拼多多

下次见。哦，让我重说一遍。那句话可能适合做我们的预告引语。哦，听起来真糟糕。

See you next time. Oh, let me retake that. That might be our teaser quote. Oh, that sounded terrible.

欢迎来到《Acquired》第七季第一集，这是一档关于伟大科技公司及其背后故事的播客。我是本·吉尔伯特。

Welcome to season seven, episode one of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

我是大卫·罗森塔尔。

I'm David Rosenthal.

我们是本期主持人。今天我们要讨论的是——引用其IPO招股说明书中的描述——一个多维空间的典范，无缝整合网络空间与物理空间。一个由分布式智能代理网络驱动的'好市多与迪士尼乐园的结合体'。

And we are your hosts. Today, we are talking about, and I quote from their IPO prospectus, an exemplification of a multidimensional space, seamlessly integrating cyberspace and the physical space. A combination of Costco and Disneyland driven by distributed network of intelligence agents.

本，你简直像在念我准备的史料和事实清单。

Ben, it's like you're reading from my history and facts there.

我就知道你也会摘录这段。难以置信，简直超乎想象。起初我以为'好市多加迪士尼'会是最大噱头，后来发现周边的描述实际上更加荒诞。所以听众朋友们，我们讨论的正是中国电商公司——拼多多。

I figured you would have pulled that too. Unbelievable. Like, absolutely unfathomable. At first, I thought Costco and Disneyland was gonna be the hook, and then I realized all the stuff around it is actually far more absurd. So listeners, of course, we are talking about the Chinese e commerce company, Pin Duo Duo.

为什么这家公司如此引人入胜？首先，它成立仅五年，两年前（2018年）也就是成立三年时就在纳斯达克上市。它是史上最快达到千亿美元市值的公司，自三月中旬全球疫情爆发以来市值增长近三倍——也就是说近三分之二的市值都是在最近几个月创造的。

Now, why is this a fascinating company? Well, first off, it's only five years old, and they went public on the Nasdaq two years ago in 2018, three years into their existence. They are the fastest company ever to a $100,000,000,000 market cap, and they've nearly tripled in value since the coronavirus spiked globally mid March. So almost all of that market cap or two thirds of that market cap created in the last few months.

我认为这一定是智能代理的分布式网络。

I think it must be the distributed network of intelligence agents that

确实是智能代理。没错。现在你可能会说，中国电商，我以为那已经是个基本定型的领域了。我听说过阿里巴巴，至少——

are It's certainly the intelligence agents. Yes. So now you might be saying, well, Chinese e commerce, I thought that was already sort of a settled frontier. I've heard of Alibaba or at

甚至可能是京东。

least- Maybe even JD.

是的，我们节目还没聊过京东，但它也是中国的电商巨头。不过，还有一个机会存在。有一个细分市场没有被这两家公司覆盖，而且规模巨大。这期节目感觉非常及时，不仅因为拼多多达到了1000亿美元的里程碑，还因为电商整体上正处在风口浪尖。全球疫情极大地加速了从线下到线上购物的转变，我相信大家或多或少都感受到了，至少作为消费者是这样。

Yeah, and we haven't covered JD yet on the show, but also an e commerce powerhouse in China. Well, there was an opportunity remaining. There was a missing segment that was not being addressed by either of those two companies, and it is enormous. This episode felt very timely, not just because of that $100,000,000,000 milestone for Pinduoduo, but also because e commerce in general is, having a moment as they say. So the global pandemic has massively accelerated the shift from offline to online commerce, as I'm sure all of you are experiencing in one way, shape or form, at least as consumers.

是啊，希望你们是亚马逊的股东。

Yeah, hopefully you're Amazon shareholders.

没错，不开玩笑。或者是西雅图居民，从中受益。当然，中国曾经在电商渗透率上落后于美国，2012年只有6%的零售是在线上完成的，现在已占到零售总额的24%。其中很多增长是在最近几个月加速的，就像美国的渗透率一样，这确实推动了拼多多估值的疯狂上涨。所以我想感谢Slack上的Ho Nam，他的评论启发我们做了这期节目。

Yeah, no kidding. Or Seattle residents and benefiting from all the side effects of that. And of course China, once behind The US in their e commerce penetration, I think it was only 6% of retail was done online in 2012, is now already at 24% of the total retail spend. A lot of that accelerated here in the last few months, much like The US penetration, which is really driving this crazy run up in valuation for, Pinduoduo. So I do want to give a shout out to, Ho Nam in the Slack, who inspired us to do the episode with this comment.

从零开始，五年内达到1000亿美元市值。这太疯狂了。微软用了25年，谷歌和Facebook用了超过12年，就连最接近的竞争对手阿里巴巴也用了14年。所以感觉像是天时地利促成这期节目。我越深入研究，就越被这家公司的面貌所震撼。

A $100,000,000,000 market cap in five years from a standing start. This is just nuts. It took Microsoft twenty five years, Google and Facebook more than twelve years, and even for their closest competitor Alibaba, it took fourteen years. And so it just felt like the stars were aligning to this episode. The more I dug into it, the more I was frankly shook by what this company looks like.

在此之前，我对这家公司的了解仅限于名字。这周做研究、了解这个庞然大物是什么，真的很有趣。

Really all I knew about this before was their name. It's been fun spending the week kinda doing research and learning what is this beast.

就像我们在Acquired节目中讲述的每一个故事一样，你一开始以为它是某样东西，然后稍微深入挖掘一下，就会感叹，天啊，哇，这个洋葱的层次可真多。

Like every story we tell here on Acquired, like you start thinking it's one thing and then you dig a little deeper and you're like, oh man, wow, there are so many layers to this onion.

好了，在我们开始之前先宣布几件事。非常感谢所有在上季末参与我们调查的朋友。现在报名已经截止了。至于获奖者，如果你是幸运的10位赢得LP项目订阅资格的人之一，我们已经给你发了邮件。而我们AirPods的获奖者是来自湾区的Amy L。

Well, few announcements before we get to it. So a huge thank you to everyone who took our survey at the end of last season. So entries are now closed. As for the winners, we emailed you if you are one of the lucky 10 to win subscription to the LP program. And the winner of our AirPods is Amy L from the Bay Area.

恭喜Amy，我们稍后也会给你发邮件跟进。一如既往，如果你喜欢Acquired并想获得更多内容，你应该成为Acquired的有限合伙人。我们最近的一期节目是与Benchmark的普通合伙人Sarah Tavill合作的，这是我们VC基础知识系列的一部分，她加入我们讨论了消费者投资的基础知识。如果你想加入，你可以获取这些额外内容，以及我们的读书会和每月在Zoom上举行的LP电话会议。你可以点击节目说明中的链接，或访问glow.fm/acquired，所有订阅都包含7天免费试用。

So congratulations Amy, and we will also be sending you an email to follow-up after this. As always, if you love Acquired and want more, you should become an Acquired limited partner. Our most recent episode was with Benchmark general partner, Sarah Tavill, part of our VC fundamentals series, and she joined us to talk about the fundamentals of consumer investing. If you wanna join, you can get access to that additional content plus our book club and our monthly LP calls on Zoom. You can click the link in the show notes or go to glow.fm/acquired, and all subscriptions come with a seven day free trial.

好了，听众们。现在正是时候感谢我们最喜爱的公司之一，它已成为我们Acquired和Anthropic工作流程的核心部分，以及他们最新的突破性模型Claude Sonnet 4.5。

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。在我们研究这些标志性公司时，我们不断提出诸如：他们处理这种情况的方式有何独特之处？或者那个策略有多新颖？还有其他公司以前尝试过吗？这类问题以及为它们提供深思熟虑的答案的能力，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不仅仅是另一个模型。它是世界上最好的编码模型，也是构建复杂智能体能力最强的模型。Shopify和Netflix的工程师称其为强大的思考伙伴，并告诉我们它正在改变他们的开发速度。而Canva在其部分产品中使用Claude，称其是一次巨大的飞跃。公司们都非常喜爱Sonnet 4.5。

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.

有一点变得很清楚，那就是让模型擅长编程也能让它天生就擅长任何分析任务。所以，让Claude擅长重构代码库的同一特性，也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，现在还有新的记忆和上下文管理功能，让智能体运行更长时间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.

所以无论你是在扩展工程团队还是构建下一代智能应用，Claude都会与你一起思考复杂性，而不仅仅是为你思考。它真正是你智能的思考伙伴。

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。如果你想联系他们了解企业产品，只要告诉他们本和大卫推荐你的。

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

现在交给你了，大卫，带我们进入拼多多的故事。

And now over to you, David, to take us into the story of Pin Duo Duo.

是啊。本，你抢了我的一些风头。我想，你知道，我们在节目中提到过，本和我在录制前不会对稿，以保持我们的反应真实。

Yeah. Well, Ben, you stole some of my thunder. I think, you know, we've talked about on the show, Ben and I don't compare notes before we record so that we keep our reactions authentic.

政教分离那一套嘛。

Church and state and all that.

没错，正是。所以我原本的开场白是迪士尼乐园、好市多和分布式智能机构IPO招股书中的那句话。到底是怎么回事？

Yeah, exactly. So my lead in was gonna be that quote from the IPO prospectus of the Disneyland and Costco and the distributed intelligence agency. What is going on?

嗯，我是说，至少这验证了我们想法一致。如果我们都注意到了这一点，那确实是有趣的部分，我确实认为这里面可能也有线索。就像，如果一家游戏公司和一家卖水果的公司合并，试图让电子商务变得有趣，然后你可以和朋友一起购物买东西。就像这样会怎样？

Well, mean, at least it validates we're on the same wavelength here. That that actually was the interesting bit to pull out if we I both pulled it definitely think there could be a lead in here too. That's like, what if you had a gaming company that got smashed together with a company that sold fruit to try to make e commerce fun and then you could shop and buy stuff with your friends. Like what if?

会怎样？你提到游戏很有意思。所以在我们深入故事之前，我想让大家记住的另一个想法当然是世界上最大、最重要的游戏公司，也是当今几乎每个市场的战略参与者——腾讯。如果你还记得我们之前的腾讯节目，我在录制这期之前又回去听了一遍。

What if? It's funny you mentioned gaming. So the other thought I wanna put in everybody's minds before we dive into the story is of course the largest and most important gaming company in the world and strategic player and it seems about just about every market these days, Tencent. So if you remember back from our old Tencent episode, which I went back and listened to before, before recording this.

这就像自我审视式的研究。

It's like naval gazing research.

是的，说真的。我们现在已经到了这样一个阶段：我们《Acquired》节目的来源之一就是被收购的公司。腾讯，如果你还记得那一集，他们在很多方面都处于主导地位，不仅在中国，而且在全球范围内，作为微信的所有者和运营商，微信是中国主导的社交平台，但他们也是制作《堡垒之夜》的Epic Games的主要股东。他们是特斯拉的最大股东之一。

Yeah. Seriously. We've now reached the point where our one of our sources for acquired is acquired. Tencent, if you recall from that episode, they are in many ways in such a dominant position, not just in China, but around the world as the owner and operator of WeChat, which is the dominant social platform in China, but also major shareholders in Epic Games, which makes Fortnite. They're one of the largest shareholders in Tesla.

他们拥有《英雄联盟》，是Snap、滴滴和美团的重大股东。但我认为可以说，他们现在在拼多多大约17%的持股可能是整个投资组合中最重要的股份。因为如果你还记得我们之前的节目，他们的弱点是什么？腾讯暴露的侧翼主要是字节跳动，特别是在社交主导地位方面，字节跳动当然制作了TikTok和今日头条，但还有阿里巴巴及其在中国庞大的支付宝金融平台。所以如果你回溯到2015、2016、2017年，这些是腾讯当时主要关心的事情，就在神奇的独角兽、十角兽、百角兽拼多多诞生之际。

They own League of Legends, major shareholder in Snap, in Didi, and Meituan Dianping. But I think you can make an argument that they're now I think it's I think it's about 17 ownership that they have in Pinduoduo is maybe their most important stake in the whole portfolio. Because if you recall from back our old episode, what were their weaknesses? The flanks that were exposed for Tencent were to bite dance most specifically in terms of its social dominance, who of course makes TikTok, of course makes TikTok and Totiao, but also Alibaba and Alibaba's massive Alipay financial platforms in China. And so if you rewind back to say 2015, 2016, 2017, these are major things that are on Tencent's mind, right as the magical unicorn, decacorn, centacorn, pinduoduo is being birthed.

所以请记住这一点。好了，让我们像往常一样从创始人黄峥开始。他1980年出生于中国杭州。他的父母是工厂工人。

So keep that in mind as we go. Okay, so let's start as we always do with the founder Colin Huang. He was born in Hangzhou in, 1980. His Hangzhou, China. His parents were factory workers.

他们俩都没有读完初中。所以你知道，他们甚至可能只是勉强触及当时正在形成的中国中产阶级的边缘，但只是勉强维持。同样，长期的听众和中国科技迷可能会在这里会心一笑，因为当然，还有哪位非常著名的中国科技企业家早一代出生在广州的一个中低收入家庭？那当然是阿里巴巴的创始人马云。这里的相似之处将会非常贴切。

Neither of them finished junior high school. So they were, you know, not even like maybe sort of on the on the just on the fringes of the establishing China middle class at this point in time, but kinda just barely hanging on. Again, also longtime listeners and China tech fans might be smiling here because, of course, what other very famous China tech entrepreneur was born in Guangzhou to, lower middle class parents a generation earlier? That would be Jack Ma, of course, founder of Alibaba. The parallels are gonna be quite apt here.

你提到了代际划分。对于之前没听过我们中国系列节目的听众来说，理解中国科技公司的方式是：当然有上一代的三大巨头百度、阿里巴巴和腾讯。它们某种程度上控制了生态系统，是造王者，不仅是中国的谷歌和脸书，还相当于你们的Benchmark和红杉资本。它们既是风险投资机构，又是中国的FANG级巨头。而我们这代看到的公司，比如小米、拼多多，正在崛起成为下一代巨头。

You mentioned the generations. For folks that haven't listened to any of our sort of China series before, the way to think about sort of China tech companies is, of course, there's the big three from the previous generation of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. They sort of controlled the ecosystem, they were the kingmakers, they were not only your Google and Facebooks, but also your, you know, Benchmark and Sequoias. They were both the VC and the sort of FANG powerhouse of China. The companies that we've sort of been seeing this generation, the Xiaomi, Pinduoduo, are the ones that are sort of rising up to become the next generation.

你可以看到这三大巨头都在争相参与下一代公司的成功。

And you can see those big three then fighting to participate in the success of this next generation.

是的。这是与美国科技界截然不同的生态系统，非常有趣。柯林上初中时热爱数学，是真的非常热爱。他一定很擅长数学，因为他参加了全国数学奥林匹克竞赛，美国也有这类比赛。我记得我小时候参加过，但在中国，这可是件大事。

Yeah. It's such an interesting different ecosystem from US tech. So when Colin was in junior high, he loves math, like really loves math. And he must have been quite good at it because he participates in a national math Olympiad, which, you know, they have contests like this in The US. I remember doing this when I was growing up, but like in China, this is like a really big deal.

他最终在这次奥赛中获奖。根据他的比赛名次，其中一个奖励是获得了杭州外国语学校的入学考试资格。起初柯林并不太感兴趣，他觉得英语之类的语言还行，但自己真正在乎的是数学和物理。

And he ends up winning, a medal in this Olympiad. And one of the other prizes for how he placed in the competition was he gets an entrance exam ticket to apply to the Huangzhou Foreign Language School. And now initially Colin is like, I'm not that interested. I mean, like English, like fine languages. I really just care about math and physics.

他父母却说：不不不，你必须去参加考试。因为事实证明这不仅是杭州的外国语学校，还是全中国最好的学校之一，也是最负盛名的预备学校之一。虽然是公立学校，但属于国家级重点中学。他最终参加了入学考试。

His parents are like, no, no, no. You gotta you gotta go take this exam because it turns out it's not just a foreign language school in Hangzhou. It is one of the very best schools in all of China and one of the most prestigious prep schools. It's a public school, but prep schools, in the country. He ends up taking the entrance exams.

他考得很好。一定考得特别出色，因为他还在犹豫是否要去这所学校时，校长亲自打电话给他——那时他大概六年级——说服他入学。于是他去了，表现非常优秀。

He does well. He he must have done incredibly well because he's still on the fence about going to the school. The president of the school calls him up personally as like, I think he was probably a sixth grader at this point in time to convince him to come enroll in the school. So he he does go. He does very well.

他后来进入同样极具声望的浙江大学学习计算机科学。在校期间在北京微软实习，这挺惊人的。采访中提到，他在北京微软暑期实习的收入比他父母在工厂一年的收入还高。后来——不知是本科还是研究生期间——他还在美国雷德蒙德的微软实习，收入是在中国实习时的八倍。你看这个年轻人，和马云不同——马云留在广州，对美国英语极度着迷，当过翻译和导游但成绩不好，直到三十多岁都待在那里。

He ends up going to the also very prestigious Zhejiang University where he studies computer science. He interns while he's there at Microsoft in Beijing. This is kinda crazy. He makes more in apparently, he he because it says in the interview, he makes more in his summer interning at Microsoft in Beijing than, his parents do in a year, working in the factory. Then later, I don't know if this was while he was in undergrad or when he was in grad school, he also interns at Microsoft in The US in Redmond and he makes eight times what he made that summer in China So, in the you know, here's this kid, you know, unlike Jack Ma who, you know, stayed in Guangzhou, I was like was was super fascinated with English in America, worked as a translator and a tour guide, but didn't get good grades, stayed there until his thirties.

这是Colin。他对在美国学英语毫不在意，一心只想编程，但他来了美国并且赚了大钱。

Here's Colin. He couldn't care less about English in America. He just wants to code, but he comes and he makes tons of money.

在他实习的那些年，大概是2000年代初，他加入微软实习项目足够早，有机会去比尔·盖茨家参加活动，参加烧烤派对并见到比尔。到我实习的时候，一个夏天就有大约1500名实习生，所以这种活动就不再是项目的一部分了。但没错，那是当时实习生的主要福利。

In the years that he was there, those sort of early two thousands, he would have been early enough in the Microsoft internship program where he would get to do the thing at Bill Gates' house and go to the barbecue and meet Bill When I interned, it was like 1,500 interns per summer or something by the time I got through. So that was no longer, part of the program. But yeah, that was the major perk of being an intern then.

有意思。这确实符合年轻Colin的一个主题——大学时期，传说中（这无法核实，但也呼应了另一位超级著名的中国科技创始人马化腾）Colin泡在网上。著名的网易创始人丁磊在论坛发帖，寻求帮助解决他正在攻克的技术难题。传说是这样的。

Interesting. Well, this definitely feeds into a theme with young Colin of when he's in college, the legend has it, this is impossible to verify, but also echoes another super famous China tech founder Pony Ma. Apparently, Collins hanging out on the Internet. The famous NetEase founder William Ding posts online in a forum, looking for help with a with a technical problem that he's, you know, working on. This is how the legend goes.

Colin回应了帖子，开始与丁磊互动，他们成了朋友。丁磊喜欢他并成为了他的导师。丁磊最终把Colin介绍给了更著名的中国科技企业家、BBK电子创始人，也是网易联合创始人之一的段永平。段永平后来创办了OPPO和一加等许多大型现代中国科技公司。

Colin responds to this, starts interacting with Ding, and they kind of become friends. Ding takes a liking to him and becomes a mentor. Ding eventually introduces Colin to an even more famous, China tech entrepreneur, BBK Electronics founder, and also I believe one of the founders of NetEase, Duan Yangping. He would go on to found Oppo and OnePlus and lots of big, big, big modern Chinese technology companies.

所以他有一些重量级的导师。

So he's got some heavy hitting mentors.

超级重量级的导师，甚至在他还是中国的大学生时就有了。毕业后，可能是在这些导师的鼓励下，他们鼓励他来美国，在美国攻读计算机科学研究生。所以他去了——Ben，你会讨厌这个——他去了威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校读研。

Super heavy hitting mentors even when he's a college student back in China. After he graduates, probably on the encouragement of these mentors, they encourage him to come over to The US and do grad school in computer science at The US. So he goes Ben, you're going to hate this, but he goes to the University of Wisconsin at Madison for grad school.

没关系。只要不是密歇根就行。太好了，十大联盟加油。

That's fine. As long as it's not Michigan. That's great. Go Big Ten.

太好了。好的，太棒了。十大联盟。这就对了。当他在麦迪逊攻读计算机科学硕士学位时，他继续在微软实习。

Great. Okay, great. Big Ten. There we go. While he's there doing his master's in CS at Madison, he continues to intern at Microsoft.

微软非常希望他毕业后能全职回来。但威廉告诉他，嘿，你知道，你在微软花了很长时间。你在那里获得了经验，建立了不错的人脉。也许更好的主意是。

Microsoft desperately wants him to come back full time when he graduates. But William tells him, Hey, you know, you've spent a lot of time at Microsoft. You've gotten the experience there. You've got a pretty good network. It might be a better idea.

我认为你应该去看看山景城的那家小初创公司。他们正在做更有趣的事情。它叫谷歌。也许你应该看看能否申请那里并获得一个竞争性offer。

I think you should check out this little startup down in Mountain View. They're doing more interesting things. It's called Google. Maybe you should see if you can apply there and get a competing offer.

他一次又一次地中彩票。我这么说不是暗示运气，而是他一次又一次地找到了对的地方、对的时间。

He just keeps hitting the lottery over and over and over again. And I don't say that to imply luck, but like he finds his way to the right place, right time over and over again here.

完全正确。所以他去了。当然他拿到了谷歌的offer。他于2004年2月从麦迪逊毕业，在谷歌IPO前六个月的那个夏天入职。他是谷歌最早的前几百名员工之一。

Totally. So he shows up. Of course he gets an offer from Google. He graduates from Madison in 02/2004, shows up that summer six months before the Google IPO. He's one of the first couple 100 employees at Google.

他最初是工程师，然后很快转做产品经理。公司上市了。他已经赚了一大笔钱。但这就像他毫不费力就在赚钱。这是他生活的主题。

He starts as an engineer and then pretty quickly switches to being a product manager. The company goes public. He makes a ton of money already. But it's like he's just making money without even trying. This is the theme of his life.

我们会讲到那里的。

We'll get there.

是的，我们肯定能做到。加入谷歌两年后，也就是2006年2月，他表现出色，被选入一个秘密团队，成为领导谷歌在中国秘密上线计划的两名负责人之一。

Yeah. We'll we'll definitely get there. Two years later after joining in 02/2006, he does so well. He gets put on a secret team at Google. He's one of two people leading the team for secret plans to launch Google in China.

本，你还记得这件事吗？这可是个大工程。不，实际上我们在商学院做过案例研究，谷歌投入了大量精力打造中文版谷歌，一切都准备就绪准备上线，但最终因为必须审查搜索结果而决定放弃。

Do you remember this Ben? This was like a huge effort. No. We actually did a case study on this in business school where Google put all this effort into building a Chinese version of Google. It was all ready to launch and then they decided not to do it because they would have had to censor the results.

这一切都与'不作恶'的信条息息相关。

And this was all like tied up with the, you know, don't be evil.

是的，我当然记得。但我不知道它从未上线过，我以为上线后又关闭了，结果它根本就没上线。

Yeah. I certainly remember that. I didn't realize it never launched. I thought it launched and shut down, but it never launched.

这其实是个好问题。如果它上线了然后又被关闭，那确实引起了很大的公众争议。

That's actually a good question. If it did launch, then they shut it down, but it was a big public brouhaha.

直到今天，中国也没有谷歌搜索，对吧？

And to this day, there's no Google search in China, right?

是的，只有香港有。

Yep. Only in Hong Kong.

太疯狂了。确实存在并持续存在着两个互联网的分裂。

Wild. There really are and continue to be, dividing two Internets.

是的。我的意思是，这就像是在谈论跳过原本会发生的事情。那时候，防火长城还没有完全建成。如果历史走向不同，谷歌这样做了，中国科技、美国科技乃至全球互联网的格局可能会大不相同，但可惜并没有。结果，科林最终离开谷歌，自己创业，这很可能是个非常好的决定。

Yeah. I mean, this is like talk about skipping ahead to what would have happened otherwise. The great firewall was not totally in place yet at this point. Like if history had turned differently and Google had done this like so much could be different about China Tech, US Tech, the global internet, but alas it didn't. As a result, Colin ended up leaving Google to go become an entrepreneur on his own right, which was probably a really good idea.

但在我们深入那之前，有个超棒的发现——我给本发了这张照片。这简直是研究中最惊人的发现。

But before we get to that, there's this amazing I texted Ben this photo. This is like the most amazing find in the research.

从你发我的内容来看，你是在YouTube视频里找到的？因为我看到底部有YouTube的进度条。好吧。

And from looking at what you texted me, you find it in a YouTube video? Because I see like the YouTube bar at the bottom. Okay.

没错。我在一个YouTube视频里找到的。我们会看看能不能找到它所在的网站，它就在互联网上，并在节目说明中附上链接。时间是在2006年2月。所以，德万，记得我们说过科林的另一位导师，他在2006年竞标并赢得了与沃伦·巴菲特共进年度午餐的机会。

Yes. I found it in a YouTube video. We'll see if we can find whatever website it's on, it's on on the internet and link to it in the show notes. Also in 02/2006. So Dwan, remember we said one of Colin's other mentors, he, bids on and wins the auction for the annual lunch with Warren Buffett, in 2,006.

他带了谁作为嘉宾一起去？他带了科林。这太不可思议了。所以有这张照片。我们会想办法链接到它。

And who does he bring with him as a guest? He brings Colin. This is crazy. And so there's this picture. We'll find some way to link to it.

有一张科林和沃伦·巴菲特的惊人照片。沃伦的手臂搭在他肩上。他们坐在奥马哈的一张桌子旁共进午餐，简直令人难以置信。

There's this amazing picture of Colin and Warren Buffett. Warren's got his arm around him. They're sitting at a table in Omaha having lunch, and it's just incredible.

看起来他们俩都喝了一杯红酒。

It looks like they both had a glass of red wine.

是的。他们面前确实有个酒瓶。我觉得段永平为这顿午餐花了超过60万美元。所以花这个价钱，你应该能喝到相当不错的酒。

Yeah. There's definitely a wine bottle in front of them. I think Dwan paid over $600,000 for the lunch. So for that price, you should get a pretty good bottle

所以在那两三年间，我们推测他见到了比尔·盖茨。他肯定见过沃伦·巴菲特。我们可以看到照片中他搂着对方的肩膀。他的导师是段永平和马化腾，或者至少他肯定与马化腾有过互动，并把段永平视为导师。

of So within that couple of year span, we speculate he met Bill Gates. He definitely met Warren Buffett. We can see the photo with his arm around him. His mentors were Duan Yongping and Pony Ma, or at least he sort of certainly interacted with Pony and had Duan as a mentor.

还有丁磊。

And William Ding.

他简直就像在逐个结识那些身价超过100亿的人。

He's just like going down the list of people who have over 10,000,000,000 in net worth.

我知道。这真的很不可思议。再说一次，对于一个父母连初中都没读完的人来说，这太疯狂了。我的意思是，这些都是当时在中国正在发生的事情。就是国家飞速现代化和资本主义开放的过程。

I know. It's pretty incredible. Again, like for somebody who his parents never finished junior high school, that's crazy. Mean, these are the types of things that were happening in China during this time. It's just this hugely rapid modernization of the country and opening up of capitalism.

好了。回到Colin的创业历程。现在是2007年2月。他刚离开谷歌。就像很多有才华的年轻人一样，离开谷歌和其他成功的互联网公司后，他想成为一名创业者。

Okay. So back to Colin's entrepreneurial journey. So it's now 02/2007. He's just left Google. And like, you know, many talented young folks, leaving Google and other successful Internet companies in in these days, he wants to become an entrepreneur.

他想创办一家公司。具体来说，他想创办一家电子商务公司，以利用中国收入增长和中产阶级崛起以及随之而来的消费增长这一趋势。有趣。好的。这似乎是一个会反复出现的主题。

He wants to start a company. And specifically, he wants to start an ecommerce company to capitalize on this trend of, you know, rising incomes and the emergence of the middle class in China and, accompanying, rising consumption. Interesting. Okay. This seems like a theme that's gonna recur.

所以还不是

So it's not yet

但拼多多。是2000年和而拼多多2015年。

but Pinduoduo. Is 2000 and And Pinduoduo 2015.

是的，没错。他创办了一家名为ouku.com，欧酷网的公司。这是一家在线零售商。他们在上面销售电子产品和其他商品。做得相当不错。

Yep, exactly. He starts a company called ouku.com, 0uku. And it's an online retailer. They sell electronics and other goods on there. It does pretty well.

他在三年内将其出售。然后他说，你知道，就像我的导师们一样，我要成为一名连续创业者，开始创办并资助多家公司。所以他创办的下一个公司叫乐其，l e q i，其想法是帮助将外国品牌、非本土、非中国品牌引入中国线上，并帮助它们在当时的领先电子商务平台——淘宝、天猫（显然属于阿里巴巴的一部分）和京东上营销和销售。好的。也很有趣。

He sells it within three years. And then he says, you know, just like my mentors, I'm gonna become a serial entrepreneur here and start starting and, funding multiple companies. So the next company he starts is called Leqii, l e q I, and that helped the idea was they were gonna help bring foreign brands, non domestic, non China brands brands online in China and help them market and sell on the leading ecommerce platforms of the day, Taobao, Tmall, which is obviously part of Alibaba, and jd.com. Okay. Also interesting.

所以这就是Colin。你知道，他有电子商务经验。他有谷歌经验。他现在正在了解他未来的竞争对手。

So here's, here's Colin. You know, he's got his e commerce experience. He's got his Google experience. He's now learning about his future competitors.

我们应该强调一个我们将反复提及的重要点。当你说淘宝和天猫时，那些是阿里巴巴的产品。所以阿里巴巴，你知道，是从B2B电子商务起步的，然后进入了消费者电子商务领域，通过天猫直接向中国消费者销售，天猫就像一个拥有高端品牌的购物中心，他们希望将其保持在自己的独立生态系统中，还有淘宝。而淘宝更像eBay。你觉得这个类比合适吗？

And we should underscore something that's gonna be an important point that we keep revisiting. When you say Taobao and Tmall, those are products by Alibaba. So Alibaba, you know, started in this b to b e commerce, and then got into consumer e commerce where they were selling directly to consumers in China with Tmall, which is think about it like a mall with really high end brands, and they wanted to keep that in its own separate ecosystem, and Taobao. And Taobao is more like the eBay. Does that seem like the right comp to you?

是的，这么说没错。我的意思是，在那个时候，阿里巴巴旗下的各种业务可以说相当于亚马逊加上eBay，在中国合二为一。我们现在大概是在2012年左右，人们开始谈论阿里巴巴即将上市——他们确实在2014年上市了，我记得对吧？

Yeah. That seems right. I mean, I I would say, like, at this point in time, Alibaba's various properties are sort of, the equivalent is Amazon plus eBay, rolled together in in China. We're now in, you know, probably 2012 timeframe and people are starting to think people are talking about Alibaba going public, which they would in was it 2014, I think?

而且它是有史以来规模最大的IPO。没错。

And it was the largest IPO of all IPO. Yeah.

是的。人们觉得，没错，他们赢了。他们是垄断者。一提到电子商务，一想到中国，就会想到阿里巴巴。

Yep. People think, yeah. Like, they've won. They are the monopoly. And you think e commerce, you think China, you think Alibaba.

京东正在崛起，他们是第二名，但阿里巴巴的优势如此明显，以至于Colin甚至决定，要在他们的平台上创办一家公司，帮助人们在阿里巴巴上销售。但他并没有止步于此。同时，在这个时间点，移动和社交游戏正火热，腾讯刚刚推出了微信。当然，他们之前有QQ，那是桌面通讯平台，长期以来深深植根于游戏生态系统。他们刚刚在移动端推出了微信。

And JD's emerging, they're a number two, but they're the winner so much so that even Colin is like, yeah, I'm gonna start a company on their platform to help people sell on on Alibaba. But he doesn't stop there. He also, at this point in time, mobile and social gaming are a big thing, and Tencent has just launched, WeChat. Of course, they've had QQ, which was the desktop messenger platform, and that was deeply embedded in the gaming ecosystem for a long time. They've just launched WeChat on mobile.

移动游戏是个大趋势。他说，我还要创办一个移动游戏工作室，依托这个新兴的微信平台，开始大量推出一些移动社交游戏。好吧，好吧，有意思。

Mobile gaming is a thing. He says, I'm also gonna start a mobile gaming studio where we're gonna start churning out some mobile, social games on the back of this new emerging WeChat platform. Okay. Okay. Interesting.

来了。所以也许我们还没到好市多和迪士尼乐园的地步，但你可以看到各种力量开始在这里汇聚。所有这些事情都在并行发展。Colin，鉴于他的背景和他的导师，你知道，他在寻找一个全垒打式的大成功。但很明显，其中任何一个单独项目都不太可能实现那种巨大的成功。

Here we go. So maybe we're not quite yet at Costco and Disneyland, but you can see the forces starting to swirl around here. All these things are running in parallel. Colin, again, given his background, his mentors, you know, he's looking for a big grand slam home run. None of them it it becomes clear none of them are really gonna on their own achieve that mega mega success.

但他知道他在每一个趋势上都抓住了大机会，他开始觉得，也许有机会把这些所有东西结合起来，在这些趋势的交汇处做点什么。如果我们能做到，我实际上有合适的团队，所有这些人。甚至回溯到他的第一家公司，都是同一批人——同一个工程团队，同样的联合创始人，他们在所有这些不同的产品上工作。我们知道怎么做。我们内部拥有从社交游戏到电子商务的所有技能，对阿里巴巴和京东有深入的了解。

But he knows he's on to some big trends with each of them and he starts feeling like, maybe maybe there's some kind of opportunity to bring all of these things together, an intersection of these trends. And and if we could do that, I actually have the right team, all of these people. It's the same people even going back to his first company who same engineering team, same co founders who are working on all of these different products. We know how to do it. We have all of these skills in house from social gaming to e commerce, deep knowledge of Alibaba and JD.

好的。我们可以一起做什么？

Okay. What could we do together?

是的。他就像那种典型的连续创业者，他确实，你知道，他组建了团队。他只是不太确定在这些不同的尝试中公司具体会做什么。我觉得其中有几个项目是并行推进的。所以他让多个人分成不同的小组，去处理那些有些重叠的工作。

Yeah. And he's like your classic serial entrepreneur, and he's really you know, he's assembled the band. He he just doesn't exactly know what the company is gonna be in all these different attempts. And I think a few of them are running sort of in parallel. So he has multiple people sort of cut up into different teams to work on stuff that that kind of overlaps.

是的。这几乎就像是，他在创业工作室这个概念流行起来之前就开了一家。所以在2015年，他说，好吧，在我们这种工作室环境里，我们来做这个。我们来开一家公司。于是他们推出了一家新公司，叫拼好货，我觉得是这么念的。

Yeah. It's almost like, he started a startup studio, before it was cool. So in 2015, he says, all right, in this studio type environment we have, let's do this. Let's start a company. So they launched a new company called Pin Hao Hu, I think is how you pronounce it.

再次说明，我们俩都不是母语者。我们会尽力，但应该是拼好货。

Again, neither of us are native speakers. We're gonna do our best here, but Pin Hao Hua.

大致翻译过来是，拼的意思是一起做某事，好货就是好商品。所以就像是一起买到好商品。这个想法，有点疯狂又超级有创意。它肯定是来自社交游戏世界，你知道，FarmVille在那时非常火。这个想法有点像现实版的FarmVille。

Which roughly translates as, pin means doing something together and means good goods. So like getting good goods together. And the idea, this is kinda crazy and super creative. It must have been from the social gaming world, you know, FarmVille is huge at this point in time. The idea is kinda like real world FarmVille.

他认为农村农业，你知道，中国的农业和农产品市场不像美国、欧洲或许多其他国家那样，有大型的农民和农业生产者合作社。更多的是大量分散的个体农户。他认为也许有机会利用互联网，特别是移动购买和订购，让这些农村农民的供应直接对接需求。想法是，如果他们能让这个模式运转起来，首先，这是阿里巴巴和京东都没能力涉足的领域。但如果他们能做到，这本质上是一个巨大的杂货品类，比如农产品，复购率会非常高。

He thinks that rural agriculture, you know, the Chinese agriculture and produce market isn't anything like The US or Europe or many other countries where there are large coops of of farmers and agriculture producers. It's much more lots of individual rural farmers. He thinks there's maybe an opportunity to use the Internet and in particularly mobile buying and ordering to have supply meet demand directly for these rural farmers. And the idea is that if they can get this to work, a, this is something that Alibaba and JD aren't equipped to go anywhere near. But if they can do it, this is a huge category of groceries essentially like produce and repeat purchase is gonna be super high.

他们可以利用从游戏世界学来的所有技巧来驱动用户获取，驱动重复购买，他们认为这真的能成功。作为一个最小可行产品，记住这里

They can use all their tricks from the gaming world to drive user acquisition, to drive repeat purchases, and they think this could really work. As an MVP, remember there

你知道，销售杂货或者水果这类商品还有一个好处是风险相对较低，尤其是当你看看当时京东和阿里巴巴的业务时。比如，买iPhone这类商品时你会信任那些品牌。但对于一家新创公司来说，你需要卖些便宜的东西，这样即使网站还不够成熟、看起来不太可靠，投入也不会太大。水果蔬菜就很适合销售，因为就算失败了也没关系，还有其他选择，反正本来也没花多少钱。

You know, the other good thing about selling groceries or effectively selling sort of fruits is the risk is low relative to you look around at the time JD and Alibaba's properties. Like, you trust those brands when you're gonna go buy an iPhone or something like that. But there's this new startup, like you kinda need a cheap thing to sell so that if your site's a little premature and, doesn't look totally trustworthy, like it has to be a small investment. And fruits and vegetables are a great thing to sell because if it doesn't work out, like that's okay, I have other options. It wasn't that much money anyway.

是啊。我是说，几斤水果才卖5元人民币，相当于不到一美元。Ben，你说到网站很有意思，这个业务根本没有网站，甚至连App都没有。

Yeah. I mean, stuff is a couple pounds of fruit for, like, 5 RMB, which equates to less than a dollar. So it's funny you say site, Ben. There's definitely no site for this. There's not even an app.

记得在移动游戏业务方面，他们意识到了微信的力量以及它作为游戏获客渠道的重要性。他们想，要不我们干脆不做App了？就在微信上运营怎么样？这些农村的农民现在都有手机了，有智能手机，手机上都有微信。

So remember, in the mobile gaming side of the house, they realized the power of WeChat and how important that was as an acquisition vehicle for games. They thought, you know, hey, to get going, what if we just don't even do an app? What if we just kinda like operate on WeChat, which all these rural farmers, you know, they have phones now. They have smartphones. They have WeChat on their phones.

我们就通过微信和他们沟通，发些订单什么的，从他们那里采购，用微信支付付款。同时我们也和购买水果的消费者聊天，通过微信支付收款。这样在我们开发App之前，算是个不错的MVP（最小可行产品）。结果开始见效了。

We'll just communicate with them via WeChat, send them some orders and stuff and buy from them and we can pay with WeChat Pay. And then we'll also just kind of chat with the consumers who are buying the fruit on the other end and take payment from them via WeChat Pay. Okay. Like, this seems like a good MVP until we can buy some time and buy an app. Well, it starts to work.

到2015年年中，他们融了一些风险投资，正式成立了公司，这个模式很有意思。不过这时候还远没有到拼多多及其神奇商业模式的那个阶段。

By mid twenty fifteen, they raise some venture capital and fully launched the company and the model is really interesting. So we're definitely still not yet at Pinduoduo and the magic that makes that work.

他们还是第一方零售商。不像亚马逊的两种模式——亚马逊自营和第三方卖家，拼好货的模式是亚马逊自营那种。你是直接从他们那里购买，并不清楚背后的农民是谁。这是经典的零售模式：零售商从批发商那里采购，持有库存（尤其是易腐商品这种难做的生意），然后卖给消费者。

They're also a first party retailer. So unlike, if you think about sort of the two models that Amazon has, where there's Amazon retail and then Amazon third party sellers, The model with Pinhau Hua is that they're the Amazon retailer. You're buying directly from them. You don't really know who the farmer is on the back end. It's your classic retail model of the retailer buys it from the wholesaler, keeps the inventory, has that tough business model, especially when the goods are spoiling, and then sells it to the consumer.

我猜他们从管理库存的复杂性中学到了一些教训，这促使他们后来转向了平台模式。

I have to suspect they learned some lessons in the trickiness of holding inventory that would lead them to later embrace the marketplace.

是的，完全正确。我的意思是，一针见血。他们在这种模式下是零售商，这很有趣，考虑到Colin有电子商务背景。这可能对他来说是很自然的选择，他的第一家公司就是零售商。

Yeah, totally. I mean, hit the nail on the head. They're they're a retailer in this model, which is interesting, you know, given Colin comes from the e commerce background. It's probably that was what was natural to him. That's what his first company was, was a retailer.

这就是为什么他们最初选择这样做，但后来发现还有更好的方式。Pinau Hua现在做得非常好，他们获得了风险投资，是个令人兴奋的企业。显然，他们通过农产品成功打入了电子商务市场。

And that's why they thought to do it this way, but it turned out there was a better way. So Pinau Hua is doing really well. They've raised venture capital. It's an exciting business. And clearly, they've hit on a good wedge into the e commerce market with produce and agriculture.

但当然，他们的野心和Collins的野心远不止于此。他们开始考虑接下来可以进入哪些其他品类，并以此为基础扩展。最终可能开始与阿里巴巴和京东竞争——这个'最终'可能就像我们即将看到的，六个月后。那么他们做了什么？他就说，哦，对了。

But of course their ambitions are and Collins' ambitions are much bigger than that. They start thinking about what other categories can we go into next and build on this foothold. And, you know, eventually maybe we can start to compete with Alibaba and JD eventually, eventually being like six months from now as we'll see. So what did they do? He's like, oh, yeah.

嗯，我有个游戏工作室，你知道，算是个孵化器。就让团队在其他品类快速搭建一些MVP类型的东西。好吧，很好。最简单的方法是什么？

Well, I got this gaming studio, you know, incubator that that I have. Let's just have the team spin up some some MVP type stuff in some other categories. Okay. Great. What's the easiest way to do that?

你知道，作为零售商，我们为Pinhau Hooah做了这个MVP，但那有点难。我们建了一堆基础设施，肯定需要资金。如果我们只是，你知道，我们真的只是想学习。那就以 marketplace 模式来做吧，这样我们就不用持有库存。

You know, like being a retailer, you know, we we did this MVP with Pinhau Hooah, but that was kinda hard. You know, we built a bunch of infrastructure, and certainly requires cash. What if we just, you know, we're really just trying to learn here. Let's just do it as a marketplace. So we won't take inventory.

我们甚至不会从交易中抽取太多分成，会非常非常低，比如不到1%作为我们的平台费，这很不同。我想亚马逊抽多少？他们的 marketplace 抽成超过30%。就连阿里巴巴和京东也要抽，你知道，10%

We won't even really take much of a cut on the transaction. We'll make it super, super small, like less than 1% of the transaction will take as a cut for our marketplace fee, you know, which is different. Like I think Amazon takes what does Amazon take? 30 plus percent on their marketplace. And and even Alibaba and JD are taking, you know, 10,

京东接近30%。京东的GMV中有28%被确认为净收入，即 marketplace 的收入。天猫和淘宝大概是5%，但仍然显著更高。

JD is 30 very close. JD is 28% of GMV is recognized as net revenue, so revenue to the marketplace. And I think Tmall and Taobao are like 5%, but still meaningfully higher.

仍然显著，是的，高出五倍。就像，好吧，太好了。

Still meaningfully, yeah, five times higher. Like, Okay, great.

它们在这里稳定在0.6%左右？

They settle here at like 0.6%?

是的，0.6%。非常非常低的收费率。再次强调，因为他们只想了解什么卖得好。所以他们推出了这个东西，然后他们就在想，哦，我们该叫它什么？

Yeah. 0.6%. Tiny, tiny little take rate. Again, because they just wanna learn what sells. So they launched this thing and they're like, oh, what are we gonna call it?

你知道，它主要也是在微信上运行。我们喜欢拼，你知道，一起做事的感觉。就叫它拼多多吧。一起，省更多，乐趣更多。看起来还行。

You know, it's also mostly running on WeChat. We like the peen, you know, the doing things together. Let's call it peen duo duo. Together, more savings and more fun. Seems seems fine.

我们就用这个名字了。

We'll go with that.

有趣的是，这是一家不同的公司。他们最初是一个独立的实体，也注册在Colin名下。这就引出了一个问题：这个Colin是谁？他怎么拥有这两家公司？抱歉，这是水果业务吗？是游戏业务？

And interestingly, this is a different company. They started as a separate entity, also registered to Colin. It sets the table for who's this Colin guy and how does he have these two companies? I'm sorry, is it is it fruit? Is it gaming?

还是商品市场？

Or is it marketplace for goods?

是的。这就是答案。所以令人震惊的是，他们推出了这个东西，它甚至比拼好货还好用。效果非常好。最终他们从这个独立实体中独立筹集了一些资金，部分来自相同的投资者。

Yes. It's the answer to that. So shocker, they launched this thing and it works even better than Pinahua. It works so well. They end up raising some money for it independently at this separate entity from some of the same investors.

这是在2015年。然后到了2016年，它增长得非常快。实际上到2016年，他们的收入达到了7000万美元，不是GMV，而是收入，尽管他们的抽成率很低，这个市场在2016年9月将公司合并，现在是一家公司。都是同一个团队一直在做这些事，叫做拼多多。然后在2017年，他们完全退出了拼好货的旧零售模式，完全转向了拼多多的市场模式。

This is in 2015. And then in 2016, it's growing so fast. Literally by the 2016, they would do $70,000,000 in revenue, not GMV, revenue with their tiny take rate with this marketplace that in September 2016, they merged the companies into it's now one company. It's all the same team that have been working on these things called Pinduoduo. And then in the 2017, they fully transitioned out of the old retailer model of PHH and fully into the marketplace model of PDD.

这里有两件事要说。一个是关于这集的一个元观点。由于我们的大多数听众是西方人，我们把所有东西都换算成美元，以便更容易理解。另一件事是，David，我们不应该轻描淡写，它确实做得非常好，砰的一声，第一年就达到了7000万美元的收入。就像，这是怎么发生的？

Two things to say here. One is a meta point about this episode. Since most of our audience is Western, we've converted everything to US dollars to sort of make it easier to understand. The other thing is, David, we should not gloss over, and it just did really well, and boom, they got to $70,000,000 in revenue in the first year. Like, how How did did that that happen?

发生？是的。这是一个非常好的问题，Ben。好吧，让我们深入探讨一下。不仅仅是拼多多是一个商品抽成率低的市场。

Happen? Yes. That is a very good question, Ben. Well, let's dive into that. It's not just that Pinduoduo is a marketplace with a low take rate for goods.

就像，这本身当然是对现有竞争对手的一个优势。但是，他们也可以大幅降低抽成率。还有，谁会信任拼多多，你知道，就像你之前说的，Ben，就像有一些新贵。你知道，你会在这上面买iPhone然后觉得很酷吗？

Like, that in and of itself, sure, is an advantage versus the incumbents. But, like, they can slash their take rates too. Also, who's gonna trust Pinduoduo to, you know, like you were saying earlier, Ben, like, there's some upstart. You know, what are you gonna buy an iPhone on this thing and be dope?

而且，仅仅靠低抽成率，我不会吸引任何零售商。亚马逊现在是亚马逊。所以如果我以0.6%的抽成率也开一个亚马逊，我不会得到，我不知道，阿迪达斯来我的小平台上零售鞋子，仅仅因为抽成率低。就像我没有受众，没有分销渠道，没有能力真正实现它。

Also, I'm not going to attract any retailers just by having a low take rate. Amazon is currently Amazon. So if I start Amazon too with a 0.6% take rate, I'm not going to get, I don't know, Adidas to come and retail shoes on my little thing with a low take rate just because it is a low take rate. Like I have no audience, I have no distribution, I have no ability to actually pull it off.

是的。我们可以在这里谈谈泰米尔顿·赫尔默。事实证明，有一种东西叫做双边网络效应，就像你有一群买家，它会吸引一群卖家，这又会吸引更多买家，砰的一声，这实际上是具有防御性的。

Yeah. We could talk to Tamilton Helmer here. It turns out there's a thing called two sided network effects where like you have a bunch of buyers, it attracts a bunch of sellers, which attracts some more buyers, and boom, that's actually defensible.

所以你是说，他们需要找到一种新颖的方式来吸引大量买家？

So are you telling me then that they needed to find a novel way to attract a bunch of buyers?

那可能是进入市场的一种方式。记住，他们拥有所有这些游戏基因。所以他们为拼多多提出了这个他们称之为团购的概念。这其实并不新鲜，我的意思是，这在很多方面至少被宣传为Groupon的核心概念。

That might be a way, to enter the market. So remember, they have all this gaming DNA. So they come up with this concept for Pinduoduo that they call team buying. Now this isn't new. I mean, this was in many ways at least marketed as the core concept of Groupon.

就像，哦，很多人一起买这个东西，然后是的，你会得到一个更低的价格

Like, oh, lots of people buy this thing together then Yeah. You'll get a lower

但那有点

But that's kind of

其实不是Groupon的本质。它是，它是一个优惠网站。

not really what Groupon was. It was is. It was a deal site.

是的。我们有一堆本来卖不出去的垃圾。所以，如果我们把价格降得足够低，你愿意来把它们处理掉吗？实际上，随着时间的推移，我们会逐渐淘汰那个团购机制。

Yeah. We have all this crap that wasn't already selling. And so, will you come take it off our hands if we lower the price enough? And actually, over time, we're just gonna phase out that, group mechanic anyway.

我记得在Groupon上买东西，而且现在如果你去——我猜如果你去他们的网站买东西，你只是作为一个个体消费者在购买。Groupon把东西摆在你面前，你买了它。就这样。

I remember buying things at Groupon and and still if you go I assume if you go buy on the site stay, you're just buying the thing. Like, you're an individual consumer. Groupon put something in front of you. You're buying it. Full stop.

就是这样。拼多多与此截然不同，团购也与之大相径庭。所以在拼多多的体验中，这也是他们如今能达到1000亿美元市值的核心机制，你会看到每件商品都有两个价格。一个是单独购买价。你可以直接按那个价格购买，明天就能收到货。

That's it. Pinduoduo is pretty different from that, and team buying is pretty different than that. So in the Pinduoduo experience, and this is the core mechanic that has gotten them to a $100,000,000,000 market cap today, you see two prices for every item. One price is the individual price. So you can just buy something straight up for that price, get it, you know, tomorrow.

就像所有优秀的互联网公司和游戏公司一样。那个按钮的颜色非常淡，像是褪了色。红色是拼多多的主题色调。

They have, just like all good Internet companies and gaming companies. That button is, like, super faded washed out colors. Red is the color scheme for Pinduoduo.

这就像是UI设计师的反面教材典范。没错。

Like It's like great anti pattern for UI designers. Yeah.

完全正确。它就像是那种非常柔和的粉色。文字也没有加粗。你真的需要与自己的本能作斗争才能点击那个按钮。

Exactly. It's like very soft pink. The text is not bolded. You really have to fight against every fiber of your being to click that button.

您确定要取消订阅吗？

Are you sure you want to cancel your subscription?

不。是的。但紧挨着它的就是团购按钮，那个按钮是大胆、明亮、饱和的鲜红色，而且它的价格通常比单独购买按钮低大约40%。

No. Yes. Right next to it though is a big bright saturated bold red color of the team buying button, which also happens to be at a price that is typically about 40% lower than the individual buying button.

这很有趣，因为这是由零售商设定的。所以零售商——我不知道这是否是合同义务，但就像在拼多多上架的一个条款，你需要设定两个价格。一个是单独购买价，然后是团购价。有趣的是，我记得最初团购人数要求好像是20人左右。如果你能凑齐20个人一起买，那么你就能以这个价格购买。

Which is interesting because that's set by the retailer. So the retailer as a I don't know if it's a contractual obligation, but like as a term of listing on Pinduoduo, you set two prices. There's the individual price and then the team buying price. And interestingly, I think it was something like the team size had to be like 20 people originally. If you could go get 20 people to come together, then you would have access.

而且我认为零售商也会控制这一点，他们会说如果你带了20个人然后变成10个人，现在一路降到两个人。但如果你能自我组织，能为我们做一些需求聚合，那么是的，你就能获得优惠。

And I think the retailer would control this too, and say if you bring 20 people and then it became 10 people, now it's all the way down to two people. But this idea that if you can self organize, you can do some demand aggregation for us, then yeah, you get a break.

是的，完全正确。现在，我不知道一开始是不是这样，但现在零售商设定了团队规模，即最小团队人数。我说零售商，我的意思是卖家。我们稍后会讨论这一点。那么当你点击那个按钮时会发生什么？

Yeah, totally. And now, I don't know if this is how it was in the beginning, but now the retailer sets the team size, the minimum team size. I say retailer, I I mean seller. We'll get into that in a minute. So what happens when you click that button?

这真是太天才了。因为一切都运行在微信支付系统上，你点击按钮的瞬间就会被收取那个价格，即团队价，那笔钱会立即转移到拼多多。他们在你点击按钮的那一刻就收到了钱。不过交易并没有完成。你有24小时的时间来达到最小团队规模。

This is just genius. Because it all runs on WeChat's payment system, you are instantly charged that price, the team price, the minute you hit that button and that dollar value gets transferred to Pinduoduo immediately. They get the money the second you hit that button. The transaction doesn't go through though. You have twenty four hours to hit the minimum team size.

现在有两种方式可以达到购买该商品的最小团队规模。你可以加入一个现有的团队，拼多多在用户界面中直接展示了一群也在尝试购买这个应用并已组建团队的人。你可以加入他们的团队。看起来很简单。通过这种方式获得折扣。

Now there are two ways that you could hit the minimum team size to buy this item. You could one join an existing team that's out there and Pinduoduo right in the UI surfaces a bunch of other people that are also trying to buy this app have also formed teams. Can join up on their teams. Seems pretty simple. Get the discount that way.

或者如果你想要额外的折扣，你可以组建自己的团队，招募自己的人来加入你。这一切都原生地内置在微信中。所以你可以非常轻松地将你正在购买的商品分享到你的家人、朋友或任何微信群，或者在微信朋友圈公开分享，招募人们来加入你。这些都是些什么东西？嗯，显然是水果，但也是鞋子、牛仔裤，我认为排名第一的产品类别仍然是纸巾，比如克里内克斯面巾纸。

Or if you want extra discounts, you can form your own team and you can recruit your own people to come in and join you. And it's all natively baked right into WeChat. So you can just super easy post this item that you're buying into your family, friends, whatever WeChat group or post a publicly on WeChat stories, whatever and recruit people to come join you. And what is this kind of stuff? It's like, well, it's fruit obviously but it's also, shoes, it's jeans, it's, I think still the number one product category is, yeah, tissues like literally Kleenex.

这就是好市多与迪士尼乐园类比中好市多那部分的意义所在。

This is where, you know, the Costco part of the Costco and Disneyland analogy comes in.

这些都是必需品。就像，谁不想被招募进一个群组去买一些你反正都得买的东西，而且现在还能更便宜地买到。

It's essentials. Like who wouldn't want to be recruited into a group to buy something that you kind of have to buy anyway, and now you get to do it cheaper.

比如，超级便宜。而且它

Like, super cheap. And it

还带有社交证明，就是你认识的人说，嘿，我正在用这个。我信任这个系统。所以跟我一起用吧。他们后来是不是推出了功能，如果你拉够足够多的人，实际上你就可以免费得到？

comes with the social proof of somebody you already know saying, hey. I'm doing this. I trust this system. So do it with me. And didn't they later launch features that if you get enough people, it's actually free for you?

是像降价之类的吗？

It's like price cut or something?

砍价。价格。所以我认为最初平台会展示一些产品，你可以尝试通过砍价来免费获得，真正支付0元。这是在让人们注册拼多多，就是真的创建账户。它的高明之处，再次说明，这全都来自游戏世界，比如说有一个标价100元的产品。你拉来的第一个人砍价能降大概50%。

Price chop. Price So I think initially the platform showed you a selection of products that you could try and attempt to get for free with the price chop to literally pay $0. It was getting people to sign up for Pinduoduo, like literally register accounts. And the brilliance of it, again, this all comes from the gaming world was, say you had like a 100 RMB product with sticker individual price. The first person you brought in for the price chop lowered it like 50 percent.

然后下一个人把它降到，比如30元。再下一个人，所以它就像一个越来越难达到零的渐进目标。如果你没砍到零，交易就不会完成。就像你没免费得到它。不是你以某个价格得到它。

Then the next person lowered it to, you know, 30 RMB. Then the next person, so it was like an asthma tote that kept getting harder and harder to hit zero. If you didn't hit zero, nothing went through. Like you didn't get it for free. It's not that you got it for like the price.

所以你把它砍到了5元。你不是花5元得到它。你必须砍到零，否则就

So you got it down to 5. You didn't get it for 5. You gotta get it to zero or It's

射月。

shooting moon.

但是你刚刚在拼多多上引入的所有这些人。

But all those people you just onboarded onto Canduoduo.

所以这些基本上是有史以来最厉害的增长黑客策略。能够在微信上以如此快的速度增长平台，并且通过精确的激励机制和最小化的摩擦，迅速吸引大量用户加入平台。不仅仅是加入平台，而是真正进行交易。

So these are like effectively the greatest growth hacks of all time. To be able to grow a platform as fast as they did and the exact correct incentives with the exact minimal amount of friction doing it on WeChat to just get a crap ton of users super fast to come and and, and join the platform. And not just join the platform, but actually transact.

真正进行交易。而让这一切成为可能还有一个关键因素，我虽然不是中国科技观察专家，但在做研究时真的很惊讶这在2015、2016年就实现了，因为即使在美国今天也做不到。中国的第三方物流网络非常成熟、惊人且发达，以至于拼多多可以在不建立自己物流的情况下做到这一点。是的，这些交易是通过拼多多促成的游戏化机制发生的。

Actually transact. And there's one more piece to making this all work that really could not I mean, not being nearly a expert China tech watcher. I'm I was actually really surprised doing the research that this was possible in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen because it's not even possible in The US today. The third party logistics networks in China are so mature and incredible and built out to an extent that PDD could do this without setting up any of their own logistics. The way this So yeah, you know, these transactions were happening in this gamified mechanic that PDD was facilitating.

然后他们会让商家，甚至是这些农村的农民，负责配送和物流。中国有大量最后一公里及以上的配送网络和竞争，这使得通过手机就能实现这一切。

And then they would have the merchant, it would be on the merchants, even these like rural farmers to take care of delivery and logistics. There's tons and tons of delivery, both last mile and up above the last mile, delivery networks and competition in China, that that was actually doable from your phone.

哦，是的。我读到过相关的内容。它们都是API驱动的，所以基本上会竞标出谁能以最低成本来接单配送，并且全部通过程序化方式完成。

Oh, yeah. I read something about this. And they're all sort of API driven. So they would basically bid out who could come and take shipment the cheapest. And it would all be done programmatically.

嗯，现在我

Well, now I

认为这就是拼多多所做的。他们投入了大量技术来构建这一体系。你可以把它想象成Shopify现在的履约解决方案，Shopify并不自己完成履约，但他们构建了所有这些API来管理。拼多多现在已经构建起来了，但在早期，他们甚至没有这样做。

think this is what Pinduoduo does. They've invested a lot of tech in building this out. You could almost think of it like, Shopify's fulfillment solutions now where Shopify is not doing the fulfillment themselves but they built out all these APIs to manage it. Pinduoduo has built that out now. But in the early days, like they weren't even doing that.

这基本上就像是说，嘿农民们，嘿制造商们，嘿，随便什么行业。是的，责任在你们身上。把这些送到消费者手里。而且顺便说一句，你们最好在七天内完成，否则你们就要

It was literally just like, hey farmers, hey, manufacturers, hey, whatever. Yeah, it's on you. Get this to consumers. And by the way, you should probably do that within seven days or you're going

哦，真有意思。

to Oh, fascinating.

在算法里。

In the algorithm.

这真的很有趣。我之前没有太意识到这一点。我想这让我明白了——我原以为主要有两大支柱，但现在看来中国在这方面领先的领域其实有三个支柱。第一个是分销，第二个是我们讨论过的团购和社交电商。社交电商在美国根本不存在。

That's really interesting. I hadn't realized this as much. I guess this makes I was thinking there were sort of two pillars, but I guess there's three pillars of areas where China is just way ahead here. So the first one there being distribution, the second one being something we've talked about in group buying and sort of social commerce. Social e commerce doesn't exist in The US.

有一些Shopify插件会显示比如某某某刚在这个网站上买了这个，让你觉得，嘿，别人真的在买东西，所以我也应该买。但并没有一个，你知道，价值数十亿美元的公司真正把它做成功，使其成为一种有效的机制。你必须相信它会的，而且你必须相信新冠疫情会加速这一点，因为购物曾经是我们为了乐趣而做的事，但现在不行了，因为我们不能和朋友一起去购物了。

There's like some Shopify plugins that will show you like, so and so just bought this on this website to make you feel like, hey, people are actually buying stuff so I should buy stuff too. But there's not a, you know, multi billion dollar company that sort of made it work and made it an effective mechanism. And you have to imagine it will, and you have to imagine that coronavirus will accelerate that because shopping used to be a thing that we did for fun, and now it's not because we can't go shopping with our friends.

我们稍后再回到那个话题。我认为有一个结构性的原因，这在美国会很难实现，而在中国则不是这样。

Let's return to that in a minute. I think there's a structural reason why this is gonna be tough in The US in a way that it wasn't in China.

那先保留这个观点，因为我想谈谈那个。但第三点是微信支付和支付宝的进步远远优于我们美国的支付和转账机制，这是因为大银行的既得利益。我们不仅困在旧技术上，还困在关于资金清算需要多长时间的旧思维中。成本

Hold that then because I wanna talk about that. But the third being the advancement of WeChat Pay and Alipay are so far superior to the payment mechanisms and money transfer mechanisms that we have here in The US because of the entrenched interests of the big banks. Where we are stuck on not just old technology, but just old thinking about how long money takes to clear Costs

关联于

associated with

难以置信的转账手续费。在中国，资金在这些生态系统中的流动速度之快、摩擦之少、费用之低，远远优于这里的借记卡系统、ACH系统和电汇系统。看看我们在那个行业里还停留在多么落后的状态，简直可以说是近乎欺诈。好了，听众们。

Incredible doing fees associated with transferring money. The speed and lack of friction and lack of fees that money can sort of move around these ecosystems in China is just far superior to the debit rails here, the ACH rails here, the wires. It's just it's it's almost crookery the way that you look at how far stuck in the past we are in in that industry here. Yeah. Alright, listeners.

现在是我们谈论另一家我们喜爱的公司Statsig的时候了。自从我们上次介绍Statsig以来，他们有一个非常令人兴奋的更新。他们完成了C轮融资，估值达到了11亿美元。

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.

是的。这是一个巨大的里程碑。祝贺团队。时机也很有趣，因为实验领域确实正在升温。

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

没错。那么为什么投资者将STATSIG估值超过十亿美元？这是因为实验已成为世界顶级产品团队产品栈中至关重要的一部分。

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

是的。这一趋势始于Web 2.0公司，如Facebook、Netflix和Airbnb。这些公司面临一个问题：如何在扩展到数千名员工的同时，保持快速、去中心化的产品和工程文化？实验系统是那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.

这些系统让这些公司的每个人都能访问一套全球产品指标，从页面浏览量到观看时长再到性能指标。然后，每当团队发布新功能或产品时，他们就可以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可以设定一个公司范围内的目标，比如增加应用内使用时长，然后让各个团队自行想办法实现。将这种做法推广到数千名工程师和产品经理身上，砰，你就获得了指数级增长。难怪实验现在被视为必不可少的基础设施。

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

没错。如今顶尖的产品团队，如Notion、OpenAI、Rippling和Figma，同样依赖实验。但他们不是自己搭建，而是直接使用Statsig。而且他们不仅仅用Statsig做实验。过去几年里，Statsig已经添加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更快地构建产品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、5万美元的创业计划，以及面向大公司的实惠企业合同。只需告诉他们是本和大卫推荐你的。跟我聊聊为什么社交这件事在美国行不通

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. Talk to me about why the social thing won't work in

在美国。好的。我们在本期节目中已经多次提到这一点。现在终于该谈谈腾讯和这里的情况了。就像你说的本，实现这一点的支柱是，首先，有一些文化因素，团购在中国线下其实已经是一种现象了。

The US. Great. So we've alluded to this a bunch of times so far in the episode. Let's finally bring in Tencent and what's going on here. So like you said Ben, the pillars to making this work are, well, A, there's some cultural stuff that group buying actually was kind of a phenomenon in offline in China already.

所以人们对这个很熟悉。物流网络已经足够成熟能够支持。金融网络也已经足够成熟能够做到这一点，但还有社交因素。好吧。让我们回到腾讯和微信。

So people are familiar with this. The logistics networks were mature enough to be able to do it. The financial networks, were were mature enough to be able to do this, but then there's social. Okay. Let's go back to Tencent and WeChat.

我们提到过这一点，如果你去听我们关于腾讯的那期节目，他们当时围绕微信做了一个与Facebook非常不同的重大战略决策。因为我做研究时就在想，我记得在Facebook IPO前后有一大批社交电商公司成立。我记得看了很多Madrona（投资机构）的项目。我们差点投资了一家。谢天谢地我们没有。

We alluded to this and if you go listen to our episode on Tencent, they made a major strategic decision with WeChat around this time that was very different than Facebook. Cause I was thinking doing research, was like, I remember there were a bunch of social commerce companies that got started right around the time of the Facebook IPO. I remember looking at a bunch of Madrona. We almost invested in one. Thank goodness we didn't.

我们丢掉了那笔交易，记得吗，因为那家公司倒闭了，原因是这些公司做的事情和拼多多利用微信做的一样，就是利用Facebook的社交图谱进行广泛传播。关于你买了什么、广播给朋友，有大量的创意。人们尝试了诸如团购之类的东西。

We lost the deal, remember, because the company went belly up because what happened was these companies were doing the same thing that Pinduoduo did with WeChat, which is they were just leveraging the Facebook social graph to blast out. There was tons of creativity about what you were buying, broadcasting it to your friends. People were trying stuff like group yeah.

就像Blippi那样。是的。当时有一个围绕记录你购买物品的社交网络。就像是广播你已经通过信用卡购买的东西。

Was like Blippi. Yeah. There was like a social network around logging things that you bought. So like broadcasting things that you had already purchased that hit your credit card.

没错。甚至像fab.com这样的东西还记得吗？对。他们融了很多钱但最后失败了。他们更像是通过电子邮件通讯进行购买，但他们也在利用Facebook的开放图谱。

Yep. Even stuff like, remember fab.com? Yeah. Which raised a ton of money and flamed out. You know, they were more of an email newsletter buying, but they were also leveraging, you know, the Facebook graph, the open Facebook graph.

事情是这样的，Facebook在IPO前后看到了这种情况。他们想要推断平台上发生的商业活动来为IPO做准备，但后来他们突然切断了连接，关闭了所有这些功能，扼杀了这种生态。虽然现在你仍然可以通过Facebook连接各种服务，但他们已经从信息流算法中移除了这类内容的推荐权重。同样地

What happened was Facebook saw this going on right around the IPO. They wanted to deduce commerce happening on the platform leading up to the IPO, but then they yanked the cord and they shut off all of this stuff and they killed, you know and you could still, you know, Facebook, connect into anything these days, but they took all the juice out of the algorithm in the feed for any kinda stuff like this. In the same

就像他们对音乐做的那样。但Spotify当时已经通过'看看你的朋友在听什么'功能获得了足够的用户分布。当然，后来Facebook停止在动态消息中显示朋友收听内容，所以没人能追上Spotify。但你的意思是，没有人充分利用Facebook图谱获得足够规模，达到'就算你关闭接口，我也已经是赢家'的状态。这就像是在他们突破临界点之前。

way that they did for for music, But Spotify had sort of already gotten enough distribution using, hey, here's what your friends are listening to. But of course, they then stopped showing here's what your friends are listening to in the Facebook news feed, and so no one could sort of catch Spotify. But what you're saying is no one had sort of leveraged the Facebook graph to get enough scale to become sort of a, I don't care if you shut it off, I'm already a winner. It was sort of like before they were over the hump.

是的。但不同于Spotify是订阅服务，你需要持续访问社交图谱来实现这个。就像拼多多在IPO招股书和持续申报中都提到的，他们对腾讯和微信有巨大依赖。如果腾讯对他们做同样的事，他们就会陷入困境，除非建立自己的社交图谱——他们在应用内有所建设，但还不完善。那么为什么腾讯和Facebook在这里分道扬镳？

Yeah. Well, you need ongoing unlike Spotify, is a subscription service, you you need ongoing access to a social graph to do this. Like, I do think, certainly a huge dependency and they have this in their IPO prospectus and ongoing filings for Pinduoduo is is Tencent and WeChat. Like, if Tencent did the same thing to them, like they'd be kneecapped unless they built their own social network graph, which they sort of have within the app, but not totally yet. So why why did Tencent and Facebook diverge here?

Facebook决定的是：我们要通过广告来变现这个平台，对吧？我们想要有效控制流经我们平台的商业活动，不想让其他人在此做任何事。如果你想这么做，我们就要让每个人交税。而微信采取了非常不同的策略。

What Facebook decided is they were like, oh, we're gonna monetize this thing via advertising, right? We effectively wanna control the commerce and business flowing through our platform. We don't wanna let anybody else do anything here. We wanna make everybody pay a tax if you're gonna do this. Now, WeChat took a really different approach.

其一，我认为因为当时中国的广告生态系统整体还不成熟，变现更困难，广告主较少；其二，这是一个基于消息的生态系统，虽然他们确实有广告，但不太合理。他们想出了一个绝妙的商业模式：让所有这些初创公司使用我们的平台建立业务，而我们拥有所有数据。

One, I think because the advertising ecosystem in China in general wasn't as mature at this point in time. Like it was harder to monetize. There weren't as many advertisers, but also two, it was a messaging based ecosystem where advertising, you know, they do have advertising, but it's not as doesn't make as much sense. They came up with just a brilliant different business model, which was, okay, we'll actually let all these startups use our platform and build businesses on our platform. And then what we'll do, we have all the data.

我们可以看到哪些模式行得通。我们会挑选赢家并投资它们。我们会投资这些公司，获得股权。然后，我们可以，你知道，施加影响力，比如优先向他们开放API新功能，比如小程序，可以说这是某些竞争对手所没有的。

We can see what's working. We'll just pick the winners and we'll invest in them. We'll invest in them. We'll get equity in these companies. And then we can, you know, put our hand on the scale and tip, like, to give them strategic access to API is new features like mini programs, one might say, that some of their competitors won't have.

而这就是最终成就拼多多的方式。

And then this is what ends up making Pinduoduo.

这确实是要划清平台与聚合器之间区别的关键点。对于读过Stratiquiri的读者，我相信Ben会有更精辟的定义。但你知道，Facebook是典型的聚合器。他们聚合用户注意力，然后聚合所有广告商，成为中间的瓶颈点。每次广告商想从你这里吸引几分钟注意力，让你在他们的网站或应用上做点什么，他们就向广告商收费。

And this is really the point to sort of draw that bright line of the difference between a platform and an aggregator. And for folks who read Stratiquiri, I'm sure Ben has a much more eloquent definition than this. But, you know, Facebook is your classic aggregator. They're aggregating the audience attention, and then they're aggregating all of the advertisers and they're the choke point in the middle. And they charge the advertiser every time the advertiser wants to leech you off for a few minutes to do something on your site or app.

而腾讯则不同，他们实际上说，嘿，微信要成为一个平台。人们将在此基础上开发丰富的应用。Facebook曾几次尝试成为平台，但最终平台与聚合器模式存在冲突，他们选择了基于聚合器的广告业务。他们基本上已经放弃了真正成为平台的努力。而腾讯取得了巨大成功，不仅因为平台模式是好生意，可能更重要的是，正如你所说David，他们能够观察哪些应用兴起，挑选赢家并进行投资。

Whereas with Tencent, they actually said, hey, WeChat is going to be a platform. People are gonna be developing rich applications on top of this. And Facebook made a few different runs at being a platform, but ultimately being a platform and an aggregator were in conflict, they picked the aggregator advertising based business. They've basically thrown in the towel on on really being a platform. Whereas Tencent has succeeded wildly, not just because being a platform is a good business, but probably more importantly, exactly what you're saying, David, is then they're gonna observe what's taking off, pick winners, and invest.

是的。有件事我甚至没意识到，这几乎是个题外话，但在研究过程中发现了。你知道，腾讯是特斯拉的最大股东之一。他们在2007年2月，我想是2017年2月，收购了5%的股份。

Yeah. One thing I didn't even realize, this is almost a a sidebar, but came up while doing the research. You know, Tencent is one of the largest shareholders in Tesla. They bought a 5% stake in 02/2007, I think. Or 02/2017.

抱歉。这笔投资本身就很成功吧？但你可能会想，嗯，这只是不相干的。这只是作为投资者很好地配置资本。那么，猜猜谁在微信上有公众号和小程序？

Sorry. Man, has that been a good investment in and of itself? But, you might think like, well, that's just unrelated. That's just being a good investor deploying capital. Well, guess who has an official account and a mini program on WeChat?

特斯拉。猜猜你能在上面做什么？你可以查找超级充电站。你可以浏览并订购特斯拉汽车。

Tesla. And guess what you can do on it? You can find superchargers. You can browse and order a Tesla.

哦，所以他们是在关注中国的需求吗？

Oh, so they were watching the demand in China?

嗯，我不确定他们是否在关注需求，但他们已经允许特斯拉

Well, I don't know if they were watching the demand, but they've allowed Tesla

开始绕道而行。所以特斯拉能在中国获得更好的渗透，因为他们拥有对不同API的专有访问权。

start way around. So Tesla can get better penetration in China because they have proprietary access to different APIs.

所以对于像特斯拉这样的公司来说，这很棒。这算是锦上添花。但对于像这样的东西，这实际上是其运作的核心。他们曾是拼多多的竞争对手。现在也仍然是拼多多的竞争对手。

So now for something like this, for something like Tesla, great. This is kinda icing on the cake. For something like this, this is literally the core of what makes it work. So they were competitors to Pinduoduo. There still are competitors to Pinduoduo.

2017年2月，腾讯决定在这个品类中 essentially 扶持拼多多上位。正如我们讨论过的，这个品类对他们来说具有至关重要的战略意义。他们领投了拼多多1.1亿美元的B轮融资。记住，这家公司当时才成立大约一年。这是在PHH和PDD合并前五、六个月，红杉资本以及红杉中国也参与进来。

Once in February 2017, Tencent decides to essentially king make Pinduoduo here in this category. And and this is such a strategically important category to them as we've discussed. They lead a $110,000,000 series b in Pinduoduo. This company remember is like a year. This is five, six months from the merger between PHH and PDD that they lead Sequoia comes in as well as Sequoia China.

所以他们给了拼多多大量资金，但也向他们全面开放了平台权限，包括他们刚刚在微信上推出的这个关键新功能——小程序。

So they give them a ton of capital, but they also give them wide open access to the platform, including this new critical feature that they've just launched on WeChat called Mini Programs.

对于那些以前从未关注过中国生态系统的人来说，这不像在美国，应用商店是获取软件的地方。在中国，微信确实在操作系统之上创建了一个抽象层，你打开微信，然后在微信内部决定要做什么。如今，这就是通过访问小程序来实现的。

And this is like for folks who have never sort of paid attention to the China ecosystem before, it's not like in The US where the app store is the place that you go to get access to software. In China, WeChat has really created an abstraction layer on top of the operating system where you open WeChat and then you decide what to do from inside WeChat. And these days, that's by going to a mini program.

从技术和计算机科学的角度来看，这简直太棒了。它完全消除了在中国各种操作系统生态中（包括iOS、Android以及各种中国特有的安卓版本或小米等系统）开发和维护丰富应用的需求。

It's totally brilliant from like a technical and computer science standpoint. This completely obliviates the need to develop and maintain rich apps across iOS and Android and all of the various other operating ecosystems within China and various flavors of China only Android or Xiaomi and and the like.

我不认为它完全消除了这种需求。我认为即使你开发的是小程序，或者至少需要接入原生功能，你仍然需要为每个操作系统构建特定版本。但它确实让操作系统变得不那么重要了。因此，切换成本基本消失了，或者你可以更轻松地在iPhone和安卓之间切换，因为无论你使用什么硬件，你都有微信和所有的小程序。

I don't think it totally obviates it. I think you do need to build special versions for each operating system, even if you're building a mini program or at least hook into the native stuff on its own. But what it did do is make the operating system less important. And so the the switching costs kind of go away, or you can switch between iPhone and Android more easily because, hey, you've got WeChat and all your Mini programs no matter what your, you know, hardware is.

是的，完全正确。而且这些公司中的大多数，一旦达到一定规模，它们确实既有原生应用又有微信小程序。但在客户获取和跨平台忠诚度方面，这是巨大的优势。我们也会尽量在节目说明中链接到这个内容。

Yep. Totally. And most of these companies, once they reach any scale, they do have native apps and WeChat Mini programs. But in terms of customer acquisition, in terms of loyalty across platforms, it's huge. And so we'll try and link to this in the show notes as well.

有一张惊人的图表，展示了拼多多及其竞争对手在自己应用生态和微信小程序生态中的用户数量对比。拼多多是唯一一个拥有2.33亿用户主要通过微信小程序交互的公司，这是一个功能齐全的拼多多应用，所有功能都与原生应用相同。这相当于

There's this amazing graph of looking at PDD and its competitors of how many users they have in their own app ecosystem versus in the WeChat mini program app ecosystem. PDD is the only one they have 233,000,000 users that interact primarily through the WeChat mini program, which is a fully featured Pinduoduo app. All the same features are in there as in the native app. That's like the equivalent of

三分之二的美国人，包括儿童，仅通过微信小程序成为拼多多用户。

two thirds of America, including children, are Pinduoduo users only through the Mini Program through WeChat.

是的。他们还有另外1.44亿用户主要通过与自己的原生应用交互。

Yeah. They have another 144,000,000 users that primarily interact with their own native apps.

这相当于四个推特那么多的用户。

Which is like four Twitters worth of users.

没错。你把它和阿里巴巴、京东、唯品会相比，所有这些竞争对手的大部分用户都在他们自己的应用上，A，而且B，拼多多在微信生态系统中的总用户数比任何竞争对手都多出指数级。对于这种天生社交性很强的东西来说，这是一个巨大的优势，因为记住，市场上买家端的所有购买流量都来自这些团购。有趣的是，在他们的文件中，年复一年，你知道，他们谈论你可以单独购买东西，然后他们说我们绝大部分的购买都是通过团购平台进行的。

Yeah, right. You compare that to Alibaba, you compare that to JD, you compare that to VIP shop. All of those other, competitors, most of the users are on their own apps, A, and b, PDD has exponentially more users total in the WeChat ecosystem than any of their competitors. And for something like this that is so natively social, that is such a huge advantage because remember, all of the buying traffic on the buyer side of the marketplace is coming via these team purchases. It's funny in their filings, year after year, you know, they talk about how you can buy things individually and then they say substantially all of our purchases happen via the team buying platform.

就像，没人会买单独的价格。

Like, nobody buys the individual price.

嗯，尤其是现在你几乎可以称之为团购都很可笑。事实上你只需要两个人组队，而且你可以和一个陌生人组成两人团。就像，如果你没有加入别人已有的团，那你肯定是点错了按钮之类的。比如，如果你不想邀请朋友搞个10人或20人的大团，你只需要两人团而且已经有人发起了，拜托，这真的算团购吗？

Well, especially now that you can it's almost silly to call it team buying. The fact that you only need a party of two and you can join a party of two with a stranger. It's like, you must have just clicked the wrong button or something if you didn't, just join someone's existing party. Like, if you didn't feel like inviting your friends and making a big party of 10 or 20 or whatever, and you just need a party of two and somebody's already posted it, like, come on. Is that really a team purchase?

你这是在试图付更多钱。

You're trying to pay more money.

是的。是的。

Yes. Yes.

所以在此基础上，这一切发生在2017年2月，投资和小程序上线。从2016年到2017年，拼多多的收入增长了超过三倍，达到2.7亿美元。他们完全转向了市场模式。他们退出了零售业务。在此基础上，他们申请上市。

So on the back of this, this is February 2017 when all this happens, the investment and the mini program launch. From 2016 to 2017, Pinduoduo over three x's their revenue to $270,000,000. They fully transitioned to the marketplace model. They get out of the retailing business. And on the back of that, they file to go public.

然后他们在2018年6月确实上市了，距离公司最初推出不到三年，距离合并不到两年。简直不可思议。

And then they do go public in June 2018, less than three years after the initial launch of the company and less than two years after the merger. Just incredible.

是的。他们在IPO招股说明书中强调的一个重要观点是，他们不仅像野火般迅猛增长，而且切入了一个所有其他平台都忽视的消费类别。如果你考虑中国城市的划分，有一线、二线、三线和四线城市。一线城市最接近主要商业中心，四线城市则是最偏远、接近农村地区的城市。财富水平大致从一线到四线逐级递减。

Yeah. And an important point that they make in this IPO prospectus is not only did they grow like wildfire, but they hooked into a consumer category that all these other ones overlooked. So if you think about the way China has different cities, there's tier one, two, three and four. And so your tier one cities are the ones closest to the big commerce centers, tier four cities are the ones sort of furthest out toward the most rural areas. And, you know, wealth kind of goes down from one to four.

拼多多做的是有效触达三线和四线城市的人群，并且他们还成功吸引了大量女性用户。我记得数据大概是，这些三、四线城市的用户主要是25到35岁的女性。虽然每笔交易的金额不高，但对许多人来说，这是她们第一次接触电子商务。因此，拼多多成了这些顾客进入电商世界的门户，他们的赌注是：看我们与这些用户增长得多快，我们将继续保持快速增长。

Well, what Pindoduo did was they were able to effectively reach people in tier three and tier four cities, And they were able to also reach a dramatically female audience. I think it was something like mostly 25 to 35 year old females in these tier three and four cities. So not a super high dollar amount per purchase, but for many of them, this is the first experience with e commerce. And so Pinduoduo is their gateway for these customers into the e commerce world, and their sort of bet is, look how fast we grew with these people. We're gonna continue to grow quickly.

随着她们开始积累更多购买力，她们会继续从我们这里购物。

And as they start to accumulate more buying power, they're gonna be purchasing from us.

这引出了我们还没谈到的几个重要点。过去几年，围绕拼多多的一个叙事就是将这些更农村的用户带入电商，这确实是事实。但其中有几个有趣的方面，我认为是策略中的亮点。记得他们是从生鲜和杂货起步的，这个应用上购买的大部分商品是日常家庭必需品。想想，谁在做这些购买？

That brings up a couple great points that we haven't touched on yet. And this has kind of been one of the narratives around Pinduoduo for the last couple of years is bringing on these more rural users onto ecommerce and that is definitely true. But there are a couple interesting things about it and I think were brilliant parts of the strategy. So remember where they started with produce and groceries and most of what the items that are being bought on this app are their everyday household essentials. You know, who's doing that?

通常是负责管理家庭的人，在很多情况下是女性，而且很多是有孩子的女性。所以如果你看这个应用的人口统计数据，至少在早期，现在它正在拓宽并渗透到整个经济中，但大约70%的用户是女性。最大的年龄层在25到35岁之间。是的。

It's whoever's kind of managing the household and in many cases that's, that's women and in many cases that's women with children at home. So if you look at the demographics of the app, at least in the earlier days, it's now broadening and penetrating the whole economy. But I think about 70% of the users were women. The biggest age demographic was between 25 and 35. Yeah.

都是家里的年轻妈妈们，用这个应用来节省大量家庭采购开支。

It was all young mothers at home who were using this to like save a lot of money on all of their household purchases.

没错。我们还没提到的另一个重点是，它是浏览导向的，而非搜索导向。想想电子商务，对于你们大多数买东西和听这个节目的人来说，你们会去amazon.com，抱歉，是smile.amazon.com来为你喜欢的慈善机构捐款。你在搜索框里输入你想要的商品，如果没有新冠疫情的话，几乎100%能找到并配送给你，如果不是一天内，就是两天内。

Yep. The other important thing that we haven't touched on yet is that it was browse centric, not search centric. So if you think about e commerce, you know, for most of you who are buying stuff and listening to this show, go you to amazon dot com, sorry you go to smile.amazon.com to donate to your favorite charity. You type in the box exactly the product that you're thinking of and absent there being a coronavirus going on, it's almost a 100% chance it's there and ships to you. If not in one day, then in two.

就像这个世界充满魔力。拼多多的洞察在于，我们会展示人们需要的东西，但我们不会把它做成基于意图的系统。我们只是会以一种蛮力的方式，通过算法随时间推移向人们展示我们认为他们可能感兴趣的东西、可能缺的东西、以及他们朋友在买从而可能影响他们购买的东西。这基本上是一个可以购物的信息流，这是一个完全不同的模式，让他们能够逃脱在我看来完全违背常规的事情——用专业术语来说就是长配送时间。所以当你在拼多多上买东西时，你并没有搜索它。

And like the world is magical. Well, Pinduoduo's insight is, you know, we're gonna feature stuff that people need, but we're not gonna make it an intent based system. We're just gonna show people, you know, at first in a brute force way over time algorithmically, things that we think they'd be interested in, things we think they might be out of, things we think their friends are are buying and thus might influence them to buy. And it's basically a news feed of stuff that you can purchase, which is a totally different paradigm and allows them to get away with something that is a in my mind, a total narrative violation, which is long, to use the phrase, long shipping times. So when you buy something on Pinduoduo, you didn't search for it.

所以这不是你当时立刻需要的东西。而是某种吸引你眼球的东西。你会觉得，哦，好吧，我要买那个。因此他们可以采用便宜得多但耗时更长的配送方式，拥有完全不同的成本结构。作为一名初创企业投资者，我觉得这非常有趣。

So it wasn't something you like immediately needed in that moment. It was something that sort of caught your eye. And you're like, oh yeah, I'll take that. So they can get away with much cheaper shipping that takes much longer and have a totally different cost structure. This is sort of like very interesting to me as a startup investor.

如果你在2016年向我推销时说，嘿，我要创建这个电子商务网站，而且配送需要很长时间。我可能会说，那肯定不行，因为未来是次日达，亚马逊已经改变了世界。事实上，美国的Zulily也有同样的洞察。他们曾一度是一家价值60亿美元的独立零售商，但——

If you had pitched me in 2016 and said, hey, I'm gonna create this e commerce site, and, it's gonna take forever to ship. I'd be like, well that's immediately out because the future is overnight shipping, Amazon has changed the world. In fact, Zulily in The US had the same insight. They at one point were a $6,000,000,000 independent retailer, but that-

被QVC收购了。

Covered by QVC.

对，QVC，总部在西雅图。他们也有同样的洞察：如果他们每天早上只是发出一份可供浏览的优惠列表，那么他们就可以采用长配送时间，因为没有人是基于意图的，也没有人需要他们搜索的东西必须明天就到。我认为与Zulily的类比其实很有趣，因为它的受众主要是女性。主要是关于优惠。但这个联系，我认为是Zulily和拼多多两家公司都有的一个非常有趣的洞察，就是当它是一种基于浏览的体验而非意图驱动时，你就可以采用便宜得多、时间长得多的配送方式。

QVC, yep, Seattle based. They had the same insight that if they just send out a browsable list of deals every morning, then they can get away with long shipping because nobody is intent based and nobody needs that thing that they were searching for immediately tomorrow. And I think the parallels to Zulily are actually interesting because it's a primarily female audience. It's mostly about the deals. But this linkage, and I think it was a very interesting insight that both companies had, Zulily and Pinduoduo, is when it's a browse based experience and it's not intent driven, you can get away with much cheaper, much longer shipping times.

这引出了与之相关的两个细微差别。其一，你知道，Colin和拼多多经常谈论的是它的娱乐价值。我认为，再次强调，尤其是对这个人群而言，你知道，这群人在不同的时代和地点可能会看奥普拉脱口秀，对吧？这和玩这些手机社交游戏的很大一部分人群是重合的。所以这本质上是一款手机社交游戏，只不过你用它来购买家庭杂货。

This brings up two related nuance points on that. One, you know, in that Colin and Pinduoduo talk about a lot is the entertainment value of this. I think again, especially about this demographic, you know, this is the demographic that in a different age and place and time would have, you know, been watching Oprah, right? This is a lot of the same demographic that played and plays these mobile social games. And so this is essentially a mobile social game except you're buying your household groceries with it.

超级有趣。另一个方面，你提到了信息流。这对市场的供应方有非常重要的影响。A，因为他们不需要像你（Ben）提到的那么极致的配送和物流时间，而且就像TikTok一样，这意味着平台上的成功地位不那么固化了。因此，通过拼团机制，卖方的新进入者可以开始突破并获得可观的销量，因为这一切都是由拼多多推送给用户的信息流算法驱动的，而不是像社交媒体中等效的关注模型或YouTube、Twitter等的订阅模型。

Super interesting. The other aspect, you know, you bring up the feed. This has a really important impact for the supply side of the marketplace. A, because they don't need as fantastic, shipping and logistics times as you mentioned, Ben, but also just like TikTok, it means that there's much less entrenched success on the platform. And so new entrance on the seller side, via the team buying mechanic can start breaking through and getting good volumes because it's all driven algorithmically by the feed that Pinduoduo isn't putting in front of users as opposed to, you know, the equivalent in social being the follow model on or subscribe model on YouTube or Twitter or whatnot.

然后TikTok是如何通过‘为你推荐’实现这一点的呢？就是任何优质内容都能脱颖而出。这里的情况也是一样的。

And then how TikTok really ended around that with the for you feed where anybody, any good content could break through. It's the same deal here.

没错。所以平台在流量引导上可以更加有主见。如果你是平台上的供应商，这其实非常非常好。我的意思是，不好的一面在于你无法与观众建立直接联系，所以可靠性较低。但当那个，我不知道怎么说，索伦的‘善眼’？

Right. So the platform can be much more opinionated on where it drives its traffic. And that can be really, really good if you're a supplier on the platform. I mean, it's bad in the sense that you don't get to build that direct connection with audience, so it's less reliable. But when the eye of, I don't know, what's the positive eye of Sauron?

当它青睐你时，可以一下子买走一大堆东西。

When it looks favorably upon you, it can buy a whole bunch of stuff all at once.

想想亚马逊。你在上面卖一种商品类的东西，已经做了很久，有一定规模，产品有一万条评论。

Think about Amazon. You're selling something, a commodity type good on Amazon. You've been on it for a long time. You have a certain scale. You have 10,000 reviews for your product.

一个新进入者想在同一品类和你竞争，但他们只有两条评论，谁会获得大部分购买？这在拼多多上不是问题。在供应端，他们能引导所有这些需求，开始吸引谁？其实是制造商自己。我们在节目前面提到过这一点。

A new entrant wants to come in and compete with you in that same category and they have two reviews, who's gonna get most of the purchases? That's not a problem on Pinduoduo. On the supply side, who do they start attracting with all of this demand that they can channel? It's actually manufacturers themselves. We alluded to this earlier in the episode.

他们最终做到的，我认为让整个经济模式成立的部分原因是，成功的不是分销商、不是零售商、不是在阿里巴巴和京东上销售的传统商家，而是实际的工厂和制造商自己。他们现在不需要任何品牌、分销等等。即使没有品牌，他们也可以直接上拼多多，并且知道这能行得通。所以我认为这是他们在价值链上实现的一次重大压缩。

What they end up doing and I think part of what makes the economics of this whole thing work is it's not distributors, it's not retailers, it's not the traditional people who are gonna sell on Alibaba and JD who are successful on Pinduoduo, it's the actual factories and manufacturers themselves. They now don't need any branding, distribution, anything like that. They can just go direct onto PDD even though they have no brand and know that it's gonna work. And so that I think is a big collapsing of the value chain that they've been able to accomplish.

是的，百分之百。我现在得提前引入一个科技主题，因为我们直接谈到了这一点。我认为整个事情的一大启示是，他们成功地绕过了传统零售商和品牌。通过不仅是完全基于互联网，还基于社交网络，他们能够将那种买家规模、需求规模直接带给品牌，而这通常是零售商该做的事。

Yeah. A 100%. I have to pull forward a tech theme now because we're talking so directly about it. I think like one of the big takeaways from this whole thing is that they successfully disintermediated both traditional retailers and brands. So by not only being entirely internet based, but also social network based, they were able to bring that scale of buyers, of demand directly to the brand, which is normally the job to be done by that retailer.

所以品牌可以大批量地销售给批发商，然后层层分销下去。社交团购模式通过需求聚合，完全取代了零售商的功能。由于去掉了中间商环节，价格可以低得多。但拼多多更进一步，在此基础上创建了一个迄今为止不太注重品牌的市场（今年开始有所改变）。因为他们主要销售家居日用品，这意味着单个制造商可以只大量上架一种自己生产的产品，而不必像品牌那样需要拥有一系列产品线、长期建立客户关系并投入大量营销费用。

So the brand can sort of sell in big chunks to the, you know, their wholesalers, and then it can get chunked down smaller and smaller from there. So the the social buying model takes that sort of aggregation of demand and totally eliminates the job to be done by a retailer. It allows for much cheaper prices because they cut out that middleman. But then Pindoduo takes it even one step further because on top of that they created a marketplace that at least so far hasn't cared that much about brands and is starting to this year. But because they sell basically household commodity things, that means an individual manufacturer can just list a huge quantity of one thing that they make, not a brand that has to have a suite of products and builds that relationship with the customer over time and invest in all this marketing.

因此他们能把价格压得非常低，既消除了零售商环节——因为所有需求都能通过团购自行聚合，又去除了品牌溢价，直接说：嘿，来买这个无品牌商品吧。然后砰的一声，就售罄了。

So like they can drive the price down so far because they get rid of the retailer, because all the demand can be aggregated on its own through the group buying. And then they also get rid of the brand and just say, hey, buy this unbranded thing from this retailer and boom, it sells out.

我认为尤其在早期，平台上很多货源其实直接来自制造商的过剩产能生产线。比如这些代工厂的订单没有被完全填满，所以有多余产能。拼多多开始接触他们，并将这种模式称为C2M（消费者直连制造）。他们去找这些代工厂说：我们能给纸巾、牛仔裤、雨衣、雨伞等产品创造巨大需求。

And I think in the early days especially, a lot of the supply on the platform was actually coming directly from manufacturing lines of manufacturers that just had excess capacity for stuff. Like they weren't booked up enough by whoever their, these contract manufacturers by whoever was using them. So they had some excess capacity. So Pinto Odoo has started going to them and they've now labeled this whole practice, C2M, consumer to manufacturer. They started going to these contract manufacturers and saying, hey, we think we can generate a lot of demand for tissues, for jeans, for raincoats, for umbrellas, whatever.

没错。他们有时还会预售对吧？先创造需求、收取货款，然后再去找制造商说：我们知道你能生产这个，直接做就行。

Yeah. Don't they pre sell stuff sometimes too? Like they even do generate the demand, take the payments, and then I think they go to the manufacturers after that and say, we know you can make this, just make it.

直接做就行，真有意思。他们可能开始这么做了。于是找到制造商说：用你的过剩产能生产这些，我们基本能保证全部售出。

Just make it. That's funny. They may start doing this. And so they go to the manufacturers and they're like, yep, we're pretty sure like you just use your excess capacity on the line, make this stuff, we can pretty much guarantee you're gonna move it.

对，这是积极的一面。消极的一面是——这也是拼多多长期被诟病的问题（近两年尤其严重，虽然他们在积极改进）——存在大量假冒商品。人们购买仿冒大牌的产品，或者代工厂生产不带商标的同类商品在拼多多低价销售。这些弊端迫使拼多多不得不大力投入反欺诈机制，以免损害自身品牌形象。

Yeah. Okay, so this is the positive scenario of that. The negative scenario is and the rip on this company for a long time now, a long time, it's been five years, the rip for the last two years, and I know they're taking lots of steps to address this, has been massive amounts of counterfeiting. And people buying goods that are knockoffs of big brands, or you know, the factories that manufacture stuff for brands are making a few others that are, you know, not putting the nameplate on it and then selling it on Pinduoduo for way cheaper. It comes with these downsides that now Pinduoduo is having to really invest in sort of anti fraud mechanisms in order to not damage their own brand as

没错。而且消费者端也存在大量欺诈行为。这家公司营销费用很高，部分用于广告，但更大比重是优惠券和促销活动。在中国乃至全球都存在非常成熟的优惠券黑产链条，人们通过联盟营销和优惠券欺诈几乎零元购得商品。

a Yep. As a brand. And also, you know, they've also, been a lot of fraud on the consumer side too. In that one of the ways, you know, this company has huge sales and marketing expenses That is certainly advertising that they do, but a big part of it is coupons and promos and deals. And they're very sophisticated coupon hacking rings essentially, in China and everywhere where people are doing affiliate and coupon fraud to pay essentially nothing for items.

是的，这其中确实存在巨大的挑战。但由于这些动态因素，他们成功进入了这个市场——中国的电子商务领域，而这个领域大家都认为已经饱和了。

So yeah, like there's massive challenges associated with this. But because of these dynamics, they've been able to break into this market, e commerce in China, that everybody thought was done.

没错。我们之前稍微聊过IPO的事情。今天我们也谈到了他们打击欺诈行为的努力。还有另一个重要的举措正在推进，那就是进军一线和二线城市。因为拼多多上每件商品的平均交易金额大约是6美元左右。

Yep. You know, we've talked to the IPO a little bit. We're talking a little bit about their efforts today to sort of combat this fraud. There's another big effort today that has been going on which is breaking into these sort of tier one and tier two cities. Because the price per item on Pinduoduo is like $6 or something, the average transaction size.

你把这个数字与任何其他平台比较，不仅是中国还包括美国的可比平台，它都非常低。所以不仅单品价格极低，正如我们讨论过的，拼多多的佣金率也低得惊人。因此他们存在收入问题。

And you look at that compared to any other, not only Chinese but American comparable, and it's super low. So not only is the price per item super low, as we talked about, PDD's take rate is incredibly low. And so they have a revenue problem.

没错。这家公司的商业模式是什么？这是个好问题。即使有很高的GMV，如果只靠0.6%的佣金率赚钱，也很难打造大业务。

Yeah. What is the business model of this company? That's a good question. Hard to build a big business even with lots of GMV if you're only making money on the 0.6% take rate.

但大卫，如果我告诉你只需要10%的收入来自佣金率，而另外90%的收入可以通过其他方式实现呢？

But what if David I could tell you that only 10% of your revenue needs to be from that take rate and you can make 90% of your revenue doing something else?

这听起来很有意思。我们现在讨论的是广告和促销。拼多多建立了一套非常复杂的广告和竞价系统，类似于谷歌、Facebook，实际上也非常类似亚马逊和阿里巴巴，平台上的商家可以付费——重要的是预付费用——以获得在用户信息流中优先展示产品的权利。就像Instagram或Twitter上的赞助帖子一样。正如你所说，这构成了该公司的大部分收入。

That sounds like it could be interesting. Now and so what we're talking about is advertising and promotions. PDD has built out a whole very sophisticated advertising and ad bidding system similar to Google, similar to Facebook, and and actually really similar to Amazon and Alibaba too, where merchants on the platform can pay and importantly prepay for preferential placement in customers' feeds of their product. For sponsored placement, just like sponsored posts on Instagram or Twitter, you know, whatever. And that, as you said, is makes up most of the revenue of this company.

有趣的是，人们认为这是一项重大创新。其实阿里巴巴和亚马逊早就开始做同样的事情了。还有一

Now what's interesting is like people think this is a big innovation. Alibaba and Amazon have been doing the same thing for a long time. There are a

亚马逊上有很多赞助产品。这种商业模式的起源，在某种程度上是分类广告。但在其他方面，则是谷歌。当然，在此之前还有雅虎和Overture。所以你提到的关于亚马逊的那件事其实并不准确。

lot of sponsored products on Amazon. The originator of this business model is, in some ways the classified ad. But in other ways, it's Google. And of course, Yahoo before that and Overture before that. And so the thing that you mentioned on Amazon is interestingly not true.

哦，我说错了

Oh, was wrong

亚马逊基本上花了23年时间才在其电子商务业务上叠加了任何有规模的广告业务。亚马逊的盈利方式是：如果你是第三方卖家，他们会收取约30%的佣金率。当然，如果他们自己是零售商，他们也有自己的利润空间，他们大部分收入是这样来的。我们暂时先不考虑AWS。他们大部分收入是通过这种方式获得的。

It took Amazon basically twenty three years to layer on an advertising business of any meaningful size to their e commerce business. So the way that Amazon makes money is they charge a 30 ish percent take rate if you're a third party seller. And of course they have their own margin that they make if they're the retailer, and they make most of their money. Let's forget AWS for a minute. They make most of their money that way.

嗯，大约只在三、四年前，他们才真正开始有意义地发展广告生态系统，这个系统一直在增长。现在对他们来说，这已经是一个年收入约100亿美元的生意。所以他们正在迅速成为广告生态系统中的主要参与者。

Well, only about three, four years ago did they really start to meaningfully develop an advertising ecosystem that's been growing. It is now about a $10,000,000,000 a year run rate business for them. So they're very quickly becoming a major player in the advertising ecosystem.

这些当然都是赞助搜索结果

And these are of course all the sponsored search results

你在亚马逊上看到的。没错，没错。这在很长一段时间里都不是亚马逊的策略，他们某种程度上是把这笔钱留在了桌面上。让我觉得有趣的是，拼多多当时想：我们在这些交易上不赚钱，所以总得想办法赚钱。

that you see on Amazon. Exactly, exactly. This was not Amazon's play for a long time and they were sort of leaving this money on the table. Fascinating to me that Pinduoduo was like, well, we aren't making money on these transactions. So we got to make it somehow.

在他们业务的早期，他们就开发了赚钱的第二条腿，即通过推广产品盈利。这在中国也更常见。你知道，阿里巴巴长期以来一直在这样做。

Very early in their business, they sort of developed leg number two of the stool to make money on promoting products. It's also more common in China. Know, Alibaba has done this for a long time.

是的，这很有趣。我之前以为亚马逊开始这个项目的时间要早得多，但可能他们实际启动得晚一些。我知道他们在这方面进行了很长时间的试点项目。但真正决定大力投资，我想知道这是否是受到中国正在发生的情况的驱动。

Yep. Which is interesting. I had thought that Amazon started this much earlier than maybe they did. I know they had pilot projects running around this for a long time. But the decision to really invest in it, I wonder if it was driven by observing what's been happening in China.

肯定是这样，因为他们确实加大了油门。从2018年的约40亿美元增长到2019年的100亿美元。所以这是一个增长非常快的业务。哦，

It had to be because they've really put their foot on the gas. It went from something like $4,000,000,000 in 2018 to $10,000,000,000 in 2019. So it's a really fast growing business. Oh,

太疯狂了。我们刚才提到了IPO，实际上规模相当大。他们在IPO中筹集了16亿美元。股票首日上涨了40%，所以比尔·格利对此可能会不高兴。

that's crazy. So we mentioned the IPO a minute ago. It was actually pretty huge. They raised $1,600,000,000 in the IPO. The stock popped 40% on day one, so Bill Gurley would be unhappy about that.

幸运或不幸的是，他在这里并不是投资者。

Fortunately or unfortunately, he wasn't an investor here.

钱给了银行家，钱给了购买IPO配售的人，而私人股东们则留下了桌上的钱。

Money for bankers and money for people who bought the IPO allocation and money left on the table for all the private shareholders.

是的，完全正确。不过科林并没有损失太多。这太疯狂了，他仍然拥有这家公司46.8%的股份。

Yeah. Exactly. Colin wasn't hurting too much though. This is crazy. He still owned 46.8% of this company.

什么？而且它上市了。是的。所以，你知道，我们马上要讨论的这个“Two公司一半”的叙述中会有一个批评点

What? And it went public. Yeah. So, you know, one of the knocks we're gonna get to this in narratives in a minute on this Two company half

是腾讯所持股份的多少倍。

is times what Tencent owned.

是的。所以，对这家公司的一个批评是它们不盈利，亏损巨大。我们稍后会谈到这一点。试想一下，如果这家公司亏损严重，为什么Colin能在大量融资的情况下仍保留如此多的股权？

Yeah. So, one of the knocks on this company is, they're not profitable. Their losses are huge. We're gonna get to that in a minute. Just think about, if this company had huge losses, how was Colin able to retain so much of the equity even though they fundraised a lot?

那是可信的竞争性融资者吗？是的

That Credibly competitive fundraisers? Yes

也是也不是。他几乎拥有公司一半的股份。上市时，这部分股权价值138亿美元，使他成为中国第十二大富豪。再说一次，这家公司基本上是在大约三年前慷慨创立的，实际上更像是两年前。腾讯和红杉都在IPO时买入而非卖出。

and no. So he owned almost half the company. At IPO, that stake was worth $13,800,000,000 making him the twelfth richest person in China. Again, for a company that was essentially founded generously three years before and, like, really two years before that. Tencent and Sequoia both bought into the IPO rather than selling.

它们各自投入约1.5亿美元购买这个理念的股份。现在看来这非常明智。是的，因为过去两年情况相当不错，股价上涨了五倍。

They each put about a 150,000,000 USD to work buying shares in the idea. And that looks brilliant now. Yeah. Because things go pretty well, over the last two years. The stock is up five X.

它们确实突破了1000亿美元的市值。Ben，正如你在介绍中提到的，它们在中国电商市场的份额从2018年IPO时按交易量计算的4%，增长到了现在的14%。这几乎完全是以阿里巴巴为代价的，后者的份额从73%下降到了62%。所以几乎所有这些份额

They did cross a $100,000,000,000 market cap. Ben, as you mentioned in the intro, their share of the e commerce market in China went from they were already at 4% of the e commerce market by transaction volume at IPO in 2018. It is now 14%. That has come almost a 100% at the expense of Alibaba, which went down from 73% to 62%. So almost all of that share

当然，现在两者都在增长。所以这是一个巨大的增长中的蛋糕。但从份额百分比来看，是的，它们确实如此。

Now, of course, they're both growing. So it's a massive growing pie. But yes, they they and from share percentage. Yes.

是啊，太疯狂了。随着股价飙升，拼多多最近因此成为头条新闻，市值突破了1000亿美元。Colin（黄峥）如今成为中国第五大富豪。他曾短暂超越阿里巴巴的马云，哇。

Yeah. Crazy. And with that stock run up, and this is why Pinduoduo has been in the headlines recently, they passed a $100,000,000,000 market cap. Colin became he's now as of today, fifth richest person in China. He briefly passed Jack Ma of Alibaba Woah.

一度成为中国第三大富豪，现在回落至第五位。他是全球第三十大富豪。就在这一切发生时，他

Becoming the third richest person in China. He's now down to number five. He's the thirtieth richest person in the world. And so as all this was happening He's

排在比尔和沃伦之后。

after Bill and Warren.

没错，他正瞄准他们呢。7月1日，他出人意料地宣布将卸任CEO，保留拼多多董事长职务，将CEO一职交给联合创始人兼CTO李琛，李琛从第一家公司起就一直与他共事。他们其实是威斯康星大学的研究生同学。我不确定李琛是否在谷歌全职工作过，但我知道他在谷歌实习过。

Yeah. He's he's gunning for them. On July 1, in a surprise announcement, he announced that he was gonna step down as CEO, remain as chairman of Pinduoduo, hand the CEO role over to his co founder and CTO, Li Chen, who had been with him, I think since the first company. They were actually grad students at Wisconsin together. I don't know if Lee, worked full time at Google, but I know he interned at Google.

所以他们一起在谷歌工作过，一起创办了第一家公司，并一直共同经营所有公司。所以现在的情况非常有趣。

So they worked at Google together and they worked on the first company and all the companies all along. So very interesting what's going on now.

是啊，真令人着迷。等等，David，你得回答那个问题。既然他们亏损了这么多钱，是怎么保住公司这么多所有权的？

Yeah, it's fascinating. Wait, but David, you got to answer that question. So how if they were losing all this money did they manage to preserve so much ownership in the company?

好的，这正好过渡到叙事部分。关于这家公司的核心叙事，我认为一直是：首先，这是一种难以理解的疯狂模式。直到上周做了大量研究，我才完全明白。这提醒我们，GAAP会计准则并不总能反映全貌。所以如果你看净亏损

All right, This is a good transition to narratives. The bare narrative around this company, I think, has been, well, a, this is just a kind of a crazy model, hard to understand. I I didn't understand it at all until doing a lot of research over the last week. This is an interesting reminder that GAAP accounting doesn't always tell the whole story. So if you look at the net losses of

哦，听众朋友们，这期播客内容相当令人兴奋，我们正在讨论的是GAAP会计准则。

this Oh boy, company this is quite an exciting podcast listeners that you're We tuning are talking about GAAP accounting.

好的。如果你看这家公司的净亏损，数额巨大且还在增长。但我发现了一些非常有趣的东西。去看看现金流量表。这家公司在过去三年多里一直有巨额的经营性现金流为正。

Okay. If you at the if you look at the net losses of this company, they're huge and growing. But then I found something really interesting. Go look at the cash flow statement. This company has had huge positive operating cash flow for the last, like, three plus years.

过去三年每年都有超过十亿美元的正向经营性现金流。

Over a billion dollars USD positive operating cash flow each of the last three years.

那是什么？是广告的预付款吗？

What is that? Upfront payments on on advertising?

所以这是商业模式中几个非常精妙的部分。

So it's a couple of things that are just totally brilliant pieces of the model.

让我用通俗的话来说说，其实也是为了我自己理解，然后你可以告诉我是否理解正确。所以有些东西没有被确认为收入，但他们确实收到了现金，这些钱进入了他们的银行账户，让他们处于非常良好的现金状况。尽管在利润表上这些不会显示为收入，因为他们为了某种未来目的而将其递延了。

Let me put something into layman's terms, frankly for myself, and then you can tell me if I'm interpreting this right. So there's something that's not being recognized as revenue, but they are receiving cash for something that gets to be in their bank account and they get to be in this really nice cash position. Even though on their income statement it wouldn't show up as revenue because they're deferring it for some future purpose.

这只是故事的一部分。这里有一个几乎相当于伯克希尔哈撒韦及其GEICO保险业务的等价物，相当于伯克希尔获得的浮存金。当新商家注册加入PDD平台时，他们必须支付相当可观的现金保证金才能入驻平台，这是为了防止欺诈。所以如果有客户投诉，比如类似于退单或者商品问题等，实际上有真正的惩罚措施。为了消除欺诈，这方面一直有很多争议。PDD有一个所谓的10倍规则，即如果商家在平台上销售假冒商品实施欺诈，将被处以商品价值10倍的罚款。他们必须预先支付这笔钱作为保证金。

That is part of the story. So there's an interesting almost kind of equivalent to Berkshire Hathaway and their GEICO insurance business equivalent to the float dollars that Berkshire gets of when new merchants sign up to come on to the PDD platform, they have to pay in a pretty meaningful cash deposit to be on the platform and that's to guard against fraud. So if there are customer complaints, like kind of the equivalent of chargebacks or, you know, kind of for merchandise or whatever, there's actually some real teeth and, there's been a lot of controversy about this in an attempt to eliminate fraud. PDD has what they call the 10x rule that the 10 x the value of the goods gets charged to the merchant as a penalty for committing fraud, for counter putting counterfeit merchandise on the platform. And they have to pay that in upfront as essentially this deposit.

嗯，现金就只是放在那里，对吧？所以如果你看这家公司资产负债表上的受限现金项目，数额巨大。这是其中一个方面，但并非受限现金的唯一来源。记得我们讨论过团队购买交易是如何运作的。当客户点击那个团队购买按钮时，现金会立即从他们的账户转到拼多多，尽管交易最多可能需要24小时才能完成。

Well, cash just sits there, right? And so if you look at the restricted cash line item on this company's balance sheet, it's enormous. So that's one aspect of it, but that's not the only source of restricted cash. Remember we talked about how the team buying deals work. When customers hit that team buying buy button, the cash immediately goes from their account over to PDD, even though the transaction isn't gonna complete for up to twenty four hours.

如果交易根本没有完成，那么钱会退还给客户，但现金仍然会先转到拼多多。

And if the transaction doesn't complete at all, then it gets refunded back to the customer, but the cash still goes over to PDD.

所以他们持有大量不能动用的现金，因为这些钱从未被确认为收入。

So they're holding a bunch of cash that they're not allowed to touch because it didn't ever get recognized as revenue.

没错。然后第三个来源是你提到的本，这是公司的一个现金流来源，即商家为了在信息流中获得赞助展示位而预付广告费，然后这些费用会在设定时间内通过算法分配并计入账户扣除。所有这些，你知道，以拼多多的运营规模来看，最终形成了这种巨大的正现金流周期——用会计术语说是负现金周期，但从现金流角度看是正的，本质上这是他们增长的无息贷款。所以他们现在已经筹集了大量资金并用于

Yep. And then the third source of this is a source of flow for the company is what you mentioned Ben, which is that merchants for advertising for sponsored placement in the feed, they prepay for that advertising and then it gets doled out algorithmically over a set period of time and kinda charged off against the accounts. So all of that, you know, at the scale that PDD is operating nets out to this massively positive or I guess negative cash cycle in accountant speak, but positive in terms of cash flow where it's essentially an interest free loan on their growth. So now they have raised a bunch of money that they've used

等等，他们能用这些钱来推动增长吗？比如如果你有所有这些受限现金？

Wait, can to they spend that on growth? Like if you have all this restricted cash?

它是受限的，但是

It's restricted, but

万一音乐停止了呢？

Like what if the music stops?

嗯，确实如此。如果他们停止增长，那么它就会下降，那部分受限现金将会减少。因为，你知道，资金是可替代的，尽管资金在进出那个受限现金池，但它规模庞大且在增长。所以我认为，就像保险资金流业务一样，虽然沃伦不能动用保险资金流来消费，但它可以被投资，对吧。所以他们将其投入

Well, certainly, right. If they stop growing, then it'll go down to it'll, that restricted cash will go down. Because, you know, money is fungible, even though money's coming in and out of that restricted cash pool, it's large and growing. And so I think kind of just like the insurance flow business where like it's not like Warren can go spend the cash on the insurance flow, but it can be invested Right. So they put and

固定收益或其他东西以获得1%的回报。

in fixed income or something to get 1%.

没错。所以如果你看公司资产负债表上的短期投资，近年来已经大幅、大幅、大幅上升。这甚至还没有算上受限现金。那是他们实际的无限制现金一直在投资，但我认为这是因为他们建立了一个庞大的财务部门，来投资他们拥有的所有这些现金池。

Exactly. So if you look at the short term investments on the company's balance sheet, it's gone way, way, way up in recent years. Then that doesn't even account for the restricted cash. That's their actual unrestricted cash they've been investing, but I assume that's because they've built out like a massive treasury department, to be investing all these pools of cash that they have.

你刚刚描绘了那个叙述的看跌和看涨两面。基本上，看跌的观点是他们在烧钱。你可以将其与美国优步时代那些不惜一切代价增长、非常不盈利的公司相提并论。

You just painted a bear and bull side of that narrative. They're basically like the bear case on it is like that they're just burning cash. You could compare this to the litany of Uber era companies in The US that were growth at all costs, very unprofitable.

更准确地说，是Groupon。

More accurately Groupon.

烧掉

Burning a

一大堆现金

bunch of cash

在销售交易和补贴这些交易的同时进行客户获取。是的。你的意思是他们并没有烧钱。他们虽然有负的经营收入，但实际上现金流表现非常好，确实如此。

on customer acquisition while selling deals and subsidizing those deals. Yeah. And what you're saying is that they're not burning cash. They have negative operating income, but they are actually doing great on cash, literally Yeah.

关于这一点并没有太多报道。但我在查看公司财务报表时发现了这一点。我当时就想，哇，这根本对不上啊。你看利润表，它描绘的公司形象是一回事。

There hasn't been a bunch of coverage about this. But I just found it as I was looking at the company's financial statements. And I was like, woah, this does not add up. You look at the income statement and it paints one picture of the company.

然后你看现金流量表，它看起来完全是另一家公司。我要讲述这个故事的另一方面，那就是由于他们增长如此之快，他们的估值高得惊人。这是一家销售廉价商品的公司，从这些廉价交易中分得的份额并不多。当你看着他们1000亿美元的估值时，这是23倍的营收倍数。要记住，他们的营收只是交易额的0.6%加上广告收入。

And then you look at the cash flow statement and it looks like a totally different company. I will paint the other side of that narrative, which is they are incredibly richly valued because of how fast they grew. So like, this is a company that sells inexpensive items, doesn't get to participate in that much of the transaction for those inexpensive items. And when you look at this, you know, 100,000,000,000 valuation that they have, it's a 23x revenue. Now keep in mind that revenue is just the point 6% of the transaction plus the money that they get from advertising.

所以他们现在的交易倍数是23倍营收。与此同时，京东只有这个值的十分之一，即2.3倍营收。阿里巴巴接近三分之一，为9倍，亚马逊是5倍。与商业模式类似的其他公司相比，你最好相信他们需要继续保持高速增长才能匹配这个估值，这说实话有点可笑，因为他们已经快要赶上阿里巴巴了，而阿里巴巴基本上是中国电商用户数量的上限。或者他们必须在每个用户的货币化方面做得更好。

So 23 times revenue they're trading at. Meanwhile, JD is literally one tenth of that at 2.3 times revenue. Alibaba, close to a third of that at 9x, and Amazon at 5x. And so compared to like other companies with similar business models, you better believe that they're gonna do a whole lot more growing the way that they have done, which frankly feels a little silly because they're already closing in on Alibaba, which is sort of the upper limit of how many users you could have in China buying things. Or they've got to get much better at monetizing each user.

所以他们一直在尝试进入一线和二线城市，而不仅仅是三四线城市。他们在这方面做得很成功。去年年底他们宣布，45%的用户现在来自一线和二线城市。所以他们基本上匹配了中国的人口结构分布。问题在于这是怎么做到的？

And so what they've been doing is trying to move into tier one and tier two cities in addition to this three and four. And they've done that successfully. Toward the end of last year they announced that 45% of users are now in tier one and tier two cities. So they sort of match the breakdown of what the sort of demography in China looks like. And the question is sort of how?

为什么一线和二线城市的人会对这个感兴趣？好吧，这就引入了补贴计划。所以他们现在在平台上列出像iPhone这样的商品，这是一线和二线城市人群感兴趣的东西。但拼多多去找制造商说，嘿，你能以85折的价格上架吗？因为这是我们平台上用户真正期待的折扣。

Why are people in tier one and tier two cities getting interested in this? Well, enter the subsidy scheme. So they're listing things like iPhones on the platform now, and so this is something that people in tier one and tier two cities are interested in. But PDD is going to the manufacturers and saying, Hey, can you list it for like 15% off? Because that's kind of, that's what people really expect on our platform.

制造商们看他们的眼神就像在看疯子。然后拼多多说，好吧，我们来补差价。这就是他们所有现金的去向。

And the manufacturers kind of look at them like they're insane. And then PDD says, Well, we'll cover the difference. And that is where all their cash is going.

是的。所以这就是为什么我知道我们刚才涉及了一些晦涩的会计细节，但这也是为什么我认为看他们的现金流量表如此有趣。没错，他们确实在补贴所有这些。他们实际上把所有钱都花在了客户获取上，但他们在这样做的同时现金流却是正的。即使去年有所有这些补贴，他们还是产生了超过20亿美元的运营现金流。

Yep. And so that's why I know we were in a little bit of arcane accounting details there, but that's why I think this is so interesting looking at their cash flow statement. Yes, they are subsidizing all this. They're effectively spending all of that money on customer acquisition, but their cashflow is positive while they're doing it. Even with all those subsidies last year, they generated over $2,000,000,000 in operating cashflow.

所以如果你从现金流的角度考虑估值，这家公司的交易价格大约是过去12个月运营现金流的50倍。这不算是一个疯狂的估值。

So if you think about the valuation in cash flow terms, this company is trading at, you know, roughly 50x past twelve months operating cash flow. That's not a crazy valuation.

这就是为什么你需要看所有三张财务报表才能真正理解一家公司。有句话怎么说来着，收入是事实，利润是观点？我认为这可以进一步引申，你可以根据你选择的估值方式对一家企业有不同的哲学观点。是的，完全正确。我知道我们在讨论叙事，但我想给听众们保持一点理智，我想做一些公司现状的对比，这样你就能理解它们的规模，京东、淘宝和亚马逊，只是为了理解两者之间的关系。中国的巨头是阿里巴巴，他们在中国的消费者电子商务是天猫和淘宝。

And this is why, you need to look at all three financial statements in order to really understand a company. What's the phrase, revenue is a fact and profit is an opinion? I think that sort of, extrapolates a lot further where you can sort of have a different philosophical viewpoint on a business based on the way that you choose Yep, to value totally. I know we're in narratives, but I want to give, just for listeners to keep a little sane here, I want to give some comparisons between where the company is today, so you understand the scale that they're at, JD, Taobao, and and Amazon, just to sort of understand the relationship between the two. The mega giant in China is Alibaba, and their consumer e commerce in China is, is Tmall and Taobao.

这些平台上的GMV接近1万亿美元。这是亚马逊GMV的三倍。这意味着有1万亿美元的商品或总商品价值通过天猫和淘宝流转。现在他们能从中获取5%作为收入。所以去年在这两个平台上，天猫和淘宝，阿里巴巴实际上实现了500亿美元的收入。

The GMV on those platforms are close to a trillion dollars. That's three x's Amazon's GMV. That is a trillion dollars of goods or gross merchandise value moved through Tmall and Taobao. Now they're able to capture 5% of that as revenue. And so last year on those two platforms, Tmall and Taobao, Alibaba actually did $50,000,000,000 of revenue.

所以阿里巴巴产生了500亿美元的收入，他们非常盈利。他们的营业利润率（不是毛利率）是18%。这有点和阿里云等业务混在一起，因为它不仅仅是零售业务。但我想描绘的是，他们是一个收入巨头，而且非常盈利。现在，如果你把这与拼多多对比，拼多多的GMV是1450亿美元。

So Alibaba generating $50,000,000,000 of revenue, they're very profitable. They have an operating margin, so not gross margin, but operating margin of 18%. This is a little bit mixed up in the Ollie Cloud and all that because it's not just the retail business. But the way I'm trying to paint this is they're a revenue juggernaut and they're very profitable. Now, if you compare that to where we are with Pinduoduo, they have 145,000,000,000 in GMV.

所以他们已经有所突破。我的意思是，这大约是阿里巴巴的六分之一或七分之一，就在过去五年里，他们已经能够做到这一点。但他们的收入只有40多亿美元。这实际上意味着他们只捕获了平台上流转GMV的约3%作为收入，无论是通过这些广告服务的形式，还是他们收取的0.6%的实际佣金。所以我觉得对比这两家企业很有意思。

So like they've made a dent. I mean, that's what one sixth, one seventh something like that of Alibaba just in the last five years, they've come up to be able to do that. But they only do a little over 4,000,000,000 in revenue. And effectively means they're capturing about 3% of all the GMV flowing through the platform as revenue, either in the form of these advertising services or in the actual, you know, 0.6% commission that they get to take. So I just think it's interesting to sort of compare those two businesses.

另一种有趣的对比方式是，拼多多这43亿美元的收入仅占京东收入的5%，但用户数是京东的1.7倍。哇。

The other interesting way to compare, Pindoduo is that this 4,300,000,000.0 in revenue that they do is only 5% of JD's revenue, but with 1.7 times the users. Wow.

是的，这又回到了你之前提到的那个动态，关于平台上商品的平均购买价格和周转速度。

Yeah, it's back to that dynamic that you were talking about earlier of the average purchase price of goods on the platform and velocity.

拼多多拥有4.9亿月活跃用户，相当于一个半美国的用户量。实际上，如果你看小程序上的用户数，他们有6.3亿活跃买家。这是通过任何平台在拼多多上购物的总人数。6.3亿，接近两个美国的规模。

Pindoduo has four ninety million monthly active users. So one and a half America's worth of users. They actually have six thirty million active buyers when you look at the number of people that are on the mini program. This is sort of the sum total of anybody who buys through Pinduoduo through any platform. Six thirty million, so close to two Americas.

你把它和京东比较一下。京东估计有2.9亿月活跃用户，所以大约是拼多多用户的一半。但你知道，他们能产生830亿美元的收入，因为28%的GMV被转化为收入。所以就像，你更愿意成为京东，拥有大约一半的用户吗？

You compare that to like a JD. JD has, an estimated two ninety million, monthly active users. So that's, you know, call it half of Pindoduo's users. But you know, they're able to generate 83,000,000,000 in revenue because 28% of GMV gets captured as revenue. So it's like, would you rather be JD and have like half the users?

还是你更愿意成为拼多多，拥有更多的用户，但看看这里，我们看到的收入只有它的5%？

Or would you rather be Pinduoduo and have, you know, way more users, but like, what what are we looking at here? 5% of the revenue that generates.

是的。最有趣的问题是，就像所有公司的估值一样，它关乎未来，而不是过去。我们认为所有这些用户和交易会发生什么变化，尤其是当拼多多开始更直接地竞争京东、阿里巴巴特别是天猫的标志性用户类型时。

Yeah. The most interesting question is like all, valuations of companies, it's about the future, not the past. And what do we think is gonna happen to all of those users and transactions, especially as Pinduoduo starts trying to compete more directly for the same types of users that JD and Alibaba and particularly Tmall are are their hallmarks.