专访：汉密尔顿·海默与陈一石谈如何打造类似AWS的第二业务

哦，抱歉。在你继续之前，这个问题是关于规模经济还是网络经济？是的。哦，该死。詹妮，你来回答吧，因为我不知道答案。

Oh, I'm sorry. Before you keep going, is this gonna be a question of is this a scale economy or network economy? Yes. Oh, damn. Go for it, Jennie, because I don't know the answer.

我们难倒了专家。

We've stumped the experts.

谁掌握了真相？是你吗？是你吗？是你吗？现在谁掌握了真相？

Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now?

是你吗？是你吗？是你吗？让我坐下。直说吧。

Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight.

另一个故事即将展开。谁掌握了真相。

Another story on the way. Who got the truth.

欢迎收听本期《Acquired》特别节目，这是一档关于伟大科技公司及其背后故事与策略的播客。我是本·吉尔伯特。

Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

我是大卫·罗森塔尔。我们

I'm David Rosenthal. And we

是你们的主持人。八年前，我向大卫提议了两个不同的播客创意。一个是关于被收购的技术公司评级，另一个则是聚焦那些成功创造了两项独立数十亿美元创新的企业。我们的假设是：大多数公司其实只有一个核心创见，而公司后续发展都是在此基础上展开的。

are your hosts. Eight years ago, I pitched David on an idea for two different podcasts. One was on grading technology acquisitions that became acquired. The other idea was to do episodes on companies that managed to create two separate multibillion dollar innovations. Our hypothesis is that most companies have really one big founding insight and that the rest of the company's history is just drafting on that.

巧的是，节目常客汉密尔顿·赫尔默和陈奕熹最近就在研究这个课题。他们一直在追问：全球顶级企业的利润有多少比例来自第二业务线？除了'七种力量'理论外，他们提出了新框架来帮助创业者解答这个转型难题：如果要扩展公司业务范围，我该如何着手？

Well, Hamilton Helmer and Chen Yixi, friends of the show, coincidentally, have been exploring literally exactly that idea. And they've been asking questions like, what percent of the profits of the biggest companies in the world came from a second business line? They have a new framework in addition to seven powers to help founders answer the transforming question. If I were to expand the scope of what my company does, how should I go about it?

现在正是和他们做这期节目的绝佳时机。最近我们报道的许多公司——无论是亚马逊与AWS，还是LVMH及其旗下品牌的转型——都印证了这个主题。特别是任天堂，从黑帮供应商到游戏主机巨头的蜕变历程，在我们的任天堂系列中展现得淋漓尽致。

And this is a particularly interesting time to do this episode with them, because I feel like a bunch of the companies we've covered recently on the show, this has been, like, a key part of the story, whether it's Amazon and AWS or LVMH and how all the businesses, LVMH itself, have been transformed over the years. And even particularly, I'm thinking about Nintendo and our Nintendo series and going from, like, a supplier for the Yakuza to dominant video game console manufacturer.

没错。大卫，我们和陈奕熹、汉密尔顿的访谈已经录制完成，正好探讨了这个问题。听众朋友们，这期节目制作过程非常愉快。两位嘉宾的到来，把我们节目中那些抽象的讨论都具象化了——那些我们总是戏谑谈论却从未明确的概念，被他们清晰呈现了出来。

Yep. And, David, I can say you and I have already recorded this interview with Chen Yi and Hamilton, and, like, we address exactly that. So listeners, this was a really fun one to do. And having Hamilton and Chen Yi on, it just concretizes a lot of the very abstract thinking that we sort of banter about on the show, but never quite crystallize. They crystallize it for us.

如果想深入了解，可以成为Acquired LP会员深入幕后。我们每两月举行Zoom会议，刚宣布将邀请LP们共同挑选未来节目主题。加入方式：acquired.fm/lp。订阅我们的第二档节目'a c q two'（原LP秀），现在公开播出创始人及投资人的专业访谈。

Yep. Well, if you wanna go deeper, you can become an Acquired LP to come closer into the Acquired kitchen. We have bimonthly Zoom calls, and we just announced that we'll be asking our LPs to help us pick future episodes. So you can join at acquired.fm/lp. Subscribe to our second show, a c q two, formerly the LP show, which is now public for expert interviews with founders and investors.

在任何播客平台搜索无空格的'a c q two'即可。加入Slack社区——已有超过15,000位聪明、深思熟虑且友善的Acquired成员聚集在acquired.fm/slack。不过要说，这只占每月听众的5%-10%。

Search a c q two, no space in any podcast player. Join the Slack. There's now over 15,000 smart, thoughtful, kind members of the Acquired community at acquired.fm/slack. It's pretty cool. But I will say that only represents, like, five to 10% of you who listen to Acquired every month.

还没加入的朋友们，快来Slack和我们相聚吧。现在要特别感谢已成为我们工作流程核心的合作伙伴Anthropic，以及他们最新的突破性模型Claude Sonnet 4.5。

So for the rest of you who haven't joined, come join us in the Slack. Alright, listeners. Now is a great time to thank one of our favorite companies that has become a core part of our workflow for Acquired, Anthropic, and their latest breakthrough model, Claude Sonnet 4.5.

是的。当我们研究这些标志性公司时，我们不断提出这样的问题：他们处理这种情况的方式有何独特之处？这种策略有多新颖？之前有其他公司尝试过吗？这类问题以及能够给出深思熟虑答案的能力，正是当今企业在构建AI时所需要的，而Claude实际上能够推理并回答这些问题。

Yes. As we research these iconic companies, we're constantly asking questions like, what was unique about the way they approach this situation, or how novel was that strategy, and had any other companies tried it before? These kind of questions and the ability to produce thoughtful answers to them are exactly what today's enterprises need when building with AI, and Claude can actually reason through and answer them.

Claude Sonnet 4.5不仅仅是又一个模型。它是全球最优秀的编程模型，也是构建复杂智能体最强大的工具。Shopify和Netflix的工程师称其为强大的思维伙伴，并表示它正在改变他们的开发速度。Canva在其部分产品中使用Claude，称其是一次重大飞跃。企业们对Sonnet 4.5赞不绝口。

Claude Sonnet 4.5 isn't just another model. It's the best coding model in the world and the most capable for building complex agents. Engineers at Shopify and Netflix call it their powerful thinking partner and tell us that it is transforming their development velocity. And Canva, which uses Claude for some of its products, calls it a big leap forward. Companies are loving Sonnet 4.5.

有一点已经变得很清楚：让一个模型擅长编程，也能让它天生擅长任何分析任务。因此，使Claude擅长重构代码库的能力，同样让它擅长梳理数千份监管文件或进行复杂的财务分析。Claude通过Anthropic的API与企业现有工作流无缝集成，现在具备新的记忆和上下文管理功能，使智能体能够长时间运行而不会丢失关键信息。

And one thing that's become clear is that making a model great at coding also makes it great at any analytical task right out of the box. So the same thing that makes Claude great at refactoring code bases also makes it great at, say, combing through thousands of regulatory documents or doing complex financial analysis. Claude integrates seamlessly with enterprises existing workflows through Anthropics API and now has new memory and context management features that let agents run longer without losing critical information.

因此，无论您是在扩展工程团队还是构建下一代智能应用，Claude都能与您共同思考复杂性，而不仅仅是替您思考。它确实是您智慧的思维伙伴。

So whether you're scaling an engineering team or building the next generation of intelligent applications, Claude thinks through complexity with you, not just for you. It is truly your intelligent thought partner.

所以请前往Claude.ai/acquired免费试用Claude，并享受Claude Pro三个月五折优惠。如果您想了解他们的企业服务，只需告诉他们是Ben和David推荐您的。

So head on over to Claude dot a I slash acquired to try Claude for free and get 50% off Claude Pro for three months. And if you wanna get in touch about their enterprise offerings, just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

闲话少说，本节目不构成投资建议。David和我可能在我们讨论的公司中有投资，本节目仅供信息和娱乐目的。

Without further ado, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

Hamilton和Chenyu，欢迎第三次来到Acquired节目。

Hamilton and Chenyu, welcome back for the third time to Acquired.

我们的荣幸。能在这里真是太好了。

Our pleasure. This all is great to be here.

自我们上次合作以来，《Acquired》的观众群体增长了许多。我们首先想稍微人性化地介绍一下这七种力量，并简单回顾一下我们在每期《Acquired》节目中讨论的内容，以及你们两位是如何成为这一领域的全球专家的？

The Acquired audience has grown so much since the last time we did this together. We thought it might be fun first to sort of humanize the seven powers a little bit and do a little background of what is this thing that we talk about on every Acquired episode, and how did the two of you come to be world experts in this?

是的，是的。很乐意这么做。正如我在其他节目中说过的，作为一名经济学家，我的理解是经济活力的基础在于创业部门的实力。有位著名经济学家约瑟夫·熊彼特曾提出过这一观点，这与当时的主流经济理论不同，因为它非常动态化而非数学化。

Yeah. Yeah. Delighted to do that. So as I've said, I think on other episodes, my understanding as an economist is that ground zero for economic vitality is the strength of the entrepreneurial sector. So there's a famous economist called Joseph Schumpeter who sort of posited that, and it was different than sort of normal economic theory at the time because it was very dynamic and not sort of mathematical.

我对此深信不疑。当然，硅谷正是这一理念的中心。所以我真正感兴趣的是：我能为此做些什么贡献？我的专长领域是商业策略。

And so I believe that very strongly. And of course, Silicon Valley is a center for that. So the thing that really interested me was, can I contribute to that in any way? Is there anything that I can do that helps with that? And my discipline is sort of business strategy.

于是问题来了：商业策略能否为这种充满创造力的动态努力增添任何实用价值？我会用我在斯坦福课堂上常用的例子来引入：想象我手里拿着两个设备。

And so there's a real question about, is there anything useful that business strategy can add to that sort of creative dynamic effort of all these people? And I'll queue it up with an example that I used to use in my class at Stanford sometimes, which is that if you can imagine me holding up two devices.

看，这是带触摸轮的iPod，另一个我完全认不出来。是计算器吗？

See, that's the iPod with the touch wheel, and I have no idea. Is that a calculator?

没错。这是美国第一款手持计算器BoMar。关键问题在于：这两个设备最初都取得了巨大成功，产品与市场完美契合。

Right. So that's the first handheld calculator in The United States, BoMar. And so here's the issue, is that here are these two devices. They were wildly successful to begin with. Incredible product market fit.

博马尔在短短几年间从大约300万增长到了1亿，这在当时可是实实在在的巨款。当然，计算器是个有趣的起点，因为日本的计算器品牌Busycom某种程度上开启了整个CPU革命。这取得了巨大成功，而iPod的故事大家都知道了——它标志着苹果公司作为惊人商业模式的开端。但同时也是iPhone的前身。

Bomar went from maybe 3,000,000 to, you know, a 100,000,000 in a couple of years, which back in those days was real money. And of course, calculators are an interesting starting point because, you know, the Japanese calculator Busycom was sort of what started the whole CPU revolution. And so tremendously successful, and you all know the story of the iPod. That was the beginning of Apple as an incredible business model. But it also was the precursor to the iPhone.

另一方面，博马尔的情况恰恰说明了七强理论的成因。

Bomar, on the other hand, and this speaks to why seven powers.

如今这名字确实不太家喻户晓了。

Not exactly a household name today.

没错，你们都没听说过。这说明我们和你们都暴露年龄了。

Right. You'd never heard of it. So that dates me and you.

所以你的意思是创新本身并不足够？

So you might be saying that innovation is not sufficient.

是的。创新或颠覆性技术本身并不足够。如果你是个算盘制造商或门罗计算器厂商，这确实极具颠覆性——它能让你破产。虽然极具颠覆性，但最终完全退出市场后却获得了惊人的品牌认知度，形成了巨大的衍生效应。

Yeah. Innovation or disruptive technology is not sufficient. It was very disruptive if you were an abacus maker or or a Monroe calculator maker. It puts you out of business. Very disruptive, but completely went out of business after a while and then had tremendous brand recognition was the thing and this huge spin up.

这就涉及到战略问题了。于是你会想，如果给这些创业公司提供建议，有没有什么方法能引导他们更偏向iPod模式而非博马尔模式？但问题在于，正如你们两位从收购网站和其他经历中所知，商业发展的本质是适应性和演进性的——不是把一群聪明人关在会议室里制定战略就能搞定的。

And that speaks to strategy. And so what you wonder is if you're helping the people founding those companies, is there anything that you could say that would maybe guide them to be a little more iPod ish and a little less bulmarish? Right? But the problem with that is that the nature, as the two of you know from your acquired site as well as all the other things you've done, the nature of developing business is adaptive and evolutionary. It's not like you sit a bunch of bright people in the room and you figure out the strategy and say, okay.

我们现在就开始执行。随着时间推移和努力前进，新信息不断涌现。比如客户行为出乎意料，竞争对手采取新策略，技术前沿发生变化等等，你必须随之调整适应。

We're just gonna execute from now. It's you go forward in time and effort, and new information comes in. Oh, that customer didn't do what I thought. This competitor is coming in this way. The technology frontier has changed, all this stuff, and you have to adapt to that over time.

因此问题在于：在这样的情况下，思想体系如何发挥作用？答案是：如果你能提供一个有用的思维模型（正如珍妮所说的模式识别），就能为创业者提供指引，让他们在商业时空中穿行时，能更清楚哪些方向可能通向iPod式的成功，哪些可能走向徒劳无功。构建这种思维模型其实非常困难。我在书中强调，它必须跨越的高门槛是：简明但不简单。必须足够简洁才能被人记住。

And so the problem with that is that, okay, well then, if it's that way, how does a body of thought contribute to that? And the answer to that is that if you can provide a useful mental model, or as Jenny calls it, pattern recognition, you provide something so that as entrepreneurs are moving through space and time, they can see what's a little more likely to end up iPod ish and a little less likely to end up bone mar ish. That kind of mental model is actually hard to construct. And what I say in the book is that the very high hurdle that it has to clear is that it has to be simple but not simplistic. So simple, it has to be that way or people won't remember it.

如果是复杂的理论，每次都需要查阅参考，那在商业决策时就帮不上忙。而'不简单'意味着它必须涵盖你遇到的大部分情况，换句话说要相对全面——这是个很高的标准。此前有许多战略框架虽然极富洞见、贡献巨大，但未能做到既简明又不简单。其中影响最大的可能是波特的五力模型，专注于他所谓的行业吸引力。

If it's some complex theory that you have to go back and look it up every time, it's not gonna help a lot when you're making business decisions. And not simplistic means that it's gotta cover most of the situations you face. In other words, it has to be relatively exhausted, and that's a high hurdle. So there were a number of strategy frameworks before that were extremely interesting and made great contributions, but weren't simple, but not simplistic. Probably the most prevalent was Porter's Five Forces focused on what he calls industry attractiveness.

这是项巨大贡献，但还不够。即便处于有吸引力的行业，也无法获得iPod那种级别的商业保障。

It was a tremendous contribution, but it's not insufficient. If if you're in an attractive industry, it doesn't get you to the kind of security that an iPod has.

没错。三星所在的智能手机行业很有吸引力，但他们的损益表看起来和苹果大不相同。

Right. Samsung is in an attractive industry called smartphones, and yet their p and l looks quite different than Apple's.

确实。有统计学研究更广泛地支持这个观点：行业吸引力无法解释企业间大部分的利润差异。另一个例子是克里斯坦森关于颠覆性技术的著作，虽然极具启发性且学术精深。但这个例子很典型——颠覆性与长期盈利能力其实并不相关。

Right. And there's been statistical work just buttressing that point more generally, that industry attractiveness doesn't explain a lot of firm differences and profitability. Another one was Christensen's work on disruptive technologies, which is just phenomenally interesting and highly erudite. But this example is perfect. Disruptive is actually not correlated with long term profitability.

这关乎产品市场匹配度。本质上是指你找到了更好的解决方案取代现有市场主导者。虽然在这个框架下非常有趣，但解决不了'骨髓与iPod'这类核心问题。此外还有围绕能力分析的整个思想流派。

It has to do with product market fit. It basically says you've come up with a better way of doing something that takes out the incumbent. It disrupts it. So very interesting in that frame, but not for the bone marrow iPod problem. And then there's a whole strain of thought around capability analysis.

虽然能力可以让你做很多事情，但通常这不是构建优秀商业模式的基础。其他人也拥有这些能力。因此从概念开发框架来看，这意味着我不得不回到起点思考：我在为创业者设计模式识别方法，什么是简单却不肤浅的？

You can do a lot of things with capabilities, but it's not common that that's the basis of why you build great business models. Other people have those capabilities as well. So what that meant from a concept development framework is that I sort of had to go back to square one and say, okay. I'm thinking about pattern recognition for entrepreneurs. What's simple but not simplistic?

这个问题的关键之一是持续性——比如预测苹果下个季度的盈利能力，这不是随机抽签。对吧？它具有高度持续性。相关统计研究也表明，这对那些非常成功的公司普遍适用。

And one of the keys to that question is persistence, which is that if you were to say Apple's profitability next quarter, it's not a random draw. Right? It's highly persistent. And there's statistical work on that that suggests that's generally true for, you know, very successful companies.

重要的是，不仅仅是下个季度，还包括

And importantly, not just next quarter, but

未来四个季度

four quarters

以及未来八个季度。没错。我们可以有相当高的把握。虽然无法预知十年后的情况（这正是本期节目要探讨的），但一年后的情况我们是清楚的。

from now and eight quarters from now. Exactly. Have a pretty high level of confidence. You know, we don't know ten years from now, and that's what we're gonna get into on this episode, but we know a year from now.

贝佐斯常说一句话：'这个季度早已注定。这个季度是三年前就决定的。我现在正在为五年后的季度做准备。'

Bezos always used to say the line, this quarter is already baked. This quarter was baked three years ago. I'm working on a quarter five years from now.

确实如此。但我觉得他说'这个季度已注定'这句话本身也某种程度上揭示了商业模式的特性。这种持续性说明存在能创造诱人结果的经济结构，于是你自然会问：能否从中总结出普遍规律？

Yeah. There's that. But I think also the fact that he says that this quarter is baked also sort of tells you about something about the business model in a way. And so that persistence tells you that there are economic structures that create attractive outcomes. And you then ask the question, can you generalize about those?

因为如果你能对这些进行概括，那么或许就能找到对创业者既足够简单又全面有用的东西。经过数十年的观察，我的结论是这其实很简单，只有七种。事实上，如今处理初创企业时，通常只是其中的一小部分。这对我来说是个相当深刻的洞见。

Because if you can generalize about those, then, you know, maybe you can get to something sufficiently simple and yet comprehensive that is useful to entrepreneurs. And so after looking at that for decades, my conclusion was that actually it is simple. There are only seven of them. And in fact, if you're dealing with startups these days, that's usually a smaller subset of that. And so that to me was a fairly profound insight.

这就是七种力量的本质。这些结构如果能达成，会让你进退有度。

And that's what seven powers is. It's just those structures that if you can get there, make you more and less.

每当分析全新商业构想并用七力框架检验时，我总强迫自己记住关键一点：七力关乎城堡防御，而非评判创意好坏。它是产品市场匹配后的二次创新，旨在建立持久业务。

And a key piece that I always have forced myself to remember whenever I'm analyzing a brand new business idea and trying to run it through the seven powers framework is seven powers is about defending the castle and less about is this a good idea or not. It is a second invention after product market fit to create a durable business.

说得对。哎呀，我真希望这话是我说的。

That's right. Gee, I wish I had said that.

我认为你说过。'二次创新'这个概念确实是你之前节目中的原话。

I think you did say that. I think this concept of a second invention is literally your words from a previous episode.

产品市场匹配与权力大体上是正交关系。这个说法有些复杂之处。本、大卫，我想分享陈毅和我去年意识到的一点——或许与书中所述略有不同——我曾认为这是顺序关系：先实现产品市场匹配，再处理权力问题。但通过与创始人们交流，我获得了最重要的认知。

So product market fit and power are more or less orthogonal. There are some complexities in that statement. And I'll tell you something, Ben, David, that has occurred to Chen Yi and myself over the last year, which is a little bit different maybe than what's said in the book, which is that I used to think that it was sequential. You get product market fit, and then you deal with power. But my biggest education is talking to founders.

我欣赏他们的智慧、创造力，甚至敢说他们的青春活力，以及对事物深刻的思考。我发现正确的路径其实是同步思考这些问题。因为你真正在做的是厘清：我该如何经营这项业务？面临这个选择或那个选择时，其中既包含产品市场匹配问题，也涉及权力问题。

I love their intelligence, their creativity, dare I say their youth, and their deep thoughtfulness about stuff. And what I'm finding is that the proper path is actually to be thinking about those things kind of simultaneously. Because what's going on is you're trying to figure out, okay, what am I doing with this business? You know, I've got this choice and this choice. And in the mix of that, there are both product market fit questions and power questions.

你不能只是说，好吧，我先搞定产品市场匹配，以后再考虑权力问题。实际上你需要现在就开始思考。一开始你无法完全解决它，也不会明白。哦，是的。

And you don't just say, well, I'm just gonna do the product market fit stuff and think about power later. You actually need to start thinking about it. You won't solve it completely at the beginning. You won't know. Oh, yeah.

我当然拥有权力，但你也应该思考这个问题。坚持会引导你深入这些结构。部分原因——你知道这很酷——在于你通过访谈思考这个问题，而我们在工作中思考它。我之前告诉过你，权力的基因型很简单，只有七种。我的合伙人比尔说，这把策略从论述题变成了选择题，不过在ChatGPT时代，我也不知道这两者还有什么区别。

I have power for sure, but you should be thinking about it. So persistence then leads you down to those structures. And part of the reason, you know, that it's really cool that you're sort of thinking about this in your interviews and we think about it in our work is one thing I've said to you before is the the genotypes of power are simple. There are only seven. My partner, Bill, says that it turns strategy from a essay question into a multiple choice question, although I don't know with chat GPT the difference anymore.

但表现型——即它们被具体表达和传承的精确微观方式——是复杂的。切尼和我...是的。我们可能会花几周时间纠结某件事是否具有权力。我会举例说明权力概念为何如此重要。你知道，我算是个体育明星迷，以前开车总超速。

But the phenotypes, that is the exact granular way in which they are articulated and carried forward are complicated. Cheney and I yeah. And we might struggle for weeks trying to figure out whether something has power or not. I'll give you an example of how the idea of power is so important. So, you know, I'm sort of a, sports star nut, and I used to drive too fast.

保时捷就是个绝佳的例子，它...

And Porsche is a great example here, which is

哦，是的。

Oh, yes.

想想看。第一代911诞生于1964年，六十年前。保时捷当时无论如何都算不上世界跑车领导者。这使得保时捷能够——我认为不完全是刻意为之，而是随时间演化的结果——将设计元素从赢得跑车爱好者青睐的要素中剔除。如果你对比1964年的911和现在的911，它们看起来几乎一样。

Think of that. The nine eleven first one came out in 1964, sixty years ago. Porsche wasn't sort of the sports car leader of the world at the time by any means. And so what that enabled Porsche to do, which I don't think was conscious exactly, but sort of spun out in an evolutionary way over time, was that they took away the design element as part of the mix in what wins over sports car enthusiasts. So if you looked at a a nine eleven in 1964 and a nine eleven today, they kinda look the same.

对吧？这让保时捷能做什么？它得以持续优化人们愿意买单的最佳性能特征——比如操控性、加速性、内饰人机工程学。当时技术前沿变化相当快。如今小型本田车能达到155英里时速的性能让我震惊——比我年轻时的捷豹XKE还快。

Yeah. You know? And so what did that allow Porsche to do? It allowed to just constantly optimize the best performance features in the context of people would pay for that, you know, handling acceleration, interior ergonomics, and the technology frontier was changing fairly rapidly. Today, I'm just astonished at the performance you can get from a small scale Honda that'll go a 155 miles an hour, you know, faster than a Jaguar XKE right back in my day.

随后出现了各种并行发展和其他方面的改进，如刹车、音响以及其他所有部件。因此他们能够持续升级每一代产品，无需考虑设计层面的问题，只需专注于性能极限的提升，而消费者也愿意为此买单。这些要素缺一不可，对吧？最终他们形成了这种极具韧性的商业模式——迄今为止最赚钱的汽车制造商，拥有狂热粉丝和卓越产品。

And then there've been all kinds of parallel developments and other aspects, brake, sound, and then everything else. And so they could constantly upgrade each generation, not having to think about the design aspect to it, but hit the performance envelope, and people would pay for that. You needed all those things. Right? And, consequently, they end up with this incredibly durable business model, by far the most profitable automobile maker and devoted fans, and great cars.

你是说他们抽离并固定了设计环节，意味着这本质上不再是依赖爆款设计的生意？不再需要纠结人们是否喜欢某个特定设计？

Are you saying the fact that they abstracted away the design and they fixed the design meant that it sort of wasn't a hits driven business? It wasn't do people like this design or not?

完全正确。天啊，为什么是你在采访我？

Exactly. God. Why are you interviewing me?

毕竟艰难的部分都由你负责啊。知道吗？我只负责整合观点。

Well, you do the hard part. You know? I just get to synthesize.

没错。所有这些要素——比如精准调校PDK变速箱——都属于固定成本投资。如果能分摊到更多车辆上，单件成本就降低了。你见过多少运动车型起初颇具亮点，却因无法持续升级而泯然众人？想想丰田2000GT或阿尔法·罗密欧的早期车型就知道了。

So yes. And then all of these elements, like getting the PDK transmission just right, Those are fixed cost investments. And if they can spread that over a larger number of automobiles, it's lower cost. So how many times have you seen sports cars that were quite interesting, and then they just couldn't keep upgrading them to meet the great? I mean, think of the Toyota 2,000 or an early version of Alfa Romeo or something.

正如你所说，关键不仅在于人们是否足够喜欢，更在于能否预判会有足够多的消费者买单，从而支撑必要的投资。如果缺乏这种确定性，或者没有魄力宣称'这款车能卖百万辆'，就无法进行必需的投资。

And to your point, it's not just did people like them enough. It's could they predict that enough people would like them to invest in the necessary things they needed to invest in. And if they couldn't be certain or didn't have the chutzpah to say, there's we're gonna sell a million of these things, then you can't make the investments you need to.

正是如此。保时捷之所以能持续精准命中性能临界点，正是因为他们有能力完成这些投资，这堪称非凡的商业模式。

Right. And so Porsche was the one that just kept being right on that performance envelope because they were able to do all these investments, and it's a phenomenal business model.

好的。让我们把话题交给陈毅。陈毅，在我们转向转型话题之前，你还有什么要补充的吗？

Alright. Let's kick it over to Chen Yi. Anything to add, Chen Yi, before we move to transforming?

我想从七力框架学习者的角度（而非创建者）补充一点。这个权力框架最实用的应用方式其实是作为认知杠杆。本，你刚才提到它并不能告诉你下一步该开发什么产品或什么产品会走红市场，但它能告诉你应该关注哪些战略性问题。我认为关键在于：不重要的事情和重要的事情同等重要。作为创始人和运营者，你们自然会花95%的时间追求运营卓越。

I guess I'll just add on to the perspective of a student of the seven powers framework, not a creator of that. So one thing that struck me as the most useful way to apply the power framework is really as a cognitive leverage. So I think, Ben, you mentioned, it doesn't really tell you what's the next thing you should build or what product's gonna hit the market, but it kinda tells you what's the right strategy question to focus on. I think the way I put it is what is not important is as important as what's important. Naturally, you know, as founder and operators, you will spend 95% of time on operational excellence.

拥有合适的团队、文化和执行力固然至关重要，但有5%的时间应该用来思考真正重要的战略问题——这些将决定企业最终的利润结构和竞争力。权力结构理论能帮你识别这5%的关键问题：在你所有思考事项中，哪些才真正具有战略价值？这可能是对在场听众最有启发的部分。另一个体会是，当我真正开始研究这个理论时，惊讶地发现它竟尚未完善。

It's so important you have the right team, the right culture, the right execution, but there's 5% of time that you may spend on real important strategy questions, and those are what determines the eventual margin structure of the business, the competitiveness of the business. And what power structure can tell you is what is that 5%? Out of all the things you're thinking about, what really makes the real strategic importance that you spend all the time thinking about? That's one way I think this will be the most useful maybe for a lot of members in your audience. And the other comment I'd have is now that I've kinda had the chance to work on the theory myself, it's actually amazing how it's not done yet.

七八年前我在斯坦福上汉密尔顿的课时，曾以为所有内容都在书里了——七个权力要素，白纸黑字写得很清楚。

Now I've been in Hamilton's class, you know, seven, eight years ago at Stanford. Now I've been working with him for the past couple years. And, you know, I used to think, oh, it's all in the book. Right? It's just there.

但随着深入研究，不断涌现出未知领域。比如去年讨论平台战略，现在探讨转型，这涉及到权力的动态演变，甚至可能延伸到公司战略层面（而不仅是商业战略）。这种理论的生命力令人兴奋，探索过程充满乐趣。

There's seven of them, and it's all described. But then as we dig into it, things that we don't know come up. You know, we talked about platform last year, and we're going to talk about transforming now. It's about sort of the dynamics part of power and maybe even extend into corporate strategy, not just business strategy. So this kind of life within the theory is actually really exciting and fun to explore.

哦，我知道我们会在转型环节深入讨论。你能先定义下公司战略和商业战略的区别吗？

Oh, I know we're gonna get into this in transforming. Can you define the difference between corporate and business strategy?

这个问题我转交给汉密尔顿来回答。

I'll kick this one to you, Hamilton.

非常感谢。商业战略，可以说，是如何在一个你认为可防御的单一实体中寻找力量。而企业战略则是关于如何在多业务单元的公司中思考战略。企业战略的核心问题是：为什么一加一大于二？换句话说，从价值角度来看，两个独立的业务为何要同属一个屋檐下。

Thanks a lot. So business strategy is how to find power, if you will, in what you would think of as a single defensible entity. And corporate strategy is how you think about strategy in a multi business unit corporation. And the central problem of corporate strategy is why is one plus one greater than two? In other words, is there any reason from a value point of view for two separate businesses to be under the same roof.

在这方面有过各种尝试。回顾通用电气时代，那些极度多元化的公司曾一度被认为能获得多元化收益，但事实证明并非如此。所以真正的问题是：为什么从事某一业务时，同时涉足另一业务是有意义或无意义的。以亚马逊AWS为例，为什么这很有趣？

And there have been a variety of efforts in that. If you go back in the days of GE, wildly diversified companies, there is a theory for a while that that was really a good thing that you get sort of these diversification benefits turned out not to be true. And so it's really that question of why is it that if you're in one thing, it makes sense or doesn't make sense to be in another thing. And so, again, think of Amazon, AWS. Why is that interesting?

静态部分是一加一大于二。动态部分——这正是我们关于转型讨论的核心——是你现有业务的哪些特质对开展其他业务有所助益？

And the static part is one plus one is greater than two. The dynamic part, and that's what our transforming discussion is about, is what is it about the business that you currently have that is somehow useful in doing something else?

嗯。

Mhmm.

你们做了关于AWS去神秘化的精彩节目，但亚马逊确实具备使其不完全陌生的能力。

So you you guys did the wonderful episode on AWS demythologizing, but Amazon did have capabilities that made it not completely alien territory.

那么，我们开始深入探讨吧。

Well, let's get into it then.

我先简要介绍一下转型为何我们认为它有趣，然后我和切尼可以稍作剖析，你们可以提问。我们主要考虑三个原因：第一，如果你对创建企业感兴趣，这很重要。关于重要性，我可以提供一些数据。我曾对标准普尔100指数中市值最大的公司做过研究，分析它们的价值构成和利润来源，并探讨有多少利润来自非原始业务。

So I'll give you a quick intro to transforming kind of why we think it's interesting, and then Cheney and I can sort of pull it apart a bit, and you can ask questions. So there are really three reasons that we think about this. The first is that if you're interested in creating businesses, it's important. And by important, I can give you a little data on that. So I did a study once of the S and P 100, the largest market cap companies in the world, and looked at if you pulled apart their value and looked where their profits came from, and you asked the question, what share of their profits came from businesses that wasn't their original business?

如果被问到这个问题，你会怎么想？

What would you think if you were asked that?

你能告诉我们你查看这个的具体年份吗？

Can you help us with a year of when you looked at this?

我是在金融危机前夕做的，所以是2007年2月。

I did it just prior to the financial crisis. So was 02/2007.

大卫，你猜是多少？

David, what was your guess?

我猜是80%。考虑到那个时间段，我可能会稍微下调到70%左右。

My guess was 80%. Knowing that time frame, I maybe dial it down a little bit to 70 ish percent.

我觉得这个比例偏低，因为在我看来，银行、石油公司这类当时世界上最大的企业并非科技公司。我猜想它们更多是单一业务线、静态发展、仍在吃老本的企业。但如果答案很无趣，汉密尔顿就不会问这个问题了。

I think it's low because I'm thinking, you know, banks, oil companies, like the largest companies in the world to that point weren't technology companies. And I have to imagine that those are more single business line, static, still drafting off their original innovation companies. But Hamilton wouldn't be asking this question if it were a boring answer.

不知道你们是否觉得答案无趣，但实际比例大约是50%。在科技领域——你们更熟悉的领域——可以想想我们讨论过的所有案例，比如AWS。我书里开篇举的英特尔进军CPU的例子，那就是转型的典范，对吧？

I don't know if you consider the answer boring, but it turned out to be about 50%. So in the tech world, which you guys intersect more, you know, you can think of all the examples we talked about, AWS as an example. The lead off example in my book of Intel getting into CPUs Yeah. That's transforming. Right?

它们存在于记忆中。

They were in memories.

确实，苹果公司的大部分收入并非来自

Certainly, the lion's share of Apple's revenue is not

没错。iPhone之前他们并未涉足这一领域。谷歌和安卓。微软则专注于操作系统和应用。他们最初是一家语言公司。

Right. The iPhone, they were not in that business before. Google and Android. Microsoft into operating systems and applications. They were originally a language company.

但正如你们两位所说，有时并非如此。哈佛大学的伯尔博士一开始就与Facebook合作，50%是个很大的数字。

But as both of you said, sometimes not. Doctor. Berber at Harvard started right out of the gate with Facebook, you know, and so 50% is a big number.

是的。美国大公司一半的企业利润并非来自他们最初的创新。

Yeah. Half of all corporate profits of the largest companies in America came from something other than their original innovation.

对。这就像是个警示信号。所以第一点很重要。第二点是这很难做对，这是个棘手的领域。

Right. So that sort of flags you. And so it's important as one. The second is that it's hard to get right. It's a difficult area.

有些原因与动机有关，有些则与理解有关。陈毅会谈到一些在此情况下站不住脚的常见商业信条。关于动机方面，我只想从创始人的角度提一句：他们刚创立了成功的事业，习惯了这种成功。因此有时可能无法完全意识到那些独特的、不可控的成功因素，他们很有创造力，只想继续前进。这种倾向本身就是强大的驱动力。

There are reasons that have to do with motivation, and there are reasons that have to do with understanding. And Chen Yi will talk about some of the common business nostrums that sort of fall apart in this. On the motivation side, I'll just mention that from a founder point of view, they've just founded something that works, and so they're accustomed to that success. And so sometimes they may not appreciate all the idiosyncratic, uncontrolled elements that went into that success, and they're very creative, and they wanna just move forward. And so they're inclined to do that, and that's a great motive force.

我非常赞同这一点。那是一个经济体的命脉，但也意味着有时你会涉足一些你其实并不擅长的事情。

I love that. That's the lifeblood of an economy, but it also means that you can sometimes get into stuff that you really don't know how to do it.

特别是对首次创业者来说，如果一开始就成功，你根本不知道成功该归因于什么。可能是能力，也可能是运气。当然，通常是两者的结合。但你完全不清楚能力和运气各自占了多少比例。

Especially for first time founders, if it works out of the gate, then you have no idea to what to attribute the success. It could be skill. It could be luck. Of course, it is some combination of it. But you have no idea the percentage that skill and the percentage that luck.

然后你会说，既然这次成功了，我只要完全重复同样的过程，肯定能再次创造成功。但事实几乎肯定不会如此。

And you say, well, it worked. I will just repeat the exact same process again, and surely, I will create success again. And that is almost assuredly not the case.

我脑海中立刻浮现出好几家这样想的公司，结果显然事与愿违。

I have several companies in my mind that thought that and definitely did not happen.

没错。而对于那些经常担任董事或提供资金的人来说，也存在认知偏差。想想风投圈，他们的商业模式就是寻找有趣的项目投资，期待增值后通过退出获利。这个机制非常精妙——要知道，这正是驱动美国经济的非凡动力。

Right. And then on the people that often sit on their boards or finance them, there's also a dissonance, which is that if you think of the VC community, the business model and VCs issue find really interesting things to invest in. And then hopefully, go up in value. And then there's an exit, which you profit from that increase in value, which is to this wonderful engine. If you think about what drives The US economy, you know, it's just phenomenal.

但在人们评估价值的早期阶段，由于缺乏持续性的业绩记录——比如企业可能正大量投入获客，盈利能力尚未显现，基础经济规律还未真正发挥作用——这时唯一可参考的只有营收表现。当听到风投抱怨企业IPO太迟时，实质上是说市场对公司的评估标准突然从营收转向了利润，导致错过了最佳窗口期。

But in the early stages of how people think about value, there isn't yet this track record of persistence because people are often, for example, spending a lot to acquire customers, and so profitability may not be evident yet, and the fundamental economics haven't really asserted themselves. And so the only thing left is kind of how the top line is doing. You know? So are you growing like crazy? And so when you hear VCs sometime complain that people waited too long to IPO, what that message really means is that all of a sudden people's perception of the company changed from the top line to the bottom line, and they miss the window.

这说明投资界理应关注营收增长——这是当前最有效的指标——但它并不能充分反映企业实力。所以这很困难。第三点（你们应该能猜到我们要说什么）是：真正理解实力能揭示关于转型的重要信息。总结起来就是这三点，非常关键。

What that says is that that investor community is focused on top line growth as it should be because it's the best marker available, but it doesn't tell you much about power. And so it's hard to do. And then the third thing, which of course you would expect from us, is that actually understanding power tells you some interesting stuff about transforming. So three things. It's important.

这很难做到正确。而权力很重要。

It's hard to get right. And power matters.

好了，听众朋友们。现在我们来聊聊我们最喜爱的另一家公司——Statsig。自从我们上次介绍Statsig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.

是啊，重大里程碑。祝贺团队。时机也很有趣，因为实验领域现在真的越来越火热了。

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

没错。为什么投资者会给Statsig超过十亿美元的估值？因为实验已成为全球顶尖产品团队技术栈中至关重要的一环。

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。这个趋势始于Web2.0公司，比如Facebook、Netflix和Airbnb。这些公司面临一个问题：如何在保持快速去中心化的产品工程文化的同时，将团队规模扩展到数千人？实验系统就是这个答案的重要组成部分。

Yep. This trend started with web two 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.

这些系统让公司所有人都能获取全局产品指标——从页面浏览到观看时长再到性能表现。每当团队发布新功能时，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.

所以Facebook可以设定'增加应用使用时长'这样的公司级目标，然后让各个团队自行探索实现方法。当数千名工程师和产品经理同时这样做时，就会带来指数级增长。难怪实验现在被视为核心基础设施。

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。如今最优秀的产品团队如Notion、OpenAI、Rippling和Figma同样依赖实验。但他们不是自建系统，而是直接使用Statsig。而且他们不仅用Statsig做实验。过去几年里，Statsig已经整合了快速产品团队所需的所有工具，比如功能开关、产品分析、会话回放等等。

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构建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。只要告诉他们是本和大卫推荐你的。我突然想到另一件事——之前从未考虑过这点。

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. Something else just finally occurred to me. I've never thought about it before.

但如果你擅长分析并能量化一家公司的实力，你就能比其他人更准确地赋予其利润倍数。因为如果你观察到某公司连续多年保持24%的运营利润率，你就可以判断：好吧，我基本能预测未来的运营利润率，从而更准确地评估这家公司。而对于刚进入稳定盈利阶段的新公司，如果你理解其权力动态，就能比其他投资者更精准地预测该公司未来所有现金流的净现值，而不是粗暴地套用和别人相同的倍数。

But if you are analytical and can figure out and quantify a company's power, then you can assign it a more accurate multiple of profit than anyone else can. Because if you can observe, oh, a company has a 24% operating margin many, many years in a row, you can decide, okay, fine. I kind of know what the operating margin is gonna be in the future, and I can figure out how I want to value this company. But if it's a new company and it just settled into some steady state of profitability and you understand the power dynamics, you can be better than other investors at predicting the sort of net present value of all the future cash flows of that company rather than a very brute force way of doing it of just slapping the same multiple on that everybody else does.

没错。所以本不仅要取代我撰写《七种力量》，还要接手战略资本。

Yeah. So Ben not only is gonna supplant me in writing Seven Powers, but he's going to take over Strategy Capital.

我觉得这个职位会交给陈煜。是的。

I think that job falls to Chen Yu. Yeah.

我们不太方便过多讨论投资细节。但基本上，战略资本的核心理念是：如果你对长期竞争结果有差异化认知——尤其是在那些难以判断的领域——你就能更审慎地进行估值。所以我完全同意你的观点。而且你正确地限定了范围：如果有长期财务历史，这些信息早就反映在价格里了。

So we're sort of constrained about talking about our investment stuff too much. But basically, the proposition of Strategy Capital is if you have a differential understanding of long term competitive outcomes in places where that's really hard to figure out, that you can value things more carefully. And so I completely agree. And you properly constrained it. If there's a long history of financials, it's already in the price.

那么沃尔玛有实力吗？当然有。

So does Walmart have power? Sure.

对，我的狗可以告诉你。

Right. My dog can tell you that.

对，对，对，对。我想找个时间见见你的狗。

Right. Right. Right. Right. I'd like to meet your dog sometime.

这就是为什么它很重要。我要简单说明一下我所说的‘转型’是什么意思。当我向你们两位提出这个话题时，我说过，如果你考虑提升公司价值，基本上有两个问题：我能做得更好的是什么？以及我接下来能做什么？你们大部分时间都应该花在‘我能做得更好的是什么’上。

So that's why it's important. And I'm gonna just give you a quick take on what I mean by transforming. When I laid this topic out to the two of you, I said that if you're thinking about increasing value in a company, there are sort of two questions. What can I do better and what can I do next? And you spend most of your time on, as you should, on what can I do better?

比如亚马逊开发更好的产品搜索引擎时，你必须考虑这一点，对吧？这占用了你大部分时间。但你也得思考：好吧，我接下来能做什么？

So you think of Amazon developing a better search engine when you look for a product. You've got to think about that. Right? And that's most of your time. But then you also think about, okay.

这就是转型的意义。比如亚马逊进军AWS云服务。想象一下，考虑是否开展AWS业务与优化搜索引擎是截然不同的工作。转型是一个独立的话题，是战略层面的根本问题，而战略就是所谓的业务定义，即你当前业务的真正边界是什么。

Well, what can I do next? And that's what transforming is. And, that would be Amazon going into AWS. And you can imagine thinking about whether to do AWS is a very different exercise than optimizing the search engine. So transforming is sort of a separate topic, fundamental thing, strategy is thing called business definition, which is what really are the boundaries of your current business.

实际上大卫，在我们之前的邮件交流中，你曾问过‘我们该如何研究这类问题？’通常我们会先看看别人讨论的内容。正是在这里，我们会遇到许多关于‘如何找到下一阶段增长点’的常见论述。我们都听过‘去倾听客户需求’——亚马逊那套相当流行的‘客户至上’理念就是典型。

So I think actually in our prior email conversation, David, you had the question of how do we go about research something like this? And, typically, we start with looking at what others have been talking about. This is exactly where we come across a lot of common narratives of where do you find your next level of growth. We've all heard about, you know, go listen to your customers. There's Amazon school of, like, customer obsession that's fairly popular.

人们会追求TAM（总可寻址市场）扩张，比如地理扩张、进入不同细分市场，或是深化核心竞争力等等。但在梳理过程中，我们发现一个问题：这些转型步骤的成功概率似乎没有定论。换句话说，你无法断言做了X就更可能成功。比如，营销短视理论就主张应该宽泛定义行业范畴。

People will go after TAM expansion, you know, expand geographically, go different segments, or, you know, fuller core competence, etcetera. And as we look through this, I think one issue we found is they don't seem to be conclusive about the chance of success of these transforming steps. So in other words, you can't say if you do x, you are more likely to succeed. Right? Like, for example, there's this whole school of thought around marketing myopia that says you should define your industry definition widely.

对吧？铁路行业衰落的原因并非人们没有交通需求，而是他们未能将自己视为综合运输公司。他们本应进军汽车、卡车、飞机乃至电话领域——这些都是新型交通方式。我认为这是《哈佛商业评论》有史以来最畅销的文章之一，足见其受欢迎程度。

Right? The reason why railroad industry goes into decline is not because people don't have demand for transportation, but because they can't think of themselves as a broad transportation company. They should have moved themselves into cars and trucks and airplanes and even telephone, which are new forms of transportation. And I think this is one of the bestsellers of Harvard Business Review of all time. It just speaks to the popularity of it.

那么我们要问的是，遵循营销短视症的公司是否都倾向于成功？这是否能为我们提供预测成功的方法？我们可以从正反两面举例。比如今天的迪士尼不仅是主题公园或动画公司，

So the question we will ask is, does companies that follow marketing myopia all tends to be successful? You know, does that give us a way to predict success? And we can kind of think of examples on either side. Right? Like, Disney today is not just a theme park company or animation company.

他们更像是综合性娱乐公司，非常擅长推出人们会喜爱并想观看的新型娱乐形式。另一方面，优步曾全力投入移动出行领域，对吧？它不仅仅关乎汽车，

They seem to be a broad entertainment company. They're pretty good at coming up with the next form of entertainment that people will love and wanna watch. On the other side, Uber at one point was all in on mobility. Right? It was not just about cars.

还记得那些电动滑板车吗？

You know? If you still remember the scooters

滑板车，公交车。

Scooters, buses.

对，还有自行车。他们曾认真考虑过飞行汽车，对吧？甚至涉足了直升机领域。

Yeah. Bikes. And they were serious about flying cars at one point. Right? They're down in helicopters.

哦，没错。是的。

Oh, that's right. Yeah.

没错。但即便最终落在相同的流动性定义上，这似乎也没能带来理想结果。这意味着我们无法断言遵循某种学派思想就必定通向成功，也就是说我们缺乏理论支撑。对吧？这就引出了我们的核心问题：能否提出更具确定性、更具预测力的观点？

Right. So but that didn't seem to end up that well even if it ends up in the same mobility definition. So what that means is we can't tell whether following a certain school of thought is definitely going to be leading to success, which means we don't have a theory behind it. Right? So that sort of states our problem is, can we say something that's a bit more definitive, you know, a bit more having the predictive power there?

经过思考，我们发现这个问题的根源在于：许多流行论述都在谈论经济价值，却很少涉及商业价值。换句话说，它们讲价值创造，却不讲价值获取。再换个说法就是——产品市场匹配并不等于权力。

And as we thought about it, the real reason why we have this issue is a lot of these popular narratives kind of tell you about economic value, but they don't tell you much about business value. Stated other words, they tell you about value creation, but not value capture. And stated in other words, we're basically saying product market fit is not power.

对。回到最初讨论的出发点，陈毅刚才指出的根本问题在于：经济价值的创造与自身价值获取（即公司价值创造）几乎是正交关系。经济价值创造和公司价值创造是两回事，但都至关重要。二者存在动态关联——创造经济价值会催生价值获取的机遇，但在某个时间切片上看，它们截然不同。

Yeah. Coming back to the very first conversation about why we did this in the first place is that the point Chen Yi just made is the fundamental one, which is that creation of economic value is pretty orthogonal to capturing some of that value for yourself, which is to say the creation of company value. So creation of economic value and the creation of company value are different animals, and both are important. And there's a dynamic connection in the sense that if you create economic value, it sort of creates the opportunity to think about capture and so on. But just a single slice and time, they're very different.

但这就是整个议题的根本所在。

But that's a fundamental point about all this.

是的。这个表述很精准，说明现有流行论述确实很有价值——它们作为创意发生器非常有用，能指引你寻找下一个产品市场契合点。而我们认为，对权力的理解才是其中缺失的关键环节。

Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it, which basically means all of the common narratives out there are really useful. They're really useful as idea generators. They tell you where to look for the next product market fit out there. And we think the understanding of power is the missing link here.

我们有各种方法来产生选项，但如何评估其中哪个才是最佳创意？这正是我们要建立更好评估框架的初衷。

We have all these ways to come up with options, but how do you assess which one of them is really the best idea? And that's what we set out to give a better structure to.

没错。我来具体说明权力如何发挥作用。之前提到过商业定义这个抽象概念——它其实非常重要。比如想想优步和网飞，它们接下来的发展方向...

Yeah. And so I'll just say how power kinda helps you out in a way. So I mentioned this sort of ethereal concept before of business definition. So it's rather important. So if you think about Uber versus Netflix, where they go next.

对吧？优步最初认为这是一项国际业务，意味着进入中国市场后，他们的优势能自然转化并取得成功。而Netflix考虑国际化时，认为在韩国启动流媒体服务会非常合理。

Right? Uber, at first, their thought was this was an international business. That means that going into China, somehow their strength would be transferable into that effort, and they could be successful. And Netflix thinking about going international, thinking that if they started streaming in Korea, that that would make a lot of sense.

那么您是将国际市场视为独立业务，还是在考虑扩展核心业务以覆盖更广阔的市场？

And are you considering the international a separate business, or are you thinking about this as, like, should we expand the core business and just address a broader market?

问题就在这里。关键在于，如果你已有成熟业务，其核心竞争力是否能延伸到新考虑的领域——无论是地理、客户还是其他方面？因为如果可以，初期风险回报的计算会乐观得多，毕竟创造新价值本就艰难。若能依托现有优势并在新环境中奏效，那绝对值得尝试，这比从零开始轻松太多了。Netflix在韩国的流媒体服务就是基于内容跨国共享这一优势。

So that's the question. The key thing there is if you have a established business, is the drivers of power in that extensible to that additional segment you're considering, whether it's geographic or customer or whatever? And because if it is, the risk reward of doing it, the calculation in the beginning, is so much better because being able to carve out value to yourself is really hard. And if you can build on to something that already does that and it works in that environment, then, oh, boy, go there because that's so much easier than doing something really new. And so Netflix streaming in Korea, it built on to saying you can share content across countries.

对吧？它依托于内容开发的相同固定成本经济学并取得成功。而优步的核心优势在于特定区域（如湾区）的地理密度，但若与中国滴滴正面竞争，则毫无优势可言，自然行不通。

Right? It built on the same fixed cost economics of content development and worked. Uber's if they have a source of power, it has to do with geographical density in a specific area like the Bay Area or something. And going into China, if they're head to head with Didi or something, they don't have any advantage at all, and so it doesn't work.

没错。他们可以移植技术平台来分摊工程设计和产品管理成本，但必须完全重新获取市场双边用户并重建密度——这才是业务中最昂贵的部分。

Right. They get to bring their technology platform over, so they're amortizing all the engineering design product management cost, but they have to go reacquire both sides of the marketplace in full and create that density, which is actually the expensive part of the business.

正是如此。如果工程成本占优步成本结构的75%（像Netflix内容成本占比50%-75%那样），或许还能成功。但事实并非如此。因此定义业务时，某些行业的国际市场属于同一业务范畴——即共享核心优势；而另一些行业则不然。

Exactly. And if it turned out that the engineering part was 75% of the cost structure, I mean, content for Netflix is 50%, 75%, then it would have been fine. But it's not, just as you said. And so when you're thinking about business definition, in some businesses, international is part of the same business, which is to say it's under the same power umbrella. And in some businesses, it's not.

你必须认清这一点。当规划下一步时，若能立足现有优势范围拓展——比如保时捷在中国而非美国卖车——那简直再好不过了。

And you have to understand that in terms of what you're doing. And if you're thinking about what's next, if you can go to things that are under your current power umbrella, oh, boy. Is that great? If Porsche wants to sell cars in China as opposed to selling them in The US, no brainer.

没错。在美国销售汽车时遇到的那些难以置信的工程难题依然存在。你们总能找到分销的方法。

Right. Still all the same unbelievably hard engineering problems that went into creating the car you're selling in The US. You can find a way to distribute that.

是的。中国竞争对手也得经历同样的计算过程。明白吗？所以这次谈话的第一要点是，要正确评估转型方向，首先要清楚了解你现有的实力基础，然后审视这个新领域——无论是客户、地域、技术还是产品——看看它是否也依赖于此。因为这样一来，前景就会显得一片光明。

Yeah. And a Chinese competitor would have to go through the same calculation. You know? So the first point of this conversation is that to properly assess transforming directions, the first thing is carefully understanding your current base of power and then looking at this new segment, whether as I say, it could be customer, geographic, technology, whatever product, and seeing whether it relies on that as well. Because then, oh, boy, a world looks rosy.

但另一方面，如果你以为依赖实际却不依赖，就像优步在中国的情况。我不知道他们亏了多少？十亿美元还是多少？具体数字我不清楚。

But on the other hand, if you think it does and it doesn't, it's like Uber in China. I don't know. What did they lose? A billion dollars or something? I don't know what it was.

如果把所有剥离业务算上，可能还不止。

Maybe more once you consider all the divestiture and yeah.

是啊。他们原本还能靠股票补偿。至于Dee，我不知道他们股票现在值多少。总之，这就是出发点。

Yeah. And so they used to be compensated by the shares. And, Dee, I don't know what their shares are worth now. So anyway, so that's the starting point.

这很有趣对吧？我们正在录制任天堂系列节目，这个思考框架很有意思。表面看跨度很大——任天堂最初为日本黑帮制作扑克牌，后来转向游戏主机，这个飞跃相当惊人。

It's interesting. Right? Like, I'm thinking about we're in the middle of our Nintendo series as we're recording this, and this really is an interesting framework to think about it because on the surface, it could be pretty far flung. I'm thinking about, you know, Nintendo made playing cards with the Japanese organized crime as their primary customer. And then moving from that to video game consoles is a pretty big leap.

但贯穿整个业务的核心线索是，他们始终牢牢掌控着分销网络，从扑克牌到玩具，再到游戏机和玩具零售商，这个优势延续至今。

But, you know, what they had originally that is the same thread through the whole business is they had an absolutely ironclad lock on their distribution networks, especially and then over time, through playing cards into toys, into video games, into toy retailers.

没错，大卫，这个案例非常有趣，因为通常正是那些看似不起眼的细节——比如锁定分销渠道——往往是最关键的因素。以索尼进军游戏主机市场为例，那完全是另一个领域，可以说极其艰难。他们依赖某些核心能力，这也说明了为什么单有能力还不够。当时模拟技术仍是主流，数字技术被视为边缘，但如今这恰恰成为他们盈利的来源。

Right. And that's such an interesting case, David, because oftentimes, it's that kind of subtlety about locking in a distribution channel, for example, that's sort of kind of invisible, but may actually be the very thing that makes that such an I mean, if you think of Sony on the other hand, when they went into game consoles, that was a different business, I'd say, and brutally hard. And it relied on some capabilities, so it shows why the capability thing doesn't get you there. I mean, yeah, some engineering at the time, analog was king there and digital was thought of as a backwater, but it was a very difficult and now it's, of course, the source of their profitability.

确实，但索尼走到这一步经历了漫长的历程。

Right. But it was a long journey for Sony to get there.

就像所有重大变革一样，总有几个关键人物和领导者，若没有他们，很难想象这一切会发生。那些富有创新精神且执行力极强的人。

And like all these things, there were a few principal actors, a few leaders that had they not been there, it's hard to imagine it ever happening. Some innovative, hard driving people.

那么，汉密尔顿和陈毅，能否请教二位：在当今技术驱动的世界中，人们在其现有权力架构内寻找扩展机会时，最常见的权力类型有哪些？

So, Hamilton and Chen Yi, can we ask you, what are the most common power types in today's technology driven world where people might find expansion opportunity inside of their current power umbrella?

我认为对初创企业而言，最常见的三种权力类型是规模经济、网络效应和转换成本。实际上，反定位策略也很常见，因为这是挑战行业巨头的途径。但还有几种权力类型通常要到企业更成熟阶段才会显现，书中提到的流程权力和品牌权力就是如此。这些需要多年深耕核心业务才能建立。考虑到今天听众的需求，我们认为聚焦规模经济、网络效应和转换成本这三种最常见类型会更实用。

I think particularly for earlier stage companies, the three most common power types that you will find are scale economies, network economies, and switching cost. Well, it's actually often common that you'll have counter positioning because that's how you tackle your incumbent in a space. But there are a couple other power types that doesn't really come in until sort of the more mature phase of the business, and that's laid out in the book, process power or brand power. You really need to develop them after years and years of experience, you know, honing in on the core business. So for the benefit of the audience today, we thought it would be more useful to focus on the three types of power, skill, network, and switching cost, which is probably the most common that we'd find out there.

您不把反定位策略包括在内，是因为在反定位框架下很难找到第二业务吗？

And are you not including counter positioning here because it's hard to find a second business under a counter positioning umbrella?

请允许我插一句。我赞同她将其排除在外，因为真正的权力必须能对抗所有潜在和现有竞争者。反定位策略通常只对行业巨头有效，对模仿者无效——因为他们没有相同痛点。最需要警惕的是那些与你模式相同的竞争者。比如对博玛而言，德州仪器的计算器业务就是如此，这就是她未将其列入的原因。

Let me just weigh in here a sec. I agree with her sort of leaving it off because to have power, right, you have to have it versus all potential and existing competitors. The counter positioning one is typically the type of power that you would have against incumbents, but it doesn't work against the wannabes because they don't have the same problems. And so the one that you have to think hardest about is versus other companies that are doing it just like you. And so for Bomar, it would be Texas Instruments doing calculators, and so that's why she left it off the list.

是的。无论核心竞争优势是什么——我称之为'前景'，因为这种优势门槛极高——即便它仍在为你构建中，且你认为这将成为长期抵御竞争的机制，第一步始终是清晰理解这种核心商业优势的样貌。以优步为例，如果其核心优势确实是规模经济（即自动匹配的技术框架极难构建且成本高昂），那么国际扩张就完全不合理。对吧？

Yeah. So regardless of what's the core power prospect, I'm calling it prospect because this power is a pretty hard bar to clear, but even if it's still in the make for you and you think this is going to be the mechanism that protects you from competition in the long run, the first step is always to get a really clear understanding of what that core business power prospect looks like. So back to your example of Uber. If the core power prospect of Uber is actually scale economies, which says the technology framework of doing the matching automatically is so hard and requires so much cost to build, then international expansion would have been totally irrational. Right?

因为你只是将固定成本分摊到更多地区，并在每个新市场获得先发优势。但事实并非如此。该业务的主要成本实际在于获取和维护客户，这意味着你真正应该追求的是网络效应（如果存在的话）。而该网络的范围决定了每个市场具有强烈的地域局限性，因此每进入一个新国家甚至新城市，都相当于从零开始经营全新业务。这个例子说明，明确核心商业优势的形态，能为你指明完全不同的转型方向或升级路径。

Because you're just spreading that fixed cost over more geographies, and you're getting a head start in every single place you have. But the truth is it's not. The majority of cost of that business actually lies in acquiring and maintaining their customers, which means, if anything, the route you should really try to get to is network economies, if you have one. And the scope of that network defines each market is actually heavily bounded geographically, and so every new country, even new city you go into is a complete new business, and you have to start from scratch. So that's just an example of getting a definitive answer or a confident answer about where core business power looks like gives you a very different place to look on where to transform or where to take it to the next step for your business.

这就像...好吧，假设我在西雅图运营类似优步的服务，拥有所有司机和乘客资源（或高密度用户群）。但对旧金山的大卫而言这些毫无价值。因此与其在旧金山推出优步，或许更应该思考如何利用西雅图的网络优势——因为这才是我相对于他人具有持久竞争优势的领域。

So it's almost like, okay. So I'm here in Seattle. If I was operating an Uber like service, I have this power, which is all the drivers and all the riders or a high density of that. That means nothing where David is in San Francisco. So instead of launching Uber in San Francisco, maybe I should try and figure out other things to leverage my network for here in Seattle because that's the place where I have the durable competitive advantage versus others.

所以优食(Uber Eats)？对吧？

So Uber Eats. Right?

对。

Right.

我认为共乘服务与食品配送是否属于同一业务尚无定论。或许确实如此。

So I think the jury is still out whether ride sharing and food delivery belongs to the same business. Maybe they do.

但这比跨地域扩张更合理些。

But it's more plausible than different geographies.

表面上看这似乎显而易见，但当你深入探究时，就会意识到——等等，可能网络重叠程度并不如我原先所想。对吧？这就是问题所在。

And this is one of these things where it seems obvious on the surface, and then when you start to dig in, you're like, oh, wait. Maybe it's not as overlapping of a network as I would have thought. Right. That's the question. Right.

外卖司机与网约车司机群体确实存在重叠，但重叠度没那么高。消费者群体显然也不同，这点从他们采取的企业行动就能看出——专门推出独立应用Uber Eats而非整合进同一个应用。所以你实际上拥有的是两个部分重叠的双边网络，而非任何一边完全重叠的网络。

The drivers for food delivery are a overlapping, but not that overlapping set of drivers for rideshare. And the set of consumers is obviously different as well, which you can see in the corporate action they took to ship a separate app called Uber Eats rather than bundling into one app. So you actually have, like, two overlapping two sided networks, but not a fully overlapping on either side of the network.

Ben，这个例子非常棒，因为它揭示了表型复杂性的本质——在揭开表象之前，人们会觉得'Uber Eats和司机不都一回事嘛'。但当你深入分析，就会发现未必如此。这说明我们必须非常细致地判断自己是否具备市场支配力。对Uber而言，这涉及到平台本质、平台两侧群体的排他性、它们的重叠程度等等。缺乏这种细致认知，就会错判形势。

Ben, that's such a great example because it speaks to the point that of the complication of the phenotypes that until you peel back the covers, it just sounds, oh, yeah, Uber Eats and drivers sounds all the same. But when you start peeling it back, it may not be. So what that says is you have to have quite a lot of nuance in your understanding of whether you have power to begin with. And, of course, for Uber, it gets into the nature of platforms and exclusiveness of the sets that occupy either side of the platform and whether they overlap and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so without that nuance, you just you miss it.

是啊。

Yeah.

我还想请教你对其他网络经济的看法，笔记里提到的微软与Slack案例。能否分析下微软决定进入Slack所在市场（那个很难准确定义的市场——异步聊天/工作沟通）推出Teams的决策？这种借助其权力伞的入场方式是否有趣？为什么？

What other network economies, one that I'm curious to get your take on, I see in your notes here, is Microsoft versus Slack. Can you sort of walk through the Microsoft decision to enter the market of whatever Slack's product is? It's quite hard to define. Async, chat, work, communication with Teams, why or why not was that an interesting entrance and use of their power umbrella?

这里有趣的是我们可以把微软也视为平台。它运营的操作系统两侧分别是用户和应用。关键在于微软平台用户的归属成本极高——

So the interesting thing here is we can also think about Microsoft as platform. Right? You operate an operating system where on the two sides, you have users and also you have applications. Now the interesting concept here is the users of Microsoft's platform has a really high cost of affiliation. Right?

这不仅涉及硬件层面（购买实体机器），通常还涉及企业级采购流程、配套的分销渠道（类似任天堂模式）。正因如此，微软的网络范围实质上覆盖了用户端的所有需求，而无需用户承担额外成本——他们不必重启采购流程或添置新硬件。

It's not just on the hardware side. You buy a physical machine, but, also, it's typically an enterprise wide adoption. There's a procurement process attached to it. There's the distribution channels that you know, similar to how the Nintendo one worked. And because of that, Microsoft's network scope basically extends to whatever demand my user side would have without incurring more cost on their end, without they don't have to do another procurement cycle maybe or do not have to buy another hardware for.

因此，这自然延伸至几乎所有的生产力软件领域。这就是为什么我们看到微软Teams至少给Slack制造了竞争压力。我们都认同Slack是一款非常出色的产品，但好产品并不总能胜出。因为当像微软这样的现有巨头具备竞争优势时，他们拥有能渗透到Slack运营领域的网络资源，这就会在竞争中制造障碍。

So that naturally extends to basically, maybe all of productivity software. And that's how you see Microsoft Teams create at least the competitive hassle for Slack. I think we all have to experience that Slack is a really, really good product, but good products don't always win. Because when there is competitive advantage from an incumbent, in the case of Microsoft, they basically have a network that can extend into the product Slack is operating in. They create issues, you know, competitively.

我们当前讨论的方向是：转型是个值得探讨的话题。而起点是认清现有业务的优势，因为若能以此为基础拓展，就能为新的尝试创造极佳的风险回报比。这自然引出了下一个议题：如果无法依托现有业务，必须进入与当前优势无关的领域时该怎么办？你们二位通过大量访谈，其实积累了丰富的信息资源，了解人们在此过程中的心路历程。

So where we're heading in this conversation is we're saying transforming is a worthwhile topic. And then we're saying that a starting point is understanding the power of your current business because if you can build off of that, it creates a wildly preferable risk return prospect for something you're getting into. And so that then takes us to the next topic, which is what if you can't build on your current thing and you need to get into something that doesn't build in your current source of power. And the two of you, with all your interviews, actually have so much. You know, you have this wealth of information about what goes into people's minds doing that.

但仔细想想，你要进入什么领域？本质上你是在创办一家新公司，对吧？

But if you think about that, what are you into? You're basically you're starting a new business. Right?

没错。恭喜你——你不需要注册特拉华州C类公司，可能还有些现成员工可以调配。但除此之外你还能复用哪些资源呢？

Right. Congratulations. You don't have to file as a Delaware c corp, and you probably have some people you've already hired that can work on it. But what other assets are you repurposing?

正是如此。请记住我之前关于标普100企业的观点：观察它们创造巨大价值的转型领域后，能否总结出普适规律？我这里稍作归纳，大致可分为三类。

Right. Exactly. And so remember that thing I said about the s and p 100. If you look at what they went into that generated a lot of value and ask the question, could you generalize it all about that? I'll create some definitions here a little bit, sort of three categories.

你可以从两个维度思考：是否满足相同需求？是否运用相同技能？毕竟我有咨询行业背景，在我们眼里世界总是二维的，对吧？

If you think of, does it satisfy the same needs or does it use the same skills? Those are the two dimensions. Right? Because I have a consulting background and the whole world is always two dimensional. Right?

如果既不需要相同技能也不满足相同需求，那就是纯粹的多元化。这种情况很少成功，属于高风险尝试——本质上是在完全陌生的领域白手起家。

And if it has neither the same skills nor the same need, I'd just call that pure diversification. And rarely does that work. That's a very high risk proposition. You're basically creating new business, something you don't know how to do at all.

当你说技能和需求时，是指我公司的技能和客户的需求吗？

And when you say skills and need, that's the skills of my company and the need of my customers?

指的是你公司的技能。比如你的工程师知道怎么做，你的销售人员知道怎么做，诸如此类的事情。

The skills of your company. So what your engineers know how to do, what your salespeople know how to do, all those sorts of things.

所以，在这种情况下，你最好让公司内部有创业精神的人出去创办新公司并分拆出去，或者用你的资金投资其他公司。

So, like, in that case, you'd be better off either having people who are entrepreneurial within your company, like, leave and start a new company and spin it off or invest your treasury in other companies.

作为大公司，你还面临着所有代理问题，比如在官僚主义重重的情况下启动新项目。

And as a big company, you have all the agency problems of trying to get something off the ground with a lot of bureaucracy and everything else.

没错。虽然有一些优势，但劣势更多。确实如此。

Right. There's some advantages, but there's more disadvantages. Right.

可能劣势比优势更多。数据也支持这一点，即不相关的多元化通常不是明智之举。

There's probably more disadvantages than advantages. And data supports that, that unrelated diversification is typically not a great thing to do.

所以这个2x2矩阵的左下角是：我既没有擅长创造这个新事物的团队，目前也没有想要这个新事物的客户。

So the lower left of this two by two matrix is I neither have the team that is great at creating this next new thing, nor do I have the customers that want this next new thing currently.

你说得对。然后如果你看左上角，那是相同的需求但不同的技能组合。你可以称之为重塑。有时你被迫这样做，但机会其实并不那么大。

You got it. Right. And then if you look at the upper left, which is it's the same need but different set of skills. You can call that reinvention. And sometimes you're forced to do that, but the opportunity set isn't that great, really.

这并不像是为你打开了整个世界的机会之门。所以这种情况相当罕见。确实会发生，比如Netflix转型做流媒体就是重塑。这是可能的。

It's not like you're opening up the whole world to opportunities. And so those are pretty rare. It does happen. I mean, Netflix into streaming is reinvention. It can happen.

这很难做到。你通常会处于对立位置，因为有一大群人想用老方法做事。而且他们在公司里通常很有话语权，因为他们掌握着损益表。

It's hard to do. You're usually counter positioned because you've got a whole group of people that wants to do it the old way. Right. And they have a lot of power in a company typically cause they've got the PNL.

这需要创始人的支持去推动。

It requires sort of the founder sponsor to go pursue it.

是的，非常有见地。完全正确。否则你就会被代理问题淹没。所以不同的需求、技能共享，相同的技能，或者不相同的但共享的技能，你可以称之为类别协同。

Yep. That's very insightful. Exactly right. Otherwise, you get swamped by agency problems. And so the different needs, skills sharing, same skills, or not same, but shared skills, you can call that category coaction.

这才是所有行动发生的地方。

And that's where all the action is.

没错，AWS就是典型的例子。

Yeah. That's AWS for sure.

对吧？没错。AWS。对。

Right? Exactly. AWS. Right.

等等。所以这是右下角？

Wait. So this is the lower right?

这算是中下部。虽然技能不完全通用，但你对进入该领域所需的操作相当了解，只是需求不同。具体数据我没在手边，但我记得标普100中90%的新价值来自协同效应。这说明了一个相当直接的事实。

This is kind of the lower middle. It's a bunch of not perfectly shared skills, but you know quite a bit about the stuff you need to do to get in there, but it's a different need. And that accounts I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think it's 90% of the value in the S and P 100 of the new stuff came from coaction. And that's saying something that's pretty straightforward.

我猜右上角不存在，因为那是你们现有产品。同一团队，相同需求。对吧？

And I guess there is no top right because that is your current product. Same team, same needs. Right?

天啊，你反应太快了。没错，是同一业务。至于额外加分题——为什么这些坐标轴不完全正交，这个我们留到下次讨论。

God. You're too fast for me. That's right. Same business. And then the extra credit on this will be why are these axes not quite orthogonal, but I'll leave that to another discussion.

以索尼进军PlayStation为例，这和索尼造车完全不同。虽属不同业务，但他们确实具备...你知道的...很多资源。这说明你应当将拓展领域限制在与现有能力契合的方向。当然，极少数公司拥有独特专长能自然形成竞争优势，比如康宁的玻璃技术——那种特殊材料科学让他们能做出别人无法复制的玻璃产品。

So if you think of Sony going into PlayStation, that was not the same as Sony going into cars. It was a different business, but they did have, you know, a lot of stuff. And so that basically says that you wanna constrain yourself to areas that sort of meet with your current capabilities. Now, occasionally, are companies that have capabilities that are so proprietary that actually that aligns with power automatically, but that's very rare. I mean, I'd say, like Corning and glass technology, for example, it's such a weird material science so they could do glass stuff that other people couldn't do.

3M公司是否属于这种右下角的典型？他们擅长制造各种新奇产品，但面向完全不同的客户群和应用场景？

Is three m a good example of this sort of lower right where they know how to make all kinds of interesting stuff, but for completely different customer bases, completely different use cases?

在我看来，3M本质上是一家材料科学公司。而材料科学很奇特，它并不完全——至少过去是这样，我现在不太跟进这方面了——在理论上尚未完全成熟。它有许多小众且独特的方面。

So my view of three m is that they're basically a material science company. And material science is weird. It's not fully or at least it used to be. I'm not so current on it so much, but not fully developed theoretically. There are all kinds of nichey, idiosyncratic aspects to it.

因此他们能够发明东西。比如便利贴，对吧，那是一种不太粘的胶水。然后他们不知道这玩意儿到底能干嘛，就这样搁置了好几年。

And so they were able to invent stuff. So if you think of Post it notes, right, that was a not so sticky glue. Right? And then they didn't know what the hell to do with it. And it went on for years.

后来有个项目支持者坚持认为：不，这里面大有可为。他们差点就错过了，直到最后一次市场试验才抓住机会，当时他们几乎就要放弃跟进。

There is a champion in the thing that just said, no. There's something great here. And they almost missed it. It came down to a final marketing trial where they almost didn't follow-up on it.

哇，真厉害。我从没这么想过。虽然知道这是个著名案例，但客观来说，他们最初做的产品很糟糕，却把这种缺陷转化成了特色。

Wow. It is great. I'd never really thought about that. I mean, I know it's a famous story, but objectively, it was a really crappy product that they made, and then they turned that crappiness into a feature.

我会稍微不同地描述它。我认为这是一项没有产品的有趣技术。

Well, I'd characterize it little different. I'd say it was a very interesting technology with no product.

这有点像Web3。像个转换器，只是速度慢得多。

It's kinda like Web three. It's like a converter. It's like way slower.

太早了。

Bed too soon.

但是，没错。对。我太喜欢这个了。

But, like Right. Right. I love that.

也许我们能找到那张便利贴。对吧？也许它速度慢的事实并不重要，毕竟它是去中心化的。

Maybe we'll find the sticky note. Right? Maybe the fact that it's really slow is irrelevant given it's decentralized.

没错。是啊。真有趣。我想我们在这点上看法一致。虽然持这种观点的人不多，但我同意你的看法。

Right. Yeah. It's funny. I guess we share a view in that. I I don't find myself very popular in that view, but I agree with you.

大家都在空谈去中心化的奇迹，说什么世界会变得更美好之类的。而我在等待...

There's all this hand waving about the wonders of decentralization and the world will be a great place and everything. And I'm waiting for the

我们需要那张便利贴。

We need the sticky note.

我们需要那张便利贴。对吧？总之，我认为这只是个简单的观察：最可能带你实现目标的是不同的需求，但利用你已有的一些技能。这并不复杂，而且数据也证明了这点。

We need the sticky note. Right? Anyway, so I think that is just a simple observation, which is that the stuff that's most likely will get you there is a different need, but using some of the skills that you have. Nothing very complicated about it, but I think data bears that out.

我想说现在很多科技公司都具备相同的能力。所以关键在于你与其他公司相比的差异化能力，还是说，嘿，你可以重新调配工程师去做些有趣的事，当然其他公司也都能做到。

I would say a lot of tech companies today have the same set of capabilities. So is it about where you have differential capability versus other companies or just, hey. You can repurpose a bunch of your engineers to do something interesting, and sure everyone else can kind of do it too.

所以这是一个非常有趣的问题。我是说，早在核心竞争力这个概念出现之前，就有作家写过相关内容。我记得他们用的是‘独特竞争力’这个词，正是你提到的意思。我认为这在核心技术和玻璃工艺领域确实成立。但这很罕见，我同意你的观点，很多科技公司都有大量相似的东西。

So a really interesting question. I mean, way back when, before the idea of core competencies, there's a writer that wrote about it. Think they used the term distinctive competencies, which is exactly what you're getting at. And I would say that that was probably true of coring and glass technology. But it's rare, and I agree with you that a lot of tech companies have a lot of similar sort of stuff.

如果你拥有独特能力，并且能在某个领域应用从而开发出好产品，那真是太棒了。但这很难得，并不常见。所以如果你处于无法在当前优势领域发展的情况，就必须意识到——就像本你之前说的——你又回到了创新起点。当然可以基于现有能力建设，但那只是基础筹码，你要承担相应风险。

And if you had a distinctive capability and that that had an application in an area so it led to a good product, then, oh, boy, that's great. But it's hard. That's not common. And so if you're in this place where you can't build in your current power, you just have to realize, as you were saying before, Ben, you're you're back in InventSpace. And, yeah, you can build on current capabilities, but that sort of table stakes, you know, you're into that level of risk.

就像所有事情一样，这是个适应过程。你知道的，就是不断尝试然后积极向前推进。

And like all those things, it's adaptive. You know, you sort of try stuff and move forward in a positive way.

根据你分享的内容，我目前的小思维瀑布是这样的：第一步，识别当前业务中的优势，并对此保持极度坦诚。

And so my little mental waterfall so far from everything that you've shared with us is step one, identify the power in your current business and be brutally honest about it.

没错。极度坦诚且非常细致。

Right. Brutally honest and very granular.

是的。第二步，判断是否能在该优势领域下开拓或扩展新业务。如果可以就去做。如果不行，就必须创办新业务，而寻找新业务最肥沃土壤的方法是利用现有能力组合，但要解决客户不同的需求——尤其这几乎是第四步——如果你比其他可能追逐同一机会的公司具备差异化能力。

Yes. Step two, figure out if there is a new business to launch or expand into under that particular power umbrella. If so, great. Do that. If not, you have to go start a new business, and where you should look for the most fertile ground for that new business is using your existing set of capabilities, but for a different job to be done for customers, look there and especially this is almost step four, if you have differential capability versus other companies who could also pursue that same opportunity.

我很喜欢这个思路。

I love it.

是的。你记下来了吗，切尼？我觉得我们应该记住所有这些。

Yeah. Did you write that down, Cheney? I think we I should remember all that.

对。我是说，冒险本质上就是帮助我们产出理论。

Yeah. I mean, venture is just help us produce theory.

对。对。对。是的。不。

Right. Right. Right. Yeah. No.

我觉得你说到点子上了。

I think you nailed it.

没错。我想强调一点。这种排序方式是有原因的，虽然可能显而易见但仍值得重申：创新是有风险的。如果你有现成的业务能力作为依托，就像亚马逊那样——他们拥有分销物流体系，最初从书籍开始，我们都知道然后是CD、电子产品等等。

Yeah. There's one point I wanna make. There's a reason why it's sequenced that way, and it may be obvious but still worth iterating, which is invention is risky. If you have something underneath your existing power umbrella, and that's what Amazon did, they had this distribution logistics. They started with, we all know books and then CDs and then electronics, etcetera.

这种自然延伸不仅能利用现有优势，还能强化你的核心竞争力，风险要小得多。你是在新领域起步，但相比任何竞争对手都有先发优势。而进军亚马逊云服务则是真正的创新。我很喜欢你们讲述的亚马逊四大起源点的故事。

It's a natural extension that not just leverage but also intensifies your existing power. That's way less risky. You know you start somewhere new but with a head start compared to anyone that's a competitor. But the movement into Amazon Web Services is invention. And I loved your guys' story on how there's the four different sources of, you know, starting point of Amazon.

人们总喜欢认为这是基于企业现有竞争优势，但实际上并非如此。这是创新。他们发现了市场需要的新事物。但尽管AWS如此成功，他们也遭遇过失败，比如Fire Phone（如果你还记得的话），在Alexa上也亏损了数十亿。

People would love to think it's based on some existing competitive advantage of the business, but it's really not. It's invention. They figured out a new thing that the market wants. But as successful as they are in AWS, they also flopped, you know, Fire Phone, if you still remember that. They also lost billions and billions on Alexa.

确实没有哪家企业能持续不断地推出成功发明的记录。这正说明了其中的风险性，因此它只排在清单上的第三或第四位。因为如果没必要涉足，就别去尝试。但如果必须涉足，协作是最有可能取得成功的方式。

There's really no track record of a business who can continuously come up with successful invention. And that speaks to the riskiness of that, which is why it's only the point number three or number four on the list. Because if you don't have to go there, don't. But if you do have to go there, coaction is the most possible place for success.

谢天谢地这些事物遵循幂律分布。否则正如你所说，由于从未有人能像这样连续取得成功，追求创新将净亏损。

Thank God these things are power law distributed. Otherwise, to your point, because no one has ever successfully been able to do hit after hit after hit like this, it would be net unprofitable to pursue, innovation.

没错。我想强调詹妮斯刚才提出的关键点：在现有能力范围内外行事，其风险级别差异巨大。这应该是你的出发点，因为差距确实天壤之别。说到创新，作为亚马逊的忠实拥趸，我认为若非甘愿承担风险并接受失败，他们不可能取得今日成就。对吧？

Right. I just wanna underline what Janice rightfully kind of pulled that out as kind of a key point here is that the risk level of doing something that's under your current power umbrella or not, The difference is gigantic. So that should be your starting point because it is absolutely gigantic. And I think since we're back into invention, and I am a huge fan of Amazon, the fact that they've been able to do what they do, I would argue that they couldn't have done it if they weren't willing to take the risk and have some failures. Right?

完全正确。当切尼和我与企业交流时，若听闻对方在转型中取得成功并谈及未来转型，那种‘我们已建立完善的创新流程，有17个步骤，明确责任人’等说辞，恰恰是最危险的红色警报。

Absolutely. And so when Cheney and I talk to companies, we'll often when we hear it, if they have been successful at transforming and we talk about future transforming, the narrative that makes us think, oh, boy. This is really should really got our problem is, oh, we have a really defined process for innovation here. And there is a 17 step process, and we know exactly who to assign to it and blah blah blah. That's the red flag of all red flags.

正是。企业内部还存在其他隐患，比如筛选标准问题。有些公司在考虑新项目时会说‘除非能显著影响公司业绩否则不做’，这意味着市场规模必须达到特定量级。

Right? And then there are other in company things. You worry about sort of screening criteria. For example, some companies, when they're thinking of doing new stuff, say, well, I won't do it unless it will move the needle corporately, which means the market has to be a certain size.

微软就是典型。他们态度基本是‘除非能创造十亿美元级产品，否则别想获批’。

This was Microsoft. I mean, it was like, oh, unless you're gonna go create a billion dollar revenue product, I'm not green lighting your document.

没错。通常当市场已达十亿规模时，入局已为时过晚。但这恰恰凸显了创新的艰难——无论对大企业还是个人都绝非易事。

Right. And usually, if it's already a billion dollar market is you're too late. But this is just a highlight that invention is really hard. It's hard for a large company to do it. It's hard for individuals to do it.

企业战略在转型方面提出了一个问题：至少在你实施转型时，现有平台是否在某些情况下能为你带来显著优势？

And corporate strategy is asking a question on the transforming side, at least of if you do it, are there cases in which your current platform are of significant benefit to you?

在这个框架中，你会把iPhone放在什么位置？

Where would you put the iPhone in this framework?

哦，iPhone和iPod完全属于协同产品。功能相似，但我的意思是，它们在广义上都是计算机。对吧？但从功能角度看，iPhone确实在某种程度上与台式电脑形成了竞争。

Oh, iPhone is and the iPod are straight up coaction. Similar capabilities, but, I mean, they are computers in sort of a generic sense. Right? But the iPhone, in a functional way, it does compete a little bit with the desktop.

是的，没错。

Yeah. Right.

比他们当初预想的竞争程度更激烈。

More so than they realized it would.

它们可能像是公司现有产品中往右上角走得最远的，但在某些关键维度上又有所不同。

They're kinda, like, maybe as high up as you can go towards the top right of their sort of like the existing products of the company, but different on some key dimensions.

是的。我想说的是，当你试图进行业务定义时，理论层面要考虑力量共享，而实证层面则是观察竞争对手的构成，看看它们是否不同。这表明它们属于不同的类别。因此，iPhone的竞争对手与MacBook Pro的竞争对手在很大程度上是不同的。

Yeah. I mean, I would say that one of the things when you're trying to do business definition, there's the theoretical side is the power shared, and then there's the empirical side is to look at the composition of competitors and see if they're different. And that's suggestive that they're sort of different. And so the competitors for the iPhone are different largely than the competitors for the MacBook Pro.

这是个很好的试金石。

It's a good litmus test.

你知道，虽然它并不完美，因为有时发展并不完全遵循经济规律，但这确实是个不错的观察角度。

You know, again, it's not perfect, but because sometimes that doesn't develop in in exactly economic ways, but it's a pretty good way to look at it.

现在正是感谢我们节目的好朋友ServiceNow的好时机。我们曾向听众讲述过ServiceNow惊人的创业故事，以及他们如何成为过去十年表现最出色的公司之一。但最近有听众询问ServiceNow具体是做什么的，今天我们就来解答这个问题。

Now is a great time to thank good friend of the show, ServiceNow. We have talked to listeners about ServiceNow's amazing origin story and how they've been one of the best performing companies the last decade, but we've gotten some questions from listeners about what ServiceNow actually does. So today, we are gonna answer that question.

首先，最近媒体经常用一句话来形容ServiceNow——它是企业的'AI操作系统'。具体来说，ServiceNow二十二年前创立时专注于自动化，最初是将实体文书转化为软件工作流，服务于企业内部的IT部门。后来他们在这个平台上不断扩展，处理更强大复杂的任务。

Well, to start, a phrase that has been used often here recently in the press is that ServiceNow is the, quote, unquote, AI operating system for the enterprise. But to make that more concrete, ServiceNow started twenty two years ago focused simply on automation. They turned physical paperwork into software workflows initially for the IT department within enterprises. That was it. And over time, they built on this platform going to more powerful and complex tasks.

他们的服务从IT部门扩展到人力资源、财务、客户服务、现场运营等部门。在过去二十年里，ServiceNow完成了连接企业各个角落所需的繁琐基础工作，为实现自动化铺平了道路。

They were expanding from serving just IT to other departments like HR, finance, customer service, field operations, and more. And in the process over the last two decades, ServiceNow has laid all the tedious groundwork necessary to connect every corner of the enterprise and enable automation to happen.

所以当AI时代来临时——本质上AI就是高度复杂的任务自动化——而谁已经搭建好了支持这种自动化的企业级平台和连接架构？正是ServiceNow。因此要回答'ServiceNow现在做什么'这个问题，他们所说的'连接并赋能每个部门'绝非虚言。

So when AI arrived well, AI kinda just by definition is massively sophisticated task automation. And who had already built the platform and the connective tissue with enterprises to enable that automation? ServiceNow. So to answer the question, what does ServiceNow do today? We mean it when they say they connect and power every department.

IT和HR用它管理全公司的人员、设备和软件许可；客户服务部门用它检测支付失败并自动转接给内部对应团队处理；供应链部门用它进行产能规划，整合各部门数据确保信息同步。再也不用在不同系统间反复录入相同数据。最近ServiceNow还推出了AI助手，任何岗位的员工都能创建AI代理处理繁琐事务，让人专注于更高层次的工作。

IT and HR use it to manage people, devices, software licenses across the company. Customer service uses ServiceNow for things like detecting payment failures and routing to the right team or process internally to solve it. Or the supply chain org uses it for capacity planning, integrating with data and plans from other departments to ensure that everybody's on the same page. No more swivel chairing between apps to enter the same data multiple times in different places. And just recently, ServiceNow launched AI agents so that anyone working in any job can spin up an AI agent to handle the tedious stuff, freeing up humans for bigger picture work.

ServiceNow去年入选了《财富》杂志全球最受赞赏公司榜单和《快公司》最佳创新者工作场所，这都归功于其愿景。如果你想在业务各个环节利用ServiceNow的规模与速度优势，请访问servicenow.com/acquired，只需告诉他们是本和大卫推荐你的。

ServiceNow was named to Fortune's world's most admired companies list last year and Fast Company's best workplace for innovators last year, and it's because of this vision. If you wanna take advantage of the scale and speed of ServiceNow in every corner of your business, go to servicenow.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

感谢ServiceNow。这里有个有趣的观点，关于苹果公司的观察：每当他们推出新的数十亿美元产品线时，本质上都是协同创新的结果。比如iPod。

Thanks, ServiceNow. So here's an interesting you can tell me if it's interesting. An observation on Apple. It's basically always been coaction when they come up with a new multibillion dollar product line. You've got the iPod.

要知道，除了需要获取新型硬盘外，他们基本已掌握iPod的所有制造技术。一旦获得微型硬盘，我们的工程师都知道如何打造这类产品。iPhone如此，iPad亦然。

You know, absent going and getting the new type of hard drive, they kinda knew how to build everything about the iPod already. And once they had the tiny hard drive, then great. All of our engineers know how to build something like this. IPhone, same thing. IPad, same thing.

这些都是为用户创造的新需求，但他们拥有全部合适的人才来构建。AirPods同理。即将发布的AR/VR设备？同样模式。我们得看未来几个月是否发布。

These are new jobs to be done for customers, but they have all the right talent to build them. AirPods, same thing. What? Maybe this ARVR device, same thing. We'll have to see if it launches here in the next few months.

但有趣的是，他们在汽车领域缺乏大量内部人才储备。因此不得不培养全新技能——如今有数千人投入这个多次变更策略却仍未上市的项目，团队对其商业成功毫无信心。这属于需要全新人才和能力才能满足的用户需求。

But interestingly, a thing where they didn't have a large amount of the talent in house is cars. And so they had to go build completely new skills within the company to try to you know, they've got what? Several thousand people working on this car now, still hasn't launched, changed strategy five times. They have no confidence this is gonna be a commercial success. It's a new requirement for customers that requires a whole bunch of people that they did not have and capability they did not have.

这恰好印证了你这个框架的指向：那个产品至今未能成功甚至面世。

And that kind of speaks to where I think you're going with this framework that that product has not been successful or even launched.

这更接近纯粹的多元化。对吧？如果把那个横轴看作从0到100%的谱系，汽车行业里从绿色轿车转向红色轿车，技能重合度高达95%。

That's closer to pure diversification. Right? Yeah. So if you think of that horizontal axis, that thing I was talking about, that's a spectrum from zero to a 100%. If you're in the car business, if you go from green cars to red cars, you have almost, you know, 95% shared skill.

从豪华车到紧凑型车，丰田能做到高度共享。但从汽车转到坦克，差异就相当大了。

Go from luxury cars to compacts, high sharing, so Toyota can do it. Go from cars to tanks. Pretty different.

保时捷是在纳粹胁迫下这么做的。

Porsche did it under coercion by the Nazis.

对，对。并非不可能，但差异很大。如果再转到冰箱制造，那就完全不同了。确实如此。

Right. Right. It's not impossible, but quite different. And then if you go from cars to refrigerators, it's really different. So yeah.

不，我同意这个分析。但别忘了企业家的重要性，因为他们是创新的核心，没有他们就不会有创新。这不是自动或机械的过程，其中包含着个人的创造力。

No. I I agree with that analysis. But remember too not to forget the importance of the entrepreneur in this because they are the locus of inventiveness, and it doesn't happen without them. And this isn't an automatic process or something mechanical. There's individual human creativity involved.

这一点在苹果公司尤为明显，但对所有企业家都是如此。所以切尼和我必须对我们所做的事保持谦逊，因为我们真正在做的是为那些人提供模式识别工具，但这不能替代他们。这只是一个工具。这是个很好的引子

And it's especially evident at Apple, but it's really true everywhere for all entrepreneurs. And so that's why Cheney and I have to be fairly modest about what we're doing because what we're really trying to do is to provide pattern recognition for those people, but it doesn't substitute for them. It's just a tool. This is a good lead

实际上这引出了我想问的，关于内部转型和新业务发展。这个框架也适用于企业并购的思考吗？因为我认为开始考虑转型的公司，可能也处于考虑进行较大规模转型并购的阶段。这是不同的吗？还是应该用同样的标准来思考？

up actually to what I wanted to ask you as we wrap on internal transforming and new business development. Does this framework apply to thinking about acquisitions as well for companies? Because I would imagine companies that are starting to think about transforming are also at a stage where they could be contemplating fairly larger transformative m and a. Is that different, or should you think about that with the same rubric?

嗯，这密切相关。收购公司时，你必须问自己的核心问题是：为什么这家公司对我的价值比对卖家更高？因为信息不对称总是存在。卖家永远比你更了解资产。这方面有大量财务分析工作，虽然无法做到完美，但基本上他们会看收购前后的股价等等。

Well, it's very related. If you're acquiring a company, the primary question you have to ask yourself is, why is this worth more to me than to the seller? Because there will always be an information asymmetry. The seller will always know more about the asset than you will. There's a ton of financial analysis work on this, and you know, you can't get it perfectly, but basically they look at stock price before and after acquisition and all this stuff.

如果总结这一切，基本上就是说，收购方勉强收支平衡，而卖方则赚得盆满钵满。他们能在大部分业务中看透这一点，堪称天才。这就引出了你能带来什么的问题，你可以想象这与业务定义等主题息息相关。正因如此，反垄断机构对此大为光火。如果你在具有规模经济的领域横向收购，只会让你的优势更加明显。

And if you distill all that, what it basically says is, you know, the acquirers kind of break even or whatever and and the seller does very well. And the fact that they figured that out for a large segment of business was genius. And so that then question of what do you bring, you can imagine how that touches on this subject of business definition and so on. Then that's why antitrust authorities get so upset about it. If you horizontally acquire in something with scale economies, that just makes your advantage that much more.

所以人们对此感到不满。大家都很想这么做，但《哈特-斯科特-罗迪诺反垄断改进法》不会让你得逞。对吧？这也是理所应当的。但你必须非常、非常自律，因为如果你身处大公司并面临这些决策时——我参与过很多次——常听到的推进理由往往是：'哦，我们不需要同样数量的会计人员'或'我们可以减少这些成本削减带来的人员重叠'，但这从未奏效，因为大组织既有规模经济也有规模不经济，而他们对此的假设往往过于乐观。

And so people get upset about it. And people would love to do it, but, you know, Hart Scott Rodino won't let you get away with it. Right? And rightfully so. But you have to be very, very disciplined because often what happens if you're inside a large company and facing these decisions, and I've been involved in many of them, what happens is the argument that's often made to advance that is, oh, well, we don't have to have the same number of accountants or we can kind of reduce their sort of these cost reduction personnel overlap thing never works because their diseconomies of being in a large organization as well as economies, and they're sort of awash is a good assumption about it.

你到底能省下多少钱？

And how much money are you really gonna save?

没错。所以这种分析无法解决问题。你需要更根本的东西，通常这与权力或类似因素有关。

Right. And so that analysis doesn't get you there. You need something more fundamental, and usually it's related to power or something like that.

大卫和我在制作'史上十大最佳收购案例'节目时学到的一点是：虽然存在例外，但大多数情况下，收购之所以大获成功，是因为你能找到更多收入来源而非节省成本。因为成本节约有上限，而新收入却有无限的上升空间。

One of David and my learnings from doing our episode, the acquired top 10, the best acquisitions of all time, was there are exceptions, but most of the time, something is a wildly successful acquisition is because you're able to find more revenue rather than find cost savings. Because cost savings are capped, whereas new revenue has unlimited upside.

对此我要补充一点：这些收入的成本结构很有利。想想迪士尼收购卢卡斯影业、卡梅隆的作品和漫威。

Well, I'll add something to that, which is that the cost of that revenue is favorable. Right. So think of Disney. So think of getting Lucas and Cameron stuff and Marvel.

哇，漫威简直太棒了。

Wow. Marvel's incredible.

是的。艾弗通过做那些事情和皮克斯创造了巨大的企业价值。这与他接手特许经营权有关。比如，LVMH接手了那些未被充分开发的强势品牌，并想办法从经济上开发它们。对吧？

Yeah. Ivor created a huge amount of corporate value by doing those things and Pixar. And that had to do with him taking franchises. Like, LVMH was taking powerful brands that weren't fully exploited and figuring out how to economically exploit them. Right?

迪士尼则是接手了强大的品牌娱乐内容，并能够充分开发它。这就回答了为什么这对我们更有价值的问题。所以你可以接手《星球大战》这样的东西，感觉乔治·卢卡斯对开发它不太感兴趣。他更像是个创意天才。对吧？

And Disney was taking branded entertainment that was powerful and being able to fully exploit it. And so it answered the question, why is this worth more to me? So you could take Star Wars stuff, which you sort of had the feeling George Lucas kind of wasn't so interesting to sort of exploit it. He was kind of a creative genius. Right?

然而迪士尼可以接手并大展拳脚。所以我认为这不是买已有的收入，而是你能够开发它。

And yet Disney could take it and run with it. And so I think that wasn't that you bought revenue that already existed. It was that you were able to exploit that.

我很好奇你是否想过，或者是否有更细致的看法，关于我常认为的成功率最高的收购——企业软件收购，比如某个产品被顶级企业软件销售力量（比如微软、甲骨文、Salesforce等）收购，然后整合进他们的销售体系。这和我们现在讨论的是类似的吗？在我看来很明显，为什么一个以Salesforce销售方式销售的好产品对Salesforce的价值远高于当前所有者。

I'm curious if you have any thoughts on or if there's more nuance to what I always think of as kinda like the highest likelihood of success acquisitions are enterprise software acquisitions where a product is bought by one of the top enterprise software, you know, sales forces, call it Microsoft or Oracle or Salesforce or the like, and then they plug it into the Salesforce. Is that similar to what we're talking about here? Like, it seems very clear to me why x y z good product that is sold in the same manner that Salesforce sells all of their products would be way more valuable to Salesforce than to its current owners.

大卫，我快速补充一点，这可能是成功率最高的，但不一定是成功规模最大的。

And, David, real quick, I'll caveat that with, like, maybe highest likelihood to succeed, but not highest magnitude of success.

对。是的。我觉得这正是它有趣的地方。

Right. Yes. And I think that's what's interesting about it.

没错。像这样的例子，它们完全契合现有业务的权力结构。你知道的，高转换成本的东西。对吧？这样他们就能将其部署给所有客户，获得同样的高转换成本经济效益。

Right. So examples like that, they plug completely into the power structure of the current business. So, you know, high switching costs stuff. Right? And so that they can deploy it to all their customers and get the same economics of high switching costs.

我不知道。莎妮娅，你想补充点什么吗？

I don't know. Shania, do you want to add to that?

是的。我突然想到这可能与转换成本直接相关。购买可能还有另一个理由，那就是自建比购买耗时更长，而时机很重要，尤其对具有转换成本的公司而言。现在回到转换成本本身的有趣之处在于它是非排他性的，对吧？

Yeah. It actually occurs to me that there might be exactly tied to switching costs. There might be another rationale for buying, which is building takes longer than buying, and timing matters, particularly for companies with switching costs. Now the interesting about switching costs going back to the power itself is it's nonexclusive. Right?

所以你的竞争对手，如果功能相当，也可能拥有转换成本。顺着这个逻辑推演，就会出现公司虽有转换成本却无利润的可能性。这种情况的发生方式是：如果竞争对手能够开发出大致相同的产品，并且完全意识到这是客户的终身价值，我是否应该争取他们？那么在获客阶段投入所有这些价值就是合理的，无论是折扣、合作伙伴激励、营销活动等等。为了赢得客户，投入全部终身价值都是合理的。

So your competitors, if they are functional equivalent, can also have switching costs. Now, if you go down this logic line, it creates the possibility of companies having switching costs but no profits. And the way it happens is if your competitors was able to build product, roughly the same product, and they fully realize this is the lifetime value of the customer, should I acquire them? Then it's rational to invest up to all of those value in the acquisition phase, be it discounting, partner incentives, marketing campaigns, whatever it is. It's rational to spend up to all of that lifetime value to try to win that customer.

最终你得到的就是那些拥有转换成本却无利润的公司。

And then what you end up with is companies with switching costs but no profits.

没错。因此，如果你拥有转换成本，关键的战略挑战就是在获客成本尚未完全抵消你预期从客户那里获得的利润流时获取客户。

Right. And so that's why if you're have switching costs, the key strategic challenge is to acquire customers when the cost of a customer does not fully arbitrage out the profit stream that you would expect from them.

对。这太有趣了。我想到我们之前讨论过的Slack、Salesforce、微软和Teams。我虽然没深入研究这些企业，但尽管外界对这些产品大肆宣传，我预计无论是Salesforce的Slack还是微软的Teams（也许Teams除外），都不是这两家母公司巨大的变革性利润增长驱动力。

Right. Which is so funny. I'm thinking of, like, we talked about earlier of Slack and Salesforce and Microsoft and Teams right now. I haven't studied either of the businesses, but I would expect that despite all the ballyhoo about all of it, neither Slack's for Salesforce nor well, maybe Teams for Microsoft is, but are not, like, huge transformative incremental drivers of profits for those two parent companies.

所以我认为这其中不太明显的一点是：如果你考虑开展新业务、进入新领域，理解商业定义至关重要——也就是说，你当前的竞争优势覆盖哪些领域？你必须明白这点。其次是切尼提出的观点：拓展到优势覆盖的领域，远比从零开始全新业务更具吸引力。

So I think sort of a non obvious point of all this is that if you're thinking of doing something new, getting into stuff, that understanding business definition is critical, which is to say, into what areas does your current power umbrella extend? You gotta understand that. Then the next one is the point that Cheney made, which is that expansion into areas where that umbrella extends is radically more attractive than starting something utterly new.

哦，我还要补充一点，这并非可有可无。如果你意识到权力保护伞的范围比你当前提供的更大却选择忽视，实际上就是在为竞争对手创造可乘之机。

Oh, and I will add to that that it's not a good to have. If you understand power umbrellas bigger than what you currently offer and you ignore it, you actually are creating competitive openings for somebody else to take on.

啊，这个观点非常重要。完全同意。

Oh, that's a really important point. Absolutely.

如果不加以利用，你就是失败的。

You're failing if you don't exploit it.

没错。因为你可以预见最终会有其他人这么做，而这可能会彻底摧毁你的竞争地位——比如当你的优势建立在规模效应上时。所以第一点，回归商业定义。认真思考你的权力保护伞范围在哪里。第二点，如果它确实延伸至某个领域，而你认为该领域极具吸引力，那就应该考虑进军。

Right. Because you can assume that eventually somebody else will, and that may completely ruin your competitive position at, for example, if it's based on scale. So point one, go to business definition. Think very hard about where your power umbrella is. Two, that if it does extend into an area, you're considering to go there because it's really attractive.

第三点是，如果你在某个领域毫无基础却仍想开拓新业务，协同合作是关键——但要明白你此刻是在创造一项全新业务。伴随而来的所有风险调整、企业家精神等因素都需要考量。陈毅，关于误判商业定义后果的见解非常精辟，我想请你举个实例。你能想到哪些公司因为未能充分理解自身业务边界而最终被淘汰的典型案例吗？

And then the third one is that if you don't have anything there and you still wanna do something new, coaction's the name of the game, but understand that you're now into invention of a new business. And with all the air things around it, risk adaptation, you know, everything and entrepreneurs matter. So Chen Yi, that was such an important point about how if you miss a business definition, I'm gonna ask you for an example. Can you think of a good example of companies that didn't understand the full extent of their business and got taken out as a result of it?

嗯，我试着举个例子。这很难，因为我们往往会陷入幸存者偏差——只记得那些成功的公司。

Well, I'll throw something out. It's tough because you will tend to have survivorship bias. You only remember those companies that made it.

对，对。是啊，那人叫什么来着？巴尔默？从来没听说过。

Right. Right. Yeah. Who was that? Balmar never heard of him.

对吧？

Right?

或者说，那些为数不多却令人难以置信的惨败案例，已经深深烙印在我们的集体记忆中。比如百视达。它本拥有分销网络和客户关系这些优势资源，却未能善加利用来推出自己的流媒体服务——这主要归咎于董事会的决策失误，但无论如何都是一次失败。

Or the handful of very few colossal failures that were so unbelievable that, you know, they're stuck in all of our psyche. For example, Blockbuster. It could be the case that Blockbuster failed where they had the distribution network and the customer relationships. So there was a source of power there, and they failed to exploit it in using that to launch their own streaming service, which mostly is because of boardroom blunders, but a failure nonetheless.

我认为百视达如果早一年开展红色信封租赁业务，网飞就活不成了。

My take of Blockbuster is if they'd done a red envelope business a year earlier, Netflix wouldn't have survived.

另一个例子或许是信用卡行业及其发展历程。

Maybe another example is the credit card industry and how it evolved.

啊，这个例子我很喜欢。没错。

Oh, I love that. Right.

最初只是特定零售店或加油站的品牌签账卡，后来演变成餐饮通用的Diners Club卡，很快又发展为万事通用的信用卡。

It started basically as branded charge cards for a particular retail store or gas station, and then turned into Diners Club, which is a card for many restaurants. And then very quickly, it turned into Universal Card. It's old card for basically everything.

本质上是在扩展信用额度。明白吗？起初商家会说'这卡在我们店能用'，后来逐渐变成'那家餐厅我们也让你赊账'。

They were basically extending your credit. Right? They were saying, this works here, and we'll give you some credit at our store. And then over time, they would start saying, we yeah. We'll spot you for that restaurant too.

我们和那家餐厅有合作关系。

We have a relationship with that restaurant.

对。你们俩有Diners Clubs卡吗？我没有。没有。对。

Right. So do either of you have Diners Clubs cards? I do not. No. Right.

所以他们错过了。是的。我是说，这是个很好的例子。他们没意识到实际上存在一个平台，需要覆盖尽可能多的消费类型，而不应受限。因此他们错过了商业定义，而Visa现在是全球利润率最高的业务之一。

And so they missed it. Yep. I mean, it's a great example. They didn't understand that it was there's actually a a platform where you wanna cover as many purchase types as possible, and it shouldn't be constrained. And so they they miss the business definition, and Visa is one of the highest margin businesses in the world right now.

对吧？

Right?

是啊。Visa的利润率高达50%，太惊人了。

Yeah. Visa's 50% margin. It's astonishing.

哇。哇。我们得找个时间研究Visa。真不敢相信Visa直到二月才上市。

Wow. Wow. We gotta do Visa at some point. I can't believe Visa didn't IPO until, like, the February.

这确实令人惊讶。他们之前是被银行持有的吗？

That is amazing, actually. Were they owned by banks?

我想那是美国银行的。没错。1958年由美国银行创立，最初名为BankAmericard。

I think it was a BofA. Yes. Founded in 1958 by Bank of America as BankAmericard.

是的。那是一个银行联盟，你说得对。我现在全想起来了。IPO正好发生在金融危机最严重的时候，那是2008年3月。

Yeah. It was a consortium of banks, and that's right. I remember all this now. The IPO happened right in the middle of the great financial crisis. It was March 2008.

时机真是糟透了，不过无所谓了。

Talk about bad timing, but didn't matter.

可能正是买股票的好时机。

Probably a good time to buy the stock.

没错，真的。好吧，汉密尔顿和陈宇，趁你们在这儿，我们得问个问题——我和大卫在任天堂那期节目里争论过，特别是关于八十年代。当时任天堂作为主机厂商...

Yeah. Seriously. Alright. Hamilton and Chenyu, while we have you here, we gotta ask you something that David and I were debating on our Nintendo episode, specifically in the nineteen eighties. So you've got a console maker, Nintendo.

他们有两类客户：购买主机玩游戏的玩家，以及第一方和第三方游戏开发商。比如马里奥是第一方游戏，还有些第三方开发商为他们制作游戏。

They have a whole bunch of customers that are the people who are buying the consoles and playing the games on them, and they have a mix of first and third party titles. So they make Mario as a first party title, and they have some third party developers making games for them.

比如《最终幻想》《勇者斗恶龙》和《恶魔城》。

Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and Castlevania.

当然，第三方发行商为他们制作游戏的原因在于他们占据了95%的游戏主机市场份额。大卫和我反复讨论，我们思考：这是规模经济效应，因为他们能将游戏开发成本分摊给大量消费者？还是典型的双边网络效应或网络经济力量？

And, of course, the reason that those third party publishers are making the games for them is because they have 95% market share of people buying video game consoles. And David and I were really going back and forth, and we were like, is it a scale economy because they can amortize the cost of game creation across so many consumers? Or is it a classic two sided network effect or a network economy power?

我今早也在思考这个问题，很有趣。我认为两者兼有。原因在于任天堂可以被视为一个向生产端垂直整合的平台。基本上，所有第一方内容都是垂直整合，因此会展现出生产商常见的规模经济结构。

I was thinking about this this morning. It's fun. So I think it's both. And the reason why it's both is because you can think of Nintendo as a platform that vertically integrated into the production site. Basically, all the first party content is a vertical integration, and that's why they would exhibit economic structure that you would typically find in producers, which is economies of scale.

但与此同时，第三方交易本质上是网络经济。现在我们需要分析的问题是：这个平台是否真正稳定？即依附该平台的成本是否很高？能否多平台运营？这些问题都需要深入探讨。

But at the same time, the third party transactions are a nature of network economies. Now some question we may have to analyze there is, is this platform really stable? Which means is there a really high cost of being attached to this platform? Can you multi home, etcetera? We have to go into that.

在八十年代，确实没有其他可行的游戏平台。

Well, in the eighties, there were no other viable platforms.

没错。所以可能他们就是唯一选择。这就是为什么你会同时观察到规模经济和网络经济的结构。更深层的问题是：这两者是因果关系，还是共同构成其市场力量的原因？我自己也没有答案。

Right. So maybe they're just the one. So that's why you would observe economic structure of both scale economies and network economies. Now there's a deeper question there, which I don't even have an answer to, is is one of them the cause and the other the effect, or are both of them causes for power?