我经营过75+家企业。这就是为什么你可能在追逐错误的想法。| Andrew Wilkinson
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson
Full Interview Transcript
Andrew Wilkinson: You don’t want to walk into the gym on day one and try and deadlift 300 pounds. So when someone comes to me and they’re a first time entrepreneur and they say, “I’m going to make the next great AI company,” I think that is the equivalent.
Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like you’ve actually started and run more companies than maybe anyone else in the world. What is your best advice for coming up with a great startup idea?
Startups Are Like Weightlifting
Andrew Wilkinson: Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner, has this amazing quote.
Speaker 3 (00:00:24): Fish where the fish are.
The biggest mistakes I’ve made have been going into business models where other people have repeatedly failed and thinking, I can do this better.
About Andrew Wilkinson & Tiny
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s so funny to watch you on Twitter. Clearly you’ve become AI obsessed.
Andrew Wilkinson: It’s like having the world’s most reliable employee who costs $200 a month and works 24/7. So many knowledge work jobs are going to change massively. I think the fundamental question is, do all jobs just become a single prompt?
How to Find a Good Idea
Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew is the co-founder and CEO of Tiny, a holding company that’s often called the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet. They own over 40 businesses ranging from Dribble to WeCommerce to the AeroPress coffee maker, and they focused on buying profitable businesses from founders and holding them for the long term. Andrew and his co-founder bootstrapped the business from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in value, and Andrew personally was worth over $1 billion at one point. In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover a bunch of strategies for coming up with a good business idea, what common business ideas you should avoid, his experience automating much of his work and life using AI, and what that means for employment in the near future. Also, what he’s learned about happiness and money and how they’re not directly related, and also how getting diagnosed with ADHD and then taking SSRIs was the thing that most impacted his happiness in life.
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Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Fish Where the Fish Are
Andrew Wilkinson: Oh, thanks man, great to be here.
Why Start With a Niche
Lenny Rachitsky: I’ve been wanting to chat with you for so long. There’s so much that I want to talk about and I want to start with a topic that I know that you think a lot about and that it’s also in the minds of a lot of people, which is coming up with a great startup idea and this is something that a lot of people are thinking about right now because AI makes it so easy to actually build your idea into something real, and I feel like this is something you spent a lot of time thinking about. I feel like you’ve actually started and run more companies than, I don’t know, maybe anyone else in the world. I feel like you’re in the top a hundred, top 10, something like that. I don’t know. Does that feel right?
Andrew Wilkinson: I’ve definitely had a lot of experiences and I’ve probably started or been involved with 75 different projects or businesses where I’ve been a primary contributor and I wouldn’t say that’s anything to brag about because I’ve been an inch deep in a mile wide. So that’s been in a lot of ways kind of my Achilles heel is I get too excited about ideas and I start too many businesses, but as a result I’ve seen almost every business model under the sun.
Avoid Creating a Job You Hate
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Okay. Yeah, I think the benefit is for us is we get to learn from your experience. Let me just ask you this question, what is your best advice for coming up with a great startup idea?
Andrew Wilkinson: Ultimately the best thing is something you’re going to be interested in, but I think a mistake a lot of people make is they choose something that everybody is interested in. So for example, they say I don’t know anyone that has hadn’t had the thought, man, I would love to start a really cool restaurant or I want to have a cool cafe or something. And in reality, what they think about is how cool would it be to come up with an amazing logo or all fun stuff, design the menu and stuff. But in reality, operating those businesses is miserable and it’s also a very hard business because every morning millions of people wake up and they go, I should start a cafe. But on the flip side, almost nobody wakes up every morning and says, “You know what? I’d love to start a funeral home,” or “I would like to start a pest control business,” or “I should start software that helps people fill out forms for the government.”
And Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner, has this amazing quote. He says, “Fish where the fish are.” And he gives this example, he says, “If you’re a fisherman and you see a large pond and all around the pond, there’s a whole bunch of fishermen and they’re all elbowing each other out of the way. They’re all using the best lures, the best fishing line, they all have amazing strategy. You actually want to walk off into the forest and find a small fishing hole with lots of fish and very little competition. And I think that’s probably the most important thing in business is actually to find those niches where you can actually make real money because competition equals lower margin. The more competitors there are, the lower your prices have to be and the more competitive the business is ultimately.
Business vs. Job
Lenny Rachitsky: It doesn’t feel intuitive to go after small markets and to find niches. So let’s just follow that thread. Well, why is that actually a source of some of the best ideas starting really small and niche?
Investing in Movies & Letterboxd
Andrew Wilkinson: I don’t necessarily think it has to be something that is small forever, but it has to be something that like I think about if you’re a first time entrepreneur or a student or something, you don’t want to walk into the gym on day one and try and deadlift 300 pounds. So when someone comes to me and they’re a first time entrepreneur and they say, “I’m going to make the next great AI company,” or “I’m going to launch a new bank,” or something like that, something that is very, very rigorous and complicated and highly competitive and regulated, I think that is the equivalent. I think you really want to take the baby weights and start slowly building your muscle. And I think about my own experience starting a business, I was so lucky because the first business I ever started my web design agency, which became Metalab, that was so easy and it worked immediately because all I had to do was know how to build websites and be able to talk to potential customers.
And then once they said, “Yes, I will pay you $5,000,” I just had to send them an invoice, do the work, and that was it. It was a very simple business. And because of that, I got immediate positive feedback and I built my own narrative. And my narrative was, “I’m good at business, I can do this, keep going.” And then I went off and I started taking my money that I made from that original business and that’s when I fucked up. So I went out and I started a pizzeria and I lost all my money. I started a designer cat furniture business, a online DJ school, a skin cream business, all of these things. I’ve just lost all my money almost immediately, but because I had that first win I kept on going. And I just think it’s so critical that people choose a business where they get that initial win.
Go Where the Fish Are
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, this is a great topic. This is just like how do you avoid creating a job for yourself that you hate? There’s a lot of business opportunities and ideas that like, “Yeah, you can make this work,” and then it works, and then you’re stuck doing this thing running a restaurant. My wife tells a story where a friend started a coffee shop and then he’s like, “I thought I was starting a coffee shop, but I’m just replacing milk and buying milk all day. That’s my job now.” So just kind of along those lines to help people avoid creating a beast that they didn’t expect any advice for Just how to know this is maybe even though this may work and make money, you probably don’t want to be spending your life doing this sort of business.
Boring Businesses Are Good Businesses
Andrew Wilkinson: So I just started a pressure washing business. I was speaking at a local business school and after I spoke, one of the kids walked up to me and he said, “Hey, I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve started two or three businesses in the past doing landscaping and I’m not enjoying school.” And so just on the spot, I said to him, “Why don’t you drop out and we’ll start a business together?” And I’d been cooking on this idea of a pressure washing business because I’d studied that industry a little bit and I knew a few friends who’d done it in other cities. And I had this unfair advantage, which is I owned a whole bunch of media properties where I could advertise it for free basically. And so we started this business and I think for him, he kind of had this moment of, do I really want to be washing people’s driveways for the rest of my life?
And what I said to him is, “Look, if this gets to scale, you’ll never touch a pressure washer unless you want to.” If the business can get big enough where you can have employees, he can just focus on sales or digital marketing or whatever aspect of the business that he really loves. And I think that’s the biggest thing that a lot of entrepreneurs miss. They say, “I don’t want to do that for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be in the back of a dry cleaner dry cleaning clothes.” And to me it’s just a question of scale. I think the cafe is a great example because a cafe, if it doesn’t get to a reasonable scale is just a job.
There’s a big difference between a business and a job. I think if you could start a pressure washing business where you’re the only employee, yeah, that’s a job, but if you can get to a scale where you can drive 10 leads a day, then you don’t have to do any of the pressure washing and you just do what you love. So I think a lot of people have this kind of Protestant work ethic where they think, well, I’ve got to be the person to do everything. And I think they really need to lean into what I call lazy leadership, which is how do I get away from the things I hate as quickly as humanly possible? How do I be Teflon for tasks?
Ideas Everyone Loves That Fail
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s interesting that this business is non-software related at all, this pressure washing business. So I guess just for folks that are coming up with ideas, and I imagine most ideas are there’s a pull to make it software oriented, something AI is going to help build for you and help you run. What’s your calculus on just going down a direction of real world physical business, like a restaurant power washing business versus a software just like what are the benefits of that direction when should someone actually seriously think about doing a business like a power washing business?
Andrew Wilkinson: I think if someone’s listening to this podcast, odds are they’re someone who’s kind of a digital native. And I think the question is, what’s your unfair advantage and what are you great at? So for me, I think I have reasonably good taste. And so what I could do is I identify and I knew enough to identify great design and development talent, but mostly I was lucky because I was a talker. I was good at meeting with clients and selling myself. And so ultimately my highest and best use my superpower was sales. And so that can be applied to anything, anything where you need to go out and you need to sell a customer. And so really it just comes down to what do you get drawn to and then how do you find the profitable business within that? So here’s an example. A friend of mine, he owns a restaurant and he said, “Oh, I love it. I’m so passionate about it. It’s this stunning beautiful restaurant in my hometown.”
And he said, “But it’s really just a job for a few different people and we can’t make any money at it, but I’ve been noticing that there’s all these vendors that service the restaurant and those guys are making a killing.” And so he told me about a business that cleans grease traps, another one that cleans exhaust vents for kitchens. So I think looking around and seeing where your passion is and then sniffing around within it, probably somewhere within your passion, there’s an opportunity. So for example, I love movies. My happy place is a dark theater. That’s the best way for me to de-stress is go to a dark theater and watch a movie and get lost in it. And probably about four or five years ago, I was like, “Man, how cool would it be to invest in movies in some way to be a part of that creative world?”
And so I started looking into funding movies and I realized that when you fund movies, like 90% of the time you lose all your money. And even if you do make some money, you rarely make a good return. But I spend a bunch of time understanding the industry and learning about it. And then two years ago I was in New Zealand and I met the founder of Letterboxd and I realized, “Oh my God, this is a business where this has a moat, so it has a network effect, it’s a huge social network for film reviewers. It’s something I’m passionate about and it’s something that we can buy at a fair price.” All those things came together and I was like, “Oh my god, I can invest in film now.” In the same way I used to be a barista, we ended up buying the AeroPress coffee maker company. So I follow my passions and spend a long time learning different industries and then I find the profitable niche within.
Lifestyle Businesses vs. VC Startups
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, and this is a great takeaway essentially when you’re thinking about startup ideas, make sure there’s some connection to something unique to you where you have some unfair advantage. This makes me think about Brian Armstrong. I saw him do a talk once and he gave this really amazing insight about why Coinbase did well and why he started Coinbase. And it’s because if you look at his background, he had this really rare Venn diagram of background of computer science and I think it was cryptography and economics, which is the exact set of skills you need to start something like Coinbase. So I think the tip there is just what is that unique Venn diagram of skills in your background and just ideally what you’re building connects to that and gives you an unfair advantage.
Defining Success: Lifestyle vs. Big Business
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, yeah. I just met another UVic student at the local university student. She is interested in marketing and so she’s gone out and she’s found some local clients, so small restaurants and stuff and managed their social media and she said, “Yeah, it’s okay. I can make a thousand bucks a month, but it’s a lot of work,” and the owners really want a lot for their money. And I said, “Well, if you just pivot that idea just ever so slightly, and instead of doing restaurants, you did realtors or wealth managers who have quite a large marketing budget and are used to spending serious money and it only has to work a little bit to make a lot of money for them. Those people, you can charge $5,000 a month.”
So I think often it’s you find your passion, your skill set, you zero in, and then you just kind of pivot and you find the most profitable way to do it. When I started my web design firm, I started mostly with local and small projects, but very quickly I found a job board in San Francisco where startups would share projects they needed help with. I could charge five times the amount for five times less work.
Lenny Rachitsky: This point about fish where the fish are I think is really important. You can start something that’s awesome that you love, that you’re so excited about, but nobody needs it. Talk a bit more about just what that looks like. What have you seen when you’re thinking about ideas that tell you that there’s fish but also not overfished as you pointed out?
Acquiring Businesses: Buffett’s Wisdom
Andrew Wilkinson: I think it’s hard like Warren Buffett has this great quote, “I’m a better businessman because I’m an investor and I’m a better investor because I’m a businessman.” And I feel like in order to know what problems are valuable to solve, you kind of need to have valuable problems. So it’s a bit of a hard thing because I remember when I was like 20, I would say, I hate how all the cat furniture I can buy for my cats is I bet people would pay a lot of money to solve this, but I didn’t understand anything about the realities of that business model. I didn’t understand how little people were actually willing to pay. I didn’t have a enough life experience to go, “Yes, that’s actually a worthwhile opportunity.” And I think that being able to know what people would pay to solve the problem realistically is incredibly valuable.
So my example of a realtor selling a house, because I’ve studied that industry, I know that a realtor can make like 20 to 5,000 a lead maybe, right? So I think you kind of have to understand the problem in depth before you really know. Because when I was starting out, I would go down every rabbit trail, every infomercial idea I had I would think was genius.
Network Effects & Switching Costs
Lenny Rachitsky: Or people, I don’t know, that don’t have this experience, which is most people. Is there one thing you do, maybe a heuristic that gives you a sense, maybe there’s something here, maybe there’s a lot of fish, maybe it’s a value of prompt or no, the soul tell me it probably isn’t.
Andrew Wilkinson: No, unfortunately, I think it’s mostly gut. I mean Munger and Buffett talk about having a whole bunch of mental models in your brain and they form a latticework, right? And they all kind of piece together. And I feel like for me, there’s so much of this that is, it’s almost like I’m an AI model and I’ve trained on all this data of what works and what doesn’t and what’s a good moat and what’s a bad business, et cetera. And when I see it, I just immediately know. I mean, I think all entrepreneurs are so lucky now to be able to go into Claude or ChatGPT and just say, “Hey, I’m thinking about starting a Botox clinic. Can you break down the numbers? Is this a good business? What’s hard about it? What is the regulatory moat? What would my payroll look like?” I didn’t have any of that and so I started so many incredibly stupid businesses, but I think there’s no excuse at this point. You should be able to do it with AI.
Hiring and Management
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s a really good tip actually. Then there’s this point you made about boring is good. That’s a really good piece of advice. A lot of people are going after flashy stuff, things they condemn on Twitter. Your advice here is boring is actually a really good thing because fewer people are going after it. Is that the general tip?
Andrew Wilkinson: Totally. I mean, so I started this business, one of my first called Flow and Flow was basically Asana before Asana came out. So it was a way to manage your to-do’s and projects with your team in a web app and we basically did the thing. We made the mistake that so many entrepreneurs make, which is to go after an industry that everybody goes after just like cafes. Everybody has the idea, man, I wish I could design my own project management system or my own to-do system. And not only that, but everybody loves new things. They love jumping around. I know me personally, in the last three years, I’ve probably used three different productivity systems and I love jumping around in them and I didn’t understand that and I ended up losing $10 million trying to compete with venture-backed businesses and bootstrapping.
It was all my own money, poured $10 million, lit it on fire trying to compete with Asana because I didn’t understand how the business world worked really as they had raised hundreds of millions of dollars and they were run by the co-founder of Facebook and it was a little bit like, I’m Fiji and I’m deciding I’m going to invade the United States in retrospect, just completely silly. Now on the flip side, if I’d taken that same amount of energy and I’d instead focused on, let’s see, what’s a really boring one I’ve heard about, there was a business I saw recently.
They were making 20,000 as a grant, pay us a thousand bucks, and that is such a boring, nobody wakes up and goes, “I want to make form filling software,” but I think they would if they could make 20 million a year
AI Practices and Tool Stack
Lenny Rachitsky: Along these lines of just bad ideas, things people shouldn’t start, what are a few ideas that you think everyone thinks is going to be a great idea and then they do it and then they always fail?
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, I think the biggest mistake, I can speak from my own experience, the biggest mistakes I’ve made business-wise have been going into business models where other people have repeatedly failed and thinking, I can do this better. So for example, me and one of my best friends about 10 years ago, we really wanted to start a bar. We just thought it’d be so cool to have a bar where us and all of our friends could go, we thought it’d be great for the city. We thought we can run this really high margin because we’re tech guys, we know how to build systems, we’re good at business, and we were utterly humbled. We realized that we didn’t know anything about business compared to someone who runs a pizzeria. If you think about it, like my example earlier of if you run a software company, what has to happen?
You have to hire a bunch of nerds, they need internet connections and computers and you need to pay them and you need to coordinate online and everyone can work asynchronously. Nothing has to go right. It’s not that complicated, at least at small-scale. A pizzeria, it’s like if the baker doesn’t wake up at three in the morning and start prepping dough, the entire thing is effed and all along the way there’s a hundred different failure points from front of house, back of house, the deliveries, arriving on time, all this logistics. And so I think it’s been stuff like that. I mean also I got into the news business, the local news business. I ended up buying an old paper in Vancouver and it’s the exact same thing. It’s like you can’t take a brilliant management team and change a bad business model. Ultimately the business model wins.
AI Replacing Jobs
Lenny Rachitsky: This is really good advice. Basically if there’s a bunch of dead bodies in that space, there’s probably something there that keeps killing them that you’re probably not aware of until maybe somebody figures something out, right? Once in a while, once in a blue moon, someone’s like, “Okay, here’s how we do this and then it works.”
AI’s Impact on Knowledge Work
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, look at Instacart. When Instacart came out, everyone said, “Well, Webvan failed. This is never going to work.” And we still don’t necessarily know if Instacart is a great business. I don’t know, I haven’t studied it, but I think it was like, okay, enough technology has changed that it can happen, but would it be easier to start Instacart, Amazon or Coupang or would it be easier to start an enterprise SaaS software company? Definitely the enterprise SaaS software company.
Lenny Rachitsky: I see. So this is I guess is the advice there. The thing that is easy to start is the thing you should not do because everyone’s going after that.
Advice for Young Professionals
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, it goes back to my gym analogy of if you’re going to deadlift 300 pounds, trained for 15 years, you should have already had three startups and they should have worked and you’ve really built up the reps. And I think that if I was going to start Instacart, that’s different than someone who’s 20 starting it. Not that I would be good at it, but at least I would know what I’m getting into.
New Jobs in the Age of Abundance
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s talk about something that is this endless debate on Twitter. Maybe it’s a false dichotomy between lifestyle businesses, bootstrap businesses, this idea of not raising money, just making revenue, living off the revenue versus venture-backed venture scale companies feels like you’re very good at the first bucket and a lot of people, this is their dream, “I’m just going to start something. I’ll start a lifestyle business, make a few million a year, never raise money. Who needs VCs? VCs suck.” Advice for deciding which route to go with an idea you have.
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, I think it’s just not true that a “lifestyle” or bootstrap business can’t get huge. I mean, we bootstrapped the entire business and now across all of our companies we do almost $300 million in revenue. And the whole time I had been focusing on taking, starting small businesses, small ideas, simple ideas, often buying small companies and watching them grow really big. And I think that the only difference between what we do and what a venture capitalist does is the level of tolerance of burning money on fire. And I just haven’t seen that If we choose the right businesses that aren’t in incredibly competitive markets or where they have some sort of moat. So what I mean by that is a great brand or a network effect like a social network or something like that, I don’t feel we’re holding them back by not letting them light up a bunch of money on fire because these things naturally grow.
The numbers, I mean they’re like balloons, they just go as long as we don’t mess them up too much. So I think the decision ultimately comes down to how hairy do you want your big, hairy, audacious goal to be? And if your big, hairy, audacious goal is I’m going to start the next satellite business that creates some sort of crazy technological revolution. Yes, you’re going to have to raise a venture capital unless you’re already a billionaire or something like that. But if you’re wanting to just tinker and solve a problem that you think is not going to be hyper-competitive, so for example, that form-filling thing or software that just does a narrow thing that doesn’t require 20, 30, 40 million to be lit on fire before it can make money, then you can have a wonderful life and build a wonderful company that can scale into the hundreds of millions of dollars if you play your cards right without ever raising money.
Advice on Educating Children
Lenny Rachitsky: Per the story you shared with Flow where you’re competing against a venture-funded company, if there is a venture-backed company in this space, is the advice you’re not going to win competing with them most likely and try to do something else.
ChatGPT and ADHD
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, look at Things. Do you know Things?
Lenny Rachitsky: I have used Things
Wealth Doesn’t Cure Anxiety
Andrew Wilkinson: I do too. It’s awesome. Things still exist and Things has existed for 20 years. It’s run by I believe one or two or three people. It’s not a big team, certainly under 10 people, it was, I believe, bootstrapped and it’s just consistently delivered an exceptional product and built up a loyal following. They have their 10,000 true fans who use it, and that’s enough for them, but they don’t do a lot. They’ve been very intentional. They don’t do any AI stuff, they don’t have an API. They’re not on Android. They’re very focused and I think they have succeeded. But the question is, what would an MBA or a business professor say about their success? If the measure of success is did they maximize taking as much market share as possible and grow to be as big as possible, then the answer is no because Asana and other people have built multi-billion dollar companies.
If the goal is the founder has an incredible life, probably has three houses, flies all over the place, does whatever he wants, has recurring revenue and he gets to work with headphones on building beautiful piece of software that people love, then I think he’s won. I am generally much more in the camp of the Things guy has won, not Dustin Moskovitz. Dustin Moskovitz is just playing a different game than the Things guy. And if Dustin Moskovitz was running Things, he’d be miserable and if the Things guy was running Asana, he would probably kill himself because he wants to put his headphones on and build.
Lenny Rachitsky: I wonder why nobody has come. It feels like just with lifestyle businesses, if it’s working and you would think somebody would come in with more money and more funding and just eat their lunch, is the key that the market is too small for a VC to ever be excited and so that’s why no one’s coming for them?
Redefining Money and Seeking Therapy
Andrew Wilkinson: I think so. I mean, I think Things probably, I’m just guessing, I don’t know any of the numbers or whatever, but I would assume it makes between five and $25 million of revenue, which to a VC is not even worth considering a VC. For a VC to invest in your business, you need to have a story where it’s worth 300 million to a billion dollars or more. So it’s just not that exciting to them, which again, going back to fish where the fish are, you don’t want to be fighting against the commercial fishermen. If you just want to have a little business where you get enough fish to feed your family and your village or whatever, find the other fishing hole. Don’t go where the trawlers are.
Shift in Medication
Lenny Rachitsky: This is great advice if you’re trying to start a non venture backed company is find. This metaphor just keeps working for us, which is fish where the fish are, but not where the professional fishermen are. Also, ideally not where there’s just a ton of, I don’t know, fishermen from all over the place. I don’t know, solopreneur fishermen. Okay. Coming back to just starting a successful company, what would you say are the keys to an amazing business model, an amazing business broadly, what should you be thinking about and looking into? I know you spent a lot of time thinking about this. When you’re buying companies, what are a few bullet points that you want to focus on?
Andrew Wilkinson: What I do for a living is basically buy businesses. So in my early career I started one business, then I started about 10 more, and then I realized starting businesses was extremely hard and I was doing pretty well. I was making quite a bit of money and I’d sold one of my businesses and I was looking out at the next 10 years and really asking myself what do I want my career to be and am I happy doing what I’m doing? And the answer was no. I did not starting businesses and experiencing that failure rate, it was incredibly stressful. And so I picked up a book about investing and I got lucky. The first one I bought was about Warren Buffett, and for those that don’t know, Warren Buffett is he’s counter to every VC kind of hustle culture thing you might hear because he basically just sits quietly in a room and reads all day, despite owning 260 different businesses and being one of the 10 wealthiest people in the world, his life is incredibly calm.
He only does what he wants and he spends most of his time quietly reading and once or twice a year, he makes a big decision to buy a business. And so when I read about Warren Buffett, I just thought, wow, I’m a sucker. I’m running around like a crazy person trying to run all these businesses. Why am I not just buying businesses and letting them run? And so when I’m buying a business, what I’m really looking for is something that I can’t mess up. Right now, obviously we buy a business, we try not to mess it up, and we’re very intentional, actually very odd in that when Tiny buys a company, we generally just leave them alone. If they already have management in place, we say nothing changes, no one should know that we’ve even bought them. Obviously people know that, but really there should be no change whatsoever.
The only change that we generally make is if the founder wants to leave the business, then we’ll bring in a CEO to run the company, and that’s probably the most important decision that we make. So I’m looking for a business though where it is so good that it’s hard to mess up, and most businesses are very easy to mess up. One person leaves and the whole business falls apart because it’s held together with dental floss and duct tape. And so I’m really looking for what Warren Buffett would call a moat. So a moat is basically a brand, so that could be a brand like Coca-Cola, Tylenol, Advil, something like that. So something that gives you pricing power where you can consistently charge and you have loyal customers or where we usually find a lot of opportunity is in network effects.
So typically we’re looking for a community that’s gotten so big where people don’t want to go elsewhere. So for example, we own Letterboxd, which is the largest social network for film lovers. And the question is, if someone else wants to compete with us, why would someone go to their social network that has a small number of users when all their friends are already on Letterboxd? And so you see that same kind of thing with Instagram or Facebook or similar. And so we’re looking for businesses like that, something that has staying power that is hard to compete with and that we can hold over the very long term.
Getting an ADHD Diagnosis
Lenny Rachitsky: It was interesting when Elon bought X, how that was such a test of the power of network effects. If you think about it, back then he changed the name. So the brand completely changed the team. 80% of the people left. What was left, it was the network and the network effect and the simplest way. Just for folks that aren’t super familiar with network effects, the way I think about it is just network effect is where every additional user that joins the network becomes more useful for everybody.
Andrew Wilkinson: There’s another moat, which is high switching costs, which I don’t really like because it’s not really very consumer friendly, but an example might be Salesforce where no one wants to, they’ve spent years and they’ve done all the implementation and trained everyone on it, and it’s kind of the standard, everybody hates it, but ripping it out and switching is such a pain in the that they just won’t bother. That’s another form of sometimes a great business, but again, that’s more depressing. I don’t love that one.
Recent Product Discoveries
Lenny Rachitsky: What’s the last company you guys bought?
My Life Mottos
Andrew Wilkinson: We bought Serato. Serato is the largest DJ software company in the world. So if you ever see a DJ playing and they’ve got a laptop in front of them, probably using Serato to DJ.
Meeting Steve Jobs
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, that is super cool. What I’d like a funding to be walking into.
Andrew Wilkinson: I used to DJ so I was aware of them and it was one of those moments we talked about earlier where I understood the business. They had a really interesting mode of this huge passionate user base and deep hardware integration. And I also love DJing and I was able to analyze the business and luck comes to the prepared mind and it worked out.
Where to Find Andrew
Lenny Rachitsky: This is another great callback to your excellent piece of advice of just ideally what you’re working on, whether you’re starting the company or buying the company, is you have a unique unfair advantage or some kind of unique background that connects to that idea. Let me ask you one more question before we shift a whole different topic, hint, hint, AI. Something that I know you talk a lot about, something you believe strongly and something you deal with a lot is when you buy companies is just as people and the challenges of management and hiring and people. So what have you learned about just how to successfully, I don’t know, find amazing people, keep amazing people, help people be more successful within the companies that you operate?
Andrew Wilkinson: My business partner, Chris, has a really great quote. He says, “There are no problems. There is only people problems.” And so we’ve found that you could tell us that there’s a disaster that one of our business units is about to fail or something like that. As long as I’m surrounded by really great smart people, I feel fine. But when we have a bad actor, we have a psycho or a narcissist or a really horrible, difficult person we’re dealing with, all bets are off and life becomes incredibly stressful. So I’d say I spend probably 20% of my time just trying to make sure we’re filtering people very carefully and ensuring we’re working with people that we enjoy. And I could talk about it in the AI, I’ve done some really interesting stuff to help me screen and identify difficult people, but I’ve just found that the biggest mistake I made in my early career was I would hire people because I liked them on gut and I would think that I could change them.
So it’s kind of like in romantic relationships, it never works out well. If you get married to someone and you go, “Okay, well this is going to be a great relationship as long as I can convert them to Christianity or I can change their parents or their personality,” or whatever it is. And so I’ve just found that I’ve never been able to change someone. You can never mentor someone out into being a good employee. And the kind of heuristic I have is if I ever think, should I fire this person even once, I should fire them immediately. It has always been a signal, at least for me, that when someone’s a superstar, I can’t imagine firing them. I think it’s impossible, I’d be lost without them.
But when I repeatedly start going, “Man, is this person going to work out?” Almost always within six to 12 months, it doesn’t work out. And so I really try and be really direct about stuff like that and just cut when it’s not working. So I’d say the lesson really is hire for what you need. Don’t hire just for potential, which is counter to what a lot of people say. A lot of people say hire for potential and coach them into being whatever you need. I just haven’t found that. I think you need to hire someone who already is fully formed and can do what you need. But again, everyone does it differently.
Lenny Rachitsky: This is big advice. Powerful advice. Is this true not just for the CEOs of the companies you run? As for folks under lower down the ladder too?
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, for CEOs, one of the most interesting things we’ve observed is, so I’ll give you an example. We had a CEO come in and we were interviewing them and in my opinion, the business needed to grow via organic marketing. In his opinion, it was enterprise sales. And so when we’re interviewing him, he keeps going back to his experience building with enterprise sales. And there’s this great saying, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And so for him, he’s looking at this business and going enterprise sales, that’s the way to grow. I hire him, but I say, “Look, if we’re going to hire you, we need you to do the organic marketing.” Lo and behold, of course, he goes off and he does the enterprise sales thing. And I’ve just found that hiring CEOs is like they’re an elephant and you’re the rider.
They’re going to go wherever it is that they want to go. And so listening incredibly carefully to people’s words and their experiences, because generally people will do the thing they tell you. So what I look for when I interview a CEO now, I want to be nodding along. I want to go, that’s exactly what I would do or that’s way smarter than my idea. And then I just leave them alone because I’ve found that anytime I try and pull them in a certain direction or coach them or whatever, it just doesn’t work. And again, this could be my problem. I might be the world’s worst coach and mentor, but for me, that’s been what’s true.
Lenny Rachitsky: I imagine there’s also an element of they won’t love the job if they want to be doing say enterprise sales, and then they’re creating viral TikTok videos all day and tweeting. They’re like, “What the hell?”
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, I’ve also found people will shoot themselves in the foot. If I tell them an idea in a board meeting and I say, “I really need you to try this,” it never works because usually they sandbag it, right? They don’t really put their heart into it or they’re just placating me and they don’t want it to work. They want their idea to work. And so I’ve learned not to do that.
Lenny Rachitsky:
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Let’s talk about AI. It’s so funny to watch you on Twitter. Clearly you’ve become AI obsessed, AIphile. I don’t know what the term is, and I love that you’re not just the kind of person that just talks about it and tweets pontifications, you’re clearly using it in every facet of your job and looking for more ways to use AI. So I have a lot of questions here because I think this is where more and more founders are going to be where you are today. First of all, just what’s in your AI stack these days? What are the tools you find yourself coming back to most or finding most useful?
Andrew Wilkinson: So the primary tool I use is a tool called Lindy, Lindy.ai. And what it basically lets you do is build workflows and agents. So it’s very simple. You might say, “When I get an email in the Gmail API, I want to add an AI agent that reads the email and labels it based on that.” Or you can build a crazy Rube Goldberg machine that sends different emails all sorts of different places. So for example, when I get an email and it’s related to my kid’s school, one of the big problems I have is that my kid’s school sends so many emails, the field trip is on Thursday and you need to bring the following things. And meanwhile, there’s parent teacher interviews and all these things get added to my calendar. The AI agent automatically takes that, puts it onto my calendar, makes sure there’s notes for all the things I need to prepare and stuff. So I have just basically tried to take every single thing a human could do in my inbox and automate it with Lindy.
Lenny Rachitsky: And you’re sitting there in Lindy doing this yourself or do you have people that you’ve trained to help build these sorts of things for you?
Andrew Wilkinson: No, I do it myself.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. How many agents, if that’s the term you want to use, do you have running for you roughly?
Andrew Wilkinson: Oh man, I think I probably have not a crazy amount within… Let’s see. Well, each workflow probably has four or five agents. So for example, my inbox has four or five agents, and then I have a whole bunch of other, I’ve got a calendar agent, I’ve got a meeting agent, I’ve got an email agent, I’ve got a scheduler, I’ve got a CRM, and basically they’re all different workflows. So the whole bunch of agents within.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, and you’re not an investor in Lindy, right? You’re just a fan, super user.
Andrew Wilkinson: No, no.
Lenny Rachitsky: Fun fact. I actually am. So this is great.
Andrew Wilkinson: Oh, no way. That’s awesome.
Lenny Rachitsky: Tiny angel investor. So just want to put that out there, which I love that this came up organically. What are a couple other really interesting use cases, workflows you’ve built that people might be inspired by it?
Andrew Wilkinson: Let me go through the email one a little more. So basically emails come in and the first agent says, does Andrew even need to see this? Let’s say you’re in a thread and you’ve already chimed in and everyone’s just saying, cool, that works. I don’t need to see that. So just archives that never. So that immediately reduces my email by about 20%. Then it decides is this something that is time sensitive? Is this something that needs to be dealt with in the next 24 hours? And if so, it labels it in a special 24-hour label. So when I go in my email, one of the biggest stresses I find is I go, “Shit, there’s 200 emails in here, and if I don’t go through all of them, I don’t know if there’s an emergency burning somewhere.” So now I do. Then it takes any email or every single email and it decides, is this a simple decision?
So for example, let’s say you email me and you say, “Hey, do you want to get lunch?” So it emails me privately and it says, “Hey, Lenny wants to get lunch. Do you want to say yes? Do you want to say yes, but in a few months? Do you want to say no? How do you want to say no?” And it gives me multiple choice. I just can say four, number four, and then it’ll email you as me and it’ll write out a nice thoughtful email or whatever. So stuff like that is so freaking cool and helpful. And I’d say that it’s replaced stuff that my full-time, I used to have a full-time assistant just working on email that’s all completely automated and there’s all sorts of other cool stuff I’m doing there. Other agents, I’m working on one right now to manage my calendar, which is really complex. I do a lot of scheduling and a lot of rules. I have another really simple one. It adds emojis to every single calendar event. So when I look at my calendar, I’ve got beautiful little emojis for every single calendar event. Very silly.
Lenny Rachitsky: What are the emojis? Do they represent something?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, so if I write weightlifting, it’ll just do a guy weightlifting or whatever. I’ve got one that, this one’s cool. Basically what it does, every time I email someone, it looks them up online, it figures out what city they live in. It checks my CRM and air table. It says, “Okay, I don’t know where do you live.”
Lenny Rachitsky: In Marin, in the Bay Area.
Andrew Wilkinson: Okay. So it’d say, “Okay, you email Lenny, he lives in Marin.” It puts in the database you live in Marin. And then next time I travel to the Bay Area, the agent will see two weeks before and it’ll say, “I saw you’re going to San Francisco. Here’s all the people in San Francisco you should try and have coffee with.” Right? So just all these things that-
Lenny Rachitsky: I would pay for that.
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, yeah, exactly. All these things that I’ve dreamed of having my assistant do that my assistant could just never consistently do because she gets distracted, we’re doing an event, there’s something going on. It’s like having the world’s most reliable employee who costs $200 a month and works 24/7.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, I want to follow that thread, but first of all, what other tools do you have? Lindy’s one, what else do you find really useful?
Andrew Wilkinson: So the other one is Replit. So Replit is basically a vibe coding platform. You can literally go into it and say, “I want to make a website for my sound software business. Here’s a big document with a bunch of details,” and it’ll go and design a pretty impressive website. But then you can also build web apps now. So you can literally be like, “Yeah, build a Python web app that does XYZ,” and the design is getting so good because it uses Claude 4. You can start saying, “Do it in the style of Stripe. Think this through, rewrite all the copy and the tone of David Ogilvy or Malcolm Gladwell,” or whoever you like, and it does a really incredible job. So what I’m finding is that things that previously would’ve frustrated me because I would’ve had to rely on a team of five, I can just do entirely on my own when it comes to web projects and stuff like that. So I’m having a blast with that.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s cool. So your team Replit versus Lovable, Bolt, v0, is that roughly right?
Andrew Wilkinson: I mean, they’re all great. I, just am the most familiar with Replit, and it seems like it has the most functionality. It has a lot of beef to it, whereas Lovable and Bolt seem a little more basic. You might have to deal with deployment and stuff in a fiddlier way with them.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay. Anything else?
Andrew Wilkinson: Another one I love, so Limitless. I don’t know if you’ve seen this.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’ve got one of those.
Andrew Wilkinson: It’s really cool. So clips to your shirt. I actually just put it on my pocket so no one actually notices that I’ve got it on usually, and I just have it on all day. And what it does is it just records everything I do. And then I can say, the other day I had a coffee with someone and I’m the kind of person where I go a mile a minute and I say, “Oh, I’ll send you that and I’ll do this,” or whatever. And so at the end of the day, I can just say, “Hey, what did I promise to people today?” Or even better, everyone loves this use case, I have a fight with my girlfriend. And she says, “You didn’t say that.” And I’m able to say, “Well, actually you did.” And you can query it as an LLM.
So you can say you’re a couples counselor. Look at this fight. What did each person need? How did it start? What are the key lines? Where did it change? How could you do this better? And so honestly, from a relationship standpoint is probably where it’s been the most useful. What’s cool too is that has an API. And so eventually, I haven’t gotten there yet, but eventually you’ll be able to just have it record your entire day and then automatically go into your Todoist or whatever it is, and add to-do’s or send emails or whatever you need it to do.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, this is so fun. Or just per your point with the relationship, ask it, “What could I have done better today? Where did the day go downhill?”
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, I saw a guy on Twitter. He said, “Every day I ask it, ‘How could I have been a better dad?’” And it’ll be like, “Oh, your daughter tried to get your attention about this. You should have paid attention,” or whatever.
Lenny Rachitsky: And that was with the Limitless data. Oh, man, I love that. With the relationship, you didn’t go where I thought you were going to go, where it’s like, “Oh, but who actually said it? What did you actually say?” I love that It became much more wholesome of just like how could we have communicated better holistically? Okay. My wife actually is like, “Don’t wear this around.”
Andrew Wilkinson: You just got to wear it really covertly. Honestly, I know it sounds kind of cheesy because you think like, “Oh, it’ll tell her,” right? But in reality, usually you’re both guilty in the fight. And my girlfriend has actually appreciated it because there’s been half the time it’ll be like, “Oh yeah, Zoe said this and it triggered this,” but a lot of the time it’s me too. And I think I’m totally right. So I find it actually really helpful. Other tools, I mean otherwise, it’s the basic stack of Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini. And Gemini I use mostly for things that are really large. So for example, all my medical records, I have trained on Gemini 2.5 just because the other ones can’t really go through it all. Claude, I use for writing very extensively. I find it’s the best for that.
And then ChatGPT for everything else. In terms of cool things I do, recently, I went through my entire medicine cabinet and I just took big photos that showed all the different medicines and stuff. And now I can say something like, “Hey, I’m really tired and stressed out today. What supplement should I take and what dose?” Or I’ll say, “Remember all the medications I’m taking, whenever I ask you a health question, always remind me in the context of I might be taking that medication.” So a few times it’s said, “Hey, you shouldn’t take this other medication because your genetics say you’re not compatible with it and you’re already taking this other one.” So stuff like that’s been really helpful.
Lenny Rachitsky: For that use case, do you come back to a specific conversation where you’ve given it that context, use a project or something-
Andrew Wilkinson: No, I say remember. I just say remember these supplements, this is what I have in my medicine cabinet or this is what I take every day.
Lenny Rachitsky: I see. So just tap into the memory of ChatGPT.
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: This is awesome. This makes me remember that. And this connects to other points you’ve been making, I’ve started to use ChatGPT deep research to prep for these conversations. I used to have a researcher who did this for 400 bucks. They did research on every guest that I had, four to 500 bucks, and gave me a whole doc, “Here’s everything about them. Here’s their background, here’s questions you might want to ask.” Deep research is better. Just as of recently, especially with o3-pro.
Andrew Wilkinson: We were talking earlier about agents. I forgot one of my favorite agents. So it looks on my calendar 30 minutes before I meet anyone. It goes on to Perplexity and it does a deep dive on the person and it sends me, it goes into my email and it gets the context of the meeting. So often I book meetings three months out. So I usually look at my calendar and I go, “Who is this person? I don’t even remember booking this meeting.” It’ll text me before and it’ll say, “Here’s who you are, here’s your background, here’s the email context of why we’re meeting.” And it basically does all the research for me. So I do the same thing. I also use deep research and say, “If I’m meeting them, you know everything about me. What are our commonalities and what are all the fun things we should talk about?”
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh my God, I just want to plug and play all these agents you’ve built to use them myself. Interestingly, I tried to create an agent to do this research kickoff for me, but I don’t think you can automate ChatGPT deep research. Okay.
Andrew Wilkinson: Only Perplexity. Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Perplexity is great too, but it’s different. Okay. So let me follow this thread I was going down, which is around job displacement. I know you think a lot about this. So with me, this researcher as a contractor I was working with for a few months, I no longer need them. Your assistant, you no longer need. Thoughts on just the impact we’re going to see on jobs as a result of AI.
Andrew Wilkinson: There’s this great William Gibson quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” And I think that we are in the Palm Treo phase. Do you remember the Palm Treo?
Lenny Rachitsky: No.
Andrew Wilkinson: So when I was, let’s see, in 2007 I think, was that when the iPhone came out? 2007?
Lenny Rachitsky: I know [inaudible 00:55:19].
Andrew Wilkinson: Something like that. In 2007, there was this device called the Palm Treo and it was like a little PDA with a stylus and it had a little modem attachment. And so what you could do is you could get your email anywhere and that was this shocking thing. It had a black and white or barely color screen and you could go in and email people. And I remember walking through the mall buying shoes while answering business emails and going, “This is the ultimate freedom. This is incredible.” But the problem with that device was it sucked. You had to use a stylus, it’s not a good user experience. And then the iPhone comes out and you’re like, “Okay, this is what I was waiting for. This is the real thing.” But I got a little preview with the Palm Treo and so right now people like me who have the time and skillset to nerd out and build the agents can do this. It’s just not accessible to everybody.
And I think that if it was accessible to everybody in terms of if you could just open ChatGPT and say, “Hey, ChatGPT, I run a business, can you help me?” And it started asking you questions and it said, “Oh well you do sales. Do you want me to set up a sales agent? Okay, great, plug in your HubSpot API, now tell me a few things and then give me access to all your data.” And then before you know it, it’s just a digital employee that’s on the other end of the phone on ChatGPT just like in the movie, Her, that you can talk to and it can go do stuff. I think that is kind of the iPhone moment that we’re going to have in some time in the next five years. And so I think that if AI doesn’t progress, we will see some serious job displacement, like what you already mentioned, the translators, the researchers, the admin, some assistant jobs, depending on the kind of work they do, those jobs will definitely be massively affected.
But I think pretty quick, all knowledge work jobs could be affected if the models scale in the way that they say they’re going to. I mean if you trust Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, I mean Dario Amodei said by, “2027, our models will be smarter than all PhDs.” So in any subject. That is a staggering statement. And he’s been a very conservative kind of almost fearful voice in the AI world. Very cautious to say things like that. And so when he said that, I perked up and started listening carefully. I don’t know that that’s how it’s going to play out. He might be trying to fundraise, we have to take it with a grain of salt. But if that’s true, then I think so many knowledge work jobs are going to change massively.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, there’s a lot here. I actually had Mike on the podcast, their CPL, Mike Krieger, and he pointed out that Dario, every prediction he’s had so far has been right over the past few years. And so there’s a reason to listen to his insights. Okay. Andrew, I know you’re not going to have all the answers for people. But let me ask you kind of a two-part question for new grads and for people currently in the workforce say like, I don’t know, senior product manager advice on what they should do, where should they focus? What skills will matter most? What jobs do you think will last? What advice can you give us?
Andrew Wilkinson: Everybody 10 years ago, do you remember there was this whole movement that we should teach kids how to code? Remember that?
Lenny Rachitsky: Mh-hmm.
Andrew Wilkinson: Now teaching kids how to code is teaching kids Basic and we have a GUI, right? You don’t need to learn punch cards and basic programming or MS-DOS because we all have keyboards and mice. We don’t have to do that. And I feel like coding has really gone away because of that. And I think now people are saying people need to learn how to prompt, which I think is very true for the tool set right now. But I don’t know how relevant that is in the future because I think we’re still, again, in the Palm Treo phase, I think that the AIs will be very good at eliciting what the actual problem you’re trying to solve is and reinterpreting it in a way that it can optimize the query to get the right answer and solve the problem.
And so I think the fundamental question is do all jobs just become a single prompt? For example, does a CEO just grow the business while making the customers happy and turning a profit or something like that? And it is able to actually be an omniscient presence that can run a whole company. Now that’s a big I’m someone building AI agents. I can barely get it to reliably do calendar entries and that kind of stuff. So I don’t think that’s totally imminent, but I can certainly see a world where that’s coming. And so the question is, what is one to do when that reality is barreling down at you? For people who have resources, I think there’s a lot of things they can do in terms of investment, they can invest in the companies that’ll benefit from this, companies that have a lot of compute or energy or that sort of thing.
So that’s one thing, but that’s not really the question. The question is what do you do if you’re a smart 18-year-old or 19-year-old or whatever? In my opinion, I think the best thing to do right now is to get incredibly good with these tools and utilize them to build enough wealth that you can put the money into diversifying into compute and energy. And I do think that while everybody thinks that all jobs will go away in five years and robots will be everywhere, people generally overestimate things in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. So I think there’s going to be this long window where robotics is not anywhere near good enough to even do raking leaves and stuff. And I think there’s going to be a ton of opportunity for people to just spin up new businesses that never existed before.
I was talking to some friends and we were like, “What do you do in a world of abundance where everything is really cheap and companies operate almost autonomously?” I think there’s a lot of weird skillsets that we can’t imagine right now. For example, just being funny, right? Being funny to hang out with them. Think about OnlyFans, right? Right now, there’s this whole idea of OnlyFans where people are paying for comfort and connection, but in a romantic sense. Imagine people did that day to day, they just love hanging out with funny people. So you have a funny guy who you chat with or comes over to your house or whatever it is, I’m making stuff up. Maybe it’s a guy who comes to play pickleball with you or something, I don’t know. But I can imagine that in this weird world, there’s all these weird new jobs.
So I think my take is things will either be totally fine or they will be terrible and we’ll all be dead. And I can’t predict which those is there. I don’t think it’s worth thinking about all of us being dead. And so I think it’s really just lean into what are the tools, how do you stay cutting edge? How do you build businesses and wealth in this new world? But I am certainly feeling a little bit like all of our brains could be defunct in the next 10 years. And that’s kind of a scary thought.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m picturing this dystopian world where humans are just going around making jokes.
Andrew Wilkinson: Where does status come from in a world of abundance? Where does status come from? Maybe it is just like being the best at hiking or something.
Lenny Rachitsky: Well, let me ask you this because this is where it gets even more real is just with your kids. What are you encouraging them to learn? What are you encouraging them to get good at? Because this is the real problem a lot of people are having right now is what will matter in the future. Obviously we don’t know, but what are you encouraging them to focus on?
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, I don’t know. I mean there’s so little, they’re five and eight. And so really what I’m focused on is making sure they’re socialized and they’re polite, very basic. So are they comfortable talking to adults? I often send my son, whenever he wants something at a cafe, I always make him go up, ask nicely, pay himself, all that kind of stuff. But at this point I feel like for the first 10 years of life, you’re just trying to make sure that they’re not traumatized or rude. And I think it’s going to be really interesting when they’re 10 plus where they’re really aware of this stuff and can start building with these tools. And to be honest, I just don’t know. I think I just want them to lean into whatever they’re passionate about and go from there. But I have no idea. And to be honest, it’s not something I’m worrying about because it’s too hard to worry about. I don’t know, it’s too multivariate. There’s too many ways it can go.
Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like a core part of your message is just get good with these tools. There’s this classic quote, “AI won’t replace you, it’ll be somebody very good using AI is going to replace you,” at least for a while. And so it feels like a big part of this is just use these things. Before we started recording, we were having a mic issue and I love you just went straight to ChatGPT, “ChatGPT, how do I connect this mic to reverse side and make it work?” And I feel like that’s just a habit to build is just like go to ChatGPT whenever you have a problem like that. I’ve been doing that a lot. I was connecting a subwoofer from what wire do I need to buy to connect the subwoofer to the receiver?
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, the best part about ChatGPT is I used to just get stuck and I have ADHD. So when I got stuck, let’s say, what’s an example? I was redoing my home IT security. And what will happen is I’ll be in the terminal and I’ll enter something and then something goes wrong and it just keeps erroring. And then I’m like, “Well, I’m out.” I have ADHD, I can’t tolerate this. I just lose the thread completely. And ChatGPT allows me to stay on track and go so much further and faster than I ever could before. I love not being artificially stopped in your tracks and being able to continue the flow state as a result.
Lenny Rachitsky: And also I noticed you were using voice mode, which is what I’ve been using more and more. And I feel like that’s something a lot of people sleep on is just the voice mode where you could talk to it and not have to sit there and type your questions. Okay, so let me go in a different direction. You’ve been spending a lot of time, you wrote a whole book about this, of just your journey from, you call it Barista to Billionaire where you started serving coffee, then you ended up being very successful, then realize that didn’t make you happy. You’re quite unhappy with lots and lots of money. I think a lot of people hear these stories, they see this stuff, they’re like, “Yeah, okay, I sort of get it.” But they still do the same sorts of things. They still assume they will be happy once they reach that next goal, that next title, make certain dollar amount. What can you share? What have you learned about just what it actually takes to be happy that you think people are still not really recognizing and still kind of are confused about?
Andrew Wilkinson: Do you remember when you’re in your early 20s? I remember when I was in my early 20s, I’d always be like, “I need to move away to Europe. I need to go discover myself.” And I’d be really anxious and stressed out and in an existential crisis and then I’d fly to Europe to go backpacking or something and I’d still feel anxious and have my existential crisis. It’s just now I’m in Europe. And I think the reality is that whatever’s in your brain, whatever that anxiety loop is, doesn’t go away just because you have a bigger house or more money in the bank account or you’re in Bali or wherever it is, that’s a chemical reaction happening inside you that relates to your past and your DNA and all that stuff that creates that soup. And for me, I’ve always been a very anxious person. I’ve always worried about tomorrow, I rarely enjoy today, I’m always worrying about what could go wrong in health or my businesses or with my family or whatever it is.
And so when I started my business, all I thought was I just don’t want to work for someone else. If I can just wake up in the morning, do my own thing, make 60K a year, then I’ll be happy. So I got that and then it was once I make a million dollars a year and I can buy a house, well, I got that and so on and so on and so on all the way up to at one point being worth over a billion dollars, by the way, should redo the title of the book from Barista to Billionaire, now it’s former billionaire because our stock went down, but it didn’t change anything. I’m still just as anxious as ever. I remember a month ago, I had this day where I was sitting in the sauna and I was stressing about a bunch of business problems and money things and I stopped myself and I was like, “Wait a minute.”
10 years ago I had all the same thoughts and I was stressed out about similar kinds of problems and our revenue was 15 million bucks. Now we’re at almost 300 million and I’m still stressed about the same things. And the saddest part was as I met more and more wealthier people all the way up to multibillionaires, I realized they were all still comparing themselves to their peers, competing over who has what and tracking stuff and still unhappy that anxiety loop or depression was still in their brain. I remember I had this moment where I met this guy who is a single-digit multibillionaire, and he goes, “Oh, Jeff Bezos, he’s just so fucking rich.” And I was like, “Wait, what do you mean you’re worth $5 billion? What can he do that you can’t?” And he goes, “He can buy a super yacht.” And it’s like, “What?”
You can look at that guy and you can say, “Oh, that’s a wacko and all the other stuff.” But the reality is that we’re all just comparing ourselves to our peers, whatever our peers have that we don’t feel hard done by. And I remember just thinking like, “Oh my God, how do I avoid becoming this?” And that’s the scary reality is no matter how lucky you are, I mean we’re also fortunate. For me, I live in Canada. I have every opportunity that I ever could have hoped for. And there’s people all over the world who have nowhere near what I had growing up. And yet I felt hard done by because in my neighborhood I was the poor kid. I wasn’t poor globally. I wasn’t even poor based on Canada. But all my friends had big screen TVs and would go to Hawaii and I never got to do any of that stuff. My parents were stressed about money. So I feel hard done by.
Lenny Rachitsky: There’s a phrase of friend’s financial advisor once shared, “The Joneses are doing really well,” and that’s hard to get over. So what changes did you make to just be happier? It’s hard to give up money. It’s hard to give up more money you could make. It’s hard to give up things that money buys, I guess just so what did you change?
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, there’s a few things. I mean, one was reframing money to some degree to have it be something that wasn’t just about feathering my own nest and making it better. So for example, I was talking to a friend who’s very wealthy and I was saying all the feelings I described of have all this and yet I don’t feel better. And he said, “Well, what are you working for?” And I said, “Well, I guess I’m just working for the numbers to get bigger and have more employees and that’s nice. Our businesses do good things in the world and help more people and stuff, but ultimately it’s just to pile up cash.” And he said, “I’ve reframed it so that all my money, 90% of my money plus, goes into my philanthropic foundation and then it gets given away to great causes. So when I think about working really hard or losing a deal or an investment going well, the win isn’t for me. The win is about doing something good.”
So I did that and that definitely helped. I also stopped spending as much money. I found that the more stuff I had, the more houses I had, the more people that directly worked for me to manage all that stuff, the less happy, I was owned by my stuff. And then I work really hard not to have people… I try not to beat people over the head with it. I drive a normal car. I don’t bring people to my house until I know them really, really well. I meet them on neutral ground, I meet them in a cafe. I dress like a schmo. I just try not to be a weird out of touch rich person. But the biggest thing, which is a weird answer, is actually medicating myself. So basically all my life I’ve been really anxious.
And in 2020, I remember I was watching a movie with my ex-wife and I was looping on, “I need to respond to this email. If I don’t respond to that email, this person’s going to be mad.” And then I realized that I was watching a movie for the last 20 minutes and I didn’t know anything about what was happening in the movie. And then I was going, “Oh my God, my wife is going to be mad at me. We’re going to get in a fight,” and I’m projecting all this negative stuff. And in that moment I was like, “Okay, maybe I do need to try an SSRI or something. This is not sustainable.” And so I went to my doctor and I got prescribed with one, and I remember I was so scared of it that I cut it into 10 pieces. I said, “I’m just going to take a tiny little piece.”
And it took me six months after that to try any. But I started taking these pieces every day and I just noticed that within about three or four days, it was like someone had turned down the volume on the nasty voice inside of me doing all that. And for the first time in my life I felt relief. No amount of money or success or attention or anything else had done what this little tiny yellow pill could do for my mental state. And so now I’ve been on an SSRI for four and a half years or something like that. And then I also started medicating my ADHD. And I would say that my brain went from Times Square to a quiet library. And I think a lot of people are scared of that, but ultimately most people are acting out something that’s going on inside of them. There’s a trauma or something medically going on and that’s creating this anxiety, this depression, this feeling and addressing that is so much more important than trying to get praise from the external world.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, it’s really powerful. I really am really thankful you’re sharing this. The advice most people hear, the general, I don’t know, culture is just like, “No, don’t take meds. Don’t medicate yourself, I don’t know, there’s all these downsides, all this risk. The pharma industry is trying to make money.” I love this other perspective of it. It’s actually really effective and actually makes a big difference in your life and it may be the only solution.
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, it’s funny because if you have a headache, I don’t think many people say, “Oh, don’t take Tylenol, you’re benefiting Johnson & Johnson, big pharma.” They go, “Yeah, you take a Tylenol when you have a headache.” Or a lot of people have seasonal allergies and they take antihistamines and they forget that histamine is not just in your nose, histamines in your brain and everywhere in your body. And so when you take an antihistamine or even a Tylenol, you’re changing your brain, you’re changing the way you think, you’re changing everything. And yet for some reason, people are so scared, myself included, of taking an SSRI or similar medication to treat something that is ruining their life. Anxiety was ruining my life. Every minute of every day I was convinced that something terrible was about to happen. And even now medicated, I still have that voice. It’s not like that frankly beneficial voice that helps you grow your business or whatever becomes unproductive at a certain point. And I think that it is wonderful to be able to actually just get a little bit of solace from it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Well, for folks that, I mentioned many folks listening, are like, “Oh man, I should really explore this,” what’s the best way to explore is to talk to your primary care physician?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah. I think talking to your doctor, and one note I think a lot of people miss is when I was so scared of side effects because you hear about all these horrific side effects of people lose their libido and feel terrible and stuff. And so I looked into it and a lot of the side effects are due to the way that people metabolize different drugs. And so you can actually do your 23andMe or similar DNA test and you can find out how you metabolize different SSRIs. And then I chose one that I could metabolize well. And so I’ve had no side effects or problems. And I know every time I mention this, I get a lot of people that say exactly what you say, big pharma and all this other stuff. But I just ask everyone listening, if you take a Tylenol or you take an antihistamine or other medications, I don’t know why something that can be so profoundly helpful is something that people need to be afraid of.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Andrew, we’ve covered so much ground. I love the spectrum of topics we’ve gone after. Is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything you wanted to double down on? Any last nugget you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Andrew Wilkinson: One thing that was shocking for me was I was doing… My doctor asked me to get a cognitive test, not because I had any problem, but he said, “Look, it’s really important to get a baseline in your 30s because then as you age, we can make sure that you’re not getting Alzheimer’s or dementia or whatever.” So I go and I do this test with a neurologist and she asked me a bunch of questions. It’s, “Remember these 10 digits and say them backwards and all this stuff.” And finally when I get my test results back, she said, “Look, your crystallized intelligence, your ability to remember stuff, long range is totally fine. You’re above average. Your short-term memory, your working memory is 10th percentile, very, very bad. And you probably should get checked for ADHD.”
And I was like, “Nope. There’s no way. I don’t have ADHD. I’m organized. I’ve got to-do lists. I built a business. I wasn’t the hyper kid in school or anything like that.” And she said, “Well, look, just humor me. Just go get tested.” And so I went through this crazy process. You can go online and just quickly get tested or whatever. But I went through this really, really five-day process to get tested. And it turned out that I do have it. And it’s really interesting because if you take the normal population of about 5% of people have ADHD, but about 30% of entrepreneurs have ADHD. And many entrepreneurs I talk to, they love new things. They love jumping around between a million different topics. They’re an inch deep and a mile wide like I described. And they describe themselves as unemployable. And frankly, I remember I was so skeptical of ADHD that when my girlfriend told me, a friend of hers got diagnosed with it, I sarcastically said, “Oh good, she better take some meth,” talking about stimulant drugs.
Previously I was very, very skeptical of ADHD, but it is a real brain disorder if you actually dig into it. It’s a very real thing, very objective that people have poor executive function. And for me, it’s given me a lot more empathy for myself and my behaviors because at work, if you have ADHD, you can delegate to other people and build systems to get around your disability. But at home, that’s where it really plays out. And so for me, it’s like my girlfriend asked me to take the garbage out, and I say, “Of course.” And then I forget three times in a row. And she views that as you are being very hurtful and you’re not caring for me. And it causes all sorts of different problems at home.
And so for me, not only did it make my work life better because I was more focused, but it actually really helped me in my personal life and it made me feel not broken. I always felt a bit broken. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I just went, “I’m not good at doing all the things everyone else seems to be able to do no problem.” And so I think especially because you have an entrepreneur audience, I think a lot of entrepreneurs should consider getting checked for ADHD. Just go and ChatGPT say, “Ask me a of questions and tell me if you think I might have it.” But I was very surprised, and that’s been really impactful for me too.
Lenny Rachitsky: Man, this garbage story is very descriptive of my life, and so I’m going to do this. There’s this implication that it’s good to know this, right? It feels scary to feel like, “Oh, shit I might get diagnosed with ADHD.” Your advice I imagine is it’s better to know because you could do stuff about it.
Andrew Wilkinson: Totally. I think it’s like any medical thing, right? It’s like there’s an Alzheimer’s gene, right? And if you know you have it, there’s a lot you can do to slow the disease or prevent maybe getting it or whatever. It’s always better to know. Even if you don’t medicate, I think there’s a lot of lifestyle interventions, dietary interventions, and just things you can do to make your life easier, even if it’s just explaining to your partner, “Hey, I need things to be explained to me this way so that I can be effective in loving you.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Beautiful. Okay. Well, Andrew, with that, we’ve reached a very exciting lightning round. I’ve got five questions for you. Are you ready?
Andrew Wilkinson: Let’s go.
Lenny Rachitsky: First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
Andrew Wilkinson: If I could only recommend two, I would recommend The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. It’s basically like a compendium of every single type of personality disorder or psychological effect. How do people work their minds to make bad decisions? What is a narcissist? What is a psychopath? All that kind of stuff. And Robert Greene does such a great job of telling all that in a really engaging way by using storytelling. So every single chapter has a story about someone with that personality disorder. So I love that book.
The other one that I love is a book by Felix Dennis called How to Get Rich. It’s hilarious because the whole book starts out saying, “I got rich and I regret it, and I wish that I’d become a poet.” And instead he went off and he built this huge publishing empire, became a poet in his sixties, and then he died of throat cancer. So it’s his story, he basically says, “I’ll tell you how to build the business even though you probably shouldn’t.” And I read that when I was in my 20s, and I found it so exciting and inspiring, and then I recently reread it and I was like, “Oh my God, why didn’t I listen to this guy?” Everything he said came true.
Lenny Rachitsky: Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed?
Andrew Wilkinson: I love Challengers. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s amazingly acted, amazing cinematography. It’s like this amazing romantic triad tennis movie. Really, really good.
Lenny Rachitsky: Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? You already mentioned Limitless. Is there anything else?
Andrew Wilkinson: I’m one of those people who really believes in the idea of a robot vacuum. I’ve probably spent $10,000 on different robot vacuums over the years, probably five or six of them. And I finally got one that actually works. It’s called the Matic Vacuum, M-A-T-I-C. And basically, I think it’s like former Google Engineers basically built like a mini Waymo car. So it has machine vision and it will avoid absolutely everything and never get tangled, and it can mop your floors and vacuum. I’ve been super impressed with it so far.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’ve got one of these myself. Completely agree. My wife loves it, which I did not expect. She’s like, “Turn that Matic on.” It’s very delightful. It has his little personality and it just does a really good job. And I’m not an investor, and that’s awesome. I’m a huge fan. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah. My favorite is a quote by Jerzy Gregorek. It’s, “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” And I often find that anytime that I’m making the easy choice, my life gets hard. And when I make the hard choice to shut down the business, fire the person, say bye to a project that I was excited about, it’s almost always the right choice and it makes my life a lot easier.
Lenny Rachitsky: Final question. Okay, so let me know if this is true. I found that when you were a teenager, when you’re running Macteens, you interviewed Steve Jobs at a conference. Is that true?
Andrew Wilkinson: So when I was a teenager, I had a tech news website and I emailed the Apple PR people and I said, “Hey, could I interview Steve Jobs?” And they kind of laughed at me. They’re like, “Yeah, there’s no way. You’re not going to interview Steve Jobs, but hey, why don’t you go to this tour of the Apple Store?” So this is no other Apple Store has existed. This is in New York at Macworld back in 2004, no, 2003, something like that. And so I was really excited about that. So I show up to go do this tour and there’s 30 other journalists there, and I’m first in line, and this big black SUV pulls up and this man gets out and the man is wearing gray New Balance, little circular John Lennon glasses, the mock turtleneck. And my brain finally puts it together and I realize it’s Steve Jobs.
And he walks directly up to me because I’m first in line and he shakes my hand and he says, “Hi, I’m Steve.” And I’m like a quivering mess. I’m 17 years old. He is my hero. He’s my Jesus. And so I was just so high on adrenaline that I just started asking him questions. As soon as we walked in, I basically just stayed at his side, and I just picked his brain about all sorts of different stuff. So it’s not like I got to ask him questions about life. I was asking him about the new 17-inch iMac or whatever. But it was a pretty cool experience to get to meet him.
Lenny Rachitsky: That is awesome. There’s such a funny thread recently with guests. Everyone, there’s like a Steve Jobs connection for the past couple months of guests. That’s an awesome story. It just shows that it wasn’t luck. You made this happen. You got there first in line.
Andrew Wilkinson: The lesson for me was ask big and maybe you’ll get something great. Ask for amazing, you’ll get something great, which I did.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yes, door in the face technique, I think people call it.
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Andrew, this was incredible. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out? I know you’re buying companies, investing in companies. Just talk about what you’re looking for there in case people are like, “Oh, this is me.” And then finally, how can listeners be useful to you?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, my business is Tiny, T-I-N-Y.com, and we buy businesses. Basically, when we sold the business, we hated it. We went through this process where we talked to all these douchebags that ran private equity firms that would show up in our office in suits and use a bunch of words we didn’t understand. And we ended up going, “Man, why can’t we just sell to somebody who’s like us?” And so we basically started Tiny to become the buyer we wish we could have sold to. And we’re looking for businesses that have some of the qualities I mentioned before. So really high quality businesses that do something positive in the world and have happy customers, happy employees, and some kind of competitive advantage that will make them continue into the future. So we own AeroPress, Letterboxd, Dribble, which is a design social network, whole bunch of businesses like that. So if somebody is thinking about selling their business, definitely get in touch.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Okay. And then how can listeners be useful to you if it’s not just that?
Andrew Wilkinson: I just would say if there’s anyone really interesting coming to Victoria, Canada, which is where I live, send me an email and would love to have coffee with you. The reason I love going on podcasts is because I get to meet so many interesting people, both randomly. If I’m in a cafe and someone sees me and says hi, I often make a lot of friends that way, or if someone comes to my hometown. So yeah, just get in touch.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Andrew, thank you so much for being here.
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, thanks, dude. That was fun.
Lenny Rachitsky: Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Reformatted by reformat_english_direct.py
我经营过75+家企业。这就是为什么你可能在追逐错误的想法。| Andrew Wilkinson
我经营过75+家企业。这就是为什么你可能在追逐错误的想法。| Andrew Wilkinson
对话实录
创业如同举重,不要一上来就挑战极限
Andrew Wilkinson: 你不会在第一天走进健身房就试图硬拉300磅。所以当有人来找我说他们初次创业,要打造下一家伟大的AI公司时,我觉得这就等于是在做那种事。
Lenny Rachitsky: 感觉你创办和运营过的公司可能比世界上任何人都多。关于想出一个好的创业点子,你最好的建议是什么?
Andrew Wilkinson: Charlie Munger,Warren Buffett 的长期商业伙伴,有一句很精彩的话。
Speaker 3: 在有鱼的地方钓鱼。
Andrew Wilkinson: 我犯过的最大错误,就是进入那些别人反复失败过的商业模式,然后觉得”我能做得更好”。
关于 Andrew Wilkinson 与 Tiny
Lenny Rachitsky: 你在 Twitter 上的表现很有意思,显然你已经变得对 AI 着迷了。
Andrew Wilkinson: 这就像拥有一个世界上最可靠的员工,每月只需200美元,全天候工作。大量知识工作将发生巨变。我觉得根本性的问题是,所有工作是否最终都会变成一个提示词?
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天我的嘉宾是 Andrew Wilkinson。Andrew 是 Tiny 的联合创始人兼 CEO,这是一家经常被称为”互联网版伯克希尔·哈撒韦”的控股公司。他们拥有超过40家企业,从 Dribbble 到 WeCommerce 再到 AeroPress 咖啡壶,专注于从创始人手中收购盈利企业并长期持有。Andrew 和他的联合创始人从零开始,将业务做到了数亿美元的价值,Andrew 本人的身家一度超过10亿美元。在我们这次广泛而深入的对话中,我们讨论了一系列关于如何想出一个好商业点子的策略、哪些常见的商业点子应该避免、他用 AI 自动化自己大量工作和生活的体验,以及这对近期就业意味着什么。此外还有他对幸福与金钱关系的体悟——两者并不直接相关——以及被诊断为 ADHD 后服用 SSRI 是如何成为对他人生幸福影响最大的事情的。
这是一场既有深度又非常实用的对话,我非常期待你听到它。
好了,接下来有请 Andrew Wilkinson。
Lenny Rachitsky: Andrew,非常感谢你来做客。欢迎来到播客。
Andrew Wilkinson: 哦,谢了兄弟,很高兴来到这里。
如何想出一个好的创业点子
Lenny Rachitsky: 我一直想和你聊很久了。我有太多想聊的话题,我想从一个我知道你思考很多、同时也萦绕在很多人心头的问题开始——如何想出一个好的创业点子。现在很多人都在思考这个问题,因为 AI 让把想法变成现实变得如此容易,而我觉得这是你花了很多时间思考的事情。感觉你实际创办和运营过的公司比……我不知道,可能比世界上任何人都多。我觉得你至少能排进前一百、前十之类的吧。这感觉对吗?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我确实经历了很多,我大概创办或参与过75个不同的项目或企业,在其中都是主要贡献者。但我不觉得这有什么值得吹嘘的,因为我是广度一英里、深度只有一英寸。所以在很多方面这其实是我的阿喀琉斯之踵——我太容易对想法兴奋,启动了太多的生意。但正因如此,我几乎见识了天下所有的商业模式。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好了。好的,我觉得好处是我们可以从你的经验中学习。让我直接问你这个问题:关于想出一个好的创业点子,你最好的建议是什么?
在有鱼的地方钓鱼
Andrew Wilkinson: 归根结底,最好的选择是你真正感兴趣的领域。但我觉得很多人犯的一个错误是,选择了所有人都感兴趣的东西。比如,几乎每个人都曾有过这样的念头:“我真想开一家很酷的餐厅”或者”我想开一家很酷的咖啡馆”。他们想象的是设计一个惊艳的 logo,设计菜单之类有趣的事。但现实是,经营这些生意非常痛苦,而且这是一个极其困难的行业,因为每天早上都有数百万人醒来然后想:我应该开一家咖啡馆。但反过来,几乎没有人每天早上醒来会说:“你知道什么吗?我想开一家殡仪馆”,或者”我想做一门害虫防治的生意”,或者”我应该做一款帮助人们填写政府表格的软件”。
Charlie Munger——Warren Buffett 的长期商业伙伴——有一句很精彩的话。他说:“在有鱼的地方钓鱼。“他举了一个例子:如果你是一个渔夫,你看到一个大池塘,池塘周围站满了渔夫,他们互相推搡拥挤,每个人都用着最好的鱼饵、最好的鱼线,都有绝佳的策略。你真正应该做的是走进森林深处,找到一个鱼多而竞争者少的小钓点。我认为这可能是商业中最重要的事情——去找到那些你真正能赚到钱的利基市场,因为竞争等于更低的利润率。竞争者越多,你的价格就必须越低,生意的竞争最终就越激烈。
为什么从小市场和利基开始
Lenny Rachitsky: 追逐小市场、寻找利基,这并不符合直觉。那我们就顺着这个话题聊聊——为什么从真正小的、细分的地方开始,反而是一些最好的创意来源?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我不一定是说它必须永远是小市场,但我认为——如果你是第一次创业的人,或者是个学生之类的,你不会想在第一天走进健身房就尝试硬拉 300 磅。所以当有人作为初次创业者来找我,说”我要打造下一家伟大的 AI 公司”,或者”我要开一家新银行”之类的——那些非常严苛、复杂、竞争极其激烈且受到高度监管的事情——我觉得那就等同于第一天就试图硬拉 300 磅。我认为你真正应该做的是拿起最轻的哑铃,慢慢开始锻炼你的肌肉。回想我自己创业的经历,我真的很幸运,因为我做的第一门生意——我的网页设计公司,后来变成了 Metalab——那太简单了,而且立刻就见效了,因为我只需要知道怎么建网站,然后能跟潜在客户沟通就行。
他们一旦说”好,我付你 5000 美元”,我只需要给他们发张发票,把活干了,就这样。这是一门非常简单的生意。正因为如此,我得到了即时的正面反馈,也构建了自己的叙事。我的叙事变成了:“我很擅长做生意,我能做到,继续走下去。“然后我拿着从那门原始生意中赚到的钱继续干——然后就搞砸了。我出去开了一家披萨店,把钱全赔了。我还开了一家设计师猫家具公司、一个在线 DJ 学校、一个护肤霜生意,所有这些东西。我几乎一瞬间就把钱全赔光了,但因为有了第一次成功,我一直在继续。我真的觉得选择一门能获得初次胜利的生意是极其关键的。
如何避免为自己创造一份讨厌的工作
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,这是一个很好的话题。就是——你怎么避免给自己创造一份你讨厌的工作?有很多商业机会和想法,就像”是的,你能把这事儿做成”,然后它真的做成了,然后你就被困在运营一家餐厅这种事情上了。我太太讲过一个故事:一个朋友开了一家咖啡店,然后他说,“我以为我在开一家咖啡店,但我现在的工作就是换牛奶、买牛奶,整天就干这个。“沿着这个思路,为了帮助人们避免创造出一头自己没预料到的野兽——有什么建议吗?就是怎么判断:这件事也许能做成、能赚钱,但你可能不想把一生花在这种生意上。
Andrew Wilkinson: 我最近刚开了一家高压清洗公司。我当时在一所本地商学院演讲,讲完之后,一个学生走过来跟我说,“嘿,我是个创业者,我之前做过两三个生意,做园林绿化的,但我不太喜欢上学。“于是我当场跟他说,“你干嘛不退学呢,我们一起开一家公司?“而我一直在琢磨一个高压清洗公司的想法,因为我研究过那个行业一点,也认识几个在其他城市做过这行的朋友。而且我有一个不公平优势——我拥有一大堆媒体资源,基本上可以免费给它打广告。于是我们开始了这门生意。我觉得对他来说,他有过那么一个时刻:我这辈子真的想一直给别人洗车道吗?
我跟他说的就是:“你听好,如果这个生意能做大,你再也不用碰高压清洗机——除非你自己想碰。“如果生意能做到足够大的规模,你可以雇员工,他就可以只专注于销售,或者数字营销,或者他真正喜欢的那个环节。我认为这是很多创业者忽略的最大的一点。他们说,“我不想一辈子干那个,我不想待在干洗店后面给别人熨衣服。“而对我来说,这只是一个规模问题。我觉得咖啡馆就是一个很好的例子,因为一家咖啡馆如果不能达到一定的规模,那就只是一份工作。
生意与工作的区别
生意和工作之间有很大的区别。如果你开了一家高压清洗公司,你是唯一的员工,没错,那是一份工作。但如果你能做到每天带来 10 个潜在客户的规模,那你就完全不用亲自去高压清洗了,只做你喜欢的事就行。所以我觉得很多人有一种新教工作伦理,觉得”我必须是那个亲力亲为做所有事情的人”。而我认为他们真正需要拥抱的是我所说的”懒惰式领导力”——就是我怎样尽可能快地摆脱我讨厌的事情?我怎样才能对各种任务像特氟龙一样——什么都不粘手?
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思的是,这门生意跟软件完全没有关系,这个高压清洗公司。所以我想对那些正在想点子的人来说——我猜大多数想法都会有一种倾向,想往软件方向走,想做那种 AI 可以帮你搭建、帮你运营的东西。你对于走向现实世界的实体生意——比如餐厅、高压清洗公司——与软件之间,是怎么权衡的?走那个方向有什么好处?什么时候一个人应该认真考虑做像高压清洗这样的生意?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我觉得如果有人在听这个播客,大概率是一个数字原住民类型的人。我觉得关键问题是:你的不公平优势是什么?你擅长什么?拿我来说,我觉得我有相当不错的审美品味,所以我能识别并——我也知道足够多的东西来判断什么是优秀的设计和开发人才,但主要还是我运气好,因为我是一个善于表达的人。我擅长跟客户见面、推销自己。所以归根结底,我最高效、最擅长的——我的超能力——就是销售。而销售可以应用到任何事情上,任何你需要出去向客户推销的事情。所以归根到底,就是什么在吸引你,然后你如何从中找到一门赚钱的生意。给你举个例子。我的一个朋友,他开了一家餐厅,他说,“哦,我很喜欢。我对它充满热情。这是我家乡一家非常漂亮的餐厅。”
但他说,“但它其实只是为几个人创造了工作,而且我们根本赚不到钱。但我注意到,有很多为餐厅提供服务的供应商,那些人赚得盆满钵满。“他跟我提到一门清理隔油池的生意,还有一门清理厨房排风管道的生意。所以我觉得,环顾四周,看看你的热情在哪里,然后在其中仔细嗅探——很可能在你热爱的领域里,就藏着一个机会。再比如,我热爱电影。我最放松的方式就是待在一个黑暗的电影院里。对我来说减压最好的方式就是去一个黑暗的影厅,看一部电影,沉浸其中。大约四五 年前,我心想:“天哪,如果能以某种方式投资电影,成为那个创意世界的一部分,那该多酷?“
投资电影与 Letterboxd
Andrew Wilkinson: 于是我开始研究投资电影,结果发现,当你投资电影时,大概 90% 的情况下你会血本无归。即使你确实赚了点钱,也很难获得好的回报。但我花了不少时间去理解这个行业、学习它的运作方式。然后两年前,我在新西兰遇到了 Letterboxd 的创始人,我意识到:“天哪,这是一门有护城河的生意,它有网络效应,是一个面向影评人的巨大社交网络。这是我热爱的领域,而且我们可以以合理的价格收购。“所有这些因素汇聚在一起,我心想:“天哪,我现在可以投资电影了。“就像我以前做过咖啡师一样,我们最终收购了 AeroPress 咖啡机制造公司。所以我追随自己的热情,花大量时间学习不同的行业,然后在其中找到有利可图的细分领域。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,这是一个很好的启示——本质上来说,当你在考虑创业点子时,一定要确保它与你的某种独特优势有关联。这让我想到 Brian Armstrong。我曾看过他的一次演讲,他给出了一个非常精彩的洞察,解释了为什么 Coinbase 能成功,以及他为什么要创办 Coinbase。因为如果你看他的背景,他拥有一个非常罕见的技能交叉组合——计算机科学,我记得还有密码学和经济学——而这恰好是创办 Coinbase 这类项目所需的那套精确技能。所以我觉得这里的建议就是:你背景中那个独特的技能交叉组合是什么,理想情况下,你正在做的事情应该与之相关联,从而赋予你不公平优势。
Andrew Wilkinson: 确实如此。我最近遇到另一位 UVic 的学生,本地大学的一个学生。她对市场营销感兴趣,所以她出去找了一些本地客户,小型餐厅之类的,帮他们管理社交媒体。她说:“嗯,还行吧,一个月能赚一千块钱,但工作量很大,“而且那些老板对花钱的回报要求很高。我说:“如果你把这个想法稍微调整一下,不是做餐厅,而是做房产经纪人或理财顾问——这些人有相当大的营销预算,习惯花大钱,而且只要效果稍微起一点作用,就能给他们带来可观的回报。这类客户,你可以每月收费五千美元。”
所以我觉得通常的模式是:找到你的热情和技能所在,聚焦下去,然后稍微调整方向,找到最赚钱的方式去做这件事。当我创办我的网页设计公司时,一开始主要做本地的小型项目,但很快我发现了旧金山的一个招聘平台,那里的初创公司会发布他们需要帮助的项目。同样的工作,我可以收五倍的价格,工作量还少五倍。
去有鱼的地方钓鱼
Lenny Rachitsky: “去有鱼的地方钓鱼”这个观点我觉得非常重要。你可能做出了一个很棒的东西,你很喜欢,你很兴奋,但没有人需要它。能不能再多聊聊这方面?当你在评估想法时,什么信号告诉你那里有鱼,同时又没有被过度捕捞?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我觉得这很难——查理·芒格有一句很好的话:“我因为是一个投资者而成为更好的商人,我因为是一个商人而成为更好的投资者。“我觉得要知道哪些问题值得解决,你自己首先得经历过有价值的难题。所以这有点棘手,因为我记得我二十岁的时候,我会说:“我讨厌能买到的所有猫家具,我打赌人们会愿意花很多钱来解决这个问题,“但我完全不了解那个商业模式的现实情况。我不了解人们实际愿意付的钱有多么少。我没有足够的人生经验去判断:“是的,那确实是一个值得把握的机会。“我觉得能够现实地判断人们愿意花多少钱来解决某个问题,这本身是非常有价值的能力。
拿房产经纪人卖房这个例子来说,因为我研究过那个行业,我知道一个房产经纪人卖一套房子可以赚两万到五万美元。所以我可以直觉判断,如果我有一种独特的方式帮他们获取会买房的客户,转化率又高,那么他们愿意为此花很多钱——一个线索可能就值五千美元,对吧?所以我觉得你必须先深入了解那个问题,才能真正做出判断。因为在我刚起步的时候,每一个兔子洞我都会钻进去,每一个电视购物广告式的点子我都觉得是天才之作。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那对于那些没有这种经验的人——也就是大多数人——有没有什么你做的事情,某种经验法则,能给你一种感觉:也许这里有机会,也许有很多鱼,也许有价值——还是说,直觉会告诉你大概不行?
Andrew Wilkinson: 没有,很遗憾,我觉得主要是靠直觉。我的意思是,芒格和巴菲特谈到过在脑海中积累一大堆思维模型,它们形成一个格栅框架,对吧?然后它们会相互拼合连接。我觉得对我来说,这很大程度上就像——我几乎像一个 AI 模型,我已经用所有这些数据做了训练:什么有效、什么无效、什么是好的护城河、什么是糟糕的生意等等。当我看到的时候,我立刻就能知道。我的意思是,我觉得现在的创业者太幸运了,你可以打开 Claude 或 ChatGPT,直接说:“我在考虑开一家肉毒杆菌诊所,你能帮我分析一下数据吗?这是一门好生意吗?难点在哪里?监管护城河是什么?我的工资支出大概会是什么样?“我当年根本没有这些,所以我开创了无数愚蠢至极的生意,但我觉得现在已经没有借口了。你应该可以用 AI 来做到这些。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这真的是一个很好的建议。然后你提到了一个观点——无聊是好事。这是一条非常好的建议。很多人都在追逐光鲜亮丽的东西,那些在 Twitter 上被人热议的话题。你在这方面的建议是:无聊其实是一件非常好的事情,因为追逐它的人更少。大致是这个意思吗?
无聊的生意才是好生意
Andrew Wilkinson: 完全正确。我创办过一门生意,叫 Flow,是我最早的项目之一。Flow 基本上就是 Asana 出来之前的 Asana。它是一个网页应用,用来管理团队的任务清单和项目。我们基本上犯了——我们犯了那么多创业者都会犯的错误,就是追逐一个所有人都蜂拥而上的行业,就像咖啡馆一样。每个人都有这个想法:“要是我能设计自己的项目管理系统,或者自己的任务管理系统就好了。“不仅如此,每个人都喜欢新鲜事物,喜欢换来换去。就拿我自己来说,过去三年里我大概用过三种不同的效率管理系统,我很享受在它们之间跳来跳去。我当时不理解这一点,最终亏了一千万美元,试图与那些有风投支持的公司竞争——而且是用自己的钱自举。
全是我自己的钱,砸了一千万美元,一把火烧光,试图跟 Asana 竞争——因为我不理解商业世界的运作方式——他们融了数亿美元,而且他们的 CEO 是 Facebook 的联合创始人。这就像斐济决定入侵美国一样——事后回想,简直荒唐至极。反过来说,如果我把同样的精力花在——让我想想,我最近听说过一个特别无聊的生意——我最近看到了一门生意……
Andrew Wilkinson: 他们一年能赚三千万美元,做的就是帮人们填写表格、申请某些政府援助项目的软件。比如你叔叔是残疾人,你需要帮他获取政府资助。整个流程极其耗时、极其痛苦,要填一大堆表格。他们就是做了一个自动填表的软件,然后告诉你:你看,你能拿到两万美元的补助金,付我们一千块就行。这生意无聊透顶,没有人早上醒来会说”我想做填表软件”,但如果他们知道一年能赚两千万,大概就会了。
所有人都觉得是好主意却总是失败的事
Lenny Rachitsky: 顺着”烂主意”这个话题,那些人们不该做的事情——有哪些你觉得所有人都以为是绝妙主意,做了之后却总是失败的?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我觉得最大的错误——我可以拿自己的经历来说——我在商业上犯的最大错误,就是进入那些别人已经反复失败过的商业模式,然后心想”我能做得更好”。举个例子,大概十年前,我和一个最好的朋友特别想开一家酒吧。我们觉得太酷了,自己和朋友们都有个地方可以去,对城市也有好处。我们觉得能把利润率做得很高,因为我们是搞技术的,知道怎么搭建系统,也懂商业。结果我们被彻底打脸了。我们意识到,跟一个经营披萨店的人比起来,我们对商业一无所知。你想想看,就像我前面举的例子——如果你经营一家软件公司,需要做什么?你需要招一群技术宅,给他们配好网络和电脑,付他们工资,在线协作,大家异步工作就行。没什么必须万无一失的地方,至少小规模下没那么复杂。但一家披萨店呢?面包师如果凌晨三点没起来和面,整件事就全完了。而且从头到尾有一百个不同的故障点——前厅、后厨、配送是否准时,各种物流环节。所以我觉得问题就出在这种地方。另外我还进入了新闻行业,本地新闻。我最后收购了温哥华一家老报纸,情况一模一样——你无法用一个优秀的管理团队去拯救一个糟糕的商业模式。最终获胜的永远是商业模式本身。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这条建议非常好。基本上就是说,如果一个领域里到处都是尸体,那大概率有什么东西在持续杀死他们,你可能根本没意识到——除非有人真正想出了破解之道。偶尔,真的偶尔,才会有人站出来说”好吧,我找到办法了”,然后才成功。
Andrew Wilkinson: 看看 Instacart 就知道了。Instacart 刚出来的时候,所有人说”Webvan 都失败了,这事儿不可能成”。而且我们到现在也不一定知道 Instacart 是不是一个好生意。我没研究过,但大概就是,技术发展到一定程度,这件事变得可以做了。但问题是,创办 Instacart、Amazon 或 Coupang 更容易,还是创办一家企业级 SaaS 软件公司更容易?肯定是企业级 SaaS 软件公司。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我明白了。所以建议大概就是——那些容易启动的事情反而是你不该做的,因为所有人都会涌向那里。
Andrew Wilkinson: 这又回到我之前举的健身房那个比喻——如果你要去硬拉三百磅,你得训练了十五年,你应该已经成功创办过三家公司,已经积累了足够的训练量。我觉得如果是我去创办 Instacart,那和一个二十岁的人去创办是不一样的。不是说我就一定能做好,但至少我知道自己将要面对什么。
生活方式生意 vs 风投支持的创业公司
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们来聊聊 Twitter 上永远吵不完的话题。也许这是一个伪二元对立——生活方式生意、自举生意,即不融资、靠收入养活自己的模式,对比风投支持、风投规模的创业公司。你显然非常擅长前者,而很多人的梦想就是:“我就随便做点什么,搞个生活方式生意,一年赚几百万,永远不融资。谁需要风投?风投就是垃圾。“对于如何在这两条路之间做选择,你有什么建议?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我觉得所谓”生活方式”或自举生意做不大这个说法根本就不对。你看,我们整个生意都是自举的,现在旗下所有公司加起来年收入接近三亿美元。而整个过程我一直在做的事情就是——从小的生意、小的想法、简单的想法入手,往往是收购小公司,然后看着它们长成很大的公司。我觉得我们所做的和风投所做的,唯一的区别就是——你有多大的容忍度去把钱一把火烧掉。我只是没看到这种必要性:如果我们选对了生意——不在竞争极其激烈的市场里,或者拥有某种护城河,比如一个强大的品牌,或者网络效应比如社交网络之类的——我不觉得不让他们烧钱会阻碍公司发展,因为这些东西会自然增长。
那些数字,简直就像气球一样,只要我们别搞砸太多,它们自己就会膨胀。所以我认为最终的决定因素是:你的”宏大、毛茸茸、大胆的目标”到底有多毛茸茸?如果你的宏大目标是创办下一代卫星公司、创造某种疯狂的技术革命,那确实,你得去融风险投资,除非你已经是亿万富翁了。但如果你只是想捣鼓捣鼓,解决一个你觉得不会陷入过度竞争的问题——比如那个填表软件,或者一个只做很窄功能的软件,不需要先烧掉两三千万美元才能赚钱——那你完全可以过上美好的生活,建立一个优秀的公司,如果操作得当,规模做到几亿美元,而且全程不融资。
Lenny Rachitsky: 聊到你分享的 Flow 的故事——你在和一家风投支持的公司竞争。如果某个领域已经有一家风投支持的公司了,建议是不是说你大概率赢不了,不如去做别的?
Andrew Wilkinson: 看看 Things 吧。你知道 Things 吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 我用过 Things。
Andrew Wilkinson: 我也用。太棒了。Things 至今还存在,而且已经存在了二十年。它的团队我记得只有一两个人,最多三个人,不是大团队,肯定不到十个人。我记得是自举的,而且一直持续交付一个卓越的产品,积累了一批忠实的用户群。他们有一万个铁杆粉丝在用,这对他们来说就够了。但他们做的事情不多,非常有意识地在控制范围。他们不做任何 AI 相关的东西,没有开放 API,也不做 Android 版本。他们非常专注,我认为他们是成功的。但问题是,一个 MBA 或商学院教授会怎么评价他们的成功?如果成功的标准是是否最大化地占据了市场份额、做到尽可能大,那答案就是否定的——因为 Asana 和其他公司已经建起了数十亿美元级别的企业。
生活方式企业与大企业的成功定义
Andrew Wilkinson: 如果目标是让创始人拥有极好的生活——大概有三套房,到处飞,想干什么干什么,有经常性收入,可以戴上耳机做他热爱的、人们喜欢的精美软件——那我认为他赢了。我总体上更偏向 Things 那位开发者是赢家,而不是 Dustin Moskovitz。Dustin Moskovitz 玩的是一个完全不同的游戏。如果让 Dustin Moskovitz 来运营 Things,他会很痛苦;如果让 Things 的开发者去运营 Asana,他大概会崩溃,因为他只想戴上耳机专注构建产品。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我好奇为什么没有人来竞争。感觉对于生活方式型企业来说,既然它在运转,你会觉得总会有人带着更多资金、更多融资进来把他们的午餐抢走。关键是不是在于这个市场太小了,小到风投根本不会感兴趣,所以才没有人来抢?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我觉得是这样。我是说,我猜 Things——我只是在猜测,我不知道任何具体数字——但我估计它的收入大概在五百万到两千五百万美元之间,对风投来说根本不值得考虑。要让风投投资你的业务,你需要讲出一个价值三亿到十亿美元甚至更高的故事。所以这对他们来说毫无吸引力。这又回到了”在有鱼的地方钓鱼”——你不想和商业渔民抢。如果你只是想要一个小生意,钓到足够的鱼养活你的家人和村子,那就去找另一个鱼塘。别去拖网渔船出没的地方。
Lenny Rachitsky: 如果你想创办一家非风投支持的公司,这是一条很好的建议:找到那个地方。这个比喻对我们一直很管用——在有鱼的地方钓鱼,但不要去职业渔民扎堆的地方。理想情况下,也不要去那种到处都是——我不知道怎么说——到处都是个体户渔民的地方。好吧,回到创办一家成功公司的话题,你觉得一个出色的商业模式、一个出色的企业,关键要素是什么?你应该思考什么、关注什么?我知道你在这方面花了很多时间思考。当你收购公司时,你会聚焦哪几个要点?
收购企业的核心理念:沃伦·巴菲特的启示
Andrew Wilkinson: 我赖以为生的事基本上就是收购企业。在我职业生涯早期,我创办了一家企业,然后又创办了大约十家。后来我意识到创办企业极其困难,而那时我已经做得相当不错了,赚了不少钱,卖掉了其中一家企业,然后展望未来十年,认真地问自己:我想让我的职业生涯是什么样的?我对正在做的事情满意吗?答案是不满意。我不喜欢创办企业,不喜欢经历那种失败率,那压力太大了。于是我拿起了一本关于投资的书,运气不错,我买的第一本是关于沃伦·巴菲特的书。对于那些不了解的人,沃伦·巴菲特和你在风投圈、奋斗文化里听到的那些东西完全相反,因为他基本上就是安静地坐在一个房间里,整天读书。尽管他拥有两百六十家不同的企业,是全世界最富有的十个人之一,他的生活却异常平静。
他只做自己想做的事,大部分时间都在安静地阅读,每年做一两次重大决定收购一家企业。所以当我读到沃伦·巴菲特的故事时,我就想,哇,我真是个傻瓜。我像个疯子一样到处跑,试图经营所有这些企业。我为什么不像他那样收购企业,然后让它们自己运转呢?所以当我在收购一家企业时,我真正在寻找的是一种我搞不砸的东西。当然,我们收购企业后会努力不搞砸,而且我们非常刻意——实际上这在业内相当奇怪——当 Tiny 收购一家公司时,我们通常就是放手不管。如果公司已经有管理团队在位,我们说什么都不变,没有人应该察觉到我们收购了他们。当然人们最终会知道,但确实不应该有任何变化。
我们通常做的唯一改变是,如果创始人想离开公司,那我们会引入一位 CEO 来运营,这大概是我们做的最重要的决策。所以我在寻找的是一家好到很难被搞砸的企业,而大多数企业是非常容易被搞砸的。一个人离开,整个企业就分崩离析,因为它全靠牙线和胶带勉强维系。所以我真正在寻找的是沃伦·巴菲特所说的护城河。护城河基本上就是一个品牌,比如可口可乐、泰诺(Tylenol)、Advil 之类的。就是那种能给你定价权的东西——你可以持续收费,拥有忠实的客户。或者我们通常发现大量机会的地方是网络效应。
通常是寻找一个已经发展到如此规模的社区,以至于人们不愿意去别的地方。比如我们拥有 Letterboxd,这是全球最大的电影爱好者社交网络。问题是,如果有人想跟我们竞争,为什么用户要去一个人数很少的社交网络,而他们所有的朋友都已经在 Letterboxd 上了?你在 Instagram 或 Facebook 身上也能看到同样的现象。所以我们寻找的就是这类企业——有持久力、难以竞争、并且我们可以长期持有的东西。
网络效应与高转换成本
Lenny Rachitsky: 当 Elon 收购 X 的时候很有意思,那简直就是对网络效应力量的一次考验。回想一下,他改了名字,品牌完全变了,团队百分之八十的人离开了。留下来的就是网络和网络效应,以最简单的方式展现了出来。给不太熟悉网络效应的朋友们解释一下,我理解的方式就是:网络效应就是每多一个用户加入网络,这个网络对所有人就更有价值。
Andrew Wilkinson: 还有一种护城河是高转换成本,我不太喜欢这种,因为它对消费者不太友好,但例子可能是 Salesforce——没有人愿意换,他们花了数年时间做了所有实施、培训了所有人,它某种程度上已经成了标准。人人都讨厌它,但把它拆掉换成别的太痛苦了,所以大家就不折腾了。这也是一种有时能成就好生意的护城河,但同样,这种比较令人沮丧,我不太喜欢。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你们买的上一家公司是什么?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我们收购了 Serato。Serato 是全球最大的 DJ 软件公司。如果你看到一位 DJ 在演出面前放着一台笔记本电脑,大概率就是在用 Serato 打碟。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,太酷了。我想这就是资金投入后走进去的场景吧。
Andrew Wilkinson: 我以前做过 DJ,所以知道他们。这也正是我们之前谈到的那种时刻——我理解这家企业。他们有一个非常有趣的护城河:一个庞大且充满热情的用户群体,以及深度的硬件整合。而且我也喜欢 DJ,所以我能分析这门生意。机遇青睐有准备的大脑,最终一切顺利。
用人与管理之道
Lenny Rachitsky: 这又呼应了你那条出色的建议——无论你是创办公司还是收购公司,最理想的情况是你拥有独特的非对称优势,或者某种与这个想法相关的独特背景。在你转向一个完全不同的话题之前——剧透一下,是 AI——让我再问一个问题。我知道你经常谈到、深信不疑,也亲身经历过的一件事:收购公司本质上就是关于人,以及管理、招聘和用人方面的挑战。那么,关于如何成功地发现优秀人才、留住优秀人才、帮助人才在你运营的公司中取得更大成就,你学到了什么?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我的商业伙伴 Chris 有一句很棒的话。他说:“没有所谓的问题,只有人的问题。“我们发现,就算有人告诉我们某个业务单元即将崩溃、要出大灾难之类的,只要我身边围绕的都是真正聪明优秀的人,我就觉得没问题。但当团队中出现了害群之马——一个精神变态者、一个自恋狂,或者一个极其难缠的人——一切都不可控了,生活变得压力巨大。所以我大概花 20% 的时间专门用来确保我们非常仔细地筛选人,确保与我们共事的人是我们真正喜欢的。说到这个,我在 AI 方面也做了一些很有意思的尝试,帮助我筛选和识别那些难以相处的人。但我发现我早期职业生涯犯的最大错误就是——凭直觉喜欢一个人就招进来,然后以为自己能改变他们。
这有点像恋爱关系,从来不顺利。如果你跟一个人结婚,然后心想:“好吧,只要我能让他皈依基督教,或者改变他的父母、他的性格之类的,这段关系就会很棒。“所以我发现我从来没能改变过任何人。你永远不可能通过指导把一个人变成好员工。我的一个经验法则是:只要我哪怕有一次想到”我是不是该解雇这个人”,我就应该立刻解雇他们。至少对我来说,这一直是一个明确的信号——当一个人是超级明星的时候,我根本无法想象解雇他们。我觉得那是不可能的,没有他们我会迷失方向。
但当我反复开始想”这个人到底行不行”的时候,几乎总是在六到十二个月内就彻底行不通了。所以我真的尽量对这类事情非常果断,不行就立刻止损。所以我认为真正的教训是:为你需要的东西招聘。不要仅仅为了潜力而招聘,这与很多人的说法正好相反。很多人说招有潜力的人,然后把他们培养成你需要的样子。我只是没发现这行得通。我认为你需要招聘一个已经完全成型、能做你需要的事情的人。当然,每个人做法不同。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这条建议分量很重,非常有力量。这不仅仅适用于你旗下公司的 CEO 吗?对层级更低的员工也是如此?
Andrew Wilkinson: 对于 CEO 来说,我们观察到一个很有意思的现象。举个例子,我们有一位 CEO 候选人来面试,在我看来,那家业务需要通过有机营销来增长;而他认为应该靠企业销售。面试的时候,他一直在讲他做企业销售的经验。有句老话说得好:“手里拿着锤子的人,看什么都像钉子。“对他来说,看着这家公司,他觉得企业销售才是增长之道。我录用了他,但我说:“如果要招你,我们需要你做有机营销。“果不其然,他最终跑去做了企业销售。我发现招聘 CEO 就像是——他们是一头大象,你是骑象人。
他们终究会往自己想去的方向走。所以,要极其仔细地倾听人们说的话和他们的经历,因为人们通常真的会做他们告诉你的那件事。现在面试 CEO 的时候,我寻找的是那种让我不断点头的状态。我想听到的是”这正是我会做的”,或者”这比我的想法聪明多了”。然后我就放手让他们去做。因为我发现,任何时候只要我试图把他们往某个方向拉,或者指导他们,就是不奏效。当然,这可能是我自己的问题,我可能是世界上最差的教练和导师,但对我来说,这就是事实。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我猜还有一个因素——如果一个人想做的是企业销售,结果却整天拍病毒式 TikTok 视频、发推特,他也不会热爱这份工作。他会觉得:“这搞什么?”
Andrew Wilkinson: 而且我发现人们还会主动给自己使绊子。如果在董事会上我提出一个想法,说”我真的需要你试试这个”,从来不奏效。因为他们通常会敷衍了事,不是真的投入,或者只是在安抚我,内心并不希望这个方案成功。他们希望自己的想法成功。所以我学会了不再那样做。
AI 实践与工具栈
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们来聊聊 AI 吧。看你在 Twitter 上的表现真的很有意思。你显然已经成了一个 AI 痴迷者、AI 爱好者——我不知道该用什么词来形容。我喜欢的是,你不是那种只在 Twitter 上高谈阔论的人,你显然在工作的方方面面都在实际使用 AI,并且还在寻找更多应用方式。所以我有很多问题,因为我认为越来越多的创始人会走到你今天所在的位置。首先,你现在的 AI 工具栈是什么样的?你最常用、觉得最有用的工具都有哪些?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我主要用的工具是一个叫 Lindy 的平台,Lindy.ai。它 basically 让你搭建工作流和智能体。操作很简单。你可以说,“当 Gmail API 收到一封邮件时,我想添加一个 AI 智能体来读取邮件并据此打标签。” 你也可以搭一个疯狂的鲁布·戈德堡机械,把不同的邮件发到各种不同的地方。比如,当我收到一封与孩子学校相关的邮件时,我有一个很大的困扰,就是孩子的学校发的邮件实在太多了——周四有郊游,你需要带以下物品,同时还有家长会,还有各种各样的事情需要加到日历上。AI 智能体会自动把这些信息提取出来,放到我的日历上,还会为我所有需要准备的事项添加备注。所以我 basically 就是试图把收件箱里所有人类能做的事情,都用 Lindy 自动化。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你是自己在 Lindy 里面搭建这些,还是有人帮你建?
Andrew Wilkinson: 不,我自己做。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。你大概有多少个智能体在运行,如果用这个词的话?
Andrew Wilkinson: 天哪,我想可能数量不算疯狂……让我想想。每个工作流大概有四到五个智能体。比如我的收件箱就有四到五个智能体,然后我还有一大堆其他的——我有日历智能体、会议智能体、邮件智能体、日程调度器、CRM,基本上都是不同的工作流。所以里面有一大堆智能体。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,你不是 Lindy 的投资人吧?你只是个粉丝、超级用户。
Andrew Wilkinson: 不是,不是。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思的是,其实我是。所以这很好。
Andrew Wilkinson: 哦,真的吗?太棒了。
Lenny Rachitsky: Tiny 的天使投资人。所以我想先声明一下,我很高兴这个话题自然而然地冒出来了。你还有哪些特别有意思的使用场景、搭建的工作流,可以给大家一些启发的?
Andrew Wilkinson: 让我把邮件那个再展开讲讲。基本上邮件进来之后,第一个智能体会判断:Andrew 需要看到这个吗?比如你在一个邮件线程里,你已经发过言了,大家只是在说”好的,没问题”——我不需要看这些。所以直接归档。光这一步就减少了大约 20% 的邮件。然后它会判断这是否是时间敏感的,是否需要在 24 小时内处理。如果是,就用一个专门的 24 小时标签标记出来。我打开邮箱时最大的压力就是——“天哪,这里有 200 封邮件,如果我不全部过一遍,我不知道是不是有什么紧急的事情正在烧。” 现在我知道了。接下来它会对每一封邮件判断,这是一个简单的决定吗?比如你给我发邮件说,“嘿,要不要一起吃个午饭?” 它会私下给我发一条消息:“嘿,Lenny 想约午饭。你想说可以吗?想说过几个月再说吗?想说不行吗?你想怎么拒绝?” 它给我多选题,我只需要回复一个数字四,然后它就会以我的身份给你回一封邮件,写出一封周到得体的邮件。类似这样的事情真的太酷、太有帮助了。我觉得它已经替代了我之前全职助理的工作——我以前有一个专门处理邮件的全职助理,现在这些全部自动化了,还有其他各种很酷的功能。其他智能体方面,我正在搭建一个管理日历的智能体,因为我的日程真的很复杂,涉及大量的调度和规则。我还有一个非常简单的智能体,就是给每一个日历事件添加 emoji。这样我看日历的时候,每个事件上都有漂亮的小 emoji。非常傻,但很好玩。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那些 emoji 代表什么意思吗?
Andrew Wilkinson: 是的,比如我写举重,它就会放一个举重的人之类的。我还有一个,这个很酷。基本上它的功能是,每次我给某人发邮件,它就会在网上查找这个人的信息,弄清楚他住在哪个城市,然后在 CRM 和 Airtable 里查一下,看看我有没有记录。它会确认”好的,我不知道你住哪里。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 住在 Marin,湾区那边。
Andrew Wilkinson: 好的,它就会记录”给 Lenny 发邮件,他住在 Marin”,把这个信息存进数据库。然后下次我去湾区的时候,智能体会在两周前提醒我:“我看到你要去旧金山了,以下是所有在旧金山你应该约喝咖啡的人。” 就是所有这些——
Lenny Rachitsky: 这个我愿意付费。
Andrew Wilkinson: 对对,没错。所有这些我一直梦想让助理做的事情,但助理永远没法稳定地做好,因为她会分心、我们在办活动、总有各种事情——用了 AI 就像是拥有了一个世界上最可靠的员工,每月成本 200 美元,7×24 小时工作。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,我想接着这个话题聊,不过先问一下,你还有哪些其他工具?Lindy 是一个,还有什么你觉得特别好用的?
Andrew Wilkinson: 另一个是 Replit。Replit basically 是一个 vibe coding(氛围编程)平台。你真的可以直接进去说,“我想给我的音频软件业务做一个网站,这里有一份很详细的文档,” 然后它就会设计出一个相当不错的网站。而且现在你还可以搭建 Web 应用。你可以直接说,“给我搭建一个做某某功能的 Python Web 应用,” 设计水平越来越好,因为它用的是 Claude 4。你甚至可以说,“用 Stripe 的风格来做。好好想想,用 David Ogilvy 或者 Malcolm Gladwell 的语气重写所有的文案,” 或者任何你喜欢的风格,它做得真的很棒。我发现以前那些会让我头疼的事情——因为需要依赖一个五人团队——现在涉及 Web 项目之类的,我可以完全自己搞定。所以我玩得非常开心。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很酷。你觉得 Replit 跟 Lovable、Bolt、v0 相比,大概是不是差不多的定位?
Andrew Wilkinson: 它们都挺好的。我只是对 Replit 最熟悉,而且它似乎功能最丰富。它很扎实,而 Lovable 和 Bolt 感觉稍微基础一些。用它们的话可能需要在部署方面花更多功夫,操作也更繁琐。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很棒。还有别的吗?
Andrew Wilkinson: 还有一个我很喜欢的,叫 Limitless。不知道你见过没有。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我有一个。
Andrew Wilkinson: 真的很酷。它夹在衬衫上。我其实就把它放在口袋里,所以通常没人注意到我戴着它,我一整天都戴着。它的功能就是记录我做的一切。然后我可以说——前几天我跟人喝咖啡,我是那种说话像机关枪一样的人,会说”哦,我会把这个发给你,我会做这个,” 等等。到了一天结束的时候,我就可以直接问:“嘿,我今天答应了别人什么?” 更妙的是,所有人都喜欢这个场景——我跟女朋友吵架了,她说”你没说过那句话,” 我就可以说”实际上你确实说了。” 你可以像查询 LLM 一样去查询它。
Andrew Wilkinson: 所以你可以让它当你们的情侣咨询师。分析这场争吵,每个人需要什么?是怎么开始的?关键话语是什么?在哪里发生了转折?怎样可以做得更好?说实话,从感情关系的角度来看,这可能是它最有用的地方。还有一个很酷的地方,它有 API。所以最终——我还没走到那一步——但最终你可以让它记录你一整天,然后自动把内容同步到你的 Todoist 或其他工具里,添加待办事项、发送邮件,或者任何你需要它做的事。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,这太有意思了。或者就你说的那个感情关系的用法,你可以问它,“我今天哪里可以做得更好?这一天是从哪里开始走下坡路的?”
Andrew Wilkinson: 对,我在 Twitter 上看到一个人,他说,“每天我都会问它,‘我今天怎么才能做一个更好的爸爸?’” 然后它会说,“哦,你女儿试图引起你注意说这件事,你应该关注一下,” 之类的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这就是用 Limitless 的数据做的。哦天哪,我太喜欢这个了。关于感情关系那个用法,你没有往我以为的方向走——我以为是那种”到底是谁说的?你到底说了什么?“的方向。我喜欢的是,它变成了一个更温暖的东西——“我们整体上可以怎样更好地沟通?“好的。我太太实际上会说,“别戴着这个东西在我身边。”
Andrew Wilkinson: 你就得偷偷戴着。说实话,我知道这听起来有点俗,因为你会想,“哦,它会告状,“对吧?但现实中,吵架的时候通常两个人都有错。我女朋友其实还挺感激它的,因为有一半的时候它会分析出”哦对,Zoe 说了这个,然后触发了那个,“但很多时候问题也出在我身上。而我自以为完全是对的。所以我发现它真的很有帮助。其他工具的话,基本就是 Claude、ChatGPT 和 Gemini 这个基础组合。Gemini 我主要用来处理体量特别大的东西。比如说我所有的医疗记录,我放在 Gemini 2.5 上做训练,就是因为其他的没法处理那么多内容。Claude 我大量用于写作。我觉得它是这方面最好的。
然后 ChatGPT 用来处理其他所有事情。说到我做的一些酷事,最近我把家里整个药柜都拍了一遍,拍了那些能看清各种药品的大照片。现在我就可以说,“嘿,我今天特别累、压力很大。我应该吃什么补充剂,剂量多少?“或者我会说,“记住我正在服用的所有药物,每次我问你健康问题的时候,都要结合我可能正在服用的药物来提醒我。“有好几次它说了,“嘿,你不应该吃这个药,因为你的基因显示你不兼容,而且你已经在吃那个了。“所以类似这样的功能真的很有帮助。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对于这个用法,你是回到一个特定的对话里——你已经给了它那些上下文——还是用一个项目之类的?
Andrew Wilkinson: 不是,我说记住。我就说记住这些补充剂,这是我药柜里的东西,这是我每天吃的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我明白了。所以就是利用 ChatGPT 的记忆功能。
Andrew Wilkinson: 对。
AI 取代人工与岗位流失
Lenny Rachitsky: 这太棒了。这让我想起——也跟你之前提到的其他观点相关——我已经开始用 ChatGPT 的深度研究功能来准备这些访谈了。我以前有一个研究员,花 400 美元。他们为我做每位嘉宾的研究,四五百美元,然后给我一份完整的文档,“这是关于他们的一切。这是他们的背景,这是你可能会想问的问题。“深度研究做得更好了。特别是最近,尤其是 o3-pro 出来之后。
Andrew Wilkinson: 我们之前聊到 agent 的时候,我忘了一个我最喜欢的 agent。它会在我的日历上任何会议开始前 30 分钟查看,然后去 Perplexity 上对这个人做深度调研,然后发给我——它会进入我的邮件获取会议的上下文。因为经常我提前三个月就约了会议,所以我通常看到日历会说,“这人是谁?我都不记得约了这个会。“它会在会前给我发消息说,“这是这个人,这是他的背景,这是你们为什么要见面的邮件上下文。“基本上它替我做了所有的研究。我也做同样的事。我也会用深度研究,然后说,“如果你要和我见面的人,你了解关于我的一切。我们的共同点是什么?我们应该聊哪些有趣的话题?”
Lenny Rachitsky: 天哪,我真想把你搭建的这些 agent 直接拿过来用。有意思的是,我试过创建一个 agent 来帮我做这个研究启动工作,但我觉得 ChatGPT 的深度研究没法自动化。对吧。
Andrew Wilkinson: 只有 Perplexity 可以。对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。Perplexity 也很好,但不一样。好吧。让我继续我刚才想展开的那条线,就是关于岗位被替代的问题。我知道你在这方面想了很多。对我来说,那个做了几个月合同工的研究员,我已经不需要了。你的助理,你也不需要了。关于 AI 对就业的影响,你怎么看?
Andrew Wilkinson: 有一句 William Gibson 的名言,“未来已经到来,只是尚未均匀分布。“我觉得我们现在正处于 Palm Treo 阶段。你记得 Palm Treo 吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 不记得。
Andrew Wilkinson: 2007 年左右——那是 iPhone 出来的时候吧?2007 年?
Lenny Rachitsky: 我知道……
Andrew Wilkinson: 差不多那个时候。2007 年,有一款设备叫 Palm Treo,像一个小小的 PDA,带一支触控笔,还有一个小调制解调器附件。你可以随时随地收发邮件,这在当时令人震惊。它有一个黑白的或者勉强算彩色的屏幕,你可以进去给别人发邮件。我记得自己在商场里一边买鞋一边回复工作邮件,心想,“这就是终极自由。太不可思议了。“但那台设备的问题是——它很烂。你得用触控笔,用户体验不好。然后 iPhone 出来了,你就觉得,“好,这才是我一直在等的。这才是真正的东西。“但我在 Palm Treo 上先看到了一点预览。所以现在,像我这样有时间和技能去折腾、去搭建 agent 的人,可以做这些事情。只是它还不是人人都能用的。
我觉得如果它能做到人人可用——比如你打开 ChatGPT 说,“嘿,ChatGPT,我在经营一家公司,你能帮我吗?“然后它开始问你问题,说,“哦,你做销售。要不要我帮你搭一个销售 agent?好,把你的 HubSpot API 接进来,现在告诉我几件事,然后把你的数据权限给我。“然后不知不觉间,它就成了一个数字员工,在 ChatGPT 的另一端,就像电影《Her》里那样,你可以跟它对话,它可以帮你做事。我觉得那就是我们未来五年内会迎来的 iPhone 时刻。所以我认为,即使 AI 不再进步,我们也会看到一些严重的岗位替代——就像你刚才提到的,翻译、研究、行政、部分助理工作,取决于工作的类型,这些岗位肯定会受到巨大影响。
AI 对知识工作的冲击
Andrew Wilkinson: 但我认为,如果模型真的按照他们声称的速度继续提升,很快所有知识工作都会受到影响。我的意思是,如果你相信 Sam Altman 和 Dario Amodei 说的——Dario Amodei 说”到 2027 年,我们的模型将在任何学科上比所有博士都更聪明。“这是一个令人震惊的声明。而他一直是 AI 领域里一个非常保守的、甚至可以说是谨慎恐惧的声音。他说这种话一向非常谨慎。所以当他说出那番话时,我竖起了耳朵,开始认真听。我不知道事情最终会不会那样发展。他可能是在为融资造势,我们得打个折扣听。但如果那是真的,那我觉得大量知识工作岗位都将发生巨变。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧,这里信息量很大。我之前请过 Mike 上播客,他们的 CPL——Mike Krieger——他指出 Dario 过去几年做出的每一个预测都应验了。所以他的洞察是有理由要认真对待的。好,Andrew,我知道你不可能给所有人现成的答案。但我想问你一个两方面的问题:对于应届毕业生,以及对于已经在职场中的人——比如说资深产品经理——你有什么建议?他们应该做什么,应该聚焦哪里?哪些技能最重要?哪些工作会留存下来?你能给出什么建议?
给年轻人和职场人的建议
Andrew Wilkinson: 十年前所有人都在搞一个运动,你记得吗?说我们应该教孩子编程?记得吧?
Lenny Rachitsky: 嗯嗯。
Andrew Wilkinson: 现在教孩子编程就相当于教孩子 BASIC,而我们已经有 GUI 了,对吧?你不需要学打孔卡片和 BASIC 编程或者 MS-DOS 了,因为我们都有键盘和鼠标,不需要那样了。我觉得编程正因为这个而在消亡。我觉得现在人们在说需要学怎么写提示词,这对于当前的工具集来说确实非常对。但我不知道这在将来还有多大相关性,因为我觉得我们仍然——再说一次——处于 Palm Treo 阶段。我认为 AI 会变得非常擅长引导你说出你真正想解决的问题是什么,然后把它重新解读,优化查询以得到正确答案、解决问题。
所以根本问题是:所有工作最终都会变成一个提示词吗?比如,一个 CEO 是不是只需要说”增长业务、让客户满意、实现盈利”之类的就行了?然后它就能成为一个全知全能的存在,运营一整个公司。当然这是一个很大的”如果”——作为一个正在搭建 AI agent 的人,我目前连让它可靠地处理日历条目之类的事情都费劲。所以我不认为这一切会马上到来,但我确实能看到那样的世界正在逼近。那么问题是,当这个现实向你席卷而来时,你该怎么办?对于有资源的人来说,他们可以做很多事情,比如投资——投资那些会从中受益的公司,拥有大量算力或能源资源的那种公司。
这是一方面,但这不是真正的问题。真正的问题是,如果你是一个聪明的 18 岁、19 岁的年轻人,你该怎么办?在我看来,我认为现在最好的做法是极其熟练地掌握这些工具,利用它们积累足够的财富,然后把资金分散投资到算力和能源上。我确实认为,虽然所有人都觉得五年内所有工作都会消失、到处都是机器人,但人们通常短期高估、长期低估。所以我觉得会有一个很长的窗口期,机器人技术远不够好,连耙树叶这种事都做不了。而且我觉得会有大量机会让人们去创办以前根本不存在的全新业务。
富足时代的新工作
我跟一些朋友聊过,我们在想,“在一个一切都很便宜、公司几乎自主运营的富足世界里,你做什么?“我觉得会有很多我们现在想象不到的奇怪技能需求。比如,单纯地搞笑,对吧?成为一个有趣的人。想想 OnlyFans,现在已经有 OnlyFans 这种模式了,人们付费获得安慰和连接,不过是浪漫意义上的。想象一下如果人们在日常生活中也这样做——他们就是喜欢跟有趣的人待在一起。于是你有一个搞笑的朋友,你可以跟他聊天,或者他来你家串门之类的——我在瞎编——也许是一个来陪你打匹克球的人,我不知道。但我能想象在那个奇怪的世界里,会出现各种奇怪的新职业。
所以我的看法是:事情要么完全没问题,要么会很糟糕,我们都得死。我预测不了是哪种情况。我觉得不值得去想我们都得死的那个场景。所以我认为关键就是——拥抱这些工具,保持前沿,在这个新世界里怎么建立企业、积累财富。但我确实有一种感觉,我们所有人的大脑可能在接下来十年内就过时了。这是一个有点可怕的想法。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我脑海中浮现出一个反乌托邦世界,人类就到处走动着讲笑话。
Andrew Wilkinson: 在一个富足的世界里,地位从何而来?地位从何而来?也许就是看谁徒步最厉害之类的吧。
给孩子的教育建议
Lenny Rachitsky: 那我来问你一个更切身的问题——就是关于你的孩子。你在鼓励他们学什么?鼓励他们在什么方面变得擅长?因为这是现在很多人面临的真正问题——将来什么才重要。显然我们不知道,但你在鼓励他们聚焦什么?
Andrew Wilkinson: 这个,我不知道。他们才五岁和八岁,还太小了。所以我真正关注的是确保他们社会化良好、有礼貌,非常基础的东西。比如他们跟成年人说话是否自如?每当儿子在咖啡馆想要什么东西,我总是让他自己去,礼貌地问,自己付钱,之类的。但在现阶段我觉得,人生前十年你只是尽量确保他们没有心理创伤、不粗鲁。我觉得等他们十岁以后,真正意识到这些东西、能开始用这些工具搭建的时候,会非常有意思。说实话,我真的不知道。我觉得我只想让他们追随自己热爱的事情,然后从那里出发。但我毫无头绪。说实话,这不是我在担心的事,因为太难去担心了。我不知道,变量太多了,可能走的方向太多了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得你传达的一个核心信息就是——用好这些工具。有句经典的话,“AI 不会取代你,取代你的是一个非常擅长使用 AI 的人”——至少在一段时间内是这样。所以感觉这里面很大一部分就是去用这些东西。我们开始录音之前,麦克风出了点问题,我很喜欢你直接去问 ChatGPT——“ChatGPT,我怎么把这个麦克风连到 Revrse 那边让它工作起来?“我觉得这就是一个需要培养的习惯——遇到这类问题就去问 ChatGPT。我也一直在这样做。我之前连一个低音炮,需要买什么线才能把低音炮连到接收器上?就去问 ChatGPT。
ChatGPT 与 ADHD
Andrew Wilkinson: ChatGPT 最好的地方在于,以前我总是卡住就停了,而我有 ADHD。所以一卡住,比如说,举例子吧,我在重新搞家里的 IT 安全设置,在终端里输了个命令,结果出了问题,就一直报错。然后我就想,“行,我不干了。“我有 ADHD,我受不了这个,思路完全断掉了。ChatGPT 让我能保持在轨道上,比以前走得远得多、快得多。我特别喜欢那种感觉——不会因为一个技术障碍就人为地被迫停下来,能够继续保持在心流状态中。
Lenny Rachitsky: 而且我注意到你用的是语音模式,我也越来越多地用这个。我觉得很多人还没意识到语音模式有多好用,你可以直接跟它说话,不用坐在那儿打字。好,我们换个方向聊。你花了很多时间在这件事上,还写了一整本书,讲的就是你的历程——你称之为”从咖啡师到亿万富翁”,从端咖啡开始,后来变得非常成功,然后发现成功并没有让你快乐。你拥有了大把大把的钱,却相当不快乐。我想很多人听过这类故事,也看过这些东西,会觉得”嗯,好吧,我大概能理解”。但他们依然在做同样的事,依然觉得自己一旦达到下一个目标、下一个头衔、赚到某个数字,就会快乐。你能分享一下吗?关于什么才能真正让人快乐,你觉得人们还没有真正意识到、仍然困惑的东西是什么?
焦虑不会因财富而消失
Andrew Wilkinson: 你还记得你二十出头的时候吗?我记得我二十出头的时候,总是想着”我得搬到欧洲去,我得去寻找自我”。我特别焦虑、特别紧张,处于一种存在主义危机中,然后我飞到欧洲去背包旅行什么的,结果还是很焦虑,存在主义危机还在。只不过我现在人在欧洲而已。我觉得现实就是,你脑子里装的东西,那个焦虑循环,不会因为你有了更大的房子、银行里多了些钱、或者你到了巴厘岛或其他什么地方就消失。那是你体内发生的化学反应,跟你的过去、你的 DNA 以及所有那些东西有关,它们共同构成了那一锅汤。就我个人而言,我一直是个非常焦虑的人。我总是在担心明天,很少享受今天,总是在担心健康、生意、家人或者其他什么事上可能出什么问题。
所以我创业的时候,心里想的全是——我只是不想给别人打工。如果我能每天早上醒来,做自己的事,一年赚六万块,那我就会快乐。于是我达到了这个目标,然后又变成了——等我一年赚一百万美元、能买一栋房子就好了。达到了,然后又是下一个,再下一个,一路往上,到某个时候身价超过十亿美元——顺便说一句,书名应该改一改,从《从咖啡师到亿万富翁》改成《从咖啡师到前任亿万富翁》,因为我们的股价跌了。但这什么也没改变。我还是一样焦虑。我记得一个月前,有那天我坐在桑拿房里,为一堆生意上的问题和钱的事焦虑,然后我停下来对自己说:“等等。”
十年前我有完全一样的念头,为类似的问题焦虑,那时我们的收入是两千万或一千五百万。现在快到三亿了,我还在为同样的事情焦虑。而最让人难过的是,随着我认识越来越多更富有的人,一直到那种拥有几十亿的超级富豪,我意识到他们仍然在跟同辈比较,比谁有什么、记账算这些东西,还是不快乐——那个焦虑循环或抑郁仍然在他们脑子里。我记得有个时刻,我遇到一个人,身家是几十亿级别的——个位数的那种几十亿富翁。他说:“噢,Jeff Bezos,他真是太他妈有钱了。“我说:“等等,你自己不是身家五十亿吗?他能做的什么是你做不了的?“他说:“他能买一艘超级游艇。“我就:“什么?”
你可以看着那个人说:“哦,这人疯了”之类的。但现实是,我们所有人都在跟自己的同辈比较,只要同辈有而我们没有的,就觉得不公平。我记得我当时就想:“天哪,我怎样才能避免变成这样?“而可怕的现实是,不管你有多幸运——我们也确实很幸运。对我来说,我生活在加拿大,我拥有了我所能期望的一切机会。全世界有很多人连我从小拥有的那些条件的零头都没有。但我仍然觉得不公平,因为在我住的社区里,我是那个穷孩子。按全球标准我并不穷,按加拿大标准我也不算穷。但我所有的朋友都有大屏幕电视,会去夏威夷玩,这些我从来都没做过。我父母一直为钱发愁。所以我觉得不公平。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有句话,一个朋友的理财顾问曾说过——“邻居们过得可真不错”——这种感觉真的很难摆脱。那你做了哪些改变让自己更快乐呢?放弃钱很难,放弃可能赚到的更多钱也很难,放弃钱能买到的东西也很难。所以你到底改变了什么?
重新定义金钱与寻求治疗
Andrew Wilkinson: 有几件事吧。一个是重新审视金钱的意义,某种程度上让它不再只是关于给自己铺路、让自己过得更好。比如我跟一个很富有的朋友聊天,我跟他说了刚才描述的那些感受——拥有这一切,却感觉不到更好。他问我:“那你工作是为了什么?“我说:“我想我只是为了让数字变得更大、雇更多人,这感觉不错。我们的企业在世界上做了好事,帮助了更多人等等,但归根结底就是在堆现金。“他说:“我重新调整了思路,把我百分之九十以上的钱都放进我的慈善基金会,然后捐给好的事业。所以当我想到自己在拼命工作、或者丢了一笔交易、或者一笔投资做得好,那个赢不是为我自己的。那个赢是做了好事。”
于是我照做了,确实有帮助。我也减少了花钱。我发现拥有的东西越多、房子越多、直接为我管理这些东西的人越多,我就越不快乐——我被我的东西占有了。然后我也很努力不让别人……我尽量不拿这些东西去砸别人。我开普通的车,除非跟对方非常非常熟,否则不会请人来我家。我在中立的场所见面,在咖啡馆见面。我穿得像个普通人。我就是尽量不做那种脱离现实的怪异富人。但最大的改变,说起来可能有点奇怪,实际上是药物治疗。基本上我这一生都一直很焦虑。
2020 年的时候,我记得我在跟当时的妻子一起看电影,脑子里一直在循环——“我得回这封邮件,如果不回的话那个人会生气。“然后我意识到过去二十分钟我一直在看电影,却完全不知道电影在演什么。接着我又开始想:“天哪,我老婆要生我的气了,我们要吵架了,“脑子里全是负面的投射。在那一刻我想:“好吧,也许我真的需要试试 SSRI 之类的了。这样下去不行。“于是我去看医生,拿到了处方,我记得我特别害怕,把药片切成了十小块。我说:“我就吃一小片。“
药物治疗的转变
又过了六个月我才真正开始服用。但我开始每天吃那些小碎片,大约三四天后我就注意到,就像有人把我内心那个不断制造那些糟糕念头的声音调低了音量。我人生中第一次感到解脱。再多的金钱、成功、关注或其他任何东西,都比不上这颗小小的黄色药片对我心理状态的帮助。所以现在我已经服用 SSRI 大约四年半了。之后我也开始针对 ADHD 进行药物治疗。我觉得我的大脑从时代广场变成了一个安静的图书馆。我觉得很多人对此感到害怕,但归根结底,大多数人的行为都是在表达内心正在发生的某些东西——可能是创伤,也可能是某种医学层面的问题,正是这些在制造焦虑、抑郁和各种情绪,而解决这些问题远比试图从外部世界获得赞美重要得多。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,这真的很有力量。非常感谢你分享这些。大多数人听到的建议,或者说普遍的文化氛围,基本上是”不要吃药,不要给自己用药,有各种副作用,有各种风险,制药行业就是为了赚钱的”。我很喜欢你提供的另一个视角——它实际上非常有效,确实能给你的生活带来巨大改变,而且可能是唯一的解决方案。
Andrew Wilkinson: 有意思的是,如果你头痛,我想没多少人会说”哦,别吃泰诺,你这是在帮强生公司赚钱,大制药厂。“他们会说”头痛就吃泰诺啊。“很多人有季节性过敏,会吃抗组胺药,但他们忘了组胺不仅仅存在于你的鼻腔里,它也存在于你的大脑和全身各处。所以当你吃抗组胺药甚至泰诺的时候,你也在改变你的大脑,改变你的思维方式,改变一切。然而出于某种原因,人们——包括我自己——对服用 SSRI 或类似药物来治疗正在毁掉自己生活的问题感到非常恐惧。焦虑曾经毁掉了我的一生。每一天的每一分钟,我都确信有什么可怕的事情即将发生。即使是现在在服药的情况下,那个声音依然存在。那种坦白说在一定程度上有助于你发展业务的声音,到了某个节点就会变得适得其反。能够真正从中获得一丝安宁,我觉得非常美好。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对于那些——我知道很多听众此刻在想”天哪,我真的应该去了解一下这个”——最好的探索方式是什么?是去找你的全科医生谈谈吗?
Andrew Wilkinson: 对。我觉得要跟你的医生谈,还有一个很多人忽略的要点是:我当初之所以那么害怕副作用,是因为你总能听到各种可怕的副作用——有人丧失性欲、感觉糟糕之类的。于是我去做了研究,发现很多副作用其实跟人们代谢不同药物的方式有关。你可以去做 23andMe 之类的 DNA 检测,了解自己如何代谢不同的 SSRI。然后我选了一种我代谢良好的。所以我完全没有副作用或问题。我知道每次我提到这个,都会有很多人说出你刚才说的那些话——大制药厂啊,诸如此类。但我只想请每位听众想一想,如果你吃泰诺,或者吃抗组胺药或其他药物,我不明白为什么一种能带来如此深远帮助的东西,反而需要让人感到恐惧。
ADHD 的诊断
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。Andrew,我们聊了非常多话题。我很喜欢我们讨论的这些内容的广度。你还有什么想分享的吗?有什么想强调的?在进入我们精彩的快问快答环节之前,有没有什么最后的金句想留给听众?
Andrew Wilkinson: 有一件事让我很震惊。当时我的医生让我做一个认知测试,不是因为我有什么问题,而是他说:“你看,在三十多岁的时候建立一个基准线很重要,这样随着你年龄增长,我们可以确保你没有得阿尔茨海默症或痴呆症之类的。“于是我去找神经科医生做了这个测试,她问了我一堆问题——“记住这十个数字然后倒着说出来”之类的。最后当我拿到测试结果时,她说:“你看,你的晶体智力,也就是长期记忆的能力,完全没问题,高于平均水平。但你的短期记忆,也就是工作记忆,只有第十百分位,非常非常差。你可能应该去检查一下 ADHD。”
我当时就想:“不可能。我没有 ADHD。我很有条理,我有待办清单,我创办了企业。我在学校里也不是那种坐不住的孩子。“她说:“好吧,你就当配合我,去检查一下。“于是我经历了一个很复杂的过程。你其实可以上网很快做个测试什么的,但我经历了一个为期五天的完整测试流程。结果发现我确实有 ADHD。这其实很有意思,因为普通人群中大约 5% 的人有 ADHD,但大约 30% 的创业者有 ADHD。我交谈过的很多创业者都喜欢新事物,喜欢在一百万个不同的话题之间跳来跳去。他们像我之前描述的那样,一英里宽、一英寸深。他们形容自己无法被人雇佣。坦白说,我记得我以前对 ADHD 非常不以为然,以至于当我女朋友告诉我她的一个朋友被诊断出 ADHD 时,我讽刺地说:“哦,挺好的,她最好去吃点冰毒吧”——我指的是刺激性药物。
我以前对 ADHD 非常非常怀疑,但如果你真的深入研究,它是一种真实的大脑障碍。它是确确实实存在的,非常客观的,就是人们的执行功能较差。对我来说,这让我对自己和自己的行为有了更多的同理心。因为在工作中,如果你有 ADHD,你可以把事情委托给别人,建立系统来绕过你的障碍。但在家里,这才是问题真正显现的地方。比如我女朋友让我去倒垃圾,我说”没问题”,然后连续忘了三次。她会认为你在故意伤害她,你根本不在乎她。这会在家里引发各种各样的问题。
所以对我来说,它不仅让我的工作变得更好,因为我更专注了,而且确实对我的个人生活帮助很大,让我不再觉得自己是坏的。我一直觉得自己有点坏,说不清楚为什么,就是觉得”别人似乎都能轻松做到的事情,我就是做不好”。所以我觉得,尤其因为你的听众中有很多创业者,我认为很多创业者应该考虑去检查一下 ADHD。就去跟 ChatGPT 说”问我一系列问题,告诉我你觉得我是否可能有这个。“我当时非常意外,而这也对我产生了很大的影响。
Lenny Rachitsky: 天哪,这个倒垃圾的故事简直就是我生活的写照,所以我要去做这个检查。言下之意是知道这件事是好事,对吧?感觉有点害怕,觉得”天哪,我可能被诊断为 ADHD。“我想你的建议是,知道比不知道好,因为你可以采取行动。
Andrew Wilkinson: 完全同意。我觉得这就像任何医学问题一样,对吧?就像阿尔茨海默症有相关的基因,对吧?如果你知道自己携带这个基因,你可以做很多事情来减缓疾病发展,或者可能预防它的发生等等。知道总是比不知道好。即使你不服药,我认为有很多生活方式上的干预、饮食上的调整,以及各种你可以做的事情来让自己的生活更轻松,哪怕只是向你的伴侣解释:“嘿,我需要你用这种方式跟我沟通,这样我才能更好地爱你。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 说得太好了。好的,Andrew,接下来我们进入一个非常令人兴奋的快问快答环节。我有五个问题。准备好了吗?
Andrew Wilkinson: 来吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 第一个问题,你最常向别人推荐的两三本书是什么?
Andrew Wilkinson: 如果只能推荐两本的话,我会推荐 Robert Greene 的《The Laws of Human Nature》(人性法则)。它基本上是一本关于每一种人格障碍或心理效应的百科全书。人们是如何在自己的思维中做出糟糕决定的?什么是自恋者?什么是精神变态者?所有这类东西。Robert Greene 通过讲故事的方式,把所有这些内容讲得非常引人入胜。每一章都有一个关于某种人格障碍者的故事。我非常喜欢这本书。
另一本我喜欢的是 Felix Dennis 写的《How to Get Rich》(如何致富》。这本书很有意思,因为整本书一开头就说”我发财了,但我后悔了,我希望自己当初去当个诗人。“然而他却跑去建立了一个庞大的出版帝国,六十多岁时才成为诗人,然后死于喉癌。所以这是他的故事,他基本上在说”我来告诉你怎么打造企业,尽管你很可能不应该这么做。“我二十多岁时读了这本书,觉得非常振奋人心、深受启发。然后我最近又重读了一遍,心想”天哪,我当初怎么没听这个人的话?“他说的每一件事都应验了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 下一个问题,你最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或电视剧?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我很喜欢《Challengers》(挑战者)。不知道你看过没有,演技非常精彩,摄影也非常出色。它是一部关于三角恋的网球电影,非常非常好看。
最近发现的好产品
Lenny Rachitsky: 你最近有没有发现自己特别喜欢的产品?你已经提到了 Limitless。还有别的吗?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我是那种非常相信扫地机器人理念的人。这些年来我大概在不同的扫地机器人上花了一万美元,大概买过五六个。终于买到了一个真正好用的。叫 Matic Vacuum,M-A-T-I-C。基本上,我觉得是几位前 Google 工程师造了一辆迷你 Waymo 汽车。它有机器视觉,能避开所有东西,永远不会被缠住,还能拖地和吸尘。到目前为止我印象非常好。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我自己也有一台,完全同意。我妻子特别喜欢它,这是我没想到的。她会说”把那个 Matic 打开。“它非常讨人喜欢,有自己的小个性,而且确实做得很好。我不是投资者,但真的很喜欢这个产品。好的,下一个问题。你有没有一个最喜欢的座右铭,在工作或生活中经常回想起来觉得很有用的?
人生座右铭
Andrew Wilkinson: 有。我最喜欢的是 Jerzy Gregorek 的一句话:“轻松的选择,艰难的人生。艰难的选择,轻松的人生。“我经常发现,任何时候我做出轻松的选择,我的人生就会变得艰难。而当我做出艰难的选择——关掉一家企业、开除一个人、告别一个我曾兴奋的项目——这几乎总是正确的选择,而且让我的人生轻松很多。
见到 Steve Jobs 的故事
Lenny Rachitsky: 最后一个问题。好吧,让我先确认一下这是不是真的。我发现你十几岁的时候,在运营 Macteens 时,曾在一场会议上采访过 Steve Jobs。这是真的吗?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我十几岁的时候有一个科技新闻网站,我给 Apple 的公关人员发了邮件,说”嘿,我能采访 Steve Jobs 吗?“他们基本上笑了。他们说”不可能,你不可能采访到 Steve Jobs,不过嘿,你要不要来参加这个 Apple Store 的参观活动?“那时候还没有其他 Apple Store 存在。这是在纽约的 Macworld 大会上,大概是 2004 年,不对,2003 年左右。所以我对此非常兴奋。我去参加这个参观活动,现场有三十个其他记者,我排在第一个。一辆黑色大 SUV 停了下来,一个人走下车,穿着灰色 New Balance 运动鞋,戴着小小的圆形 John Lennon 式眼镜,穿着那件标志性的高领衫。我的大脑终于反应过来了,我意识到那是 Steve Jobs。
他径直走向我,因为我排在第一个,他跟我握手说”嗨,我是 Steve。“我当时浑身发抖。我才十七岁。他是我的偶像,我的神。我肾上腺素飙升,直接就开始问他问题了。一走进去,我就一直待在他身边,问他各种各样的事情。所以并不是说我能问他关于人生的问题,我问他的是新款 17 英寸 iMac 之类的东西。但能见到他确实是一次非常酷的经历。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。最近几期嘉宾有一个很有意思的共同点,大家注意到了吗,过去几个月的嘉宾每个人都有一个跟 Steve Jobs 的关联。这个故事太棒了。而且这说明这不是运气,是你主动创造的,你排到了第一个。
Andrew Wilkinson: 我学到的教训是,大胆地开口要求,也许就能得到了不起的东西。要求最好的,你就会得到好的东西,我确实得到了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对,人们好像把这叫作”留门”技巧。
Andrew Wilkinson: 是的。
在哪里找到 Andrew
Lenny Rachitsky: Andrew,这次对话太精彩了。最后两个问题。如果大家想联系你,可以在哪里找到你?我知道你在收购公司、投资公司。请谈谈你在寻找什么样的公司,万一有人听了说”哦,这就是我”。最后,听众怎样才能帮到你?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我的公司叫 Tiny,T-I-N-Y.com,我们收购企业。当初我们卖掉自己的公司时,整个过程非常痛苦。我们跟各种运营私募股权公司的混蛋打交道,他们会穿着西装出现在我们办公室,用一堆我们听不懂的词。最后我们就想,“为什么我们就不能卖给跟我们一样的人呢?“所以基本上我们创办了 Tiny,成为我们当初希望自己能卖给的买家。我们在寻找具有我之前提到的那些品质的企业——真正高质量的企业,在世界上做正面的事情,有满意的客户、满意的员工,以及某种竞争优势能让它们持续发展下去。所以我们拥有 AeroPress、Letterboxd、Dribbble——一个设计师社交网络,以及很多类似的企业。所以如果有人在考虑出售自己的企业,请务必联系我们。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好了。好的,那如果不仅仅是这个的话,听众怎样才能帮到你?
Andrew Wilkinson: 我只想说,如果有什么特别有趣的人来到加拿大维多利亚——也就是我住的地方——给我发封邮件,我很乐意和你一起喝杯咖啡。我之所以喜欢上播客,就是因为我能借此认识那么多有趣的人。不管是随机的缘分——比如我在咖啡馆里被人认出来打招呼,我经常这样交到很多朋友——还是有人专程来我的家乡。所以,随时联系我。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。Andrew,非常感谢你来做这期节目。
Andrew Wilkinson: 谢谢,哥们儿。很开心。
Lenny Rachitsky: 大家再见。
感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们打分或留下评价,这真的能帮助更多听众发现这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| ADHD | ADHD |
| AeroPress | AeroPress |
| Airtable | Airtable(低代码数据库平台) |
| Andrew Wilkinson | 安德鲁·威尔金森(首次出现保留原文:Andrew Wilkinson) |
| Asana | Asana |
| Bolt | Bolt(AI 应用构建平台) |
| Brian Armstrong | Brian Armstrong |
| Challengers | 《Challengers》(2024 年网球题材电影) |
| Charlie Munger | 查理·芒格 |
| Coinbase | Coinbase |
| Coupang | Coupang |
| Dario Amodei | Dario Amodei(Anthropic CEO) |
| David Ogilvy | David Ogilvy(广告大师,此处指其文案风格) |
| Dribbble | Dribbble |
| Dustin Moskovitz | Dustin Moskovitz(Asana 联合创始人) |
| Felix Dennis | Felix Dennis(英国出版商、诗人、企业家) |
| Flow | Flow |
| Her | 《Her》(2013 年科幻电影) |
| How to Get Rich | 《How to Get Rich》(Felix Dennis 著作) |
| HubSpot | HubSpot(CRM 和营销自动化平台) |
| Instacart | Instacart |
| Jeff Bezos | Jeff Bezos(亚马逊创始人) |
| Jerzy Gregorek | Jerzy Gregorek(波兰裔美国举重运动员、作家) |
| Lenny Rachitsky | Lenny Rachitsky |
| Letterboxd | Letterboxd |
| Limitless | Limitless(可穿戴 AI 记录设备) |
| Lindy | Lindy(AI 工作流平台,lindy.ai) |
| Lovable | Lovable(AI 应用构建平台) |
| Macteens | Macteens(Andrew Wilkinson 少年时运营的科技新闻网站) |
| Macworld | Macworld(苹果相关的年度展会) |
| Malcolm Gladwell | Malcolm Gladwell(作家,此处指其写作风格) |
| Matic Vacuum | Matic Vacuum(一款带有机器视觉的扫地机器人) |
| Metalab | Metalab |
| Mike Krieger | Mike Krieger(Anthropic 首席产品官) |
| moat | 护城河(商业竞争壁垒的比喻) |
| OnlyFans | OnlyFans(创作者订阅平台) |
| Palm Treo | Palm Treo(2000 年代的早期智能手机/PDA 设备) |
| Perplexity | Perplexity(AI 搜索引擎) |
| pickleball | 匹克球 |
| Replit | Replit(vibe coding 平台) |
| Robert Greene | Robert Greene(美国作家,著有《The Laws of Human Nature》等) |
| SaaS | SaaS |
| Salesforce | Salesforce |
| Sam Altman | Sam Altman(OpenAI CEO) |
| Serato | Serato(全球最大的 DJ 软件公司) |
| SSRI | SSRI |
| Steve Jobs | Steve Jobs(苹果公司联合创始人) |
| Stripe | Stripe(在线支付公司,此处指其网站设计风格) |
| switching costs | 转换成本 |
| The Laws of Human Nature | 《The Laws of Human Nature》(Robert Greene 著作) |
| Things | Things(一款 iOS/Mac 任务管理应用) |
| Tiny | Tiny |
| UVic | UVic(维多利亚大学) |
| v0 | v0(Vercel 推出的 AI 前端生成工具) |
| Warren Buffett | 沃伦·巴菲特 |
| Webvan | Webvan |
| WeCommerce | WeCommerce |
| William Gibson | William Gibson(科幻作家,赛博朋克运动奠基人之一) |
| Zoe | Zoe(Andrew Wilkinson 的女朋友) |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)