A16Z创始人：好的VC应该无情地开放并远离自我

When Marc Andreessen wants to think about deep issues like the state of the economy and technological change, he mentally spars with the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Page — the people he says are the most audacious people who have worked in Silicon Valley. “I have a little simulation of Peter Thiel. He lives on my shoulder right here. I argue with him all day long.”

当Marc Andreessen想要思考经济状况和技术变革这样的深层次问题时，他精神上可以与Peter Thiel，Elon Musk和Larry Page等人匹敌，这些人都是硅谷最大胆的人。 “我有一点模仿Peter Thiel。他住在我肩上。我从早到晚都和他辩论。“

Imaginary arguments, he says, allow you to sharpen your thinking against people smarter than you. “You want to kind of construct a model of how they think and be able to be very objective and fair — where you can think things through from their standpoint,” he says. “Then you have your own view on things. Then you try to run through in your head what you know of them and say, OK, here are the conclusions that they would reach. If you put enough time into that, you start to be able to have these conversations with yourself. People might look at you funny while it’s happening, but you get to engage in this dialogue.”

虚构的辩论可以让你的思维在与比你更聪明的人的对抗中变得更清晰。“你要建立一个他们如何思考并能够做到客观公平的模型 — 这样你就可以从他们的角度来思考事情。” 他说， “你有自己的看法。然后，你试图通过你的头脑知道他们会得到的结论。如果你有足够的时间，你可以开始与自己进行这些对话。这时候，人们可能会看着你有趣，而你会沉浸在这个对话里。”

During a  View From the Top  talk with students at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Andreessen shared insights and advice about the role of technology in a changing economy, how to capitalize on the opportunities that present themselves throughout a career, and why the best ideas are likely already out there waiting to happen.

在与斯坦福大学商学院学生进行的《高端视点》对话中，Andreessen分享了他关于技术在不断变化的经济中的作用的见解和建议，如何抓住职业生涯中的机会，以及为什么最好的想法可能已经在发生了。

Tech Isn’t a Job-Killer 技术不是一个就业的杀手

“There are more jobs around the world than ever before,” Andreessen says, and income levels have never been higher. “So if technological change were going to cause elimination of jobs, one presumes we would have seen it by now.”

Andreessen说：“世界上的工作比任何时候都要多，收入水平也从未如此之高。 所以如果技术变革会导致工作岗位的消失，那么我们现在就应该看见了。”

The more pressing question, Andreessen says, is how to harness the constant state of flux in the economy. Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work. And creating 5 million new jobs for them seems impossible with net monthly job gains typically in the hundreds of thousands. “Five million jobs seem like a lot of jobs. It is a lot,” Andreessen says. But looking at the big picture shows that “every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and about 24.5 million are created,” Andreessen says. “So the real answer to how do you replace 5 million jobs is, we already replace that in less than a quarter [of a year] today.”

Andreessen说，更紧迫的问题是如何利用经济中永恒存在的变化。例如，自动驾驶可能会使运输相关工作的500万人失业。为他们创造500万个新工作看起来似乎是不可能的，因为月净新增工作通常在数十万。 “500万个工作似乎是很多工作岗位。的确很多，“ Andreessen说。但是从更大的画面看 “美国每年平均有2100万个工作消失，但又有约2450万个新工作被创造了，所以回答如何替代500万个就业岗位的真正答案是：今天我们已经可以在不到四分之一年的时间内替代这些工作了。”

Starting from the point of view that jobs are going to change — rather than disappear — means you can focus on more important questions. “How do we set people up to be able to take advantage of the change? How do we have change work for people? How do we expand opportunities?” he says. “The conversation I think we ought to be having is on the things we could do to have more people have access to all the opportunity that the new technology in many cases is creating.”

从工作会改变而不是消失的观点出发，意味着你可以专注于更重要的问题。 “我们如何让人们能够利用这种变化？我们如何为人们改变工作？我们如何扩大机会？“他说。 “我认为我们的谈话应该集中在我们可以做的事情，让更多的人能够获得新技术创造的所有机会。”

Be Ruthlessly Open-Minded 无情的开放

Over the course of a career, you’re going to make a sequence of bets, Andreessen says: “You’re going to make those bets of the places you choose to go and the people you choose to work with. You’re going to screw some of those up.” And just like in the VC business, it’s wise to understand the difference between two types of errors. Mistakes of commission — losing everything you invest in a company — can be tough, but you’ll get over them in time. Errors of omission — not investing in the first place — will scar you for life. “Every highly successful VC has made mistakes of omission, really big ones, of companies that they had the chance to invest in, they should’ve invested in, they didn’t invest in,” Andreessen says. “Take the bet, lose 1X. Don’t take the bet and possibly miss on 1,000X.”

在职业生涯中，Andreessen说：“你会为你的选择下注，不管是选择工作的地方还是选择合作的人。你肯定会搞砸一些事情。 Andreessen说：“每一个非常成功的风险投资公司都犯了遗漏的错误，真的是大的公司，他们有机会投资，他们应该投资，但是他们没有投资。 

Why do we make those mistakes of omission so often? “It’s almost always because we have some theory for why something’s not going to work,” Andreessen says. “You develop an idea, and then you look for all the evidence that supports it and ignore all the evidence that disproves it. You get locked into your ideas.” That mindset works against you, Andreessen warns, because what didn’t work in the past might work now. “Just because MySpace didn’t reach Facebook levels of scale didn’t mean Facebook wouldn’t be able to. So you have to be ruthlessly open-minded and constantly willing to reexamine your assumptions,” Andreessen says. “You have to take the ego out of ideas, which is a very hard thing to do.”

为什么我们经常犯这些遗漏的错误？ Andreessen说：你被锁定在你的想法中。” 这个心态对你来说是有害的，安德森警告说，因为过去不行不代表现在不行。 “仅仅因为MySpace没有达到Facebook的规模水平并不意味着Facebook不行。

Predicting the Future 预测未来

Most of the good ideas are obvious, Andreessen says. They just might not work right away. Before Apple’s iPad was a huge success, for instance, the Newton was a dud. Instead of spending time overanalyzing whether something will work, he advises, try asking what happens when it does.

Andreessen说，大多数好的想法是显而易见的。他们可能不会立即实现。在苹果iPad取得巨大成功之前，Newton这个产品就是一个哑弹。

“Let’s just assume for a moment that self-driving cars actually work,” Andreessen says. “What are the consequences of that?” Cars fundamentally changed our idea of the geography of home and work. Before cars, people lived in the city to be close to their jobs. Then cars created the suburbs, and hence the commute. “We all sit here 80 years later wishing that nobody had thought of that,” Andreessen says. “We all hate it. It’s all a waste of time.”

Andreessen说：“让我们假设，自动驾驶汽车实际上是可行的。这有什么后果？” 汽车会从根本上改变了我们对家庭和工作地理位置的想法。在汽车之前，人们住在城市靠近他们的工作。然后汽车创造了郊区，因此造成了通勤。Andreesse说：“80年了，我们还坐在那里，没有人想过：我们都讨厌它，这是浪费时间。”

But self-driving cars can reclaim that time. “All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? What if you get to spend that hour playing with your kid or reading the news or watching TV or actually working because you don’t have to worry about driving?”

自动驾驶可以收回那段时间。 “突然间，你可以想到一个小时的通勤实际上是一个很大奖励，因为你不用坐着集中精力在车流里煎熬，现在你的汽车变成了流动的客厅。如果你可以花上一小时与你的孩子一起玩、看新闻、看电视或甚至工作，而不必担心驾驶，会怎样？”

This opens up a whole new set of questions. If you can grab a chunk of your sleep time in a car, the geography of daily life changes and urban environments can become much, much larger, Andreessen says. If a car can be a rolling office, “what would be the consequences of that in terms of how these companies get built? What would be the infrastructure to support that kind of thing? What kind of early signals show that that kind of thing is starting to happen or not?”

这打开了一系列新的问题。Andreessen说，如果你可以在汽车里抢回一段睡觉时间，日常生活的变化和城市环境的变化可能会变得非常非常大。如果一辆汽车可以成为一个移动的办公室，那么这些公司如何建立起来会是什么后果呢？支持这种事情的基础设施是什么？什么样的早期信号表明这种事情开始发生了？”

Start seeing those questions, Andreessen says, and you can begin to “chart some view of how the future will unfold.”

Andreessen说，开始思考这些问题的时候，你可以开始“绘制一些关于未来的看法”。

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