Day 10: What will the next company with large cash flows be?
（Sunday）
各位书友，今天我们一起阅读《Zero to One》第五章LAST MOVER ADVANTAGE的48-58页。
What does a company with large cash flows far into the future look like？
一家在未来具有大额现金流的公司是什么样？
01 CHARACTERISTICS OF MONOPOLY
What does a company with large cash flows far into the future look like? Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.
一家在未来具有大额现金流的公司是什么样的呢？每个垄断企业都有自己的特色，但是它们通常会综合一下几个特点：专利技术、网络效应、规模经济以及品牌优势。
This isn’t a list of boxes to check as you build your business—there’s no shortcut to monopoly. However, analyzing your business according to these characteristics can help you think about how to make it durable.
但这并不是你建立公司时要核对的清单——垄断企业是无捷径可走的。但是，按照这些特点分析自己的公司，可以帮助你思考怎么使你的公司拟更长命。
1. Proprietary Technology
Proprietary technology is the most substantive advantage a company can have because it makes your product difficult or impossible to replicate.
专利技术是一家公司最实质性的优势，它使你的产品很难或不能被别的公司复制。
As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.
一般而言，专利技术在某些方面必须比它最相近的替代品好上10倍才能拥有真正的垄断优势。
Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s. Proprietary technologies for extremely short page load times and highly accurate query auto completion add to the core search product’s robustness and defensibility. It would be very hard for anyone to do to Google what Google did to all the other search engine companies in the early 2000s.
例如谷歌的搜索算法，搜索效果比其他的搜索引擎都好。超短的页面加载时间和超精准的自动查询增加了和信搜索产品的稳健性和防御力。谷歌在21世纪初所向披靡，而现在很难有搜索引擎公司做得到谷歌那时做到的事。
The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new. If you build something valuable where there was nothing before, the increase in value is theoretically infinite.
要做出10倍改进，最明确的方法就是创造全新的事物。如果你在一个领域创造了前所未有的有价值的事物，理论上，公司价值就会无限增长。
A drug to safely eliminate the need for sleep, or a cure for baldness, for example, would certainly support a monopoly business.
例如能安全消除睡眠需求的药物，或是秃顶的治疗方法（希望帮助英国威廉王子解决“秃头危机”），都会支撑起一家垄断公司。
Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.
或者你可以彻底改进一种意境存在的事物：如果你能做到10倍好，你就可以避开竞争。
Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.
亚马逊做出的10倍改进人人可见：他们提供的书至少是其他书店的10倍。
When it launched in 1995, Amazon could claim to be “Earth’s largest bookstore” because, unlike a retail bookstore that might stock 100,000 books, Amazon didn’t need to physically store any inventory—it simply requested the title from its supplier whenever a customer made an order. This quantum improvement was so effective that a very unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker.”
1995年上市时，亚马逊就宣布要做成“全世界最大的书店”。不同于只能储存10万本书的零售书店，它不需要储存任何实体书——只要在顾客下单后从供应商那里得到书就行。这种对库存量的改进收到很好的效果，以致Barnes & Noble（巴诺书店，美国最大的实体书店）在亚马逊上市的前三天提起诉讼——称亚马逊不是个“书店”，而是“图书掮客”。
You can also make a 10x improvement through superior integrated design. Apple released the iPad. Design improvements are hard to measure, but it seems clear that Apple improved on anything that had come before by at least an order of magnitude: tablets went from unusable to useful.
你也能通过出众的综合设计做出10倍的改进。苹果公司发布了ipad。设计上改进的幅度很难衡量，但是苹果公司在所有方面做到了大幅改善：平板电脑从不好用变成了很有用。
2. Network Effects
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, too. Unilaterally choosing a different social network would only make you an eccentric.
网络效应使一项产品随着越来越多的人使用变得更加有用。例如，如果你所有的朋友都用Facebook，那你注册个Facebook账号就有意义。而如果你只是单方面用一个与众不同的网络社交工具，那就显得奇怪了。
Network effects can be powerful, but you’ll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users when the network is necessarily small.
网络效应作用很大，但是除非你的产品在网络群组规模尚小时对初期用户已经具有价值，否则无法收到网络效应。
Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.
矛盾的是，享有网络效应的企业必须从非常小的市场做起。Facebook的最初使用者只是一群哈佛学生——马克.扎克伯格的第一个产品是为了让同班同学注册，而不是吸引全地球人。这就是为什么成功的网络企业很少像工商管理硕士一样为了开公司而开公司，他们最初的市场很小，小到看上去根本不像一次商机。
3. Economies of Scale
A monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger: the fixed costs of creating a product (engineering, management, office space) can be spread out over ever-greater quantities of sales. Software startups can enjoy especially dramatic economies of scale because the marginal cost of producing another copy of the product is close to zero.
垄断企业越大越强：开发一项产品的固定成本（设计、管理、办公地点）需要更高的销量来分摊。软件开发就享有非常的的规模经济效应，因为产品不需要重复的投入，边际成本趋近于零。
Many businesses gain only limited advantages as they grow to large scale. Service businesses especially are difficult to make monopolies. Because service businesses will never reach a point where a core group of talented people can provide something of value to millions of separate clients, as software engineers are able to do.
许多企业在扩大规模的过程中也只获得了有限利益，服务型企业尤其难做成垄断企业。因其永远不可能像软件工程师那样，以优秀的人才组成核心团队，为上百万顾客提供有价值的产品，对服务型企业来说，软件工程所获利润是可望而不可即的。
A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design. Twitter already has more than 250 million users today. It doesn’t need to add too many customized features in order to acquire more, and there’s no inherent reason why it should ever stop growing.
一个好的初创企业在刚开始设计时就应该考虑到之后的大规模发展潜能。推特现在已经拥有了2.5亿用户，它不需要为了得到更多用户再添加定制的特性，其内在的运行机制可以让它持续增长。
4. Branding
A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.
一家公司最显而易见的垄断是对自己品牌的垄断，因此打造一个强势品牌是形成垄断的有力方式。
Today’s strongest tech brand is Apple: the attractive looks and carefully chosen materials of products like the iPhone and MacBook, the Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own.
当今最强势的科技品牌是苹果：像iPhone和MacBook那样的产品，具有吸引人的外观、一流的用料、时尚的简约设计、精心控制的用户体验、无所不在的广告、优质产品该有的价格和乔布斯的个人魅力，这些都是苹果打造出了属于自己的品牌。
Many have tried to learn from Apple’s success: paid advertising, branded stores, luxurious materials, playful keynote speeches, high prices, and even minimalist design are all susceptible to imitation. But these techniques for polishing the surface don’t work without a strong underlying substance.
许多公司都想效仿苹果：花钱做广告，开品牌店，使用高端的材料，玩味十足的主题演讲，设定高价格，甚至模仿它的简约设计。但是这些表面光鲜却没有强大的内在实质支持的科技根本不起作用。
Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.
如果先从品牌而不是靠实力来经营，也有很大隐患。
Ever since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo! in mid-2012, she has worked to revive the once-popular internet giant by making it cool again. In a single tweet, Yahoo! summarized Mayer’s plan as a chain reaction of “people then products then traffic then revenue.” The people are supposed to come for the coolness: Yahoo! demonstrated design awareness by overhauling its logo, it asserted youthful relevance by acquiring hot startups like Tumblr, and it has gained media attention for Mayer’s own star power. But the big question is what products Yahoo! will actually create.
自从玛丽莎.梅耶尔2012年中旬成为雅虎公司的首席执行官，她就在努力复苏这个曾经风行一时的网络巨擘。在一篇推文中，雅虎总结了梅耶尔的链式计划：“人先与产品，产品先于交易，交易先于收益。”消费者照理说会冲着这种很酷的理念而来，要知道，雅虎不仅通过改变企业标识来展现这种理念，而且收购了如汤博乐（Tumblr，目前全球最大的轻博客网站，也是轻博客网站的始祖）这样的热门初创企业，以此来表示自己仍然朝气蓬勃。同时，梅耶尔的个人明星效应也为雅虎吸引了媒体的注意力。但是有一个大问题：雅虎究竟要创造什么产品？
On account of that no technology company can be built on branding alone.
因为，没有科技公司可以仅靠品牌发展。
02 BUILDING A MONOPOLY
Brand, scale, network effects, and technology in some combination define a monopoly; but to get them to work, you need to choose your market carefully and expand deliberately.
品牌、规模、网络效应和科技的组合可以打造一家垄断公司，但是想使公司运行起来，还需要仔细选择市场，谨慎扩大范围。
A Start Small and Monopolize
Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.
每个初创公司刚开始时都很小，每个垄断企业都在自己的市场内占主导地位，因此，每个初创公司都应该在非常小的市场内起步。宁可过小也不能打，理由很简单：在一个小市场里占主导地位比在大市场里容易得多。如果你认为自己起步的市场可能太大，那就一定是太大了。
Small doesn’t mean nonexistent. 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, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.
从小市场起步并不意味着去找一个不存在的市场。一个初创企业完美的目标市场是特定的一小群人，而且几乎没有其他竞争者与你竞争。任何大的市场都是错误选择，而且已经有其他竞争者存在的大市场更糟糕。这就是企业家想占价值1000亿美元的市场的1%总是行不通的原因。实际上，在一个大市场中不是找不到一个好的出发点，就是会陷入竞争，所以很难达到那1%。如果侥幸获得了一个小小的立足之处，你应该为能够维持下去而感到高兴：因为残酷的竞争会吞噬掉你全部的利润。
B Scaling Up
Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books.
一旦你成功创造了或是主导了一个利基市场，就要逐步打入稍大些的相关市场。比如亚马逊，杰夫.贝佐斯的愿景是使亚马逊成为在线零售业的主宰，但是他很谨慎，以图书作为起步。
Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world’s general store.
之后亚马逊有两个选择：增加已有的用户数，或是货站到其他垂直市场。他们选择了后者，并且从相近的光盘、影像和软件市场开始，然后继续增加品类直到成为世界级的“综合商店”。
Amazon comes from the Amazon River which is of the broadest drainage area. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company’s scaling strategy. The biodiversity of the Amazon rain forest reflected Amazon’s first goal of cataloging every book in the world, and now it stands for every kind of thing in the world, period.
亚马逊这个名字来源于世界流域面积最大的河流——亚马孙河，它巧妙地暗示了这家公司的扩展策略。而生长在亚马孙河流域的亚马孙热带雨林，其生物的多样性也反映了亚马逊公司的第一个目标——提供这世界上各种各样的书。而现在，它则是要提供这世界上各种各样的东西。
For an additional, eBay also started by dominating small niche markets.
另外，eBay也是从主导小的利基市场起步。
Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.
企业家往往低估了循序渐进发展市场的意义，其实市场需要有纪律地逐步扩大。最成功的公司会先在一个特定的利基市场里占据主导，然后扩展到相近市场，他们的创业故事类似，都是由核心事业逐步向外扩展。
C Don’t Disrupt
Originally, “disruption” was a term of art to describe how a firm can use new technology to introduce a low-end product at low prices, improve the product over time, and eventually overtake even the premium products offered by incumbent companies using older technology.
原本“破坏”是指一家公司可以用科技创新低价推出一种低端产品，然后逐步对产品做出改进，最终取代现存公司用旧科技生产的优质产品。
Since Silicon Valley has become obsessed with “disruption.” Disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new. This seemingly trivial fad matters because it distorts an entrepreneur’s self-understanding in an inherently competitive way. The concept was coined to describe threats to incumbent companies, so startups’ obsession with disruption means they see themselves through older firms’ eyes. If you think of yourself as an insurgent battling dark forces, it’s easy to become unduly fixated on the obstacles in your path. But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create. Indeed, if your company can be summed up by its opposition to already existing firms, it can’t be completely new and it’s probably not going to become a monopoly.
自从硅谷迷上了“破坏性创新”。“破坏”最近已经被曲解成了形容因所谓新事物、新趋势而沾沾自喜的流行词。这个看上去无关紧要的流行词其实很有影响，它以内的竞争性扭曲了企业家的自我认识。这个概念被用来描述现存公司所受的威胁，而初创公司痴迷于这种“破坏”，这意味着它们是透过旧企业的眼光看待自身的。如果你认为自己是对抗黑暗势力的起义者，就很容易过分专注于道路上的阻碍。但如果你真想创造新的事物，那就去创造，创新的行为远比旧产业不喜欢你的创新来得重要。确实，如果可以将你的公司归结为已有公司的敌对者，那你的公司就不是创新的，也不会成为一个垄断企业。
Disruption also attracts attention: disruptors are people who look for trouble and find it. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.
破坏还会吸引注意力：破坏者到处找麻烦，并最终让你惹上麻烦。所以如果你准备扩张到相邻市场，不要“破坏”，要尽可能地躲开竞争。
03 THE LAST WILL BE FIRST
You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal.
你可能听说过“先发优势”：如果你是第一个进入市场的，在其他竞争者还在艰难起步的时候，你可以独自占据可观的市场份额。但先行一步只是个策略，不是目标。
What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess.
真正重要的是在未来产生现金流，因此如果有别的公司出现并取代了你，那么就算你是第一个做的也捞不到一点好处，反而那个最后下手的人更好——最终可以在一个特定的市场里取得重大进展，获得几年甚至几十年的垄断利润。要实现这个目标就要先主导一个小的利基市场，在这个基础上扩大，直到达到你预想的长远目标。至少在这一点上，经商就像下棋。
拓展
Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.”
国际象棋大师卡帕布兰卡说过：“要想赢，首要工作就是研究残局。”
☞ 领读达人：刘亚南
☞ 主播：Angela
☞ 设计：刘莹
☞ 编校：陈珺洁