导语：

感谢大家订阅皮埃罗•斯加鲁菲（Piero Scaruffi）的钛媒体72问.知识专栏《硅谷的秘密》。我是今天的提问者赵何娟。上一期课程，我们学习到，硅谷不是一种发明家的主流文化，但如果硅谷并不看重发明，硅谷是如何保持一种年轻人的生态文化的呢？

正文：

Now the society in Silicon Valley is typically young people right? It's a very young society and these people who care about connections, socializing and becoming popular. That's what these people want to be and so on. So when they hijack the technology, typically they use it to do something cool right? That's what Silicon Valley does.

硅谷的生态文化是以年轻人为主的，因此是个年轻的社会。这些年轻人十分注重沟通、社交以及如何变得更加受欢迎，这就是年轻人想要做的事情。当他们绑架了技术以后，他们想要做的就是看起来很酷的事情，这就是硅谷所做的事情。

The technology is invented original for one very scientific purpose, it has some very specific reasons to be invented. But Silicon Valley is the society of young independent people who take it and find a way to use it, usually use it for themselves. That is different. And guess what, because they are young people, typically that thing is precisely what millions of people want. 

科技最初都是为了某种特定的科学领域而被发明的，其有着十分明确的科学目的。而硅谷有着很多独立的年轻人，他们把科技拿过来，并设法去利用它们，通常是为了自身目的而进行改造的。而正由于他们是年轻人，他们所创造的东西也正是好几百万其他年轻人所想要的。

Think of YouTube or Instagram. YouTube when it was invented it was invented by somebody else invented how to put videos on the internet. But when YouTube started doing it, it was the right way to do it, every young person in the world wants to do that: yeah let's put the video there and let's watch it or let it change videos and songs. It turns out that millions of kids around the world were taking pictures, but they were bad quality and difficult to share. But Instagram makes it easy ok. So the society of Silicon Valley is very good at understanding how a technology can be used by millions of people. 

拿YouTube或者Instagram做比喻吧，最初不是YouTube发明如何把视频上传到网上的，是其他人发明的，但是YouTube却成功利用了这项技术，让全球年轻人争相把视频放到他们网站上，他们发现世界上很多人都喜欢拍照和上传照片，但是上传以后质量失真而且很难进行图片分享，于是Instagram成立以后让这一切变得更加快捷容易。因此我们可以说，硅谷真的很清楚知道如何利用科技造福社会。

And it's not like a formal program, it's not like somebody sitting at a desk and say how can we use this technology, how can we make it very popular. It is just the people who live there are very good with technology, very knowledgeable about technology and they have this spirit of experimenting with the technology and there is this motivation to do it first of all for themselves and their friends. But it turns out that they represent the whole world. So very soon it spreads. 

另外，这一切并不是一个正式官方的项目，不是说有专人坐在桌子前面专门策划如何传播科技，如何让它更流行。而是说，硅谷里面的人天生就对科技十分敏感，十分清楚了解科技的一切，而且很愿意进行试验，想要为自己或者朋友做点新奇有趣的玩意，结果他们想要的东西也恰好正是全世界青年想要的，因此他们的产品很快就传播开来。

Then when it starts spreading, it becomes also business, because it turns out that Youtube is very useful for marketing, selling houses, promoting music. But then if you look at the original way that it becomes popular, usually is not because it is targeting big corporations or government, usually it's because it's targeting actually ordinary people, and today is even targeting poor people sometimes. So that's what it's really happens in Silicon Valley. 

而一旦广泛传播以后，产品就变成了社交商业，例如人们发现Youtube也可用作市场营销、房地产销售又或者音乐的传播途径等等。但如果你仔细想想这些公司的建立初衷，就会发现它们都不是为了政府或者军事而建立的，它们的目标人群是人们大众，甚至现在有些公司是面向贫苦人民的。这就是硅谷目前的状态。

There's not so much inventing something, it's difficult to find something that was really invented in Silicon Valley, but it's thinking about technology as something that I want to use. And usually when it is invented, it is not invented for me, then I start thinking what can I do with this thing - Virtual Reality, 3D printing whatever. what do I want to do with it. And then I think oh yeah it would be great to do this, but that thing costs two million dollars, I cannot afford two million dollars, how can I do the same thing and make it feasible for me and make it easy to use. And so, when I do that, I'm actually doing it for the whole world.

你很难在硅谷找到原创的技术，他们想要的只是把科技变成自己能够享用的东西，因为科技的原始受众并不是他们。他们总是在想“我究竟能够怎么利用这些科技呢，虚拟现实、3D打印等等技术，我究竟想要从中得到什么？”然后当他们想出好主意时，却发现需要耗资2百万美金才能实现，但是他们并没有那么多的资金，然后他们就会想如何才能在自己能承受的范围内实现这个创想。当他们为自己这样做的时候，其实也是在为整个世界想办法。

The original motivation is just me, but actually the whole world would like to do the same thing. But they're living in places where this is not easy to do, but in Silicon Valley this is easy. Of course, today is also easy, because there's immediate capitalist who gives me some money right immediately. Oh wow you want to do a 3D printer that sits on a desk, two hundred thousand dollars, half a million or whatever.

他们的初衷不过是为了自己，但事实上全世界都想这样做，不同之处在于世界其他人们所处的地方很难达成这些创想，而硅谷却是个理想的地方。而现在这一切变得更加容易了，因为硅谷有很多投资人愿意资助个人，例如你想做一款桌上3D打印机，你马上就可以得到20万美元或者50万美元。

So then you understand why we specialize in the Global Brands. The result of this process is that Google and Facebook and so on create products and services that are cool for millions of people around the world, initially usually young people, but then once you have enough critical mass, everybody.

说到这里你应该能明白为什么硅谷擅长于全球品牌了。因为它们实现创想的过程，比如说脸书和谷歌这些公司，也是为全球好几百万人创造很酷的产品和服务的过程。它们一开始很可能是面向年轻人的，但是一旦影响足够大，全球所有人都会开始关注。

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