Cliff Sosin - Investing in Carvana — 文稿

M11:19

大家好，欢迎收听。

Hello and welcome everyone.

我是Patrick O'Shaughnessy，这里是 Invest Like the Best。

I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.

这档节目深入探讨市场、创意、故事和策略，帮助大家更好地投资时间和金钱。

This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.

如果你喜欢这些对话，想要更深入了解，可以看看我们的季刊 Colossus Review，里面有关于商业和投资领域关键人物的深度介绍。

If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.

你可以在 joincolossus.com 找到 Colossus Review 和我们所有的播客。

You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.

F11:44

Patrick O'Shaughnessy 是 Positive Sum 的CEO。

Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum.

Patrick和播客嘉宾的所有观点仅代表他们个人，不代表Positive Sum的观点。

All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum.

本播客仅供信息参考，不应作为投资决策的依据。

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Positive Sum的客户可能持有本播客中讨论的证券头寸。

Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

了解更多，请访问 psum.vc。

To learn more, visit psum.vc.

M12:12

今天我的嘉宾是Cliff Sosin。

My guest today is Cliff Sosin.

Cliff是CAS Investment Partners的创始人，他在2012年用500万美元创立了这家基金，现在规模已经达到17亿美元。

Cliff is the founder of CAS Investment Partners, a fund he started with $5 million in 2012 that's now $1.7 billion.

这次对话和我们以往的节目不太一样。

This conversation is different from our typical episodes.

我们先聊了Cliff的投资哲学，但这次长谈的主要内容是他对Carvana的精彩投资案例研究。

We start by talking about Cliff's investment philosophy, but the bulk of this long discussion is a case study into his remarkable investment in Carvana.

Cliff是这家公司的大投资者之一，Carvana的市值在2021年曾超过600亿美元，然后暴跌了99%，但挺过来了，现在市值又接近500亿美元。

Cliff is one of the biggest investors in the business, which had a market cap of over $60 billion in 2021, then fell 99%, survived, and now has a market cap approaching $50 billion again.

去年我邀请了Carvana的CEO Ernie Garcia来分享公司应对这种波动的内部视角，而今天我们听到的是这个非凡故事中投资者的角度。

While I hosted Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia last year to get the inside perspective on managing through such turbulence, today we hear the investor side of this extraordinary story.

这是一期独特的节目，难得有机会听到一位主要投资者描述他在整个动荡旅程各个阶段的决策过程。

It is a singular episode and a rare opportunity to hear a major investor describe his decision-making process at every stage of a volatile journey.

希望大家喜欢我和Cliff Sosin的精彩对话。

Please enjoy my great conversation with Cliff Sosin.

Cliff，我非常激动能和你做这期节目。

Cliff, I'm so excited to be able to do this with you.

我至少求了你三四年了，差不多是这样。

This, I, I've been asking you to do this for at least 3 to 4 years, something like that.

所以我不知道你为什么终于松口了，但这是个好机会，可以聊聊你对投资的整体看法，以及你亲身经历的一些非常有趣的具体案例。

So I don't know what made you capitulate, but it's an excuse to talk to you about investing in general and some very interesting specific episodes that you've been involved with specifically.

我觉得我们得从宽泛的话题开始，因为我想让不了解你是谁、你的背景怎样的听众有个大致了解。

And I think we got to start broad, because I want to set the context for everyone that doesn't know who you are or what your setup has been.

也许先简单讲讲你是如何创办这家公司的吧。

Maybe just give us like a history of how you started the firm.

是不是2012年左右？

What was it, 2012, something like that?

你为什么要成立这家公司，这些年来它又经历了什么？

Why you started the firm and kind of what it's been since?

M23:37

如果追溯到高中时期，我当时觉得自己会成为发明家。

If you'd gone all the way back to when I was in high school, I thought I would have been an inventor.

我内心有点把自己想象成爱迪生那样的人。

I sort of modeled myself as, you know, an Edison in my mind or something.

但上了大学学工程之后，我发现发明很多时候就是不停地调试真实的东西，而自然法则很不留情面。

But when I went to school and I studied engineering, you know, a lot of inventing is kind of obsessively debugging real things, and nature is pretty unforgiving.

所以我意识到自己不太喜欢那个过程。

And so what I learned about myself was that I didn't love that process.

对我来说，那真的没那么有趣。

It just wasn't as fun for me.

所以我当时在四处寻找自己想做的事，后来去了一家大型私募股权公司实习。

And so I was sort of casting about for what I wanted to do, and I ended up doing an internship at a big private equity firm.

我觉得特别酷的是，我发现可以把在学校学到的很多知识，比如博弈论，应用到这些场景中，并且能带来一些新的见解，而这些是那些从业多年的人没有用到的。

And I just thought it was really neat that I could use— and I discovered I could use a lot of these things I'd been learning in school, like game theory, apply them to these situations, and that brought novel insights that these people who'd done this for so long weren't using.

我就被深深吸引了，就是那种能够做到这一点的想法。

And I was hooked, like the idea of being able to do that.

从那以后，我就努力想进入投资领域。

From there, I was trying to kind of get into investing.

我当时以为自己会去做私募股权。

I thought I was going to do private equity.

我知道进私募股权的路径是通过银行的analyst项目，但我不想走传统的卖方analyst路线。

I knew the path into private equity was through a banking analyst program, but I didn't want to do a traditional sell-side analyst program.

所以我最后去了金融重组部门，因为我不想做太多营销工作。

So I ended up going into financial restructuring because I didn't want to do as much marketing.

于是我在一家叫Houlihan Lokey的公司工作，这家公司是金融重组领域的领导者，我在那里干了一段时间。

So I worked at a place called Houlihan Lokey, which is a leader in financial restructuring, and I did that for a time.

但我还是想进入买方，所以又去了一家叫Silver Point的公司待了一年，然后从那里去了UBS，在那里干了五年，之后才开始自己创业。

I still wanted to get to the buy side, so I went to a place called Silver Point for a year, and then from there I went to UBS, where I spent 5 years before I started my business.

在UBS期间，我认为那是真正让我成熟起来的阶段，我思考了很多——我本身有贷款和金融背景，而在UBS我参与了交易、股票投资和股票买卖。

While I was there, that was really where I think I did a lot of my maturing, and I thought a lot about— I'd come from a lending and finance background, and at UBS I was involved in trading, investing in stocks, trading in stocks.

当时UBS做的是自有资金投资业务。

UBS at the time, it was their proprietary investing business.

用的是银行自己的资本。

It was the bank's own capital.

你可以把它看成是一个只有一个LP的对冲基金，做的也是很多对冲基金常做的那些传统事情。

Think of it as a hedge fund with one LP, and it did a lot of the sort of traditional things that I think a lot of hedge funds do.

他们非常关注短期业绩。

There was a lot of focus on short-term performance.

他们希望找到被错误定价的资产，但同时希望有多个催化剂能推动价格上涨。

There was a sort of desire to have, yes, we want things to sort of be misvalued, but we want to have a bunch of catalysts that are going to cause the price to go up.

围绕事件做很多交易。

There was a lot of trading around events.

做了很多对冲操作。

There was a lot of hedging.

在参与的过程中，他们也试图教我怎么做这些事。

As I was involved in that, there was sort of an effort to teach me how to do it.

但我不喜欢。

I didn't like it.

我发现，他们常说，嗯，我们应该这样做，那样做。

I sort of discovered that, you know, they would sort of say, well, we should, we should do this and do this.

然后我就问，为什么呢？

And I'd sort of say, well, why?

那根本说不通啊。

And that doesn't make sense.

而且，我也不知道为什么这只股票的beta是3。

And, you know, I don't know why this stock has a 3 beta.

为什么我每买入1美元的股票，就必须卖空3美元的S&P呢？

Why do I have to— why do I need to short $3 of S&P for every dollar, you know, of stocks we're gonna buy here?

这完全不合理。

That doesn't make any sense.

这件事导致我和以前的几位同事之间展开了非常激烈的争论。

And this led to like a really vigorous debate between me and some of my former colleagues there.

但平心而论，我当时年纪轻，作为下属确实非常难相处。

And to their credit, I mean, I was young and incredibly difficult to have as someone working for you.

我就一直纠缠他们，争论没完没了，后来我越来越清楚自己是对的。

And I just hounded them about it and eventually this debate went on and on and it became pretty clear to me that I was right.

我当时还很天真，以为只要跟他们解释清楚我对了，他们就会改变做法。

I was naive enough to think I would just explain to them that I was right and they would just do it differently.

后来我进一步意识到，他们没法改变，原因在于存在委托代理问题。

It further occurred to me that they couldn't change, and they couldn't change because they had a principal-agent problem.

问题在于他们必须向银行提供稳定的利润，如果出现大幅回撤，他们就会亏掉资金。

The problem was that they had to deliver steady profits to the bank, and if they had big drawdowns, they would lose their money.

于是我悄悄开始四处寻找其他工作机会，然后发现其他所有公司也一样。

So I started poking around quietly looking for another place to work and I realized that so did all the other firms.

整个行业都面临同样的问题。

In the industry, they had the same problem.

事实上，这基本上是普遍现象。

In fact, it's endemic basically.

有人可能天真地认为投资行业就是要最大化业绩，但并非如此。

One might naively think that the investing business is about maximizing performance, but it's not.

实际上是最大化市场推广性，业绩只是其中的一部分。你真正要做的是展示才能，而方法就是找到那些反馈周期短、噪音低的事情，这样你就能向别人证明：你看，我们这么做成功了，那么做也成功了，这个没成，但总体我们赢了。

It's about maximizing marketability and performance is a component of marketability, but really what you're trying to do is signal talent and the way you do that is by finding things with short feedback loops, with low amounts of noise so that you can sort of show people, look, we did this and it worked and we did this and it worked and we did this and it didn't work, but on average we win.

我当时考虑的那种投资方式——基本上就是通过股市买入一家公司的股份，然后长期持有——这种投资反馈周期长达三、五、十年，而且噪音极大，根本不适合那种模式。

The type of investing I was thinking about—basically buying a piece of a company through the stock market and owning it for a long time—these are multi-year, 3, 5, 10-year feedback loops that are incredibly noisy and they just don't lend themselves to it.

如果实际想想，假设我和某个机构的人见面，首先我得让他们相信我有那个能力。

If you think about it practically, let's say that I meet with someone from an institution and first of all, I convince them that I've got that.

他们会问：你怎么选股票的？

They're gonna say, like, how do you pick stocks?

我会说：嗯，我认真思考。

I'm gonna say, well, I think really hard.

然后他们就会说：好，不错。

And, you know, and they're gonna be like, okay, cool.

比如：我相信Cliff确实认真思考了。

Like, I'm convinced Cliff thinks really hard.

他这方面很厉害。

He's good at this.

但他们得回去向委员会汇报。

But then they have to go back to their committee.

委员会就会问：那Cliff到底怎么选股票的？

And the committee's gonna be like, well, how does Cliff pick stocks?

然后他们说：嗯，他认真思考。

And he's like, well, he thinks really hard.

委员会就会说：这个嘛，不太可信。

And they're like, well, you know, that's not very credible.

就算他们最终投了资，现在他们也要持有这个仓位。

And then even if they do make the investment, now, you know, they're gonna own it.

于是不可避免地，业绩涨涨跌跌，我看起来聪明或愚蠢。

And so invariably, we're up or down, we're up or down, I look smart, I look dumb.

在这个过程中，他们会问：我们当初为什么这么做？

And along the way, they're gonna be like, why did we do this?

而且，我们还有董事会。

Like, and by the way, we have a board.

我们要向董事会报告。

That we're reporting to.

而且这季度我们亏了，就因为Cliff显然在认真思考。

And like, we're down this quarter because Cliff thinks really hard, apparently.

这实在是一个很难搞的局面。

This is just a really challenging setup.

这意味着，当我开始做这件事的时候，我并没有完全意识到会有多难，但我的初衷是创办一家公司，真正专注于长期复利，找到相对较少的一批股票，把它当作拥有一家业务的一部分，并承受随之而来的波动。

What this means is that, you know, when I started this, I wasn't fully aware of quite how challenging it would be, but the premise was that I would start a business, you know, based on really focusing on long-term compounding, finding a relatively small number of stocks, treating it like owning a piece of a business, dealing with the volatility that comes with it.

我当时以为这样能在回报上做到最大化，而在市场推广性上最小化。

And I figured it would be maximally optimized around returns and minimally optimized around marketability.

我觉得至少在市场推广性方面，我们确实做到了极致。

And I think certainly on the marketability side, we nailed it.

所以现在就是这个情况。

And so that's where we are.

但我不会改变任何东西。

But I wouldn't change a thing.

我这个人就这样。

It's how I'm built.

所以，这就是我——

So that's how I—.

M18:47

那你当初是怎么跟你的原始投资者说的？

So what did you tell your original investors?

因为有些人给了你钱，包括一些知名机构。

Because some people gave you money, including some well-known institutions.

你跟他们说了什么？

What did you tell them?

那为什么他们的决策过程不一样呢？

And why were their decision-making processes different?

你起步时有多少资金？

And how much did you start with?

M29:02

啊，我启动时带了520万美元。

Ah, so I launched with $5.2 million.

M19:05

老派的方式。

The old-fashioned way.

M29:06

嗯嗯。

Uh-huh.

其中200万是我自己的，因为我在瑞银做得很成功，他们给了我——我喜欢开玩笑说，这在危机后算很多，在危机前不算多。

It was $2 million from me, because I'd been successful at UBS, and they paid me— I like to joke, it was a lot for post-crisis, not a lot pre-crisis.

我还从我妈妈那里拿了200万。

And I also got $2 million from my mom.

她是个同情我的观众。

She was a sympathetic audience.

还有100万来自一个朋友，而且，你知道，最后你总会问人们最感激谁。

I had $1 million from a friend, and it was, you know, at the end, you always ask people who they're most grateful to.

他——我心里有两个，他就是其中之一。

He's— I had 2 in mind, and he's one of them.

我认识他很多年了。

I'd known him for years.

好多年，我们聊过，他是个非常成功的人。

Years, and we talked, and he's a very successful person.

我开了那个会，那大概是我第三次——第二次营销会议。

And I had this meeting, it was like my third— second marketing meeting ever.

我坐下来，他基本上就说，我绝对会给你10万美元。

And I sit down, and he basically is like, I'm absolutely gonna give you $100,000.

没问题。

No problem.

我当时就想，哇，这会很顺利。

And I was like, wow, this is gonna go great.

下次我看到那样一张支票，你知道，是几年后了。

The next time I saw a check like that, you know, it was years.

然后还有几十万美元来自其他一些我认识的人。

And then it was a couple hundred thousand from some other people that I knew.

就这样起步了。

Started with that.

而且，你知道，多年来，我能够时不时地稳步带来一点钱，然后复利增长，我很幸运。

And, you know, over the years, was sort of able to kind of steadily bring in a little bit of money here and there and compound and I was fortunate.

你知道，我有过好年份，也有过坏年份。

You know, I've had up years, I've had down years.

如果你改变这些年份的顺序，会达到同样的结果，但我肯定筹不到任何钱。

If you changed the order of the years, get to the same place, but I definitely wouldn't have raised any money.

所以运气也占了很大一部分。

So there's also a meaningful component of luck.

M110:12

那这让我们今天走到了哪里？

And where does that bring us today?

那你现在有多少投资者？

So how many investors do you have?

资本基础大概是怎样的？

What's kind of the capital base like?

你现在怎么看待这家公司？

How do you think about the firm today?

M210:17

我不太记得我们到底有多少投资者。

So I don't remember exactly how many investors we have.

大概在100到200之间，分布在几支不同的基金里。

It's sort of between 100 and 200 across a few different vehicles.

嗯，公司规模每天都在变，但大致在15亿到20亿美元之间。

Um, and the firm's— it moves around every day, but sort of between $1.5 billion and $2 billion.

M110:28

你对投资和市场的看法是什么？

What is your view of investing and markets?

比如，说说你认为应该怎么做。

Like, describe how you think it is supposed to be done.

说得详细一点。

In some detail.

M210:34

前提一直是，你知道，去寻找少数公开上市的企业，我可以在市场上买入这些企业的一部分，并持有它们，前提是永远持有。然后一直持有，直到基本上我找到更好的、可以升级的标的，或者发现自己最初就误解了这家企业。

The premise was always, you know, let's find a handful of businesses that are publicly traded where I can buy a piece of that business in the markets and own them, own it for, you know, with the premise of owning it forever, and then own it until basically I find something that I can upgrade that I think is even better, or I discover that I've misunderstood the business in the first place.

所以，从投资组合里退出来只有两种情况。

So there's 2 ways out of the portfolio.

一种是我觉得——我找到了更好的东西，所以可以升级。

One is that the gap between what I think— I find something better so I can upgrade.

另一种是，我对于什么能让企业成功有自己的看法。

Or the other one is that I have some view as to what makes a business successful.

你可以想象一个心智模型，描述企业如何在生态系统中竞争并获胜。这个模型会给出对世界的预测，然后你得到现实数据，把现实数据和心智模型的预测做对比。

You can think about a mental model of how the business is competing and winning in the ecosystem and that makes predictions about the world and then you get real-world data and you can compare the real-world data to what your predictions of your mental models are.

如果你发现预测对不上，就得更新心智模型，有时甚至需要把它整个扔掉。

And if you discover that your predictions aren't lining up, then you need to update your mental model and it might be that you need to throw it out.

到了某个时候，你会意识到自己已经分不清方向了，那这笔投资就该抛掉，因为你已经不再知道它到底是怎么回事了。

At some point, you sort of realize you don't know which way is up anymore and then that would be an investment that you would jettison because you just no longer know.

随着时间的推移，我们大概——就叫4到8个吧。

Over time, we've sort of had kind of between, we'll call it 4 and 8.

可能一度有10个，但持仓数量大致就是这个范围。

It might have been as many as 10 at one point, but that's kind of the number of investments.

在我做投资的这些年里，平均下来，每年大约买入或卖出一项。

Over the course of time I've been investing, I think, on average, I've sort of bought and/or sold one thing a year.

这是一个相当缓慢的换手节奏。

It's a pretty sort of lethargic pace of turnover.

核心是，企业以特定方式竞争和获胜。

It's this idea that businesses compete and win in certain ways.

有一小部分企业，一旦你琢磨透了，就能看出它们相对于其他价格相当的企业，会非常成功。

There's sort of a minority of businesses that once you sort of figure them out, you can just tell they're going to be very successful relative to other similarly priced businesses.

所以，我们可以聊，有很多心智模型之类的东西，比如我认为企业竞争的种种方式，一套我用来思考的企业分类。

And so, we can talk, there's a lot of mental models and stuff, like ways that I think businesses compete, sort of a taxonomy of businesses that I sort of think about.

但这些只是我用来理解这个复杂世界的方式，也就是试着找到少数几个有效的东西。

But those are just my ways of understanding a really complicated world and sort of trying to find a few things that work.

M112:34

嗯。

Yeah.

所以我猜，那个显而易见、非常简单但又很大的问题是：什么是好企业？

So I guess the obvious and very simple but very big question is, what is a good business?

那你的分类是什么样的？

What is that taxonomy?

也许现在是聊你一个我很喜欢的观点的时候，你喜欢那些你称为“有界”的企业。

Maybe this is the time to talk about one of my favorite ideas of yours, that you like businesses you described as contained.

我们聊公司的时候，我一直很喜欢这个说法。

I've always liked that description when we've talked about companies.

跟我们说说，你认为一家好企业靠的是什么。

Give us your view on what makes a good business.

M212:53

你想一想，在大多数市场里，利润本来就不该很高。

If you think about it, in most markets, you shouldn't have a lot of profits.

利润几乎是一种侥幸，是因为某种安排，使得出于某种原因，竞争的力量无法把经济利润压低到零。

Profits are kind of a fluke of some sort of something about the setup that makes it so that, for some reason, competitive forces can't drive economic profits to zero.

那些原因，我是说，其实有很多。

Those reasons, I mean, there's sort of a lot of them.

关于如何思考它们，我从微观经济学、心理学、商业史等不同领域搜集例子，来理解公司是如何开辟出自己具有优势的一片天地的。

In terms of how to think about them, I gather different examples from sort of microeconomics, from psychology, from business history to try to understand different ways that companies have carved out a piece of the world where they are advantaged.

然后你可以把公司长期的盈利能力看作是它的市场机会乘以它的优势。

And then they can— you can think about a company's profitability over time as kind of its market opportunity times its advantage.

所以，我并觉得关于什么造就了一个伟大企业有什么特别激动人心的东西。

So, I mean, I don't think there's anything particularly exciting about what makes a great business.

就是你通常希望拥有多重优势，很多对你有利而竞争对手难以复制的东西。

It's that you generally want to have multi-threaded advantages, a lot of things working for you that are very hard for your competitors to replicate.

你想要为消费者带来大量价值。

You want to bring a lot of value to your consumers.

你希望那些对你有利的东西基本不随时间变化，随着社会的演进而改变。

You want the things that are working for you to be generally invariant with time as society evolves and changes.

当你大致把这些都安排好了，你应该能够获得高资本回报，相当不错的利润率，所有这些人们看重的指标都会增长。

And when you kind of have all those things lined up, you should be able to have high returns on capital, reasonably good margins, all those things grow, all those things people look for.

当然，每个人都知道我刚才说的这些东西。

Of course, everyone knows everything I just said.

所以整个游戏就在于识别出那些别人因为这样或那样的原因而错过的东西。

And so the whole game is to identify the ones that other people have missed for one reason or another.

而且这真的是——这是帝王般的事业。

And it's really— it's the emperor.

我认为投资是智力活动中的帝王，在这个意义上：在学术界，人们写论文。

I think investing is the emperor of activities in the sense that— of intellectual activities in the sense that in academia, people write papers.

他们可能对，可能错。

They're wrong, they're right.

最终他们带着一堆想法死去。

Eventually they die with a bunch of ideas.

其中大部分都是错的。

Most of them are wrong.

就像在政治中，人们有各种观点，而且很多肯定都是错的，对吧？

Like in politics, people have views and like they're definitely wrong, unlike a lot of them, right?

而在商业中，人们有一个狭窄的世界，他们必须擅长在自己的狭窄世界里执行，但不一定需要深刻的理解。

And in business, people, they have this narrow world and they kind of have to be really good about executing in their narrow world, but they don't necessarily need like a deep understanding.

就像你可以经营一家熟食店，不一定要深刻理解为什么肉价是这样。

Like you can run a deli without necessarily having like a deep understanding of like why meat prices are what they are.

但在投资中，你知道，它需要高度负责。

But in investing, you know, it is wildly accountable.

你在预测哪些企业会赢，哪些会输。

You're making predictions about which businesses are going to win and which are going to lose.

要知道，为了理解——企业是一种复杂的社会结构，嵌入在我们的社会中，而社会本身也是一个复杂的社会结构。

Which, you know, to understand— businesses are sort of complex social structures embedded in our society, which is a complex social structure.

那么你需要理解关于企业长期成功或失败的什么东西呢？

So what do you need to understand about a business's success or failure over time?

就是你几乎需要知道一切。

It's like you kind of need to know everything.

所以它——而且与所有这些其他追求不同，这一个高度负责任。

So it's— and unlike all these other pursuits, this one's like highly accountable.

所以我认为它是智力追求中的帝王。

So I think it's the emperor of like intellectual pursuits.

我认为没有比这更好的训练人们理解世界的舞台了。

I think that there's no arena to train people better about understanding the world.

而且我认为如果你只是对世界感到好奇，没有什么比研究商业更有趣的了。

And I think if you're just curious about the world, like there's nothing more interesting than to study business.

M115:36

说说你为什么喜欢这个想法，什么叫一个受限制的企业。

Say why you like this idea, what a contained business means.

以及什么是不受限制的企业，你为什么喜欢避免它们？

And what an uncontained business is and why you like to avoid them?

M215:43

我通常认为受限制的企业是，当你试图理解一个公司时，如果你发现问题开始变得棘手，因为很难思考变化会怎样——社会中有很多可能变化的东西正在变化。

I generally think of a contained business as one where when you're trying to understand a company, if you find that it's just that the problem starts to feel intractable in the sense that it's very hard to think about how changes— there's many things that could change in society that are changing.

这可能会让你对这家公司未来可能变成什么样子的看法随着时间改变，这种问题真的很难长期忍受。

That could cause your view of what the business could be to change over time, that is just a tough problem to live with.

因为它太容易受影响了，随着世界不断变化，你根本不知道这家公司会往哪个方向发展。

Because it's just very susceptible, as the world evolves, you don't know where the company's going to go.

相反，如果一家公司之所以能运转，靠的因素相对狭窄，而且处在我们生活中变化不太大的领域，那它的不确定性就非常有限。

Whereas a business where the thing that makes it work, or the things that make it work, are relatively narrow and in a sort of part of our lives that isn't evolving that much, that would be very contained.

一旦你把周围相关的那些东西都弄清楚了，外面发生的其他变化好像就没那么重要了。

Once you sort of understand everything immediately around that, other changes outside that are sort of happening feel less relevant.

M116:46

软件工具算是个好例子吗？

Would software tooling be a good example?

M216:48

对，那是个很好的例子。

Yeah, that'd be a great example.

谁知道十年后人们会怎么写软件？

Who knows how people are going to write software in 10 years?

为什么而写？

For what?

为量子计算机吗？

For quantum computers?

就像你可能今天有个业务，但它就像在沙子上建城堡一样。

It's just like you might have a business today, it's like building a castle on sand.

要做预测真的非常非常难。

It's just very, very hard to make predictions.

但另一方面，香烟生意呢，尼古丁是会让人上瘾的。

But on the other hand, the cigarette business, nicotine is habit-forming.

有一种现象叫次级强化物，这是一个心理学现象，你把它输入到 ChatGPT 里，它会给你解释。

There's this phenomenon called secondary reinforcers, which is a psychological phenomenon that you can put into ChatGPT, it'll explain it to you.

但基本上，它会让人们对那些刺激奖赏系统的东西产生极其强烈的品牌忠诚度。

But basically, it makes people incredibly brand loyal to things that stimulate the reward systems.

然后还有分销经济学。

And then there's also distribution economics.

但那个领域真的没什么剧烈的动态变化。

But like, that is just not an area where there's a lot of dynamic change happening.

而且那个领域也不需要我去考虑十五个不同的变量，才能大致判断会发生什么。

It's also not an area where I need to think about 15 different moving parts to sort of have a general sense as to what's going to happen.

当然，这类受限的事情的问题在于，如果它们很容易理解，那所有人都会理解它们。

Of course, the problem with these contained things is that if they're easy to understand, then everyone understands them.

对。

Yeah.

所以，投资就是这样一件极其困难的事，你就像在刀锋上跳舞。

And so, again, investing is this incredibly challenging endeavor where you're dancing on the knife's edge.

你要找的这些东西，一方面要简单到你能理解它。

You're looking for these things that, you know, like on the one hand, they're simple to understand so you can understand them.

另一方面呢，它又要难到其他人都错过它。

On the other hand, they're challenging to understand so everyone else misses.

M118:10

它。

It.

给我们举个例子吧，说说你探索一个有界系统时会经历什么样的过程。

Give us an example of the process you go through to explore a contained system.

你第一次遇到一家新公司，你想开始了解所有东西。

You're coming across a new company for the first time, you want to start to learn everything.

你的方法是什么？

What is your method for doing that?

我明白这在一定程度上是个显而易见的问题。

And I recognize that, like, to some degree, this is like an obvious answer.

你得跟人聊、读资料、然后思考。

You talk to people, you read stuff, you think about it.

我特别喜欢那种突然有了新的理解、像是顿悟的时刻。

I always love these moments where you get like some new click of understanding.

也许你可以讲讲其中一个顿悟的故事，或者投资史上的一件事。

And maybe you could tell the story of one of those clicks of understanding or something from the investing history.

M218:36

我脑子里有很多不同的框架，用来理解一家公司在竞争激烈的世界里长期如何赚钱。

I have in my head a number of different frameworks for how a company can make money over time in a competitive world.

一个简单的微观经济学例子就是 Cournot 寡头垄断。

And a simple example from microeconomics would be that of a Cournot oligopoly.

对于那些可能忘了大学里学过的博弈论的人来说，经济学文献里大体有两种寡头垄断。

And just for those who maybe forgot their game theory from college, there are two broad types of oligopoly in the economics literature.

一种是 Cournot，另一种是 Bertrand。

One is Cournot, the other is Bertrand.

两者关键的区别在于，Cournot 寡头垄断中，竞争者先选择要卖的数量，价格随之而定。

The key difference between them is that in a Cournot oligopoly, the competitors choose the quantity of things they're going to sell first, and the price falls out.

价格是那个变动的量。

It's the thing that moves.

而在 Bertrand 寡头垄断中，竞争者先选择销售价格，然后数量随之而定，数量是那个变动的量。

In a Bertrand oligopoly, the competitors choose the price that they're going to sell at, and then the quantity falls out, and it's the thing that moves.

这看起来只是个微妙的改变，但会导致竞争均衡产生相当大的差异。

And this seems like a subtle change, but it results in a pretty big difference in the competitive equilibrium.

所以在非合作的 Bertrand 寡头垄断中，也就是说人们不会想办法去传递信号和合作，那么通常会发生什么？想象一下，比如我在州博览会上卖饼干，除了我还有另一个竞争者，有两个卖饼干的位置，我们俩都能在旁边的卡车里想生产多少就生产多少。

So in a Bertrand oligopoly that's non-cooperative, that is to say that people aren't figuring out a way to signal and to cooperate, then what happens typically, if you imagine, let's say I'm selling cookies at the state fair and there's me and there's another competitor and there's two spots to sell cookies and we both can manufacture all the cookies we want in a truck next to the fair.

假设人们只根据价格买饼干，而且两个摊位紧挨着，完全竞争，其他所有条件都一样。

And let's say people only buy cookies based on price and they're right next to each other in perfect competition, all the rest.

那么会发生什么？比如说，每块饼干成本是1美元。

So what happens is, you know, let's say each cookie costs $1 to make.

我一开始——可能卖2美元。

Well, I start out—maybe I started selling them for $2.

我想每块饼干赚1美元。

I want to make $1 a cookie.

但我的竞争者意识到，如果他们定1.99美元，就能把所有生意都抢走。

But my competitor realizes that if they charge $1.99, they can get all the sales.

于是他们定1.99美元，然后我定1.98美元。

And so they charge $1.99, and then I charge $1.98.

转眼间，我们俩都降到1美元，每块饼干一分钱都赚不到。

And before we know it, we're both down to $1, and we're making no money per cookie.

那就是均衡。

And that's the equilibrium.

那是非合作均衡。

That's the non-cooperative equilibrium.

我们不赚钱。

We make no money.

但现在，换个设想，我必须带一个固定数量饼干的托盘，不能再做更多了。

But now, let's imagine instead that I had to bring a tray with a fixed number of cookies, and I can't make more.

那么会发生什么？那天早上我会琢磨到底要做多少饼干。

Well, what happens is that morning I'm trying to figure out how many cookies I'm going to make.

我问自己一个问题：该不该再多做一块饼干？

And I ask myself the question, should I make one more cookie?

如果多做一块饼干，会有两个影响。

And if I make one more cookie, it'll have 2 effects.

一是能多卖出一块饼干，赚到每块饼干的利润乘以这一块饼干的钱。

One is I'll get to sell an extra cookie and I'll make whatever the profit on the cookies are times that cookie.

二是这会让市场上的饼干数量增加，从而压低饼干的价格。

But the other is it will increase the number of cookies in the market, which will drive down the price of cookies.

这会导致我所有的饼干都以稍微低一点的价格卖出去。

And this will cause me to sell all of my cookies at a slightly lower price.

嗯。

Mm-hmm.

所以在做这个决定的过程中，你会看到会有一个自然的利润最大化点，在那个点上我实现利润最大化。

And so as I'm making this decision, you can see how there would be a natural maximization point where I maximize profits.

现在，在这个情况里有两个竞争者。

Now, in this case, there's 2 competitors.

所以当我往市场里多加一块饼干时，我把自己所有饼干的价格拉低了。

So when I add an extra cookie to the market, I lower the price for me.

我也同样会压低我竞争对手的价格。

I also lower the price for my competitor.

但我不会把对竞争对手的影响内化。

I don't internalize the effect on my competitor.

所以我最终的行为就像垄断者，只不过这个垄断者只吸收了市场价格影响的一半。

So I end up behaving like a monopolist, but a monopolist who only absorbs half of their price impact in the marketplace.

换句话说，我面对的是更有弹性的需求，但我依然像垄断者一样行事，只是一个面对更有弹性需求的垄断者。

In other words, one who faces more elastic demand, but I still behave like a monopolist, just one facing more elastic demand.

所以仍然有垄断利润可赚。

So there's still monopoly profits to be had.

所以均衡就这样解出来了——我们俩同时解各自的微分方程，到达一个均衡，然后你猜怎么着，我俩最终都赚钱了。

So the equilibrium gets worked— we both solve our differential equations at the same time, we get to an equilibrium, and lo and behold, we, we end up— we both end up making profits.

好。

Okay.

这些都非常理论化。

This is all very theoretical.

于是你开始研究邮轮行业。

So you start studying the cruise line industry.

好。

Okay.

就拿一个行业举例吧，我不是那种——我不是——我从来没有拥有过邮轮公司，但你知道，我一直有接触这个行业。

Just to pick an example of an industry, I'm not that— I'm not— I've never owned a cruise line business, but it's been, you know, I've been around it.

结果就是，如果他们想要更多邮轮，不可能打个响指就变出更多邮轮来。

It turns out that if they want more cruise ships, they can't just snap their fingers and have more cruise ships.

在相当长一段时间内，邮轮的数量基本上是固定的。

The number of cruise ships for a good long while is essentially fixed.

所以他们的做法就是——这是 Cournot 寡头垄断的一个完美例子。

So what they do is— this is a perfect example of Cournot oligopoly.

邮轮数量在短期到中期是固定的，所以他们最大化收益率，基本上就是在调整价格。

The number of cruise ships is fixed in the short to medium term, so they maximize yield, which basically means they're adjusting price.

这会引导你思考：好吧，这种业务光从这个角度看，就有很多其他的东西要考虑。

That leads you down a path of, OK, this is a business where just from that perspective, there's lots of other things to think about.

有品牌，有分销，还有数不清的东西。

There's brand, there's distribution, there's a zillion things.

从这个角度看，你就能理解为什么这种业务应该有可观的垄断利润。

From that perspective, now you have a sense as to how this is a business where there should be some monopoly profits.

但决定经济利润有多少的，是竞争对手的数量，对吧？

But what will mediate how much economic profits there are is how many competitors there are, right?

还有需求弹性有多大，当然还有其他因素。

And also how much elasticity of demand there is, and then of course other factors.

当然还有一个问题：你是处于均衡状态，还是大家意外地带少了？

And then of course there's also the question of, are you in equilibrium or did people accidentally bring too few?

比如说你到了集市，端着一盘饼干，结果下雨了。

Let's say you show up at the fair and you brought your tray of cookies and it rains.

那饼干价格就会暴跌，你就亏钱了，对吧？

Well, now the price of cookies plunges and you lose money, right?

或者假设你到了集市，不知道什么原因来了个著名歌手，人山人海，然后你的饼干就能卖出高价。

Or let's say you show up and for whatever reason a famous singer shows up and there's a gazillion people and Now you sell the cookies at a premium.

所以，你是否处于均衡状态，是另一个很好的问题。

So, you know, are you at equilibrium is another, you know, good question.

但事实证明，很多旅游相关的业务都是，你知道的，Cournot 寡头垄断。

But it turns out that like a lot of travel businesses are, you know, Cournot oligopolies.

嗯，你知道，租车、航空旅行、邮轮。

Um, you know, rental cars, um, air travel, um, cruises.

所以这是一个例子，说明如何使用一个思维模型，让你以某种系统化的方式理解某些类型的业务。

So this is an example of using a mental model that allows you to understand like certain types of businesses in a somewhat systematic, um, way.

我积累经验最多、最早获得很多成功的投资之一，就是建筑设备租赁行业。

One of the investments I sort of cut my teeth the most on, where I sort of first had a lot of success, was in the construction equipment rental business.

而那个行业也是——它也是一个 Cournot 寡头垄断。

And that is also— it is a Cournot oligopoly.

在任何市场里，租赁公司的数量是固定的，它们拥有一定数量的设备，短期内改变这些设备的能力是受限制的。

In any market, there's a sort of fixed number of rental companies and they own a certain amount of equipment and their ability to change that in the short term is constrained.

因此，这就是一个 Cournot oligopoly。

And therefore, it's a Cournot oligopoly.

而且这个模型还挺好的，因为需求弹性——需求是非常缺乏弹性的。

And it's also a pretty good one because elasticity of demand is— demand is very inelastic.

结果发现，没人会说，这周升降机的价格降了100美元，我要去租一台。

Turns out nobody said, like, I see the price of manlifts is down $100 this week, I'm going to rent one.

同时，也没人会说，我这个月不盖楼了，因为升降机价格涨了100美元。

And at the same time, nobody ever said, like, I'm not going to build my building because the price of man lifts is up $100 this month.

希望这回答了你的问题。基本上，你可以想到有很多这样的概念，然后你可以顺着这些概念推到它们的结论。

I hope that got to your question, but basically, you can think about there being many of these things, like these concepts that you can then kind of follow to their conclusions.

当然，现实生活很复杂，每家公司往往有很多这些因素汇聚在一起。

And of course, life is complicated and every company has like often a whole confluence of these things.

你真正要找的是一家拥有这些因素协同作用的企业。

And what you're really looking for is a business where you have a sort of a bunch of these things that are working together.

比如邮轮行业，建造一艘邮轮需要很长时间，你不能打个响指就变出一艘新的邮轮，这个特性基本上不随社会技术进步而改变。

With the cruise ship industry, like the idea that it takes a long time to build a cruise ship and you can't just snap your fingers and have another cruise ship is fairly invariant to technological change in society.

我猜未来也许我们可以打印邮轮，但就目前和可预见的未来来说，这个限制是固定的。

I guess maybe there's some future state where we can print them out, but for now and for the foreseeable future, this is going to be fixed.

所以你寻找的是相对不受技术变化影响的优势，这些优势层层叠加、相互交织，最终构成了业务。

And so you're looking for relatively sort of technologically invariant advantages, layered and interwoven, that kind of give you the business.

再往后，我有一个朋友开玩笑说，一个好的价值投资者的备忘录大约有20页讲业务，1页讲估值。

And then from there, I have a friend who jokes that A good value investor's memo is like 20 pages about the business and 1 page on the valuation.

所以从那时候开始，就好像，我也不知道，它便宜吗？

So like from then from there, it's like, I don't know, like, is it cheap?

相对于价格，它能不能赚很多钱？

Does it make a lot of money relative to the price?

相对于价格，它会不会大幅增长？

Is it going to grow a lot relative to the price?

你知道，这些都是相当简单的计算。

You know, these are pretty trivial calculations.

M125:14

如果我在想你会怎么安排时间，那么随着时间的推移积累这样的模型似乎非常有价值。

If I was thinking about how you would spend your time, it would seem to be incredibly valuable to collect models like this over time.

你大部分是通过具体的业务找到这些模型的吗？

Do you find your way to most of them through a specific business?

哪个先来，业务还是思维模型？

Which comes first, the business or the mental model?

M225:26

哦，你是在问怎么找到地下的金子吧？

Oh, so you're asking how do you find the gold in the ground?

答案是，是的。

The answer is yes.

很难。

It's hard.

就像，没有什么——我总是回到那句话，投资里没有一件事是不难的。

Like, there's nothing— I keep coming back to that, but there's nothing about investing that's not hard.

嗯，我们，我们寻找，你知道，我雇了一位斯坦福教授，把斯坦福所有课程里的经济学模型整理出来，然后带我过一遍，确保我没有漏掉任何一个。

Um, we, we look for, you know, I hired a Stanford professor to assemble all of the economics models in all of the courses in Stanford, and then just like walk me through all of them to make sure I hadn't missed any.

然后我捡回了一些我之前遗漏或忘记的模型。

And I picked up a few that I'd like, you know, missed or forgotten about.

我会试着广泛阅读，你知道，然后当然，你一个接一个地研究公司。

I would try to read broadly, like, you know, then of course, you study companies one after the other.

在不同的公司里，你会突然领悟到某种事情正在发生。

In various companies, it'll sort of click for you that something is happening.

M126:03

为了更清楚地说明这个观点，你能再举一个像 Cournot oligopoly 这样的例子吗？让我们感受一下你过去用过的另一个东西。

To drive home the point, can you do one more like the Cournot oligopoly just to give us a flavored sense of another thing that you've used in the past?

M226:11

Secondary reinforcers。

Secondary reinforcers.

所以这只是在另一个不同的领域里。

So this is just a different place.

这是心理学上的东西。

This is out of psychology.

事实上，在动物研究和人体研究等等方面，已经积累了大量的心理学文献。

It turns out that there's a meaningful psychology literature that's been built up in animal studies and people and all the rest.

它基本上说的是：当你给哺乳动物某种能刺激其奖励系统的东西时，你的大脑——找不到更好的词——会捕捉到它被接收时的那个情境。

Which basically says this idea that when you give mammals something that stimulates their reward systems, your brain, for lack of a better term, sort of captures the context in which it was received.

然后如果它喜欢，就会试图复制那个情境。

And then if it likes it, tries to replicate that context.

而且你可以——这种做法的进化原因是不言自明的。

And you can— the sort of evolutionary reason why this makes sense is self-evident.

有趣的是，这些次级强化物的强度与刺激本身的强度成正比，同时也与——与刺激出现和愉悦感受器被激活之间的时间差成反比。

And what makes that interesting is that it turns out that the strength of these secondary reinforcers is proportionate to the power of the stimulus, as well as it's proportionate to the— inversely proportionate to the time lag between when the stimulus comes and when the pleasure sensors get stimulated.

所以，你知道，如果某个东西在你得到它三小时之后才让你感觉良好，你的大脑就有点搞不清楚。

So, you know, if something makes you feel good 3 hours after you got it, your brain kind of doesn't know.

它到底是从哪儿来的。

Where it came from.

如果某个东西在你得到它的那一刻就让你感觉良好，那你的大脑就完全知道。

If something makes you feel good within a moment of when you got it, then your brain knows exactly.

而有趣的是，这些被称为次级强化物，因为你可以在刺激和它被接收时所处情境中的其他事物之间建立关联。

And what's interesting about that is these are called secondary reinforcers because you can create these associations between the stimulus and other things that are in the context that it was received.

所以你能让老鼠更喜欢那种伴随特定颜色灯光给它们的可卡因。

So you can make rats prefer cocaine that's given to them with a certain colour light.

即使你不再给它们可卡因，它们还是会继续去找那个灯光。

They'll continue to seek out that light even when you deprive them of the cocaine.

好吧，挺酷的。

Okay, cool.

这是关于人类大脑的一个很酷的知识。

That's a neat thing to know about the human brain.

我在哪儿看到这一点被应用呢？

Where do I see that applied?

嗯，如果我要按利润率给消费品包装行业排序，我觉得排名大概会是这样的。

Well, if I were to rank by margins the consumer packaged goods industries, I think the ranking might look something like this.

最上面是尼古丁香烟，然后可能是像 dip 那种无烟烟草，然后大概有，你知道，可口可乐，然后是咖啡，然后可能某个位置是糖果，然后有含糖甜食，比如，呃，饼干之类的东西。

You'd have the nicotine cigarettes at the top, And then you'd have like dip, and then you'd probably have, you know, Coca-Cola, and then you'd probably have coffee, and then you'd probably somewhere have like candy, and then you'd have like sugary sweets, like, um, uh, you know, cookies and stuff like that.

然后是像番茄酱、面包这类的东西，再然后就是，我不知道，水，对吧？

And then you'd have like tomato sauce and bread, and then you'd have I don't know, water, right?

大概是这样的。

Something like that.

这大概是个粗略的排名。

It's probably a rough ranking.

嗯，事实证明，如果你沿着这个列表往下看，问是什么在刺激人们的愉悦系统——那么，就通过香烟或电子烟吸入的尼古丁而言，尼古丁极其强大，而呼吸系统是非常快速的递送机制。

Well, it turns out that if you go down that same list and you ask what is stimulating the pleasure— people's pleasure systems, well, in the case of nicotine inhaled through a cigarette or a vaping product, nicotine is incredibly powerful and the respiratory system is a very fast delivery mechanism.

所以你会得到对人们愉悦感受器的非常快速的刺激。

So you get this very rapid stimulation of people's pleasure sensors.

然后你瞧吧，它创造了非常强的次级强化物，让人们非常忠于品牌。

And lo and behold, it creates these very strong secondary reinforcers, which make people very brand loyal.

嗯。

Hmm.

而且不只是——我是说，如果你观察吸烟者，他们不仅抽同一个牌子，他们还每天在相同的时间、相同的地点抽。

And not only by— I mean, if you ever watch smokers, they're not only smoking the same brand, they're smoking at the same time in the same place, like every day.

尼古丁具有成瘾性，这也有帮助，它会触发习惯的形成，这完全是另一个大脑功能部分，你在那里会形成并遵循习惯。

It also helps that nicotine is addictive, which creates a trigger for a habit, which is a whole other brain function piece where you're kind of making and following habits.

你知道，如果你往下看这个列表，咖啡因是个不错的刺激物，但它不一定有尼古丁那么强效。

You know, if you go down the list, Caffeine is a good stimulator, but it's not as potent necessarily as nicotine.

更重要的是，你是通过胃来摄入它的。

More importantly, you're taking it through your stomach.

顺便说一句，dip 是通过嘴唇吸收的，所以相当快，但没有香烟那么快。

And by the way, dip goes through your lips, so it's pretty fast, but not as fast as cigarettes.

咖啡因、苏打水含糖和咖啡因，它们通过胃吸收，所以更慢，但仍然会产生相当多的——这种关联的时间间隔没那么长。

Caffeine, soda has sugar and caffeine, it goes through your stomach, so it's slower, but it still creates a fair bit of— the association isn't that far apart.

随着你的研究，你就会接触到像饼干之类的东西。

As you work, then you get to things like cookies.

在那里，饼干和脂肪之类的东西混合在一起，所以它的效果会减慢。

There, the cookie is mixed with fat and stuff, so it slows it down.

糖和脂肪之类的东西混合在一起，所以它的效果会更加减慢，但它仍然相当强烈。

The sugar is mixed with fat and stuff, so it slows it down even more, but it's still pretty potent.

它显然是一种甜食。

It's obviously a sweet.

你继续往下，就会遇到咸味食品之类的。

You work your way farther down, you get to your savouries or whatever.

这里，是的，这些是人们真正喜欢的东西，但这种刺激要弱得多。

Here, yes, these are things people really like, but the sort of stimulation is much weaker.

它更有时间延迟效应。

It's more time-lagged.

因此，人们会有自己喜欢的番茄酱品牌，但最终，品牌忠诚度远不如香烟之类的东西。

And as a consequence, people have a preferred tomato sauce, but in the end, there's much less brand loyalty than, say, a cigarette.

显然水也一样，除非你考虑那些更注重地位的品牌。

Obviously water, other than if you think about brands that are more status focused.

但如果你只是考虑一瓶水这样的东西，我认为最终没有人会那么挑剔。

But if you think about just sort of like a bottle of water, I don't think in the end anyone's that picky.

M130:33

我猜市场上的有价值之处在于市场并没有恰当地重视那个洞察。

And I guess the valuable thing in markets would then be that markets don't properly value that insight.

如果你看看Philip Morris，它一度是美国历史上表现最好的股票之类的，持续了几十年之久。

If you look at Philip Morris, at one point it was the best-performing stock in US history or something like that for decades and decades.

所以这证实了这个想法，即它可能是一个有价值的洞察，但在某个时候它会被定价。

So it would corroborate this idea that it's probably a valuable insight, but at some point it gets priced.

所有的洞察都会被定价。

Insights all get priced.

所以也许这就是你之前谈到的，你需要在一个被忽视的领域里汇聚这些因素，才能找到一个有趣的机会，之类的话。

And so maybe that's what you were talking about earlier, which is you need a confluence of these things in an area that's been neglected to find an interesting opportunity, something like that.

M231:03

是的，你需要一些能把人吓跑的东西。

Yeah, you need something that scares people away.

嗯，你知道，我认为，我给出的例子，比如，我不认为对大多数人来说Coca-Cola是一个好业务是个谜，对吧？

Um, you know, I think the, the, you know, the example I gave, like, I don't think it's a mystery to most people that like Coca-Cola is a good business, right?

我不完全相信我刚才阐述的东西还能在公开市场上让你赚很多钱，因为我认为它已经被定价进去了。

I'm not totally convinced that like, what I just laid out is like, gonna make you a lot of money in the public markets anymore, because I think it's priced in.

我不完全相信拥有这些东西的人理解它。

I'm not totally convinced that the people who own these things understand it.

他们只是观察到在实践中这些是品牌忠诚度非常高的业务。

They just have observed that in practice, these are very brand loyal businesses.

然而，有时候事情会出现，而且我曾经参与过一家尼古丁vaping公司，这家公司相当成功，最终被一家大型烟草公司收购。

However, sometimes things come up and there were— I was involved in a nicotine vaping company, which was reasonably successful and ultimately acquired by a large tobacco company.

在早期，并不一定——你并不完全有证据表明这些会是真正伟大的业务，但我刚才阐述的理论框架是一个重要的指导因素，让我有信心这是一项业务。

In the early days, it was not — you didn't have necessarily all this evidence that these were going to be really great businesses, but the theoretical construct that I just laid out to you was an important sort of guiding factor in giving me confidence that this was a business.

还有很多其他因素，但这是一个最终会成功的业务。

There's a lot of other factors, but this is a business that would ultimately be successful.

或者我有朋友——我没有这么做是因为我认为他们是对的，但我认为我有其他更好的事情。

Or I have friends who— I didn't do it because I thought they were right, but I thought I had other things that were better.

而且还有机会成本需要考虑。

And there's opportunity cost to consider.

但我有一些朋友是Philip Morris International的成功投资者。

But I have friends who were successful investors in Philip Morris International.

他们当时在观察Zyn。

They were observing Zyn.

而且，你知道，这种知识框架给了他们一种感觉，即Zyn会有很高的品牌忠诚度，你知道，在当时，它还未经证实。

And, you know, a lot of this, like, intellectual construct gave them a sense that, like, that Zyn was going to have a lot of brand loyalty, you know, where at that time, you know, it was sort of unproven.

嗯哼。

Mm-hmm.

而Zyn，当然，确实是。

And Zyn, of course, is.

M132:47

相当大的一个。

Quite a big one,

M232:47

已经扩散开了，而且品牌忠诚度很高。

Has proliferated, and there's a lot of brand loyalty.

但这在当时并不明显，至少在历史数据里看不出来，直到——所以所有这些招数，在它们派上用场之前都没用，我觉得可以这么想。

But that wasn't obvious, at least it wasn't in the historical data until— so all of these tricks, they're not useful until they are, I guess, would be kind of the way to think about it.

M133:06

如果你想想在市场中寻找优势的经典方法，那就是信息优势，而这种优势似乎已经消失了。

If you think about the classical ways of finding edge in markets, it would be informational, which seems kind of gone.

分析优势，我们谈了很多这方面的内容，然后最后一个类别，我称之为结构性或者行为性之类的。

Analytical, which is a lot of what we're talking about, and then I'll call the last bucket structural or behavioral or something like that.

你对ESG怎么看？

What do you think about ESG?

我想到这个是因为尼古丁的例子，有一类投资者被禁止持有这类股票，这对市场产生了奇怪的影响，尤其是当这些资产所有者规模很大的时候。

It comes to mind because of the nicotine examples where there's just a class of investor that's not allowed to own it, which creates a weird impact on markets, especially if those asset owners are very large.

你对ESG怎么看？

What do you think about ESG?

M233:35

我觉得如果你替别人管钱，却要把你自己的道德框架应用到投资方式上，那是极其傲慢的。

I think that if you manage money for other people, you're deeply arrogant if you are going to apply your ethical framework onto the way that you invest.

整个社会会形成一个集体共识，什么允许、什么不允许，我们称之为法律。

Society in aggregate comes to a collective view of what's allowed and what's not allowed, and we call that the law.

如果一家企业违法，那通常是个糟糕的投资，因为，你知道，这很明显。

If a business is violating the law, that's often a bad investment because, you know, obvious.

如果社会在演进，法律有可能改变，那是你在投资中必须考虑进去的风险。

If society is evolving and the law is likely to change, that is a risk that one needs to factor into an investment.

你不去考虑这个的话，就有点傻了。

And you'd be sort of silly not to think about that.

但如果某样东西只是被一群人讨厌，但他们还没有在这个国家积累起改变法律所需的临界规模，而且你觉得发生这种事情的风险并不特别高，但你仍然决定套用某种道德框架，因此不帮他们赚钱，不为你的合伙人赚钱，那真的是一个很有问题的事情。

But if something is just disliked by a group of people, but they haven't built up the critical mass necessary to change the law in this country, and you don't think the risk of that happening is particularly high, but you decide that you're going to apply some moral framework and not make them money to do it, not make money for your partners to do it, that's a really fraught thing.

因为，凭什么你认为自己在是非对错上的深刻智慧，比社会的集体意志和判断还要高明？

Because, like, what gives you this deep wisdom about what's right and what's wrong that is better than the collective will and judgment of society?

顺便说，也许你会说，好吧，那我不用我自己的判断。

By the way, maybe you'd say, okay, fine, I'm not going to use my judgment.

我要用我作为投资者的判断。

I'm going to use my investor's judgment.

但问题就变成了，好吧，是哪个投资者，你怎么给他们加权？

But then the question becomes, okay, well, but which investor and how do you weight them?

等权吗？

Equally?

按AUM吗？

Is it by AUM?

如果是机构投资者呢？

What if it's an institution?

你要去征求机构里那些底层人士的意见吗？

Do you poll the underlying people at the institution?

这太离谱了。

This is a wild thing.

我认为一个更好的做法是，直接说目标就是最大化回报。

I think a much better approach is to just say that the goal is to maximise returns.

显然，在追求这个目标的过程中，公司必须遵守法律，你也必须遵守法律，而且你必须把社会规范的变化考虑在内。

And obviously in doing that, companies have to comply with the law, you have to comply with the law, and you have to take the change in norms into account.

但在这之上再叠加任何额外的道德——当然，如果你最大化回报，人们当然可以把那些钱捐给任何他们想捐的慈善机构。

But laying any sort of further ethics onto that— and then of course, if you maximise returns, people can of course take that money and give it to whatever charity they feel that they want to.

我觉得这大概是唯一的解决办法。

And I think that that's sort of the only solution.

我觉得这是唯一一个能解决这个问题、而又不充满矛盾纠葛的方案。

It's like the only solution that I think kind of resolves this problem that isn't fraught.

我在职业生涯中注意到，投资圈的人经常谈论恐慌，对吧？

I've noticed in my career that people in investing circles, they talk a lot about panics, right?

就是那种你想在情况糟糕的时候买入的想法。

This idea that you want to buy when things are bad.

我注意到在我的职业生涯中确实发生过一些经济恐慌。

I have noticed that there are certainly economic panics that have happened in my career.

我也注意到过一些所谓的道德恐慌。

I've also noticed there's sort of moral panics that have happened.

而且你可以像利用经济恐慌那样去利用道德恐慌来投资，而且还能做得不错。

And you can buy into moral panics much the way you can buy into economic panics, and you can do well.

不过，经济恐慌伴随着一种风险，就是情况可能会变得更糟，企业可能无法应对未来的挑战。

Now, economic panics bring with them the risk that things could get worse and the business might not survive the challenges that lie ahead.

道德恐慌带来的风险则是，你可能引发立法、监管或规则层面的变化，而这些变化可能会伤害到公司。

Moral panics bring with them the risk that you could bring about legislative or regulatory or rulemaking change that can hurt the company.

所以你需要把这些因素考虑进去。

And so you need to take these things into account.

但我认为，作为一个投资者，去关注那些被看作不太好但又不违法的地方，是合理的。

But I think that it's reasonable as an investor to look to areas that are viewed as sort of bad, but are not illegal.

而且，怎么说呢，当我深挖过类似的事情后，我发现它们远比那种天真的看法——比如“煤炭不好”——要复杂得多。

And for what it's worth, when I've dug into most things like this, I've always discovered that these things are far more complicated than the sort of naive, you know, coal is bad.

好吧，当然，但电力是挺好的。

OK, well, sure, but electricity is pretty good.

所以事情很复杂。

So it's complicated.

我再补充一点，就是你刚才提到的那个想法，就是有些基金不能投资之类的。

I'll add one other thing, which is this idea that I think you mentioned, which is funds that can't invest or whatever.

你其实隐含了一个观点，就是价格弹性的概念。

There's an implicit point that you're sort of saying, which is an elasticity of price concept.

我并不是说——我觉得相关研究也基本同意我的看法——我不认为投资者群体决定放弃某些资产类别，比如石油公司，就一定会让它们变得特别便宜。

And I'm not that— I think the literature on this kind of agrees with me, but I don't think that groups of investors deciding to forego certain asset classes like oil companies necessarily cause them to be super cheap.

嗯。

Hmm.

但我觉得确实可能存在一些更广泛的情况，人们因为某种原因不太想持有某些东西，而且如果这种趋势真的很广泛，可能会产生一些影响。

I do think that there can be sort of more broad-based things where people kind of don't want to own something for some reason, and that can, you know, and if it's really broad, it can have some effect.

但我认为大多数情况是，人们只是有点害怕。

But I think mostly what happens is people just kind of get scared.

这更像是一种恐慌。

It's more of a panic.

人们会害怕，比如，“哦不，这家公司会被关掉，因为那群人觉得它很糟糕，他们想搞垮它。”

People get scared, like, oh no, you know, this company is going to get shut down because, you know, this group of people view it as terrible, and they're going to try to kill it.

M137:31

我觉得现在是时候花一大段时间来聊聊你在Carvana上的投资了。

I think now's a great time to devote a long block of time to your investment in Carvana.

我觉得了解你和你公司历史的人，一定会把你和这个仓位联系起来。

I think people that know you and your firm's history will certainly associate you with the position.

长期以来，这对你来说一直是一个巨大的仓位。

It's been an enormous position for you over time.

你是这家公司最大的投资者之一。

You're one of the biggest investors in the business.

对我来说，我之所以多次请你来做这件事，原因之一就是——大概五六年前开始，我有机会和你聊这家公司，经历了它的许多起起落落。

And for me, one of the reasons I've, I've asked you so many times to do this is that, let's say dating back 5 or 6 years now, I've had the chance to talk to you about this company through its many ups and downs.

这是我从另一位投资者那里获得的最有趣的投资教育之一，就是时不时和你聊聊这家公司以及你对它的看法。

And it's been one of the most interesting educations that I've received from another investor on investing, just talking to you every so often about this company and what you're thinking about it.

所以我很幸运能享受这种“一对一听众”的待遇。

And so I've been lucky to enjoy that, you know, audience of one.

而且我觉得这是一个绝佳的机会，听你讲述这个非常复杂的故事。

And I thought it would be an amazing opportunity to hear you tell the story, which is very complicated.

这是一个复杂的商业故事。

It's a complicated business story.

这是一个复杂的投资故事。

It's a complicated investment story.

你自己经历这一切的故事既有趣又复杂。

Your own story about how you were going through it all is interesting and complicated.

它有很多维度。

There's all sorts of dimensionality to it.

你开玩笑说这就像五条河汇聚在一起。

You were joking that it's like 5 rivers coming together.

你得分别解释每一条河。

You kind of have to explain each river.

但我们时间充裕，所以我不知道最好从哪里开始——先从哪条河讲起呢，嗯，也许你来选。

But we have the luxury of time here, so I don't know how best to— to start with which river, uh, maybe you can pick.

但我想花很多时间，我会有很多追问，因为我觉得你可以去看Carvana的股价图，也可以去听我和Ernie的两次对话。

But I want to devote like a lot of time, and I'll have lots of follow-up questions because I just think like you can go look at the Carvana price chart, you can listen to my 2 conversations with Ernie.

关于Carvana，已经有太多太多内容了。

Like there's lots of, there's lots of stuff out there about Carvana.

但我觉得有意思的是投资者的视角。

But the thing that I find interesting is the investor's perspective.

作为可能持有最大仓位、一直持有、不断加仓、陪伴它最久的人，你对它有着最全面的视角。

As the person that probably had the biggest position, held on to it, bought more, um, has been with it the longest, you sort of had the most holistic perspective on it.

我希望大家都能从亲身经历这种投资的过程中获益。

And I want everyone to benefit from what it's like to own and live through one of those.

M239:10

当然。

Sure.

我答应来的原因之一——实际上，几乎全部原因，甚至超过全部原因，就是这绝对是商业史上的一段疯狂经历。

And part of the reason I— actually, almost all the reason I said yes, more than all the reason I said yes to coming on, is that it has been such a wild episode in business history.

我有点担心，如果不试着在一定程度上把它记录下来，它就会被遗忘。

And I sort of worried that if I didn't try to memorialize it to some extent, that it would get forgotten.

而且这故事太有意思了。

And it is such an interesting story.

我觉得它值得被记录下来。

I think it deserves to be memorialized.

我还觉得，大家对Carvana在2022年、2023年及之后发生的事情存在很大的误解。

I also think it's sort of wildly misunderstood in terms of what happened to Carvana in 2022 and '23 and beyond.

所以，嗯，也许可以从不熟悉的人做一个基础介绍开始。

So yeah, I guess maybe a place to start just to level set for people who don't know it so well.

Carvana是一家二手车在线零售商。

Carvana is an online retailer of used cars.

它由Ernie Garcia在2013年创立，你采访过他。

It was founded in 2013 by Ernie Garcia, who you've had on.

如果要大致描述这家公司从2013年到2021年的历史，那就是一路向上、向右发展。

And if you were to broadly describe the company's history from 2013 to 2021, it was up and to the right.

业务每年增长，利润率每年提高，而且增长得非常快。

The business grew every year, its margins improved every year, and it grew really fast.

它经常每年翻倍，后来稍微慢了一点，但大致就是那个节奏。

It was doubling often every year, slowed a little bit, but that was kind of roughly the pace.

如果你在2021年问我，我大概会预期这个趋势会持续下去。

If you'd spoken to me in 2021, I roughly would have expected a continuation of that trend.

结果当然，业务放缓了。

And of course, what happened was the business slowed.

它亏了很多钱。

It lost tons of money.

股价跌了99%，这比……相当糟糕。

The stock went down 99%, which is more than— Pretty bad.

这确实相当糟糕。

Which is pretty bad.

然后，把故事讲完——我想大多数人都意识到了——结果发现那全是误会。

And then to ruin the story, which I think most people realize, it turns out that was all a mistake.

公司没问题。

The company's fine.

它回来了。

It's right back.

它比我预想的稍微落后一点，但实际上更盈利了，回到了正轨，股价也基本恢复了，等等。

It's a little behind where I sort of thought it would be, but it's actually more profitable and it's back on track and the stock's mostly recovered and all the rest.

所以大致的过程就是这样。

So that's kind of the broad arc.

M140:56

特别是现在我们已经打下了基础，了解你如何运用思维方式去理解一个新公司。

Especially now that we've laid the groundwork for how you sort of apply ways of thinking to understanding a new company.

所以也许可以更具体到你个人的经历，比如你是怎么遇到它的？

And so maybe even make it specific to you, like how did you encounter it?

在你尝试了解这个行业的时候，有哪些模型让你觉得相关呢？

What were some of the models that, you know, felt relevant to you as you tried to learn about the business?

然后利用这一点来介绍这个业务是如何运作的。

And use that as a way to introduce like how the business works.

M241:12

我第一次接触Carvana是在2018年，他们网站上曾经有一个视频，现在可能还有，大致描述了这个业务。

I first encountered Carvana in 2018, and they used to have a video up on their site, they might still, that kind of describes the business.

那是上市前的视频，就是那种你会放在网站上的东西。

It was a pre-IPO video, one of these things you put up.

诸如此类。

Whatever.

我记得看那个视频的时候，基本上意识到这是一个很棒的生意，会发展得很好，而且价格被严重低估了，所以我会大量持有，前提是他们说的都是真的。

And I remember sort of watching that video, basically realizing this is an amazing business that's going to do great, and it's incredibly underpriced, and I'm going to own a lot of this, provided like everything they just said is true.

但显然，现实并不是这样，因为我有那种感觉是因为多年积累的背景知识。

But obviously, that's not how reality works in the sense that the reason why I felt like that was years and years and years of context.

所以再往前追溯，在前几年，你知道，在我们这一行，你就是在等股票上涨。

And so to go further back, over the prior years, you know, like when you're in my business, you're waiting for your stocks to go up.

与此同时，你会看看其他东西。

In the meantime, you're sort of looking at other things.

所以我花时间研究了CarMax，也研究了汽车经销商。

And so I had spent time studying CarMax, and I had spent time studying car dealerships.

所以我对汽车零售业务的运作方式算是相当熟悉。

So I was sort of reasonably fluent in kind of how the auto retailing business works.

我也参与过汽车贷款业务。

I'd also been involved in the auto lending business.

我参与过Credit Acceptance，这是一家知名的汽车贷款公司。

I'd been involved in Credit Acceptance, which is a well-known auto lender.

我也看过——显然，谁没研究过亚马逊呢？也读过《万货商店》这本书。

I'd also looked— obviously, who hasn't studied Amazon and like read The Everything Store.

我还研究过物流公司，也看过制造业公司等等，还有软件公司。

I'd also studied logistics companies, and I'd also looked at, you know, manufacturing companies and all the rest, and software companies.

结果发现Carvana所有这些都占。

And so it turns out that Carvana is like all of these things.

当他们解释这个业务时，我清楚地看到，那些能让一家成功的分销公司、零售商或贷款公司拥有的经济优势，都具有规模经济、技能和信任这些要素。

As they were explaining the business, it was clear to me that the economic advantages that allow someone to build a successful distribution company or a successful retailer or a successful lender. All of them have economies of scale, skill, and trust.

而Carvana所构建的将同时涉及所有这些不同业务的所有优势，它们实际上同时处于这些领域。

And Carvana had— what Carvana was building was going to involve all of the advantages from all of these different businesses that they're effectively in at the same time.

这叫做范围经济。

And this is called economies of scope.

通过在所有这些方面都做得很好，它将会产生一个非常巨大的护城河。

And by being great at all of these things, it was going to produce this very— it could produce this very big moat.

在看到那个视频之前，我原本并不太相信会有人在网上买车。

What I didn't believe, necessarily, until I saw that video, was that anyone would buy a car on the internet.

因为那只是普遍的认知。

Because that was just common wisdom.

当时，你知道，这是挺久以前的事了，那时还不明显，但他们已经有一些用户群曲线了。

And at the time, this is, you know, this is a while ago, this is before it was obvious, but they just had some cohort curves.

我当时就想，嗯，人们显然很喜欢这个。

And I was like, well, people clearly love this.

所以当时就像是，一见钟情。也许可以稍微解释一下这个业务，以及为什么我认为我识别出的那些东西，变成了如今它巨大的优势，也就是护城河。

And so at that point, like, it was kind of like love at first sight. Maybe to sort of explain a bit about the business and why I think it's so— the things I identified turned into the tremendous advantages it has today, and are kind of the moats.

那我花几分钟来讲一下。

So let me just spend a few minutes.

核心来说，Carvana系统的运作方式，就是跟踪一辆车。

So at the core, the way the Carvana system works, it will follow a car.

Carvana主要从公众那里买车。

Carvana buys cars mostly from the public.

你拍一张你的车牌照片，然后输入一些信息。

You take a picture of your license plate, and you enter a few things.

大概就四个问题。

And it's like 4 questions.

他们会给你一个报价，你可以选择接受或者不接受，你有7天时间考虑。

And they'll give you a price, you can exercise it or not, you have 7 days.

一旦你这么做，你可以安排让人来取车，或者你也可以花一点费用把车送到他们的一个中心，然后，嗯，拿到钱，交易瞬间就能完成。

Once you do that, you can arrange to have someone pick up the car, or you can, for a small fee, drop it off at one of their hubs, and, you know, get your money, and the transaction takes no time.

大家给他们的评价都是五星。

Everyone gives them 5 stars.

做到这点很难，对吧？

Doing that's hard, right?

就像我刚才说的，听起来很简单，但实际上，要能从车牌映射到VIN，再映射到该VIN对应的所有车辆特征，然后要能估算出，比如，你预计能卖多少钱、运输费用是多少、修复费用是多少，再从这些信息中算出你预计能赚多少钱，然后确定出多少报价才能最大化利润，所有这些都建立在这个潜在客户的基础上。

Like what I just said, it sounds so simple, but actually being able to take a license plate, to map it to a VIN, to map all the features of the car's VIN, to then be able to figure out, like, what you think you're gonna be able to sell that car for, how much it's gonna cost to ship it, how much it's gonna cost to recondition it, and be able to work out from all that, therefore, what you think you're going to be able to make on the car, and then to figure out what you want to offer in order to maximize the profits, like from this lead.

而且所有这些，要针对全国道路上每一辆车，随时都在运行，对吧？

You know, and to do it all, like, you know, for every car on the road, like all the time across the country, right?

这太疯狂了。

It's like wild.

然后Carvana拥有一定的房地产规模。

Then Carvana owns a real estate footprint.

这些房地产资产包括大型的检查和修复中心。

That real estate footprint consists of larger inspection and reconditioning centers.

这些是非常大的设施，每年能修复多达4万辆车，停车场里，嗯，有6千、7千、8千辆车，数量很多。

These are very, very big facilities that can recondition up to 40,000 cars a year, with, you know, 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 cars in the parking lot, which is a lot of cars.

然后还有一些本地站点，他们称之为hubs。

Then there's local points of presence that they call hubs.

这些hubs，比如在康涅狄格州费尔菲尔德就有一个，原本是纯粹非面向消费者的设施。

And those hubs would be, you know, there's one in Fairfield, Connecticut, small facilities that originally were sort of purely non-consumer-facing.

现在他们已经改造得有点面向消费者了，但它们，嗯，不是很大。

Now they've modified them to be somewhat consumer-facing, but they're, you know, they're not very big.

所以hubs里的车，hub连接到IRC。比如说你让人把车取走。

And so the cars at the hub, the hub is connected to the IRC. Let's say you have the car picked up.

他们那种小巧的单车运输车会出来一辆。

One of their nifty little single-car haulers will come out.

他们会把车取走。

They'll pick the car up.

他们会把它带回hub。

They'll bring it back to the hub.

从那里，那个hub通过一辆9车运输车与IRC连接起来。

From there, that hub is connected to the IRC via logistics on a 9-car hauler.

这些IRC之间也通过9车运输车连接。

Those IRCs are then connected to each other via logistics on 9-car haulers.

这样做就建立了一个中心辐射型的物流系统。

And what that does is it's built a hub-and-spoke logistics system.

就像FedEx之类的。

It's like FedEx or something.

Ernie的洞见在于，如果你想要——历史上，如果你想运送汽车，那是非常缓慢和昂贵的。

The sort of insight there, which Ernie had, was if you wanted— historically, if you wanted to ship cars, it was very slow and expensive.

原因是在康涅狄格州费尔菲尔德和阿拉巴马州的某个地方——莫比尔之间，汽车运输的量很少。

And the reason is that sort of the amount of car shipping happening between Fairfield, Connecticut, and, you know, Alabama, and someplace in Alabama— Mobile.

阿拉巴马州莫比尔。

Mobile, Alabama.

就是没那么多量。

It's just no volume.

所以点对点的汽车运输系统行不通。

And so the car point-to-point system doesn't work.

因此他们在中心辐射系统中所做的，就是将所有这些运输量集中到相对狭窄的路线上。

So what they've done in their hub-and-spoke system is they've collapsed down all this volume onto relatively narrow routes.

大部分运输发生在IRC之间。

Most of the shipping is happening between IRCs.

这种枢纽的数量相对较少，而且它们之间的连接也比较稀疏。

There's a relatively small number of them, and they're sort of sparsely connected.

这样它们就可以让卡车在这些IRC之间来回不停运载车辆。

And what that allows them to do is to move trucks continuously back and forth, loaded with cars between these IRCs.

你可以把它们想象成铁轨，车辆可以在这些站点之间持续移动。

And you can think about them as train tracks, where the vehicles are moving— can move continuously between these spots.

这样做的好处是，如果一辆卡车平均时速40英里，每英里成本3美元，那么你就可以算出用一辆能装9辆车的卡车运输，车辆能多快移动以及成本是多少。

And what that does is, if a truck travels 40 miles an hour on average, and costs $3 a mile to travel, then you can work out what the cost on a 9-car hauler is, how fast cars can travel and what the cost is.

实际上成本并没有那么高。

And it's actually not that high.

但是运行这样一个中心辐射式的网络，首先，它很难。

But running a hub-and-spoke network like this, one, it's hard.

建立一个物流系统需要很高的密度，需要很大的规模。

Building a logistics system requires a lot of density, requires a lot of scale.

其中还涉及很多技术，比如招聘司机。

There's also a lot of technology to it, recruiting drivers.

涉及的东西很多。

There's a lot.

但这就是系统的下一个环节。

But that's the next piece of the system.

有了这个系统，车辆会被送到IRC。

With that, the car will come to an IRC.

然后在那个IRC里，车辆会进行翻新。

And at that IRC, it'll get reconditioned.

在IRC里翻新车辆是一件很有挑战性的事。

And reconditioning a car in an IRC is a challenging thing.

哪些凹陷需要修复？

Which dents do you repair?

怎么修复？

How do you repair it?

你可以把翻新中心想象成一系列不同的工位，每个工位做相对单一的工作。

And you can think about a reconditioning center as a bunch of different stations that do a bunch of different work that's relatively homogeneous.

比如换轮胎、换机油、检查。

So changing tires, changing oil, inspecting.

无痕凹陷修复、喷漆，或者其他各种活儿。

Paintless dent repair, painting, whatever the thing may be.

一辆车进来时，需要做的工作是混合多样的。

A car starts out with a mix of work that has to be done to it.

这些需要先通过检查来确定，然后车辆会被引导到IRC里的不同工位，最后出来拍照，放到网站上。

That has to be ascertained in an inspection, and then the car is going to be routed through the IRC to different stations, and then come out and be imaged and put on the website.

过一段时间，车就卖掉了。

Sometime later, it sells.

他们用能装9辆车的卡车把车运到中心枢纽。

They take the car, 9-car hauler, to the hub.

你会发现这个系统非常平衡。

Now, you'll see this is beautifully balanced.

车辆会从中心枢纽返回。

Cars are coming back from the hub.

同时也会从中心枢纽发出去。

They're also going out to the hub.

没错。

Sure.

对吧？

Right?

所以车辆会从它所在的IRC出发，沿着这些“铁轨”运到离客户最近的IRC。

So the car will go from the IRC it's at to the IRC closest to the customer along basically the rails.

然后从IRC运到中心枢纽，再从中心枢纽用单辆车的卡车配送，或者由客户自提。

And then it will go from the IRC to the hub, and then from the hub, it'll be delivered on the single-car hauler or picked up by the consumer.

这就是实体物流系统。

That's the physical system.

还有金融服务。

There's also finance.

如果你上他们的网站，输入你的信息，不用按价格搜索，你可以按每月付款额来搜索每辆车。

If you go on their site and you enter your information, instead of searching by price, you can search every car by payment.

你可以调整贷款月数和首付金额，然后你能看到每辆车精确到分的每月付款。

So you can adjust the number of months, your down payment, and you can see each payment for each car to the penny.

这是基于你个人的信用评分。

Based on your individual credit score.

而且这不是一个估算。

And this isn't an estimate.

这就是，这就是实际的数字。

This is, this is exactly what it is.

为了做到这一点，Carvana 有一套完全垂直整合的融资体系。

In order to do this, Carvana has a fully vertically integrated financing stack.

所以本质上，他们实时为每辆车的每一种贷款组合做承销评估。

So they're essentially underwriting you for every loan combination for every car in real time.

然后他们把这些信息，通过一个很酷的小工具呈现给你。

And then they're taking that, and they're making it available to you through this, like, cool widget.

到目前为止，据我所知，还没有人能复制这种能力。

To this day, as far as I'm aware, no one's, like, replicated this capability.

要做到这一点，你需要垂直整合优质贷款和次级贷款业务。

In order to do it, you need to be vertically integrated into prime lending, subprime lending.

但事实就是，没有其他人做到这点。

It just turns out that, like, no one else is.

而且要做好这些业务，确实非常难。

And it's also very hard to get into these, you know, to do these businesses well.

还有产权和登记。

There's title and registration.

显然，还有客户服务。

Obviously, you've got customer service.

你要知道，关于这门生意，你得记住，这一切都很好，但事情总会出现问题。

You know, the thing about this business, you have to remember that, like, this is all great, but things go wrong.

然后你得处理所有可能出现的各种边缘情况。

Then you have to deal with, like, all the many, many corner cases that can come up.

如果你想找点乐子，就去看看 Carvana 的一星评价。

If you want to entertain yourself, like, go read the 1-star reviews at Carvana.

就像有人写：我搬家的时候，住在佛罗里达州订了车，但我需要它送到北卡罗来纳州。

It's like, well, I was moving and I ordered the car when I lived in Florida, but I needed it delivered to North Carolina.

然后来了一场飓风，结果车就迟到了。

And then there was a hurricane, and as a consequence, it was late.

但之后我的产权文件又出了问题。

But then there was a problem with my title.

你看了就会想，天哪。

And you're like, oh my God.

这套系统大致就是这么运作的。

That's kind of how the system works.

现在，在整个系统中，我们来看看有哪些规模经济效益。

Now, in that whole system, let's identify some economies of scale.

库存。

Inventory.

事实证明，车型选择很重要。

Turns out selection matters.

非常重要。

Matters a lot.

如果你想想所有汽车的品牌、型号、配置、年份，还有里程数，选择空间是巨大的。

There's, if you think about all the makes, models, trims, years of cars, as well as mileage, like the selection space is massive.

而 Carvana 的覆盖范围，即使以它现在的规模，仍然相对较小。

And Carvana's coverage, even at its size, is still relatively small.

所以结果是，选择越多，转化率就越高。

And so as a consequence, conversions go up as selection goes up.

所以选择就是很大的规模经济。

And so selection is like big economy scale.

M150:15

什么都卖的商店。

Everything store.

对。

Yeah.

M250:17

物流，运营物流系统的成本。

Logistics, the cost of running a logistics system.

你可以把这些卡车的运输看作一种固定成本。

You know, you can think about moving these trucks like a fixed cost.

如果你想要提供完整的连通性并快速移动车辆，事实证明转换速度非常重要。

And if you want to provide complete connectivity and move cars quickly, it turns out conversion speeds matter a lot.

另外，当你考虑库存空间时，靠近客户的库存会提高转化率，因为你能更快地将车送到他们手里。

And by the way, when you think about the inventory space, inventory nearer to customers increases conversion because you can get to them faster.

然后你可以考虑这些 IRC。

Then you can think about these IRCs.

这些都是非常大的设施。

These are very large facilities.

事实证明，如果运营得好，你可以在一个大设施里用更少的钱和时间翻新汽车，因为汽车是贬值资产。

It turns out that run well, you can recondition cars for a lot less money and time because cars are depreciating assets if you have a big facility.

所以如果是一个传统经销商，车来了，然后一个人（不管男女）做所有维修工作。

So if I have a traditional dealership, the car comes in and like one guy does all the— one guy or gal does all the repairs.

但问题是这个人不一定是合适的技术水平——他们对于很多要做的车辆工作来说是大材小用了。

But the problem is that person isn't necessarily the right level of like— they're overqualified for a lot of the things they're going to do on the car.

而且他们还必须切换任务。

And they have to change tasks.

这会拖慢速度。

And that slows you down.

如果你在 Carvana，你可以让非常初级的人来做清洁、换机油和换轮胎。

If you're at Carvana, you can have people who are very entry-level to do the cleaning and the oil changes and the tire changes.

而且你可以让高级技工只做非常狭窄的一小部分工作。

And you can have advanced mechanics do just like a very narrow subset of stuff.

而且你可以让人们在专门的工位上专门做这一件事，这样他们效率更高。

And you can have people at specialised stations where this is what they're doing, and so they can be more efficient.

不过，要做到这一点，你必须要高效地安排车辆在系统中的路线等等。

Now, to do that, though, you have to efficiently route the cars through the system and all the rest.

而且，传统经销商位于昂贵的地方，所以你的间接费用更低。

Also, the dealership is in an expensive place, and so you have less overhead.

所以这些只是例子，但做这些事有规模经济，还有巨大的流程能力，类似于规模经济。

So these are just examples of places, but there's economies of scale to doing that, as well as enormous process power, like economies of scale.

贷款核保显然是一项随着时间的推移你会学会如何做的工作。

Underwriting loans is obviously an endeavour where you learn the way to do this over time.

你连接所有这些数据源，学习如何预测违约，然后多年积累的数据又循环反馈回去。

You connect all these data sources, you learn how to predict defaults, you then get data over years that cycles back into it.

车辆所有权证和注册登记，有专门的软件来处理所有这些。

Title and registration, like there's software that's built to run all this.

所以这就像是，在能够做所有这些事情方面存在着巨大的规模经济和技能经济。

So this is like, there's enormous economies of scale and skill in terms of like being able to do all these things.

然后，你知道，如果我不提信任，那我就太失职了。

And then, you know, I would be really remiss if I didn't mention trust.

当消费者买车时，这是一种未见实物、凭空信任的行为，是一种信任之举。

Consumers, when they buy a car, it's an act of sight unseen in the air, it's an act of trust.

我们可以聊聊 Carvana 是如何发展的。

We can talk about how Carvana grows.

这也是2022年出问题的原因之一。

And it was one of the things that kind of went wrong in 2022.

但是，Carvana 能让人们买车，是因为多年来通过提供出色的体验积累了大量的口碑。

But like, Carvana is able to get people to buy cars, because there's been an enormous amount of word of mouth built up over many years of delivering great experiences.

而且，你知道，那是买不来的。

And, you know, you can't buy that.

你得随着时间慢慢建立起来。

You have to build it up over time.

那是买家端的信任。

That's trust on the buying side.

卖家端也有信任，但稍微少一点。

There's also trust on the selling side, a little bit less.

融资业务里也有信任，对吧？

There's also trust in the financing business, right?

你发放这些贷款，然后把它们卖出去。

You make these loans, then you sell them.

买这些贷款的人必须相信，你是按标准发放这些贷款的，而且这些贷款的表现会跟宣传的差不多。

And the people who buy these loans have to trust that you're making these loans to spec, and that the loans are going to perform kind of as advertised.

你是……

You're.

M152:43

一个很棒的贷款发起人，没错。

A great originator, yeah.

M252:44

当然也要看经济状况。

Subject to economic conditions.

这门生意还有一点，如果你考虑一笔汽车交易，它是一系列必须都做对的事情。

The other thing about this business is if you think about a car transaction, it's a, it's a whole series of things that have to go right.

只要做错任何一个环节，你在这笔交易上就会亏钱，而且客户也会很难受。

And if you get any one of them wrong, you're going to lose money on the transaction, and your customers are miserable.

这就是范围经济，对吧？

And this is economies of scope, right?

所以这个概念就是，你必须把这一整套事情组合起来，而且必须全都做对，并且每一次都全部做对。

So this is the idea that you have to put this whole portfolio of things together And you have to get them all right, and you have to get them all right every time.

嗯，你知道，这就是——就是这些事情的组合。

And, um, you know, this is— it's this combination of things.

如果我说的话里有任何听起来容易的，那说明我描述得不对。

And if, if anything I've said sounds easy, it's because I haven't described it right.

实际上，这太难了。

Like, it's so hard.

嗯，所以这就是为什么除了 Carvana 之外，所有想建这门生意的人都失败了。

Um, and, and so that's why everyone who's tried to build this business besides Carvana has failed.

这也是为什么 Carvana 花了十多年时间和一百亿美元，才走到现在这一步。

And that's why it's taken Carvana, you know, over 10 years and $10 billion, um, to get, you know, where it is.

而且，你知道，在美国之外，也有人试图在其他市场复制 Carvana。

And, you know, outside the U— outside the US, there were other people trying to copy Carvana in other markets.

你知道，有些人做得还行，很多人失败了，但没有一个做得真正出色。

You know, some of them are doing okay, a lot of them have failed, but none of them are doing really great.

归根结底就是，这件事太难了。

And just the bottom line is that it is so hard.

M153:39

就先停一下，谈谈把规模、范围、信任，你知道，不同类型的传统规模经济结合起来这个概念。

Just to pause on the, on just like the concept of combining scale, scope, trust, you know, traditional economies of scale of different types.

你还能想到另一门生意吗，也许是亚马逊，你觉得它也同时具备所有这些特质，并且一直以来都让你感兴趣，好给大家做个比较？

Is there another business that comes to mind, maybe it's Amazon, that you think captures all these same things that has interested you through time, just to like draw a comparative point for people?

M253:59

我其实很喜欢拿亚马逊来做比较。

I actually love the comparison to Amazon.

但你知道，有一个著名的——我看过一个视频，我不确定它有多出名，但我很喜欢，里面杰夫·贝索斯在解释为什么图书是互联网生意最好的起点。

But you know, there's a famous, there's a video I saw I don't know how famous it is, but I love it, where Jeff Bezos is describing why books is the best first place for an internet business.

他谈到选品有多重要，然后他讲你可以拿到书，可以发货，而且，你知道，还可以付款。

And he talks about how the selection matters so much, and then he talks about how you can get the books and you can ship the books, and, you know, and you can pay for it.

人们可以为书付款。

People can pay for the books.

那么，想象一下——我其实觉得，从消费者的角度来看，二手车和图书一样棒。

Well, imagine if— I actually think that from a consumer's perspective, used cars is just as great as books.

选品的空间是无限的。

The selection space is infinite.

选品极其重要。

Selection matters an enormous amount.

而且，我之前描述的Carvana系统相比传统经销商系统，运营成本更低。

Also, what I described with Carvana's system is a lower cost-to-operate system than the traditional dealership system.

体验也更好。

It's a better experience.

但书这个东西的好处是，操作起来真的很容易。

But the thing about books is it's really easy to do.

想象一下，如果你想创办亚马逊，但不能直接联系制造商拿书。

Imagine if you had to start Amazon, but you couldn't just call up the manufacturer and get books.

你得自己生产书。

You had to manufacture them.

再想象一下，你不能直接叫FedEx来送书。

And imagine if, you know, you couldn't just call FedEx and have them ship the books.

你得自己建一个类似FedEx的系统。

You had to build basically FedEx.

再想象一下，你不能直接接受MasterCard付款，对吧？

And imagine if you couldn't just, like, accept MasterCard, right?

你得自己搭建一个融资平台。

You had to build a financing platform.

而且天知道，你不能只是把书卖给顾客。

And Lord knows you can't just sell the person the book.

你还得处理车辆所有权和注册手续，对吧？

You have to do title and registration, right?

还有诸如此类的事情。

And all that.

而且呢，买书的风险真的没那么高。

And, you know, with books, the stakes really just aren't that high.

所以人们愿意去尝试。

And so people are willing to try it.

就算效果不怎么样，他们虽然失望，但也还能接受。

And if it doesn't go so well, you know, they're disappointed, but it's okay.

汽车可是你人生中第二大的消费。

A car is the second largest purchase of your life.

所以你可以想象，这同样是非常有挑战性的。

And so you can imagine how, like, that is also really challenging.

所以从履约的角度来看，我认为二手车可能是最难做好的品类。

And so in the sort of fulfilment sense of it, I think, you know, used vehicles are probably the hardest thing to build in.

但拿亚马逊来类比，其实我觉得还挺贴切的。

But the analogy to Amazon, actually, I think, is apt.

M155:43

我采访过Ernie几次。

I've interviewed Ernie a few times.

实话实说，我对Ernie的评价很高。

You know, my bias is that I think very highly of Ernie.

因为Carvana发生的一切，他其实是个饱受争议的人物。

And he's a much maligned figure because of everything that's gone on with Carvana.

听到这个故事的各种不同版本，就像罗生门一样，真的很有意思。

And it's so fascinating to me to hear all the different Rashomon-style parts of the story.

所以我先说明一下，基于我了解的情况，我对Ernie评价很高。

So I'll put out there that I think very highly of Ernie based on what I've known.

我完全没有像你那样深入研究过这家公司。

I haven't studied the business like you at all.

我自己也没有持有Carvana的股票。

I don't own Carvana.

我在财务上跟这件事没有利益关系，但我觉得谈谈管理层还是挺重要的。

I don't have a dog in this hunt financially, but I think it's important to say a little bit about management.

而且，也许这也是个借口，因为我还没问过你，你如何看待管理层在特定企业中的作用。

And maybe it's also an excuse since I haven't asked you yet to talk about how you think about management as it relates to certain businesses.

以及你在这个光谱上的位置——从“领导力决定一切”到巴菲特说的“火腿三明治”概念，就是一家好到连火腿三明治都能经营的企业，因为总有一天会有人（或某个东西）来经营它。

And where you fall on the spectrum of like leadership is everything to like the Buffett ham sandwich, you know, concept of a business that's so good that a ham sandwich could run it because someday someone will or one will.

所以聊聊Ernie，Carvana背后的管理团队，以及你对管理层和投资理念的看法吧。

So talk about Ernie, the management team behind Carvana, the team behind Carvana, and kind of your philosophy on management and investing.

M256:34

如果你5年前问我，我会坚定地把自己归入‘专注于业务’那一类。

If you'd asked me 5 years ago, I would have put myself firmly in the let's focus on the business.

我不觉得自己能带来多大优势。

I don't think I bring much advantage.

在理解管理方面。

To understanding management.

这五年很精彩。

It's been an exciting 5 years.

在这段时间里，有一件事出现了：那些业务，如果你问我，‘好吧，Cliff，我知道你不在乎，但还是给它们排个名吧。’

And in that time, one of the things that's come out is the businesses where if you'd ask me, okay, Cliff, I get it, you don't care, but rank them anyway.

然后我会给它们排名，那些我参与过的团队。

And I'd rank them, the teams that I was involved with.

那个排名完美地预测了这些团队后来的表现与我当时的预期之间的关系。

That ranking would have perfectly predicted how things did relative to my expectations at the time.

所以从中学到了两件事。

So what I learned there was 2 things.

第一，团队很重要。

One, it matters.

我知道它重要，但更重要的是，我认为我有判断力。

I knew it mattered, but more importantly, I think I can judge it.

嗯。

Hmm.

所以现在，显然，我主要关心业务和价格。

And so now I fall into the— obviously, I care predominantly about the business and the price.

就是说，这归根结底是正确的做法。

Like, that is, in the end, the right thing.

一个优秀的团队搭配一个糟糕的业务会是个挑战。

A great team with a terrible business is going to be a challenge.

会是场苦战。

It's going to be a slog.

这毫无疑问。

There's just no two ways about it.

顺便说一句，回到你刚才说的‘可控与不可控’的问题，这是另一个思路。

By the way, just to go back to your contained versus uncontained point, like, that's another idea.

有些业务每隔六到十二个月就会冒出新问题，不断抛出没完没了的难题。

It's like, there are businesses where there's a new problem to solve every 6 to 12 months, and it throws up a never-ending series of hard problems.

所以你想要的是——一个可控的业务就是那种一旦……‘一劳永逸’这个词不准确，但有一个明显的——你想卖更多车吗？

So you want businesses— so a contained one would be one where once it's— set it and forget it is the wrong term, but there's an obvious— would you like to sell more cars?

是的，是的，当然想。

Yes, yes, I'd like to.

好，现在我们回到管理这个话题。

Okay, so now going back to management.

所以我不一定会达到那种‘这个团队太棒了’的程度。

So I don't necessarily think I'm going to ever get to a point where I'm like, this team is great.

我不在乎这是一个会不断抛出难题的业务。

I don't care that this is a business that will perpetually throw up hard problems.

我照样会买。

I'll buy it anyway.

但我确实认为，我现在明白了，我有判断力，而且管理非常重要。

But I do think that I've now come to understand that that I can judge it and that management matters a lot.

所以它在我思考中的权重增加了，以前不是这样。

So it gets weighted into my thinking in a way it wasn't before.

不管怎么说，我再告诉你我是怎么判断的。

For what it's worth, I'll add to you how I judge it.

和管理团队会面很棒。

Meeting with a management team is great.

事实证明，所有成为CEO的人都懂得如何——听起来很棒。

It turns out all the people who become CEOs figured out how to— Sound great.

听起来很棒。

Sound great.

你知道，我学到了一点，但我当然也会听他们在公开场合的讲话，随着时间的推移，你肯定能分辨出哪些人似乎在做出合理的商业判断并给出好的理由，哪些人则不然。

You know, I learn a little bit, but I certainly listen to them talk in public, and you can definitely pick up over time who kind of is making what seem like sound business judgments and giving good reasons for them, and people who, you know, aren't.

话虽如此，我发现真正好的方法是和前员工聊聊。

That being said, the really good way to do it, I find, is I talk to former employees.

我当然很感兴趣。

And I'm certainly interested.

我用这个方式来了解公司，了解它的运作方式。

I'm using that to learn about the company, learn about how it works.

你怎么买东西？

How do you buy things?

你怎么卖东西？

How do you sell things?

等等等等。

Blah, blah, blah.

但我同时也在评估他们。

But I'm also just assessing them.

一家公司如果推出一些工作了十年、友好离职的员工，而你会觉得：我不明白。

And a company which spits out people who worked there for 10 years, left on good terms, who you're just like, I don't get it.

这家伙是个傻瓜。

This guy's an idiot.

这说明了组织里人员的水平。

That says something about the caliber of people in the organization.

而且人力资本的‘排放’可以反映内部的状况。

And the human capital exhaust is kind of indicative of what's inside.

相反，你知道，当你发现——当你和十个在Capital One工作至少五年的前员工交谈时，他们会让你大吃一惊。

And conversely, you know, when you find yourself— when you talk to, you know, go talk to 10 former employees who spent at least 5 years at Capital One, they'll blow your mind.

这能告诉你一些关于Capital One内部的情况。

That tells you something about what's going on at Capital One.

所以我觉得这确实是最好的方法。

And so I find that that's really the best approach.

至于Ernie，我认为，冒着让他自负的风险，我想将来人们会拿Jeff Bezos和Ernie Garcia比较，而不是反过来。

As to Ernie, I think, you know, at the risk of inflating his ego, I think that someday people will compare Jeff Bezos to Ernie Garcia, not the other way around.

他非常出色，对吧？

He's extraordinary, right?

这个行业极其困难，我已经强调过很多次了。

This business is incredibly difficult, as I've tried to emphasise so many times.

他们成功是有原因的。

There's a reason why they've succeeded.

在世界其他地方没有人能够成功的地方。

Where nobody else in the world has been able to succeed.

另外我还要补充，我当然知道他父亲在储蓄贷款危机中的经历。

And I'll also add that I'm aware obviously of his dad's history with the savings and loan crisis.

我记得他当时好像是二十多岁，支付了20或50美元的罚款。

And I think it was either a $20 or $50 fine that he paid as like a late 20-something.

顺便说一下，这是他父亲，不是他。

And this is, by the way, his dad, not him.

这是50年前或40年前的事了。

And this was 50 years ago or 40 years ago.

我只是觉得，你知道，让我感到不可思议的是，人们竟然会认为——

It's just, you know, it is wild to me that people then take—.

M160:21

那是什么？

What is that?

M260:22

是的，人们抓住这个事实，他们就会说，因此这家公司就是个骗局。

Yeah, people take that fact, they're like, therefore this company, you know, is a fraud.

然后就会想：哦天哪，这个家伙可是个亿万富翁。

And it's like, oh my God, like, this is the, you know, the guy was a billionaire.

他的计划是什么？

What was his plan?

为了多赚几十亿却把他所有爱的人送进监狱吗？

To like make a few billion more but send everyone he loves to prison?

这对我来说完全说不通。

Like, this makes no sense to me.

如果你花点时间和那些跟Garcia家族打过交道的人聊聊，就会发现过去35年里，从那人犯错开始——其实仔细看细节，也不一定是他做了什么大错事，但反正他被卷进去了——所有人都对他们评价极高。

If you just spend any time dealing with, talking to people who've dealt with the Garcias over the 35 years since the guy made a mistake, which if you actually go through the details of it, it's not obvious he did anything super wrong, but whatever, he got caught up in stuff.

每个人都对他们赞不绝口。

Everyone speaks incredibly highly of them.

他们的行为一直都完全合乎道德。

They've done nothing but behave totally ethically.

看看公司在2022年左右的经历，他们有很多机会可以损害我们这些第三方股东的利益，但他们没有。

If you go through the experience that the company had in 2022 or whatever, there were plenty of opportunities for them to hurt us as third-party shareholders, and they haven't.

所以，我觉得Ernie很擅长屏蔽那些噪音。

So, I mean, Ernie does a great job of just tuning all that nonsense out.

至于他做得好的地方，就是他极其聪明。

As to like what he does well, he's incredibly smart.

他身边聚集了一群非常聪明的人。

He's assembled a team around him that are incredibly smart.

而且他很擅长从各种角度思考问题，想得非常周全。

And he does a great job of thinking about things from a variety of perspectives that are very, you know, wise.

一方面，他会从分析的角度告诉你，作为一个外部投资者，你可以怎么分析CarMax，然后对Carvana的价格需求弹性做出一个合理的猜测。

So, on the one hand, he'll analytically explain to you how, as an outside investor, you could look at CarMax and try to make a sensible guess at what Carvana sees as its price elasticity of demand.

这其实挺偏分析的。

Which is a fairly analytical thing.

然后如果我们问他一个问题——有一次我大概说，你为什么不调整定价，更积极地跟Vroom竞争？

And then if we were to ask him a question about— once upon a time I sort of said, why don't you adjust your pricing to kind of compete more aggressively with Vroom?

他基本上就描述了一下，如果他把跟Vroom竞争当成一件重要的事，那么突然之间，整个组织就不再专注于客户，而是变成了——Vroom赢了，我们就输了。

And he basically sort of described how if he made competing with Vroom something that mattered, then suddenly instead of focusing on the customer, everyone in the organization would be sort of, when Vroom wins, we lose.

Vroom输了，我们就赢了。

When Vroom loses, we win.

我们就不再专注于客户了。

We're not focused on the customer anymore.

他考虑的是这种竞争心态对他公司文化带来的第二层和第三层的社会效应，而且他对这类事情非常深思熟虑。

And he was thinking about the second and third order social effects on his culture, um, and he's very deliberate about things like that.

M162:08

好了，现在我们得聊聊整个故事和经历中最难的部分了。

All right, now we get to talk about the tough part of the whole story and experience.

业务到底哪里出了问题？

What went wrong with the business?

跟我们讲讲整个过程吧，作为这家公司的大投资者之一，在情况变糟的时候，你是什么样的感受？

Just tell us the whole story, like what it was like to be one of the larger investors in the business as this was going wrong.

你做了什么？

What did you do?

你是怎么怀疑自己的？

How did you second-guess yourself?

那时的心理状态是怎样的？

What was the psychology like?

我对所有这些方面都很感兴趣。

Like, I'm interested in all aspects of it.

M262:26

需要指出的是公司现在的情况，因为在公司大部分历史中，Carvana能增长是显而易见的。

It's worth pointing out where the company is today because through most of the company's history, it was obvious that Carvana could grow.

不过，利润率虽然在改善，但关于公司经济模型的争论一直存在。

Margins, however, were improving, but there was always debate around the economics of the business.

我之前说过，这是一个更高效的体系。

And I said earlier that this is a more efficient system.

很长一段时间里，这只是一个推测。

And for a long time, that was a matter of conjecture.

我可以大致算算单位经济模型，比如每英里运一辆车要花多少钱之类的。

I could sort of work out unit economics and how much does it cost to ship a car a mile and blah, blah, blah.

但你看，我们没办法从新闻稿里直接看到这些数据。

But like, it didn't, you know, we couldn't see it like on the press release.

现在，公司的利润率，EBITDA利润率——而且他们股权激励很少，资本支出也相对较少——大概在10.5%左右，还在上升。

As of now, the company's margins, EBITDA margins, and they have very little stock-based comp and relatively little CapEx, are 10.5%-ish and rising.

而且根据他们说的，他们可能会达到百分之十三、十四左右的范围。

And they'll probably get to the 13%, 14%-ish percent range based on what they've said.

而且没有什么——没有理由怀疑这一点。

And there's nothing— no reason to doubt it.

而普通汽车经销商的利润率大概在百分之四点五左右。

And the average car dealership's about 4.5%.

所以他们的利润率大约是竞争对手的2.5到3倍。

So they make on the order of 2.5 to 3x the margins of their competitors.

而且我们追踪他们卖出的每一辆车，并且和CarMax卖出的类似车辆进行比较。

And we track every car that they sell, and we compare it to similar cars sold by CarMax.

我们也会和其他市场指数比较。

We also compare it to other market indices.

我们相信通过这种方式，他们卖车的价格大约便宜500到600美元。

And we believe that they sell cars on the order of sort of $500, $600 cheaper doing that.

不过公平地说，他们在融资方面收费稍高一些，但总体上仍然更便宜。

Now, in fairness, they charge a bit more on financing, but it's still cheaper overall.

而且他们提供的体验显然要好得多，选择也多得多，而且他们还在增长。

And they offer obviously a far superior experience, far superior selection, and they're growing.

有发布的高频数据，所以最近他们的同比增长率一直在45%到50%之间。

There's high-frequency data that's published, and so recently they've been growing 45% to 50% year over year.

所以，关于他们把这些东西整合在一起的效果，到了这个阶段你已经不需要再去猜测这个模式的力量了。

And so the idea that they're putting all of these things together, at this point you no longer need to speculate about the power of the model.

而且这个模式是越大越好的。

It's also a model that gets better as it gets bigger.

所以随着时间推移，选择会变得更好。

So as time goes on, the selection gets better.

所以这里我要提一点。

And so I should make a note here.

传统的汽车经销商是一个整体单元，拥有一定数量的车。

A traditional car dealership is a monolithic unit, certain number of cars.

即使你想想像CarGurus这样的，也是你所在地区一定数量的经销商，它们合起来有一定数量的车。

Even if you think about like CarGurus, it's a certain number of dealerships in your area that collectively have some number of cars.

Carvana的全国库存集中在一起，意思是，现在Carvana网站上可用的车，比我们现在坐在这里，整个康涅狄格州所有其他经销商的车还要多。

Carvana's pooled national inventory is like, there are more cars available on Carvana's website right now than there are for us right now sitting here in the entire state of Connecticut from all the other dealerships.

对。

Right.

对。

Right.

而且这种情况只会继续改善。

And that's only going to improve.

品牌，还有流程效率，他们还有很长的路要走。

Brand, also process efficiency, they still have a long ways to go.

在固定成本杠杆方面，也还有很长的路要走。

In terms of fixed cost leverage, there's a long ways to go.

所以这是一个越做越大就越好的生意。

So this is a business that gets better as it gets bigger.

而且它已经比竞争对手好太多了。

And it's already so much better than its rivals.

而它的竞争对手，当然，要真正更新汽车经销商的流程是非常困难的。

And its rivals, of course, it's very challenging to meaningfully update the processes in a car dealership.

它不是一个很有规模的组织。

It's just not a very scaled organisation.

他们到底能运用多少技术，等等等等。

How much technology can they really bring to bear, all the rest.

我想我最后把这个故事讲完。

I thought I'd just finally finish that story.

好，把故事讲完。

Yeah, finish the story.

公司增长了。公司在2021年有巨大的需求。

The company grew. The company had enormous amounts of demand in 2021.

只要把车挂到网站上，车就消失了。

Just put a car on the site, car disappeared.

他们正努力克服疫情带来的挑战，建立供应，要在2022年实现大幅增长。

And they were trying to overcome the challenges of the pandemic to build supply, to grow tremendously into 2022.

他们在2021年大约卖了42万5千辆车。

They sold something on the order of 425,000 cars in 2021.

他们还计划在2022年翻倍甚至更多。

They had ambitions of doubling or more in 2022.

为了实现这个目标，整个2021年他们一直在不停地招人。

To do that, over the course of all of '21, they were hiring and hiring.

结果呢，需求突然暴跌，他们还发现了一堆运营问题，这让2022年变得特别艰难。

As it would work out, demand collapsed, and they discovered all manner of operational problems that they were having, and it made 2022 really challenging.

你现在听我说这些，是因为我有整个阶段的经验，加上事后回顾，有足够的时间去梳理，才能平静地讲清楚。

When you tell a story like this, you have the benefit of everything you learned during the whole period and everything you learned after and all the time to synthesize it and sit calmly later on and figure it all out.

所有这些都是在信息不全、一团乱麻中发生的，所以听起来会很清晰、很有条理，但当时有些部分我确实抓住了。

All of this happened in a cloud of dust with incomplete data, so it's all going to sound so neat and put together and understood, and there were definitely pieces of this that I had nailed.

有些部分是我后来才搞明白的。

And there were pieces of it that I learned later.

但我想说——

But I just want to—.

M166:11

嗯，

Yeah,

M266:11

你知道，这就是真实情况。

You know, this was real life.

当时发生的事，至少我现在理解是，有几个原因。

What happened was, at least my understanding of it now, was a few things.

第一个是，他们有很多潜在的运营问题，我们可以一个一个来说。

One is, they had a bunch of latent operational issues, which we can walk through.

另一个原因是，2022年的二手车市场非常反常，导致市场规模比正常年份小很多。

Another was that there was just a very unusual used vehicle market, which led to the used vehicle market being significantly smaller than normal in '22.

而且到现在也没完全恢复。

And it still hasn't fully recovered.

只是部分恢复。

It's only partially recovered.

尤其是对独立经销商来说，情况很糟糕。

In particular, it was bad for independents.

这个我们后面再聊。

And we'll talk about that.

还有一个原因，就是车辆融资市场发生了非常奇怪的变化，让他们日子苦不堪言。

Another was Because the vehicle financing market did totally strange things, which made life absolutely miserable for them.

然后呢，因为事情就是这么发展的，他们收购了Odessa，背了一堆债，资本市场又对他们关上了门，等等，这又是另一堆外部因素。

And then, of course, because things had to be the way they were, they bought Odessa, they added a bunch of debt, the capital markets were closed to them, all the rest, which is another set of external facts.

那我们就先说说内部的运营问题吧，因为这个挺有意思的。

So let's just, in terms of— let's just do internal operational stuff, because it's interesting.

这家公司之前一直在年复一年地增长。

The company had been growing year after year.

大概每年翻倍。

Um, circa 100%.

当你在做像Carvana这么复杂的事，而且发展速度又这么快时，问题总会不断出现。

And when you're doing something as complicated as what Carvana is doing and growing as fast as Carvana is growing, things were always going wrong.

我经常能听到公司某个部门传出一些吓人的故事。

And I would always hear kind of some horror story or another out of some part of the organization.

但你看看整体数据，比如星级评分，他们的评价其实很好。

But, you know, you looked at the overall rate, star ratings, they had great reviews.

你就会觉得，嗯，公司这么大，发展这么快，有点问题也正常。

It was like, well, you know, it's a big organization, they're growing really fast.

想想看，如果你每年翻倍，那平均下来，不到一半的员工在公司待了还不到一年，对吧？

To think about it, like, if you're doubling every year, less than half of your employees on average have been with you for like less than a year, right?

这太疯狂了。

This is wild.

他们还刻意优先追求增长速度，而不是放慢脚步把流程真正弄得扎实。

They also had deliberately prioritized speed in growth over necessarily slowing down and really hardening their processes.

这么做的原因是，他们认为这是个规模化生意，如果没能第一个实现规模化，长期来看就会处于劣势。

And the reason for this was that they viewed this as a scale business, and there was risk that if they weren't first to scale, that they would be disadvantaged over time.

当时，他们的竞争对手还没失败。

And at the time, their competitors hadn't failed yet.

他们增长了。

They grew.

他们很多运营工作更多是靠，怎么说呢，我称之为部落知识和文化来推动。

A lot of their operations were more mediated by, like, I'd call it tribal knowledge and culture.

所以举个傻一点的例子，但这是真实发生的。

And so, silly example, but a real one.

在IRC，也就是检测和整备中心，有个规则是针对接收卡车、把车卸下来、再把其他车装上去、然后让卡车继续出发的。

There's a rule at the IRC, inspection and reconditioning center for receiving trucks, taking the cars off the trucks, putting different cars on the trucks, and sending the trucks on their merry way.

听起来很简单，但这里卡车很多，车也很多。

This sounds simple enough, but it's a lot of trucks and it's a lot of cars.

所以就有一个问题：车停在哪里，以及按什么顺序装上卡车？

And there's this question of, like, where do you put the cars and what order do you put them on the trucks in?

顺带一提，如果有一辆车打不着火，你要怎么办？

And by the way, if one of them doesn't start, what do you do?

这个操作怎么安排人手？

And how do you staff this operation?

因为在一个有六千辆车的停车场里取一辆车，可不是像去街边开车那么简单，对吧？

Because it turns out fetching a car in a 6,000-car parking lot is not like walking down the street and getting a car, right?

所有这些都是问题。

And all of these things.

如果有人干得不错还挺聪明，他们基本能自己琢磨出来，干得也还可以。

And if someone's done it well and sort of smart, they can kind of figure it out and they can do a pretty decent job.

但当你规模扩大时，你会把不那么擅长这些的人安排到岗位上。

But as you scale, you're putting people into roles who may not be as good at this.

现在回头看，2021年，这个业务头一次——部分因为疫情、部分因为增长——从流程成熟度的角度看，它的能力有点跟不上野心了。

And in 2021, in retrospect, for the first time, the business kind of, in part because of COVID in part because of the growth, the business's kind of reach outstripped its grasp from a process maturity perspective.

到了2022年，有了一个软件系统，它会告诉你：这个时间段你需要多少人，车放在哪里，以及你的操作规程是什么。

Now, in 2022, there's a software system, and the software system tells you, like, this is how many people you need at these times of the day, and this is where you're going to put the cars, and here are your protocols.

你会准备一个启动器，比如一个搭电用的跳线。

You're going to have a starter, like a jumper.

你要把它放在这里，对吧？

You're going to keep it here, right?

然后，就这么做。

And like, this is how you do this.

事实证明，这套操作规程在局部和全局上都能优化得比最优秀的人还好，而且还能确保每个人——它能让最优秀的人变得更强，然后让其他人也差不多达到最优秀人的水平。

And it turns out that this set of protocols locally and globally optimizes better than even the best people, but also makes sure that everybody— so it takes the best people, makes them better, and then takes everyone else and makes them almost as good as the best.

对吧。

Right.

那个软件之前从来没人写过，对吧？

That software had never been written, right?

因为根本没人买过这种功能。

Because this was just not a function that someone had ever bought.

你想想看，我刚才描述的这一套本身就是相当有分量的项目，对吧？

Because think about how that's in and of itself, what I just described is a fairly meaningful, like, project, right?

在2018年之前——应该说2019年之前，这家公司几乎全部的车都是从拍卖行买的。

Before 2018— before 2019, I should say, the company bought almost all of its cars at auction.

所以车的流程是：拍卖行到IRC，再到客户。

So the flow of cars was auction to IRC, to customers.

从2019年开始，公司开始从公众手里买车。

Starting in 2019, the company began buying cars from the public.

这件事非常成功。

And this has been a wildly successful thing.

这样做他们赚得更多。

They make a lot more money doing this.

但事实证明，当你这样做的时候，你就创造了一种可能性：如果你买的车比你——如果你的系统里有一个节点，一个IRC，除非你想过这个问题，否则车可能会在某个节点堆积起来。

But it turns out that when you do that, you create the potential that if you buy more cars than you're— if you have a node in your system, an IRC, it's possible, unless you've thought about this, for cars to accumulate at a node.

你买进的车可能比离开那个系统的车多，或者说进入的车比离开的车多。

You can be buying more cars than are leaving that system, or more cars can be transiting in than are leaving.

如果你的停车位是有限的，这就会造成拥堵。

And if you have finite amounts of parking, this can create congestion.

有趣的是，在2021年左右第一次发生的事情是，买车流程变得非常成功，他们第一次买进了更多的车。

And what had happened, interestingly, what happened for the first time in 2021 or so was the buying cars process became really successful and they were buying more cars for the first time.

所以突然间他们的物流系统发生了这种转变，有点降低了——翻转了净流动的方向。

And so now suddenly they had this shift in the logistics system, sort of reduced the— flipped the direction of net flow.

这没问题。

This is fine.

你只需要建造一些东西来改变它。

You just need to build a bunch of things to change it.

但这就是那种同时发生好几件事的一个例子。

But this is an example of the sort of thing that was happening all at the same time.

在21年，很多这些问题都被掩盖了，因为他们在大规模招人。

A lot of this was covered up in '21 because they were hiring to beat the band.

所以当你人手过剩的时候，它会掩盖很多瑕疵。

And so when you have excess staffing, it kind of covers up a lot of blemishes.

到了21年底，第一个出问题的迹象是十一月表现有点疲软。

As you get into the end of '21, the first indication that something was wrong was slightly weak November.

然后Omicron来了。

And then Omicron happened.

他们的整个系统变成了一场灾难。

Their whole system became a disaster.

原因在于，如果你把一辆车看作一系列必须依次发生的事件，如果——比如说你有一辆卡车，卡车开出250英里，和司机换班，然后回来。

And the reason is that if you think about a car as like a series of events that have to happen one after the other, if— let's say you have a truck and the truck goes out 250 miles, switches with the driver, and comes back.

那么，如果那个司机请病假，这条卡车路线怎么继续？

Well, if that driver calls in sick, like, how does that truck route continue?

好，现在你有9辆车被困在某个地方了，对吧？

Okay, so now you have 9 cars that just got stranded somewhere, right?

你怎么让这些车重新动起来？

How do you get those cars moving again?

而现在这种事一直在发生。

And now this happens all the time.

但这种事如果频繁发生，你就会超出你清理这些问题的能力。

But like, if this happens a lot, you overwhelm your ability to like clear these things.

然后你就会看到车基本在整个系统里大堵车，一辆接一辆堆积起来。

And now you have cars piling up in basically giant traffic jams throughout the whole system.

然后你在网站上承诺的交付时间不得不大幅延长，因为你只是……所以你的销量大幅下降。而且，如果你以前没有过那种可能不小心买进比卖出更多的车的情况，因为这种情况从未出现过，那么现在突然你就有了一个问题：你在买车，你在让系统积压，你知道，你的物流系统的流量并没有为此优化。

And then your delivery times that you're promising on your website have to get way extended because you just So your sales come way down, which, if you haven't had a system before where you could accidentally buy more cars than you're selling, because that's never come up, now suddenly you have a problem where like you're buying cars, you're accumulating the system, you know, and you don't have your flows to your logistics system haven't been optimized for this.

所以车到处堆积，你在来回调度车辆。

So the cars are piling up everywhere, you're sort of shuttling cars.

这就是2022年1月系统的情况。

This is what the system looked like in, you know, January of 2022.

完全一团糟。

It was total wreck.

他们在努力修复它。

And they were trying to fix it.

他们花了几个月时间才做到，大概3到6个月左右才解决这个问题。

And, you know, it took them a few months to do it, like 3 to 6 months or whatever to fix this.

但重要的事实是，它掩盖了需求，而需求正在断崖式下跌。

But the important fact is that it obscured demand, which was falling off a cliff.

嗯。

Mm-hmm.

基础需求在断崖式下跌。

Underlying demand was falling off a cliff.

这意味着他们在二月份的行为还像是需求跟九月份一样。

And it meant that they were still behaving in February like demand was as it had been in September.

尽管到了那个时候，回过头来看，需求已经大幅下降了。

Even though by that point, in retrospect, demand had materially declined.

他们用债务收购了 Adesa。

They bought Adesa using debt.

M172:35

Adesa 是—— 简单描述一下 Adesa 是什么。

Adesa was— just describe what Adesa was.

M272:37

好的。

Sure.

Adesa 是一门传统的拍卖业务。

So Adesa is a traditional auction business.

想象一个大场地。

So think a large lot.

人们—— 汽车经销商、车队，他们把车带来，然后进行线下拍卖。

People bring— car dealerships, fleets, they bring cars, and they hold in-person auctions.

你把车开过一条车道，人们出价。线下拍卖业务会有很长的尾巴，但最终会随着时间逐渐衰落。

You drive them down a lane, people bid The in-person auction business will have a long tail to it, but it's eventually a decaying business over time.

但他们从 Adesa 得到的是，我记得是 54 个非常大的、位置居中的场地，可以在上面建 IRC 和存储设施。

But what they got with Adesa is 54, I believe, very large, centrally located properties on which they can build IRCs and store facilities.

他们业务中的一个挑战是，你知道，后来他们发现他们需要—— 对他们来说，最好把大型 IRC 建在离客户相对近的地方，因为高快交付速度有好处。

One of the challenges in their business had been that, you know, it turns out they worked out that they need— that it is better for them to have large IRCs located relatively close to the customer, because high, fast delivery speeds are good.

接近劳动力市场也是好事。

Access to labour pools is good.

而且这些比待在远处的那些好处更重要。

And those are more important than kind of the benefits of being far away.

但事实证明，要弄到 200 英亩，而且是在波士顿市中心 10 英里范围内，划为汽车工业用途的地块，至少可以说是很难的。

But it turns out that building, getting 200 acres, you know, like zoned for, you know, auto industrial in, like, you know, within 10 miles of downtown Boston is difficult, to say the least.

结果 Adesa 有的正是这种地产。

It turns out this is the sort of property that Adesa had.

所以他们基本上是为了商业地产买的。

And so they basically bought it for the commercial real estate.

还附带拍卖业务，对他们也有很多好处。

It came with the auction business, which has a lot of benefits to them as well.

这完全说得通。

And makes all the sense in the world.

回过头看，这绝对是一个巨大的成功。

In retrospect, it's been a huge home run.

但他们是全债务收购的。

But they bought it with all debt.

他们是在 22 年 2 月买的。

They bought it in February of '22.

其实，如果你看委托书之类的，他们谈了好几年了。

After, if you read the proxy or whatever, they've been talking for years.

只是时机恰好很糟糕。

It just so happened the timing was bad.

太糟糕了。

Was bad.

然后到了三月份，他们好像意识到自己遇到了需求问题。

So what happens is you get to March, and they sort of realize that they have a demand problem.

我还没真正说清楚是什么导致了需求问题。

And now I haven't really addressed what was going on that caused the demand problem.

根据我最好的理解，有 3 个因素。

So there were, as far as my best understanding is, there were 3 things.

尽管当时我基本只知道其中两个。

Although at the time, I pretty much only sort of knew about 2 of them.

值得指出的是，这些事情都随着时间的推移变得越来越糟糕。

And it's worth pointing out that all of these things, they kind of got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse over time.

所以你以为你找到了问题所在，然后大概 6 个月后，情况更糟了。

So you thought you'd identified it, and then like 6 months later, it was like worse.

第一个因素，2020 年和 21 年出现芯片短缺，导致制造短缺，并导致二手车价格上涨。

So the first, there were chip shortages during 2020 and '21, which caused manufacturing shortages and caused used car prices to rise.

你知道，把二手车生意想象成帮人们换车就行了。

You know, think about the used car business as facilitating people swapping cars.

但人们换车的时候，通常是升级换更好的车。

But what happens oftentimes when people are swapping cars is they're upgrading.

如果车价更高，升级的成本也就越大。

And so if prices are higher, the cost of upgrading is greater.

这会降低人们换车的意愿。

And that tends to reduce people's propensity to swap cars.

这样一来，二手车行业每年通常交易大约四千到四千两百万辆车，2021年大概是三千九百多万辆，后来降到了大约三千六百万辆，甚至三千四百万辆。

As a consequence of that, the used car industry, which is typically about 40 to 42 million cars a year, it was about 39 and change in 2021, fell to about 36 million cars, or 34 million cars.

我记得最低时年化数字降到了三千四百万。

I think it got as low as 34 annualized.

全年大概三千六百万辆之类的。

The 36 million for the year or something like that.

我的数据可能有点出入，但确实是下降了。

I might have my stats slightly off, but it fell.

这看上去影响不算特别大，但实际比你想象的严重得多。

And this doesn't seem like a huge negative effect, but it was bigger than you might realize.

因为情况是这样的：特许经销店——比如你的福特或丰田经销商——当一辆租赁车被归还时，除非客户行使购买权，否则租赁经销商——你归还车的那家店——会以租赁合约签订时定好的价格拿到这辆车。

Because what happened was franchise dealerships— think your Ford or Toyota dealership— when a lease vehicle is returned, unless the customer exercises their buyout, the leasing dealership, the one you return it to, gets the car at a price that's been set at the time the lease was created.

所以当车价上涨时，如果归还租赁车的人——当然，经销商不会主动告诉他们有权买下车——不知道这一点（很多人没仔细看租赁合同中的小字），就把车还了，那么经销商就能以很便宜的价格拿到车。

And so when car prices rise, if the lease-returning person— of course, dealership has no incentive to tell them that they have the right to buy the car— doesn't know this, which many people haven't read the fine print of their leases, and they return the car, the dealership gets basically a really cheap car.

这对特许经销店来说是一笔巨大的补贴。

What this turns into is a big subsidy for franchise dealerships.

这些经销商会转手把车卖掉。

And those dealerships would then turn around and sell this car.

对他们来说，这看起来是很大的利润。

It would look to them like a big profit.

但实际上相对于批发价格，这车拿得很便宜。

But was actually really cheap relative to wholesale prices.

但这样做给那些没有这种超便宜库存的非特许经销商带来了巨大压力。

But what that's doing is putting enormous pressure on non-franchise dealerships who don't have access to this super cheap inventory.

哦，对了，我们就是这种情况。

Oh, by the way, that's us.

我们是非特许经销商。

We're a non-franchise dealership.

要理解这个影响有多大，最好的例子就是CarMax。

And so the best example to understand the magnitude of this is CarMax.

在大衰退时期，CarMax的同店销售额曾短暂下降近20%，大概持续了几个月，后来又回升到低两位数的跌幅。

So if CarMax, in the Great Recession, CarMax briefly saw nearly a 20% decline in comp store sales for like a few months, and then it was sort of down, like back up to like low double digits.

2022年，CarMax的同店销售额全年下降了20%。

CarMax's comp store sales were down 20% for the whole year.

在2022年。

In 2022.

而且，顺便提一下，到现在还没恢复。

And they, by the way, still haven't recovered.

我觉得大概只回升了一半左右。

I think they've sort of clawed half that back.

部分原因是车价更贵了，而且利率也让买车成本更高了。

The reason was in part because cars are more expensive, and interest rates also made the cars more expensive.

另一个因素是这个奇特的现象：特许经销商因为有了这种异常的低价货源，竞争力变得异常强。

And the other thing was this weird effect where franchise dealerships were being unusually competitive because they had access to this unusual source of cheap supply.

所以起点就是，独立经销商二手车交易量的跌幅创下自大衰退以来——包括大衰退时期在内——甚至比大衰退时期还要大的记录，这开局就很艰难。

So as a starting point, you had the biggest decline since the Great Recession, including the Great Recession, bigger than the Great Recession, in the number of used-car transactions at an independent dealership, which is a rough place to start.

更糟糕的是，这是二手车市场的情况。

To make matters worse, so that was the used vehicle market.

Carvana正面临这个局面。

Carvana was facing that.

第二件事是利率上升时，一般人可能会天真地认为——我当时也是这么想的——这对Carvana的影响不会太大，对吧？

The second thing that happened when interest rates rose, the sort of naive thing you would think, was certainly what I thought, was it wouldn't matter all that much to Carvana, right?

好的，利率上升了，这可能会对整体市场有点影响，可能也会影响汽车价格，比如汽车的折旧曲线。

Okay, so interest rates will rise, that could affect the overall market a little bit, it will probably affect car prices a bit, sort of the depreciation curve of a car.

但归根结底，人们换车的倾向不应该有太大变化。

But in the end, people's propensity to sort of swap cars shouldn't change that much.

而且，对于Carvana的金融业务来说，他们只是靠利率赚取差价，对吧？

And yes, to Carvana's financing business, you know, they just finance a spread off of rates, right?

不管利率是1%还是4%，其实应该没太大区别。

Whether rates are, you know, 1% or 4% sort of shouldn't really matter that much.

这完全正确。

And that's totally correct.

我们当时就是这样想的。

And that's exactly where we got to.

但这里有个陷阱。

But there was a catch.

你看，我之前不知道的是——

You see, what I didn't know—.

M177:53

这就是那99%的部分的来源。

This is where the 99% part comes from.

M277:58

你看，我当时不知道的是，当利率上升时——汽车金融市场的构成是：一堆信用合作社和小银行，然后一堆大银行互相竞争，还有像Carvana这样的独立方也在竞争。

You see, what I didn't know was that when rates would go up— so the auto finance market's made up of a bunch of credit unions and small banks, and then a bunch of larger banks who compete, and then independents like Carvana who compete.

信用合作社给贷款定价——我是说，这取决于具体的信用社，但通常是基于存款利率、联邦基金利率，或者随便拍脑袋。

The credit unions price their loans— I mean, it depends on the credit union, but like off of deposit rates or off of Fed funds or off of a napkin.

当时两年期利率上升了，而联邦基金利率和存款利率都很低。

The 2-year went up and Fed funds were low and deposit rates were low.

说到两年期利率，需要指出的是，一池汽车贷款的平均期限（包括提前还款和违约）大约是两年。

And the credit unions— and when I say the 2-year, it's worth pointing out that the average duration of a pool of auto loans, including prepayments and defaults, is about 2 years.

所以两年期利率是一个合理的近似指标，可以当作适当的无风险基准。

So the 2-year is a reasonable proxy for the appropriate kind of risk-free benchmark.

所以在2021年底，随着两年期利率飙升，人们预期联邦基金利率会上升，但所有这些竞争对手都没有提高利率，因为他们就是没提。

So in late '21, as the 2-year goes racing up, as people expect Fed funds to rise, all these competitors just didn't raise rates because they didn't.

从学术角度讲，他们没有理由不提高。

There's no academic reason why they shouldn't have.

但他们就是没提。

They just sort of didn't.

没提。

Didn't.

然后即使联邦基金利率开始上升，他们也超级慢。

And then even as Fed funds began to rise, they were super slow.

我记得有很长一段时间，像Navy Federal这样的机构提供的汽车贷款利率，竟然比同等期限的国债利率还低，甚至低于联邦基金利率。

And, you know, I remember there was a long period of time where, like, Navy Federal was offering car loans at a discount to Fed funds, to the Treasury, of the comparable duration.

这对我们来说是个大问题。

And this is a big problem for us.

这听起来好笑，但问题是我们每天都要和他们竞争。

Like, this is funny, except for the fact that we have to compete with this every day.

到2022年底，全行业的汽车贷款利差降到了我有数据以来的最低点，这个数据可以追溯到2008年金融危机之前。

Industry-wide, auto loan spreads by late 2022 were at the lowest levels in the whole time series I have going back to before the crisis, before the financial crisis in 2008.

在这种情况下出现这种局面真是疯狂，因为其他所有消费信贷的利差都很宽。

And it was a wild time for that to be the case because every other consumer credit spread was wide.

没错。

Right.

原因有一大堆，而且都很正当。

For a whole bunch of really good reasons.

而且作为抵押物的汽车本身，其价格也处于历史最高点。

And the underlying auto collateral was the most kind of overpriced it would ever be.

所以汽车贷款在利差上本应该非常昂贵，但实际却达到了历史最低。

So auto loans should have been really expensive on a spread basis, but instead they were at their all-time tights.

原因就是有这么多愚蠢的竞争对手。然后你去调查一下他们的情况，他们会说，我们的资产负债管理委员会一个季度才开一次会。

And the reason was that there was just all these dumb competitors. And then you'd call these— we did research into what was going on and be like, well, our asset liability management committee meets once a quarter.

而且我们尽量一次不提高利率超过25个基点。

And then we try not to raise rates more than 25 bps at a time.

然后我们要花60天才能实施利率调整，因为我们的系统，等等等等。

And then it takes us 60 days to implement the rate changes because our systems, blah, blah, blah.

你就会想，但各位，这到底是怎么回事？

And you're just like, but guys, what is going on?

简直。

It's.

M180:12

有点像油价跌成负数那会儿。

Kind of like when oil goes negative.

这种事本不该发生啊。

This is not supposed to happen.

发生。

Happen.

M280:14

对。

Right.

这绝对不在教科书里。

This is definitely not in the textbook.

但问题是——CarMax他们就这么硬扛下来了。

But so the problem— so CarMax, they just ate it.

他们就是用很低的利差放贷。

They just originated at low spreads.

然后第二年，甚至某种程度上——现在已经在好转了。

And then the next year, and even to somewhat— it's getting better now.

但如果你看他们的财报，你会发现一两年后他们为此付出了代价，但当时就是硬扛着。

But if you look at their financials, you can see they paid for it a year or two later, but they ate it at the time.

他们为了眼前牺牲了一点未来。

They sacrificed a bit of the future for the present.

但Carvana不是那种情况，对吧？

Carvana was not in that position, right?

就是说，我们，你知道，公司需要钱。

Like, we, you know, the company needed the money.

所以Carvana只能按现实定价。

So Carvana had to price to reality.

这意味着Carvana在市场上提供的贷款比竞争对手贵了一大截，这对他们可没帮助。

And that meant that Carvana was in the market with loans that were, like, meaningfully more expensive than competitors, which did not help.

嗯嗯。

Mm-hmm.

嗯，简单说个背景吧，Capital One也按现实定价了，因为他们很聪明。

Um, and to just put this in context, Capital One also priced to reality because they're smart.

他们的汽车贷款发放量下降了百分之五十。

They saw their auto originations fall 50 percent.

嗯，所以Carvana要同时应对这两件事。

Um, so Carvana is dealing with both of those things.

另外一件事，我觉得更微妙一些，但我也认为确实如此，嗯，跟早期用户有关。

The other thing, which I think is more subtle, but I also think is true, um, has to do with, with early adopters.

这是其中之一——这是我当时最没意识到的部分，但我后来做了更多研究，理解得透彻多了。

And this is one of these— this is the part that I was least aware of at the time, but I've done more work on, and I've come to understand a lot better.

Carvana，你知道，如果想想康涅狄格这样的市场，Carvana有——我不太清楚康涅狄格州二手车库存总量有多大，但假设Carvana拥有康涅狄格州所有库存的四分之三，包括它自己的，就说个大概的数。

Carvana, you know, if you think about a market like Connecticut, Carvana has— I don't know exactly how big Connecticut's, you know, fleet total used vehicle inventory is, but let's say that Carvana has something like 3/4 of all the inventory, including Carvana's inventory, in the state of Connecticut, just to make up a number.

你可能会问，那为什么我们没有四分之三的销量呢？

One might ask why we don't have like 3/4 of the sales.

因为他们大概有——我一时想不起康涅狄格的销量是多少，但大概就百分之一左右。

Because they probably have— I don't know what Connecticut sales are off the top of my head, but like 1% or something like that.

所以你首先要排除一些因素：好吧，他们有些车在加州，有运费，有交付延迟。

And so the first thing you might do is throw out, okay, well, there are some cars they have that are in California, there's shipping fees, there's delays.

咱们只看附近的车。

Let's only look at cars that are nearby.

于是你把库存范围缩小了。

And so you cut that inventory down.

然后你可能说，好吧，再把没听说过Carvana的人排除掉。

And then you might say, well, let's throw out people who haven't heard of Carvana.

结果发现他们大概有百分之八十的知名度，但我们会排除一些人。

Turns out they have like 80% awareness, but we'll throw out some people.

好，我们减少一下——有一半的人说他们目前不想在网上买车，虽然这个数字在下降，但我们就先排除那一半。

Okay, let's reduce— half of people say they don't want to buy a car online right now, although the number is falling, but like, let's throw out, you know, that half.

剩下的数字还是远远高于他们目前的销售水平。

You're still left with a number that's way higher than where they are.

所以，销量到底去哪儿了？

So like, where are the sales?

另外奇怪的是，你进入一个市场，有这么多库存，这么好的产品。

And also weird is, okay, you go into a market, you have all this huge inventory, this great product.

为什么销量不是一下子上去，而是像这样慢慢爬坡呢？

Why does it take all, you know, why do sales kind of ramp like this as opposed to just like step function?

是什么在阻碍人们接受这个？

Like, what is delaying people adopting this?

很长一段时间我都想不出很好的答案。

I didn't have a great answer for that for a long time.

嗯，我当时觉得是口碑传播。

Well, I kind of thought it was word of mouth.

我就觉得，你知道，只是需要时间。

I was kind of like, you know, I think it just takes time.

口碑传播。

Word of mouth.

我的证据是，如果你调查那些从 Carvana 买车的人，问他们会不会推荐给别人，大概是平均推荐给4个人，这个数字非常大。

And my evidence for that was that if you surveyed people who bought from Carvana and asked them if they recommended it to people, I think it's something like 4. They would recommend it to 4 people on average, which is an enormous number.

一个病毒式的效应。

A viral thing.

M182:39

对。

Yeah.

M282:40

所以我就这么认为了。

And so that's where I'd left it.

所以我就这么认为了。

And so that's where I'd left it.

但在试图弄清楚这些问题的过程中，我开始更深入地思考。

But as, you know, in the sort of wreckage of trying to figure all this stuff out, you know, I started thinking harder about this.

我突然意识到，我从来没有做过两件事，事后看来这两件事很明显。

And it occurred to me that I'd never done two things which seem obvious in retrospect.

第一，我从来没问过人们，口碑对他们的购买决定有多重要。

One was I'd never asked people how important this word of mouth was to their decision to buy from Carvana.

嗯。

Hmm.

所以我们就在调查里加了一个问题，类似于，你有没有从朋友或家人那里得到推荐？

So we added to the survey something to the effect of, um, uh, you know, um, like, did you get a recommendation from a friend or family member?

它有多重要？

How important was it?

结果发现，百分之七十的人说，在决定从 Carvana 买车时，这个推荐有点重要或非常重要。

And we found that 70% of people said that it was either somewhat or very important in their choice to buy from Carvana.

因此，只有三分之一的人是在没有朋友或家人推荐的情况下买的。

Therefore, only a third of people were buying from Carvana without, um, the recommendation of a friend or family member.

看到这个数据后，我就想，那这三分之一的人是怎么回事？

And, you know, once I saw that, that got me thinking, and I was like, I wonder what's going on with this third of people.

那些没有推荐就买车的人。

People who are buying without the recommendation.

所以这让我相信了病毒式传播的存在，对吧？

So that convinced me there's virality, right?

嗯哼。

Mm-hmm.

但那些没有朋友或家人推荐就买车的人，是怎么回事呢？

But what's going on with these people who are buying without the recommendation of a friend or family member?

我的理论是，嗯，他们是早期采用者。

And my theory was, well, they're early adopters.

所以我们调查了从 Carvana 买车的人。

So we survey people who bought from Carvana.

我们会问他们一些像这样的问题，比如，你有 Robinhood 账户吗？

We ask them questions like, do you have a Robinhood account?

你买过比特币吗？

Have you ever owned Bitcoin?

你会在网上买杂货吗？

Do you do online grocery shopping?

答案当然是，这些我都会做。

And the answer is, of course I do all these things.

全部都是是是，比不是 Carvana 的消费者高得多。

All yes, yes, yes, way higher than non-Carvana consumers.

所以现在我可以这么说，看，很多人不会这么做，除非有人表示认可。

So now I can say, look, many people won't do it unless someone says, okay.

有些人就会直接尝试一下。

Some people will just give it a plunge.

大体上，你越是喜欢早期采用新事物，就越不需要亲友的推动就会去做。

And in general, the more early adopter-ish you are, the less nudging you need from relations to do it.

这正是驱动增长曲线的原因。

And that's what drives the growth curve.

这也让我们回到 2022 年。

It also gets us back to 2022.

你看，回到 2021 年，假设你是那种有 Robinhood 账户的人，你可能会炒一些 SPAC 和加密货币。

You see, back in '21, let's say that you were the sort of person who had a Robinhood account and you might have speculated in some SPACs and some cryptocurrencies.

你可能赚了一笔意外之财。

You might have had a windfall.

你可能会想，看，这可不是几十亿美元那种。

And you might have thought, look, this isn't like billions of dollars.

这是几千美元，也许几万美元。

This is thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, maybe.

你可能想过，既然你有这笔意外之财，你会去买一辆车。

You might have thought that given your windfall, you were going to go buy a car.

你也可能心里想，既然你是那种持有 SPAC、加密货币，又在网上购物的人，显然你要买车的地方就是 Carvana。

And you might have thought to yourself, since you're the sort of person who owns SPACs and cryptocurrencies and shops online, obviously, the place you were going to buy a car was Carvana.

现在，你可能真的在 Carvana 买了那辆车，也可能没有，因为 Carvana 当时卖光了，也许没有你想要的车。

Now, you may or may not have actually bought that car at Carvana, because Carvana was sold out, and they might not have got what you wanted.

你可能去了别的地方。

You might have gone somewhere else.

但问题是这样的。

But here's the deal.

你把你的需求提前了。

You pulled your demand forward.

所以从 Carvana 的角度来看，即使这只是—— Carvana 在 2021 年大约只有 1% 的市场份额。

So from Carvana's perspective, even if this is like— Carvana in 2021 had like 1% share.

所以即使这只是市场的 0.3%，并不需要占很大的市场份额，Carvana 就能感受到这种巨大的需求拉动，他们确实看到了。

So even if this is 0.3% of the market, this does not have to be a lot of the market for Carvana to feel this enormous demand pull, which they definitely saw.

这也意味着，再往后推一年，所有这些人都处于完全相反的位置。

And it also means that you roll forward a year, and all these people are in the exact opposite position.

他们刚刚经历了意外之财的反面，不管你怎么称呼那种意外损失。

They've just had the opposite of a windfall, whatever you call that a sort of unexpected loss.

M185:12

损失惨重。

Decimation.

M285:13

对。

Yes.

而前一年，他们刚刚都买了车。

And the year before, they all just bought a car.

所以结果就是，从 Carvana 的角度来看，虽然我们当时谁都没意识到，这并不好。

So turns out, from Carvana's perspective, although none of us sort of realised it at the time, this isn't great.

所以我认为那是第三个 Carvana 特有的因素。

So I think that was a third contributor that was unique to Carvana.

所以你有这三样东西：整体市场跌幅比大萧条时期还大。

So you have these 3, you've got the overall market is down more than the Great Recession.

汽车信贷利差处于有史以来最紧的水平，而且你根本无法匹配。

You've got the tightest auto credit spreads ever, and you can't match.

还有一个特殊情况，就是你那些最前沿的客户基本上去年都已经买了。

And you have this unique thing where you kind of had all of your sort of bleeding-edge customers bought last year.

M185:41

而且你刚刚用一大笔债务买下了这个大资产。

And you just bought this big asset with a bunch of debt.

M285:43

而且你刚刚用一大笔债务买下了这个大资产。

And you just bought this big asset with a bunch of debt.

结果你发现，很多流程——其实我一直觉得Carvana在运营上总会遇到一些坎坷，但没想到现在全撞上了。

And it turns out that you're learning that, like, a bunch of your processes— like, eventually, I always sort of thought that Carvana would have bumps in the road operationally, like, sort of, but it turns out they're all now.

是啊。

Yeah.

而且当时这些情况并不完全明显。

And none of that was totally obvious at the time.

只是零零碎碎的一些迹象。

There were, like, bits and pieces.

你边走边学。

You're kind of learning as you go.

利率方面的东西还挺清楚的。

The rate stuff was pretty clear.

市场方面的东西也挺清楚的。

The market stuff was pretty clear.

我描述的那些情况，其实所有数据都有滞后性。

The stuff I described, you know, like, but all this data comes at a lag.

就是一大堆，全都笼罩在不确定性之中。

Like, there's just a bunch of, like, it was all in a cloud of uncertainty.

然后你就做Carvana必须做的事，对吧？

And then you do what Carvana has to do, right?

那就是开始削减开支。

Which is you start cutting.

而且这个业务有一个很棒的方面，就是规模越大，表现越好。

And this is a bit, one of the things that's glorious about this business is that as it gets bigger, it gets better.

规模带来规模。

And size begets size.

这就是一个良性循环。

It's just a virtuous cycle.

但问题是：

But here's the thing.

当你大幅削减的时候，因为所有这些因素，反而会对你产生不利影响。

When you cut that a lot, because of all this stuff, it all runs against you.

所以你削减广告、削减库存，然后外部需求变得更糟，而你又减少了一堆本可以刺激需求的东西，进一步拉低了需求。

So you slash advertising, you slash inventory, and then external demand gets even worse, and you've reduced things that drive down demand further.

他们一整年就像在追一个滚下山的球。

And they were chasing a ball down a hill all year long.

而且Ernie在你的播客里讲过，他们在组织上如何变得更能专注于效率，又如何慢慢摸索出这条路。

And Ernie told you the story on your podcast about kind of how they got better organizationally at being focused on efficiency and how they kind of learned their way into it.

实际上，从宏观角度来看，他们从2022年3月到11月这段时间，在提升效率方面做得还行，但2022年11月之后才真正做得非常出色。

And look, the reality is the sort of 10,000-foot telling of the story was they were okay at getting more efficient between March and November of 2022, and they got really amazing at it after November of '22.

他们花了6个月才搞明白。

It took them 6 months to figure it out.

这没问题。

That's fine.

所以我亲历了那6个月。

So I lived for those 6 months.

当时的感觉可不像我刚才描述的那么轻松。

It did not feel like I just described it.

感觉那是一段非常漫长的时间。

It felt like a very long time.

M187:29

而且要说一下背景，这远是你最大的持仓。

And for context, it's by far your biggest position.

M287:32

没错。

Absolutely.

毫无疑问，是我最大的持仓。

By far, it's my biggest position.

而且你知道，当时我手里的其他东西也都不怎么好，这更是雪上加霜。

And, you know, it didn't help that nothing else I owned seemed to be doing well at the time either.

你知道，到了2022年秋天的时候，需求一直在不断萎缩。

You know, by the time you get to the fall of '22, demand just keeps going away.

而且到那时候，他们还没来得及在成本上跟上来解决这个问题。

And they hadn't by that point caught up on costs to, like, fix it.

所以到这个时候，所有人——也不是所有人，但市场上确实有一种说法：看吧，问题在于这模式行不通。

So everyone at this point— not everyone, but there was a narrative out there, look, the problem is it doesn't work.

问题在于他们想实现盈利，但就是做不到。

The problem is they're trying to get to profitability, but there isn't— they can't do it.

如果继续削减成本，也做不到。

If they keep cutting costs, they can't.

他们说，好吧，五月份的时候，这个运营计划就像是，行，我要重新评估一切。

They said, okay, in May, this operational plan's like, okay, so I'm going to re-underwrite everything.

然后我觉得，他们能做到。

And it's like, I think they can do this.

我觉得这说得通。

This makes sense to me.

而且他们有大量的流动性来让这个计划落地。

And they have a lot of liquidity to make this work.

六个月以后，他们烧掉了大量流动性。

Fast forward 6 months, they've burned a lot of liquidity.

他们远远落后了，对吧？

They're way behind, right?

到那时你就会想，好吧，如果明年跟今年一样，那我们大概十三、十四个月后就会把钱烧光。

And now at that point, you're like, well, if next year looks like this year, we're going to run out of money kind of in 13, 14 months.

你会问，那这种情况会发生吗？

You'd ask, well, is that going to happen?

他会说，嗯，不，我觉得不会。

He's like, well, no, I don't think so.

我觉得不会。

I don't think so.

我觉得他们会解决的。

I think they're going to fix it.

我觉得单车经济模型是能跑通的。

I think the unit economics work.

顺便说一句，信贷市场这种疯狂的状态迟早会结束。

By the way, this crazy thing with the credit markets is going to end at some point.

而且我肯定Navy Federal不会永远白送钱。

And I'm sure Navy Federal isn't going to give away free money forever.

但接着你会说，是啊，但我当然没想到Navy Federal会白送钱长达九个月。

But then you'd say, yeah, but of course, I never thought Navy Federal would be giving away free money for 9 months.

我以为他们几周内就会注意到利率已经变了。

I thought it was going to be a few weeks before they noticed that interest rates had changed.

我没想到会拖这么久。

I never thought it'd taken this long.

没想到他们会这么追不上不断下跌的需求。

That they'd have so much trouble chasing demand this far down.

所以在那时候，那是这笔投资最艰难的部分，因为那时你确实得面对现实——就像Ernie说的，看，我们在削减成本，但我们也在烧钱。

And so at that point, that was when it was the most challenging part of the investment, because at that point, you did have to put on the table— like Ernie would say, look, we're cutting costs and we're burning cash.

随着成本下降，我们最终会实现盈利。

And as our costs go down, eventually we'll be profitable.

但至于这个进度和烧钱速度的对比，理性的人对于能不能撑到那一天会有不同看法。

But as to the pace of that versus the cash burn, reasonable people could disagree as to whether we'll get there.

对。

Right.

而且随着时间的推移，这让人非常放心。

In time, which is super reassuring.

然后发生的事情是，他们削减成本的速度快了很多。

And then what happened was they got much faster at cutting costs.

银行系统似乎发现利率已经上升了，这真的很有帮助。

The banking system kind of discovered that interest rates had gone up, and that really helped.

然后在2023年1月或2月的某个时候，他们不再追逐需求，反而像是抑制需求。

And sometime in January, February of '23, instead of chasing demand, it looked like they were restraining it.

你可以从某种程度上看到这一点，因为如果你把网站上的交货时间看作一条线，你就能看到排队提车有多长。

And you can sort of see that because if you think about delivery lead times on the website as, uh, as like a line, you can sort of see how long the line is to get a car.

而且你能看到，车辆数量是稳定的，但排队时间更长了，如果这说得通的话。

And you could see that, like, the units were steady, but the lines were longer, if that makes any sense.

M189:58

对。

Yeah.

M289:59

嗯，然后利率自己就稳定了。

Um, and, and, and so, and then rates, you know, fix themselves.

而且整个行业也看到，随着汽车制造改进，车价逐渐走低。

And the industry's seen, you know, as car prices, manufacturing improved, car prices ground lower.

随着时间的推移，销量有所改善，整个行业都有点提升，尽管仍然相当低。

And over time, you know, unit volumes have improved, you know, industry-wide a bit, although it's still pretty low.

他们成功削减了大量成本，然后达到了今天的状态，就是一切都很顺利。

And they succeeded in cutting a lot of costs and, you know, and got to the place they are today, which is, you know, that everything worked.

哦，我忘了提，因为每个人都觉得整个故事就是他们跟Apollo达成了交易。

Oh, I should— I forgot to mention, because everyone thinks the whole story is they got this deal with Apollo.

对。

Yeah.

所以基本上，在这个过程中，他们不得不拉动的杠杆之一是把他们的债务——也就是他们的债权人——置于囚徒困境中。

So basically, along the way, one of the levers they had to pull was putting their debt— their lenders in a prisoner's dilemma.

你有多个债券持有人，然后你基本上说，听着，我们可能谁都还不起。

So you have multiple bondholders, and you basically say, look, we might not be able to pay any of you.

但第一个接受更低还款额的人会先拿到钱。

But the first person who accepts less gets paid first.

如果你的文件写得对，你就可以这么做。

And if your documents are written the right way, you can do that.

而他们的文件就是对的。

And they were.

于是他们最终协商出了这个新的有担保贷款结构，人们把债务转换成新债务，更安全、优先权更高，但有折扣。

And so they ended up negotiating this new secured loan structure, and people converted their debt into new debt, which is safer, higher priority at a discount.

整个交换过程发生在2023年夏天。

And that whole exchange happened in the summer of '23.

很多人在复述这个故事时，会说正是通过那次交换，他们挽救了公司。

And a lot of sort of the retelling of the story is, and by virtue of that exchange, they like saved the business.

到那个时候，我在看的数据显示一切都很棒。

By that point, the data I was looking at said that everything was great.

嗯，那就像是锦上添花，因为那在利息支出和债务方面给他们省了一大笔钱。

Um, that was just kind of like, you know, the, the cherry on top, because that saved them a ton of money in terms of interest expense and debt.

但是，它无论如何也不是让业务好转的关键。

Um, but, um, it was not by any stretch the, the thing that turned the business.

M191:27

你能谈谈你的投资决策吗？

Can you talk about your investing decisions?

因为在那个时期，每天都是一个决策，不卖就是一个重大决策。

Because during that period, like every day is kind of a decision, like not selling is a big decision.

随着信息不断出现。

As the information comes online.

你做了什么？

What did you do?

你买入了更多吗？

Did you buy more?

你买的时候有什么限制吗？

Were there constraints on how much you could buy?

事后看，你会做得不一样吗？

Would you have done anything differently in hindsight?

当时的障碍是什么——显然事后看，你本来应该买更多的。

What were the frictions that— obviously you would've bought more in hindsight.

M291:47

这是个蠢问题。

Stupid question.

我应该在最高点全卖掉，再在最低点全买回来。

I would've sold all of it at the peak and bought all of it.

M191:52

再买回来。

Back.

非常蠢的问题。

Very stupid question.

我觉得你懂我的意思。

I think you know what I mean.

带我们梳理一下心理过程、那些障碍，就是那些真正棘手的东西。

Walk us through the psychology, The barriers, the, like, yeah, you know, so the real hard stuff.

M292:04

我知道他们在第一季度物流上遇到的问题。

I knew the issues they were having logistically in Q1.

我能看到这些问题。

Like, I could see it.

说我能看到，是因为我们看了网站上大量的数据。

And when I say I could see it, like, we look at a lot of data on the website.

所以我知道Omicron是个问题。

So I knew that Omicron was an issue.

而让人失望的意外是，随着Omicron逐渐消退，我本以为会有一些单位从系统中出来。

And so the disappointing surprise was that as Omicron kind of cleared up, you know, it was like I was waiting for, like, some units to come out of the system.

我就想，为什么？

And I was like, why?

他们为什么不卖任何单位？

Why are they not selling any units?

显然是有问题的，但那时股价已经暴跌了。

It was kind of clear there was a problem, but then the stock had thudded.

它跌了——最初的大部分暴跌是因为Omicron期间情况真的很糟。

And it went down— the first sort of most of that thudding was because things were really bad during Omicron.

但直到你意识到存在深层需求问题之前，那看起来就像市场里常见的短期运营波折。

But until you realised that there was a deep demand problem, that seemed like the sort of thing that happens in markets when you have a short-term operational hiccup.

只有等到需求没有恢复，你才会想，哦，出事了。

And it was only once demand didn't kind of recover that you're like, oh, something's wrong.

但到那时，股价跌得太多，你又会觉得，嗯，好吧。

But by then, prices go down so much, you're kind of like, well, yeah.

实际上在那整个下跌过程中，我一直没买。

I didn't actually buy any the whole way down to there.

原因就是它已经是很大的仓位了，我一般不会增持超过基金一定比例的东西。

And the reason was just it was a big position and I generally don't buy more of things that are over a certain amount of the fund.

我就在等，想着，如果它跌到那个比例以下，我就多买点。

And I was sort of waiting, like, it was kind of like, well, if it gets below that, I'll buy more.

如果没跌到，那也没事。

If it doesn't, it's fine.

之后我确实多买了一点，但那时已经有些不对劲了，所以没买太多。

And then I bought a bit more after that, but by then something was off, so I kind of didn't buy a lot.

然后他们推出了运营计划，还以80美元的价格进行了增发。

And then they came out with this operational plan and they did an issuance at $80.

我想，好吧，他们会解决这个问题的。

And I thought, okay, like, this is— they'll fix this.

就是这样。

This is it.

所以我又加仓了不少。

So I bought a bunch more.

然后股价一路跌到了20美元。

And then the stock went all the way down to $20.

在那段时间里，我又去拜访了他们，和他们一起看了一遍整个运营计划，基本上是尝试从零开始，像承销那样重新梳理一遍。

And in that intervening period, I'd gone out to visit them again, and I'd gone through the whole operational plan with them and, like, tried to basically do a blank sheet of paper, like, underwriting.

我让自己相信这个方案是可行的。

And I convinced myself that this would work.

不，Clifford，你不是个白痴。

No, Clifford, you weren't a moron.

是啊，股价跌了95%，但没关系，他们会没事的，他们会解决这个问题的。

Yes, the stock was down 95%, but this was okay, and they'll be fine, and they're going to sort it out.

但在那个时间点，我意识到这家公司需要做的深层运营调整比我之前想的要多。

But I realised at that point that there were more, kind of, deep operational fixes in the business than I'd realised.

所以我当时的想法是，他们应该没问题，我先买一半，等看到转机再买另一半。

And so my thinking at the time was like, they should be fine, I'll buy half now and I'll buy half when I can see it turn.

为了观察转机，我们和一家第三方咨询公司合作，他们主要做数据分析、网络爬虫和数据库，还会去拿信用卡数据进行匹配，等等等等。

And in order to see it turn, what I'm going to do is we work with a third-party consulting firm that basically does analytics, web scraping and database, go get credit card data and match it and blah, blah, blah.

然后我们就说，好吧，我们要大干一场，我们要把这家公司全方位地监控起来。

And so we're like, okay, we're going to just go, we're going to instrument the heck out of this in a way.

其实我们之前已经有一定程度的监控了，但这次我们要把注意力完全集中在加强监控上。

We already were instrumenting it somewhat, but we're really going to turn our attention to focusing on instrumenting this.

我们会重点关注那些我们认为最先能看到转机的指标。

And we're gonna, we're gonna focus on the things we think we're gonna see first when we see the turn.

等看到转机的时候，我们就知道了，也许那时买入的价格会高一些，但我们就是要等到那时候再买剩下的那一半股票。

And when we see the turn, you know, we're gonna know, and maybe we'll have to pay a little more, but we're gonna get— that's when we buy the second half of the stock.

那是5月份的事。

And that was May.

所以我先买了前一半，我记得大部分是在大概25美元左右的价格买到的。

So I bought the first half, and I think, um, sort of in the mid-20s is where I ended up getting kind of most of it.

所以我在80美元买了一些，在25美元左右也买了一些，嗯，就是100美元、80美元和25美元这些价位。

And so I bought some at 80, some in the mid-20s, um, and, uh, just to mention, like 100 and 80 and mid-20s.

然后我们就开始加强监控，开始等待。

And then, um, and then we started instrumenting and we started waiting.

结果情况越来越糟，越来越糟。

And like, things just get worse and worse and worse.

每一个数据点都比上一个更差。

And it's like every marginal data point was like worse.

我记得，感恩节那周销量通常会下滑，然后下周会回升。

I remember, I, you know, the week after Thanksgiving, sales always fall off on Thanksgiving, and then they always come back the week after.

因为季节性的原因，通常销量会稍微低一点。

It's always a little lower because of seasonality.

但那次感恩节销量下滑之后，就再也没有回升。

And it was like sales fall off during Thanksgiving, and then they like just didn't.

我当时就想，这怎么回事？

It was just like, what the heck?

你知道吗，你是在实时经历这一切，对吧？

And like, you know, you're living this in real time, right?

你只会想，这到底怎么回事？

You're just like, what the heck?

所以我真的很庆幸没有买剩下那一半。

And so I was really glad I hadn't bought the second half.

但到这个时间点，我们的监控已经做得相当到位了。

But at this point, we had things pretty well instrumented.

而且我们有了很多利率数据，这是我在刚开始的时候没有的。

And, you know, we had all this rate data, which I hadn't had in the beginning of this process.

我们有很多方法可以追踪不同年份车型的流动情况。

We had just a lot of, like, a lot of ways to capture how cars move in vintages.

真的有很多。

There's just a lot.

然后，那一年结束了，他们发布了那个毒丸计划。

So then, you know, the year ends, they put out this poison pill.

这个毒丸计划基本上就是说，任何持股超过5%的人，比如我和另外两个人，就不能再买更多股票了。

And the poison pill basically said that anyone who owns over 5%, which was like me and like 2 other people, can't buy more stock.

他们这么做有非常充分的理由。

And they had very good reason to do this.

原因是他们有大量的NOLs。

The reason is they had big NOLs.

而且美国国税局有关于股权变动的规定。

And there's IRS rules having to do with turnover.

如果5%以上的持股人变动太频繁，那就会毁掉这些NOLs的价值。因为按照重新定价的方式，如果发生一定程度的变动，他们会根据你的市值重新给NOLs定价。

And if there'd been too much turnover amongst the 5% holders, then they would have destroyed the value of those NOLs, because the way they repriced it, if a certain amount of turnover happens, they reprice the NOLs based on your market cap.

所以市值非常低，NOLs可能会发生变动，而且已经有大量变动了。

So the market cap was super low, and the NOLs could turn over, and there'd been a bunch of turnover.

所以他们面临风险，可能会跨过某个门槛。

So there was a risk they were gonna cross some threshold.

所以他们就实施了毒丸计划，这对他们来说完全合理，但对我没什么帮助。

And so they put this poison pill in, which made all the sense in the world for them, but it was not particularly helpful for me.

但说实话，我最初的反应就是，好吧，真烦人。

But, you know, to be honest, my initial reaction was like, well, that's annoying.

不过我反正也没打算马上买。

But I wasn't planning to buy any right now anyway.

M196:45

对。

Right.

M296:46

但后来，就像命运安排的一样，六到八周之后，我再看我所有的数据，全都是向好的苗头。

But then, as fate would have it, you know, 6 weeks, 8 weeks later, I'm looking at all of my data, and like, it's all green shoots.

我当时就想，可恶。

And I'm like, darn.

我原话不是这么说的。

That wasn't what I said.

说的是另一个词。

It was a different word.

所以我试图联系他们，看能不能破个例，但当然，你知道，他们不能，就这样。

And so I tried to reach out to see if they could make an exception, but of course, you know, they can't, all that stuff.

所以最后我们没法再买了。

So we ended up not being able to buy anymore.

不过我得说，当我决定先买一半、以后再买另一半的时候，我向自己保证过不会自责。我就是跟自己说，听着，Cliff，如果你的判断是对的，你会成为一个快乐、成功的人，不管你买不买这另一半。

Now, I should say, when I made the decision to buy half now and half later, I promised myself that I wouldn't beat myself up if I sort of said, listen, Cliff, you will be a happy, successful person if you're right about this, whether you buy this other half or not.

所以都没关系。

So it's all good.

嗯。

Hmm.

所以我到现在还这么跟自己说。

And so I'm still telling myself that.

M197:30

那你谈谈当时心理上的波动吧，有没有到那种程度，就是真的深深地怀疑自己？

So say a little bit about the range of psychology and maybe how close you got to thinking, just really deeply questioning yourself.

你是那种投资者，就是通常什么都知道——我跟你聊公司的时候，你对那家公司的了解，比我聊过的其他任何人对那家公司的了解都要多。

You're one of these investors that typically knows— when I've talked to you about companies, you've known more about the company than anyone else I've talked to about that same company.

对Carvana来说，一直是这样。

And that's always been the case with Carvana.

是的。

Yeah.

我觉得在股价跌了99%之前是这样。

I think that was true prior to the '99 decline.

今天可能也还是这样。

It's probably true today.

但即使如此，尽管你知道这么多，有点像Navy Federal Credit Union的X因素那种感觉。

But even despite that, even though you knew so much, it's sort of like the Navy Federal Credit Union X Factor thing.

就是说，你内心是怎么运作的？

Like, how are you wired?

你当时有多沮丧？

Like, how distraught did you get?

M298:07

我会讲讲当时有多惨，其实也挺容易想象的，当时真的很惨。

I'll talk about how it was super miserable, and like, it's pretty easy to imagine how it was super miserable.

嗯，但还是值得提一点。

Um, but it is worth just making a point.

就是说，我们又不是在太平洋上跟日本人打仗。

Like, we were not fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.

确实很糟糕。

Like, it sucked.

你知道，不过就人类的经历而言，我过得算是很幸运了。

You know, but right in the realm of human experience, I've lived a blessed life.

我觉得可以这么看，当时有两个我。

I would say one way to think about it is there were 2 versions of me.

有一个是你跟我说话时面对的我，那个我能比较清晰地告诉你，嗯，利率那边出了些奇怪的事，不可能永远这样下去。

There was the me who you spoke to, who I think would sort of cogently say, well, there's this weird thing going on with rates and it can't last forever.

等它好转了，我觉得这个也会好转。

And when it gets better, I think this will get better.

还有一个是凌晨一点还醒着躺在那儿的我，那个我心里有个声音，你知道，对自己特别不客气。

And there was the me who was laying awake at night at 1 AM, who was just kind of like, you know, my inner voice was not being kind to me.

嗯。

Hmm.

我一直觉得自己是那种，天生就能比较好地控制内心独白的人。

And I've always thought of myself as a person, I think I am sort of naturally one of these people who has pretty good control over his inner monologue.

那是我人生中第一次也是唯一一次，像是失去了对内心独白的控制。

And it was the first and only time in my life where I like lost control of my inner monologue.

我，你知道，会半夜躺在那儿睡不着，我从来不会为事情失眠的。

Like, I, you know, would lay awake at night, I never lose sleep over things.

我平时睡得挺好，但那时候就会躺着睡不着，然后焦虑，责怪自己。

I sleep, and I would lay awake at night, and I would fret and berate myself.

那样活着真的很难。

And it's super hard to live like that.

但话说回来，我又没得晚期癌症。

But again, I didn't have terminal cancer.

我又没在太平洋上跟日本人打仗。

I wasn't fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.

这还是在人类正常经历的范围内，但确实非常难。

It was within the realm of human experience, but it's super difficult.

而且你还有让你失望了的合伙人，对吧？

And you have partners that you've let down, right?

我的意思是，我说“你让他们失望了”，就好像你真的让他们失望了。

And I mean, I say you've let them down as though you've let them down.

你真的让他们失望了吗？

Have you let them down?

你自己的看法可能是，也许你并没有让他们失望。

Your view of the world is that maybe you haven't let them down.

只是觉得，这你知道，是一件非常大的事。

It's just like, this is, you know, just a very big deal.

然后你的合伙人，你知道，各有各的反应，你会得到不同的回应。

But like, then your partners would, you know, some, like, you got different responses.

你知道，我有一些小合伙人，现在已经不是合伙人了，他们当时挺刻薄的。

You know, I had some smaller partners who are no longer partners who, you know, were mean.

但也有其他合伙人，你知道，他们会非常理智、完全合理地想好好盘问我这件事。

But like, I had other, you know, partners who would very sensibly and totally appropriately, like, want to grill me about it.

那种盘问并不是刻薄，是完全合理的。

But that grilling didn't— wasn't like mean, it was totally reasonable.

但那种盘问并不是出于信心，对吧？

But like, it didn't come from a place of confidence, right?

你知道，我们等会儿会说到我感激的人，但有一个合伙人，他开了很远的车来找我吃午饭。

You know, we'll eventually get to people I'm grateful for, but there was one partner who drove, you know, a long distance to have lunch with me.

结果发现，他们开那么远的车，就只是为了这顿饭。

And turns out that was the only reason they drove this long distance.

然后我们到了吃午饭的时候，我心里想，这顿饭估计不太好过。

And we get to lunch and it's like, this is not gonna go great.

你知道，最近这些会议都不太顺。

You know, these meetings haven't been going my way recently.

我们坐下来后，他说，Cliff，我来这里就是想表达我和我所有同事的看法，就是你太棒了。

And we sit down and he goes, Cliff, I'm just here to express my and everyone I work with's view that you're awesome.

而且，你知道吗，你现在经历了很多。

And, you know, you're going through a lot.

我们就是——我来这里就是想告诉你，你很棒。

And we're just— I'm just here to say, like, you're great.

我们支持你。

We support you.

如果需要帮忙，就跟我们说。

Let us know if we can be helpful.

但总之，我们是Cliff这边的。

But like, we're, you know, we're Team Cliff.

嗯，我没哭，但我心想，哇，这真是难得。

And like, I didn't cry, but I was like, wow, like, what a thing.

然后他说，对，我们来吃午饭吧。

And he's like, yeah, look, we're here for lunch.

我开车过来就是为了和你见面。

I drove here just to meet with you.

我们可以聊聊投资。

We can talk about investing.

对，也可以聊点别的。

Yeah, we can talk about other things.

我其实无所谓。

I don't really care.

但这就是我们做的事。

But like, this is what we're doing.

我当时就想，天哪。

And I was just like, it was like, wow.

所以这又是一类事情。

And so that would be the other thing like that.

到现在我还记得，而且我觉得这让我成为更好的人，因为我记得那件事对我的影响。

I still, to that day, and I think it makes me a better person because I remember how that affected me.

比如前几天，我参与的一家公司里有个CEO。

Like the other day, there's a CEO in a company I'm involved in.

他正被一些特别蠢的投资者无端指责。

He's wrongly getting a lot of crap from really dumb investors.

于是我给他写了封信，就像给了他一个拥抱一样。

So I wrote him, like, I sent him like a hug.

我给他发了封特别好的邮件，我觉得。

Like, I sent him like a nice, like a really nice email, I think.

尽可能写得温暖。

As nice as I could write it.

但我认为，站在那个角度，听到这些话并记住，这让我变得更好了。

But I think it makes me a better person to be on that side and to hear it and remember.

所以要说起其他感激的事，那也算一件。

So in terms of other things I'm grateful for, that would be another one.

但你确实让人失望过。

But you've let people down.

然后你会把这种感受内化。

And you internalize that.

还有一件奇怪的事，就是当你持有的股票跌了30%时，你会想，好吧，这里有问题，我们要怎么修复，对吧？

And there's also this weird thing that happens where, like, when you own a stock that's down 30%, you know, okay, here's what's wrong, here's what we're gonna fix it, right?

等等，等等。

Blah, blah, blah.

但当它跌了99%的时候，就会有人遇到你然后问，嘿，Carvana怎么了？

When it's down 99%, like, so, you know, someone meets you and says, like, what's up with Carvana?

然后你会想，嗯，我知道去年我以为他们会卖80万辆车，结果现在按进度只能卖30万辆。

And you're like, well, I'm aware that last year I thought they were gonna sell 800,000 cars, and they're on track to sell 300,000.

我还知道去年我以为他们今年能实现正的EBITDA，但现在按进度要亏20亿美元。

And I'm also aware that last year I thought they'd make positive EBITDA this year, and they're on track to lose $2 billion.

我也知道股价跌了99%。

And I'm also aware that the stock is down, uh, 99%.

但我想说的是，我觉得事情会好起来的。

But what I'm about to say is I think things are going to be okay.

你可以看到，这么说让你显得好像完全失去了判断力。

And you can see how, um, that makes you seem like you've lost the plot.

M1102:15

是啊。

Yeah.

M2102:16

而且真的没有什么好办法，能让这么说显得你不完全是个疯子。

And there isn't a good way to, like, say that that doesn't make you seem totally nuts.

因为基本上，你这么一说，他们就会觉得，哦，你可真是个否认现实的牛市宝贝，你知道的，你懂的。

Because basically, the way you say all that, and they're like, oh, you, you denial bull market baby, like, you know, you know.

所以这也是另一个真心棘手的地方。

And so I, That was another real tricky thing.

就是真的没什么好办法——而且在某种程度上也有深层的不确定性，因为事情已经糟糕到我不能直接说，你看，我百分之百确定。

It was like there was no good way to— and there was at some level deep uncertainty because things had gotten bad enough where I couldn't be like, look, I'm 100%.

我不能直接说，是的，是的，我们没问题。

I couldn't be like, yes, yes, we're fine.

我只能说，你看，事情严重偏离了轨道，而且原因是我根本预料不到的。

I was like, well, look, things are way off course, and for reasons I never would've predicted.

那你怎么开这种会？

And so how do you have that meeting?

然后你怎么开第三十次这样的会，对吧？

And then how do you have 30th version of that meeting, right?

因为你得一次次反复开这种会，对吧？

Because you do these over and over, right?

然后当然，你从那个会出来，就算勉强应付过去了。

And then, of course, you get— you leave that meeting, and you've sort of done it.

然后你开车，股价又跌了8%，对吧？

And then, like, you drive, and the stock's down another 8%, right?

然后你去健身房，就，你知道，特别那种，你试着调整自己，然后还是睡不着。

And, you know, you're, like, going to the gym, and you're, like, you know, particularly, you know, whatever, like, you sort of try to manage yourself, and then you can't sleep.

就是，真的——真的很难。

It's just, it's really— it was really hard.

我宁愿不要再经历一次。

I'd rather not go through it again.

M1103:21

这真的太不可思议了——我很高兴我们讲了完整的故事，不管人们关不关心这只具体的股票。

It's such an incredible— I'm so glad we did, like, the long version of the story, because whether or not people care about this specific stock.

我就是觉得，作为一个投资和商业故事，它非常独特。

I just think like as an investing and business story, it is very singular.

我在Ernie那期节目里说过这个。

I said this on the Ernie episode.

我们看过，因为他给了我那个数据，说跌90%相当于跌20%跌了20次，大概是这样。

We looked because he gave me that stat about going down 90% is like going down 20%, 20 times or something like that.

每一次都很痛苦。

And each one's painful.

真的没有另一个例子，是市值那么大的一家公司，跌了99%，最后还活下来了，而且不是诈骗。

There really is not another example of a company that was that big by market cap or something that went down 99% that survived and like wasn't a fraud.

就像，这，这——这绝对是个例外。

Like, it, it, it, like, it doesn't— that's an N of 1.

这在历史上根本不存在。

It doesn't exist in the record.

所以能听到它的大投资人从头到尾讲一遍，真的太酷了。

And so it's so cool to hear its major investor talk through the entire thing from soup to nuts.

最后我想问的是，你觉得有了这次亲身经历之后，你未来会用怎样不同的方式去对待投资机会？

And I guess in conclusion, I'm curious how you think you will most approach future investment opportunities differently as a result of having had this specific experience personally.

M2104:16

我之前提到过的一件事是管理团队的重要性。

One thing I mentioned earlier was the importance of management teams.

如果我把所有事情排个序，看看最终结果在整个过程中的表现，管理团队对结果的预测力远超我的预期。

If I rank things and sort of how they ultimately turned out over the full span, the management teams were wildly predictive of outcomes versus my expectations.

所以这是一个实际的教训。

So that's like a practical learning.

另一个教训是，我总体上对从亏损到盈利在现实中比纸上难多少有了新的、更深刻的认识。

Another is that in general, I have a new and deeper appreciation for how much harder it is in reality to go from unprofitable to profitable than it is on paper.

在纸上。

Paper.

而且，你知道，每个人，我觉得这有点老生常谈。

And like, you know, everyone, like, I feel like that's kind of trite.

但问题是，你做分析的时候，你会想，好吧，这是，你知道，边际利润什么的，诸如此类。

But like, the thing is, you do this analysis, you're like, okay, this is, you know, the incremental margins and blah, blah, blah.

然后看起来一切都说得通。

And like, it all makes sense.

但是，现在我在近距离看着这一切发生，而且真的很难。

But like, now I've seen this like play out like up close over, and it's hard.

就是，太难了。

Like, it's so hard.

比看起来难太多了。

It's so much harder than it looks.

所以我觉得我的——不是说我不会投资亏损公司，但我愿意为此承保的意愿已经调整了。

And so I think my— it's not that I won't invest in loss-making companies, but like my willingness to underwrite to that is just adjusted.

有一个基准率的调整，我——嗯。

There's like a base rate adjustment that I'm— Mm-hmm.

这个对我来说比以前更突出。

That's more salient for me than it was before.

我应该这么说，我对投资那些优势较窄的企业兴趣减少了，因为生活总会给你扔巨大的曲线球。

I have less of an interest, I should say, in investing in businesses that have narrower advantages because life will throw massive curveballs at you.

而且有一个有趣的点，如果你在2021年它交易在300美元左右的时候问我为什么持有那么多Carvana，我会说，这是一家极其坚韧的企业。

And there's sort of an interesting point, which is if you'd asked me why I owned so much Carvana back when it traded for like $300 back in 2021, I would've said, this is an incredibly stout business.

人们没有意识到这家企业有多坚韧。

People do not appreciate how stout this business is.

回过头来看，我是对的。

And in retrospect, I was right.

世界同时向这些人扔了三个一生一次级别的曲线球，而他们同时还有各种内部问题，这些都不常发生，而且他们同时加杠杆什么的，但他们做到了。

The world threw 3 once-in-a-generation curveballs at these guys at the same time while they were having all kinds of internal problems that don't happen that often, and they added debt and whatever at the same time, and they did it.

他们挺过来了。

They got through it.

所以事实证明它确实有那么坚韧。

So it turns out it really was that stout.

但如果不是那么坚韧，如果这些优势只是，你知道，如果这家企业完全成熟后只是个5%利润率的企业，而不是，不是，像13或14%利润率的企业，我不确定他们有没有能力撑过去。

But had it not been that stout, had these sort of advantages been you know, if this business all grown up and super great was a 5% margin business, and not a, not a, like a 13 or 14% margin business, I'm not sure they'd have had the wherewithal to make it.

嗯，所以，所以我更倾向于，我对那些，是的，它行得通，但就是，消费者剩余没那么大，优势也不够大，但算起来还行的那种公司的反应就是，算了，跳过去吧。

Um, so I, so I have a greater, like my sort of just my reaction to companies where, yeah, like it works, but they're just, consumer surplus isn't that much, and the advantage isn't that big, but like pencils, it's just kind of like, move on.

M1106:32

这有没有让你对集中度的偏好有不一样的思考？

Has it made you think any differently about your appetite for concentration.

我想起那句老话，对我们无知唯一理性的运用就是分散投资。

I think of that old quote, the only rational deployment of our ignorance is diversification.

M2106:43

是的。

Yeah.

M1106:44

与其说是无知，不如说是Navy Federal信用合作社因素。

And it's not ignorance so much as just the Navy Federal Credit Union factor.

那种事情在世界中会发生，而一个简单的应对方法就是，某种特定风险的数学计算，不管是15个仓位，特定风险就全没了，为什么不用15个仓位而用5个呢？

That stuff happens in the world, and a simple way to protect against that, the idiosyncratic math of whatever, 15 positions, the idio risk's all gone, and why not have 15 positions instead of 5?

这有没有让你重新质疑这些东西？

Has it made you re-question that stuff?

显然，你的投资组合就是对这些问题的答案，所以也许答案是否定的，但我很好奇你怎么想。

Obviously, your portfolio is the answer to this question, so maybe the answer is no, but curious what you think.

M2107:10

这让我重新质疑了这一点。

It's made me re-question that.

嗯，我觉得一方面，我对那些问我这个问题的人说过，这个时期的教训很重要，但它是一勺药，不是整瓶药。

Well, I think on the one hand, one of the things that I have said to people who've asked me about this is sort of like the lessons from this period are important, but it's a teaspoon of medicine, not the whole bottle.

所以在边际上，我对亏损公司的兴趣降低了，但我并没有排除它们。

So on the margin, I'm less interested in loss-making companies, but I'm not excluding them.

M1107:31

是的。

Yeah.

M2107:31

在边际上，我觉得可能还有一点空间去更加多元化。

On the margin, I think there's probably room to be a little more diversified.

但是，你知道，我们在基金的整个历史中取得了很大的成功，一直到、贯穿、包括这个时期。

But, you know, like, we've had a lot of success over the whole history of the fund, up to, through, and including, you know, this period.

那个成功是因为我们做事的方式。

That success was because of how we did things.

如果我在整个过程中放弃集中度，我觉得我们的结果会更差。

And if I were to have thrown out the concentration over the whole life, I think we'd come out in a worse place.

尽管也许波动会更小。

Albeit maybe with less volatility.

嗯，所以教训是，是的，在边际上，可能有多元化的空间，尤其是如果你考虑到你可能会有一些不那么稳健的公司。

Um, and so the lesson is, yeah, like on the margin, there's room to be more diversified, probably, especially if you factor in the idea that you might have some companies that are less like stout.

嗯，但一勺药，不是整瓶药。

Um, but a teaspoon of medicine, not the whole bottle.

M1108:12

嗯，这是一个令人难以置信的故事。

Well, it's an incredible story.

我想用剩下的时间来谈谈世界、未来以及更广泛意义上的投资。

I'd love to take our remaining time and talk about the world and the future and investing kind of writ more large.

我觉得我们现在可以再次谈论 IQ 了，所以我会用这种方式来提问。

I think we're allowed to talk about IQ again, which is why I'll frame the question this way.

如果你想一想世界在人类大脑中的处理能力储备——某种衡量标准，即具有一定处理能力的人数，加上他们使用这些能力的效率，或者他们是否有效地使用它，或者他们只是玩电子游戏什么的——然后我们再想想引入。这是一个关于人工智能被引入世界的问题，我很好奇你总体上怎么看。

If you think about the world's stock of processing power in human brains, some measure of the number of people with a certain amount of processing power plus how efficiently they use that or if they use it productively or if they just play video games or something, and then we think about the introduction— this is a question about the introduction of artificial intelligence into the world, which I'm curious for your take on generally.

但我更具体地好奇，你对智力和处理能力被引入投资工作这件事的看法——也就是吸收信息、寻找重叠的东西、训练过去的模式识别以及历史上在商业中行之有效的东西。

But I'm also more specifically curious for your take on the introduction of intelligence and processing power into the job of investing, of ingesting information, looking for stuff that overlaps, training on past pattern recognition and what's worked in businesses historically.

如果我们快进10年左右，在一个人工智能无处不在的世界里，即使是一个非常聪明的人去投资，那会是什么样子。

And if we fast forward 10 years or something, what it's going to be like for even a very smart human to invest in a world that is full of artificial intelligence.

我只是好奇，我以前没有和你这么具体地谈过这个话题。

And I'm just curious, I haven't talked to you about this before in such specific terms.

我只是好奇你对整个这件事的看法，你如何看待它在过去几年里展开的过程，以及你觉得它会如何影响这份工作。

I'm just curious for your take on the whole thing, how you've processed watching it unfold in the last couple of years and how you think it'll affect this job.

M2109:33

是啊，你应该去问问真正聪明的人。

Yeah, you should ask someone really smart about that.

M1109:36

然后我们现在就在这儿了。

And here we are.

M2109:38

我会告诉你一些关于人工智能的想法，非常狭窄的想法。

I'll tell you a few thoughts on artificial intelligence that are super narrow.

因为世界很大也很复杂。

Because the world is big and complicated.

而且我觉得2022年的教训之一就是你知道的其实不多。

And I think maybe one of the lessons of 2022 is that you don't know a lot.

我觉得这非常有帮助。

I find this to be super helpful.

我每天都用各种 AI，尤其是对于那些网上信息很多的业务。

I use various AIs every day, in particular for businesses where there's a lot of information on the internet.

所以如果你在研究 Medicare Advantage 或者 Medicaid 管理式医疗公司，就拿 Medicaid 管理式医疗来说吧。

So if you're studying Medicare Advantage or Medicaid managed care companies, let's take Medicaid managed care.

有智库、政府报告和 RFP，网上这些材料都能堆满一个房间，你根本不可能全部读完，而且大部分其实挺无聊的。

There's think tanks and government reports and RFPs, and you could fill a room with the materials that are on the internet and you can't possibly read all of it and most of it's kind of boring anyway.

但这些 AI 可以。

But these things can.

然后你就可以问它问题，比如，好，谁赢得了那些 RFP？

So then you can ask it questions like, OK, who won the RFPs?

在过去的50个州的医疗补助招标中，是现有公司赢了，还是新进入者赢了？

Did the incumbent win or did the entrant win for Medicaid RFPs in the last 50 RFPs by state?

在决定每个结果时，主要有哪些定性因素被识别出来？

What were the major qualitative factors identified in the decision that drove each one?

给我做个表格。

Make me a table.

那是大量的工作，但用AI两秒钟就搞定了。

That's a ton of work and it takes 2 seconds with an AI.

所以我觉得，在人生的竞技场上，这对我这种独立工作的人特别有利。

So I think that in the playing field of life, it advantages someone like me who works fairly independently.

我在投资领域没有庞大的团队。

I don't have a giant team in investing.

至于这些——比如现在，大量信息并不在互联网上，对吧？

As to whether these— like, right now, an enormous amount of information is not on the internet, right?

对。

Right.

所以如果我用AI来拷问所有关于Medicare、Medicaid、managed care的事情，它知道很多。

So if I were to grill an AI about all things like Medicare, Medicaid, managed care, it knows a lot.

如果我问它关于Carvana的事情，我们很快就没东西可问了。

If I grill it about Carvana, we pretty quickly run out of stuff.

这次采访会被收录进去，但我知道的大部分关于Carvana的信息，都是通过大量思考、和以前在那里工作的人聊天、数据抓取以及其他目前网上还没有的东西得来的。

This interview will get in there, but most of what I know about Carvana, I've learned from a lot of thinking, a lot of talking to people who used to work there, a lot of data scraping and other things that just aren't on the internet yet.

所以这些工具，如果你花很多时间试图从AI那里了解Carvana，我觉得你不会有太大收获。

And so the tools, if you spent a bunch of time trying to learn about Carvana from an AI, I don't think you'd get very far.

话虽如此，随着时间推移，也许会有一些智能体能够收集信息，然后放到互联网上。

That being said, over time, maybe they have agents that are able to gather information, put it into the internet.

也许互联网，这个信息库，会越变越大，因为会有更多东西以其他方式被放进去。

Maybe the internet, this corpus of information on the internet, gets bigger because more stuff is put in there in other ways.

当然，这些工具只会越来越好。

And of course, these tools are only going to get better.

当AI发展到可以做投资决策的时候，可能——我觉得那在它们需要做的事情光谱上，还非常遥远。

When AIs get to the point where they can make investing decisions, there's probably not a lot— that's pretty far down the spectrum, I think, of things they would require doing.

这有点像在讨论奇点。

It's kind of like asking about singularity.

就像，呃，你知道，我有时候很庆幸在这些发生之前我有机会做得还不错，因为在这些发生之后，可能就很难再做好了。

It's like, eh, you know, I sometimes am grateful that I've had a chance to sort of do well before all this happened because it might be hard to do well after all this happens.

如果我想想未来的大局，我是说，以前人们问我宏观观点，他们总是指利率和GDP增长，我通常会给他们的答案是，看，我完全相信我的曾孙辈会惊叹于我的贫穷，除非他们都死了，但希望他们不会。

If I reflect on the future sort of big picture, I mean, people used to ask me what my macro opinion was and they always meant like interest rates and GDP growth and I would always give them some version of is something like, look, I'm fully confident that my great-grandchildren will marvel at my poverty, unless they're all dead, but hopefully they won't be.

我认为这些工具让我们更清楚地看到我们如何到达那里，特别是如果量子计算发生了，对吧？

I think these tools make it all the clearer how we're going to get there, especially if quantum computing happens, right?

因为能够用量子模拟器在现实世界模拟中创建合成数据，然后用这些数据训练AI，这看起来非常有趣。

Because the ability to create synthetic data with real-world simulations using quantum simulators and then to train the AIs on that seems like a wildly interesting.

M1112:54

你的投资组合——我不确定是不是全部，但历史上主要是美国公司。

Your portfolio is— I don't know if it's entirely, but it's been historically mostly US companies.

如果想想美国，它有所有这些令人难以置信的优势。

If I think about the US, you've got all these incredible advantages.

我们是创新的发源地。

We're the home of innovation.

我们有这种令人难以置信的地理隔离和国内资源的丰富。

We've got this incredible geographic isolation and abundance here domestically.

我们的货币一直是世界储备货币。

Our currency's been the reserve currency of the world.

在这些方面，我们某种程度上掌控着自己的命运。

We sort of control our own destiny in those ways.

你对美国有什么观察吗？它在现代历史上一直是为寻找伟大投资机会提供最肥沃土壤的地方，这个情况是否在以某种方式发生变化？

Any observations just about the US as what historically has been the most fertile soil for finding great investment opportunities in kind of the modern era and whether or not that is changing one way or the other?

M2113:26

美国是一个了不起的系统。

The US is an amazing system.

我认为这有很多原因。

I think there's a lot of reasons for that.

我是说，我倾向于认为，当初选择移民到美国的人和选择留在本国的人之间，存在非常明显的选择效应。

I mean, I tend to think about the idea that there was meaningful selection effects in the people who chose to migrate to the US versus the people who chose to stay behind.

这可能导致了我们——美国——的基因库总体上筛选出了某种类型的人：就是那种会创业、有独立精神、肯为了更好的生活登上船、漂洋过海去一个未知国度的人。

And that probably led to us having— the US having a gene pool that in aggregate is selected for people, the sorts of people who will create businesses and be sort of independent-minded and get on a ship and travel to an unknown land across the other side of the sea for a better life.

我不认为这在根本上有任何改变，但我也并不认为我投资美国是因为美国本身有多么好。

I don't see that changing in any deep way, but I don't necessarily think I've invested in the US because it's such a great place per se.

我觉得我投资美国，主要是因为——我总是用下面这个例子来说明。

I think I've mostly invested in the US because— I always use the following example.

比如你跟某个投资者聊天，他跟你讲他投资了一家英国餐厅什么的，你就会说，'那太酷了。'

You talk to some investor and they're telling you about their British restaurant investment or something and you say, that's so cool.

'听起来你真的特别了解英国。'

Sounds like you really know England really well.

'那你能告诉我，在英国哪三个地方能买到电钻吗？'

Why don't you tell me 3 places you could buy a power drill in the UK?

然后他就会意识到，自己其实不知道，对吧？

And they sort of like realize that they don't know, right?

而只有你真正待在那里，才能学会大量关于那个地方的事情。

And there's just an enormous amount that you learn about a place by being there.

所以不是说我永远不能投资美国以外的地方，只是我非常清楚，要克服一定程度的天真是非常非常难的，哪怕是对一些看起来很近的地方，比如英国。

And so it's not that I could never invest outside the US, it's just that like I'm keenly aware that like overcoming a certain degree of naivete is very, very hard, even for some places seemingly close as like the UK.

所以我就是觉得，美国是一个巨大的市场，有很多有意思的事可以做。

And, and so I just think that like, the US is an enormous market, there's lots of interesting things to do.

然后，你知道，如果有人跟我推荐某只中国股票，我会说，'这很有意思。'

And, you know, someone will pitch me some like, you know, Chinese stock, and I say, that's fascinating.

'我确信它会很成功。'

I'm sure it's gonna be great.

'我会把它放在我清单的最底部，排在所有美国股票的后面。'

I'm gonna put on the bottom of my list right after all the American stocks.

这一直对我很有用。

That served me well.

我肯定也会错过各种各样的东西。

I'm sure I miss all kinds of stuff.

但我们得选好自己的赛道。

But we got to pick our lanes.

M1114:57

我觉得特别有意思也挺好笑的是，外面有很多大投资者之所以走到今天，是靠着持有微软、亚马逊这些激动人心的大公司——而且没有人会因为这样而被责怪。

I think it's so interesting and, and funny that lots of the big investors out there have gotten to the position they're in owning Microsoft and Amazon and these exciting big— like, no one gets faulted for this.

而我们在这里讨论的是二手车、次级贷款之类的东西。

And we're talking about used cars and subprime lending and things like this.

M2115:15

我以前也买过多层次营销公司的股票。

I used to own multi-level marketers, too.

M1115:17

对，那当然。

Right, of course.

这真的很有意思，做好投资可以有这么多不同的方式。

And it's just so interesting how many different ways there are to do really well in investing.

在惯例收尾问题之前，我的最后一个问题是：你怎么处理那些真正的大型公司？——比如，我相信你觉得微软是一家伟大的企业。

And maybe the last question I'll ask before my traditional closing one is just how you process the really big— like, I'm sure you think Microsoft is a great business.

客观地说，那确实是一家伟大的企业。

Objectively, it's just a great business.

你是怎么看待那些在市场上占据统治地位、市值占整个市场很大比重的公司的？

How do you process those ones that are so dominant in the market, that are such a huge percent of the market's market cap or whatever?

从你自己的钱的角度，你会怎么想？我知道你在自己的基金里投了很多钱。你希望把这些公司纳入投资组合吗？

How do you think about, for your own money, I know you're a huge investor in your own funds, your own fund, do you want exposure to those things?

对于普通人来说，你觉得他们应该怎么看待市场敞口？

What do you think about market exposure for the average person?

对普通投资者来说，这似乎是件非常合理的事。

It seems like a very sensible thing for the average investor.

你会不会觉得有点奇怪——这些庞大的、了不起的、看起来能长久存续的企业，你却和它们一点关系都没有？

Do you ever feel strange that there are these massive, incredible, what seem like enduring businesses that you have nothing to do with?

M2116:10

我有个相当无聊的看法，和其他人差不多。

I have a fairly boring view like everyone else.

我认为对于普通投资者来说，你知道，S&P 500 ETF 是个很好的方式，或许是全市场 ETF 之类的。

I think for the average investor, you know, an S&P 500 ETF is a great way to go, maybe an all-market ETF or whatever.

但是，嗯，我当然看过所有这些大公司。

But, um, I've certainly looked at all these big companies.

它们之所以伟大是有原因的。

They are great for a reason.

嗯，你知道，我有时确实认为它们代表了从良好到甚至优越的回报。

Um, you know, I've certainly thought at times that they represented like good to even superior, you know, returns.

这从来不——它们从来没有那种……我的意思是，我工作中最难的部分之一是，我坐下来研究所有这些事情，我找到很多事物，你知道，我说了个笑话，在一千亿美元的投资组合里，肯定有空间。

It's just never— they've never kind of I mean, one of the hardest parts about my job is like, I sit around and I study all these things, and I find plenty of things where, you know, I said a joke, in the $100 billion portfolio, there's definitely room for that.

但我们并没有，你知道，我们不是在管理一千亿美元。

But we don't, you know, we're not managing $100 billion.

事实上，你知道，卖掉 A 去买 B 的机会成本行不通。

And as it is, you know, the opportunity cost of selling A to buy B doesn't work.

所以最难的部分，我工作中较困难的部分之一，日常就是花大量时间在某件事上，深入了解它，得出结论它是一个很好的投资，但就是不如另一个那么好。

So the hardest part about this, one of the harder parts about my business, about my day-to-day is like spending a lot of time on something, getting to know it really well, concluding that it's a great investment, but just not quite as great as the other thing.

这很令人沮丧。

That's frustrating.

而且有些时候，我记得早在 2010 年，比如 Google，我有个朋友说得很好，Google 就在那里看起来很便宜，对吧？

And there have been times I remember back in 2010, like Google, a friend of mine put it really well, there's Google sitting there looking all cheap, right?

他说得对。

And he was right.

但谢天谢地我没有买，因为我认为我拥有的东西表现更好，但不是全部。

But thank goodness I didn't buy it because I think the things I owned did better, but not all of them.

所以我希望我能挑出我拥有的最差的东西，但生活不是这样运作的。

So I wish I could have picked the worst thing I had, but that's not how life works.

这些都是伟大的企业。

These are great businesses.

如果我退休，我想我会停止思考股票，进行多样化投资，我会拥有它们。

If I ever retire, I imagine I'll stop thinking about stocks and diversify, and I'd own them.

如果有人不——如果我的母亲没有投资我的基金，我会告诉她买那个。

If I had someone who wasn't— if my mother wasn't invested in my fund, I'd tell her to buy that.

但有很多企业我不拥有。

But there's a lot of businesses I don't own.

关键不是理解一切，甚至不是挑选最好的那个。

The key isn't to understand everything or even to pick the very best one.

关键是挑选一堆东西，一些你熟悉并且会表现良好的东西，密切关注它们，不要过于担心所有其他事情。

The key is to pick a bunch of things, a handful of things that you know well and are going to do well and watch them closely and don't worry too much about all the other stuff.

M1117:47

每当我们交谈，时间过得真快。

Whenever we talk, time flies by.

有 20 件事我可以问你。

There's 20 things I could ask you about.

也许我会说服你五年后再做这个。

Maybe I'll convince you to do this in another 5 years.

我们可以到时候再谈那些。

We could talk about those then.

但现在，我必须问我的传统结束问题。

But for now, I have to ask my traditional closing question.

有人对你做过的最善良的事情是什么？

What's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

M2117:59

所以我之前提到的那两个。

So I had the 2 that I mentioned earlier.

一个是那个人，正当我开始我的基金时，他投资了。

One was the guy who, right when I was starting my fund, invested in it.

我当时并没有完全意识到这有多罕见。

And I didn't quite appreciate at the moment just how rare that was.

但结果证明这是一个重要的事件，对我最终取得一些成功起到了重要作用。

But it turned out to be a major kind of event that played a big role in me ultimately having some success.

然后另一件是在 2022 年，那个合作伙伴特意前来，基本上是在午餐时给我打气。

And then the other one was in 2022, that partner who went out of his way to just come and basically buck me up over lunch.

他不必这么做的。

Didn't have to do it.

多么善良的一件事。

What a kind thing to do.

我是说，你想想看——我让那个人损失了一大笔钱，对吧？

I mean, and if you think about how— I mean, I'd lost the guy a fortune, right?

至少在账面上是这样，对吧？

At least on paper, right?

而且这不仅当时让我感觉好多了，我觉得它也让我成为更好的人，因为我现在可以回想那件事，然后努力确保——你知道，你有一个管理团队，事情进展不顺利，你知道，你会怎么做？

And not only did it make me feel better at the time, but I think it's made me a better person because I can reflect on that now and try to make sure that, you know, you got a management team, things are not going well, you know, like, what are you going to do?

一方面，你有责任去了解情况，所以你必须提问。

On the one hand, you have an obligation to understand, so you have to ask questions.

但另一方面，他们在努力，对吧？

But on the other hand, like, they're trying, right?

即使他们是傻瓜，他们也在努力，对吧？

Even if they're idiots, they're trying, right?

所以，你知道，记住我当时的感觉，以及不同的人是怎么对待我的，还有我想怎么对待别人，这很重要。

And so, you know, it's important to sort of remember how I felt then and how I was treated by different people and, like, how I want to treat people.

嗯，所以这让我成了更好的人。

Um, and so made me a better person.

这很好。

It's great.

M1119:17

美好的故事。

Beautiful stories.

Cliff，谢谢你终于和我一起做这个。

Cliff, thanks for finally doing this with me.

谢谢你的时间。

Thanks for your time.

M1119:39

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She identified several important issues we needed to negotiate and gave us excellent advice on exactly how to push back.

That's the kind of high-quality, fast legal advice that makes good deals happen quickly.

It's no wonder that the fastest-growing companies like Cursor, Cognition, Ramp, and Rogo use Crosby.

Learn more at crosby.ai/invest.

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