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他是Napster、Facebook、Spotify的創始人之一|《財富》雜志專訪肖恩·帕克

Clifton Leaf
2018-06-24

在Spotify成為上市公司之際,《財富》雜志采訪了肖恩·帕克,他是該公司最早的上市推動者之一。在采訪中,帕克分享了他鐘愛這家在線音樂巨頭的原因(與遺憾)和其他故事。

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帕克在2016年癌癥免疫療法研究所成立發布會現場。Courtesy of The Parker Foundation

《財富》:在你的幫助下,音樂流媒體服務公司Spotify發展成為了一家國際巨頭,而且在今年4月上市,估值達到了約300億美元。它的成功似乎圓了多年前你在音樂分享先驅Napster上未完成的夢想。你與Spotify之間的合作是什么時候開始的?

肖恩·帕克:我托人將自己引薦給了丹尼爾·艾克,他是公司的創始人之一。我們在紐約見了面,談了很長的時間,倒是找引薦人花了不少時間。我并未意識到,我們可能在某一地方曾有過交集,也就是在網上(在一個聊天室)。事實證明,那時候我確實認識簡·庫姆,但直到我和簡見面之后才知道他是WhatsApp的聯合創始人。當時我想,“等等,不會吧。我們都來自于同一家公司,而且共同成立了一家價值數十億美元的公司。這太詭異了。”過去有一段時間,我覺得當時那些癡迷于互聯網的人意識到了互聯網無限的可能性,那些互聯網可能性的純粹論者則會天馬行空地想象借助互聯網可以做的各類事情。進入早期采納者這個圈子是有益的。你看待事物的角度會發生些許變化。

當艾克和我在紐約見面時,他直截了當地對我說:“你知道自己是再次往火坑里跳吧。你真的想再經歷一次嗎?你知道你的對手都是誰吧,不是嗎?”

這里的對手就是唱片行業,它的起訴讓Napster關門大吉。

我知道。但我覺得我已經認識了大多數唱片公司的高管。我對他們有了更深入的了解。

你了解他們的擔憂吧。

是的,但更重要的是,唱片行業的大難已經臨頭。這個行業已經崩潰了。CD銷量的持續下滑也為嘗試新鮮的業務模式提供了一個合法的窗口。與此同時,其替代模式——蘋果采用的99美分下載——并沒有奏效。這一模式并未能彌補CD銷售的虧損。即便如此,我們在經歷了兩年的談判之后才讓Spotify進入了美國。這是一個很大的挑戰。

你擔任Spotify董事一職長達7年之久。鑒于當時的其他種種工作需要,包括你對免疫療法治療癌癥的探索,你都在那里忙些什么,是風投公司的大量投資業務嗎?

有關音樂的事情。我一直都在思考這一問題。因此有很長一段時間(在Napster倒閉之后)我都在與社交媒體打交道,但我總是會轉而思考如何打造一個合理的互聯網音樂銷售模式。我完全可以組建一支團隊來嘗試這件事,但是我得知Spotify已經開始在瑞典萌芽。瑞典是全球的盜版之都,也是P2P下載和頗具實力的工程之都。它是p2p軟件Kazaa一名創始人的故鄉,下載工具BT的員工亦來自于瑞典。丹尼爾·艾克實際上還編寫了一款名為μTorrent的BT客戶端程序,在當時非常受歡迎。此外,瑞典還是音樂的國度。

但阿巴樂隊除外。

即便不考慮阿巴樂隊,能夠以較低的薪資招聘工程師的事實對于我們來說也是大有裨益。你能夠找到像丹尼爾和馬丁·洛倫森)這樣經驗異常豐富的人士,他們都賺了不少錢,也出售過公司,因此他們知道如何打造和運營企業,而且他們還擁有產品的核心技術,因此他們有這個基礎來做這件事。我們也知道,如果這個點子是你想出來的,你可能實際上就知道該怎么執行,而不是在這一方面嘗試白手起家。

你從這次經歷中學到了什么?

我覺得我對毅力和耐心有了更深刻的認識。這項業務與Facebook“快突破,除舊立新”的理念完全不同。在這一行當,你每天起來之后都得去和唱片公司軟磨硬泡,與數字音樂團隊的每一位成員合作,不僅僅只是首席執行官。你得花時間向很多人宣傳,而且還得在宣傳材料上下功夫,拿出能夠讓他們獲得安全感的策略,這樣,他們就不會因與你合作而被外人看作是傻瓜。

但是這一關系需要持續的維護。因此Spotify設立了一個龐大的團隊來管理與所有唱片公司的關系。到了某一個階段之后,我無需做任何事情。我只是偶爾在需要幫助的時候才出現,因為我還有一些人脈關系。但這并不是那種正式的談判,為了達成目的而絞盡腦汁。這種模式還是蠻有效的。

我記得我曾經向一家公司的董事會進行推銷,這幫人管理著一個巨大的法國集團,而董事會不得不同意了這筆交易。在我看來,每一個節點都像是一場電子游戲,你在打敗小怪之后還得打大怪,最后才發現實際上還沒有獲得最終的勝利,因為還有一個終極怪物等待著你去征服。你必須得換一種思考方式。之后,我們必須將重心放在產品上。因此你必須強烈地意識到哪些內容對于產品來說是必要和必須的,哪些可以拋棄。

讓我們稍微談論一下社交音樂組件。Spotify是否圓了你對Napster的夢想?

回顧Spotify,我的一個遺憾在于未能實現自己的愿景,也就是打造一個真正的社交音樂網絡。我們在搜索、播放、播放清單、推薦和電臺方面都做的非常出色。然而,我們一直未能實現一個夢想——有著同樣愛好的朋友都在這里,不妨看看他們都喜歡什么。

而這剛好是你的追求。

在某種程度上,這一點是我們希望通過Napster實現的目標之一。你在瀏覽某個人的收藏之后對其十分感興趣,并通過其他用戶來發現音樂。我們在Spotify也提供了一部分這樣的功能,人們基本上也可以這樣做。但這一功能并未成為一項首要特色。公司基本的核心產品就是搜索、檢索或組織(例如組建播放清單)。作為一個產品來講,這些功能有足夠的吸引力,吸引了數億名用戶。

讓我們換個話題:除了最終解決整個音樂分享的問題,你似乎特別熱衷于從事一些大部分人從來都沒聽說過的事,并為此而驕傲,而且說真的,人們很難想象一家風投公司在硅谷的推介會上會對這類事情感興趣:新聯邦稅法的隱晦條款。《投資機會法案》是什么?為什么你會如此賣力地推動這一法案?

一個簡單的理念在于,如果某人擁有未實現的資本收益,他們會將資金投入基金,后者將尋找全國一些落后地區的投資機遇(或稱之為“機會區域”)。這一投資的任何納稅義務將被延期。如果人們持有這筆投資足夠長的時間,那么基數就會有所增加。稅率方面的節省[根據投資持有期限而變動]是一項相對溫和的鼓勵政策。真正的激勵在于,人們通過這一載體賺的每一分錢,在持有投資至少10年之后,都是免稅的。

也就是羅斯個人退休賬戶這類的鼓勵政策。

的確如此。

需要指出的是,你所提倡的并不僅僅是稅法變革。為了推動這一動議,你實際上創建了一個名為Economic Innovation Group的華盛頓智囊團。

這是一個長達10年的歷程。我從2008年開始認真思考這個問題。我們也看到,金融危機對某些地區造成了不同程度的影響,而且當經濟復蘇時,只有那些大型城市才會出現復蘇跡象,而且這些城市恢復的都相當不錯,并將大多數城市拋在了后面。

我覺得這是美國中部地區(為特朗普上臺提供了一臂之力的地區)感到沮喪的原因,而且這些沮喪來自于那些被落在后面的工業城鎮或曾經的工業城鎮。但是我在特朗普上臺之前便已經在思考這些問題。處于這些經濟荒漠中的民眾因為其抵押貸款或其社區而被困在了那里。我們一直在大談特談經濟移動性,但是因為這些原因,人們無法移動。

是什么讓你覺得通過對稅法進行調整能夠解決這個問題?

我最先做的事情就是與美國的首席經濟學家們討論我們可以采取哪些措施,這些經濟學家包括哈佛大學的肯·羅格夫、芝加哥大學的史蒂夫·戴維斯、重點預算與政策中心的賈里德·伯恩斯坦,以及曾在美國企業學會工作的凱文·哈塞特(如今是特朗普政府的首席經濟師)。由上述學者組成的智囊團與我們合作了數年,并提出了《投資機遇法案》背后的支撐理念。

在經歷了數年的股市強勁增長之后,近6萬億美元的未實現收益都處于閑置狀態。我們認為,如果我們能夠讓這一部分資本運轉起來,特別是回歸經濟不發達的地區,那么就有可能見證這些地區發生顛覆性的變化。當時的問題在于,如何才能讓這部分資金運轉起來?這種方式必須同時得到保守派和激進派的首肯,同時最終還能夠讓城市或鄉村地區煥發新的面貌或推動對最貧困地區的投資。

雖然,從其核心來看,它并不是什么新概念,不是嗎?我記得已故的眾議員杰克·肯普在數十年前曾提到過“企業區”這個類似的概念。為什么這個政策未能奏效呢?

最重要的區別在于,新法案是一個基于自由市場的鼓勵政策,并非是稅收抵免。因此,所有此前嘗試的種種政策,包括新市場稅收抵免或最終實現的企業區概念(由杰克·肯普提出,并由克林頓總統頒布為法令)實際上都是稅收抵免政策。

我覺得其中一個很有意思的機制是,它并未將所有經濟不發達地區列為機會區,而是讓各州根據貧困和失業標準,在這些地區中選出四分之一可能符合條件的區域。

它的構思是非常重要的。其理念在于,首先,在這一過程中你總得給州長一些權力吧,不是嗎?州層面的控制異常重要,而且讓州長根據各市市長和社區提供的信息來做出決定亦是十分重要。此舉能夠讓他們專注于那些他們曾與社區領導打過交道的地區。第二,可能也是最重要的一點在于,此舉能夠實現資本的集中。43%的人口普查區都符合成為機會區的條件。即便注入大量的資金,并非所有的地區都有能力實現飛躍式發展。可能有一些地區是如此之貧困和偏遠,以至于他們都難以吸引到投資。但各州將負責選出最適合該項目的25%的地區。

你對哪些地區符合條件有什么想法嗎?

我們為州長設定了指導原則。我說:“它應該鄰近一個較為發展的地區,人們可以以該地區為跳板,將投資吸引到那些發展的并不是很好的地區。”比較好的一個案例就是帕洛阿爾托/東帕洛阿爾托地區。如果靠近學術中心或大學也是個不錯的選擇。有不少地方有發展的潛力,但沒有獲取資本的渠道。并非所有的地區都會受益,然而只要那些原本沒有機會騰飛的地區實現了快速發展,或我們能夠推動不發達地區的實際發展速度,那么我們就實現了我們的目標。然后,人們就會過來修建廉價住房、商業空間,所有這些設施都將成為現實。這些地區必須留住那些能夠吸引員工的企業。

這一理念有點公有制的意味。引發了很多投資者的共鳴,這些投資者希望通過善舉來謀求發展,例如Quicken Loans的創始人丹·吉爾伯特以及在底特律投入大量資金的摩根大通首席執行官杰米·戴蒙。而且此舉是對革命性首席執行官史蒂夫·凱斯的復刻,他一直在推廣他所稱的“共同崛起”動議。你曾經和這些人討論過這一理念嗎?

丹·吉爾伯特是Economic Innovation Group的奠基人之一。我成立這一機構的目的是推動這一提案,并進行宣傳。它屬于501(c)(4)條款所規定的組織。該提案最初由蒂姆·斯科特(南加州共和黨)與科里·布克(新澤西州民主黨)引入參議院。在整個過程中,我們一直保持著共和黨和民主黨支持人士數量的平衡。

你對這一提案獲得通過異常有自信,當然,這種樂觀精神在任何與聯邦政府打交道的人看來都是不可思議的。

我對所有人說:“大家都知道,我認為這一法案肯定會得到通過。”大家的反應是,“呵呵”。這些脾氣不好、小氣的稅收政策專家對我們的這一提案一笑了之,而這些人在其整個職業生涯都在嘗試對稅法進行一些小打小鬧的改動。他們說:“這可是自大蕭條以來最宏大的發展經濟項目,就算它是個不錯的理念,但你不會連造勢都不去做就指望它能通過吧?好吧,能通過才怪了。”不過,它卻通過了。(財富中文網)

本采訪的刪減版刊登于《財富》2018年6月印刷版。

譯者:馮豐

審校:夏林

FORTUNE: Spotify, the music streaming service you helped turn into a global powerhouse, went public in April at a valuation of about $30 billion. Its success seems to close the loop on the adventure you began with music-sharing pioneer Napster so many years ago. How did your association with Spotify start?

SEAN PARKER: I asked around for an introduction to Daniel Ek, one of the founders. We met in New York and had a long conversation. It took me a while to find someone who knew him. I didn’t realize that he and I had potentially met at one point, online (in a chat room). As it turns out, I did know Jan Koum back then, but had no idea that he was the cofounder of WhatsApp until we later met, and I was like, “Wait a second here. This is weird, all of us from the same group, are have founded companies worth billions of dollars. That’s very weird.” There was a certain moment in time, where I think the people who were attracted to the Internet back then recognized its unlimited possibility and who were purists about its possibility, imagining all the things that it could be. It pays to be part of that community of early adopters. You see things a little differently, I think.

When Ek and I met in New York, he was very straightforward with me. He said, “You do realize you’re throwing yourself back into the furnace here. Do you really want to go through this again? You know who you’re dealing with on the other side, right?”

Meaning the music industry, which sued Napster out of existence.

Yeah. But I felt like I’d gotten to know most of the label executives. I understood them a lot better.

You understood their fear.

Yes, but more important, the apocalyptic scenario in the music industry had already come to pass. The industry had collapsed. There was a legitimate openness to trying something new because CD sales continued to drop. Meanwhile, the replacement model—the 99¢ download that Apple introduced—wasn’t working. It wasn’t compensating for the loss of CD sales. Even so, it was a two-year negotiation to bring Spotify to the U.S. That was the big challenge.

You were on Spotify’s board for seven years. What kept you engaged, given all the other demands on time: your quest to cure cancer through immunotherapy, your full plate of investments as a VC?

The music thing. I just never stopped thinking about it. And so there’s this long period [after Napster] where I’m working on social media, but I keep coming back to what I think is the right business model for selling music on the Internet. I could have built a team and tried to do it, but you had this little experiment starting in Sweden, the piracy capital of the world and also the peer-to-peer, hard-core engineering capital. It had one of the Kazaa founders. The BitTorrent stuff came out of Sweden. Daniel Ek actually wrote a BitTorrent client called μTorrent that was really popular. Plus, it’s a music country.

With the exception of ABBA.

Even if you don’t count ABBA. The fact that you can recruit engineers cheaply helped. And you had really experienced entrepreneurs in Daniel and Martin [Lorentzon]—they’d both made money and sold companies before, so they knew how to build and run a business. And they had the core of a product. So there was a base to build from. And you knew that if you contributed ideas, you could actually get execution versus trying to start something like that from scratch.

What did you learn from the experience?

I think I learned a lot about persistence and patience. It’s a very different business from the “Move fast and break things” philosophy of Facebook. It’s about getting up every day and schlepping over to the label—working with everybody on the digital music team, not just the CEO. You had to spend time evangelizing to a lot of people. You had to be creative on the fly to come up with strategies that would give them a sense of safety—that they could do this with you without looking like schmucks.

But it required constant maintenance. So at Spotify, there was a big team in place to manage all the labor relations. There came a certain point when I didn’t need to do anything. My presence was occasionally helpful because I had certain relationships. But it wasn’t the hard core negotiating, coming up with every ploy we could come up with in order to get the deals done. But it sort of worked.

I remember going to pitch one board of directors, a bunch of guys running this massive French conglomerate, and the board had to sign off on the deal. You realize, at every point, it was like a videogame when you beat the boss, and then you have to beat the big boss, and then it turns out that you haven’t actually won yet, because there’s still the big big boss you have to convince. It just required a different mentality. Then, we really had to hold our line on the product. So you had to have a very strong view of what was necessary and essential in the product and what was potentially disposable.

Talk a little about the social music component. Does Spotify scratch the itch you had with Napster?

My one regret, looking back on Spotify, was that the vision of a truly social music network never really materialized. We are really great at search, play, playlists, recommendations, and radio. But we never realized the dream of “Here are all your friends who have similar tastes—browse what they’re excited about.”

Which happens to be your passion.

It’s one of the things that we had with Napster to some extent. You’d look at someone’s collection, and you’d get interested in it and discover music through other users. We have some of that at Spotify; you can kind of do that. But it’s never been prioritized. The basic core product of search and retrieval, or organization—like building playlists—is compelling enough as a product to attract hundreds of millions of users.

So, changing gears here: Apart from finally solving the whole music-sharing thing, you seem rather excited and proud of something that most people have never heard of—and something that’s, frankly, hard to imagine a VC in a Silicon Valley pitch meeting getting excited about: an obscure provision in the new federal tax legislation. What’s the Investing in Opportunity Act, and why did you push so hard for it?

The simple notion is, If someone has unrealized capital gains, they can roll the money over into a fund that will go to find investment opportunities in certain distressed areas [or “opportunity zones”] across the country. And any tax liability from that investment is deferred. If the investment is held long enough, there is a step up in basis. The savings on the tax rate [which adjusts based on the investment holding period] is a relatively modest incentive. The real incentive is that any gains you make in that vehicle, after holding an investment for at least 10 years, are tax-free.

So it’s the Roth IRA of incentives.

Exactly.

I should point out, this isn’t a tax law change you simply advocated for. You actually created a Washington think tank, called the Economic Innovation Group, to push for it.

This has been a decade-long journey. I really began thinking about this around 2008. You could see that the financial crisis disproportionately affected certain communities, and that when the recovery happened, it really only happened in certain major cities. These places have rebounded nicely. Most everybody else is left behind.

That’s where I think a lot of the frustration in the heartland [that fueled the election of Donald Trump] came from—from many of these left-behind industrial towns or former industrial towns. But I was thinking about all this pre-Trump. People in these economic deserts were stuck there because of their mortgages or their community. We talk a lot about economic mobility, but there are all these reasons why people can’t move.

So what made you think that a tweak to the tax law could offer a solution?

One of the first things I did was talk to some of the country’s leading economist about what we could do about it, like [Harvard’s] Ken Rogoff, and Steven Davis at the University of Chicago, Jared Bernstein [at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities] and Kevin Hassett, who was at the American Enterprise Institute, who’s now in the Trump administration in the chief economist role. This brain trust of academics worked with us for years to develop the idea behind the Investing in Opportunity Act.

Following years of strong growth in the stock market, there’s something on the order of $6 trillion in unrealized gains sitting on the sidelines. And we thought if you could get that capital back into play—and specifically, in distressed communities—then you would potentially see a transformation. The question then was how to put that money to work. It had to be something that conservatives and progressive both liked, but in the end would lead to urban or rural renewal and drive investment in the poorest areas.

At its heart, though, this is an old idea, right? I remember the late Congressman Jack Kemp talking about “enterprise zones,” in much the same fashion, decades ago? Why didn’t that policy do the trick?

The essential distinction is that the new law is a free market-based incentive and not a tax credit. So all of these prior things that have been tried—like the New Markets Tax Credit or what ultimately became enterprise zones, which was the Jack Kemp concept that President Clinton signed into law—were essentially tax credits.

One of the mechanisms that I found really interesting was the decision not to include every economically distressed area as qualified opportunity zones, but rather making states choose only a quarter of those districts that might otherwise qualify, based on poverty and jobless metrics.

So the thinking there is really important. The idea is (1) you want to give governors some skin in the game, right? State control is really important, and letting governors make decisions with the input from their mayors and from their communities is important. It allows them to focus on the places where they have engaged leadership at the community level. And second, and perhaps most importantly, it concentrates capital. Forty three percent of the census tracts were eligible to be nominated as opportunity zones. Not all of these places are going to take off, even with an influx of investment. Some areas are probably so distressed or so disconnected that they’re going to have a hard time attracting investment. But states get to choose the 25 percent that are the best fit for the program.

And you have some thoughts on where those locales should be.

We laid out guidelines for governors. I said, “You’d like to be near an area that’s already doing well, where you can start to attract investment to a neighboring area that’s not doing as well.” A good example of that is Palo Alto/East Palo Alto. And it would be good if you were near an academic center or university. There’s a bunch of places that have the potential to take off but haven’t had access to capital. Not every area will benefit, but a win for us would be that some areas that just would not have taken off really explode—or we can accelerate the pace at which these underdeveloped areas actually develop. And then there are people who are going to come in and build affordable housing, commercial space, all of that stuff is going to be built out. You’re going to need anchor businesses that attract a work force.

This idea is having a kind of communal resurgence. It’s resonating with a lot of investors, who want to do well by doing good—people like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who have made a huge investment in Detroit. And this has been a refrain of Revolution CEO Steve Case, who has been championing what he calls “The rise of the rest.” Did you talk this idea through with some of these folks?

So Dan Gilbert is on our founders circle at the Economic Innovation Group, which is the organization I set up to push for this, to advocate. It’s a 501(c)(4). The bill was originally introduced in the Senate by Tim Scott [Republican of South Carolina] and Cory Booker [Democrat of New Jersey]. And we maintained an equal balance of Republicans and Democrats all the way through.

You were strangely confident this thing was going to pass—which is, of course, a remarkably optimistic perspective for anyone who’s dealt with the federal government.

I told everyone, ‘You know I think this is going to pass.’ And everybody was like, ‘Yeah right.’ The crusty, curmudgeonly tax policy experts, who had spent their whole career trying to advocate for some minor change in the tax code, laughed our idea off. They’d say, “You’re going to pass the most ambitious development economics program since the Great Depression, and you’re going do it without an advocacy campaign, just because it’s a great idea? Yeah. Uh-huh. That’s going to happen.” And well, it did.

An abridged and edited version of this interview is published in the June 2018 print edition of FORTUNE.

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