In teaching entrepreneurship or writing about entrepreneurship, there's a big challenge in it because I think there is no single formula. As you can tell from the last few speakers, it's always a very, very different story.
在教授或撰写有关创业的内容时，最大的难题在于我认为并不存在放之四海而皆准的公式。正如前几位演讲者所展示的，每个创业故事都是截然不同的。
And I think every moment in the history of business, every moment in the history of technology, It happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be building a social networking site.
我认为，商业史上的每一个时刻、技术史上的每一个时刻，都只会发生一次。下一位马克·扎克伯格不会再去创建一家社交网络公司。
The next Larry Page will not be building a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not be building an operating system company. If you're copying these people, in some sense, you're not learning from them.
下一位拉里·佩奇不会再去做搜索引擎，下一位比尔·盖茨也不会再去创办操作系统公司。如果你只是复制他们，从某种意义上说，你并没有真正向他们学习。
And this is why I think there is no science to business. Science starts with the number two. It starts with things that are repeatable and experimentally verifiable in one way or another.
这也是我认为商业并非科学的原因。科学始于“二”，始于那些可以重复、可以通过实验验证的事物。
Whereas I think every great company is one of a kind and the question of how do you get from zero to one? And so the starting point for my book Zero to One is this sort of anti-formulaic approach.
而我认为，每一家伟大的公司都是独一无二的，关键问题是如何实现从零到一的跨越。因此，我的《从0到1》一书就是以这种反公式化的视角为出发点。
It's to take this question of singularity and uniqueness as the central question. And I try to get at it through a variety of sort of contrarian questions. What great business is nobody building?
把“单点性”和“独特性”作为核心问题，我通过一系列逆向思考的问题来切入：有什么伟大的业务尚无人涉足？
Tell me something that's true that nobody agrees with you on.
告诉我一件你认为是真实却无人同意的事情。
These are often quite hard questions to answer because we think it's hard to come up with some new truth or it often requires courage because you often have to go against conventional wisdom in one way or another.
这些问题往往非常难以回答，因为要提出新的真理本就不易，而且常常需要勇气，因为你必须在某种程度上与主流观点背道而驰。
I want to maybe share two or three of these contrarian truths that I believe that people generally don't understand. My book Zero to One is a whole set of these things,
我想分享两三个我认为多数学人尚未理解的逆向真理。《从0到1》一书中收录了一整套类似观点，
things that I believe to be true that most people do not agree with me on. First big truth that comes right out of this idea of unique businesses. I think that all, if you're a founder or entrepreneur, what you want to aim for is monopoly.
这些都是我深信却少有人认可的真理。第一个重大真理源于“独一无二”的企业理念：如果你是创业者，你真正应该追求的是垄断。
You want to aim to build a company that is one of a kind and that it's so far differentiated from the competition that it's not even competing.
你的目标应是构建一家独一无二、与竞争对手差异化到几乎不存在竞争关系的公司。
And I think the conventional wisdom is always that capitalism and competition are somehow synonyms. I believe they're antonyms. A capitalist is someone who's in the business of accumulating capital.
传统观念总把“资本主义”和“竞争”视为同义词，而我认为它们恰恰是反义词。资本家是以积累资本为业的人。
A world of perfect competition is a world where all the profits are competed away. If you want to compete like crazy, then you should just open a restaurant in Chicago.
在完全竞争的世界里，所有利润都会被竞争吞噬。如果你真想拼命竞争，那就去芝加哥开一家餐馆吧。
And I think the great companies like Google, sort of the paradigm example I use, . ..has had no serious competition in search since 2002 when it definitively distanced itself from Yahoo and Microsoft.
我认为像谷歌这样的伟大公司——这是我常用的范例——自2002年在搜索领域彻底甩开雅虎和微软后，就几乎没有遇到真正的竞争。
And as a result, it's been generating enormous cash flows for the last 12 years. I sort of get at this... I think there are sort of two different reasons this monopoly and competition idea is not understood.
因此，在过去12年里，谷歌持续创造巨额现金流。我之所以强调这一点，是因为人们对垄断与竞争常常理解不到位，有两方面原因。
One is somewhat intellectual, because the people who have monopolies don't talk about it. They pretend not to have monopolies for reasons that I will leave to your imagination.
其一是认知层面：拥有垄断地位的人绝口不提垄断，他们出于种种原因假装自己并非垄断，这些原因不言自明。
And the people who don't have monopolies pretend to have something unique about their business because otherwise nobody would invest or give them any money. And the way you do this is if you have a monopoly like Google, you will pretend that you are in a much, much larger market. So you will never, as Google, talk about the search business and say, we have a 66% share of the search market and we're much more dominant than Microsoft ever was with the operating system market in the 1990s. You will instead say that we are a technology company.
其二是未获垄断者则自称“独特”，否则无人投资、无人融资。若你像谷歌那样握有垄断，你会假装自己身处更广阔的市场。因此，谷歌绝不会谈论“搜索业务”并声称“我们拥有66%的搜索市场份额，比微软90年代在操作系统市场的统治力更强”。它会说“我们是一家科技公司”。
And technology is this vast space where we're competing with Apple on iPhones and we're competing with Facebook on social. And we're going to build a self-driving cars. We're competing with all the car companies in Detroit.
科技是一个巨大领域，我们在iPhone上与苹果竞争，在社交上和Facebook竞争，还要做自动驾驶汽车，与底特律所有车企竞争。
And there's just competition everywhere. And so it sort of gets obscured by making the market appear to be bigger than it really is. And then conversely, if you were to listen to my talk today and run out of here and decide you had to start a restaurant immediately, And you would talk to various investors and they'd say, well, I don't want to invest in a restaurant because I know they all go out of business and I will lose all my money. You will tell them some idiosyncratic story where this is a one-of-a-kind restaurant.
于是看起来竞争无处不在，通过把市场描绘得比实际更大来掩盖垄断地位。反过来，如果你听完我的演讲立刻决定要开餐馆，去找投资人，他们会说，“我不想投餐馆，因为餐馆都倒闭，我会血本无归。”于是你会编造独特故事，说这家餐馆独一无二。
It's completely unique and very different from all the others. It is the only British-Nepalese fusion cuisine in downtown Chicago. And so there's sort of this fictional story that gets told the other way.
它绝对独特，与众不同，是芝加哥市中心唯一一家英式-尼泊尔式融合餐厅。因此，另一种虚构叙事就形成了。
And so I think that because of these distortions that people tell about their businesses, I think this monopoly question ends up being very, very underappreciated and was sort of underweighted as a variable intellectually.
正因这些针对企业的自我扭曲描述，使得“垄断”这一变量在认知层面被大大低估、被严重忽视。
But I think there's also sort of a second reason that this is not understood that well. The opening line of Anna Karenina is that all happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way.
此外还有第二个原因。《安娜·卡列尼娜》的开篇语说：幸福的家庭都是相似的，不幸的家庭各有各的不幸。
And I think the opposite is true of business. I think all happy companies are different because they came up, they figured out some way to radically differentiate themselves and escape from competition. All unhappy companies are alike because they fail to escape the essential sameness that is competition. The chapter in my book entitled, All Happy Companies Are Different, got excerpted by the Wall Street Journal and they retitled it a little bit more provocatively with the title, Competition is for Losers.
我认为在商业领域恰恰相反。我认为所有成功的公司各有不同，因为它们找到了一种根本性的差异化方式，从而成功逃离了竞争。所有不成功的公司却大同小异，因为它们未能摆脱竞争所带来的同质性。我在书中写了一章《所有成功公司各不相同》，《华尔街日报》曾摘录这章并用更具挑衅性的标题刊登——《竞争是失败者的游戏》。
And the reason this is such a provocative title is because we always think that the losers are the people who can't compete effectively enough. The losers are the people who are slow on the swim team in high school.
这个标题之所以挑衅，是因为我们通常认为失败者就是那些竞争力不足的人——就像高中游泳队里游得最慢的队员。
The losers are the people whose grades or test scores aren't quite good enough to get into the right universities or something like that.
失败者也是那些成绩或考试分数不够好、无法进入名校的人，诸如此类。
And so the idea that somehow competition itself is something that we are perversely attracted to, is very counterintuitive. And yet I want to suggest that there is always this incredible pull that competition has on us.
因此，说我们以一种近乎病态的方式被竞争本身所吸引，这听起来极不合常理。然而我想指出，竞争总对我们有着难以置信的吸引力。
The autobiographical anecdote in my book, when I was a teenager in my 20s, and the advice I'd give my younger self, I was incredibly driven by these sort of competitive dynamics.
书中的自传式轶事讲述我二十岁左右的青少年时期，以及我会给年轻时自己的建议——那时我完全被这类竞争动力驱使。
My eighth grade junior high school yearbook, one of my friends said, I know you're going to make it into Stanford in four years. And sure enough, I got into Stanford four years later, then went to Stanford Law School, and then ended up at a big law firm on Wall Street. It was one of those places where from the outside, everybody was trying to get in. On the inside, everybody was trying to get out. When I left after seven months and three days, one of the people down the hall from me told me it was reassuring to see me leave. He had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. And of course, all you had to do was go out the front door.
在我八年级的初中毕业纪念册里，一位朋友写道：“我知道你四年后一定能进斯坦福。”果然，我四年后进入斯坦福，又继续就读斯坦福法学院，随后进入华尔街一家大型律师事务所。那是个外面人人想挤进去、里面人人想逃出来的地方。我在那里待了七个月零三天后离职，走廊里的同事对我说，看见我离开让他如释重负；他之前完全不知道原来有人能从“恶魔岛”逃出去。当然，你所要做的只是走出大门而已。
But it was psychologically hard for people to do this because their identity was so wrapped up in the competitions they had won, the people they had beaten along the way, that they could not even imagine doing anything different.
然而心理上，人们难以迈出这一步，因为他们的身份紧紧系于曾赢下的竞争、击败的对手，以致无法想象去做任何不同的事。
And this is why I think competition is always this very two-edged thing. When you compete ferociously, you will get better at that which you're competing on. But you will always narrow your focus to beating the people around you.
这就是我认为竞争是一把双刃剑的原因。当你激烈竞争时，你的确会在所竞争的领域变得更强，但你也会把注意力不断收窄到击败周围的人身上。
And it often comes at this very high price of losing sight of what is more important or perhaps more valuable.
这种做法往往以高昂代价换来：你会失去对更重要或更有价值之事的关注。
And so I think there's this very strange phenomenon in Silicon Valley where a lot of the most talented A lot of the great startups seem to be run by people who are suffering from a mild form of Asperger's.
因此，在硅谷出现了一个非常奇怪的现象：许多最有才华、最成功的初创公司似乎都由患有轻度阿斯伯格综合症的人领导。
And I think we need to always turn this fact around and view this as an indictment of our whole society. Because what does it say about our society when anyone who does not suffer from Asperger's, who is socially well adapted, We'll be talked out of all of their original creative ideas before they're even fully formed. Who will sense, this is a little bit too weird, that's a little bit strange, that sounds a little bit crazy, people are looking at me in a weird way. And I think this is something that we must all realize is sort of a deeply endemic problem. They've done these studies at Harvard Business School, which I think you can often think of the business school student as a profile in anti-Asperger's. They're sort of very extroverted, often have no real convictions.
我认为我们必须反过来看待这一事实，把它视为对整个社会的控诉。因为如果一个没有阿斯伯格症的人，他社交能力良好，却会在原创创意尚未完全形成前就被劝阻放弃——他会感觉这有点怪、那有点奇，说出来像傻瓜，别人正用异样的眼光看着我。我认为我们必须认识到，这是一个深层的普遍问题。哈佛商学院做过相关研究，你常可将商学院学生视作“反阿斯伯格”的典型：他们极其外向，却往往缺乏坚定信念。
And you have sort of a hothouse environment in which you put all these people for two years. And at the end of the two-year process, they've all sort of talked to each other and they've concluded they should all try to catch the last wave.
把这群人关在一个温室般的环境里两年。两年后，他们相互交流一番，得出结论：大家都应该去追逐最后一波浪潮。
And it's invariably a pretty bad idea. In 1989, they all wanted to work for Michael Milken just a year or two before he went to jail.
而这几乎总是糟糕的主意。1989 年，他们都想去迈克尔·米尔肯手下工作——结果一两年后米尔肯就进了监狱。
They were never interested in tech or Silicon Valley except for 99-2000 when they timed the dot-com bubble implosion perfectly. And then sort of 2005 to 07, it was all housing and private equity and things like that.
他们从不关心科技或硅谷，除了 1999-2000 年那会儿精准踩中了互联网泡沫破裂；随后 2005 到 2007 年，他们又一头扎进房地产、私募股权等领域。
And it's easy in some ways to make fun of people in business school or people who are sort of conventionally tracked. But I think we should recognize that we're all very prone to this.
在某种程度上，嘲笑商学院学生或循规蹈矩的人很容易。但我们应当意识到，我们每个人都很容易陷入这种状态。
Already in the time of Shakespeare, the word ape meant both primate and to imitate. And there is something very deep in human nature that is imitative. It has a lot of good things. It's how language gets learned by kids.
早在莎士比亚时代，ape 既指猿猴，也指模仿。模仿深植于人性，带来许多好处——孩子们学习语言就是靠模仿完成的。
It's how culture gets transmitted in our society, but it also can lead to sort of a lot of insane behavior, lead to the madness of crowds, to bubbles, to sort of mass delusions of one sort or another, and I think it can And I think it's advertising. We always tell ourselves that we're not that prone to this. And I think that's something I'd encourage all of us to rethink.
这正是文化在社会中得以传播的方式，但它也可能引发许多疯狂行为，导致群体狂热、泡沫，以及各种形式的大规模错觉，而我认为广告正是这种现象的体现。我们总是告诉自己不容易被其左右，但我鼓励大家重新思考这一点。
We always think of advertising as something that just afflicts other people, that never afflicts ourselves. I think this is very far from the case. And so the monopoly competition is not just this intellectual failure.
我们总以为广告只会影响别人，从不影响自己。事实远非如此。因此，那种趋同竞争不仅是一种思想层面的失败。
It's also this thing where you have a tiny door where everyone's trying to rush through. And there may be around the corner a vast, .
它还像是一扇狭小的门，人人都争先恐后地往里挤；而在拐角处，可能有一条宽阔的……
..and a secret gate that no one's taking and you should always find the secret path and go ahead and take that. Two other quick thoughts on, two other quick ideas on things that I believe to be true that most people don't agree with me on.
……还有一扇无人光顾的隐秘之门，你应该永远寻找那条秘密路径并大胆踏入。接下来我再快速分享两点，大多数人不认同但我深信不疑的想法。
I think there are many answers to this question, what is true that people don't agree with me on. And most of us actually don't think there are that many answers left. We think that all these answers have been discovered.
关于“哪些真理尚未被大众接受”这一问题，我认为答案很多。然而大多数人觉得几乎已无答案可寻，仿佛真理都已被发现。
And I sort of give a trichotomy in my book of conventions, which are truths everybody already knows. The other end, there are mysteries, which are truths that nobody in this world can figure out.
在我的书中，我将真理分为三类：其一是人人皆知的“常识”；另一端是无人能够参透的“谜团”。
And then there are things that are in between that are hard. It takes a lot of work, but if you apply yourself, you could figure those out. And I call those secrets. And I think there are many secrets left.
介于两者之间的是“难题”——需要付出巨大努力，但你若肯投入即可破解。我称之为“秘密”，而且仍有大量秘密等待发掘。
Now there are certain areas where it's not that promising to look. So if you were growing up in the 17th or 18th century, there were some empty spaces on the map and you could become an explorer and discover some more secrets about geography.
当然，也有些领域并不值得寻找。例如，如果你生于 17 或 18 世纪，当时地图上仍有空白，你可以当探险家，发现地理上的新秘密。
Or in the 19th century, there were still some empty spaces left on the periodic table of elements and you could go into chemistry. ...and discover some things in basic chemistry.
又或者 19 世纪，元素周期表仍有空缺，你可以投身化学，去基础化学中揭示新发现。
And so I think geography, basic chemistry, these are areas that have been fully explored. These are areas where you're not going to find any secrets.
因此，地理与基础化学等领域已被完全挖掘，在那里你找不到新的秘密。
These are not promising areas where you will discover a new truth that no one else knows and that can become the basis for a great insight or a great business. But I think most areas are not like this.
这些领域不大可能出现未知真理，无法成为重大洞见或伟大事业的基础。但大多数领域并非如此。
And I think that there are many directions we can go in where the frontier is still surprisingly close. There certainly has been an enormous amount of ideas and businesses that have been discovered in this IT space for the last 40 years.
许多方向的前沿仍近在咫尺。过去 40 年，IT 领域已涌现无数创意与企业。
And there's no reason to think that's going to stop around computers, internet, mobile internet, software. There are many things people find. The ideas are often, they always seem shockingly simple in retrospect. They're pretty hard ex-ante.
没有理由认为这种势头会在计算机、互联网、移动互联网、软件领域戛然而止。许多想法回顾起来简单得惊人，但在事前却颇为艰难。
You know, when we came up PayPal with combining email with money, you know, that was a secret. It was not an easy thing to figure out. No one else in the world had figured it out. But it was, you know, far from impossible to do.
当年我们把电子邮件与货币结合并创建 PayPal，那就是一个秘密。当时没人想到这一点，想出来并不容易，但绝非不可能。
And, you know, once we came up with the idea, we thought, well, it's, you know. It's amazing no one's thought of this yet. We have to really execute fast before anyone catches up.
当我们提出这个想法时，觉得不可思议竟无人想到；因此必须迅速执行，抢在所有人之前。
And so I think there are many things, there are many secrets like this that are left to be discovered. And we see this with all the new businesses that emerge in these areas.
我认为仍有许多类似的秘密等待发现，正如这些领域不断涌现的新企业所示。
I actually think that we should try to find some in a number of other areas. So I think that everything from biotech to Space technologies, all sorts of other areas of technology, I think have been somewhat underexplored in recent decades, and that it would be good if the cone of progress were not just this narrow cone around computers and the world of bits, but were expanded to include the world of atoms in many, many other ways.
我甚至认为我们应在更多领域寻找秘密。从生物技术到航天技术，在过去几十年里都有所忽视，如果进步之锥不再局限于计算机和比特的狭窄尖端，而能扩展到原子的广阔世界，那将更为理想。
So, second idea is there are many, many secrets left for us to discover. Third idea that I'll end on. And this is the basic dichotomy in my book. I think for us to have a successful 21st century, we're going to have to have both globalization and technological innovation. And I think these are two very different modes of progress. And people often use these words interchangeably, and I think that's always a big mistake.
因此，第二个观点是：仍有无数秘密等待我们发现。接下来是第三个观点，也是我书中的基本二分法——若要迎来成功的 21 世纪，全球化与技术创新缺一不可。这两种进步模式截然不同，人们常把二者混为一谈，而这始终是一个重大错误。
I draw globalization always on an x-axis. I describe it as copying things that work, going from one to N, horizontal or extensive growth. China is the paradigm of globalization today.
我总是把全球化画在横轴上。我把它描述为复制有效的方法，从 1 到 N 的横向或外延式增长。中国是当今全球化的典范。
And to first approximation, what China needs to do in the next 20 years is just copy everything that's working in the West. You can maybe skip a few steps, but if it executes against that, the people in China will be much better off in the decades ahead. And then I always draw technology on the y-axis. I describe it as vertical or intensive growth, doing new things, going from zero to one.
粗略地说，中国未来 20 年只需将西方行之有效的一切加以复制。或许可以跳过若干步骤，但若能照此执行，未来几十年中国人民的生活将会大为改善。随后我总是把技术画在纵轴上，将其描述为纵向或内涵式增长，去做全新的事情，从 0 到 1。
And we can sort of see this big difference between globalization and technology if we think about the history of the last 200 years. There have been periods of globalization. There have been periods of technology.
如果我们回顾过去 200 年的历史，便能发现全球化与技术之间的巨大差异：历史上既有全球化的时期，也有技术的时期。
The 19th century was a period of both. From 1815 to 1914, you had tremendous technological progress and tremendous amounts of globalization taking place.
19 世纪二者并行。从 1815 年到 1914 年，技术取得巨大进展，全球化也在迅速扩张。
After 1914, with world wars, communism, all sorts of other events, globalization sort of went in reverse. The world became a much more disunited, much more fragmented sort of a place. But technology continued to go at a ferocious pace.
1914 年以后，由于世界大战、共产主义等各种事件，全球化出现逆转，世界变得更加分裂、碎片化。但技术仍以惊人的速度前进。
And I would argue since maybe about 1971, when Kissinger went to China and globalization restarted, began at a ferocious rate the last 40 plus years. Technology's been going a little bit more slowly, where it's been, as I already said,
我认为自 1971 年基辛格访华、全球化重新启动以来，过去四十多年全球化势头非常迅猛。与此同时，技术的发展则稍显迟缓，如我之前所言，
a narrow focus on computers and a little bit less of other things. The last century, unlike the 19th century, has been a period where we first had lots of technology but no globalization,
它过于聚焦于计算机，对其他领域关注不足。与 19 世纪不同，上一个世纪先是技术繁荣却缺乏全球化，
and we've now had a more recent period where we've had lots of globalization but only limited technological progress. And this change is reflected in a very different way in which we talk about today's world.
而近几十年则经历了全球化盛行却只有有限技术进展的阶段。我们描述当今世界的方式也因此大为不同。
In the 1950s or 1960s, we would have described the world as being divided between the first world and the third world. The first world was that part of the world that saw Relentless, accelerating technological progress.
在 1950 或 1960 年代，人们会把世界分为第一世界和第三世界。第一世界指技术持续快速进步的地区。
The third world was that part of the world that was permanently stuck, permanently screwed up in one way or another. So no globalization, but lots of technology. Today we would divide the world into the developed and developing nations.
第三世界则是长期停滞、在某种程度上陷入困境的地区。那时全球化缺失，但技术充沛。如今我们则把世界划分为发达国家和发展中国家。
The developing nations are those that are copying the developed world.
发展中国家就是那些在复制发达国家的国家。
And so this developed-developing dichotomy is a pro-globalization It's sort of a convergence theory of history where the entire world will become more and more homogenous as globalization continues apace.
因此，“发达—发展中”这一二分法本质上是一种支持全球化的历史收敛理论，认为随着全球化的加速，世界将越来越同质化。
But it is also implicitly an anti-technological dichotomy because when we say that we're living in the developed world, we are implicitly saying That we're living in that part of the world where nothing new is going to be done,
但这同时也隐含一种反技术的意味：当我们称自己身处发达世界时，实际上暗示我们所处之地不会再诞生新事物，
where things are finished, they're complete, and we can expect decades of stagnation and sclerosis, and the younger generation should expect to have a lower living standard than their parents.
一切皆已定型、完善，我们只能期待未来几十年的停滞与僵化，年轻一代的生活水平将低于父辈。
And we have sort of this rather bleak view of the future. And I think we should not accept that sort of a label. We should not accept this idea that we're living in the developed world.
这导致我们对未来持相当悲观的观点。我认为我们不应接受这种标签，也不应认同“我们生活在发达世界”的说法。
And so I will end by saying that I think we should always return To the very contrarian question, how can we go about developing the developed world? Thank you very much.
因此我最后想说，我们应始终回到那个反主流的问题：我们如何让“发达世界”继续发展？非常感谢。