Synthesia的成长与核心使命

Synthesia is the world's leading AI video platform. We crossed 100 million AR (Annual Recurring Revenue: 年度经常性收入，衡量订阅业务表现的关键指标). We launched the first product to a million AR, and it took us 4 months. We then went from 1 million AR to 3 million AR in one year, basically tripling revenue from there, tripling again, and then we doubled and doubled.

Synthesia是全球领先的AI视频平台。我们的年度经常性收入（AR）突破了1亿美元。我们用4个月时间，使第一款产品的AR达到了100万美元。随后，我们用一年时间将AR从100万美元提升到300万美元，在此基础上实现了营收三倍增长，然后再次三倍增长，接着又连续翻倍。

Are we doing this because it's fun and new? Are we doing this because it's actually useful for the customer? People are not trying to use a model to do something; they're trying to solve a problem that they have. In our case, the problem is making a video for something.

我们做这些是因为它有趣和新颖吗？还是因为它对客户确实有用？人们并非仅仅为了使用模型而做某事；他们是为了解决自身面临的问题。就我们而言，问题在于制作某种视频。

I think a lot of AI apps are feeling this today where you may go viral, have a lot of people who are interested in your product and they come to you and play around with it. But it's really important to understand who are coming because they have a real use case that's recurring and who's coming because it's a cool fun thing that they want to try out. Do we actually think that they look real enough to work or is it a gimmick?

我认为很多AI应用今天都面临这种状况：你可能会迅速走红，吸引大量对产品感兴趣的人前来试用。但真正重要的是要区分：哪些人是带着真实、持续的需求而来，哪些人仅仅是觉得它有趣好玩想尝试一下。我们真的认为它们看起来足够真实以至于能发挥作用，还是仅仅是个噱头？

Sometimes you'll be the hottest company in town and everybody will want to talk to you. Other times you'll be deemed as the incumbent that nobody cares about or you're not doing something that's fun or kind of in the current hype cycle. No matter which of those cycles you're in, the most important thing is really just like Victor Riparbelli, and I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Synthesia. Synthesia is the world's leading AI video platform for the enterprise and for businesses.

有时你可能是城里最热门的公司，人人都想与你交谈。另一些时候，你可能被视为无人问津的守旧者，或者你所做的事情不够有趣，不符合当前的炒作周期。无论你处于哪个周期，我认为最重要的一点就是，我是Victor Riparbelli，Synthesia的联合创始人兼CEO。Synthesia是全球领先的企业级AI视频平台。

At its core, what we help our customers do is to land whatever message they have for their customers, their employees, their partners with the most engagement and effectiveness possible. So we've built a platform that enables anyone who knows how to use a PowerPoint to create a video. What we're all about is communicating in video, which is the most effective way to deliver a message.

其核心在于，我们帮助客户以尽可能高的参与度和有效性，将他们想传达给客户、员工和合作伙伴的信息传递出去。因此，我们构建了一个平台，让任何会使用PowerPoint的人都能创建视频。我们所做的核心就是通过视频进行沟通，这是传递信息最有效的方式。

Today, we crossed 100 million AR. We've raised $330 million in venture capital (VC: 风险投资，向初创企业提供资金以换取股权的投资形式). Commercially, we work with more than 70% of the Fortune 100 (世界500强企业: 《财富》杂志评选的全球营收最高的100家公司). Today, we have more than 65,000 customers all around the world.

如今，我们的年度经常性收入（AR）已突破1亿美元。我们已筹集了3.3亿美元的风险投资。在商业上，我们与超过70%的世界500强企业合作。目前，我们在全球拥有超过65,000名客户。

People are not trying to use a model to do something; they're trying to solve a problem that they have. In our case, the problem is making a video for something.

人们并非仅仅为了使用模型而做某事；他们是为了解决自身面临的问题。就我们而言，问题在于制作某种视频。

早期挑战与AI视频的愿景

We started the company in 2017. The first three years of the company, it wasn't very fun, and the tech didn't really work, and it was a kind of an uphill battle. So this was like the first time the world really saw a neural network (神经网络: 一种模仿人脑结构的计算模型，是深度学习的基础) generate video at a pretty high quality fully automatically. If you saw the output of that face-to-face video and you would have to do that in a visual effect studio, you would be talking like millions of dollars to create a clip like this, and this thing actually did it in real time. When I saw that for the first time, my mind started running. I felt like this is going to change everything about how we create video, but it's also going to change everything about video itself as a medium.

我们公司成立于2017年。公司成立的前三年并不太愉快，技术也未能真正奏效，那是一场艰难的战斗。所以，这是世界首次真正看到神经网络以相当高的质量全自动生成视频。如果你看到那个面对面视频的输出效果，在视觉特效工作室制作这样一个片段可能需要数百万美元，而这项技术却能实时完成。当我第一次看到它时，我的思绪开始飞转。我感觉这将彻底改变我们制作视频的方式，同时也将改变视频本身作为一种媒介的一切。

But I felt like it was worth exploring starting a company around this technology. When we see new technologies, the first thing we always do is imagine all the 1,000 ways it can go wrong. Cars, smartphones, AI, video generation, music generation. That's always what we default to. But it just turns out most of the time that technologies end up being used mostly for good things by good people. And there's a subset of people who use it for bad things. And I think being optimistic about technology, especially in the early stages of it, is actually a huge arbitrage (套利: 利用价格差异获取利润的行为，此处引申为早期投入的巨大潜在收益) in itself.

但我认为围绕这项技术创办公司是值得探索的。当我们看到新技术时，我们总是首先想象它可能出错的1000种方式。汽车、智能手机、AI、视频生成、音乐生成，我们总是默认这样思考。但事实证明，大多数时候，技术最终主要被好人用于好事。当然也有一小部分人将其用于坏事。我认为对技术保持乐观，尤其是在其早期阶段，本身就是一种巨大的套利机会。

Essentially, we went out and we told people, "Look, in 10 years, you're going to be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop just with your imagination. You won't need anything else than that, and it's going to be more or less free to do it." A lot of people just thought that was a crazy idea. It was in the AI winter (AI寒冬: 指人工智能领域发展停滞、投资减少的时期). There had been a lot of disillusionment; a a bunch of companies funding in the years before we started the company had all kind of turned out to not really work because technology was just too immature.

本质上，我们出去告诉人们：“听着，十年内，你将能够仅仅凭借想象力，在笔记本电脑上制作一部好莱坞电影。你不需要其他任何东西，而且这几乎是免费的。”很多人当时都觉得那是个疯狂的想法。那时正值AI寒冬。之前有很多幻灭感；在我们公司成立前几年获得资助的一批公司最终都未能真正成功，因为当时的技术还不够成熟。

We got turned down by about 100 investors until we eventually sent a cold email to Mark Cuban. He was probably the only person we met who totally shared our vision of the future. So he wasn't evaluating the vision; he was bought in on that. He was more evaluating if he thought the team was worth funding and if he thought we had a shot at building something real. You need one person to say yes. That's all it takes. Generally, it's easier to try and find people who already share your vision of what's going to happen in the world, as opposed to trying to convince them of it, especially if you're not doing something that's in the current hype cycle.

我们被大约100位投资者拒绝，直到我们最终给马克·库班发了一封不请自来的邮件。他可能是我们遇到的唯一一个完全认同我们未来愿景的人。所以他不是在评估这个愿景，他已经完全相信了。他更多是在评估这个团队是否值得投资，以及我们是否有机会建立一些真实的东西。你只需要一个人说“是”，这就足够了。通常，找到那些已经认同你对世界未来愿景的人会更容易，而不是试图说服他们，尤其当你所做的事情不在当前的炒作周期中时。

If in your gut you truly feel that you're on to something, and that someone—if it's not you—someone is going to build a big company around the product that you're doing, you should continue. Throughout the entire journey of Synthesia, I've never a day in my life doubted that someone is going to build a big company around this technology. I could doubt myself sometimes, I could doubt my execution, I could be afraid that I was too early for where we were, but I never doubted that this technology was going to be extremely valuable for the world, and someone was going to build a company around it.

如果你内心深处真正觉得你正在做的事情很有前景，并且即使不是你，也会有人围绕你正在做的产品建立一家大公司，那么你就应该坚持下去。在Synthesia的整个发展历程中，我从未怀疑过会有人围绕这项技术建立一家大公司。我有时可能会怀疑自己，怀疑我的执行力，可能会害怕我们所处的阶段为时过早，但我从未怀疑过这项技术对世界来说将极其有价值，并且会有人围绕它建立一家公司。

从AI配音到虚拟形象：产品策略的转变

The hard thing is knowing when to continue and when to pivot (战略转向: 公司改变其产品、市场或商业模式以应对挑战或抓住新机遇). We started off with a million dollars, which is not a lot of money when you're building a company like what we were trying to build. So we had to figure out what we thought we could realistically both build and sell before having to raise the next round, which we would have to show some kind of progress.

困难之处在于何时继续，何时进行战略转向。我们一开始只有一百万美元，对于我们试图建立的公司来说，这笔钱并不算多。所以我们必须弄清楚，在不得不进行下一轮融资之前，我们能实际地构建和销售什么，因为那时我们必须展示某种进展。

The first thing we stumbled upon was this idea of AI dubbing, which is: give us a real video shot with an actual camera. We can translate it for you by replacing the voice-over with a different language, but then also reanimating the face so it looks like the actor is speaking a different language. This would be useful if you're making a Hollywood film and you want to distribute that all over the world. If you can make it look like it was recorded in French or Italian, that would be good for those audiences. That value proposition was actually good enough; it is definitely valuable when you can do it. But the technology was very early. It only worked if you looked straight at the camera. It took two PhDs like 10 days to make a 30-second clip. It didn't scale at all. The quality threshold was insanely high because all these video people, they wouldn't accept anything but the very best in terms of quality.

我们偶然发现的第一件事是AI配音这个想法：给我们一个用真实摄像机拍摄的真实视频。我们可以通过用另一种语言替换画外音来为你翻译，同时重新动画化面部，使其看起来像演员正在说另一种语言。如果你正在制作一部好莱坞电影并想在全球发行，这将非常有用。如果能让它看起来像是在法语或意大利语环境中录制的，那对这些观众来说会很好。这种价值主张实际上足够好；当你能做到时，它无疑是有价值的。但当时这项技术还处于非常早期。它只在你正视摄像机时才有效。两个博士需要大约10天才能制作一个30秒的片段。它根本无法扩展。质量门槛高得惊人，因为所有这些视频专业人士，他们除了最好的质量外，什么都不会接受。

And it was just clear to us that it was a vitamin; it wasn't a painkiller. People liked that. They thought it was cool. But if we disappeared, no one was going to yell and scream. They would just go back to translating the way we did things before. So we went back to the drawing board, and we talked to lots of people during this period.

我们很清楚，它只是一种维生素，而不是止痛药。人们喜欢它，觉得它很酷。但如果我们消失了，没有人会大喊大叫。他们只会回到以前的翻译方式。所以我们回到了原点，在此期间与很多人进行了交谈。

We realized that rather than focusing on the people who are already making video all the time, there was a huge group of people, probably billions of people, that weren't making videos at all. These people are desperate to make video. They were basically telling us, "Hey, I want to deliver this message to someone. And I know I should be doing a video or audio because that's what people want to consume. I just don't know where to start. I don't know how to use a camera. My boss won't give me any budget to record it. And I know that there are so many problems after I've actually shot the content, even though I get to make a video, because you can't edit a video after you've shot it." And there are all these problems of video.

我们意识到，与其专注于那些一直都在制作视频的人，不如关注那些根本不制作视频的庞大群体，可能数十亿人。这些人渴望制作视频。他们基本上告诉我们：“嘿，我想把这个信息传达给某人。我知道我应该用视频或音频，因为那是人们想消费的内容。但我不知道从何开始。我不知道如何使用摄像机。我的老板不会给我任何预算来录制。而且我知道，即使我制作了视频，实际拍摄内容之后也会有很多问题，因为视频一旦拍摄就无法编辑。”视频存在所有这些问题。

Then we spoke more and more to these people, and ultimately learned that what these people wanted to do was corporate videos. Corporate videos are a lot easier than a Steven Spielberg film. So if we could just essentially help our customers with the talking head style footage, that would be pretty big. And that was a much smaller domain than making any kind of Hollywood film you can imagine. So we built this avatar technology that became one of the central parts of the product today. That's when the company started to really take off very quickly.

然后我们与这些人进行了越来越多的交流，最终了解到他们想要制作的是企业视频。企业视频比史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格的电影要容易得多。所以，如果我们能帮助客户制作“talking head”（头像式讲解）风格的视频片段，那将会非常重要。这比制作任何你想象中的好莱坞电影要小得多。因此，我们开发了这项虚拟形象技术，它成为了我们产品今天的核心部分之一。也正是从那时起，公司开始迅速腾飞。

We had a lot of conviction on a technology very early. It was very unclear what the right first use case was, something that was both valuable and you could realistically build. But I think we found our way there. You could argue that we should just have built the avatar technology from day one. But back on day one, none of us had any idea how we would potentially do that. The research evolved over the years. We learned the technology better and better, and so I think product-market fit (产品市场契合: 产品满足市场需求，实现持续增长的状态) is one of those things which is much more art than science, and I think we're very much led by a deep understanding of the customers that we're serving and, of course, deep insight into the technologies. It ultimately turned out the right way.

我们很早就对某项技术抱有坚定信念。最初并不清楚正确的第一个用例是什么，即既有价值又能实际构建的东西。但我认为我们最终找到了方向。你可能会争辩说我们应该从第一天就构建虚拟形象技术。但回到第一天，我们谁也不知道如何才能做到这一点。多年来，研究不断发展。我们对技术的理解越来越深入，所以我认为产品市场契合是一种更偏向艺术而非科学的东西，而且我认为我们很大程度上是受到对客户的深刻理解以及对技术的深刻洞察的引导。最终，这一切都走向了正确的道路。

客户洞察与产品市场契合

Once we launched the product and we had the first avatar MVP (Minimum Viable Product: 最小可行产品，具有最少功能但足以推向市场并获取用户反馈的产品) out there, we went viral very quickly. So we had lots of people coming onto the website, lots of people making free demo videos of avatars by typing in things because it was fun and cool and they wanted to show all their friends, and it's amazing. The first time you see it, you're kind of mind-blown. But a lot of these people did not have any real use case, and we could see that in the retention. They weren't coming back. They were just making a few videos, showing it to people, not making any more videos. So that wasn't really a sustainable revenue stream for us.

一旦我们推出产品并发布了第一个虚拟形象最小可行产品，我们很快就走红了。因此，很多人访问我们的网站，很多人通过打字制作免费的虚拟形象演示视频，因为这很有趣、很酷，他们想向所有朋友展示，而且效果令人惊叹。第一次看到时，你会感到非常震撼。但这些很多人并没有真正的使用场景，我们可以从留存率中看出这一点。他们没有回来。他们只是制作了几个视频，展示给别人看，然后就不再制作了。所以，这对我们来说并不是一个可持续的收入来源。

But there was a small group of people, and they kept using the product, they kept coming back. We went into that group and spent a lot of time speaking to those folks. That's where we uncovered an interesting value equation where these people were not comparing our videos to real videos or camera videos; they were comparing our videos to text documents. When that's the comparison, then the quality threshold looks very different. The feature requests that they needed looked very different. So it was an organic thing, I think, of letting yourself be guided by customers but also applying a lot of critical thinking. Critical thinking is difficult when you have so much inbound interest.

但有一小部分人，他们持续使用我们的产品，并不断回来。我们深入这个群体，花了很多时间与这些人交流。正是在那里，我们发现了一个有趣的价值等式：这些人并没有将我们的视频与真实视频或摄像机拍摄的视频进行比较；他们将我们的视频与文本文档进行比较。当比较对象是文本文档时，质量门槛看起来就大不相同了。他们所需的功能请求也大相径庭。所以，我认为这是一个自然而然的过程，既要让客户引导自己，也要运用大量的批判性思维。当你有如此多的内生兴趣时，批判性思考是很难的。

I think a lot of AI apps are feeling this today where you may go viral, have a lot of people who are interested in your product and they come to you and play around with it. But it's really important to understand who are coming because they have a real use case that's recurring and who's coming because it's a cool fun thing that they want to try out. Early days of 2021, we have customers who will scream and yell if we shut down the product tomorrow. That's always a good acid test of whether you have something real or not, or if people kind of mildly care but not really.

我认为今天很多AI应用都面临这种情况：你可能会迅速走红，吸引大量对产品感兴趣的人前来试用。但真正重要的是要区分：哪些人是带着真实、持续的需求而来，哪些人仅仅是觉得它有趣好玩想尝试一下。在2021年早期，我们有客户会因为我们明天关闭产品而大喊大叫。这总是一个很好的试金石，可以检验你是否有真正有价值的东西，或者人们只是稍微关心但并非真正重视。

We all realize that there are lots of unanswered questions for sure, but there clearly is something, there's a kernel of something that is huge. And I think it was kind of double exciting in some ways because it felt like it was our little secret, and it was for a couple of years. It wasn't very obvious from the outside that anyone had any real use for this tech. That was a fun couple of years where we felt like we knew something the rest of the world doesn't, and we're capitalizing on it.

我们都明白，肯定有很多未解之谜，但显然有些东西，有一些核心的东西是巨大的。我认为这在某种程度上是双重令人兴奋的，因为它感觉像是我们的小秘密，而且持续了几年。从外部看，这项技术对任何人来说都没有明显的实际用途。那几年很有趣，我们感觉自己知道一些世界其他人不知道的东西，并且我们正在利用它。

兼顾自下而上与自上而下的增长策略

We figured very early on, actually in 2021, that we wanted to focus on the enterprise because that was clearly where there was the most value to drive, and that was clearly where we could get to the biggest contract size. But it was also very obvious to us that the growth channels and the way to get this into the hands of as many people as possible was not through enterprise sales. It was through just giving people access to the product, letting them play around with it, let them find their own use case, letting them qualify themselves before they spoke to the sales team.

我们很早就，实际上是在2021年，就发现我们想专注于企业市场，因为那显然是能创造最大价值的地方，也是我们能获得最大合同的地方。但对我们来说，同样非常明显的是，增长渠道以及让尽可能多的人接触到产品的方式，并非通过企业销售。而是通过让人们直接接触产品，让他们试用，让他们找到自己的用例，让他们在与销售团队交谈之前自行筛选。

What was hard is when you're building both a bottoms-up motion (自下而上策略: 从个人用户开始，通过产品吸引和扩散，最终渗透到企业内部) and you're trying to build a tops-down motion (自上而下策略: 通过高层决策者推动产品在企业内部的部署和采用). Those things conflict in many different ways. As a startup, you have limited resources. A lot of things you build for a big company will have very little impact on a small company. If you build admin tooling for a CIO (Chief Information Officer: 首席信息官，负责信息技术和计算机系统的最高级别管理人员), a 50-person company is not going to care about that. So they won't get much value out of it. On the other hand, if you build tools for small businesses, a lot of that will not have value for someone who is a really big business. There are always these trade-offs that you make.

困难在于，当你既要建立自下而上的策略，又要尝试建立自上而下的策略时。这两者在许多方面会产生冲突。作为一家初创公司，你的资源是有限的。你为大公司构建的许多东西，对小公司而言影响甚微。如果你为首席信息官（CIO）构建管理工具，一家50人的公司是不会在意的。所以他们从中得不到太多价值。另一方面，如果你为小企业构建工具，其中很多对真正的大企业来说就没有价值。你总是需要做出这些权衡。

But I think when you look at the last 10-15 years, some of the companies that have had the best and most impressive runs are companies that have managed to combine the vacuum effect of PLG (Product-Led Growth: 以产品为核心驱动增长的策略), where when you really get it working, it's just this vortex that just sucks in traffic and converts it into both paying customers and credit cards, but also spits out the world's best enterprise leads with a world-class sales team that knows how to handhold customers, take them through a sales process, make them successful, and do all these different things.

但我认为，回顾过去10到15年，一些表现最佳、最令人印象深刻的公司，是那些成功结合了产品驱动增长（PLG）的真空效应的公司。当PLG真正奏效时，它就像一个漩涡，吸入流量，将其转化为付费客户和信用卡用户，同时也能产生全球顶级的企业潜在客户，配合世界一流的销售团队，他们知道如何指导客户，引导他们完成销售流程，帮助他们取得成功，并完成所有这些不同的事情。

And it's interesting because it's not just in the expression of the product and the product roadmap. A lot of people tend to think that, but it's also very much in the people you hire. Some people really love the self-service world, and that's what they're passionate about. Other people really love enterprise sales. So marrying those two cultures together is definitely a challenge, but I think we've in broad strokes done pretty well on it.

这很有趣，因为它不仅仅体现在产品和产品路线图上。很多人倾向于这样认为，但它也在于你所雇佣的人。有些人确实热爱自助服务模式，并对此充满热情。另一些人则非常热爱企业销售。因此，将这两种文化结合起来无疑是一个挑战，但我认为我们大体上做得相当不错。

创业公司的招聘策略与心态

I think a mistake people often make, especially people who may have already had a job in big tech or successful companies, is they go out and then they try to hire people from Google, Meta, OpenAI, whatever kind of is the hot companies of our time. They go out, "Hey, I have this cool startup idea, why don't you join me? I'll pay you not as much, but I'll try and pay you almost roughly as much," etc. Of course, this can work. There are very smart people who work there who also want the startup hustle. But often times you just can't get them straight up, or if you do get them, and they are used to a very different salary, a very different lifestyle working in a big tech company as opposed to being in a startup. So that's actually often not the best path.

我认为人们常犯的一个错误，尤其是那些可能在大科技公司或成功企业工作过的人，他们出去尝试从谷歌、Meta、OpenAI，或者任何当时热门的公司招聘人才。他们会说：“嘿，我有一个很酷的创业想法，你为什么不加入我呢？我付的钱可能没那么多，但我会尽量付得差不多。”等等。当然，这可能奏效。那里确实有非常聪明的人，他们也渴望创业的拼搏。但很多时候，你根本无法直接挖到他们，或者即使你挖到了，他们也习惯了在大科技公司工作时截然不同的薪资和生活方式，而不是在初创公司。所以，这实际上往往不是最好的途径。

So I think that the better way of doing it, which is what we did, is you try and find people that are a bit off. They're not the most obvious people to join your startup, but there's something you like about them. That could be that they have just a lot of hustle, a lot of grit, engineers that maybe haven't worked at a tier-one or tier-two company, but they are great open-source project that they're managing and updating. There are a lot of other signals you can find good people. And if you can find these people who are truly hungry and want to work at a startup and want to put in the work, you gather a great group of those, and they will very often outperform the 10 people who used to work in big tech with their comfy lifestyles.

所以我认为更好的做法，也是我们所做的，是尝试寻找那些有点“不走寻常路”的人。他们可能不是最明显会加入你初创公司的人选，但他们身上有你欣赏的特质。这可能是他们充满干劲、坚韧不拔，比如工程师可能没有在顶级或次顶级公司工作过，但他们管理和更新着很棒的开源项目。有很多其他信号可以帮助你找到优秀的人。如果你能找到这些真正渴望在初创公司工作并愿意付出努力的人，你就能组建一个优秀的团队，他们往往会超越那些习惯了舒适生活的大科技公司员工。

You can take people and help shape them, give them opportunities to do something. That's your only option in the early days: finding that ragged group of underdogs that have the collective energy to go up against the competitors and incumbents. I think there is nothing that prepares you to really start a business like starting a business. Spending four years in McKinsey is not going to make you a better entrepreneur; it might give you a little bit more network and maybe slightly easier to raise money. But if you truly know deep in your heart that you want to build a company and you are a builder, I think you just get started as quickly as you can.

你可以接纳并帮助塑造人才，给他们做事情的机会。在早期阶段，这是你唯一的选择：找到那群充满干劲的“落魄者”，他们拥有集体能量去对抗竞争对手和现有企业。我认为没有什么能比真正开始一项事业更能让你为创业做好准备。在麦肯锡工作四年并不会让你成为一个更好的企业家；它可能会让你拥有更多人脉，融资可能稍微容易一些。但如果你内心深处真正清楚自己想建立一家公司，并且你是一个实干家，我认为你就应该尽快开始。

And don't be afraid of starting too early. The doom scenario is rarely as bad as people think it is or make it out to be. Most big companies really value people who have tried to do something themselves, even if they failed.

而且不要害怕过早开始。所谓的“末日情景”很少像人们想象或描绘的那么糟糕。大多数大公司实际上非常看重那些曾尝试自己创业的人，即使他们失败了。

信息消费的未来：视频与沉浸式体验

I do think that we will see less and less text in the world. I don't think we will be consuming most of our information in text. I think there will still be a place for text. We still go to the theater, we still listen to vinyl. There will definitely be a place for text to exist. But I think in the world of information sharing, training knowledge, etc., I do think that we will move into a world in which we consume almost everything as video and audio and maybe VR (Virtual Reality: 虚拟现实) and AR (Augmented Reality: 增强现实) in 10-20 years with those technologies.

我确实认为世界上的文本会越来越少。我不认为我们大部分信息会以文本形式消费。但我认为文本仍然会有一席之地。我们仍然会去剧院，仍然会听黑胶唱片。文本肯定会有存在的空间。但我认为在信息共享、知识培训等领域，我确实认为我们将在10-20年内，随着虚拟现实（VR）和增强现实（AR）等技术的发展，进入一个几乎所有信息都以视频和音频形式消费的世界。

I do think that's going to happen, and I don't think it's going to be as bad as people think it is. A lot of people are very averse to the idea that people wouldn't necessarily be using tech as much as they are today. But I think as humans, it's very clear that we have always been on this trajectory towards more interactive and more visual and more auditory content that reminds us more of actually being in the real world.

我确实认为这会发生，而且我不认为它会像人们想象的那么糟糕。很多人非常反感人们不一定会像今天这样大量使用技术的想法。但我认为，作为人类，我们显然一直朝着更具互动性、更视觉化、更听觉化的内容发展，这些内容更能让我们联想到身处真实世界的感觉。