The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)

频道: Lenny's Podcast
视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eh9C3TUotc
原文语言: en
统计: 共 79 轮 · Mark 41 · Lenny 38

[0:00] Mark

If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume.

如果你真有野心，就把你的简历烧了。

[0:02] Lenny

You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products.

关于怎么打造出色的产品，你有一大堆特别反常识的独到见解。

[0:06] Mark

Your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea.

你的直觉有 95% 的时候是对的，但你的想法有 75% 的时候是错的。我们见过太多创始人了，他们就那么硬扛着、悲壮地死守着一个注定要输的想法。

[0:15] Lenny

How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following?

那你怎么判断，这是不是只是你正走在一条错的路上呢？

[0:18] Mark

If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not [music] an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works.

如果你还得问自己产品到底是不是 A 级，那它就不是 A 级。当你真的抓住了那种千载难逢的机会、真的拿到了正向信号的时候，怎么做都顺。

[0:26] Lenny

Most products are better versions of things that existed before. Talk about how you get over that hump of copying.

大多数产品其实都是在已有东西基础上做得更好的版本。聊聊你是怎么迈过「抄袭」这道坎的吧。

[0:31] Mark

It's almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, but you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana like for Farmville. You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer.

这几乎可以说是一种道德套利。你之所以成为创始人、成为创业者，是因为你想去做个创新者；可你真正要赢得的，是印第安纳州那些护士的心——比如做 FarmVille 那会儿。你要的不是同行的奖项和尊重。你得用你的用户的眼光，来重新定义你的野心。

[0:50] Mark

Building a consumer social app, very few people have successfully done it and built something durable.

做一款面向大众的社交 app，真正成功、还能做得长久的人，少之又少。

[0:55] Lenny

We have beyond a latent demand for social. It's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. [music] They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel you're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm here." Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude on our GPT, but there's no cocktail [music] party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. Today my guest is Mark Pinkinis, founder of Zingga, [music] who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history, over a dozen both within Zinga and before Zinga. And over the past 5 years, [music] he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks, and it is so good, and it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Alman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create. Mark [music] is an expert at this. And after reading this book and having this conversation, I could not agree more. In his book and in this conversation, Mark shares a really clever [music] and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for coming up with successful product ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas. why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you. [music] Why your instincts are usually right, but your ideas are usually wrong. Also, what he's learned about raising kids. He's got five. [music] And so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking about starting a company. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennisprod.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Mark Pinkis.

我们对社交其实有一种远超表面的潜在需求，只是它已经没了那股肾上腺素的劲儿。现在人们甚至会很自豪地告诉你，我已经不玩 Instagram 了。他们觉得自己根本没错过什么热闹。如果你想重新发明社交，就去找那个「鸡尾酒会」在哪儿。一场很棒的鸡尾酒会，我们一看就知道——你会有种「啊，真庆幸我来了」的感觉。而今天，我们都泡在自己的 Claude、自己的 GPT 上，却没有那种鸡尾酒会的氛围。我给听众们出的挑战就是：想办法把它弄得热闹喧腾起来。今天我的嘉宾是 Zynga 的创始人 Mark Pincus，可以说，他打造出的成功大众消费产品，比历史上任何一个人都多——在 Zynga 内部、以及在创办 Zynga 之前，加起来有十几款。过去五年里，他一直在写一本书，把他这些年关于打造成功消费产品所学到的一切都梳理进去了。书名叫《Life at the Speed of Play》，再过几周就要出版了。这本书太好了，而且读起来还特别快。OpenAI 的联合创始人 Sam Altman 给这本书写的推荐语里说：如今打造伟大产品唯一的瓶颈，就是知道该创造什么。而 Mark 正是这方面的高手。读完这本书、又和他聊完这一场之后，我再同意不过了。在书里、也在这场对话里，Mark 分享了他自己摸索出的一套非常巧妙、又特别反直觉的框架，用来想出那些能成功的产品点子。比如：为什么「少一点野心」往往才是想出最有野心的点子的捷径；为什么你得在希望害死你之前，先亲手把希望掐灭；为什么你的直觉通常是对的，而你的想法通常是错的。他还会聊到自己养孩子的心得——他有五个孩子。以及太多太多别的东西。这一期献给每一个正在打造产品、或者正在琢磨着要创业的人。在正式开始之前，别忘了去 lennysprod.com 看看，Lenny 时事通讯的订阅者可以独家免费用一年全世界最热门、做得最精良的 AI 产品。好，接下来，有请 Mark Pincus。

[2:51] Lenny

Mark, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Mark，太感谢你来了，欢迎来到这档播客。

[2:55] Mark

I've been a [music] big listener.

我一直都是你节目的忠实听众。

[2:57] Lenny

Oh, wow.

哦，哇。

[2:58] Mark

And I'm excited to I'm excited to finally be on. So,

终于能上节目了，我特别激动。所以——

[3:02] Lenny

I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book. It's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. There's uh so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed uh called proven better new and the framework is basically designed to help you come up with and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your idea is a good idea and that it will work. Uh it is such a clever idea, such a simple idea with so much depth. Um I want to spend a bunch of time on this. Um, so first of all, just give us kind of the the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas.

终于把你请来了，我也特别激动。你刚出了一本书，出版时间差不多就在这期播客上线前后，书名叫《Life at the Speed of Play》。这里面有太多我想聊的了。我想先从你提出的一个框架聊起，叫 proven、better、new（成熟的、更好的、全新的）。这个框架基本上是用来帮你想出并打磨产品点子和创业点子的，核心就是大幅提高你这个点子是好点子、并且真能跑通的概率。这个想法太妙了，简单，却又有那么多层次。我想多花点时间在这上面。那首先，你先给我们大致讲讲这个框架是什么、人们在想点子的时候可以怎么用它。

[3:44] Mark

Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zingga and it became like a religion and the fundamental the the core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zinga. And it's was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book we called it proven better new but then I was like oh that's too dry a name and I I love this concept of life at the speed of play which we can talk about but is the bigger gestalt to the book. So, but proven better new is this core um philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zingga, which is that we have these the we have these instincts like in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% or at best right 25% of the time. The framework of proven better new takes that philosophy and says okay what do we do with that? Okay let's let's isolate your innovation zone. Let's isolate that thing you have in your gut and let's just test many many ideas around that and let's fail for the right reason not the wrong reason. It might be I mean at Zingga we'd see new game launches. Sid Meyers like the you know godfather of game design who's the most revered game designer. He came out, I think, a a social civilization on Facebook and we thought, "Oh god, here comes like the ultimate game designer." And 10 minutes after the game came out, the Zinga PM's emailed around their analysis and they said, "It's dead on arrival because his Fatoule, his first time user experience, was so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever going to see his great game design." Even Sid Myers tripped over what were understood by the most junior product managers at Zingga was the best of breed approach to onboarding a new user to the first-time user experience on the Facebook platform. But because he didn't perfectly copy that, he didn't do the proven right, his innovation never got seen by anybody. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, Work OS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Versell, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are [music] 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 [music] 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 up market ends up working with Work OS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a 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 [music] where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. Workos allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to work os.com to make your app enterprise ready today. And so the con the point of proven better new is to say let's take all the proven off the table. If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now, AI cameras. Fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on. You're the icon. Um the maybe just the way a camera works. look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally and with hopefully some taste. We can get into like great copies and bad copies, but but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say we we don't we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist. And then better is usually we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations. And better is something that 10 out of 10 of your existing the existing users of that product would say [ __ ] yeah. 10 out of 10 not you. What you think is better is called new, right? What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new and and so better could be it's now free. There's no download. there's something that you can both statistically show works, you know, is better and every user would say yes to. And and usually it's it's very small and it's polish and it's it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most. And in our game, Words with Friends, you know, it was Scrabble, but if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't right? There must have been something, you know, better and novel about it. But it had such a polish for mobile was the better and the new. What's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's going to get people to download and try it? And in the case of words with friends, it was social. It was your friends are just is attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. You know, even that which you'd think of course I want, you might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes. And we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail. And if we do proven better new right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right, and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we we just prosecute it in a different way. And and we really it's I like to think if you do proven better, new, right? It's it's like a time machine because what if I could go back to Mark, you know, 2003 and four and say, "Dude, you don't even realize how right you are." Like, one of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once, and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $ 1.6 trillion company. That's, you know, I'm not going to tell you which. I'm not going to totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you there's something there's another answer in this that you could pursue that would be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, by the way, your Tribes idea that's Reddit that becomes a whole company industry, you know, listings. So, there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working. Our D30 retention was terrible. We were sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas. I'm going to look around me like if you're doing proven better, you're also looking around you for what's what are you finding heat that's proven in the market that you can also go test and you know I would have massively changed my odds of success. Okay, there's so much here. So just to summarize how I think about this framework which is so good like if you start to really think through all the products that have succeeded and how many of them actually follow this whether they are conscious or not it's wild so kind of the steps that I hear is so proven better new proven is make a list of the things that are proven to be working already in the market things people love about this sort of space better is make something that is not just better but that 10 out of 10 people will say f yeah I would switch at this is better and then add something new that nobody's tried before that adds a little wrinkle and I think a little bit like you have a bunch of examples in the book Slack and threads there's also like if you think about the iPhone and the iPod like you don't think you don't think about them that way but basically the iPod there was a music player they made it better and they added some new stuff and it

好的。这套框架是我们在 Zynga 很早期就摸索出来的，后来它简直成了一种信仰，成了我们在 Zynga 做产品管理背后最根本的核心原则和引擎。它对这本书太关键了，以至于写书的四年里有三年我都把书名定为《Proven Better New》；但后来我觉得，哦，这名字太干巴巴了，而我特别喜欢 Life at the Speed of Play 这个概念——这个我们待会儿可以聊——它是整本书更大的那个整体意象。不过呢，proven-better-new 是我从创办 Zynga 起就一直秉持的产品核心哲学，核心就是：我们每个人都有一种藏在直觉里的、人性层面的本能，而这种本能几乎总是对的；然后我们会在这本能之上叠加一些想法，而这些想法通常是错的。我的经验法则是：你的直觉有 95% 的时候是对的，而你的想法有 75% 的时候是错的——最好的情况也只有 25% 是对的。proven-better-new 这套框架接住了这套哲学，然后说：好，那我们拿它怎么办？好，我们来圈定你的「创新区」。把你藏在直觉里的那个东西隔离出来，然后围绕它去测试很多很多个想法，而且要为对的原因失败，而不是为错的原因失败。举个例子，在 Zynga，我们会盯着各家新游戏的发布。Sid Meier——你知道，他是游戏设计的教父级人物，最受敬仰的游戏设计师——他出了一款，我记得是 Facebook 上的社交版《文明》，我们当时心想：天哪，这下来的可是终极游戏设计大神。结果游戏上线才十分钟，Zynga 的产品经理们就把他们的分析群发了一圈，他们说：这游戏一上来就死了，因为他的 FTUE（首次用户体验）点击步骤太多、太糟糕了，根本没人能撑到看见他那精妙的游戏设计。连 Sid Meier 都栽在了这一关上——而这一关，在 Zynga 哪怕最初级的产品经理眼里，都早已是 Facebook 平台上引导新用户、做首次用户体验的业界最佳范式。可就因为他没把这套东西完美照抄过来，没把 proven 那部分做对，他的创新最后压根没人看得见。这一期节目由我们本季的冠名赞助商 WorkOS 带来。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Vercel、Replit、Sierra、Clay，还有其他几百家成功的公司，有什么共同点？它们全都跑在 WorkOS 上。如果你正在为企业级客户做产品，那你一定体会过接入单点登录（SSO）、SCIM、RBAC、审计日志，以及大公司要求的种种功能时的那种痛苦。WorkOS 把这些会卡死交易的拦路虎，变成了一套套即插即用的 API，背后是专门为 B2B SaaS 打造的现代开发者平台。说真的，我投资的每一家创业公司，只要开始往中大型企业市场扩张，最后都会用上 WorkOS。原因就是，它们是最好的。无论你是想拿下第一个企业客户的种子轮创业公司，还是正在全球扩张的独角兽，WorkOS 都是让你最快做到「企业级就绪」、解锁增长的那条路。它本质上就是企业级功能领域的 Stripe。去 workos.com 就能上手，或者直接去他们的 Slack——那儿有真正的工程师等着回答你的问题。WorkOS 让你能更快地构建产品：用上让人愉悦的 API、详尽的文档，还有顺滑的开发者体验。今天就去 workos.com，让你的应用变得企业级就绪吧。所以呢，proven-better-new 的要点就是：咱们先把所有「成熟、已验证」的东西都从牌桌上拿走。比如你想做 AI 版的 Snapchat、AI 相机——我现在看到一大堆这种，AI 相机。行。那咱们先从你「不打算在上面创新」的部分开始。你不创新的就是那些标杆——比如相机本身是怎么工作的。去找出那个已被验证为业界最佳的范式，不管它是 Apple、Snapchat 还是 Instagram，然后在合法的前提下、最好还带点品味地，把它们抄过来。咱们待会儿可以聊聊什么是高明的抄、什么是糟糕的抄；但总之，你得先成为「成熟玩法」的大师。先把 proven 这门课读到博士。我喜欢这么说：在我们成为全世界研究现有最好的手机相机的头号博士之前，我们根本没资格去在相机上搞创新。然后说到 better（更好）：通常我们压根找不到 better。better 往往是非常小的增量和改进。better 是那种，这款产品现有的十个用户里有十个都会说「卧槽，太爽了」的东西。是十个里十个，不是你自己觉得。你以为是 better 的那个东西，其实叫 new。我们以为的 better，其实是 new。我们在 new 上面通常都太有野心了。所以 better 可能是：它现在免费了；它不用下载了；是那种你既能用数据统计证明它确实更好、每个用户也都会点头说「要」的东西。而且它通常非常小，是打磨层面的、是那些重度用户、超级用户最能察觉到的细节。拿我们那款《Words with Friends》来说，它本质就是 Scrabble（拼字游戏），可如果它就只是个 Scrabble，凭什么它能成为一个有 1400 万 DAU 的现象级爆款，而 Scrabble 本身却不行？那肯定是它身上有某种更好、又新颖的东西。它在移动端那种打磨感，就是它的 better，也是它的 new。那个新颖的点子、那个印在包装盒背面、能让人愿意下载来试一试的点子是什么？在《Words with Friends》这个例子里，就是社交——它接到了 Facebook 的社交图谱上，你的朋友们本来就在那儿等着跟你一起玩，这就是一个全新的点子。你看，哪怕是这种你觉得「我当然想要啊」的东西，你可能也凑不齐十个里十个都说「要」。我们必须接受：这个新点子很可能是会失败的。它给了人们一个来试一试的理由，但它八成会失败。可如果我们把 proven-better-new 这套做对了，产品在市场上成功的胜算就会大得多，而且不会因为错的原因而失败。一旦我们从「这个 new 大概率不对」这个前提出发，而且手里早就备好了另外四个 new 的点子可以测，那我们对它的处理方式就完全不一样了。我喜欢这么想：如果你把 proven-better-new 做对了，它就像一台时光机。要是我能回到 2003、2004 年对当年的 Mark 说：哥们儿，你根本没意识到自己有多对。你某个直觉将来会对应到一家市值 1.6 万亿美元的公司，而且你比他们早了整整一年。你比一家 1.6 万亿美元的公司早了一年。我不会告诉你是哪家，我不会彻底作弊把答案给你，但我会告诉你：这里面还藏着另一个你本可以去追的答案，而那个答案值 1.6 万亿。对了顺便说一句，你那个 Tribes 的点子，就是后来成了 Reddit、成了整整一个行业的那个——分类信息（listings）。所以在做 Tribe 的时候有那么一刻，我心里清楚我的数据指标根本跑不通，我们的 D30 留存烂透了，我们就像一艘正在下沉的快艇。要是当时我有「我要去多试好多点子、我要环顾四周」这种心态——因为你做 proven 的时候，本来就也得环顾四周，看看市场上有什么已经被验证、正发烫的东西是你也能拿去测一测的——那我成功的概率本来会被大幅改写。好，这里面信息量太大了。我来概括一下我对这个框架的理解，它真的太棒了：如果你真的认真去把所有成功过的产品都捋一遍，看看其中有多少其实都遵循了这套——不管他们是有意识还是无意识的——你会惊掉下巴。所以我听下来，大致的步骤是：proven、better、new——proven 就是，列一张清单，把市场上已经被验证有效的东西、把人们在这个领域里特别喜欢的东西都列出来；better 就是，做出某个不只是更好、而是十个里十个人都会说「卧槽我愿意换过来用，这更好」的东西；然后再加上一点 new，一点谁都没试过的、带来一点小花样的东西。我觉得这有点像——你书里举了一堆例子，Slack、Threads；还有比如你想想 iPhone 和 iPod，你平时不会从这个角度去想它们，但本质上 iPod 就是：本来已经有音乐播放器了，他们把它做得更好，再加了些新东西，然后它就——

[12:54] Lenny

yeah in the world

对，在世界上（成了）。

[12:56] Mark

I was there at the TED conference when this team from MIT was demoing their touchscreen and they did it on a gigant gigantic whiteboard and Steve Jobs was obsessed with it. They had a whiteboard and they had a table with it and I watched him and he spent the whole time there with this team obsessing over their their touch. I don't know if that's the first time he saw it, but I know he was obsessed with it. Like, okay, there's his new idea is is a touch screen. It's [snorts] only new idea. Um, and I want to say proven gets so misused and that what I've found over the years with founders is that they start to use proven better new to justify a wrong idea and they're like, "Look, Mark, I'm doing Proven. Proven is this game that was popular in the 90s. Proven is and they they pick something that and it's to their own detriment. They're they're not using proven. You we have to be precise. We have to think at the pixel level of this experience. Proven is on this platform for this audience for this experience. And you can look to what's been proven before as great sources of new ideas, but but it's not if it's not on this platform, it's you know, it doesn't count as proven. And and yet the the masters at this product craft do proven better new whether they call it that or not and they do it at such a a a beautiful level that nobody even thinks no one realizes what it's derivative of and and Slack was a great example because I think Slack might have just been proven and better and no new and that's even better if you can get a if you can have a successful product and I don't want to sound anti-inovation but you know people don't like change. So if you take a behavior they like but you make it much more accessible or something much more fun about it like in the case of Slack um people love that even more. There's this thread of uh of copying that comes through this framework that will turn a lot of people off. uh talk about what you think people are missing and how you get over that hump of like this is actually the right approach in most cases

当年 MIT 的那个团队在 TED 大会上演示他们的触摸屏时，我就在现场——他们是在一块巨大无比的白板上演示的——而 Steve Jobs 当时完全着了迷。他们那儿有块白板、还有张桌子带着触屏，我就那么看着他，他整场都泡在那个团队那里，死磕着他们的触控技术。我不确定那是不是他第一次见到这玩意儿，但我知道他当时彻底着迷了。你看，好，他那个新点子就是触摸屏。那是它唯一的新点子。我还想说，proven 这个词被严重滥用了。这些年我在创始人身上发现的情况是，他们开始拿 proven-better-new 来给一个错误的点子找借口，他们会说：你看 Mark，我在做 proven 啊。这个 proven 是九十年代特别火的那个游戏；proven 是……然后他们就挑一个什么东西，而这恰恰害了他们自己。他们根本不是在用 proven。我们必须精确。我们得在像素级别去思考这段体验。proven 是指，在「这个」平台上、面向「这个」受众、为了「这个」体验而被验证有效的东西。你可以把过去被验证过的东西当作新点子的绝佳来源去借鉴，但是，如果它不是在「这个」平台上，那它就不算 proven。然而，真正精通这门产品手艺的大师们，不管他们管它叫不叫这个名字，他们都在做 proven-better-new，而且做得极其漂亮，漂亮到没人会去想、没人意识到它到底是从什么东西演化来的。Slack 就是一个很好的例子，因为我觉得 Slack 可能就只做了 proven 和 better，根本没有 new——而这甚至更好。如果你能拥有一款成功的产品（而它只靠 proven 和 better）……我不想听起来像在反对创新，但你要知道，人是不喜欢改变的。所以如果你拿一个他们本来就喜欢的行为，只是让它变得方便得多、或者其中某个点变得有趣得多——就像 Slack 这样——人们反而会更爱它。

[15:27] Mark

in the Peter Teal sense it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product you you became a founder an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator and so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work and we were taught in school copying is cheating. So there's there's a lot of good uh reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But but that also makes that opportunity in some ways, you know, more available for people who have less ego involved. And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zingga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. If you and if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. You're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana like for Farmville. You're going to define innovation differently and you're you're not going to worry about whether you're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her an experience that she loves more. And so if you know so and if you if all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And so and and I think that the the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it because I think consumer taste also resists just a copy. I think that consu if movies, TV shows, you know, books, if if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, um, then it it could go against, you know, our consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newark on Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. And I was like, and he lived in my neighborhood, and he was friends with my dog, Zingga, more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially, and he connected more with the dog. And I tried to be friends with him through the dog. And so he would sit and talk to me and he was working on I was like, "What are you working?" And I said, "I've been working for two years on adding photos to listings." I'm like, "What do you mean two years?" He's like, "Well, I really want to make sure that people like it and that the photos come up in the right ways. I don't know. I honestly don't even understand what he did for two years, but if you're driving across San Francisco to buy someone's couch, why wouldn't you want to? Why isn't that better? In his mind, it was new." And I'm like, that's a world-class product maker because he what he gets is that his there there's we feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day. And we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're like angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition. And we don't want to think about these things. And what if by adding photos to his listings, he moved where the text was? And what if you rifle through listings and now the text is below the fold, you know, and a junior product maker might make the whole thing a picture and not realize that what people liked most was being able to see the text real quick and they were trying to compare prices on the couch they already knew that I don't know.

用 Peter Thiel 的话来说，这几乎是一种道德套利。因为我们内心深处作为一个产品人……你之所以成为创始人、成为创业者，是因为你想去当个创新者，所以当你发现通往创新的路居然是从抄别人的活儿开始的，那感觉简直像挨了一记闷棍。而且我们从小在学校里就被教育：抄袭就是作弊。所以，我们之所以会建立起这种对「抄」的道德抵触，背后是有一大堆很正当的理由的。但也正因如此，这个机会在某种意义上反而对那些不太放不下自尊的人更敞开。我喜欢这么说，我也对我在 Zynga 的产品人说过这话：如果你真有野心，就把你的简历烧了。如果你用你的用户、而不是同行的眼光来定义你的野心——你要的不是赢得同行的奖项和尊重，你要赢的是印第安纳州那些护士的心，比如做 FarmVille 的时候——那你对创新的定义就会完全不同，你也就不会再纠结要不要从任何你能找到的地方去拿最好的点子了，只要这些点子是服务于「给她一种她更爱的体验」。所以你想，如果你做的全部就只是抄，那她根本没有理由去选你的产品，对吧？可如果你拿一个她本来就喜爱的东西，把它哪怕只做好一英寸，她可能会比你给她看一个她从没见过、起床时也压根不知道自己想要的东西，更爱它。我觉得这门手艺的艺术在于：你得用一种连她自己都意识不到的方式去做。因为我认为消费者的品味同样会抗拒一个赤裸裸的抄袭——电影也好、电视剧也好、书也好，如果它们感觉太像照搬、又没加进什么重要的新东西，那它就可能跟我们消费者的品味对着干。但最好的那批产品人——我特别爱举 Craigslist 的 Craig Newmark 这个例子，他花了整整两年时间才给 Craigslist 的帖子加上照片功能。我当时心想……他就住在我家附近，而且他跟我那条叫 Zynga 的狗，比跟我还熟。他这人社交上有点笨拙，反而跟那条狗更投缘。我就试着通过那条狗去跟他交朋友。于是他会坐下来跟我聊，他当时在忙活点什么，我就问：你在弄啥呢？他说：我已经花了两年时间给帖子加照片功能。我说：啥意思，两年？他说：嗯，我特别想确保大家是真喜欢它，确保照片是以正确的方式呈现出来的。我也不知道，说实话我到现在都没搞懂他那两年到底干了啥，但你想想，如果你要开车横穿整个旧金山去买别人一张沙发，你怎么会不想看看照片呢？这怎么会不算更好呢？在他心里，这就是 new。我就想，这才是世界级的产品人，因为他懂的是：对于那些我们每天都依赖的产品，我们会有一种很强的「所有权」感受。一旦它们变了，我们就会火大。哪怕它是往好了变，我们照样火大，因为我们靠模式识别在飞速地过日子，我们不想再花脑子去琢磨这些东西。那万一他给帖子加照片的时候，把文字的位置挪动了呢？万一你刷帖子的时候，文字现在掉到了首屏下面去了呢？一个初级产品人可能会把整个东西做成一张大图，却没意识到人们最喜欢的恰恰是能一眼快速看到文字——他们是想比一比那张他们早就看中的沙发的价格。我也说不准。

[19:30] Mark

Yeah. I'm thinking like as you're talking I'm just thinking what are all the best products and are they all just kind of uh one word are they copies and evolutions of existing products or how many are just completely brand new and I'm looking around like the iPhone that was you know there's phones before and they kind of took the elements of what was great made them awesome uh my Aala I don't know water bottle like there was water bottles that worked and then they added things to make it better uh chrome I don't know I'm just like looking around like it's so interesting how once you start to think about it through this lens Most products are better versions of things that existed before. And then I'm thinking about as a product team, what you what do you often do? You go look at the competitors, look at all their flows, here's what they're doing, here's what's working, look at all these great ideas, and then you build on that. So I think there's like it's easy to get turned off to this idea of like the word copy. But like as you think about it, this is mostly how products end up getting built anyway. Well, there's so much on this that we could we could literally spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with, too, or do a whole episode just on this because so much comes up for me. On the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on, and I I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. I That was my first company, Freeloader. What I found was in the Netscape browser and in the Internet Explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing, but they had it as this buried power user feature. And I saw the genius in that for that moment because bandwidth was so slow that I was like, "Oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature." Nikita saw his perfect product buried inside an Arabic only version, right, of his product and he said, "Oh my god, they they nailed it." So I think the when we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product but they have you know the wrong idea around it that's that's gold you know that's that's one and then to your question of is every product derivative is every product from proven better my answer is no and I and I talked about this a little bit in in the book and in my course. But the question is at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? And I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard. Don't look at any other products that is kind of roio getting to Angry Birds. They made 45 games. Every single game was totally different. not as far as I could tell learning from the previous failures or the market and their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds and it was a hit and it was innovative but the odds that's wildcat drilling and do you want to have those odds or do you want to be do what OMG Pop did which is very similar story but opposite path which is OMG Pop created uh the hit game draw something and Zingga bought them. They were the number one game and app in the app store for 60 days in, you know, 2012. But OMG Pop was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative. No one ever seen her tried it before. It failed completely. And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit. And now they did Proven Better Newly. They said, "We're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that in as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile and they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends and they made a massive hit.

是啊。你说这些的时候我就在想，所有那些最好的产品，是不是都可以用一个词来概括——它们是不是全都是对现有产品的「抄袭加演化」？又有多少是完全从零开始、全新的？我环顾四周……比如 iPhone，在它之前是有手机的，他们大致就是把那些原本很棒的元素拿过来、做得极致；比如我这个……我说不上牌子的水瓶，本来就有能用的水瓶了，然后他们加了些东西让它更好；比如 Chrome……我也说不准，我就是这么环顾四周地看，一旦你开始透过这个视角去看，真的太有意思了：大多数产品都是在已有东西基础上做得更好的版本。然后我又在想，作为一个产品团队，你平时都干些啥？你会去看竞品、把他们所有的流程都过一遍，看看他们在做什么、什么是有效的、把这些好点子都看一遍，然后在这基础上去做。所以我觉得，人们很容易一听到「抄」这个词就反感，但你真去想想，产品本来基本上就是这么被做出来的。（Mark：）关于这一点能聊的太多了，我们简直可以拿整期播客来聊，我也完全 OK，或者干脆单做一期就聊这个，因为我脑子里冒出来的东西实在太多了。一方面，我想到 Nikita——我想你请他上过节目——我特别喜欢他讲 TBH 的那个故事。它就是个完美的例子：他在别人的产品里发现了一个被验证过的东西。我自己的第一家公司是 Freeloader，我当时发现，在 Netscape 浏览器和 IE 浏览器里，都埋着一个「离线浏览」的功能。我那整个产品做的就是离线浏览，可在他们那儿，这只是个埋得很深的、给高级用户用的功能。我在那个时间点看到了它的天才之处，因为当时带宽太慢了，我心想：哦，我们可以围绕这一个功能做出一整款产品。而 Nikita 则是在他那款产品的一个纯阿拉伯语版本里，看到了他心目中那款完美产品，他说：我的天，他们做对了。所以我觉得，当我们能在别人的产品里看到某个已经被验证有效的东西，但他们围绕它的那个大想法是错的——那，那就是金矿。这是其一。然后回到你的问题：是不是每款产品都是衍生品、是不是每款产品都源自 proven-better-new？我的答案是：不是。我在书里、在我的课里也稍微讲过这个。但摆在我们所有人面前最一开始的那个问题是：你想走哪条路？我的观点是，如果你走「纯创新」那条路——从一块空白的白板开始，不去看任何别的产品——那有点像 Rovio 一路做到《Angry Birds》的过程。他们做了 45 款游戏。每一款都完全不一样，据我所知，并没有从前面那些失败里、或者从市场里去学什么，而他们的第 45 次射门才是《Angry Birds》，它火了，而且确实有创新，但那种概率……那是在玩野猫钻井（碰运气乱钻油井）。你是想要这种概率，还是想做 OMG Pop 做的那种事？OMG Pop 是个很相似、但路径正相反的故事：OMG Pop 做出了爆款游戏《Draw Something》，后来被 Zynga 收购了。在 2012 年，他们整整 60 天都是 App Store 里排名第一的游戏和应用。但 OMG Pop 当时已经烧到了最后一块钱。他们之前试过一个全然创新的东西，谁都没见过、谁都没试过，结果彻底失败了。于是这下他们极度、绝望地需要一个爆款。这一次，他们做的就是 proven-better-new：他们说，我们要拿这款已被验证的游戏，以一种对移动端上已经有效、已经在病毒式传播的东西的完美学生的姿态，把它的每一个细节都做到位。他们把我们《Words with Friends》里的回合制系统完美地抄了过去，然后就做出了一款现象级爆款。

[23:49] Lenny

I uh I love this idea of moral arbitrage. That's such a [laughter] way thinking about this

我……我太喜欢「道德套利」这个说法了。这角度真是太（妙了）。

[23:54] Lenny

Peter Tian, you know, um Very. Yeah. So, there's there's so many fun threads that kind of connect to all this. One is and you have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. One is be less ambitious. Talk about why that's a really good lens to actually build more ambitious products.

Peter Thiel，对吧。嗯，真是。是啊。所以这里头有好多有意思的线索都能串到一块儿。其中一个就是——你有一大堆特别反常识、关于怎么打造出色产品的独到见解——其中一个就是：野心要小一点。聊聊为什么这其实是个特别好的视角，反而能帮你做出更有野心的产品。

[24:12] Mark

I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say there there's there's so many paradoxes in this. And and one that I've had to learn over and over again is is if if we're if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough humble enough place because it it's it might usually that the starting point for these products is embarrassingly mall. So many of these massive hit products or you know franchises started with such humble um you know non-ambitious places and you know the Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys you know at Harvard right and the irony for me that I I've I've found that my career has gone in these waves and And maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too that I've started in a very humble place of I just want to get to anything any product market fit. Had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies freeloader and support.com. They both started with very very small humble premise and then afterwards felt like now I can do anything and I know Elon has is the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise magical unlimited amounts of capital which helps but and he does not start in humble places at all. But for the rest of us mortals, I'd say that we tend to after success be feel the need to do something bigger the next time. That's human instinct and we want to be more ambitious. And so when I got to Tribe and I saw social networking and LinkedIn was just starting and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with tribe. It was really ambitious and I didn't pick one use case and there was multiple inside tribe that worked. The tribes the the idea of these urban tribes worked. People loved it. But I was too ambitious and so we failed. And then I was so humbled and I was in this abyss we can talk about for so long and I was so just desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zingga I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean to be 41 multi-time successful founder that could go do something important in the world. And what did I do? I made a Facebook app. Like a poker game. Not even a Facebook app. I mean a poker game. It was people thought I had no dignity. I mean, people were like, "Mark, there's so much you could do in the world." But I was I'd say my my ambition came down to like a a th00and foot altitude, you know, not 100,000 foot. And and that was the key to that being successful. And and I see this with it's just so hard. I see it with so many product founders and and it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit. But the world doesn't care about your resume. You know, that's the good news for everyone watching. Like everyone has the same chance. And in a lot of ways, if you're in a more humble place, you have you have a better opportunity. So I the paradox is the more ambitious you are that the the more humble you should be and the the smaller place you should be willing to start.

我自己现在正处在重新学这一课的过程中。我得说，这里头有太多悖论了。我不得不一次又一次重新学到的一个就是：如果我们在最一开始就太有野心、对想做的产品太有愿景、太宏大，那我们很可能会错过 product-market fit，因为我们没能从一个足够小、足够谦卑的地方起步——因为这些产品的起点，往往小到让人难为情。这么多现象级的爆款产品、或者说大 IP，起步的地方都是那么谦卑、那么没野心。你看，Facebook 一开始不过是个用来在哈佛打量打量姑娘小伙儿的 app，对吧。而对我来说有个讽刺之处，我发现自己的职业生涯是一波一波这么走过来的——也许你别的几位创始人嘉宾也有过同样的经历——我每次都从一个很谦卑的地方起步：我只想先做到任何一种 product-market fit 就行。在我头两家公司 Freeloader 和 Support.com，我取得了比我预想中大得多的成功。这两家都是从一个非常非常小、非常谦卑的前提起步的，然后事成之后我就感觉：现在我什么都能干了。我知道 Elon 是那个例外，他从来都不从谦卑的地方起步。部分原因我觉得是他能筹到魔法般、无上限的资本，这帮了大忙；但对我们其余这些凡人来说，我得说，我们往往在一次成功之后，会觉得下一次必须得干一票更大的。这是人的本能，我们想要更有野心。所以等我做到 Tribe 的时候，我看到了社交网络，LinkedIn 当时刚起步，我看到这个机会有多大，我就想拿 Tribe 把所有事儿都干了。它野心太大了，我没有锁定单一的一个使用场景，而 Tribe 内部其实有好几个场景是跑通了的——urban tribes（城市部落）这个点子是成立的，人们很爱它。但我太有野心了，所以我们失败了。然后我被狠狠地打回了原形，跌进了一个我们可以聊上半天的深渊里。我太渴望从那个深渊里爬出来了，以至于等我做到 Zynga 的时候，我做了一件小到让人难为情的事。我都已经是个 41 岁、多次创业成功、本可以去给世界做点要紧大事的创始人了，结果我干了啥？我做了个 Facebook app。一个扑克游戏。连 Facebook app 都算不上，我是说就一个扑克游戏。当时人们觉得我一点尊严都没了。真的，大家都说：Mark，你明明能在这世界上做那么多事啊。可我呢，我得说，我的野心被压低到了大概一千英尺的高度，而不是十万英尺。而这，恰恰就是它能成功的关键。我在这么多产品创始人身上反复看到这一点——这事儿真的太难了。它甚至给了新手创始人一个相对于多次成功的老兵的优势，因为我们手里的绳子太多了，多到足够把自己吊死。在还没做到 product-market fit 之前，我们太容易凭着一个宏大愿景去融资、去招团队了。但这世界根本不在乎你的简历。这对每一个正在看节目的人来说都是好消息：每个人机会都一样。而且在很多方面，如果你正处在一个更谦卑的位置，你反而有更好的机会。所以这个悖论就是：你越有野心，你就越应该谦卑，就越应该甘愿从一个更小的地方起步。

[28:25] Lenny

One of your uh insights along these lines is that this is your advantage as a startup is to be less ambitious because a Zuck needs to go really big because the revenue is already so high. anything they take on needs to be many billion dollar business opportunity and as a startup you don't need to do that and and this is how you end up discovering some of the biggest ideas in the end.

你沿着这条思路得出的一个洞见是：身为一家创业公司，你的优势恰恰在于可以「野心小一点」。因为像 Zuck 这种，就必须得往特别大了做，因为公司收入本来就已经那么高了，他们接手的任何东西都得是好几十亿美元级别的商业机会；而作为创业公司，你不需要这样。也正因如此，你最后反而能发掘出一些最大的点子。

[28:44] Mark

Yeah. Yeah. Being willing to pursue these little threads when they're flaky when they're they're not a business when they're so much earlier and and so many of the successful companies today you know started there.

对，对。就是愿意去追那些小线索——在它们还很不靠谱、还根本算不上一门生意、还处在那么早期阶段的时候。今天这么多成功的公司，你想想，都是从那儿起步的。

[28:59] Lenny

Yeah. Is there an example that comes to mind when because Yeah. What's like an what's a what's a company or two that started very unambitious?

对。有没有让你立马想到的例子？因为……对。有没有那么一两家公司，起步时是特别没野心的？

[29:05] Mark

I love the story of Bolt.new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much I coldma mailed the founder because I was just so impressed with

我特别喜欢 Bolt.new 的故事，它去年是真的火了。我太喜欢了，以至于我直接给创始人发了封冷邮件，因为我实在太佩服——

[29:14] Mark

Yeah. And you know they they toiled in obscurity on something that they were into and then they open sourced it. I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development and then they had this realization one day of wait a second if we take these uh web stacks this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web but we actually add that to an AI coding co-pilot we now have something that's better than what anybody else has and and I I think that was just a great story that he they were passionate about one thing and you know and they stuck with it.

对。你知道吗，他们曾在无人问津中埋头打磨一个自己很热爱的东西，后来把它开源了。我觉得当时他们靠商业开发都快撑不下去了，然后有一天他们突然醒悟：等等，如果我们把这些 web 技术栈、把这个我们一直在让它跑在网页上的虚拟机，真的接到一个 AI 编程副驾驶上，那我们现在手里就有了一个比任何人都更强的东西。我觉得这就是个特别棒的故事——他们对某一件事满怀热情，然后，你知道的，他们就死守住了它。

[29:59] Lenny

Yeah, Eric was on the podcast. We talked about that.

对，Eric 上过这档播客。我们聊过这个。

[30:01] Mark

Oh, he was so impressed. Um in a lot of ways Slack also, you know, was humbled. Stuart keeps trying to start game companies and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies. Um we'll see what he does next. now has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time.

哦，他可太厉害了。在很多方面，Slack 也是，你知道，起步时也是很谦卑的。Stuart 一直在尝试做游戏公司，而那些游戏公司却出人意料地变成了更大的爆款公司。嗯，等着看他接下来会做什么吧。他现在手里的资本大概多到，这次可以就这么一直做个游戏公司了。

[30:26] Lenny

But I think to your point like he might try again to unhumbled go big.

不过照你的说法，我觉得他可能会再试一次——抛开谦卑，直接往大了干。

[30:31] Mark

Yeah. But each time, right? So he started a a big uh you know idea for like the mass market MMO which I've also loved but really difficult. And they were humbled in that enough to say, "Okay, wait. There's this little teeny thing that our engineers use. Let's build a product around that." And it takes it it it really takes a a really attuned, curious, humble founder to to call the ball on that. I mean, it's I can't imagine I mean, I I can imagine I guess I've been there. how hard it is when you've got investors and team and everybody going in one direction and you have to we have to express confidence as founders whether or not we have actual confidence inside we that's part of I think the dissonance of this how do you express confidence how do you stay in a place of intellectual honesty how do we stay authentic and transparent and not rattle our team, you know, how do you and I've I'm still learning. I had I had people I heir on the side of transparency and honesty and you know being authentic to a fault and I burn out people in that process and I I did at Zingga and I have since because it you know people will say the the negative critique I'm working with me is oh working for Mark is like third grade soccer and every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea and And they're not wrong, but where I can get better at this maybe is, you know, if if we can if we can build a a culture with our team that says, "Okay, we are ambitious. We're so ambitious that we're not going to hold on to a B+. Even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction, we we have a north star that we are going not going to stop until we find product market fit against our north star. And this isn't it. And and it's going to take courage on our part. And hey, let's look around the room. Is everyone ambitious enough to do this? or do you want to peel off and go join someone else who's already a rocket ship, which I that's a fair career choice for you to make. But but I think that that's to me the real founder mode is can you have the courage to to to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?

对。但每一次都是这样,对吧?他一开始搞的是一个特别大的想法——那种面向大众市场的 MMO,这种东西我也很喜欢,但真的太难了。而他们足够谦逊,愿意承认:“好吧,等等。我们工程师内部在用的这个小玩意儿,我们干脆围绕它做个产品吧。”要做出这种判断、敢于喊停,真的需要一个特别敏锐、好奇、谦逊的创始人。我是说……我没法想象——其实我能想象,因为我自己经历过——当投资人、团队、所有人都朝着一个方向走的时候,这有多难。我们作为创始人必须表现出信心,不管我们内心是不是真有信心。这就是我觉得这件事最拧巴的地方:你要怎么表现出信心,同时又怎么保持知识上的诚实?我们怎么既真诚透明,又不动摇团队的军心?这个我到现在还在学。我身边有人觉得我太偏向透明和诚实了,真诚到了过头的地步,结果在这个过程中把人累垮了。我在 Zynga 是这样,后来也还是这样。因为大家对我的负面评价是:跟 Mark 一起工作就像三年级小孩踢足球,每周一他进来都对一个全新的想法兴奋得不行。他们说得没错。但我或许可以做得更好的地方在于,我们能不能跟团队建立一种文化,告诉大家:“好,我们很有野心。我们野心大到不会去守着一个 B+。哪怕能拿到融资,哪怕它已经有点起色,我们也有一个北极星,在找到对得起这个北极星的 product-market fit 之前我们绝不停下。而这个东西不是答案。这需要我们拿出勇气。来,看看屋里这些人——大家是不是都有足够的野心干这件事?还是你想抽身去加入别人那艘已经起飞的火箭?那对你来说也是个合理的职业选择。”但我觉得对我而言,真正的 founder mode 就是:你有没有勇气告诉你的团队和投资人——这东西还不是答案?

[33:17] Lenny

That's uh that's exactly where I wanted to go. uh which is this other piece of advice you give which is kill hope before hope kills you. Talk about just what that is cuz uh so much of your advice is kill your bad ideas quickly. So just kind of talk about that and then uh I'm really curious to know when you kind of what it takes to realize an idea is bad. When do you decide okay this is B+ let's move on.

这正是我想引到的地方。你还有另一条建议,叫“在希望害死你之前先把希望杀掉”。聊聊这是什么意思吧,因为你很多建议都是“尽快杀掉你的烂点子”。先讲讲这个,然后我特别想知道,你到底是怎么意识到一个点子是烂的?你什么时候会判定“好,这是个 B+,我们往前走”?

[33:37] Mark

I don't know if I get credit for you know making up that quote but I love it. Kill hope before hope kills you. It's there's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's it's a prayer, but it's but it's it's not it's not founded in anything that your your lived experience. It's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data and and and I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. And I think that the best product makers, I like to say they're collecting winnings. They're not making bets. They already know. You know, if you talk to Brian Chesy about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it. And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP. Minimum viable. that the viable is the the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from, right? If it's viable, it might make it, right? And there's a difference between get in the market early, learn, you're you're putting a product out that you're going to learn from and you're putting a product out that you're going to launch, that you think, you believe, not hope, is going to be a hit. And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction. And and AI is is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took maybe 3 months instead of three years. And that's a dangerous drug because it means that I what I thought would happen where we be today is that people would be using AI to build these like incredible testing machines, failure machines that are testing, I like say more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing a 100red ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred ideas, you know, in a day. And what would it look like? I like to say we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. So build it wrong before you know it's right. And if you could build it right, great. But don't be slowed down by that. Because if we start off if we say, okay, what what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product. What are you going to do differently because you believe it's the wrong product? You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product. Oh, I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. But the point of what I'm building is to learn. So, is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea? And I think we can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. It's so often it could be an ad. I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before they go and put in the market. It's an afterthought and it was so often at Zinga it blew my mind. I mean give one story from Zinga when we were launching our first expansion pack for Farmville which became a mass these became massive business drivers for us. Um it was I think it was Farmville um English countryside or something. The team came to me and they said, "Okay, we have a $10 million ad budget and we're going to start running ads before the launch." I'm like, "Wait, you have 2530 million people a day using your product, but you're going to put ads somewhere else for coming soon. You have these people engaged What if you just put something on the game board? And and what if you don't just start your product marketing, you're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat. What if you start putting different art forms of your English countryside locked on the game board and you just see how many clicks you get and you just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message. And at the same time, when people click on it, it says coming soon. Click here to be a a preuser. You know, click here to get access two weeks before anybody else. And it turned out everybody clicked on it, right? Because it's a change on your game board. And it both gave us direction on what was the right marketing and the right variant of the product. But the unintended consequences was we started selling keys to people for you and a friend and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys to get early access to, you know, the new expansion pack. And so we took something that was going to be afterthought advertising, try to drum up interest in this product and turn it into something that gave us signal and direction on the product and revenues. And and so often, you know, you you can have, you know, this is an existing product, but you can turn something you could turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and, you know, heat driving feature, something that could drive revenues or or something else that matters. So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to vibe code, cloud code, but but build build the, you know, the the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on.

我不确定这句话的版权算不算我的,但我特别喜欢它——在希望害死你之前先把希望杀掉。信念和希望是两码事。希望是没有根据的信心。希望就是一种祈祷,它扎根不在任何东西上,不在你的亲身经历里,不在你跟自己产品打交道的经验里,不在你看人们使用你产品的经验和数据里。我觉得太多创始人和团队靠着希望一直撑下去,指望下一个版本能变出什么魔法来。而最好的产品人——我喜欢说,他们是在“收割奖金”,不是在“下注”。他们早就知道结果了。你去问 Brian Chesky 他们的发布,他早就知道这是个爆款。他发布不是为了搞清楚大家喜不喜欢。我会区分发布 MVP(minimum viable product,最小可行产品)和发布 MLP(maximum launchable product,最大可发布产品)。因为如果我们是靠希望在走,我们做出来的就是这个 MVP——“最小可行”里的“可行(viable)”这个词,跟“希望”一样得杀掉,因为“可行”正是希望的来源,对吧?既然它“可行”,那说不定就能成,对吧?“早点进市场、去学习”和“发布一个你打算正式上线的产品”是两回事:一种是你放出去是为了从中学习,另一种是你放出去是因为你认为、你相信——不是希望——它会是个爆款。把这个区分讲清楚特别重要。而 AI 在今天是个危险的工具。它强大到危险的地步。它强大到意味着我们能用比以前少得多的时间和钱做出一个“可行”的产品——也许三个月就够,而不是三年。这是种危险的毒品,因为我本来以为我们今天会处在这样一个状态:大家用 AI 去搭建那种超棒的测试机器、失败机器,一周里测试的想法比你整个行业一年测的还多。你怎么做到一天测一百个想法,而不是三个月测一个?可我觉得现在 AI 更多是被用来三个月做一个想法,而不是一天做一百个。那理想状态会是什么样?我喜欢说:在我们确认它是对的产品之前,先把它彻底做错。所以,在你知道它对之前先把它做错。如果你能直接做对,当然好。但别因此被拖慢。因为如果一开始我们就问:“我今天能相信什么?”——我相信这是个错的产品。那既然你相信它是错的,你会做点什么不一样的?你就不会花三个月去做一个错的产品。我宁愿花一天或一周去做这个错的产品。但我做它的目的是为了学习。所以问题是:它够不够好,能让我拿到信号、验证我的想法?我觉得我们通常能把这些拆开,用“错”的方式去测这些零件。很多时候它甚至可以只是一个广告。我真的不敢相信,有多少团队在把产品推向市场之前,连产品的广告都没测过。广告成了事后才想起来的事,在 Zynga 这种情况太常见了,简直让我震惊。我讲一个 Zynga 的故事吧。当时我们要发布 FarmVille 的第一个资料片——这后来成了我们巨大的业务驱动力。我记得好像叫 FarmVille English Countryside(英格兰乡村)之类的。团队来找我说:“好,我们有一千万美元的广告预算,打算在发布前就开始投广告。”我说:“等等,你们每天有 2500、3000 万人在用你们的产品,你却要跑到别的地方去打‘即将上线’的广告?你手里有这些已经被吸住的用户啊。如果你直接在游戏画面里放点东西呢?而且如果你别急着做产品营销,而是继续做产品测试,看哪个最能引爆呢?如果你在游戏画面上放上英格兰乡村各种不同的美术风格(锁着的),然后就看能收到多少点击,开始测画面、测感觉、测营销文案呢?同时,当用户点进去,显示‘即将上线,点这里成为抢先体验用户’。点这里就能比所有人早两周拿到访问权。”结果是所有人都去点了,对吧?因为这是你游戏画面上的一个变化。它既给了我们方向——什么才是对的营销、对的产品变体;但意料之外的结果是,我们开始向用户出售“钥匙”,让你和一个朋友一起,最后我们卖出了一千九百万美元的钥匙,就为了抢先体验这个新资料片。所以我们把一件本来只是事后才想起的广告——本想给这个产品造点声势的东西——变成了既能给我们产品信号和方向、又能带来收入的东西。很多时候,虽然这是个已有的产品,但你可以把一件本来打算当营销的事,变成一种制造稀缺感、引爆热度的功能,变成能带来收入或别的重要东西的东西。所以我们该怎么用 AI:把它当成一台测试机器、一台失败机器,一种 vibe code、cloud code 的方式——去搭建那种循环周期最短、能让你拿到信号反馈的最低限度产品版本。

[40:07] Lenny

Awesome. I want to ask about something that I think might be on people's minds as they hear you talk. For a lot of product builders, when they think Zingga, they're not like this is the product I want to build, you know, and there's a spectrum of of products you guys have built. There's like uh farmville and city and all these things that I think pe turn some people off. Then there's like poker, words with friends, mafia wars that I think people are like, "Oh, that's amazing. I love that." Can you just speak to that?

太棒了。我想问个我觉得大家听你讲的时候可能会冒出来的问题。对很多做产品的人来说,一想到 Zynga,他们并不会觉得“这就是我想做的产品”。你们做过的产品其实是有谱系的:一头是 FarmVille、CityVille 这些,我觉得会让一部分人反感;另一头是 Poker、Words with Friends、Mafia Wars 这些,大家会觉得“哦这太棒了,我很喜欢”。你能聊聊这个吗?

[40:33] Mark

Sure. I I think if I'm unpacking that when you say that that the products turn people off, it's it's funny you say that because Farmville and Cityville were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues. Um, now Words with Friends and Poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and the other games didn't. is a whole other story. But but I think the part you're getting to is that Zingga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success that it was our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that the your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it. And and that's that's fair. But what I would say, I think what's misunderstood about Zingga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created uh eight massive hits out of 10 mass large game launches. We had a very high hit rate. It wasn't that we were good at virality. It was that we we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else. And we had lots of competitors, lots and copying and we still managed to keep winning. And so it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality. First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games. and being Gordon and I kept coming back to this idea that I love and I and I want your founders, product makers watching this to to join me in thinking about which is how can we add more dimensionality. I love this idea of it's it's what I call a bold beat. It's it's how do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring and wrote poker or whatever. How do I add a whole new dimension to it? And by adding social, by adding real identities, by giving you this, you're doing social networking, you're in this cocktail party, and now we're giving you a way to actually meet new people or improve your relationships in a game. Well, the reason why people, so many, especially middle-aged women, love Farmville and these games was because they they had this kind of hobby, but they weren't doing it alone. and they were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. And in the game, our our most successful features were co-op play. There there were things that let you do gifting and do things of, you know, value to your for your friends. And so we called the games invest, express, and connect. You could do something that was you were being seen as creative. I like to say people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative. So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. It's what midjourney does for me today. And then we were letting you so so you were expressing yourself and then you were connecting with people around it. So that was the first thing and then at if you think at a mechanical metric level our core metric was retention not virality. We grew. We outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about in the book. I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, well, statistically this is true. They have the highest day 365 retention. You know, can you build against day 365 retention? Yes. you we can't wait till day 365. We can find early indicators of a positive day 365 and a negative day 365 retention. If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have, you know, high day 365. So those track, you know, those are correlated. But you can have the opposite. You can have very high day 30 and a zero day 365, which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that way too. They kind of think, is this worth investing in? Whether it's a game or a camera, it's am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this or, you know, is this should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me or whatever? And I think there's a mentality to that. And I like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, you know, be real, there's, right, we've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right? They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster, you know, which is try to get people back, or plug the hole in the boat. and you know or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. But but yeah, so we we were tracking both in our games in our network what what was the retention and we were we were really constantly thinking about you know about that and and I think the two things to take away from Zinga success in my opinion that I hold is is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week that and and we even built a metric that's still not used by anyone. This is an Easter egg if anyone if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening. We built a metric called ASN and it stood for what what we measured what was your active social network. So we looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player. Meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back. You gifted them and they gifted you back. And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. And so we could actually, you know, build and innovate against that metric. And and it made sense, right? Because if you saw positive feedback loops, it's like someone likes your photos, comments, you know that that's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get. 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, [music] having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. 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当然。我来拆解一下你说的“产品让人反感”这件事,挺好玩的你这么说,因为 FarmVille 和 CityVille 恰恰是我们在安装量、参与度、retention、收入上最大的爆款。而 Words with Friends 和 Poker 之所以更长寿,是因为它们成功迁移到了移动端,而其他游戏没有——那是另一个故事了。但我觉得你真正想说的是,Zynga 在很多方面是“自己成功的受害者”:我们的游戏太病毒化了,把 Facebook 的信息流占得满满当当,以至于你那个在玩游戏的朋友,开始让你这个不玩的人嫌烦。这说得没错。但我想说,Zynga 从一开始就被误解的地方,以及我们为什么能成功——我们在 10 次大型游戏发布里做出了 8 个巨型爆款,命中率非常高——并不是因为我们擅长病毒传播,而是因为我们专注于两件我觉得我们做得比谁都好的事。我们有一大堆竞争对手、一堆抄袭者,我们却还是一直赢。所以原因不可能只是我们更会发垃圾信息、更会病毒传播。第一,我们有一个核心使命和专注点,就是“通过游戏连接世界”。我和 Bing Gordon 一直在回到一个我特别喜欢的想法,我也希望正在看这期的创始人、产品人能跟我一起思考:我们怎么增加“维度感”?我很喜欢这个我称之为“大胆变奏(bold beat)”的想法:怎么把一个已经变得无聊、套路化的东西——比如扑克之类的——加上一个全新的维度?通过加入社交、加入真实身份,我们给了你一种东西:你其实在做社交网络,你在这场鸡尾酒会里,而现在我们让你能在游戏里真正认识新朋友、或者改善你跟现有朋友的关系。为什么这么多人,尤其是中年女性,这么爱 FarmVille 这类游戏?因为她们有了这样一种类似爱好的东西,而且不是一个人在玩,是跟好朋友一起玩、一起认识新朋友。在游戏里,我们最成功的功能是合作玩法(co-op play),是那些能让你送礼、能为朋友做点有价值的事的功能。所以我们把这些游戏叫做“投入、表达、连接(invest, express, and connect)”。你能做一些让你被看作有创造力的事——我喜欢说,人们不是想要有创造力,而是想感觉自己有创造力。所以我们让你感觉自己有创造力,在别人眼里显得有创造力,就像 midjourney 今天为我做的事。然后我们让你表达自己,再围绕这件事跟人连接。这是第一点。然后,如果你从机制和指标的层面看,我们的核心指标是 retention,不是病毒传播。我们之所以增长、之所以比所有人都活得久,就是因为我们有最好的 retention。我觉得我们大概是全世界唯一一家追踪“第 365 天 retention”的消费公司,今天我都不觉得还有谁在追踪它。我在书里讲了这个,我觉得这是送给创始人的一份礼物。我相信全世界最有价值的公司——统计上确实如此——拥有最高的第 365 天 retention。你能不能朝着第 365 天 retention 去打造产品?能。我们不可能等到第 365 天,但我们可以找到正向和负向第 365 天 retention 的早期指标。如果你的 D1 低、D30 低,你大概率不会有高的第 365 天 retention。这些是相关的。但反过来也可能:你可以有非常高的第 30 天、却是零的第 365 天——大多数产品都是这样。如果你不去想“一年后某人为什么还会用这个”,如果你没有这种心态——结果是,当有人试用我们的产品时,他们其实也在这么想。他们会想:“这值得我投入吗?”不管是游戏还是相机,他们都会想:“我一年后还会用这个吗?我该不该跟朋友安利它?我值不值得为它投入?值不值得把我的信息给它?”我觉得这背后有一种心态。我喜欢说,那些靠病毒传播的公司——这种公司很多,比如 BeReal,我们见过——它们是“正在下沉的快艇”。它们拼命想开得比下沉速度更快,对吧?它们想塞进更多的人。你要么开得更快,要么往外舀水更快(也就是想办法把人拉回来),要么把船上的洞补上,或者干脆造一艘没有洞的更好的船。所以,对,我们在游戏里、在我们的网络里同时追踪 retention 是多少,我们一直在不停地想这件事。我觉得从 Zynga 的成功里能带走的两点(这是我坚持的看法)是:第一,要有一个强有力的创新愿景,而且它能转化成你的团队每周实际在做的事。我们甚至造了一个到现在还没人用的指标——如果这段没被剪掉、还有人在听的话,这就是个彩蛋——我们造了个指标叫 ASN,代表“active social network(活跃社交网络)”。我们衡量的是你跟一个朋友或另一个玩家之间有多少次“往返(round trip)”:你走了一步,他们回了一步;你送了他们礼物,他们回送了你。我们发现,如果你的 ASN 从 0 变成 1,我们下个月再看到你的概率是 80%;如果我们能让你做到 4,那么接下来 30 天里你出现 22 天的概率是 80%。所以我们真的可以朝着这个指标去打造和创新。这也合情合理,对吧?因为如果你看到正向的反馈循环——比如有人喜欢你的照片、评论你——你知道这大概是我们能得到的最大的多巴胺刺激。我太兴奋了,要给你们介绍本季的赞助商 Vanta。Vanta 帮助超过 15000 家公司——比如 Cursor、Ramp、Duolingo、Snowflake、Atlassian——赢得并证明客户的信任。多亏了 AI,各团队构建和发布产品的速度比以往任何时候都快。但结果是,被引入你产品和业务中的风险也比以往任何时候都高。我接触的每一位安全负责人,都越来越感受到保护自己组织、业务,更别提客户数据的压力。因为一切都在飞速变化,他们一直在被动应对、被迫去猜优先级、不得不将就用过时的解决方案。Vanta 用超过 35 种安全和隐私框架自动化合规与风险管理,包括 SOC 2、ISO 27001 和 HIPAA。这帮助公司快速合规并持续合规。比以往任何时候都更甚的是,信任有能力成就或毁掉你的业务。去 vanta.com/lenny 了解更多。作为本播客的听众,你可以省 1000 美元。就是 vanta.com/lenny。我们来聊聊做一个消费级社交应用吧。非常难。成功做到、还能做出持久东西的人极少。我们在播客里聊过很多次了,消费领域基本上什么都不灵——火一小阵子然后就死了。而你,可能比任何人都做出过更多社交消费产品,成功的就有十来个。理论上 AI 显然改变了游戏规则。你觉得,要让某个东西在今天这个世界里再次成功,需要什么前提成立?

[49:08] Mark

It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in social and and and consumer in general. It seems like people have kind of given up on the idea that that a social app could take off or be viral. And I see them every so often. and they've given up for good reason because nothing's proven and nothing's working. So I I like to think first is there latent demand? So if if just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite. And in 2007 when I started Zingga, video gaming was a $23 billion business. But I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web. And I thought there's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing my family, but I can't get people to play games with me. And it's too much investment. It's too hard. It It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. Literally, I I got my nephews who are intense gamers to play Rise of Nations with me and we set up two machines for them and two for me and we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game and we were on a game server and we did that one time and I was like that is a lot of effort and it was fun but we did it once and I said my premise was okay. I believe this could be and should be a mass market activity. I believe adults want to give themselves permission to play, but I got to make it so accessible, so cheap in terms of what it asks for them. Free. Not just free even, which it wasn't. It was $60 to go buy a game. So, I made it free and I said, I'm going to make it a game you already know. Three clicks and you're in. And I'm going to ask five to 15 minutes of you, you know, to to do this and and you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. You're not going to, like I say, we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read them. So, I believed there was a latent demand. And in fact, today, you know, gaming is a $280 billion industry. And I actually think there's latent demand. Again, I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews. And yet it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth waiting in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it or they must be some it's very big but none I know. So so okay so social um and consumer I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social we are being social right online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and and Tik Tok, but I believe it's it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Like, is there a heat in it? Like, are you excited to go get on Instagram or or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips? Like, are these positive calories or negative calories um or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing I we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35. There's people have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram, right? They're not missing the party. They're like, "Whoa, I got off that." So, I think so. So I think all that to say I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I mean I think I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent this social experience for the agentic AI age. They're but how are they going to do it? You know, I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again. That they're going part of what we got. People forget Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or a thousand friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity. They still do, but they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of wasting time because they wanted to engage more and have more ads and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but but definitely, you know, Instagram had Tik Tok envy. So, you know, they started doing that. And so I think there is a new step function of productivity that we could be getting in that experience that our agents are letting us stay even more in the loop with the people we care about or you know but not wasting our time as much. So and I'll also say this there's a side of this I call this social thing the cocktail party. Okay, that's that's the big uh instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party and I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen and how how do we add things to the [ __ ] We'd love to host the cocktail party and if we're not, we'd love to be at it. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You know it. You feel it. You're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm here." And it's moves from like obligatory. I'm at this party, it's the birthday party to almost like greed, like I love this party, I'm love the people I'm meeting. And what do you get at a great cocktail party? You often get great leads. And so that cocktail party that for me it started with Napster when all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file. But then Fster, Facebook, LinkedIn, what we were getting was better lead generation. That was better productivity for our time. Before that, we would go to Google for a lead or Craigslist. And it was a lot of noise to signal. And now we're like, "Oh my god, I could get on Fster and find a date." And it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Fster. Um so what I would say to people is like look if you want to reinvent social look for where the cocktail is or you could host and then think about how is lead generation happening. It might sound weird when I say lead genen, but what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn start with lead genen. All the productivity, the value started in the a utility in being in this cocktail party today. And and by the way, with Zingga, I said, I'm going to go to the cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks. I'm going to drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension to network in the games because they want to be on Facebook. I want to give them more to do. Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. So, my my Easter egg to people is it is it's a it's a quiet, lonely cocktail party like the web was before social networking. And my challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. figure out how to make that cocktail party social and socially productive and you will probably, you know, find gold there. I want to come back to your thread on your your question was how do you how do you know when an idea is a B+, right?

你大概跟我一样吃惊,我们在社交、乃至整个消费领域看到的东西竟然这么少。感觉大家好像已经放弃了“一个社交应用能起飞、能病毒传播”这种想法。我偶尔会看到一些,但大家放弃是有充分理由的,因为没什么被验证过、没什么是奏效的。所以我首先会想:有没有潜在需求(latent demand)?仅仅因为某个品类今天不存在,不代表我们作为消费者不想要它。事实上,最好的机会往往恰恰相反。2007 年我创立 Zynga 时,电子游戏是个 230 亿美元的产业。但我自己已经不玩游戏了,我也不认识谁在玩,它在网上甚至排不进前十的活动。我当时想:这里有潜在需求。我爱游戏,我爱跟家人一起玩,但我找不到人跟我一起玩。投入太大了,太难了——想拉个人陪你玩游戏,简直像在碎玻璃上爬过去。真的,我把我那些骨灰级游戏玩家的外甥拉来跟我玩 Rise of Nations,我们给他们架了两台机器、给我自己架两台,一台机器上开着 FaceTime,再加上游戏,我们都连在一个游戏服务器上,就这么玩了一次,我心想:这工程量也太大了,虽然好玩,但我们就玩了那一次。于是我说,我的前提是:我相信这能、也应该成为一项大众市场活动。我相信成年人想给自己“允许玩耍”的许可,但我得把它做到极其易得、极其廉价(就它对人的要求而言)。免费——甚至不只是免费(以前可不免费,买个游戏要 60 美元)。所以我把它做成免费的,我说:我要做一个你早就会玩的游戏,点三下就进去了。我只占用你 5 到 15 分钟,而且你会“绊到”它——它是某处的一个面包屑。你不会专门去做,就像我说的:我们不会专门跑去漫画书店,但如果漫画就印在报纸上,我们就会读。所以我相信存在潜在需求。事实上,今天游戏已经是个 2800 亿美元的产业了。而我现在反倒觉得,这里依然有潜在需求。我还是不玩游戏,除了外甥外甥女,我认识的人没谁玩游戏,可它却是这么大的生意。所以我真心觉得,游戏里还藏着另一波巨大的增长——因为它已经这么大了,却又这么无聊,成年人不玩,或者玩的人……它很大,但我认识的人里没人玩。好,那么社交和消费。我相信我们对社交的需求超越了“潜在”的层面——我们本来就在线上社交,对吧?我们在 Snapchat、Instagram、TikTok 上。但我相信它已经失去了那股肾上腺素。我经常琢磨“肾上腺素”这件事:这里面有没有热度?你是不是兴奋地想去刷 Instagram,还是说你有点像在吃薯片?这些是正卡路里、负卡路里,还是中间那种空卡路里?有件有意思的事:我们看过 NPS(净推荐值),发现人们退出 Facebook、退出 Instagram 时,会从 +35 掉到 -35。人们有一种像是刚戒了烟的感觉。人们会很自豪地告诉你他们不用 Instagram,对吧?他们觉得自己不是错过了派对,而是“哇,我戒掉那玩意儿了”。所以我觉得——这么说吧,我认为这是互联网上最大的、尚未被探索的机会。我非常有信心,会有人为“agentic AI 时代”重新发明这种社交体验。但他们会怎么做?我猜他们会重新给我们带来生产力。大家忘了,Facebook 当年给了我们巨大的社交生产力——我们能跟 300 个甚至 1000 个朋友保持联系。LinkedIn 给了我们巨大的生产力,现在依然如此,但它们开始偏离那种生产力,滑向浪费时间的领域,因为它们想要更多的参与、更多广告、更少的“LinkedIn 本味”;Instagram 则得了“TikTok 嫉妒症”,于是也开始那么干。所以我觉得,在那种体验里,我们本可以获得一个新的生产力阶跃:我们的 agent 能让我们跟在乎的人保持更紧密的联系,同时不那么浪费我们的时间。我还想说,这事还有一面,我把这种社交叫做“鸡尾酒会(cocktail party)”。这是我最大的本能直觉脉络。我会去想那个鸡尾酒会:它正发生在哪里、它想发生在哪里,我们怎么往里头加东西。我们都希望能主办这场鸡尾酒会;如果做不到主办,那我们也希望能身在其中。看到一场很棒的鸡尾酒会,我们一眼就认得出来。你知道的,你能感觉到,你会想:“啊,真高兴我来了。”它会从那种“义务式”的——我来参加这个生日派对——变成几乎是“贪婪式”的:我爱这场派对,我爱我认识的这些人。而你在一场很棒的鸡尾酒会上能得到什么?你常常能拿到很棒的“线索(leads)”。对我来说,这场鸡尾酒会是从 Napster 开始的:突然之间我们所有人都彼此相连,而那条很棒的线索就是一个音乐文件。然后是 Friendster、Facebook、LinkedIn,我们得到的是更好的“线索生成(lead generation)”,是我们时间上更好的生产力。在那之前,我们要找线索得去 Google 或 Craigslist,噪音对信号的比例很高。而现在我们会想:“天哪,我可以上 Friendster 找个约会对象。”而且确实是条好线索——我在 Friendster 上有过一次很不错的约会。所以我想对大家说:如果你想重新发明社交,就去找那场鸡尾酒会在哪里、或者你能主办哪一场,然后想想“线索生成”是怎么发生的。我说“线索生成”可能听着怪,但 LinkedIn 是什么?LinkedIn 就是从线索生成开始的。它所有的生产力、所有的价值,都源于“身处这场鸡尾酒会”里的那种实用性。顺便说一句,当年做 Zynga 时我就说:我要去这场鸡尾酒会。大家都在社交网络上扎堆,我就把游戏丢到正中间,给他们一个在游戏里社交的新维度——因为他们本来就想待在 Facebook 上,我就给他们更多可做的事。而今天,我们都在自己的 Claude、自己的 GPT 上扎堆,可那里没有鸡尾酒会。所以我给大家的彩蛋是:它现在是一场安静、孤独的鸡尾酒会,就像社交网络出现之前的网页世界一样。我给听众们的挑战是:想办法把它搞热闹起来。想办法让那场鸡尾酒会变得社交、变得有社交生产力,你大概就会在那儿找到金矿。我想回到你那条线上来——你的问题是,你怎么知道一个想法是 B+,对吧?

[57:13] Lenny

Yeah.

对。

[57:14] Mark

Okay. I love the question on well, how do you know if it's a B+? And what I would say to you is how do you know if you're with the right person? Like you're dating. What was your experience dating? And my experience has been that when I'm with the right person, I know it. I'm not asking, is this the right person? I'm like [ __ ] yeah. I I love this person. This is my person. And that's the best feeling ever. And I hope everyone can experience that. When you're with the A minus person, you're with the B+. You're asking, could this be the one? You're like, you're and you know, Osho said if you're torn between two paths, they're both wrong. You know, you have feet in two canoes. If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. And you're you're full of hope. You hope it's an A. It doesn't mean you might not have the chance to turn that into an A, but the first point of intellectual honesty is to say, okay, it's not. And then, well, how do you know how are you getting validation that it's not? You don't have the validation that it is. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. It's anecdotally, you love your product. You're addicted to it. You show it to friends and they love it. your metrics show that it works. I mean, did we have to ask if GPT was it? Did we say, "Oh, is GPT it? I'm not sure." You know, we're like, "No, I'm [ __ ] living on that and it's making me dream of new things to do." Right? So, I'd say the the the hard part about this is, you know, what do you what do you do with a B+? First, can we be intellectually honest that it is a B+? And then what do we do with a B+? Do we just kill it and start all over again? Do we use it to learn? The power is knowing it's a B+. That that's the first point is okay, this is not it. Now, what do I do with that? Is it a way to learn? Did do I can I do I see examples that are near this that are it? Can I find anything proven or near proven when when we realize it's not it? We we look for more things to do and and it's such a hard lesson. Two weeks ago, I pulled the plug on my Earth project for like the fourth time. Okay, I've been building my version of the metaverse for 20 years. It's what led me to Zingga. I call the metaverse that I want life at the speed of play. We're getting closer and closer to that anyway with AI. And by the way, I define the metaverse, I give Reed Hoffman credit for this definition, as blurring the lines between the virtual and the real. And that is where our lives are going anyway. So we're getting more and more metaversian. It's not being in this other escape to immersive world. It's it's that the virtual and the real completely blur together. And but I kept coming at it from the game side and I went native, not in the good way. You know, I got so into wanting to prove I could build this experience that I was building this game engine, web browserbased game engine. And I was not getting a product market fit. I was being too ambitious. I was not going for a small small idea. I was going for a really big idea. And it was really hard and I pulled the plug on it after four years in and $25 million in just this one version of it. And in the last two weeks since then, I've been more inspired around ideas than I have been in four years. So there is power in pulling the plug on a B+ and even more, you know, on a D. There's a whole uh discussion I want to have about the abyss, which you talk a lot about in the book of how that's such a source of good ideas. But I want to touch on distribution just as we're on this thread. Something that's come up a lot on this podcast is just how with AI making it so easy to build stuff, one of the biggest challenges becomes distribution. Always been a challenge, always been hard, harder than ever because there's so much happening in the market constantly. There's so much trying to get your attention. All the channels are full paid and SEO. What's your just like advice to founders? What do you think needs to be true for a com for a startup to break out because it's so hard now?

好。我很喜欢这个问题:你怎么知道它是不是 B+?我想反问你:你怎么知道自己有没有遇到对的人?比如你谈恋爱,你谈恋爱的体验是怎样的?我的体验是,当我遇到对的人时,我是知道的。我不会去问“这是对的人吗?”,我会想:“没错,就是她。我爱这个人,这就是我的那个人。”那是世界上最棒的感觉,我希望每个人都能体验到。而当你和一个 A- 的人在一起、和一个 B+ 在一起时,你会在问:“这会是那个对的人吗?”你会犹豫。Osho(奥修)说过:如果你在两条路之间纠结,那两条都是错的。你这是两只脚踩在两条独木舟上。如果你在问你的产品是不是 A,那它就不是 A。你满脑子都是希望,你希望它是个 A。这并不意味着你没机会把它变成 A,但知识诚实的第一步是承认:它现在不是。那么,你怎么知道?你拿到什么验证说明它不是?——你没拿到任何能说明它是的验证。当你真正“瓶中捕到闪电”、拿到真实信号时,一切都顺。从体感上说,你爱你的产品,你对它上瘾;你拿给朋友看,他们也爱;你的指标显示它奏效。我是说,我们需要去问 GPT 是不是“那个东西”吗?我们会说“哦,GPT 是答案吗?我不太确定”吗?才不会,我们会说:“不,我他妈就靠它活着,它还让我梦想出一堆新东西去做。”对吧?所以我想说,这件事的难点在于:你拿一个 B+ 怎么办?第一,我们能不能知识诚实地承认它就是个 B+?然后,拿这个 B+ 怎么办?我们是直接杀掉它从头再来,还是用它来学习?力量恰恰在于“知道它是个 B+”。第一步就是承认:这不是答案。那现在我拿它怎么办?它是不是一条学习的路径?当我们意识到它不是答案时,我能不能看到一些就在它附近的、确实是答案的例子?我能不能找到任何已被验证、或接近被验证的东西?我们会去寻找更多可做的事。这是个特别难的功课。两周前,我把我的 Earth 项目又拔掉了插头,差不多是第四次了。我搞我自己版本的元宇宙(metaverse)已经搞了 20 年——正是它把我引向了 Zynga。我把我想要的那个元宇宙叫做“以玩耍的速度生活(life at the speed of play)”。借着 AI,我们反正也越来越接近它了。顺便说,我给元宇宙下的定义——这个定义的功劳归 Reid Hoffman——是“模糊虚拟与现实之间的界线”。而我们的生活反正本来就在往那个方向走,我们正变得越来越“元宇宙化”。它不是逃进另一个沉浸式世界,而是虚拟和现实彻底交融在一起。但我一直从游戏这一侧去切入它,结果我“走火入魔(went native)”了,而且不是好的那种。我太想证明我能做出这种体验,以至于我在搭一个基于网页浏览器的游戏引擎,却始终拿不到 product-market fit。我太有野心了,我没去追一个“小小的想法”,而是去追一个特别大的想法。它真的很难,在投入了四年、光这一个版本就烧掉 2500 万美元之后,我把插头拔了。而在那之后的这两周里,我被各种想法激发出的灵感,比过去四年都多。所以,给一个 B+ 拔插头是有力量的;给一个 D 拔插头,力量更大。我还想跟你好好聊聊“深渊(the abyss)”——你在书里讲了很多,讲它是多么棒的好点子来源。不过既然我们在这条线上,我想先碰一下“分发(distribution)”。这个播客上反复出现的一点是:正因为 AI 让做东西变得这么容易,最大的挑战之一就变成了分发。它一直都是个挑战,一直都难,而现在比以往任何时候都难,因为市场上无时无刻不在发生太多事,有太多东西在抢你的注意力,所有渠道都被付费和 SEO 塞满了。你对创始人有什么建议?你觉得一家初创公司要想突围而出,需要什么前提成立?因为现在真的太难了。

[1:02:00] Lenny

Let's start with talking about consumer distribution which

我们先从消费端的分发开始聊吧,因为这块

[1:02:05] Mark

I understand better.

我更懂一些。

[1:02:06] Lenny

Yes.

对。

[1:02:06] Mark

Um

嗯。

[1:02:08] Mark

there there's a one question we got to back up and really explore which is is AI a new platform and I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology. We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever chat we use AI chat. But it's not in my mind a platform. A platform in the traditional sense of it was a hardware platform. Well, it's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. People are trying to explore that, but it is not yet. And then it became at least a an interface platform whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up. And and in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. We we're not at that point yet. I believe we will get there. I don't know how. I have ideas, but we're not there yet. And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. We still use a browser. Uh and even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers. It could be. I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And that we're kind of like halfway to a platform. I we are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means we're when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't ever install new apps. You know, the average app installs per user per month is zero. So, it's really important to think about that that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, we don't it doesn't stick. You know, there were something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the app store and zero, you know, became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. So, your odds are bad. Okay. So it's not it's it's not an ideal, you know, moment to be, you know, you can't launch consumer right now with with high confidence. And that's just something that we have to acknowledge. And it makes consumer and consumer categories like social and games almost not investable. They're still getting investment, but it's very hard. uh it's much easier, you know, to be proumer or enterprise now. Um but for good reason because we're seeing those companies scale revenue ARRs um very quickly. So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas and you asked about distribution. Distribution is just so crucial and core to any consumer any business idea, but any consumer idea. And it it can't be an afterthought. It's not I'm going to build the best mousetrap and they're going to come. Distribution has to be part of your product and part of baked into the strategy deeply and and proven from the beginning. And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, you know, that's hope strategy, you know, not a belief strategy. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep experimenting. And now is a great time to experiment. And in fact, it'll be a hundred times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because it'll there'll be 100 times more noise. And once there is distribution, there'll be a flood of competition. But but when distribution is this broken, it is even more core to your product and your strategy. And I I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a proumer approach that find that go after their power users, their whales, the people who care enough to find it, care enough to spend money on it upfront to sustain a business, you know, long before we can get out to consumer. And there there is a great idea that um I got to that Gary Tan had that I'll repeat here because I loved it so much this week that if we get in the mindset of basically uh intelligence on tap free tokens and if we think that the the amount of tokens that we're buying today you know that will basically be free in a year or two that that that the token, you know, supply is going to go up so much. Our demand will too, but if today we start building re-imagining consumer services based on free tokens, I think that's such an interesting innovation zone and it could sound like a dot business plan. And I remember ordering pig ears for my dog Zingga and and wanting to send thank you notes to the VCs because they were cheaper than at Petco, right? That's not a good business plan. So, you know, giving away tokens at a loss isn't a good business plan, but it might be in a phenomenal business because what the dot thing had wrong was the price of pig ears wasn't going to come down or delivery wasn't going to come down, but the price of tokens will. And so I think that's another kind of Easter egg of an insight that I'm intrigued by and I think I think founders are going to do something really interesting with it that because games don't work premium games and premium apps that have to go and hit the AI that even if you wanted to spend on it you're hitting token limits right so getting around that today might unlock really interesting innovation. And I also just another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. I love the idea of the agent being in the middle and brokering our social relationships. And getting back to that lead genen, dating, jobs, you know, general listings, but I love the idea that the agent has our context and knows my context and your context. And we have this membrane. I call it the social membrane. This intelligent membrane of trust. And it it gets smarter and smarter at knowing when to change dynamically change that trust or change that attention level that it's going to take from us like a great chief of staff. And and it could share less information with both of us than it knows. It could be you're in Marin and I'm like, "Lenny, let's hang out. You're like, "Mark, I'd love that." So, okay, let's have our social secretaries work on that. There's going to be an asymmetry in your interest and my interest in any given weekend and hanging out. And how do we broker that without hurting, you know, one of our feelings or, you know, going into there's some really interesting spaces that the that the AI and the agent can broker between us in in ways that start to give us both productivity. They they find ways for us to get together without going without getting in a bad place of, you know, you see me on your calendar for Saturday and you want to be with your kids.

有一个问题我们得退回去好好探讨一下:AI 到底是不是一个新平台?我会主张:它目前还不是一个新平台。它是一项重要的技术。我们有了一个通往它的新入口——GPT 或者我们用的别的什么 AI 聊天。但在我看来,它还不是一个平台。传统意义上的平台,首先是个硬件平台。那它在消费端肯定还不是硬件平台——有人在尝试探索,但目前还不是。后来平台至少变成了一种“界面平台”,无论是 Windows 界面、浏览器界面,还是一个开放出来的社交网络;在移动端,它既是硬件又是界面。我们还没走到那一步。我相信我们会走到,只是我不知道会怎么走——我有一些想法,但目前还没到。承认这一点很重要,要说:我们仍然处在移动和网页时代。我们仍然在用浏览器。哪怕我们身处这个聊天应用里,它也还不是一个供别的应用、体验和开发者使用的平台。它有可能成为,我也希望它成为,但目前还不是。我们大概是“走到了通往平台的一半”。我们正处在一个“发现(discovery)”的节点上。能在消费层面突破的新技术会解锁“发现”,这一点非常重要。“发现”意味着:我们刚拿到手机时,一直在装新应用。而现在我们再也不装新应用了——人均每月安装的应用数大约是零。所以非常重要的是要意识到:我们不仅不在“发现”期,而且哪怕我们处在,它也不黏——装了也留不住。去年应用商店里大概上线了 4 万款新游戏,零款进了前十爆款,甚至连前 25、前 50 都没有谁能稳住。所以你的胜算很糟。好,所以现在并不是一个理想的时刻——你现在没法很有信心地去做消费产品。这是我们必须承认的事实。这也让消费、以及像社交和游戏这样的消费品类,几乎变得不可投资。它们还是在拿到投资,但非常难。现在去做面向专业用户(prosumer)或企业级(enterprise)要容易得多。这也是有充分理由的,因为我们看到那些公司能非常快地把收入、ARR 做大。所以我确实觉得现在是个钻研消费想法的好时候。你问到分发——分发对任何消费业务、对任何业务想法来说都太关键、太核心了。它不能是事后才想起的东西。不是那种“我去造个最好的捕鼠器,他们自然就来了”。分发必须是你产品的一部分,必须从一开始就被深深地烤进战略里、并被验证过。如果你只是闷头造产品,指望大家会来、指望它病毒式传播或口碑扩散,那是“希望策略(hope strategy)”,不是“信念策略(belief strategy)”。这并不是说你不该继续实验。现在恰恰是实验的好时候。事实上,一年后想在市场上拿到同样的效果,成本会贵一百倍,因为那时噪音会多一百倍。而一旦分发渠道出现,竞争就会蜂拥而至。但正因为分发现在这么不灵,它反而比以往更是你产品和战略的核心。我觉得我们正看到越来越多成功的公司采取一种 prosumer 的打法:去攻他们的超级用户、他们的“鲸鱼用户(whales)”,那些足够在乎、愿意先掏钱去支撑一门生意的人——这远在我们能触达大众消费者之前。还有一个很棒的想法,是 Gary Tan 提出来的,我这周特别喜欢,所以在这儿复述一下:如果我们进入这样一种心态——基本上把智能当作“随取随用、免费的 token”,如果我们认为今天我们买的 token 量,一两年后基本上就免费了,token 的供给会大幅上升(我们的需求也会涨),那么如果我们今天就开始基于“免费 token”去重新想象消费服务,我觉得这是个特别有意思的创新区。这听起来可能像个互联网泡沫时期(dot-com)的商业计划——我还记得当年给我的狗 Zynga 网购猪耳朵,还想给那些 VC 写感谢信,因为比在 Petco 买还便宜,对吧?那可不是个好商业计划。所以,亏本送 token 不是个好商业计划,但它有可能催生一门了不起的生意。因为当年那个互联网泡沫想错的地方在于:猪耳朵的价格不会降、配送成本不会降,但 token 的价格会降。所以我觉得这是另一个让我着迷的洞见彩蛋,我觉得创始人会用它做出特别有意思的东西。因为游戏不行——付费游戏、付费应用一旦得去调用 AI,哪怕你愿意为它花钱,你也会撞上 token 上限,对吧?所以今天能绕开这个限制,可能会解锁特别有意思的创新。我再分享一个关于“社交鸡尾酒会”的彩蛋想法。我特别喜欢“让 agent 居于中间、为我们的社交关系做中介(broker)”这个想法。回到“线索生成”——约会、找工作、各种常规的供需撮合。我特别喜欢这个画面:agent 拥有我们的上下文,既了解我的情境,也了解你的情境。我们之间有一层膜,我把它叫做“社交膜(social membrane)”——一层智能的信任之膜。它会越来越聪明地知道,什么时候该动态地改变那层信任、或者改变它要替我们承担的那种注意力水平,就像一个出色的 chief of staff。它还可以对我们双方都只透露它所知的一部分信息。比如:你在 Marin(马林郡),我说“Lenny,咱们聚聚吧”,你说“Mark,我很乐意”。好,那就让我们各自的社交秘书去安排。在任何一个给定的周末,你的兴致和我的兴致之间总会有不对称。那我们怎么在不伤到彼此感情、不至于走进尴尬境地的情况下把这事撮合好?这里有一些 AI 和 agent 能在我们之间居中撮合的、特别有意思的空间,而且是以一种能给我们双方都带来生产力的方式。它们能想办法让我们聚到一起,而不至于走到那种糟糕的境地——比如你在日历上看到我占了你周六,而你其实想陪孩子。

[1:10:15] Lenny

I love all these ideas you're sharing. Like what I'm hearing there, there's this always this idea of why can't we just here's my calendar, here's your calendar, let's just find time. And like the issue there is you don't want to ever feel like you don't want to look like you're you got nothing going on and you're like the most boring person. Like you don't want the other person to know.

我特别喜欢你分享的这些想法。我从中听到的是,总有这么一个念头:为什么我们不能直接“这是我的日历,这是你的日历,咱们找个时间就行”?而这里的问题在于,你永远不想让人觉得你无所事事、像个最无聊的人。你不想让对方知道。

[1:10:29] Mark

It's totally open available to you.

“我对你完全开放、随时有空。”

[1:10:31] Lenny

Yeah. [laughter] Exactly. Um,

对。(笑)就是这样。嗯,

[1:10:33] Mark

and and even worse, you don't want it to to you don't want it to

而且更糟的是,你不想让它——你不想让它

[1:10:38] Mark

schedule you for a meeting, you know, that was not

给你排一个你本来并不想去的会,

[1:10:41] Lenny

Yeah, that's right. Just to close the loop on the distribution part, what I'm hearing is like we might be on the verge of a new distribution platform, a way to get out and for people to discover you. Uh, it's not there yet.

对,没错。就把分发这块收个尾——我听到的意思是,我们可能正站在一个新分发平台的边缘,一种能让你触达外界、让人发现你的方式,只是它现在还没到来。

[1:10:53] Mark

I I'm somewhere between belief and hope in this because I don't have enough evidence to believe it and I'm it's a little more likely to me than just hope. I think right now there's a obvious race and competition around coding between the major LLMs. I think they're going to get back to consumer and proumer and developers hearts and minds. And I think they are interested in developers hopes and minds, but first they're competing on this coding front. But I think where we will get to in one way or another is that there there will be some kind of there will be some kind of consumerf facing platform for for AI apps and agents. I I can see so many I can see so many consumerf facing agentic services that make so much sense to me that I think consumers will want but they're not going to get it because it's if it's just buried in I doubt they're going to get it buried in the mobile app store and I think it's going to be in OpenAI's interest claude gro um to to see these these apps, consumerf facing agentic service apps happen and see them be successful with their LLM baked in. And the more it's uniquely instantiated to OpenAI, the more it drives their consumer value proposition. One example that is my my number one is my Easter egg on this is I think there should be an agentic travel agent. So, perfect example to me of a place where I think there is latent demand and the only reason we don't have it is because it doesn't make economic sense to offer it to us because we won't pay enough for it is a travel agent. I believe if I offered you a free 247 travel agent that was always there for you, knows your travel context, knows you, and will actually book, not just book travel, but I think the most valuable part is when you're in the middle of a travel a trip, be ready to rebook your flight and be on top of, you know, your travel logistics as they're happening. and often failing. And I think that's valuable to all of us, but not available to all of us because travel agents couldn't make a living. They they weren't getting enough commissions and we weren't ready to pay enough. So, they we're we're the internet has grown through us getting a better deal. But I think the the next area of growth probably will include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services and and that's my prime example. But if someone built the best travel agent today, you know, maybe we'd find out about it, but it's it's a it's a tough road. But if if it was specifically baked into open AI or claude and was a gave me a a a real clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond, you know, there's there's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that I'm having more and more trouble differentiating and it's just I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or or to GPT and so so they at some point and that's why they they're differentiating themselves right now on coding and there's real value and they're that's an amazing business but but they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level.

我对这件事的态度介于“信念”和“希望”之间,因为我没有足够的证据去“相信”它,但对我来说它又比单纯的“希望”要更靠谱一点。我觉得眼下各大 LLM 之间在“编码(coding)”上显然有一场赛跑和竞争。我觉得它们会重新回到消费端、prosumer 和开发者的“民心”上来。我觉得它们对开发者的“民心”是有兴趣的,但眼下它们先在编码这条战线上较劲。但我觉得我们最终会以某种方式走到一个状态:会出现某种面向消费者的、给 AI 应用和 agent 用的平台。我能想到太多太多面向消费者的 agentic 服务,对我来说都特别合理,我觉得消费者会想要,但他们拿不到——因为如果它只是埋在……我很怀疑它能埋在移动应用商店里被人拿到。我觉得这会符合 OpenAI、Claude、Grok 的利益:让这些面向消费者的 agentic 服务应用出现,并且看着它们带着各自的 LLM 一起成功。而且它越是被独特地嵌进 OpenAI 里,就越能拉动它们的消费者价值主张。一个例子,也是我在这件事上的头号彩蛋:我觉得应该有一个 agentic 的旅行代理(travel agent)。对我来说这是个完美的例子,一个我认为存在潜在需求、而我们之所以还没有它、唯一的原因是“给我们提供它在经济上不划算(因为我们不会为它付足够多的钱)”的领域——就是旅行代理。我相信,如果我给你一个免费的、7×24 全天候的旅行代理,它一直为你待命,了解你的旅行情境、了解你,而且会真的去帮你订——不只是订行程,我觉得最有价值的部分是当你正在旅途中、行程出了岔子(而且常常会出岔子)时,它能随时帮你改签航班、盯紧你正在发生的各种旅行后勤。我觉得这对我们所有人都有价值,却不是所有人都能拥有,因为旅行代理这行没法养活自己——他们拿到的佣金不够,而我们又没准备好付足够的钱。所以,互联网一直是靠“让我们拿到更划算的交易”增长起来的。但我觉得,下一个增长领域大概仍会包含“划算的交易”,但更会是关于“拿到极棒的服务”——这就是我的首要例子。可如果今天有人造出了最好的旅行代理,我们也许会知道它,但那是条很艰难的路。但如果它是专门烤进 OpenAI 或 Claude 里的,给了我一个非常清晰的理由,让我觉得“我从我的 GPT 这儿拿到了价值”——超越那种泛泛的价值……今天我从 AI 聊天里得到的很多是通用价值,我越来越难区分它们了,我甚至都不知道我到底是在问 Claude 还是在问 GPT。所以它们到某个时候——这也是为什么它们现在在编码上做差异化,那里有实打实的价值、是门了不起的生意——但它们在消费层面几乎没怎么做出差异化。

[1:14:52] Lenny

Yeah. To me like the question is are they just going to do it or why do they need anyone to do it if they are building this AGI they could just do all the things. So I think it's going to be interesting to see if they just want to eat the entire market of everything or they play nice with other startups.

对。对我来说,问题在于:它们到底是会自己亲自下场做,还是说既然它们在造 AGI,那它们干脆什么都自己干,何必需要别人来做?所以我觉得看下去会挺有意思的:它们到底是想把整个市场、所有东西一口吞掉,还是会跟别的初创公司好好相处。

[1:15:06] Mark

Yeah, that that is going to be interesting. And and look, we there's we can see past examples with Microsoft, you know, Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. They were a brutal platform. You know, they they ate everything around them. And and then, you know, with us, you know, we saw it on Facebook, you know, they the two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music cuz it was really painful with IP rights and games because they didn't want to like hire artists. Uh, but everything else they did absorb. I want to go in a different direction and touch on you have all these really amazing nuggets of advice for scaling company, managing people, hiring people, working with people. I want to just kind of touch on a bunch of these. Um, one is this idea of making everybody a CEO at your company. Talk about that lesson.

对,这确实会很有意思。你看,我们能从过去的例子里看出端倪:微软(Microsoft)当年是个残酷的垄断者、一个残酷的平台,把周围的一切都吞掉了。而对我们来说,我们在 Facebook 上也见过这一幕——他们唯独不愿涉足的两个领域是音乐(因为 IP 版权太头疼)和游戏(因为他们不想去雇一帮艺术家),但其他几乎一切他们都吸收了。我想换个方向,聊聊你那些关于扩张公司、管理人、招人、与人共事的、特别棒的建议金句。我想挨个碰一下。其中一个是“让公司里每个人都成为 CEO”这个想法。聊聊这堂课吧。

[1:15:56] Mark

All my management principles I got to through desperation. I don't like managing people. I say every day you're managing people is a day of work. And it's a necessary evil for us as product makers because we can't abdicate and just have someone else be CEO because all a sudden the priorities get messed up and you know teams don't have to listen to us and we're now feedback not direction. So that's a failing path. So we we have to be a CEO. But then the question is how do we get to spend the most time doing what we love and the least time doing what we don't? that the bigger principle to me that I started to get to was that oh I'm like all of management is just how do we get people to do the right thing we're not when we're not in the room. So I was like, okay, if I give them a hill to take, and if I make them a CEO, make them a real CEO. I mean, they they have operating control, degrees of freedom to take that hill however they want, and they can give me a plan, a budget, and then do whatever they want within that. What I found was I didn't have to manage them. So they're not coming back to me with questions. And certain kinds of people really want to be a CEO. What I also found was it was incredibly motivating for people. It's motivating to me. You know, I always say, uh, I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team. Um, so can I hire other people like that? And and I I like to say I was a frustrated expert witness when I worked for other people. And those are the best people to turn into a CEO. They're kind of a little bit of a know-it-all. they think they have the right answers and they're we're gonna find out if they do and so we let them actually be a CEO and they have all this pent up demand to actually go and prove that they were right and and that's a beautiful thing. So, so yeah, this I love this principle of make everyone a CEO and we're kind of going there in Silicon Valley with this idea of get rid of middle management. You know, Brian Armstrong was saying everyone should be an individual contributor. Everyone should be managing a lot of other people. That's really kind of to me the best CEO is like the best player at the position and is doing the thing they're great at and they're not wasting their time on management.

我所有的管理原则都是被“绝望”逼出来的。我不喜欢管人。我常说,每一天你花在管人上的时间,都是一天的“工作”。对我们这些做产品的人来说,这是个必要之恶,因为我们不能甩手把 CEO 让给别人去当——一旦那样,优先级突然就乱套了,团队也不必听我们的了,我们就从“给方向”降级成了“给反馈”。那是条死路。所以我们必须当 CEO。但接下来的问题是:我们怎么才能把最多的时间花在我们热爱的事上,把最少的时间花在我们不爱的事上?对我来说,我开始悟到的那个更大的原则是:管理的全部,无非就是“当我们不在场时,怎么让大家做对的事”。所以我想,好,如果我给他们一座要拿下的山头,如果我让他们当 CEO——当一个真正的 CEO,他们拥有运营的控制权、有按自己方式拿下那座山头的自由度,他们可以给我一个计划、一份预算,然后在这个框架内想怎么干就怎么干。我发现,这样我就不用管他们了,他们不会拿着问题回来找我。而且某一类人是真心想当 CEO 的。我还发现,这对人极其有激励作用——对我自己就很有激励。我老说:只要这个团队是我说了算,我就是个团队合作者。那么,我能不能招一批像我这样的人?我喜欢说,我以前给别人打工时,是个“憋屈的专家证人(frustrated expert witness)”。而这种人,正是最适合被培养成 CEO 的人。他们多少有点“万事通”的劲儿,觉得自己手里握着正确答案——那我们就来看看他们到底有没有。于是我们真的让他们去当 CEO,他们就有这股憋了很久的劲头,要去证明“我当初是对的”,这是件很美的事。所以,对,我特别喜欢“让每个人都成为 CEO”这个原则。在硅谷我们也正往这个方向走,就是“干掉中层管理”这个想法。Brian Armstrong 说过,每个人都应该是个体贡献者(individual contributor),每个人都应该管很多人。对我来说,这其实有点像:最好的 CEO 就像场上那个位置上最好的球员,在做他最擅长的事,而不是把时间浪费在管理上。

[1:18:18] Lenny

You mentioned this idea of an expert witness and you also have this uh nugget of of advice of staying close to the metal. I love this general advice. Talk about what you mean there, why that's important for someone in their career.

你提到了“专家证人”这个说法,你还有一句建议金句叫“贴近金属(stay close to the metal,即贴近一线、贴近底层实干)”。我特别喜欢这个泛用的建议。聊聊你指的是什么,以及为什么这对一个人的职业生涯很重要。

[1:18:31] Mark

They go together. We start our careers, you know, in our 20s very close to the metal, meaning we are individual contributors and we are working on getting the primary data and building the actual product. Usually we're in the trenches and the people in the trenches are usually closest to the data, closest to probably the right answer, but they're also usually furthest from making the decision. And that's what I call the expert witness syndrome because you're called to the stand by the adults and you plead for what you passionately believe is the right answer and then you're excused and then they make a decision and then you have to deal with the consequences and you know disagree and commit. What if what if I'm disagreeing because I'm [ __ ] right and now I'm committing to clean up your mess because you're wrong. And that's why many of us become founders cuz we just are sick of being in that position. You're also closer to the metal. And when you go become a CEO, when you become a founder, part of the the paradox of it that that I believe we have to be careful about is that we stay close to the metal. And I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutia of the details. you know, all the stories about Steve Jobs. I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting in the conference rooms, you know, and and I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small pixel level details that matter. And I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord and they they came to this conclusion too that they needed to actually be an inverted pyramid. And they said, "We realized that we outsource, we delegate the most important product decisions, the UX to our least experienced people, and they're doing this every day." And we we decided to turn that upside down and say, "We as founders need to be kind of the first and last mile for the product." And we have to be the ones who bless our our best use of our time is making these minute decisions that change the product user experience. And so to me that's being close to the metal. Brian Chesy believes in, you know, in doing things in non-scalable ways and doing it himself with the team by hand. You know that there's so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuck of the thing that mattered most. they would go and work, you know, two days a week deeply with the team on it. And and it makes sense. If you were the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field, you know, we we want to put you on the ice. We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors and managing and scaling.

这两件事是连在一起的。我们二十几岁开始职业生涯时,离金属非常近,意思是我们是个体贡献者,在干获取一手数据、打造真正产品的活儿。通常我们身处一线战壕,而战壕里的人往往离数据最近、离“正确答案”大概也最近,但他们同时往往离“做决策”最远。这就是我说的“专家证人综合症(expert witness syndrome)”:你被那些“大人”传唤到证人席上,你为你满腔热血地坚信是正确的答案据理力争,然后你被请下去,接着他们做决定,然后你得去承受后果,还得“不同意但服从(disagree and commit)”。可如果我不同意,恰恰是因为我他妈是对的呢?而现在我却要服从,去给你的烂摊子擦屁股,因为你错了。这正是我们很多人之所以成为创始人的原因——我们受够了待在那个位置上。你那时也离金属更近。而当你成了 CEO、成了创始人,这里有个悖论是我认为我们必须当心的:我们要保持“贴近金属”。我相信最好的产品型 CEO 都泡在细枝末节的微观里。你知道所有那些关于 Steve Jobs 的故事——我听说他坚持要亲自挑会议室的地毯时特别震撼。我也试着保持同样的心态:去“微观管理(micromanage)”那些真正要紧的、像素级的小细节。我和 Discord 的创始人有过一次很棒的对话,他们也得出了这个结论:他们其实需要做一个“倒金字塔”。他们说:“我们意识到,我们把最重要的产品决策——UX——外包、下放给了我们经验最浅的人,而这些人每天都在做这些决定。”于是他们决定把它倒过来,说:“我们作为创始人,得当产品的‘第一公里和最后一公里’。我们必须是那个去做这些细微决策、去改变产品用户体验的人,这才是对我们时间最好的运用。”所以对我来说,这就是“贴近金属”。Brian Chesky 信奉用“不可规模化(non-scalable)”的方式做事、亲自带着团队手把手地干。你知道关于 Jeff Bezos 和 Zuck 的好多故事——对于最要紧的那件事,他们会一周花两天扎进去、跟团队一起深入地干。这也合情合理:如果你是公司里最好的产品人,我们就想让你上场,想把你放到冰面上(打球),而不希望你把时间花在跟投资人谈话、做管理、搞扩张上。

[1:21:34] Lenny

Yeah. Uh Elon famous for this too. You have this uh line in the book along these lines. Micromanagement is beautiful. You should micromanage as long as you can. I believe that and and I I did that building zinga to a fault. I mean, we we got to a point that I had all the way to 50 employees, we had a standup call that would go on for two hours and I I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're going to do today and I go through name by name and say, "Okay, did you get that done? Can everyone else verify they got that done? Okay, what are you going to do today?" and I completely micromanaged, but we were much more effective. And then I I you know I kept micromanaging things as as I'm like if you can be in the room, be in the room assuming that you are the best player. So yeah, I I I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was 20 years ago. But but when I was building Zingo, we had to apologize for things like micromanaging or you know expecting uh you know massive results from our teams and and I think I'm happy to see that that's becoming kind of accepted as more it's closer to best practices today I think. But

对。Elon 也以此出名。你书里有句话大意是:“微观管理是美的。你应该尽可能地微观管理。”我信这个,而且我在做 Zynga 时把它贯彻到了过头的地步。我们一度——直到 50 名员工时——开一个站会(standup)能开两个钟头。我把每个人的名字都放进一张表格,记着他们昨天本该做什么、今天要做什么,我一个名字一个名字地过:“好,你那件事做完了吗?其他人能不能证实他确实做完了?好,你今天打算做什么?”我完完全全地微观管理,但我们的效率高得多。后来我也一直在微观管理各种事——我的想法是,如果你能待在屋里,那就待在屋里(前提是假设你是最好的那个球员)。所以,对,我觉得现在说这话,没有 20 年前那么离经叛道了。但当我在做 Zynga 时,我们得为“微观管理”这种事道歉,或者为“期待团队拿出巨大成果”道歉。我很高兴看到如今它正变得越来越被接受,我觉得今天它已经更接近“最佳实践”了。不过——

[1:22:52] Mark

um but my point about like that management is get people to do the right thing when you're not in the room. The first principle is be in the room if you can be as much as you can be and then only delegate when you get to the point that you you can't possibly be in all these rooms at the same time. And then all these management principles are just different strategies to try to get people to do the right thing when you're not there. And I love these non-scalable ideas that actually scale your scale what you're trying to do as a product maker in the right way. And one of the ones I love is this idea of tech assistance and and this idea of a teaching hospital. How do you pass the vampire blood of you to other people? Like you have this burning mission and passion around your product. How do you spread that to other people and have them spread in the organization? The first thing is put them in the room with you. Like so the idea of this teaching hospital was okay I'm just going to put as many people as I can in the room while I'm doing these product management meetings and have my passion and ideas and approach you know spread to all of them too and and that worked. And then grab someone from the ranks and make them your tech assistant. have them just follow you around for six months or 12 months and make make it the mini me, the person who is you in your 20s who was the expert witness, a little bit of a know-it-all. um and and start having them follow you around to pick up learn absorb everything you do and give them projects to test them and and then hopefully you've created a mini me that you can now put in at in a much bigger role somewhere else and in fact Andy Jasse at Amazon everyone on the sea staff used to be someone who had been the tech assistant to Bezos so it act that idea actually scales and you kind of get it for free.

——但我关于管理那一点的意思是:管理就是“当你不在屋里时,让大家做对的事”。第一原则是:只要你能在屋里,就尽可能多地待在屋里;只有当你到了那个“不可能同时出现在所有这些屋子里”的地步时,才去下放。然后,所有这些管理原则,都不过是想在你不在场时让大家做对的事的不同策略而已。我特别喜欢那些“不可规模化、却又能真正放大你作为产品人想做的事”的点子。其中我很喜欢的一个,是“技术助理(tech assistant)”和“教学医院(teaching hospital)”这个想法:你怎么把“你的吸血鬼之血(vampire blood)”输给别人?你对自己的产品有一种燃烧着的使命感和热情,你怎么把它传给别人、并让它在组织里扩散开?第一件事就是:把他们放进屋里,跟你一起。所以“教学医院”这个想法是:好,我开这些产品管理会议时,尽可能多地把人放进屋里,让我的热情、想法和打法也扩散到他们所有人身上——这招奏效了。然后,从队伍里拎一个人出来,让他当你的技术助理,让他就跟着你跑六个月、十二个月,把他打造成一个“迷你版的你”——那个在你二十几岁时身为专家证人、有点万事通劲儿的你。让他跟着你跑,去吸收、学习、消化你做的一切,再给他一些项目去考验他,然后但愿你就造出了一个“迷你版的你”,可以把他放到别处一个大得多的角色上去。事实上,亚马逊的 Andy Jassy——“S 团队(高管层)”里的每个人,以前都当过 Bezos 的技术助理。所以这个想法是真能规模化的,而且你几乎是“免费”得到它的。

[1:25:01] Lenny

I love this phrase of transferring your vampire blood. Oh man. Um maybe one last uh nugget from the book along these lines is you have this line of just the number one job of a CEO is to be right. Talk about that.

我太喜欢“输送你的吸血鬼之血”这个说法了。天哪。嗯,沿着这条线,也许再来书里最后一句金句吧:你说“CEO 的头号工作就是‘是对的’”。聊聊这个。

[1:25:14] Mark

Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. Um but if if I got to pick one if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat. And a a great boat in, you know, a dead lake bed, you know, isn't going anywhere. And so I I look for that in people like are they right? Like that's the best resume. I could see that you were right about something and and I look for that in the team and it's less do I like your style or approach or you your you know personality fit. I'm like I'll take I'll take misfits who are right. I'm like, I want I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest and and you know, the more people you have around you who are right, you know, that's they're they're putting balls in the net.

嗯,这又是一句我从 Bezos 那儿“偷”来的。如果只让我挑一件你作为 CEO 该做到的事,我会挑“你是对的”。所以哪怕你做不到——哪怕你没法把这艘船或这家工厂运营得多好——我也宁愿你挑对了产品、挑对了战略,而不是你执行力惊人、或特别会鼓舞人、特别会管理。因为“身处对的水域”比“拥有对的船”更重要。一艘很棒的船待在一片干涸的湖床上,哪儿也去不了。所以我在人身上找的就是这个:他们对不对?这是最好的简历。我能看到你在某件事上是对的——我在团队里找的就是这个,而不是“我喜不喜欢你的风格、打法,或者你的性格合不合得来”。我会说:我宁可要那些“对”的怪咖。我想要的,是那些极其聪明、知识诚实的专家证人。你身边“对”的人越多,他们就是在把球一个个送进网窝里。

[1:26:34] Lenny

I want to maybe end with a question about your kids and parenting. I talked to a bunch of people that know you well in preparation for this conversation and every single person commented on just how wonderful a dad you are

我想用一个关于你孩子和育儿的问题来收尾。为了这次对话,我提前跟一群很了解你的人聊过,每一个人都谈到了你是个多么了不起的爸爸。

[1:26:45] Lenny

and how much time you put into that part of your life. And a question I've been trying to ask folks that are parents and great parents in this AI era. Uh and there's a lot of stuff I want to ask about, but let me start here is just what's something that you are teaching them or helping them to develop that you think is going to be important to them in this crazy world we're we're entering of of AI? Thank you for asking about this. I It's I think my greatest role and job and and service to the world is trying to grow good humans. So I really really put a lot into it and take it seriously and I get so much out of it. I I like to say I'm growing my best friends. Um

以及你愿意在生活的这一块投入多少时间。我一直想问那些为人父母、而且做得很好的人一个问题，尤其是在这个 AI 时代。我有很多想问的，但先从这里开始吧:在我们即将进入的这个疯狂的 AI 世界里，你正在教孩子什么、或者帮他们培养什么，是你觉得对他们会很重要的?谢谢你问这个。我觉得我此生最重要的角色、工作和对世界的贡献，就是努力养育出善良的人。所以我在这件事上投入了非常非常多，认真对待，也从中收获了太多。我喜欢说，我是在养育我最好的朋友。

[1:27:25] Mark

and so far it's true. So, so there's a couple principles that have come in philosophies that have uh been important to me as a parent that I've just seen. I do them naturally and I see that they work over time. The the first one for me is I have five kids there. Every one of them is just such a different version of a human. and I have a special needs son uh who's fairly extreme special needs. Um our new one-year-old baby uh has a gene mutation and she actually may also end up being very neurode divergent. Um so you have this wide range and my my 15-year-old girls are they're twins and they're completely divergent from each other. This first principle that I've found is meeting them where they are and and and it's with kids I find we can kind of talk down to them. We could talk to them as kids um and or we can kind of treat them like adults and neither of those are right. It's like we got to like find engage with them at the altitude that they're at but as human to human and find the way to do that. And then once we do that and meet them where they are, I think we can bring them to surprisingly sophisticated places that may be way beyond what where they're supposed to be, you know, in that moment. like my twins, I started playing with math with them when they were really, really little. And then during the pandemic, I taught daddy math because I saw that their school was not equipped to do online homeschooling. So, I taught them and their friends daddy math. And I just tried to teach them a math brain. Like I and I didn't know where they were supposed to be. They were in fifth grade, but I just started for them and their friends just trying to teach them how to approach math in a way that's fun and curious. And then I found out I we found out later I taught them all the way through eighth grade math. Um, and I didn't know it and they didn't know it and that was cool. And in I'd say in the how does this apply in the age of AI and where we are I feel like we're at the end of this hundredyear cycle of mass produced education which was get the most knowledge in get everyone's averages up to the best place we can educate 20 million graduates a year or whatever number but it was factory produced it was and it was for a certain kind of work first factories then knowledge workers you know, knowledge working is going away. It's changing, but we're still teaching knowledge education. And I feel badly about it with my kids. And what I've tried to do with my older kids is teach them to have critical thinking more than and and I say, "I don't care if you go to college," which is a little hard for them because they're kind of achievers and like I don't care if you go to college. What I care about is that you develop critical thinking and you find a way to be useful to people in the world. And my one daughter Carmen uh she's also neurode divergent. She has ADHD and dyslexia and she created she's created a brand of sweatshirts called Comfy Fancy. Um and she also has created a a gathering a grouping a group for um neurode diversion middle school kids called neurosparkley and and it's taking this thing which should be a problem and a deficit and it's making it a way that she can connect and help a lot of other kids. So I'm proud to see that. I I've also I what I'm the the dissonance that I feel in this moment as a parent is that my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker and I know that game is over and I know so so what do I want my kids doing? I I try to teach them to when when an look at the deeper the meta of what's going on. When an adult is trying to convince you of something, when a teacher has a point of view that you don't agree with, try to understand why. What's their agenda? Where are they coming? What's their lived experience? And how has that impacted it? So, I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions, not know more answers. And and I think that's, you know, and and and I'd say in terms of how that spills into their online use and what I try to promote and discourage, it's I try to promote how can you be generative in what you're doing and not consumptive. So what can you do online or offline that is generative? that is actually putting something new out in the world because that's how you're going to get something back and not consuming, not being a passive consumer of content and experiences and and sometimes it works. I see them doing that and then sometimes it doesn't. But, you know, that's that's how I'm trying to navigate this. I also tried to make it till they were 16 with no phones, no smartphones, and I got to 14. And I got them flip phones and they had internships at Niantic working on Pokemon Go. They built a first-time user experience. It's really good with that. They were they I think used, but they had to get smartphones for that and they still have them. And so so even you know I tried to make it and I didn't.

到目前为止确实如此。作为父母，有几条原则和理念对我特别重要，我看着它们一点点形成。我自然而然就这么做了，而且我看到它们长期下来是有效的。对我来说第一条是这样:我有五个孩子，每一个都是截然不同的个体。我有一个特殊需要的儿子，他的情况相当严重。我们刚满一岁的小宝宝有基因突变，她最后很可能也会是高度神经多元(neurodivergent)的。所以差异跨度非常大，我那两个十五岁的女儿是双胞胎，但彼此完全不一样。我发现的第一条原则是:在他们所在的位置去接住他们(meeting them where they are)。对孩子，我们往往要么居高临下地跟他们说话、把他们当小孩，要么又把他们当大人，这两种都不对。我们得在他们所处的那个高度去跟他们互动，但要以人对人的方式去找到那种连接。一旦我们做到了、在他们所在的位置接住了他们，我觉得就能把他们带到出乎意料成熟的地方，甚至远远超出他们那个年龄段本该达到的水平。比如我那对双胞胎，她们很小很小的时候我就开始陪她们玩数学。后来疫情期间，我看到学校没能力做好线上的居家教学，就开了个『爸爸数学课』。我教她们和她们的朋友『爸爸数学』，就是想培养她们的数学脑子。我并不知道她们『应该』在什么水平，她们当时上五年级，我只是开始带着她们和她们的朋友，用一种有趣、好奇的方式去接近数学。后来我们才发现，我已经把她们一路教到了八年级的数学。我没意识到，她们也没意识到，那感觉挺酷的。要说这在 AI 时代、在我们今天这个节点意味着什么——我觉得我们正处在一个长达百年的『大规模量产式教育』周期的尾声:塞进尽可能多的知识，把所有人的平均水平拉到最高，一年培养出两千万还是多少个毕业生，但那是工厂式量产出来的，是为某一类工作准备的——先是工厂工人，然后是知识工作者。而知识工作正在消失，正在改变，可我们还在教知识型教育。我为自己的孩子感到有点难受。我对几个大孩子尝试做的，是教他们批判性思维，而不是别的。我跟他们说:『我不在乎你上不上大学。』这对他们有点难接受，因为他们多少是那种很要强、很想有成就的孩子，但我就是说我不在乎你上不上大学，我在乎的是你培养出批判性思维，并且找到一种方式去对这个世界上的人有用。我有个女儿叫 Carmen，她也是神经多元的，有 ADHD 和阅读障碍，她创立了一个卫衣品牌叫 Comfy Fancy。她还为神经多元的初中孩子建了个社群、一个聚会，叫 Neurosparkley，把一件本该是『问题』和『缺陷』的事，变成了她跟很多别的孩子连接、并帮助他们的方式。看到这些我很骄傲。作为父母，我此刻感到的那种割裂感是:我的孩子身处一套教育体系里，这套体系想把他们培养成能考进好大学、当好一个知识工作者的人，而我知道这盘游戏已经结束了。所以我到底想让我的孩子做什么?我尽量教他们去看更深一层、去看正在发生的事背后的『元层面』。当一个大人想说服你相信某件事，当一个老师持有你不认同的观点时，试着去理解为什么。他的动机是什么?他从哪儿来的?他经历过什么?这些又怎么塑造了他的看法?所以我是在教他们问更好的问题，而不是知道更多答案。我想这也会渗透到他们怎么上网、我鼓励什么、不鼓励什么上。我尽量鼓励他们去做有生产性的事(generative)，而不是消费性的事。你能在线上或线下做点什么是有生产性的、是真正往这个世界里放进新东西的?因为只有这样你才会有回报，而不是去消费、不是被动地消费内容和体验。有时候这管用，我看到他们在这么做;有时候不管用。但这就是我试图摸索的方向。我还试过让他们到 16 岁之前都别用手机、别用智能机，结果撑到了 14 岁。我给了他们翻盖机，后来他们去 Niantic 实习做 Pokémon Go，做了一套首次用户体验，做得真的很好。他们当时——我觉得他们用了，但为了那个项目他们不得不弄了智能机，到现在还在用。所以你看，我努力过，但没成。

[1:33:20] Lenny

Oh man, that's hilarious.

哎呀，太逗了。

[1:33:22] Mark

Oh, and and I also I'll tell you one more thing. For my older girls, I keep a running uh Google doc of life philosophies and anything I say to them as like a quote I say over and over, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to actually like write that up with stories and I keep it in this document for them and who knows if they'll use it, but they they do start to repeat some of them, so I know they read it." Um, you know, one is nothing's personal. Don't don't ever take anything personal. And if you assume nothing's personal, you're probably right 19 out of 20 times. And the 20th time, you probably handled it right because of that. So that's one, you know, and don't be a victim. You know, the world doesn't happen to you, it's happening around you. And you know, you're we're defined how we react to the world, not by the events that happen to us. So, I'm trying to, you know, give them these and, you know, and and it's and I'm and they're teenagers with the older two and, you know, and I'm in it and learning and and I've got two littles that, you know, a one-year-old and a four-year-old who sleep with me every night and

对了，我再跟你说一件事。给我那几个大女儿，我一直在维护一个 Google 文档，记录各种人生哲学，还有那些我对她们反复说的话——只要是我翻来覆去念叨的金句，我就会想:『好，我得把它认真写下来，配上故事。』我把这些都存在那个文档里。谁知道她们会不会用，但她们确实开始重复其中一些，所以我知道她们读了。比如其中一条是:没什么是针对你的。永远别把任何事当成是冲着你来的。如果你假设一切都不是针对你的，那二十次里你大概有十九次是对的;而剩下那第二十次，你也很可能正因为这个心态而处理得当。这是其中一条。还有就是别当受害者。这个世界不是『发生在你身上』，而是『在你周围发生』。定义我们的，是我们如何回应这个世界，而不是发生在我们身上的那些事。所以我尽量把这些东西给到她们。我那两个大的现在是青少年，我也身在其中，边做边学。我还有两个小的，一个一岁、一个四岁，每天晚上跟我睡。

[1:34:40] Lenny

Oh, man, you're busy. Uh, I feel like it's clearly what your next book is going to be is these life philosophies. I I feel like these are useful for people for human for adults I mean.

天哪，你可真忙。我觉得很明显，你下一本书就该写这些人生哲学了。我觉得这些东西对大家、对成年人都很有用，真的。

[1:34:49] Mark

Yeah. I wanted to write a book on parenting saying everything everything I know about parenting I learned from my dog Zingga because I had her before I had kids and she was like a person and you know I gave her clear boundaries and freedom and love in between and you know she uh she believed that she was a person. So,

是啊。我一直想写一本关于育儿的书，书名就叫『我所知道的关于育儿的一切，都是从我的狗 Zinga 身上学来的』,因为我是先有它、后有孩子的，它简直像个人一样。我给了它清晰的边界和自由，中间夹着爱，它真的相信自己是个人。所以——

[1:35:14] Lenny

is there anything else you wanted to share before we wrap up?

在我们收尾之前，你还有什么想分享的吗?

[1:35:20] Mark

The thing that I've gotten that's resonated most in writing in my book of life for the last 30 years, it took me a long, long time. It took me until I started Zing at 41 to finally identify and articulate my why. And I think for all of us, it's so important to get there. and we might do for a long time before we actually can say the why. But I figured out that mine was I talk about in the book is I want to create an internet treasure. Like you know when people say Mark how do I know that you're going to work hard on this next thing or you know you're post economic or you're a board rich guy or whatever. I'm like well I haven't done my thing yet. I like to like what is what does our soul need to do before we die or at least to be in integrity with it? What do I need to be working on and know that I gave everything I had against it? And it's to build an internet treasure which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world. And my friend Bing Gordon says, you know, one day those treasures will be in the Smithsonian. [snorts] And and I think he's right. And you know, I think it is the greatest opportunity that we have as product makers in this era is to build this digital skyscrapers that the next generation can't believe anyone ever lived without. And so that's that's my ambition and why why I'm still like rubbing sticks together and

过去三十年里，在我那本『人生之书』里写下的东西中，最能打动我自己的是这个——我花了非常非常久才想明白。直到 41 岁创办 Zynga 时，我才终于识别并清晰地说出我的『为什么』(why)。我觉得对我们所有人来说，抵达那个答案都太重要了。我们可能干一件事干了很久，才真正说得出那个『为什么』。我后来想明白，我的『为什么』——我在书里也讲到——是我想创造一份『互联网珍宝』(internet treasure)。你知道，有人会说『Mark，我怎么知道你会在下一件事上拼命努力呢?你都财务自由了、靠董事会席位就富得流油了之类的。』我会说:可我还没做成我那件事呢。我喜欢想的是:我们的灵魂在死之前需要做成什么、至少需要做到问心无愧?我需要在做什么、并且知道我为它倾尽了全力?那就是建造一份互联网珍宝——一种我们记不起没有它之前的生活、也无法想象没有它的生活的服务。作为产品人，我相信这是我们能向世界奉献的最伟大的抱负、最伟大的东西。我朋友 Bing Gordon 说，总有一天这些珍宝会被收进史密森尼博物馆。我觉得他说得对。我认为这就是我们这个时代作为产品人最大的机会:去建造这些数字摩天楼，让下一代根本无法相信居然有人曾经没有它也活过来了。所以这就是我的抱负，也是为什么我现在还在像钻木取火一样死磕——

[1:37:03] Lenny

and writing books.

——还在写书。

[1:37:04] Lenny

Uh speaking of that, to help people build their own internet treasure. Your book is coming out very soon. I think around the time this episode comes out. Uh tell people where to find it. Uh anything else you want to share about the book?

说到这个，为了帮大家打造属于他们自己的『互联网珍宝』——你的书很快就要出版了，我想差不多就在这期节目上线的时候。跟大家说说去哪儿能买到吧。关于这本书你还有什么想分享的吗?

[1:37:16] Mark

It's right here.

就在这儿。

[1:37:17] Lenny

Well, you have a copy. I just got a copy.

你手上有一本嘛。我刚拿到一本。

[1:37:20] Mark

Two copies somehow.

不知怎么的还拿了两本。

[1:37:22] Lenny

Two because you're important. Uh, we hope you read it twice. Um, give it out to a friend. So, uh, I would just say that Life of the Speed of Play is my it's I'm trying to share my my playbook and philosophies and I I'm hopeful that somebody uh will steal from my ideas and and take it further and and we're all kind of in a conversation and I love this podcast and and you hosting this cocktail party and we're We're all trying to move the the philosophies and the craft of product making ahead and and we're we're all learning as we go and and I hope that my book uh can be something referenceable and I hope it's easy and fun to read because I have pain reading a lot of books.

两本是因为你重要嘛。我们希望你读两遍，再送一本给朋友。所以我想说，『Life at the Speed of Play』是我的——我想把我的打法手册和理念分享出来，我很希望有人能从我的想法里『偷师』，并把它往前推进。我们其实都身处同一场对话之中。我很喜欢这档播客，喜欢你主持的这场『鸡尾酒会』,我们都在努力把产品打造的理念和手艺往前推，我们也都在边走边学。我希望我这本书能成为一个可供随时翻阅参考的东西，也希望它读起来轻松又有趣，因为我自己读很多书都读得很痛苦。

[1:38:19] Lenny

It is actually very easy to read. It's like very not that long and it's very uh bite-sized. So, great job with that.

它读起来确实非常轻松。篇幅不算长，而且都是很『一口一块』、好消化的那种。这一点做得很棒。

[1:38:26] Lenny

Oh, good. Um, Mark, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for sharing all this wisdom with us.

太好了。Mark，非常感谢你来上节目，谢谢你跟我们分享这么多智慧。

[1:38:32] Mark

Thanks. This is this is fun. This is actually I've I've done some podcast about the book and I didn't want to talk about the content of the book on most of the podcasts and on this one I did and I'm trying to I'm trying to only go into places, you know, that that I want to talk about, you know, which I try to do in the book, too. So,

谢谢，这很有意思。其实我为这本书录过一些播客，但大多数节目上我都不太想聊书的具体内容，唯独这一期我聊了。我尽量只去那些我真正想聊的地方——这也是我在书里努力做到的。所以——

[1:38:52] Lenny

there we go.

这就对了。

[1:38:53] Mark

Thank you for inspiring me to want to talk about product. My pleasure. Thanks, Mark. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, 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 or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

谢谢你激发了我聊产品的兴致。我的荣幸。谢了，Mark。各位再见。非常感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你常用的播客 App 上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们打个分或留个评价，那真的能帮助更多听众发现这档播客。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。下期再见。