Snapchat 的第一位产品经理：团队要像恐怖组织，广告要长线贪心｜Lenny's Podcast

先认识嘉宾：Snapchat 的第一位产品经理

先弄明白的几个人和几个词

• 尼基塔·比尔（Nikita Bier）：美国消费社交领域最出名的连续创业者之一，创办过 TBH 与 Gas 两款青少年应用，前者卖给 Meta，后者卖给 Discord，2025 年 7 月起担任 X 的产品负责人约一年。他上过这档播客，当时说过一句「我很荣幸作为一个不相信产品管理真实存在的人，来参加你们这档产品管理播客」——塞利斯在节目里接着这句话往下讲。56
• 埃文·斯皮格尔（Evan Spiegel）：Snap 联合创始人兼 CEO，塞利斯在节目里多次提到他当面否掉想法的判断力。
• 亚当·莫塞里（Adam Mosseri）：Instagram 负责人，也上过这档播客；塞利斯谈 Instagram 抄走 Stories 之后做得更好时，把功劳记在他和那批设计师身上。7
• 埃里克·索弗特（Eric Seufert）：长期跟踪移动广告的分析师，写过广告竞价与归因方面的行业研究；塞利斯用他的一句话当作自己判断广告的出发点——「广告是互联网的产品市场匹配」。8
• ZIRP（零利率政策）时代：2020—2022 年那段钱很便宜、机会成本很低的时期。塞利斯用它解释产品经理这个职业为什么会一度膨胀。
• Core Product Value（核心产品价值）：Snap 与 Discord 内部都用的一个框架——把「用户为什么每天回来」写成一句话，再把这句话拆成有因果关系的指标。
• 「像恐怖组织一样设计团队」：这是塞利斯自己的说法，指的是两件事的组合，下面单独展开。
• Vickrey–Clarke–Groves 机制（VCG）：拍卖理论里的一种「说真话不吃亏」的机制设计，官方节目把「广告主为了触达不想被打扰的用户要付更多钱」这条思路的出处标在这里。9

像恐怖组织一样设计团队（05:44–15:16）

1. 一套意识形态式的文化，每个人都理解自己为什么在做手上的事——用他的话说，战略对整支团队要近乎一种宗教。
2. 一个非常清晰的组织结构，明确谁在哪个决定上被信任，谁是那件事上「可以直接掐住喉咙的人」。

尼基塔·比尔：你管不了他（11:19–15:16）

为什么中位数产品经理很差（15:16–20:49）

Snap 的广告生意为什么没做大（20:49–27:57）

系统思维不是买一本书（27:57–35:27）

品味与「说不」这种肌肉（35:27–40:05）

OpenAI 做广告：拍卖机制与信任（40:05–46:25）

三条反直觉的经验（46:25–57:50）

什么时候该押注全新的东西（57:50–01:02:18）

1. 从核心能力出发找相邻人群。 把产品真正的核心拿出来（Snap 是相机，Discord 是语音），看看还有哪些人群用得上它，这是最容易评估的一种。
2. 跟着用户走。 他说最珍贵的礼物是用户以你没想到的方式使用产品，从那里往外扩，像同心圆一层层展开。
3. 从公司为什么被造出来出发，完全不受当下约束地推演未来。 他称之为从未来往回推（backcasting），而非常规的预测：今天分享一个瞬间的最好方式还受限于现有技术（掏出手机对准），如果问「最好的方式应该是什么样」，答案可能是眼镜。

SpaceX 与退役猎鹰 9 号（01:02:18–01:07:01）

长线贪心与 Core Product Value（01:10:26–01:16:33）

一个优秀产品经理的三组悖论（01:16:33–01:20:29）

1. 极度自信与真正的谦逊。 前半段是别人身上常见的、甚至接近傲慢的自信；后半段是他最看重的东西——自信到知道「产品经理无论如何都会拿到足够的功劳」，所以能当场把功劳归给具体的人：在最后一秒改了一版设计的设计师，为了赶上合作方活动熬夜上线的工程师。
2. 极强的组织性与对模糊的耐受。 这类人理解好流程的价值，也理解流程该有多少；他能说清楚「我能和有歧义的问题共处」，同时保持条理。塞利斯顺带批评了一句时髦话：把所有流程都说成没用，是另外一种偷懒。
3. 长期思考与日常的强行动偏向。 他们知道半年、一年、两年后世界应该是什么样，知道要让整个系统转起来需要哪些积木到位；但在每一天的尺度上，他们推动事情的力度大到近乎恼人，并且事实上在为整家公司设定节奏——「他早上醒来，整个团队就醒了」。

反方观点角：三档辣度（01:20:29–01:26:00）

快问快答与收尾（01:26:00–01:36:53）

• 推荐最多的三本书：莫欣·哈米德（Mohsin Hamid）的《How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia》、讲长期资本管理公司兴衰的《When Genius Failed》，以及他送给很多消费品产品经理的《Einstein's Dreams》——麻省理工学院物理学家艾伦·莱特曼写的那本关于时间的小说。
• 最近喜欢的剧集：他基本不看电视，于是把问题换成了游戏。他推荐去年的年度游戏《光与影：33 号远征队》（Clair Obscur: Expedition 33），说那个法国独立工作室用音乐和音效搭出来的东西「有着卢浮宫级别的美」，也让他觉得社会还没学会怎么欣赏游戏这种艺术形式。
• 当下最有意思的 AI 产品：Hex。他说这是第一个让他立刻改变工作方式的产品，也是他见过少有的「可以几个人一起用」的 AI 体验——他和 Discord 联合创始人斯坦在同一个会议里开着同一个 Hex 线程，一边讨论一边取数。
• 常用的人生格言：斯坦贝克《伊甸之东》里写时间的那句——时间没有可以悬挂时长的路标，从虚无到虚无，根本不算时间。他说这句话既让他害怕也推着他走，所以他尽量快地把想见的人见到、想做的事做掉。
• 听众能怎么帮到他：他希望大家听完之后把不同意的地方告诉他，他说自己很喜欢听到反驳，也喜欢跟人争论。
• 一个没被话头带过的旧事：他在 LinkedIn 上的第一段产品经历，是在 Ustream 做「柴犬幼犬摄像头」的产品负责人。那是一家早期的直播公司，2009 年的首席产品顾问是乔什·埃尔曼。他说 Ustream 本质上是失败的（它本该聚焦游戏，Justin.tv 这么做了，后来成了 Twitch），但那个 24 小时直播柴犬幼犬的摄像头收到了大量「这救了我的命」的邮件。

这一期之外：把嘉宾的说法放到公开数字上

完整中英双语逐字转录稿

本逐字稿由本期官方音频（1 小时 36 分 53 秒）自动转写、机器翻译并逐段对齐生成，按讲话人分段，每段先英文原文、后中文译文，时间轴每 10 分钟标注一次。除下列技术性处理外，文字未加工、未删减：（一）识别器在若干无语音的音频间隙复读了本频道的检索提示文本，共 20 处，已用同段音频重新识别的结果替代并补全，其中最长的两处分别为 66.8 秒与 49.3 秒；（二）同一讲话人连续发言的片段做了合并；（三）少量与本节目无关的识别残留（如单独的「P」「Thank you.」）已删除。讲话人归属由声纹自动判定，节目开头的精彩片段混剪处按对话内容人工校正；两人快速抢话处仍可能有个别归属误差，专名与数字也可能存在识别误差。

00:00 - 00:10

I asked you, what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned that go against common startup wisdom?

中文：我问你，你学到的一些违反常见创业智慧的反直觉教训有哪些？

I'm no longer a beholden to any corporate comms team right now, so I can let it rip a little bit.

中文：我现在不再受任何企业公关团队的约束，所以我可以放开一些了。

Do you like to design teams like a terrorist organization?

中文：你喜欢像恐怖组织一样设计团队吗？

A good terrorist organization essentially has two things. One is it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing. And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision.

中文：一个好的恐怖组织，本质上有两样东西。一个是它有这种意识形态文化，每个人都明白他们为什么在做他们正在做的事情。然后它有一个非常非常清晰的组织结构，明确谁可以被信任去做哪些决策。

You like to spend time writing your best people into the ground versus improving the average people.

中文：你喜欢把时间花在把你最优秀的人逼到极限上，而不是提高普通人。

If you see somebody drowning, you want to save them. I did that absolutely opposite. If somebody is strong and crushing it, I'm just handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with.

中文：如果你看到有人溺水，你会想要救他们。我做的完全相反。如果有人很强并且表现出色，我就是给他们越来越多的绳子让他们自绳其身。

Something that I know you believe most product managers are bad and are often net negative to the company.

中文：我知道你认为大多数产品经理很糟糕，并且往往对公司是净负面的。

The great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders. They're becoming executives. It's kind of set up to be this profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.

中文：优秀的产品经理正在离开这个体系。他们正在成为创始人。他们正在成为高管。这个职业的设置有点像，中等的产品经理实际上可能相当糟糕。

Snap is quite famous for not hiring PMs for a long time.

中文：Snap 因长时间不雇佣 产品经理 而相当有名。

The baseline is we should just be able to operate this product without any product manager. So this person has to provide value over nobody.

中文：基本前提是我们应该能够在没有任何产品经理的情况下操作这个产品。所以这个人必须比没有人时提供更多的价值。

Feels like an interesting new skill for PMs is pushing back on things, adding to your products.

中文：感觉产品经理的新技能很有趣，就是在事情上提出异议，为你的产品增添价值。

I think I saw Evan personally say no to better ideas than I've seen almost any other consumer startup launch. Exercising that kind of muscle of saying no, of restraint, is probably one of the few muscles of taste you can exercise. If a museum has all of their collection on the walls, then the curator hasn't done anything.

中文：我想我亲眼看到埃文·斯皮格尔对比我几乎见过的任何其他消费者创业公司推出的更好创意，都能亲自说不。锻炼那种说不、克制的能力，可能是你可以锻炼的一少数品味的肌肉之一。如果一个博物馆把所有馆藏都挂在墙上，那么馆长什么也没做。

Today my guest is Peter Sellis. Peter is a legend in the PM community. He was the first PM at Snapchat, where he spent seven years building one of the most delightful and popular consumer products in history.

中文：今天我的嘉宾是彼得·塞利斯。彼得是产品经理社区的传奇人物。他是 Snapchat 的首位产品经理，在那里他花了七年时间打造了历史上最令人愉悦和受欢迎的消费产品之一。

More recently, he was head of product at Discord, which he helped grow significantly. And now he's between gigs, which means he was finally able to come on the podcast without a comps team, without a PR team, which means that he's able to be especially honest and real about everything that he's seen and learned and has been excited to share. We cover so much ground from how the best teams are organized like terrorist organizations, what it's like to manage Nikita Bier, why most PMs are really bad, why Snapchat has struggled to build a truly massive business in spite of having a billion multi-active users, and it's not what you think, and so much more. This episode is full of so much gold, and that's why it went so long, I couldn't stop digging into stuff that Peter kept bringing up. A huge thank you to Jack Brody and Sriram Krishnan for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny'sProductPass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI and non-AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's Newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Peter Sellis.

中文：最近，他曾任 Discord 的产品负责人，在他的帮助下，公司取得了显著增长。现在他正处于过渡期，这意味着他终于可以没有竞争团队、没有公关团队地参与播客，这也意味着他能够特别坦诚和真实地分享他见过和学到的一切，并且很兴奋地分享出来。我们讨论了很多内容，从顶尖团队如何组织得像恐怖组织一样、管理尼基塔·比尔的感受、为什么大多数产品经理表现很差、为什么尽管拥有十亿活跃用户 Snapchat 仍然难以建立一个真正庞大的业务——这并不是你想的那样——等等。本期节目充满了大量干货，这也是它时间如此之长的原因，我忍不住深入探讨彼得不断提出的话题。非常感谢杰克·布罗迪和斯里拉姆·克里希南为本次对话提出话题和问题。 在我们开始之前，别忘了访问 Lenny'sProductPass.com，获取一年的免费订阅，享受世界上最热门、最精美的 AI 和非 AI 产品，这些产品仅向 Lenny 的通讯订阅者提供。有了这个，我为你带来 彼得·塞利斯。

Peter, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

中文：彼得，非常感谢你来这里。欢迎来到播客。

Thank you, Lenny. It feels like it's been a long time coming that you and I have known each other, but I'm really excited to be here.

中文：谢谢你，Lenny。我感觉我们认识很久了，但我真的很高兴能来到这里。

You've never done a podcast before. You've been in product. You've been out there for so long. I'm very honored you chose to do this. Why have you avoided podcasts? Why have you decided to finally do this podcast?

中文：你以前从未做过播客。你一直在做产品工作。你已经在外面这么久了。我很荣幸你选择做这个。你为什么一直回避播客？你为什么决定终于做这个播客？

You know, it's not avoiding podcasts. I've really just been avoiding you. No, I'm kidding. It's been, you know, I always, I think there are two things. To be totally frank with you, a lot of times when I saw, especially early on, because you have such wonderful distribution among so many influential people and teams. When I saw somebody going on Lenny's podcast, I was like, oh, that person's probably about to get fired. They're going on and they're pimping themselves out for their next role, which was maybe one view of it. I was like, why aren't they just grinding? Now, I think when I take a step back, a lot of the people I've worked with, a lot of teams I've had the opportunity to lead, I think one of the things that I generally do is show up pretty authentical Every day at work, you can call it no filter, you can call it whatever you want. And a lot of the stuff that I say and do, I think it's probably better suited for behind closed doors. But as you and I have chatted about now, I'm between different roles. So I'm no longer beholden to any corporate comms team right now.

中文：你知道，并不是在刻意避免播客。我真的只是一直在回避你。开玩笑的。其实，你知道，我总觉得有两件事。坦率地说，特别是一开始的时候，当我看到的情况，尤其是因为你在很多有影响力的人和团队之间有这么好的传播渠道。我看到有人上 Lenny 的播客时，我会想，哦，这个人可能快被辞掉了。他们上去是为了推销自己，为下一个职位做准备，这可能是其中的一种看法。我会想，为什么他们不直接努力工作呢？现在，当我退一步来看，我和很多人合作过，领导过许多团队，我认为我通常做的一件事就是每天在工作中表现得相当真实。你可以称之为不加掩饰，随你怎么叫都行。 我说的和做的很多事情，我觉得可能更适合在闭门情况下进行。但正如你和我现在聊的，我正处于不同角色之间。所以我现在不再受任何公司公关团队的约束。

So yeah, I guess I can let it rip a little bit. Okay, amazing. These are the best conversations. No PR people involved, no comps people.

中文：所以是的，我想我可以稍微放开一点。好，太棒了。这些是最好的对话。没有公关人员参与，没有竞争分析人员。

Yeah, nothing to promote either. I have no book coming, no other podcasts, no collaboration. Yeah.

中文：是啊，也没有什么要宣传的。我没有新书，也没有其他播客，没有合作。是啊。

Wow, just pure alpha.

中文：哇，真是纯粹的阿尔法。

Just pure, yes. About to drop some pure alpha, baby.

中文：就是纯粹的，是的。准备释放一些纯正的阿尔法，宝贝。

This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit WorkOS.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today. The first thing I want to talk about is something that stood out in our... Jamming on what to talk about is the way you think about designing teams, the way you described it to me, is you like to design teams like a terrorist organization.

中文：本集由我们本季的主要赞助商 WorkOS 提供。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Replit、Sierra、Clay 以及数百家其他成功公司有什么共同点？它们都由 WorkOS 驱动。如果你正在为企业开发产品，你一定体会过整合单点登录、权限管理、RBAC、审计日志等大型公司要求的功能的痛苦。WorkOS 将这些交易障碍转换为可直接使用的 API，并提供专为 B2B SaaS 构建的现代开发者平台。实际上，每家我投资的、开始朝大客户市场扩展的初创公司最终都会使用 WorkOS。这是因为他们是最顶尖的。无论你是试图获取首个企业客户的种子期初创公司，还是正在全球扩张的独角兽公司，WorkOS 都是快速实现企业准备就绪、促进增长的最快途径。它本质上就是企业功能领域的 Stripe。 访问 WorkOS.com 开始使用，或者直接加入他们的 Slack，那里的真正工程师会等待回答你的问题。WorkOS 让你通过愉快的 API、全面的文档和顺畅的开发者体验更快地构建。访问 workos.com，让你的应用程序今天就具备企业级准备。我想先谈的第一件事是我们中闪现出的一些内容……对于要谈什么的问题，你设计团队的方式让我印象深刻，你对我描述过，你喜欢像设计恐怖组织一样设计团队。

Yeah, yeah. I should probably workshop this one a little bit. Like this is probably an example of the one that's better for behind closed doors. But yeah, I actually talked to the chief people officer at Discord about this, and I think she was like simultaneously surprised.

中文：是的，是的。我可能应该对这个稍微修改一下。就像这可能是一个更适合在私下进行的例子。但对，我实际上和 Discord 的首席人事官谈过这件事，我觉得她好像同时感到很惊讶。

horrified and intrigued in a way,

中文：以某种方式既感到恐惧又感到好奇，

which credit to her for not judging me, you know, right off the bat. But yeah, I think it comes from essentially like two primary beliefs from me. One is that there's actually like a hidden cost to collaborating that... no one really internalizes extremely well, meaning like, you'll never hear really any executive at any company be like, stop collaborating. And to me, that's kind of like a like a warning sign. Collaboration comes with incredible coordination costs and coordination costs essentially assure that you're moving as slow as the slowest node in the system. And so I try and aggressively internalize the cost of collaboration sometimes. And then I think the second thing, separately from this, is that At high growth companies, especially, and so many of the people that listen to your podcast, I think, aspire to be at these types of companies, product managers should be in a position where they're making decisions that the founders would have made, sometimes like six months ago. Definitely like a year or two ago, these are decisions that the founders themselves would have made.

中文：我得给她一点信用，因为她没有立刻对我作出评判。嗯，我觉得这基本上源于我两项主要的信念。第一，是合作实际上有一种隐藏的成本……而没人能真正充分认识到它的意义，也就是说，你几乎不会听到任何公司的高管说‘停止合作’。对我来说，这算是一种警告信号。合作伴随着巨大的协调成本，而协调成本基本上意味着你得以系统中最慢的节点的速度前进。所以我有时会尽量积极地内化合作的成本。 然后我认为第二点，与此分开的是，在高速成长的公司里，尤其如此，我认为许多听你播客的人都渴望进入这类公司，产品经理应该处在这样的位置：他们所做的决策是创始人六个月前有可能会做出的决策。甚至像一两年前，这些决策本来是创始人自己会做的。

Set aside violence for a moment. Like, I'm not saying that, you know, I designed my teams for violence, but a good, like, terrorist organization essentially has two things. One is it has this, like, ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing. And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision. And I think like creating a culture where there's a very clear like ideological, almost like religious level goal, essentially that the strategy is almost like a religion to the entire team and an organizational structure where people understand who are the directly responsible individuals, who's single threaded on something, who's the throat to choke, we use whatever MBA, blah, blah, blah, ism you want. I think the combination of those two things can be leveraged in a way such that you don't need to over-collaborate and you can be assured of achieving the results that you wanted as if you had collaborated. And so I think the components of what is this great ideological setup... A lot of things I focus on, for example, because I think oftentimes the head of product at high growth companies where the founders are still in charge, the head of product is really kind of like a vessel for their vision. And both with Snap and at Discord, where I had the privilege of working with the founders in both cases, I tried to take and absorb and internalize their vision and then create like small phrases and languag that could be used and repeated that were essentially shortcuts or almost like synecdoches of like the whole strategy. And so, yeah, I could go more into that, but that's kind of how I think of it. And obviously giving it like branding that, you know, I'm designing it like a terrorist organization

中文：先暂且把暴力放一边。我不是说，我的团队是为暴力设计的，但一个好的恐怖组织本质上有两件事情。第一，它有一种意识形态文化，每个人都明白自己在做什么以及为什么要这么做。第二，它有一个非常非常清晰的组织结构，说明谁可以被信任去做哪些决策。我认为，创造一种文化，让人们有一个非常明确的意识形态目标，几乎像宗教一样的目标，本质上战略对整个团队来说就像宗教一样；还有一个组织结构，让人们明白谁是直接负责的人，谁在单线负责某项工作，谁是必须追责的对象，不管你用什么 MBA 啊、blah blah blah 之类的主义都行。 我认为这两者的结合可以以一种方式被利用，这样你就不需要过度协作，同时你也可以确保实现你想要的结果，就好像你进行了协作一样。所以我认为这个伟大的意识形态设置的组成部分是什么……有很多事情我专注于，比如说，我认为在高速成长的公司里，当创始人还掌权时，产品负责人往往真的只是他们愿景的一个载体。在 Snap 和 Discord 中，我都有幸与创始人合作，在这两种情况下，我都尝试去接受、吸收并内化他们的愿景，然后创造一些小的短语和语言，这些短语和语言可以被使用和重复，本质上是整个战略的捷径，或者几乎像是整个战略的提喻。 所以，是的，我可以更深入地讲这个，但这就是我对它的看法。显然，把它像一个恐怖组织那样进行品牌化设计

at least gets people's attention, but maybe I need to workshop that a little bit. No, you don't. This is perfect. This is exactly what I was hoping this conversation would be. So just to be very clear about the elements of the terrorist organization that we want to keep, one is this idea of autonomy, essentially kind of trusting people further down in case the leaders get caught or are incommunicative. So basically giving more autonomy to folks further down the chain. And then two is having a very clear mission ideology, you might say, so that everyone's very aligned and in sync.

中文：至少能引起人们的注意，但也许我需要稍微修改一下。不，你不需要。这是完美的。这正是我希望这次对话能达到的效果。所以，为了非常明确我们想保留的恐怖组织的要素，有一点是自主性理念，基本上是信任下层人员，以防领导人被抓或无法交流。也就是说，基本上给链条下层的人更多自主权。第二点是有一个非常明确的使命意识形态，你可以这么说，这样每个人都非常统一和步调一致。

Yeah, yeah. From kind of the organizations I was building, I couldn't help but notice that there were organizations out there operating like this, and they just so happened to be terrorist organizations. So yeah, that led to a lot of interesting reading lists. I think that the Peter Sellis product reading list is like a, it's almost like a banned book list at this point.

中文：是啊，是啊。从我所建立的组织来看，我忍不住注意到外面确实有一些组织是这样运作的，而它们恰好是恐怖组织。所以，是的，这导致了很多有趣的阅读清单。我觉得彼得·塞利斯产品的阅读清单就像是，几乎可以说现在像一个禁书清单。

00:10 - 00:20

It's interesting because I've heard many people describe, you want to build a cult, and this is not that different because, you know, cults are very effective at getting stuff done. It is not.

中文：这很有趣，因为我听过很多人描述，你想建立一个邪教，而这其实没什么不同，因为你知道，邪教在完成事情方面非常有效。但事实并非如此。

Yeah, you can't spell culture without cult. And so I think, yeah, it is not very different from that. I think there are elements of a cult. Thank you.

中文：是的，culture（文化）这个词里就有 cult（邪教）。所以我认为，是的，这和那个没太大区别。我认为有一些邪教的元素。谢谢。

Speaking of a higher power, a fun fact about you is you managed Nikita Bier, who came on the podcast, one of the most popular episodes of the podcast, quite a character, was head of product for X recently for, I think, a year. Very few people have worked with Nikita. I'm curious what it was like to actually manage Nikita work with Nikita.

中文：说到更高的力量，一个有趣的事实是，你曾管理过 尼基塔·比尔，他来过播客，这是播客最受欢迎的几期之一，是个很有个性的人，最近曾担任 X 的产品主管，我记得大约一年。很少有人与 尼基塔 一起工作过。我很好奇实际上管理 尼基塔 并与 尼基塔 一起工作是怎样的体验。

Yeah, Nikita was on my team at Discord. We acquired his startup, and he was on the team at Discord for over a year with some phenomenal engineers that came along with him. I think managing Nikita, that's a very loose term of use of the word manage. I think much like, yeah, you don't manage Nikita. You only seek to control him or direct him. I liken it a lot to like... I mean, Nikita is an awesome personality and just actual operator in the product space, like pretty much one of one. And I have a ton of respect for a lot of the stuff that he does. I think of him a lot like Liam Neeson in like the Taken movie series. Like, like, yeah, if your daughter gets kidnapped, like he has a very special set of skills. And he's going to employ those skills. And those skills are very hard to come by and very useful in certain situations. But then when you need him to raise the daughter or buy some groceries or stuff like that, all he knows how to do is just kill everybody in the grocery store or something like that. And so now he's an incredible person to work with when you have him on the areas that he's an expert in and truly one of one from that perspective. Yeah.

中文：是的，尼基塔 曾经在我在 Discord 的团队里。我们收购了他的创业公司，他在 Discord 团队里工作了一年多，还带来了一些非常出色的工程师。我觉得所谓管理 尼基塔，这个“管理”一词用得很宽泛。我觉得就像，你根本无法管理 尼基塔。你只能尝试控制或引导他。我很像地把他比作……我的意思是，尼基塔 拥有非常棒的个性，而且在产品领域也是一个真正的执行者，几乎是独一无二的。我对他所做的很多事情非常尊重。我常把他想象成《飓风营救》电影系列里的 连姆·尼森。如果你的女儿被绑架了，他拥有一套非常特殊的技能，而且会运用这些技能。这些技能非常稀有，在某些情况下非常有用。 但是当你需要他抚养女儿或者买些杂货之类的东西时，他唯一会做的就是把杂货店里所有人都杀掉或者类似的事情。因此，当你让他处理他擅长的领域时，他是一个非常棒的合作伙伴，从那个角度来看，他确实是独一无二的。是的。

How do you feel about having folks like that in your team? A lot of people talk about having very distinct, I don't know, roles for different, different people for different roles, and sometimes you need someone like that just to drive something.

中文：你觉得在你的团队里有那样的人怎么样？很多人都说应该为不同的人设定非常明确的角色，我也不知道，不同的人承担不同的角色，有时候你确实需要那样的人来推动某件事情。

I think it's essential to be able to create an organization that can adopt that type of talent. I view it as a failure state if you have product orgs that can't handle really spiky talent. Nikita took it to extremes. You remember when he was on intro doing that thing? At one point, I was trying to get a one-on-one with him. By the way, he reported up into me, and I couldn't get him. So I was like, dude, if you don't fucking answer my DMs, I'm going to go on intro and book you so I can just have a one-on-one with you right now.

中文：我认为能够创建一个能够接纳这种类型人才的组织是至关重要的。如果你的产品组织无法应对非常突出的天才，我认为这是一个失败的状态。尼基塔把这种情况推到了极端。你还记得他在 intro 上做那个事情的时候吗？有一次，我试图和他单独见面。顺便说一下，他向我汇报工作，但我却联系不上他。所以我就想，伙计，如果你他妈的不回复我的私信，我就要在 intro 上直接预约你，这样我现在就能和你单独见面了。

Yeah. And I think that's a really good point. His ability to mesh talent of very different types that literally does not get along otherwise to create these winning teams, to have done it both as a player and as a coach in two different places, to use philosophies from different, from Eastern philosophies, Western philosophies to combine all this stuff. Like, I think he's like one of the most meaningful leaders from a leadership styles perspective of the last half century. And I think like the thing about product, like especially when it comes to consumer and anything that involves more creativity and taste is I think a lot of product leaders, more like bands putting out albums. And like you can like love a band, but sometimes they have a dud album.

中文：是的。我觉得这是一个非常好的观点。他能够将本来互不相容的不同类型的人才融合在一起，组建出获胜的团队，而且他既作为球员又作为教练在不同的地方都做到了这一点。他能够利用东方哲学和西方哲学的理念，将所有这些东西结合起来。我觉得从领导风格的角度来看，他是过去半个世纪最有影响力的领导者之一。我觉得关于产品的事情，特别是涉及到消费者和任何需要更多创造力和品味的东西，我认为很多产品领导者更像是在发乐队的专辑。你可以喜欢一支乐队，但有时候他们也会有不太成功的专辑。

And what you do with the band as a fan during that time, like, do you stay a fan? Do you still listen to the album? Like, do you ride it through? Do you just listen to the old stuff? Like, that's kind of how I think of a lot of the spikier product managers that I've worked with, which is like, man, sometimes they whiff on an album, but if I still believe in them as an artist, like... I'll stick with him.

中文：而作为粉丝，在那段时间你会怎么对待这个乐队呢，比如，你会继续做他们的粉丝吗？你还会听那张专辑吗？你会一直追随下去吗？还是只听以前的作品？我对很多我共事过的脾气急躁的产品经理就是有这种想法，有时候他们在某个项目上会失败，但如果我依然相信他们，就像相信一个艺术家一样……我会继续支持他。

Something that kind of coming back to Nikita, but going in a different direction. When he came on the podcast, he had this line that he's like, I'm honored to be on a podcast of our product management as someone that doesn't believe product management is real. And it's funny that he went on to be head of product at X. But this connects to something that I know you believe, which is that most product managers are bad and are often negative to the company. Talk about that and just like why you think the kind of the median PM is not actually good.

中文：有点回到 尼基塔 的话题，但方向不同。当他来参加播客时，他说了一句，他觉得很荣幸能参加我们产品管理的播客——作为一个不认为产品管理真实存在的人。这很有趣，他后来竟然成为了 X 的产品负责人。但这与我知道你相信的一件事有关，那就是大多数产品经理表现不佳，而且常常对公司持负面态度。谈谈这个，以及你为什么认为中位数 产品经理 实际上并不优秀。

I feel like this might have been a contrarian take during like the Zerp era. But now it's like kind of I think it's kind of bleeding into the mainstream of like holding a higher bar. Yeah, now we're a bunch of self-hating PMs who've made a bunch of money being PMs are now like, oh, PMs are bad. But no, I think there's actually kind of a mathematical explanation for this. First of all, I think any craft that is... Especially when you're at the top end of any kind of skill that is normally distributed, you're at the tail end of the distribution. And so for product management, if product management is normally, the skill of product management is normally distributed across the population, the ones who are actually product managers are all the way on the right-hand side of the distribution. So you lop that off and it becomes a power distribution. And for any power distribution, the median is going to be far below the average. Most people are on the left side of it. And I think this actually gets excessively emphasized within... And so once you're in it, you're being compensated essentially as if you're on a technical ladder. So you have kind of a very high incentive to remain part of it. If you're very good at it, the skills you develop as a product leader are almost perfect for either other executive roles, just like overall leadership roles, or starting your own company. So you're on the right-hand side of the distribution, like the great product managers are exiting the system. They're becoming founders, they're becoming executives, etc. And on the other side of the distribution, anybody who's in is doing anything possible to stay in. So the distribution just becomes more weighted, weighted, weighted like this. And I think during Zerp, you saw this and there were memes about it and stuff like that. And maybe there's been some correction. But yeah, I think mathematically, it's kind of like... Set up to be this profession where the media and product manager is actually probably pretty bad.

中文：我觉得这在 ZIRP 时代可能是一种逆向看法。但现在我觉得它有点像逐渐渗透到主流，即对标准要求更高。是的，现在我们一群自我厌恶的产品经理，通过做产品经理赚了很多钱，现在却觉得，哦，产品经理不好。但不，我其实认为这背后有一种数学上的解释。首先，我认为任何技艺……尤其是当你处于任何正态分布技能的顶端时，你就在分布的尾端。因此，对于产品管理来说，如果产品管理技能在整个群体中是正态分布的，那么真正成为产品经理的人都在分布的最右端。这样一切切掉之后，它就变成了一个幂律分布。 对于任何权力分布，中位数都会远低于平均值。大多数人都在它的左侧。我认为这一点实际上在……中被过度强调了。一旦你进入其中，你基本上会像在技术阶梯上一样得到补偿。因此，你有很高的动力去留在其中。如果你非常擅长做这件事，作为产品领导者你所发展的技能几乎完美适用于其他高管职位，就像总体的领导职位一样，或者创办自己的公司。因此，你位于分布的右侧，就像那些优秀的产品经理正在退出系统，他们成为创始人、成为高管等。而在分布的另一侧，任何处于其中的人都在尽一切可能去留下。所以这个分布就会越来越偏重，越来越偏重，就像这样。 我想在 ZIRP 期间，你看到了这个，并且有关于它的梗什么的。也许已经有一些纠正了。但我觉得从数学上来说，这有点像……设定成了这样一个职业，媒体和产品经理实际上可能相当糟糕。

Do you feel like it's getting better? And do you think there's something I think about a lot that a lot of people say that like PMs suck, they're useless. And I find that that's usually the case because they've just not worked with a great PM. And a lot of people haven't worked with great PMs. And so it kind of like makes the whole profession feel, look bad and sound bad when a lot of people have, like, as you described, are working with these kind of mediocre PMs. Thoughts there?

中文：你觉得情况有好转吗？你觉得有些事情我经常在想，而很多人都说像 产品经理 很糟糕、没用。我发现情况通常确实如此，因为他们只是没有和优秀的 产品经理 一起工作过。很多人也没有和优秀的 产品经理 一起工作过。所以当很多人像你描述的那样，与这些中等水平的 产品经理 一起工作时，这会让整个行业看起来很糟糕，听起来也很糟糕。你对此有什么看法？

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I've also like kind of noticed this. I feel like so much in the world right now is explained by some form of the midwhip meme in some way or another. But yeah, I think you're exactly right. That is a second-order effect of this kind of distribution that I think governs the whole profession. I do think it's getting better because I think, again, lik I do think it's getting better because I think, again, like when, A lot of people reference the Zerp era, but I truly feel like when interest rates go down, that means opportunity costs are lower. And so when opportunity costs are lower, people are doing things like just hiring that extra person, doing stuff like that. But these opportunity costs, I think, are... are higher than our internalized because of some of the stuff we started talking about that a lot of these costs are not are not internalized. And so like I've been, and we can talk about this, but like I've been really focused on developing a system for evaluating product managers, not just the person, but the person and the place that they are at that time, to make sure that the team is actually just like net positive. And in my experience, and we can talk about what some of those methods are, but like, in my experience, like, the way this kind of ends up is that I really don't hear great engineers complain about product managers that much. Because great engineers, A, they know how to bend product managers to their will. They get the use out of them that they want. And B, they just don't put up with bad ones. So they don't get assigned or they don't get to work with bad product managers. I think ironically, in kind of a midwit weim or the horseshoe theory of things, really bad engineers also don't complain about product managers because they know they can just like hide behind their decisions and stuff like that. So it's really just the ones in the middle that are complaining.

中文：是的，我觉得你说得完全正确。我也有点注意到这一点。我感觉现在世界上很多事情都可以用某种形式的中鞭（midwhip）梗来解释。但对，我觉得你说得完全正确。这是这种分布的一种二阶效应，我认为它支配着整个职业。我确实认为情况在改善，因为我觉得，再次说，我确实认为情况在改善，因为我觉得，比如，很多人提到 ZIRP 时代，但我真的觉得当利率下降时，这意味着机会成本降低了。所以当机会成本降低时，人们会做一些事情，比如多雇一个人，做类似的事情。但我认为这些机会成本，比我们内化的要高，因为我们开始谈到的一些原因，这些成本并没有被内化。 所以就像我一直在做的那样，我们可以讨论这个，但我一直非常专注于开发一个评估产品经理的系统，不仅评估个人，还评估他们当时所处的位置，以确保团队实际上是净积极的。根据我的经验，我们可以讨论其中的一些方法，但根据我的经验，情况通常是，我真的不太听到优秀的工程师抱怨产品经理。因为优秀的工程师，一方面，他们知道如何把产品经理引导到自己的意愿上。他们从产品经理那里获得想要的利用。另一方面，他们只是不会容忍糟糕的产品经理。所以他们不会被分配到或者不会和糟糕的产品经理共事。 我认为具有讽刺意味的是，按照某种中等智力的观点或者马蹄铁理论来看，非常糟糕的工程师其实也不会抱怨产品经理，因为他们知道自己可以躲在决策背后之类的东西后面。所以真正抱怨的其实只是处于中间水平的人。

00:20 - 00:30

I do want to ask about Snap. I feel like it's a company that doesn't feel like it lived up to the potential of what I think Evan and everyone imagined it could be. I imagine the main reason from, and I had Evan on the podcast, is just the users that it's going after are just hard to monetize. Is that kind of the core of what has kept Snap from becoming a bigger success or is there more to it?

中文：我确实想问一下关于 Snap 的情况。我感觉这家公司似乎没有达到我认为 埃文·斯皮格尔 和所有人设想的潜力。我想主要原因是，我曾在播客上采访过 埃文·斯皮格尔，就是它所针对的用户群体很难实现盈利。这是否就是阻碍 Snap 成为更大成功的核心原因，还是还有其他因素？

I'll try and be as objective as possible, Lenny, because this is a little bit of my life's work, and maybe I do have some level of chip on my shoulder. Yeah, I'll try and be as objective as possible. So I'll say two things, maybe three things about... snap from a monetization perspective, at least it adds monetization perspective. And then we could talk about like, they've had a lot of success with Snapchat Plus and subscription products in general are doing well, but ads are truly the magical kind of like product market fit of consumer monetization on the internet. And there's a lot of mathematical reasons why that's true. And there are three things that hold back Snap from an ads perspective that I think the company, like we still kind of talk about is we deserve a little bit more credit maybe than we get, but I understand why we don't. The first is yes, the user base is extremely young. Like Snap appealed to Gen Z at an excessive rate early on. Now even I think Gen Alpha as they like kind of graduate from like Roblox and stuff like that. And there is a step change, like literally a suspicious discontinuity in advertising CPNs between 17 and 18 and between 18 and 21 in the United States and abroad. If you're under 17, the rules around how you can track and measure and target ads are extremely, extremely constraining and justifiably so, right, to protect teenagers. That means that it's essentially much harder to drive ROI. And so, yeah, the Snaps audience is definitively less valuable from that perspective versus a Pinterest or an Instagram or a Twitter. The second thing is... Almost every ads business, every ad product you'll see that isn't search-based, every display ad product opens to the screen where you put the ads. There's a lot of studies around attention and just mathematically where you're going to get the impressions, where you need to kind of like maximize that for advertising. And Snap opens the camera. And that makes it awesome as a product, right? Like in terms of its ability to be the fastest way to capture a moment and share it with your friends. But in no part of that flow, the core flow of taking a snap and sending it to your friends, is there like a logical place for an advertisement? It is just not a feed based product. And it is not a consumption oriented product. It is a creation oriented product, a visual creation oriented product. And there don't really exist a lot of advertising opportunities. We experimented with this a lot at Snap, and probably one of my biggest failures was the ability to drive camera monetization. It was literally just too hard. I couldn't figure it out, or I couldn't greenlight the teams that could figure it out. And yeah, so it's a very hostile environment for advertising from like that initial thing. And then it's core, it's a messaging app. And like, there aren't really great ad products for messaging apps right now. I think even the monetization of certain messaging apps via subscription or via business accounts, and people will always cite like some of the Asian chat apps as examples. You peel it back and from a dollars per time spent perspective, none of these are doing that well. None of these are exceptionally great at monetizing. Message apps are incredible utilities, are incredible to have as part of a portfolio. But Snap was trying to build a multi-billion dollar ads business very quickly on a lower value audience, a very tough format for ads, and a service that was more utilitarian than consumption oriented.

中文：我会尽量客观，Lenny，因为这是我的一点人生工作，也许我确实有某种程度上的偏见。是的，我会尽量客观。 所以我会说两件事，也许是三件事，关于……至少从变现的角度来看，这增加了变现的视角。然后我们可以谈谈，他们在 Snapchat Plus 和订阅产品方面取得了很大成功，而且总体上订阅产品表现良好，但广告才是真正的魔法，是互联网消费变现的产品与市场匹配。这里有很多数学上的原因说明为什么是这样。有三件事情限制了 Snap 在广告方面的表现，我认为公司仍然在讨论，我们也许应得比获得的更多的认可，但我理解为什么我们没有得到。第一，是的，用户群非常年轻。 就像 Snap 在早期以过高的比例向 Z 世代投放广告一样。现在即使我也认为阿尔法世代喜欢那些就像从 Roblox 之类的毕业出来的东西。而且这里有一个显著的变化，就像在美国和海外的广告 CPN 在 17 岁和 18 岁之间，以及 18 岁和 21 岁之间存在明显的断层一样。如果你未满 17 岁，关于你如何追踪、衡量和定位广告的规则是极其严格的，这是合理的，为了保护青少年。这意味着实现投资回报率本质上要困难得多。所以，从这个角度来看，Snaps 的受众肯定没有 Pinterest、Instagram 或 Twitter 那么有价值。第二点是...几乎每一个广告业务，每一个非搜索类广告产品，你会看到它都会展示广告的画面。 有很多关于注意力的研究，还有数学上你会得到曝光量的研究，你需要最大化这些用于广告。Snap 会打开摄像头。这使得它作为一个产品非常棒，对吧？就其捕捉瞬间并与你的朋友分享的速度而言，它几乎是最快的方式。但是在整个流程中，在拍摄快照并发送给朋友的核心流程中，没有一个合理的地方放置广告。它根本不是一个基于信息流的产品，也不是一个以消费为导向的产品。它是一个以创作为导向的产品，一个以视觉创作为导向的产品。实际上没有太多广告机会。我们在 Snap 上对此做了很多实验，而我可能最大的失败之一就是推动摄像头变现的能力。实际上这太难了。 我搞不明白，或者说我无法批准那些能够搞明白的团队。是的，所以从最初的阶段来看，广告环境非常敌对。而它的核心是一个消息应用程序。而且，目前针对消息应用程序的广告产品并不理想。我认为，即使是通过订阅或商业账户来实现某些消息应用程序的变现，人们也总会引用一些亚洲聊天应用作为例子。但仔细分析，从每花费时间的收益来看，这些应用都做得不怎么样。这些应用在货币化方面没有特别出色的表现。消息应用是非常实用的工具，在投资组合中拥有它们是非常宝贵的。 但 Snap 正试图在一个价值较低的受众群体上非常快速地建立一个数十亿美元的广告业务，这是一个广告非常困难的模式，而且其服务更多是实用型而非以消费为导向的。

Wow, that was fascinating. Like, I think it's important to note, Snap is doing, it's like a many multi-billion dollar business. I think a billion monthly active users, you know, like all the teens use it. It's like, in the scheme of things, it's very successful. It's more just everyone thought it was going to be much, much bigger, like the next Facebook. Yeah.

中文：哇，那真是太令人着迷了。我觉得重要的是要注意，Snap 的运作，它就像是一个数十亿美元的企业。我觉得它有十亿的月活跃用户，你知道的，所有青少年都在用它。整体而言，它非常成功。只是大家原本以为它会变得更大更大，就像下一个 Facebook 一样。

And I think it, yeah, it really, if you were to peel apart Snap as a product, it's, it's, uh, again, some of my information is dated and I haven't really like looked at, but like, it's the number one messaging app among teenagers in almost every Western country, like 70 to a hundred percent penetration of, you know, people under 21. And it's their default map. It's used more than Apple or Google Maps by this group. I think it's the most popular astrology app for most of these. It's definitely the most common camera. So, like, imagine if you're like, hey, there's a holding company. There's a Gen Z Berkshire Hathaway that has the number one camera app, the number one messaging app, the number one maps app, the number one astrology app, the number one content. Because, like, I guess TikTok would be the number one content consumption one, which is part of the problem with the ad stuff. But you peel it apart and you're like... That's an insane consumer product track record. And none of this credit goes to like me at all, right? This is like that OG design team that cranked out some of the biggest hits of like our generation. But I think from an ads product, like maybe, yeah, the chip on my shoulder is like Snap started after Twitter, after Reddit, after Pint It went public before all of them except for Twitter. It was quicker to 4 billion, I think, in ads revenue than all of them, despite starting later. And like, what is, like, Twitter is a global town hall. Like, all the most valuable people on the planet are talking on Twitter. Pinterest is literally a place where you tell it what you want to buy, right? Like, these are really great places for ads. What was Snap known for at the time? I don't know. Like, I don't want to make your podcast brand unsafe, but, you know, we can talk about what Snapchat was known for at the time. Disappearing photos of certain kinds. It was still able to scale this ads business, which I think is like, yeah, it's pretty fascinating. But yeah, it's a fascinating company. And I think just given the dearth of like 100 million Dow consumer products that have been started in the United States since then, it still kind of like deserves to be studied.

中文：我觉得，是的，真的，如果你要剖析 Snap 作为一个产品，它是，呃，再次说明，我的一些信息可能过时了，我也没有真正去看过，但是，它是几乎每个西方国家青少年中排名第一的消息应用程序，比如在 21 岁以下人群中的普及率达到 70% 到 100%。它是他们的默认地图，这个群体使用它比使用 苹果 或 谷歌地图 更多。我认为它是大多数人最受欢迎的占星应用，它绝对是最常用的相机应用。所以，想象一下，如果你说，有一家控股公司，有一个 Z 世代 伯克希尔·哈撒韦，拥有排名第一的相机应用、排名第一的消息应用、排名第一的地图应用、排名第一的占星应用、排名第一的内容应用。因为，我猜 TikTok 会是排名第一的内容消费应用，这也正是广告问题的一部分。 但你仔细分析一下，你会觉得……那真是一个疯狂的消费产品记录。而这些成就根本不归我一点功劳，对吧？这是那个最初的设计团队，他们创造了我们这一代里一些最大的热门产品。但我觉得从广告产品的角度来说，也许，是的，我心里总有点小不服气，因为 Snap 是在 Twitter、Reddit 之后，Pint It 上市之后才开始的，除了 Twitter 之外，比它们晚开。但在广告收入上，我认为，它比所有产品都更快达到 40 亿美元，尽管起步晚。就像，Twitter 是一个全球范围的大会，地球上最有价值的人都在 Twitter 上讨论。Pinterest 则是一个你可以告诉它你想买什么的地方，对吧？这些都是广告的绝佳场所。那么当时 Snap 以什么闻名呢？我不知道。 我不是想让你的播客品牌不安全，但是，你知道，我们可以谈谈 Snapchat 当时以什么闻名。消失的某些类型的照片。它仍然能够扩展这个广告业务，我觉得，嗯，是的，这相当有趣。不过，是的，这是一家令人着迷的公司。我觉得鉴于自那以后美国创立的价值超过 1 亿美元的道琼斯消费品公司稀少，它仍然值得被研究。

Yeah, when Evan was on the podcast, I pointed out that I think it was the last... Big, successful social consumer product to launch, which was 12 years ago. I think other than TikTok, which is not like social, really. It's more of a content media sort of thing.

中文：是的，当埃文·斯皮格尔上播客时，我指出我认为那是最后一个……大而成功的社交消费产品推出，已经是 12 年前的事情了。我想除了 TikTok 之外，它其实不太像社交产品。它更像是一种内容媒体类的东西。

Yeah. Discord technically started in 2015.

中文：是的。Discord 技术上是从 2015 年开始的。

Okay.

中文：好的。

But very, very, very like a niche product.

中文：但非常、非常、非常像一个小众产品。

Like the world's biggest niche is gaming. But yeah, quite a different vibe. Just like maybe a final thought here. I'm curious to get your take. You could almost argue that this is a... Example of more PMs would have been helpful because it's such an incredibly beautifully designed product and experience and so delightful and people love it or hooked on it, but it's just the monetization and the business basically was not solved. And you would think that's where PMs would come in. And so I wonder if that was a hindrance is the low number of PMs involved.

中文：就像世界上最大的细分市场是游戏。但对，感觉完全不同。就像可能这里的最后一个想法。我很想知道你的看法。你几乎可以说这是一个例子，更多的产品经理会很有帮助，因为这是一个非常美丽设计的产品和体验，非常令人愉快，人们很喜欢或上瘾，但关键是货币化和业务基本上没有解决。而你会认为那正是产品经理可以发挥作用的地方。所以我想知道是否因为参与的产品经理数量少而成为了一个障碍。

I think that Snapchat Plus, the subscription product, if it had launched, subscription products are tough because the math around them is pretty brutal. Like, essentially, like, time is your enemy with subscription products.

中文：我认为 Snapchat Plus 这个订阅产品，如果它已经推出的话，订阅类产品很难，因为它们的计算方式非常严格。基本上，时间是订阅产品的敌人。

Churn.

中文：流失

Yeah, anything you do takes a lot of time to matriculate in terms of impact. So I think Snapchat Plus has actually been quite successful. And there's a lot of how it's been executed. That's really, really, really great. But I sometimes wonder if it had been launched four years earlier, like where it would be, just because like, With messaging utilities, and you see this with Discord and Nitro as well, much different than content products like Spotify or Netflix, you first kind of like become acclimated to using the product daily and getting a lot of value out of it. And that's when you see the value of the subscription product, not like right when you start, right? You're not like, you don't open Snapchat the first time, you're like, oh, I definitely need to pay, you know, 20 bucks a month or five bucks a month for something. And so time is like kind of like the cohorts, essentially penetration grows slowly over time, but, you know, grows quite linearly usually. And so, yeah, if Snap had had this product out four years ago, there might have been less pressure on the ads business to scale as quickly as it does, less pressure on the ads business to scale as quickly as it does, allows for more freedom on the content consumption side of things and the experience and allows them maybe to compete more with TikTok. I don't know. It's a... Yeah, it's a big brain system thinking, like, okay, Snap needs more PM, but yeah, interesting.

中文：是的，你做的任何事情在影响上都需要很长时间才能显现。所以我认为 Snapchat Plus 实际上已经相当成功了。而且它的执行方式有很多方面真的非常非常棒。但我有时会想，如果它早四年推出，会是什么情况，仅仅是因为像消息类工具一样，你也可以从 Discord 和 Nitro 中看到这一点，这和 Spotify 或 Netflix 这样的内容产品完全不同，你首先会每天习惯使用产品并从中获得大量价值。那时你才会看到订阅产品的价值，而不是一开始就能看到，对吧？你不会第一次打开 Snapchat 就想，哦，我一定要每月付 20 美元或 5 美元才能使用它。 所以时间有点像这些群体，本质上渗透率随时间慢慢增长，但你知道，通常增长相当线性。所以，是的，如果 Snap 在四年前就有这个产品，也许广告业务的扩张压力不会像现在这么大，广告业务的扩张压力不会像现在这么大，这样在内容消费方面和体验上会有更多自由，也可能让他们更有竞争力去与 TikTok 竞争。我不知道。这是一个……是的，这是一个宏观系统思维的例子，比如说，好的，Snap 需要更多产品经理，但确实很有意思。

00:30 - 00:40

Man, systems thinking, that's like, I think the seventh time in a row that term has been used in this podcast.

中文：伙计，系统思维，我觉得这是这个播客连续第七次提到这个术语了。

One of the, was it the Netflix?

中文：其中一个，是 Netflix 吗？

Yeah. Yeah, it was Stone.

中文：是的。是的，是斯通。

Somebody got this?

中文：有人拿到这个吗？

That was a big one, yeah.

中文：那真是一个大事，是的。

Yeah, sometimes you, like people say systems thinking, then they go out and buy that book.

中文：是啊，有时候你，比如人们说系统思维，然后他们就去买那本书。

Yeah, with the slinky.

中文：是的，用弹簧玩具。

Yeah, I'm a systems thinker now. Yeah, I think actually the most underrated aspect of systems thinking is having a mathematical background to be able to describe the system in mathematical terms. Like to actually map it out in terms of like stocks and flows and different probability, like is this bimodal or is this normally distributed? And just being able to understand, like to be able to... I was going to ask you,

中文：是的，我现在是一个系统思维者。是的，我实际上认为系统思维中最被低估的方面是拥有数学背景，以便能够用数学术语描述系统。比如，实际上用库存和流量以及不同的概率来绘制它，比如这是双峰分布还是正态分布？并且能够理解，能够……我本来想问你，

To help people understand what is systems thinking, because it's this broad term that is hard to really know. And so I love this answer. So you're finding basically just ask why is that is actually a really effective way to develop systems thinking to actually think about the bigger picture.

中文：帮助人们理解什么是系统思维，因为这是一个很广泛的术语，很难真正理解。所以我喜欢这个答案。所以你实际上就是不断地问“为什么”，这实际上是一种非常有效的方式来培养系统思维，从而真正考虑更大的整体情况。

Yeah, but I would love it if maybe rather than reading the Slinky book, there was more like Jay Forrester system dynamics from the manufacturing kind of stuff from the 1970s. And then I think just like a mathematical understanding of how the system works, like if you had to model it.

中文：是的，但如果不是读《Slinky》这本书，而更多是像 1970 年代制造业那种杰伊·福雷斯特系统动力学的内容，我会更喜欢。然后我认为只要对系统的运作有数学上的理解就好了，比如如果你必须对它进行建模。

Yeah, I was going to ask you basically just create like a spreadsheet model of how.

中文：是的，我本来是想问你基本上如何创建一个电子表格模型。

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This, I think, could be very clarifying.

中文：没错。是的。是的。我认为，这可能会非常清楚明了。

That is actually. Okay. So that's a really good way to understand systems thinking. Model it out. Put in a spreadsheet. What are all the variables? What comes in? What comes out? What are the levers?

中文：那实际上。好吧。这是理解系统思维的一个非常好的方法。把它建模出来。放进电子表格里。所有变量有哪些？输入是什么？输出是什么？杠杆有哪些？

Yeah. Yeah. What are the levers? What are the distributions behind those levers? Yeah, I think it can be very clarifying, even if the spreadsheet goes nowhere other than your shared drive. It can be very clarifying.

中文：是的。是的。杠杆是什么？这些杠杆背后的分布是什么？是的，我认为这可以非常清楚，即使电子表格除了你的共享驱动器之外别无去处，也能非常清楚。

Feature agent. I was going to say real quick on Snapchat Plus, my favorite part of the story is that Instagram launched Instagram Plus. It's just like another classic Snapchat story.

中文：功能代理。我本来想快速说一下 Snapchat Plus，我最喜欢的部分是 Instagram 推出了 Instagram Plus。这就像是另一个经典的 Snapchat 故事。

Yeah, I think there was early on, I remember at Snap, it was like so, so funny to see how aggressively Instagram was copying, that they were actually copying like some of our worst features, like ones that weren't working, just because I think they just like assumed everything that we were touching was turning to gold.

中文：是的，我记得在早期的时候，我记得在 Snap 上，看到 Instagram 抄袭得如此激进真的非常好笑，他们甚至抄袭了一些我们最糟糕的功能，那些根本不起作用的功能，只是因为我觉得他们认为我们碰到的每一样东西都会变成金子。

What's an example of that?

中文：那有什么例子吗？

Yeah, and then there are some features that on Instagram just don't make as much, like the map and things like that, that will take time. But when it comes to stories, which was obviously extremely effective from a copying perspective, you'd be hard-pressed to say anything, but the version of it on Instagram is now much better. What Instagram has done with that format, it really suits the product super well. And that team is powered by a bunch of great designers. And when they start thinking from first principles and with the taste that Adam, who was also on the pod, has, that product is well architected from a human computer interaction standpoint in a way that I think is actually really admirable on many levels.

中文：是的，然后还有一些功能在 Instagram 上不太适用，比如地图之类的东西，这些需要时间。但说到故事，这是从复制角度来看显然非常有效的，你很难说什么，但 Instagram 上的版本现在好多了。Instagram 对这种格式的运用非常适合产品。这个团队由一群优秀的设计师组成。当他们从第一性原理出发思考，并带有 亚当·莫塞里（也在播客中）所具备的品味时，该产品从人机交互的角度来看设计得非常好，我认为在很多层面上都非常令人钦佩。

I keep trying to move away from Snapchat, but I have so many new questions come up as you share more. Something that came up in my chat with Evan about this is like seeing everybody copying Snapchat for 15 years or however long it's been. His takeaway basically is software is no longer remote. You have to focus on other things. That's why he's spending so much time on hardware. It was his answer. And also just like the ecosystem and the network effects of a product. Thoughts on that?

中文：我一直试图远离 Snapchat，但随着你分享更多内容，我又有了很多新的问题。我在和 埃文·斯皮格尔聊这个时提到的一件事是，看到大家已经模仿 Snapchat 15 年，或者不管到底多久了。他的结论基本上是软件不再是远程的。你必须关注其他事情。这就是为什么他花这么多时间在硬件上的原因。这是他的答案。还有就是产品的生态系统和网络效应。对此有什么看法？

I have tremendous respect for Evan, and I think he's essentially been right on almost everything, just early on some stuff. Maybe early on everything, actually, too. Even stuff like avatars, like AI, like essentially all of the like on-device AR that we were doing was, at the time it was more just called machine learning, but I have tremendous respect for Evan and I think he's essentially been right on almost everything, just early on some stuff. Maybe early on everything actually too. Even stuff like avatars, AI, essentially all of the on-device AR that we were doing at the time it was more just called machine learning. employed some form of machine intelligence that was like super avant-garde at the time. So I think when he says something like this, there's probably some truth to it. I think a lot of people are frustrated with Snap because it doesn't have the financial profile to be able to support the type of hardware development that He said, Yeah, I kind of think he's right, but maybe investors or the world doesn't want to give him the space to be right in some ways. It's challenging. Yeah, it has artist vibes, rejected artist vibes, or on the outskirts artist vibes, which I think there's still so many things. It actually reminds me... There's so much talk these days about taste and things like that. So hard to describe things like that. But one of the things that I learned at Snap is, like, I think I saw Evan personally say no to better ideas than I've seen almost any other consumer startup launch. And it kind of made me think of like this, like, my goal is like a product leader for, for founders, like at these high growth companies was always to like, turn them into almost like the best startup. The richest museum, curators in the world, where whatever's in the product at any one time is just a small slice of the overall collection. It's whatever that curator thinks is right for this time and place in society. And I think if one way you can kind of get at somebody's taste is when you're interviewing them is just ask them about some of the things they built that they never shipped. Not that they tested and got bad results for, but like that literally they held it in their hands, the prototype, and they're like, the world's not ready for this or like this thing is not ready. And if they have a lot of high quality ideas that are on the shelf, exercising that kind of muscle of like saying no, of restraint is probably one of the easiest, like one of the few like muscles of taste you can exercise. If a museum has all of their collection on the walls, then the curator hasn't done anything. And so, yeah, I think about this a lot because Evan is, yeah, probably the best at it.

中文：我对埃文·斯皮格尔抱有极大的尊重，我认为他几乎在所有事情上基本上都是正确的，只是在一些事情上稍微早了一些。实际上，可能在所有事情上早了一些。甚至像头像、人工智能这样的东西，实际上我们当时所做的几乎所有设备端增强现实，当时更多被称为机器学习，但我对埃文·斯皮格尔抱有极大的尊重，我认为他几乎在所有事情上基本上都是正确的，只是在一些事情上稍微早了一些。实际上，可能在所有事情上早了一些。甚至像头像、人工智能这样的东西，实际上我们当时所做的几乎所有设备端增强现实，当时更多被称为机器学习，都采用了一种当时非常前卫的机器智能形式。所以我认为当他说类似的话时，其中可能有一定的真实性。 我认为很多人对 Snap 感到沮丧，因为它没有足够的财务状况来支持他所说的那种硬件开发。是的，我有点觉得他说得对，但也许投资者或世界在某种程度上并不想给他空间去证明自己是对的。这很有挑战性。是的，它有艺术家的氛围，被拒绝的艺术家氛围，或者边缘艺术家的氛围，我认为这其实还有很多东西。这让我想起……如今关于品味之类的讨论太多了。很难描述这些东西。但我在 Snap 学到的一件事是，我个人觉得我看到 埃文·斯皮格尔 拒绝了一些比几乎任何其他消费类初创公司推出的主意都好的想法。 这让我有点想到，我的目标是成为这些高速增长公司创始人的产品领导者，总是希望把他们几乎变成世界上最优秀的初创公司博物馆策展人，无论产品中任何时候的内容，只是整体收藏的一小部分。这完全取决于策展人认为在当时社会环境下什么是合适的。我认为了解一个人品味的一个方法是在面试他们时，问问他们曾经做过但从未发布过的一些作品。不是说他们测试失败或结果不好，而是真的他们握在手里的原型，并认为世界还没有准备好，或者这个东西还不成熟。 如果他们有很多高质量的想法被搁置着，那么锻炼那种像说不、克制的肌肉，可能是最容易的，也是为数不多可以锻炼的品味之肌肉之一。如果博物馆把所有藏品都陈列在墙上，那么策展人实际上什么也没做。所以，是的，我经常思考这个问题，因为埃文·斯皮格尔在这方面，嗯，可能是最擅长的。

That is such an interesting insight, especially these days, because AI is very bad at removing things from designs and from products. It always adds. It doesn't say, hey, maybe we should cut this piece. And so it's so interesting how this connects now to the there's like we talk about taste all the time with AI. And this is like an interesting element of that, of being good at understanding what to remove as AI becomes a bigger part of the building process and designing process.

中文：这是一个非常有趣的见解，尤其是在当下，因为人工智能在从设计和产品中去除元素方面非常不擅长。它总是添加，而不是说，嘿，也许我们应该去掉这一部分。所以这与我们现在讨论的 AI 味觉联系起来非常有趣。随着 AI 成为构建和设计过程中的重要部分，理解何时去除某些元素也是一个有趣的方面。

Yes, yeah, this will be hard. I think this is a hard skill for AI to replicate. I think like in general, it seems like right now it's obviously at the code level, it's getting to the design level, it's in some cases at the video and the photo level.

中文：是的，是的，这将会很难。我认为这是一个人工智能难以复制的硬技能。我觉得总体来说，目前显然它在代码层面，正在达到设计层面，在某些情况下还可以达到视频和照片层面。

It'll eventually maybe even get to physical level as well, but it's really going to empower anybody to be a creator. And we've seen this in the past, right? Like lowering the threshold for creativity, not just kind of like enables the existing creators to do more, but enables people who were otherwise kind of like subscription products and things like that Bounded out or restricted from entering the arena to enter it. But this will put a lot of pressure on essentially creating stuff that deserves human attention in a way that I wonder if there are some analogs to this in the past. We'll have to think about it.

中文：它最终可能甚至会达到物理层面，但它真的会让任何人都有能力成为创作者。我们过去也见过类似的情况，对吧？降低创造力的门槛，不仅仅是让现有的创作者能够做更多的事情，还让那些本来因为订阅产品之类的限制而无法进入的人也能够进入创作领域。但这将在根本上对创造那些值得人类关注的作品施加很大压力，我在想过去是否有一些类似的情况。我们需要去思考这个问题。

And it just feels like an interesting new skill for PMs is pushing back on things AI, adding to your products. Engineers are like, what if we had this? So it's like, it's not even on AI right now. It's on the product teams, basically, to cut stuff. Yeah.

中文：而且感觉就像是一个有趣的新技能，产品经理在推进关于人工智能的事情，向你的产品添加内容。工程师们会想，如果我们有这个会怎么样？所以就像，现在甚至还不是在人工智能上，而是基本上由产品团队来决定删减内容。是的。

Yeah. Yeah, maybe they can. It'd be pretty funny if the conclusion of every Lennie podcast is basically, yeah, the world might just need more PMs.

中文：是的。是的，也许他们可以。如果每一期 Lennie 播客的结论基本上都是，嗯，这个世界可能真的需要更多的产品经理，那就会很有趣。

Crazy.

中文：疯狂。

Oh, man. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking now with spend. I've been a Mercury customer for so many years now. I switched all my business banking to Mercury, and honestly, I could not be happier. It's what online banking feels like when it's built by product people, not by bankers. And now with Spend, you can give your team individual cards, set spending limits per person or per team, and have expense receipts automatically pulled in from Gmail or over text. You can even give your AI agents their own cards with their own limits and policies. Most founders start out the same way. One card used by everybody at the company. It works until it stops working. Someone goes over, a receipt disappears, you spend two days trying to figure out who spent what and why. Spend is expense management built directly into Mercury. All your team's cards, budgets, and reimbursements all live in the same place as your business banking. No chasing, no manual reviews, no end-of-month scramble. The result is a team that can move fast and a founder who is no longer the bottleneck. Learn more and get signed up at Mercury.com. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided to Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC. The I.O. card is issued by Patriot Bank, NA member FDIC, pursuant to a license from MasterCard International, Inc. There's a couple elements here that I think connect Snapchat and AI. Having seen the ads experience of Snap and where that has gone and not become as big as people may have thought, ChatGPT in particular is exploring ads. I imagine other AI tools will. Thoughts on that opportunity? Do you think that's actually a massive business opportunity for these companies or do you think they're not understanding the actual business there?

中文：哦，伙计。本集由 Mercury 提供赞助，彻底不同的银行体验，现在配备了 Spend。我已经是 Mercury 的客户好多年了。我把所有的商业银行业务都转到了 Mercury，老实说，我非常满意。这就是由产品人员而非银行家打造的在线银行的感觉。现在有了 Spend，你可以给你的团队分配个人卡，为每个人或每个团队设置消费限额，并从 Gmail 或短信中自动获取报销收据。你甚至可以给你的 AI 代理分配自己的卡和各自的限额与政策。大多数创始人开始的方式都是一样的——公司所有人共用一张卡。它用得顺利，直到出现问题。有人超支、收据消失，你得花两天时间搞清楚是谁花了什么钱以及为什么。Spend 是直接内置于 Mercury 的费用管理工具。 你们团队的所有卡片、预算和报销都与您的商务银行集中在同一个地方。无需追踪，无需人工审核，无需月末抢忙。结果就是团队可以快速行动，而创始人不再成为瓶颈。了解更多信息并在 Mercury.com 注册。Mercury 是一家金融科技公司，而不是 FDIC 保险的银行。为 Choice Financial Group 和 column NA 成员 FDIC 提供银行服务。I.O. 卡由 Patriot Bank 发行，NA 成员 FDIC，根据 MasterCard International, Inc. 的许可发放。这里我认为有几个因素将 Snapchat 与 AI 连接起来。在看到 Snap 的广告体验及其发展方向，并没有达到人们可能预期的规模之后，特别是 ChatGPT 正在探索广告。我想其他 AI 工具也会如此。对此机会有什么看法? 你认为这实际上是这些公司一个巨大的商业机会，还是你认为他们没有理解那里的实际业务？

00:40 - 00:50

I subscribe to the Eric Seufert side of the world of ads are the product market fit for the internet. And I still think that from a monetization standpoint, there's a number of reasons, again, mathematical, for why that is true and why I think... are kind of overrated versus ads from a consumer side of things. when I look at what OpenAI is doing from an advertising perspective, they are speed running all of the like, Thank you. Thank you. the correct way to build an ads auction in even like a chat environment in chat GPT. And what I mean by that is, I think where the innovation came from from meta was not just like the highest bidder, and I'm oversimplifying like crazy, but like, not just that the highest bidder wins, but that the organic value of an advertisement and an advertiser to that user should be factored into their bid. Such that you essentially have to pay more as an advertiser to reach people who may not want to be reached or may be harder to reach or may not necessarily be as relevant to you. And this also is great because it allows you to mox both content, organic content and advertising content on a similar and a unified auction with dollars as essentially the ultimate denominator. Right. And the reason that I say that this is good for chat is not necessarily that organic value is what's important here, like how much you like an ad or not in a content feed. But in chat, it probably feels like this could be replaced or augmented with essentially trust.

中文：我认同 埃里克·索弗特 在广告世界中的一方是互联网产品市场的契合。我仍然认为，从货币化的角度来看，有许多原因，再次从数学角度来看，这是真的，并且我认为……相对于消费者端的广告来说，它们在某种程度上被高估了。当我从广告的角度看 OpenAI 所做的事情时，他们正在以极快的速度运行所有类似的操作，非常感谢，非常感谢，在像 ChatGPT 这样的聊天环境中构建广告拍卖的正确方式。我的意思是，我认为 Meta 的创新不仅仅是最高出价者，我在这里极度简化，但不仅是最高出价者获胜，而是广告和广告商对用户的有机价值应当被计入出价中。 这样你本质上必须支付更多费用作为广告主，以触达那些可能不想被触达、可能更难触达或未必对你有相关性的人。而这也很好，因为它允许你在一个类似的统一拍卖中混合内容、自然内容和广告内容，美元本质上是最终的衡量标准。对吧。我之所以说这对聊天有好处，不一定是因为有机价值在这里重要，比如你在内容流中是否喜欢一则广告。但在聊天中，这可能感觉像是可以被本质上信任所替代或增强。

If you boil this down to something very simple, it's just like, hey, what X should I buy? What mic should I buy? And in that moment, we have to decide, like, should I give you the objective answer? Should I give you a set of answers? And how influenced should I be by a set of advertisers that want to get in front of you? And I think the mechanism by which how influenced I should be... Thank you for having me. It's not threatening the product. Amazon is such a great product, but what is the great product of Amazon? It's like the selection and the next day shipping or whatever. Like it is getting a little crazy when you search for something and you have 16 ads before you get to the first thing and you're like, Oh shoot, is that like subtly influencing my my trust in the system? And so that's why I actually think like opening eyes, speed running all the right stuff and where the push is going to come to shove is And so I think that's a really good question. Um, like what does this format look like in, in chat? Are we still going to be, what if, what if it's voice? Like, we don't know. So I think like one of the coolest jobs right now for a PM, uh, and designer would probably be like ad formats at OpenAI. Um, that'd be a, that, that's like a, that's like a societal level job in advertising right now. Um, and so, uh, yeah, I think, I think it'll be really interesting to see how they, how they work on that. Um, Yeah, maybe one other thing I'll say is I was kind of disappointed that they jumped right to an ad-free experience for the top tier. Because I feel like ads could actually be really additive to every part of the OpenAI, not like coding and things like that, but like actual chat. Like, let's set aside work and coding and like lopping off your most valuable users so early. I was a little disappointed, but I understand why people do that.

中文：如果你把这个归结得非常简单，它就像是，嘿，我应该买什么 X？我应该买什么麦克风？在那个瞬间，我们必须决定，我应该给你客观的答案吗？我应该给你一系列答案吗？而我应该受到一组希望出现在你面前的广告商影响的程度又有多大？我认为决定我应该受到多大影响的机制……谢谢你邀请我。它并没有威胁到产品。亚马逊是一个很棒的产品，但亚马逊的伟大产品是什么呢？就像是它的选择范围和次日送达之类的东西。当你搜索某样东西时，如果在看到第一条结果之前有 16 个广告，这就有点疯狂，然后你会想，哦糟糕，这会不会在潜移默化中影响我对系统的信任？ 所以这就是为什么我实际上认为，比如说睁开眼睛，快速运行所有正确的东西，以及冲突将要发生的地方是，所以我觉得这是一个非常好的问题。嗯，比如这个格式在聊天中看起来会是什么样的？我们还会……会怎么样，如果是语音呢？我们不知道。所以我认为，目前对产品经理的设计师来说，最酷的工作之一可能就是 OpenAI 的广告格式。嗯，那将是一个，目前广告界的社会层级工作。所以，嗯，是的，我觉得看看他们如何处理这个会非常有趣。嗯，是的，也许我还想说的另一件事是，我有点失望，他们直接跳到高端用户的无广告体验。 因为我觉得广告实际上可以真的对 OpenAI 的每一个部分都有很大的帮助，不是像编码之类的东西，而是真正的聊天。就像，让我们先不谈工作和编码，也不要那么早就削减你最有价值的用户。我有点失望，但我理解人们为什么会这么做。

It is so fun to listen to you talk about this as you take a swig of your vodka right there. I don't know if people...

中文：听你一边喝伏特加一边谈论这个真是太有趣了。我不知道人们是否...

It's actually really, really fancy, douchey water. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

中文：它实际上真的是，非常，非常高档、装逼的水。好吧。是的，是的。

That you replace with vodka so nobody can tell.

中文：你用伏特加替换，这样没人能看出来。

This is the key. That's right. If you keep me on for another 30 or so minutes, it'll really get on your nerves. Yeah.

中文：这是关键。没错。如果你再让我待上大约三十分钟，它真的会让你心烦意乱。是的。

So what I was saying, it's so fun to hear you talk about the ads ecosystem, and it shows how much you know and how deep this goes. Like, I feel like we could do a whole episode on this, probably. Don't need to do that right now. But it's amazing. Clearly, you've spent a lot of time thinking about ads. What I'm also feeling now is OpenAI needs to hire you immediately to help them with this.

中文：所以我刚才说的是，听你谈论广告生态系统真是太有趣了，这也显示了你有多么了解这个领域，它有多深奥。比如，我感觉我们可能可以专门做一期完整的节目来谈这个，当然现在不需要。不过这真的很棒。很明显，你花了很多时间在思考广告方面。我现在还感觉到的是，OpenAI 需要立即雇用你来帮助他们处理这方面的事情。

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess like free agent. So, you know, this is maybe that's my ulterior motive of the pot, you know, the interview.

中文：是的，是的。是的，我想就像自由球员一样。所以，你知道，这也许是我参加这个面试的 ulterior 动机。

Well, I think you fast. OK, I want to go to something else. I so we were talking and chatting about what to spend time on. And I asked you, what are some counterintuitive lessons that you've learned over the course of your career that go against kind of common startup wisdom, common leadership wisdom? And there's four you shared. And I want to just go through them and get your take because they're awesome. Okay, so the first is you like to spend time writing your best people into the ground versus improving the average people. Share more.

中文：嗯，我认为你很快。好，我想换个话题。我们刚才在谈论和交流应该把时间花在什么上。我问你，你在职业生涯中学到的那些违反常见创业智慧、常规领导智慧的意想不到的经验教训有哪些？你分享了四个。我想逐一谈谈，听听你的看法，因为它们非常棒。好，第一个是你更喜欢把时间花在让你最出色的人尽全力工作，而不是提升普通员工。能多说一点吗？

I'm realizing you write this out.

中文：我意识到你把这个写了出来。

He's building terrorist organizations and all he does is write his best people into the ground.

中文：他正在建立恐怖组织，而他所做的就是把他最优秀的人写得一败涂地。

This is going to be the title of the episode.

中文：这将是这一集的标题。

Yeah, you're going to need to like, there's going to be like a, like a recovery group, like a therapy group of PMs that work for Peter Sellis. But no, you're probably should worry about that.

中文：是的，你需要像，有一个类似的，类似的恢复小组，像一个产品经理的治疗小组，为彼得·塞利斯工作。但不，你可能不应该担心那个。

They're all sitting in Discord.

中文：他们都坐在 Discord。

Yeah, God forbid it's a Discord group. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I think this actually kind of flows from the whole kind of like Vorp thing. It's like once you have somebody in a position, and there are a lot of tropes around this too, right? Like if you want something done quickly, give it to the busiest person kind of thing. But I think it's very, it's not necessarily counterintuitive. it's counter to like human nature, right? Like if you see somebody drowning, you like, you want to save them. And like, I did the opposite, absolutely opposite. I just like kind of, and maybe it's, you know, we were right before we started, we started the podcast, I was talking about nominative determinism where like your name kind of like creates who you are and like joking that maybe I need to be a salesperson because of my last name is Salas. But there's also like this, you know, MBA Peter principle where you're like people are promoted to the level of their incompetence, which definitely could describe my career. But like, that's like kind of what I seek to do is like if somebody is is strong and crushing it, I'm just like, I'm just like handing them more and more rope to hang themselves with. And I'm pushing them as hard as possible, you know, like to the point of breaking, because like at the end of the day, like one of the biggest leadership principles for me is that like I will, the people on my team, I will always defend in public, like in front of execs and stuff like that. I never, never criticize them. And so, like, people who are making consistently good decisions, I just want to load them up with more decisions until I start to see them make bad ones. I think, like, there's so much kind of, like, self-reinforcement or self-fulfilling prophecy of, like, when you have confidence and when things are going well, like, And so, yeah, I think I like try and really show that I believe in people. And when I don't, yeah, maybe this is just a personal thing. I just don't have a really good mechanism for helping people improve. So I essentially like let them fail on their own, which could be, I think, probably pretty frustrating for me as a leader to work for and somewhat sad. Yeah. I think the thing you need to control for when you adopt this type of management philosophy is that not paying attention to somebody doesn't mean they're failing. Like there are a lot of people that I've hired over the years, especially if I've worked with them multiple times, where I'm like... I know you know what to do, so go do it. And I just like let them execute. But yeah, it's, you know, spend time with your winners, ride your racehorses, give a busy person something to do if you want it done quick. Whatever the stupid trope is, yeah, I try to pursue it pretty aggressively.

中文：是啊，天哪，希望不是 Discord 组。哦，天啊。我觉得这实际上有点像从整个 Vorp 的概念延伸出来的。一旦你把某人置于某个位置，而且关于这一点也有很多套路，对吧？就像如果你想让事情快点完成，就交给最忙的人一样。但我认为这很，有点，不一定是违反直觉的。它是与人性相悖的，对吧？比如你看到有人快要淹死了，你会想去救他们。而我完全相反，完全相反。我只是有点……也许是，因为就在我们开始播客之前，我在聊名字决定论，说你的名字在某种程度上决定了你是谁，然后开玩笑说，也许我因为姓氏是 Salas 所以需要成为一个销售员。 但这里也有一种，就像是你知道的，MBA 的彼得原理，你会看到人们被晋升到他们不称职的层级，这绝对可以形容我的职业生涯。但这也有点是我想做的事情，如果某个人很强，很出色，我就像是在给他们越来越多的绳子让他们自缢。我会尽可能地推动他们，知道吗，直到崩溃，因为说到底，对我来说，最大的领导原则之一是，我会在公众面前、在高管面前始终为我的团队成员辩护，我从不、绝不批评他们。所以，那些持续做出好决定的人，我只想让他们承担更多的决策，直到我开始看到他们做出错误的决定。 我想，就像，当你有信心、事情进展顺利的时候，存在很多自我强化或自我实现的预言。是的，我觉得我会尽量去真正展现我对别人的信任。而当我不信任时，嗯，也许这只是个人问题，我没有一个很好的机制去帮助别人改进。所以我基本上会让他们自己失败，这可能对作为一个领导者的我来说相当令人沮丧，也有点令人伤心。是的，我认为当你采用这种管理哲学时需要注意的一点是，不关注某人并不意味着他们在失败。多年来，我雇佣过很多人，尤其是如果我曾多次与他们合作过，我会意识到……我知道你知道该做什么，所以去做吧。我只是让他们去执行。 但是，是的，你知道的，多花时间和你的胜利者在一起，骑你的赛马，如果你想要事情做得快，就给一个忙碌的人一些事情去做。不管那个愚蠢的陈词滥调是什么，是的，我会尽量积极地去追求它。

00:50 - 01:00

Makes sense to me. And there's many ways to say it. Some are kinder than others. Another contrarian take you have is that collaboration is a pretty bad use of time. A lot of times, you talked about this earlier, but is there anything more to add there?

中文：对我来说是有道理的。表达方式有很多种，有些比其他的更和善。你另一个逆向的观点是，协作是相当浪费时间的。很多时候，你之前谈到过这个，但还有什么要补充的吗？

I think when you're building a team and you talk about the team's principles or tenets or whatever... If you find yourself saying things that no one can disagree with, either those aren't good principles or tenets, or maybe they need to be challenged.

中文：我认为，当你在组建团队并讨论团队的原则或信条时……如果你发现自己说的事情没有人会不同意，要么那些不是好的原则或信条，要么它们可能需要被挑战。

And yeah, I think collaboration kind of falls under this umbrella a lot of the time. But yeah, I think we talked about kind of my reasoning there.

中文：是的，我觉得合作在很多时候都可以归入这个范畴。但我觉得，我们已经谈过我在这方面的某种理由。

Okay. Another contrarian take you have is that growth typically comes from the core of the business. Yeah.

中文：好吧。你持有的另一个逆向观点是，增长通常来自业务的核心。是的。

I mean, this one was learned... Like a couple of times, both at Snap and at Discord, And this isn't to say that there aren't these wonderful growth strategies about expansion into new markets or things like that. But I think the nature of network effect oriented businesses is that they want to grow implicitly. And so what you can do to drive growth much more effectively. is focus on people who are essentially already using or wanting to use the product for what it's for or some kind of derivative nearby of that and just making it much easier, much more performant, much more relevant, et cetera. I think the way you could think about this, we're using very eighth grade math where if you want to, I think almost every consumer product Maybe this is also a controversial take, like needs to be optimizing for daily active use. Like there are very few things in, in, eventually you need to tie everything to people's natural lives and cycles and like days are real, right? Weeks, they can be real, but they're not necessarily real for like, like, you don't think about, there aren't a lot of things you do on a weekly regimen regularly, really, really effectively. But like you wake up, you know, like they're, they're, they're the circadian rhythm is real. Very few things are done on a monthly basis, like a lot of B2B stuff, like paying bills, etc. I guess there's some biological things that happen monthly, we could get into that. But there's something about the daily active use or even hourly active use that I think is essential for almost every consumer product. And the idea, like if you're thinking about a daily active user, if you're going for somebody who uses a product once a month, you're going to need 30 of those to equal somebody who uses it daily. That's like very, very, very, very basic math. And so that's why I think a lot of the most effective consumer products have extremely high DAU-MAU ratios. And so a lot of growth can come from essentially moving that ratio just a few basis points. Thank you. And what we like laser focused on after that was performance, particularly on Android. Existing people who are already using the app, just making it much, much faster and more performant for them. And that led to almost like a growth renaissance that, you know, went on for multiple years. At Discord, I think it was even more controversial because at the time, Discord has been something for a lot of people during the pandemic, during crypto, during AI, etc. So the time you had MidJourney being built on Discord, and MidJourney was phenomenal, just like such a cool company, product, everything. And a lot of people on the outside were just like, wow, this is a moment. Mid-journey must be huge for Discord. From a user perspective or daily active use, like a metrics perspective, if I were to show you like a, you know, you can even look at this online, right? Like Discord's use over time, you wouldn't be able to pick out mid-journey. Like, the reason people use Discord is to connect with their friends while playing, before, during, and after playing games. And what we did in 2024 was completely focus the team around this idea of how can we be the best place for you and your friends to play intentional multiplayer games together. And it turns out, like, even though Discord is technically it's a that technical team is phenomenal and be it's it's. Thank you. No. There were a lot of reasons that you were just on the edge and you decided not to join voice. You decided to use the in-game voice. You decided to call your friend on FaceTime instead, whatever it was. As we made Discord better, as we focused on performance, we were actually able to drive some of the fastest, I think it's not the fastest growth, and I'm not sharing anything that's not public, like since the pandemic. Obviously, Discord exploded during the pandemic. And this was by focusing on the thing that everybody already said we had 100% penetration of, which was like intentional multiplayer gamers. Now from there, you have a lot of options, right? There are a lot of things that look like multiplayer gaming. Crypto looks like multiplayer gaming, right? Intense coordination costs, you know, time sensitive, etc. Honestly, software development looks like multiplayer gaming. Like there are a lot of things that you could build off of that core. But by focusing on people who play games with their friends, we were actually able to like identify a lot of things that brought somebody from using Discord online. So, you know, 20 or let's say 10 days out of the 30 to 11 to 12 to 13, that's actually monster growth when you think about those pockets and moving up people's illness, like last seven out of seven days. I think I stole that from Meta, who once again wrote like a great playbook on growth. And so focusing on that illness of the core consumer base, I think it just like ended up being so, so positive in both the Snap and Discord examples.

中文：我的意思是，这个是学到的……就像几次一样，在 Snap 和 Discord 都有涉及。这并不是说没有那些关于进入新市场或类似事情的出色增长策略。但我认为，面向网络效应的业务的本质是它们希望隐性地增长。因此，你可以更有效地推动增长的方法是，专注于那些本质上已经在使用或者希望使用产品来达到其目的的人，或者是在这附近的某种衍生用途的人，并且让使用变得更容易、更高效、更相关等等。我认为，你可以这样思考这个问题——我们用的是非常八年级水平的数学，如果你愿意，我认为几乎每一个消费产品，也许这是一个有争议的观点，都需要优化每日活跃使用。 就像有些事情非常少，最终你需要把一切都和人们自然的生活与周期联系起来，像一天是真实存在的，对吧？一周也是可以真实存在的，但它们不一定是真实的，比如说，你不会经常真正高效地按照每周计划去做很多事情。但你每天醒来，你知道的，生理节律是真实的。每月进行的事情很少，比如很多 B2B 的事情，比如缴账单等等。我想也有一些每月发生的生物学现象，我们可以谈这个。但我认为几乎每个消费类产品都需要每日活跃使用，甚至每小时活跃使用，这一点是至关重要的。 而这个想法是，如果你在考虑每日活跃用户的话，如果你的目标是一个每月使用一次产品的人，你需要 30 个这样的用户才能等于一个每天使用的人。这就像是非常非常基本的数学。因此，这就是为什么我认为许多最有效的消费者产品拥有极高的 DAU-MAU 比率。因此，很多增长本质上可以通过将这个比率提高几个基点实现。谢谢。在那之后，我们非常专注于性能，特别是在安卓上的性能。针对已经在使用该应用的人，只是让它对他们来说更快、更高效。这几乎引发了一种增长复兴，持续了好几年。 在 Discord，我认为它更具争议性，因为在那个时候，Discord 对于很多人在疫情期间、加密货币时期、人工智能时期，都有特别的意义。所以当 MidJourney 在 Discord 上建立时，MidJourney 非常出色，就像一个非常酷的公司、产品，一切都很棒。很多外部的人都会觉得，哇，这是一个重要的时刻。MidJourney 对 Discord 来说一定非常重要。从用户角度或日活跃使用量的指标角度来看，如果我要向你展示，比如，你甚至可以在网上查看，对吧？查看 Discord 随时间的使用情况，你也无法挑出 MidJourney。人们使用 Discord 的原因是为了在玩游戏前、玩游戏中和玩游戏后与朋友保持联系。 我们在 2024 年所做的就是将团队完全围绕这样一个理念集中起来：我们如何才能成为你和你的朋友一起玩有意图的多人游戏的最佳场所。事实证明，虽然 Discord 在技术上确实是一个非常优秀的团队，非常出色，谢谢你。不。你当时在犹豫不决，有很多原因让你最终决定不加入语音，你选择使用游戏内语音，或者干脆给朋友打 FaceTime，不管是哪种方式。随着我们不断提升 Discord，专注于性能，我们实际上能够实现一些最快的增长，我认为不是最快的增长，我也没有分享任何非公开的信息，自大流行以来，显然，Discord 在大流行期间迅速爆发。 而这是通过专注于每个人都说我们已经拥有 100%渗透率的群体，也就是有意的多人游戏玩家。从那里，你有很多选择，对吧？有很多事物看起来像多人游戏。例如，加密货币看起来像多人游戏，对吧？需要高度协调成本、时间敏感等等。老实说，软件开发也看起来像多人游戏。基于这个核心，你可以构建很多东西。但通过专注于那些与朋友一起玩游戏的人，我们实际上能够识别出很多能把人们从在线使用 Discord 带来的因素。所以，你知道的，从 30 天中的第 20 天，或者说是 10 天，到 11、12、13 天，当你考虑到那些用户群体的转变以及提升人们的参与度时，这是非常惊人的增长，比如七天中的最后七天。 我想我是从 Meta 那里偷来的，他再次写得像一本关于增长的伟大手册。所以专注于核心消费者群体的那个问题，我认为它最终在 Snap 和 Discord 的例子中都变得非常非常积极。

This is a really important lesson for people trying to grow a product. The TLDR to me is there's always money in the banana stand.

中文：这是一个对试图发展产品的人来说非常重要的课程。对我来说，简而言之就是香蕉摊里总是有钱的。

We were talking earlier about building a terrorist organization. That's a great example of a phrase that if you could ascribe, in a strategy document, you could ascribe value. There's always money in the banana stand. Return to your core users, make sure it's perfect for them.

中文：我们之前在讨论建立一个恐怖组织。这是一个很好的例子，如果你能够在策略文件中使用这个短语，你就能赋予其价值。香蕉摊总是有钱可赚。回到你的核心用户，确保对他们来说是完美的。

There was always money in the banana stand. I think at Discord, it had exceptionally positive externalities because the most vocal, critical, positive, Honestly, intelligent or high IQ user base in the world are gamers, honestly. You think you've built for people who are critical about your product, who are detail oriented. Unless you've built for gamers, you haven't. And to be able to turn around and say we are focused, like here's a bug thread on Reddit. Show us what's messing up. We don't care how small it is, how big it is. We will fix it. It had this unbelievable positive externality of we are delivering for this community. And I honestly think this is why Discord is so great and so without peer in this specific niche. It's because it's so laser focused on if you play games with your friends and you care about it, this product is going to... There are people who sit in that office who will make it perfect for you forever.

中文：香蕉摊里总是有钱。我认为在 Discord，它具有异常积极的外部性，因为世界上最直言不讳、批判性强、积极、诚实、聪明或者高智商的用户群体是游戏玩家，真的。你以为你是为那些对你的产品持批评态度、注重细节的人构建的。除非你是为游戏玩家构建的，否则你没有做到。而且能够转过身来说我们专注于，比如这里有一个 Reddit 的漏洞帖子。告诉我们是什么出了问题。我们不在乎它有多小或者多大。我们会修复它。它有一种令人难以置信的正面外部性，就是我们正在为这个社区提供服务。我真的认为，这就是为什么 Discord 如此伟大并且在这个特定细分领域无与伦比的原因。因为它如此专注于，如果你和朋友一起玩游戏并且在意它，这个产品就会…… 有些人坐在那个办公室里，会为你永远把它做到完美。

So this begs the question, when does it make sense to bet on something new and try new things? Because, you know... It doesn't always make sense to just continue refining and refining the one piece of product market fit that's worked. Any guidance to folks, and this is for consumer in particular, any guidance for when it makes sense to still make bets outside that core?

中文：所以这就引出了一个问题：什么时候去押注新事物并尝试新东西才有意义？因为，你懂的……只是不断改进已经奏效的产品市场契合点并不总是有意义的。对于大家，尤其是面向消费者的情况，有没有任何指导说明什么时候仍然有意义去在核心之外做押注？

Yeah, I think there are two really incremental ways to think about it. One is if you boil down the core things about your product that are really, really great that people come to it for. So for Snap, maybe it's the camera. For Discord, it's voice. And then you look to other niches, other cohorts for which that could be useful.

中文：是的，我认为有两种非常渐进的方式来考虑这个问题。一种是把你产品中那些真正非常棒、人们为之而来的核心东西提炼出来。例如对于 Snap，可能是相机；对于 Discord，可能是语音。然后你再看看其他细分市场、其他群体，对他们来说这些功能可能也有用。

It's a very MBA style, two by two type of thing. That's, I think, one method to do that. And you should honestly always be assessing that because that's an easy one. And then I think the second thing is one of the greatest gifts is when people use your product in a way that you didn't. And he was the first person to do that. So it kind of is a version of that, but it's like expanding to the next thing. And that's more like thinking about concentric circles. It's like, okay, we got it at the core. How do we expand, expand? I feel like I'm doing something with my hands here that's going to be memed. But we got it. Sorry, I'll stop. But I think then the other, the kind of like more... The more Snapchat, the more innovative way to think about it is more to look at your company's philosophy around why it was built and then think about the future totally unencumbered by the present. No incrementality from the present, more like future casting, like backcasting instead of forecasting. And be like, okay, right now, the best way to share a moment is to pull out your phone and aim the camera at it and record.

中文：这非常像 MBA 风格的那种，两两分组的方式。我觉得那是一种方法来做到这一点。你应该始终诚实地评估这一点，因为那是最容易做的一点。然后我认为第二件事是，当人们以你没有预料到的方式使用你的产品时，这是最大的礼物之一。而他是第一个这么做的人。所以这在某种程度上是那种情况的一个版本，但它就像是向下一个方向扩展。这更多地像是考虑同心圆的方式，就像，好，我们掌握了核心。我们如何扩展，扩展？我感觉我现在用手做的动作可能会被做成表情包，但我们明白了。抱歉，我会停下来。但我认为还有一种，更像……更 Snapchat、更具创新性的思考方式，是更多地去看你公司建立的理念，然后去思考未来，完全不受现在的限制。 没有来自现在的递增性，更像是未来预测，像是回溯而不是预测。而且就像，好的，现在分享一个瞬间的最佳方式是拿出你的手机，对准它拍摄并记录下来。

01:00 - 01:10

That's very constrained by the existing technology. If we were to envision a future of like, what's the future look like to be the best way? Like something just happened or my child just took its first steps. I'm at a concert. I just saw something really funny on the street. Like, what's the best way to share that moment with my friends? Like, I think that's what leads to you to something like, oh, probably glasses or, you know, things like that. So this like backcasting method, I think, is what everybody wants to do. And in my experience, there are very few people that have this type of like blank sheet creativity to think about the future. Totally unencumbered from the present. Most people like to like, even really creative people like remix versions of the present. Or like, I think these days, most product managers like go on like an ayahuasca journey or travel to Japan or something and then come back and they're like, I've solved it. But like, very few people I think are very good at this version of it.

中文：这很受现有技术的限制。如果我们要设想一个未来，比如，未来看起来会是最好的方式是什么？比如刚发生了一些事情，或者我的孩子刚学会走第一步。我在音乐会现场。我刚在街上看到一些非常有趣的事情。那怎样才是和朋友分享这一刻的最佳方式呢？我认为这会引导你想到像是眼镜之类的东西。所以这种反向预测方法，我认为，是每个人都想做的。在我的经验中，很少有人拥有这种‘空白纸’式的创造力去思考未来，完全不受现在的影响。大多数人，即使是非常有创造力的人，也喜欢对现有事物进行重新混合的版本。 或者，比如，我觉得现在大多数产品经理都会去进行像阿亚胡斯卡的旅行，或者去日本之类的地方，然后回来后就说，我解决了这个问题。但我觉得，真正擅长这种方式的人很少。

And I think a big part of this is you found product market fit, something's working, you almost take for granted how lucky you are that you found something that works. And it may be easy to think, oh, we'll find the next thing now. And very few people do. Airbnb is actually a really good example of this. Like nothing beyond the original idea has worked in a big way. It's still basically the same core idea. And, you know, I've worked there for a long time and nothing has significantly impacted the growth trajectory other than just exactly what you just described, continuing to make the core experience better, more supply, more demand. So I think this is a really profound point for people to take in.

中文：我认为这其中很大一部分原因是你找到了产品市场契合点，某些东西有效，你几乎把自己找到有效产品的幸运当作理所当然。可能很容易想，哦，我们现在会找到下一个成功的产品。但实际上很少有人能做到。Airbnb 实际上就是一个很好的例子。除了最初的想法之外，没有任何东西取得了重大成功。它基本上仍然是同样的核心理念。你知道，我在那工作了很长时间，除了你刚才描述的那种继续改善核心体验、增加供应和需求之外，没有任何事情显著影响了增长轨迹。所以我认为这是一个非常深刻的观点，值得人们去思考。

It's also like you can keep teams leaner this way, things like that. The biggest risk is it's kind of like that, I think it's a Nassim Taleb meme of like 1,001 days in the life of a Thanksgiving turkey. Where it's just like, yeah, everything's getting better and better and better until something comes along that's literally 10x better than what you're doing. And it takes you to zero overnight. And guarding against that, I don't have any, if I knew how to guard against Black Swan events like that, yeah, I think. You'd be in finance. Yeah, definitely being in finance. I actually think like this, you know, we were talking a little bit like SpaceX is probably a good example, actually, of a company that like guards itself against this in some ways.

中文：这也像是你可以用这种方式保持团队精简，类似这样的事情。最大风险就是，情况有点像，我觉得这是一个纳西姆·塔勒布的梗，叫《感恩节火鸡的一千零一天的生活》。意思就是，一切看起来越来越好，越来越顺，直到突然出现某些比你正在做的事情强十倍的东西。这会让你一夜之间归零。对于如何防范这种情况，我其实没有办法，如果我知道如何防范这种像黑天鹅事件一样的事情，是的，我想……你可能会在金融行业。是的，绝对是在金融业。我实际上是这样想的，你知道吗，我们之前聊了一点，SpaceX 可能是一个很好的例子，实际上，这家公司在某些方面在保护自己不受这种事情的影响。

Okay, say more. I know your wife works at SpaceX. So you have a really unique insight into how SpaceX works and what has worked there.

中文：好吧，说得更详细一些。我知道你的妻子在 SpaceX 工作。所以你对 SpaceX 的运作以及那里什么有效有非常独特的见解。

Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, like... No inside information. I'm like a second party. You know, I'm not first party, but, you know, I sleep next to a SpaceX engineer every night. So that helps. Yeah, that's all you have to do. But no, I think like SpaceX is the greatest American company right now, greatest company in the world. Thank you. They are taking the Falcon 9, which is their primary launch system, the greatest launch system in the world ever by far, reusable, most cost-effective, kilograms to low Earth orbit, to geostationary orbit. Every country on the planet would give up their GDP to have this technology to be able to launch and reuse rockets, and they're sunsetting the Falcon 9. And this is like Cortez-level burn the ships upon arriving because they're essentially saying, like, in order to reach our vision in the future, we need, like, a heavier lift launch vehicle. That is Starship. So, you know, starting in a few years, because, you know, they have customers and things like that, you'll no longer be able to buy rides on the Falcon 9. I don't think it's for everything, but, you know, they're gradually basically telegraphing that, like, the Falcon 9 is a past. By the way, the Falcon 9 would be the future for literally every other country, nation state, on the planet. It's the, it's the, it's, it's incredible machine. And yeah, I think this is the, like Elon has built this culture that like, you know, Clayton Christensen is dead, but like he probably would, would shed a tear over how happy it would make him about avoiding the innovators dilemma versus like, just because we have the thing that is the best. We're completely willing to build the thing that will compete against ourselves and make the thing that we built irrelevant. And I wish I had more insight into... What drives that beyond maybe just Elon or that whole organization? But what I've witnessed top to bottom is everybody you talk to there is like, yeah, it's going to be awesome. Yeah, we're going to do this.

中文：是的，是的。不，不，不，像……没有内部消息。我就像是第二方。你知道的，我不是第一方，但是，你知道，我每晚都和一位 SpaceX 工程师睡在一起。这对我有帮助。就是这样。但是不，我认为 SpaceX 现在是美国最伟大的公司，也是世界上最伟大的公司。谢谢。他们正在放弃 猎鹰 9 号，这是一种他们的主要发射系统，迄今为止世界上最伟大的发射系统，可重复使用，性价比最高，能将公斤级载荷送入低地球轨道和地球静止轨道。地球上每个国家都愿意放弃 GDP 来获得这种能够发射和重复使用火箭的技术，而他们却在逐步淘汰 猎鹰 9 号。这就像科尔特斯抵达时烧掉船一样，因为他们本质上在说，为了实现我们未来的愿景，我们需要一种更重型的运载火箭。这就是 星舰。 所以，你知道，从几年后开始，因为，你知道，他们有客户之类的东西，你将不再能够乘坐猎鹰 9 号。我不认为这适用于所有情况，但是，你知道，他们基本上在逐步暗示，猎鹰 9 号已经是过去了。顺便说一下，猎鹰 9 号对于地球上其他每一个国家来说本来都是未来。它，它，它是一个令人难以置信的机器。是的，我认为这是，像埃隆·马斯克已经建立了这种文化，比如，你知道，克莱顿·克里斯坦森已经死了，但他可能会因为看到我们如何避免创新者困境而高兴得掉眼泪，而不是仅仅因为我们拥有最好的东西，我们完全愿意去打造一个与自己竞争的东西，让我们建造的东西变得无关紧要。我希望我对...有更多的见解。 有什么驱动着那一切，可能不仅仅是埃隆·马斯克或者整个组织？但我从上到下的观察是，你和那里每个人交谈时，他们都会说，嗯，这会很棒。是的，我们会做到的。

It's definitely part of the culture, maybe the cult, that they can do this, even though... On paper, and now as a public company, it kind of looks insane. And so yeah, I think that's actually a really underrated part about SpaceX is their ability to essentially burn the ships and focus on what's next.

中文：这绝对是文化的一部分，也许是邪教的一部分，他们能够做到这一点，尽管……从表面上看，现在作为一家上市公司，这看起来有点疯狂。所以，是的，我认为 SpaceX 真正被低估的一点是他们实际上有能力断后专注于下一步。

To me, it comes well back to the original beginning of this conversation, building an org like a terrorist organization, in particular the mission. Like, clearly, the mission of SpaceX, make humanity multi-planetary, get to Mars. And with that mission, I can totally see how they may be working backwards from, in order to do this, we need this larger rocket. It makes no sense to keep investing here. So to me, it feels very clear how they go about making these decisions.

中文：对我来说，这很好地回到了这次对话的最初开端，像建立一个恐怖组织一样建立一个组织，尤其是使命。比如，很明显，SpaceX 的使命是让人类成为多星球物种，到达火星。基于这个使命，我完全可以理解他们可能是倒着推的，比如为了实现这一目标，我们需要更大的火箭。在这里继续投资是没有意义的。所以对我来说，他们做决策的方式感觉非常清楚。

Yeah, I think there's another thing about both of Elon's major, like SpaceX and Tesla. I know less about Neuralink, Boring Company, et cetera. But you look on the website, I mean, now I don't know where it is, but they publish essentially 10-year plans. Nothing SpaceX is doing is not something that they didn't talk about 10 years ago. Tesla talked about exactly what they wanted to do with the initial roadster to fund the S, to fund the 3, like Tesla. The, in some ways, like, the product roadmap is, is published, right? And that's like, as a product leader, like, I aspire to that level of swag, where it's just like, yo, we're gonna do something that's so aggressive and so ambitious, that we can just tell you exactly what you're going to do. Because if you think you can do it better than us, like, you're welcome to try. But like, This, yeah, that's like, yeah, that's a mission, right? That you can publish and turn into a product roadmap. Say you're going to do it, do what you're going to say, and then say like, yeah, copy us. And in the Tesla case, like, oh, and here are the patents too.

中文：是的，我觉得关于埃隆·马斯克的两个主要项目，还有一点事情需要说，比如 SpaceX 和特斯拉。我对 Neuralink、Boring Company 等了解得较少。但你看他们的网站，我现在也不知道具体在哪里，但他们基本上会发布 10 年的计划。SpaceX 正在做的事情，没有一件不是他们 10 年前就谈过的。特斯拉谈到了他们希望通过最初的 Roadster 来资助 S 型，再资助 3 型，正如特斯拉所说。在某种意义上，产品路线图是公开的，对吧？作为一个产品负责人，我也渴望达到那种水平，就是非常自信地说，我们要做一些极具野心和进取的事情，我们可以直接告诉你将要做什么。因为如果你认为你能比我们做得更好，你可以尝试。但是，就这样，是的，这就是一种使命，对吧？ 你可以发布它并把它变成产品路线图。说你要做这件事，做你说要做的事情，然后再说，嗯，跟我们学。在 特斯拉 的例子里，还有，哦，这些也是专利。

Right, I was just going to say, they released their, yeah, all the patents for the Tesla electric stuff.

中文：对，我正想说，他们发布了他们的，是的，特斯拉 电动设备的所有专利。

Yeah, so next level.

中文：是啊，下一阶段。

It's so interesting. So one meme across this podcast over the past couple of months has been systems thinking. The other has actually been ambition and how much that matters now with companies and startups because AI is making it so much easier to build. You just tell it, build this thing, it does it. And what that means is the level of ambition has to keep going up. And that's like a new habit people have to build because we're not naturally... Thank you.

中文：这太有趣了。在过去几个月的这个播客中，一个经常出现的主题是系统思维。另一个主题实际上是雄心以及它在现在的公司和初创企业中有多么重要，因为人工智能让构建变得容易得多。你只需要告诉它，建造这个东西，它就会做。而这意味着雄心的水平必须不断提高。这就像是人们必须培养的新习惯，因为我们天生并不是这样……谢谢你。

like whatever, again, whatever framework you're using, local versus local Optima versus, you know, global Optima, like, you know, opportunity cost. Like it's all basically just trying to build a muscle to help you gain the courage to just like make tomorrow not look like today.

中文：随便啦，不管你用什么框架，本地最优对比本地最优，你知道，全局最优，机会成本之类的。基本上就是在锻炼一种能力，帮助你获得勇气，让明天不要看起来像今天。

Thank you. It's not just the position, it's the vector, right? Like, again, the Falcon 9 is up and to the right like this. But it's like, okay, I don't want the actual position. I don't even want the speed. I don't want the velocity. I want the acceleration. And like, in order to get that acceleration, I need impulse, right? I need the third derivative, I guess. Like, I need to push it and... Yeah, this is just not natural. And people who can do that regularly and repeatedly, but not just like disruptively all the time, like, you know, just always asking for more, blah, blah, blah. I think it became very trendy as like Steve Jobs' kind of like ethos grew. But like, yeah, the type of people who can do that within an organization, especially a large organization, are pretty rare.

中文：谢谢。这不仅仅是位置的问题，而是向量，对吧？就像，猎鹰 9 号 再一次是向上和向右这样的方向。但就像，好吧，我不想要实际的位置。我甚至不想要速度。我不想要速度向量。我想要的是加速度。而为了得到那个加速度，我需要冲量，对吧？我猜需要第三阶导数。就像，我需要推动它，然后……是的，这根本不自然。而那些可以经常、重复这样做的人，但不是一直以破坏性的方式搞事情，就像，你知道的，总是要求更多，诸如此类。我认为随着 Steve Jobs 式的理念发展，这变得非常流行。但是，能够在一个组织里做到这一点的人，尤其是在大组织里的人，非常少见。

I just had Tara Sation on the podcast. She's head of product for ChatGPT Work, although they're always shifting people around. I don't know what her role is these days. And she pointed out the job of PMs now actually more and more is to elevate the ambition of the team, to remind them we can go bigger. What would it take to think bigger? What would the thousand X of this idea be?

中文：我刚在播客上请到了 Tara Sation。她是 ChatGPT Work 的产品负责人，虽然他们总是在调动人员。我不知道她现在的角色是什么。她指出，产品经理现在的工作实际上越来越多是提升团队的雄心，提醒他们我们可以做到更大。要想得更大，需要什么？这个想法的千倍版本会是什么？

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, again, like, if you can do that credibly, repeatedly, you know, not just by, like, showing up to meetings and be like, what if we did more?

中文：是的，是的。我的意思是，再说一次，如果你能可靠地、反复做到这一点，你知道的，不只是像参加会议然后说，‘如果我们做得更多会怎么样？’那样。

Exactly. What if we did it faster?

中文：没错。如果我们做得更快呢？

Yeah, exactly. Like, no, I got, yeah, I have, I've got white male, gray hair, you know, fancy degrees. I can just come at any meeting and be like, have you thought about doing this quicker? Like, okay, like, why don't I just, have you thought about punching yourself in the face? Like, yeah, maybe.

中文：是的，完全正确。就像，不，我明白了，是的，我有，我有白人男性、灰头发，你知道，有些花哨的学位。我可以随时参加任何会议，然后说，你有没有想过更快地完成这个？就像，好吧，我为什么不说，你有没有想过自己打自己一巴掌？嗯，也许吧。

Oh, man. So that's the skill of saying that, but in a way that doesn't get you punched in the face.

中文：哦，伙计。原来这是那种能说出来又不会挨揍的技巧啊。

Yeah, yeah. To be fair, I've been punched in the face a couple of times. You don't get a nose like this naturally. You get punched in the face a couple of times.

中文：是的，是的。公平地说，我被打过几次脸。你不会天生就有这样的鼻子。你是被打了几次脸才有的。

01:10 - 01:20

Is this for real? Is that a real thing that you get punched in the face?

中文：这是真的吗？你真的会被打脸吗？

I have gotten the shit kicked out of me a couple of times because I run my mouth nonstop, but I haven't really learned.

中文：我因为不停地唠叨几次被打得很惨，但我其实并没有真正学到教训。

Is there a story there you can share? Or is that off? That's more ancient history. We like to move past these things. Are there any that we haven't covered, things that you think are kind of recurring pieces of advice or frameworks or even lessons you've learned that you think are important for people to hear that might be helpful?

中文：你那里有可以分享的故事吗？还是说不方便？那属于更古老的历史了。我们喜欢向前看，过去那些事情就让它过去吧。有没有一些我们还没涉及的内容，你认为是一些反复出现的建议、框架，甚至是你学到的课程，你觉得人们应该听到，可能会对他们有帮助的？

I don't think there's like too many. I mean, I think a few of them came up. I think when we were talking about ads, like one that I think I might have, like I don't know if I deserve original credit for this, but I've used it quite a bit, is like this idea that, you know, So, yeah, I think ads is such a cutthroat, hand-to-hand combat, very revenue-goal-driven product area that it's very easy to become very short-term oriented. And one of the things, and this harkens back to the ideological stuff from building the type of organization you want, that we really focused on over the years, both Snap, Discord, and even some of the companies I've advised on the ad stuff, is like... With ads, you really want to be long-term greedy. And that was a phrase we used. And long-term greedy is a funny phrase, but it was actually backed by essentially the kind of like mathematical realization that, which again, it's not rocket science, but like revenue tomorrow for advertising is essentially causally related to the ROI you drive for advertisers today. So... You need to focus, your focus should be on driving advertiser ROI. The issue is that the easiest way to drive ROI is actually to decrease the denominator, the I, so you can lower prices, right? Now, in modern auctions, price is an output, not an input. But the kind of like powerful learning there is that... The way I will grow this business long-term, the way I will hit my goals long-term, the way I will see compounding growth because of retention and increasing budgets, like net revenue retention for some of these SaaS products, is essentially by delivering ROI for people today, even at the cost of potentially short-term revenue. And so this type of phrase allowed for, gave space for a type of thinking that was otherwise, like, can get pretty tough. And people say like, oh, yeah, it's thinking long-term. Again, I'll take it back to like, there are there you're going to encounter times in your career where thinking long term is actually like, really, really fucking tough. And a lot of this time will be when you are a public company, like when you are missing numbers, when like, you may have to do a layoff if certain things don't happen. And to be able to have an ideological setup, right? Thank you. At both Snap and Discord, we created this concept of core product value. And this was related to my DAO comment. You need to define both from a theoretical or a conceptual level, as well as a metrics level, what it means for somebody to come back to your product every single day. And so like Snap, I think at the time was like, Snap is the fastest way to share a moment with the people you care about. So it's like fast, share a moment, people you care about. And you could actually like break down what does fast mean? Like time to load. What does share mean? It's like, okay, you're opening to the camera, was sharing quickly. What is people you care about mean? Focused on best friends. Like you could actually break this thing down. And so you had fastest way to share a moment with your best friends. So if you're building a product roadmap on the consumer side, and you're like, oh, should we work on this? It's like, well, does it help us be the fastest way to share a moment with your best friends? Kind of tenuous link to that. Maybe that's not what we should prioritize. I think Discord was the best way to talk and hang out with your friends before, during, and after playing games. So it's like talk, hang out, games, before, during, after. You can break this thing down. And we actually had metrics definitions, which I think are kind of proprietary internal. But we had metrics definitions that we were looking for. Those metrics definitions made their way into the growth books, into the hacks. Like, okay, did this impact CPV? And this whole ideological language that everybody shared, you could onboard new data scientists to, I think just got people on the program really, really fast.

中文：我觉得没有太多数量。我是说，我觉得有几个出现过。我觉得当我们谈广告时，有一个我可能有的想法，我不知道我是否应该为此获得原创信用，但我用过很多次，就是这个想法，你知道的。所以，是的，我认为广告是一个非常激烈、近战、以收入目标驱动的产品领域，很容易变得非常短期化。其中一件事，这也回到了从建立你想要的那种组织的理念问题，我们多年来真正关注的一点，无论是 Snap、Discord，甚至我所指导的一些公司广告方面的事情，就是……对于广告，你真的想要长期贪婪。这是我们使用的一个短语。 长期贪婪是一个有趣的说法，但它实际上是基于一种本质上的数学认知，其实这并不是什么火箭科学，但广告的明日收入本质上与今天你为广告商带来的投资回报率是因果相关的。所以……你需要专注，你的专注点应该是提升广告商的投资回报率。问题在于，提升投资回报率最简单的方法实际上是减少分母，也就是投资（I），这样你就可以降低价格，对吗？现在，在现代拍卖中，价格是输出而不是输入。但这里有一种强大的学习是…… 我将长期发展这项业务的方式，我将长期实现我的目标的方式，我将看到因为客户留存和预算增加而产生的复合增长的方式，例如一些 SaaS 产品的净收入留存，基本上是通过今天为人们提供投资回报，即使代价可能是短期收入。因此，这种表达方式允许并给了人们一种思维空间，否则这种思维可能相当困难。人们会说，哦，是在进行长期思考。再回到我的观点，你在职业生涯中会遇到一些时刻，长期思考实际上真的非常非常艰难。很多时候这会发生在你成为上市公司时，比如当你未达到业绩指标时，当某些事情没有发生时，你可能不得不裁员。而能够拥有这样一种意识形态的安排，是很重要的，对吗？ 谢谢。在 Snap 和 Discord 中，我们创造了核心产品价值的概念。这与我的 DAO 评论有关。你需要从理论或概念层面，以及指标层面，定义什么意味着有人每天都回到你的产品。就像 Snap，我当时认为，Snap 是与关心的人分享瞬间的最快方式。所以它就是快速、分享瞬间、关心的人。你实际上可以分解‘快速’是什么意思，比如加载时间；‘分享’是什么意思，比如打开相机后快速分享；‘关心的人’是什么意思，比如专注于最好的朋友。你实际上可以把这个概念分解。所以你最终得到的是，与最好的朋友分享瞬间的最快方式。 所以如果你在构建面向消费者的产品路线图时，你会想，哦，我们应该做这个吗？其实可以问自己，这是否有助于我们成为与好友分享瞬间的最快方式？这可能关系不大，也许这不是我们应该优先考虑的。我认为 Discord 以前是与朋友在玩游戏之前、玩游戏中以及玩游戏之后进行交流和相处的最佳方式。所以，它就是交流、相处、游戏——之前、期间、之后。你可以把这个拆解开来。我们实际上还有指标定义，我认为这有点内部专有。但我们确实有一些我们关注的指标定义。那些指标定义最终被纳入了增长手册和小技巧中。例如，这是否影响了 CPV？这种大家共享的理念语言，你可以用它快速让新的数据科学家上手，我认为确实能让人们非常快速地融入这个项目。

These are awesome. This idea of core product value is such a nice way to frame. It combines mission with the levers, essentially, of the business. Yeah. Basically, the idea here is come up with just like a phrase that describes the mission that happens to also connect with how we grow this business. And it feels like three components is a consistent pattern here.

中文：这些太棒了。核心产品价值的这个理念是一个很好的框架方式。它实际上将使命与业务的杠杆结合在一起。是的。基本上，这里的想法是想出一个短语，描述使命，同时恰好也与我们如何发展这个业务相关联。而且感觉这里的三部分是一个一致的模式。

Yeah, three minute, three minute. Yeah, maybe it's just like a rule of threes. Yeah, yeah, that's it. But the way you characterize it exactly right. And like, you can't overlie on one or the other, right? Like, if it's just metrics, it's kind of meaningless to people. If it's just a phrase, it doesn't get actioned day to day by data scientists, product managers and engineers. So having both and building a story around that, and telling that story repeatedly, like for for for core product value at Snap. We actually had an onboarding presentation, which I delivered to every single new hire for seven years straight, every week or every other week later, that was about this, because like, that was part of the cult. Right? Like, this is how we deliver core product value. This is why people choose Snapchat every single day, in the face of tons of alternatives and a bunch of savage competitors. And I think the same same goes for Discord.

中文：是的，三个要素，三个要素。是的，也许这只是一个三的法则。是的，是的，就是这样。但你描述的方式完全正确。而且，你不能只依赖其中一个。比如，如果只是度量指标，对人们来说就有点没有意义。如果只是一个短语，数据科学家、产品经理和工程师在日常工作中也不会付诸行动。所以两者兼有，并围绕它们构建一个故事，并反复讲述这个故事，就像在 Snap 的核心产品价值上那样。实际上，我们有一个入职培训演示，我连续七年每周或每两周为每个新员工进行一次，我都会亲自讲解这个内容，因为这也是那种文化的一部分。对，这是我们传递核心产品价值的方式。这就是为什么人们每天都会选择 Snapchat，即使面对众多替代品和一大堆激烈的竞争者。 我认为 Discord 也是同样的情况。

And the work is coming up with that phrase that actually is clear, simple, connects to all these things. Not easy, I imagine.

中文：而这项工作就是想出那个真正清晰、简单、能与所有这些事物相连的短语。我想，这并不容易。

And the metrics that are like causally demonstrated with retention. That's tough, too. I think no data scientist likes working with me because I'm like, hey, guys, we got to figure this out.

中文：以及那些与留存因果关系明确的指标。这也很难。我想没有数据科学家喜欢和我一起工作，因为我总是说，伙计们，我们必须搞清楚这个问题。

Interesting. Okay, one other take that you mentioned when we were chatting, this is this idea of how a great PM is an oxymoron.

中文：有趣。好吧，你在我们聊天时提到的另一个看法是，这个关于一辆伟大的 产品经理 是自相矛盾的想法。

Yeah, I can't help but think this is maybe why it's so hard to come by some of them, because you see an overexpression. There's basically these three, and yeah, I would love, I bet you could actually come up with this from a synthesis of so many of the amazing product leaders you've had on here, but there are these three oxymorons, I think. There are two wolves inside of the PM three times. One is, I think to be a really good PM... You kind of have to be like really confident. And that borders on arrogance a lot of the time, especially at certain levels. And so that has to be balanced with like some form of humility, like really serious humility, where you kind of, again, are so confident that what we're doing is the right thing to do and that we have conviction on this path. And also personally that I will be recognized for my contribution. I can go out there and give credit to exactly who deserves it. The designer who made that last second change that made a huge difference, the engineer that stayed up all night to get out the thing on time for the partner event. Like, I think that this also ties to being a great leader, but like having the humility and the attention to detail to know who to give credit to actually comes from this sense of confidence that like, you kind of know that PMs are going to get too much credit no matter what. And so I think that's the first one. The second one, which I really like and really try to test for in interviews, and I'm not the best interviewer, is you want these people who are extremely organized and very process-driven. They understand the value of good process and not too much, not too little, etc. And then are just like... Thank you. If you can demonstrate that through some stories or through some kind of like examples, that's like so attractive to me in a candidate. It's like, yeah, I'm really comfortable with ambiguity, but that doesn't mean I just like I'm not organized or like I hate process. Another one of those things where like it's really trendy to just say like all process is useless, but it's like I like somebody who has both of those wolves.

中文：是的，我忍不住觉得这可能就是为什么有些人很难遇到的原因，因为你会看到一种过度表现。基本上有这三种，我很想，我打赌你实际上可以通过对你们这里许多优秀产品领导者的综合理解来总结出来，但我认为有这三种自相矛盾的特质。在 产品经理 中有两只内心的狼出现了三次。其中一只，我认为要成为一个真正出色的 产品经理……你必须非常自信。而这种自信很多时候几乎接近傲慢，特别是在某些层级。所以这必须与某种形式的谦逊平衡，比如真正认真的谦逊，在这种谦逊下，你同样非常自信我们正在做的是正确的事情，并且对这条路径充满信念。同时也希望个人的贡献能够得到认可。 我可以出去并确切地把功劳归给应得的人。那位在最后一刻做出改变并带来巨大影响的设计师，那位为了合作伙伴活动而熬夜把东西按时完成的工程师。我觉得，这也和成为一个伟大的领导者有关，但有谦逊和关注细节去知道该把功劳归给谁，其实来自一种自信感，你大概知道无论如何，产品经理都会得到太多的功劳。所以我认为这是第一个。第二个，我非常喜欢且在面试中真的会测试的一点，虽然我不是最好的面试官，就是你想要找那些极其有条理、非常注重流程的人。他们理解良好流程的价值，不过度也不缺失，然后就是……谢谢你。 如果你能通过一些故事或者一些例子来展示这一点，那对我来说在一个候选人身上非常有吸引力。就是那种，“是的，我对不确定性非常自在”，但这并不意味着我完全不讲组织，也不意味着我讨厌流程。这又是其中一件事，现在很流行说所有流程都是无用的，但我喜欢那种两个方面都具备的人。

And then I think the last one is a little more obvious, but like. You really, a lot of the great PMs that I've worked with really just always have some form of long-term thinking in their mind. Like they just know how they want the world to look six months, a year, two years from now. And they're patient and they know what building blocks need to come into place for the system to work. But yet on a day-to-day basis, their bias for action is just like... Borderline annoying. They're just such good people at setting the pace of the entire company. When they wake up in the morning, the company wakes up, the group wakes up, the team wakes up, whatever it is. And yeah, I think that combination of urgency and bias for action with long-term thinking, those are my three oxymorons, the three pairs of wolves inside every great PM.

中文：然后我觉得最后一点有点明显，但就是那样。我遇到的很多优秀的 产品经理 真的总是脑子里有某种长期的思考。他们就是知道自己希望世界在六个月、一年、两年后会是什么样子。他们耐心，而且清楚为了让系统运作，需要哪些构建模块到位。但是在日常层面上，他们的行动偏好就像……几乎让人恼火。他们在设定整个公司的节奏方面真的是如此出色。当他们早上醒来时，公司就醒了，团队就醒了，不管是什么团队，都被唤醒。是的，我认为这种紧迫感和行动偏好与长期思维相结合，这就是我的三个矛盾组合，每一个优秀的 产品经理 内心都有这三对狼。

01:20 - 01:30

Amazing description of what makes a great PM. Such a cool way to think about it. Nikhil Singhal was on the podcast a couple of times and he talks about the, it's like a different way of thinking about it, but he talks about the shadow. You have a superpower, but then there's the shadow and what the downside of that is. It's a different thing, but I love this. It's just like a really interesting way to just think about what is a great PM. Okay, one final thing before we get to our very exciting lightning round. I want to take us to Contrarian Corner, which is a recurring podcast segment where I feel like you're going to have some good stuff here. The question is just what's something you believe that most other people don't?

中文：对什么造就了一个伟大的 产品经理 的精彩描述。这是一个很酷的思考方式。尼基尔·辛格 曾几次出现在播客中，他谈到了，这就像是另一种思考方式，但他谈到了阴影。你有超能力，但随后有阴影，以及这其中的负面影响。这是另一种情况，但我很喜欢。这只是一个非常有趣的方式来思考什么是一个伟大的 产品经理。好了，在我们进入非常令人兴奋的闪电问答环节之前，我想带大家来到逆向思维角，这是一个定期的播客环节，我觉得你这里会有一些精彩内容。问题就是，你相信的而大多数人不相信的是什么？

Being contrarian is tough these days. It's very trendy to be contrarian, which is ironic. So maybe I should just be conformist. Can I break this into like a light spicy, medium spicy, heavy spicy?

中文：如今做反向思维的人很难。做反向思维现在很流行，这很讽刺。所以也许我应该顺从一点。我能把这个分成微辣、中辣、重辣吗？

Love that. Let's do it.

中文：喜欢那个。我们干吧。

Okay. So my light spicy, I don't think everyone would disagree with this, but I think as a product manager in particular, I don't think we have time to go into everything, but I think the most important career decision you mak is who your partner is, like who you marry, who you spend your time with personally. I think this like has both growth and just like knock-on effects that are really hard to quantify. And yeah, you'd be, there's no... There's no amount of Lenny podcasts you can listen to and internalize that will match, you know, finding a great partner who will, like, help you, support you, and help you grow and be, like, kind of, like, intellectually a sounding board for you. So I think that's probably my light take because I think a lot of people would kind of, like, agree to that in some degree. I know my super spicy one. So that one I don't think of. On the medium spicy, like...

中文：好了。那么我的轻度观点是，我觉得并不是每个人都会不同意这一点，但我认为作为产品经理，尤其如此，我们没有时间事无巨细地考虑每件事，但我认为你做的最重要的职业决定是你的伴侣是谁，比如你娶谁，或者你私下里和谁共度时间。我认为这不仅影响你的成长，而且还会产生很难量化的连锁反应。是的，你会... 没有任何数量的 Lenny 播客可供收听和内化，能够与找到一个优秀的伴侣相比，那种伴侣会帮助你、支持你、帮助你成长，并在某种程度上在智力上成为你的思想碰撞者。所以我认为这可能是我的轻度观点，因为我觉得很多人在某种程度上会同意这一点。我知道我的超级尖锐观点，那一点我还没考虑过。 中等辣的，就像...

This is kind of related to my museum curator comment. I think a lot of people who I look up to in terms of taste, and like, I, maybe it's just being in Los Angeles, but like, I care a lot about like, stuff like art, like art behind me and stuff like that, is I've noticed that, you know, like, The difference, especially in wealthy people, between those who have like taste and those who are seen as like gauch or something like that is the ones with taste like kind of like stop one step before everybody else does. Like, like. And maybe they're collecting art in a certain trend, but then they realize when things are, whatever the old phrase is, jumping the shark, or when things are hitting a certain level where it's like, okay, now is the time to stop and look for something new. And I think that... What you haven't shipped, what you've built and tried and held in your hands and loved but haven't brought to the world, I think is kind of like a test for that in some ways.

中文：这有点和我关于博物馆策展人的评论有关。我觉得，我欣赏品味的人很多，而且，可能只是因为我在洛杉矶，但我非常关心，比如艺术，像我身后的艺术之类的东西，我注意到，尤其是在富人中，那些有品味的人和那些被看作土气或者类似的人之间的区别是，有品味的人总是在别人之前稍微停一步。比如说，也许他们会按照某种趋势收藏艺术品，但当他们意识到某些事情，或者用了老话说，已经“跳入鲨鱼区”，或者当事情达到某种程度时，他们会觉得，好吧，现在是停下来寻找新东西的时候。我认为... 你没有发布的东西，你建造、尝试、亲手触摸并且喜爱的东西，但没有带给世界的东西，我认为在某种程度上，这在某种意义上是一种考验。

And so, yeah, I don't know if that's, yeah, that's like a super contrarian, but I think you can measure a lot is like people with great taste seem just like, know when to take something and get passionate about something and then kind of like...

中文：所以，是的，我不知道这是否，是的，这有点像超级反对派，但我认为你可以衡量很多的是，有好品味的人似乎就是，知道什么时候该接受某些东西，并对某些事情充满热情，然后有点像...

When he gets cringe.

中文：当他感到尴尬时。

Yeah, maybe cringe is it. Yeah, let it go. My spiciest one, and like this is like... We'll bring it back here to the start of the podcast. Why am I doing this podcast now? You and I have known each other, been in group chats, chatted all the time for a long time. This one's probably a take where I don't even know if I'd be super comfortable saying it, depending on my employer. I think that to truly create great consumer products for certain cohorts of huma I think that to truly create... great consumer products for certain cohorts of, of humans, of, of users, um, the product managers and designers that you put on some of those products, um, there are certain, uh, inalienable traits about those product managers that cannot be learned, uh, cannot be acquired that are. that are essential to creating truly great consumer products. And by that, I mean, literally gender, um, race, uh, ethnicity, uh, socioeconomic background. Um, and what I mean by this is not like, Oh, if you want to create a product for, um, you know, young black men, you need to hire young black men. Like, I don't mean stuff like that. I just mean, um, and I don't think, I don't know how comfortable I am giving like examples, but, I do think that we are not comfortable as a society admitting this, but there are certain things about how people are brought up, who they are biologically, things like that, that suit them to better working on certain consumer products. Because at their core, like most consumer products are, and Nikita talks about this too, are like hitting against certain like standards. And so I think that's a really good example of how we can do that. Yeah, maybe I'll leave it at that before I get my second.

中文：是的，也许说尴尬就是它。是的，放手吧。我最辣的一条，而且就像这样……我们会把它带回到播客的开头。我为什么现在要做这个播客？你我彼此认识，很长时间在群聊里聊天，一直在聊天。这一条可能是一个观点，我甚至不确定我是否会很舒服地说出来，这取决于我的雇主。我认为，要真正为某些人群创造出卓越的消费产品，我认为，要真正为某些人群、某些用户创造出卓越的消费产品，放在这些产品上的产品经理和设计师，有一些产品经理具有某些不可剥夺的特质，这些特质无法学习，无法获得，却是创造真正卓越的消费产品所必不可少的。 我的意思是，字面上的性别，嗯，种族，呃，族裔，呃，社会经济背景。我的意思不是说，比如说，如果你想为年轻的黑人男性开发产品，你就需要雇用年轻的黑人男性。我不是这个意思。我只是指，嗯，我也不确定我给例子有多舒服，但我确实认为，作为一个社会，我们不太愿意承认这一点，但人们的成长环境，他们的生物特征等等，这些事情会让他们更适合开发某些消费产品。因为从根本上来说，大多数消费产品，尼基塔也谈到过，都是针对某些标准的。所以我认为这是我们可以这样做的一个很好的例子。好吧，我可能就先说到这里，免得我再喝第二杯。

Yeah, like the real spicy version would be like that grid of here's who you need for this type of product. But we're not going to go there.

中文：是的，真正辛辣的版本会像那个网格，告诉你这个类型的产品需要哪些人。但我们不会谈到那个。

Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that we haven't touched on? Anything else you wanted to share? Anything you want to double down on before we get to our exciting lightning round? We covered a lot of ground, so there might not be.

中文：在我们进入非常激动人心的闪电问答环节之前，还有什么我们还没有涉及到的吗？你还想分享什么吗？在进入令人兴奋的闪电问答之前，有什么你想再次强调的吗？我们已经讨论了很多内容，所以可能没有了。

No, I think, yeah, we covered a ton of ground.

中文：不，我觉得，是的，我们已经覆盖了大量内容。

It's really great.

中文：这真的很棒。

Well, Peter, with that, we reached a very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

中文：好了，彼得，就到这里，我们进入一个非常刺激的闪电环节。我有五个问题要问你。你准备好了吗？

All right. I will admit to our viewers and listeners that I have not prepared for these, which I guess is the point of the lightning round.

中文：好吧。我会向我们的观众和听众承认，我没有为这些做准备，我想这正是快问快答的目的。

That is the point, except they're the same questions to everybody except the last one. Oh, okay. Cool. So there's no, it's not too much of a surprise.

中文：重点就是这样，除了最后一个问题之外，其他问题对每个人都是一样的。哦，好吧。酷。所以这没什么，也不算太惊讶。

Okay. Then I don't need questions. All right.

中文：好的。那么我不需要问题了。好吧。

Okay. And I love it when people aren't prepared. Okay. Two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people.

中文：好的。我喜欢人们没有准备的时候。好的。两三本你发现自己最常推荐给别人的书。

I'm going to butcher the title of it. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. And When Genius Failed.

中文：我要把它的标题搞砸。《如何在崛起的亚洲变得非常富有》和《天才何时失败》

Oh, I haven't heard of these. Amazing.

中文：哦，我没听说过这些。太神奇了。

And then the third one, so how to get filthy risk rising Asia. When Genius Failed is about the rise and fall of long-term capital management in late 1998, caused like one of the crashes or nearly averted crashes. And then my third one, which I actually give to a lot of consumer PMs, is Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, the physicist from MIT.

中文：然后是第三本，那么如何获得迅速上升的风险亚洲。《当天才失败时》讲的是 1998 年末长期资本管理公司的兴衰，这导致了其中一次崩盘或几乎避免的崩盘。然后我的第三本书，我实际上推荐给很多消费者产品经理，是麻省理工学院物理学家艾伦·莱特曼的《爱因斯坦的梦》。

Very unique picks. I haven't heard these on the podcast before. Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

中文：非常独特的选择。我以前在播客上没听过这些。你最近特别喜欢的电影或电视节目是什么？

So I do not consume TV, and I rarely – I haven't watched as many movies as I used to. I used to be a big movie buff. So if I could f So if I could flip this to something that was closer to my heart, gaming, I think if you don't play games, video games, you should give last year's Game of the Year, Claire Obscure, Expedition 33, a shot. Just a wonderful indie studio out of France that constructed a story with music and sound that is just like Louvre-level beauty and really reminds you that games are a form of art that maybe we still as a society haven't yet realized how to appreciate. And I think the people behind it are phenomenal, and I think what they produce is amazing.

中文：所以我不看电视，而且我很少——我不像以前那样看很多电影。我以前是个电影迷。所以如果我能把话题转到更贴近我内心的事情上，那就是游戏。我认为，如果你不玩电子游戏，你应该尝试去玩去年的年度游戏《《光与影：33 号远征队》（Clair Obscur: Expedition 33）》。这是一个来自法国的精彩独立工作室，他们构建的故事配以音乐和声音，简直有着卢浮宫级别的美丽，真的让你意识到游戏是一种艺术形式，也许我们作为社会还没有学会如何欣赏它。我认为背后的人非常了不起，而且我认为他们制作的作品非常棒。

Wow. I want to watch a Twitch stream of you playing it. How fun would that be? That could be your follow-up.

中文：哇。我想看你玩 Twitch 的直播。那会有多有趣啊？那可以成为你的后续内容。

Is that on desktop or is that like a console thing?

中文：那是在电脑上还是像主机那样的东西？

It's available on console as well, but I think probably best experience on desktop. I think it works on Mac and PC.

中文：它在主机上也可以使用，但我觉得在桌面上的体验可能最好。我认为它在 Mac 和 PC 上都能运行。

So cool. I think that's the first game recommended. I like how different this round is than most. Favorite interesting AI product right now?

中文：太酷了。我觉得那是第一个推荐的游戏。我喜欢这一轮和大多数不一样的地方。你现在最喜欢的有趣的 AI 产品是什么？

In general, a lot of the AI products still feel like we're throwing spaghetti at the wall. I'll take a more, and I've heard a couple people actually mention references on the pod. The one that I found that changed my workflow the most at work is was Hex. It was the first time that I just markedly found myself doing something differently immediately. And it was one of the only multiplayer AI experiences that worked. Literally me and the co-founder of Discord, Stan, in a meeting, in a Hex thread, interacting with Hex as we were having discussions in the meeting and getting data back and things like that. Obviously, latency and inference time and stuff like that is still an issue, but I find that product to be like... Really, really great and really changed, like really just enabled me to feel like a super, super human.

中文：总体来说，很多 AI 产品仍然感觉像是在墙上扔意面。我会多尝试一下，我也听到过几个人在播客中提到参考资料。我发现的那个最改变我工作流程的是 Hex。那是我第一次明显地发现自己立即以不同的方式去做事情。它也是少数几个有效的多人 AI 体验之一。字面上说，是我和 Discord、斯坦 的联合创始人在一次会议中，在 Hex 讨论线程里互动使用 Hex，同时我们在会议中进行讨论并获取数据之类的东西。很明显，延迟和推理时间等问题仍然存在，但我觉得这个产品真的... 非常棒，确实改变了很多，使我感觉自己像一个超乎常人的存在。

I love how every one of these answers I don't think anyone's ever said. Two final questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often find useful in work or in life?

中文：我喜欢这些回答中每一个都是我认为没人曾说过的。最后两个问题。你有没有一个常常在工作或生活中觉得有用的座右铭？

There's this quote that I'm going to butcher because I don't have it in front of me that says, That is from John Steinbeck in East of Eden, I think, about the passage of time. And I'm just generally obsessed with the passage of time because the people in my life, whether it's been personal or professional, who I've just always been literally infatuated by, like I've just wanted to spend more time, I've fallen in love with these people. They oftentimes seem to float through time and perceive time very differently than normal people. And this quote from Steinbeck, it's about like how time passes differently when you experience more or less. And essentially, the quote is that like, Duration has no signposts. Sorry, time has no signposts upon which to drape duration. From nothing to nothing is no time at all. And I really want to get the full quote for you, because it's like literally one of those things where you're like, how could a human write this? It's so beautiful. And so like a time, a life that is even scarred with tragedy or like essentially just do it, right? Like just get out there, meet new people, experience things, because the best way to slow the passage of time is essentially to do something with it. And so I'm like, I'm pretty generous, I think, with my time and how I spend it with people and just trying to do things that I want to do as soon as possible because you just never know. And yeah, those time periods that really seem to pass slowly in a good way are the ones where you've just experienced a lot. And so, yeah, this idea that from nothing to nothing is no time at all is so scary and motivating to me.

中文：有一句引述，我要糟蹋它了，因为我手边没有原文。它出自 John 斯坦贝克 在 《伊甸之东》 中的某篇文章，我想，是关于时间流逝的。我对时间的流逝非常着迷，因为我生命中的那些人，无论是私人的还是职业的，我一直对他们充满了字面意义上的迷恋，我就是想和他们共度更多的时间，我爱上了这些人。他们往往似乎在时间中漂浮，对时间的感知与普通人非常不同。而这句来自 斯坦贝克 的引述，大意是，当你经历更多或更少时，时间流逝会有所不同。基本上，这句话的意思是，持续没有标志。抱歉，时间没有标志可以让持续附着。从无到无根本不存在时间。 我真的很想为你完整引用这段话，因为这简直就是那种让人觉得‘一个人怎么可能写出这样的东西？’的东西。它太美了。就像即使是一个充满悲剧的生命，也应该去做那些事情，对吧？就是要出去，认识新朋友，体验新事物，因为减缓时间流逝的最好方式其实就是去做些事情。所以我觉得我自己对时间相当大方，无论是和别人相处，还是尽快去做自己想做的事情，因为你永远不知道会发生什么。是啊，那些以一种美好方式真正缓慢流逝的时间段，往往是你经历了很多事情的时候。所以，从无到无毫无时间可言，这个想法对我来说既可怕又具有激励意义。

01:30 - 01:36:53

That is beautiful. Again, a quote nobody has shared before. Final question. Okay. So I was looking at your LinkedIn, looking at your career history. Funny enough, you were head of product immediately. That was your first product role at a company.

中文：那真是太美了。又是一句以前没人分享过的名言。最后一个问题。好吧。所以我在看你的 LinkedIn，查看你的职业经历。有趣的是，你一上来就担任了产品负责人。这是你在公司的第一个产品职位。

I was a product manager for a little bit, but.

中文：我曾经当过一小段时间的产品经理，但。

Okay. Okay. You've overlooked that in your LinkedIn. So it was a company called Ustream, and you described your role as product leader for the Shiba Inu puppy cam. We need to hear more.

中文：好的。好的。你在你的 LinkedIn 上忽略了这一点。所以那是一家公司，名叫 Ustream，你把自己的角色描述为柴犬小狗摄像头的产品负责人。我们需要听到更多信息。

Yeah, yeah. Ustream is a funny, funny company. It was like the first live streaming. It was one of the first live streaming companies, a long stride live stream, the company actually called live stream, and Justin TV with Justin Kahn and him, like kind of a golden age of live streaming that was first enabled by essentially like higher bandwidth and things like that. And sometimes we talk about failures, like Ustream was essentially a failure because we should have focused on gaming. Justin.TV focused on gaming, became Twitch, etc. But one thing about Ustream, or I'll tell you really quick, I know it's lightning round. The number one product advisor to Ustream, this is 2009, was Josh Elvin. That was my come up in product was 17 years ago, having a mentor who was Josh Ellman, which was really, really phenomenal to learn product. And then the actual first product manager at Ustream was this guy, Matt Schlicht, who had dropped out of high school, I think, to work on the product. Thank you. Ustream became really popular from the Shiba Inu puppy cam, which was somebody taking a Logitech camera and aiming it at a litter of new Shiba Inu puppies and 24-7 just streaming these puppies growing up, acting crazy, etc. And we should have learned – there were actually three 24-7 cams at the time, I think. There was – There was the Shiba Inu puppy cam. Then there was the eagle cam that showed the birth of baby eagles in Decorah, Iowa. And then there was Jason Kalkanis on just like 24-7 broadcast. He was the only person who could afford like a broadcasting. His This Week in Startups. So two beautiful things and one hideous thing. No, I'm just kidding. But yeah, the Shiba Inu puppet cam, there was a lot to learn about that. People use it as their background. Just to have it in the background while they worked on their headphones, just listening to these puppies was very soothing. And we got so many emails and people being like, this saved my life, like blah, blah, blah.

中文：是的，是的。Ustream 是一家非常有趣的公司。它就像是第一个现场直播公司之一，它是其中一家公司，长程直播公司，实际上叫做直播公司，还有 Justin TV，由 Justin Kahn 创立，那时候算是直播的一个黄金时代，本质上是由更高带宽等因素促成的。有时候我们谈论失败，比如 Ustream 本质上是失败的，因为我们本应该专注于游戏。Justin.TV 专注于游戏，后来变成了 Twitch 等等。但关于 Ustream，有一件事我很快就告诉你，我知道这是闪电战环节。Ustream 在 2009 年的首席产品顾问是 Josh Elvin。那次我在产品领域的成长是在 17 年前，有一位像 Josh Ellman 这样的导师，这对于学习产品来说真的是非常、非常棒的经历。 然后，Ustream 的第一个真正的产品经理是这个人，马特·施利希特，我想他是为了做产品而从高中辍学的。谢谢。Ustream 因为柴犬小狗摄像头变得非常受欢迎，那是有人用一个罗技摄像头对准一窝新生的柴犬小狗，全天候 24 小时直播这些小狗的成长、胡闹等。我们本该学到一些东西——当时实际上有三个全天候摄像头，我想。一个是柴犬小狗摄像头。然后是鹰摄像头，显示爱荷华州德科拉刚出生的小鹰。还有一个是 Jason Kalkanis 全天候广播。他是唯一负担得起这种广播的人。他的节目是《初创企业本周》。所以是两件美好的事情和一件丑陋的事情。不，我只是开玩笑。不过，是的，柴犬小狗摄像头，那里有很多东西可以学。 人们把它作为背景。只是为了在他们用耳机工作时让它在背景播放，仅仅听这些小家伙就非常让人放松。我们收到了很多邮件，人们都说，这救了我的命，之类的，诸如此类。

Yeah, yeah, it was really fun. Live streaming is still kind of like an uncracked product category. Still technically challenging, quite expensive, et cetera. But I learned a lot from a consumer standpoint from that.

中文：是的，是的，真的很有趣。直播仍然有点像一个未被开发的产品类别。技术上仍然具有挑战性，相当昂贵，等等。但从消费者的角度来看，我从中学到了很多。

Incredible. There's also on your LinkedIn, you worked at a company that incubated Dollar Shave Club and Liquid Death. We're not going to get into that. Peter, you mentioned briefly a second ago how generous you are with your time. I really appreciate you making time to be here. We got through so much. And this is one of the longer episodes I've done, which says a lot about just how much there is to talk about and how much you have to share. So thank you for being here.

中文：真不可思议。在你的 LinkedIn 上，你还曾在一家公司工作，这家公司孵化了 Dollar Shave Club 和 Liquid Death。我们暂且不谈这个。彼得，你刚才提到你在时间上是多么慷慨。我非常感谢你抽出时间来这里。我们讨论了很多。这也是我做过的较长的一集，这说明有很多话题可以聊，也说明你有很多可以分享的内容。所以谢谢你来到这里。

Yeah, it's so great to talk about some of this stuff. And, you know, I haven't expressed it externally in a lot of ways. And really, I think it says a lot about like you and your podcast and your readership and viewership. I think you like probably have done more than any person to really shape what this career looks like and how it's improved over the years. So I'm really grateful for the time. I'm grateful for everybody who listened.

中文：是的，谈论这些事情真的很棒。你知道，我在很多方面其实还没有对外表达过。实际上，我觉得这很能说明你、你的播客以及你的读者和观众。我觉得你可能比任何人都更有影响力，真正塑造了这个职业的样子，以及它这些年来是如何改进的。所以我非常感激这段时间。我也感激所有听过的人。

Final question, how can listeners be useful to you?

中文：最后一个问题，听众如何对你有用？

I thi people, if they listen through this podcast, they probably got an idea of like, not necessarily like the contrarian takes, but just some of the aspects of like how I think about, um, product that are maybe like just like a little bit different than the typical product leader that came up in Silicon Valley or something like that. And, um, yeah, if they feel, if they feel like something resonates to them or that they disagree with something and want to correct it or, or they'd have beef with it or they just like something fascinated them about it. Um, I would love to hear about it. I'm not, yeah, I would just love to hear. I just love, I love hearing when, I love disagreeing with stuff. I love hearing about stuff like that.

中文：我认为，如果人们通过这个播客来听的话，他们可能大概能了解一些，比如，不一定是反常的观点，但只是一些我在思考产品时的方面，可能有点不同于典型的硅谷产品负责人之类的人。嗯，如果他们觉得，有些东西跟他们产生共鸣，或者他们不同意某些观点想要纠正，或者他们对某事有意见，或者他们只是觉得某些东西很吸引他们，嗯，我很想听到这些。我并不是，嗯，我只是很想听，我喜欢听当别人不同意某些东西时的想法，我喜欢听这样的东西。

Sweet. And we'll point you to your socials if folks want to disagree with you. Peter, thank you so much for being here.

中文：太好了。如果有人想反对你，我们会指引他们到你的社交媒体。彼得，非常感谢你今天到这里。

Thank you for having me, Lenny. Really appreciate it.

中文：谢谢你邀请我，Lenny。真的很感激。

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

中文：再见，大家。非常感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这个内容有价值，可以在 苹果 播客、Spotify，或者你喜欢的播客应用上订阅本节目。此外，请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这真的有助于其他听众找到这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有以往的节目或了解更多关于本节目的信息。我们下期节目再见。