尼克·科科纳斯 - 了解你所销售的产品 - [像最佳投资者一样投资，重播]

显然，这在你脑海中留下了深刻的印象，成为了一种新奇有趣的体验，而这正是我们想要达到的效果。

And clearly, it stuck out in your mind as a new weird fun experience, which is really what we're shooting for.

只是为了给这个论点再添点证据。

Just to pour evidence on the pile.

我到现在还经常跟别人提起这件事。

I still tell people about that all the time.

有趣的是，我注意到企业往往倾向于走安全路线，不愿冒险，这不仅极其无聊，而且是个糟糕的商业决策。

And it's interesting to me how often businesses seem to wanna go down the fairway and sort of not be risky and how incredibly boring, but also how bad a business decision that is.

因为如果只是普通的熔岩蛋糕之类的东西，我根本不会提起它。

Because if it was just a lava cake or something, like, I wouldn't talk about it.

这里有一个重要的区别，那就是：

There's an important distinction here, and that is this.

现在已经有其他人模仿这个做法了。

People have copied that now.

任何好的东西都会被模仿。

Anything good gets copied.

如果你在谷歌上搜索南美洲和亚洲那些模仿它的餐厅，它们都模仿得不好。

And if you Google up restaurants in South America and Asia that are copying it, they don't copy it well.

它们只是把一堆食物直接倒在桌子上。

They'll literally just take a bunch of food and dump it on a table.

不。

No.

不。

No.

不。

No.

不。

No.

如果你要尝试这种高风险、可能引发争议的做法，你也必须让它优雅而美丽。

If you're gonna try to do this very risky kind of potentially polarizing thing, you have to make it elegant and beautiful too.

执行很重要，想法本身很棒。

Execution, the ideas are great.

我经常告诉人们，你拥有世界上所有伟大的想法都没用。

I tell people all the time, you can have all the great ideas in the world.

如果你不能高水平地执行它们，最终还是会失败。

If you do not execute them at a high level, it's gonna fall flat.

格兰特，我们刚开业时，想在食物中展现动感，他弄了个小装置，用细线挂着培根之类的。

Grant, when we first opened, wanted to show movement in food, he had this little bacon on a wire thing and stuff.

现在许多牛排馆都把厚实的牛排馆培根夹在衣夹上。

And now there's a bunch of steakhouses that put thick steakhouse bacon on a clothespin.

我们的做法可能很傻，而且只持续了四个月，但他们根本没理解其中的深意。

Our thing may have been dumb, and we only did it for four months, but they didn't really get the point of it.

但至少看起来很漂亮。

It looked beautiful at least.

现在他们用衣夹把培根挂在细线上。

And now they've got clothespins holding bacon on a wire.

你必须弄清楚它为何特别的核心原因。

You have to figure out the core of why it's special.

而很多时候，这是一件很难做到的事情。

And that's a tricky thing to do a lot of times.

回到业务本身的运营方式和服务交付上，你们在售票、提前在线销售餐食、不在餐厅内销售以及动态定价等方面都极具创新性。

Going back to the kind of way the business itself is run and the service delivered, you guys have been extremely innovative in things like ticketing, selling meals ahead of time, not at the restaurant, things like dynamic pricing.

你能谈谈你们最初是如何想到这两个概念的，以及它们实施后对业务产生了怎样的影响吗？

Can you talk through how you arrived maybe at those two concepts at first and the impact that they had on the business once they were in place?

我从未在餐厅工作过一天。

I had never spent a day working in a restaurant.

即使在我们开设Illinium之后，我的角色也只是协调。

And then even after we opened Illinium, my role was to coordinate.

我就像一部电影的制片人。

I was like the producer of a film.

我找来所有人，让他们参与进来，与建筑师、室内设计师合作，办理所有许可证、酒类执照、法律事务等等。

I found everybody, got them involved, worked with the architect, the interior designer, did all the permitting, the liquor license, the legal, all that sort of stuff.

但在开业那天之前，我从未真正在餐厅工作过。

But I didn't actually work in a restaurant ever until the day we opened.

我当然没打算在餐厅工作。

And I certainly didn't intend on working at the restaurant.

我原本以为自己只会负责财务和账目之类的事情，然后把这些交给总经理之类的人员处理。

I expected that I would do the financials and the books and things like that, but I would also hand that off to the general manager, say, or things like that.

我们开业大约十八个月后，格兰特被诊断出患有四期癌症，当时医生说他只剩六个月寿命。

About eighteen months after we opened, Grant was diagnosed with stage four cancer and at the time was given six months to live.

他现在已经癌症康复十一年了。

He's eleven years cancer free.

这本身就是一个故事。

That's a story in and of itself.

但在那一刻，我走进了餐厅，开始每晚都去服务现场，不再只处理业务方面的事，而是真正关注其他各个方面。

But at that moment, I went in to the restaurant, started going in every night for service, not doing just the business side, but really looking at the other aspects of it.

我只是环顾四周，心想：为什么我们明明有六十个人在等位，却还有一张空桌子？

I just would look around and be like, Why in the world do we have an empty table right now when we have 60 people on the wait list?

哦，他们根本就没来。

Well, they just didn't show up.

当然，我知道当我光顾其他餐厅时，明明预约了晚上8点，却被要求在吧台等四十五分钟。

And of course, I knew that when I went to other restaurants, I'd have an 08:00 reservation and be told to wait at the bar for forty five minutes.

于是我开始问一些非常基础的问题。

And I started asking really, really basic questions.

为什么我预约了晚上8点的餐厅，却被告知要等四十五分钟？

Why is it that I go to a restaurant, have an 08:00 reservation, and then I'm told to wait for forty five minutes?

是因为他们管理混乱，还是来的人太多了？

Is it because they're disorganized or so many people came?

答案是：不是。

And it's like, no.

实际上，他们骗了我，说晚上8点有位子，但他们明明知道要到晚上9点才有空位。

Actually, they lied to me and told me they had an 08:00 table, and they knew that they didn't have one till 09:00.

他们为什么要这么做？

And why would they do that?

因为如果他们告诉我晚上9点才有位，我就会去街对面那家餐厅，而那家餐厅也骗我，说晚上8点有位。

Well, because if they told me 09:00, I would've gone to the restaurant down the street that lied to me and told me 08:00.

相反，很多人对餐厅撒了谎。

And then conversely, a lot of people lied to the restaurant.

他们当时会给Alinea打电话，说：嘿。

They would call Alinea back then, and they would say like, hey.

我们想要3月23日六个人的座位。

We want a table for six on March 23.

餐厅会说：非常抱歉。

Say, I'm really sorry.

我们只有四个人的座位。

All we have is a table for four.

他们会说：好的。

They would say, okay.

我订了。

I'll take it.

然后他们带着六个人来了。

And then they show up with six people.

或者更糟的是，他们想要一张两人桌，却说：‘抱歉，我们只有六人桌。’

Or worse, they want a table for two, and they say, I'm sorry, we only have a table for six.

好的，我们定了。

Okay, we'll take it.

我们带四个朋友来就行了。

We'll just bring four friends.

但他们只来了两个人。

They show up as two.

于是突然间，两个人坐在六人桌旁，你白白损失了1000美元的收入。

So all of a sudden, you have two people sitting at six top, and you've just forgone $1,000 of revenue.

现在，把这种情况全年累计起来，仅通过这两种情况，我们就损失了超过100万美元的收入。

Now you multiply that out over the course of the year, and we were losing over $1,000,000 revenue through those two things happening.

餐饮行业里人们常忽略的一件基本事，甚至我们自己的员工也这样，就是没人会把每天的损失乘以7天、52周。

One of the basic things that people don't do in the restaurant industry, and it drives me nuts, even with our own staff, is no one multiplies it out by seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year.

所以，如果你每天损失20美元，就把它加总起来。

So if you have something that's costing you even $20 a day, add it up.

这是一门低利润的生意，因为你没有关注这些大额收入。

It's a low margin business because you're not looking at these chunks of revenue.

我只是在想，为什么我们有200人的排队名单，却不能只让那些愿意先付一点定金的人前来用餐呢？

I was just going, why in the world, if we have a waitlist of 200 people, can we not just limit it to the people who actually are willing to come in and take a little bit of a deposit first?

有趣的是，当我向人们提出这一点时，我说：看看吧，棒球比赛、音乐会、剧院——其他所有形式的娱乐都有某种票务系统。

And what's fascinating about that is that when I said that to people, I was like, look, baseball games, concerts, theater, every other form of entertainment does some sort of ticketing.

但我被告知这是个糟糕的主意，因为餐厅不是娱乐场所。

And I was told that it was a terrible idea because restaurants are not entertainment.

那它们是什么呢？

And I was like, what are they?

关于餐厅，尤其是食物本身，真正有趣的是，因为我们是需要进食的生物，人们对餐厅附加了各种情感、文化和道德负担。

What's really fascinating about restaurants is food in general is that because we are biological creatures that need to eat, people have all sorts of emotional and cultural and ethical baggage on top of what a restaurant is.

而在疫情期间，你正目睹着这一点。

And you're seeing that now during the pandemic.

但归根结底，你其实并不需要外出就餐。

And at the heart though, you don't need to eat out.

外出就餐是一种社交活动。

Eating out is a social endeavor.

这是一种娱乐。

It's entertainment.

它可能是艺术，同时也绝对是维持生命所需。

It might be art, and it definitely is sustenance as well.

从根本上说，我们可以继续推进。

At the core of it, we could charge ahead.

我跟每个人交谈时，他们都告诉我这是个糟糕的主意。

I was told by everybody I talked to that it was a terrible idea.

literally 所有人，除了我妻子。

Literally everybody, except for my wife.

格兰特认为这是个糟糕的主意。

Grant thought it was a terrible idea.

当时我们的总经理也认为这是个糟糕的主意。

Our general manager at the time thought it was a terrible idea.

注意我说的是当时。

Notice I say at the time.

这非常、非常、非常令人沮丧，因为我每天醒来都一直有个念头：我们其实只要收50美元押金，问题就解决了。

It was very, very, very frustrating because I kept having this notion in my head where I'd wake up every day going, we really should just take a $50 deposit and then the problem is solved.

当时我根本不懂行为经济学。

I honestly knew nothing about behavioral economics at the time.

我不知道这些已经被验证过。

I didn't know that these were things that were tested.

我只是知道，作为一名衍生品交易员，如果一天结束时所有东西都归零，那就像是一个到期的期权。

I just knew that as a derivatives trader, if everything went to zero at the end of a day, that's like an expiring option.

而这种期权的价值会随着到期日的临近而变化。

And that option value changes the closer you get to expiration.

但我们却一直保持所有价值不变。

And yet we kept all of our values constant.

在世界其他地方，情况并非如此。

In other parts of the world, that wasn't the case.

2014年某一天，我坐下来写了一篇长文，但在那之前，我先跳过了前面的部分。

I sat down one day in 2014 and wrote this long essay, but before then, skipped ahead.

当我们打造NeXT时，我突然觉得这就像一家剧院式餐厅。

When we were building NeXT, I just decided this is like a theater like restaurant.

它每年会更换三次菜单，每次都完全不一样。

It changes three times a year to an entirely new menu.

我要卖这种餐厅的票。

I'm gonna sell tickets to this.

而且，我公司里的每个人都觉得我是个傻瓜。

And again, everyone in my own company thought I was an idiot.

所以我不得不聘请外部程序员，还故意不接电话。

So I had to hire an outside programmer, had to not get a phone on purpose.

我们勉强赶在截止前完成了开发，但系统立刻就崩溃了，因为这是自己搞的软件。

We barely built it in time and it broke right away because it was a homebrew software.

但就在第一天，我们首次卖出了56.2万美元的餐厅门票。

But then the first day we sold $562,000 in tickets to a restaurant for the first time ever.

我记得那是我生命中最幸福的一天之一，因为我打开了这个东西，人们终于做到了——而我之前已经盯着它看了五六年，心里一直想：我确信这会成功的。

And I remember that as one of the happiest days of my life because I turned on this thing and people did it five or six or seven years of me kind of looking at this going like, I'm pretty sure this will work.

我确信这会成功的。

I'm pretty sure this will work.

整个行业的人告诉我不行，我所有的员工都对我翻白眼。

And everybody in the industry telling me no, all my employees rolling their eyes at me.

我记得我给格兰特打了电话，那时正是NeXT的开业之夜，我对他说：你得来我家一趟。

I remember I called Grant up, and we were opening night for NeXT, and I said, you've gotta come to my house.

他却说：老兄，今晚我们可是要开餐厅啊。

And he was like, dude, we're opening a restaurant tonight.

我走不开。

I can't.

这儿一团糟。

Things are falling apart here.

我说：你就来一下吧，就十分钟。

And I was like, just come, just for ten minutes.

他穿着厨师服和木屐出现了。

And he showed up literally in his chef whites and clogs.

我一定看起来糟透了，因为我连续十天像拍烂片一样，吃着披萨、喝着葡萄酒，拼命把这东西 setup 好。

And I must have looked like hell because I had spent like ten straight days, like a bad movie, eating pizza and drinking wine and trying to get this thing set up.

所以我没刮胡子，也没洗澡。

So I hadn't shaved, hadn't showered.

我看起来就像《大勒布斯基》里的主角。

I looked like the big Lebowski.

我带他上了三楼的小办公室，告诉他：点击那个按钮，那张桌子就会变成可预订状态，然后立刻被卖出去。

I took him up to my little 3rd Floor office and I showed him, I'm like, click on that button, that table will become available and then it will instantly sell.

他照做了。

And he did it.

他问：发生了什么？

And he's like, what happened?

我回答：我们刚收到了625美元进账，而那个人至少两个月内都不会来。

And I was like, we just got $625 in our bank account and that person's not gonna die in for two months.

你打开的任何一个人会立即售出。

And anyone that you open will instantaneously sell.

他说道，这太棒了。

And he was like, that's amazing.

我回答说，是啊，这他妈太棒了。

And I was like, yeah, it's fucking amazing.

然后他笑了。

And then he just laughed.

我说，好吧，我去做饭了。

I was like, okay, I'm gonna go cook.

那就是那种你觉得自己拥有了时光机的时刻。

And that was like one of those moments where you go like, I have a time machine.

当我还是交易员的时候，交易所交易基金刚刚兴起，而它们的自然对冲工具是商品交易所的期货。

When I was a trader, there was exchange traded funds were just starting, and the natural hedge for them was the futures at the Mercantile Exchange.

我是那个提出我们需要通过封闭的蜂窝网络连接这两个交易所的人，这样人们可以直接交流，而不是依赖这么多手势和电话。

I was the guy who said we need to connect these two exchanges via closed end cellular network so that people can talk to each other instead of using all these hand signals and phone calls.

当我经过一年多的时间获得监管批准并完成所有工作后，这个系统一启动，我就在市场上拥有了一个五秒的时光机。

The moment that I got that turned on after over a year of work getting regulatory approvals for it and everything, I had a five second time machine on the market.

现在，人们在高频交易中已经缩短到了皮秒级别。

Now people are down to, like, picoseconds now with high frequency trading.

但当时，真的是一个五秒的时光机。

But at the time, literally five second time machine.

我能在芝加哥收到信息前五秒就看到纽约发生的事情。

I could see what was going on in New York five seconds before it arrived in Chicago.

这种感觉完全一样。

This felt like the same thing.

我能以世界上其他人无法做到的方式经营我的餐厅，而且它成功了。

I can run my restaurant in a way that no one else in the world can't, and it worked.

我的意思是，我们一整年都卖光了每一个座位。

I mean, we sold every single seat for a year.

第一年我们的利润率超过了30%。

We made over 30% margins in the first year.

我们在为人们提供非凡价值的同时，彻底超越了所有目标。

We blew out all of our goals while providing people with an incredible value.

那张开业菜单是85美元，包含12道菜。

That opening menu was $85 for a 12 course menu.

这既令人无比满足，又让人极其沮丧，因为即使我做到了，人们还是会说：‘哦，这招只适用于那一家。’

It was incredibly satisfying and then incredibly frustrating as well, because even after I did it, people would say, Oh, well, that works for that one.

在任何行业中，你都不得不不断证明你的模式在自己的小众领域之外也同样有效。

In any business, you're kind of constantly having to prove that it works outside of your own niche.

即使你回看那些报道，它们也会说：‘哦，这是一家非常独特的餐厅。’

Even if you look back at the articles, they would say, Oh yeah, this is a really unique restaurant.

这家和其他所有餐厅都不一样。

This one's different than all the others.

所以它对他们有效，但对随便一家平价披萨店就不灵了。

So it works for them, but it won't work for pick your casual pizza place.

我当时只想说：不，不，不。

And I was kind of going like, No, no, no.

这就是为什么变量这个词被包含在内。

That's why the variable word is in there.

你可以只收5美元，仍然影响人们的行为。

You can charge $5 and still affect people's behavior.

花了四年时间，但四年后，我实在受不了了，于是开始说出来。

It took four years, but four years later, I just couldn't take it anymore, so I started to talk.

在我们深入探讨一些谈话的起源故事并花大量时间讨论之前，你认为这种票务、预付甚至动态定价的概念是否可以并且应该扩展到其他各种商业领域？

Do you think, before we get into some of the talk origin stories and spend a bunch of time there, do you think that this concept of ticketing, prepayment, and even dynamic pricing can and should be extended to all sorts of other business verticals?

我在想，比如美发沙龙或水疗中心之类的行业。

I'm thinking about like salons or spas, anything like that.

我最初的设想是，如果你回看旧的博客文章并搜索‘餐厅票务’、‘Alinea’，它仍然可以在网上找到。

My original thought, and if you look back at the old blog post and you Google ticketing for restaurants, Alinea, it's still somewhere out there.

我称之为针对时段化业务的动态和可变定价。

I called it dynamic and variable pricing for time slotted businesses.

任何时段化业务都应该实行动态和可变定价，甚至包括你的律师、牙医。

Any business that's time slotted should be dynamically and variably priced right down to your lawyer, frankly, Your dentist.

如果每个人都因为工作时间而想要周六上午10点的预约，为什么看牙医、去美容院或其他类似服务不贵一点呢？

If everyone wants a 10AM Saturday appointment because of work hours, why doesn't it cost more to go to the dentist or a salon or anything else for that matter?

周二上午10点的私人教练客户数量不如周二早上6点那么多。

Personal trainers at 10AM on a Tuesday do not have as many clients as 6AM on a Tuesday.

在我看来，所有这些都应当并且将会实行动态定价。

To me, all of those things should be and will be dynamically priced.

但目前实现这种定价的工具尚未广泛普及。

The tools to do so are not yet widely available.

但你看看亚马逊和Shopify在实体商品上的做法，它们已经在这样做了。

But you look at something like Amazon and Shopify for hard goods, they're doing that already.

这种做法在实体商品上已经被接受了。

It's accepted for hard goods.

但在服务领域，这种做法的接受度较低。

It's less accepted for services.

无论如何，这终将发生。

Inevitably, it's gonna happen.

如果我要开一家干洗店之类的企业，我会立即采用动态定价。

If I was gonna open a dry cleaner or something like that, I would immediately have dynamic pricing.

你能谈谈 Tock 这个平台的起源吗？

Can you discuss the origin of Tok itself?

我想现在我们可以谈谈你那种创新思维如何转化为软件业务，并为全国众多餐厅提供服务。

I think now we can talk about software business that potentially is rolling out the innovative thinking that you have and making it a service for a whole bunch of restaurants to begin all over the country.

Tock 为什么会诞生？

Why did Tock begin?

我们会逐一探讨每个阶段，包括疫情时期一段非凡的经历。

And we'll kind of talk through each stage, including an incredible story through COVID.

我以一个外来者的身份进入餐饮行业，有着奇特的背景。

I came to the restaurant business as an outsider with this weird background.

我在大学主修哲学。

I was a philosophy major in college.

我研究逻辑和语言哲学，并将其应用于衍生品，最终进入了餐饮行业。

I studied logic and philosophy of language and applied it to derivatives and then ended up in the restaurant business.

不可避免地，你会开始想：我需要了解我的顾客。

Inevitably, you start going like, well, I need to know my customers.

我需要开始查看一些数据。

I need to start looking at some data here.

当时所有提供给餐厅的软件——这一点至今仍未改变——其商业模式都在中介餐厅与消费者之间的关系。

All of the software available to restaurants at the time, and this is still true, their business model intermediates the relationship between the business and the consumer.

OpenTable 希望掌控这种关系，因为这是他们盈利的方式。

OpenTable wants to own that relationship because that's how they monetize it.

他们每有一位顾客通过平台预订，就收取一美元，如果餐厅参与他们的促销计划，最高可收七美元。

They get paid a dollar for every diner that books at a restaurant, up until $7 if you enter their promotional plans as the restaurant.

因此，他们向餐厅宣称：是我们带来了顾客，而不是你，不是你那些好点子，也不是我们之前谈到的餐桌服务等等。

So they claim to the restaurant, we deliver the diners, not you, not your great ideas, not the table plate we were talking about and all that.

我当时就想：他们根本没为我们带来任何顾客。

And I was like, they're not delivering any diners for us.

那些顾客都是我们自己吸引来的。

We're doing that.

我们正在创造一种绝佳的体验。

We're making a great experience.

但我并不知道今晚来的是哪位帕特里克·奥肖内西。

And yet I don't know which Patrick O'Shaughnessy is coming in tonight.

所以我也不知道你妻子是左撇子，喜欢喝茶。

So I don't know that your wife is left handed and likes tea.

我不知道你已经来过我另外五家餐厅22次了，因为每家餐厅都是独立的服务器，彼此隔离。

I don't know that you've been to my other five restaurants 22 times because each restaurant is siloed as its own server.

当我深入探究这一切背后的原因——这些公司是如何盈利的，他们的定价计划是什么，数据归谁所有，客户关系归谁掌控——我越来越觉得，这正是创新的契机，但作为老板，这简直让人抓狂。

And the more I dug into the why of all that, how are these companies monetizing it, what are their pricing plans look like, who owns the data, who owns the customer relationship, I started more and more going, this is right for innovation and it's just frustrating as hell as a business owner.

我开发这个前身并不是为了商业化。

I didn't build the predecessor to commercialize it.

我只是为我自己的餐厅开发的，因为我对现有的系统感到不满。

I just built it for my own restaurants because I was dissatisfied with the existing system.

最终我发现，要解决这个问题、编写程序、构建系统，其复杂程度远超我的预期，因为其中涉及的组件实在太多了。

And it ended up being a much bigger problem than I thought in terms of solving it, programming it, building out the system because there's just so many components to it.

这就是为什么以前没人开始做这件事。

And that's why no one had started it before.

有很多公司专门围绕餐厅的排队系统建立，但这只是一个功能，而不是一个应用程序。

There are whole companies built around a wait list for a restaurant, and that's a feature, not an application.

但他们把它做成了一个应用，只是做了一个更好的排队系统，然后以4000万美元卖给了Yelp。

But they turned it into an app, and they just built a little better waitlist thing, and they sold it to Yelp for, $40,000,000.

所以我看到这种情况就会想，这怎么可能成立？

So I would look at this and go, how is that a thing?

这只是一个周末就能完成的项目，而且还没做好。

That's a weekend project, and it's not even executed well.

不过，我得承认，他们确实厉害。

More power to them, mind you.

但我只是对这些零零散散的尝试感到无比沮丧。

But I would just get incredibly frustrated that there are these little peaks and pokes at it.

所以最终，有一天我突然醒悟，读到了《华尔街日报》上关于Reserve、Resy和OpenTable的文章，心想：没人真正理解这一点。

So finally, I woke up literally one day and read this article in The Wall Street Journal about Reserve and Resy and OpenTable and just went, no one gets it.

没人理解这里真正的问题所在。

No one gets what the real problem is here.

我会去听一些行业领袖的看法。

I would listen to some leaders in the industry.

哇，他们也不懂。

Wow, they don't get it either.

与此同时，我知道我自己的餐厅财务状况是什么样子。

Meanwhile, I knew what the finances of my own restaurants looked like.

这个问题并没有他们说的那么难。

This doesn't seem as hard of a problem as they're saying.

当我参加研讨会并与他们交流时，他们的反应非常轻视。

When I would go into conferences and talk to them, it was incredibly dismissed.

我是在周六早上写下了这篇博客文章。

I wrote this blog post literally on Saturday morning.

醒来后读了那篇文章，心想：我应该把所有想法都写进一篇博客里。

Woke up, read the article, said, I should probably dump all my thoughts into a blog post.

五千字，四个小时写完就发布了。

5,000 words in four hours and posted it up.

在头几个月里，它被阅读了几百万次，因为经济学家们很喜欢，他们觉得：哦，这正是行为经济学的体现。

It was read a couple million times in the first couple months because economists loved it because they were like, Oh, this is behavioral economics in action.

一些餐厅老板说：没错，这正是我在想的。

Restaurant owners that were like, Yes, this is what I've been thinking.

现在，如果有200个餐厅老板给你发邮件，你就会陷入每个初创公司都会掉入的陷阱：嗯，大家都觉得这是真的。

Now, if 200 restaurant owners email you, you fall into the trap like every startup going like, well, everybody thinks this is what.

看吧，人们很喜欢这个想法。

Look, people love this idea.

但当然，给你发邮件的这200家餐厅只是少数群体。

But of course, the 200 restaurants that emailed you are the ones that are the minority.

我当时并不知道这一点。

I didn't know that at the time.

跨越鸿沟这个说法确实有道理。

The crossing the chasm thing is kind of real.

所以早期采用者都会打电话给你，说你太棒了。

So the early adopters are all gonna call you up and say that you're brilliant.

我们想要这个软件，还有其他所有东西。

We want the software and all that.

我确实上当了，于是给布莱恩·菲茨帕特里克打电话说：你看。

Well, I fell for that and called Brian Fitzpatrick and said, look.

我需要把这个做成一家公司。

I need to make this into a company.

当时他是谷歌芝加哥分部的负责人。

And he was the head of Google in Chicago at the time.

我想着得雇两个工程师，把这东西做出来。

I was like, need to hire two engineers and build this thing out.

我严重低估了所需付出的努力。

I was seriously under imagining what it would take.

在创业初期，这种天真是很宝贵的。

That naivete is great to have when you're starting a company.

我曾经投资过其他软件公司。

I had invested in other software companies.

我从小就开始编程，虽然现在我根本不会编程了。

I grew up programming as a kid, not that I can program at all now.

但我了解这需要些什么。

But I knew what was sort of required.

他辞去了谷歌的工作。

And he quit Google.

我没指望他会这么做，但他只是说：我想辞职，和你一起创业。

I didn't expect him to, but he just said, I want to quit and start this with you.

我们雇用了几位非常出色的工程师，他们中有一位曾听过我在谷歌的一次演讲，那次演讲是关于企业时段动态定价的。

And we hired a few really great engineers who had heard me, one of whom heard me give a talk at Google, actually, about dynamic and variable pricing for time slot of businesses.

那场演讲讲的是衍生品，以及衍生品如何应用于金融产品以外的领域。

And it was a talk about derivatives and how derivatives can apply to things other than financial products.

这些工程师都非常技术宅，理解这些事物背后的数学和统计原理，并对将它们应用到一个占GDP 5%的行业感到着迷。

These folks are super geeky engineers and understood the math and statistics of these things and whatnot, and were enamored of trying to apply that to an industry that's 5% of GDP.

所以我们最初只有五个人，真的挤在一个壁橱里。

So we started out with a group of five people literally in a closet.

我们在Alinea餐厅办公室里借了一个闲置的储藏室。

We had like a spare storeroom in the Alinea offices.

事情就是这样开始的。

That's how it started.

能够把这款产品卖给这个行业，真是令人着迷。

It's been fascinating to actually sell this thing to the industry.

你能谈谈最早期的情况吗？你们是如何决定优先关注哪些餐厅客户，以及优先提供哪些功能的？

Can you talk about what it was like in the earliest days and how you decided which restaurant customers to focus on and which features to deliver to them first.

我总是觉得，在开发软件时，最大的挑战在于：你虽然知道最终目标是什么，但实现路径的先后顺序对成败至关重要，而且很难保持自律。

I always find this to be a huge challenge in building software is you kind of know where you're going in the end state, but the sequencing is really critical to success or failure and hard to stay disciplined on.

那么在Talk的早期阶段，情况是怎样的？

So how did that go in the early days of talk?

你们优先关注了哪些客户？最先交付了什么功能？

Who did you focus on, and what did you deliver first?

那么，你是如何决定这两件事的策略呢？

And and what was your strategy for deciding those two things?

我看了其他人是怎么做的。

I looked at what everyone else was doing.

而其他人、我们全球的竞争对手，他们研究了全球每一个预订系统，他们所做的就是复制OpenTable的大部分或全部功能，然后免费提供产品以获取市场份额。

And what everyone else was doing, our competitors worldwide, they looked at every booking system worldwide, And what they all did was that they copied part or as much as they could of the feature set of OpenTable and then gave the product away for free to gather market share.

这是一种标准的商业模式，就是打造一个稍好一点的迭代版‘捕鼠器’，然后以更低的价格击败竞争对手。

That is a standard playbook kind of thing to do, which is, hey, we'll make the slightly better iterative mousetrap and then underprice the competition.

我们可能会宣传一两个新功能，但其实我们并不想在这里开创什么新天地，因为我们不想吓到人们。

We tout a new feature or two, but really, it's we're not trying to break new ground here because we don't wanna scare people.

当时，这正是获得融资的方式。

That is exactly what was getting funded at the time.

我研究了这些产品，心想：这些功能对我来说，和我在OpenTable上能做的没什么区别。

And I looked at the products, I was like, this doesn't do anything for me that I couldn't do on OpenTable.

是的，它可能是免费的。

And, yeah, it might be free.

但如果你免费赠送东西，吸引来的人就是那些需要免费的人。

But if you give something away from free, the people that you attract are the people who need free.

所以，以一种奇怪的方式，你得到了最差的客户。

So in a weird way, you get the worst customers.

如果人们对价格如此敏感，他们可能并没有蓬勃发展。

If people are that price sensitive, they're probably not thriving.

于是我们坐下来，在公司成立的前六周里，我们纯粹是用白板把所有东西都画了出来。

So we sat down, and for the first six weeks of the company, we literally just whiteboarded out everything.

前六个月的目标客户是谁？

What is the target customer in the first six months?

我唯一能毫无疑问证明的是，对于某种高端餐厅，这将是一个改变游戏规则的举措。

The one thing I could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt was that for a certain kind of prefix high end restaurant, this would be a game changing thing.

这能为他们带来数百万美元的收入。

It would make them millions of dollars.

而且，这些餐厅通常也是知名度高、愿意承担风险的餐厅。

They were also tended to be the high profile restaurants and the restaurants that could take risk.

所以我们决定全力聚焦高端市场。

So we were like double down on the high end thing.

这有点像特斯拉的策略。

It's kind of like the Tesla approach.

先打造豪华车型，再逐步向下渗透市场。

Let's build the fancy car first and then work our way down market.

其他人都在试图制造大众甲壳虫，通过免费赠送来大量销售。

Everyone else is trying to build the Volkswagen Bug and sell a ton of them by giving away for free.

我记得当时和风投们交谈过。

I remember talking to VCs at the time.

他们问：你的总潜在市场有多大？

They're going like, what's your TAM?

我回答：我的总潜在市场占全球GDP的很大一部分。

And I'm like, my TAM is a giant percentage of GDP in the world.

是的，但你只服务高端餐厅。

Yeah, but you're only for high end restaurants.

我说：不，不，不，不。

I'm like, no, no, no, no.

我们就是从这个开始的。

We're starting with that.

然后我们会向下渗透市场。

And we will go down market.

我的意思是，当时很多著名的风投告诉我，这根本行不通。

I mean, had very famous VCs tell me that this will never work.

你需要采取B2C的策略。

You need to have a b to c strategy.

这些竞争对手在广告和推广上每笔下载要花25到50美元，而我们当时每次新增一家高端餐厅，就能获得成千上万的新客户——虽然只有几千，但确实是成千上万，因为人们会主动寻找这些餐厅。

These other guys are paying $25 to $50 per download on advertising and promotion, whereas we're getting thousands at the time, just a couple thousand, but thousands of new clients every time we add a high end restaurant because people are seeking out that restaurant.

这回到我的观点：OpenTable的网络并不是在帮用户找到餐厅。

That goes back to my point that the network of OpenTable wasn't finding the restaurant.

如果我们拿到了法国洗衣店、十一号麦迪逊公园、肥鸭餐厅、塔利尔·克伦和所有这些米其林三星餐厅，人们不管用什么预订系统都会去这些地方，因为他们根本不在乎用的是什么预订系统。

It's like if we got the French Laundry and eleven Madison Park and the Fat Duck and Talier Crenn and all these Michelin three star restaurants, people people are gonna go to them no matter what the booking system was because they didn't care what the booking system was.

所以我们能免费获得第一批百万用户，然后通过每月向这些餐厅收取700美元的费用，提供极佳的投资回报率。

So we'll get our first million users for free, and then we'll provide a great ROI on the $700 a month we're charging to these restaurants.

顺便说一句，我们将处理数百万美元的交易。

And by the way, we'll process millions of dollars.

我们会从POS系统中提取资金，从根本上成为一家支付处理公司。

We'll pull that from the POS systems, and we'll be a payment processing company at the core.

这就是我们长期赚钱的方式。

That's how we will make our money in the long run.

我告诉你，风投界没人相信这一点。

And I'm telling you, nobody believed it in the VC world.

但也不是没人相信，因为当我有50到80家，甚至100家餐厅加入后，一些非常优秀的风投很快就相信了。

Now not nobody believed it because I had some really great VCs that very quickly believed that once we had 50 to 80 to a 100 restaurants on.

Origin Ventures的杰森·赫尔策尔，我曾担任芝加哥大学布斯商学院新企业挑战赛的评委。

Origin Ventures, Jason Heltzer, I served as a judge at the New Venture Challenge at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

我曾几次坐在他旁边。

Sat next to him a couple of times on that.

我当时就想，哦，这家伙真懂。

And I was like, Oh, this guy gets it.

他提出了很多尖锐的问题，等等。

He asked the tough questions here and all that.

他总是对我说：如果你哪天打算为演讲拿钱，一定告诉我。

He always said to me, If you're ever gonna take money for talk, let me know.

虽然我们从未打算这样做，但大约一年后我意识到，这将是一个长期项目，一个十年的项目。

While we never intended to, I recognized about a year into it that this is gonna be a long term project, ten year project.

要建成它需要数百人，而不是几十人。

It's gonna take hundreds of people to build it, not dozens.

我出去筹钱了。

I went out to raise money.

我给他打了电话。

I called him up.

他来了。

He came in.

他们谈了一个小时。

They talked for an hour.

一小时后，我们就拿到了一份疯狂估值的条款清单。

We had a term sheet at a crazy valuation, an hour later.

这是因为多年来，他一直看到我是如何亲自运营的，他知道我致力于把事情做好。

And that was because for years, he saw how I personally operated, and he knew that I was committed to doing it well.

但直到今年，这个商业模式才真正引起大多数人的共鸣。

But the business model didn't resonate with most people until, honestly, this year.

现在人们意识到，在纽约、洛杉矶和旧金山建立网络，不如在堪萨斯城、明尼阿波利斯等城市建立网络来得更具韧性。

People now see that creating a network in, say, New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco is not as resilient as creating a network in Kansas City, Minneapolis, and those cities as well.

你需要覆盖每一个地方，需要各种不同的餐厅，并且要弄清楚如何为这些企业的各个层级提供投资回报。

You need everywhere and you need all sorts of different restaurants and you need to figure out how to provide the ROI to all strata of these businesses.

一旦我们拥有了能为高端餐厅提供卓越投资回报的所有功能，我们就刻意迅速转向低端市场，开发所有这些功能并不断改进。

As soon as we had all the features that could provide a great ROI for really high end restaurants, we started going hard down market fast on purpose and building out all of those features and breaking them.

然后，我们所有的工程师都去餐厅当了迎宾员。

And then all of our engineers went and worked in restaurants as hosts.

这些人之前花时间盯着电脑屏幕，或者突然在餐厅为顾客签到。

These are people who spent their time staring at a computer screen or suddenly checking people in at a restaurant.

因此，他们突然对终端用户产生了同理心。

So they suddenly had empathy for the end user.

我们没有进行焦点小组访谈。

And we didn't conduct focus groups.

我们没有把餐厅老板请到我们的办公室。

We didn't bring the restaurants into our offices.

我们做了相反的事。

We did the opposite.

我们把我们的员工送到餐厅里去工作。

We took our people, and we put them into the restaurant.

两个了不起的洞察，一个是最后一个——把人放进餐厅，另一个是精心挑选首批客户所体现的价值。

Two incredible insights, the one being that last one there, putting people in there, but also the value of fending care and time choosing your first customers.

令人惊讶的是，企业的成败在多大程度上取决于它选择的首批客户。

It's so interesting how much of a business gets determined by who it picks as its first customers.

感觉这一点被谈论得还不够。

Feel like that doesn't get talked about enough.

还有你没有选择的人。

And who you don't pick, too.

三年前，有一些餐厅和餐厅集团想使用我们的服务。

There are restaurants and restaurant groups that wanted to use us three years ago.

当我看到他们的需求和他们想做的事情时，我就觉得，我们还没准备好迎接你们。

When I saw what they needed and what they wanted to do, I just went, we're not quite ready for you yet.

他们当时已经准备好了，随时可以签约。

And they were, like, ready to sign on.

但我却说，不行，如果我们现在这么做，肯定会失败，因为我们还没有这个特定的排队功能或到店登记功能。

And I was like, no, we'll fail if we do this right now because we don't have this particular waitlist feature or a walk in feature.

有太多不同的方面了。

There's so many different aspects.

比如一家餐厅实际上会销售十种不同的东西。

Like a restaurant actually sells 10 different things.

当时，我们只能服务这十项中的两项。

At the time, we can only service two of the 10.

与此同时，他们还有五个其他系统在服务全部十项。

And meanwhile, they had five other systems that were servicing all 10.

我当时就想，你知道吗？

And I was like, you know what?

当我们准备好了，我会主动联系你。

When we're ready for you, I will call you.

然后我希望你能认真对待我。

And then I want you to take me seriously.

我们一遍又一遍地这样做。

And we did that over and over and over again.

直到三年后，我们才有了销售团队，这简直不可思议。

We didn't even have a sales team at all until three years in, which is crazy.

我们以非常高效的方式使用资本发展了公司。

We grew the company very, very capital efficiently.

我们做到这一点的一种方式是，这个月能否上线超过100家餐厅？

And one of the ways we did that is can we onboard more than a 100 restaurants this month?

不行？

No?

好吧。

Okay.

那我们就先集中精力做好50家，做到完美。

Well, let's just concentrate on doing 50 then and do it perfectly.

这种自律很少见。

That discipline is rare.

一遍又一遍地看到它。

See it over and over again.

我觉得这可能也是芝加哥的特点。

I think it's a Chicago thing too.

或者也许只是因为我一直经营着盈利的企业。

Or maybe it's just that I always ran profitable businesses.

在初创公司中，'烧钱'这个说法简直是世界上最糟糕的词，因为我并没有在烧钱。

The concept of the phrase burn in a startup is just the worst word in the world because I'm not burning money.

我是在进行投资。

I'm investing it.

投资初创公司，尤其是科技初创公司，其时间跨度远比人们想象的要长。

The time horizon on investing money in a startup, tech startup especially, is a lot longer than people think.

对于每一个像Instagram那样的案例，你突然获得大量用户，然后它就像一个迅速膨胀的独角兽，首次融资就达到一亿美元，估值达到十亿美元，或者以十亿美元出售等等。

For every Instagram out there where you get a ton of users and all of sudden it's like this ballooning unicorn and their first raise is a $100,000,000 and billion dollar valuation, or they sell it for a billion dollars or whatever.

绝大多数SaaS公司必须在早期就高效地管理资本。

The vast majority of SaaS based companies have to work capital efficiently early on.

每当我看到某个月份出现亏损——这种情况会持续很长时间——我都会感到非常沮丧。

And I just anytime I saw a negative month, which was gonna be for a long time, I was, like, just viscerally upset.

从理智上讲，我知道要打造一个可扩展的事业，就必须有长远的投资视野。

Intellectually, I knew that in order to grow something that's scalable, you're gonna have to have a long time horizon of investment.

话虽如此，我的餐厅在开业第二个月就开始盈利了。

That said, my restaurants are making money in the second month that they were open.

现在他们正在偿还一大笔前期投资，但我想着，嗯，十八个月或二十四个月后，我们就能把这笔钱全部收回。

Now they're paying back a giant upfront investment, But I could kind of go like, well, yeah, in eighteen months or twenty four months, we'll have all that paid off.

从那以后，只要持续运营，它就是盈利的。

And for as long as it runs after that, it's profitable.

交易公司也是同样的情况。

The trading firm was the same way.

它是盈利的。

It was profitable.

对我来说，为一家多年后才可能盈利的企业工作，这非常奇怪。

It was very strange to me that working for a business that wouldn't be profitable for years.

我认为正因如此，我们吸引到了理解并欢迎这种心态的人。

And I think because of that, we attracted people who understood and welcomed that mindset.

但这种心态也让许多投资者在新冠疫情之前望而却步。

But that also was a mindset that turned off a lot of investors prior to COVID.

我想谈谈Toc在疫情期间的作为，但我感到有必要先就餐厅业务本身做一些背景铺垫。

I want to talk about what Toc did during COVID, but I feel obligated to do some setup first around just the restaurant business, generally speaking.

你提到过它有十种盈利方式。

You talked about the 10 ways it makes money.

这让我想到一句老话：在许多行业中，利润的三分之一归制造商，三分之一归批发商，三分之一归零售商。

It makes me think of the old adage, a third, a third, a third of the margin goes to the manufacturer, the wholesaler, and the retailer in a lot of businesses.

我总是听说餐厅靠酒水赚钱，真想听听你的看法。

And I would just love to hear you always hear the restaurants make their money on booze.

我希望能请你描述一下典型的餐厅商业模式，从食材种植一直讲到餐厅的零售价格。

I would love you just to describe sort of the canonical restaurant business model from the food in the ground through to the retail price at the restaurant.

一般来说，一家普通的餐厅是如何运作的？这样我们可以在讨论新冠疫情如何改变这一切之前，先打好基础。

Generally speaking, how does a simple restaurant business work so that we can lay that groundwork before talking about how COVID changed things?

我不会用一个简单的例子。

I'm not gonna use a simple one.

我会用一个复杂的例子，然后倒着讲。

I'm gonna use a complicated one and then go backwards.

格拉姆西酒馆是我认为美国最好的餐厅之一。

So Gramercy Tavern is one of, I think, the best restaurants in America.

这是一个很棒的地方。

It's a great place.

它很有代表性。

It's iconic.

我们就以格拉姆西酒馆为例吧。

Let's use Gramercy Tavern.

当你到达格拉姆西酒馆的正门时，他们完全不知道你会做什么。

When you arrive at the front door of Gramercy Tavern, they have no idea what you're gonna do.

我说的这句话是字面意思。

And when I say that, I mean that very literally.

他们不知道你会买什么。

They have no idea what you're gonna buy.

那里有一个休闲的酒吧区域，提供更随意的餐食。

They have a bar area there that's casual, that serves more casual fare.

还有一个你可以直接点餐的吧台。

They have a walk up bar that you could be at.

所以现在他们有两种不同的产品：一个是休闲餐厅，一个是酒吧。

So now we have two different things that they're selling, your casual restaurant and your bar.

然后在主用餐区，你会坐下来。

Then in the main dining room, you sit down.

他们有一个非常棒的单点菜单。

They have an a la carte menu, which is amazing.

迈克尔·安东尼是一位出色的主厨，这个地方很棒。

Michael Anthony's great chef, great place.

然后你还可以选择品尝菜单。

Then you have a tasting menu.

他们会对坐下用餐的客人说：如果你想选品尝菜单，你们所有人必须都选品尝菜单。

They tell the people sitting down, if you wanna do the tasting menu, you all need to do the tasting menu.

然后我们有两种类型的品尝菜单。

And then we have two kinds of tasting menu.

我们有一种普通的杂食性品尝菜单，还有一种素食品尝菜单。

We have the regular omnivore one, and we have a vegetarian tasting menu.

如果你选择品尝菜单，还可以额外搭配葡萄酒，或者直接购买酒单。

And if you do the tasting menu, you can add on wine pairings or you can buy the wine list.

然后他们提供私人用餐服务。

And then they have private dining.

他们那里有两个私人用餐室，专门用于特殊场合、企业活动等各种需求。

So they have two private dining rooms there that are sold for special occasions, corporate events, all that sort of stuff.

此外，他们还出了一本食谱。

Plus they have a cookbook.

所以，他们销售的食物和服务包括：酒吧、休闲餐饮、单点菜单、两种套餐菜单、私人用餐以及周边商品。

So eat things that they are selling, the bar, the casual, the a la carte, two prefix menus, private dining, and merchandise.

当你预订时，你唯一需要说的就是‘我会来’。

When you go to book that, the only thing you say is I'm showing up.

这效率低得惊人。

That's incredibly, incredibly inefficient.

他们会说：是的，但只有4%的人会选择品尝菜单。

And what they'll say is they'll say, well, yeah, but only 4% of the people buy the tasting menu.

但这是因为你依赖服务员在那一刻向他们推荐这个选项，然后餐桌上的每个人都必须当场同意。

But that's because you're relying on the server to surprise them with this as an option, and then everyone at the table needs to agree to it at that moment.

如果有一人不同意，这个选项就会被否决，所有人都会点单点菜品。

If one person doesn't agree with it, it gets vetoed and everyone orders a la carte.

如果你在周六晚上推出这个选项，而那时你的需求是供应量的三倍，有700人想来，但你只有250个座位。

If you put that up on a Saturday night when your demand is three times your supply, there's 700 people that wanna go there, but you only have 250 seats.

这个数字是我编的。

I'm making that number up.

如果你说，我打算只出售100份品尝菜单，那你肯定能全部卖完。

If you say, well, I'm gonna put a 100 of these up for sale as tasting menus only, you will sell all 100.

而且在客人到来之前，你就能知道他们将享用什么，而不是那些点单点菜品的人。

And you will know before people come in what they're gonna get for those people, not the a la carte people.

对于那些想在吧台用餐的人，你可以设置一个单独的按钮，写着‘我要 Casual 餐饮’。

The people who wanna do it at the bar, you have a separate button that says, I want the casual aspect.

如果你想象同样的模式应用到一家披萨店，你最喜欢的那家堂食披萨店，前厅烤炉旁会有一些座位，人们喜欢坐在那里观看披萨的制作过程。

If you imagine all that same thing applying to a pizza place, your favorite pizza place to go to get pizza on premise, there will be seats in front of the pizza oven that people like to sit at to watch the making of the pizza.

会有一个很棒的角落桌子，好像常客总能坐到那里。

There will be the really nice corner table that seems like the regulars always get.

还会有一些私人活动，以及出售T恤。

And there will be private events and there will be t shirts for sale.

所以我一直想知道，收入来源是什么？

So I always went, what are the revenue sources?

你也提到了成本方面，所有那些都存在。

You mentioned the cost side as well, and there is all of that.

但餐厅从未专注于收入端，除了像‘本月卖最多玛格丽塔的服务员能获得奖金’这样的做法，这本质上意味着你一开始就会听到糟糕的推销。

But restaurants never concentrated on their revenue side other than going like, whoever sells the most Mai Tais this month gets a bonus to their servers, which essentially means that you get a terrible sales pitch at the beginning.

所以我的整个理念是，我们为餐厅提供了真正能促进销售的工具。

So my whole thing is we gave restaurants tools to actually sell.

另一方面，如果你更高效地销售，你的利润率就会越来越高，因为最后赚到的每一分钱都是纯利润。

The other part of that is that if you sell more efficiently, your margins get better and better because the last dollars in are the dollars you keep.

你的固定成本是已知的，比如租金、水电费，诸如此类。

Your fixed costs are known, rent, utilities, all that sort of stuff.

当你减少浪费时，你的商品销售成本会变得越来越好。

Your cost of goods sold look better and better and better when you have less waste.

所以这实际上对环境也有好处。

So it's actually good for the environment.

这对你食材成本也有利。

It's good for your food costs.

通常劳动力占30%到35%，食材成本占30%到35%，固定成本、保险和各种管理费用占30%，剩下的就是你的利润，大约10%。

It's usually 30 to 35% labor, 30 to 35% food costs, 30% on your fixed costs and insurance and overhead and all that, whatever you're left with, 10%.

如果你能降低食材成本，提高运营效率，甚至在周二晚上9:30这样的冷门时段也能实现高需求，你的利润率就能达到20%到30%。

Well, if you can eliminate food costs, if you can run more efficiently, if you can have high demand on a Tuesday at 09:30 at night, you will make 20 to 30% restaurant.

我接触过数十家餐厅，他们都表示，利润率超过20%是完全不可能的。

I've had dozens of restaurants I've talked to where they said that it's completely impossible to make more than 20%.

这根本不可能。

It's just not possible.

一次又一次地，我发现当他们做出这些小改变后，即使是那些在收入端原本很普通的休闲餐厅，也会突然解锁出他们从未想到过的利润。

Over and over and over again, I see that when they make these small changes, even the casual places on the revenue side, suddenly it unlocks money that they just were like, wow.

分母相同，分子变大了。

The denominator is the same and the numerator got bigger.

这其实没那么难，但就是没人这么做。

It's just not that hard, but no one does it.

没人高效运营，人们害怕改变。

No one runs it efficiently, and people are scared of change.

人们会说，那那些想打电话的顾客怎么办？

People are like, well, what about our customers that want to call on the telephone?

或者那些不想吃品尝菜单的优质顾客怎么办？

Or what about the people what about the great customer that doesn't want the tasting menu?

我说，太好了。

And I was like, great.

预留四张桌子。

Hold back four tables.

点击那个按钮，预留四张桌子。

Click that button and hold back four tables.

我不是让你为了每个人彻底改变你的业务。

I'm not telling you to change the entirety of your business for every person.

我是说，运行一下我们一开始讨论的那些实验，看看结果如何。

I'm saying run some of those experiments we talked about at the beginning and see what the outcomes are.

总的来说，我对这个行业愿意这样做程度感到非常失望。

And I've been incredibly unimpressed in general with the industry of their willingness to do that.

你认为从Tock的这些经验中，关于明确收入来源并更主动地向客户展示、减少不确定性，有哪些可推广的教训？

What do you think the generalizable lessons are from these learnings at Tock about specifying revenue sources and exposing them to customers more deliberately, reducing uncertainty?

如果你只是从一般商业角度思考，你认为哪些经验可以非常广泛地应用，而不仅限于餐厅？

If you were just thinking about business, generally speaking, what lessons do you think could be very broadly applied, not just to restaurants?

了解你卖的是什么，然后真正把它卖出去，这听起来非常

Know what you're selling and then actually sell it, which sounds incredibly

显而易见。

obvious.

愚蠢。

Stupid.

是的。

Yeah.

不。

No.

我知道。

I know.

这太蠢了。

It's so stupid.

我跟你说真的。

I'm telling you what.

应该开一门关于这个的商业课程。

There should be a business course on that.

如果我问格拉姆西酒吧你们卖什么，他们会说食物。

If I ask Gramercy Tavern what you're selling, they'd say food.

我会说，不对。

And I'd go, no.

你实际上销售的是七种不同的体验，外加一些商品。

You're actually selling seven different experiences plus some merchandise.

与此同时，你直到顾客进来之后才去分类这些体验。

Meanwhile, you haven't categorized those experiences until after someone comes in.

你甚至没有告知消费者这些体验的存在。

You haven't even informed the consumer that they exist.

当你去提你买好的车时，你希望被惊喜吗？

Do you want to be surprised when you go to pick up your car that you bought?

如果车的颜色变了，他们还试图说服你买这辆，会不会很奇怪？

Would it be really weird if the car had a different color and they tried to sell you on that one?

是的，你会直接走出店门。

Yeah, you'd walk out of the place.

我给Talk的所有新员工以及整个行业做的演讲之一，叫做‘星期二不是星期六，还有七个你明明知道却什么都没做的道理’。

One of the talks I give to all of our new employees at Talk and to the industry is called Tuesday is not Saturday and seven other things you already know but are doing nothing about.

这其实非常明显。

It's really obvious.

你不需要是餐饮业的专家，也能知道世界上几乎所有餐厅，可能99%以上，周六晚上的生意都比周二晚上好。

You don't need to be an expert in the restaurant business to know every restaurant in the world, probably, or 99% with some anomaly, are busier on Saturday night than Tuesday night.

好的。

Okay.

所以我们有这一点。

So we have that.

即使是一家快餐店也不会对此有异议。

You're not gonna get an argument even from a diner.

是的。

Yeah.

周六晚上外出吃饭的人更多。

More people eat out on Saturday night.

你打算怎么应对这种情况？

What are you gonna do about that?

你打算怎么让周二有更多人来？

How are you gonna get more people in on Tuesday?

你会采取哪些措施来吸引他们呢？

What levers are you gonna pull to get them in?

不知为何，整个行业除了七十年代的早鸟特惠、蓝盘特惠和小餐馆外，高端餐饮业都直接表示：不，我们档次太高，不屑于这么做。

And for some reason, the whole industry, with the exception of the early bird special in the seventies and the blue plate special and the diners, the high end industry just went like, yeah, no, we're too good for that.

我们不会调整价格，因为怕惹恼周六晚上的顾客。

We're not gonna pull the pricing lever because we might piss off the people on Saturday night.

因为这是我员工给我的理由。

Because that was the argument given to me by my own employees.

那周六的顾客会不会因为自己付得更多而生气呢？

Well, won't the people on Saturday be pissed that they're paying more?

不会。

No.

坐在球场五十码线第十排的人，会因为他们花了500美元看球赛，而旁边看台的人只花了80美元而生气吗？

Do people sitting on the 50 yard line on the tenth row, are they pissed off that they spent $500 in the football game instead of $80 to be in those bleeds?

不会。

No.

这很正常。

That's like a normal thing.

另一点是，人们买不到你没有出售的东西。

The other thing is people can't buy what you aren't selling.

你必须在人们生活的地方提供信息，而现在人们都生活在手机上的互联网上。

You have to have the information readily available where people live, and people live on the Internet now on their phones.

如果你不在那里销售，不只是说‘来我的餐厅吃这道美味的食物’，而是如果你不销售这些体验，不说明‘我们披萨店有个大家都想要的绝佳角落座位，每人需付10美元押金，因为我们不能让这个座位空着’。

And if you are not selling there, not just saying, hey, come to my restaurant, eat this delicious thing, but if you're not selling those experiences, if you're not saying, hey, we've got this awesome corner table at our pizza place that everybody wants, and it's a $10 deposit per person because we can't have no shows at that table.

每人10美元的沉没成本，他们在到达前一周就已经在心理上完成了支付。

The sunk cost of that $10 per person is mentally done a week before they arrive.

他们到店后会花更多钱，而且更开心，因为他们需要等位，却得到了店里最好的座位。

They end up spending more once they get there, and they're happier because they need to wait for the table and they got the best table in the place.

这简直是三赢。

It's like win win win.

拥有这些杠杆和工具，无论做什么生意，都能真正实现销售，这至关重要。

Having those levers and those tools to actually sell regardless of what business it is is massive.

出版也是同样的道理。

Same thing goes for publishing.

我们自己出版所有的书籍。

We publish all of our own books.

上周，我们为一家餐厅一周卖出了12万美元的书籍，利润率远高于餐厅本身，但我们是自己销售的。

Last week, sold a $120,000 of books in a week for a restaurant with margins much better than the restaurant, but we actually sell them ourselves.

我拥有邮件列表。

I have mailing lists.

我拥有网站。

I have websites.

我拥有Instagram和Facebook。

I have Instagram and Facebook.

我们每天投入几千美元做广告，并且拥有这本书的版权。

We're running a couple thousand dollars of ads per day, and we own the rights to the book.

搞定。

Done.

没那么难。

Not that hard.

这又回到了最初的问题。

That goes back to the original thing.

拥有它。

Own it.

出版社并不拥有我们的书。

The publisher doesn't own our books.

我们拥有。

We do.

然后去销售。

And sell it.

这并不是什么难事。

This is not hard stuff.

让我感到惊讶的是，行业中这么多人认为商业与他们的道德信念相悖，尽管这听起来很奇怪。

It's amazing to me that so many people in the industry don't there's a lot of artists in the industry that view commerce as antithetical to their ethical beliefs, as weird as that sounds.

然而，这些因素让整个艺术表达和创作部分变得更加可能。

And yet so much of that makes the whole artistic expression and creative part of this more possible.

通过像经营企业一样成功运作，你创造了更多机会去做他们真正想做的事。

By running it successfully like a business, you create more opportunity to do more of the thing they want to do.

是的。

Yeah.

是的。

Yeah.

我的意思是，归根结底，如果你一直在亏钱，就无法持续运营。

I mean, at the end of the day, you can't operate if you're losing money.

顺便说一句，有些餐厅已经运营了几十年，本质上是非营利性的，但它们并不在意。

And there are restaurants out there, by the way, that have run for decades, nonprofits essentially, and they don't mind.

这没问题。

And that's fine.

对他们来说，这完全合理。

That's totally valid for them.

但那不是我想做的。

But that's not what I wanted to do.

而且我觉得很多时候人们会说，你们能这么做是因为你们是Linea。

And I think a lot of times people say, well, you guys can do that because you're a Linea.

你们可以勇往直前，因为你们是Linea，或者你们可以卖自己的书，因为你们是Linea。

You can charge ahead because you're a Linea, or you can sell your own books because you're a Linea.

我总是说，不，不，不。

And I always say, no, no, no.

我们是Linea，是因为我们做了这些事情。

We're a Linea because we do those things.

你把因果搞反了。

You're getting the order wrong.

这很难做到。

It's hard to do.

这很糟糕。

It sucks.

我们曾经多次做过一些愚蠢且不成功的事情。

There's been many times we've done stupid things that haven't worked.

然后你就把它们扔掉，继续前进。

And then you junk them, and you you move on.

在出版方面，你还学到了其他什么经验吗？

Any other lessons that you've learned from publishing?

你之前提到过这是你做并且享受的事情。

You mentioned that earlier as something that you do and you enjoy doing.

你提到了更高的利润率。

You mentioned the higher margins.

关于出版，你还有其他想法吗？我认为，就像餐厅一样，很多人会本能地认为这是个糟糕的生意。

Any other thoughts on publishing, which I think, again, like restaurants, many would knee jerk reactions say is a bad business?

如果你向一个行业提问，而他们不愿告诉你答案，这通常意味着有人正在赚大钱。

If you ask questions of an industry and they won't tell you the answer, that's always a good sign that someone's getting very wealthy.

在出版业，如果你问一位作者——随便问哪位作者——印一本书花了多少钱？

In publishing, if you ask an author, ask any author, how much did it cost to print the book?