2014-09-12 Peter Thiel.Competition Is for Losers

Refer To：《Competition Is for Losers》。

What valuable company is nobody building? This question is harder than it looks, because your company could create a lot of value without becoming very valuable itself. Creating value isn't enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create.

有哪一家有价值的公司还无人创办？这个问题比看上去更难，因为你的公司可能创造大量价值，却自身未必能变得很值钱。创造价值并不足够——你还必须截取部分自己创造的价值。

This means that even very big businesses can be bad businesses. For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year. But in 2012, when the average airfare each way was \$178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in \$50 billion in 2012 (versus \$160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits—more than 100 times the airline industry's profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it is now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.

这意味着即使规模庞大的企业也可能是糟糕的生意。以美国航空公司为例，它们每年为数以百万计的乘客服务，创造了数千亿美元的价值。但在 2012 年，单程机票平均 178 美元时，航空公司每位乘客仅赚取 0.37 美元。与之相比，谷歌创造的价值较少，却获取的价值更多。2012 年谷歌收入 500 亿美元（航空公司为 1600 亿美元），其中 21% 变成利润——是当年航空业利润率的 100 多倍。谷歌赚的钱多到其市值是所有美国航空公司总和的三倍。

The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly.

航空公司彼此竞争，而谷歌独霸一方。经济学家用两种简化模型来解释这种差异：完全竞争和垄断。

"Perfect competition" is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. Every firm in a competitive market is undifferentiated and sells the same homogeneous products. Since no firm has any market power, they must all sell at whatever price the market determines. If there is money to be made, new firms will enter the market, increase supply, drive prices down and thereby eliminate the profits that attracted them in the first place. If too many firms enter the market, they'll suffer losses, some will fold, and prices will rise back to sustainable levels. Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

在经济学入门课程中，“完全竞争”既被视为理想状态，也被当作默认状态。所谓完全竞争市场，在生产者供给与消费者需求相等时实现均衡。竞争市场中的每家企业都没有差异化，销售同质产品。因为没有企业拥有市场力量，它们只能按市场价格出售。若有利可图，新企业会进入市场，增加供给、压低价格，从而抹去最初吸引它们的利润。若进入者过多，它们将遭受亏损，一些企业会退出，价格则回升至可持续水平。在完全竞争下，从长期来看，没有公司能够获得经济利润。

The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits.

与完全竞争相对的是垄断。竞争性企业必须按市场价销售，而垄断者掌控市场，因此可以自行定价。由于没有竞争，它选择能使利润最大化的产量和价格组合。

定价过高有可能适得其反，巴菲特专门跑去英国调研一家报纸的定价策略，参考：《1991 Warren Buffett.Three Lectures to Notre Dame Faculty》。

To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state or innovates its way to the top. I'm not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: By "monopoly," I mean the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: It hasn't competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo!

在经济学家看来，所有垄断看起来都一样，无论它通过阴险手段排挤对手、获取政府许可，还是凭创新登顶。我说的“垄断”不是非法恶霸或政府宠儿，而是指那些在自身领域强大到无可替代的公司。谷歌就是从 0 到 1 的典型例子：自 2000 年代初与微软、雅虎拉开决定性差距后，它在搜索领域再无真正竞争对手。

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business.

美国人把竞争神化，认为它让我们免于社会主义配给排队。事实上，资本主义与竞争相互对立。资本主义以资本积累为前提，而在完全竞争下，所有利润都会被竞争消耗殆尽。对创业者的启示很明确：若想创造并攫取持久价值，就不要去做没有差异化的商品生意。

How much of the world is actually monopolistic? How much is truly competitive? It is hard to say because our common conversation about these matters is so confused. To the outside observer, all businesses can seem reasonably alike, so it is easy to perceive only small differences between them. But the reality is much more binary than that. There is an enormous difference between perfect competition and monopoly, and most businesses are much closer to one extreme than we commonly realize.

世界上到底有多少市场是真正垄断的？又有多少是真正竞争的？很难说，因为我们对此的公共讨论极为混乱。在外部观察者看来，企业似乎都差不多，人们只看到它们之间细小差别。但现实远比这更二元：完全竞争与垄断之间存在巨大鸿沟，而大多数企业比我们意识到的更接近某一极端。

The confusion comes from a universal bias for describing market conditions in self-serving ways: Both monopolists and competitors are incentivized to bend the truth.

这种混乱源于一种普遍偏见：人们总以有利于自己的方式描述市场状况——无论是垄断者还是竞争者，都有动机扭曲事实。

Monopolists lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized and attacked. Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly—usually by exaggerating the power of their (nonexistent) competition.

垄断者撒谎是为了自保。他们知道若夸耀自己的强大垄断将招致审计、监督和攻击。为了让垄断利润不受干扰，他们会竭尽所能隐藏垄断地位——常见做法是夸大（并不存在的）竞争对手实力。

Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn't claim to be a monopoly. But is it one? Well, it depends: a monopoly in what? Let's say that Google is primarily a search engine. As of May 2014, it owns about 68% of the search market. (Its closest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have about 19% and 10%, respectively.) If that doesn't seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word "google" is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen to Bing.

想想谷歌如何描述自己的业务。它肯定不会自称垄断。但它是吗？这取决于垄断什么。假设谷歌主要是一家搜索引擎公司。截至 2014 年 5 月，它占据搜索市场约 68%。（微软和雅虎分别为 19% 和 10%。）若这还不够统治，请注意，“google”已作为动词收录进《牛津英语词典》；至于“bing”，恐怕你别指望它也能如此。

But suppose we say that Google is primarily an advertising company. That changes things. The U.S. search-engine advertising market is \$17 billion annually. Online advertising is \$37 billion annually. The entire U.S. advertising market is \$150 billion. And global advertising is a \$495 billion market. So even if Google completely monopolized U.S. search-engine advertising, it would own just 3.4% of the global advertising market. From this angle, Google looks like a small player in a competitive world.

但若我们把谷歌看作一家主要的广告公司，情况就不同了。美国搜索引擎广告市场年规模 170 亿美元，线上广告 370 亿美元，美国广告市场总体 1500 亿美元，全球广告市场更达 4950 亿美元。即便谷歌完全垄断美国搜索引擎广告，它也只占全球广告市场 3.4%。从这个角度看，谷歌更像是竞争激烈世界中的一名小玩家。

What if we frame Google as a multifaceted technology company instead? This seems reasonable enough; in addition to its search engine, Google makes dozens of other software products, not to mention robotic cars, Android phones and wearable computers. But 95% of Google's revenue comes from search advertising; its other products generated just \$2.35 billion in 2012 and its consumer-tech products a mere fraction of that. Since consumer tech is a \$964 billion market globally, Google owns less than 0.24% of it—a far cry from relevance, let alone monopoly. Framing itself as just another tech company allows Google to escape all sorts of unwanted attention.

如果我们把谷歌定位为一家多元化技术公司又如何？这似乎也说得通；除搜索引擎外，谷歌还有数十款软件产品，更别提机器人汽车、安卓手机和可穿戴设备。然而，谷歌 95% 的收入仍来自搜索广告；其他产品在 2012 年仅创造 23.5 亿美元，面向消费者的科技产品占比更低。全球消费科技市场规模 9640 亿美元，谷歌仅占不到 0.24%——距离具有影响力，遑论垄断，还相去甚远。把自己包装成普通科技公司，使谷歌得以避开各种不想要的关注。

Non-monopolists tell the opposite lie: "We're in a league of our own." Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.

非垄断者则撒相反的谎：“我们独一无二。”创业者总倾向低估竞争规模，但这可能是初创企业最大的错误。致命的诱惑在于把市场描述得极其狭窄，以便在定义上占据主导。

Suppose you want to start a restaurant in Palo Alto that serves British food. "No one else is doing it," you might reason. "We'll own the entire market." But that is only true if the relevant market is the market for British food specifically. What if the actual market is the Palo Alto restaurant market in general? And what if all the restaurants in nearby towns are part of the relevant market as well?

假设你想在帕洛阿尔托开一家英国菜餐馆。“没人做这个，”你可能会想，“我们将垄断整个市场。”但这只有在相关市场仅指英国菜时才成立。如果真正的市场是整个帕洛阿尔托餐饮市场呢？如果附近城镇的所有餐馆也属于相关市场呢？

These are hard questions, but the bigger problem is that you have an incentive not to ask them at all. When you hear that most new restaurants fail within one or two years, your instinct will be to come up with a story about how yours is different. You'll spend time trying to convince people that you are exceptional instead of seriously considering whether that is true. It would be better to pause and consider whether there are people in Palo Alto who would rather eat British food above all else. They may well not exist.

这些都是棘手的问题，但更大的问题是你根本不愿去问。听说大多数新餐馆在一两年内倒闭时，你的本能会是编造一套自家与众不同的说辞。你会花时间去说服别人你很特别，而不是认真思考这是否属实。不如停下来想想，在帕洛阿尔托是否真的有人把英国菜视为首选——他们很可能根本不存在。

In 2001, my co-workers at PayPal and I would often get lunch on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif. We had our pick of restaurants, starting with obvious categories like Indian, sushi and burgers. There were more options once we settled on a type: North Indian or South Indian, cheaper or fancier, and so on. In contrast to the competitive local restaurant market, PayPal was then the only email-based payments company in the world. We employed fewer people than the restaurants on Castro Street did, but our business was much more valuable than all those restaurants combined. Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors—maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother's recipe—your business is unlikely to survive.

2001 年，我与 PayPal 的同事常在加州山景城的Castro Street吃午饭。那里的餐馆琳琅满目，首先有印度菜、寿司、汉堡等大类。确定了种类后，选择更多：北印度还是南印度，经济还是高档，等等。与当地竞争激烈的餐饮市场形成鲜明对比的是，当时 PayPal 是全球唯一一家基于电子邮件的支付公司。我们的员工人数比Castro Street任何一家餐馆都少，但公司价值却超过所有这些餐馆的总和。开一家新的南印度餐馆是极难赚钱的。如果你忽视竞争现实，只关注无关紧要的差异——例如坚信凭曾祖母的烤饼秘方更胜一筹——你的企业很可能无法存活。

The problem with a competitive business goes beyond lack of profits. Imagine you're running one of those restaurants in Mountain View. You're not that different from dozens of your competitors, so you've got to fight hard to survive. If you offer affordable food with low margins, you can probably pay employees only minimum wage. And you'll need to squeeze out every efficiency: That is why small restaurants put Grandma to work at the register and make the kids wash dishes in the back.

竞争性业务的问题不仅仅是利润微薄。想象你在山景城经营其中一家餐馆，你与数十家对手并无太大区别，所以必须拼命才能生存。若提供价廉利薄的餐食，你大概只能给员工支付最低工资，并且必须把效率挤到极致：这就是为什么小餐馆会让奶奶站收银台，让孩子在后厨刷碗。

A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto—"Don't be evil"—is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today's margins that it can't possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.

像谷歌这样的垄断企业则截然不同。由于无需担心竞争，它能更从容地关心员工、产品及其对世界的影响。谷歌的口号“Don’t be evil”（不作恶）部分是品牌策略，但也体现了这种成功到足以认真对待伦理而不危及自身生存的企业特点。在商业中，金钱要么很重要，要么就是一切。垄断者有余力考虑赚钱之外的事情；非垄断者则做不到。在完全竞争中，企业过于专注当日利润率，根本无法规划长期未来。只有垄断利润，才能让企业超越每日残酷的生存斗争。

先鸡先有蛋？Google先是一家有安全感的企业。

So a monopoly is good for everyone on the inside, but what about everyone on the outside? Do outsize profits come at the expense of the rest of society? Actually, yes: Profits come out of customers' wallets, and monopolies deserve their bad reputation—but only in a world where nothing changes.

因此，垄断对内部人员皆有好处，但外部人士呢？巨额利润是否以牺牲社会其他成员为代价？答案是肯定的：利润来自顾客的钱袋，垄断理应声名不佳——不过那仅在一个一成不变的世界里成立。

In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: Deeds are shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There is no way to win by inventing a better kind of real-estate development. The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you can do is try to buy them up.

在静态世界中，垄断者只是收租者。若你垄断了某个市场，就可随意抬价；他人别无选择，只能向你购买。想想那款著名桌游：地契在玩家手中流转，但棋盘永远不变。你无法通过发明更好的地产开发方式获胜；各地块相对价值永远固定，你只能尽量把它们买下。

But the world we live in is dynamic: We can invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren't just good for the rest of society; they're powerful engines for making it better.

然而现实世界是动态的：我们可以发明新事物、改进旧事物。富有创造力的垄断者通过向世界增添全新的丰富品类，为顾客提供更多选择。创意型垄断不仅对社会有益，更是推动社会向善的强劲引擎。

Even the government knows this: That is why one of its departments works hard to create monopolies (by granting patents to new inventions) even though another part hunts them down (by prosecuting antitrust cases). It is possible to question whether anyone should really be awarded a monopoly simply for having been the first to think of something like a mobile software design. But something like Apple's monopoly profits from designing, producing and marketing the iPhone were clearly the reward for creating greater abundance, not artificial scarcity: Customers were happy to finally have the choice of paying high prices to get a smartphone that actually works. The dynamism of new monopolies itself explains why old monopolies don't strangle innovation. With Apple's iOS at the forefront, the rise of mobile computing has dramatically reduced Microsoft's decadeslong operating system dominance.

政府也明白这一点：这就是为什么它的一些部门通过授予新发明专利来努力创造垄断，而另一些部门则通过反垄断诉讼来打击垄断。人们可以质疑，仅凭率先想出移动软件设计就应获得垄断权吗？但苹果凭 iPhone 在设计、生产与营销上获取的垄断利润，显然是因创造了更大的丰裕，而非人为制造稀缺：顾客乐于支付高价，终于可以买到真正好用的智能手机。新垄断本身的活力解释了为什么旧垄断不会扼杀创新。随着苹果 iOS 领衔，移动计算的崛起已显著削弱微软数十年的操作系统统治地位。

Before that, IBM's hardware monopoly of the 1960s and '70s was overtaken by Microsoft's software monopoly. AT\&T had a monopoly on telephone service for most of the 20th century, but now anyone can get a cheap cellphone plan from any number of providers. If the tendency of monopoly businesses was to hold back progress, they would be dangerous, and we'd be right to oppose them. But the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of.

在此之前，20 世纪 60 至 70 年代 IBM 的硬件垄断被微软的软件垄断取而代之。AT&T 在 20 世纪大部分时间垄断电话服务，但如今任何人都能从多家供应商那里获得廉价手机套餐。若垄断企业的倾向是阻碍进步，它们将十分危险，我们也理应反对。然而，进步史正是优秀垄断企业取代旧有企业的历史。垄断推动进步，因为对数年乃至数十年垄断利润的预期提供了强大创新动机；而垄断利润又使企业能够进行长期规划，资助竞争激烈环境下公司做梦都不敢想的雄心勃勃研究项目，从而持续创新。

So why are economists obsessed with competition as an ideal state? It is a relic of history. Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: They see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. Their theories describe an equilibrium state of perfect competition because that is what's easy to model, not because it represents the best of business. But the long-run equilibrium predicted by 19th-century physics was a state in which all energy is evenly distributed and everything comes to rest—also known as the heat death of the universe. Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it is a powerful metaphor. In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death. If your industry is in a competitive equilibrium, the death of your business won't matter to the world; some other undifferentiated competitor will always be ready to take your place.

那么，为什么经济学家仍将竞争奉为理想状态？这是一种历史遗留。经济学家借用了 19 世纪物理学家的数学，把个人与企业视作可互换的原子，而非独特的创造者。其理论描述的是完全竞争均衡状态，因为这便于建模，并非因为它代表商业最佳形态。然而 19 世纪物理学预言的长期均衡是一切能量均匀分布、万物归于静止的状态——即宇宙的热寂。无论你对热力学有何看法，这都是一个强有力的隐喻。在商业中，均衡意味着停滞，停滞意味着死亡。如果你的行业处于竞争均衡，你的企业消亡对世界毫无影响；总有其他同质化竞争者准备随时取而代之。

Perfect equilibrium may describe the void that is most of the universe. It may even characterize many businesses. But every new creation takes place far from equilibrium. In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

完美的均衡或许可以描述构成宇宙大部分的虚空，也可能概括许多企业的状态，但所有新的创造都发生在远离均衡的地方。在经济理论之外的现实世界里，一家企业之所以成功，正是因为它做到了别人做不到的事。因此，垄断并非病态或例外，而是每一家成功企业的常态。

Tolstoy famously opens "Anna Karenina" by observing: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.

托尔斯泰在《安娜·卡列尼娜》的名句开篇中写道：“幸福的家庭都是相似的，不幸的家庭各有各的不幸。”而商业世界恰好相反。所有成功的公司各不相同：它们通过解决独特问题而赢得垄断地位。所有失败的公司则相同：它们未能逃离竞争。

Adapted from Mr. Thiel's new book, with Blake Masters, "Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future," which will be published by Crown Business on Sept. 16. Mr. Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palantir and made the first outside investment in Facebook.

本文摘编自彼得·蒂尔与布雷克·马斯特斯合著的新书《从零到一：创业笔记，或如何打造未来》，该书将于 9 月 16 日由皇冠商业出版社出版。蒂尔是 PayPal 和 Palantir 的联合创始人，也是 Facebook 的首位外部投资者。

2014-09-12 Peter Thiel.Competition Is for Losers

2014-09-12 Peter Thiel.Competition Is for Losers

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