20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

The industry today is run basically by principles associates in Junior GPs. A principle is not actually waiting for an exit. They just want a promotion now. We are in the industrialization of startups, playbook land, where everybody's trying to churn out some piece of ridiculous arbitrage every week in order to get through the end of their incubator and raise their seed round. There is absolutely a belief that too much capital can mess up a company. This is 20 VC with me Harry Steppings. Now our guest today has been a friend of mine for about 8 to 9 years if you can believe it. He's very modest and so he doesn't really want the intro to be about him. So I'm going to leave it with, Nabil Heid is a general partner at Spark Capital. Spark is one of the leading firms of the last decade, with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deal and more. And I do just want to say again on Nabil. Nabil helped me, advised me, was a friend when the show was very small and no one cared. That to me is the sign of true kindness and so I really appreciate the friendship Nabil.

今天的行业基本上由初级GP（普通合伙人）中的原则合伙人运作。一个原则合伙人实际上不会等待项目退出，他们现在只想获得晋升。我们正处在初创企业的工业化时代，所有人都试图每周通过一些荒谬的套利操作来度过孵化期，并筹集种子轮资金。确实有人相信，过多的资本可能会损害一家公司。这里是《20 VC》，我是哈里·斯蒂平斯。今天的嘉宾已经是我的朋友大概8到9年了，相信你能相信。他很谦虚，所以他不希望介绍是关于他的，那么我就简单说一下：纳比尔·海德是Spark Capital的普通合伙人。Spark是过去十年的领先公司之一，其投资组合包括Twitter、Anthropic、Coinbase、Affirm、Discord、Deal等。关于纳比尔，我再次想说，纳比尔在节目还很小、无人关注时给予了我帮助、建议并与我成为朋友。对我来说，这是真正善良的标志，所以我非常感激这段友情，纳比尔。

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Now, Bill, it is so good to have you here, dude. I'm also excited because you said before, we have quite different views. And that always makes for a great show. So, thank you for letting me turn a coffee meeting into an interview. It's your base, man. Say that you're doing your job, I get it. Dude, it is great to have you here. Now, I want to just dive right in. You said to me, your single biggest concern right now or something that you're thinking about is how we need to change our investing mindset in the new world of AI. I'm really concerned that actually the way that we've always invested maybe more spreadsheets, SaaS investing is going to make us dinosaurs if we don't move with the times. How do you think about this and the mindset shift that needs to happen in investing? Well, I think it's happening already, whether we like it or not. I think we can't really preach that a founder is supposed to adapt to a market and understand that the market is there. There's a thing called founder market fit. And there's also, frankly, a thing called VC market fit. And this market for AI is wildly different. I don't think anyone would argue it's not wildly different. And then the question is, in what way is it different? And we had a BDB SaaS amazing, wonderful bull run in 2021 and a little bit afterwards. And I think we got really good at like Greg Trevorton uses this phrase of puzzles versus mysteries, which is just like, puzzles are this thing that you can like, you know, use that raw horsepower to solve. And mysteries are, you know, they're you have to go on the journey. There's like fog of war, and you cannot work it out ahead of time. In many ways, like the BDB SaaS blow up of that era was all about like the industrialization of venture capital. It was all about figuring out all the puzzles needed to hire a hundred associates to do all of the work to figure out exactly the right SaaS metrics, and then grind it all out. And no one has any idea what a model is even going to do in a week. So I don't know how that isn't a mystery. And so I think you have to build a firm with that set of talent. Can we invest in mysteries alone? Puzzles that kind of doable but challenging. The mysteries, this is what I find so challenging, which is like the world was turned upside down by deep seek. Yeah. And then something will happen again in three months, you know that? I do. Yeah. And so how do we think about adjusting to investing in a world of mysteries when we've been so used to puzzles? How long have you been doing this? The show 10 years. Yeah. So I've been a VC for a little bit over 10 years.

现在，比尔，真高兴你能来到这里，伙计。我也很激动，因为你之前说过，我们的观点有很大不同。这总是让节目更精彩。所以谢谢你让我把咖啡会谈变成了一次采访。这里是你的地盘，兄弟。说实话，你是在做自己的工作，我明白。兄弟，真高兴能和你一起聊聊。现在我想直接切入主题。你跟我说过，你现在最担心或最在意的事情是我们该如何在新的AI世界中调整投资心态。我非常担心，如果我们不与时俱进，那我们过去基于电子表格的软件即服务（SaaS）的投资方式可能会让我们变成恐龙。你怎么看待这个问题，以及投资中需要发生的心态转变？ 嗯，我觉得这已经在发生了，不管我们愿意与否。我认为我们不能仅仅宣扬某个创始人应该适应市场，并明白市场就在那里。有一种配称叫做"创始人与市场的匹配"，而事实上，还有一种叫做"风投与市场的匹配"。对于AI市场来说，这种匹配截然不同。我不认为有人会否认它的截然不同。那么问题是，它到底有什么不同呢？在2021年及其后，我们见证了B2B SaaS的精彩牛市。我觉得我们当时变得非常擅长于解谜和探索这个过程的相关问题，正如格雷格·特雷弗顿所引用的“谜题与谜团”的说法："谜题"是你可以用那种原始计算能力去解决的，而"谜团"是你必须去经历的旅程，存在着战争迷雾，你无法提前弄清楚。 在许多方面，那一时期B2B SaaS的爆发完全是围绕着风险投资的工业化进行的。这一切都是关于解决所有需要招聘上百名助理来完成的谜题，找出正确的SaaS指标，然后努力去实现的，但没人能保证模型在一周内会有什么表现，所以我不知道这怎么不算是个谜团。因此，我认为我们必须建立一个拥有那类人才的公司。我们能仅靠投资那些谜团吗？谜题是可完成但富有挑战性的。我觉得最具挑战性的是谜团，比如世界因深度学习而颠覆，这种情况在三个月后可能还会发生。你知道吗？我知道。那么，我们该如何在习惯了谜题之后，去思考如何适应投资于一个充满谜团的世界呢？ 你做这个节目多久了？ 十年了。不错，我做风投也有十多年了。

So we're in the same generation, in this sense of trying to think about unpacking this puzzle. I was a founder beforehand. I would say the early stages of venture capital, the real early stages of venture capital for thinking about the beginning of Sequoia and so on, like that was all mysteries, man. Like that wasn't puzzles. And so I think the truth is, it may sound incredibly old school, but it's going back to the way things were really done before. It is an artisanal business. There's a reason it's an artisanal business. And that's because. But you actually think so, like if we look at your ramp or your brakes or any of the kind of successful companies of kind of the last era, so to speak, yeah, serial founder, tick, pedigree, founder, tick in a good big market tick, novel go to market, novel custom place. This is completely different. Yeah, it is. I am not saying that if you built an awesome strategy to dominate the world, and therefore you're probably regarded as like a tier one brand or whatever you were four years ago, you're probably dead without completely changing. And there was exactly the right strategy for that era. You go tick down the box. We were kind of like in late stage capitalism for startups, everything was red ocean. And so it was all about optimization and speed and like minor arbitrage is we are now in a world where like you need rampant creativity inside of an org. You need like the all of it is in the nuances. And so you need to build a firm that can kind of like grok to that. Do you think many of that your firms are adapting in the way that they need to? No, no, you know this cycle because the cycle in VC evolution is like horribly, horribly slow because it also loops back to LPs. They don't get to act on their own, right? They don't get to just like make a decision tomorrow. They have to go back and raise another fund against a new mandate, which probably requires like, I don't know, maybe you turn over half the team.

所以，我们是在同一代人里，都在试图解开这个难题。我之前也是个创业者。我会说，早期的风险投资，真正意义上早期的风险投资，比如说像红杉资本刚刚起步的那段时间，真的是非常神秘的，不像是解谜题。而我觉得事实是，可能听起来特别老派，但我们需要回到事情真正被完成的那种方式。风险投资是个手艺活，这是有原因的。 如果我们看看你的公司，不管是Ramp还是Brex，或者其他过去时代取得成功的公司，通常都有一些共同点，比如：连续创业者、优秀背景、大市场、新颖的市场策略和独特的客户群。这和过去完全不同。我不是说如果你之前有一个出色的战略来统治市场，你大概被看作是顶级品牌，那么要是在不彻底改变的情况下，你很可能就“死”掉了。那个时代有其准确的策略，从“打勾”到“盒子打勾”。我们当时处于初创公司的晚期资本主义阶段，整个市场都是红海，讲究的是优化、速度和一些小套利。 而我们现在的世界需要公司内部充满无尽的创造力，所有的差异都在细微之处。因此，你需要建立一个能够适应这些变化的公司。你认为很多公司采取了必要的适应措施了吗？没有，你知道这种循环，因为风险投资的演变周期非常慢，这不仅环环相扣到有限合伙人（LPs）。他们不能自行决定，比如明天做出一个决定，他们必须回过头来以一个新的使命筹集下一只基金，而这可能需要更换一半的团队。

By the way, what's doing what's right for the firm may actually lead to bad messaging to LPs. Because if you're managing a firm that needs to be very drastically reshaped for this new age, LPs find instability very disconcerting. And that is a red mark in your box. That's right. And it may take three years to show that transition word by which point they will have turned because they will have gone in a bill. You change your team entirely, you move this, this and this next fund, though. LPs want stability at a time when there's rapid change. So it's the wrong market fit. You have to ask if who's the person making that decision at that firm? So if they were sitting on all the wonderful, amazing B2B SaaS markups from four years ago, and so now they're the head honcho at that place, do you think they're really making this call?

顺便说一下，为公司做正确的事情可能实际上会对有限合伙人（LPs）传递不好的信息。因为如果你在管理一家需要为新时代进行剧烈重组的公司，LP们会觉得这种不稳定性很让人不安，这会给你的表现打上一个红色的标记。没错。可能需要三年时间来显示这种转变，而到那时他们可能已经改变了，因为他们已经在抱怨了。你彻底改变了你的团队，调整了这个、这个和下一个基金。然而，在快速变化的时代，LP们希望保持稳定。因此，这是一个错误的市场契合。你必须问自己，谁是公司里做这个决策的人？所以，如果他们掌握着四年前那些优秀的B2B SaaS项目估值，现在成为了公司的大佬，你觉得他们真的是在做这个决定吗？

So what should we be doing? I learn from amazing guests like you on the show. Yeah. I am building a firm. When we think about reshaping our firms to a new world of venture and startups, what needs to be done? I think you need to think like a founder. I think you need to be okay with a small team that makes subjective bets and think about the craft of what a founder needs today, which is that honestly, what a founder needed four years ago was a lot of playbooks. You needed every single arbitragey, simple way to make everything move a little bit faster. The conversations I have founders calling me about now after a board meeting, before a board meeting, they are all unknowables.

我们应该做些什么呢？我从像您这样的精彩嘉宾那里学习。在构建我的公司时，我们考虑如何在新的风投和初创世界中重塑我们的企业，需要做些什么？我认为你需要像创始人一样思考。我认为你需要接受一个规模较小的团队，这个团队会做出主观的决策，并且关注创始人今天需要掌握的技巧。坦率地说，四年前创始人需要的是大量的操作手册，每一步都需要简单的方法来让事情推进得更快。而现在我和创始人在董事会会议前后交流，他们谈论的都是未知的问题。

They are all trying to like figure out what is the new user experience that I should use when models go multimodal. And like, there are explorations that not necessarily I have the answer for. They're not coming to me for answers. It's a sounding board, right? And they need a sounding board of board members that are actually actually using their products and actually have a curiosity to use the rest of AI products and get more native instead of just watching Twitter and looking at markups. In terms of the heuristics for how you define quality, a lot of traditional investments are made with, oh, they're at X million in error, and it's been 18 months to X million now. That was a classic, like 18 months to 10 million.

他们都在尝试弄清楚，当模型变得多模态时，我应该采用什么样的新用户体验。而且，这方面的探索并不一定有明确的答案。他们不是来找我寻求答案的，更像是一个讨论平台。他们需要一个由真正使用他们产品并乐于尝试其他AI产品的人组成的讨论平台，这些人对AI产品有深入的好奇心，而不是只看着推特和一些草图。至于如何定义质量的准则，很多传统投资都是通过一些指标来做决定的，比如收入达到某个百万级别，并且在18个月内实现。这是一个经典的例子，比如18个月达到1000万。

Yeah. Gold standard. Yeah. AI is just completely blown that out of the water. And we see multiple products, hit 10 million now, and a couple of months. Yes. That will probably be dead in two years. So how do we think about revenue as a heuristic for quality? Can I push back a little bit on even step up one level from even that? I think why did the simple heuristics of revenue? You can pick one, you have to hit 10 million. You can pick another set of metrics or dashboards that turn green so that you can get your partnership to agree to let you go do the thing you really want to go do. How did those things evolve? Because that's not how partnerships were 20 years ago.

是的，黄金标准。是的，人工智能已经完全超越了这一点。我们看到多个产品在几个月内就达到了1000万的用户。是的，它们可能在两年内就会消失。那么我们如何把收入看作是质量的一个简易评判标准呢？我可以稍微反驳一点甚至从这一点进一步探讨吗？我觉得为什么要用简单的收入标准？你可以选择一个，比如必须达到1000万。你也可以选择一套指标或仪表盘，当它们变成绿色时，你的合作伙伴就会同意让你去做你真正想做的事情。这些事情是如何演变的呢？因为20年前的合作伙伴关系并不是这样的。

So why did that happen? That happened because you added people to the partnership. You have to look at the core of the org and then work downstream from that. What happens is if you take a room, which used to have seven partners, and that room becomes 25 partners or 30 partners or 500 partners at a certain set of firms, like what really happens? And I think the industry today is run basically by principles associates in junior GPs. That incentive system is what we're all swimming in, which did not exist 20 years ago.

那么，为什么会发生这种情况呢？这是因为你增加了合伙人。你需要查看组织的核心，然后再从这个基础上向下分析。情况是这样的：如果一个房间曾经有七个合伙人，现在变成了有25个、30个甚至在某些公司有500个合伙人，这时候会发生什么呢？我认为如今这个行业基本上由原则性助理和初级GP管理。这种激励机制在20年前是不存在的，而这正是我们现在所面对的环境。

Why does that matter? Because what does a principal want? Well, a principal is not actually waiting for an exit. They just want a promotion, man. Like they just want to move up the ladder. A better job. They want to bounce to Sequoia or bounce to be a GP somewhere else. And the industry moves fast enough that they're not going to wait until an exit or cash to get that other job. You're giving them a promotion or you're giving them a more respect in two years or they're going to try to go somewhere else that's better. So what does that mean? Well, that means if I want to get a promotion and I'm inside of Schmubich Mubi VC firm, then I need markups. So if I need markups, how do I quickly get markups? I figure out what the guy one stage after me is interested in. And so my job is not really to go figure out what the future is.

为什么这很重要呢？因为校长在乎的是什么？其实，校长并不真正关心“退出”机制，他们只想获得晋升。就像他们只是想往上爬。一个更好的职位。他们想跳槽到红杉资本，或者去其他地方当普通合伙人。而这个行业发展得如此之快，以至于他们不会等到“退出”或获得现金后才去找那个更好的工作。如果你不能在两年内给他们升职或赢得更多尊重，他们就会去找更好的地方。那么这意味着什么？这意味着如果我想在Schmubich Mubi风投公司获得晋升，我就需要提升估值。那么我该如何快速获得估值提升呢？我需要弄清楚后面一级的人对什么感兴趣。因此，我的工作并不是真正去弄清楚未来是什么。

It'll go figure out how to be aligned with a founder and do great work or figure out how to get really deep with AI and figure out it's to go have a dinner with co2 or have a rails and figure out what they're into this month and then invest in it one month earlier, get the mark up four months later so they can get a promotion. And that's basically the entire industry right now. Jason Lambkin always says that the invention is a packaging industry. I need to get this, package it up and then shift it on to the next person. Yeah. You hate that analogy. I hate that analogy deeply. Well, to a certain extent, you understand it. You just hate it. I understand it. I don't think it's good for startups and I don't think it's good for founders. And I also maybe more importantly than just some kind of value judgment, I think it's a losing strategy when no one knows what's about to be hot in nine months without being very, very deep in the work. And so a winning strategy respectfully is back amazing founders with unique insights and go long.

这个段落的大意是： 目前的行业趋势是：一些人试图找到与创业者对齐的方法，进行出色的工作，或者深入研究人工智能，搞清楚市场趋势。比如说，他们可能会和创业者共进晚餐或关注技术动态，了解近期热点并提前一个月投资，以便四个月后获得回报，这样就能通过升职。这基本上就是现在的行业现状。Jason Lambkin 常说，创新行业就是一个包装业，把东西整理好，再交给下一个人。你不喜欢这个比喻，我也深恶痛绝。当然，从某种程度上你会理解，但你就是不喜欢。我理解你的感受，这对于创业公司和创始人都不是好事。而且，这样的策略也是失败的，因为没有人能在没有深入参与工作的情况下预测未来九个月的热点。相反，一个成功的策略是支持那些有独特见解的杰出创业者，并长期投入其中。

Some of the hardest sports are the ones where the things you say are loud are easy to say but hard to execute. Yeah. I remember Bruce Dunlevy. I said to him once, what do you think of all of these transitions in the industry and how difficult it is? He said, ventures an incredibly simple business. Yeah. Very hard, very simple, very simple. And I always kind of go back to that. So like, that's not the right way to do it. You mentioned that kind of principles and associates running firms totally agree. Is it not also just the explosion of startups that we actually have, meaning we need simple heuristics to gauge yes or no, worth meeting, not worth meeting. There are so many companies, if you don't have a framework, is it interesting enough? You're just going to be meeting everyone. Yeah. The principles and associates don't even solve that problem, right? You have a you have a hundred X increase in number of startups and you added like nine principles.

一些最难的运动项目往往是那些看似简单易说却难以执行的。我记得布鲁斯·邓乐维，他曾问我对行业中的这些转变以及它有多艰难的看法。他说，创业是一项极其简单的业务。非常难，但又非常简单。对此，我一直牢记于心。因此，这样做并不正确。你提到了原则和合伙人运行公司，我完全同意。但这不也是因为我们实际上有太多创业公司出现吗？这意味着我们需要简单的规则来判断是否值得见面。如果没有框架来衡量一个公司是否有趣，我们就要与每个人都见面。这么多公司，如果光靠原则和合伙人也无法解决这个问题，对吧？创业公司的数量增加了一百倍，而你可能只新增了九位合伙人。

I'm sorry, you didn't cover the industry suddenly unless you're doing pattern matching. And I think the more fundamental question is, can you pattern match in this market? I don't know that the Brita filter version of investing is the right way to evaluate or at least I'm not executing the way that I want to do my job and the way that I think my partner should do their jobs together in that kind of like trying to get win the coverage game. What's the birth of filter of investing? You know, take all the founders, put them in the top, and then you hope you sift out a handful of the good ones at the bottom. And that's a very inbound inbox oriented view of the world. And if you do that, then your job is to weed as much as you can be possible, market as much as you can be like possible, bring everything into the top of the filter, and then do a really, really fast job filtering this incredible amount of inbound in order to be very, I would say call it like transactional nature, get through the funnel as quickly as possible, say no as quickly as possible to move on to the next one.

很抱歉，如果你没有通过模式匹配，突然涉足这个行业是不容易的。我认为更根本的问题是，你能在这个市场中进行模式匹配吗？我不确定像滤水器那样的投资方式是否是评估的正确途径，至少我并没有按照我想要的方式去执行我的工作，也不是我认为我的合伙人应该在抢占市场中相互配合的方式。什么是投资的滤水器模式呢？就是说，把所有的创业者放在入口，然后希望能够筛选出少数优秀的项目。这是一种非常靠收件箱的世界观来进行的。如果你这样做，那么你的工作就是尽可能多地淘汰不合适的项目，尽可能多地推销出色项目，把所有的机会都汇集到滤水器的入口，然后用极其高效的方式筛选大量的进入项目，以一种可以说是交易性强的方式，以最快的速度完成筛选，尽快拒绝不适合的项目以进入下一个项目。

When you reflect back on your prior portfolio in the last decade, was that a pattern matchy approach that was successful? Um, but have you had to change? No. I also think I was really badly shaped to be an investor in 2021. I mean, I think we got lucky. Spark was started in the early web 2.0 era, like right at that age, in the same cohort as USB and benchmark 2.0, that the beginning of that girly era, and a handful of other firms that I think all treated mobile really well and did mobile really well, which felt similar. You didn't know what the metrics were supposed to be. It was a wide open crazy world. And you're like looking at something that was maybe a fart app in the morning and then, and then Uber in the afternoon, like it was an insane situation. I think our DNA was very fixed by that. Our value is very set by that navigation.

当你回顾过去十年中的投资组合时，是一种成功的模式匹配方法吗？嗯，那你是否需要改变呢？不。我还认为我在2021年时并不适合做投资者。我的意思是，我们有点幸运。Spark是在早期的Web 2.0时代创立的，就在那个时候，与USB和Benchmark 2.0等公司一起处于同一阶段，这是一个崭新的时代。还有一些其他公司，我认为它们在移动领域表现出色，处理得当。那时一切都充满未知，你不知道该关注哪些指标，世界充满了疯狂的机遇。早上看着一个可能是屁声应用的东西，到了下午就出现了Uber，这简直是个疯狂的情境。我认为我们的基因当时就被固定住了，我们的价值观也因此而确立。

And I'll be the first to say that like, I don't know that we navigated the B2B SaaS era four years ago, this kind of industrialization. We didn't do the things that a lot of our peer firms did. Like we had been very successful. We could have very easily raised $5 billion. We could have very easily tripled our quadruple the size of the team. We didn't do that. We stayed seven people, six people partnership. We all write checks. We all do work with our founders. We like the service work. I would argue that made our job a lot harder for five years ago, to be honest. And it makes it a lot easier now because we feel very well shaped for this phase. Do you agree with Doug Leone that we have seen the transition adventure from a high margin village community to a low margin commoditized industry? I think he is executing the strategy of Sequoia as if that is true and still trying to keep the rest of it compact and true. They're trying to exclude me. They're doing all the things. I would argue actually they're in the same vein as Spark, actually, which is kind of sitting in the middle. That seed fund is 190 million. Yeah, so I was going to say that growth funds are like a billion and a half or two. Don't get me wrong. It's a huge amount of money combined as his spot, by the way. I'm not going to let you just get away with that one. But it's not the mega mega. That's right. I think they kind of sit in the middle, but you agree that it's moved to this low margin commoditized industry? I think when we look back at this specific era right now, it will not feel that way. Why? Most of the firms are executing strategies that are not particularly effective to this market. That means you're actually only competing with a smaller sub segment of people on any given deal. One thing I find challenging is it is very difficult to win great companies when you are optimizing for performance and your competitors optimizing for deployment. That's true. We've lost two deals in 24 months where literally they trebled the price and went to common stock. I'm like the founder, you should take it. It's free money. That is a different game. That is a different game. We won't win all of those. I have that same list. I have a same list of FOMO deals that you wish you had done, and then the price just got insane and got crazy. Are you your best deals all highly priced?

翻译成中文，尽量简洁易读： 我会第一个承认，我们在四年前并没有很好地适应B2B SaaS时代和这类工业化趋势。我们没有像很多同行那样去做，虽然我们非常成功，我们本可以很容易地筹集50亿美元，轻松将团队规模扩大三到四倍。但我们没这样做，我们保持在七人、六人团队的基础上，所有人都写支票，和创始人一起工作。我们喜欢这样的服务工作。说实话，这让我们五年前的工作变得困难得多，现在反而简单了很多，因为我们觉得自己的状态适合当前这个阶段。 关于Doug Leone认为我们已经从高利润的村庄社区转变为低利润的商品化行业，我认为他在执行红杉的策略就像这一观点一样，并试图保持紧凑和真实。他们试图排除我，他们在做所有事情。我认为他们其实和Spark差不多，处于中间状态。那只种子基金是1.9亿美元。我想说，增长基金大概在15亿到20亿美元。不要误会，这是个巨大数额，加上他的权重。不过还算不上超级大。 我认为这些变化会让我们回顾当前这个时代时，不会有这种感觉。为什么？大多数公司在执行的策略对这个市场并不特别有效。所以实际上在每笔交易中你只是在和更小的竞争者群体较量。对于那些专注于表现的公司来说，赢得优秀公司的难点在于你的竞争对手集中在投资部署上。过去24个月，我们输掉了两笔交易，他们竟然将价格提高三倍，还会完全用普通股。我甚至告诉创始人：你该接受，这是免费的资金。这是一种不同的游戏，我们不会在所有这样的交易中获胜。 我也有相同的遗憾名单，有些交易本来想参与，但价格变得高得离谱。你做得最好的交易都是高价的吗？

Yes. I'm not a value investor. No way to get you, but everyone often says, the hottest deals don't turn out to be the best. Yeah. Often is sad. It's the ones where they weren't competitive at all, and then they turn into something great. I think we forget. Dude, you're on a podcast. Just give us a sound bite. Yes. I reject that notion. This industry is all about exceptions. That's literally the industry we're in. Why are we building a bunch of playbooks if the whole thing is about exceptions? Like you have to build a firm, and as a founder, you have to be okay with the idea that there's going to be an exception next week to all the things you knew before, or else you wouldn't be doing. do you give a shit if something's one of many? And what I mean by that is we're looking at a company now and I'm fighting with someone on the team about it, because it's not a generational defining company. They're one of 50 data providers. I'm just not interested in being one of 50, and they're like, well, there's 15 data providers that make over a billion dollars a year. Good response back, fair enough, if you're thinking about enterprise value, but like being one of many others, do they have some competitive barrier to entry? Some reason that they might build a B.A. lasting institution, or is it an iceberg in the sun? There's lots of boats in the sea. They will have their own individual slice, but it's a data provider like all the others are. I think that one feels like an easy no. If you just don't feel like they have a competitive edge, then that's hard. Oh, all these things are going to be big. It's maybe not big enough, or maybe if it's small enough fun, but we're trying to invest in companies that we hope will be public long-lasting institution decades from now, you have to believe that they have some enduring value that will last for a long time, right? You guys move a lot of money on large checks, especially growth checks. Can you do that on mysteries where companies can be turned upside down overnight? We operate an early stage fund in a growth fund. How big is the early, how big is the growth? The early stage funds, a little over $700 million in the growth has doubled that. I mean, it's not small for an early fund, is it? It's seven partners. I didn't say you have to write small checks. I said you have to be subjective and come from first principles in your investing. If you're spending all of your time trying to set up checklists for what is okay or not to bring into a partnership, if you're spending all of your time trying to work the politics of the org in order to get something done, that is all taking away from trying out the fundamental truth of whether this set of founders with this amazing idea is going to turn into something great. That's what I mean. Love that. How do you remove the politics? How do you remove the politics? I mean, I think venture, somebody said at one point, you probably know the quote because you're good with quotes. Venture is the most politics per human inside of almost any org. I think there's a reason for that. The reason for that is that all of the measurements before exit are all false profits. Until the thing is actually a primback return back capital and you see this wonderful enduring institution, it's all just games and packaging. That really means that if I internalize trying to build up respect with my peers in order to be thought of as being able to do good deals, I'm in a packaging product business for just my peers. You just have to work with a point where you people start with respect.

当然。我不是一个价值投资者。没错的是，大家经常说，最热门的交易往往不是最好的。是的，这常常令人感到遗憾。那些没有竞争的投资，反而可能变得出色。我觉得我们容易忘记这些。伙计，你正在录播客，只要简单直白地说就好。是的，我拒绝这种观点。这个行业靠的就是例外情况。我们的行业就是这样的。如果整个行业都充满例外情况，那我们为什么还要构建一堆指南呢？作为创始人，你需要接受这样一个观念，那就是下周可能会有一个例外打破你以往知道的一切，否则你就不会继续做下去了。 你在乎某件事情是否只是大多数中的一个吗？我的意思是，我们正在研究一家公司，我和团队里的一个人就此事争论，因为这家企业并不是一种一代人定义的公司。它只是一众数据提供商中的一个，我对这种不感兴趣。而他们则说，有15家数据提供商年收入超过十亿美元。好的回应，考虑到企业价值，这是有道理的，但作为众多公司之一，他们是否有一些竞争壁垒？一些能使他们成为持久企业的理由，或者他们只是一座阳光下的冰山？海上有很多船，但它们都有自己的立足之地，然而它们仍和其他数据提供商一样。我觉得这很容易拒绝。如果你觉得他们没有竞争优势，那就很难了。哦，所有这些东西都会变得庞大。可能不够大，或者可能还不够小或有趣，但我们希望投资的公司能够在几十年后成为上市的长期企业，你必须相信它们具有一些持久的价值，会延续很长时间，对吧？你们投入很多资金，特别是成长资金。你能在那些有可能瞬间翻盘的公司中这样做吗？我们运营一个早期阶段基金和一个成长基金。早期基金有多大，成长基金有多大？早期基金略高于7亿美金，成长基金翻了一倍。对于一个早期基金来说并不算小，对吧？有七个合伙人。我不是说你必须写小支票。我是说你必须主观思考，以第一原理进行投资。如果你把所有时间花在为引入合伙关系建立什么可以接受或不可以接受的检查清单中，如果你把所有时间花在处理组织内部政治上以完成某件事情，那么这些都会分散你对这组创始人的出色想法是否会变成伟大事物的探索。这就是我的意思。很喜欢这个。你如何消除政治影响？我的意思是，我认为风险投资，有人说过，你大概知道这个因为你很善于引用名言，风险投资是每个组织中人均政治最多的。我认为这是有原因的。原因是所有在退出前的指标都是虚假的成就。直到事情真正回本成为持久的企业前，它们都只是在玩游戏和包装。这意味着如果我专注于与同行建立起尊重以被认为有能力做好交易，我实际上是在为同行包装一个产品。你必须和那些从尊重开始的人合作。

How do you approach coaching and mentorship within a partnership? How do you think about coaching in a partnership effectively? It's really hard because people call this an apprenticeship business, but in many ways, especially the way that Spark does our job, it's more of a process of self-actualization. If I was trying to be beyond what I joined or trying to be Santo when I joined, I can't be the mini-me version of that person. I think the mentorship has to come from that bracing. It's really the journey of trying to get to know another person and trying to figure out what their superpowers are.

在合作伙伴关系中，你如何进行指导和辅导？你如何有效地在合作中进行指导？这其实很难，因为很多人把这称为学徒制的业务，但在很多方面，尤其是像Spark这样的公司的工作方式，这更像是一个自我实现的过程。如果我努力超越刚加入时的自己或者想成为我加入时的某个典范人物，我无法成为那个人的小版本。我认为指导必须来自于这种真实的拥抱。这实际上是一个旅程，试图去了解另一个人并找出他们的“超能力”。

How are they going to be the best partner to a founder? How are they going to fall in love with a founder? Because a lot of this really is falling in love and then pulling that out of them. If you're doing a good job with somebody, then three months in, six months in, you're noticing things about them, their pattern of investing, their weaknesses, what are the bad deals they fall in love with all the time? We call crap on each other all of the time.

他们要如何成为创业者最好的合作伙伴呢？他们要如何与创业者建立深厚的关系呢？因为这很大程度上就像是“谈恋爱”，然后从他们身上挖掘出更多的潜力。如果你与某人合作得很好，在三个月、六个月后，你会开始注意到他们的一些特点：他们的投资模式、他们的弱点、以及他们总是容易被哪些不好的交易吸引。我们经常互相指出对方的问题。

I would not want to do this alone because I actually think my partners know me better than I know myself. They're like, we use a phrase internally being your brother or sister's keeper. We actually feel like the debate is not a political fight to try and get something approved. It's a room that's a search for truth. When did you doubt yourself most as an investor? COVID era. It's the worst version of venture of what I really didn't want startups to become, which is everything was pushing to zoom.

我不想单独去做这件事，因为我觉得我的伙伴们其实比我自己更了解我。他们就像我们内部常说的一句话——做你兄弟姐妹的守护者。我们真的觉得，这种辩论不是为了通过什么而进行的政治斗争，而是一个寻求真理的过程。作为投资者，我最怀疑自己的时候是什么时候呢？是在新冠疫情期间。这是风险投资最糟糕的版本，我真的不希望创业公司变成这样的局面，一切都被推向了线上会议。

There's a reason we're doing this in person. I like making eye contact with people. I like connecting with people. It's the reason I like doing this. I like being service with founders. I can't be in service with founders and try and do work with them. If all we're doing is we're on Zoom for an hour, then I'm just right at term sheet eight hours later, which is that era. I thought about leading the industry.

我们之所以亲自做到这里，是有原因的。我喜欢与人进行眼神交流，喜欢与人建立联系。这就是我喜欢这样做的原因。我喜欢为创业者们提供服务。如果我们只是在Zoom上进行一个小时的交流，然后在八小时后直接签署合同，那么我就无法真正与创业者们一起工作。那样只是一种形式。我也曾考虑过引领这个行业的发展。

Did the quality of your investments go down, do you think? I didn't write checks. The best thing I did during that era is while everything was being marked up like crazy and everybody was having go-go a couple of years, I wrote the fewest checks I've ever written in my career. I think I wrote like two checks in a year and a half. Do you think the sparks went down? I think our quality of investing went down on the early stage team and has since recovered. Our growth team navigated it quite well. I think they actually did an incredibly good job of processing things.

你认为你的投资质量下降了吗？我当时没有写很多支票。在那个时代，我做得最对的事情是在大家疯狂加价、过着非常忙碌的几年时，我写的支票数量是我职业生涯中最少的。我记得在一年半的时间里，我大概写了两张支票。你觉得热情降低了吗？我认为我们的早期投资团队的投资质量确实下降了，但后来已经恢复了。我们的成长团队处理得非常好，我认为他们在处理这些变化时做得非常出色。

There's a reason we have a separate growth team in an early stage team because I do think they're different sportsmen. They're just different animals and we do them in our spark way. Why do you say that? Because I have someone incredibly smart like you and then I have someone incredibly smart like Kush, who tells me the opposite. Why do you think that they are very different and that she requires different teams? I just watch what our growth team does and they do their job incredibly well.

我们之所以在早期阶段团队中设立一个独立的增长团队，是因为我真的认为这两种团队是不同类型的人，就像是不同的运动员。我们用自己的方式来处理这些事情。为什么这么说呢？因为像你这样非常聪明的人告诉我一种观点，而像Kush这样同样聪明的人却告诉我相反的观点。你为什么认为它们非常不同，并且需要不同的团队？我只是观察到我们的增长团队在做的事情上表现得非常出色。

We talk about deals all the time. They're seven people. They're also a small team, but they can be a little bit more hierarchical. They can have principles, they can have associates, they can do more diligence. You can look at the numbers. You can call 25 customers. I'm not calling 25 customers. Most of the time I'm investing, there aren't 25 customers. And so it's a different process. It's a different muscle. I'm not saying I couldn't do it, but in a world where, as you said earlier, just doing the job simply at the highest possible level is incredibly hard. Why would I try and play two sports?

我们经常讨论交易。他们有七个人。他们也是个小团队，但他们可能比较有层级性。他们可以有原则，可以有助理，可以进行更详细的调查。你可以查看数字，可以给25个客户打电话。我不会给25个客户打电话。大多数情况下，我投资时没有25个客户。所以，这是个不同的过程，用的是不同的技能。我不是说我做不到，但在一个如你所说的，只是简单地把工作做到最高水平就已经非常困难的世界里，我为什么要试图同时玩两个项目呢？

You can try and be Jordan and play basketball and basketball. Some say that you actually become a better early stage master, especially with the late stage mindset. You know what later stage one. But you're also close to the public markets. You have a closer understanding of what makes a fundamentally great business. Again, this is all amazing and wonderful pitches for 2021. Who knows what the public markets are going to like in AI in seven years?

你可以努力成为乔丹，打篮球和篮球。有些人认为，尤其是当你有后期心态时，你在早期的掌握上可能会更好。你知道后期的一个是什么。但你也对公众市场更接近，能更深入理解什么才是一个根本上优秀的生意。同样，这些都是针对2021年的精彩论点。谁知道七年后的公众市场会对人工智能有什么偏好呢？

What are you doing? And so if you spend all your time trying to internalize what the public markets are thinking about this month, you are absolutely going to make the wrong calls. What do you think of these VC armchair investors who love macro? You just got to hope that the cycle comes a background for them in exactly seven to 10 years when those companies want to go public. And if it does, they'll do great. You said service as a word quite a few times. Keter Boy says on the show and very publicly, the best founders don't need the help of a VC.

你在干什么？如果你把所有时间都用于揣摩这个月公开市场的想法，你绝对会做出错误的判断。你怎么看那些迷恋宏观经济的风险投资“座椅投资者”？你只能希望在七到十年后这些公司的上市时机正好到来。如果是这样，他们就会很成功。你提到“服务”这个词好几次。Keter Boy 在节目中和公开场合表示，最优秀的创始人不需要风险投资的帮助。

Do you agree? And how do you think about that in conjunction with service? Look, I had a bunch of venture that I raised as a founder. I raised eight rounds of venture capital as a founder. I never had a horror story from a VC. I had nobody who was like terrible and horrible. I basically had mostly VCs that were fine. The way they fall into the Keter Boy camp, like they show up to board meetings, it's okay. And I just going to run my company. I just imagine that in any other context of life, if I had somebody who was on my team, anyone else on my team, and they were fine, what would be the feedback? Marge. Actually, it wouldn't be fine. It's not just happy. Good, Marge. If you're executive assistant to your VP of engineering or your head of product was fine. So why are we accepting? You'd be your band. Why are we accepting mediocrity at that level?

你同意吗？你是如何将这种情况与服务结合起来考虑的？听着，我作为创始人筹集过很多风险投资，进行过八轮融资。我从未经历过任何风险投资者的可怕经历，也没有遇到过特别糟糕的人。基本上，我遇到的大多数风险投资者都还不错。他们可以归类为“普通水平”，比如会准时参加董事会议，这没什么不好。我只是继续运营我的公司。试想一下，如果在生活中的其他领域，我团队里的某个人表现得普通，那么我会怎么反馈呢？比如说，如果你的执行助理、工程副总裁或产品负责人只是表现平平，那我们为什么要接受呢？我们怎么能在这个层面上接受平庸呢？

I think what you want is people who are engaged, who look at the details, who are invested emotionally, who want you to win, and are doing the detail work to be able to not just give you armchair VC advice that they got from the one other board meeting they were in this week with the other hot company that they're in, because every single startup is a different journey. And so you can tell you get out of the covers of what's really going on inside of this org, aka how do these co-founders fight, what are the problems inside of the executive team, then you're going to give different advice to somebody if you really understand them. And so it's worth understanding them. If you can't, if you got in race, look, I've had really tough rounds to raise, both as a founder and as a VC who's back to seed company or a series A that's not working out well. So look, if you cannot find that amazing and wonderful VC that you think is going to be deeply engaged and use your product, then go for the no op VC. Go for the VC who at least do no harm.

我认为你需要的是那些真心投入、关注细节、情感上投入的人，他们希望你成功，并且愿意进行详细的工作，而不仅仅是根据他们这周在另一个热门公司董事会上获得的表面建议来给你做“摇椅上的风险投资人”。因为每个创业公司的旅程都是不同的。如果你能深入了解这家公司的内部，比如联合创始人之间是如何争斗的，执行团队内部存在什么问题，那么你就能根据对他们的真正理解给出不同的建议。所以，值得去了解他们。如果你在筹资时遇到困难，我也能理解，因为我在创办公司和作为支持种子阶段或A轮遇到问题的公司的风险投资人时都经历过非常艰难的筹资阶段。所以，如果你找不到一个会积极参与、使用你的产品的优秀风险投资人，那就选择一个至少不会造成伤害的风险投资人。

Oh yeah. High price fuck off. Fine. I get it. But where you flip that to being the goal, mediocrity is the goal. That's not the goal. Every time you have an ability to have an investor or an employee or really anyone enter your orbit as a founder, your goal should be somebody who is going to be obsessed with you and think about your mission and try and help you. Otherwise, you shouldn't be engaging. And if you fail at it, fine. But many second time founders, I meet, say, listen, the thing I've learned about the first time is what I want from my venture investor is good money, good terms get out of the way. And again, I just say they're setting their bar too low. That's the bottom line. Like they're settling for mediocrity because they're afraid of risk. And that's why it's important you do more marketing. Yeah. I win this debate.

哦，明白了。高价格就放弃，好吧，我懂了。但是，如果你把目标降到平庸，那可不是目标。每次作为创始人，当有机会让投资者、员工或任何进入你圈子的人加入时，你的目标应该是选择那些对你充满热忱，愿意思考你的使命并帮助你的人。否则，就不该参与。如果失败了，也没关系。但我遇到的很多二次创业者都会说，他们第一次创业的教训是希望投资者给出好的资金和条款，然后不再干涉。我只想说，这种想法设立的标准太低了。他们为了避免风险而选择平庸。这就是为什么你需要加强营销，这一点很重要。是的，我赢得了这场辩论。

Can you do that at scale? I mean, you do what two checks a year? Two to four at the most. But yeah, like two checks a year. Can't do many. You can't have high service and high volume. Absolutely not. It's a model. What do you do when you lose faith in the founders? Hopefully you have had many, many conversations before you get to that point. When I use a word like service or falling in love with a founder or being dedicated or loyal, that doesn't not come with tough love. That doesn't not come. You use the marriage analogy. If you're just smiling all the way through marriage, you're not executing it right. You need to have tough conversations. And so yeah, sometimes you're having a tough conversation that you feel like that person has lost their way.

你能大规模地做到这一点吗？我的意思是，你一年检查两次？最多两到四次。但通常是一年两次。不能做很多。你不能既提供高质量服务又有高业务量。绝对不行。这是一个模式。当你对创始人失去信任时怎么办？希望在你达到那个地步之前，已经进行了很多次沟通。当我用像服务、爱上创始人、忠诚这样的词时，这并不意味着没有严格的关爱。这绝对不会缺少严格的爱。你用婚姻来做比喻。如果你在婚姻中总是微笑，你就没有正确地执行它。你需要进行严肃的对话。所以有时候你会觉得那个人偏离了方向，这时你需要进行一次严肃的谈话。

When they've lost their way, what did you not see that you should have seen? It hasn't gone well for mostly two reasons. The first is that they're conflict-avoidant and I didn't pick up on it early enough. And it's very hard to pick up on early because you're going through a period where ideally you love them. They love you. There's not that much conflict maybe until late term sheet or something like that. But there's not that much conflict. And then you go through 25 conflicts in the first month of the company or three months of the company and you realize that they're conflict-avoidant. They're not facing the problems of that company because every company has a thousand problems obviously. That's the first one. You try to read for it, but you can get it wrong.

当他们迷失方向时，你没有看到什么本该看到的东西呢？主要有两个原因导致事情进展不顺。第一个原因是他们害怕冲突，而我一开始没有及时察觉到。这种性格特征在早期很难被发现，因为最理想的状态是你们彼此喜爱，彼此欣赏，可能直到签订后期合同前，都没有太多冲突。但之后，在公司的头一个月或前三个月里，你会经历大约25次冲突，然后就会意识到他们惧怕冲突。他们没有直面公司的问题，因为每家公司显然都有成千上万个问题。这是第一个原因。尽管你努力去识别，但有时可能会判断失误。

The second one is that every founder is like, this is one of those things that I did not have as a framework 10 years ago. But after you make a bunch of mistakes and you look back on things, they can become more clear. Every founder you want to move really, really fast. We all talk about execution speed. You want to say, you can imagine somebody on the very, very far end of execution speed. We also want them to have taste and judgment. We also want them to be, especially in the world of AI, only taste is going to matter in the future because execution is just going to happen. So these two things are directly in conflict.

第二点是，每位创始人都会感受到这样的状况：十年前，我并没有这样的思维框架。但在经历过多次错误后，回过头来看，一切变得更加清晰。每位创始人都希望快速推进，我们都在谈论执行速度。可以想象，有的人在执行速度上达到了极致。同时，我们也希望他们具备品位和判断力。尤其是在人工智能领域，未来只有品位才会真正重要，因为执行会变得自动化。所以，这两者是直接矛盾的。

If you are always the shoot first ask questions later person, you probably are not really deeply introspective about the choices that you're making. You're just shiny penny running after whatever happened on Twitter yesterday. And if you are deeply, deeply, deeply full of taste, you didn't ship anything. Like you just sat navel gazing forever trying to find the perfect thing.

如果你总是那种先行动后思考的人，你可能并没有深入反思自己做出的选择。你就像追逐昨天在推特上发生的事情一样，被新鲜事物吸引。而如果你太过挑剔，过于追求完美，可能最终什么也没做成。就像一直在冥思苦想，想找到完美的东西，却一直没有付诸实践。

And so the casting for a founder needs to match the opportunity of that startup. You have to have good taste, especially in this world, and you have to be very fast. But where you are on that spectrum is incredibly illuminating. You mentioned earlier, you would try to look at a company that was like very, very competitive, and of 35, should I invest in this thing? It's like, well, that's an execution play. That person needs to be in the top 0.0005% on the planet of being able to execute because the roadmap ideally is probably pretty clear.

因此，创业者的选择需要与创业机会相匹配。尤其是在当今这个世界，你需要有良好的品味，并且行动要非常迅速。但在这个过程中，你处在哪个位置是非常关键的。你之前提到，你会去研究一家公司，看看这个公司是否非常具有竞争力，然后思考“我应该投资这个吗？” 这实际是在考察一个执行能力的问题。这个人需要在全球执行能力上达到前0.0005%，因为理想情况下，他们的路线图应该是非常明确的。

And even if it's not clear, some competitors about to do it tomorrow. And so you could see it and you can run faster than them. And if you can aggregate everybody's innovation that's happening in industry across all 25 of your competitors, you will win. There's many other situations, especially for the deals that we do at Spark, which are often creating a new market that didn't exist before.

即使情况不明朗，一些竞争对手明天就会采取行动。因此，你可以观察他们，然后比他们更快地行动。如果你能够汇总整个行业中来自所有25个竞争对手的创新，你就会获得胜利。在许多其他情况下，尤其是我们在Spark进行的交易，通常创造了一个之前不存在的市场，这样的情况也非常常见。

You're having your granulos of the world, respect for you. I put in the incredible taste. Yes. I'm sure he's great at execution too. But it has real taste. Real taste. And I'd say granola is a great example of a situation where everybody else competing in that market would have taken the execution angle. They would have built a MeToo product, slight arbitrage, looks like fireflies or any of the other things with a little bit faster or maybe a chatbot in a slightly larger box or whatever it is.

你置身于这个世界的颗粒之中，令人敬佩。我为其中的美味感到惊叹。是的，我确信他在产品执行方面也很出色。但是，这个产品真正有味道，是真正的味道。我会说，格兰诺拉麦片就是这样一个例子，在这个市场上，其他竞争者可能都会选择在执行上下功夫。他们可能会打造一个"我也是"（MeToo）产品，通过一点点的套利，可能看起来像萤火虫或者类似的东西，只是速度稍微快一点，或者在更大一点的盒子里加个聊天机器人，类似这样的东西。

And they would try to run faster than their competitors. Chris, his product changed completely from the seed round to the Series A, which we led, like complete reset. Even though the internal metrics were okay, and it was because it didn't feel right to him, he could kind of like self inspect and realize it wasn't working. And that takes real taste.

他们会尽力跑得比竞争对手更快。Chris 的产品从种子轮到我们主导的A轮融资发生了彻底的改变，就像一次完全重置。即使内部指标表现尚可，但因为他自己感觉不对，他可以进行自我反省并意识到这不奏效。这需要真正的品味。

But he's in a competitive market to be clear and he knows it. Like he's got to be pretty high on the execution path. Oh my God. He's a hard combination of both of you. And that is where I think the best founders can manage and understand at any given moment what is the muscle that I'm using and how am I using it? I think the mistakes for founders is realizing that one, I like got them wrong on one of these axes, you know, quite a lot.

但要明确的是，他身处一个竞争激烈的市场，而他也心知肚明。可以说，他在执行方面必须表现得非常出色。天哪，他是你们两个的优点结合体。而我认为，最优秀的创业者能够掌握并理解在任何时刻他们正在运用哪种能力，以及如何使用它。我觉得创业者常犯的错误是经常在某一个方面判断失误。

Or I cast it correctly. Like maybe you cast somebody who's very execution oriented with a good amount of taste. And then the market flipped something crazy happened. Well, this is what I was going to say, which is something crazy happens. And the sustainability of value today seems to have completely eroded. And what I mean by that is something crazy happens and open AI release a new model. And it just completely kills granola overnight.

或者我正确地预测到了。可能你选择了一个非常注重执行，又很有品位的人。结果市场发生了翻天覆地的变化。我要说的是，会有一些疯狂的事情发生。今天的价值持续性似乎已经彻底崩溃。我的意思是，有时会发生一些疯狂的事情，比如OpenAI发布了一个新模型，然后一夜之间就彻底取代了原有的产品，比如麦片。

Or the data provider example that we have, I don't know if any of the large foundation models decide that actually that's the prime easy market for them. They have all the overnight the data providing goes and it just goes rolled into their core products. How do you think about sustainability of value in such a changing world? I think you have to find a founder who is continually innovating.

可以翻译为： 或者以我们有的数据供应商为例，我不知道是否会有大型基础模型决定，那实际上是他们的主要简单市场。他们可能会立即将数据供应纳入他们的核心产品。在这样一个不断变化的世界中，你如何看待价值的可持续性？我认为你必须找到一个不断创新的创始人。

You can ask all the simple questions about barriers to entry and all the rest of it and have some decent answers. But the truth is, if you are not reinventing yourself, everything in the deep seat tells you that you've got no idea about barriers. I'm saying you have to justify it to yourself to go to sleep at night and maybe have some base where it says like for right now, this is what I think the barrier to entry is. This is how I think their next year is going to be good.

你可以问所有关于进入壁垒的简单问题，并得到一些不错的答案。但是，事实上，如果你不不断自我革新，内心深处会告诉你，你对壁垒根本没有真正的理解。我的意思是，你需要说服自己，以便晚上能够安然入睡，同时要有一个基本的想法，认为什么是当前的进入壁垒，以及他们在接下来的一年里如何能够做好。

But some kind of compounding effect where we think no matter what happens after this year, it's eBay, they just launch a product and 40 years later the product look basically exactly the same and it's just fine. That those ages are not right now. It might, it those might metastasize inside a smaller vertical market saying AI in the next couple of years.

在中文中，这段话可以翻译为： 但我们想，这种复合效应就像是，无论今年之后发生什么，都会是像eBay那样的平台。他们推出一个产品，40年后产品看起来基本还是一样的，但这也完全正常。不过，这种情况在当下并不适用。在接下来的几年里，这种情况可能会出现在一个规模较小的垂直市场中，比如人工智能领域。

But by and large, it is a sea of speed and taste at the same time right now. Do you give a shit about market size? You said about the market creation angle there. How do you think about market size? It's such a simple heuristic for investors to fall back on. We don't talk about or look at market size at all unless it's sometimes there's a confirmation that it's a small market.

总体来说，现在市场既迅速又充满了品味。你在意市场规模吗？你提到了市场创造的角度。你怎么看待市场规模？对于投资者来说，这确实是个简单的参考标准。我们根本不会去谈论或关注市场规模，除非有时需要确认某个市场确实很小。

If the guy's starting an ice cream truck, then it's probably not for us. But usually if you're creating a. But with respect, I would still push back and say crumble, one of the fastest growing businesses in America, which is the cookie business, that is looking like a venture sized outcome at this point. Starbucks was also a venture-backed business. I didn't say they can't be good businesses. I said they're not spark businesses. Again, we're not trying to canvas the entire world for every single possible thing that we can invest in. We're not trying to be the Brita filter of venture capital firms that has to look at absolutely everything. I need to do a good deal a year. That's the job. It's not that hard. It's incredibly hard to execute. It is a simple thing in its essence. If I try and win every single war across every single front, I will be average across the whole board. We try to be good at what we're doing. We try to partner well with founders who want that product. We try to look for new market opportunities, which by the way, in the world of AI, you can imagine why, like I'm a kid in a candy store right now. The most excited I've literally ever been in my entire career, including as a founder. It's just an amazing opportunity.

如果那个人要开一家冰淇淋车，那可能跟我们没有关系。但如果你在创业，我还是想说一件事：尽管小心翼翼地表达我的看法，但我仍然想提出不同意见。以Crumble公司为例，它是一家以饼干业务为主的公司，是美国增长最快的企业之一，目前看起来像是一个有潜力的风险投资对象。星巴克也是一家由风险投资支持的公司。我并不是说它们不能成为好企业，只是说它们不是那种闪耀型的企业。我们并不是想在全世界寻找每一个可能的投资对象，也不是想成为风险投资界的滤水壶，必须看遍所有项目。我的职责是每年做一个好的投资，这其实并不难。但执行起来非常困难。这本质上是简单的事情。如果我把所有战线上的每一场战争都想赢下来，那我最终会在所有方面都变得平庸。我们试图在我们所做的事情上做到优秀，努力与寻求那种产品的创始人合作，寻找新的市场机会。顺便说一下，在人工智能领域，你可以想象为何我现在像一个进了糖果店的孩子一样兴奋。在我的职业生涯中，包括作为创始人的时候，从未有过如此的兴奋。这真的是一个令人惊叹的机会。

If you're asking what makes a new market opportunity, I think you're looking for a new behavior. Looking for a new behavior where when you try it, it just seers into your brain, you can't stop thinking about it. Again, sounds simple. If you just do that, is this really a 10x better product? You just don't see that many of those. That simple thing. You just don't see very often at all. You have such a product-centric investor. I spoke to Kyle at the bot company. I spoke to Andrew at Descript. I spoke to Ritu before. I really stalked the shit out of you. Very impressive. Everyone was like, his product-centricity makes him such a unique investor.

如果你在问什么是新的市场机会，我认为你要寻找的是一种新的行为。寻找一种新的行为，当你尝试时，它会牢牢地印在你的脑海中，让你无法停止思考。同样，这听起来很简单。如果你只是这样做，是否能真正创造一个好上十倍的产品？这样的例子其实并不多见。这么简单的事情，你很少会看到。有这样一位以产品为中心的投资者。我和那家机器人公司的Kyle聊过，也和Descript公司的Andrew聊过，还之前和Ritu聊过。我对你真的进行了深入研究，印象非常深刻。大家都说，他专注于产品的特性让他成为一个非常独特的投资者。

I thought it was just so interesting because the one transient element of investing, if you think about market people and product, is the one thing that will really change. Market can do, but often less so people iterate around the same market. Why do you focus on the one that is so transient? You use market people and product as your three cores. I think if you just look at right now, market, do we understand any of these markets? How fast are they all changing in the world of AI? They're all shifting like crazy. Who knows which ones are going to become commodity markets with absolutely no margin whatsoever anyway. If it's a big market, maybe it was a big market two years ago and it's about becoming a really small market and the same thing in reverse. People is very interesting. I think there are firms that do a really good job at just making people bets. I think you have an instinct about people that just get over the line and you make your bet on people.

我觉得这真的很有趣，因为在投资中，市场、人才和产品这三要素中，唯一一个具有流动性的是市场。市场会变化，但通常人们会在相同的市场中反复尝试。你为什么专注于如此不稳定的市场呢？市场、人才和产品是你的三大核心。看看当前的情况，我们对这些市场了解多少？在人工智能的世界中，市场变化得如此之快，谁能知道哪些市场会变得商品化，利润越来越少呢。一个大的市场，可能两年前还是个大市场，现在就变成了一个非常小的市场，反过来也一样。人才就很有意思了。我认为有些公司在投注人才方面做得非常好。我觉得你对能成功的人有一种直觉，你就下注在这些人身上。

Thank you. My tiny down-up Chris, I know they're in the pre-scene chase-back, wasn't it? You can't be. It's no bill. You can't be 100% all the time. Or Alex, it deal. Or Christina, I found it. I have my fair share of issues. I just managed to bring the real best. I don't think of product like am I the product master. I think of product as an instantiation of what the founder does. Let me recast it a different way. How do we separate hucksters from good executors? Because they're here pitching us as VCs. The way we separate hucksters who do a good pitch from people who are real executors is you look at the thing that comes out of their hands. You look at the thing that this Petri dish of humans has created in the world and you try and evaluate and ask questions to get to that.

谢谢。我的小小朋友Chris，我知道他们在追逐回溯的前场，是不是？你不可能的。这不是账单。你不可能总是做到100%。或Alex，它处理。或Christina，我找到了。我也有自己的一些问题。我只是设法展现出自己最好的一面。我不会把产品想成我是产品大师。我认为产品是创始人所做事情的具体体现。让我换个方式说。我们如何区分骗子和优秀的执行者？因为他们在这里向我们这些风险投资人推销。我们区分做得好推销的骗子和真正的执行者的方法是看他们实际创造出来的东西。看看这个人类培养皿在世界上创造的东西，然后通过提问来评估和了解它。

When you say I'm a product investor, I would push back slightly and that I've never evaluated a company by looking at the product, using the website and being like, oh, this person should have a $15 million check. I don't think that's right. You look at the product and you try and learn about the humans behind the product by evaluating the product. It's the questions that you ask somebody like Kyle, who started cruises now doing botco, and you ask him why he made the decisions he made in this thing that you were using. That's where you can get a sense of who this person is and what they're going to do from there. I had an absolute fucking meltdown with the team the other day because I have a seat you're going to hate this, but you're a freaking hate this. Like a CEO template for how we analyze CEOs. They took that CEO template and put it on a CPO and asked the same things.

当你说我是一个产品投资者时，我会稍微反驳一下，因为我从来不是通过看产品、使用网站然后就决定是否给某家公司投1500万美元。我觉得那样做不太对。你看产品是为了通过评估产品来了解产品背后的人。你向像Kyle这样的人提问，比如他曾创立了Cruises，现在在做Botco，你问他在使用的东西中做出那些决定的原因，这样可以让你了解这个人是谁，以及他们未来可能会做什么。前几天，我和团队的讨论简直要崩溃了，因为有一个模板，你一定会讨厌这个，就是我们用于分析CEO的模板。可是他们把这个CEO分析模板套用到CPO身上，问了同样的问题。

That is criminal. We changed the template entirely to what product decision you most proud of. What would you most like to build, but you have constraints that mean you can't build it. What are you most embarrassed about building? This is actually what I don't actually care the specific answers. It's the way that they think around those questions. That's right. It's the way we conduct any deep level of investigation on a person. You're not asking them give me your TAM answer and give me your margin answer. You're trying to figure out how they think about the things they're doing. If you're talking about an early stage startup, what is the thing they have thought about the most? They produced a TAM slide or they produced something.

这真是太过分了。我们完全修改了模板，变成询问最让你自豪的产品决策是什么。你最想做但因种种限制而无法实现的东西是什么？你最感到尴尬的产出是什么？其实我并不在乎具体的答案，而是关注他们在这些问题上的思考方式。没错，这就是我们对一个人进行深入调查的方式。你不是在问他们给我你的市场总潜力（TAM）答案，或利润率答案，而是想了解他们对自己所做事情的思考方式。如果你在谈论一个早期创业公司，最值得关注的是他们考虑最深的是哪个方面？他们可能做了一张TAM幻灯片，或者产生了什么东西。

They did that for the deck for you. They put what two hours into that, three hours into that? Nowadays, they probably sent it over to Gem or some other product and just had it spit out those slides. If you're trying to get to what they have been obsessed about, it's like this thing that you're using, they've spent the most time thinking about. Where are you going to get the most insight into the humanness? How many companies do you meet a week? Almost a no, 20, 30? 20 to 30 a week? Sometimes. Yeah, email. Email. But I own a cool. I don't do that many on a call. I probably want to do a day.

他们为你做了幻灯片，是不是花了两三个小时？现在，他们可能把任务交给Gem或者其他工具，让它直接生成了那些幻灯片。如果你想了解他们最专注的东西，就是你正在使用的这个东西，他们花了最多时间去思考。你每周会见多少家公司？几乎没有，20到30家？有时会这么多。是的，大多通过电子邮件。我在线会议不是很多，大概一天参加一个。

Okay, once, two a day. How long do you have? I think the one hour call is the worst call anywhere because it's like too short to get a real read and too long to get the speed dating version of the world. So a half an hour, I'm just trying to figure out whether I like the person at all and I want to have a second call. And then I'd rather go from a half an hour to two hours. So you do the first one and you're just trying to get a read. Is there a chism? Is there a connection? Is there any chemistry here? Do you feel it? And then after that, it's like, yeah, we should just go for a walk, man. Let's go have a conversation. Let's go really talk about everything. Will you ever invest if you haven't met them in person? Probably not. There's some world where you met them five years ago, you know them quite well.

好的，每天两次。你还有多久的时间？我觉得一个小时的电话是最糟糕的，因为时间太短无法真正了解，但又太长不能像快速约会那样简单。所以半小时的话，我只是想试着了解我是否喜欢这个人，以及是否想再聊一次。我更愿意从半小时直接跳到两个小时。第一次通话时，只是试着感受一下，对方使否有趣？有没有联系感？有没有化学反应？你能感觉到吗？之后如果觉得不错，那就一起散步吧，一起聊聊，真正谈谈一切。如果没有见过面，你会投资吗？可能不会。除非在某种情况下你五年前就见过他们，并且对他们很了解。

Chris from Granola is a prior Spark founder. And so he was one of the first people I met after I joined Spark because I was supposed to go sprinkle growth fairy dust on him in New York and talk about growth marketing and growth hacking and all the rest of those metrics things that I don't really aspire to now. And I say, you know, Discord, Jason, I knew for seven years we were founders together before investing in Discord and also smartly passed twice on Discord before investing. So like, you know, a lot of long term relationships and a lot of short relationships where you passed and then spent time.

Chris是Granola的一位前Spark创始人。在我加入Spark后，他是我遇到的第一批人之一，因为当时我被派去纽约为他提供增长方面的建议，讨论增长营销、增长黑客以及其他那些我现在并不真的向往的指标方面的事情。关于Discord，我和Jason认识了七年，我们曾是一起创业的伙伴，然后才投资了Discord。我们之前还很聪明地两次放弃了投资。可以看到，这是一个由很多长期关系和一些你先放弃但随后又花时间投入的短期关系组成的过程。

Crews back in the day with Kyle, I passed. We did a huge deep dive on why I thought his business wasn't going to work. He disappeared for nine months and wouldn't return my emails. And then he comes back nine months later and he's like, yeah, this is we've repivoted. We've gone from trying to put, you know, aftermarket things on top of Audi's and we're now going to build a full self-driving stack. We're going to show you a demo you and like five other investors a demo because I really liked our last conversation. And so you knew somebody for eight nine months, you've thought of how they internalize information and you really know them.

早些年，我和凯尔合作过。当时我们深入探讨了我认为他的生意行不通的原因。他消失了九个月，没有回复我的邮件。然后他在九个月后回来，告诉我他们已经转变了方向。他们从给奥迪车添加改装件，转向开发全自动驾驶技术。因为他很喜欢我们上次的对话，所以打算给我和另外五个投资者展示一个演示。经过八到九个月，你了解了他们如何吸收信息，也真正认识了他们。

Now that can't always happen with every investor. The last investment I did was a company called Wordware. And that was a very, very fast, very, very competitive. They had term sheets for quite a bit higher. But you know, I'm getting dinner with the founders. I'm going for walks in the morning. Like I met with those guys six, seven times before we invested in the span of a week. You don't have time, but in the span of a week because you care. Wordware, granola, the script. These were pretty big valuations actually and pretty hot rounds. They were. How price sensitive are you? I'm not that price sensitive. I mean, there's always a number. We could go through the deals that we didn't do because the press got away. There's always a price where it just doesn't make economic sense anymore.

这并不是每个投资者都能做到的。我的上一个投资对象是一家名为Wordware的公司。这个投资过程非常快，而且竞争激烈。他们的投资条款报价要高得多。但因为和创始人一起吃饭、早上散步，我在一周内和他们见了六七次。在这么短的时间里，你没有多余的时间，但你关心这个项目所以会去投入。Wordware、Granola、The Script这些项目的估值都相当高，融资轮次也很火爆。你对价格有多敏感？我对价格并不是特别敏感。当然，总有一个价位。在某些情况下，因为价格太高我们最终没有投资，有些价格是无论如何也不划算的。

But I went looking in a series A now and it's like we put down like 10 on 60 and the founders like I want 100. And then the bot is like, we're do 80. And I'm like, we do 80, but not 100. I feel like for us valuation is always a test on conviction. Like if you liked it at 60, but don't like it at 65. But 60 goes to 100 and that is different. That is different. But 60 to 80 is not that different. And then 80 to 100 is not that different. Do you see what I mean? We can push it. Harry, is this this is this is hard job? This is our job. Yeah. What did you turn down because of price that you most regret? Because we run a fund the way that we run a small number of investors, you know, six investors with a $700 million fund is kind of broken in venture camp. And so what it means is usually it's not about valuation. Usually it's about check size. So in our model, if you really believe in the company and you want to have the ownership that you have, and you believe that they're at the right stage, then it's about whether you're going to write a $5 million check, a $10 million check, a $15 million check, a $20 million check. And so sometimes you say valuation, but I route back to maybe that founder is raising around and you don't think they're going to spend $20 million very well. And it will mess up the company. There is absolutely a belief for me at least that too much capital can mess up a company. And so sometimes it's not about valuation, although obviously it's algebra. These things are all related. It's about a $25 million round here is probably going to kill this company. And so if it was a $10 million round I'd be in, and also we'd have the ownership properly and it'd be a good partnership, but I just I think this company will be different with this amount of capital into it. And so the company changes.

但我现在去找A轮融资，情况是我们以6000万美元估值下了1000万美元，然后创始人说他想要1亿美元。接着，负责投资的机器人说，我们能做到8000万美元。我就想，我们能接受8000万美元，但不能接受1亿美元。我觉得估值对我们来说总是对信心的考验。比如，如果你喜欢6000万美元的估值，但不喜欢6500万美元；但是6000万升到1亿，这是不同的。但是6000万到8000万并没有那么大的差距，而8000万到1亿也不是那么大的差距。你明白我的意思吗？我们可以推动这一点。Harry，这是一份艰难的工作吗？这就是我们的工作。那你因为价格而拒绝了哪个投资而最感到后悔？因为我们管理的基金有点像风险投资营里的小规模投资者，我们有6个投资者和7亿美元资金，所以这通常意味着问题不在于估值，而在于投资的金额。因此，在我们的模式中，如果你真的相信这个公司，并且希望拥有相应的所有权，并且相信它们处于正确的阶段，那就看看是否会开出500万美元、1000万美元、1500万美元或者2000万美元的支票。所以有时我们提到了估值，但我回想到可能是创始人希望筹集一轮资金，而你不认为他们会把2000万美元用得很好，这可能会搞砸公司。我个人认为，至少对我而言，太多的资本可能会毁掉一家公司。所以有时并不是关于估值，尽管显然这些都是相关的事情，而是另一个2500万美元的轮次可能会毁掉这家公司。如果是1000万美元的轮次，我会参与其中，我们也将很好地拥有所有权，并建立良好的合作关系，但我觉得这个公司在这种规模的资本投入下会变得不一样，所以公司会发生改变。

Which one stands out most? Minus Figma. It was quite a while ago now. It was still pre-launch. So it was trying to write like a very large check pre-launch. For me it's that because also there was just like a connection with Dylan. It's not just that it was a large valuation. It's that I think that that journey would have been fruitful and interesting and an amazing way to spend five to 10 years of your life. Before we do dig in on AI, I do just want to use that there by capital inefficiency within companies. One challenge in real concern that I have is a lot of growth investors who have too much cash blunty are going, I'm willing to pay up because I believe it's going to be a $5 billion fine. I might not get a 5x, but I'll get a 3x and I'm playing a deployment game. That's right. But it's the wrong actual thinking because you're assuming that it's equa probable and that putting an preemptive round in place will still lead to that $5 billion. But me and you both know, if I try and shove cash in before it's ready, I could destroy that potential $5 billion and make it a $1 billion. It's another good example of where we have a different world now that we had four years ago. That company will probably raise another $100 million and then they might just die. In fact, they probably will die. Their probability of dying eventually, it'll take a long time because it got a lot of money, goes up. So then if that happens, if you feel like that company has raised too much capital, you can watch their hiring velocity, you can look at the quality of the people they're hiring, their execution speed, you can see it all teetering and then maybe invest in something else in the market, even though there's a lot of money in the market. When you say no, don't raise that round, do they listen? Never.

哪一个最引人注目？排除Figma（的投资）。那已经是很久以前的事了。当时它还没有推出，所以当时的情况是需要在没有推出前写一张非常大的支票。对我来说，它显得特别因为我和Dylan之间有一种联系。不仅仅是因为估值高，我认为那段旅程会是富有成效和有趣的，是一段值得用五到十年去经历的非凡旅程。 在深入探讨人工智能之前，我想讨论公司内的资本低效问题。我担心的是，许多增长型投资者持有过多现金并愿意投入，因为他们相信这会带来50亿美元的回报。他们可能不期望获得5倍的回报，但希望至少得到3倍，因为他们玩的是资本部署游戏。这种想法是错误的，因为你假设成功的可能性是均等的，而且认为通过提前投资就可以达到50亿美元的估值。但我们都知道，如果在公司尚未成熟时注入大量资金，可能毁掉其达到50亿美元的潜力，最终只剩下10亿美元。这就体现了与四年前的不同情况。那家公司可能会再融资1亿美元，然后可能会失败。事实上，由于获得大量资金，他们的失败概率会上升，尽管失败可能花费很长时间。 如果你认为公司筹集了过多资本，你可以观察他们的招聘速度、招聘人员的质量和执行速度，看到一切摇摇欲坠，然后也许去投资市场上其他项目，尽管市场资金充裕。当你建议他们不要进行那轮融资时，他们会听吗？从来不会。

Do you engage in secondary markets actively? No, why not? With the huge influx of private late stage capital and the continuing delays of public markets, we need liquidity. At some point, you have to deliver cash to investors. I do too. Do you not think that becomes an ever more important part of our role? I'm not saying you never sell secondary. I'm not saying it never happens.

你是否积极参与二级市场交易？没有，为什么不参与？随着大量私人后期资本的涌入和公开市场的持续推迟，我们需要流动性。在某个时刻，你需要为投资者提供现金。我也是。你不认为这会成为我们角色中越来越重要的一部分吗？我不是说你从不在二级市场卖出。我不是说这种情况从未发生过。

The primary job of trying to figure out a little bit about the future, listen to those founders who have that little glimmer of the future, have a beginner's mind enough to be open to it so that when somebody comes into you with some cockamamie idea that was way off-peast from how you thought the world was going to work, that you're open to shifting to it, that takes time, energy, research, it takes trying every product, it takes curiosity.

要尝试了解未来，首先要倾听那些预见未来的创始人的想法，并保持一颗开放的初心，这样当有人带着一个与你对世界的看法完全不同的古怪想法来到你面前时，你能接受并考虑改变。这需要时间、精力、研究和尝试每一个产品，更需要持久的好奇心。

The question is where are your hours coming in the day? Sure, there's secondary that happens. Sure, there's later stage valuation that happens. Sure, you can decide to figure out you want to do growth. Sure, you could run a conference every month. Sure, there's a thousand things you can do, but doing the simple thing at the highest level takes time and energy, and I don't even think I'm good at it yet. I'm still just trying to get good at my first job before I do the second, third, and fifth job.

问题在于你一天中的时间是如何安排的？当然，有其他的事情会发生。当然，有后期的评估需要进行。当然，你可以决定要做增长。当然，你可以每月举办一次会议。当然，有上千件事情等着你去做，但要在最高水平上做好简单的事情需要时间和精力，而且我甚至认为自己还不擅长这个。我依然在努力做好我的第一份工作，然后才去考虑第二、第三或者第五份工作。

When we think about AI companies specifically, you said to me before, and I love this, there's three categories of AI startups. I love a framework. I know you do. But we're not in the age of frameworks anymore, guys, just remember that. It's the guy with three categories of AI startups just saying. It's helpful to bucket things and have lenses. Totally, no, very much. Can we say lenses and not frameworks and I'm with you?

当我们特别考虑人工智能公司时，你之前跟我说过，我非常喜欢这句话：人工智能初创公司可以分为三类。我也喜欢这种框架，但提醒大家，我们已经不再是框架的时代了。只是那个把人工智能初创公司分成三类的人这么说。这种分类和有不同视角的方法确实有帮助。当然，非常有帮助。我们能用“视角”而不是“框架”这个词吗？这样我更认同。

Lens is what's well for me, but what is the three categories of AI startups and how should we think about that? This actually is a framework that came in the mobile revolution for us at Spark, and then reapplied. This is an old lens reapplied, which is adaptation, evolution, and revolution. And there are versions of this that have existed as people have talked about AI generally. It can I use the mobile analogy to get you there?

这句话的意思是：Lens对我来说非常有帮助，但是AI初创公司有哪三种类别，我们应该如何看待这个问题？其实这是我们在Spark期间使用的一个框架，最初用于移动革命，然后重新应用于AI领域。这是一个旧的视角被重新应用，包括适应、进化和革命。人们在讨论AI时，这些概念的不同版本其实一直存在。我可以用手机的类比来帮助你理解这个问题吗？ 这段话主要探讨了AI初创公司的三种类别，并提到这些类别对应的概念曾在移动革命中被应用，并尝试解释如何通过这些概念来理解AI领域的变化。

Adaptation is the obvious, like, I'm going to take the thing and I'm going to make a copy of the thing for AI. In the mobile revolution, the New York Times makes New York Times dot com on mobile, and that's the product. That's obviously a world where 2023 was the big adaptation push, and that was when Adobe Firefly launches. It's when Spotify DJ launches. It's when Canva create. I think it's called. It's when the big boys came to town with their AI products and everybody had a year to go think about what they were going to do after the GPT era and ship their incumbent advantage stuff. Like, that's all adaptation.

适应过程很显而易见，比如说，我要将一个事物拿来，并为人工智能制作一个副本。在移动革命中，纽约时报制作了适用于手机的纽约时报网站，这就是他们的产品。在2023年，显然是适应性推向高潮的一年，那时候Adobe Firefly推出了，还有Spotify DJ上线了，Canva也推出了一个新功能（我想是叫这个名字）。那时，大公司纷纷带着他们的AI产品进入市场，每个人都有一年时间去思考在GPT时代之后，他们该做些什么并推出自家的产品优势。这些都是适应过程的一部分。

Evolution, I think the easiest way to separate it is it's when there's a new workflow. It's when the behavior has changed slightly. The good example of this is in the mobile era is Instagram, where you're suddenly doing a different behavior than you used to when you think about Flickr or prior photo websites. It's a new behavior that is native to that medium. This can be done by incumbents and by starters, by the way. Like, sometimes a really fast moving startup will do it. Sometimes it's an incumbent.

进化，我认为最简单的理解方式是，当有一种新的工作流程出现时，就是进化。当行为稍微改变时，就是进化。一个很好的例子是在移动互联网时代的Instagram，与之前的Flickr或其他照片网站相比，人们突然有了不同的行为方式。这是一种属于这种媒介的新行为。这种变化既可以由现有的大公司实现，也可以由新创公司实现。有时候，一个快速发展的新创公司会做到这一点，有时候则是老牌公司做到。

Grinola is a good example of this, right? They are an evolved product. You are treating, I don't know if you want to call that an AI meeting note software. I don't know if you want to call it transcription software. I don't want to call it just Apple Notes with AI in it, but it's a different behavior. It's a different way of using the product. I think Replit agents, the way that they've rebuilt. Now, the really good example of like evolving the medium in a way. Descript is another example. You cannot take the incumbent UI and just slap Descript on. It is a rethinking of how you would do audio and video editing from scratch with AI in mind. That's evolution.

Grinola 是一个很好的例子，对吗？它是一种进化过的产品。你在使用它，我不知道你会不会称之为 AI 会议记录软件，或者叫转录软件。我也不想仅仅称它为加入了 AI 的苹果笔记，它代表了一种不同的操作方式，是使用产品的一种全新方式。我认为 Replit 代理在重建方面也是一个很好的例子，展示了一种从根本上改变媒介的方式。Descript 也是另一个例子。你不能仅仅在原有的用户界面上加入 Descript，这是对如何从头开始进行音频和视频编辑的重新思考，而且是以 AI 为核心的。这就是进化。

Then the last one, Revolution, this is the canonical. I'm sure this gets talked about every week on your podcast, but this is Uber. This is like, it's an entirely new platform that would only exist because this technology exists. Where do we have the most and where do we have the least? Oh, we are in the industrialization of startups playbook land where everybody's trying to churn out some piece of ridiculous arbitrage every week in order to get through the end of their incubator and raise their seed round.

接下来是最后一个，Revolution（革命），这个是最典型的。我肯定你们的播客每周都会讨论这个话题，但这就是Uber。这就像是一个全新的平台，只有因为这项技术的存在它才可能存在。我们在哪些方面最多，哪些方面最少？哦，我们正处于初创公司工业化的版图中，每个人都在每周努力创造一些荒谬的套利机会，以便通过孵化器的考验并成功筹集到种子轮投资。

We mostly have evolved products that are not good enough, or we have adapted products with a coat of paint on top that says AI. What do you find most interesting? We invest most of our largest exits at Spark over time and most of them in the most satisfying work over time has been on the Revolution and sometimes the Evolution category. We have no desire to invest in anything that's an adaptation.

我们的产品大多是经过改进的，但效果并不理想，或者是只是做了一些表面功夫、标榜为“人工智能”的产品。你觉得什么最有趣？在Spark，我们的最大投资回报往往是在“革命性”和有时的“进化性”产品上，而不是那些简单改良的产品。我们并不想投资于任何仅仅是改造过的产品。

We're trying to lean towards the more disruptive, the higher risk, knowing that that won't always work out, but at least it's a journey worth traveling. When we think about value or cruel in the new landscape, Kyle at the bot company said that bluntly, you've hedged this and you have better sin foundation models and models, and then you also have better sin application layer. How do you think about where sustainable value or cruise and the GPT rapper, oh, there's no value in application, thin layer? I wouldn't call that hedging. I believe both could win. We were in very early investor. You maintain that stay with models. Absolutely. We were early investor in anthropic and very happy about the investment and think there's a lot ahead for it and feel really, really positive about it. Absolutely. Then on the other end, can you paint the bull case to me with anthropic? Sure.

我们试图倾向于那些更具颠覆性和更高风险的方向，明知道这不会总是奏效，但至少这是一段值得走的旅程。 当我们考虑在新环境中的价值或残酷时，聊天机器人公司的凯尔直言不讳地说，你已经对此进行了对冲，并且你的基础模型和模型更好，应用层也更出色。你怎么看待可持续价值或在GPT包装的影响下的意义，哦，应用薄层没有价值吗？我不认为这叫对冲。我相信两者都可以成功。我们是非常早期的投资者。你坚持与模型保持同步，当然。我们是Anthropic的早期投资者，对这项投资感到非常满意，并认为前景广阔，对未来充满积极信心。绝对的。那么，从另一方面看，你能向我描绘一下Anthropic的乐观前景吗？当然可以。

The thing to understand about anthropic and open AOI, CHAPGP, they're direct competitors, obviously, is to think about it in the terms of this adaptation evolution revolution framework. I'll just use this thing we just talked about a minute ago as a way to make this point. If you are trying to make the next best model and you're running out of data, then what do you need? You need to understand how people want to use your model. If you want to understand how people want to use your model, then you need a lot of people using your model. And so the fact that those two companies have a user interface which has both insights to how a user would use it, but also frankly, data exhaust on how people are trying to navigate a model and get through it, gives you insight that no one in some academic lab somewhere just popping up a model is going to be able to advance as fast as you. You can make a faster algorithm, but you can't get new data and new data exhaust from consumers.

要理解Anthropic和Open AOI、CHAPGP之间的竞争，本质上可以从"适应-进化-革命"的视角来看待。可以用我们刚才讨论到的这个例子来说明这一点。如果你想开发下一个更好的模型，但却缺乏足够的数据，那么你需要做什么呢？你就需要理解人们如何希望使用你的模型。而要理解这一点，你需要很多人来使用你的模型。因此，这两家公司拥有一个用户界面，这不仅能让他们了解用户会如何使用它，同时也能获得用户在尝试使用和探索模型时产生的数据。这些洞察是其他只是在实验室中开发模型的学术人员无法快速获得的。你或许可以开发出更快的算法，但无法从消费者那里获得新的数据和使用数据。

But the level of consumer data is probably 10x more for opening the new is anthropic? I didn't say it was the only competitive benefit. But for both of those companies, you said make the case for these. I think for both of those companies, I think that's a major, major case, right? They will have a user interface, they will have user data that will help them be smarter. I'm sorry, does everyone not deep-seak sitting on number one is getting more consumer data and more consumer insight than anyone else? I mean, Xi Jinping's having a data fast. But I mean, respectfully, there's so many that do. I mean, U.com has a pretty good user interface. I wouldn't say it's that much worse than Claude. It's like, it's okay.

翻译为中文： 但关于消费者数据的水平，新开张的可能是Anthropic的要多10倍？我并不是说这是唯一的竞争优势。但对于这两家公司来说，你说要为它们列出理由。我认为对于这两家公司来说，这是一个非常非常重要的理由，对吧？它们将拥有用户界面，将拥有用户数据，这将帮助它们变得更聪明。不好意思，难道不是每个人都明白，坐在头把交椅上的那个正获得比其他任何人都多的消费者数据和消费者洞察吗？我的意思是，习近平正在进行数据禁食。但我意思是，有很多公司也在做。我认为，U.com 的用户界面相当不错，我不会说比Claude的差多少，总体来说还可以。

Do they have enough users and enough growth? No. Do they have enough scale? No. I think you want to own the interface with the customer. And if you own the interface with the customer, you have the chance to iterate on it and interface with the customer and stay ahead of everybody else. So if you just look at anthropic and you look at artifacts, which now open AI is copied, if you look at the next phase of the things, those are going to come out of insights with the customer. And those things matter. It's not just model quality. So I don't think foundation models are just model quality. This also your ability to continue to innovate, your taste, your execution speed.

他们的用户和增长是否足够？没有。规模是否足够？也没有。我认为，你需要掌握与客户的接口。如果你能掌握与客户的接口，就有机会对其进行迭代，并保持在竞争中领先。所以当你观察Anthropic和Artifact（现在OpenAI也在模仿）的时候，如果你看看下一阶段的情况，这些都将来自于与客户的深入交流。这些因素很重要，不仅仅是模型的质量。因此，我认为基础模型不仅仅取决于模型的质量，这还涉及到你持续创新的能力、你的品味以及执行速度。

And then do you have a relationship that's very direct with the customer with which you can still keep iterating with them faster than everybody else? So if I compare that to somebody who's spending a bunch of money on compute for an academic lab for a very large foundational model, I don't think those things accrue very well over time. I think you need to be full stack. Does deep-seak change how open AI and Antropic should operate? I just had Jonathan from Grok on the show and he said, if I was Simon Altman, I would open source today. You will die if you don't open source.

然后，您是否与客户保持着非常直接的关系，可以比其他人更快地与他们一起进行迭代？如果我将这种方法与一个为学术实验室的大型基础模型花费大量计算资源的人进行比较，我认为这些投入随着时间的推移并不会产生很好的效果。我认为您需要全栈式的运作。那么，Deep-SeaK会改变OpenAI和Anthropic的运营方式吗？我刚刚在节目中采访了来自Grok的乔纳森，他说，如果我是Simon Altman，我会选择开源。如果不开放源代码，你们会走向衰亡。

I don't know that deep-seak changes that much for the way that I think about the future strangely enough. And maybe that's an odd thing to say when everybody in the world is freaking out about deep-seak this week. I don't know that I ever really believed personally that the $100 billion or $500 billion or $1 trillion training was the only barrier to entry for making these models. In fact, if we had believed that only capital was going to win, then we would not have invested in Antropic because you surely Sam was telling us and everybody else, like, we're going to win the capital game. The capital game is the only way to win. And so there's no reason to build a competitor. So we didn't believe that back then. I also wouldn't invest it in Antropic. And so it's still true today.

翻译成中文： 我说不上来深海对我思考未来的方式有多大改变，说来也奇怪。而当全世界的人这周都在对深海感到疯狂时，说这种话也许有点奇怪。我个人从未真正相信，像1000亿美元、5000亿美元或1万亿美元的投入是制造这些模型的唯一进入门槛。事实上，如果我们认为只有资金能赢，我们就不会投资于Antropic，因为你肯定知道Sam当时告诉我们和其他人，说资本竞争是唯一的胜利之道。因此，没必要建立一个竞争对手。所以那时候我们不相信这一点。要不然我也不会投资Antropic。至今这一点仍然成立。

And do you think Antropic wins them because of product taste? I think Antropic wins the same way that every company wins, which is that they are executing very fast with taste. They are listening to their customers and delivering what their customers want. What do you think will be a bigger business, the API business or the consumer? I think when you're at the front end of innovation, when you're moving really fast, I think you want to be vertical. I think you want to have as much connectivity layer between the model you're trying to build and the thing that the consumer is trying to wrestle with the world to make happen.

你认为Antropic是因为产品的品味而获胜吗？我认为Antropic获胜的方式跟每个成功的公司一样：他们执行得非常迅速且有品味。他们倾听客户的需求，并提供客户想要的东西。你认为API业务还是消费者市场会更大？我觉得，当你处于创新的前沿并且快速前进时，你应该选择垂直化。你需要在你试图构建的模型和消费者努力实现的目标之间建立尽可能多的连接层。

You said about data resource. And you said to me before about it, I just want to make sure I get the quote right. The data resource is more important than models. That being the consumer insights later? Well, I'll give you an example. If you are descriptive today, you don't just sit on this amazing and wonderful interface, which kind of changed the market and reinvented what this was. You also sit on every single edit that every single person has done to try and go from a rough cut where somebody like me comes on your podcast and says ridiculous things. And then cut that down to something that actually sounds like a wonderful production. That's internalizing the wisdom of experts. One of the things that we're seeing right now in this world, OpenAI and lots of other companies are paying a bunch of PhDs to buy hand to go figure out PhD math equations so they can internalize the model.

你提到过数据资源的重要性，并且之前也跟我谈过这个。我只是想确认一下我理解的是否正确。你说数据资源比模型更重要，是因为能带来消费者的洞察，对吗？我来举个例子。如果你今天是做描述性的工作，你不只是坐拥一个改变市场、重新定义这个领域的极佳界面。你还拥有每个人为了将草稿编辑成成品而做出的所有修改记录，比如当我在你的播客上说了一些可笑的话之后，通过这些修改变成一段优秀的作品，这就是吸收专家智慧的过程。我们目前在这个领域看到的是，OpenAI和很多其他公司正在花费很多资金雇佣博士们，用手工去破解高深的数学方程，以便将这些模型内化。

I think Web 2.0 was very much the wisdom of crowds. And we're at an age where it's the wisdom of experts. We're not trying to get what the average output of every single human is. We're trying to get what really amazing people at whatever their field is across every field in the world would do in this situation. And so if you are running a next gen product with AI deeply embedded and you have the best users using that product, that will inform you to make better products for those users and inform the models that you're building. This is about trying to build a top of market product and then trying to make decisions for AI.

我认为Web 2.0更多是大众智慧的时代。而现在则是专家智慧的时代。我们不再试图得到每个人的平均输出，而是想了解在这种情况下，来自世界各个领域的真正杰出人士会做些什么。所以如果你正在运营一款深度嵌入AI的下一代产品，并且有最优秀的用户在使用这款产品，这将会帮助你为这些用户打造更好的产品，也为你建设的模型提供信息。这是在努力打造顶级产品，并为人工智能做出决策。

The promise of AI is this thing, this little alien in your computer is going to help you be smart and as smart as the best person who does this thing. I just walked with Manny Medina from Outreach and he's building essentially a stripe for agents. And he was talking to me about kind of the future of agents. And he was saying, hey, the future is actually hypervertic-lized in what would have been non-interesting small markets. But because you're replacing labor, it's actually so much bigger than you could have ever thought. And so an example is that happy robot, this Andreessen company, which is brokers, calling truckers to organize loads and transports before you're like, that's not very interesting. But actually, if you replace the broker, that's a multi-multibillion-dollar market.

人工智能的承诺就在于，这个“小外星人”存在于你的电脑中，将帮助你变得聪明，甚至能够像做这件事的最优秀的人一样聪明。我刚刚和Outreach公司的Manny Medina一起走过，他正在开发一个类似于Stripe（支付平台）的中介平台。他和我谈论了中介行业的未来，他认为未来在那些原本不太受关注的小市场中会出现“高度垂直化”。由于用技术取代了人力，这些市场的规模比你想象中要大得多。比如，有一个叫Happy Robot的公司，属于Andreessen旗下，它的任务是联系货车司机，组织货物运输和调配。起初你可能觉得这并不有趣，但实际上，如果你能够取代这些经纪人，这就是一个价值数十亿美元的市场。

How do you think about the future of an agent economy in that respect? Are you excited by that? Do you spend time thinking about it? I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think most of them fall into if you just really think through the second-order effects of it, fall into kind of like near-term arbitrage, which might just take that whole market to zero, especially if you're meeting the market where it is today with the models of today. You need to assume that you still have a second, third, and fourth act in your business, because you're going to need to keep innovating. Or else, how are you not going to get lapped by 25 other competitors who are also going to build call agents into your vertical market tomorrow? And so I think you do have to ask some of these questions, sensibly, how hard is the job to be done? This is a direct contrast.

你对未来的代理经济怎么看？对此你感到兴奋吗？你会花时间去思考这个问题吗？我花了很多时间思考这个问题。我认为，如果你仔细考虑它的二阶效应，很多情况会变成短期套利，这可能会让整个市场归零，尤其是在你以当前的模型迎合市场的时候。你需要假设你的业务还有第二、第三和第四个发展阶段，因为必须持续创新。否则，如何不被明天也要在你的垂直市场中开发呼叫代理的25个其他竞争对手超越？所以我认为你确实需要理性地自问一些问题，比如这个工作到底有多难？这是一个直接对比。

If I just took my 200k check and I just joined an incubator and I'm trying to show 10% or 10% week over week growth so I can raise my seed round in three months, then I want something that the models can solve for tomorrow. And so I might go into a market that, I don't know, a little bit of transcription from AI, it solves it and we're kind of done. If that's really the extent of your innovation, you're probably going to be a wash with 50 other people who also joined all the other incubators and are also doing the exact same thing. And so your marginal benefit to the world is zero. If you are doing something at the very edge, I mean, I definitely am constantly trying to advise founders and encourage founders to think about what the models might do in six months or nine months and start to chart there.

如果我刚拿到一张20万美元的支票，并加入了一个孵化器，想要展示每周10%的增长以便在三个月内筹集种子轮投资，那么我希望选择一个模型可以在明天解决的问题。因此，我可能会进入一个市场，也许AI的一些文字转录就能解决问题，我们就算是完成了。如果这就是你创新的全部，你可能会和另外50个加入其他孵化器的人一样，做相同的事情，对世界的边际贡献为零。如果你在做非常前沿的事情，我会不断建议和鼓励创业者思考模型在六个月或九个月后可能实现的功能，并朝着那个方向前进。

Because. Is that a worthy exercise? And what I mean by that is it's so unpredictable. Six to nine months of a product roadmap prediction for model providers. Good luck. You can try and figure out what it. I'll put it more simply. And then who cares? 18 months they decide to change. Deep seat comes out, they hit by that. Let me try a different wording. Pick a job that's hard. Venture. No, I mean, if you're a startup. Being a doctor. Pick a job or a decision that is not solved by today's AI perfectly. Pick a job that you think it will be worth trying to pursue for the next decade because that's the nature of the startup. And so if you can solve it fully, which are the most satisfying things as a founder, I can satisfy this fully by the time I get to the end of my three month incubation period in my little seed round and I'll be done, then you probably are going to get lapped. If you think the best you can get is an MVP that hallucinates constantly because this particular problem is incredibly hard, but people will pay a little bit and I'll get a little bit of traction. And if I do that, I can make a little bit more progress and I can imagine working on this project for the next 10 years and still innovating seven years from now.

这值得去做吗？我的意思是，现在的情况充满了不可预测性。对于模型提供商来说，制定一个六到九个月的产品路线图预测，祝你好运。你可以试着弄清楚，但我会更简单地说，那又有什么关系呢？18个月后，他们决定改变策略，推出新的深层功能，大家都受到了影响。让我换种说法，挑一个难做的工作，比如创业。特别是如果你是一个创业公司，或者像医生这样的工作，这些都是当前的人工智能无法完美解决的问题。选择一份在未来十年值得追求的工作，因为这就是创业公司的特性。如果你能完全解决这个问题，并且在三个月的孵化期结束时已经做完，那么你可能会被超越。如果你认为最好的结果只是一个经常出错的最小可行产品，因为这个问题极其复杂，但人们愿意为此付钱，而我因此获得了一些关注度。通过这样做，我可以取得一点点进步，并且可以想象在接下来的十年里都在这个项目上继续创新，即使在七年后依然可以取得新进展。

Okay, so now you're in a right path. And then, by the way, if the model takes an extra three months or more three months left to hit it's a level of fidelity, you'll be okay. What's been your biggest loss, Nabil? Loss? Yeah. My mother? I mean, what do you mean? Have you had a zero? Oh, have I had a zero? I'd push back, man. I don't know that you should look at your losses. I mean, maybe if you felt like the decision that you made at the time, if you look back on it and you just were in a bad place when you made the choice and you should try to not be in the bad place the next time you make the choice, you made the choice for the wrong reason. But I don't know, we're in the business of the things that work. And so you study your successes? Yeah.

好的，现在你走在正确的道路上。顺便说一下，如果模型需要额外三个月或更多时间才能达到预期的精确度，这也是可以的。Nabil，你最大的损失是什么？损失？是的。我的母亲？你是什么意思？你有没有遭遇过彻底的失败？哦，我有过彻底的失败吗？我会反驳一下，我觉得不应该过多关注你的损失。我是说，如果你回头看之前做的决定，在那个时候你处于不好的状态，那么下次做决定时尽量避免这种情况，因为当时你做决定的理由是不对的。但我觉得，我们更关注那些成功的事。因此，你会研究你的成功经验吗？是的。

How did I find that founder? What were the signals that happened there? What are the lessons I can learn? What are the types of founders that connect well with me and I connect well with them? What are the market dynamics at that time? What was the product like at that time? Those are things worth deeply investigating. Are you incredibly bullish about the future of the US right now? I am incredibly bullish about the long term of the US right now. You're in a market dynamic where. I don't understand you Americans, respectfully. Because you're too positive? No, because a lot of you are like, oh, you know, how is, how is, how is, chum comes in, does a load of really efficient stuff, markets go to the fucking moon and you're still like me? Am I, you ungrateful, ungrateful champagne socialist?

我怎么找到那位创始人的？当时有哪些信号？我能从中学到什么经验？哪些类型的创始人与我能够很好地沟通？当时市场的动态是怎样的？当时产品是什么样的？这些都是值得深入研究的问题。你现在对美国的未来非常乐观吗？我对美国的长期未来非常乐观。你正处于一个市场动态中。我不太理解你们美国人，请多包涵。是因为你们太积极乐观了吗？不是的，而是很多时候，你们会感到困惑，比如，有人进来做了一堆非常高效的事情，市场飞速上涨，而你们仍然在犹豫不决，我是这样的吗？你们这些忘恩负义的香槟社会主义者？

And we sit here with the Lego had Chancellor who does negative growth on us. Yeah. And we're meant to just take it. I don't know that the president affects the economy in the US as much as you would think that any president affects the economy. I think you would normally be right, except Trump. The confidence that is instilled now in the US public markets, I think is unparalleled. And I think he's. But I'm not investing in the US public markets today. So when you ask me, how do I feel about America? Am I optimistic about America and all the rest of that stuff? Am I immediate? My pronation of thinking about the world is like, oh, well, why do I think about 10 years from now? That's my thinking.

我们坐在这里，看着像乐高砖块一样脆弱的财政大臣，他给我们带来了负增长。而我们却被要求接受这一切。我并不认为美国总统对经济的影响有想象中那么大。通常情况下，你可能是对的，但特朗普是个例外。我觉得他在美国公共市场中建立了前所未有的信心。不过，我今天并没有投资于美国公共市场。所以你问我怎么看待美国，我对美国是否乐观，对其他一切问题的看法是什么？我立刻想到的是，我关心的是未来十年会怎么样，这就是我的思考方式。

I'm a long, long, long, like I don't get to do anything today. I get to invest today for something to seven, 10 years from now. I think a huge amount of people will want to move their money to the US, want to invest in the US in data centers, in real estate, in you name it. Yeah. Because of the state of the economy. Sure. I think that trickles down. It does. It does. But what's your point? I'm optimistic. I would be optimistic about the US in either case. No matter who won this election, I'd be optimistic about the US. Are you optimistic about Europe? You've got granola here. You spend some time here. No. There's been exceptions to every rule. What do you think the challenges that Europe faces then? If I was a founder starting a company, my default state is dead.

我感觉今天无所事事，只能为未来的七到十年进行投资。我认为将来会有大量的人想把钱转到美国，想要投资到数据中心、房地产等领域，因为经济状况的原因。这种趋势会逐渐显现。无论谁赢得这次选举，我都对美国持乐观态度。你对欧洲乐观吗？毕竟你在这里呆过一段时间。不。我认为每个规则都有例外。那你认为欧洲面临的挑战是什么？如果我是创业公司创始人，我默认的状态是失败。

Things are really hard. It's hard to recruit. It's hard to raise money. All of it's hard. You're pitching the worst of the world that you're dedicating your life to this thing and you're all in quote. And so if that's true and you're trying to risk mitigate all the things that are going to kill you and it's the age of AI, I don't know why you're not in San Francisco.

事情真的很艰难。招募困难，筹集资金也很困难，一切都很困难。你在向世界展示自己投入一生的事业，并且全力以赴。当你试图减少所有可能让你失败的风险，而现在又是人工智能时代，我不明白你为什么不在旧金山。

Forget the opposite case. Can somebody succeed in London? Can somebody succeed in Berlin? Like, of course they can. But the real question is like, if as a founder, why would you make that choice? So that's the problem. The problem is that more of the people who are actually all in, not just telling you they're all in, more of the people that are actually all in, who are actually trying to do everything on the planet to put themselves in the best case to win and are willing to sacrifice for it, they're going to want to be at the dinner where they're learning about AI people. They're going to want to be able to recruit the best people.

忘掉相反的情况吧。有人能在伦敦成功吗？有人能在柏林成功吗？当然可以。但是，真正的问题是，作为创始人，你为什么会选择这样做？问题在于，真正倾注一切的人，不只是口头上说全力以赴，而是那些真正竭尽全力、愿意为成功做出牺牲的人，他们会想要参加能了解人工智能的晚宴活动。他们会想要招募到最优秀的人才。

All those people are in San Francisco right now. And so why wouldn't you do it? They are just being challenged to push back on it's like talent acquisition is so freaking hard there. Competition for talent is so high. Salaries are so high. Churn is so high. You guys are very promiscuous with your jobs. But oh, well, you know what, this isn't that hard anymore. I'm soldering off to somewhere else that's way harder.

所有这些人现在都在旧金山。那么，为什么不去尝试呢？他们面对的挑战是反对这样做，因为在旧金山招揽人才实在太难了。对人才的竞争非常激烈，薪水很高，员工离职率也很高。你们在工作上变化无常。但是，说实话，现在这已经没那么难了，我准备去另一个更具挑战性的地方。

Well, Antropic is new up round isn't as big as the X is. So we're moving Christ, you jump around. So what does that incentivize? That incentivizes a system where you have to keep innovating and you have to have speed or you have to have synthetic growth. There's a downside to it. I agree. You have to be smart enough to separate those two things. Final one for we do a quick fire so much for job is like you sit down with the founder after investing.

Anthropic的新一轮融资没有X那么大。所以我们在不断变化的环境中前进。那么这会激励什么呢？这会激励一个需要持续创新和快速发展的系统，或者需要实现合成增长的系统。当然，这也有其缺点，我同意这点。你必须足够聪明，能够区分这两者的不同。最后一点，在我们快速开展工作之前，很多时候你就像是在投资后与创始人坐下来交谈。

Yeah. And they're like, What do I need to get to raise my A? And you're like, well, and then you kind of plot the part. Just a conversation. Yeah. And then you kind of plot the path to A. It goes back to that. I don't like that conversation. I understand it and I have it. But it goes back to the packaging and just putting a ribbon on you and then passing you along.

好的。他们会问，我需要做什么才能把成绩提高到A？你可能会回答，然后帮他们规划提高到A的途径。这就是那种对话。我不太喜欢这种对话，我理解这个过程，我也会参与，但这就像是把你包装好，系上一个蝴蝶结，然后把你带走。

How do you feel about that conversation of what do I need to get an A? And how do you approach it? Yeah. How do you get to the next round? I usually try and start from asking them a lot of questions about how they think about the future and trying to separate them from the way a VC thinks about the future. Because ultimately, we're listeners more than we are really tellers. Like, I get that part of this job is for us to be tweeting for us to be on podcasts like this and so on and so forth.

你对"我需要做什么才能拿A"这样的对话有什么感觉？你是如何处理的？是的。你如何进入下一轮？我通常会从问他们很多关于对未来想法的问题开始，并试图将他们的思维方式与风投的思维方式区分开来。因为最终，我们更多的是倾听者，而不是讲述者。虽然我理解这份工作的一部分是需要我们在推特上发言、参加这样的播客节目等等。

But the future is invented by founders. The question is, what can you surprise an investor with in the next year that they weren't asking versus the other way around? A down round. Like if you, if that conversation has often led to situations like, well, everybody kind of expects us to do eight to 10 million ARR. And it's like, oh, well, everybody expects you to do eight to 10 million ARR. Then I got to tell you, they probably won't invest if you do it. Because what they want is for you to exceed expectations.

未来是由创始人创造的。问题在于，在接下来的一年里，你能用什么出乎意料的东西打动投资者，而不是顺应他们的期望？比如，降轮估值。就像这种对话常常会导致这样的情况：大家都期望我们做到800万到1000万的年度经常性收入（ARR）。如果大家都期望你做到800万到1000万的ARR，那我得告诉你，他们可能不会投资。因为他们希望看到的是你超越预期。

What they're trying to invest in is the best. If they think you've already got eight to 10 in the bag, then it's not going to work. So I'm so glad we had this conversation. Now, what do you think would really surprise yourself about this business? If you woke up a year from now, what would shock you? What would make you feel amazing? Do you think you can story tell that to VCs? Can we, can we work on packaging that? Let's make, I, I about 20% of the time, 25% of the time founders are down for it.

他们想要投资的是最优秀的。如果他们认为你已经有八到十个投资者了，那就行不通。所以，我很高兴我们进行了这次谈话。现在，你觉得关于这项业务有什么会让你自己感到意外的？如果一年后你醒来，什么会让你感到震惊或兴奋？你觉得你能把这个故事讲给风险投资家听吗？我们能否合作来包装这个故事？大约有20%到25%的时间，创始人都是愿意这么做的。

After we invest, I immediately try and have a conversation and get a pitch deck together for the next round. Just a glossary, just a table of contents. What would you want your next pitch to be? Could be story, could be product, could be data, could be anything. It's storytelling. It's always storytelling. Let's get the story down. And I think people default back to numbers when they have no other story to tell. So let's start from the beginning.

在我们投资之后，我会立刻尝试进行一场对话，并为下一轮融资准备好一个演示资料。就是一个简单的术语表、目录。你希望下一次的提案是什么样的？可能是故事，可能是产品，可能是数据，可能是任何东西。其实这就是在讲故事，它总是在讲故事。让我们先把故事理清。我认为，当人们没有其他故事可讲时，往往会回归到数字。所以让我们从头开始。

Tell the story about what you want to be able to tell the world in 18 months about this product that you're building, this company that you're building. And then we can figure out whether we think that that's actually like viable enough or are you sandbagging? I love that. I'm going to take that. So it's just a one page. It's like a memo. Yeah. Okay. When we look at all the cohort of enterprise companies who've raised seeds and Asa the last three to five years, and they've brought up on the triple triple double double style kind of pathway.

翻译成中文： 讲述一个关于你希望在18个月后能够告诉全世界的关于你正在构建的这个产品或公司故事。然后我们可以判断这是否足够可行，或者说你是在保守估计吗？我很喜欢这个主意，我会采纳的。所以这只是一个一页纸的文件，有点像备忘录。好的。当我们查看过去三到五年中所有获得种子轮和 Asa 轮融资的企业公司时，他们采用了三三二二增长模式。

Yeah. And they're at eight to 20 million in a era. What happens to them? Because new growth, growth investors are going, doesn't fit my AI company growth cycles, loveables that 10 million so fast, X is bolts at X so fast. Did they just don't have a smart answer here, man? I don't know. You don't know. I don't know. I don't either. I don't know. I'm worried. Yeah. Yeah. I can tell you that some of the founders that I have worked with that that are stagnating and don't have that next chapter, they're doing the things that founders do.

好的。他们的收入在800万到2000万之间。接下来会发生什么？因为新的增长型投资者感到不满，觉得这不符合他们对AI公司快速增长的期望，喜欢那些达到1000万销售额的公司那么快，X公司在X那么快的情况下就停滞不前了。他们似乎没有聪明的解决方案。说实话，我不知道。你不知道。我也不知道。我也很担心。对。我可以告诉你，我曾经合作的一些创始人，他们正处于停滞状态，没有下一步发展的方向，他们正在做创始人通常会做的事情。

It's not even their stagnating. It's their doubling. And that's not enough enough now for VCs who are used to AI revenues. And they're like, yeah, I even use the work stagnating and you're right. It's not. They're still growing. Yeah. They're still growing. Yeah. Listen, I want to do a quick find, my friend. So I say short statement. Yeah. You ready? I'm ready. Okay. So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? I don't think you should evaluate any company by the models that are underneath it, even model companies. Well, the business school have just gone out of business.

这句话的意思是：问题不在于他们停滞不前，而在于他们的收入翻了一番。对于习惯了人工智能收入的风险投资家来说，这还不够。他们会说，我甚至用了“停滞”的说法，而你是对的，情况并不是这样的。他们仍在增长，对的，他们还在增长。听着，我想做个简短的总结。你准备好了吗？我准备好了。好的。那么在过去的12个月里，你有什么改变主意的事情？我觉得不应该通过其背后的模型来评估任何公司，即便是模型公司。嗯，商学院已经破产了。

What about I'm thrilled? I can't work in Excel's Brad Shears. Teams like, hi, if you do equal sum, I'm like, oh, came up with a bracket. What about the way that your parents brought you up? Did you do differently with your kids deliberately? I don't know that I did very much differently because I think my parents did not understand me at all. And yet were incredibly open to me walking my path. My mother was a first-generation immigrant. Like she just wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, except unlike a lot of first-generation immigrant families, she never told me that and I never even felt it.

在这段文字中，作者表达了对一些事情的看法和自己的家庭背景： "我感到兴奋，但在 Excel 的 Brad Shears 工作不适合我。当团队说，如果你用等式加总时，我只是觉得，哦，又出现了一个括号。至于你父母教养的方式，你是否有意对自己的孩子采取不同的做法？我不觉得我做了太多不同的事情，因为我认为我的父母根本不理解我。然而，他们又非常开放地让我走自己的路。我的母亲是第一代移民，她希望我成为医生或律师之类的职业，但与许多第一代移民家庭不同，她从来没有告诉过我这些，我甚至从未感受到过这种期望。" 这段文字主要讨论了父母与子女之间的期望和个人成长路径的选择。作者反思自己在育儿方面是否有意与父母不同，最终认为父母虽然不太理解他，但给了他自由选择的空间。

She could tell that I was going to walk a weird path. She didn't even know what entrepreneurship was. She didn't know any of that stuff. And she just wanted me to find my place. So no, I'm more trying to mimic my parents than I am the opposite. Are you hands-off as a parent? No. I'm pretty hands-on as a parent. But you let them do what they want to do. Inciglieri. I like the role of Inciglieri in the world. We can talk like crazy with a founder or my two sons about what they're going through. And then with Ernest and like deep heartfelt coming from a real place, be like, it's your decision at the end.

她能够看出我将走上一条不同寻常的道路。她甚至不知道创业是什么，也不了解那些东西。她只是希望我能找到自己的位置。所以，不，我更倾向于效仿我的父母，而不是相反。你作为父母是放手的吗？不是的。我作为父母相当用心。但我会让他们去做自己想做的事情。Inciglieri。我喜欢在世界中承担Inciglieri的角色。我们可以和一个创业者或者我的两个儿子疯狂地谈论他们正在经历的事情。然后，带着真诚和发自内心的感受说，最终决定权在你自己手中。

It's okay. And I don't know what the truth is. So I'm not telling you what's right or wrong. You got to walk your own path. But it doesn't mean we can't like exhaustively talk about it at all. I said the other day to my mother, the best thing you ever did for me was fuckle. When I left university and I was a law scholar to do a podcast. And to be fair, it's not fuckle. It's trusting in your child and their conviction enough. Yeah. I mean, look, I had a moment where I came home after my sophomore year in college as a computer science major, which is you're like, oh, he probably gave me a job.

好的。我不知道真相是什么，所以我不会告诉你什么是对的或错的。你需要走自己的路。但这并不意味着我们不能彻底地讨论它。我前几天对我妈妈说，你为我做的最好的事情就是放手。当我离开大学时，我是一名法律学者，去做一个播客。说实话，这不是放手，而是对你的孩子和他们的信念充满信任。是啊，我有过这样的时刻，那时我在大学二年级下学期学计算机科学专业时回家了，你可能会想，哦，他应该会有一份工作。

It wasn't even sure then. And I was like, I want to leave. And I'm not even sure if I'm going to go to university. I might just start another company. I don't know. I just, I can't do this. I ended up going to art school. And my parents were completely supportive, could not have been more supportive. Does being rich make you a better investor? If I had any superpower joining venture, it was that I had no long term desire to be in venture. I was very happy to be in venture. If it worked out, and I'm still very happy to go start a company.

那时候我也不确定。我当时的感觉是，我想离开。我甚至不确定我要不要上大学。我可能会直接创业。我不知道。我就是，做不了这个。我最后去了艺术学校。我的父母完全支持我，不能更支持了。是否有钱会让你成为一个更好的投资者？如果我在风险投资中有什么超级能力，那就是我没有长期待在这个行业的欲望。我很乐意参与其中，如果一切顺利我会继续，但我也很乐于去创办公司。

I would be very happy as a founder as well. It's just not what I chose to do. And I really love this job deeply. But if it had not worked out, it was okay. And so I came in with nothing to lose mentality, which allows you to sit on the front end of creative risk and being willing to take that extra risk, which of course, that's what this business is about. Versus this kind of protection is like, I just want to make sure I have my job. I just mean, I want to get to next one, which is where I think you make most of your mistakes.

我作为创始人也会非常快乐，只是那不是我选择的道路。我非常热爱现在的工作。如果事情没有成功，那也没关系。所以我抱着无所畏惧的心态，这让我能够站在创意风险的前端，愿意承担额外的风险，这当然是这个行业的本质所在。相较于那种只想保住工作的心态，我认为那样反而更容易犯错。

If you were sitting down with the HBS Banker style young investors today, you've been used to the last five years, what would you advise them to prepare them for the next generation? There's this thing where musicians struggle with their second album when it works, and that is completely untrue about athletes when they get to their second year of being a pro. If you're a tennis player and you go to your second year, you get better, you get smarter, you get better. Musicians, it actually gets harder. Why is that? Why do you have the sophomore album problem?

如果你今天和哈佛商学院风格的年轻投资者坐在一起，你已经习惯了过去五年的情况，你会给他们什么建议以帮助他们为下一代做好准备？在音乐界，人们常说音乐家在创作第二张专辑时会遇到困难，而这一点对职业运动员进入职业生涯的第二年时完全不适用。如果你是一名网球运动员，在进入职业生涯的第二年时，你会变得更出色、更聪明、更加进步。而对音乐家来说，第二张专辑反而变得更难。这是为什么呢？为什么会有所谓的“第二张专辑困境”？

And it's because one is a core creative exercise, where you're not trying to A your tests. You don't know what the next answer is. With athletes, you know, it's a fixed game. Venture is not a fixed game. It is more a creative exercise than it is a maths exercise. And that is because the markets are changing constantly. The venture market is changing constantly. The founders are changing constantly. The products are changing constantly. And so it's just not like putting a ball in a hoop. I don't know how to talk to somebody about navigating that, but I try to get them to a world where they understand how to navigate uncertainty with confidence and without terror. Which company in the last 24 months did you not do that? You reflect on most? I think many of the decisions that are made wrong and how people build venture firms and how people hire people and how people invest is about not being fundamentally attuned to that fact. And because it's so unnatural for humans to work in a kind of incredibly intrinsic way.

这是一个核心创意的活动，而不是在进行测试时去选择A选项。你无法预知下一个答案是什么。对运动员来说，比赛是固定不变的。而创业并不是一个固定的游戏，它更像是一个创意练习，而不是数学演算。因为市场在不断变化，创业市场不断变化，创业者不断变化，产品也不断变化。所以这不像把球投进篮筐。我不知道怎么教别人如何在这种环境中前行，但我尽量让他们明白如何在不确定性中自信而无畏地前进。在过去24个月里，您在哪家公司没有做到这一点？你反思得最多的是哪一个？我认为决策中存在许多错误，无论是在创业公司建设、人员招聘还是投资上，都是因为没有真正适应这一事实。因为以这种方式工作对于人类来说是很不自然的。

Do you feel like you did a good job today? I came in six months after this job. And I'm like, and look, I sold a company to Zinga beforehand. I was in this early growth hackers of Silicon Valley kind of groups. I was A.B. testing everything with some of the very first people who were helping mix panel and amplitude build out their data dashboards. I was an all in data guy. And so you can imagine I'm three, six months in, and I'm like, am I doing a good job? And I'm trying to measure literally everything to figure out whether I'm doing a good job. And I give so much credit to Bijon, who is the person who really recruited me in this park, who just kind of would always reflect back to me. He was just like, did you enjoy the work you did today? Do you think you put all in? Do you think you want to come back and do it tomorrow? That's it, man. Just do it well. Did you make much money from selling your company?

你觉得今天自己干得不错吗？我是在这份工作开始六个月后加入的。而且，我之前还把公司卖给了Zynga。我曾是硅谷那波早期成长黑客小组的一员。我和一些帮助Mixpanel和Amplitude建立数据仪表盘的最早的团队一起做过A/B测试。可以说，我是一个全身心投入数据的人。所以你可以想象，我在工作三到六个月后就在想，我做得好吗？我试图衡量几乎所有方面来确认自己是不是做得好。我很感谢Bijon，他是把我招进来的那个人。他总是会提醒我，他就说，你今天喜欢自己做的工作吗？你觉得自己全力以赴了吗？你觉得自己明天还想继续吗？就这样，兄弟。只要做好它。你卖掉公司赚了很多钱吗？

What I'm going at here is how did making money change your mindset? I don't think that making money changed my mindset very much. I don't actually think I execute that differently than when I was when I had a term sheet pulled on me and I had to sell my car in order to make payroll for my team and those stages of early entrepreneurship. I don't know that I process the world that differently, mostly because I like playing the game for the joy of playing the game, whatever the game is. And the score takes care of itself. And I get that we all get measured on a leaderboard. Like, I don't get to keep doing this if we don't make a lot of money for our LPs and our founders aren't happy and all the rest of it. But I just enjoy the work and I still enjoy the work and I can go do other things if this doesn't work out.

我想说的是，赚钱是怎么改变你的思维的？我觉得赚钱并没有太多改变我的思维。我实际上并没有采取不同的行动，就像当时我被撤销投资意向书，不得不卖掉我的车来给团队发工资以及那些早期创业阶段一样。我并没有对世界有太不同的看法，主要是因为我喜欢玩这个游戏的乐趣，不管这个游戏是什么，分数自然会记录。我明白，我们都会在排行榜上被衡量。如果我们没有为投资者赚很多钱，创业者也不满意，那我就不能继续做下去了。但我就是喜欢这个工作，现在仍然享受它。如果这件事行不通，我还可以去做其他事情。

What question have I not asked that I should have asked? I don't know. The big broad thing that I think about right now is I can complain a lot about the way the VC market is structured today and think that it's not structured that well, frankly, for innovation and it's not really in service to founders in the right way. That doesn't really answer how should this whole market actually work. If you could wave your wand and it was 10 years from now, we might agree that especially in worlds of high levels of innovation, you can't look at a checklist and decide whether a company is amazing or not. And that's not how you make exceptions and we're in the business of investing in exceptions and exceptional companies. But that doesn't really lay out like, what should this whole thing look like? If we really believe that startups are the font of innovation and that they help the world move forward and also create great capital value for people and all the rest of it, what should it feel like and what should it look like? I don't know the full answer for that, but I think that's a more productive conversation because once you've talked about the way you think it should all work, then maybe piece by piece together, we can all try and nudge the world there. I'm seeing more and more founders want no prep shares, like all common shares. How do you feel about that? Venture as an industry was a very weird thing when it was invented, right? This idea that you wouldn't take majority share in a business and you'll be a passive investor with just a board seat, a small voice instead of a loud voice. That was a unique thing when it happened.

我没问到什么问题是我应该问的？我不知道。目前我在思考的一个大问题是，我可以抱怨很多关于风险投资市场的现状，坦率地说，我认为它的结构对创新不太友好，也没有以正确的方式支持创始人。但这并没有真正回答整个市场应该如何运作的问题。如果可以挥动魔杖到十年后，我们可能会同意，尤其是在高度创新的领域中，你不能通过检查清单来决定一家公司是否出色。我们是在投资例外和杰出公司的生意中。但这并未真正说明整个事情应该是什么样子的。如果我们真的相信创业公司是创新的源泉，并且它们帮助推动世界进步，同时也为人们创造巨大的资本价值等等，那么它应该是怎样的呢？我不知道完整的答案，但我认为这是一个更有成效的对话，因为一旦你谈论你认为它应该如何运作，也许我们可以一点一滴地共同努力，将世界推向那里。我发现越来越多的创始人希望没有优先股，只要普通股。你怎么看这个问题？当风险投资这个行业被创造出来时，它是个非常奇怪的事情，对吧？这种不取得企业大部分股份，而是以一个董事会席位参与，仅作为一个小声音而非大声音的被动投资者的想法，当时是很独特的。

And so we've always been a world where we were in the leanback instead of lean forward control, PE mechanism of it. Whether that means we're preferred or common or the term sheet changes and our lick preps are different and all of these these things have like altered over time, like open to it. Like I just want to make sure founders can build good companies and that they treat the people that they're bringing into their orbit as people who should be committed to the same cause. And I think treating everything transactionally is kind of like the enemy of what I'm trying to work on. It's like, it's probably as simple as that.

我们一直生活在一个比较被动掌控而不是主动掌控的世界里，尤其是在私募机制方面。不论是优先股还是普通股，或者是条款表的变化，我们的清算优先权都不一样，这些因素随着时间都有所改变。我希望创始人能够建立优秀的公司，并且对待他们吸引到这个圈子里的人，就像希望这些人也对同一个目标负责一样。我认为把一切都当成交易来看待，是我所努力反对的敌人。大概就是这么简单。

It's been such a pleasure to have you. Honestly, I so I love doing it in person. It makes such a difference being able to see this. So thank you so much. I look forward to you sending me a picture of when you ring the bell for Grenoda at the IPO. I'll just send a picture back at me crying. Thank you so much for having me on. I love what you do. It's like insane what you've done over the last 10 years. And it's really, really amazing. I do just want to say the thing that really strikes you when you spend a lot of time with an Abil in person is just what a good human being here is how genuine authentic sincere and just kind. And Abil is one of the special ones. This was such a joy to do. I so appreciate his friendship and you can watch the episode on YouTube by searching for 20 V.C. That's 20 V.C.

非常高兴能与你相处。说实话，我真的很喜欢面对面交流，这样能看到彼此真的很不同。所以，非常感谢。我期待着你给我发一张你为Grenoda IPO敲钟的照片，我会回发一张我感动哭的照片。非常感谢邀请我参与其中。我非常欣赏你所做的事情，你在过去十年中取得的成就简直令人瞠目结舌，真的非常令人惊叹。我想说的是，当你与Abil面对面相处很长时间，你会被他那颗善良的心打动，他是那么真诚、真实、真挚、友善。Abil真的是个特别的人。这次一起做这件事真是太开心了，我非常珍惜这段友谊。你可以在YouTube上搜索20 V.C.来观看这一集。

But before we leave you today, it can be difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all-in-one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI all built for your organization. Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration and quicker creativity, giving you more time to build and whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble or an enterprise team looking for better team alignment. Coda matches your working style.

但在我们今天结束之前，需要指出的是，要构建一个在价值观到工作流程各方面都一致的团队可能会很困难。然而，这正是Coda的使命所在。Coda是一个多合一的协作工作空间，它的起源只是一个简单的草图。如今，距离推出测试版仅仅五年时间，Coda已经帮助世界各地的五万个团队达成共识。通过使用Coda，您可以获得文档的灵活性、电子表格的结构、应用程序的强大功能，以及为您的组织量身打造的AI智能。Coda无缝的工作空间促进了更深入的协作和更快速的创意，给予您更多时间去建设。不论您是希望在保持灵活性的同时组织混乱的初创公司，还是寻求更好团队一致性的企业团队，Coda都能符合您的工作风格。

To try it for yourself, go to coda.io slash two zero V.C. Today, and get six months free of the team plan for startups, that's coda CODA.io slash two zero V.C. to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Now that your team is aligned and collaborating, let's tackle those messy expense reports. You know, those receipts that seem to multiply like rabbits in your wallet, the endless email chains asking, can you approve this and don't even get me started on a month-end panic when you realize you have to reconcile it all? Well, Clio offers smart company cards, physical, virtual, and vendor-specific so teams can buy what they need while finance stays in control.

要亲自尝试的话，访问 coda.io/20VC。今天就能免费获得创业公司团队计划的六个月使用权。就是这个网址——coda.io/20VC，免费开始使用，并获得团队计划的六个月免费权限。 现在你的团队已经整合并开始协作了，接下来我们来解决那些麻烦的费用报销问题。你知道的，那些在钱包里不断增多的发票，那些无休止的邮件链，询问“你能批准这个吗”，更不用提月底结算时的慌乱了。Clio 提供了智能公司卡，包括实体卡、虚拟卡和特定供应商卡，让团队在购买所需物品的同时，财务也能保持掌控。

Automate your expense reports, process invoices seamlessly, and manage reimbursements effortlessly, all in one platform. With integrations to tools like zero, QuickBooks, and NetSuite, Clio fits right into your workflow, saving time and giving you full visibility over every entity, payment, and subscription. Join over 37,000 companies already using Clio to streamline their finances. Try Clio today, it's like magic but with fewer rabbits, find out more at plio.io forward slash 20 V.C. And don't forget to secure trust with your customers. Trust isn't just earned though, it's demanded. That's why over 9,000 companies, including Atlassian, Quora, and Factory rely on Vanta to automate their security compliance.

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So, Vanta helps businesses achieve certifications like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, turning months of tedious work into this beautifully fast and straightforward process. Now, platform automates compliance across over 35 frameworks, it centralises workflows, and it proactively manages risk, all while saving you time with automation and AI. So, whether you're just starting or scaling your security program, Vanta connects you with auditors and experts to get audit ready quickly and build trust with your customers. Get $1,000 off your first year by visiting vanta.com forward slash 20 V.C. That's v-a-n-t-a.com forward slash 20 V.C.

Vanta可以帮助企业获得像SOC 2和ISO 27001这样的认证，将耗时数月的繁琐工作变成一个快捷简便的过程。现在，这个平台可以在超过35种框架中自动化合规工作，集中管理工作流程，并主动管理风险，同时通过自动化和AI节省您的时间。所以，无论您是刚刚起步还是在扩展您的安全项目，Vanta都会为您连接审计员和专家，以便快速做好审计准备，并与客户建立信任。访问vanta.com/20VC，可以获得首年$1,000的优惠。网址是v-a-n-t-a.com/20VC。

As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Wednesday with Max Levchin, founder of the firm.

一如既往，我非常感激大家的支持。请继续关注本周三即将播出的精彩节目，特邀嘉宾是公司创始人马克斯·列夫琴。