Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more)

频道: Lenny's Podcast
视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJjl1TwyfWM
原文语言: en
统计: 共 120 轮 · Tony 60 · Lenny 60

[0:00] Tony

You still need humans in the loop. Don't surrender to the machine. We can use the machines, but don't cognitively surrender

你还是得让人留在决策回路里。别向机器投降。我们可以用机器，但别在认知上缴械投降。

[0:05] Tony

because it's so easy to build. The things that stand out are the things that are really well thought through.

正因为东西太好做了，真正能脱颖而出的，恰恰是那些经过深思熟虑、想得特别透的东西。

[0:09] Tony

Today in the AI world, I can just make a prompt and all of a sudden it gets [music] spit out. You're building on a really crusty foundation. You're getting short-term game for very very long-term loss. If you're going to build a real company, can't be throwaway.

在今天这个 AI 时代，我只要写个 prompt，「啪」一下东西就生成出来了。可你是在一个特别糟糕、特别脆的地基上盖楼。你拿到的是短期的爽快，换来的是长得多的长期损失。如果你真要做一家公司，这东西就不能是用完即弃的。

[0:22] Lenny

One of your colleagues, Herman Hower, that ask him how he decides what is worth building.

你的一位同事 Herman Hauser，曾经讲过他是怎么判断什么东西值得做的。

[0:26] Tony

I always start from pain. Are there new technologies to solve that pain? Bring innovation in, revolution [music] in redefine the space.

我永远从「痛点」出发。有没有新技术能解决这个痛点？把创新带进来、把变革带进来，重新定义这个领域。

[0:33] Lenny

What's the threshold? What's a sign of, okay, this isn't big enough?

那门槛在哪儿？什么样的信号会让你判断「好吧，这事儿盘子不够大」？

[0:36] Tony

Oh, the iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations of the iPod before it became [music] successful. You got to fail a few times till you find your way.

嗐，当年 iPod 的盘子就「不够大」。iPod 整整出到第三代才真正成功。你得先失败个几次，才能摸到正确的路。

[0:43] Lenny

You are so into marketing that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all.

你对「营销」这件事投入得特别深，而做产品的人里，恰恰有很多人压根儿就不去想营销这块。

[0:48] Tony

The technology is in service of the customer, not [music] we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat. A customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing. You often come back to [music] the value of storytelling for product builders. Too many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. The why is storytelling. When I watched Steve, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just cuz he had done it a 100,000 times. Today my guest is Tony Fidel. Tony doesn't know this, but ever since I started this podcast, [music] he's been near the top of my wish list of people that I've dreamed to have on this podcast. And that's because Tony [music] is the epitome of what most people listening to this podcast want to become. He co-created some of the most innovative and beautiful and popular products in history, the iPod, the iPhone, the Nest thermostat. He's also famous for being part of the legendary team at General Magic. He's co-authored over 300 patents. He also wrote one of the most important and valuable and inspiring books for builders called Build. Tony is currently an active investor [music] and adviser to deep tech startups with his team at the Build Collective. He was recently named the inaugural designer and residence at the MIT Morning Academy [music] of Design. There's so much gold in this episode. I could go on and on. I'm going to leave it there. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennispodcast.com for a free year of some of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Tony Fidel. Tony, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

技术是为客户服务的，而不是「我们要把技术硬塞进客户的嗓子眼儿」。客户只能透过营销这层镜头去看他所看到的东西。你常常会回到「讲故事」对产品打造者的价值这个点上。太多时候，我们一以技术为导向，就只谈「是什么」，不谈「为什么」。而「为什么」就是讲故事。我亲眼看着 Steve（乔布斯）每天都在打磨 iPhone 的那个故事。所以当你看到他站上舞台，那只是因为他已经把这事儿演练了十万遍。今天我的嘉宾是 Tony Fadell。Tony 自己不知道，但自从我开始做这档播客，他就一直高居我「梦寐以求想请上节目」的名单前列。原因是，Tony 正是这档播客大多数听众想成为的那种人的化身。他参与共同打造了历史上一些最具创新性、最美、也最受欢迎的产品——iPod、iPhone、Nest 恒温器。他还因为是 General Magic 那支传奇团队的一员而出名。他参与署名的专利超过 300 项。他还写了一本对「打造者」们来说最重要、最有价值、也最鼓舞人心的书，叫《Build》。Tony 目前是一位活跃的投资人，带着他在 Build Collective 的团队，为深科技创业公司做投资和顾问。他最近还被任命为 MIT 设计学院的首任「驻校设计师」。这一期里干货实在太多了，我可以一直讲下去，但就先打住吧。在正式开始之前，别忘了去 lennyspodcast.com 看看——那里有全世界最热门、做工最讲究的一批 AI 产品，免费送一年，独家提供给 Lenny's Newsletter 的订阅者。好，下面有请 Tony Fadell。Tony，太感谢你来了，欢迎来到节目。

[2:31] Tony

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

谢谢你请我来，我很感激。

[2:33] Lenny

I have a bazillion questions I want to ask you. I feel like I could fill four hours of conversation with all the things that I want to get out of your head. I want to start with uh with the Blackberry. I was just watching the uh BlackBerry movie recently and it's kind of this journey of the BlackBerry founders and their story and then at the end they were like, "Oh," and this iPhone thing launched and they're like, "No, this is dumb. It's like no keyboard. It's not serious. Can't do anything with it." I've always wondered just being on the other side of this, being within Apple building the iPhone. Uh how much did you guys actually doubt that, okay, maybe they have something, maybe we need to add a keyboard? It was the most heated conversation and it dragged out the longest. There was one one way of looking at the Blackberry which was that is the market we want to go after and we want to win. And then there's the other side the flip side of that argument which is only 1% or 2% of mobile phone users at the time had a Blackberry, knew what a Blackberry was. So what about the other 98% of the people? What would they want? What would they need? Why are we going to go after winning this this very loyal and and and you know um incredibly passionate user base and try to pull them away from something? And so there was this basically head-to-head competition between a display keyboard or a virtual keyboard and a physical keyboard. I had been doing virtual keyboards for a while since General Magic in in the 90s and I knew what handwriting was and and keyboards were like on these touchcreens and but I was only doing it on a um I was writing software and calibrating them making trying to make them work with a single touch uh display resistive or what have you. And so I knew what the limitations were of those kinds of things. So I was like, "This is really going to be difficult." And we hadn't, you know, multi-touch was just, you know, was on a big pingpong table. It like it hadn't been scaled down. So it wasn't like something in a consumptive form where you could really do user tests with it. And so we set out a set of tests like, okay, how fast can I type this text? How can I how fast can I do this on a hardware keyboard? And then how can we do this on the virtual one with multi-touch? And it was a hardware software integration challenge of how we could get this to work. So we were going back and forth and back and forth. Oh that doesn't quite work in the software. Oh we need to change this in the hardware. And so this was a over a set of months would okay the hardware keywords here you know and depends on how pro you know how much you've been using it but it there's this margin error and we could really understand it. This over time was started way down here and it started to get it, you know, and it got a little faster and a little faster and a little faster and how many errors, not just how fast, but how many errors and how do you correct the errors and all of those things and at the end of the day I was able to convince myself it wasn't going to be a hardware issue. And I was convinced at some point that we were good enough. Were we as good as a hardware keyboard? No. But were we good enough? Yes. And then other people came to that conclusion. But at the same time there were other people who were adamant that the hardware keyboard has to be there and they were unrelenting. And so it came down to so this was a you know classic like I I say in build the data versus opinion-based decision. And if you think about it you had data that said there was pros and cons on both sides and what happened was the data was not clear that we should choose one over the other. And Steve said, "We are going this way." Enough other people kind of said, "Yeah, that seems like that's the right thing to do. We're going to get close enough to get there." And then other people were like, "No, my opinion is this." And guess who wins at the end of the day? Steve Jobs opinion does. And he was like, "If you're not going to get on board, get out of this room and you can go work on another project, but you're not going to work on this."

我有一大堆问题想问你，感觉光是想从你脑子里掏出来的东西，就够聊四个小时。我想从黑莓（BlackBerry）说起。我最近刚看了那部《黑莓》电影，讲的差不多是黑莓几位创始人的历程和他们的故事，到结尾时他们大概是那种反应——「哦」，然后 iPhone 这玩意儿发布了，他们说：「不行，这太蠢了，连键盘都没有，根本不正经，啥也干不了。」我一直很好奇，站在另一边、身在 Apple 内部做 iPhone 的你们，当时到底有多少次真的动摇过——「会不会他们说得对，也许我们得加个键盘？」——那是争得最激烈、也拖得最久的一场讨论。看待黑莓有一种视角是：那就是我们想去拿下、想去赢的市场。而另一种、也就是反过来的视角是：当时手机用户里只有 1% 到 2% 的人有黑莓、知道黑莓是什么。那剩下那 98% 的人呢？他们会想要什么？需要什么？我们为什么非要去抢这一群极其忠诚、极其狂热的用户，硬把他们从他们认的东西上拽过来？于是这基本上就变成了一场正面对决：屏幕键盘（也就是虚拟键盘）对阵物理键盘。我从 90 年代在 General Magic 那会儿就一直在搞虚拟键盘，我懂手写识别是怎么回事，也懂在那种触摸屏上做键盘是什么感觉，不过当时我只是在写软件、做校准，想让它们在单点触控的显示屏上能用——电阻式之类的。所以那些东西的局限我心里很清楚，我当时就想：「这真的会很难。」而且我们那时候多点触控还只是个摆在大乒乓球桌上的东西，还没缩小到能装进消费级形态里、能真正拿去做用户测试。于是我们设计了一组测试：好，我打这段文字能打多快？在硬件键盘上做这个能做多快？换成多点触控的虚拟键盘又能多快？这其实是个软硬件一体化的挑战——怎么把它做成。所以我们就来来回回、反反复复地折腾。哦，这在软件里不太行；哦，那硬件这块得改。就这样跨了好几个月。好，硬件键盘大概是这个水平，当然这也取决于你有多熟练、用了多久，但它有个误差区间，我们能把它摸得很透。虚拟键盘一开始水平远在底下这儿，然后慢慢上来了，一点点变快、一点点变快、再一点点变快——而且看的不只是多快，还有出多少错、怎么纠错，所有这些都要看。到最后我说服了自己：这不会卡在硬件上。某个时刻我确信我们已经「够好」了。我们做到和硬件键盘一样好了吗？没有。但够好了吗？够了。然后其他人也陆续得出了同样的结论。可与此同时，还有另一拨人死咬着「必须得有物理键盘」，寸步不让。所以这就归结到——这是我在《Build》里讲的一个经典例子：基于数据的决策，对阵基于观点的决策。你想想，你手上的数据告诉你：两边各有各的利弊，而数据并没有清楚到能告诉你该选哪一个。这时候 Steve（乔布斯）说：「我们就走这条路。」足够多的人差不多都点头：「嗯，听起来这是对的，我们能做到足够好。」然后另一拨人还是：「不行，我的看法是这样。」那你猜到头来谁说了算？是 Steve Jobs 的看法说了算。他就一句话：「如果你不打算上这条船，那就走出这间屋子，你可以去做别的项目，但这个项目你别干了。」

[6:41] Lenny

This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Verscell, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by work OS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single signon, skim, arbback, audit, logs, and other features required by large companies. Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SAS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand [music] up market ends up working with Work OS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are seedstage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit works.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. Work OS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to works.com to make your app enterprise ready today. One direction I want to get into here is this idea that you'll talk a lot about about uh micromanaging being actually really uh important and powerful. So, there's this image that's floating around Twitter that I don't know if you've seen. I'll show it on the screen as I'm describing it and hopefully you can visualize it. It's a functional system versus a dysfunctional system. basically a company that's doing great versus not great and there's this chart that goes up to more functional that is uh basically unkind truth and then another unkind truth another unkind truth creates more functional systems uh kind lie followed by kind lie followed by kind lie leads to dysfunctional systems something Steve Jobs is very famous for you in your book you talk about missiondriven are actually really you want you want a mission driven there are certain types of that are great talk about just the importance of somebody being very direct in what it takes to build great products.

本期节目由我们本季的冠名赞助商 WorkOS 带来。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Vercel、Replit、Sierra、Clay，以及其他几百家在各自赛道里胜出的公司，有什么共同点？它们背后都跑着 WorkOS。如果你在做面向企业级的产品，你一定体会过那种痛——要去对接单点登录（SSO）、SCIM、基于角色的访问控制（RBAC）、审计日志，以及那些大公司必然会要求的一堆功能。WorkOS 把这些「成交拦路虎」变成了即插即用的 API，背后是一套专为 B2B SaaS 打造的现代开发者平台。我投的创业公司里，但凡开始往中大型客户市场扩张的，几乎全都最后用上了 WorkOS。原因很简单：它们就是做得最好。无论你是想拿下第一个企业客户的种子轮初创，还是正在全球扩张的独角兽，WorkOS 都是「变成企业级就绪、打通增长瓶颈」的最快路径。它本质上就是「企业级功能版的 Stripe」。去 workos.com 上手，或者直接去他们的 Slack——那儿有真正的工程师在线等着回答你的问题。WorkOS 让你能凭借一套用着舒服的 API、详尽的文档和顺滑的开发体验，把东西做得更快。今天就去 workos.com，让你的应用变成企业级就绪。我想往一个方向聊一聊，就是你常讲的一个观点——「微观管理」其实非常重要、也非常有力量。Twitter 上现在流传着一张图，不知道你看过没有，我边描述边把它放到屏幕上，希望你能在脑子里想象出来。它讲的是「健康的系统」对比「失灵的系统」——基本就是一家做得很棒的公司 vs 一家做得很糟的公司。图里有条线一路往「更健康」走，是先一条「不中听的真话」，再一条不中听的真话，再一条不中听的真话，累积起来就造就了更健康的系统；而「中听的谎言」接「中听的谎言」再接「中听的谎言」，最终导向失灵的系统。Steve Jobs 就以这个出名。你在书里也讲到「使命驱动」其实非常重要——你想要的是使命驱动型（的人），有那么几类这样的人是顶尖的。聊聊这件事吧：有一个人愿意在「做出伟大产品到底需要什么」这件事上极其直接，这有多重要。

[8:42] Tony

When you're doing a 1.0 of anything, when you're doing if you're doing anything that matters and it's a 1.0 and it's a new category or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before, you have very few analoges that you can use to make datadriven decisions. And so if most of your decisions are going to be opinion-based decisions for a 1.0, No, you have to have one or two or a very very small set of people who are charged with making the opinion-based decisions and can actually get you from point A to from a a white paper, you know, white blank blank sheet of white paper, whiteboard to an actual 1.0 spec. Because if you try to do datadriven decisions all the way along, you're you're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing or you're just getting just data, right? So you're going to have to figure out how to get opinion-based decisions to happen. And that means you have to have, you know, for lack of a better word, taste makers. This is what we are doing. We are the the person or the team who is going to make those opinion-based decisions. Of course, some people aren't going to like it. And it's be like, I'm sorry. This is a benevolent dictatorship. This is what's going to happen and this is the vision and we don't know what we don't know until we ship it and we get opinions from the, you know, the the the users. Now, it's very different when you do this on a in a B2B context versus a B TOC context. And so the hardest environment to work within when when you have these opinion based decision is in a BTOC context because you have to see these decisions in the full light and you don't consumer does they have to see it in from the marketing from how they discover it in the marketing the key uh the key feature sets the the ability to use the product all of these different things for them to actually come up with an opinion of what they like and what they don't like and being able to critique it and if you don't and if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen you're not going to get that from consumers ever. You have to ship it and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness so that when they do the evaluation and they spend their own money then you're getting real feedback when it comes to consumer hard atomsbased products with services or not whatever it is you have to build the entire thing and visualize the entire thing to be able to make those uh uh opinion-based decisions and so you need a small team who's looking at the marketing angles the engineering angles, the the sales angles, all those different things to go, okay, that's the way we're going. And there's only so many ways you can do it because the rest of the team doesn't see this either. And so you have to be very articulate about how what that opinion-based decision is made for, why, how it might affect market, how you do it, and make sure the team understands it. Now, if the team is just fully against it, well then maybe it has to be unkind. But hopefully if you've done a good job and you really you know have an informed gut and you can articulate that you can get everybody moving in the same direction even if it is and it's going to be risky right you got to know they got to take risk because most people in those other functions they don't want to take any risks and so there's someone who's got to be the target right and today you know in many contexts people go and hire consultants right they go and hire okay we're going to do a user study or we're going to do all this and they don't have the user study doesn't have the full context like I was just describing. They don't go buy the product and they don't what have you and then they get data and that's because the leader or whoever's in there board maybe it's like we need data to make sure this 1.0 is going to be a success. And I saw this so many times at all these major corporations. So they're just kind of covering their ass with data and not really doing the hard work of saying I'm going to make this decision and we are going to select this and yes I might be wrong or we as the opinion-based decision makers are wrong and we will correct it later and we'll take the heat for that. So that's the you know a great product manager a great person who's leading this thing has to understand that's that's what they have to do if they're really doing something innovative. So what I'm hearing here is just the power especially in a consumer product of a singular vision of a singular leader that drives it that is basically relies on their instinct and their taste and their experience and and and a lot of and but a again a lot of informed judgment from all the experts around asking questions refining prototyping these kinds of things to then make a decision. So it's not just like I woke up one morning and you know this is you know now it's we're going this direction. No, it's it there's a lot of work to get to get there.

当你在做任何东西的 1.0、当你在做任何「要紧的事」、而且它是个 1.0、是个全新的品类、是个世界还没见过的新设备时，你能拿来做「数据驱动决策」的可参照物（analog）极少。所以如果一个 1.0 里你的大部分决策注定是基于观点的决策，那你就必须有一个、两个，或者一小撮人被授权去做这些基于观点的决策，并且真能带着你从一张白纸——你知道，一张空白白板——走到一份真正的 1.0 规格。因为如果你从头到尾都想靠数据驱动决策，那你要么做不出有差异化的产品（因为你的数据是从别的东西那儿搬来的），要么你拿到的就只是一堆数据，对吧？所以你必须想清楚，怎么让基于观点的决策真正发生。这意味着你得有——找不到更好的词，就叫「品味担当」（taste makers）吧。「这就是我们要做的，我们就是那个人、那支团队，由我们来拍那些基于观点的板。」当然，有些人会不喜欢。那我也只能说声抱歉——这是一个「仁慈的独裁」。事情就这么定，这就是愿景，而我们在把它发出去、从用户那儿拿到反馈之前，本来就「不知道自己不知道什么」。现在，在 B2B 场景下做这件事，和在 B2C 场景下做，是非常不一样的。当你要拍这些基于观点的板时，最难干活的环境就是 B2C，因为你必须让这些决策在「完整的光照下」被看见——消费者就是这样，他们必须从营销里、从他们怎么发现这个产品、到那些关键功能集、到产品好不好用，所有这些维度一起看，才能真正形成「我喜欢什么、不喜欢什么」的判断，才能去批评它。而如果你不这么做、又是在做一个世界从没见过的 1.0，那你永远别指望从消费者那儿拿到这种反馈。你必须把它发出去，必须把整套生态都搭起来，让消费者在「完整状态」下看见它，这样当他们真去评估、真掏自己的钱时，你拿到的才是真反馈。落到消费类、那种硬件原子级、带不带服务都算的产品上，不管它是什么，你都得把整件东西做出来、把整件东西可视化出来，才有可能做出那些基于观点的决策。所以你需要一支小团队，去同时盯着营销的角度、工程的角度、销售的角度，所有这些不同的角度，然后说：「好，我们就这么走。」而且能走的路其实就那么几条，因为团队里其他人也同样看不到这个全貌。所以你必须把话讲得非常清楚：那个基于观点的决策是为什么而拍的、为什么、它可能会怎样影响市场、你打算怎么做，并且确保团队都理解到位。当然，如果团队就是铁了心全员反对，那也许就只能「不中听」一回了。但但凡你前面功课做得好、真有那种「被充分喂养过的直觉」、又能把它清楚地讲出来，你就能让所有人朝同一个方向动起来——哪怕这事儿有风险，对吧。你得明白，他们得去冒这个险，因为其他那些职能里的大多数人都不愿意冒任何风险，所以总得有个人来当那个靶子，对吧。而今天，你看，在很多场景里，人们的做法是去请咨询公司，对吧——去请人，「好，我们做个用户调研」「我们做这做那」——可他们那个用户调研，并不具备我刚才描述的那种完整上下文。受访者并没有真去买这个产品、没有怎么样怎么样，然后就攒出一堆数据。之所以这样，是因为那个领导，或者董事会里那位，心态大概是：「我们需要数据，来确保这个 1.0 一定会成功。」这种事我在那些大公司里见过太多次了。说白了，他们只是在用数据给自己「擦屁股、留后路」，而没真去干那件最难的事——「我来拍这个板，我们就选这个，是的，我可能会错，或者我们这些拍板的人会错，那我们之后再改、那口锅我们来背。」所以一个真正出色的产品经理、一个真正在带这件事的人，必须明白：如果你真在做某种创新的东西，这就是你必须扛起来的事。

[13:28] Lenny

I want to come back to the idea of micromanaging which a lot of people like to a lot of people that word is is bad and don't be a micromanager. You advocate for for creating great products. You need to actually be really micromanaging. Just speak to that. What people you think miss about the importance and power of micromanaging as a as a leader.

所以我从你这儿听到的，正是——尤其在消费类产品里——「一个人的单一愿景」的力量：一个核心领导者去驱动它，本质上靠的是他的直觉、他的品味和他的经验，再加上大量、大量来自身边所有专家的「被充分喂养过的判断」——不断地提问、不断地打磨、做原型，诸如此类——然后才去拍这个板。所以并不是「我某天早上一睁眼，呐，就这么定了，我们往这个方向走」。不是的，要走到那一步，背后是大量的功夫。

[13:46] Tony

You know, we've heard the term sweat the details. It's micromanagement of certain details and then there's the kind of hands off of other details. You have to really understand the blend of which things really matter, which things don't. When I was early on my career, I thought everything mattered and I drove everybody nuts, drove myself nuts, the people hated like and you know the and it became my it became like everybody's got to do it the way I would do it. It's like no no no no there's only a few key things mostly for the customer or maybe some certain things from manufacturing or cost or something where it needs to really be very clear or a long-term vision but then you can delegate other things but certain pieces of it you really need to and when I mean micromanage it means micromanage the decision not necessarily the operations of doing it making sure you're getting the data like we did with the keyboard on the iPhone to make sure we're getting the right data to help us get the informed gut to make that opinion-based decision. And so, so it's it's the the the the micro specification and delivery of those certain data pieces that you need. And and maybe it's also to get out of a crisis. Or maybe it's a it's a system level thing where you have to worry about this thing at the low level changing up here and here and like like we could do that but only if they do this and this is like okay guys we're going to fix all of those things at once and you have to micromanage it because everybody wants to find excuses why they can't do that or they can't do that. So you have to ask why a lot. So it just and but it's all in service of some really key detail that needs to get delivered or some innovation that needs to be delivered. Just like like I said the keyboard, we had to do the hardware, we had to do the software, we had to do the fil filtering, you know, we had to do how it was how the graphics were done on the screen. So you had all of these layers that had to keep constantly changing and adjusting and and and sometimes you have to micromanage that because there's just too many variables and someone has to be the orchestrator of this of this huge orchestra of many different components to kind of make it all come together and be harmonious.

我想回到「微观管理」这个话题——很多人一听这个词就觉得它是坏的，「别当个事无巨细的微观管理者」。可你却主张，要想做出伟大的产品，你恰恰需要真的去微观管理。就这点讲讲吧：你觉得人们在「微观管理作为一名领导者的重要性和力量」这件事上，普遍误解了什么？

[15:57] Tony

I want to go in a slightly different direction. I want to talk about the Nest

你知道，我们都听过一句话叫「死磕细节」（sweat the details）。这就是对「某些」细节的微观管理，同时对「另一些」细节则要放手。你必须真正搞清楚这中间的配比——哪些东西是真要紧的、哪些其实无所谓。我职业生涯早期，以为「什么都要紧」，结果把每个人都逼疯了，也把自己逼疯了，大家都烦透了……到后来就变成：「所有人都得照我会做的方式去做。」其实不对、不对、不对——真正关键的就那么几件事，大多是为了客户，也可能是制造、成本之类需要拎得特别清楚的某些点，或者是某个长远愿景；除此之外的事你完全可以放权下去。但某些环节你确实需要亲自抓——而我说的「微观管理」，指的是微观管理「那个决策」，未必是去管「执行它的具体操作」。是要确保你拿到了数据——就像我们在 iPhone 键盘上做的那样——确保我们拿到了对的数据，来帮我们养出那种「被充分喂养过的直觉」，去拍那个基于观点的板。所以它指的是对「你所需要的某些特定数据片段」的那种微观层面的界定和交付。也可能它是为了把你从一场危机里捞出来。也可能它是个系统级的事儿——你得操心某个底层的东西一动，上面这儿、那儿都会跟着变，就像……「我们是可以那么改，但前提是他们得先做这个、做那个」，于是你就得说：「好，各位，我们要把这一堆事儿一次性全修好。」这时候你就得微观管理，因为每个人都想找借口，说他们为什么做不了这个、做不了那个。所以你得不停地问「为什么」。但归根结底，这一切都是为了某个真正关键、必须交付出来的细节，或者某项必须实现的创新。就像我刚说的键盘那样——我们得搞定硬件，得搞定软件，得搞定那套（误差）过滤，得搞定屏幕上图形是怎么呈现的。你面对的是这么多层，全都得不停地变、不停地调、再调，有时候你就必须去微观管理它，因为变量实在太多了，总得有个人来当这支「由众多不同声部组成的庞大乐团」的指挥，把它们捏合到一起、奏成一曲和谐。

[16:00] Lenny

the thermostat I'm assuming.

我想换个稍微不一样的方向，我想聊聊 Nest——

[16:01] Lenny

Thermostat. Yeah. What versus what the bird a right I

我猜是那个恒温器吧。

[16:08] Tony

Yeah. Uh, man, the uh smoke alarm is is that discontinued by the way the smoke alarm. Yeah, I just you just what do you why you want to stab me in the heart like a go?

恒温器，对。怎么，难不成你想聊那个……（指别的产品）对吧，我——

[16:19] Lenny

That was one of the toughest products I and our team and Nest and other people who were on the have ever made their life cuz it's so hard to make something like that. That's there's so many constraints like that's an ultimate constraint kind of product to actually innovate in. So yes, it unfortunately is discontinued, but it was the best product in the space for a decade and no one changed it. No one invested in it. It's it is so crazy. It's It like pains me and it pains everyone. People like they're expiring around me. What do I do? And I'm like, I wish I could tell you there's something better. No one replaced it with something better. I It's It's mindboggling that the number one product with revenue and everything, you're just going to toss it away. Why do you think that's happening?

对……唉，老兄，那个烟雾报警器——对了，那玩意儿是不是已经停产了，那个烟雾报警器。是啊，你这是……你干嘛非要这样捅我心窝子，跟个……

[17:04] Tony

Because it was an orphan.

那是我、还有我们团队、Nest 以及当时参与的其他人这辈子做过最难的产品之一，因为要做出那样的东西真的太难了。它有那么多约束，简直是那种「约束被拉满」的产品，你居然还得在里头搞创新。所以是的，它很遗憾地停产了，但它在那个品类里整整十年都是最好的产品，没人能改进它，没人愿意往里投。这太疯狂了。它……真的让我心痛，也让所有人心痛。身边总有人跟我说他们家那台快到期了，「我该怎么办？」我只能说：真希望我能告诉你有更好的替代品。可没人拿更好的东西去替代它。这……简直匪夷所思——一个收入和各项数据都是第一的产品，你说扔就扔了。你觉得这是为什么会这样？

[17:06] Lenny

It's an It's just not a big enough business within Google.

因为它成了个「没人管的孤儿」。

[17:09] Lenny

No, no, it was Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was a stepchild. They You really had to pour a lot of love, a lot of a lot of attention, a lot of love to make something that was that crystallin and and it had to be wellformed and nobody really wanted to put in the effort. So, they probably like, "Who want to do this? Who who's excited by it?" Nobody was probably excited and they just said, "Yeah, okay, we'll just it's not that big a deal in the end of the day where if it was invested in, I think it would have been a critical piece of the next generation AI assistant in your home."

它在 Google 内部就是块盘子不够大的业务。

[17:42] Tony

I want to hear more about that. And just on the smoke alarm point, I my favorite feature. I was at an Airbnb once and it just started instead of just like straight to beeping. It was just like I'm about to make a loud noise like [laughter] it's just warning you that it's going to get we call it.

不不，它确实……对，就是这样，它就是个「拖油瓶继子」。你真的得倾注大量的爱、大量的关注、大量的爱，才能做出那么晶莹剔透、那么打磨到位的东西，可没人真愿意下这份功夫。所以他们大概就是那种心态：「谁想干这个？谁会为它兴奋？」——大概没人兴奋，于是他们就说：「行吧，反正到头来这也不是多大的事儿。」可要是它当初被好好投入，我觉得它本会是你家里「下一代 AI 助理」中至关重要的一块。

[17:59] Lenny

I love that feature so much. It's like it's about to get very loud. Thank you for telling me.

这个我想多听听。先说回烟雾报警器那点——那是我最喜欢的一个功能。有次我在一个 Airbnb，它不是「啪」一下直接就开始尖叫，而是先（柔声）提示：「我马上要发出一声巨响啦」——（笑）就是先警告你，它要响了，我们管这个叫……

[18:04] Tony

Oh, it's so good. [laughter] You know, it's so you don't get PTSD every time because you know when a smoke alarm go well, you're like, "Okay, everyone calm. We're going to do this now." Especially when we're doing tests and stuff. We're like, you know, when we're because people are supposed to test it or are supposed to test itself like, you know, like everyone stay calm. It's going to be good, children. Just we got to do this one thing and we'll get through it. Don't worry.

我太喜欢那个功能了。就像是「它马上要变得非常吵啦」。谢谢你提前告诉我。

[18:28] Lenny

That's so good. I was like, thank you so much for telling me.

哦，那功能太棒了。（笑）你知道吗，正因为这样，你就不会每次都被吓出 PTSD（应激阴影），因为你心里有数——烟雾报警器一响，你就能（淡定地）「好，大家都冷静，我们现在就来处理这事儿」。尤其是我们做测试那会儿。我们就会，你懂的，因为人是该去测它的、或者它要自检嘛——「大家都保持冷静，会没事的，孩子们，我们就把这一件事做完，挺过去就行了，别担心」。

[18:30] Lenny

There was a lot of love and care poured in that thing.

那功能真是太棒了，我当时就想：太谢谢你提前告诉我了。

[18:32] Lenny

So, I was going to ask specifically about the Nest. Like the Nest thermostat is still the best thermostat out there. I use it everywhere I go. It's just the best. The app hasn't evolved. Nothing's changed for a long time. Is it the same reason you just described? It's just not a priority. Step in the heart.

我本来是想专门问问 Nest 的。比如说，Nest 恒温器到现在依然是市面上最好的恒温器，我走到哪儿都用它，就是最好的。可那个 App 一直没什么进化，很久都没什么变化了。是不是就你刚才说的那个原因——它压根儿就不是个优先级？又捅我一刀。

[18:46] Tony

Yeah. You know, the the whole organization was a stepchild for whatever reason. You know, there was cultural mismatch. There was, you know, probably a business mis mismatch. Um, I think if Nest was uh around and alive today like it was, it would have a whole different thing when like Google and Gemini and Google IO was what yesterday or the day before. Um, you know, it would have been one of I think some of the centerpieces of what you could do because AI needs context. AI needs a lot of context and in a home you want to make everything very seamless. Um, and the way you get best context is by having sensors properly placed around the home that don't necessarily invade privacy, but allow you to pick up a lot of comingings and goings and who's who in the room and your voice and these kinds of things. Uh, audio I should say, not voice. Um, to be able to give AI's context so that you can have a anywhere assistant that really knows what's going on.

对。你知道，整个那块组织不知道为什么，就一直是个「拖油瓶继子」。当中有文化上的错位，也大概有业务上的错配。嗯……我觉得，如果 Nest 像当年那样在今天还活蹦乱跳地存在着，那会是完全不一样的局面——你看 Google、Gemini，还有 Google I/O 不就是昨天还是前天的事嘛。嗯，它本会是「你能用它做什么」当中我认为的几大核心亮点之一，因为 AI 需要上下文。AI 需要大量的上下文，而在一个家里，你希望把一切都做得非常无缝顺滑。嗯，而你拿到最好上下文的方式，就是在家里恰当地布置好传感器——这些传感器不必侵犯隐私，但能让你捕捉到大量的「谁来了谁走了」、屋里有谁、谁是谁，以及你的声音之类的东西。呃，我应该说是「声响」，不是「人声」。嗯，把这些上下文喂给 AI，这样你就能拥有一个真正懂得当下正在发生什么的「随处可用的助理」。

[19:48] Lenny

Is there space for someone to launch the new Nest, do you think?

你觉得现在还有空间让人去做一个新的 Nest 吗？

[19:51] Tony

Oh, for sure. For sure. People keep asking me what are you gonna get? It's like, no, absolutely. It's now's the I now's the time if it isn't already happening. I'm actually getting business plans of people who are like, hey, you know, is this interesting to you? Want to invest in it? You want to come and help us, you know, build it? This is like Nest 2.0. So, you know, they're trying to do stuff like that at ring. I don't think very, you know, it not very privacy focused, but that's what they're trying to do. That was our vision in the beginning to tell you the truth. That's how we we were like, you're going to need lots of context because we remember we the Nest learning thermostat wasn't the Nest AI thermostat. It could have been called that, but we couldn't call it that in 2011 because people would have freaked out. Now you would have called it the Nest AI thermostat, right? And people would have bought it. Um, and so we knew what AI was, right? So since 2010, that was one of the predication piece foundational pieces of the company was AI. And so that's how we were able to do a lot of the things we were able to do. But it was much you know obviously not LLMs but smaller stuff and we said okay we can see this world growing and this AI assistant then voice assistance came then then there was Alexa and all that stuff that happened later on in 2013 145 it's like okay and that was gen one but we could see this kind of blossoming and you know unfortunately in the fullness of time it takes 15 years more uh you know from the time Nest launched um for that vision to come to fruition. But it is there now and it and if Nest was if we pitched it that way, we were just too we were just too early.

当然有，肯定有。老有人问我打算入手什么，我说，绝对的，现在就是时候，如果还没人在做的话。其实已经有人拿着商业计划书来找我了，说『嘿，你对这个感兴趣吗？想不想投点钱？要不要来帮我们一起做？』这就是 Nest 2.0 嘛。Ring 那边也在试着搞类似的东西，不过说实话他们不怎么注重隐私，但他们想做的就是这个方向。老实跟你讲，这本来就是我们最初的愿景。我们当时就想，你会需要大量的上下文信息，因为你想想，Nest 学习型恒温器其实并不叫 Nest AI 恒温器。它本来可以叫那个名字，但 2011 年我们不能这么叫，因为大家会吓坏的。换到现在你就会把它叫做 Nest AI 恒温器了，对吧？而且大家会买账。所以我们当时是懂 AI 的，对吧？从 2010 年起，AI 就是这家公司最底层的奠基性预判之一。正因如此，我们才能做成很多别人做不到的事。当然那时候明显还不是 LLM，是更小的东西，但我们当时就说，好，我们能看到这个世界在生长，这个 AI 助手——然后语音助手出现了，接着 Alexa 之类的都来了，那都是 2013、14、15 年之后的事了。那算是第一代，但我们能看到这东西在慢慢开花。可惜的是，从 Nest 发布算起，要让那个愿景真正结出果实，前前后后花了 15 年甚至更久。但现在它确实就在那儿了。当年 Nest 如果按那套说法去讲，我们只是太早了，纯粹是早了。

[21:24] Lenny

Let me follow this thread around how to know what what to build and what how you come up with ideas. So I emailed a bunch of people that know you asked them what to ask you. Uh one of your colleagues, Herman Herman Hower. Hermon.

我想顺着这条线接着聊——怎么知道该做什么、你的点子是怎么冒出来的。我提前给一堆认识你的人发了邮件，问他们我该问你什么。你的一位同事，Herman Hauser……是叫 Hermon 吗。

[21:36] Tony

Oh, Herman Hower. Yeah.

哦，Herman Hauser，对。

[21:37] Lenny

Herman Hower. So his question he wanted me to ask you. He said, "Ask him how he decides what is worth building."

Herman Hauser。他想让我替他问你的问题是：『问问他，他怎么判断什么东西值得去做。』

[21:43] Tony

Okay. Well, Herman's I've known Herman since 1987, probably before any most of your listeners were even born, but Herman, just for context, Herman was the creator of Acort computer, which was the Apple 2 of the UK back in the 70s. And then he created uh with his team the ARM processor. So, Acorn Risk, so ARM means Acorn Risk Machine from the Acorn computer. And so, he was the founder of one of the founders of ARM. And so I was talking about process anyway. So that's so how do so so Herman and I go way way back. So the the thing is how do you solve or figure out what is worthy to be built and what's not. So um the first thing is I start from pain. I you know some people start from other different directions. I always start from pain. That's what I learned is what are people's pain right now or you can see it on the horizon. they're going to have pain and and not too far away. Um, but how do you solve for that pain? And typically those pains were because when those products were created, either it was unintentional consequence or it was a limitation of the technology at the time it was created and it kind of just it evolved but it never revolutionized itself. And so it just evolved and that same pain kind of was it, but it gave you enough of a a painkiller for the other problem that having this new pain was worth it. And so I always kind of start with okay, where's our current pain? And are there new technologies to solve that pain? And like in the thermostat case, the Nest was we could use AI to learn. So it can learn when you're there, when you're away, what you temperatures you like. So you don't have to program it. So you can save energy. So the big pain was being either comfortable or saving money because 50% of your energy bill was in this heating and cooling unit that you had you hated the interface. You didn't know what it was. You just paid the bill. And so it started from that pain and said okay well programmable thermostats weren't innovative but they weren't used like everyone a lot of them had it because in you know uh the energy company would give you rebates for it but no one knew how to use it because it was arcane it was programming of ECR and so what I said was oh wait a second what if it could learn your patterns and that was AI and so now let's put that together in a much cooler looking attractive package that costs five to six times times more than the the things that you're buying today. But that was the that was the crazy opinion-based decision was, okay, yes, it's going to cost $249, but it's going to save you $800 to $1,200 a year, so it could pay for itself literally within a, you know, a year or two. So that was the kind of that was the big idea. And AI was brought to bear on that old problem and and hopefully solve it in a new way. So, so it starts with the pain longtime pain maybe habituated away pain that you have to discover and new technology bonded with that to then to then uh bring innovation in revolution in and and and then redefine the space in a way which is what we did which is not with just the product but how you installed it you know it was always installed by third party installers as opposed to yourself how you bought it which was you bought it through the installer you didn't buy it in Best Buy or somewhere else. So, it was we had to reinvent many different pieces of the puzzle to get Nest to be the Nest. It wasn't just the product. It was all the other things. Just like the iPod wasn't the iPod or the I smartphone wasn't the or the iPhone wasn't the phone. It was It was the iPhone plus the App Store. iTunes plus uh iTunes uh iPod plus iTunes and then the iTunes music store. So you have to think about the full the full thing you're trying to build, not just the one piece, even though that's what you might remember. You have to remember it's it's a it's a system that you're going to innovate with.

好。Herman 啊，我从 1987 年就认识他了，那时候你的听众里大多数人估计都还没出生呢。先交代个背景，Herman 是 Acorn 计算机的缔造者，那玩意儿就是 70 年代英国版的 Apple II。后来他带着团队又搞出了 ARM 处理器。所以 Acorn RISC——ARM 就是 Acorn RISC Machine，名字来自 Acorn 计算机。他是 ARM 的创始人之一。我刚才在讲处理器嘛，总之我和 Herman 是老交情了。回到问题：你怎么解决、或者说怎么想清楚什么值得做、什么不值得？首先，我是从痛点出发的。有些人从别的方向切入，我永远从痛点开始。我学到的就是这个——人们现在的痛点是什么，或者你能在地平线上看到、他们不久就会遇到的痛点。那怎么去解决那个痛点呢？通常这些痛点之所以存在，是因为当年那些产品被创造出来时，要么是无心造成的后果，要么是受限于当时的技术，然后产品就那么一路演进，却从没真正自我革命过。它只是演进，那个老痛点一直都在，但它给了你足够的『止痛药』去缓解别的问题，所以即便带着这个新痛点也还算值得。所以我总是先问：我们现在的痛点在哪？有没有新技术能解决这个痛点？就拿恒温器来说，Nest 当时是我们可以用 AI 来学习——它能学会你什么时候在家、什么时候外出、你喜欢什么温度，这样你就不用去编程设置它，从而省下能源。最大的痛点是：你要么图舒适、要么想省钱，因为你家能源账单的 50% 都花在这个供暖制冷设备上，而你又讨厌它那个界面，你根本搞不懂它是啥，你就只是乖乖付账单。所以一切从那个痛点出发，我们说：好，可编程恒温器其实没什么创新，而且没人真用它，虽然很多人家里都装了——因为能源公司装了会给你返现——但没人知道怎么用，因为它太晦涩了，那是 ECR 那种编程。于是我就想，等一下，要是它能学会你的作息模式呢？那就是 AI。那现在我们把它装进一个酷得多、好看得多的外壳里，价格是你今天买的那些东西的五到六倍。这就是那个疯狂的、基于观点的决定：好，没错，它要卖 249 美元，但它每年能帮你省 800 到 1200 美元，所以一两年它基本就能回本。这就是那个大点子。AI 被引来对付一个老问题，并且——但愿——用一种全新的方式解决了它。所以它始于痛点，可能是被习惯掩盖、需要你去挖掘的长期痛点，再把新技术和它绑在一起，由此带来创新、带来革命，然后重新定义这个领域——这正是我们做的，而且不只是产品本身。比如它一直是由第三方安装商上门安装的，而不是你自己装；比如你购买的方式是通过安装商买，而不是在百思买或别的地方买。所以我们得重新发明这道谜题里的很多块拼图，才让 Nest 成为 Nest。它不只是产品，而是所有其他这些东西。就像 iPod 不只是 iPod、智能手机不只是手机、iPhone 不只是电话一样——它是 iPhone 加上 App Store，是 iPod 加 iTunes 再加 iTunes 音乐商店。所以你得想清楚你要造的『整件事』，而不只是其中一块，哪怕你记住的可能只是那一块。你得记住，你要拿来创新的是一整个系统。

[25:47] Lenny

So this two-part kind of formula you shared here, the pain and new technologies. The second part is really interesting. Essentially, it's like what's the why now? What's like the new tech that has emerged that now allows us to solve this pain. It feels like that's a core part of Okay. It's because it's interesting because when you talked about the the iPhone keyboard, it was a similar story of like, okay, we can actually sort of do this virtual keyboard for the first time in history,

你刚分享的这个两段式公式——痛点加新技术。第二部分特别有意思，本质上就是『为什么是现在』。是什么新技术冒了出来，让我们终于能解决这个痛点。感觉这是个核心要素。好，这有意思是因为，你刚讲到 iPhone 键盘的时候，也是个类似的故事——好，我们历史上第一次真的能做出这种虚拟键盘了。

[26:09] Tony

right? Exactly. It could because of multi-touch. That's really what it was. And then we were just on the verge of having fast enough processors, right? And we were just on the verge. So it wasn't, you know, if you look at the iPhone or you look Nest iPhone or iPod, you can see where all these technologies were just coming to light. So in the iPod it was just now mass storage that was portable and battery operated. That was really what it was. And it was also MP3s or digital music, right? Those were kind of and we also had um high density. We were the first products to have lithium ion or lithium prismatic polymer cells. So it was new battery technology, new new mass storage, portable mass storage and this new uh generation of of digital music and we had ARM processors, right? And so and the really really low power. So all of those things had to come together to do that. Um and then on the iPhone it was the it was multi-touch, but it wasn't just that. was also the fact that now we had Wi-Fi everywhere and we knew that 3G was coming because we was only 2 and a halfG when that was and that was very slow but we had Wi-Fi so it was and we had cameras right digital cameras so we had the digital camera we had digital video which was we had YouTube at the time so it was all of those things just on the verge to say this is what's going to be very different than what just came before it like a blackberry which was really just a texting machine and nothing house.

对，没错。能做出来是因为多点触控，真正的原因就是它。再加上当时我们刚好踩在处理器速度足够快的临界点上，对吧？我们正好就在那个临界点上。所以你看 iPhone、看 Nest、看 iPod，你能看到所有这些技术都恰好在那一刻冒头。iPod 那会儿，恰好出现了便携且电池供电的大容量存储，真正的关键就是这个。再加上 MP3、也就是数字音乐，对吧？还有高密度电池——我们是头一批用上锂离子、也就是锂聚合物方形电芯的产品。所以是新的电池技术、新的大容量存储、便携的大容量存储，加上这一代新的数字音乐，再加上 ARM 处理器，对吧？而且功耗真的真的非常低。所有这些东西必须同时凑齐才能做成那件事。到了 iPhone，是多点触控，但又不止于此，还有一个事实是：那时候 Wi-Fi 到处都有了，而且我们知道 3G 快来了，因为当时还只是 2.5G，特别慢，但我们有 Wi-Fi。还有摄像头，对吧，数码相机——我们有了数码相机、有了数字视频，那时候 YouTube 都有了。所有这些东西都恰好踩在临界点上，让你能说：这玩意儿会跟它之前的东西截然不同，比如黑莓，那其实就是个发短信的机器，别的啥也不是。

[27:38] Lenny

I'm going to close the loop on the on your advice on finding a great idea. I'm curious about kind of the flip side of uh when it's still when it's not good enough. So, there's like so many gadgets out there that are solving some pain level. Maybe there's a new technology that they integrated, but there's still like it's not a big business. It's not a real company. What's kind of what's the threshold? What's like a sign of okay, this isn't big enough?

我想把你关于『怎么找到一个好点子』的建议这条线收个尾。我好奇的是反面——当它还『不够好』的时候。市面上有那么多小玩意儿，都在解决某种程度的痛点，可能也整合了某种新技术，但它就是成不了大生意、成不了一家真正的公司。那个门槛大概在哪？什么样的信号说明『好吧，这盘子不够大』？

[27:59] Tony

Well, you know, the iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations of the iPod before it became successful. everyone look you know well anyone who knows you know if they remember iPod before iPhone because iPhone swallowed everything it's like the black hole of everything but you know iPod the first generation was only successful with the Mac geeks and the Mac geeks were less than 1% of the market and then the second generation was also that way. So when we we get we we'd sell everything we'd sell everything we could for the most part in the first quarter and then it would die because it was just the Mac afficados the loyalists who'd come and buy everything and it wasn't until the third generation where we made it work on Windows did it actually and we had the iTunes music store did it actually start to take off. So sometimes you have to say we're on the right thing, but we need to make some changes to get this market going. And that was a real opinion-based decision to, you know, we the team at the team uh um that I was running, we were really clear that we had to have Windows connectivity out of the gate or not out of the gate, but just after the first iPod shift. And Steve said, "Over my dead body, no way. This is going to help us sell more Macs." So, and then and then, you know, we're like, "Okay, we're making the second one. Oh, we're going to keep it with Mac only. We just got to fix a few of these things and then all of a sudden it'll take off. And it was like it didn't take off. So then it was there's a long story about how that h about how we finally got Windows connectivity, but there was always this skunk works thing project behind the scenes doing that. I did the same thing with um stylus. Steve never wanted a stylus on the iPhone or the iPad. He never wanted he never wanted it. He's like the finger is good enough and we can't do it with the finger. It's like and I'm like but we're going to have a B2B context and we're going to have forms filling and people are going to write and and he's like I don't care that means we're going to get to like Windows pen because he thought it was going to be like Windows pen which was you had to use the pen for everything as opposed to using your finger. So it was like I wanted instead of pen dominant I wanted finger dominant but it that's what he was saying but then when we added the stylus which was another skunk works project all of a sudden it came out it was like well we had to have stylus right and now it's a a big feature of the product not everyone uses it but it is a big feature for certain professionals who who really want that and artists and hobbyists and stuff and so sometimes you have to have those skunk works things that even if the opinion-based uh leader doesn't like it you're that seems like the right thing. Maybe not right now, but it's going you can see it on the horizon. So, you just keep working on those things. So, but we had, like I said, the the iPhone wasn't a hit right away. It was kind of like a, oh yeah, it worked on AT&T and it was 2 and a halfG and it was this and that and you know, it did it only worked in the US. So, we had to get multiple versions till we got out. And that's in in my book I have the and uh it's called um three I think it's three generations. Everything needs three generations. Yes, Bill. There it is. Three generations. I've I've learned you make the product, you fix the product, then you fix the business. So you have there's no I I've never seen anyone get it all right the first time. Like you want to you would like to but you get close but make the product fix the product after you get customer feedback and then make the business which means make the margins like on the first iPods we weren't making any money first iPhones we weren't making any money right the second iPhone or second iPod okay we started getting a little bit better numbers but we got more or less the features sort of dialed third one was like okay windows we got the margins we're getting up the volume we got all the right and like go right reliability whatever else it had to be. So you need to stick with your idea even if it's not necessarily going the first time unless there's something really severely your brain damaged about whatever it was. You have to restart. But sometimes you have to hang in there. And I same thing with Nest. We had to hang in there with two generations of the the smoke detector and a few generations of the thermostat before we made the business work, right? Not just make the product work.

嗯，你知道吗，iPod 当初也不够大。iPod 出到第三代才真正成功。其实所有了解的人——如果他们还记得 iPhone 之前的 iPod 的话，因为 iPhone 把一切都吞掉了，它简直是吞噬万物的黑洞——但 iPod 第一代只在 Mac 极客里成功，而 Mac 极客占市场还不到 1%。第二代也是这副光景。所以我们每次基本上能卖的都在第一个季度卖光，然后就熄火了，因为来买的就是那群 Mac 死忠、忠诚粉，他们会来把货扫光。直到第三代我们让它能在 Windows 上用、又有了 iTunes 音乐商店，它才真正开始起飞。所以有时候你得说：方向是对的，但我们得做点改动才能把这个市场盘活。那是个非常基于观点的决定。我带的那个团队当时非常清楚，我们必须一开始就支持 Windows 连接——不是一上来，而是第一代 iPod 之后紧接着就上。可 Steve 说：『除非我死了，没门，绝不。这是用来帮我们多卖 Mac 的。』然后呢，我们说：『行吧，我们做第二代，还是只支持 Mac，我们就把这几个地方修一修，然后它突然就会起飞了。』结果它没起飞。后来关于我们最终怎么搞定 Windows 连接，有个很长的故事，但背后一直有个臭鼬工厂式的秘密项目在偷偷做这事。我对触控笔也干了同样的事。Steve 从来不想在 iPhone 或 iPad 上加触控笔，从来不想，他觉得手指就够好了，『我们用手指搞不定的东西就别做』。我就说，可我们会有 B2B 的场景，会有表单填写，人们会要手写。他说我不在乎，那意味着我们会变成 Windows 那种笔——因为他以为会搞成 Windows 笔，就是那种你干啥都得用笔、而不是用手指的东西。我想要的是手指主导，而不是笔主导，可他说的就是那个担忧。但后来我们加上了触控笔——那又是个臭鼬工厂项目——它一推出来，大家就『哎我们必须得有触控笔啊』，现在它成了产品的一大卖点。不是人人都用，但对某些专业人士、艺术家、爱好者来说，它确实是个大卖点，他们就是真想要那个。所以有时候你得搞这些臭鼬工厂的东西，哪怕那个基于观点的领头人不喜欢，但你觉得这是对的方向。也许不是当下，但它正在路上，你能在地平线上看到它。所以你就一直默默打磨这些东西。但就像我说的，iPhone 也不是一推出就火。一开始就是『哦对，能在 AT&T 上用，是 2.5G，又这又那的』，而且你知道，它只在美国能用。所以我们得出好几个版本才铺开。这在我书里有写——叫……我想是三代吧。所有东西都需要三代。对，Bill，就是它，三代。我学到的是：你先把产品做出来，然后修产品，再然后修商业模式。我从没见过谁第一次就全做对的。你当然希望第一次就对，但你只能接近——先做出产品，拿到客户反馈后修产品，然后再做商业模式，也就是把利润率做出来。第一代 iPod 我们一分钱没赚，第一代 iPhone 也没赚，对吧。第二代 iPhone 或第二代 iPod，好，数字开始稍微好看一点，功能大致也调顺了。第三代就是：好，Windows、利润率有了，销量也上来了，可靠性等等该有的都对了。所以你得坚持你的点子，哪怕第一次不一定顺——除非那东西从根上就有什么严重的脑残缺陷，那你就得重启。但有时候你就得咬牙挺住。Nest 也一样。我们必须扛过两代烟雾报警器、好几代恒温器，才把商业模式跑通，对吧——不只是把产品做通。

[32:16] Lenny

There's so many directions I can go here. One that's interesting is how often Steve Jobs was actually wrong. [snorts]

我能切入的方向太多了。其中一个有意思的是：Steve Jobs 其实判断错的次数有多频繁。[哼笑]

[32:22] Lenny

How many times you had to

你有多少次不得不……

[32:24] Lenny

you're like takes years to like okay finally he's

你那种『得花上好几年，他才终于……』

[32:26] Tony

we all were wrong at certain times but you know it's when you hit those you when you hit it big when you get the right ones they over they they overshadow all the other stuff that but that's how you have to try and iterate. You know Jeff Bezos says the same thing. I believe in the same thing. You got to fail a few times till you get to till you find your way. and um and uh but but you only fail if you stop. If you keep iterating, keep going, well then that's not failure. That's called learning.

我们每个人在某些时候都判断错过，但你知道，当你押中那些大的、抓到对的那几个时，它们的光芒会盖过其他所有东西。这就是你必须去试、去迭代的方式。Jeff Bezos 也是这么说的，我也信这一套。你得失败几次，才能找到自己的路。而且——你只有在停下来的时候才算失败。如果你一直迭代、一直往前走，那就不叫失败，那叫学习。

[32:54] Lenny

The other interesting uh part of the story you just shared here, which was one of my favorite stories in your book, actually, the fact you uh you kind of implied this, but basically the first iPod was you had to have a Mac to use it. And the idea is it would we want you want to sell Macs. This is a way to get people to buy Macs. And it's like the way you tell it is basically this ended up saving Apple eventually. Not selling Macs but people buying iPods and that was like the became the big part of the business.

你刚分享的故事里还有另一个有意思的部分——其实那是我书里最爱的故事之一。你刚才隐约提到了，但基本上是：第一代 iPod 你必须有台 Mac 才能用。当时的想法是，我们想卖 Mac，这是一个让大家去买 Mac 的办法。而你讲这个故事的方式基本上是：这件事最终反而救了 Apple——不是靠卖 Mac，而是大家来买 iPod，那后来成了业务的大头。

[33:18] Tony

Yeah. The the mantra was Steve, you know, if we don't have Windows connectivity, the iPod doesn't cost $349. It costs $3,000 because you got to buy a Mac and you got to move all your digital life over to it and everything else. People are not about to take a a risk on this company that's almost bankrupt for $3,000. So, how are we going to do that? Like, okay, let's make sure it is only $349 and that they can try it. And once they try the brand, they go, "Oh, that's pretty interesting. Maybe I should try other products from this company and give, you know, give them a shot." Because that was just such a sublime experience. And that's how it, you know, it all changed and that's how iPhone was able to be created because without the iPod there, I'm pretty sure there would have been no iPhone. There would have probably been no Apple because it was close to bankruptcy.

对。当时那句口号是这样的——Steve，要是我们不支持 Windows 连接，iPod 就不是卖 349 美元，而是卖 3000 美元，因为你还得先买一台 Mac，还得把你整个数字生活全搬过去等等。人们才不会为了 3000 美元去赌一家几乎要破产的公司。那我们要怎么做？好，那就确保它只卖 349 美元，让他们能试一试。一旦他们试了这个品牌，就会想：『哦，这挺有意思，也许我该试试这家公司的别的产品，给他们个机会。』因为那真是一种妙不可言的体验。一切就这么变了，iPhone 也才得以诞生——因为如果没有 iPod 在前面，我敢肯定就不会有 iPhone，很可能连 Apple 都没了，因为它当时濒临破产。

[34:07] Lenny

Wow. That's crazy how close it was to that if some of these decisions went the wrong way.

哇。太惊人了，要是这里头某些决定走错了方向，距离那个结局竟然只有一步之遥。

[34:12] Tony

Yeah, very close. And remember, there was no retail back then, Apple retailers, none of that stuff. You know, most people don't don't know how on the ropes Apple was back in 2001.

对，非常近。而且记住，那会儿根本没有零售这回事，没有 Apple 零售店，那些都没有。你知道吗，大多数人根本不知道 2001 年的 Apple 当时有多狼狈、多命悬一线。

[34:22] Lenny

So many stories, but I want to I want to come back to the the customer journey thread that you touched on, which I think is really really important for people listening to this podcast to hear. something that you kind of reinforce again and again in the book and you have this awesome image that we're going to show of the entire customer journey and the kind of your point that you make is so many product builders focus on building the product and think build the best product we're going to win and you have this very important advice of there's so much more to it talk about especially the marketing piece talk about what you think builders don't really get even though they hear this advice in many ways

故事太多了，但我想回到你刚提到的『客户旅程』这条线——我觉得这点对在听这档播客的人来说真的特别特别重要。这也是你在书里反复强调的，你还有一张很棒的图，等下我们会展示出来，画的是整个客户旅程。你的核心观点是：太多做产品的人只盯着把产品做好，以为只要做出最好的产品我们就赢了。而你有一条非常重要的建议——远不止于此。聊聊吧，尤其是营销这块，聊聊你觉得做产品的人即便反复听到这条建议、却还是没真正搞懂的地方。

[34:54] Tony

when we build products we define products when we build them we have a good sense of the context when we are defining those things. We're we are we're living in that world, okay? And so we're like, "Oh, we're like this and these are our issues and this is who we are." And you know, maybe you put on personas, you know, you we we would strip out and figure out who our target customers were with their personas. You know, is it a a single mom with kids or is it a a dual income no kid or is it senior citizens or whatever? and we would come up with these personas and we would kind of live inside them as we're thinking about the product. But you have to also remember that these people don't live in those that they live in the context but they're not aware of your product in their context. And so you have to bring it home to them in and meet them where they are. And so your marketing, your website, your, you know, your Instagram ads, your whatever, what your earned, owned and and earned and owned media that you do, you really need to put that your product in their context and make the visuals and make the words and everything sing to them. And if not, they're not going to get it, right? And so too many times we just say, "Oh, if we just make the perfect product." No, you have to put all for a consumer thing specifically. And it's it's also really good for a B2B product as well is make sure you understand your customer and they go, you know, and when you say the right word, they go, "Oh, they get me. Oh, I want to listen to these more." And this is before they ever got the product. You need to get them to convert in some way. And they need to hear that you're you've already thought about their issues or you know, and you're living in their shoes and they're like, "Yes, yes, yes, more of that. Is this an emotional point? Is this a rational point? Is it? And you're you're weaving this this tapestry to get them to come to some kind of trial or purchase or conversion or something of the product. And the best way to do that is m is word of mouth, right, by other early adopters. But you got to do the same thing for the early, you know, I mean, not the earliest early adopters, but the early adopters who other people trust to talk to because a lot of other people who are late adopters, they know, oh, that's that, that's wacky George, he tries everything and then like, no, no, no. But if so and so's tried it, oh, I should take notice of that, right? And so what you want to do is make sure you understand your the gestation of your customer and where they are and where they are in the thing and who who you're trying to I I also updated the cross the chasm uh you know crossing the chasm graphic um in the book saying how we go about this in our in in in in uh in your product developments because you really have to think about who your target user set is and your target marketing based on the version of product you're in and how you're going to get those higher and higher volumes and you and it really means about speaking the context. So maybe when you first ship you can speak to those early adopters and you can put it in enough words that they're going to convert but then the second version of the product you're getting these nar later adopters and you got to speak in their language and you and the third set adopters who are really lagards you've got to really speak to them and you know go through that and it could be totally different and so this was this was a very interesting um story that I it it was so emlazed in my mind back in 2001 23 you know still when Apple had no presence outside of the US Apple was really it was selling in the US some Canada and some in Japan but that was it and that was the max so we were selling iPods into those areas and so we had the kind of the early adapter and then we had some other language and then and by the third fourth version of iPod we had some really refined language for those kind of late adopters. So then we said we're going to go back and get a push into Europe. We're going to get we're going to get because iPod hadn't taken off in Europe. So we're going to push you we're going to push iPod into Europe. And so we're on I think the fourth generation or something like that. And so what did we do in Europe? We ran the same marketing as we were doing in the US in Europe. And the thing is, it didn't resonate with the early adopters. It didn't resonate with the later adopters because we didn't have the same messages. We were going for a different set of people. And we're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. We sales aren't working. Say, we got to change the marketing. We got to meet those Europeans where they're at because they're low. They're slower to adopt technology versus it starts with the coast and goes inward in the US, right? And so we're like, oh, we got to change things up. And so, you know, sometimes it's when you get to new new areas, you have to rethink your marketing for that area and remember to meet them where they're at and where the if it doesn't have a installed base for word of mouth, you're going to have to get that word of mouth started. So, work with those people to get that going. Now it's different with all software products and all these things and many many um many uh products can go global right away but marketing you still got to tell a story and you gota you know so it's it it just reminds me that even though we've maybe compressed the time for some pieces of the adoption puzzle you know because we can distribute faster doesn't mean we can the the the the awareness can get accelerated and that we can get people to intelligently understand what this product faster faster if we just say the words of somebody who might have known about the product for three years.

我们做产品、定义产品的时候，对上下文是有很好的感知的——因为我们就活在那个世界里，对吧？我们会想：『哦，我们是这样的，这些是我们的问题，这就是我们。』可能你还会套上用户画像，我们会拆解、搞清楚目标客户是谁、他们的画像长什么样——是带孩子的单亲妈妈，还是双收入无孩家庭，还是老年人，等等？我们会捏出这些画像，在思考产品的时候就活在他们身上。但你还得记住，这些人并不活在『那个』世界里——他们活在自己的上下文里，而在他们的上下文里，他们根本不知道你的产品。所以你得把产品带到他们家门口，到他们所在的地方去跟他们碰面。所以你的营销、你的网站、你的 Instagram 广告、随便什么，你赢得的和自有的媒体，你真的得把你的产品放进『他们的』上下文里，让画面、让文案、让一切都唱进他们心里。要是做不到，他们就 get 不到，对吧？太多次我们只会说『哦，只要我们把产品做到完美就行了』。不对。尤其对消费品来说，你必须把所有这些都做到位。这对 B2B 产品其实也同样关键——你得确保你真的懂你的客户，当你说出那句对的话时，他们会想『哦，他们懂我，哦，我想多听听这些』。而这是在他们还没拿到产品之前。你得想办法让他们以某种方式转化。他们得感觉到你已经替他们想过他们的难处了、你设身处地站在他们的鞋子里了，他们就会『对对对，多来点这个。这是个情感点吗？是个理性点吗？』而你就在编织这块挂毯，引导他们走向某种试用、购买或转化。而做到这一点最好的方式是口碑，对吧，靠其他早期采用者。但你得对早期采用者做同样的事——我是说，不是最最早的那批，而是那些会被别人信任、别人会去找他们打听的早期采用者。因为很多后期采用者心里清楚：『哦那是那个，那是疯疯癫癫的 George，他啥都试』，然后就『别别别』。但如果是某某某试了，『哦，那我得留意一下了』，对吧？所以你要做的是搞清楚你客户的『孕育过程』、他们处在哪个阶段、在这件事里走到哪一步、你想触达的是谁。我在书里还更新了那张『跨越鸿沟』的图，讲我们在产品开发里是怎么处理这件事的——因为你真的得想清楚，基于你当前所处的产品版本，你的目标用户群是谁、目标营销是什么，以及你打算怎么把销量一级一级往上拱。这真的关乎『说对上下文』。所以也许你首次发货时，你能对那些早期采用者说话，用足够打动他们的话术让他们转化；但到了产品的第二个版本，你面对的是这些靠后一点的采用者，你就得说他们的语言；到了第三批采用者——那些真正的落后者——你就得真正对他们说话，带着他们走完这一程。话术可能完全不同。这是个很有意思的故事，它在我脑子里烙印得特别深。回到 2001、2003 年那会儿，Apple 在美国以外几乎没有存在感——它主要在美国卖，加拿大一点、日本一点，就这些了，顶多这样。所以我们把 iPod 卖进这些地方，于是我们有了那种针对早期采用者的话术，然后有了另一套语言，到 iPod 第三、第四个版本时，我们针对那些后期采用者打磨出了一套相当精炼的话术。于是我们说：我们要回头去把欧洲市场拱起来，因为 iPod 在欧洲还没起来。所以我们要把 iPod 往欧洲推。当时大概是第四代左右。那我们在欧洲做了什么？我们把在美国跑的那套营销原封不动搬到了欧洲。问题是，它没能打动早期采用者，也没能打动后期采用者，因为我们没有相应的讯息——我们针对的是另一群人。结果『叮叮叮叮叮』——销量不动。于是我们说，得改营销，得到欧洲人所在的地方去跟他们碰面。因为他们对技术的接受更慢，而在美国是从沿海开始、然后往内陆扩散，对吧？所以我们就『哦，得把打法换一换』。所以有时候你到了新的地区，就得为那个地区重新构思营销，记得到他们所在的地方去跟他们碰面，而且如果当地没有可供口碑发酵的安装基数，你就得想办法把口碑启动起来——去和那些人合作，把它带动起来。当然，现在对所有软件产品、对这些东西来说情况不一样了，很多很多产品可以立刻全球化，对吧；但营销上你还是得讲一个故事。所以这只是提醒我：哪怕我们也许把采用拼图里某些环节的时间压缩了——因为我们能更快地铺开分发——也不代表认知就能随之加速，不代表我们能更快地让人们真正、聪明地理解这个产品；如果我们只是把一个可能已经认识这产品三年的人说的那套话照搬出来，是没用的。

[40:53] Lenny

I got to ask about maybe the most famous uh I don't know tagline of all time when a product was launched. A thousand songs in your pocket.

我得问问那句也许是史上最有名的产品发布标语。『一千首歌装进你口袋』（A thousand songs in your pocket）。

[41:00] Tony

Songs in your pocket.

『装进你口袋的歌』。

[41:01] Tony

Uh is there a story behind that? Back in the day at Apple and I I think it's still that maybe it's changed now but back in the Steve days there was the different functions of Apple and because they were all lean because the company was only 4,000 5,000 people and it was already doing max and everything each function was kind of very very functional and so the marketing the marketing didn't get into the engineering and the design folks, it was like separate like Steve was the it was the hub and he was in each of them putting them together like I said the the uh the um you know opinion-based decision maker and so when we heard the tagline for the first time I was like that's genius now how long that happened how what was the behind the scenes we were so we were just a tiny team you know we were getting this done in 10 months so everybody was just running for it right versus versus iPhone, which was we had discussions of it. Should we call it the iPod phone or should we call it the iPhone because Cisco had the iPhone back in the day and there was copyright issues and trademark issues and so we were into that because it was also a two and a half year development and we were in so and it was betting the farm and we were going to cannibalize iPod right so there was a lot more discussions but in those early days of thousand songs it was everybody running in literally not in less than n it was really five to six months everything got up um because we really started it in April and it shipped in end of October.

这背后有故事吗？想当年在 Apple——我想现在可能还是这样，也许变了，但在 Steve 那个时代，Apple 各个职能部门，因为公司只有四五千人、都很精简，但已经在做 Mac 和所有产品了，所以每个职能都极其职能化。营销部门不会跑去插手工程和设计那帮人，是各自分开的，就像 Steve 是那个枢纽，他坐在每个部门当中把它们拼起来——就像我说的那个基于观点的决策者。所以当我们第一次听到那句标语时，我心想：太天才了。至于它是怎么诞生的、幕后是什么样——我们当时就是个超小的团队，要在 10 个月里把这事干成，所以每个人都在玩命冲刺，对吧。对比 iPhone，iPhone 我们是讨论过的：该叫它 iPod phone 还是 iPhone？因为当年思科有个 iPhone，涉及版权和商标问题，所以我们卷进了那些，而且它还是个两年半的开发周期，我们身处其中，那是在『押上整个农场』，而且我们要自己蚕食 iPod，对吧，所以讨论多得多。但在『一千首歌』那段早期日子里，大家就是埋头狂奔，真的——前后还不到……其实就五到六个月一切就搞定了，因为我们真正是 4 月才动手，10 月底就发货了。

[42:40] Lenny

So I think one of the core takeaways from what you shared here is even if you may have the perfect product, the marketing may be the gap that if something isn't working, it may

所以我觉得你刚分享的核心收获之一是：哪怕你手里可能有一款完美的产品，营销也可能是那个缺口——如果哪里跑不通，问题可能就出在……

[42:51] Tony

absolutely and and the thing is I think I think we're starting to see that the cracks of it uh it might be more than cracks now with like Open AI. What is it? It's like oh it's your answer machine whatever like what what does it do for me and now I gotta keep paying you like it was fun as a demo and if I but what am I using it for every day and like oh claude it does claude code and it does you know code you know it's and then what happens open is like oh we have codeex now but then they were Sora and they were you know this and they were that we're going to do sex chat we're going to like what are you and so it's like oh yeah you're the great first you know like Netscape everyone went out and bought Netscape Explorer or whatever it was called next navigator and then all of a sudden it evaporated like well what do I use the net for like I I got the tool to get onto it but what do I use it for daily and what's and it had to develop and so open AI is now shifting like oh we got to get product teams and we got to start about product marketing and we gota so so you know that is to me that's it's marketing but if you start if you are already thinking about the marketing you're already going to start thinking about the product and That's the thing is when you're just thinking about the product, you're like, and it was really just a technology demo that went, you know, viral and they're like, oh yeah, and they still keep winning on that. They never put product in till it was too late. Now, Anthropics where they are and valued more and higher revenue and all that other stuff. So you know it it just it just even if it's a software only product yes there's lots of hardware and servers and all other stuff you need to think holistically and you need to think about the entire customer journey the marketing the you know the sales pieces the distribution pieces the product definition p the messaging the target markets early on you can't leave it till later and then get it yeah and then back calculate in and that's why I say you should you know you should really make the press release before you before you more or less start the pro project.

绝对的。而且我觉得，我们已经开始看到这上面的裂缝了——拿 OpenAI 来说，现在可能已经不止是裂缝了。它是啥？就像『哦，它是你的答案机器』之类的，那它到底能为我做什么？现在我还得一直付钱给你。它当个 demo 是挺好玩，可我每天到底拿它干嘛用？再比如『哦 Claude，它有 Claude Code，它能写代码』，那是它的用处；然后呢，OpenAI 就『哦我们现在有 Codex 了』，可接着又来了 Sora，又这又那，『我们要做色情聊天，我们要……』那你到底是个啥？所以就好比『哦对，你是了不起的开路先锋』——就像 Netscape，当年人人都跑去装 Netscape，那个叫 Explorer 还是 Navigator 来着，然后突然之间它就蒸发了，因为『我上网到底是为了干嘛？我拿到了上网的工具，可我每天用它来干什么？』它得慢慢发展出用途来。所以 OpenAI 现在正在转向，『哦我们得搞产品团队了，我们得开始抓产品营销了』。所以在我看来，这就是营销；但反过来，如果你一开始就在想营销，你也就已经开始在想产品了。问题就在于，当你只想着产品时，你就会……而它其实只是一个意外走红的技术 demo，他们也确实还在靠那个一路赢，可他们一直没把『产品』放进去，直到为时已晚。看看 Anthropic 现在的位置——估值更高、收入更高，等等。所以你看，哪怕是个纯软件产品——当然你还有大量硬件、服务器和其他东西要操心——你也得整体地去想，得把整个客户旅程都想清楚：营销、销售环节、分发环节、产品定义、讯息、目标市场，这些一开始就得想，不能拖到后面再去补、再去倒推回来。这也是为什么我说，你真该在动手做项目之前、或者说基本动手之前，先把新闻稿写出来。

[44:53] Lenny

Yeah, there's a whole chapter on that. Uh we had the found the um like Amazon's also very famous for that. There's a whole book on working backwards that goes really deep on this approach. But the weird thing is it's working backwards. See that the thing working backwards? I would a movie be created that way? Is it called working backwards when you say I'm going to make a script and I'm making a treatment and I'm gonna really know what it is. is I know what the I know what my characters are and how I do character development. Like, is that really working backwards? It sounds like it's backwards. It's like, no, that's the way you do it. It's just because it's so technologyled and technologist, and this is what I thought when I was 20. I was like, yeah, we're, you know, now it sounds backwards. It's actually, no, that's actually insane. It's not working backwards. It's just an insane way of working. Like, come on, let's really think through this. I it says so much that you as one of the I don't know most successful insightful builders are so into marketing. I think that's a really important takeaway for people just how obsessed you are with that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all. Well, when you live in that world and you live in the customer because you're coming from a customer point of view. So, you have to see the lens and the customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing and sales, right? And so you have to be in their shoes and you go, "Okay, like when I do the when I do the press release, I can only have three or four key features. After that, it becomes gobblelygook for a customer." So you're like, "Okay, what are those three or four things?" Okay, what is that? That's what we're going to focus on. And so, no, we're not going to add five more features. That's not going to make it sell better, right? Or, oh no, we're going to cut these two features and ship it. It's like, well, wait a second. We cut out two of our three key tentpole features. How are we going to sell that anymore? So it's it's it's a holistic design. It's not, you know, like because we think the technology the technology is in service of the customer, not we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat and they're going to figure out how to use it.

对，书里有一整章讲这个。我们……Amazon 也以这个出名，有一整本书叫《Working Backwards》（逆向工作法），把这套方法讲得特别深。但有意思的是这个『逆向工作』——你看那个词，『working backwards』？拍电影会是这么个搞法吗？你说『我要写个剧本、做个故事梗概、真正搞清楚它是什么，我知道我的角色是谁、怎么做角色塑造』——这真叫『逆向』吗？听着像是反着来，可其实不是，那就是该有的做法。只是因为这行太技术导向、太工程师思维了——这正是我 20 岁时的想法，我当时就觉得『对啊，这听着像倒着来』，但其实不，那才叫疯。它不叫逆向工作，它（不那么干）才是一种疯狂的工作方式。拜托，我们认真把这事想透好不好。你身为我所知最成功、最有洞察力的产品人之一，竟然这么痴迷营销，这本身就说明了很多。我觉得这对大家是个特别重要的收获——你对『造东西』里这一块的着迷程度，是很多做产品的人压根不会去想的。嗯，当你活在那个世界里、活在客户当中，因为你是从客户的视角出发的——你得看到那块透镜，而客户只能透过营销和销售这块透镜看到他们所看到的，对吧？所以你得站在他们的鞋子里，你会想：『好，当我写新闻稿时，我只能放三四个关键功能，再多客户就觉得是天书了。』所以你会想：『好，那三四个东西是什么？』那是什么？那就是我们要聚焦的。所以，不，我们不会再加五个功能，加了也不会让它更好卖，对吧？或者『哦不，我们要砍掉这两个功能再发货』——等一下，我们把三根顶梁柱功能里砍掉了两根，那以后还怎么卖得动？所以这是一种整体性的设计。不是说——因为我们认为技术是服务于客户的，而不是『我们要把技术硬塞进客户喉咙、让他们自己琢磨怎么用』。

[46:52] Tony

There's too much noise. You got to make it frictionless and you got to fit it in their world and see from their point of view go, "Oh, that's why I needed General Magic was the perfect story for that."

噪音太多了。你得把它做到无摩擦，得让它嵌进他们的世界，从他们的视角去看，然后『哦，原来这就是我需要它的原因』——General Magic 就是这方面的完美例子。

[47:02] Tony

You know, I don't know. Your your viewers should definitely watch the movie General Magic because absolutely we made the iPhone 15 years too early and that was a classic case where we were just making the things that were really cool but nobody needed it.

我不知道，你的观众真的应该去看看《General Magic》那部纪录片，因为我们当年绝对是把 iPhone 早做了 15 年。那是个经典案例——我们当时只是在做那些真的很酷的东西，可没人需要它。

[47:14] Lenny

Yeah, that documentary is incredible. It's like such a like the very young version of you.

对，那部纪录片太精彩了。里面有个超级年轻版的你。

[47:19] Tony

Yeah. Very different. Probably people won't recognize me.

对，很不一样。大家可能都认不出我来。

[47:22] Lenny

Yeah. You have a whole chapter about just like not overworking in your in your career based on that experience

对。你书里专门有一章讲的就是别在职业生涯里过度劳累，这一章正是基于那段经历——

[47:27] Lenny

which general magic was for me.

对我来说那段经历就是 General Magic。

[47:28] Tony

Yeah.

对。

[47:29] Lenny

Yeah. I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor, Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Dualingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. Teams are building and shipping products faster than ever thanks to AI. But as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been. Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks, including SOCK 2, ISO 27,0001, and HIPPA. This helps companies get compliant fast and stay compliant more than ever before. Trust has the power to make or break your business. Learn more at vanta.com/lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta. That's vanta.com/lenny. I want to talk about something else around the evolution of the product management role and builders. What's really interesting, this kind of going in a different direction, but it's all connected. Uh, I feel like you were so ahead on this idea that we are builders versus product managers, engineers, design. Like I have your book right here. It's called build and this is what everyone's starting to call product managers, people on product teams. Uh, I'm curious just what you're seeing with that this kind of merging of these roles. Do you feel like everyone just becomes a builder and there's no more designer, engineer, product manager? Do you think they'll continue being these functions with but we're merged? I don't What are you seeing with the with the product the discipline of product management specifically?

对。我特别想跟大家介绍本季的赞助商 Vanta。Vanta 帮助超过 15,000 家公司——比如 Cursor、Ramp、Duolingo、Snowflake、Atlassian——赢得并证明客户对它们的信任。多亏了 AI，团队构建和交付产品的速度比以往任何时候都快。但结果是，你的产品和业务所引入的风险也达到了前所未有的高度。我接触过的每一位安全负责人，都越来越能感到肩上那份保护自己组织、业务、更别提客户数据的重担。因为节奏太快了，他们只能不停地被动应对、靠猜来排优先级，还得将就着用过时的方案。Vanta 用超过 35 套安全与隐私合规框架——包括 SOC 2、ISO 27001、HIPAA——把合规和风险管理自动化了。这能帮公司快速达成合规，并比以往任何时候都更容易持续保持合规。信任足以成就或摧毁你的业务。想了解更多请访问 vanta.com/lenny。作为本播客的听众，你还能享受 1,000 美元的折扣，就是 vanta.com/lenny。我想聊点别的，关于产品经理这个角色以及「构建者」的演变。有意思的是，这话题方向有点不一样，但其实都连在一起。我觉得你在「我们是构建者，而不是产品经理、工程师、设计师」这个想法上太超前了。我手边就有你的书，叫《Build》，而现在大家也开始这么称呼产品经理、产品团队里的人了。我很好奇，你在这种角色融合上观察到了什么？你觉得是大家都变成「构建者」，不再有设计师、工程师、产品经理之分了吗？还是说这些职能会继续存在，只不过我们融合在了一起？我不……你具体怎么看产品管理这门学科的走向？

[49:20] Tony

Well, the discipline of product management sits between all of these functional roles. Okay? Whether that's marketing, sales, uh distribution, sometimes manufacturing, depends on what the product is, um engineering obviously um and so uh customer support. So when you sit between all of these things, you know, maybe those roles shift or change, especially depending on what it is you're building and and that kind of thing, but you have to interpret, you know, what's going on between all of them and stitch them all together to make this this thing sing. And what we're saying and you know is oh I can just today in the AI world I can just make a prompt and all of a sudden it gets spit out and you don't know what all those little functions if you are not aware of each of those functions even in AI world of what those things are they are very clear definitions of certain points of view for the customer and you have to consider them and to say that they're going to get washed away and an AI is going come up with it. It reminds me a lot of how software coding is getting done with um like something like Claude today, you know, I don't know, maybe it was a month ago when the Claude source code leaked.

嗯，产品管理这门学科是夹在所有这些职能角色之间的。对吧？无论是市场、销售、分销，有时候还有制造——取决于产品是什么——当然还有工程，以及客服。所以当你夹在所有这些东西中间时，也许这些角色会随之变动或改变，尤其取决于你在做的是什么之类的，但你必须去解读它们之间到底在发生什么，再把它们全都缝合到一起，让这个东西「唱起来」。而现在大家说的是：哦，今天在 AI 的世界里，我只要写个 prompt，啪一下结果就吐出来了。可你根本不知道那些小职能是什么——如果你对每一个职能都没有意识，哪怕在 AI 的世界里也一样，它们其实代表着面向客户的某些非常清晰的立场和定义，你必须把它们考虑进去。要说这些都会被冲刷掉、由一个 AI 来搞定，这让我特别想起如今软件编码是怎么被完成的，比如用今天的 Claude 这种东西——我也说不准，可能是一个月前吧，当时 Claude 的源代码泄露了。

[50:45] Lenny

Mhm.

嗯哼。

[50:45] Tony

Right. The cloud source code leaked and everybody's like, "Oh my god, it leaked." And then if you and and at the time and I'm and may I don't maybe they changed it maybe they didn't but at the time Daario was saying you know 90 to 100% of all our code's written by you know our you know Claude and you know we just monitor it and watch it and we're like oh wow that's really interesting and then the code leaves and then if you looked at the code anybody who looked at the code who's a real software architect and engineer threw up. They were like, "It made what?" They're like, "This stuff is brittle." Engineers were looking at like like this should be layered in four or five, you know, actually 12 or 15 different subfunctions. This is the main loop of CL of of of of anthropics claude. The main loop, not not just something off in the This is the main loop. And people are like, "How can you do this? This looks brittle. There's like it's unreadable. It's and they're like, well, the AI knows it. But when you think about it and you have to maintain it, you can have an agent make code for you and it could work and it could test, but is it secure? Is it maintainable? If there's something going wrong, can you roll things back and understand what's going on? Like, there's so many other aspects to writing code and delivering a product thing that you still need humans in the loop. And so when I think of product design, I think of software code with AI. And when you look at AI and if it's not architecting things and it's not segmenting things and looking at each of those things, like I was saying, you know, like there's software architects and then there's software optimizers and then there's just general coders and then there's security reviews. And if you don't have those different mixture of experts around the code structuring it so that subsequent generations can get better and better and it just kind of devolves into this mass of things you don't know. You're getting short-term gain for very very long-term loss and that's you know that's called software debt right technical debt. Everybody hates technical debt. So you might be fixing something, but it might it most likely is giving you more technical debt, especially when you're at the high level. So now, how does that map to product management? So if you're a product manager and you type this in and you get some result, but you don't have a really good marketer, a really good marketing communications person, a really good salesperson, a really good channel salesperson, a really good, you know, architect, a really good manufacturing manager, all these different things in this thing that you're getting. You're not going to be able, you might be able to make the first one, but when you go to version five, six, how does that work? you're building on a a really crusty foundation and people think well my AI is going to be smarter. It's not proven to do that. What's proven is if you properly architect it and have code claude code go into certain sub segments or have claude help you build the architecture you modify refine it lock it in and say just work on these few things you know when these more limited scoped things yeah you can make that work and I think that's the way we have to consider how we use these tools in a product management capability as well to just say it's all abstracted away it's all going to be better and when you ask specific pointed questions. do you want this thing fixed in your marketing thing or whatever? And then they're going to like, well, the AI should just figure that out to it's like you have given up so much. Like that's to me, sure, you can write code, but there's going to be the difference between, you know, it's like the difference between H&M and a luxury brand. You could go get certain things that look like that and copies that and like and but it doesn't last more than one washing or one season and it's this and you throw it away and it's cheap and blah blah blah. Or you go to the luxury thing and you pay more and it's crafted. It's handcrafted. It's and you know it's going to be around for a while like oh there is this dichconomy of like fast and throwaway. So you know like it's called fast fashion. We got fast software but software if you're going to build a real company can't be throwaway. Maybe it can but I don't think it can be if you're really going to do this because you get just technical debt. You got to start over again. So you got to really understand how you're using these tools. And a lot of these things that these AI coders can do, agent coders can do can make you incredible prototypes. Do more prototypes. Do more of those things to help you get that informed gut to say we're going this direction. Architect that in and then work on the subsegments below it and and and and all the expert systems that expert things that you need in each of those domains.

对。Claude 的源代码泄露了，所有人都「天哪，泄露了」。当时——我也不确定，也许他们后来改了也许没改——但当时 Dario 是这么说的：你知道，我们 90% 到 100% 的代码都是由 Claude 写的，我们只是监控它、盯着它。我们当时想，哇，这真有意思。然后代码泄露出来了，任何一个真正的软件架构师和工程师只要看了那代码都会想吐。他们会说：「这写的什么玩意儿？」他们会说：「这东西太脆了。」工程师们看着就觉得，这本该被分成四五层——其实是 12 到 15 个不同的子函数。而这居然是 Anthropic Claude 的主循环。是主循环，不是边边角角的什么东西。这是主循环。大家就「你怎么能这么干？这看起来太脆弱了，根本没法读，简直……」他们会说，可 AI 自己懂啊。但你仔细想想，当你需要去维护它的时候，你可以让一个 agent 帮你写代码，它也许能跑、能测，但它安全吗？可维护吗？万一出了岔子，你能回滚、能搞清楚到底发生了什么吗？写代码、交付一个产品，还有那么多别的方面，你仍然需要人在回路里。所以当我想到产品设计时，我会拿它跟「AI 写软件代码」类比。当你看 AI 的时候，如果它不去做架构、不去分模块、不去逐一审视每一块——就像我刚才说的——你知道，有软件架构师，有软件优化的人，有普通写代码的人，还有安全审查的人。如果你没有这些不同的「专家混合」围绕在代码周围、把它结构化，让后续一代代越来越好，它就会退化成一团你根本看不懂的东西。你这是在用极其极其长期的损失，换取短期的收益——这就叫软件债，对吧，技术债。所有人都讨厌技术债。所以你也许是修好了某个东西，但它极有可能给你带来了更多技术债，尤其是当你站在高层级的时候。那么这怎么映射到产品管理上呢？如果你是个产品经理，你把需求敲进去、拿到了某个结果，但你手边没有一个真正出色的市场人、一个真正出色的市场传播人、一个真正出色的销售、一个真正出色的渠道销售、一个真正出色的架构师、一个真正出色的制造经理——所有这些不同的角色，都不在你拿到的这个东西里。那你就做不到——你也许能做出第一版，但当你做到第五版、第六版时，那还怎么玩？你是建在一个特别松垮的地基上。大家以为「反正我的 AI 会越来越聪明」。可没有证据表明它能做到这一点。被证明有效的是：如果你正确地把架构搭好，让 Claude Code 去进到某些特定的子模块里，或者让 Claude 帮你搭架构，你再去修改、打磨、锁定它，然后说「就只做这几件事」——当任务范围更受限的时候，对，你能让它跑起来。我觉得在产品管理的语境里，我们也得这样去考量怎么用这些工具，而不是说「这一切都被抽象掉了，一切都会更好」，然后当你问到具体、尖锐的问题时——你想把市场部分的这个东西修好吗，诸如此类——他们就会说「这 AI 应该自己搞定才对」。这就好像你已经放弃了太多。对我来说，当然，你能写出代码，但这里头会有差别，就像 H&M 和奢侈品牌之间的差别。你可以买到某些看上去像那样、是仿品的东西，但它经不起一次以上的水洗、撑不过一季，廉价、随手就扔。或者你去买奢侈品，多花点钱，但它是精心打造的、手工做的，你知道它能用上好一阵子。这里就有这么一种「快与即弃」的二分。所以你看，那叫快时尚。我们现在有了「快软件」。但如果你真要建一家公司，软件是不能用完即弃的。也许可以吧，但我不认为可以——如果你真打算认真做这件事的话，因为你会落一身技术债，最后不得不推倒重来。所以你真得搞懂自己是怎么用这些工具的。而这些 AI 编码工具、agent 编码工具能做的很多事，能帮你做出超棒的原型。那就多做原型，多做这类事，帮你练出那种有依据的直觉，让你能说「我们就往这个方向走」。把那个方向架构进去，然后再去做它下面的子模块，以及每个领域里你需要的那些专家系统、专家级的东西。

[55:34] Lenny

Yeah. And I think what you may also be saying here which I think is really really important is that because it's so easy to build people can just build all these features and additions and the value acrru to build something awesome and the product mind becomes more important to help push this stuff from just a sloppy every feature every checkbox to something awesome that people actually use

对。我觉得你这里可能还想说的——我认为这点特别特别重要——是因为构建变得太容易了，大家可以一股脑儿地堆出所有这些功能和附加项，而价值恰恰在于做出真正了不起的东西。于是「产品脑子」就变得更重要了，它能把东西从那种「每个功能、每个勾选框」的草草凑数，推向一个人们真正会用的、了不起的东西。

[55:58] Tony

be because at the end of the day if you're building it for yourself whatever go have fun but if you're going to build it and you want going to sell it and like you know and you only need three key features to sell it to someone like it's going to have to be boiled down. It's going to be have to be figured out because you're still selling it to a human who needs to understand it. Now, do you think you could vibe code Flighty?

因为说到底，如果你是给自己做的，那随便，玩得开心就行。但如果你要做出来、还想卖出去——你知道，而你其实只需要三个关键功能就能卖给某个人——那它就必须被提炼。它必须被想清楚，因为你卖的对象终究是一个需要理解它的人。话说回来，你觉得你能用 vibe coding 搓出一个 Flighty 吗？

[56:22] Lenny

Probably.

大概能吧。

[56:23] Tony

Maybe now that flighty exists, you could

也许吧，既然 Flighty 已经存在了，你就能——

[56:25] Lenny

copy this.

照着抄一个。

[56:26] Tony

Like you could do version two of flighty maybe vibe coded because you say look at flighty but the original flighty like that's to me that's luxury software right understood how the pixels are done. So you got to remember is it version one or is it version two, three, four? because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You're going to you still need the version one to be done. So, and maybe you can prototype with these things. So, I just, you know, we I could go on for hours, but whatever. That's just one old guy's point of view. I think it's really important this insight that as it becomes easier to build the things that stand out are the things that are really well thought through and great and luxury almost as you described

你大概能做出 Flighty 的第二版，也许靠 vibe coding，因为你可以说「照着 Flighty 来」。但最初那个 Flighty——对我来说那就是奢侈品级的软件，对吧，它把每一个像素是怎么处理的都想透了。所以你得记住，这到底是第一版，还是第二、三、四版？因为对于那种高度创新、高度差异化、靠观点驱动的东西，AI 没有它的模型，那种东西它库里没有。你仍然需要先有人把第一版做出来。所以也许你能用这些工具做原型。我就……你知道，这事我能聊上好几个小时，但算了。这只是一个老头的一家之言罢了。我觉得这个洞察真的很重要：当构建变得越来越容易，那些真正脱颖而出的东西，就是那些被深思熟虑、做得极好、几乎像你说的那样「奢侈」的东西。

[57:15] Tony

and and you can feel it right and you go oh my god and you know I'm like one of the biggest proponents of I'm like telling flighty flighty because I you know all the people in my in my sphere they're all flying all this I'm like have you tried it it's insane you know so it's you know and then you get the word mouth and you know things take off because there has been that level of care and craft to it and yeah maybe a lot of the subfunctions of flighty could be built and whatever from clawed code or whatever but the whole thing and the architecture and everything I don't think so

而且你能感觉得到，对吧，你会「我的天哪」。你知道，我算是 Flighty 最铁的拥趸之一了，我逢人就安利 Flighty，因为我身边那帮人全都在到处飞，我就「你试过这个没？简直绝了」。然后口碑就这么传开了，东西就火起来了，因为它确实做到了那种程度的用心和工艺。是，也许 Flighty 的很多子功能可以靠 Claude Code 之类的搭出来，但要论整个东西、那套架构、那所有的一切——我可不觉得行。

[57:50] Lenny

and if someone hasn't tried flighty clearly download it and play with it this is I love that this is the example of a amazing product that's like a really cool

如果有人还没试过 Flighty，那显然该去下一个玩玩。我特别喜欢拿它当例子——一个超棒的产品，特别酷。

[57:57] Tony

yeah and it's all software it's all software

对，而且它全是软件，纯软件。

[58:00] Lenny

yeah something along these lines as people hear you talk uh clearly you are an amazing storyteller and in your book you often come back to the power of storytelling the value of storytelling for product builders what's I guess one is just why is that so important do you think and two is what's like one tip you could give people to get better at storytelling storytelling that's how we've passed information down or or got people to commit to doing something like stories are so who we are we go to the movies for stories we have books, we have all this stuff and it's just so essential to who we are because we like to be taken on a journey. We like to, you know, and hopefully when you're buying a product or, you know, licensing one or whatever it is you're subscribing, you're taken on a journey that meets your expectations or out, you know, is is better than the what do your, you know, your the expectations were set. It's much it's outsized that. And so, you know, Dave Chappelle is he just, you know, when it comes to comedy and storytelling, the way he weaves it, he can weave a story for 20 minutes to get to the punch line and you're just you're, you know, just in it, right? I just love his comedy as opposed to the punchline guys who just, you excuse me, the the short ones. Um, I it's something in our nature, our human nature. You know, we were told stories when we were a kid. You know, we read the same or watched the same movies a hundred times when we were kids. There's something about being taken on that journey that we love. And people love to be educated that way, right? Your best your your best college professors, high school teachers, whatever, they taught you why you should love, you know, certain math or certain physics or whatever, and took you a journey of why it mattered. And then you're like, "Oh, now I get it." you know, you can learn all the the basics of, you know, how to do something, but that doesn't really tie it into something that's meaningful. And so, when you tie it to something that's human, right, that's when it becomes uh and accessible for humans and it's relatable, that's when it goes. And it can be for anything. And that's when great marketing, great sales um um happens, you know, and and great storytelling through the product design, that's even better, right? because it wasn't just perfume this pig and you put some, you know, on this bad product and you you say, "Oh, yeah, try it." And you're like, "Oh," and then it doesn't meet the expectations, but when it sings from the depths of the product, like you were bringing up with um you know, the Nest Protect, the thermostat or the the smoke detector and stuff, when we had all that and that you could feel the love and care, that's when people go, "Oh, I love this and I want more from that brand or from that company or that team." That's what they want. And so to get better at it, I've learned it because I watched my dad. He was in sales, right? So I watched how he would sell Levis's and I would watch and he would be like and it he wasn't always selling to sell. Sometimes he was convincing them not to buy something because that wasn't the best product they had. Buy this one instead and actually go to my competitor down the street because he was building a relationship and storytelling because he these people loved what it was. So it sometimes is not just setting expectations and telling a story, but it's also saying, "Hey, maybe I'm not for you." And that's truth. That's also truth. And so like Steve always said, the best marketing just tells the truth. Now might put nice words around it, nice creative and everything, but it's telling the truth. And so when I watched Steve prepare for and like I said when we did the two and a half years with the iPhone, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. He didn't give it to marketing. He knew what that thing was and what those key um features were like we talked about like and micromanage those features because he knew those were the things going to the world's going to take uh take notice to. and he would refine the story and then tell other people who were unwashed by like friends who were really smart and say, "I'm gonna give you the pitch and give you the pitch." And he would refine, refine, refine. And um and so when you saw him come on stage, it was just cuz he had done it, you know, 100,000 times or at least 10,000 times, right? And he he knew it like boom boom boom boom boom just it just came off. And so I watched and I learned from that. And that's what we did for like the Nest learning thermostat. That's what we learn, you know, we did for each of those things. It was just that same storytelling over and over. What does it matter? Why why does it matter? Why does it matter? And because too many times when we're technology-led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. And the why is where the storytelling is because you want to take a journey of why it matters to you. You know, if you're t talking about the what, you're just talking to another geek. Love geeks. No problem. I'm one of them. But and we can relate on that level. But general, most people who are not in the technology world, they want a story and they want something that that touches them in some way.

对，顺着这个话头说——听你讲话就知道，你显然是个超会讲故事的人。你在书里也常常回到「讲故事的力量」上，回到讲故事对产品构建者的价值上。我想问，一是：你觉得这为什么这么重要？二是：你能给大家一条让自己更会讲故事的建议吗？讲故事，这是我们传承信息、或者说让人愿意去做某件事的方式。故事如此地构成了我们之所以是我们——我们去看电影是为了故事，我们有书，我们有这一切，它对「我们是谁」太本质了，因为我们就喜欢被带上一段旅程。我们喜欢……你知道，但愿当你在买一个产品、或者授权使用、或者订阅什么东西时，你被带上的那段旅程能满足你的预期，或者说远超你被设定的预期。它要远远地超出那个预期。你看 Dave Chappelle，论喜剧和讲故事，他编织故事的方式——他能铺陈一个故事铺二十分钟才抖出包袱，而你就完全沉浸在里头，对吧。我就爱他那种喜剧，而不是那种只会抖机灵的、抱歉，那种短平快的。这是我们天性里的某种东西，我们的人性里的东西。你知道，我们小时候被人讲故事长大。小时候同一本书读上一百遍、同一部电影看上一百遍。被带上那段旅程这件事，有某种我们就是会爱的东西。而且人们就喜欢用这种方式被教育，对吧？你最好的大学教授、高中老师，他们会教你为什么该爱上某门数学、某门物理之类的，带你走一段「它为什么重要」的旅程。然后你就「哦，我现在懂了」。你可以学会某件事所有的基本功，但那并不能真正把它跟某种有意义的东西连起来。而当你把它跟某种「人」的东西连起来时，对吧，它才变得对人可亲近、可共鸣，那时候它才真正动起来。它可以用在任何事情上。这时候伟大的市场、伟大的销售才会发生，而通过产品设计来讲故事，那就更棒了，对吧？因为它不是「给猪抹香水」——你往一个烂产品上抹点东西，然后说「来，试试」，对方「哦……」结果它达不到预期。可当它从产品的最深处「唱」出来——就像你刚才提到 Nest Protect、那个恒温器或者烟雾报警器之类的，我们把那一切都做到了，你能感受到那份爱与用心——那时候人们就会「哦，我爱死这个了，我还想从这个品牌、这家公司、这个团队那儿要更多」。这才是他们想要的。至于怎么变得更会讲故事，我是学来的，因为我看着我爸学的。他是做销售的，对吧。我就看他怎么卖 Levi's，我在旁边看，他会……而且他并不总是为了成交而卖。有时候他是在劝人别买某样东西，因为那不是他们家最好的产品，「买这个吧」，甚至让人去街对面我竞争对手那儿买——因为他是在建立关系、在讲故事，因为这些人爱那个东西本身。所以有时候它不只是设定预期、讲一个故事，它还在于敢说「嘿，也许我这个并不适合你」。这是实话，这也是一种实话。所以就像 Steve 一直说的，最好的市场营销就是讲真话。当然你可以给它套上漂亮的措辞、漂亮的创意，但它讲的是真话。所以当我看着 Steve 准备——就像我说的，我们为 iPhone 干了两年半——他每天都在打磨 iPhone 的故事。他没把这事交给市场部。他清楚那东西是什么、那些关键功能是什么——就像我们聊过的那样——他会微管理那些功能，因为他知道那些就是会让全世界注意到的东西。他会一遍遍打磨这个故事，然后讲给别人听——讲给那些还没被「洗过脑」的人，比如那些特别聪明的朋友，说「我给你讲一遍我的说辞」，再讲一遍。然后他打磨、打磨、再打磨。所以当你看到他站上舞台，那效果，就是因为他已经做过了——你知道，十万遍，至少一万遍吧，对吧。他熟到「砰砰砰砰砰」一气呵成，张口就来。我就在旁边看着、学着。我们后来做 Nest 学习型恒温器就是这么干的，每一个产品我们都是这么学、这么做的。就是同样的讲故事，一遍又一遍。它意味着什么？它为什么重要？为什么重要？因为太多时候我们以技术为主导，我们只谈「是什么」，不谈「为什么」。而「为什么」才是讲故事的所在，因为你想带人走一段「它为什么对你重要」的旅程。你知道，如果你只谈「是什么」，那你不过是在跟另一个极客对话。我爱极客，没问题，我自己就是其中一员，我们能在那个层面上共鸣。但大体上，大多数不在科技圈里的人，他们想要一个故事，想要某种能以某种方式触动到他们的东西。

[1:03:14] Lenny

One lesson I'm hearing from what you just described is telling the story over and over and over and refining it over time is where the best stuff comes from. Not just here's I just came up with this and it's going to be amazing.

从你刚才讲的里头，我听到一个心得：把故事讲一遍又一遍、随时间不断打磨，最好的东西就是从这里来的。而不是「喏，我刚想出来这个，它肯定会超棒」。

[1:03:25] Tony

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. because you you need and and telling it to other people who don't un who don't it's to see if it resonates. I remember I remember the number of times I told the Nest story before Nest came out because I was like this is crazy this thermostat thing you know I'm like okay let me set up the virus of doubt which was do you know how much you spend on your energy bill every every year for your heating and cooling don't you hate your you know thing now there's a there's another way there's another way to look at the storytell I put this in the book oh no I didn't put this in the book we all have seen infomercials Right? You know those ones that drag on for a half an hour, an hour at late night TV, you know, on some random every channel now, right? And they just sit there and they tell you the story from all the different directions. They give you the virus of doubt. They're like, "Oh, here's this cheese grater." And you know when you you have this bad cheese grater and your knuckles bleed and you know whatever and it's hard to clean and and they overexaggerate everything and they show you all the pain points of it and then they show how wonderful easy it is to use in this whatever they're selling and then it's easy to buy and then it's easy to return and it's overly dramatic and we all know, you know, it's like wrestling. It's all an act and whatever. It's not, you know, there's probably no real this there, but it is storytelling in a way. And if and not that you should do that because they they overhype the expectations, but look at the techniques that are used, the psychological techniques, the emotional techniques to get there. And then dial it back and go, okay, I'm going to do that, but with truth. And that's when things start to go pop. Or at least that's what I've seen. And so I always use that as another metric. And it's not just telling the story over and over. It's what what story you are telling. And so I try to think of that as well, but not obviously clowny and cheesy and everything else, but it is a caricature of of doing good marketing.

对。哦，绝对的。因为你需要——而且要讲给那些还不懂的人听，看它能不能引起共鸣。我还记得，在 Nest 上市之前，我把 Nest 的故事讲了多少遍——因为我当时就想，这「恒温器」这事儿听着挺疯的，你知道吧。我就「好，那我先来埋下一颗『怀疑的种子』」：你知道你每年在供暖制冷上花了多少电费吗？你难道不烦你家那玩意儿吗？现在，有另一种方式了，有另一种方式了。还有另一个角度来看讲故事这件事——这个我写进书里了……哦不，这个我没写进书里。我们都看过那种电视购物广告，对吧？就是那种深夜电视上拖个半小时、一小时的，现在随便哪个频道都有，对吧？他们就坐在那儿，从各个不同的方向给你讲那个故事。他们给你埋「怀疑的种子」。他们「哦，看这个奶酪刨」——你知道当你用一个烂奶酪刨、刨得指关节都流血、还特别难洗的时候，他们把一切都极度夸张化，把所有痛点都摆给你看，然后再展示他们卖的那个东西用起来有多么美好、多么简单，接着买起来也容易、退货也容易，整个夸张到不行。我们都知道，这就跟摔跤一样，全是表演、是演出来的，那里头大概没什么真东西，但它在某种意义上确实是在讲故事。倒不是说你该那么干——因为他们把预期吹得过头了——而是去看看里头用到的那些技巧，那些心理学技巧、情绪化的技巧，是怎么把人带到那一步的。然后你把它收一收，说「好，我也这么干，但用的是真话」。这时候东西才开始「砰」地火起来。至少这是我看到的。所以我一直把它当作另一把尺子。它不只是把故事讲一遍又一遍，更在于你讲的是「哪个」故事。所以这一点我也会去琢磨，但显然不是要搞得那么小丑、那么俗气，它只是把「做好营销」这件事漫画化、夸张化了的一个版本。

[1:05:26] Lenny

I feel like this is a really interesting lens into the press release first or working backwards idea is create the infomercial first and just go extreme.

我觉得这是个特别有意思的视角，去看「先写新闻稿」或者「倒推法」这个思路——先把那支电视购物广告做出来，而且往极端里做。

[1:05:34] Tony

Sure, you could. [laughter]

当然，你可以。（笑）

[1:05:36] Lenny

Oh my god.

我的天哪。

[1:05:36] Tony

Know what you don't want to do for sure. But it's like a cool lens to go really far and then kind of pull back the best parts and make it honest. I think we just came up with a really good idea here.

至少能让你看清绝对不该做成什么样。但它是个挺酷的视角：先走到极远处，再把最好的那些部分往回拉、做得诚实。我觉得咱俩刚刚是想出了个相当不错的点子。

[1:05:46] Lenny

Um [clears throat] I want to come back to the iPhone. So I think it came out like 20 years ago almost at this point, right? It launched 27 2007.

嗯（清嗓子）我想回到 iPhone。我记得它差不多是 20 年前问世的吧，对吧？它是 2007 年发布的。

[1:05:55] Tony

Yeah. 2007.

对，2007 年。

[1:05:56] Lenny

So what's crazy is people are still trying to build the next iPhone especially with AI. Everyone's just like what's this? We've had this thing forever. What the hell? Why has nothing changed? I'm curious. I imagine people ask you this question. I'm curious just like what you think the next iPhone may look like with AI. What's like the device that you think emerges over time? Do you have vision?

疯狂的是，人们到现在还在试图打造「下一个 iPhone」，尤其是借着 AI。所有人都「这是个什么？我们用这玩意儿用了这么久了，搞什么？为什么什么都没变？」我很好奇——我猜肯定有人问过你这个问题——我就是好奇你觉得借助 AI，下一个 iPhone 可能长什么样？你觉得随着时间推移会冒出来一个什么样的设备？你有没有一个愿景？

[1:06:16] Tony

Okay. There's the what it could look like long term and there's what it could look like soon. And so a lot of people like, okay, there's the long-term thing and and when we can trust the models and when they have memory and when they do this stuff, then then we're still going to need a display cuz, sorry people, unless we're plugging it into our brain like a BCI brain computer or there's some laser thing going into our retina, we're going to need a display. So, so barring those kinds of technologies, we're going to need a display. Okay. And so the best display that we have is a smartphone like thing. Okay. It's not going to be this tiny thing. We saw what happened with humane all other stuff. So you're going to have some kind of because the best way to visualize visual information is with a display, right? So we're going to have some kind of small slab. Maybe it's foldable like we see today, whatever, so that you can access it. You maybe many things you don't need a display for, but a lot of things you still do, right? because you might not be tapping and swiping and all this stuff. So I am of the opinion that long-term if you look at how a device is layered today and this is many many devices and iPhone specifically started this which was you know tapping and swiping right that was that was the first thing is you know you use your finger then after that was keyboard and then after that the tertiary thing was a voice input. We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it. And we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do at Nest, which is I want to remove displays. And we need to have voice as the number one primary feature. And you build around voice. Then we have keyboard if necessary. And then we have tapping and swiping. Okay, it should go exactly the opposite. And the problem why we know most of us don't go around talking to our phones and everything. And we saw this also happen with cars. There was tactile buttons and then there was the touchcreens and then they also added the voice in. But nobody really uses voice in the car unless it's some accessibility thing, right? because voice was always added at the end because it was always like well it sort of works and it's it's a gizmo but it's you know it's like like Alexa was for version 1.0 know or Siri was what but when we actually have really good voice input with not just it understand it's like whisper flow or something because that's great what what I'm saying is the intelligence behind it with memory and everything else so it's then we can start to say and and uh we can start to use that much more specifically and then deprecate those other things but we've always have to have them there as a crutch for voice because voice has never been able to deliver. So that's the long-term thing. So it'll have some kind of display, but it's going to be much more voice primary and then you're going to have the other things as secondary and tertiary in the middle now or sometime soon. It's going to look much much like this. The this smartphone is because we're not going to get away from the all app interface anytime soon. We're not going to get, you know, we're gonna remove some things, but we don't trust it yet. It's going to take a while till we trust it. And we are literally turning over a lot to this trusted thing, right? Because tapping and swiping, we know what that is for the most part. We know that we can trust ourselves when we're tapping and keyboarding or whatever. This other thing we don't know. And so it's going to take a lot of time. Reminds me of kind of general magic in a way for us to be able to get on mass to trust it. And we're already seeing this with coding agents and everything else, you know, oh, they deleted my source code. And again, I'm not trying to be an old guy who's saying it's not going to work. Sure, it's going to work in certain things. I'm seeing for consumers every day and the things they want and it's cheap enough so it doesn't cost him a lot. Right? Today, people are, "Yeah, I'm going to try Chad GPT or whatever. It's $20 a month or $200 a month." That is unsustainable for if you think consumers are going to pay that. There's just no way unless it's incredible. But they're not gonna do, you know what I mean? Like they tried it and now they're getting kind of their Siri. A lot of them are getting their Siri 1.0 with this. Like I paid for it, but it's really not all that yet. And it's like full self-driving. Like I paid for full self-driving. It's 15 years later. I'm still waiting for full self-driving. So I think we again understand what we think we want but where the technology is and and and the social adoption and the social trust that needs to be created around that is going to take a lot of time and it's going to take a lot of iterations to get there especially and especially if you're going to have to pay for it. It's really interesting to hear you say that long term even we're going to need a screen. Uh because I think a lot of people are trying to go to just just like an AirPod or like some kind of magical air

好。有「长期它可能长什么样」，也有「很快它可能长什么样」。很多人会说，好，先讲长期的：当我们能信任这些模型、当它们有了记忆、当它们能做到这些事的时候，那时我们仍然会需要一块显示屏。因为，抱歉各位，除非我们把它直接接进大脑——像 BCI 脑机接口那样——或者有某种激光打进我们视网膜的东西，否则我们就是需要一块显示屏。所以撇开那类技术不谈，我们会需要一块显示屏。好。而我们现有最好的显示屏，就是智能手机这样的东西。它不会是那种巴掌大的小玩意儿，我们已经看到 Humane 之类的东西是什么下场了。所以你会需要某种——因为可视化视觉信息最好的方式就是用显示屏，对吧。所以我们会有某种小板砖。也许它像今天这样能折叠，随便，反正你能用上它。也许很多事情你不需要显示屏，但很多事情你仍然需要，对吧，因为你可能不再是点点划划那一套了。所以我的观点是，长期来看，如果你看今天一台设备是怎么分层的——很多很多设备都是，而 iPhone 尤其开了这个头，就是点和划，对吧，那是头一件事，你用手指；之后是键盘；再之后排在第三位的，才是语音输入。我们得把它翻过来。我们绝对得把它翻过来。我们得说——这也是我在 Nest 一直想做的事——我想去掉显示屏。我们得把语音当成头号、最主要的功能，围绕语音来构建。然后如果需要，再有键盘。再然后才是点和划。好，顺序就该完全反过来。而问题在于——我们都知道我们大多数人并不会成天对着手机说话，对吧。这一点在汽车上也发生过：先是实体按键，然后是触摸屏，然后他们又加了个语音输入。但除非是某种无障碍场景，没人真在车里用语音，对吧。因为语音总是最后才被加上去的，因为它总是「嗯，勉强能用、是个小噱头」，就像 1.0 版本的 Alexa，或者当年的 Siri。但当我们真的拥有非常好的语音输入——不只是它能听懂，比如 Whisper Flow 那种，那个很棒——我说的是它背后的那份智能，带着记忆和别的一切，那时我们才能开始更有针对性地去用它，然后把那些别的方式降级。但我们始终得把它们留在那儿，作为语音的拐杖，因为语音从来没真正交付过。这是长期的图景。所以它会有某种显示屏，但会以语音为主，然后其他东西作为次要和第三位的。而当下，或者说不久的将来，它看起来会跟现在这个非常非常像。这台智能手机之所以是这样，是因为我们短期内不会摆脱「全是 app」的那套界面。我们不会——你知道，我们会去掉一些东西，但我们还不信任它。要等到我们信任它，还得有一阵子。而我们其实是在把很多东西交托给这个「被信任的东西」，对吧。因为点和划，我们大体上知道那是什么。我们知道自己在点、在打字之类时是可以信任自己的。这另一个东西，我们还不了解。所以这得花上很多时间。这某种程度上让我想起 General Magic——要让大众层面上去信任它。而我们已经在编码 agent 之类的东西上看到这一幕了，「哦，它把我的源代码删了」。再说一次，我不是想当个唱反调的老头说「这不行」。当然，它在某些事情上是会成的。我每天都在为消费者看——他们想要什么，而且它便宜到不会让他们花太多钱，对吧。今天大家是「行吧，我去试试 ChatGPT 之类的，一个月 20 美元，或者 200 美元」。要是你以为消费者会一直掏这个钱，那是不可持续的，绝无可能——除非它真的牛到不行。但他们不会的，你懂我意思吧。就像他们试了一下，结果拿到手的有点像他们的 Siri。他们里头很多人用这个拿到的，是 1.0 版的 Siri。就像「我付了钱，但它现在其实还没那么神」。这就跟全自动驾驶一样。我付了全自动驾驶的钱，15 年过去了，我还在等全自动驾驶。所以我觉得，我们再一次地——我们清楚自己「以为」想要什么，但技术到了哪一步、以及围绕它需要建立起来的社会接受度、社会信任，这些都得花很长时间，得经过很多次迭代才能到那儿，尤其是、尤其是当你还得为它掏钱的时候。听你说「即便长期来看我们也仍然需要一块屏幕」，这真的很有意思。因为我觉得很多人都想直接奔向一副像 AirPod 那样的东西，或者某种神奇的「空气——」

[1:11:36] Tony

like how you going to look at a map if you want to look at a map you're going to just you're going to listen like put on the voice stuff in your car and never look at the map on your car and say oh turn left in 200 feet turn left in 100 feet you're like shut up I can't hear you anymore like I just want to glance over. So, I I I don't buy it. Like, unless you have it jacked into your brain or into your eye or some other way, it's getting into your cortex.

比如说你要看地图怎么办？如果你想看地图，你难道就光听吗——就像在车里把语音那套打开、从不看车上的地图，让它「哦，200 英尺后左转，100 英尺后左转」，你就「闭嘴吧，我听不下去了，我就想瞥一眼」。所以我不信这套。除非你把它直接插进你大脑、插进你眼睛、或者用别的什么方式钻进你的大脑皮层，否则不行。

[1:11:58] Lenny

That is so interesting. And you're not a fan of like the humane approach, I think, was like a little projection on your hand as a screen replacement, right? Is that part of it?

这太有意思了。那你大概也不待见 Humane 那种路子吧——我记得就是在你手上投一小块投影来替代屏幕，对吧？这也是你不买账的一部分原因吗？

[1:12:06] Tony

Yeah. Why? [laughter]

对。凭什么呀？（笑）

[1:12:09] Tony

What? It's just it it's different, not better.

什么？它只是不一样而已，并不是更好。

[1:12:14] Lenny

So funny. I guess the advantage obviously is it's like a small little device you could just put somewhere versus like a screen. But yeah.

太逗了。我猜它的好处显然是，它是个小小的设备，你随便往哪儿一放就行，而不像屏幕那样。不过，确实是这样。

[1:12:20] Tony

Yeah. And you're like, "Oh, it's like, you know, it's like uh the the hologram projections of Star Wars or something." You're like, "Yeah, that's cool." But you still need to you still need a you know a screen or something to you to project on. So it is a screen at the end of the day. You got to still project it onto something.

对。你会觉得「哦，这就像《星球大战》里的全息投影之类的」，你会说「嗯，这挺酷」。但你还是需要一块屏幕之类的东西去投影。所以归根结底它还是块屏幕，你总得把它投到某个东西上。

[1:12:37] Lenny

Yeah. It's well because everyone keeps saying how is it possible that the end ideal product is a piece of glass that we look at and you're what you're sharing here is just like that's actually maybe the ideal product.

对。这挺有意思，因为大家总在问：怎么可能最终的理想产品就是一块我们盯着看的玻璃呢？而你刚才分享的观点其实是说——也许这块玻璃才真的是理想产品。

[1:12:49] Tony

Yeah. And like I said, you fold it up, you put it in your thing and it rolls out or whatever else, but I still think there's going to be that thing. If you look at her, if you remember the movie Her, they had they had glass.

对。就像我说的，你把它折起来，揣进包里，要用的时候它再展开，或者别的什么形式，但我还是觉得那个东西会一直存在。你看那部电影《Her》，他们其实就有玻璃屏。

[1:13:00] Tony

There was glass there for certain for certain things.

在某些场景里，确实是有玻璃屏的。

[1:13:03] Lenny

Wow. I didn't I I completely

哇，我完全没……我完全……

[1:13:04] Tony

Yeah, you have to go back and watch the movie. It's there. Oh my god, that movie. I nailed it. Oh man,

对，你得回去重看那部电影。它就在里面。天哪，那部电影。我说中了。哎呀。

[1:13:13] Lenny

Spike Spike Jones, right? Yep. I don't know. Um,

是 Spike Jonze 拍的吧？对。我不太确定。嗯……

[1:13:17] Lenny

I wanted to ask also just, it's interesting that basically everyone is getting to hardware now. Like you've been at this for so long building hardware in AI and now it's just like the hottest thing. Everyone's building hardware.

我还想问一个，挺有意思的是，现在基本上所有人都在往硬件上扑。你在 AI 硬件这个领域已经做了这么久，而现在它突然成了最火的方向，每个人都在做硬件。

[1:13:27] Tony

So funny.

太逗了。

[1:13:28] Lenny

Thoughts? I don't know. How does that feel?

有什么感想吗？我不知道，这让你是什么感觉？

[1:13:30] Tony

Look, I I was building hardware when it wasn't in vogue in 1995 and 96. Everyone's like, "Tony, you're" and this was in the Valley. Tony, you're crazy. It's all about the internet. We don't need any hardware. And then iPod comes like, and I was pitching new businesses in 99 and 2000. They're like, "Well, that's the stupidest idea ever." Then the iPod comes out. Tony, you want to leave Apple and start that business you wanted to do with hardware, you know? And then and then it was like, "Okay." And then it was all software mobile stuff again like okay we don't need anything cuz but we we can't get to the next level of software if we don't make the next level of hardware and it has to the revolution has to happen completely like you got to have the mobile network and the mobile network software for the mobile network to work. You had to have the MP3 player and the MP3 you know format bits to make that work. We're seeing with AI we got to have AI plus all the data centers and edge compute to make that work. So and then over time the hardware becomes less it becomes more mundane like okay it doesn't change as much but all the software starts to then you know so I've always just been continually going through the things that I love to do and doing the things at the the the the full stack level because that's where I know is innovation. That's what we had to do at Nest. We had to innovate the software level, the hardware level, the network level to get the first thermostat out and then the Nest Protect and all that stuff. If we look now going on, people are like, uh, if you're a SAS company or if you're a software only company, your software companies do worthless because anyone can vibe code it into the thing. And and now they're like, we're only funding companies that have atoms in their business plan with software. I'm like, duh. like like where have you guys been? Like so it's just it's just funny to watch these cycles go and happen and it's like okay all right you guys can go chase your tails but it'll just keep here doing these full system kind of products and businesses. Yes, they're a lot harder and yes they cost more money and yes they're going to take longer to scale and adopt and blah blah blah but they have staying power for years, right? and and they bring and they bring new new features that you could have never had if you just did software only because you need especially let's say in robotics form you need new sensors and you knew this and knew that what have you right look at Whimo you know it's like it's an electric car what you know electric car with tons of sensors and and everything was it's a hardware platform maybe doesn't look as streamlined as maybe a smartphone but it's an incredible hardware platform with an incredible software platform and that is something that we're going to be able to innovate on and it'll become a platform for something else. I'm sure you know delivery or this or whatever else.

你看，我早在 1995、96 年硬件还不吃香的时候就在做硬件了。那会儿在硅谷，大家都说「Tony，你疯了吧。现在全是互联网的天下，谁还需要硬件」。然后 iPod 就来了。我在 99 年、2000 年到处去推新业务的点子，他们说「这是我听过最蠢的主意」。结果 iPod 一出来——「Tony，你不是一直想离开 Apple 去做硬件创业吗？」然后就变成「好吧」。再然后又轮回到全是软件、移动那一套——「好吧，我们什么硬件都不需要」，可问题是，如果不做出下一代硬件，软件根本到不了下一个层级。这场革命必须彻底地发生：你得有移动网络，还得有跑在移动网络上的软件，移动网络才能转起来；你得有 MP3 播放器，还得有 MP3 这种格式，那一套才能跑起来。我们现在在 AI 上看到的也一样——你得有 AI，再加上所有的数据中心和边缘算力，它才能跑起来。然后随着时间推移，硬件就变得没那么关键了，变得越来越平淡，不怎么变了，但软件就开始不断迭代。所以我一直就是在持续地做我热爱的事，而且是在全栈这个层面去做，因为我知道创新就在那里。这正是我们在 Nest 必须做的事：我们得在软件层、硬件层、网络层全面创新，才能把第一台恒温器、还有 Nest Protect 那些东西做出来。现在你再看，大家会说，如果你是个 SaaS 公司、或者纯软件公司，你的软件就一文不值，因为任何人都能 vibe coding 把它捣鼓出来。于是他们又开始说「我们现在只投那些商业计划里既有原子（硬件）又有软件的公司」。我心想——这不废话嘛，你们这些人之前都跑哪儿去了？所以看这些周期轮回上演挺有意思的，就像「行行行，你们尽管去原地打转吧」，而我们会一直在这儿做这种全系统的产品和生意。没错，它们难得多，没错，它们更烧钱，没错，它们规模化和被市场接受会更慢，等等等等，但它们能撑住很多年，对吧？而且它们能带来那些你做纯软件永远做不出来的新功能。因为——比如说在机器人这种形态上——你需要新的传感器，你早就明白这点、明白那点。你看 Waymo，它本质上就是一辆电动车，对吧，一辆装了一堆传感器、什么都有的电动车，它是一个硬件平台。也许看起来不像智能手机那么精致流畅，但它是个了不起的硬件平台，配上了一个了不起的软件平台，而这正是我们能在上面持续创新的东西，它还会变成承载其他东西的平台——我相信，比如配送之类的，或者别的什么。

[1:16:19] Lenny

When Evan Spiegel is on the podcast, Snapchat founder, he said exactly this. This is why they're they've spent so much money on these specs and he's just like this is the only way to survive in software is you need to have a hardware component now.

Snapchat 创始人 Evan Spiegel 来上节目的时候，说的就是这个意思。这就是为什么他们在那副眼镜上砸了那么多钱，他的看法就是：如今在软件领域唯一能活下来的办法，就是你得有一个硬件的部分。

[1:16:30] Tony

Yeah. Just very interesting. Everything old is new again. And and and you know, I've been in this game 354 years. I just you just see it. You're like, "Okay, I was there at 99 when the bottom fell out." And you know AI is different but it's there's a lot of similarities and you know we're going to have the gen one companies the gen two companies and you know when people really understand product instead of selling technology platforms that people have to figure out for themselves. So you know it's it's it's fun to watch. It's a game.

对。非常有意思。所有的老东西都会以新的面貌再来一遍。你知道，我在这行干了三四十年了，你就是会看到这种轮回。你会想「好吧，99 年泡沫破裂的时候我在场」。AI 当然不一样，但其中有很多相似之处。我们会有第一代公司、第二代公司，然后会有人真正搞懂产品，而不是去卖那些得让用户自己琢磨怎么用的技术平台。所以，看着挺有意思的，这是一场游戏。

[1:17:02] Lenny

Okay. Maybe one more question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. What do you what are you most excited about these days in terms of I don't know gadgets or hardware or technology that's emerging? Is there anything you're like, "Oh, pay attention."

好。在进入我们非常精彩的闪电问答之前，也许再问一个问题。最近在正在涌现的——我也说不好——小玩意、硬件或者技术里，你最兴奋的是什么？有没有哪个让你觉得「哦，这个得留意」的？

[1:17:13] Tony

I've been doing this AI plus hardware thing now, not just at Nest, but in many of the startup companies that we funded at Build and so company like Simbi Robotics, you know, it's Simbi Robotics. We were doing robotics way back now, it's not a humanoid, but it does inventory inventory of retail stores. And we've been at it, I don't know, eight years now, seven years. And now it's just taking off, right? and it does have AI and it has a robotic platform and it's like and it really solves real pain points for the retailers of inventory and the workers hate doing inventory counting everything on every shelf and all that stuff. So, it really works and like I love seeing that stuff. You know, I we're doing the same thing at Great Parrot with AI and tech and uh recycling like it's literally figuring out what things should go in this recycling bin versus that and doing it really fast with cameras and and all this stuff. It's like and we've been at that for a few years. And we have AI plus textiles like most textiles, you know, are have uh you know uh weaving errors and and and and color errors and defects and things like that. And so people still make all of these these products, but then they have to incinerate them because they're not perfect at the end because we they don't catch the quality problems early enough in the in the in the product product. And we're doing AI plus cameras to to spot all this stuff. again another thing and we're doing this. We've been doing AI and drug drug design now for 10 years at Orianis and that's taking off and it's like so I'm really interested in not just these frontier models and this whole thing is really good AI that you can trust scoped correctly with this solving real problems every day as opposed to pipe dream AGI you know okay you can go solve that I'm going to go and build all these businesses that really matter right now and we're finally getting traction action because people are like what AI and uh we're robotics and uh and now all of a sudden we're in Vogue and we've been here really working on our product market fit working on our marketing working on version 3.0 and over the device and everything and people are adopting them and that's what's wonderful to see. So, I'm excited by all that. We have we have another one like AI infusion, you know, and doing that or or um finally doing um tons of software with chemical reactions and now we're we're turn we have a agricultural uh clean agricultural uh fuel and oils company that uh is cleaning up farms all around uh Central America. So like and we're almost all Adams plus software in some way. And so it's just nice to be sitting here and um and knowing that we made these bets a long time ago and we're doing it now. were not necessar you know I was early on in Grock that you know right because I was like and it was cheap then and it was like yeah that's the right way to go and and and my friends were in Cerebrus and I got into that and then you know it's like but these are long-term plays and they're finally coming to fruition but we did invested it not when it was hyped and it's you know we were doing it back when unicorns valuations were billions of dollars today if you don't have a $5 billion rack found raised you're not anything. It's like okay well that doesn't work from a venture perspective like with those kinds of you never get the venture returns you can't invest in things when when the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits and you you think you get a small portfolio that's like uh that's not the kind of game I want to play. So I I'm glad that we have well positioned in the all these companies that have real good product market fit that came in the right valuations that that we can really help and make big change and deliver painkillers and we'll let everybody else over there play. So that's what's exciting to me.

AI 加硬件这件事，我一直在做，不只是在 Nest，还在我们 Build 投的很多初创公司里都在做。比如 Simbe Robotics 这样的公司——我们很早就在做机器人了，它不是人形机器人，而是给零售门店盘点库存的。我们已经做了，我也说不准，七八年了。现在它正好开始起飞，对吧？它确实带 AI，有一套机器人平台，而且它真正解决了零售商在库存上的痛点——员工特别讨厌盘点库存，要数清每个货架上的每样东西，那些活儿太烦了。所以它真的管用，我特别喜欢看到这类东西。我们在 Glacier 也在做同样的事——用 AI 加技术做回收，它真的就是在判断什么东西该进这个回收桶、什么该进那个，靠摄像头之类的东西飞快地分拣。我们这块也做了好几年了。我们还有 AI 加纺织品的——你知道大多数纺织品都会有织造瑕疵、色差、各种缺陷。人们还是会把这些产品都做出来，但最后因为不完美就只能销毁焚烧，因为在生产环节里没能足够早地抓出质量问题。我们就用 AI 加摄像头把这些缺陷揪出来，这又是一件我们在做的事。我们在 Orionis 做 AI 加药物设计已经十年了，现在也在起飞。所以我真正感兴趣的，不只是这些前沿大模型这一整套东西，而是真正可信、范围界定得当、每天都在解决真实问题的好 AI——而不是那种画大饼的 AGI。好吧，那个你们去搞，我要去做这些此刻真正有意义的生意。我们现在终于有了起色，因为大家都在喊「什么 AI、什么机器人」，而我们突然就成了香饽饽——可我们早就在这儿了，扎扎实实地打磨产品市场契合、打磨营销、做到 3.0 版本，把设备做出来，现在人们开始采用了，这正是看着让人欣慰的地方。所以这些都让我兴奋。我们还有别的，比如 AI 加静脉输液之类的；还有终于用大量软件去做化学反应；现在我们还有一家清洁农业燃料和油料的公司，正在帮整个中美洲的农场做清洁。所以基本上我们做的每件事，多多少少都是原子（硬件）加软件。坐在这儿、知道这些赌注是我们很久以前就下的、现在才开花结果，这种感觉真好。我们并不是在风口上才进去的——比如我很早就投了 Groq，那会儿它还很便宜，我觉得「对，这条路是对的」；我的朋友们在 Cerebras，我也跟着进去了。但这些都是长线布局，现在终于开始结果。我们当初投的时候它还没被热炒，那是独角兽估值才几十亿美元的年代；放到今天，你要是没拉到一笔 50 亿美元的融资，你就什么都不是。这从风投的角度根本玩不转——估值已经到九位数、十位数了，你再进去，根本拿不到风投该有的回报，而且你只能拿到一小块份额，那不是我想玩的游戏。所以我很庆幸我们布局得当，手里这些公司都有真正不错的产品市场契合、进的估值也合理，我们能真正帮上忙、做出大改变、交付实打实的「止痛药」，至于其他那帮人，就让他们在那边玩去吧。这就是让我兴奋的东西。

[1:21:03] Lenny

Oh man, there's this quote that I I used the other day on a different podcast um that I think applies to you. It's a b quote from the Bible that you were made for a time like this. [laughter] Feels like all the things are converging around the things that you have been doing for so long and the technology is finally getting exactly as described to actually something amazing.

天哪，有句话我前几天在另一档播客上引用过，我觉得用在你身上很合适。这是《圣经》里的一句话——「你正是为这样一个时代而生的」。（笑）感觉所有这些东西都在朝着你做了这么久的方向汇聚，而技术终于发展到了它一直被描述的那个样子，真的能做出了不起的东西。

[1:21:23] Tony

The same thing happened at General Magic, right? General Magic iPhone too early and then I just kept at it and add it and then then doing the iPhone. So, it's just you just you stick with it. Like there's too many people who chase their tail and chase whatever the hottest thing is. When it's already hot, it's already too late to be in it.

在 General Magic 也发生过一模一样的事，对吧？General Magic 就是太早的 iPhone，然后我就一直坚持、一直琢磨，最后才做出了真正的 iPhone。所以你就是得坚持下去。有太多人只会原地打转，去追逐当下最火的东西。可等它已经火了，再进去就已经太晚了。

[1:21:39] Lenny

For people that don't know what you do these days, you talked about all these companies you work with. help people understand what what it is you spend your time on in case they may want to try to work with you on this stuff.

为了让那些不了解你现在在做什么的人也能明白——你聊了这么多你参与的公司，能不能帮大家弄清楚你到底把时间花在什么事情上？万一有人想在这些事上跟你合作呢。

[1:21:48] Tony

I think the the first thing to know is that I'm we invest in um deep technology. So that could be hardware, it could be software, software plus hardware, could be chemical, could be all kinds of different stuff. So remember we talked earlier about what's the pain and is there new technology that comes out to solve that pain in a new way or and so what what we do is I've learned that I invest in the deep technologies that are going to unseat the incumbents because it's going to change the market or the product in such a dramatic way that customers will choose this. So, we're not we're not just feature com competing on features or better marketing or whatever. We're fundamentally a different product. Now, it might take longer to get the market to shift to it, but it's fundamentally different. Just like I brought up Grock and Cerebras and these kinds of things, it's fundamentally different. And so, at Build, what we do is we invest in those technology companies that can be that seed that can unseat things. and maybe they go the distance or maybe they are the key enabling tech that allows another startup to go to the distance that kind of stuff. And so that's we invest in and we do it in in the environment in societal benefits and health benefits. That's where we focus and you know at times we've had a portfolio of over 200 companies and we we do that but we don't just invest when we get involved. many of the companies we advise and that we come in help them with product management, operations, we help them with financing, we help them with org development, uh you know just all kinds of different ways that a lot of times in marketing and communications, right? Because we talked about storytelling. Storytelling is really important and a lot of deep technology people, they're incredible, you know, engineers, scientists, researchers, what have you. They have a really good idea, but they don't necessarily know how to form the product around it or form the marketing around the product they're building or help the marketing to inform the product and vice versa. And so we try to encomp encapsulate that and and really bring that to bear. So they don't they don't hit it on the fourth version. They try to get very close to the first or second version so they can get on that three that three version um cycle to get to a a a great uh company. And so that's what we do. So we get to have a lot of fun. We get to work play in all these different place uh spaces. Health, medicine, drugs, robotics, uh um you know, chips, these kinds of things. So that's what's that's just what's wonderful to us. And we get to just be kids in the candy store and work with all these incredible smart entrepreneurs and everything. So that's one thing I do. The other thing I do is I'm a designer at residence at MIT. So I just finished up my first year there um with the MIT media lab in architecture and design and helped to uh you know give lectures and and um and work with work with students amazing amazing smart students on with the great technology but help them with the customer journey like try to make sure that they see this stuff early on in their career not after 10 years and then they finally understand oh wait a second what am I really building who is it for not what is it I'm building but why am I building it and for who and so we're trying to get that into the into some of the later undergraduate and graduate uh students so we can you know watch them change the world more quickly

我觉得首先要知道的是，我们投的是深科技。可以是硬件，可以是软件，可以是软硬结合，可以是化学的，可以是各种各样的东西。还记得我们前面聊过的吗——痛点是什么，有没有新技术冒出来、能用一种全新的方式去解决这个痛点。所以我们做的事是：我学到的是，要去投那些能掀翻现有巨头的深科技，因为它会以极其剧烈的方式改变市场或产品，让客户主动选择它。所以我们不是在功能上拼、在营销上拼，我们从根本上就是一个不一样的产品。也许要花更长时间才能让市场转向它，但它是根本性的不同。就像我提到的 Groq、Cerebras 这些东西，它们是根本性的不同。所以在 Build，我们做的就是去投那些能成为种子、能掀翻旧格局的技术公司。也许它们能一路跑到底，也许它们是那个关键的使能技术，让另一家初创公司能一路跑到底，诸如此类。我们就投这些，而且我们专注在环境、社会效益和健康效益这些领域。有段时间我们的投资组合里有超过 200 家公司。我们做这些，但我们不只是投钱就完事——一旦我们参与进去，很多公司我们会做顾问，帮他们做产品管理、运营，帮他们融资，帮他们做组织发展，各种各样的方式，很多时候还包括营销和传播，对吧？因为我们前面聊过讲故事——讲故事真的非常重要，而很多深科技的人，他们是了不起的工程师、科学家、研究员，他们有个非常好的点子，但未必知道怎么围绕它把产品塑造出来、怎么围绕产品做营销，或者怎么让营销反过来给产品输入信息、互相成就。所以我们就试着把这一整套都包进来、真正落地，这样他们就不至于到第四个版本才做对——他们争取在第一或第二版就非常接近，这样才能进入那个「三版迭代」的节奏，最终做成一家了不起的公司。这就是我们做的事。所以我们能玩得很尽兴，能在这么多不同的领域里折腾——健康、医药、药物、机器人、芯片这些东西。这对我们来说就是最美妙的部分。我们就像进了糖果店的孩子，跟这么多聪明绝顶的创业者一起共事。这是我做的一件事。我做的另一件事是，我在 MIT 当驻校设计师。我刚在那儿结束了第一年，是在 MIT 媒体实验室的建筑与设计方向，去做讲座，跟那些极其聪明的学生一起，他们手里有很棒的技术，我帮他们打磨用户旅程——尽量让他们在职业生涯很早期就接触到这些东西，而不是熬了十年之后才终于醒悟「等等，我到底在造什么？这是给谁造的？」——不是「我在造的是什么」，而是「我为什么要造它、为谁而造」。所以我们想把这个理念灌输给一些高年级本科生和研究生，好让我们能看着他们更快地去改变世界。

[1:25:23] Lenny

incredible I love just all the levels of ways you are helping people there's the investing there's this book there's MIT there's these conversations

太了不起了。我特别喜欢你帮助别人的那么多种层面——有投资，有这本书，有 MIT，还有这些对谈。

[1:25:32] Tony

it's fun it's just so much fun you know

很有意思，就是特别好玩，你知道吗。

[1:25:35] Tony

I love I love how much fun you're having is there anything else you wanted to share that we didn't cover we should really just talk about ethics and morals and your your point of view on that and as a product manager, as a product designer, you need to really consider these things. I understand we have lots of big questions about AI and is it going to be a disaster for the for the, you know, for the next generation and for societies and all the other stuff. But I think that you really need to be well-grounded and have real principles when you're designing something and don't let those things go astray. Just like you wouldn't go astray with a bad user interface or something like that. Make sure you're not trying to addict your users. And if anybody is, there's always other jobs and there's always other better companies. And don't chase the money for tearing apart what it is the fabric of this society that we've built. Obviously, there's going to be innovation and there's going to be change and but when it you're really doing it and you can see that you're doing it and you're like trying to get people hooked or you're like, "Ah, I get more dopamine or what have you." That's when, you know, you have to start really looking at things. And a lot of times people are young and they they think, "Oh, that's great. That's what I want." But when you start to have kids and you start to have families and you start to see the and you're not just about you. you you're you're you're not trying to just get out of your family, you know, uh out of your when you were growing up, you know, I'm an individual and I want what I want, you know, you really need to start thinking systemically about how what the benefit that you're bringing to to society as a whole, not just to the business that you're in and trying to bring in whatever revenue you're trying to do. Um because at the end of the day, users will feel that and then I think and will will reward that as we see with Apple with privacy, right? And people say, "Oh, they're behind because they're so private and there's this." But it's a double-edged sword. You know, I remember when we had a very pointed discussion when the iTunes music store and and when it was turning into video um was being specified and when we're thinking about it and everyone's like, "Oh, this is going to be great. We're going to do movies. We're going to do TV shows. That's going to all be great. We're going to make a lot of money with this in the studios. Everybody's behind it. And then somebody goes, "Yeah, when we should have porn, of course." Steve was like, "What? Is that the kind of world you want your kids to grow up in?" And Apple is related with that. And Apple's about is that what we want to do? And it was very clear. It was shut down. And we need leaders like that. You know, we need leaders who are very clear as opposed to I'm going to make a huge service for everyone and they're all sex chat sex chat bots for everyone. I just think, you know, when you start normalizing those things and you start telling other generations that's a value and you start and I understand that everyone has their own what's right and what's wrong and here I am the old guy, you know, again, uh, I think we, you know, we can go a little too far. I'm for individual rights. I'm for everyone to be a thing. But when major companies are are doing this in the guise of certain kinds of behaviors they're trying to achieve um you know when we're selling we're turning uh personal connection into a product with AI chat bots and making them really you know uh devolve uh you know social interaction to the point where I'm going to have a perfect interaction with this thing because the world is so messy. It's like we're we're losing humanity with that and we're just for for for gain. So I I I wish that the other product designers out there really take it to heart. Not saying we got to be Lily White and, you know, being in a in a in a church every weekend and Bible banging. I'm not saying that. I'm not MAGA. I'm not any of that stuff. Just saying, hey, think about it.

我特别喜欢看到你玩得这么尽兴。还有什么我们没聊到、你想分享的吗？我们其实真该聊聊伦理和道德，以及你在这方面的看法。作为产品经理、作为产品设计师，你真的得认真考虑这些事。我明白，我们对 AI 有很多重大疑问——它会不会对下一代、对社会、对其他一切造成灾难。但我觉得，当你在设计一样东西的时候，你真的得脚踏实地、得有真正的原则，别让这些原则跑偏。就像你不会容忍一个糟糕的用户界面那样，别去做让用户上瘾这种事。如果有人非要这么干——天底下总有别的工作，总有别的更好的公司。别为了撕裂我们建立起来的社会肌理而去追逐金钱。当然，会有创新，会有变化，但当你真的在做这种事、而且你自己也能看出来你在做、你在试图把人勾住，或者你想「啊，我能多搞点多巴胺」之类的——那就是你必须真正开始审视这些事情的时候。很多时候人年轻，会觉得「哦，那挺好啊，那正是我想要的」。但等你开始有了孩子、有了家庭，你开始看到……你就不再只关乎你自己了。你在成长的时候是「我是一个独立个体，我想要什么就要什么」，而现在你真的得开始系统性地思考：你给整个社会带来的是什么样的好处，而不只是给你所在的这门生意、给你想冲的那点营收带来什么。因为说到底，用户是能感觉到的，而且我认为他们会回报这种东西，就像我们在 Apple 身上看到的隐私那样，对吧？人们说「哦，他们落后了，因为他们太注重隐私了，又是这又是那」。但这是一把双刃剑。我记得当年 iTunes 音乐商店、还有它要扩展到视频的时候，我们有过一次非常尖锐的讨论。当时在做规划、在琢磨这事，所有人都说「哦，这会很棒，我们要做电影、做电视剧，那都会很棒，我们要跟制片厂一起靠这个赚一大笔钱」，所有人都支持。然后有人说「对，当然我们也该上成人内容」。Steve 当场就说「什么？那是你想让你的孩子在里面长大的那种世界吗？」Apple 就跟这件事绑在了一起——Apple 关心的是：这是我们想做的事吗？答案非常清楚，这事直接被毙了。我们需要这样的领导者。我们需要立场非常清晰的领导者，而不是那种「我要给所有人做一个超大的服务，结果里面全是给所有人用的色情聊天机器人」。我就是觉得，当你开始把这些东西正常化、开始告诉下一代「这是一种价值」的时候……我也理解每个人对什么是对、什么是错都有自己的看法，而我在这儿就是个老古董，对吧，我承认我们可能会有点矫枉过正。我支持个人权利，我支持每个人都能做自己。但当大公司打着追求某种行为的幌子去做这种事的时候——当我们在用 AI 聊天机器人把人与人之间的连接变成一个产品、让社交互动退化到「我要跟这个东西有一场完美的互动，因为现实世界太乱了」的地步——这就像我们正在为了利益而丢掉人性。所以我真心希望外面那些产品设计师能把这事放在心上。我不是说我们得当圣人、得每个周末都泡在教堂里捧着《圣经》布道，我不是这意思，我不是 MAGA，也不是那一类，我只是说：嘿，想一想这件事。

[1:29:37] Lenny

A lot of people look at the iPhone as this like thing now that everyone's hooked on. It's like gotten it's so good. or just like it's too good. Uh and there's all this data showing all the impact it has on people and things like that. Just like how do you think about that and the the impact the iPhone has had on people?

现在很多人看 iPhone，觉得它就是那个让所有人都上瘾的东西。它做得太好了，或者说就是太好了。有一大堆数据显示它对人产生的种种影响。你是怎么看待这件事、怎么看 iPhone 对人产生的影响的？

[1:29:53] Tony

Well, the first thing is the iPhone wasn't set out to be that. We you know there's unintended consequences and the unintended consequence was social this social media happened and social media Apple's not a social media company, right? But it does distribute the apps or make available those apps, right? And so the way I think about it is, you know, we have lots of junk food and we have an obese nation or obese world because of all the junk food and it takes us to regulate our our in our our consumption to do that and and get healthy tools and you know and and and you know there's nutritional elements on the back of things and you if you want to make a better decision you can and I hope AI and these assistants will help people be able to get better control uh of those kinds of things where our lizard brain is being, you know, stimulated in a way that like consume more, consume more of physical food, right? And now the same thing's happening in digital food, but we have digital food that doesn't have the nutrition labels, doesn't have the warnings, doesn't have the regulation that it needs to have, just like we do with our physical food because, oh, we can't you can't let innovation, you know, whatever, uh, you know, be slowed down. I think I think there's I'm not saying again being a nanny and all that other stuff, but we got to have some balance and it's just swung too far. And I still think that the platform companies like Google and Apple could be doing a lot more around digital consumption tools and information to help people make better decisions for themselves, for their families, and what have you. Because, you know, you could go to the refri get iPhone's just a refrigerator. You can put in junk food or you can put in good food. And even if you put in good food, you could go to the good food every five seconds, right? You have a refrigerator in your kitchen. You can put good food or bad food. You can open it all the time and keep consuming. So, we need to learn habits. We need to teach habits. We need to put in regulations. We need information. We need tools to help us monitor and manage that stuff. And they need to be supplied. And we have just like we have rules around, you know, who can buy something when they're 21 or under 21. We need all those kinds of things. And uh it needs to happen. Um because because why? Sure, you could have a short-term game and no customers, but if you make your customers unhealthy, you're not going to have customers.

首先，iPhone 当初的设计初衷并不是要变成那样。你知道，凡事都有意料之外的后果，而这个意料之外的后果就是社交媒体的出现。社交媒体——Apple 不是一家社交媒体公司，对吧？但它确实分发那些 App、让那些 App 能被用上，对吧。所以我是这么想的：我们有大量垃圾食品，正因为这些垃圾食品，我们有了一个肥胖的国家、一个肥胖的世界，这就需要我们自己去调节摄入，需要有让人变健康的工具，你知道，食品包装背面有营养成分表，如果你想做一个更好的决定，你是可以做到的。我希望 AI 和这些助手能帮人们更好地掌控这类事情——我们的「蜥蜴脑」总是被以某种方式刺激，让你「多吃点、多吃点」实体食物，对吧。如今同样的事正发生在数字食品上，但我们的数字食品没有营养标签、没有警示、没有它本该有的监管，不像我们的实体食品那样——因为「哦，不能让创新被拖慢」之类的。我还是要说，我不是要当个什么都管的保姆，但我们得有点平衡，现在就是摆得太过了。我仍然认为像 Google、Apple 这样的平台公司，本可以在数字消费的工具和信息上做得多得多，去帮人们为自己、为家庭做出更好的决定。因为你想，iPhone 其实就是台冰箱，你可以往里塞垃圾食品，也可以塞健康食品。可就算你塞的是健康食品，你也可能每五秒就去拿一次，对吧？你厨房里有台冰箱，你可以放好食物或坏食物，你可以一直开它、不停地吃。所以我们得学会习惯，得去教这些习惯，得制定监管，得有信息，得有工具帮我们去监测和管理这些东西，而且这些得有人来提供。就像我们对「谁满 21 岁能买什么、不满 21 岁不能买什么」是有规则的，我们需要所有这类东西，而且它必须落地。为什么？当然，你可以做一锤子买卖、根本不在乎客户，但如果你把你的客户搞得不健康，你最后就不会有客户了。

[1:32:18] Lenny

Let me just say for folks that haven't read your book, I just want to uh communicate how great it is. There's very few books that are both tactically useful that give you like here's how to do a thing and also just inspire you to build and make great things and Bill does that in such a great way. Uh I think everyone knows about it. I don't know if everyone's read it. So highly encourage you to read it. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to maybe learn about the stuff you're up to now and how can listeners be useful to you?

我想替那些还没读过你这本书的人说一句，我特别想强调它有多棒。很少有书能既在实操上有用——告诉你「具体该怎么做一件事」，又能纯粹地激励你去打造、去创造伟大的东西，而《Build》就以一种特别出色的方式做到了这两点。我想大家都知道这本书，但不确定是不是每个人都读过，所以强烈建议你去读一读。最后两个问题。如果大家想了解你现在在做的事情，可以在网上哪里找到你？听众又能怎么帮到你？

[1:32:46] Tony

Great. Well, let's see. Well, thanks again. This was fun interview. I really enjoyed it. I think if you want to interact with us, we're at buildc.com. So buildcollective, but we're buildc built dc.com. You can go and see the companies we invest in and you can find ways to contact us there. Um, and how can uh viewers help me um or help us? I think learn about the companies, see if you can model whatever you're doing and some of the learn from insights. You know, there's a lot of websites that we helped to create, a lot of the marketing we created for deep tech through those through those those investments we made. So, you can see some well done marketing. I hope you like our our website for build seed to show you how what we think is a really great website that you know only doesn't sell things necessarily, you know what I mean? Uh like you know, point andclick and and purchase. But um uh I I I just I it just get the get the rebuild and apply it. You know, that's I think that's the most thing is rebuild, read other things like that. Um and really hone your craft, make better products, make a better world because the world only gets better by the things we make and how what we bring. And so that to me, that's the that's the most important way to help me is by making other cool products like Flighty or other things. They're like, I love this thing. So, make great stuff, people, and don't think the AIS will, you know, use them for the the tools that they they can help with, but don't have cognitive surrender. Don't allow don't surrender to the machine. We can use the machines, but don't cognitively surrender and make better stuff. Make better stuff than myself or any of the teams that we back can make because we do have better tools now. So, please do.

好。让我想想。再次感谢，这次采访很有意思，我真的很享受。如果你想跟我们互动，我们的网址是 buildc.com，也就是 Build Collective，但简写是 buildc.com。你可以去看看我们投了哪些公司，也能在那儿找到联系我们的方式。观众怎么帮我、或者帮我们呢？我想是去了解这些公司，看看你能不能把你自己在做的事情对照参考一下，从中学到一些洞见。你知道，我们帮着做了很多网站、为深科技创造了很多营销内容，都是通过我们做的那些投资。所以你能看到一些做得很棒的营销。我希望你喜欢我们给 Build 做的官网，让你看到我们心目中真正出色的网站是什么样的——它并不一定是去卖东西，你懂我意思吧？不是那种点一下、买一个。我就是……把它拆解、研究、然后应用。我觉得最重要的就是去拆解、去读别的这类东西，然后真正磨练你的手艺，做出更好的产品、造一个更好的世界。因为这个世界只会因为我们做出来的东西、因为我们带来的东西而变得更好。所以对我来说，帮我的最重要的方式，就是去做出别的很酷的产品，比如 Flighty 或者别的东西。我会想「我爱死这个东西了」。所以，各位，做出色的东西，别以为 AI 会替你包办——你可以把它们当工具，用它们能帮上忙的地方，但别「认知投降」，别向机器缴械。我们可以用机器，但别在认知上投降，去做出更好的东西。做出比我自己、比我们投的任何团队都更好的东西，因为我们现在确实有了更好的工具。所以，请务必去做。

[1:34:32] Lenny

Amazing. Tony, thank you so much for being here. Hey, Lenny, that was great. Really appreciate it. Uh, looking forward to seeing what your what your audience creates.

太棒了。Tony，非常感谢你来到这里。嘿 Lenny，聊得很开心，真的很感激。很期待看到你的观众们会创造出什么。

[1:34:42] Lenny

Same. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple [music] Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes [music] or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

我也一样。各位，再见。非常感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期内容有价值，可以在 Apple Podcast、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客 App 上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们打个分或留个评价，这真的能帮到其他听众发现这档播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目、或了解更多关于本节目的信息。我们下期再见。