Zero To One

| 分类 读书笔记  标签 创业  互联网  英文原版 

一些关于《Zero To One》的心得和体会，有些非常有启发的观点，值得一读。

心得

  • 为什么要创业

如今中国的创业氛围非常浓厚，时常在新闻报纸中看到谁谁谁创业成功，走向人生巅峰，或者拉到风投身价倍增，甚至连总理都在发声“大众创业，万众创新”。但是为什么要创业了？政府提出这样的目的是为了解决就业问题，那个人了？书中的答案我非常认可，为了解决当前社会的某个问题，并且你的方案比现有的至少要好10倍。你的脑子里整日想的不是别的，就是如何推广自己的这个解决方案。这个时候才可以想想如何创业。如果只是单纯的想去挣钱，去一家正在蒸蒸日上的公司就可以了。

如果当时去了Google现在0.01%的股票就值3500万美元。大多数创业公司都会死掉，没必要为了创业而创业。

  • 创始人和公司
    • 使命
      • 创始人是有使命感的，不是拿到了风投做到了CEO就给自己开一个最高的工资。Box的创始人一直担心自己的工资太高，并且住的房子几乎就没有什么家具。如果创始人没有做好表率，那公司的其他人可想而知
    • 销售
      • 如果公司没有销售，那么CEO就是销售。Elon musk创造的Spacex拿下的美国政府大单就是如此
      • palantir的CEO一个月有24天都在路上见客户谈项目。想想之前的咨询公司也是如此，老板是最大的销售，公司没有设置销售岗位，每个人都是销售
      • 销售和产品同样重要，很多书呆子认为销售只是吃吃喝喝。那是因为销售必须非常用力才能看起来毫不用力
    • 秘密
      • 创始人发现秘密，并且把秘密实现变成创意
      • 这个世界上大多数人都不会去思考秘密，或者害怕犯错或者不够自信。想沿着前人走过的道路继续前行，规避风险。这没有什么错，只是这样的人不会是创始人
    • 市场
      • 关注一个细分市场并进行绝对垄断，不要怕起步很小。Facebook当时的用户只有一个宿舍，后来变成了全球人都用
      • 如果一开始就是一个大的市场，那么竞争太过激烈
      • 有意思的是很多垄断的公司会强调自己并不是垄断，比如Google创始人自己说Google is a small fish in a big pond, there are many ways to access information，但是很多处于竞争白热化的公司反倒强调自己的垄断性。真好笑

摘抄

5 Last Mover Advantage

  • since the Times was profitable while Twitter wasn’t. But a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future
  • Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future
  • Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business
    • 是不是职业经理人的通病？
    • 创始人不关注长期目标的原因是什么？可能是卖方市场
  • Characteristics of monopoly
    • proprietary technology
      • Google’s search algorithms
      • make a 10x improvement: Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a prticular visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore
    • network effects
      • make a product more useful as more people use it. For example, if all your friends are on Facebook, it makes sense for you to join Facebook
      • This is why successful network business rarely get started by MBA tyeps: the inital markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all
    • economics of scale
      • A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design
    • branding
      • Today’s strongest tech brand is Apple
      • 以Yahoo举例，Mayer只是让Yahoo变得cool但是没有核心产品，产品才是核心
  • The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice. This is why it’s always a red flag when enterpreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market
  • Amazon deliberately started with books. and roughly the same shape so easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books. Then Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual
  • eBay found that the auction model works best for individually distinctive products like conins and stamps
  • As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible(不要抢别人的利益)

6. You are not a lottery ticket

  • Succes is never accidental
  • Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.. Strong men believe in cause and effect
  • Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options
  • a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive-to be a monopoly of one(这是从结果倒推?)
  • While a definitely optimistic would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers(这里的概念definitely optimistic和indefinitely optimistic是作者提出的概念吗？)
  • People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast(大众创业万众创新就是一个坑,即使拥有Google 0.01%股份也是$35 million, power law就是28定理适用于任何资源，某些时刻就是最重要的，比如儿子的成长，某些投入就会带来80%的收益。看清主次然后再行动)

8. Screts

  • People are scraed of secrets because they are scared of being wrong
  • If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it
  • every greate business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside

9. Foundations

  • “Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation can’t be fixed
  • 美国人权法案到现在只有17次修改，最开始定的就是大方向了 Companies are like countries in this way, bad decisions made early on
  • Most conflicts in a startup erupt between owership and control-that is, between founders and investors on the board(A borad of three is ideal)
  • Anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned
  • A company does better the less it pays the CEO-that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups(A cash-poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole)
  • Any kind of cash is more about the present than the future
  • Early employees ussally get the most equity because they take more risk, but some later employees might be even more crucial to a venture’s success
  • Sending out a company-wide email that lsits everyone’s owership stake would like dropping a nuclear bomb on your office

11. If you build it, will they come?

  • Even though sales is everywhere, most people underrate its importance
  • what nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy
  • People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” Peole who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politcians.”
  • In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale
  • Complex sales works best when you don’t have “salesmen” at all
  • It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck
  • Marketing and advertising work for relatively low-priced products that have mass appeal but lack any method of viral distribution
  • If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished
  • Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson

12. Man and machine

  • computers are complements for humans, not substitutes. The most valuable business of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete
  • As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements
  • If LinkedIn had tried to simply replace recruiters with technology, they wouldn’t have a business today

13. Seeing green

  • Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the seven questions
    • Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvments
    • Is now the right time to start your particular business
    • Are you starting with a big share of a small market
    • Do you have the right team
    • Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product
    • Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future
    • Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see
  • Companies must strive for 10x better because merely incremental improvments often end up meaning no improvement at all for the end user
  • selling and delivering a product is at least as important as the product itself
  • The best problems to work on are oftern the ones nobody else even tries to solve
  • The challenge for the entrepreneurs who will create energy 2.0 is to think small

14. The founder’s paradox

  • Some people are strong, some are weak, some are geniuses, some are dullards but most people are in the middle
  • Perhaps every modern kind is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution

上一篇     下一篇