Silicon Valley Prophet Anderson: What if it works?

NetEase Science and technology news October 21, according to foreign media reports, to squeeze from the Markendersen from the point of the material is not difficult. The burly, the energetic skinhead who invented the world's first major internet browser Netscape, then became an early investor in Twitter and Facebook and took a huge windfall. He is now the king of Silicon Valley's philosophy, often on Twitter, his bold and wide-ranging rhetoric for him to attract a large number of fans, but also let him into a number of war. In any case, Anderson is still a leading figure in the tech industry and a solid supporter of his own futuristic assertions.

The following is the full text of the interview:

When you first met Mark Zuckerberg, he said: "What is Netscape?" "* I like this scene very much.

He had no idea what Netscape was.

* August 9, 1995 Netscape's initial public offering was a great success. On the first day, the share price rose from $28 per share to $75 a share, and the market value reached 2.2 billion dollars.

He was in junior high when you started Netscape. The technology industry is developing very quickly, creating a whole new collective memory every 10 years, what does it look like to work in such an industry?

I personally think it's great. For example, I think there are two Silicon Valley now. Some people came here during the 2000 stock market crash, and others were not, and the mental state of the two groups was completely different. Those like me who have been through the 2000 stock market crash still have a lingering fear that everything was really bad.

You came to Silicon Valley in 1994, what was the Silicon Valley like?

The PC industry was booming in the 80 's, but it was in Seattle, with Apple, Intel and Microsoft emerging. Then, in 88, the U.S. economy entered a recession in 89, followed by Japan's 10 years of rapid growth. There was a flash of time in Silicon Valley, but then Japan took over, just as the US economy slipped into the bottom of the line. When you pick up a newspaper, it is written in endless pain and sadness. America's technology industry hangs, America's economic development also hangs, at that time All American children are gen-x lazy ghost *―― No ambition, will eventually accomplish nothing.

*gen-x: Referring to a generation born after World War II, specifically the generation born from 1965 to 1980, who are unpredictable about their future and unwilling to pursue their parents ' careers and lifestyles.

What did you do?

I just finished college and came here 94 after graduation, when Silicon Valley is in hibernation. In high school, I thought I had to learn Japanese to work in the technology industry. When I came here, I felt like I had missed everything, the 80 's is the time to thrive here, and I came too late. But then, I might be the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I can say that I'm extremely optimistic. I tend to be optimistic about new ideas, although many are wrong. When I face a new idea, I often ask myself not: "Is this going to work?" Instead: "Well, what if it succeeds?" ”

It's also an attitude I try to maintain because it's easy to turn to another extreme. I remember when ebay was just rising, I thought to myself: "Impossible!" A damn flea market? How many "scrap" are there in the garage? Who's going to want these crap? But what the founders of ebay and the early investors thought was: Let's ignore the idea of success. What we should consider is, what if it succeeds? If it succeeds, then you build the world's first global trading platform and you will have a real price discovery mechanism.

But you obviously don't think that all the ideas will end up being successful.

Of course not. But some people are born to be skeptical and some are inherently optimists. I can tell you that in the past at least 20 years, if you bet on the optimist side, you basically will not lose.

But if there were more sceptics in the world in the 1999, many might be able to keep their pensions. Is there no place for sceptics in the tech industry?

Let me explain it in another way. In the last hundred years, if you can point out that all the things in this period of time are the same and have no development, then the skeptics will have a foothold. But we all know that there is no time to find it. So the skeptics are always wrong.

Silicon Valley was like the 80 's Wall Street, bred a large number of man.

In fact, this has both advantages and disadvantages. One oft-heard word from entrepreneurs is that it's better to start a business in a recession (but not necessarily easier), because there are few bubbles in the recession, hiring easier and fewer competitors. And in times of economic prosperity it is hard because everyone is excited and spending too much money on marginal businesses.

Today's technology industry has a number of big companies, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple. What do you think is the hope of being a member of these big companies in startups today?

All startups we invest in.

As an investor, you can invest a lot of companies.

You treat your children equally.

One of your favorite hobbies is to dig up some of the gloomy predictions of the past on Twitter, such as Krugman Paul Krugman, who thinks the internet will be the next fax machine. *

* Krugman: A famous American economist who predicted that the internet had less impact on the economy than a fax machine.

That's something you'll experience when you're in the tech industry. It's weird, but it really fits the heart of American culture. Have you ever read the works of Tocqueville (De Tocqueville)? * There is a paradox in the core of American culture: In theory, we all like change, but when it comes to change, there is a lot of opposition.

Anyone who has done anything in Silicon Valley will jump out and say, "this sucks." Will not succeed. That's a stupid idea. ”

Tocqueville once said: "I always can't help worrying that the future people will think that the new theory is dangerous, all the innovation is trouble, social progress is a step towards the revolution, so they will completely refuse to look forward."

There is obviously more scepticism about the technology industry than you.

This is more like a cultural critique. Obviously I would not agree with many of the remarks, but I do think that some issues are worth talking about: are technology, for example, eating away at all the work? There is also the issue of income equality.

When it comes to cultural criticism, Silicon Valley now seems to be in the Golden Age, as is the case with HBO's Silicon Valley, the black history of Silicon Valley.

I think the play is fantastic.

But the play is mocking people like you.

The play is really good. The irony points are accurate-I can recognize the real characters that each character in the play is alluding to. Those people are real, I know the VC in the play.

Who is it?

I'm not going to say it, but I know him very well and I like chatting with him. He is just like the description in the play. *

* The fictional VCs role in the play has suggested not to go to college, and considering the other features of the bridge, it is almost certain to insinuate that the founder of PayPal, the famous VCs Peter Thiel.

Now Silicon Valley companies have been criticized for their diversity. In Twitter, for example, 90% of employees are men, and more than 50% of workers are white.

I think there is a basis for these arguments. But I don't agree with many specific points of view.

What do you think?

I think it's a false point of view that there are deliberate and systematic acts of discrimination in Silicon Valley companies. I have two reasons to support my argument. For a start, Silicon Valley companies are a microcosm of America. All diversity reports say that 70% of engineers are white and Asian, but Asians don't count as minorities, and then you walk into tech companies and you first see Americans, but also Russians, eastern Europeans, French, Germans and Britons. Then you can see Chinese people, Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Indonesians and Vietnamese. With so many countries, so many countries, so many different cultures, what kind of diversity should we talk about?

2nd, Silicon Valley companies are really desperate for talent, and these companies are like lookout who are panting on the beach.

So how do you explain the numbers in these reports?

There are two fundamental problems that cause many people to think that Silicon Valley companies are in fact problems that I think need to be solved. One of them is the problem of unequal education. Born in an upper middle class family, went to Stanford to study, learned the great expertise, the professor is very concerned about you, and then went to Silicon Valley to work, learn a skill, and eventually become a gold collar, which is almost a template to enter the Silicon Valley line.

But most people in the world, including most people outside the United States and many in the United States, will never get the chance to receive such education.

We have just been discussing the issue of racial diversity, and the issue of gender diversity also exists ...

I hold the same view.

Same view?

Yes, the same point.

So there's no need for Shelley Sheryl Sandberg to write that book? *

* refers to Sandberg's book "Step Forward" (Lean in)

I think the book she wrote is unbelievable, it's a great work.

But the book is all about the systemic gender bias.

I don't want to be a wise judge of hindsight, and I'm not willing to speculate on anything Shelley said. We have been quoting the sentences in this book. Whenever someone flinched, we shouted: "Step forward and sit on the table." ”*

* The sentences in Sandberg's works.

This has become a popular slogan. The reason this is a slogan is because it is recognized that women in the technology industry are indeed more difficult than men.

I'm a fan of Shelley, and she's perfectly capable of publishing her own personal insights. I think this book is mainly about people who can control their own destiny and become more outstanding than they think.

How many science majors do Stanford have each year? 500? 600? What about the University of California, Berkeley? Up to 2000 people. This is far from enough, you see the efforts of technology companies. Google is now funding programming schools such as code.org*.

Code.org: A charity organized by Hadi Partovi, a former Microsoft executive, Hadi Partovi, aims to promote computer programming education.

You can actually speed up the development of the online education industry. My question is, who can gain the most from online education? Most of the audiences of online education are from scholars. Surveys show that people with low income groups actually have little access to online education.

It is premature to make a judgement, as this line is still at its most elementary stage of development. It's as if the first DOS 1.0 would never turn into Windows. We are still in the experimental stage of touching a stone across the river. We cannot educate by the old ways of the past. We can't build many campuses, we have no space, we don't have much money, we don't have so many professors. If you have a chance to go to Harvard, you should go to Harvard to study, which is not related to you. What really does matter is that for a 14-year-old Indonesian child, he has a different choice: whether to continue farming, or to receive a Stanford education, and then have the opportunity to embark on the job.

People still underestimate the prospects of online education. The value of MOOCs is still low: it's just taking a professor's course in the classroom. But we look forward, in 10 years, maybe we can see 101 math online Courses? Perhaps this class will be well received, with a wide range of accreditation and diplomas? Maybe 1 million of the students will have classes every year? Maybe every student will pay 100 dollars for tuition? Maybe we can get hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue each year?

Let's talk about robotics, your favorite item?

Good.

You said there would be two kinds of people in the future: one to give instructions to a computer and another to receive instructions from a computer.

I disagree with my point of view.

For the past few decades, people have feared that automation will destroy the economy.

No one wants to go back to the past. The farm work of the past was too bad. Farmers get up at six and work 14 hours a day. It's bad to work in a factory, and someone dies in a factory accidentally. The coal miners are not to mention. These are very bad jobs, and new careers are better. These things are now ubiquitous in China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Every time Foxconn opens a factory, hundreds of people seek jobs. In the developing world, people are eager to work in modern factories because their work is worse. The only thing that can end all of this is progress, and the work will be better. West)

What do you think about universal basic income?

This is a very interesting idea. Even some liberals believe in Ubi. They say the question of welfare is basically a government agency, where the bureaucracy determines where the money goes, and the government's paternalistic tests to determine what you should eat and what you can buy with food stamps. Forget the government machine. The libertarian argument is "give people money and let them decide what they want to buy". The negative argument is that when you give people money, they don't need to work, how much percentage of those people will go to work? It depends on your point of view.

(* Universal Basic Income (UBI): The amount of money that a citizen of a country obtains from a government or other institution that is sufficient to survive. ）

Let's discuss the nature of the work. Keynes (British economist) once said that when everything becomes automated, we essentially have no material needs and no work to do. All of our food will be sent or synthesized or otherwise

We are trying to solve the problem. But that doesn't mean people don't need to work anymore. Keynes wrote these in the 20 and 30, when even basic food and heating were problematic. But he is addicted to the fallacy of labour synthesis, which assumes that once people have completed their needs, there will be no new demand. We have food, clothes and shelter, that's enough, that's all we need. We don't need a spa, no psychologists, no video games, no space travel, no prosthetic limbs, no blind people needing corneal transplants, and we don't need thousands of new things that we find.

(* Labour compounding fallacy (lump of labor fallacy): The economic concept that the total amount of work available to the workforce is fixed, which most economists consider to be a fallacy. ）

And I agree with Friedman's view that he thinks Keynes is wrong, and I have the same reason for him: human needs and desires are endless. We will never be satisfied. Go back and tell Keynes that middle-class parents in America want their children to have violin lessons.

(* Brief explanation of Economics: about the central bank, Keynes: Support, Friedman: opposition; on government intervention in economic affairs, Keynes: Support, Friedman: opposition; about the free market, Keynes: What is Freedom?) Friedman: Too supportive! ）

I agree with your view that the continuous upgrading of applied technology has made consumers better off. But for manufacturers, things are getting harder. I always associate with Amazon. As a consumer, I like Amazon very much. I can buy a lot of cheap things and can deliver goods to the door. But as a book producer selling books to Amazon, it has the power that scares me. With Spotify (a music app), we have an unprecedented number of choices as consumers, but producers shudder. Your vision of the future is worrying me, and people are being treated as consumers rather than producers.

No, no, no, no, no. People are considered both as consumers and as producers. The same technology makes people a better producer. Without these new technologies, would you be a better producer than you are now?

Yes, but if I was a musician, a song gets 1 million hits, and I only get a 6-dollar check, am I sacrificing too much?

This is a really awkward situation, that is, is the actual value of our work consistent with what we think it is worth?

So, what's the answer?

The answer is, not necessarily. You look at the most successful authors, people pay them to give speeches. For musicians, the concert business has grown four times times over the past 15 years. Because the copied version is everywhere, digital music makes copy business worthless, and the live experience becomes rarer and more precious, so the income of the tour increases very much.

But that's just a superstar model.

Not really, it's also true for touring bands, even ordinary bands. Look at those heavy metal bands that sold 300,000 of records in the 80 's, they toured the world and made a lot of money. Even the most difficult bands are now playing at people's birthday parties or performing for the start-up of a technology company. People no longer want to hear Hootie and the Blowfish (a pop band with more than a platinum album in the 90), but it would be cool to invite them to a birthday party and get 25,000 dollars.

(*def Leppard and Kiss band toured 42 cities this summer)

So the future is for superstars to perform at child-mitzvah ceremonies.

This is a very important part. But then again, you can be invited to give a speech and tell everyone how scary these things are.

Yes, speaking at the National Blacksmith's union.

In addition, recording music is an oligopoly. The only reason musicians were able to earn their money on CDs in the 90 's was that the record companies made price rules. The CDs were sold to 16 dollars, not because it was the market price at the time, but because five record companies set prices after they met. Who's going to pay for this? Consumers. Why do consumers go public at the beginning of digital music? Because it broke the price rule. The same is true of book publishers. Amazon broke it. So, do you want to live in a world like that, or do you want to live in the present world?

As a consumer, I am willing to live in the present world. As a producer, I'm not sure.

I don't think you'll have a problem. But you might get a cruise.

You once described the middle class of the 20th century as a myth.

There are two kinds of middle class. One is the history of the middle class, that is, the bourgeoisie, starting from about 1600 years. These were merchants, traders, wholesalers, butchers, bakers, shopkeepers, and merchants who had come all the way from China to bring silk.

But in the 1940s, there were some very important events that we blew up the rest of the industrial world. That's why Germany's industrial base is wiped out, Japan goes to zero, the rest of the continent is bombed, England is bombed, and the world's industrial base is blown. The United States, one of the major industrial countries, was not bombed, so the United States became a monopoly producer of industrial goods.

The army blew up the American middle class?

This is a historical accident. We took the opportunity and made the best use of it. This opportunity lasted from 1945 to 1966 and 1968, during which we were invincible. In this opportunity, a variety of exquisite things happened, one of which is the emergence of a new concept of the middle class, unprecedented, that is, to the high school education level of people college graduates salary. As long as there is no competition, everything is very good. When the Japanese appeared, the Germans appeared, and everything was over.

Last night, you said, "as a billionaire, there's a problem that no one will tell you your stupid idea is stupid." Is that the problem you're worried about?

I'm not a billionaire! That's why I feel so funny. Everyone immediately defaults to me talking about myself.

But in your position, if I work for you, I will not dare to tell you that your stupid idea is stupid.

The problem with my micro-borrie is that billionaires don't know what they are. They are the last to know, because they do not feel any change. They always feel that I am the one I used to be, I am on patrol, I am doing myself, but seldom stop to think. Everyone is more friendly to me than ten years ago. By the way, this is not just for billionaires, but also for presidents, senators, congressmen, mayors and all the right people.

So you, Anderson, how do you make sure that you receive honest feedback from yourself?

Every morning, as soon as I wake up, I see a bunch of people on Twitter saying I'm a jerk, which is really helpful.

Did they convince you?

They really let me down to earth, let's see if they can convince me. I mean, partly convinced, I like to argue.

No way?

The biggest use of Twitter for me is to argue with more people.

According to your Twitter rule, you sleep about 3 hours per night.

I sleep intermittently.

Do you have a bed for your daytime rest in your office?

It was the first time in my life that I had an office with a door, because it was the first time in my life that I had a couch in my office. So, actually, I did have a nice nap yesterday afternoon.

What do venture capitalists do every day? I'm sure you have countless meetings every week, but what will you see if I follow you in 24 hours?

In fact, our company probably only makes 15 decisions a year. *

(* Some recent decisions include: January, invest 20 million to custom clothing company Teespring;6 Month, invest 90 million to enterprise safety facility tanium,8 Month investment 50 million to BuzzFeed)

This is a good life.

Of course. Our output will eventually turn into a return on investment. We are the trustees of the investors. They trust us and give us a lot of money on behalf of others. The purpose of a company is to invest and get a return on investment. We make about 15 major investments a year, so that's a big decision. In the end, what do we need to be responsible for? is to make those 15 decisions and the consequences of those decisions. I spend a lot of time working with the founders and CEOs of my portfolio, and for them I'm basically on call.

Let's talk about leisure time: You said you like watching TV. I know you like to watch deadwood*, is this your favorite TV?

Yes, it's always been my favorite.

(*hbo has cancelled the play, directed by David Milch, about the the 1870s Dakota prospecting)

In a sense, for venture capitalists there is no better, because the play is about gold and build society. Do you think you would have been destined to be a Western gold prospector if you were put in that time?

I'm sure it is. Deadwood happened in Dakota, but obviously California was at the point of origin, so, yes, I have no doubt. I've been completely obsessed with the concept of the Pathfinder role in my life.

I think the pioneering spirit of the present is about the expansion of life. It is estimated that many technologists are frustrated that humans are still not conquering death.

I think the most amazing thing is that if you look at Americans and ask them if they want to live longer, there will be so many people who don't want to be surprised that almost 70% or 80% of people say they don't want to.

Do you agree with them?

I think we need to be careful about two big negative facts. One is the phenomenon that people become more and more resistant to new ideas when they get older. This is not personal and there are a number of exceptions, but it refers to the general sense of standing in a social perspective, you can witness it happen. The second is inequality. If you give one person more than 20 or 50 to accumulate wealth, then the wealth accumulated by age will be considerable.

I hate "heritage" once, but when you look at your life in general and what people will know about you, what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind? Is it Netscape? I mean, Netscape will certainly appear in the first paragraph of your obituary.

You should not use that word for another question.

Do you think your greatest contribution is still in the back?

God, I don't know how to answer this question.

I guess you're not going to buy a newspaper like Jeff Bezos? You told the New York Times not to print anymore.

(* bought the Washington Post with 250 million)

They haven't stopped printing yet. But they'll be fine. Things are moving in the right direction. They say their online business seems to be doing better. In fact, I think their strategic memo is great.

(* "Innovation report" from Time magazine May)

Asser Cregg Solzberg * wrote that?

I mean, they always pull through and it looks like they can do it. Obviously, the Wall Street Journal will be fine, and the FT will be fine. I think the power of these publications has gone far beyond the weight of the problem itself.

(* New York Times publisher Asser Otz Solzberg and heir)

Are you going to buy an Apple Watch?

Of course it will. I'm not a good litmus reagent. My answer will always be. I have every kind of smart watch, I can buy it all.

As I read about you, I find that your attitude towards people is not very friendly. I remember you said, "I don't like people."

Conceptually speaking, I still like people.

On an individual level?

On an individual level I don't know. (Ding)