这点。但亚马逊在这块业务上建立的，即便不是他们护城河的最大部分，也是极其庞大的。如今亚马逊在全球有185个履约中心，拥有96架飞机的自营航空公司，还有海运公司。

For years and years, nobody realized this. But what Amazon's building up on this side of the business is an enormous, if not the largest part of their moat. Today, Amazon has a 185 fulfillment centers around the world. They have 96 airplanes on their own airline. They have a maritime company.

他们拥有20万辆配送货车，还另外订购了10万辆电动配送货车。

They have 200,000 delivery vans. They've got another 100,000 electric delivery vans on order.

我是说，这家公司雇用了160万人，其中大部分从事这项工作。是的。这就是护城河。从客户角度看，这一切都是免费的。杰夫显然没有预见到

I mean, the company employs 1,600,000 people, most of which do this. Yes. And here's the moat. From the viewpoint of the customer, all that is free. Jeff obviously wasn't envisioning

这个具体细节，但，这就是为什么他们会击败巴诺书店，为什么他们会击败eBay，最终为什么他们会在电商领域击败沃尔玛。是的。

that specifically, but, like, this is why they're gonna beat Barnes and Noble, and this is why they're gonna beat eBay, and this is eventually why they're gonna beat Walmart and ecommerce. Yeah.

那么，跟我们说说eBay吧。如果你要向我推销这两家企业，让我戴上风险投资人的帽子，告诉我可以选择这个资产重、库存大、需要巨额资本支出建设所有这些配送中心的亚马逊业务。或者选择高毛利率、轻资产的eBay业务。100次里有99次，我会想投资eBay。但亚马逊却碾压了eBay。

Well, tell us about eBay. If you were to pitch me on both of these businesses and put on my venture capitalist hat, and you told me that I could take this really asset heavy inventory business with an unbelievable amount of CapEx that needs to be built out with all these fulfillment centers with Amazon. Or I could run the high gross margin asset light business of eBay. 99 times out of a 100, I'd wanna invest in eBay. But Amazon dominated eBay.

那么这是怎么发生的呢？

So how'd that play out?

与eBay的竞争，还有巴诺书店那件事。是的。那是亚马逊赢得的首场战役，但很明显他们会赢。eBay这场才是真正的较量。起初它们截然不同。

So the competition with eBay, the Barnes and Noble thing. Yeah. That was the first battle that Amazon wins, but it was obvious they were gonna win that. EBay, like, this is a real fight. So at first, they're different.

eBay是做拍卖的。卖的是豆豆娃、PEZ糖果盒——顺便说下，皮埃尔创立eBay是为了让妻子收集PEZ糖果盒的整个传说，其实是公关人员编造出来让故事更人性化的。那不是

EBay is auctions. It's Beanie Babies. It's Pez dispensers, which by the way, that whole legend of Pierre started eBay so his wife could collect Pez dispensers. That was a PR person made that up to humanize the story. That's not

发生了什么。拍卖网站，不是eBay。

what happened. Auction web, not eBay.

就在这一切发生的同时，你提到了那些MBA们。杰夫和亚马逊开始聘用安迪·贾西、杰森·凯勒、维多利亚·皮克特、哈里森·米勒、杰夫·布莱克本等等。所有这些新加入的MBA们，他们的任务都是为亚马逊开拓新品类。贾西负责音乐和CD，凯勒负责DVD。

So as all this is happening, you mentioned the MBAs. Jeff and Amazon start hiring Andy Jassy, Jason Kailar, Victoria Pickett, Harrison Miller, Jeff Blackburn, blah blah blah. All these people who are coming in, all these MBAs, they're all tasked with adding a new category to Amazon. Music and CDs, that's what Jassy does. Kylar does DVDs.

维多利亚负责盒装软件。哈里森·米勒负责玩具。克里斯·佩恩负责电子产品。杰夫·布莱克本领导业务拓展部门，开始收购其他互联网公司。很快，亚马逊和eBay就形成了更直接的竞争关系。

Victoria does box software. Harrison Miller does toys. Chris Payne does electronics. Jeff Blackburn leads BD and starts buying all these other Internet companies. So pretty quickly, Amazon and eBay, they're competing much more head to head than Mhmm.

人们最初的想法是。eBay在1995年由皮埃尔·奥米迪亚以AuctionWeb的名字创立，直到1997年亚马逊上市后才转型为真正的风投支持公司并更名为eBay。当然，最著名的是基准资本在1997年向eBay投资了670万美元。

People originally thought. So eBay started as AuctionWeb in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar, didn't turn into, like, a real venture backed company and changed its name to eBay until 1997 after Amazon was already public. And then, of course, famously, Benchmark invests 6,700,000.0 in eBay in the 1997.

创造了风险投资史上最伟大的投资案例之一。

Producing one of the greatest venture investments of all time.

那是1997年的事。我记得他们持有约25%的股份，这个假设很合理。我们很快会详细讲述这段历史。eBay在1998年9月以20亿美元市值上市。

So that was '97. I think they own, like, 25% or something of, you know, well, fair assumption. We'll go tell that whole history soon. But eBay goes public in September 1998 at a $2,000,000,000 market cap.

我的意思是，eBay当时就是赢家。在那个时间点，所有人看着它都觉得这是最好的互联网企业。想想看，1997年A轮融资700万美元，1998年就以20亿美元市值IPO。确实如此。

I mean, eBay was the winner. At this point in time, everyone just looked at it and was like, oh, that's the best.com business. And also think about that. Series a in '97 raising $7,000,000, $2,000,000,000 market cap IPO in '98. Yes.

拜托。我记得当时觉得Snap上市简直疯狂，才成立多久，四年？四年。没错。那真是个疯狂的时期，eBay也刚上市，市场狂热达到顶点。

Come on. I remember thinking how insane it was when Snap went public after, what was it, four years? Four years. Yeah. This was an all time insane moment with eBay going public and Mania at an all time high.

哦，那些Benchmark公司行政助理退休的故事都成传奇了。

Oh, they're legendary stories of administrative assistants at Benchmark retiring.

那笔小小投资的分成部分，对。

The little piece of the carry of the one investment in yeah.

eBay上市时市值可没停在20亿。到1999年，他们的市值就冲到了250亿。

The market cap didn't stop at 2,000,000,000 when eBay went public. By the next year in 1999, they hit a $25,000,000,000 market cap.

按今天的标准那算大公司了，而现在我们都有万亿市值的公司了。

That's a big company by today's standards, and we have trillion dollar companies now.

从AuctionWeb算起其实才四年，但从eBay成立算只有两年。这很厉害。是的。这一切都发生在1998年，就在eBay上市前夕，当时亚马逊和eBay更像是...等等，我们好像走的是同一条路。

And it's effectively four years from AuctionWeb, but it's two years from eBay. That's impressive. Yep. As all this is happening in the 1998, right before the eBay IPO, but as Amazon and eBay are more like, wait a minute. We're kinda going in the same direction here.

梅格·惠特曼和皮埃尔飞往西雅图。

Meg Whitman and Pierre fly up to Seattle.

迪士尼战略规划名人梅格·惠特曼。

Meg Whitman of Disney Strat Planning fame.

迪士尼，高利润的媒体公司。记住这一切。这就是梅格的核心。他们飞往西雅图与贝索斯和黑鸟会面。记住，亚马逊此时已是上市公司。

Disney, high margin media company. Keep all this in mind. That's the DNA of of Meg. They fly up to Seattle to meet with Bezos and Blackbird. Remember, Amazon's the public company at this point.

eBay当时还是个刚获得Benchmark A轮融资的小初创公司。他们很火，但你知道，终究还是初创企业。杰夫们带他们参观了西雅图物流中心。皮埃尔就像个典型工程师，他觉得'哇，这太酷了'。

EBay is still this little startup that had raised the series a from benchmark. They're hot, but, you know, they're still startup. Jeff and Jeff take them on a tour of the Seattle Fulfillment Center. Pierre is like, he's such a, like, engineer. He's like, oh, this is super cool.

接着他们会见两位杰夫时，虽不像巴诺书店那次晚餐，但他们委婉暗示'或许亚马逊该收购你们'。据布拉德说，他们随口提了个6亿美元的数字。梅格和皮埃尔回到硅谷后，据说皮埃尔感叹'那物流中心太酷了，他们在打造真正差异化的东西'。

Know, You then they sit down to meet the two Jeffs, make it kinda maybe not quite like the Barnes and Noble dinner, but they make a sort of oblique reference of, well, maybe Amazon should acquire you. Supposedly, according to Brad, they sort of float like a $600,000,000 number if such a thing were to happen. So Meg and Pierre get back to Silicon Valley and supposedly, according to Brad, Pierre's like, wow. That was really cool. Man, that fulfillment center, they're building something very differentiated.

梅格后来在书中引述皮埃尔的话（非原话）：'皮埃尔，仓库一点都不酷。我们永远不该运营仓库。你知道什么才酷吗？高利润的纯互联网业务。别在仓库里折腾。'

Maybe we should think about that. And Meg supposedly says, I think this is from an interview with Pierre in the book. Meg says, Pierre, this is not a direct quote. I'm paraphrasing. Pierre, warehouses are not cool.

我们永远不该碰仓库。知道什么才酷吗？高利润的纯互联网业务。那才叫酷。别把时间浪费在仓库上。

We never want to operate warehouses. You know what is cool? High margin Internet businesses. That's cool. You don't wanna be mucking around with warehouses.

这极其鲜明地展现了未来几年最佳商业模式与长期最佳业务的区别。长期来看，最佳业务是超乎想象地取悦顾客；而未来几年（甚至十年内，对eBay而言）最佳选择是高利润纯互联网业务。但贝索斯想的是数十年后——'除非确保极可靠、极快速的配送时效，保持库存充足，否则我们怎能成为十年后网购的最佳选择？'

Well, and this is the very, very, very starkest illustration of what's the best business model over the next few years and what's the best business to be in long term. Well, the best business to be in long term period is delighting your customers more than they ever imagined. And the best business to be in, certainly for the next few years, maybe even the next decade if you're eBay, is a high margin true Internet business. But Bezos is thinking in decades, and he's thinking, how are we possibly gonna be the best place to buy something on the Internet a decade from now unless it's extremely reliable shipping times, very short shipping times. We have it in stock.

他们从信任且安全的供应商那里购买。所有这些都要求我们要么成为商家，要么至少负责履行订单并将其存放在配送中心或履约中心。所以他们在不同时间框架下都是对的。我最喜欢的贝索斯名言来自我之前提到的那次早期采访。我为了准备这次节目看了贝索斯所有访谈，但那场采访在三四分钟内就涵盖了所有精华，而且那时候他还有头发。

They're buying it from a vendor that they trust, that is secure. All these things sort of require us to either be the merchant or at least be the ones who fulfill it and keep it in a distribution center or a fulfillment center. So they're both right on different time frames. And my favorite Bezos quote is and this, I think, comes from that very first interview that I referenced earlier. I mean, I've watched every interview Bezos has given in prep for this, but that one has all the highlights in, like, three to four minutes, and, you know, he's still got hair.

他说，长期来看，客户利益与股东利益永远不会存在冲突。

He says long term, there is never any misalignment between customer interest and shareholder interests.

太对了。

So true.

这个说法非常惊人，因为我觉得很多人会对此提出异议。而他是在无限时间维度上思考的。

And that's such a dramatic statement because I think a lot of people would argue with that. And he's thinking on an infinite time frame.

与梅格和皮埃尔会面后发生的事情，真正展现了杰夫和亚马逊这家公司的非凡之处——他做出了我认为没几个人能完成的心理和情感跨越。他既坚信你刚才说的一切（我读过《美国制造》），又在构建这个优势。这将是我的模式。

What happens after this meeting with Meg and Pierre, I think really illustrates just how special Jeff and Amazon as a company are because he makes a mental and emotional leap that I don't know many people could have made. He both believes everything you just said. I've read Made in America. I'm building out this advantage. It's gonna be my mode.

我要让客户惊喜。这就是我的道路。

I'm gonna delight customers. This is the way.

同时又极度渴望在拍卖业务上击败eBay。

And desperately wants to beat eBay at auctions.

嗯，他极度渴望击败eBay，但他也明白eBay的优势所在。这开启了一段旅程，而今天的亚马逊拥有令人惊叹的后端分销系统。就像我们刚才说的，在互联网上，你几乎找不到比亚马逊更快、更好、更便宜的购物渠道。综合所有可购商品来看，亚马逊确实遥遥领先于其他任何平台。你甚至可以在亚马逊上购买非亚马逊自营的商品，这一切都归功于那次会议。

Well, desperately wants to beat eBay, but he's like, and eBay is also right. And this starts a journey, but Amazon today is that amazing back end distribution. Like we were just saying, you can get stuff from Amazon faster and better and cheaper than just about anywhere else on the Internet. And certainly in aggregate of everything you can buy, Amazon is head and shoulders above anybody else. And you can buy from other people who are not amazon.com on Amazon, and that is all thanks to that meeting.

是的。这再次说明亚马逊在碰壁后选择退后一步，然后重新尝试。显然，他们没有收购eBay。显然，他们自然必须采取下一步行动——尽管亚马逊以客户为中心，但他们同样重视竞争对手。

Yeah. I mean, this is again Amazon having to run into a wall, back up, try it again. So, obviously, they don't buy eBay. Obviously, they naturally do have to do the next thing, which is even though Amazon is focused on the customer, they're also focused on their competition.

当然了，他们确实如此。

Of course, they are.

杰夫有很多关于客户的名言，我记得这应该是在98年或99年的致股东信里提到的。我们相信客户的忠诚度会一直持续，直到他们找到比我们更好的解决方案。这是我凭记忆复述的，可能不够准确但大意如此。我认为他的觉悟就是：好吧，

Jeff has all these quotes about how the customers and I think this is in the 98 letter, maybe the 99 letter. We believe that our customers are very loyal up until the moment that there is a better way for them to solve their problems than buying from us. And so that's off the top of my head. It's not exact, but it's close. And I think his realization is, okay.

如果eBay发展迅猛，并且存在获取更稀有或更便宜商品的途径，那我们某种程度上也必须涉足这个领域。于是这就有了亚马逊首次代价高昂的失败实验——亚马逊拍卖。会议结束后，贝索斯对布莱克本说：拍卖可能

If eBay has grown really fast and there's a way to get something rarer or cheaper or something. We kinda have to be in business doing that too. So this is Amazon's first very expensive failed experiment with Amazon auctions. So after the meeting, Jeff Bezos turns to Jeff Blackburn is like, auctions could

会成为未来。我们要启动一个秘密项目，在亚马逊内部复制eBay。这简直就像《捕食者》那本书里巴诺书店的桥段，只不过他们这次信心十足。

be the future. We're We're gonna start a secret project to clone eBay within Amazon. It's almost like the book predator with, Barnes and Noble except they're actually confident.

而且我们不是说要向eBay学习并应用到我们的业务中，也不是要针对不同于eBay的细分市场，或者用不同方式做拍卖。我们要直接对标eBay，完全复制他们的模式。

And it's not like we're gonna, like, learn from eBay and apply it to our business, go for a different segment than eBay or, like, do auctions differently. We're gonna go directly at eBay doing exactly what they're doing.

是的。现在明白为什么这事要保密了。保密还因为Intuit创始人斯科特·库克同时担任两家公司的董事。于是亚马逊开始做拍卖业务，简直就是eBay的翻版。当时eBay还没有收购PayPal。

Yes. Now it makes sense why this would be secret. It's also secret because Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, is on the board of both companies. So Amazon starts working on Amazon auctions, literally exact clone of eBay. Now eBay did not have PayPal at this point in time.

所以eBay的支付环节是个大痛点，却成了亚马逊的巨大优势。亚马逊已有用户信用卡信息，等等等等。亚马逊发现eBay的梅根、皮埃尔他们可不傻，他们清楚这是个问题。当时eBay正在洽谈收购能解决支付问题的初创公司。

So paying on eBay was this huge source of friction and a huge advantage for Amazon. Amazon has your credit card, you know, blah blah blah. Amazon finds out that, of course, Megan, Pierre and her, they're not dumb at eBay. They know this is a problem. They're talking to startups about acquiring startups that could, you know, solve payments on eBay.

时间是一九九八年夏天。那时PayPal还没诞生。Confinity公司（最早叫connex.com）甚至要到98年底99年初才成立。eBay当时正在和一家叫accept.com的初创公司谈判，想收购他们来处理支付业务。

Now this is summer nineteen ninety eight. There's no PayPal yet. Confinity, the first kinda, you know, connex.com, they didn't even get started until the '98, like early ninety nine. Wow. EBay is talking to a startup called accept.com and wants to acquire them to handle payments on eBay.

贝索斯突然介入，亚马逊截胡收购了accept.com，主要就是为了不让eBay得手。

Bezos swoops in and Amazon steals the deal and acquiresaccept.com, mostly so that eBay doesn't get it.

而且亚马逊刚上市不久，手头有大把现金，所以自我感觉良好，觉得能搞这种操作。

And they just went public. You know, Amazon's got all this cash from that. So they're feeling themselves and feeling like they can do stuff like this.

没错。eBay当时还做不到这点。要知道亚马逊股票流动性好估值高，资金充裕等等。如果当时情况相反，PayPal可能就不会存在了。

Yeah. EBay can't do this yet. Know, Amazon's got highly valued liquid stock, all this cash, blah blah blah. If that had gone otherwise, I don't know about PayPal. Like, there's probably no PayPal.

甚至可能就不会有PayPal黑帮了。说得太对了。硅谷的命运就在那个时间点发生了天翻地覆的变化。

There might not be a PayPal mafia. Yeah. Great point. Man, Silicon Valley, like, totally turns on a knife point at this moment in time. Okay.

三月份，亚马逊推出了亚马逊拍卖，克隆了eBay，与eBay竞争，但令人震惊的是，你居然没听说过亚马逊拍卖。它彻底失败了。

So March, Amazon launches Amazon auctions, clones eBay, competes with eBay, and shocker, you haven't heard of Amazon auctions. It's a flop.

这里有个有趣的评论。Greg Linden在他的博客中写道，这位早期工程师曾负责个性化和拍卖等多项工作。网站上线时，在技术上优于eBay——搜索更快更好，还推出了几项实用新功能。库存量尚可但不算庞大。这就是那种飞轮早已转动的典型案例。

So here's an interesting comment on it. So Greg Linden writes on his blog, again, this early engineer who worked on personalization and auctions, a bunch of other stuff. So when the site launched, it was technically superior to eBay's faster, better search, and several new useful features. The inventory was reasonable, but not large. This is one of those things where the flywheel was just already in motion.

当你拥有像eBay那样的网络效应——更多买家吸引更多卖家，更多卖家又吸引更多买家，而eBay已领先几年时，这种效应早已形成规模。即便你拥有技术上更优越的界面，以及亚马逊主站的流量优势，他们...

When you have the network effect of more buyers attracting more sellers and more sellers attracting more buyers like eBay had and they were a couple years ahead, it was just already in full swing. And even if you have a more technically superior interface And the advantage of traffic on amazon.com that they

可以导流过去，但，这都没用。是的。他们没有网络效应。

could send there, like, it didn't matter. Yep. They didn't have the network effect.

亚马逊当时并未真正重视它。当你访问亚马逊的商品详情页时，他们发明了这个激怒所有书商的绝妙功能——在同一个页面上同时提供新旧书购买选项。他们觉得：反正是同一本书，我们就放一起卖。这当然惹恼了出版商，因为他们认为：等等，我们的核心是让你买新书，怎么能把二手书和新书并列销售？

And Amazon wasn't really prioritizing it. So you go to a product detail page on Amazon, they had invented this pretty amazing thing that really pissed off all the booksellers, which was when you look at a product detail page, you could buy new and used. They're like, it's the same book, so we'll put them both right there. And, of course, that pisses off the book publishers because they're like, wait. Our whole thing is that you wanna go buy the new book, and you can't buy a used one right next to the new one.

二手书本该走其他分销渠道。但亚马逊的态度是：我们不在乎。顾客可以在统一的产品详情页上自主选择——这直接为第三方卖家模式埋下伏笔。没错，今天的情况如出一辙。

The the used books are in this other distribution channel. And Amazon's like, we don't care. The customer can choose which they want from one singular unified product detail page, which flash way forward to third party sellers. Yeah. It's the same thing today.

作为第三方卖家，你的竞争目标就是成为顾客点击购买按钮时，能从产品详情页获得流量的那个幸运儿。但亚马逊拍卖当时还没做到这点。

You're competing as a third party seller to be the one that gets the traffic from the product detail page when people click the buy button. So they weren't doing that with Amazon auctions yet.

不。那是个独立标签页，独立网站。

No. It was a separate tab, separate site.

Auctions.amazon.com。它没能获得亚马逊的流量。

Auctions.amazon.com. It was not getting Amazon's traffic.

是啊。缺乏网络效应。人们偏爱eBay的另一个原因，伙计，就是他们完全没把亚马逊当竞争对手。绝妙的商业模式。

Yeah. Didn't have a network effect. Another reason people like eBay, man, they just totally shrugged off Amazon as a competition. Beautiful business model.

所以他们的市值持续疯狂上涨。

So their market cap continued to go nuts.

没错。当时杰夫收购了ampaccept.com以防它落入eBay手中。那个时期他们开始大量收购公司，很多初创企业，部分原因我认为是为了阻止eBay和其他人染指，部分原因嘛...谁知道呢，那时候大家都像喝高了似的。

Yep. Now, Jeff he acquired ampaccept.com to keep it out of the hands of eBay. They could start acquiring, like, a lot of companies, a lot of startups in this era, partially, I think, to keep them from eBay and other people partially because I don't know, everybody was drunk back then.

他们还投资了一堆企业作为对冲策略。看到pets.com时，他们心想'短期内我们可不想涉足狗粮配送'。实际上，我记得他们曾尝试用统一运费配送猫砂，结果成本高得离谱。早期亚马逊员工经常把这个案例当作配送失败和完全错误定价的典型。

And they were investing in a bunch of them as kinda hedges. They looked at pets.com, and they thought, oh, we're not gonna get into shipping dog food for a while. In fact, I think they had tried to ship some cat litter at the same shipping rates as everything else, and it was super expensive. That's an example that's referred to very often by early Amazon employees as sort of a failed distribution, totally mispricing thing.

不过确实，他们在pets.com和Cosmo上砸了不少钱。

But, yeah, they sunk a bunch of money into pets.com, Cosmo.

我记得他们曾经拥有大约40%的股份之类的。完全正确。

I think they owned, like, 40% of it or something at some point. Totally.

所以从故事角度来看，所有这些收购中最疯狂的是一个叫Jungly的公司。

So the craziest of all of these acquisitions, just from the story, is a company called Jungly.

是的，在沃尔玛那期节目里提到过。

Yes. Which was referenced on the Walmart episode.

确实。我们不会讨论Jungly具体是做什么的。它是由三位斯坦福计算机科学博士和一位来自网景的商业人士创立的比价网站。具体业务不重要，关键是那位网景的商业人士名叫拉姆·施拉姆。

Indeed. We're not gonna talk about what Jungly actually did. It was a comparison shopping site started by three Stanford computer science PhDs and a business guy from Netscape. What it was doesn't matter. That business guy from Netscape, his name was Ram Shriram.

这个名字对某些人来说可能耳熟。

That might sound familiar to some folks.

但对大多数人来说可能并不熟悉。

But probably not to most people.

于是亚马逊以大约1.5亿到1.75亿美元收购了这家公司。他们原本在帕洛阿尔托办公，但亚马逊说你们不能继续在那里工作了——我们不能在加州建立税务关联。要知道那会儿还是那个年代，他们必须搬到西雅图去。

So Amazon acquires this company for, like, I don't know, a hundred and fifty, $175,000,000, something like that. They're in Palo Alto, but Amazon's like, you can't work there anymore. We can't have a tax nexus in California. Remember, this is still in those days. You gotta move up to Seattle.

好吧，Jungly团队。你刚给了我们一大笔钱。行吧，我们会搬到西雅图去。但他们讨厌那里。

So the Jungly team, alright. Well, you just gave us a bunch of money. Okay. We'll move up to Seattle. They hate it.

收购没成功。从一开始就考虑不周。几个月内他们就全部辞职，搬回了帕洛阿尔托。

The acquisition doesn't work out. It's ill conceived from the get go. Within a few months, they all quit and they move back to Palo Alto.

顺便说一句，他们后来创立的东西最终被沃尔玛收购，成为沃尔玛实验室，后来又变成了Yes。这可能是沃尔玛如今能在电商领域成为真正竞争者的第二大原因，仅次于Jet和Marc Leroy。

Which, by the way, then they would go on to ultimately start the thing that would be acquired by Walmart, which became Walmart Labs, which became Yes. Probably the second biggest reason that Walmart is a very real competitor in ecommerce now, second only to Jet and Marc Leroy.

于是他们回到了帕洛阿尔托。Ram是网景公司的商务人士，我猜通过他的联合创始人——那些斯坦福计算机科学博士们——他结识了另外两位斯坦福计算机科学博士。两个叫拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林的人。Jung Lee被收购了，他们赚了一大笔钱。

So they're back in Palo Alto. Ram, the business guy from Netscape, I assume through his cofounders, the Stanford CS PhDs, he gets hooked up with two other Stanford computer science PhDs. Two guys named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Jung Lee got acquired. They made all this money.

你知道吗？谢尔盖和拉里当时说，哦，我们想为正在做的这个东西筹点钱。

You know? And Sergey and Larry are like, oh, we wanna raise a little money for this thing that we're doing.

还有，我们讲了快三个小时的亚马逊故事，这有多疯狂？亚马逊已经上市了。是的。而我们还在谈论谷歌成立前拉里和谢尔盖在斯坦福的事。

Also, how crazy is it that we're nearly three hours into the story of Amazon? Amazon's already public. Yes. And we're talking about Larry and Sergey at Stanford before Google's founded.

于是Ram说，没问题。你们看起来很有前途。这个'BackRub'网页排名的东西。我懂了，它很有潜力。

So Ram's like, sure. You guys seem promising. This whole back rub page rank thing. I get it. It's got potential.

太好了。他最初向谷歌投资了25万美元，并加入了谷歌董事会。几个月过去了，确切地说是六个月，杰夫和拉姆一直保持着联系。尽管他们离开了亚马逊，但关系依然友好。是的。

Great. He invests the first $250,000 in Google, and he joins the board of Google. Now a couple months go by, about six months to be exact, Jeff and Ram kinda stay in touch. And even though they left Amazon, they're friendly. Yep.

杰夫听说了谷歌的事，打电话给拉姆，他说，嘿，我想见见这些人。拉姆说，当然可以。来硅谷吧，我会在我家招待你们所有人。

Jeff hears about Google, calls up Ram, and he's like, hey. I wanna come meet these guys. Ram's like, sure. Come on down to Silicon Valley. I'll host you all at my house.

那时杰夫对搜索业务感兴趣了吗？亚马逊在2002/2004年那个时期对搜索业务非常痴迷。他们当时有任何种子项目吗？

And was Jeff interested in search yet? Amazon got obsessed with search in that sort of a nine era of 02/2004. Do they have any seeds yet?

事情就这样发展。好的。于是杰夫和麦肯齐飞往硅谷。他们一起去了拉姆家，享用了一顿丰盛的早餐，大家互相拍背寒暄。

This leads to that. Okay. So Jeff and Mackenzie fly down to Silicon Valley. They all go over to Ram's house. They have a big, you know, nice breakfast, a lot of backslapping.

拉姆、拉里、谢尔盖、杰夫、麦肯齐。早餐后，拉里和谢尔盖离开了。杰夫把拉姆拉到一边说，嘿，我也想给这些人投点钱。拉姆说，老兄，种子轮融资六个月前就结束了。

Ram, Larry, Sergei, Jeff, Mackenzie. After the breakfast, Larry and Sergei leave. Jeff takes Ram aside and he's like, hey. I wanna put some money in these guys too. And Ram's like, dude, the seed closed six months ago.

而且，像Kleiner、Sequoia这些风投已经在筹备A轮融资了。但杰夫说，我不在乎。

And, like, Kleiner, Sequoia, like, they're circling about doing a series a. Like, Jeff's like, I don't care.

杰夫说，我可是杰夫·贝佐斯。

And Jeff's like, I'm Jeff Bezos.

是的。这对我毫无意义。我要加入，而且要以和你相同的条件加入。于是Ram为他奔走，说服Larry和Sergei以种子轮价格再接受Jeff和Mackenzie的25万美元个人资金——我当时没搞清具体价格，但紧接着的A轮融资中，谷歌在Kleiner Perkins的John Doerr和红杉的Mike Moritz之间选择了分投，按1亿美元投后估值计算，这在当时简直疯狂。

Yes. That means nothing to me. I want in, and I want in on the same terms as you. So Ram goes to bat for him, and he convinces Larry and Sergei to take another $250,000 of Jeff and Mackenzie's personal money at the seed price, which was I couldn't figure out what it was, but the series a that would happen shortly thereafter of Google famously split between John Dora Kleiner and Mike Moritz at Sequoia was at a $100,000,000 post money valuation, which was insane for the point in time.

Mike Moritz进场后对Doug Leone说——正如Doug在我们访谈中回忆的——即便完成这笔投资后，他看着谷歌说：'我们从未花这么多钱买这么少的东西。'

And Mike Moritz came in and told Doug Leone, as Doug told it on our interview with him, even after making this investment, he's looking at Google and goes, we've never paid so much for so little.

没错。哦，要是我有那期Doug的访谈就好了。

Yes. Oh, if I got that episode with Doug.

太精彩了。真是高光时刻。好的。那就按1亿算吧。我们可以说，我猜大概在2000万到2400万之间。

Amazing. What a highlight. Okay. So that's down at a 100. So we can say, like, I'm gonna guess somewhere 20,000,000, 24.

不确定。我是说Ram主导的这次。1000万？我猜最多1000万，甚至可能更低。

Don't know. I mean, Ram led this. 10? My best guess is 10 or maybe even lower post.

所以你认为Ram在A轮获得了10到20倍的回报？

So you think Ram got, like, a 10 to 20 x from the series a?

我想是的。不确定。

I think so. I don't know.

应该说拉姆和杰夫。还有麦肯齐。

Ram and Jeff, we should say. And Mackenzie.

我认为可以很肯定地说，杰夫和麦肯齐至少持有谷歌1%的股份。个人持股。甚至可能在A轮融资稀释后依然如此，因为他们没有进行其他轮次的融资。

I think it is probably safe to say that Jeff and Mackenzie owned at least one percent of Google. Personally. Probably even after dilution from the series a because they didn't raise another venture around.

没错。谷歌仅凭那轮A轮融资就上市了。

That's right. Google went public just on that series a.

确实如此。谷歌，作为有史以来

They did. Google, one of the

最快速实现现金盈利的企业之一。

most immediately cash generative businesses of all time.

天啊。不过他们也是经历了一番波折才找到付费搜索的商业模式，但说真的，太惊人了。杰夫从未公开回应过——虽然被多次问及——他和麦肯齐是否抛售了谷歌股票，但在IPO前他们根本没机会出售。

My god. Well, they had to, you know, walk in the woods before they found the paid search business model and, you know, all that, but, like, my god. So Jeff has never commented. He's been asked. He's never commented on whether or not he and Mackenzie sold their Google shares, but they wouldn't have even had a chance to sell before the IPO.

所以他至少持有谷歌1%以上的股份直到上市。很可能持有了更长时间。这就是杰夫和麦肯齐积累财富的方式。

So at a minimum, he held to the IPO, like, one plus percent of Google. Probably held longer than that. Like, I don't know. That's how Jeff and Mackenzie got wealthy.

2004年2月，谷歌以230亿美元市值完成首次公开募股。

So in 02/2004, Google IPO ed for twenty three billion dollar market cap.

没错。

Yep.

当时他们的股票价值2.3亿？不对，是25亿美元。那是18年前的事了。而过去18年间，谷歌市值从那时起增长了65倍。

So their shares would have been worth 230 Yep. Million dollars Quarter billion. At IPO, which was eighteen years ago. And since then, over the last eighteen years, Google has 65 x ed from there.

刚才是我在笑，但听众朋友们，你们应该想象成是杰夫·贝佐斯在笑。对。

That was me laughing there, but you listeners, you should just imagine Jeff Bezos laughing there. Yes.

天啊。确实，即使贝佐斯当时没有抛售任何亚马逊股票，他也有充足资金来投资那些疯狂酷炫的——

Oh, man. So, yes, even if Bezos wasn't selling any Amazon shares for a while, he had plenty of capital to work with for doing things like investing in crazy cool

钟表公司、火箭企业还有风投基金。对，比如Benchmark、PSL。不过我觉得应该不是eBay基金。

Clocks and rocket companies and Venture funds. Yeah. Benchmark. PSL. Which also I don't think it was the eBay fund.

不可能是eBay基金。但后来贝佐斯确实成了Benchmark的大个人投资者——当然Benchmark是eBay主要支持者。所以这关系也挺盘根错节的，想想看

It couldn't have been the eBay fund. But yeah. Then Bezos becomes a large personal investor in Benchmark in the future, of course, the main backer of eBay. So it's also incestuous. Think about it

这边也是。如果杰夫还持有谷歌的股份，无论谷歌云还是AWS胜出会怎样？

this way too. What if Jeff still owns a percent of Google, whether Google Cloud wins or whether AWS wins?

尤其是现在杰夫只是亚马逊的董事会成员。斯科特·库克曾是亚马逊和eBay的董事。

Especially now that Jeff's just a board member of Amazon. Scott Cook was a board member of Amazon and eBay.

他持有多少？比如现在亚马逊17%的股份？大概是这样？

What does he own? Like, 17% of Amazon today? Something like that?

差不多是这样。

Something like that.

所以他希望亚马逊获胜的动力只是谷歌的17倍。我们这是在编数字。我们很大程度上是在猜测他的入场价格等等。他能获得这些是因为亚马逊收购了一家公司后他们都离开了，但他保持了关系。我是说，这些事情

So he's only 17 x more incentivized for Amazon to win than Google to win. We're making up numbers here. We're sort of we're speculating quite a bit on what price he got in and everything. And he got access because Amazon bought a company and then they all left, but he maintained the relationship. I mean, these things

人生漫长。真神奇。我觉得这里有个教训，那就是投资谷歌。

life is long. Amazing. I feel like there's a lesson there and the lesson is invest in Google.

我想，是的，这也是我能得出的全部结论了。

I think, yeah, that's all I can take away too.

回到亚马逊。尽管这对杰夫和麦肯齐个人来说是一笔难以置信的丰厚意外之财，但此刻亚马逊的情况相当糟糕。互联网热潮开始消退，裂痕初现。1999年《巴伦周刊》发表了那篇著名的'亚马逊炸弹'文章。

Back to Amazon. Despite this unbelievable bountiful windfall for Jeff and Mackenzie personally, things are pretty bad at Amazon at this point in time. The .com euphoria is starting to wane. Some cracks are starting to show. Barron's in 1999 publishes the famous amazon.bomb article.

'亚马逊炸弹'。当时仍有一些分析师对亚马逊非常非常看好。摩根士丹利的一位分析师——她的名字肯定有人会从她在凯鹏华盈和如今邦德时期的经历中认出——玛丽·米克

Amazon.bomb. There were some analysts who were still very, very excited about Amazon at this time. A Morgan Stanley analyst with the name that some people will definitely know from her Kleiner Perkins days and now Bond days, Mary Meeker

嗯。

Mhmm.

当时她刚以分析师身份加入摩根士丹利，就在亚马逊IPO前后写道：亚马逊是互联网上领先的零售商品销售商。她说这个估值让我们感到巨大程度的心痛，但最终她总结道：我们不想错过这个机会。她是对的。此时她职业生涯的很大一部分成就是来自于对亚马逊的精准判断所积累的专业资本。完全正确。

At the time just at Morgan Stanley as an analyst, wrote right around IPO time that Amazon is the leading retailer merchandiser on the Internet. She said the valuation gives us heartburn of gargantuan proportion, but she did conclude, we do not wanna miss this one. And She was right. A lot of her career at this point would come from sort of trading on professional capital that came from being extremely right about Amazon. Totally.

但这改变不了互联网泡沫开始出现裂痕并最终破裂的事实。

But that doesn't change the .com bubble starting to show cracks and then eventually pop.

她将独自陷入困境，因为就在亚马逊发布1999年第二或第三季度财报时——还是老样子：营收大幅增长，巨额亏损。我们没说乔伊，而她通过三年超负荷工作获得的成功让她彻底精疲力竭。

She would be out in the cold here by herself because the amazon.com piece comes out. Amazon reports, I think, either q two or q three earnings in 1999. And, I mean, it's the same story. Like, lots of revenue growth, hugely unprofitable. We we didn't say Joy and then her success she worked super hard for three years, totally burned out.

她的继任者沃伦·詹森从达美航空空降接任CFO。乔伊先离职，接着沃伦也走了。他们策划通过债务市场筹集了约20亿美元可转换债券，这完全挽救了亚马逊。

Her successor Warren Jensen took over as CFO from Delta Airlines. He's where he came from. Joy first and then and then Warren too. They orchestrate raising about $2,000,000,000 in convertible debt on the debt markets, which totally saves Amazon's skin.

而且远超过他们IPO时的融资额。远不止。他们只融了5500万美元。

And was way more than they raised in the IPO. Way more. They only raised 55,000,000.

是啊。有时候人们会说，哦，亚马逊。资本轻量化的绝佳范例。他们只融了1000万美元风投和5500万IPO就建成了亚马逊。才不是呢。

Yeah. Sometimes people are like, oh, Amazon. What a great example of Capital Light. They raised $10,000,000 in venture and 55 in their IPO and built Amazon. Like, no.

不。不。还有另外20亿美元。

No. No. There is another $2,000,000,000.

而且他们用掉了这笔钱。

And they used it.

他们确实用掉了。要不是这笔钱，亚马逊早就完蛋了。所以在1999年某个时候，股价开始下跌。董事会对公司和杰夫非常担忧。我是说，现在很难想象，但确实如此。

And they used it. Amazon would have been amazon.toast had it not been for that. So somewhere in 1999, the stock starts falling. The board gets pretty worried about the company, about Jeff. I mean, it's hard to remember this, but Yeah.

事情是这样的：董事会要求杰夫引入一位COO来辅佐他。读到这段历史真是令人唏嘘。他们请来了比尔·坎贝尔，那位传奇教练。

This happened. The board asks Jeff to bring in a COO to compliment him. That's so painful to read this and, like, go back that this happened. And they bring in Bill Campbell, the coach, the legendary Bill Campbell.

必须说明他是传奇人物。所有人都对他赞誉有加。他曾被引入推特，后来作为董事会的隐秘代理人运作罢免了CEO。你也会好奇这里发生了什么。

Who we should say he's legendary. He's everyone speaks very highly of him. He was brought in to Twitter and then worked as a pseudo nefarious agent on behalf of the board to oust the CEO. You gotta wonder what was going on here too.

不，不仅仅是推特。比如比尔，我认为他可能确实非常出色，那么多人的证词都证明了这一点。甚至包括像斯科特·库克这样被他接替的人。所以这不仅仅是推特。

No. It's not just Twitter. Like, Bill, I think, probably genuinely was amazing, and the testimony of so many people to him. Even people like Scott Cook who he came in and replaced. So it wasn't just Twitter.

苹果有史蒂夫·乔布斯，谷歌有埃里克·施密特，Intuit有斯科特·库克。

Apple with Steve Jobs, Google with, you know, Eric Schmidt, Intuit with Scott Cook.

令人惊讶的是，他以教练身份闻名，但实际上他反复做的事情是

It's amazing that the thing that he got reputation for was being a coach when in fact, the thing that he really did repeatedly

说服创始人退居二线，引入成熟的管理层。是的，这里确实存在一个固定模式。但这并不意味着他可能不优秀，或者没有帮助过那些公司。亚马逊董事会把他引入亚马逊的同时，还要求杰夫去找一位首席运营官。据说，这个职位的主要候选人之一是杰米·戴蒙，你信吗？

It was convince the founders to move aside and bring in the adult supervision. Yes. There's a fact pattern here for sure. Doesn't mean he probably wasn't amazing and, like, didn't help all those companies and, you know, but, yeah, the Amazon board brings him into Amazon and simultaneously asked Jeff to go find a COO. So supposedly, actually, a leading candidate for the job was Jamie Dimon, if you can believe that.

没错。

That's right.

这难道不疯狂吗？

Isn't that crazy?

如果成真会怎样？

What could have been?

他们最终选择了乔·加利，他曾是百得公司的高管，实际上已签约准备去百事公司担任菲多利部门的执行职位。还有哪位从百事COO转任科技公司CEO的例子？约翰·斯卡利。没错，就是约翰·斯卡利。所以1999年的亚马逊正在上演一场斯卡利式的情景。

They settle on Joe Galley, who had been an executive at Black and Decker, and he had actually signed to go take an executive role at Pepsi running the Frito Lay division. What other COO transitioned to CEO of tech company came from Pepsi? John Scully. That would be John Scully. So there's a Scully situation going on here at Amazon in 1999.

贝索斯确实认真对待这件事。他进行了重组，让所有人都向乔汇报——就是那位百得来的乔。他说现在我唯一的直接汇报对象就是乔。

So Bezos does take this seriously. He reorgs. He has everyone report to Joe. The Black and Decker guy, to Joe. And, you know, he says my only direct report is now Joe.

与此同时，他也明确表示：听着，你是COO不是CEO。而乔可能因为与比尔·坎贝尔的交谈（我们不确定）以及与其他董事会成员的交流，产生了自己应该做CEO类型工作的印象。

And at the same time, he's also like, you look, you're COO. You're not CEO. And Joe's sort of under this impression probably from talking to Bill Campbell, we don't know for sure, and probably from talking to other board members, I think I'm supposed to do CEO type stuff.

而且，我觉得我应该先当一段时间COO，然后

And, like, I'm I think I'm supposed to, like, be the COO for a while and then

再接手这个职位，按照我的方式来。我们要用我在百得和原来行业的那套方法。但亚马逊拒绝了这个方案。于是乔开始以某种方式运营亚马逊，试图让人们转向他的做事方式和领导风格。

Move into this role and, you know, do it my way. We're gonna do it the way that we did it at Black and Decker and from the world where I came from. And Amazon rejects this. So Joe starts running Amazon sort of. He starts sort of trying to get people to start moving to his way of doing things and his style of leadership.

顺便说，他每个周末都飞回东海岸，而不是扎根在西雅图。

By the way, while he's commuting back to the East Coast every single weekend rather than being on the ground in Seattle.

哦天啊，这还不是最糟糕的问题。

Oh, man. That that wasn't the worst offense.

亚马逊高管们就像排斥失败的器官移植一样拒绝了这个提议。

The Amazon executives just reject this like a bad organ transplant.

关于这里的文化冲突，你只需要知道乔是那种老派高管——他处理邮件的方式是让秘书打印出来读给他听，然后口述回复内容。

Everything you need to know about the culture clash here is that Joe was one of those old school executives who the way he did email was he had his secretary printed out and read it to him, and then he would tell her what to respond.

是啊。说实话这听起来挺棒的。我也想这样。

Yeah. Actually, that sounds pretty awesome. I would love that.

我也很想这么做。绝对愿意。没错。我愿意整天这么干——或者说尽可能少花时间但尽可能频繁地这么干，

I would love to do that. Definitely would. Yes. I would do that all day long or actually for as little time as possible as in often as possible,

或者说尽可能少地这么干。不过确实，这套在亚马逊行不通。所以乔出局了。是的。

as rarely as possible. But, yeah, that's not gonna work running Amazon. So Joe's out. Yep.

但他确实为亚马逊做出了一个极其惊人的持久贡献——他是招募杰夫·威尔基的关键人物。我想杰夫和其他人也是，但这足以抵消很多过错了。

He does though make one absolutely incredible lasting contribution to Amazon, which is he was a key part of recruiting Jeff Wilkie. I think Jeff and everybody was too, but that absolves a lot of sins.

对于不熟悉杰夫·威尔基的听众，杰夫后来在公司做了什么？

And for listeners unfamiliar with Jeff Wilkie, what did Jeff go on to do at the company?

杰夫基本上继承并扩展了里克·多泽尔的职责。后来，当贝索斯开始退居二线，贾西成为AWS的CEO，而贝索斯担任整个公司的CEO时，贾西的搭档、亚马逊零售的CEO是杰夫·威尔克。

Jeff basically inherited and then expanded Rick Dozell's role. And then eventually, when Bezos started to step back and Jassy became CEO of AWS, and Bezos was CEO of the whole company, Jassy's counterpart and CEO of Amazon retail was Jeff Welke.

所以他在亚马逊留下了一些遗产。乔在分道扬镳时也是如此。

So he's got a little bit of a legacy at Amazon. Joe does as he parts ways.

没错。他会回到他原来的世界。他成为了制造胡佛和Dirt Devil吸尘器的控股公司的CEO，而且我认为他在那里做得非常好。

Yep. And he would go back to the world he came from. He became CEO of the holding company that makes Hoover and Dirt Devil vacuums, and I think did very well there.

所以这些年来可能在亚马逊上卖出了很多。

So Probably sold a lot of them on Amazon over the years.

可能在亚马逊上卖出了很多。是的。确实如此。

Probably sold a lot of them on Amazon. Yes. Yes, indeed.

好吧。不过亚马逊的困境是真实的。基于这次大规模可转换债券发行，他们现在有一大笔债务要偿还。1999年，他们仍在以惊人的速度增长，虽然不及之前的增速。

Alright. So Amazon's woes, though, are real. They now have a big debt service to pay based on this big convertible bond offering. And 1999, they're still growing at what is honestly an insane pace. It's not the amount that they were growing before.

我认为他们的收入大约翻了三倍，明确地说，在1999年是从6亿增长到18亿，令人难以置信地令人印象深刻。但他们的股价在前一年（从98年到99年）已经涨了10倍。因此，市场对这家公司的期望已经高得离谱。我们评估它不仅仅基于扎实的基本面。

I think they're about tripling revenue, which to be clear, in '99 is, like, 600,000,000 to 1,800,000,000.0. Unbelievably impressive. But their stock price the previous year from '98 to '99 had 10 x. And so expectations are through the moon for this company. It's not just solid fundamentals that we're valuing it.

人们对亚马逊的估值方式是：确实，目前没有净利润或盈利缺口，但他们增长如此迅猛。他们似乎拥有品类领导地位。如果互联网真如我们所想的那样重要，我只想分一杯羹。

The way people are valuing Amazon is, sure, there's no net income or gap profitability coming out today, but they're growing so fast. They appear to have category leadership. And if the Internet's really gonna be the thing that we think it all is, I just wanna own a piece.

是啊。

Yeah.

当然，这就是泡沫如何形成，然后泡沫自然会破裂。

And so this is, of course, how bubbles happen, then bubbles, of course, pop.

天哪。我们最近的历史上对此一无所知，对吧？

Oh my gosh. We wouldn't know anything about this in recent history, would we?

完全不知道。到了2001年2月，情况变得明显，他们遭遇了退潮。于是在2001年2月，他们裁掉了1300人。如今亚马逊已长期占据主导地位，以至于很难想象他们曾濒临绝境——虽然当时他们并不占优，现在回想他们并非一帆风顺的时期，这种说法感觉很奇怪。

No. Not at all. So by 02/2001, it's becoming clear that they got a pullback. And so in 02/2001, they lay off 1,300 people. And this is almost like Amazon had been so dominant for so long today that it's hard to even think about the fact that I don't know how close to death they were, but they almost well, they weren't dominant, and that feels weird saying today, remembering a time where it wasn't always succeeding.

我认为他们当时确实濒临绝境。在那次'天哪'事件后——我们姑且称之为事件——杰夫重新表态：'我想继续担任CEO，我要重新掌舵。'他把公司口号从'快速扩张'改为'整顿内务'。

I think they were pretty close to death. So after the whole golly incident, let's call it an incident, and Jeff kinda reaffirms, hey. I do wanna be CEO here. I'm putting my hands back on the wheel. He changes the motto of the company from get big fast to, quote, get our house in order.

我记得他们还做了T恤衫

I think they also had t shirts made of

这让我想起Facebook最初的口号是什么？是‘快速行动，打破常规’。后来变成了‘在稳定基础设施上快速行动’之类的。

of that. That reminds me a lot of what did Facebook change from? It was move fast and break things. It was like move fast with a stable infrastructure or something like that.

那太搞笑了。不完全一样。不完全一样。不。我不知道这和Campbell教练那件事有多大关联。

That was so funny. Not quite the same. Not quite the same. No. I don't know how related it was to the whole coach Campbell, golly thing.

可能更多是关于竞争动态。但不久之后，不知道是哪方先提出的，但有一方或双方都去找Scott Cook说：老兄，你不能同时担任这两个董事了。而耐人寻味的是，Scott选择了eBay。他在《万物商店》里对Brad说过：在那之前，我看到Jeff只有一种状态，就是不惜一切代价扩张的冲冲冲模式。

Probably it was more just about the competitive dynamic. But shortly after that, I don't know which side initiated it, but one side or the other or both came to Scott Cook and were like, dude, you can't be on both of these boards anymore. And tellingly, Scott chooses eBay. And there's he actually has a quote to Brad in the Everything Store. He says, up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go go speed of grow at all costs.

我从未见过他转向追求盈利和效率。大多数高管，特别是初次当CEO的人，往往只会做自己擅长的事。坦白说，我当时不认为他能做到。而这一切都很说明问题，全世界也都这么想——他们不认为亚马逊能做到。

I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency. Most execs, particularly first time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance. Frankly, I didn't think he could do it. And a, everything about that is telling, but, like, the whole world thinks the same thing too. They don't think Amazon can do this.

但Jeff，我觉得他始终相信自己能做到。于是他宣布了一个全公司目标，作为‘整顿内部’口号的一部分：2001年前要实现盈利。于是他们开始寻找各种增加现金流的方法，需求果然是发明之母——他们开始思考：好吧...

Yeah. Jeff, though, I think he always believed he could do this. So he announces, internal company goal that he announces to the whole company, part of the get our house in order mantra, that they will be profitable by the 2001. So they start looking at any possible way to increase cash flow and necessity being the mother of invention here. They start looking around like, okay.

我们有什么？能做什么？我们有个不错的电商网站。很多人都想要电商网站。如果我们主动找这些公司，把我们的网站基础设施卖给他们呢？

What do we have? What can we do? We've got a pretty good ecommerce website. A lot of people wanna have ecommerce websites. What if we start going to other companies who wanna have good ecommerce websites and we offer to sell them our website, like our infrastructure.

几乎就像Shopify的模式。对，这类似Shopify而非AWS。而且他们用了一种极其高接触的方式来做。没错。

Almost like being Shopify. Yeah. This is like Shopify, not AWS. And they do it in a ludicrously high touch manner. Yes.

我们不会就这么开放平台。现在亚马逊对接口和API的这种痴迷当时还没出现。所以他们就在想，能和哪些奇怪的合作伙伴搞些一次性合作，用我们的技术和人员帮他们建个联合品牌网站，卖那些他们与制造商有合作关系的商品。还有客户，以及我们能...

It's not like we're just gonna open up our platform. This whole obsession with interfaces and APIs that exist with Amazon today hasn't really happened yet. No. So they're like, who can we basically do weird one off partnerships with to create some sort of cobranded website for them using our technology and all of our people to sell the stuff that they have relationships with manufacturers on. And customers and, and that we can

然后就像收软件费一样拿钱。对。他们和玩具反斗城这么合作过，后来又和Borders书店也这么干。

then just get paid like a software fee for. Yes. So they do this with Toys R Us, and then they do it with Borders.

我记得Borders品牌下的亚马逊网站，感觉特别奇怪。

I remember the Borders branded Amazon. It was really weird.

我记得这事。当时会收到Borders的礼品卡，可以在Borders网站上用。但因为后台和亚马逊是同一个系统，这些卡也能在亚马逊上用。我清楚地记得这么操作过，而且反过来也行得通。

I remember this. I would get Borders gift cards, and you could put them into the Borders site. But because it was also the same back end as Amazon, you could then use that on Amazon. I totally remember doing this, and it worked the other way direction too.

现在回头看亚马逊的愿景清晰得不可思议，但发展过程中确实有些诡异插曲让你觉得'这不对啊'。他们就像被困在角落里，做了些与企业文化主旋律和战略完全相悖的事。这怎么符合贝索斯历年致股东信里写的战略呢？

The clarity of vision on Amazon seems so clear in hindsight, but there's these weird things that happened along the way where you're like, oh, no. They were just, like, in a corner and did something pretty antithetical to what the drumbeat of the culture and the strategy was. Like, how is this strategic with everything that Bezos has been writing in his letters?

确实不符合，但他们当时需要钱。于是就和Target合作，实际上Target网站是他们运营了好几年——更诡异的是这个合作是在2001年9月11日宣布的。唉。

It wasn't, but they needed the money. Yeah. So they do it with Target. They literally ran Target's website for years, which, ominously, they announced that deal on 09/11/2001. Oof.

真够呛。他们甚至跑去向沃尔玛推销同样的合作方案。沃尔玛的反应大概是：'不了谢谢'

Rough. They even go pitch the idea to Walmart to do the same thing with Walmart. Walmart is, they're like, yeah. No. Thanks,

伙计们。但是

guys. But

不。想得美。最精彩的部分来了。亚马逊正在四处游说其他零售商：让我们来接管你们的业务。

no. Nice try. Here's the super fun part. So Amazon is going around pitching all these other retailers. Let us take over for you.