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David Friedberg: Entrepreneurship Gives Life Meaning [Entire Talk]

发布时间 2011-10-08 00:24:09    来源
Without further ado, David. Thank you. Hi. Thanks for coming in the rain. I know the weather can have an impact on how things turn out. And I'm glad that we had a great turnout here today. I started out with a picture of the greatest entrepreneur that never lived, Willy Wonka. So we have a fond appreciation for him. When I was asked to give a talk about entrepreneurism, it sort of got me thinking along the lines of, you know, well, I've never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. People sort of use that term a lot and it's bandied about that, you know, entrepreneurism is like a career. It's like something you decide you're going to do. And a lot of people say, I'm a serial entrepreneur, I'm going to go do entrepreneurial stuff. And so it got me thinking about, well, why do I not feel that way? And what is it about what I do that makes me say I'm not an entrepreneur.
好的，接下来有请大卫。谢谢。大家好。感谢大家在雨天前来参加。我知道天气可能会影响事情的进展。我很高兴今天有这么多的人到场。我以从未存在过的最伟大的企业家威利·旺卡的照片作为开始，所以我们都非常欣赏他。当我被邀请来谈论创业时，这让我开始思考，大家知道，我从未认为自己是一个企业家。人们常常使用这个词，谈到创业，好像是一种职业，是你决定去做的事情。很多人会说，我是一个连续创业者，我要去做创业的事情。这让我开始思考，为什么我没有这种感觉？我的工作中有什么让我觉得自己不是一个企业家。

So I tried to sort of put together some of those thoughts and put together some of the things that I feel I've learned in starting this company. And I hope that it helps frame things. So just by way of important to have an agenda. I've learned over the last couple of years it's important to be organized. So I've tried to Greg works with me so he knows it's something I've had to work on. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my background and a little bit about the company that we started about five years ago called Weather Bill. And then there's sort of some learnings about entrepreneurism and some ways that I like to think about entrepreneurism now that I thought I'd share with you.
所以，我试图将一些想法整理出来，并总结一些我在创办这家公司过程中学到的东西。我希望这些能够为大家提供一些参考。首先，我意识到制定计划的重要性。在过去的几年里，我学到了有条理的重要性。我和Greg一起工作，他知道这是我必须要努力的一个方面。因此，我会谈一些我的背景，以及我们大约五年前成立的公司Weather Bill。此外，我还想分享一些关于创业的经验，以及我现在对创业的一些思考方式。希望能对大家有所启发。

So I was born in South Africa in Cape Town as where I spent my youth. When I was six years old my parents and my sister and I moved to the United States. At the time in 1986 when we moved, you know, a part-time was ending in South Africa. And for those who aren't familiar with the history, a lot of folks left the country. My parents family, all both sides of the family, everyone seemed to move to London. It's a popular place to find oneself after South Africa. And my parents set out on what I would call sort of their entrepreneurial conquest, which was to become big filmmakers in Hollywood. So they were filmmakers in South Africa, worked for the public television station there. And they wanted to go and have a shot at making it big.
我在南非开普敦出生，并在那里度过了我的童年。当我六岁时，父母和妹妹以及我一起移居到了美国。当时是1986年，南非的一个时代正接近尾声。对于不太了解历史的人来说，那时有许多人离开了南非。我的父母双方家族的所有成员似乎都搬去了伦敦，这对许多离开南非的人来说是一个热门目的地。我的父母则踏上了我认为是他们的创业征程，目标是在好莱坞成为著名的电影制片人。他们在南非时也是电影制片人，为当地的公共电视台工作，但他们希望能在好莱坞有所成就。

So they took my sister and I and we moved to Los Angeles when I was six years old. When we moved, in 1984 my, the first Macintosh computer came out and my dad had bought one of the first Macs made available in South Africa. And he used Mac paint and our old image writer printer to print up a sign that said go for gold. And he took the sign and he put it up in my mom's editing room where she edited her films. And that sign's out there as sort of a reminder that they made this big change in their life when they were young with two young kids in tow and no money to make it happen. To come to LA and try and go for their dreams and try and make a make a new life for themselves.
他们带着我和妹妹一起搬到了洛杉矶，当时我才六岁。1984年，我们搬家的时候，第一台Macintosh电脑刚刚面世，我爸爸买了一台南非市场上最早的Mac之一。他用Mac paint软件和我们家的旧图像打印机打印了一张写着“争取金牌”的标语。他把这张标语贴在我妈妈剪辑电影的房间里，以此作为一个提醒：他们年轻时带着两个年幼的孩子，手头几乎没有什么钱，就做出了这个重大改变，来到洛杉矶，努力追求他们的梦想，并试图为自己创建一个新的生活。

And I'm assuming I haven't really dealt too much into it, but I'm assuming there was some sort of relationship between my parents attitude towards making life decisions and what I ended up doing in my life later on. So when I grew up in Hollywood, you know, I went to the school with all the Hollywood kids, but we didn't have a lot of money and there was a lot of unemployment and my parents, you know, struggled in Hollywood as a lot of independent filmmakers do over the years. And I was always sort of the kid at school who didn't really have the ability to afford all the things that the other kids could. I always felt a little bit constrained and a little bit as an outsider and not very socially well adjusted.
我没怎么深入探讨过这个问题，但我猜我的父母在做生活决策时的态度和我后来的人生选择之间存在某种联系。小时候我在好莱坞长大，和好莱坞明星的孩子们一起上学。虽然我们家不太富裕，好莱坞也有不少失业现象，我的父母作为独立电影制作者总是很辛苦。我一直是学校里那个买不起其他孩子所能消费的东西的孩子。我总觉得有点受限，有点像个外人，社交上也不太适应。

And it was sort of, you know, when I was 16 years old that I got my first opportunity to leave and get out of there and try and change my life. I've realized looking back that was sort of why I ended up leaving. I went to upstate New York to a school for a year where I actually got a job working in a pool hall. And the owner of the pool hall was really big into playing poker and I started playing poker with him and the local bookie that ran the books for all the sports betting in upstate New York. It was a really funny experience at 16 years old to go through with this. I ended up coming back to California and starting a program at Cal, a major in astrophysics.
我16岁的时候，第一次有机会离开那里，尝试改变我的生活。回头来看，这就是我当初为什么要离开的原因。我去纽约州北部的一所学校待了一年，在那里我找了一份在台球厅工作的工作。台球厅的老板特别喜欢玩扑克，我也开始和他还有当地负责体育博彩的庄家一起玩扑克。16岁的时候经历这样的事，真是件有趣的经历。后来我回到了加州，在加州大学开始了一门天体物理学的课程。

And since I was a young kid, I always said when I was a young kid, I want to understand the secrets of the universe. I want to unlock and understand why things work the way they do. And I know there's a lot of engineering students in here and I've got to imagine there's a hint of a motivation in each one of you that says why are things the way they are? What makes them work? And for me, the biggest problems, the biggest questions that had never been answered are found in cosmology and in astrophysics and this is what sort of drove me to go get my degree in astrophysics.
从我还是个小孩的时候起，我就一直说，我想要理解宇宙的奥秘。我想揭开并理解事物为何以那样的方式运作。我知道这里有很多工程专业的学生，我相信你们每个人心中都或多或少有这样的动力，想知道为何事物是这个样子？是什么让它们运作起来？对我来说，那些从未被解答的最大的问题都存在于宇宙学和天体物理学中，这也正是驱使我去攻读天体物理学学位的原因。

And while I was at school, I got a job as an undergrad doing some work at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and sort of like getting inside the sausage factory. You know, when you work at these department of energy labs, you really see sort of what is it about the scientific breakthroughs that people win Nobel prizes for? How does it all work? And I know that there's probably some folks here who might work at Slack or might have some experience similarly. But I always thought as a kid, fantastically like Albert Einstein sat in a room with a piece of paper and a pencil he solved the secrets of the universe and wrote the general theory of relativity.
在我上学期间，我找到了一份本科生的工作，在劳伦斯伯克利实验室做一些工作，就像亲身进入“香肠工厂”一样。你知道，当你在这些能源部的实验室工作时，你真的能看到那些让人获得诺贝尔奖的科学突破究竟是怎么回事？这一切是如何运作的？我知道这里可能有一些人可能在Slack工作，或者有类似的经历。但我小时候总是充满幻想地认为，像阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦那样的人，会坐在一个房间里，手拿一张纸和一支铅笔，解决宇宙的奥秘，并写下广义相对论。

That's how it works, right? No, there's a machine and it takes forever and there's thousands of people involved. And the degree of impact at which and the pace at which things progressed, I found frustrating. And I realized it's not the life I wanted to live. While I was an undergrad in 1998 to 2000, there was this dot com bubble going on and it might be read about in the history books nowadays. I'm really surprised because I walk in, I feel old. So like this was, you know, 10 years ago when I graduated.
这就是它的运作方式，对吧？其实不是这样的。有一台机器，需要很长时间，还涉及成千上万的人。我对事物进展的速度和影响程度感到沮丧。我意识到这不是我想要的生活。在我1998年到2000年读本科时，正好赶上互联网泡沫，现在可能已经写进了历史书。我感到很惊讶，因为走进校园，我会觉得自己老了。就好像这是我十年前毕业的事了。

But so at the time the dot com bubble was going on and I would start to read the Wall Street Journal. I thought it was really interesting. Like there's these crazy ideas coming out of Silicon Valley and people are doing crazy stuff. And they're seemingly changing the world. The world is changing before my very eyes and around the world in which I live. And I read these stories in the Wall Street Journal. I remember I loved the marketplace section because it was like profiles of people doing cool stuff.
当时正值互联网泡沫时期，我开始阅读《华尔街日报》。我觉得非常有趣，因为硅谷正在冒出一些疯狂的想法，人们在做一些疯狂的事情，他们似乎正在改变世界。世界就在我眼前以及我生活的周围发生变化。我在《华尔街日报》上读到了这些故事。我记得我特别喜欢市场版块，因为那里有关于一些人做酷事的专题报道。

And I thought this is what I want to do rather than sit in the dark room and be part of a cog in a machine that was going to take forever to output some theory that may or may not be disproven 50 years later. I wanted to be able to go out and do something that was impactful and would have lasting change in the world. And I could control my own destiny and I could make that happen in the time that I live on this earth. And it was really exciting to me towards the end of my undergrad career.
我意识到，与其待在暗房里成为一个机器的一部分，花费无尽的时间去输出某个可能在50年后被推翻的理论，不如去做一些更有影响力的事情，为世界带来持久的改变。我希望能够掌握自己的命运，并在我有生之年实现这一目标。大学快毕业的时候，这让我感到无比兴奋。

So I said I want to go and do technology stuff. And I want to go do this Silicon Valley stuff. So towards the end of my career, it became clear this dot com bubble was blowing up and there were all sorts of problems in Silicon Valley. And around that time I got a job in investment banking when I graduated because that was like the one thing that seemed like, oh, it's a good job. You can actually make a that's a secret of my success. Michael J Fox.
所以我说我想去搞技术，而我想去硅谷做这些事情。但在我职业生涯接近尾声时，很明显互联网泡沫开始破裂，硅谷出现了各种各样的问题。大约在那个时候，我毕业后找到了一份投资银行的工作，因为那看起来是一个不错的选择，这是我成功的秘诀之一，就像迈克尔·J·福克斯一样。

The you know, that's the one job that everyone sort of said that's a good profile job. You'll learn a lot about how technology works. I was doing technology investment banking. We basically advise companies on acquisitions. And when I started, there was 11 people in my investment banking analyst class and two years later, there were only two of us left. It was like the great contraction, I would call it, of Silicon Valley that I got to sit through and watch dozens of companies and I worked on about 20 acquisitions at the time.
你知道，那是大家都认为有发展前途的工作。你会学到很多关于科技运作的知识。我当时在做科技投资银行业务，主要是为公司提供收购建议。刚开始的时候，我所在的投资银行分析师班有11个人，两年后只剩下我们两个人。我称之为硅谷的大萎缩，我亲身经历并见证了几十家公司的变化，当时我参与了大约20起收购案。

And I got to see all these companies and and sort of the CEO that started these things and the failures that they went through and the challenges and they're selling these companies off because it's a frenzy and it's a disaster and so on and so forth. And then I did a little work in private equity and during the time I was focused on finding investments to make an online advertising company. So it was really cool. I got to see all these different businesses and how they worked and how they operated.
我见到了所有这些公司，以及那些创办公司的CEO们，了解了他们经历的失败和挑战。因为现在市场非常混乱和糟糕，他们纷纷出售这些公司。之后，我在私募股权领域工作了一段时间，专注于寻找投资机会，以创建一家在线广告公司。这段经历真的很不错，我得以了解这些不同的企业、它们的运营方式和运作模式。

And I learned a lot about Google at the time and how Google was doing and it was a growing up company. It's about less than 1,000 people there at the time. There was clearly a future in front of it. It was still a private company, very secretive, but there was a good understanding of sort of what was going on there. And they were forming a corporate development team and so I took advantage of the opportunity and joined because, you know, let's see how a business works.
当时，我对谷歌有了很多了解，知道它是一家正在成长中的公司。那时，谷歌的员工还不到1000人，很明显它有着光明的前景。谷歌仍然是一家私营公司，保持着很高的神秘性，但人们对它的发展状况有一定的了解。当时，他们正在组建一个企业发展团队，所以我抓住机会加入了，为的是看看一个企业是如何运作的。

This is something that's interesting and exciting and I've never actually worked at a company and seen how these companies work. And the exciting part about private equity was you could invest in these businesses and see them grow. Well now you can actually be a part of it. So that's why I made the move to Google and I learned more in Google than I did at any other point in my career in my life for that matter because there was so much going on by the time I left Google. There was over 10,000 people. And I left Google to start Weather Bill.
这件事情对我来说既有趣又令人兴奋，因为我从未在公司工作过，也从未见识过这些公司的运作方式。而私募股权最吸引人的部分，是可以投资这些企业并见证它们的成长。现在，我实际上可以成为其中的一部分。这就是我转职到谷歌的原因。在谷歌，我比职业生涯中任何其他时候都学到了更多的东西，因为在我离开谷歌时，公司规模已经超过了一万人。我离开谷歌是为了创办Weather Bill。

So let me tell you the story. In 2002, I used to drive past down the Embarcadero to get on the 280 to go to work in Foster City. And I used to drive past this place called the Bike Cut. It's right next to AT&T Park on the Embarcadero. And they rent bicycles to tourists and they ride them around on the waterfront. And at the time when I was doing investment banking, I was learning about finance and I was learning about business and how managers think about their P&L and their income statements and so on.
让我告诉你一个故事。2002年，我经常开车经过Embarcadero，然后上280号公路去Foster City上班。那时，我会经过一个叫Bike Cut的地方，就在Embarcadero上的AT&T球场旁边。那里租自行车给游客，他们可以骑着自行车在海滨区转悠。当我在做投资银行工作的时候，我正在学习金融和商业，了解经理人如何看待他们的利润损益表和收益报告等等。

And every day it was raining, the Bike Cut would be closed. So the guy wouldn't even come in and open up shop because tourists aren't renting bikes and riding around in the rain. So the dude didn't even show up to work. And I thought that's a pretty crappy business. Like whether or not this guy is going to make money in a given month is based on how many days it rains. And so you start to think, well, that's actually a big problem. You ever go to the movie theater on a Sunday when it's raining? There's like so many people in the movie theater. And the coffee shops are packed when it's raining. No one goes to the ski resorts when it's warm and it hasn't snowed.
每天如果下雨，“Bike Cut”就会关门。所以那个员工根本不会来开店，因为下雨天游客不会租自行车出去骑。因此，他干脆就不来上班了。我觉得这生意做得真不咋地。他一个月能不能赚钱全看下雨的天数。这样一想，就会觉得这真是个大问题。你有没有在周日下雨时去过电影院？那时候电影院里人满为患。而且雨天咖啡店也是人挤人。然而，当天气暖和而且没下雪时，没有人会去滑雪场。

So like you start to think about it and it turns out that I love this statistic. This is our big number. The 70% of businesses are affected by the weather every year. So years later when I was at Google, I came back to this idea about sort of all the world's businesses affected by the weather. Maybe there's something they can do about it. And we can sell coverage to pay them if bad weather happens, making it easier for them to run and manage their businesses. 70% of the world's businesses, $4 trillion of the GDP in the United States each year.
所以，当你开始思考这个问题时，结果发现我非常喜欢这个统计数据。这里有一个重要的数字：每年有70%的企业受到天气的影响。多年后，当我在谷歌工作时，我又想到了这个关于所有企业都受天气影响的想法。也许他们可以采取一些措施来应对这个问题。我们可以出售保险，当恶劣天气发生时向他们支付赔偿金，这样企业就更容易运营和管理。全球70%的企业，每年涉及美国GDP的4万亿美元。

And at the time I was working at Google, working on AdWords, and this idea of sort of taking lots of data and being able to extract signal from it and determine some sort of fee or charge that one would make to a customer in the case of Google advertisers could apply here. We could analyze weather data, we could determine the probability of future weather events occurring, and we could sell you coverage that would pay you if bad weather worked to happen to your business.
当时我在谷歌工作，负责AdWords项目。我们有一个想法，就是从大量数据中提取有用的信息，以确定在谷歌广告客户的情况下向客户收取某种费用或服务费。这种思路也可以应用到其他领域。举个例子，我们可以分析天气数据，预测未来天气事件发生的概率，然后销售一种保险产品：如果恶劣天气对你的业务造成影响，我们就会赔付给你。这样，我们就能帮助客户减轻坏天气带来的风险。

And so if you know that the bad weather is going to cause a loss of 100 bucks, well then you want to get paid 100 bucks when that bad weather happens. And so we'll give you a price to cover that because we will be able to figure out the probability of that event occurring and we will charge you an appropriate charge to cover you. And there's no claims process or proof of loss because we can monitor the weather. There's all these data feeds available now.
如果你知道恶劣天气会造成100美元的损失，那么在这种情况下，你就希望得到100美元的赔偿。因此，我们会给你一个价格来弥补这种损失，因为我们可以计算出这种事件发生的概率，并收取与你风险相对应的费用。由于我们可以监测天气，现在有各种数据源可用，所以不需要申报索赔或证明损失。

We can choose a weather station where we have a data feed and we'll monitor the weather automatically and we'll trigger a check to you if it happens. So big problem, huge global market opportunity. The first step was building a basic sort of prototype. And so this was our first prototype. Can you see that? Yeah, cool. It's pretty good looking website. So I wrote a prototype. The first thing I did was buy some weather data. So you got to, you know, we bought some weather data for about 200 stations and we got availability on feeds into those 200 weather stations.
我们可以选择一个有数据来源的气象站，通过自动监控天气情况，并在发生变化时通知你。这个问题非常重大，全球市场潜力巨大。我们的第一步是构建一个基本的原型。这就是我们的第一个原型。你能看到吗？对，很好看的网站。所以我编写了一个原型，首先购买了一些天气数据。我们购买了大约200个气象站的数据，并为这些气象站的数据供应建立了获取渠道。

So we can now monitor 200 weather stations and we knew what the history was going back 30 years. And so the first pricing engine was written in R. Everyone here familiar with R, right? So it's like open source and you can write a Java connector and then you can write a front end app and now you've got a website that uses R to price stuff. And so we were able to use the data that we had bought. And so when you typed in the dates of coverage you wanted and choose your weather station and say, what do you want to get paid for?
现在我们可以监测200个气象站，而且还可以追溯到30年前的历史数据。第一个定价引擎是用R语言编写的，大家都熟悉R吧？R是开源的，所以你可以写一个Java连接器，再开发一个前端应用程序，这样你就能建立一个使用R语言进行定价的网站。我们可以利用购买的数据，当你输入你想要覆盖的日期，选择你所需的气象站，并指定你希望获得的赔付款时，我们就能进行计算。

I want to get paid a thousand bucks every day it rains more than a quarter inch as measured at the Stanford campus. So we would take the appropriate weather data, look at the last 30 years of history, get a distribution, fit a distribution model to the empirical data. And we would be able to use that to calculate the expected loss on that product and be able to figure out what we should charge you to cover you against that occurring.
我希望在斯坦福校园每天降雨量超过四分之一英寸时能获得一千美元的收入。为此，我们会采用相关的天气数据，查看过去30年的历史记录，得到一个分布情况，并将这个分布模型应用于这些实际数据。通过这种方法，我们可以计算出这种情况下的预期损失，并能确定我们应该向你收取多少费用来赔付这种情况的发生。

So that was the very simplistic prototype and we could use that to then go and ask people for money to start this business. So the first guy would to give us money was a guy named Danny Rimer who works at a venture fund called index ventures. He wrote us a check for $300,000, which I then was able to quit Google and go and say comfortable enough to do this. And when I quit Google I left a lot of stock on the table and a lot of money behind and I didn't have a lot of money at the time and it was kind of like, well, why not? Let's just take advantage of this opportunity we have in life and when you're presented with opportunities where you feel you can make a really big impact, it's worth doing it in light of the sort of comfort of not doing it.
这只是一个非常简单的原型，但我们可以用它来向人们筹集资金，以启动这个业务。第一个愿意投资我们的，是一位名叫丹尼·里默的人，他在一家名为Index Ventures的风险投资公司工作。他给我们开了一张30万美元的支票，这让我能够离开谷歌，并且有足够的底气去全力投入这个项目。当我离开谷歌时，我放弃了大量的股票和可观的财务收入，那时我并没有很多钱。这有点像是，反正何不试试看呢？生活中有这样的机会让我们产生重大影响的时候，值得在可能的安逸面前抓住这个机会。

So the first step was to raise more money because $300,000 is enough to get things going but to hire folks to work for us and try and recruit them. We needed to raise a series A round or a seed round of funding from Agile Vester. So we went across Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road and all the VCs that we met with said no, including some who are now investors in the company many years later. You can never hold a grudge in Silicon Valley. Just always smile and say I'll take your check. Thank you very much.
所以，第一步是筹集更多的资金，因为30万美元足够开始运作，但要雇佣员工来为我们工作并尝试招募他们，我们需要从Agile Vester筹集A轮或种子轮的资金。因此，我们走遍了硅谷、Sand Hill Road，所有我们见过的风投公司都拒绝了我们，包括一些现在已经成为我们公司投资者的公司。你在硅谷永远不能心存怨恨，只需始终微笑着说：“我会接受你的支票，非常感谢。”

So we completely failed at raising money because we went to these VCs and we're like, we're going to start this business that pays people for bad weather and they can choose the weather they want to get paid for and we'll figure out the probability and we'll cover them. That is not an X for Y business. I call them X for Y. It's like Group On for Moms. It's a lot easier for people to understand something in the context of how they're already operating in the context of other business models and the context of how things operate today.
所以，我们在筹集资金时完全失败了，因为我们去找那些风险投资公司时，说要创办这样一个公司：我们打算为人们遭遇的不良天气支付赔偿，用户可以选择他们希望获得赔偿的天气，然后我们会计算概率并为他们提供保障。这并不是一个"X 为 Y"的业务。我称它为"X 为 Y"。这就像"专为妈妈们打造的团购网站"这种概念。在现有的商业模式和运作方式中，人们更容易理解这样的公司。

So to sort of come at this from a fundamental problem with what we think is a good technology solution was sort of a little bit challenging to sell. Granted, we probably weren't doing a good job selling at the time and over time we refined the pitch and we refined the story and this is a completely greenfield. No one knows what's going to happen with what we're doing.
要从根本上解决我们认为是一个好技术方案的问题，这在推销上有点困难。当然，当时我们的推销可能做得不够好。随着时间的推移，我们改进了推销方式和讲述方式。这个项目是全新领域，没有人确切知道我们的工作会带来什么结果。

So luckily I knew a lot of people that had a lot of money because I worked at Google and company had gone public and people had done well. So I raised money from them. And so we raised about $2 million from what I would call angel investor friends and we started this thing and later on index ventures in any age of us another $2 million note and we sort of were able to start hiring people. So this was our launch.
幸运的是，因为我在谷歌工作并且公司已经上市，很多人赚了很多钱，所以我认识了很多有钱人。我向他们筹集了资金，大概从我称之为天使投资人的朋友那里筹集到了约200万美元。我们就这样开始了这个项目，后来 Index Ventures 和 NEA 也给我们提供了另一个200万美元的资助，我们就可以开始招聘员工了。这就是我们项目的启动过程。

We launched in January of 2007. This is the best picture I could find. I did a Google image search for phone booth in the middle of a field because that's sort of what it felt like. Right. We did this great big build. Right. We were like 24 seven no sleep for months before we launched in January of 2007. And the idea was we would put that great website. We just saw up made it available to the world and the 70% of businesses that had problems with the weather were exposed to the weather would all show up and they would finally say finally I'm a lemonade stand owner.
我们在2007年1月启动了。这是我能找到的最好的一张图片。我用谷歌搜索了“田野中的电话亭”，因为这大概就是当时的感觉。对，我们进行了这个非常庞大的项目构建。没错，我们在2007年1月启动之前的几个月中几乎是全天候工作，几乎没有休息。我们的想法是，将我们刚才看到的那个很棒的网站提供给全世界，那些有气象问题的70%的企业都会出现，他们终于会说：终于，我是一个柠檬水摊主了。

I always wanted to buy this product. I'm so glad you put the weather below website up. Let me pull out my credit card and they would start buying stuff. So no one bought. At the time we also had to do a lot of learning about regulatory stuff. So we met with the CFTC and lawyers and we're like we didn't have insurance paper. That's a whole nother multi day lecture about how insurance works. It's a painful lesson we've all had to learn.
我一直都想买这个产品。我很高兴你们把天气相关的网站上线了。我正准备拿出我的信用卡来买东西。但是没有人购买。当时我们还不得不学习很多关于监管的知识。所以我们与CFTC（美国商品期货交易委员会）和律师见了面，我们发现没有保险文件。这又是一个关于保险如何运作的漫长而复杂的课程。这是我们都必须经历的一个痛苦的教训。

But we wrote these products as derivative contracts over the counter derivatives. The thing that blew up the economy. That's sort of what everyone calls it now. But at the time it was like efficient and stuff. So we used these over the counter derivatives and we had to figure out how to make all this stuff work. So there's a lot of plumbing involved in pulling this whole business together with the big sort of launch out to the world. We moved from 200 stations to 400 stations.
我们之前把这些产品写成场外衍生品合同。这类东西就是导致经济崩溃的原因，现在大家基本都这么称呼它们。但在当时，这种做法被视为效率高之类的。所以我们使用了这些场外衍生品，并且需要搞清楚如何让这一切运作起来。为了将整个业务整合并向全世界推出，我们进行了大量基础设施的工作。我们的站点从200个增加到了400个。

So now you could measure the weather at 400 different places. It's amazing. We went to industry conferences and learned about what was going on in the weather derivatives market, which is used by energy companies and so on and so forth. So in that first year after no one came to the website to buy coverage. I was sort of along with the rest of our early team of endeavors pioneers. So cold calling businesses in all these different industries.
现在，你可以在400个不同地点测量天气。这实在是令人惊叹。我们参加了一些行业会议，了解了天气衍生品市场的情况，这个市场被能源公司等企业所使用。然而，在最初的一年里，网站上几乎没有人来购买相关服务。因此，我和我们早期团队的其他开拓者一起，开始给不同行业的公司打电话推销。

Why aren't you buying? So hey Mr. Construction Company doesn't it cause delays in your operations when it rains or hey Mr. Farmer like if there's a freeze you're going to lose your entire citrus crop. And you start to end up in these consultative dialogues with these potential customers. And cold calling was something that I would say is sort of a critical. So something you shouldn't be afraid to do if you're dealing with customers because you're going to have to do it to understand what your customers want. So this through this process we realized well there are people that want this and we're able to close some sales but every single one of them we're having to say well tell me the weather that affects you and then they give you a whole story and you do an analysis for them and then you run the price.
为什么你们不购买呢？比如，嘿，建筑公司先生，下雨时你的工程进度会不会被延误？或者，嘿，农场主先生，如果遇到霜冻，你的柑橘作物会不会全军覆没？通过这样的方式，与你的潜在客户进入咨询对话。说到电话推销，我认为它是一种关键技能。不必害怕与客户打交道，因为这是了解他们需求的必要步骤。通过这个过程，我们意识到确实有人需要我们的产品，并且我们能完成一些销售订单。但我们每次都需要询问客户，是什么天气情况会影响到他们，他们给我们讲述一大堆故事，我们为他们进行分析后才给出报价。

So we were using our own website to sell products to people that wouldn't go to our website because there was a whole bunch of handholding and positioning and the technology work but at the end of the day we hadn't productized yet. We clearly just had a proof of technology. So the next year we ended up being what was the guy that Yahoo peanut butter we were like spread very thin. So we were trying to sell into all these different markets. Travel companies energy companies how do we make this thing work like can we get travel companies to give rain free guarantees to all their customers you know.
所以，我们以前是通过自己的网站向那些不会访问我们网站的人出售产品，因为整个过程需要大量的指导和定位，尽管技术是可行的，但最终我们还没有将其转化为真正的产品。显然，我们仅仅是有了一个技术验证。因此，第二年我们就像是“雅虎花生酱”的那个比喻一样（比喻精力分散），把资源分布得很稀薄。我们尝试在不同的市场销售我们的产品，比如旅游公司和能源公司，并努力思考怎样能让这项技术起作用。比如，我们是否能让旅游公司为所有顾客提供“无雨保障”？

We're also getting negotiations getting on planes flying back and forth meeting with all the online travel agencies we almost got a deal we're almost there that's not really going to work so we've you know we've got a back off of that market ski resorts you know can we get all the ski resorts to buy well you know we make snow and people show up and we'll make money other way as well. So we learned a lot about customers in different markets but we didn't get deep enough to provide a solution to customer in any given market.
我们也进行了多次协商，乘坐飞机来回见面会谈，与所有的在线旅行社沟通，我们几乎达成了协议，离成功很近，但这个方法并不太行得通，所以我们知道我们需要退出那个市场。至于滑雪场，我们想能不能让所有滑雪场来采购我们的产品。我们的想法是，我们制造人造雪，人们就会来光顾，我们也可以用其他方式赚钱。因此，我们在不同市场中学到了很多关于客户的知识，但我们没有深入到任何一个市场为客户提供解决方案。

So in 2009 we made the decision to focus the entire business around agriculture and we're really lucky that we raised a ton of money in our first year of business after that first year where I was cold calling all those businesses. We were able to close a couple million dollars of sales and so for a startup during the web 2.0 heyday to actually make a couple million dollars in their first year of business was a big deal despite the fact that a lot of people didn't fully understand or comprehend or care about what we were doing.
2009年，我们决定将整个业务集中在农业领域。我们非常幸运，在做出这个决定的第一年，就筹集到了大量资金。记得那一年，我还在不断地给那些公司打陌生电话。最终，我们成功达成了几百万美元的销售额。对于一个在互联网2.0发展热潮中的初创公司来说，在头一年实现几百万美元的销售额是一件大事，尽管很多人对我们在做的事情不太理解或者不太关心。

You made money and you're a web 2.0 company you can get a big check so we raised money and that money afforded us the ability to make a lot of mistakes and a lot of mistakes were really required for us to figure out what could work as a business. 2009 we were seeing our cash go down and we hadn't yet built a model in any market where we could scale the business. So we said let's make a bet the bet is we're going to focus on agriculture we're going to focus on farmers because if we do this the right way we'll be able to build a product that we can sell to farmers over and over again and this is the market that we felt at the time provided the best opportunity for us to build a scalable business and Greg smear in our chief revenue officer joined us around this time and helped lead this effort for us.
我们赚了钱，并且作为一家Web 2.0公司，我们能够获得大笔融资。因此，我们筹集了资金，这让我们有能力去尝试、犯错，而这些错误实际上是必要的，因为这样才能找出什么商业模式是可行的。到了2009年，我们发现资金在减少，却还没有在任何市场建立一个可以扩展的业务模型。所以，我们决定放手一搏，专注于农业和农民。因为我们相信，如果能正确地执行这一计划，我们就能开发出能够反复卖给农民的产品。我们当时认为这个市场为我们提供了打造可扩展业务的最佳机会。Greg Smear，我们的首席营收官，就是在这段时间加入的，协助我们领导这项工作。

Big learning was when Greg came on board and really made us diligent about this approach just how little we knew and how little focus we had at the time in solving the right problems. So in 2009 we started selling the specific products to farmers we moved to 14,000 grids as opposed to 400 stations because we realized no one cares about the rainfall 150 miles away they want the rainfall to be measured at their location that was a big reason a lot of people weren't buying.
当格雷格加入我们团队时，他让我们在这一方法上变得非常严谨，这让我们意识到自己当时对解决正确问题知之甚少，关注也不够。因此，在2009年，我们开始将特定产品销售给农民，我们将监测网格从400个站点扩大到14,000个网格，因为我们意识到没有人关心150英里外的降雨量，大家只想要测量他们所在地的降雨量。这是很多人之前不购买的一个重要原因。

And so that's really where we understood at that point the focus of the technology that we build as a company measure the weather more and more locally and today we measure the weather using Doppler radar and satellite imagery and all sorts of things that can pinpoint the weather to your exact location and the technology scale at which we operate has become pretty substantial but at the time that was a big move for us.
因此，那时我们真正理解到了作为一家公司构建技术的重点，就是越来越精确地测量局部天气。如今，我们利用多普勒雷达、卫星图像以及各种技术来测量天气，这些技术可以精确到您的具体位置。我们运营的技术规模已经相当可观，但在当时，这对我们来说是一个重大转变。

And so the ag product started to work and we realized that we needed to provide full season protection to farmers so none of us came from an agriculture background none of us came from an insurance background but it turns out farmers won't buy your product unless it's written on insurance papers so we had to figure out how do we build an insurance company and that was a lot of fun.
所以，这个农业产品开始发挥作用，我们意识到需要为农民提供全季节的保护。然而，我们团队中没有人有农业或保险方面的背景，但事实证明，除非产品被列在保险单上，否则农民是不会购买的。因此，我们必须想办法建立一家保险公司，这个过程非常有趣。

Like I said I'm going to leave that conversation off for another day but we have to get all the regulatory approvals in all 51 jurisdictions in the United States for doing this where you're not actually sending an adjuster out to me. We're sending an adjuster out to measure what happens here farm we're actually just writing you a policy it says if this weather occurs I'll send you a check and how do we get that approved and how do we get an a rating on the product and how do we get the money and the reinsurance to back us and this all became a big hustle but it worked and last year we launched a program called total weather insurance and we figured out a sales model that works that scales where people will buy the product every season and we can go out and close sale after sale after sale in a given day.
就像我之前提到的，我打算把这个话题留到以后再谈，但我们必须在美国所有51个司法辖区获得相关的监管批准，因为在这种情况下，我们并不会派出理赔员到现场。我们只是在拟定一份保单，承诺如果发生某种天气状况，我们就会寄给你一张支票。我们需要思考如何获得批准，如何使产品获得良好评级，如何获得支持我们的资金和再保险。这一切曾是个大难题，但我们最终成功了。去年，我们推出了一个名为"全方位天气保险"的项目，并找到了一个有效且可扩展的销售模式，让人们每个季节都会购买我们的产品，我们可以在一天内连续完成许多销售。

And so we raised a bunch of money earlier this year based on the fact that our business was growing very quickly and we had a product that every farmer wanted to buy there's a hundred sixty million acres of corn and soybeans planted just in the Midwest of the United States our product costs forty dollars an acre there's six billion dollars of revenue we're going after and our close rate is very very high. More than half of the farmers that are offered our product actually buy it because it's something that we finally figured out can make a lot of value and makes a lot of sense for them and we can scale this business pretty substantially so we're you know we're less than thirty people in q one of this year and we're now over a hundred people Eli our recent addition to the team Stanford undergrad joining in a couple of months and we have a revenue number now that's in the tens of millions of dollars per quarter.
今年早些时候，由于我们的业务增长迅速，我们成功筹集了一大笔资金。我们的产品非常受欢迎，几乎每位农民都想购买。仅在美国中西部地区就种植了1.6亿英亩的玉米和大豆。我们的产品每英亩售价40美元，因此我们瞄准的是60亿美元的市场潜力。我们的产品转化率非常高，超过一半的农民会选择购买我们的产品，因为我们终于找到了能为他们带来大量价值的解决方案，并且这个方案对他们来说非常合理。我们能够大规模扩展这项业务。今年第一季度的时候，我们团队不到30人，现在我们已经有超过100名员工。我们还迎来了新成员Eli，他是斯坦福本科毕业生，将在几个月后加入我们。我们的季度收入已经达到了数千万美元。

And the business is growing very quickly in the technology that we're building is exciting we have probably one of the largest we're probably the largest user of the elastic map reduce service at Amazon which is basically had to in the cloud we're simulating the weather on a two by two mile basis for the next seven hundred thirty days ten thousand times covering the entire United States and then similarly on a grid basis covering the entire globe so the scale of the data which we operate we monitor that whether we update the simulations twice a day as new simulation. The simulation models come out has become pretty substantial and it gives us the ability to better service our clients and there's a whole sort of product mission around what we do we're renaming the company I was going to say but Greg asked me not to we're doing the renaming announcement next Tuesday.
我们的业务正在快速增长，我们正在开发的技术非常令人兴奋。我们可能是亚马逊弹性MapReduce服务的最大用户之一，该服务基本上是云端的Hadoop。我们正在模拟未来730天的天气，每次模拟是在一个2x2英里的区域内进行，模拟次数达到一万次，覆盖整个美国。此外，我们也在以类似的方法在全球范围内进行模拟。因此，我们操作的数据规模非常庞大，我们每天更新两次天气监测和模拟，因为新的模拟模型会不断出现。这使我们能够更好地服务客户，并且我们的工作围绕着一个全面的产品使命。目前我们正在更名，公司将在下周二正式宣布新的名称，尽管我本来想现在就说，但Greg让我暂时保密。

Five years later we're renaming the company it's crazy so I was perfectly happy doing this this is one point because I think it speaks to how nimble one needs to be and how sort of brutally self honest and self aware you need to be as you go through this process we've had to change what we're doing and how we're doing it many times over in the course of this the development of this business and it came to a point recently that the company name may not be appropriate for what we're doing in the scope of the things that we'd like to do as an organization. And so let's change the company name well okay that's not off the table and we found a great URL and we're going to launch on Tuesday next week with this great new company name so we didn't hold any sort of personal sort of you know I'm stuck on this name because it's what I always wanted to build it's my business it's my baby I can't let go of it no like every day is a new challenge and every day there's a new solution to that problem.
五年后，我们决定给公司更名，这听起来有点疯狂。我之前对公司一直很满意，但这是一个很值得思考的点，因为这过程需要我们保持灵活，并且要严苛地自我反省和自我认知。在公司发展的过程中，我们多次调整了自身的业务和运作方式。最近我们意识到，公司当前的名字可能不再适合我们现在和未来想开展的业务范围。因此，我们决定更名，我们找到了一个很棒的网址，并将在下周二推出这个新的公司名称。我们没有固执地坚持使用原来的名字，尽管它象征着我一直以来想要建立的事业，我视它如同自己的孩子。然而，每一天都是新的挑战，每一天都会有新问题的解决方案。

And as long as you keep living every day like that you're going to progress and at some point you're going to have success in your mission. But you cannot hold on to the things in the past and I tell my DCs and so on you know they introduce me as sort of the founder of the company I got founders really a role it's not really a title I like and the CEO of the company today and I may not necessarily be the best CEO of the company tomorrow and a lot of founders it's for them it's it's very much like they cling onto that title because it's what they do. But it's important to avoid it so I want to talk a little bit about some of the learnings of the last couple of I'm just checking your clock here the last couple of years so first one doing a startup I might alienate the I don't know but I might alienate people with some of the things I'm going to say but I'm just going to speak from the heart.
只要你每天坚持这样生活，你就会取得进步，并在某个时刻实现你的目标。但是，你不能执着于过去的事情。我告诉我的直接下属和其他人时，他们会称我为公司的创始人，我认为“创始人”更多的是一种角色，而不是我喜欢的头衔。我是公司现在的CEO，但明天我可能不再是这个公司最合适的CEO。很多创始人对于他们来说，这个头衔是他们的象征，所以他们紧抓不放。但避免这种情况是很重要的。在这里我想谈谈过去几年中的一些经验。我看看时间，第一点是做创业公司。我可能会因为说的一些话而让某些人不快，但我想开诚布公地谈谈心里话。

The first one is I hear a lot of people in Silicon Valley say I'm going to go do a startup and this is similar in the vein of I'm a serial entrepreneur doing a startup has about as much meaning it's saying I'm going to jump out of a plane. What I mean by this is that doing a startup is really an activity or a way of organizing a group of people around a problem that they're trying to solve. You don't get a bunch of people together and say let's all grab a couple of guns and maybe we'll go find a dictator to kill. If there's a dictator to kill you put together a team that's most appropriate for taking that dictator out okay it's a terrible analogy but I want it to wake everyone up okay and be controversial so. The process of starting up a company to solve a problem is exactly that I'm starting up a company to solve a specific problem so the way I'm going to go about doing it the people that are going to help me do it is really dependent on the problem it's not an exercise in an activity stream that I'd like to undertake of getting my ass kicked every day not getting paid enough suffering through years of misery and maybe I'll find a problem to solve and that's why I say it's a kin to saying I'm not going to do it. I say it's a kin to saying I'm going to go jump out of a point.
第一个例子是，我在硅谷听到很多人说他们要去创办一家初创公司，这听起来就像是在说“我是一个连续创业者”。事实上，说要去做一个创业项目，就像说我要从飞机上跳下去一样。我想表达的是，创业真正的意义在于组织一群人，围绕他们试图解决的问题去展开行动。你不会随便找一群人说“咱们抓几把枪，去找个独裁者干掉”。如果真有个独裁者要解决，你会组织一个最合适的团队去执行这个任务。好吧，这个比喻有些极端，但我想让大家受到震撼，也有点争议性。 创办公司是为了解决一个具体的问题，因此，如何去做、谁来帮忙，完全依赖于这个具体的问题。这不是简单为了创业而创业，因为这意味着你每天都会面临挑战，没有足够的报酬，经历多年的苦难，甚至不知道能否解决问题。因此，我说这就像是在说“我要去从飞机上跳下去”。

The second one is that I hear or there is a sense in my limited exposure to the sort of what I call the rock star motif of what entrepreneurism is and especially in Silicon Valley and it's good I mean there's a culture of taking leaps and doing big exciting things here and you know you're an important person if you do that. But just being an entrepreneur does not make one a rock star the odds of the guy of being the guy on the left are according to a study and I put the URL of their point oh oh oh six percent that's the odds of starting up a company and having the company be worth more than a billion dollars. However all of the press coverage and all of the attention in Silicon Valley goes to the guy on the left. The person on the right is the status quo your typical entrepreneur your typical Silicon Valley startup team looks like the person on the right. There's a reason I look like I'm 50 and I'm only 31 years old okay the probability of being the person on the right is greater than 99 percent and so I would say don't do a startup. And don't try and solve a problem via a startup if your goal is to have the status of the rock star entrepreneur because it is a false premise.
第二个问题是，尽管我对创业，特别是硅谷创业的了解有限，但我感受到一种所谓的“摇滚明星”情节。在这里，有一种鼓励大胆尝试和从事大型激动人心项目的文化，如果你能做到，你就是个重要人物。然而，仅仅成为一名企业家并不意味着你就是“摇滚明星”。根据一项研究，创业并将公司发展成市值超过十亿美元的几率是0.00006%。然而，硅谷的新闻报道和关注度都集中在这些极少数的成功者身上。相对而言，大多数硅谷创业团队更像是普通人，成功几率超过99%。所以我会说，不要创业，也不要通过创业去解决问题，如果你的目标是获得所谓的“明星企业家”地位，因为这是一个错误的前提。

The financial reward or the opportunity cost of doing a startup is very high. This is from that same study that I just used a lot of engineers here I'm assuming 100 percent of you will have the ability to interview for a job at Google when you graduate. If you were to get a job at Google when you graduate the anecdotal evidence suggests that your first year salary would be about $105,000 this year. If you were to start a company and raise money from a venture capitalist and you were then able to sell that company or take that company public your median time to doing that would be 49 months. And assuming three founders your median expected payoff to the founders would be about $300,000 each which works out to an annualized salary equivalent of $73,000. And the probability that you actually make no money is 67 percent.
创业所带来的经济回报或机会成本非常高。这是基于我刚才引用的同一项研究，假设在座的各位工程师中，100%的人毕业时都有能力去谷歌面试。如果你在毕业时获得谷歌的工作，今年的统计显示，你第一年的工资大约为105,000美元。如果你选择创业，并从风险投资家那里筹集资金，然后成功出售公司或将公司上市，平均需要49个月。假设有三个创始人，每位创始人的平均预期收益约为300,000美元，相当于年薪73,000美元。而实际上你可能赚不到任何钱的概率为67%。

So the reason for being entrepreneurial and the reason for forming a startup to solve a problem should not be for the financial rewards because the financial rewards if that's your motivation would indicate that you're better off going to Google going to a hedge fund going to some other career that has stable and confidential. If you were to get a job at an existing company you would have the ability to make an impact there would be lots of people there there would be lots of resources there there would be a platform upon which you could build something that could affect a lot of people. If you were to get a job at Google they have 100 million users if you launched a product to their 100 million users you would have 100 million users. If you were to try and launch that product on your own you would have zero users and there would be a big big challenge trying to get to 100 million users.
因此，追求创业精神和创办初创公司以解决问题的理由不应该是为了经济回报，因为如果经济回报是你的动机，说明你选择去谷歌、对冲基金或其他拥有稳定发展的职业会更好。加入现有的公司，你将有机会产生影响，那里有很多人、很多资源，还有一个可以让你开发影响很多人的东西的平台。比如说，如果你在谷歌工作，他们有一亿用户，如果你为一亿用户推出一个产品，你就会有一亿用户。而如果你尝试自己推出这个产品，从零开始，你将面临极大的挑战才能达到一亿用户。

So my point here is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to go work at a big company. You can still have the potential like growing companies at succeeding companies at successful companies to make a big impact on the world to make a big impact and have a large number of customers use something that you build or do something that's a result of your effort. However you need to be for a warrant that at a big company there can be a problem with misalignment. So the big company has to make money by doing X or Y or Z and you want them to do A or B or C because you think that would be a good idea. And so the big company's decision will be to continue doing X or Y or Z and say sorry you can't do A or B or C that's misalignment.
我的观点是，去大公司工作并不见得是坏事。在那些成功的大公司，你依然有机会对世界产生重大影响，有许多用户使用你的作品或成果。然而，需要注意的是，在大公司可能会遇到目标不一致的问题。大公司可能需要通过做某些事情（X、Y 或 Z）来赚钱，而你认为他们应该做其他事情（A、B 或 C）会更好。结果，大公司可能会继续做他们认为的X、Y或Z，而不是你建议的A、B或C，这就是所谓的目标不一致。

And so your personal ambitions your personal interests or your personal product idea or solution idea for a problem is not an alignment with the big company. Scale can constrain a big company's ability to do things so big companies might have several people involved in the decision making process and that can make it that much more difficult for you to get a decision made that what you're trying to do is worthy of resources and worthy of showing to the 100 million users and so on and so forth. And finally resources can't be recruited within a big company. You don't own your destiny resources are granted to you you are told here's how many people can work on your team and here's how much money you're going to have and here's how long you are allowed to apply your time for which we're paying you to do X or Y or Z.
因此，你的个人抱负、个人兴趣或针对某个问题的个人产品想法可能并不符合大公司的目标。公司的规模会限制其行为，因此大公司在决策过程中可能会有很多人参与，这使得你要想得到支持、认为你的项目值得投入资源并展示给亿万用户，变得更加困难。此外，在大公司内不能自主招募资源，你不能掌控自己的命运；资源是公司分配给你的。公司规定你团队的人员数量、资金投入以及你可以为某个项目投入的时间。

And so there are challenges to doing things in a big company and they all need to be sort of taken into consideration and I want to highlight some of these points because I don't want to say be entrepreneurial. I want to make sure that everyone in this room walks away from this discussion today and is completely reflective about what it is you want out of life and then making a choice that's based on some of the things that I'm trying to tell you about today and that you think and are self aware about whether or not the decision that you're going to make is going to best help you achieve what it is you want from life.
在大公司里做事面临着很多挑战，这些挑战都需要仔细考虑。我想强调这些要点，因为我并不是想说你应该创业。我希望在座的每一个人今天在讨论结束后，都能认真思考你想要的人生是什么样的。然后基于我今天提到的一些内容，做出决定。希望你们在做决定时能够自省，考虑这个决定是否真正有助于实现你的人生目标。

This is my Elron Hubbard dionetics cover slide. It's actually what's that movie the tree of life is a great film in 40 years. None of your failures will matter and none of the small things that you succeeded doing will matter what's going to matter or the big things that you achieve in life. So for some people that's about having a family. For some people it's about leaving kids behind. For some people it's about writing a great book. For some people it's about changing the lives of a few people. For me I want to know that I affect the world in an impactful way and in a meaningful way that lasts and that it is going to last once I'm gone.
这是我的埃尔龙·哈伯德的《戴奥尼蒂克》封面幻灯片。实际上，这让我想起那部电影《生命之树》，真是一部伟大的电影。在40年后，你的失败都不会再重要，而那些你成功的小事也不重要。真正重要的是你在人生中取得的重大成就。对一些人来说，这意味着拥有一个家庭；对另一些人来说，意味着留下孩子。还有些人希望写出一本伟大的书，或者改变几个人的生活。对我来说，我希望能够以一种有影响力和有意义的方式改变世界，并且这种影响能够持久，即使在我离开之后依然存在。

The only way I'm going to be able to do that is through entrepreneurism and that's why I call it existential entrepreneurism. Because for me I find meaning in life by doing what I'm doing because for me my life is and when I look and say what is it I want for my life I want to leave a lasting impression on the world. I want to leave a mark on the world and the only way I can think about doing that and having a big enough impact is to be entrepreneurial. And so I want to be able to look back at every day and say that I may be effort to do that. Even if I fail that's the decision that I'm making every day to live an entrepreneur life.
我只能通过创业来实现这一点，这就是我称之为"存在主义创业"的原因。因为对我来说，通过我正在做的事情，我找到了生活的意义。我希望我的人生能给这个世界留下持久的印象，给世界留下痕迹。而我能想到的唯一能做到这一点并产生足够大影响的方法就是创业。因此，我希望每天回顾时，都能说自己努力过。即便失败了，我每天依然选择过这样的创业生活。

So that's sort of some discussion about the premise why one should be an entrepreneur. And I want to talk a little bit about the process. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is getting rid of luck. This is sort of the strategy of entrepreneurism in my mind. And the second one is grinding. It's like a poker term. If anyone plays poker here I used to play a lot of poker before it was big and you only played limit hold them. And the difference between limit hold them and no limit is you got a grind to make money at limit. You cannot get lucky when you go all in and make a bunch of money on a pot.
这段话的中文翻译是：这就是关于为什么要成为企业家的前提的一些讨论。我想稍微谈谈这个过程。首先，我要谈的是如何摆脱运气。在我看来，这是企业家精神的一种策略。第二个是努力奋斗。在扑克术语中，这叫“打磨”。如果有人玩过扑克，我过去也常玩，在它流行之前，只玩限注德州扑克。限注和无限注的区别在于，限注下需要通过艰苦努力来赚钱，而不是靠一把全押赚取一大笔钱。

You actually have to sit there for hours and days to make money. It was a very painful undergraduate lesson. And so the second piece is what I call the grind is the tactics of entrepreneurism. So I equate these things to be the same. Luck, risk and the unknown. When you say I got lucky you got lucky because you didn't know what was going to happen. So the corollary is if you know what's going to happen there's no luck there's no risk and there's no uncertainty in what it is you're doing.
要赚钱，你实际上需要坐在那里好几个小时，甚至好几天。这是一个非常痛苦的大学课程。其次，我称之为“磨砺”，是创业的策略。我将这些事情视为相同：运气、风险和未知。当你说“我很幸运”时，你是幸运的，因为你不知道接下来会发生什么。相应地，如果你知道将会发生什么，就没有运气、没有风险，也没有不确定性。

Therefore shouldn't your objective be to know what is going to happen and your pursuit should always be to remove the unknown from the equation. And that's sort of the fundamental premise of how I think about building the business. Figure out what you don't know and then know it. And at the end of the day you'll be left with truth or fact and you'll know exactly what's going to happen in your business will achieve what it is you're setting out to achieve.
因此，你的目标应该是了解即将发生的事，你的追求应当始终是将未知因素排除在外。这是我构建业务的基本理念。找出你不知道的东西，然后去了解它。这样一来，最终你将掌握事实或真相，并准确知道你的业务会发生什么，从而实现你所设定的目标。

I had to throw a formula in. This is sort of a very basic like discounted cash flow analysis of the value of a company. So value of a company is their near term cash flows plus what's known as this terminal value with perpetuity value and the perpetuity value is the cash flow in the out year divided by the expected risk minus the long term growth rate. And so if there's no risk or if the risk approximates the growth rate the value of the company's infinity. So if you know exactly what's going to happen your business should be worth infinity every business has some degree of inherent risk so I'm sort of taking this to the extreme right.
我必须加入一个公式。这是一种非常基础的企业价值折现现金流分析。公司的价值包括其近期的现金流，以及所谓的终值，也就是永久价值。永久价值是指最后一年的现金流除以预期风险减去长期增长率。如果没有风险，或者风险接近于增长率，那么公司的价值就接近无穷大。因此，如果你能完全预知未来，你的企业理论上应该是无价的。但是，每个企业都有一定程度的内在风险，所以我在这里有点走极端了。

If you understand all the risks you know all of the risk and you take them out of the business then the business is worth infinity dollars it's the greatest business ever it's effectively the universe. If however you are constrained by a lack of knowledge about where the markets are headed a lack of knowledge about what competitors might do a lack of knowledge about whether a product will succeed a lack of knowledge about whether you can get the product sold at a particular price point or about whether you can keep your operating costs low enough to sustain your profit margins.
如果你了解所有的风险，并且能够将这些风险从业务中去除，那么这个业务的价值就等同于无穷大，它就是最好的业务，几乎就是宇宙本身。然而，如果你因为不了解市场走向、不了解竞争对手的行动、不了解产品是否会成功、不了解产品是否能以特定价格售出，或者不了解能否控制运营成本以维持利润率而受到限制，那么情况就不同了。

These are the many uncertainties that exist in later stage businesses and there are similarly many uncertainties that exist in early stage businesses will people buy my product. It's a good first question do users find my value proposition valuable. Is this something that's engaging do people people come back can I build the product can I recruit the engineers to help me build the product these are the risks and uncertainties in early stage business and the more of those you can identify as a product.
在后期阶段的企业中存在许多不确定性，而在早期阶段的企业中也同样存在许多不确定性，比如人们会购买我的产品吗？这是一个很好的第一个问题——用户觉得我的价值主张有价值吗？这东西是否有吸引力？人们会再来吗？我能否打造出这个产品？我能否招聘到工程师来帮助我打造产品？这些都是早期阶段企业中存在的风险和不确定性。你能识别出越多这些问题，对你的产品就越有帮助。

The easier it's going to be for you to take them off the table. So identify the unknown mitigate the unknown and then you're enabling certain outcomes and that's how you increase the value of your company and that's how you move yourself towards achieving the mission. And it requires this one tell me if you've heard this before you don't know what you don't know anyone heard that before.
越早识别未知因素，并化解这些未知因素，就越容易让你从中获益。通过这样做，你可以促成某些结果的发生，从而提升公司价值，并朝着实现使命的方向迈进。正如常听到的那句话：你不知道你所不知道的。有谁听过这句话？

Couple people I heard this all the time when I was starting up a business and I didn't listen. This was the biggest thing that I missed out on when I was starting a company and it's basically become the premise of how I think about the strategy of entrepreneurs and the strategy of what we're trying to do. Because it's not until you get hit in the back of the head with something that you weren't thinking about that you wake up to the fact that that should be what you focus on what do I not know because the rest is tactics.
当我刚开始创业时，我经常听到几个人提到这点，但我并没有把它当回事。这是我在创办公司时错过的最大一件事，它几乎成了我思考企业家战略和我们尝试做的事情的基础。因为你只有在被一些你没想到的事情给打醒时，才会意识到应该关注的其实是那些你不知道的东西，因为其他的都只是战术而已。

So this is how I think about the general strategy approach to the to running the business you try and put as much stuff as you can in the left column and then you try and move it to the right column. And then the rest is just tactics. Figure out all the things you don't know about the business. Know them or solve them or ask the questions or build things to test them in a scientific way and you can move them into the known column.
所以，这就是我对经营业务的总体策略的看法：尽量把所有内容放在左栏（未知的事情），然后努力将它们移到右栏（已知的事情）。其余的就是战术。找出所有你不了解业务的地方，通过了解、解决、提问或进行科学测试，将这些内容转移到已知栏中。

Will people buy my product? Is there a positive ROI marketing model for what I'm trying to do? You can build a test for that. You can build a product for that and see if it works. There's a lot of different approaches for the tactics and that's all nuanced around the kind of business you're building. But in general, if you focus on knowing what it is you don't know you're taking the risk out of the equation and you make it known, you figured out what to do next.
人们会购买我的产品吗？我正在尝试的方案是否有正面的投资回报率（ROI）营销模型？你可以对此进行测试，开发一个产品来看看是否有效。有很多不同的策略方法，而这些都与您所建立的业务类型息息相关。但总体来说，如果你专注于了解自己不知道的东西，就能降低风险，使问题明朗化，进而找出下一步该怎么做。

This is one of my early slides from when I raised this series A for Weather Bill in August 2007. So when we first raised money we said, he'll tell the stuff we don't know and then we started to know it and then it's like, oh now there's all these other things. And we added those to the list and the more you're transparent about this, the more your team will believe in your mission, the more everyone in the company will be aligned with what it is you're trying to achieve and the more investors will believe in you being the right kind of person to execute on the opportunity you have in front of you.
这是我在2007年8月为Weather Bill筹集A轮资金时制作的早期幻灯片之一。当我们第一次筹集资金时，我们说，我们会告诉大家我们还不知道的事情，然后我们开始知道这些事情，同时又发现，哦，现在还有其他很多事情不知道。我们把这些新发现的内容也加到了列表中。你越是坦诚透明，你的团队就越会相信你的使命，公司里的每个人就越能统一目标，而投资者也会越相信你是能够抓住面前机会并将其付诸实现的合适人选。

Because this is total transparency about what's working and what's not and it makes it very clear to everyone about how you're going to succeed. How do you succeed? You got a grind. This is the right brothers example. I have a couple slides on this. I got to visit Kitty Hawk in July. Was it July? July 4th. Pretty cool. Anyone ever been? Really awesome. I was inspired. I spent the day walking around by myself. And they had their shack there, but we'll show a picture of the shack in a second.
因为这完全透明，让所有人都清楚地知道什么有效，什么无效，并且明确你将如何获得成功。你想成功吗？你需要努力拼搏。这就像莱特兄弟的例子。我有几张幻灯片来展示这个。我在七月份参观了基蒂霍克。是七月吗？是的，七月四号。非常酷。有没有人去过？真的很棒。我受到了启发，我独自一人度过了一整天，四处走走。他们在那里有一个小屋，稍后我们会展示小屋的照片。

This guy auto-lilianthol. Aviation at the time was sort of like the cool engineering thing to be thinking about in the late 19th century. And auto-lilianthol was one of the early sort of aviation pioneers. And he wrote this in the aeronautical journal. It said, while theoretically no difficulty of any considerable importance precludes flight, the problem cannot be considered solved until the act of flying has been accomplished by man.
这个人是奥托·利林塔尔。在19世纪末，航空是当时非常酷的工程学领域之一。奥托·利林塔尔被认为是早期的航空先驱之一。他在航空期刊中写道：“虽然理论上没有任何重大的困难阻碍飞行，但在飞行行为被人类实现之前，这个问题不能被认为已经解决。”

In its application, however, unforeseen difficulties arise of which the theorists can have no conception. And this really highlights the fact that it's the grind that's going to end up making the difference. He died a few months before this was published because he got on a plane or a glider that wasn't built right and crashed. I don't know. Around the same time, the right brothers who had a background working in the printing industry, they saw this cool new thing.
在实际应用中，却出现了一些理论家无法预料的困难。这表明最终能够带来不同的是持之以恒的努力。他在这篇文章发表前几个月去世了，因为他搭乘了一架设计不当的飞机或滑翔机并发生了坠毁事故。我不太清楚。大约在同一时期，来自印刷行业的莱特兄弟注意到了这个酷炫的新事物。

The internet of the day was transportation. And so the right brothers saw that all consumers rather than getting on Facebook and doing social sharing stuff, consumers at the time were riding bicycles. That was like the cool new thing to do. So they bought a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, and they started building bikes and they started building better bikes and they started engineering them. And then they read this aeronautical journal and they wrote to the Smithsonian.
当天的“互联网”是交通。因此，莱特兄弟看到，那时的消费者并不是在上网社交，而是在骑自行车，这是一种非常流行的新潮活动。于是，他们在俄亥俄州代顿市买下了一家自行车店，开始制造自行车，并不断改进和设计出更好的自行车。随后，他们阅读了一本航空杂志，并写信给史密森学会。

And the first step was learning. So when there's something you don't know, the first thing you can do is you can start researching and learning. I didn't know anything about weather. I still don't know very little about weather. I didn't know anything about insurance. I've had to learn a little bit about insurance. And along the way, the needs of the mission, the problem we were trying to solve mandated that we learned stuff that we didn't already know.
第一步就是学习。当你不知道某件事情时，你能做的第一件事情就是开始研究和学习。我对天气一无所知，现在也只知道一点点。我对保险也不了解，但为了任务的需要和我们要解决的问题，我不得不学习一些相关知识。在这个过程中，任务的需求迫使我们去学习那些我们原本不懂的东西。

And so the first step was these guys started writing to the Smithsonian and they got, they requested, you know, equivalent to a FOIA Act request nowadays, you know, government request. So they all the information you guys have on aeronautical research that's been done. And they started reading through all these documents. They started learning the engineering of the day. They then came up with an idea for flexible weighing and they built a prototype.
于是，这些人首先开始向史密森学会写信，他们请求类似于如今的信息自由法案（FOIA）的政府信息公开请求。他们要获取与航空研究相关的所有信息。接着，他们开始阅读这些文件，学习当时的工程技术。然后，他们想出了一个关于柔性称重的设计，并制造了一个原型。

And this was the prototype kite glider that they had and they tested a couple of them. So this was the first step and they figured out what do we not know why are these gliders failing. And they said, well, now we've got to tactically implement a solution that can allow us to very quickly identify all the things we don't know and know them. So they invented something called a wind tunnel.
这是他们的试验风筝滑翔机原型，他们测试了好几个。这是第一步，他们要弄清楚我们不知道什么，为什么这些滑翔机会失败。他们说，现在我们必须策略性地实施一个解决方案，让我们能够快速识别所有未知之处并了解它们。于是他们发明了一种叫做风洞的东西。

I actually think it was invented before, but they implemented a new sort of wind tunnel. I don't know what the nuance was, but it was some sort of more advanced wind tunnel. And it allowed them to test over 200 wing designs and they recorded the coefficients associated with each wing design in a very detailed way that no one had done before.
我认为这种技术其实更早就已经被发明了，只是他们实现了一种新型的风洞。我不太清楚具体的细微差别，但这确实是一种更先进的风洞。通过这个风洞，他们能够测试超过200种机翼设计，并且以一种前所未有的详细方式记录了每种机翼的相关系数。

And that gave them the ability to systematically go out and build a better wing that they were then able to use to build a plane and eventually fly. And it was that grinding process. It wasn't a breakthrough. There wasn't some sort of moment of genius with the right brothers. There wasn't some discovery or penicillin thing that, you know, whatever mythology.
这让他们能够系统地去设计出一个更好的机翼，进而用它来制造飞机，并最终实现飞行。而这整个过程是通过不断努力和打磨实现的。并没有什么突破性的发现，也没有莱特兄弟的天才瞬间，没有什么像青霉素的大发现，也没有那种被传奇化的故事。

These are what I call the sort of black swan outlier rock star motif equivalent events that occurred. These guys literally just took the principle of we need to get into the sky. That's a problem. We need to solve it. They found the things they didn't know. We don't know the drag coefficient. We don't know the optimal wing design. And they solved it.
这些就是我所说的黑天鹅事件的摇滚明星般的惊人事件。他们纯粹是基于这样一个原则：我们需要飞上天空。这是一个需要解决的问题。他们找出了自己之前不知道的东西，比如我们不知道空气阻力系数，不知道最优的机翼设计。他们解决了这些问题。

And to do that, who knows who's on the right. That's the Oracle from the Matrix. Because she tells Neo you got to know thyself. And the one on the left is from Ray Dalio. If you haven't read Ray Dalio's the principle that's an interesting read. I'm not going to critique it, but it's on Bridgewater Associates website.
为了做到这一点，谁知道谁是正确的。这是来自《黑客帝国》的先知。因为她告诉尼奥，你要了解自己。左边这位是瑞·达利欧的作品。如果你没读过他的《原则》，那是一本有趣的书。我不会评论它，但你可以在桥水联合基金的网站上找到。

But he says there's two use. There's the you, the designer. And then there's the you that's effectively the actor. So the designer is the one who gets the people together to accomplish a task of X or Y or Z. And you as an actor are good at something. You're either good at writing code. You're good at selling. You're good at operations. Who knows.
他说有两种“你”。一个是设计者角色的“你”，另一个则是扮演者角色的“你”。作为设计者的你负责将人们聚集在一起完成某个特定任务，比如X、Y或Z。而作为扮演者的你在某些事情上很擅长，你可能擅长编写代码、销售或者运营等。

But in order for you to succeed, you're going to have to recruit people to help you do these sorts of things that you're not going to be able to do on your own. And in order to do that, you have to be self aware about what are the things you're going to be good at. And do you have the right people helping you to accomplish them. There's a lot more that could be said about this grinding notion. And I don't want to I know we have limited time now. But I think there's plenty of books written Steve blanks book is a great book. There are lots of books out there about, you know, how do you optimize that process of figuring out what you don't know and then knowing it.
为了取得成功，你需要招募人员来帮助你完成那些你无法独自完成的事情。为了做到这一点，你必须对自己的优劣势有清晰的认识，并确保你找到了合适的人来帮助你实现目标。关于这一点，其实还有很多可以讨论的事情。我知道我们现在时间有限，但我认为市面上有很多相关的书籍可以参考，比如斯蒂夫·布兰克的书，讨论了如何优化这个了解自身不足并不断学习提高的过程。

Innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage any company can have. I think we can probably spend an entire hour talking about all the companies that have failed for lack of following an innovative path. And you can say well, rim didn't innovate because Apple innovated with a better OS. And so the iOS is a better OS than rim and therefore it beat the blackberry. Okay, easy to say that. But innovation at scale as a company gets bigger and this is a later stage problem than I think is probably appropriate for thinking about early stage of but innovation at scale is challenging for a couple of reasons.
创新是任何公司唯一可持续的竞争优势。我认为我们可能可以花整整一个小时讨论所有因为缺乏创新而失败的公司。你可以说，加拿大黑莓公司没有创新，因为苹果公司用更好的操作系统进行了创新。所以iOS成为比黑莓操作系统更好的系统，因此击败了黑莓。这样说似乎很简单。但是，当企业规模不断扩大时，进行创新会变得更加困难，这种问题更适合在企业成熟阶段考虑，而不是在早期阶段。创新在大规模企业中具有挑战性，原因有几个。

It requires perpetual change. So the concept of taking risks all the time on new things and having them not work out is sort of counterintuitive to what successful people consider to be successful. Because when you take risks odds are you're going to fail when you're trying to do something new odds are you're going to fail and successful people don't like to fail. They like to be successful. And so the challenge with innovating at scale is that you have to get people in the mindset that failure is a process. It is part of that iterative process of grinding. The right brothers didn't consider themselves failures when the first 199 wing designs didn't work. They considered themselves successful at the end of the day because they accomplished their mission and failing is part of the mission.
这需要不断的改变。因此，总是在新事物上冒险并且遇到不成功的结果，似乎与成功人士对成功的理解相悖。因为当你冒险时，大多数情况下会失败，而当你尝试新事物时，大多数情况下也会失败。成功的人不喜欢失败，他们喜欢成功。因此，大规模创新的挑战在于，需要让人们认识到失败是一个过程，是磨练过程中的一部分。莱特兄弟在前199个机翼设计失败时，不认为自己是失败者。他们认为自己最终是成功的，因为他们实现了使命，失败是这一使命的一部分。

It's part of the process of getting to that mission. So people tell me all the time well let's you're running an insurance company. In San Francisco you're running an agriculture insurance company. We're not an insurance company. This is how we think about our business is that we're focused on solving a big problem. That doesn't change our mission is what it is. And then you don't listen to the how is this done. What's the model for doing that. Someone has got an interesting model. Why don't we tweak it a little bit. Solve the problem that you're setting out to solve and be smart about how you're solving it. That's it.
这是实现我们使命的一部分。所以人们经常对我说，“你经营的是一家保险公司。在旧金山，你经营的是一家农业保险公司。” 其实我们不是一家传统意义上的保险公司。我们对待业务的方式是专注于解决一个重大问题。这不改变我们的使命。然后，你不必拘泥于如何完成这件事。有人有一个有趣的模式，不妨稍作调整。解决你要解决的问题，并且聪明地去解决。这就是全部。

A lot of people nowadays are trying to use the business model mold. Think about innovation. It's the opposite. You should be innovating to come up with the new business model mold. And so when people say you're an ex company or you're a y company or you're doing x for y or group on for kids or whatever it is. You're probably going down a path that's very likely going to result in you being upset at the end of the day. You're not having a lot of money. So people say well where are all these problems.
如今，很多人都在试图套用现有的商业模式模板。然而，真正需要的是创新，这正好相反。你应该通过创新来创造新的商业模式模板。因此，当人们说你是某某公司，或者你在做某某项目，为某个群体服务，比如“孩子版的团购”等等，其实你很可能是在走一条最终让你失望的道路，因为这种方式通常不会带来丰厚的收益。那么，问题到底出在哪里呢？

That wasn't the line. I adjusted it. It's because I love this scene. I think it goes without saying that a lot of people are doing a lot of similar things in Silicon Valley nowadays. And there's a lot of people outspoken people talking about there needs to be more innovation in Silicon Valley. And people are well, you know, I can do photo sharing for students at Stanford. And we can do photo sharing on our iPhone for students at Stanford. It's like x for y for z. There are problems in the world today that are more substantial than we've ever faced in the history of humanity.
这不是原来的台词，我做了一些调整。因为我真的很喜欢这个场景。我认为，现在硅谷有很多人在做类似的事情，这已经不言而喻了。也有很多直言不讳的人在说，硅谷需要更多的创新能力。有人会想，我们可以为斯坦福大学的学生开发一个照片分享应用，或者为 iPhone 开发一个类似的应用。好像是 x 为 y 做 z。而如今，世界面临的问题比人类历史上任何时候都更加严峻。

You can look around. And it's not just in software. And it's not just in California. And it's not just to your peers. If you look at all the markets in the world today, you can probably break it apart market by market and say, here's something fundamentally flawed with the way businesses in this market are operating. You can probably break it apart by saying, what are businesses in general doing wrong today? You can probably say how are governments not operating efficiently today.
你可以环顾四周。这不仅仅发生在软件行业，也不仅仅在加利福尼亚，也不仅仅是你的同行之间。如果你观察当今世界上的各个市场，你可能会逐个分析并指出这些市场的商业运作方式存在根本缺陷。你可能还会分析出，今天的企业普遍存在的问题是什么，以及政府如今是如何运行得不够高效的。

There's a hundred thousand different ways that one could break apart the opportunity set that exists for you with big problems to solve today. I'm the kind of guy that when I drive up when I drive through traffic, I'm highly stressed. I'm highly stressed because every time I'm driving on the freeway or I get to a traffic light, I know someone is driving inefficiently and it drives me nuts. And I see the way that anyone else has this problem. It's got to be engineers in this room, right?
有成千上万种不同的方式可以拆解摆在你面前的大问题的机会。对于今天要解决的问题，我是那种在交通中开车会高度紧张的人。每次我在高速公路上开车或者遇到红绿灯时，我都会感到非常紧张，因为我知道总有人开得很不高效，这让我抓狂。我想其他人也遇到过这样的问题，对吧？这里肯定有一些工程师同样感同身受。

So you see how people are driving and you're like, they could be driving better. This isn't a tough thing. Just look around. I mean, there's so many opportunities. And so, you know, to the point of like, what should I be doing, where are the opportunities to innovate? I don't think it takes more than a weekend in the library or on the internet or whatever to see the global opportunities that exist in the world today. And it's actually a critical time to do this. I think one of the most exciting times to do this ever because there is sort of a global stagnation in economic development and innovation is the only way out.
所以你看到人们的驾驶方式，就会觉得他们可以开得更好。这其实并不难，只要多留心观察。机会实在太多了。所以，当你在思考应该做些什么、哪里有创新机会时，我不认为需要超过一个周末的时间去图书馆或上网查找就能了解当今世界的全球机会。而现在实际上是一个关键时刻，我认为这是有史以来最激动人心的时刻之一，因为全球经济发展正处于一种停滞状态，而创新是唯一的出路。

And I know you've heard this from other folks and I know a nice choper goes on about this all the time. And I think it's really important for people in this room to take heed. If you're thinking about doing something entrepreneurial, think about solving a really big problem. Because it's going to be great not just for you. It's going to be great for everyone. And it's really needed now. And there's really a lot of problems out there that can be solved that can result in lasting meaningful impact in the world.
我知道你可能听其他人说过这句话，而且我也知道某位专家经常谈论这个问题。我认为，在座的各位真的应该认真考虑一下。如果你在思考创业的事情，请考虑去解决一个非常大的问题。因为这样不仅对你有好处，对所有人都有好处。而且现在确实需要这样做。社会上有很多问题可以被解决，并且能够在世界上产生持久而有意义的影响。

So, in summary, I would say having a premise, no one is trying to do and whether it's the right thing. The strategy is to know what you don't know. The tactic is to grind. And there's plenty of places for you to innovate. And to wrap up again, it's this pursuit of entrepreneurism that gives me meaning in life. It's why I wake up every day and I have a smile on my face about what it is I'm doing. I don't always have a smile on my face by the end of the day.
总结来说，我认为首先要有一个前提，没有人试图去做，也没有人知道这是否是正确的事情。策略就是知道自己不知道的事情，而战术就是坚持不懈。你有很多地方可以创新。总而言之，正是对创业精神的追求让我找到了生命的意义。这就是为什么我每天醒来时都面带微笑，对自己正在做的事情充满期待。不过，到了每天结束时，我脸上不一定一直都有微笑。

But it is for me what I've decided is going to give me the most meaning when I look back 40 years from now. And I say, did I try to make the biggest impact I possibly could in the time that I was on this earth? And the answer is yes. There's an op ed piece in the New York Times by Neil Gabler. I can't read all my notes. He said, we live in the vaunted age of information. This was in August 2011. We live in the vaunted age of information.
但我决定，这将是当我在未来40年回顾时，能给我带来最大意义的事情。我会问自己：在我这一生的时间里，我是否努力去尽可能产生最大的影响力？答案是肯定的。《纽约时报》有篇由尼尔·加布勒撰写的评论文章。我记不全自己的笔记了。他提到，我们生活在一个被称赞的信息时代。这是在2011年8月发表的。

Courtesy of the internet. We seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone can ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history. And he goes on. If information was once grist for ideas over the last decade, it has become competition for them. We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop. It keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort.
多亏了互联网，我们似乎可以立刻获得任何人可能想知道的东西。我们无疑是历史上信息量最多的一代。接下来他说，过去十年里，信息曾经是孕育思想的原料，但现在却成了思想的竞争对手。我们更喜欢知道而不是思考，因为知道能立刻带来价值。它让我们和世界同步，保持与朋友和群体的联系。

And the implication of a society that no longer thinks big or enormous. And I would encourage everyone here that is considering entrepreneurism as an activity to think big because now is the time to do it. And there's never been a better time in the history of humanity. And that's all I have. Thank you. That was a fabulous way to kick off the year. And we can open up for questions.
社会不再具备伟大思维的潜在影响是值得我们关注的。我鼓励在座各位考虑创业的人大胆思考，因为现在正是大展宏图的好时机。在整个人类历史上，从未有比现在更好的时机。我的发言到此结束。谢谢大家。这是一个开启新一年的精彩方式。接下来，我们可以开始提问。

We've got 10 minutes. This isn't really a question, but you aren't going to hear this until later. Ironically, while you're talking about rock stars, one of the biggest rock stars in Silicon Valley history past the way Steve Jobs died. Wow. That's incredible. I'm sure we'll have lots of opportunities to remember him and everything. Everyone's seen his commencement speech, right? It's a much watch.
我们还有10分钟。 这其实不是个提问，但你要到稍后才会听到这个消息。很讽刺的是，当你们在谈论摇滚明星的时候，硅谷历史上最大的一位“摇滚明星”——史蒂夫·乔布斯去世了。哇，太不可思议了。我相信我们会有很多机会去怀念他和他的一切。大家都看过他的毕业演讲，对吧？这是一段必须观看的演讲。

You haven't seen it. You got to watch it. Right. That is your homework to watch Steve Jobs commencement address. In 2005, it was totally. Look, it's not the right time, but that is Steve Jobs said, I want to leave a dent in the universe. Who here doesn't use an Apple device? There is literally no human being in our lives that has made more of an impact on more of the world than that man.
你还没看过吧。你得去看一看。对，这就是你的作业：去看一下史蒂夫·乔布斯在2005年的毕业演讲。虽然现在可能不是最合适的时机，但正如乔布斯所说的，“我想在宇宙中留下一个印记。” 这里有谁不使用苹果设备呢？几乎没有哪一个人像他那样对世界产生如此大的影响。

And that's what he always said he wanted to do. And he set out to do it and his achievements speak for themselves. Well, it certainly is a sad day. And does anyone have any questions that are actually related to this talk in here? For your business, what's the competitive advantage? Why can't an insurance company analyze the way that they've done how?
这就是他一直说自己想做的事情。他努力去实现，并且他的成就已经说明了一切。今天确实是个伤心的日子。那么，有没有人有与这个讨论相关的问题？对于你的企业，竞争优势是什么？为什么保险公司不能像他们那样进行分析呢？

Yeah. So insurance companies are generally not. Can you repeat the question? So the question was, what's our competitive advantage and why can't other insurance companies do what we do? It's a little bit nuanced. Insurance companies generally aren't technologically savvy. Insurance companies like to underwrite risks in a static way and go out with a static what's called rate sheet.
好的。一般来说，保险公司在技术方面不是很精通。请再重复一下问题。刚才的问题是，我们的竞争优势是什么，为什么其他保险公司做不到我们做的事情？这个问题有点复杂。保险公司通常喜欢以静态的方式评估风险，并以一种固定的方式制定所谓的费率表。

And so there's a pre-underwriting process. The customizability of our products is what really gives us the ability to sell them because people need to customize them to their. In my farm, I plant between May 1 and May 15. And so the dates, when you change the dates for weather coverage, the risk changes pretty dramatically.
因此，有一个预先核保的流程。我们产品的可定制性正是让我们能够销售它们的原因，因为人们需要根据自己的需求进行定制。在我的农场，种植时间通常是在5月1日至5月15日之间。因此，当你调整天气保险的日期时，风险会发生显著变化。

And so the risk profile changes pretty dramatically and you have to re-rate it in real time is how we do it. Secondly, the automated sort of processing of claims, so understanding what weather took place and then sending a check. It's sort of a data feed, right? You're taking it, you're processing it. But insurance companies, there are very few insurance companies who have the bureaucratic ability to enable an automated payout program. They have a claims and adjustment process and a loss adjustment team that does every sort of analysis of every claim that's filed. And so automated payouts based solely on data is not in the lifeblood of how insurance companies operate.
风险状况会发生显著变化，因此我们需要实时重新评价，这是我们的方法。其次，自动化处理索赔，比如了解天气情况，然后发送赔偿款。这就像一个数据流，拿到数据，然后处理它。但保险公司中，很少有具备官僚机制来支持自动赔付计划的公司。通常，他们有一个索赔和调整流程，还有一个负责对每个提交的索赔进行各种分析的损失调整团队。因此，仅仅基于数据进行自动赔付并不是保险公司运作的核心方式。

And to the point about innovation, it is very hard to get them to change how they operate. And so for them to do this automated payouts, 40% of our customers, our farmers that buy our products, get some sort of money back. And sometimes it gets small amounts because we cover this sort of very little variations in weather that cause little variations in your profit as a farmer. Those small variations occur to 40% of farmers. So 40% of our farmers are getting some money back at the end of the season or getting some deduction on the premium that they are.
关于创新这点，很难让他们改变运作方式。因此，当我们实施自动支付时，40%的顾客，也就是购买我们产品的农民，会收到一定金额的返还。有时，这些金额很小，因为我们涵盖了天气变化造成的小幅利润波动。这些小幅波动影响着40%的农民。因此，40%的农民在季末能够拿回一些钱，或者获得保费上的减免。

And that's called a 40% claims frequency. The typical claims frequency for insurance companies like less than 3%. So for them to then scale up their loss adjustment program by 10X would be untenable. So there's a bureaucratic and then there's a couple of sort of technical, you know, what I would call sort of core technology IP pieces that we've built that, you know, or we would go ahead with the technology company and feel comfortable. I'd imagine the accuracy of your weather prediction algorithm is critical and something you guys are constantly trying to increase for your benefit and for your farmers and stuff.
这被称为40%的理赔频率。而通常像这样的保险公司的理赔频率通常不到3%。因此，如果它们将损失调整计划扩大10倍是不可行的。这背后有一些官僚问题，还有一些技术方面的问题，比如我们所称的核心技术知识产权部分，我们已经建立起来的这些部分，使我们可以与科技公司合作，并对此感到放心。我想，你们的天气预测算法的准确性至关重要，并且你们会不断努力提高它的准确性，以造福你们自己和你们的农民。

Where do you guys see the trajectory from your company providing insurance from farmers switching over to, you know, creating the best weather prediction algorithm or software that's out there? Yeah, so next week when we announce our name change, I hope it'll frame sort of the direction that the company's headed, which is a broader scope. We focus on farmers, but there is more that we can do with the platform that we built and the technology that we built where we're predicting the weather on a micro scale basis 10,000 times for the next two years.
你们的公司从为农民提供保险服务，转向研发出最好的天气预测算法或软件，这个发展轨迹会如何？ 是的，下周我们会公布公司更名，我希望这能体现公司未来更广泛的发展方向。尽管我们的关注点仍是农民，但我们的平台和技术可以做得更多，比如在微观尺度上进行天气预测，在未来两年内可以进行一万次预测。

Then we're doing today right now we're underwriting insurance policies with that data. And in the future we hope to use that data to build interesting new products that can enable new ways that people interact with the weather, plan their businesses, think about what they're doing, get an alert if it's going to rain and you should wear raincoat or something, right? I mean, like there's a whole slew of products and services that we could eventually build on this platform that we've, that we've already built the infrastructure for.
我们现在正在利用这些数据进行保险政策的承保。在未来，我们希望利用这些数据开发有趣的新产品，帮助人们以新的方式与天气互动、规划他们的业务、思考他们的行动。如果即将下雨，人们可以收到提醒并穿上雨衣，对吧？也就是说，我们最终可以在这个我们已经构建了基础设施的平台上，开发出一系列的产品和服务。

And so that's sort of where I think we're headed agriculture is such a huge opportunity. We can scale into different crops. We sell to three crops today, it's an unusual talk, but for us the product is a crop corn and wheat and soybeans. We're going to launch sorghum and cotton and rice. We're the products that we're launching and then we can launch that in Australia and in Canada and Brazil and in Asia and in India. So there's ways for us to expand our business in agriculture and then into different verticals and then into data services.
我认为我们正在走向一个大有可为的农业前景。在农业领域，我们有很大的发展机会，可以扩展到不同种类的作物。我们目前销售的作物有三种：玉米、小麦和大豆。虽然听起来有些特别，但对我们来说，作物就是我们的产品。我们计划推出高粱、棉花和水稻。这些是我们将要推出的产品，然后我们可以把这些产品推广到澳大利亚、加拿大、巴西、亚洲和印度。因此，我们有多种方式可以在农业领域扩展我们的业务，然后进入不同的行业领域，最终涉足数据服务。

And so there's lots of ways that we think about building on the platform that we've built today. So one of the things that took us from your talk is this, it really to be fearless or sort of, you know, disregard for this involved somewhat or at least think that you can go out there and take the risk. In China however, most of what I do is based, the idea of failure is so like it will just totally take care of your whole family or your whole community, but you're not allowed to fail in another way.
我们有很多方式可以在我们今天所建立的平台上进行拓展。从您的讲话中，我得到的一个启示就是要无所畏惧，或者说至少要有这样的想法，敢于冒险。然而，在中国，我的大部分工作都是基于这样一种观念：失败的影响是如此之大，它甚至可能影响到整个家庭或社区，因此在另一种意义上来说，你是不能失败的。

So how would you help inspire those that are in places like China where our failure is not an option? The question was how would one help folks in China be more entrepreneurial where failure is not an option? I don't know enough about that market or the cultural dynamics there or the economic incentives that exist in the US there are economic incentives. So if you build a good business there's a flow of capital that will give you more money to grow the business and eventually you can make money by selling the business or taking it public or selling some of your shares or paying yourself a good salary.
如何激励那些在比如中国这样不容失败的环境中的人变得更具创业精神呢？问题在于，如何帮助中国的朋友变得更具创业精神，而在这种环境下失败并不是一个可选项？我对中国市场、那里的文化动态以及经济激励措施了解不多。在美国，有一些经济激励政策，建立一个好的企业会有资金流入，帮助扩展业务，最终可以通过出售公司、上市、出售部分股份或者给自己支付不错的薪水来赚钱。

If the economic incentives are there and the bureaucracy frees one to innovate, I believe this should be natural human behavior to solve big problems and it will happen. So we would say let's just identify what the bureaucratic problems are and what economic incentives aren't there and identify ways that maybe they could be implemented but I don't know enough about the market specifically to put a pine on points.
如果有经济激励，并且官僚体制允许人们自由创新，我相信这应该是人类自然而然的行为来解决重大问题，而且这将会发生。因此，我们可以说，首先应该找到官僚体制中的问题和缺乏的经济激励，然后寻找可能的解决方案。不过，我对具体市场了解不够，无法指出具体的问题。

How are you modeling climate change into your weather models? Climate change, how do we model climate change is the question. Climate change is a number of different factors so there are changes in temperature over time which global warming is a big sort of thing that people hear about all the time. Yes there are trends in the average temperature everywhere and the temperature on average is going up almost everywhere. More importantly the trends in how much storm events are occurring or how frequently we're seeing droughts or how bad those droughts are getting. There are trends in those indices and those are the indices that we care most about because that's what we're focused on.
你们是如何在天气模型中纳入气候变化因素的？气候变化是一个涉及多种因素的问题。随着时间的推移，温度出现了变化，全球变暖是人们经常听到的一个重要现象。可以看到，几乎全球范围内的平均温度都在上升。更重要的是，风暴事件的发生频率、干旱出现的频率以及干旱的严重程度等也在发生变化。我们最关注的就是这些趋势和指标，因为它们对我们的生活影响最大。

Yes there are trends across the board. The climate is changing. Whether or not the climate is changing as a result of manmade effects or we're going through a natural multi decade or multi century or multi millennial cycle. I don't know but there are changes underway and we model those changes and incorporate them in all of our simulation models. I know you mentioned the fact that you said you didn't know particularly much about fear, insurance or about farming. How did you get around that when you were starting up your business?
是的，各个领域都存在趋势。气候正在发生变化。无论气候变化是由于人为影响还是我们正经历一个自然的多十年、多世纪或多千年周期，我不确定，但确实有变化正在发生。我们对这些变化进行建模，并将其纳入我们的所有模拟模型中。我知道您提到您对风险、保险或农业不是特别了解。那您在创业时是如何克服这些障碍的呢？

Yes sorry the question was how did I learn about insurance and farming. Given that I didn't have any background we started the business. We had to learn about a lot of different industries so we learned about our customers problems and along the way you learn about the customers. We talked to a lot of farmers and then we hired people that know farmers and we hired people that were farmers. Those are the folks that gave us the insight that we needed to help us think about our business. We didn't say there is no way we can do this because we don't know farming. There is no way we can do this because we don't know insurance.
对不起，我的问题是我如何了解保险和农耕。尽管我没有相关背景，但我们还是开始了这个生意。我们需要了解很多不同行业，所以我们学习了客户的问题，在这个过程中也了解了客户。我们与许多农民进行了交流，之后我们聘请了了解农民的人以及有务农经验的人。这些人给了我们洞察力，帮助我们思考我们的业务。我们并没有因为不懂农耕或保险而放弃。

I hired lawyers and asked them about insurance. We hired people with insurance background to the company to help advise us. Along the way you have to make the decisions to be this goes back to the sort of two use. The designer me has to say me the person with knowledge doesn't know shit about insurance. I need to find someone who does. You need to be self-aware and you need to be able to say we don't have the right people on board. I didn't know how to scale a sales team. Greg does. Greg is our chief revenue officer and without him we wouldn't have succeeded at what we're doing right now as a company.
我雇佣了律师，咨询有关保险的事情。我们还请了有保险背景的人到公司来帮助我们提供建议。在这个过程中，你必须做出决策，这可以追溯到两个自我的对比。作为设计师的我必须承认，我这个有知识的人对保险完全不了解。我需要找一个真正懂行的人。你需要有自知之明，并且能够承认我们的团队里缺少合适的人。我不知道如何扩展销售团队，而格雷格懂。格雷格是我们的首席营收官，没有他，我们公司就无法在目前的事业上取得成功。

Along the way you have to make those decisions to recruit and incorporate advice and people that are going to be useful to you. That's where you have to be smart about those decisions. How does weatherable hedgerings itself against drastic events like Katrina? Yes, the question is how does weatherable hedgerings drastic events like catastrophic weather events. We actually have 100% quota share reinsurance arrangement. We take no balance sheet risk on the stuff that we write. When we sell insurance and there's exposure there's a reinsurance that stands behind us and at the end of the season if we make a profit we keep some of that profit.
在这个过程中，你需要做出决策，引入能够给你提供有用建议和帮助的人员。这就是你需要聪明行事的地方。Weatherable公司如何防范像卡特里娜这样的灾难事件呢？是的，问题是Weatherable如何对抗像这样具有毁灭性的天气事件。实际上，我们有100%的份额分保安排。对于我们承保的那些风险，我们不承担财务损失风险。当我们销售保险并面临风险时，会有再保险公司在背后支持我们，而且如果在年度结束时我们盈利，我们可以保留部分利润。

We also take some money off the top. If we have a loss the reinsurance covers 100% of the loss. We've transferred all of the risk that we have into the guys that have billions and trillions of dollars. There's a big reinsurance market out there. An adventure capitalist don't want to be betting on the weather. They want to bet on a team that can help other people's capital bet on the weather. So that's sort of what we're doing. I'm sure you'll agree this was an absolutely fascinating talk and I want to thank you for joining us today.
我们会先从中抽取一部分资金。如果我们有损失，再保险会 100% 覆盖这些损失。我们已经把所有的风险转移给那些拥有数十亿、数万亿美元资金的人。外面有一个庞大的再保险市场。冒险资本家不愿意直接赌天气，他们更愿意投资于能帮助其他人把资本投向天气的团队。这就是我们正在做的事情。我相信你会同意，这次谈话绝对让人着迷，感谢你今天参加我们的活动。



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