The physics that the start-up company survived

Absrtact: A living organism is constantly generating entropy or increasing positive entropy, and gradually approaching the dangerous state of maximum entropy, i.e. death. To get rid of death, to live, the only way is to constantly draw negative entropy from the environment. A living organism has postponed

"A living organism is constantly generating entropy--or increasing the positive entropy, and gradually approaching the dangerous state of maximum entropy, i.e. death." To get rid of death, to live, the only way is to constantly draw negative entropy from the environment. A living organism has a marvelous ability to postpone the tendency to balance (death) of thermodynamics, just as a living organism attracts a negative entropy to counteract the amount of entropy it produces in life, thus keeping itself at a steady and low entropy level. ”

--from Schrodinger's "What Is Life" 1943

Everyone has a different understanding of science and art. In my understanding, science is an objective law that is independent of human being, full of absoluteness and certainty, and is now feasible in the future. Art is also an objective law which is independent of human being, but full of relativity and uncertainty, and it is unknown in the future. But the reality is that today's science is the art of uncertainty, such as quantum physics, while art has a scientific certainty, such as music or poetry can be created by computer deconstruction.

The superposition state of science and art is like the wave-particle duality of light, as for today's entrepreneurial theme, entrepreneurship is also full of superposition of science and art. We'll find that the smaller the business, small to Soho clan, entrepreneurial art is far higher than science, and the larger business, for example, for unicorn companies, a company determined to do bigger and stronger, vowed to 1 billion U.S. dollars, tens of billions of dollars or even hundreds of billions, then it must be a scientific component much larger than the artistic component. It's like the classical mechanics are better suited to the macroscopic world, and quantum mechanics is better suited to the microcosm.

Grandson said, in order to be combined with Qi Sheng, is the goal of aspiring to big start-up companies in the long term its significance Yuqi wins, in fact, the greatest company is never the pursuit of victory, but the pursuit of life. The introduction said so much, then exactly to the founders who aspire to bigger and stronger, the biggest scientific paradigm is what? , I think it is:

Entropy and negative entropy

Entropy was originally a physics concept, and was first proposed by German physicist Rudolph Kest Lausius in 1850 to measure the degree of disorder of a thermodynamic system. For example, in a closed isolated box, when a High-temperature object in contact with a Low-temperature object, as long as a certain amount of time, high-temperature objects will naturally be a force majeure to the Low-temperature object to transmit energy. We can simply understand rudely as hot molecules because of the thermal expansion, there is nowhere to go, and finally each grumpy high temperature molecule jumping is crowded into a more open, low-temperature space, and some of the cryogenic molecules themselves are squeezed into the free position of high temperature space transfer in irregular motion, When the energy is uniform and all the molecular temperatures are gradually calmed down, eventually the neighbors around each molecule are completely different from the previous one, and this time the chaos reaches the maximum (the entropy is the biggest).

This process is also known as the entropy increase process, which also gave birth to the second law of thermodynamics, called the "Law of entropy increase", namely: in the natural process, an isolated system of the total chaos (that is, "entropy") will never be reduced.

It is obvious that the entropy corresponds to the relation of the order. In the microscopic state, this relationship has been given by Bohr to a precise quantitative relationship: the entropy =kln (d), K is the Bohr constant, and D is a quantitative measure of the randomness of the object's atoms. The larger the D, the greater the entropy, is the increase in entropy, d reduce, the entropy is reduced, is the entropy minus, but then how the entropy is greater than or equal to zero. Corresponding to the above example, if the temperature of the object to cool, is a entropy reduction behavior. Well, we are here to discuss entrepreneurship, ah, half a day of physics, the concept of entropy, what is the relationship with the start-up? Don't worry, let's look at the relationship between life and entropy.

What are the characteristics of life? When can a substance be considered alive? Schrödinger believed that when "it" remained "to do something", to maintain movement, to continue to exchange substances with the environment, and its expectation than a inanimate matter in a similar situation "to maintain" time much longer.

This is a great originality. My personal understanding of this sentence is that the characteristics of life is its purpose, do something, one is its movement, keep moving, one is its not mortality, implies die. As long as the three features are met, "it" is life. No mortality there will be misunderstanding, what life is not dead? All things have the time of death, including the death itself, but life is the only conscious unwilling to die of "things" and the only hope that the more the better the "things", which is its mortality.

Because of the characteristics of these three lives, life and nature depend on each other against the natural, or Schrodinger said the precise, the characteristics of life show the appearance is: the living organism in doing everything to avoid the decline of the inertia of the "balance", and thus the life of the life of the so-called vitality.

How does life do everything to avoid recession as an inert "balance"? Schrodinger thought it was:

Metabolism

The beginning of this article is quoted in the sixth chapter fourth to seventh of Schrodinger's life. I think this passage is the greatest way in which life can be sustained, even the pursuit of immortality. Below, allow me to crudely deduce how organic life evolves in the logic of negative entropy.

Negative entropy for the first step, everything to exist, must first stable and orderly

As we all know, atom-molecule-level particles are moving in an unregulated heat movement, however, the universe is occupied by stable matter, only stability can think that "you" exist, "you" exists long enough to be worthy of the universe to be named, all unstable existence has been abandoned by the universe. The so-called survival of the fittest, in fact, is the stabilizer to survive (survival of the stable), this sentence from the "selfish Gene", author Richard Dawkins.

In this sense, existence is life. The rock, the water, the air, all the universe still exists. The material we name is life, the inexhaustible particles in order to allow themselves to survive, many brush a sense of existence, with each other into all things, at the particle level it desperately seek to combine with other particles into a stable structure, desperately and endlessly moving, desperately to "live" down, This is a generalized life, but today we only discuss the life of organisms, that is, the narrow life.

Organism macromolecules are the first through the water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia in the ancient Earth under the Lightning Force, in a form of energy conversion, through chemical reaction, the macromolecules and macromolecules to transform each other into organic macromolecules (purine and pyrimidine), thereby becoming more stable, in the long river of time, They gradually occupied the primitive soup which floated in the whole primitive sea, commonly known as life.

However, note that the stability of each chain of organic molecules is orderly, each molecule will choose some of the affinity molecules close to the formation of a positive sequence, will also choose its reverse attraction to form a complementary reverse sequence, all for the sake of stability, but its combination is orderly. How this blind unconscious order was born I do not know, but billions of years of natural evolution tell you that the complete disordered combination of life is still in front of us?

Negative entropy for the second step, to the centrality of survival, must be replicated orderly

I think there are two branches of life, one is the center of the Living inorganic life, one is to the central survival of the organic life. Rock, water, air, etc, are the epitome of central survival, they represent the solid, liquid, gaseous three kinds of life forms, they are all a single matter or a small number of substances in the centralized holding of the survival of each matter is a separate matrix completely independent, if all of them out of decomposition, will soon disappear But the greatest feature of organic life is the birth of an extraordinary macromolecule, the giant molecule that is capable of splitting and reproducing itself--a molecule called DNA.

Although I do not know how it is incidental to learn to copy their own, but we know that the small probability, as long as there is such a possibility, in the infinite time conditions, it will happen sooner or later. The only criterion for distinguishing between the central and the central life lies in the unity of the former and the Division and replication.

But the same, replication is needed in order, a natural hundreds of millions of years by nature of the stable macromolecular chain, the formation of the sequence must be fully copied to form the same stability, because once the copied sequence of disorderly error, who do not know what nature will give it what kind of consequences. But mistakes are still unavoidable, this is the art of science, there will always be a certain probability of error, and the error itself is naturally as a test of evolution, most of the wrong sequence disappeared, but there are some "mistakes" has become a new breed and the original ordered macromolecular chain to compete better. Therefore, the differentiation of survival was born.

Negative entropy for the third step, differential survival, must choose orderly

I think that the differentiation of survival is the most intelligent aspect of natural evolution, although it is probably only because of the wrong forced differentiation, but it is wrong to let life taste the sweetness of differentiation, thus achieving the life of the anti-vulnerability. In the original world of chaos, I believe that disorder is the main form of the world, but under the bondage of gravitation, electromagnetism force, strong mutual and weak each other four kinds of forces, the world gradually enters into order, especially the birth of organic life makes the order of the most powerful branch begin exponential growth evolution, unprecedented impact on the original disorderly world.

However, the game between disorder and order is the yin and yang of the Tao, the possibility and uncertainty of disorder always shocks the orderly power, such as climate change, meteorite impact, magnetic field reversal ... Over the past billions of years, organic life has been trying to cope with this uncertainty by constantly testing and using it to diversify its gene pool, using dominant genes to optimize itself in peaceful and serene times, and enabling a prepared recessive gene to adapt to the changing environment and stress conditions.

I sometimes even think, is not the so-called mutation, in fact, is life in the conscious trial and error? Let's take a look at the bundle of ripened that Schrodinger mentioned in "What Is Life". A count of the length of each ripened of a bundle of purebred ripened compared to the number of ears, as shown below, the median length of the ripened wheat is dominant, the length increases and the length reduces the number of ears to be reduced, now the painted black is significantly higher than the average ripened length of the wheat to sow, according to the traditional Darwinian theory, It is expected that a column graph with a maximum value moving to the right will appear, but the actual test results are that the offspring of the ripened wheat ripened are exactly the same length as the number of wheat. The result is exactly the same if you choose a ripened with a particularly short spike.

Coincidentally, the same parents born children, if the number of children enough, the number of children and height, there will be a similar graph, the average number of children is about the same height, but there are always one or two children are either higher than the average height or a lot shorter than the average height. Examples of this have been verified many times in my family and in other communities of contact. It can be speculated that if a human cloning of a person, the clone group will also appear such a height curve.

This is the power of order. Life uses the Gaussian distribution order of differential existence to deal with the uncertainty of disorder to the greatest extent, the tall and the short seem to be accidental, but it is the day of life to prepare a taller man, or a shorter dwarf, and all the dwarves and tall men make sacrifices for the Order of life, But the entire human race has shown the greatest stability, or the so-called anti-fragility. If one day humans need a very tall man to survive, then one-of human mutations are very tall and not far away, but this mutation of the very tiny probability is adapted to the needs of the environment, and thus become correct.

Entrepreneurship and negative entropy

After three layers of long-winded advance, finally to the theme of today's discussion. If you do not agree with the logic of entropy and life above, and disagree with the great similarity between life logic and entrepreneurial logic, then I suggest you stop reading and I apologize for the delay.

As described in section III, the humble life has its three characteristics: purpose (do something), movement (keep moving), not mortality (implies die). Entrepreneurship. The three main characteristics of a start-up company:

Does the company have a clear entrepreneurial motivation or vision whether the company is still moving to expand the company has a strong desire to die

Whether the company is unwieldy or on the verge of failure, as long as there is a strong inexhaustible desire to remain alive, the company can continue to live, this is any company to maintain the biggest secret of death, but it sounds like a nonsense. For the three steps of living negative entropy, startups have three steps to negative entropy:

First, we must build a stable and orderly team structure

A person can also be a delegation team, but it is extremely unstable, especially in the early stages of entrepreneurship, the establishment of a partner team can be said to be critical. Angel B. Based on the years of experience in early investment, we consider that the positive sequence structure of the choice of values and the reverse sequence structure of skill complementation are relatively ideal team combinations. In the early days, the reverse sequence structure of complementary skills such as products, technology, the market in a short time combination of success is more difficult, the CEO's ability to find people is a serious challenge, at this time in the absence of suitable candidates, can appropriately reduce the complementarity of skills, but the only one can not reduce the demand is the consistent values of the positive sequence structure. Consistent positive-order structure is the first priority to build a stable team.

Second, we must construct a set of ordered DNA that can be duplicated.

The biggest revelation of the life logic to Internet entrepreneurship is the distributed and decentralized life organization structure, from 0 to 1, which is how to build a set of DNA coding that splits and replicates to allow rapid growth in life, and this information code is 1. Looking for this "1" that can split and replicate is the most tested and tortured start-up team, I can say that most of the start-up team is dead in the search for this "1", and you are welcome to say, many now take a round or even B-round companies, many have not really found to be able to split the replication of "1".

We take O2O for example, in order to find "1", from the region a point breakthrough verification, the product business run through, this process is the running-in team of 1, online products 1, offline service flow of 1, the way to push 1, each 1 experience really have some 1 of the prototype, can try to expand other regions, Get further iterations of "1" in feedback from other regions.

And so on, when a city can fully prove that the "1" of the robust and evolutionary flexibility (with a certain market share and user experience satisfaction as indicators), can dare to replicate this orderly DNA coding division to other cities, and even the whole country. The reality is, there are too many O2O companies, in a region of "1" also completely selves situation, began to rush the whole city, too fast positive entropy growth behavior for a very limited resources of the start-up company is more lethal.

Finally, we must strain a diversified gene pool of orderly error

All great innovations are conceived in the midst of mistakes, tolerance, and innovation. Rather than the third step, I would prefer to think of this as a start-up company that needs to be moji to the heart. Start-up companies can survive in the current competitive business environment, and can grow into a tree, the core is differentiated survival, differentiation is to avoid competition, the second is to adapt to the times because of uncertainty and the demand change. But where does the differentiation come from?

We still look for clues from the logic of life. The gene pool of single-celled organisms is relatively single, but they also survived for billions of of years, such as bacteria, such as a lot of viruses, their life logic is the first two steps to achieve the peak, the corresponding industrial form, is the Zhejiang and Fujian, some of the cluster industry, a small city only the production of zippers, socks, hardware, wood carving, Shoes ...

This is the logic of many of Europe's established luxury companies, which only produce watches, purses, furniture and so on for hundreds of of years. Single-celled organisms in the Earth's environment is relatively peaceful, no change in the circumstances, this extreme single focus is very simple is very vitality, its biggest problem lies in the lack of mutation, in response to complex environment, uncertain times, it appears very painful or even direct death extinction.

In response to the high stability of single-celled organisms, the metamorphosis of reproduction, but the lack of strain on complexity, multicellular organisms, especially the intelligent life of human beings as the representative, it is the greatest of the uncertainty or the possibility of endless exploration, and in order to achieve this adaptability, is to constantly diversify their gene pool to try out all kinds of possibilities, the potential problem is that because of the constant trial and error will bring all kinds of innovation dilemma, will greatly affect their stability.

In the changing era of the Internet, personalized, diversified demand has flooded the world, in such a context, my personal bias is: Internet start-ups are bound to be a single-celled organism into, but in the long run, the ultimate evolution will still go to the complexity of multicellular organisms. This also explains why all the big internet companies will blade meet each other in the end, fighting the Imperial War, the ecological war.

The biggest paradox is that if startups are a chance to reverse their own attacks because of the differential mutation, it is a problem to avoid startups becoming victims of mutations. Biologically, the great logarithm mutation is suicide (because it is extremely unstable). So, to determine whether a start-up team has a good mutation ability, largely due to its trial and error cost is low enough, this requires the founder team to their own industry has a deep insight, on the one hand, the founder of the CEO should not be too opinionated, to the diversity of talent is inclusive, but, The most important thing remains that startups have to have a methodical approach to trial and error.

How to construct a real negative entropy system

Since then we understand that negative entropy is not negative entropy, but how to keep a person, a family, a company, an organization how to maintain an orderly low entropy level in order to stay away from the equilibrium state. Limited to space, the following will be a large number of display views to deduce this assertion.

Learning to make tools and control the use of fire is the beginning of human wisdom, it lets the human habitat has the fixed place, guards against has, the food has the existence, compared to other animals, investigates the sun and the moon climate, follows the world Day and the day, the day meals, enters the human nature unification the orderly state, may say, mankind's brain intelligence how evolves? The essence is evolved from a millions of-year low entropy life, and humans can become masters of animals precisely because it is the most negative entropy animal on Earth.

Too emotional people are positive entropy increase, and rest irregular people are positive entropy increase, do not have the goal of casual people are positive entropy increase, sexual intercourse is the person who is increasing entropy, the life without any pursuit of thinking chaos is the positive entropy increase, the person with the average life expectancy is lower than the negative entropy, and the success rate of venture is lower than negative entropy, Human evolution or value less than negative entropy.

A successful man standing behind a successful woman is wrong, strictly speaking, he has a relatively more negative entropy than other men of marriage, in addition to the cause of negative entropy, in the family life is also negative entropy line, his family no more entropy gossip, today's lover noisy to go home, tomorrow mother-in-law and daughter-in-law war, The children's education is a mess, and the disharmony of entropy increases life hurts to destroy a harmonious family.

Stable entrepreneurs, life and rest of the law of entrepreneurs, family life and harmonious entrepreneurs, for the future full of planning entrepreneurs, in the river of time, the winning probability will increase.

A good internet product must be negative entropy. Uncontrolled chaos Consumer-to-consumer inevitable defeat, completely without control and screening of the Consumer-to-consumer are bullying, believe that the power of negative entropy, the power of the order, believe that high-quality, from the Business-to-consumer, Consumer-to-consumer, and then to b2c,c2c is always a means, not an end.

Search engine can turn out and become one of the most valuable products in the Internet world today, because it is one of the most negative entropy products so far, it makes the vast and chaotic information black box see the light. Mushroom Street, beauty, such as the earliest shopping guide products can be believed to have been a foregone conclusion of the women in the electricity business, only because they for the vast number of young girls do two negative entropy things: in the vast and dazzling Taobao clothes selected in the chaotic and confused clothes with the model.

Where to go the first in the thought of the long foregone Ota to kill their way out, only because he did a negative entropy thing: for thousands of users to unify the selection of the most cost-effective air tickets in China, and in the previous countless travelers for this problem headaches unceasingly.

Why do startups have to subdivide their focus? The first version of the product on line must be very simple to point and try? The deep logic behind this is that, for the vast majority of cases, a start-up that has little money is bound to go into chaos as a result of a mismatch between full power and resources, all-inclusive by confusion, and more chaotic by the loss of focus. Only one situation can try all-inclusive, is your product completely without any precedent, can only testing find out your that "1".

It is inevitable that the company will increase the entropy, but a priority helmsman, each step of the division of the duplication of the entropy behind are premeditated, each step of diversification of the expansion behind is also a layout, which is in the negative entropy logic of the goal of entropy increase, such a corporate life system as a whole still maintained at a low entropy level.

The army of the increasing entropy, even though a gifted general, is still the absolute negative entropy army of a second-rate general in the long run. Why can a totalitarian state survive for hundreds of of years, sometimes the so-called democracies do not have more time to live than totalitarian states, since the latter do not establish a system of negative entropy, and a good universal idea is rapidly collapsing without the support of negative entropy.

Finally, for the long article wrapped in this smelly foot cloth to do a non conclusive guidance of thinking. How to construct a real negative entropy system, a real ordered structure based on life logic? Belgian Prigogine, the founder of modern thermodynamics, the famous statistical physicist, gave his theory of dissipative structure affecting the world, confined to my coarse knowledge of physics, I can only copy as follows, for the outstanding entrepreneurs to study and see if there is any revelation.

Prikozyn puts forward the requirements for the system to form an ordered structure:

The system must be open, that is, the system must exchange material and energy with the outside world. Away from the equilibrium state, the open system leaves the equilibrium state under the external action, the opening increases gradually, the external influence on the system gradually becomes stronger, and the system is gradually pushed from the near equilibrium state to the non-linear zone of equilibrium. Nonlinear interaction exists between the subsystems of the system. A deviation from a stable state of a system. In the equilibrium state and near equilibrium state, fluctuation is a kind of disturbed and orderly disturbance, but in the condition of far from equilibrium, the nonlinear action can enlarge the random small fluctuation rapidly, so that the system transitions from unstable state to a new ordered state, thus forming dissipation structure. The open system deviating from the equilibrium state is "self-organizing" into a dissipative structure after crossing the critical point, and the dissipative structure emerges from the mutation and its state is stable.