Why can Musk subvert four different industries? There are very few competitors in his field, which is a very interesting reflection on his first principles.

First, Musk's first principle

(1) Three things that Musk is doing now.

Musk has subversive innovations in four different areas. The earliest PayPal he was involved in was the financial payment, which has now been sold.

The three things he is currently doing:

Tesla , currently the hot electric car company;

It is very remarkable in the manned space field. After the space shuttle is retired, it is also the main space vehicle in the United States;

Sun City, an energy company, was acquired by Tesla last year.

(2) Aristotle's first principle of principle

The first principle came from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. He said: "The first principle of principle exists in every system exploration. The first principle is the basic proposition and hypothesis, which cannot be omitted and deleted. It can't be violated."

Five public works of Euclidean geometry:

Any two points can be connected by a straight line;

Any line segment can extend infinitely into a straight line;

Given an arbitrary line segment, one end point can be taken as the center of the circle, and the line segment is used as a radius as a circle;

All right angles are equal;

If the two straight lines intersect the third straight line and the sum of the inner corners on the same side is less than two right angles, the two straight lines must intersect on this side;

These five are the first principles that Aristotle said. In the eyes of Aristotle, the principle of first sexuality has a supreme position, even full of divinity.

This is a pantheistic thought that is incompatible with the ideas of early Greek mythology and the ideas of other nations for mythology. Aristotle regards this property as the most noble, so it is called first principles.

(3) Musk's first principle

Let's go back to Musk. How does he see first principles?

He has a saying like this: "It is very important that we use first principles, rather than thinking about thinking. We always tend to compare in life, we have done things that others have done or are doing. Also do it, the result of this development can only produce small iterative development.

The first principle of thinking is to look at the world from the perspective of physics, that is to say, layer by layer to open the appearance of things, to see the essence of the inside, and then go up from the essence. "

This is the first principle in his eyes.

Note: For example, when Musk founded SpaceX, the mainstream view of the US space industry is that the cost of building satellites is extremely expensive, and it takes a lot of time. It is not a big company like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. No. But the US military, scientific research institutions and large companies have another real need: low-cost, fast launch of small satellites. Musk realized that if he could do this, then everything would be reshuffled. To this day, everything that Musk has done at SpaceX is based on first-principles—almost all of its own research and development, manufacturing, and frantically reducing costs.

I remember when I interviewed Musk, asked him if he had faith? He shook his head and said no, he only believed in physics. Probably means that he only believes in a system derived from the principle of first principles.

For example, the traditional battery pack, the average market price is 600 US dollars / kWh, the main battery supplier is Panasonic. Musk found through first-principles that if the raw materials for the lithium battery pack purchased from the London Metal Exchange are combined, it only costs $80/kWh.

He found a huge price gap, so Tesla started to build a battery factory in 2013. Mass production began in January this year. After the production, the price of the battery can be reduced by 30%, and 1.5 million electric vehicles can be supported each year. Battery requirements. This is his application of the principle of first principles.

Second, the first principle and comparative thinking

In the business world, first principles and comparative thinking are two distinct ideas.

We are now in an era of information explosion, surrounded by a variety of information. So we need to constantly filter the information every day, and you can't see the deep reason for this information, only the appearance.

Most of the time we can only look at things by looking at them, that is, by comparing them. But in fact, comparative thinking has a lot of flaws.

I have come up with two levels of defects in comparative thinking:

Horizontal comparison

Horizontal comparison is a sense of competition, although it is not possible to see where the end point is.

Peter Thiel has a very interesting point in the book From 0 to 1. He said: "Competition is a concept that spreads throughout society and distorts our thinking. As a result, the competition is getting more and more fierce, and we are getting less and less in practice. We are trapped ourselves in the competition."

This idea makes sense, to give two examples.

The first is shared bikes, and this area is now hot. The founder of Mobai, Hu Wei, is my former colleague. We used to be journalists. I remember that she told me that her thoughts on sharing bicycles were actually based on first-principles thinking.

She pointed out that after the subway in the big city, it may be only one or two kilometers away from the destination, but it is impossible to get a car at the peak. At this time, you can only play black cars or walk, if there is a bicycle at this time, how good.

Later, she discovered that mobile payment began to become more and more popular in China. She wanted to apply mobile payment to the bicycle field, so she went to do it now.

But at the time, I felt that it was not reliable. First, it was difficult to solve the problem of stealing cars. Second, I felt that she was a young woman of literature and art and could not do anything in manufacturing. But she did it, and she did a great job. Her thinking is based on first-principles thinking.

Next we see more and more shared bicycles on the market. There is a paragraph on the Internet saying that if you don't do a shared bicycle again, then you can't squeeze in the seven colors of the rainbow. Sharing bicycles today is a purely comparative thinking-based competition. They want to defeat their opponents, and a lot of capital is also contributing to the back, so this situation is caused.

Do we really need so many shared bikes? I think I can make a question mark.

Zhou Hang, the founder of the easy-to-use car, said that his ideal competition should be two people running, you chase after each other, encourage each other, cross the finish line. This process is good for both parties and learn from each other. Bad competition is two people fighting, that is, in the process you put another person PK off.

He doesn't want to compete like the latter and wants to focus on the product and user experience. But in fact, in the field of private car service, there has been a very fierce competition in the past two or three years. The first is the Didi merge express, and later the combination of Uber and Didi. So the ideal is full, but the reality is cruel. In many times in China, comparative thinking prevails.

2. Vertical comparison

Vertical comparisons are based on a comparison of past experience and history.

There is a saying in Peter Petit's "From 0 to 1":

"Every moment in the business world will not repeat itself. The next Bill Gates will not develop an operating system. The next Larry Peggy or Sergey Brin will not develop a search engine. The next Zucker. Gee will not create social networks. If you copy these people, you are not learning from them."

People who have been great in the past, they have some very wrong ideas based on vertical comparison thinking. For example, "The world may only sell five computers." The person who said this sentence is Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM.

"Now we don't even have the weakest evidence to use nuclear energy." This is Einstein.

"AC is useless because it is too dangerous to kill people like lightning. Only DC is safe." This is Edison.

Xiaomi founder Lei Jun also said that "as long as you stand in the air, pigs can fly." This sentence is very correct in 13 and 14 years, he also achieved great success. However, in the past year or two, Xiaomi has been declining, including Sony, OPPO, and vivo, which he had not seen before, and they have quickly grown up and quickly captured offline retail stores in third- and fourth-tier cities.

So history is not going straight ahead, but spiraling forward, or taking two steps back, taking three steps and taking a step back.

Lei Jun’s Internet thinking should be correct, but he may not consider the speed of Internet development in our country. Now the third- and fourth-tier cities are not suitable for the one he said before, but in the long run, I agree with him. .

Musk's decision-making criteria for the project is that this matter works well at the physical level.

Why can't we do it? We must do it.

He started directly from the core issues and then solved it step by step, which is not the same as most Chinese entrepreneurs. There are very few competitors in his field, which is a very interesting reflection on his first principles.

Third, first principles and big data thinking

I recently read Wu Jun's "Intelligent Times", which mentions big data thinking. It would be interesting to compare big data thinking with first-principles thinking.

Wu Jun mentioned in the book that “the information contained in the data can help us eliminate the uncertainty, and the correlation between the data can replace the original causality to some extent.”

Based on the principle of first sexuality is the way of thinking of causality, that is, you must first discover the most central reason for one thing, and then reason out the result you want step by step from this reason. But in the era of big data, we actually have better solutions.

In the "Intelligent Times" Wu Jun teacher believes that we can find the answer directly from big data, even if we do not know what the reason is.

This is what the book says:

"It is good to know the cause according to causality, but because of the complicated problems, it is very difficult. In addition to the cross-material conditions, people's efforts depend on luck. In the era of big data, we can have new ways of thinking, from a large number of Find the answer directly in the data, even if we don't know why.

This aspect gives us a way to find shortcuts, and we will not be stumped by the lack of luck. If we are willing to accept the answer that we can't find the reason, our way of thinking has jumped out of the mechanical era to pursue the causal relationship and began to have big data thinking. "

In the following examples, this big data thinking can be reflected:

For example, advertising on Google, placing snack advertisements on movie rental websites, and advertising men's clothing on women's websites. We don't know what is causal between them, but in fact, in the era of big data, there is no need to know what its causal relationship is. We only need to know that they are related, and advertising based on relevance will be very good. The effect is ok. Some of the recommendations that users see on Tmall now are actually technology development based on big data thinking.

Finally, I want to say that in this era, we see a lot of crazy people.

They are doing crazy things, not that they are really crazy or that they are really smarter than us, but that they look at the problem differently than we do.

For example, Musk, through first principles rather than comparative thinking, he can see the essential causes of many things, and then made a lot of things that ordinary people think is crazy but very remarkable.

Fourth, the question and answer session

Question 1: I am very interested in Elon Musk himself. What qualities do he have and what kind of personal charm?

Zhou Xingxing: When I first saw him, I felt like a robot. He speaks with no emotions, his speech rate is very stable, there is no ups and downs, his speech is very logical, but he is very determined and unquestionable.

There are some descriptions of him in the book, he will put pressure on the staff, although many people can stick to the end, but more people are oppressed by him, so Tesla 's turnover rate is very high, leaving All are people who have a firm belief in what he does.

Another point is that his curiosity is particularly strong. I remember that he asked me several times about the only child in China. He said that through calculations, if China has adopted the one-child policy, the Chinese population will have a cliff-like decline in the past few decades. He thinks this is a terrible disaster.

Through calculations, China must have at least two children to maintain a stable population. As a result, China has really liberalized its second child policy. He also likes children very much. He has five children.

In short, I think he is a very personal charm, but at the same time not a very good person.

Question 2: As an entrepreneur, how to solve social problems with technology?

Zhou Xingxing: Explaining social phenomena with mathematics or using physical phenomena. This is a first-principle way of thinking, but now most people do not have this kind of thinking or the ability to do this.

The question that Musk gave me to China’s one-child policy just now is to use mathematical methods to see this problem.

I have heard that there are many ways to explain some social phenomena by means of big data. For example, in the United States, there are many ways to evade tax evasion. They use big data to check a certain community. For example, the average tax paid is, but in one hundred samples, if one sample finds that the tax paid is very small, there may be a suspicion of tax evasion.

I remember that Wu Jun’s book also mentioned that the US police used to check the electricity consumption in a community to estimate whether or not to grow cannabis. Because if you grow marijuana, you will use a lot of electricity, and the power consumption is very high, so use this method to find people who can grow marijuana. Therefore, there will be many in the future, especially the government can use big data to solve some social problems.

Question 3: Musk said that he wants to retire on Mars. Have you discussed this issue in the process of communicating with him? In addition, it is said that artificial intelligence will become the terminator of human beings. What do you think?

Zhou Hengxing: First of all, he said that he was retiring on Mars. I didn't believe it when he first said it. I think this is the gimmick of his propaganda. In fact, many of these entrepreneurs have used it.

But in the last year or two, I found that he started to say more and more specific on many occasions, and planned to have more details. At the end of last year, there was a very detailed plan, such as which year to build a base in Mars, and which year began to carry people. At this time, I realized that he was really doing this, and I personally admire it.

There is also Blue Origin, a company founded by Amazon founder Bezos, and the company is also very interesting. Bezos is different from Musk, he is very low-key, but he does things very similar to Musk, but the path to space exploration is different.

Space X began to develop transportation tools to and from outer space, first shipping a lot of raw materials to another planet, and then starting to transport people.

Blue origins began with manned aviation, first traveling near the ground, then traveling to the moon, and then traveling to Mars. Their ultimate goal is to achieve Martian immigration.

Musk is pessimistic about artificial intelligence. He believes that artificial intelligence is terrible and may destroy human beings. Be very careful. The founders of Google feel that there is no need to worry too much.

My personal opinion is that the development of a technology depends on long-term and short-term. Most people overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term, but underestimate the role of a technology in the long run.

Artificial intelligence may have very good applications in the short term, which will bring a lot of help to human beings, but it is likely to have a negative effect in the long run. Even artificial intelligence will rule humans in the future. This is my personal. the opinion of.

Question 4: How far do you think China is to create a “dreamer who can look up at the stars and a down-to-earth realist”? What can we do to shorten this distance?

Zhou Hengxing: I have been thinking about this issue all the time. Now our country has been encouraging entrepreneurial innovation, which is quite good. From my personal point of view, I graduated from the university in 2008, and my classmates want to go to government agencies or state-owned enterprises and banks.

But after so many years, I found that young people may have new ideas after graduation, such as starting a business, going to a startup, or taking risks to do something that no one is doing. This is a good trend.

As long as the young people in our country are willing to change their minds, they can try new things. Regardless of success or failure, there may be something different in the end.

Because even the greatest innovations and the greatest subversions in the United States are in fact one of the best. It is possible to have hundreds of companies to have a company out there, but it is because of the hundreds of companies that will continue to innovate. So as long as our country continues to encourage young people to do such things, one day there will be some very different things, very great innovations.

During this time, many young people on the Internet discussed the issue of buying a house. They could not afford to leave the big cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. When I was in the United States, many young people around me could not afford to buy a house, but they all thought that renting a house was quite good.

I have always accepted this point of view, because I think the house is used to live, you rent a house is also living, and buying a house is also living. The company is actually like a person, a good company, the positive cash flow is very important, it is the same for people.

You spend a lot of money on a house, with little cash flow, and your ability to resist risk or your ability to do things is very low.

So many young people spend a lot of money on buying a house, I don't think it is a good investment. Young people should do something to invest in themselves, or do something that you find meaningful and interesting.

Question 5: For the entrepreneurs who have failed in Silicon Valley, where are they mostly going the wrong way?

Zhou Xingxing: I very much agree with your formulation. What we learned from successful entrepreneurial cases is not as much as we have in failure cases. Most startups in Silicon Valley have failed, and 99% have failed. We may be similar in our country. I think the lessons of their failure may be the most important:

First of all, entrepreneurship is to do what you are interested in. Entrepreneurship is very difficult. If you are not interested in this matter and are not interested, it is very easy to give up. It is very important to insist on the initial heart. When the entrepreneur is very rich or famous when he is very young, it will be easy to lose himself and not put his mind on the product, which will lead to rapid decline. I see a lot of such examples.

Second, integrity is also important. Only by upholding integrity can we build a good business environment and reduce the cost of starting a business.

Third, Silicon Valley companies have strong innovation capabilities, but they often lack manufacturing capabilities. After making a prototype of a product, it is impossible to find a supply chain or manufacturing. But they don't understand Chinese, so their eyes are black, which has been unable to achieve mass production, and it is easy to die.

Question 6: What are the similarities and differences between entrepreneurial innovations in China and the United States?

Zhou Xingxing: According to my observation, first of all, China and the United States are two countries with large market and sufficient population. They can be self-sufficient. For example, Chinese developers only need to serve Chinese users well, because China has almost 700 million. There are more than 200 million Internet users in the United States.

But apart from China and the United States, it is difficult to find so many Internet users in the third and fourth countries. India may be the next very promising country, but their infrastructure does not reach the capabilities of China and the United States.

Secondly, in the past we have been saying that China copied the United States, but in the last two or three years, there have been more and more innovations in the United States. Such as mobile payment. When Apple CEO Cook came to China, he lamented that even the aunt who sells watermelons has Alipay, which is not seen in the United States.

This is mainly because the traditional economy of the United States is very developed and the infrastructure is very complete, such as banking and automobile. So the result is that China's traditional industries are very easy to be subverted by the Internet, but not so easy in the United States, and Chinese Internet users are still relatively young, so they are willing to accept a lot of new things.

In the United States, everyone is driving to go shopping, so O2O, and even e-commerce may not be as developed as China. In the next five to ten years, China and the United States will follow suit. Recently, I have also seen more and more American companies starting to learn from China's innovations, such as sharing bicycles, mobile payments and e-commerce, which are much better than the United States.

Question 7: What are the points of interest to China in the Silicon Valley technology community?

Zhou Hengxing: On the one hand, many VCs in the United States want to learn about China's successful business model. They think it may help the investment in Silicon Valley. The second is that they want to find money in China because many hot money in China is willing to invest in venture capital.

The second group is entrepreneurs. American entrepreneurs are interested in China, mainly to see China's huge market, population base, and Internet users in China. For example, after the product comes out, you can quickly launch a Chinese version of the app, or sell the hardware products to China.

But one problem is that the information is very asymmetrical. Chinese entrepreneurs know English. We know what is happening in the United States, but American entrepreneurs don't understand Chinese. They mainly rely on Chinese people who can speak English to understand China's entrepreneurial circle.

 

 

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