--- author: a16z date: '2026-09-16' guest: '' layout: post.njk source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5yGLO8c6T0 speaker: a16z tags: - startup - crm - pivot - business-model title: Keith Peiris 谈从 Tome 转型创办商业世界模型 CRM 公司 Lightfield summary: 在 a16z 播客中，Lightfield 首席执行官 Keith Peiris 分享了从演示文稿产品 Tome 彻底转型的心路历程，探讨了构建商业世界模型与 AI 驱动 CRM 的产品定位、应对自研系统的挑战及专注解决客户痛点的经验。 insight: '' draft: true series: '' category: business-entrepreneurship area: finance-wealth project: [] people: - Keith Peiris - Joe Schmidt - Alex Rampell companies_orgs: - Lightfield - Tome - a16z products_models: - GPT-3 media_books: [] status: evergreen --- ### 创立团队与 Lightfield 的前沿应用 我们的五位创始成员中有三位来自 Facebook。构建一支营收团队是一个非常丰富的问题集。这是每个人都在乎的事情，而且总有改进的空间。
Original English Three out of our five founding members came from Facebook. Building a revenue team is a very rich problem set. It's something that everyone cares about. It could always be done better.
>> 目前有人用 Lightfield 做的最令人兴奋的事情是什么？这家名为 Power 的公司，他们有一个撮合市场，汇集了患有各种疾病和并发症、正在寻找前沿治疗方案的患者。他们把所有这些都在 Lightfield 中进行了建模，而 Lightfield 实际上在几天内就帮助了一位阿尔茨海默病患者找到了前沿治疗方案。在这个 AI 时代，你们有什么不同的做法吗？
Original English >> What's the most exciting thing someone's doing with Lightfield today? This company Power, they have this marketplace where they're aggregating folks that have various illnesses and complications that are looking for frontier treatment. So, they've modeled all of this in Lightfield and Lightfield actually helped someone with Alzheimer's find frontier treatment within days. Is there anything that you've done differently in this kind of AI era?
>> 作为红海领域里的一家 CRM 公司，我们必须成为一家注重业务拓展（expansion）的公司。如果我们能帮您彻底建模您的业务和客户现实，那么剩下的事情就会迎刃而解。
Original English >> As a CRM company in a red ocean space, we have to be an expansion company. If we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy.
>> 如果让你重新开始，你会回去给自己提哪一条建议？
Original English >> What would be the one piece of advice that you'd go back and give yourself if you are just starting again?
### 嘉宾介绍与 Tome 的爆发式增长 嗯，欢迎回到 a16z 播客。我是 Joe Schmidt。和我一起的有我的合伙人 Alex Rampell，以及 Keith Peiris。Keith 是 Lightfield 的首席执行官。Lightfield 刚刚完成了由我们领投的 4700 万美元 A 轮融资，他们正在构建一个商业世界模型。商业世界模型将客户的电子邮件、通话和会议转化为 AI agent 可以用来完成工作的记录。我们将探讨 Keith 是如何转型到 Lightfield 的——这非常耐人寻味——他们是如何构建最初的产品，以及客户可以用它做些什么。Keith，感谢你的加入。
Original English Um, welcome back to the A6Z podcast. I'm Joe Schmidt. I'm joined by my partner, Alex Rmpelle, and Keith Paris. Keith is the CEO at Lifefield. Lifefield just raised a $47 million series A led by us and they're building a business world model. A business world model turns customer emails, calls, and meetings into a record that AI agents can use to get work done. We'll explore how Keith pivoted, which is very interesting to Lightfield. How they built the initial product and what customers can do with it. Keith, thanks for joining us.
>> 很高兴来到这里。
Original English >> Excited to be here.
>> 好的，也许我们先从回顾 Tome 的历程以及你是如何走向 Lightfield 开始。这是一段非常不寻常的历程。你现在已经让两款产品达到了爆发式的规模。嗯，跟我们聊聊那段经历，以及你是如何最终来到 Lightfield 的。
Original English >> Yeah, maybe we'll start just going back to the tome journey and how you got to light field. very atypical journey. You got two products now to explosive scale. Um tell us a little bit about uh that that experience and how you ended up at Lifefield.
>> 我们创立 Tome，你知道，主要是因为我们做消费级产品出身，而且我们认为大语言模型将会改变人们的沟通方式；当时我们在 Instagram 和 Messenger 负责自拍设计之类的工作，于是我们决定涉足想法的叙事表达。我们在 GPT-3 前后推出了这款产品。
Original English >> We started to uh you know mostly because we were consumer people and we thought like LLMs were going to change the way people communicate and we were working on like selfie design you know at Instagram and Messenger and we decided to to go into the the storytelling of ideas. We got this product out to launch around the time of GBT3.
>> 是的。那是怎样的？也跟我们聊聊这款产品。所以它是一款演示文稿产品，你可以用 GPT 来生成演示文稿、生成页面等等。我们在 ChatGPT 发布的同一时期推出了它，然后迎来了爆发式增长。我们每个月能新增 200 万用户。在我们的推理算力不足以支撑他们时，用户还在排队等候。
Original English >> Yeah. And what was the and tell us a little bit about the product too. So it was a it was a presentation product where you could use uh GPT uh to generate presentations and generate pages and and so forth. And we launched it around the same time as chat GPT and uh we just got explosive growth. Um we got you know 2 million users a month. Um you know uh people were uh lining up when we didn't have enough inference to uh you know to to support them.
### 为何决定彻底转型 >> 哇，天哪。所以你们把它做到了惊人的规模，随后却决定停下来，进行彻底的硬转型。
Original English >> Wow. Oh my gosh. And so you got that to amazing scale. You then decided to stop and completely hard pivot.
>> 那是一个怎样的决定？你们是如何做出那个选择的？为什么？
Original English >> What was that decision like? How did you make that choice? Why?
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 我想说这背后有很多指标考量，但在内心深处的直觉层面上，我们所有人其实都不喜欢这款产品——这么说可能有点搞笑。我觉得归根结底，如果你是一名创始人，你必须热爱自己正在打造的产品，必须为客户使用它而感到兴奋。而我们无论如何就是做不出好的演示文稿。哇。
Original English >> So I would say there are a lot of metrics behind it, but you know deep down I think at an instinctual level. Um none of us like the product which is which is kind of a funny thing to say. Like I think at the end of the day if you're a a founder you have to like love the product that you're building and you have to be excited for your customers to use it. And um we just couldn't for the life of us make good presentations. Wow.
>> 我的意思是，我们看不到一个有品位、挑剔的演示文稿制作者以不可或缺的方式使用这个工具的路径。是的。我们看不到像你们这样的人会用它来写备忘录，看不到投行或咨询行业的人会使用它。我们只是觉得技术限制了我们，让我们只能成为一个面向个人和学生的工具。
Original English >> You know uh and what what I mean by that is you know we could never we could not see the path of like a high quality discerning presentation maker using this tool. Yeah. In an indispensable way. We couldn't see you know people like yourselves using it for memos. We couldn't see people using it in in like investment banking or consulting. Um, we just thought that the technology constrained us to being a tool for individuals and students.
>> 太有意思了。好，所以你们从 AI 演示文稿走向了——
Original English >> So interesting. Okay. So you go from AI presentations to
>> 一无所有。那么你们是如何选择下一步做什——
Original English >> nothing. And so how did you make the choice of what to
>> 也许我可以稍微倒回去一点。我是说，有时候你到了这个节点，会觉得，好吧，如果技术继续向前发展，它就会变得足够好。
Original English >> maybe if if I can rewind a little bit. I mean sometimes you get to this point and you're like oh well if the technology kind of continues advancing then it will be good enough.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 但那也是一种危险。我认为，所谓的“等待戈多”——但你是怎么决定的？我的意思是，这可能正是你想问的问题，但为什么不直接等待技术变好呢？
Original English >> But that's also a little bit of a danger. I think the uh it's calledium uh is is the but how did you decide I mean this was probably the question that you were getting at but like why not just wait it out for the technology to get better
>> 因为 GPT-3 到带有 Astra 的 GPT-6 之间的飞跃是非同寻常的——
Original English >> because I mean the leap between GPT3 and GPT6 with Astra is extraordinary
>> 但显然，如果你在烧钱等等，你就没有等待的奢侈条件。不过我想知道，你们是如何看待技术曲线的形态的，为什么不顺着曲线等待下去？
Original English >> but obviously if you're burning money and everything you don't have the luxury of waiting but I guess how did you think about like just the shape of the curve and why not wait out the curve?
>> 是的，问得很好。所以我们确实考虑过缩减团队规模并静观其变，因为我们看到了从 3.5 到 4 的跨越，看到了正在取得的飞跃。但我认为最大的问题是模型根本没有足够的上下文去真正理解演讲者、听众以及演讲者与听众之间的关系，而无论多少通用推理能力都无法逾越这一点。所以我们觉得，这充其量只能成为一个用于一次性空想演示文稿的绝佳工具，而我们实在不知道该如何把它变成让我们感到兴奋的东西。
Original English >> Yeah it's a good question. So we we we definitely thought about let's shrink the team and wait it out, you know, because we were seeing 3.5 to four and and seeing the leaps being made. But I think the biggest issue was that the model just didn't have enough context to to really understand the presenter, the audience, the relationship between the presenter and the audience and like no amount of general reasoning gets you past that. Um, so we were like, this is a going to be a best a great tool for a oneshot pie in the sky presentation and we just couldn't figure out how to turn that into something that we were excited about.
### 探索 B2B 场景与发现底层数据痛点 >> 是的。你们是如何思考接下来想要攻克的问题的？我认为，你刚才所说的最难的部分、最痛苦的部分是“我们所有人都不喜欢这款产品”。如果那就是你的全部生活，那确实很难受。[笑声]
Original English >> Yeah. How did you think about the problems that you wanted to attack next? I think the, you know, the hardest part of what you just said and the most painful part is none of us liked the product. Like that's hard if that's your entire life. [laughter]
>> 你们是如何确定自己真正想做的产品是什么的？那个过程是怎样的？
Original English >> How did you decide what was the product you actually wanted to build? What was that process like?
>> 我想我们在内部进行过很多讨论：等等，我们当初为什么创办这家公司？我们创办这家公司是因为我们想帮助专业人士去讲述专业的故事，那些高难度的故事。所以我们想，看看能不能找到 B2B 的使用场景。
Original English >> So I think we we had a lot of conversations internally about how wait a minute why did we even build this company? We built this company because we wanted to help you know uh professionals tell expert stories you know hard stories. So we're like let's see if we can find the B2B use case.
>> 于是我们在自己的用户群中进行了一番梳理。我们大概有 2500 万用户，我们发现 B2B 用户主要集中在销售和营销领域。
Original English >> So we um we we sort of looked in our user base. We had 25 million users or something and we found that the the the uh the B2B users were sales and marketing.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yep.
>> 于是我们联系了他们。我们找了这周围大概 500 到 1000 人的公司做了 12 个试点，我们说：“嘿，我们免费帮你们做。我们就给你们做高质量的演示文稿，看看后续会怎样。”于是我们最终被几支销售团队采用。起初我们提出的是“我们来帮你们制作拓展新客户的幻灯片，或者制作提案”，接着对方说：“等等，既然你们在这儿，能不能做点别的事？”
Original English >> Um so we reached out to them. We went and got 12 pilots uh from call it like 500,000 person companies around here and we're like hey we'll we'll do this for free. We'll just we'll we'll we'll do great presentations for you and let's see where it goes. So we ended up being used by a couple of sales teams. And um at first we came in with we'll make your new business decks or we'll make your proposals and we're like wait a minute while you're here can can you do other things?
>> “你们能做些调研吗？能帮我们做潜在客户资格筛选吗？能帮我们了解哪些公司适合做业务拓展吗？”
Original English >> Can you guys do some research? could you help us qualify leads? Could you help us like um understand companies for expansion? And um
>> 到了那个节点，我们心想：“行啊，我们就顺着热点走，看看会发生什么。”我认为让早期创始人擅长此道的原因在于，你基本上没有先验包袱，你愿意忽视自己之前造出来的东西。我们就想，顺着这条线索走，看看会通向哪里。然后我们提出的第一个要求就是：“噢，只要给我们访问你们上下文仓库的权限就行。”当时我以为那指的就是 Salesforce。于是我们说：“太好了。给我们访问你们的 CRM、通话录音系统、数据仓库等等的权限，然后我们再想办法帮你们把这项工作完成。”
Original English >> at that point we were like sure, you know, let's just follow the heat, see what happens. I I think I think what makes early stage founders good at this is that you you sort of have no priors. You're you're willing to ignore the thing you built. And we were like, let's just follow this trail and see where it goes. Um, and then the uh the first thing we asked was like, "Oh, just give us access to your context box," which at the time I thought was Salesforce. So, we're like, "Great. Give us access to your CRM, your call recorder, your data warehouse, more and then we'll figure out how to do this work for you."
>> 然后我们意识到，完成这项工作实际上最难的部分，其实是理顺所有这些孤立系统中的所有数据，而且这些数据往往是不完整的、彼此冲突的。通话录音系统所呈现的现实往往与 CRM 中的不同。实际上，重新梳理这些数据所需的工作，感觉才是最重要的工作。
Original English >> Then we realized actually the hardest part of doing this work was actually um making sense of all of the data across all of these disparate systems, you know, and it was sort of uh it was incomplete. it was uh conflicting. You know what what the the call recorder often had a different view of reality than the CRM. Actually the the work required to reorganize it felt like the most important work. M
>> 我想正是通过这件事，我们开始意识到，等等，也许这才是更值得去解决的有趣问题：
Original English >> um and I I think through that we we started to realize, wait a minute, maybe this is the more interesting problem to solve,
>> 那就是，如果你能以机器能够理解、同时人类也能理解的方式为一家公司重组业务现实，这感觉比我们当时正在做的那家公司要有趣得多，也持久得多。
Original English >> which is that if you can reorganize reality for a company in a way that machines can understand and also for humans to understand, um that feels like a way more interesting and enduring company than the one that we're on right now.
>> 是的。你是从什么时候知道自己在做新产品上找到了正确方向的？
Original English >> Yeah. When did you know that you were on to something with the new product?
>> 这中间其实有一点脱节。起初我们并不知道自己想要做一款 CRM。一开始我们做的是一款市场拓展（GTM）助手。我们让人们喜欢上了它，但接着我们却没法让任何人为此付费。[笑声]
Original English >> So there there's a a little bit of discontinuity. We didn't know we wanted a CRM first. First first we built like a a go to market assistant. Um we got people to like it and then uh we couldn't get anyone to pay for it. [laughter]
>> 那就是说，你知道，我们拥有所有的
Original English >> That was to say that uh you know we had all of
这些 AE（客户总监）每天都在用它，但我们没有定价权，因为那不是我们的数据。是的。
Original English these AES using it every day but we had no pricing power because it wasn't our data. Yeah.
>> 嗯，而且还有其他 10 家公司，所有这些公司都在为此竞争。所以我们决定缩减团队规模，从零开始，从第一性原理出发去重新构想 CRM。我想我们在暗中闭门研发了大约 4 个月。然后我们需要找到使用我们 CRM 的人。事实证明，没有人愿意用你才开发了 4 个月的 CRM。所以我们……[笑声]
Original English >> Um you know and there were 10 other companies and all of these companies competing for it. So we decided to shrink the team um start from scratch and go and like reimagine the CRM from first principles that I think we we built in in the dark for about 4 months. Uh and then uh we needed to find people to use our CRM. And it turns out no one wants to use your four-month-old CRM. So we uh figure [laughter]
>> 所以，我们审视了手里仅剩的资产——那个我们退不掉的巨大办公室空间。然后我们就想，我要去 X 和 LinkedIn 上发个帖子：“只要你用我们的 CRM，就可以免费坐进我们的办公室。”
Original English >> so uh we we sort of looked at the only asset we had left which was this giant office space we couldn't get rid of. Uh, and we were like, I'm gonna post on X and LinkedIn. You can sit in our office space if you use our CRM.
>> 嗯，然后我们找到了 10 家——
Original English >> Um, and then we found 10
>> 负定价。
Original English >> negative pricing.
>> 负定价。是的。是的。一点没错。于是，我们找到了 10 家初创公司来使用这款产品，出于某种原因，他们每天都泡在里面。他们会因为缺少各种功能而抓狂，也会因为运行太慢而抓狂，但他们每天都在用，而且大概每两个小时就会在 Slack 上给我们提一次反馈。
Original English >> Negative pricing. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Uh, so we found 10 startups to come use the product and for some reason they were in it every day. Um, and they were mad about everything missing. and they were mad about how slow it was, but they were in it every day and they were giving us Slack feedback about it like every two hours.
>> 当时我就觉得，“哇，这跟以前完全不同了，我们有了一个勉强能跑、勉强做出来的半成品，但大家却一直都在用，而且他们如此在乎它，以至于每小时都会给我们提供反馈。”
Original English >> And I was like, "Oh, this is so different than to in the sense that we have this this barely working, barely finished product that people are in all the time where they care about it so much they're going to give us feedback about it on an hourly basis."
### 从底层重构 CRM >> 是的。当你思考 C——我是说，你一开始是不是会说，我看过 Salesforce、HubSpot 等等，这就是我想改变的地方？或者说，你是如何确定待办任务（job to be done）的？因为一方面，CRM 就像一个仓库，对吧，它就像——
Original English >> Yeah. And when you think about C I mean did you did you start off saying you know I view Salesforce and HubSpot and other things and like here's what I want changed or I guess how did you triangulate on like the job to be done because in one hand like a CRM is just a repository right it's like
>> 客户关系管理，好，这就是存放所有信息、所有客户信息的存储库。但另一方面，它也像……如果你跟任何管理销售团队的人聊过，最大的痛点之一就是：“我那帮愚蠢的销售代表不更新 CRM。”而且它往往就像一个过时的存储库。但我很好奇，对于当今世界出了什么问题，你们的指导原则是什么？
Original English >> customer relationship manage well here here's the repository of all the information all the customer information um but on the other hand it's also like this you know if you've talked to anybody who's run a sales team one of biggest pain points is like my stupid salespeople don't update the CRM. Um, and it's often like a stale uh, you know, repository. But I guess like what what were the what were the governing principles, if you will, around like what was broken with the world today?
>> 你们打算做哪些不同的事情？还是说，就像只要把拿着负定价的人招揽进我的办公室，然后我搞清楚他们在抱怨什么并围绕这些去构建就行了？
Original English >> What were you going to do differently? Or was it like let's just have people with negative pricing uh, in my office and I'll figure out what they're complaining about and build around that.
我觉得对我们有利的一点，老实说，就是我们在这个领域有多幼稚。因为如果你在一家成长阶段的公司，CRM 是销售代表用来防止遗漏事项的工具；
Original English I think u one of the things that benefited us was was honestly how naive we were at the space because if you're in sort of a growth stage company the CRM is the tool that reps use to not forget things
>> 它是驱动底层自动化的工具，也是驱动预测的工具。我认为我们幼稚的观点实际上是：这里最重要的是后者。如果我们能帮你完全建模你的业务和客户现实，那么剩下的事情就会很容易；
Original English >> it's the tool that powers low-level automation um and it's also the tool that powers forecasts and and I think um I think our naive view was actually the most important thing here is the ladder you know we if we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy,
>> 剩下的应该就只是提示词和工具调用了。正因如此，我认为世上很多人都奔向了“用于工作流程的 CRM”；
Original English >> you know, the rest should just be prompts and tool calls. Um, and and because of that, I think a lot of the world ran towards CRM for work.
>> 我们则奔向了高保真度的业务建模。因此，我们就想，是什么阻碍了这一点？那就是销售代表的手动录入；
Original English >> We ran towards uh like like highfidelity business modeling. Uh, and because of that, we were like, what gets in the way of this? You know, it's the the rep's manual entry.
比如 API 的质量。我们当时有点像待在自己的孤岛上，尝试去构建世界模型，而不是去发邮件。
Original English like the API quality and and we were sort of on our uh you know on our island trying to to world model instead of sending emails.
>> 是的。你能谈谈你在架构上所做的那些非常刻意的决定，以及你是如何构建允许这一切发生的原语的吗？因为现在很有意思的是，它很漂亮，体验也很不可思议，但它能运行仅仅是因为你早期做出了正确的选择。所以，谈谈你是如何从第一性原理出发做到这一点的，以及它现在实现了什么。
Original English >> Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the very intentional decisions you made on the architecture and just like how you kind of built the primitives that allow this to happen because it's interesting now it's like beautiful and the experience is incredible but like it only works because you made the right choices early on. So talk a little bit about the way you kind of did that from first principles and what it now enables.
>> 好的。实际上，我们 5 位创始成员中有 3 位来自 Facebook 或数据领域，我们有一个非常朴素的看法，即实际上 CRM 中最重要的东西是对关系的建模。所以我们参考了 Facebook 的时间线（Timeline），我们觉得，我们只需要对你的业务与对方业务之间按时间顺序发生的关系进行建模。
Original English >> Yeah. Uh so actually three out of our five uh uh founding members came from Facebook or data and u we had this very naive view that um actually the the the most important thing in the CRM is modeling the relationship. U so we actually looked at you know the the sort of the Facebook timeline and we were like we just need to to to model the the chronological relationship between your business and this business.
>> 所以我们实际上最先构建了活动日志（activity log）：你最早是什么时候联系的？你对他们说了什么？他们对你说了什么？你们开过什么会？来回发送了什么文档？最终，比如他们在你的产品里做了什么？他们是如何给你付款的？我们认为，基于这个活动日志来开展工作是正确的原语。
Original English >> U so we actually built out the activity log first of you know when did you first reach out? Um what did you say to them? What did they say to you? What meetings did you have? What documents were sent back and forth? Um you know and then eventually like what are they doing in your product? How are they paying you? And uh we thought like working off of this activity log is sort of the right primitive.
>> 很有意思。
Original English >> Interesting.
>> 所以我们的系统会构建你们关系之间的活动日志，然后利用它来触发你所期望的传统 CRM 更新，比如更新字段、更新阶段等等。但你始终拥有这个作为一切构建基础的、权威的关系日志。
Original English >> So we have the system where it sort of builds the activity log between your relationship and then it uses that to trigger sort of the traditional CRM updates that you'd expect, right, of like updating fields, updating stages and so on and so forth. But you you you always have this like canonical log of relationship that everything's built on top of.
然后你是怎么考虑的？有那个按时间顺序排列的视图，但随后还有所有这些在任何其他 CRM 中都未曾存在过的元数据，对吧？我是说，我记得最初这确实引起了你的共鸣，那就是有太多的其他上下文，然后你如何考虑将这些作为记录的一部分？我不知道那是何时加入进来的，还是说有某种你试图支持的工作流触发了它？
Original English And then how did you think about there's there's that chronological view, but then there's all of this other metadata that's never existed in any other CRM, right? I mean, like this was one of the things I remember initially really, you know, jing with you on which is there's there's so much other context and like how do you then think about that as a part of this record and I don't know when that came in or or was there like a certain workflow that you were trying to enable that
>> 触发了那个？是的。所以我们其实尝试过采用完全非结构化的方式。
Original English >> triggered that? Yeah. So we we actually tried going fully unstructured.
>> 然后我们发现查询耗时太长了。
Original English >> Um and we found that uh the queries just took too long.
>> 是的。是的。
Original English >> Yeah. Yeah.
>> 没错。这就遇到了大海捞针的问题。所以我们最终找到了这种半结构化的方法，在这个活动日志中存储大量的非结构化数据。
Original English >> Right. You sort of have the like needle in the haystack problem. So we ended up finding this like semistructured approach where we store gobs of unstructured data in this activity log.
>> 太酷了。
Original English >> Cool.
>> 然后系统可以使用这个活动日志来推断因果关系，并从那里推进工作。这就是为什么它比数据湖（data lake）好用得多的原因。
Original English >> Um and then the system can use the activity log to sort of infer causality and work through from there. And that's why it like works so much better than a data leak.
>> 是的。当然你可以在里面放任何东西。你可以把你的 Snowflake 记录放进去。你可以把你的活动放进去。
Original English >> Yeah. Um, and of course you can put anything in it. You can put your snowflake records in it. You can put your activity.
>> 嗯，也许可以举个例子，因为我认为这是一个很好的切入点，比如举个例子说明这意味着什么？在最终状态下它到底是如何被使用的？
Original English >> Well, maybe give because I I think I think this is a good point like maybe give an example of like what does that mean? How how is it actually used at the end state?
>> 好的。一个很好的例子就是，我们在 Lightfield 上有很多客户成功人员，他们可能会接到任务：“嘿，这个客户准备好增购了吗？”如果你向 Lightfield 提出这种开放式问题，比如“我们应该向他们推销什么？”“我们应该什么时候向他们推销？”，它现在可以遍历该客户所做过的所有事情。首先是人际互动方面：他们对你说了什么？他们的工单是什么样的？然后它还可以查看产品使用情况，这些都只是作为活动日志条目存储的。你就会发现，“好吧，他们已经一个月没有登录了。也许你该尝试向他们推销更多东西。”
Original English >> Yeah. So, u you know a good example would be u we have a lot of customer success folks on lightfield and um they might be tasked with hey is this account ready for expansion? You know um and if you ask lightfield this open question like you know what should we sell to them? what you know when should we sell to them. It can now go through everything that this account has do done. First it's sort of the people interactions of what did they say to you? What what do their tickets look like? And then it can also go to the product usage which is just stored as like activity log entries. You're like well they haven't logged in in a month. Maybe you should try to sell them more stuff.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 然后，如果你想做对比，因为最常见的问题是“我应该跟进哪些客户进行增购？”，现在它可以遍历那种 CRM 模式（schema），然后深入钻研每个客户的日志，为你提供一个很好的答案。
Original English >> Um and then if you want to like compare uh because you know the most common question is like which of these accounts should I work on expansion? Now it can like traverse the sort of CRM schema and then dive deep into uh you know into the the log of each customer to to give you a good answer.
>> 太有意思了。你是如何考虑让小型、中型甚至大型公司的初始体验和初始配置变得——
Original English >> So interesting. How do you think how did you think about making the initial experience and like the initial configuration of all of this
>> 变得直观的？
Original English >> intuitive for a small midsize even large company
>> 我们有这样的看法，说来有趣，我们与很多 CRM 顾问聊过，我们开始记下“你们平时到底是做什么的”，我们发现，他们帮你做的最大、影响最深远的决定就是你的数据模型。
Original English >> we had this view that uh it's funny we spoke to a lot of CRM consultants and you know we started to write down like what is it that you do right and we found that uh the biggest most consequential decision they help you with is your your data model.
>> 是的。如果你把那个搞砸了，一切就全完了。
Original English >> Yeah. You screw that up, it's over.
>> 全完了，对吧？如果你弄错了阶段、弄错了字段，你根本没法让销售代表倒退时间回去补填。一切就全完了。我们当时就想，
Original English >> It's over, right? If you get the wrong stages, the wrong fields, you can't get the reps to go back in time and fill it out. It's over. We're like,
>> 我们能否做到实际上是无模式（schemaless）的，
Original English >> can we be, you know, effectively schemaless,
>> 也就是说，“我们会帮你连接上邮件，我们会给你一个通话录音器，我们会连接到你的数据仓库，然后直接为你拼接组织起你们的关系。”之后你随时可以再去填字段，如果你更改了你的——
Original English >> just to say that like, you know, we'll connect you to, we'll connect to your emails, we'll give you a call recorder, we'll connect to your data warehouse, and then just assemble your relationships for you. and then you can fill out the fields later, you know, um if you change your
想法，关于字段的，你只要去遍历活动日志重新填入就行。
Original English minds about the fields, you can just traverse the activity log and refill them.
>> 所以，我们最后就做成了这种类似无模式的架构，
Original English >> So, we ended up with this like schemaless setup
>> 你登录之后，连接你的邮箱等等。
Original English >> where you log in, you connect your email and more.
>> 对。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 呃，然后，呃，我们内置了丰富的数据源，然后它就会为你实时拼装。
Original English >> Uh and then uh we we have built-in enrichment sources and then it just assembles for you in real time.
>> 太酷了。
Original English >> So cool.
>> 嗯，而且
Original English >> Um and
>> 基本上就是智能大于模式。这就是
Original English >> basically like intelligence is greater than schema. That's the
>> 核心所在。
Original English >> the crux.
>> 嗯，所以用起来就像个消费级产品。你只要按一下同步，等个五分钟，东西就出来了。
Original English >> Um so it feels like a consumer product. You just press sync, you wait five minutes, and it's there.
### 关系型数据库与无模式 >> 哎，要是回到特别早期的年代，就像是为了省空间，因为你知道，那时候全是关系型数据库，对吧？
Original English >> Well, if you go back to the really old days, it's like to save space because, you know, you'd only have these were all just relational databases, right?
>> 然后为了在一个给定的表里节省空间，就像每个字段，就像，哦，这是个——我不知道你懂多少 SQL，但就像你知道的，varchar。对，
Original English >> And then to savea space in a given table, like each column, it's like, oh, it's a I don't know how much you know SQL, but like you know, varcar. Yeah,
>> 就是可变字符。你实际上得预先定义在表里那一列最多能有多少个字符，
Original English >> that's variable character. And you would actually predefine how many characters that particular column could be in the table,
>> 对吧？所以就像你会说名字是 varchar 25。对。
Original English >> right? So like you'd say like name would be varcar 25. Yeah.
>> 对。然后就像“哎呀糟糕，这个人的名字太长了”——想想一路走到今天这步，真挺有意思的，
Original English >> Right. It's like oh shoot this person has too long of an it's just funny how far this has gotten
>> 因为当年你真是连每一个 bit、每一个 byte 都要斤斤计较，嗯，你真的要在表里为一个列预先定义最大字符数。而现在就像根本没有模式。真挺有意思的。是的。所以
Original English >> because back then when you were really really managing every every bit and every bite um you would literally predefine the maximum number of characters for for a column in a table. And now it's like no schema. It's just it's just funny. Yes. So
>> 时代变了。
Original English >> the times have changed.
>> 是的。是的。智能大于模式。
Original English >> Yes. Yes. Intelligence is greater than than schema.
### Lightfield 的应用场景 >> 没错。嗯，我也许顺着智能那个思路聊。所以现在发生的很多很有意思的事情，我认为就是你给了人们某种底座，去把智能投入到真正棘手的问题上。你刚才举的那个例子，一个客户成功经理说：“我该怎么向这个客户增销？”现在有人用 Lightfield 做的最令人兴奋、或者最出人意料、或者最有意思的事情是什么，是他们在之前的 varchar 世界或者另一个世界里做不到的？
Original English >> Exly. Um I maybe drafting off of that intelligence, you know, thought. So some so so much of the interesting things I think that are happening right now is you're giving someone the kind of chassis to commit intelligence at really hard problems. That example you gave on a on a CSM saying, "How do I upsell this customer?" What's the most exciting or most random or interesting thing someone's doing with Lightfield today that they couldn't have done in the var world or or another world before this one?
>> 所以，我很自豪的事情之一就是，我们一开始就支持完全任意的模式，比如自定义对象、自定义关系，因为在 Lightfield 里这根本无所谓，不像在别的产品里那样受限。所以，我很喜欢我们那些商业模式奇特的客户，他们需要对各种各样不同的事物进行建模。嗯，我们有一家叫 Power 的公司，他们，呃，他们跟制药公司合作，去，嗯，呃，帮助他们寻找临床试验参与者；而在另一端，他们建了这个市场，把患有各种疾病和并发症、正在寻找前沿治疗方案的患者汇集在一起。所以他们把所有这些都在 Lightfield 里建模了，你知道，B2C 这一端和 B2B 这一端，而且他们做出了自动化流程，去抓取 FDA 和 clinicaltrials.gov，为他们构建一个包含全球所有正在进行的试验的世界模型，
Original English >> So, one of the things that I'm really proud of is we started with fully arbitrary schema like custom object custom relationship because it just doesn't matter you know in light field the way that it does other ones. So, I I love the our customers that have strange business models where they just need to model different things. Um we have this company power and they uh they work with pharmaceutical companies that um uh to help them find clinical trial participants and on the other side they have this marketplace where they're aggregating folks that have various illnesses and complications that are looking for frontier treatment. So they've modeled all of this in Lightfield, you know, the the BTOC side and the B2B side, and they've they've built automations to go and scrape the FDA and clinical trials.gov to give them a a world model of every trial going on in the world
>> 然后在 B2C 端进行匹配，同时也匹配到合适的制药公司。所以就像是有各种碰撞在发生。
Original English >> and then do matching on the BTOC side as well as with the right pharmaceutical company. So there's sort of like collisions happening.
>> 哇。嗯，而且，呃，Lightfield 实际上帮一个阿尔茨海默病患者在几天之内就找到了前沿治疗方案。
Original English >> Wow. Um, and uh, Lightfield actually helped someone with Alzheimer's find frontier treatment within days.
>> 那太不可思议了。
Original English >> That's incredible.
### 绿地与棕地市场策略 >> 所以，我是说，我们在这里经常讨论的一个问题，就是这种，呃，所谓的绿地与棕地之争。如果你想想通常意义上的初创公司，嗯，向棕地去卖是很难的，就因为它是棕色的。嗯，意思是说，棕地是什么意思？意思是它已经被现有的巨头踩踏过了，
Original English >> So, I mean, one one question that we talk about a lot here is this uh, kind of green field versus brownfield thing. So, if you think about like startups normally, um, selling into the brownfield is hard just because it's brown. Um, meaning what does brownfield mean? It means that like it's been trampled by an incumbent,
>> 对吧？所以才叫棕地。就像你试着去卖 ERP，你有一个比 SAP 好得多得多的产品，但就像乔听我讲过一百万次的一句老话：最好的公司手里拿捏的是人质，而不是客户；就像 SAP 手里的是人质，那就是棕地。有时候你能打进去，我的意思是，就像当年云与本地部署的竞争，云做了什么？它就像是，那也是棕地，但我差不多重新定义了问题，说“你知道你们在用什么吗？”要是你回到当年的 CRM 时代，就像是你们在用跑在办公室 IBM AS400 大型机上的 Siebel 系统。你们受够了。负责维护那套系统的员工辞职了，他都 92 岁了。也许现在你们该换一家基于云的厂商了。那差不多就是，那就是当年棕地从本地部署转向云端的一部分做法。嗯，但另一种策略是走绿地路线，就是说我不管那些人质了，我只要做全世界最好的产品，然后那些没有被任何现有软件方案束缚的全新公司，他们自然就会用我。
Original English >> right? Like hence brown. So like try selling ERP and you have a product that's much much better than SAP but like there's a saying that Joe's heard me use it a million times like the best companies have hostages not customers like SAP has hostages that's a brownfield sometimes you can break in I mean like kind of cloud versus onrem what did cloud do it's like it was brownfield but I kind of just redefined the problem and said you know what you're using if you go back to like the CRM days it's like you're using seable systems that's running on your IBM AS400 mainframe in your office. You're tired. Like the guy that maintained it quit. He was 92 years old. Maybe now you should use a cloud-based vendor. And that's kind of like that's that's partially how that brownfield was done from onrem to cloud. Um but the other strategy is going green field is saying I'm not going to bother with the hostages. I'm just going to build the best product in the world and then brand new companies that are untethered from any existing software solution. they'll just use me.
>> 而且
Original English >> And
>> 我想，当你当时在通盘考虑的时候，我是说回到当年搞负定价的早期阶段，拿免费办公场地作为负定价。我是说你当时是怎么考虑，比如你知道，哪里、谁才是合适的客户？你是怎么找到你知道的我们所说的一个、你知道的，ICP、理想客户画像的？要不聊聊这个。
Original English >> I guess like when you were thinking through I mean going back to the the the early days of negative pricing with the free office space being the the negative price. I mean how did you think about like you know where who are the right customers? How did you get to your you know what we call an you know ICP ideal customer profile like maybe talk about that a little bit.
>> 坦白讲，你知道，当我们刚创立这家公司的时候，对于如何打入棕地，我们并没有足够明确的论点。呃，所以我想我们当时的看法是，建立一支营收团队是一个非常丰富的命题集合。这是每个人都关心的事，而且总有做得更好的空间。所以我们深信这里面有大机会，但我们不能百分之百确定具体是什么。所以我们当时就想，先试着拿下一家新公司吧。
Original English >> Just to be totally real you know when we were starting the company we didn't have a sharp enough thesis on how to get into Bradfield. Uh so I I think we had this perspective that you know building a revenue team is a very rich problem set. It's someone that something that everyone cares about. It could always be done better. So we like we believe there's something in here. But we weren't sure exactly what it was. So we we sort of figured let's just try to win a new company.
>> 对。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 先做这个。嗯，然后我们就在想，我们怎么拿下一家新公司呢？当时其实，呃，是我和我的幕僚长在 LinkedIn 上寻找潜在客户，给 YC 的公司发邮件，你知道，就说：“嘿，我们能打败现有的某款初创公司 CRM 吗？”嗯，那就是我们起步的大致过程。我们觉得通过深入倾听，我们最终会找到打入棕地所需要的切入点。而且，嗯，
Original English >> First. Um and we were like how do we win a new company? was actually uh my my chief of staff and I doing LinkedIn prospecting, emailing YC companies, you know, being like, "Hey, can we can we beat one of these startup CRM?" Um and and that was sort of how we got started. And we figured by listening really deeply, we would find, you know, the sort of wedge required to go brownfield eventually. And um
>> 我觉得过去几个月里我们算是找到了，也就是说你能获得大量的迭代。所以我们得到了，嗯，现在服务早期初创公司的好处之一就是，从 Pre-Seed 轮到 Seed 轮、从 Seed 轮到 A 轮再到 B 轮的速度从未如此之快，我们现在的客户里，有的刚加入我们时只有零个销售代表，现在已经有 100 个销售代表了。
Original English >> I think we sort of found it over the past few months, which is to say you get lots of iteration. So we got um one of the nice things about serving an early stage startup right now is it's never been faster to go from preede to seed seed to A to B and we we've we now have customers that had like you know zero reps when they joined us now who have you know 100 reps.
>> 嗯，所以我们开始能够向内观察，弄清楚我们在为你解决哪些你真正关心的问题。对。嗯，而且看起来它其实比我们原先预想的还要更高维度一点。如果你看看过去几年硅谷周围所有 AI CRM 的广告牌，它们总是在讲“帮你干活，帮你干活，帮你干活”，对吧，比如做线索评分、发外发邮件等等。而我觉得我们团队始终抱有这样一种观点，那就是这并不是打入棕地的真正切入点；因为最终比如 Salesforce 也是会发邮件的。我是说，截至今天，他们大概已经这么干了，对吧？嗯，而我们当时就觉得，
Original English >> Um so we've been start been able to like look inside and figure out like what problems are we solving for you that you actually care about. Yeah. Um, and it seemed like it was it was actually a little higher level than we had even anticipated. If you looked at all of the AI CRM billboards around Silicon Valley in the past couple of years, they've always been about like do the work, do the work, do the work, right, of like uh lead scoring, sending out outbound emails and more. And I think our team always had this perspective that that wasn't really the wedge to to do brownfield like event like Salesforce is going to send emails. I mean I guess they have as of as of today, right? Um and we were like
>> 我觉得打入棕地的切入点必然与更深入地理解你的公司有关，
Original English >> I think the wedge in Brownfield has to do with like you know better understanding your company
>> 嗯，这样你才能在公司创立的这种混乱时期掌舵你的公司。但这真花掉了我们大概 6 个月时间，面对着那些客户，观察着他们，才让这一点浮现出来。
Original English >> um so you can steer your company the sort of like chaotic era of company building. But it it took us honestly like 6 months of having customers like that staring at them to to sort of for that to emerge.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 对。嗯，同样会浮现出来的另一件事就是，如果你在做一款更好的产品，而你有了所有这些作为该产品消费者的用户，那是自然的，但我们还是拿绿地与棕地的区别来说。你在你的绿地公司雇来的销售副总裁，已经被规训、训练去使用那款老东西了。我其实记得当我创办我最初的几家公司之一时，我极其坚决不肯为 Salesforce 每个月付 85 美元，所以我用了叫作 SugarCRM 的东西，那是免费的。
Original English >> Right. Well, one of the things that also emerges is um if you're creating a better product and you have all of these people that are consumers of the product, of course, but like let's just take the Greenfield versus Brownfield distinction. The VP of sales that you hire at your Greenfield company has been acclimated and trained to use this thing. I actually remember when I when I started one of my first companies, I was so adamant about not paying $85 a month for Salesforce that I used this thing called Sugar CRM, which was free.
>> 呃，最后我妥协了。我最终还是开始付费买 Salesforce 了。为什么？不是因为产品有什么缺失或者之类的，而是因为我雇了这位销售副总裁，他当时就说“我才不用那个什么鬼”——我当时觉得我用的这个明明更省事、更好，但那确实也是个挑战。所以，这就像是，我是说并不是说一家新公司本身必须做培训别人的业务，但也存在着那种差距。关于绿地与棕地之间极少被人理解的一点就是，那些绿地的人
Original English >> And uh finally I gave up. Like I finally started paying for Salesforce. Why? Not because of like product gaps or anything like but like I hired this VP of sales and he was like I'm not using that f in like I was like it's easier, it's better, but like that was also challenging. So, it's also like this I mean it's not like a new company needs to be in the business of like training people per se, but like there's also that gap. It's one of the things that is seldom understood about like Greenfield versus Brownfield is that like the Greenfield people
### 克服销售决策阻力与免费推广 雇用像 Brownfield 那样的副总裁，他们实际上会做产品或者……抱歉，是做采购决策。所以，你懂的，我坚决认为这是一个好得多的产品，但比如你该如何克服来自那些人的异议（如果你愿意这么称呼的话）？他们会说：“你知道吗，我用一些没那么好用的东西也完全没问题。”
Original English hire Brownfield like VPs that actually like make product or sorry make uh purchasing decisions. So, how did you like, you know, I feel adamantly this is a much much much better product, but like how do you overcome some of the objections, if you will, from people who were like, you know what, I'm just perfectly fine using something that doesn't work as well.
>> 嗯，这是个好问题。我们早期的设计原则之一是，你知道，我们觉得自己会非常擅长说服创始人、工程负责人、产品负责人使用某种前沿技术来了解和服务客户，但是，你知道，要去说服新加入的销售副总裁接受这是正确的方式，可能需要做大量的工作。
Original English >> Um, it's a good question. One of our design principles early on was, you know, we figured we were going to be great at convincing the founder, the engineering leader, the product leader to use sort of frontier tech to understand and serve customers, but you know, it was probably going to be a lot of work to convince that VP of sales that joins this is the way.
>> 所以我们有了这样一个想法，对于我们所有的销售主导型计划，我们打算把这个东西免费提供给公司里的任何人。首先，这有助于公司……有助于 Lightfield，你知道，去了解工程团队在做什么、客户支持团队在做什么、财务团队在做什么。另外一件事是，它会建立某种真正的公司网络效应，让我们更难以被替换掉。
Original English >> So, we had this idea uh where for all of our salesled plans where we're like, we're going to give this thing away for free to anyone in the company. Um and one it helps the com it helps light field you know to just understand what engineering's doing what customer support's doing what uh finance is doing. Um the other thing is it it'll create sort of real company network effects that make it harder to rip and replace us.
>> 是的。我们在好几家公司都遇到过这种情况，你知道，经验丰富的销售副总裁进来了，他们会说：“这个挺酷的，但我只知道怎么用 Salesforce，因为我是受那种训练出来的。”而公司的其他人就会说：“等等。”
Original English >> Yeah. Uh, so we've been at a few companies now where, you know, the seasoned VP of sales comes in and they're like, you know, this is cool, but I only know how to use uh Salesforce because I've been trained that way. And the rest of the company is like, well, hold on.
>> 你知道，[笑声] 工程师就是靠这个来了解客户的；财务就是靠这个来进行收入确认的；客户成功团队就是靠这个来做客户评分的。你能再努力尝试去搞懂 [笑声] 这个吗？在这种情况下，我们就有了这种关系纽带，我们会介入，向他们展示我们将如何让他们的工作更轻松，然后我们就有了胜算。
Original English >> You know, [laughter] this is like how the engineers understand customers. This is how finance does revenue recognition. This is how customer success uh does account scoring. Um, can you try harder to figure [laughter] this out? you know, in which case then, you know, we have the relationship, we jump in, we show them how we're going to make their lives easier and uh and we've got a fighting chance.
### 产品权衡：传统表格界面与自然语言交互 >> 你知道，现在有太多不同的方式来完成过去只是个表格的那些任务了。那么，你是想尝试把那些表格提供给人们，让它变得非常拟物化，比如“这就是你习惯的 CRM，它也是蓝色的，诸如此类”；还是说，“嘿，实际上，你现在可以用自然语言来做很多事情，你实际上不必去看所有这些仪表盘，Lightfield 会在有事情发生时直接告诉你”？你是怎么看待这种产品权衡的？我认为很多记录系统实际上都在试图弄清楚如何把人们带入现在已经到来的真正未来。
Original English >> You know, there's so many different ways to now do those tasks that were just a table in the past. And so, do you want to try to, you know, give those tables to people and try to make it very skeoric like here's the CRM that you're used to and it it's also blue and blah blah blah or is it, you know, hey, actually, you can now use natural language to do a lot of this. you don't actually have to look at all these dashboards. Light people will just tell you when something happens like how how do you think about those kind of product trade-offs which I think a lot of systems of record are actually trying to figure out how do we bring people to the real future which is now here.
>> 是的，是的。我认为在这方面我们实际上是偏向务实主义的。
Original English >> Yeah. Yeah. I think we've we've actually on the side of pragmatism here.
>> 也就是说，比如现在我是公司事实上的销售主管，我依然通过电子表格视图来开我们所有的会议。我认为我们当时的想法是，如果我们真的想成为一个真正的企业级 CRM，我们就不能对人们的工作方式抱有偏执。所以我们倾向于……我们有很好的仪表盘，我们有很好的表格视图。如果你想用，你可以使用那些东西；然后如果你是站在前沿的那类人，你可以搞定这一切……
Original English >> Um which is to say that like right now I'm the the deacto sales manager at the company and I still run all of our meetings from the spreadsheet view. Um, I think we had this view of if we really want to be like a real enterprise CRM, we can't be religious about the way people work. Um, so we've leaned into we have great dashboards, we have great table views. Um, you can use those things if you want and then if you're sort of at the frontier, you can do it all
>> 而且你想要比如 CLI 之类的。
Original English >> and you want like CLI or whatever.
>> 是的，没错。你也可以那么做。
Original English >> Yeah, exactly. You can also do that.
>> 是的，完全没错。
Original English >> Yeah. Yeah, totally.
### 从物理按键到极致直观的演进 >> 嗯，我觉得这挺有意思的。我刚买了一辆新车。我之前开的是宝马，上面大概有 900 万个按键。就像你去坐飞机，对吧？你看驾驶舱，就会想飞行员是怎么知道的？对，那些有差不多 9000 个开关……
Original English >> Well, I find that like, you know, so it's funny. I just bought a new car. I came from a BMW which had like nine million buttons. Like you know if you go in an airplane, right? It's like you look at the cockpit and it's like how does the pilot know? Yeah. Like what these there were like 9,000 switches
>> 简直像是完全来自……
Original English >> straight out of all.
>> 最酷的事情是，甚至有点吓人，不知道你是否了解这个，比如最新的特斯拉，它们甚至连换挡杆都没有。
Original English >> And like the really cool thing it's actually even scary like you know I don't know if you know this like the newest Teslas they don't even have they don't even have like a stock to change gears.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 根本就没有。
Original English >> There isn't one.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 比如最物理的物理按键，就这么完全没了。但实际上它非常简单、非常直观，连 5 岁小孩都能用。我是说，但愿 5 岁小孩别去开车，但你能明白我的意思。这也是思考有模式与无模式（schema versus schemaless）的另一种方式，对吧？如果你有所有这些旋钮和开关，这固然很好，非常高级，就像销售副总裁或者如果你和财务人员交流，他们知道彭博终端里的所有按键……
Original English >> Like the most physical of physical buttons. It's just completely gone. But actually it's so simple and so intuitive that like a 5-year-old can use it. I mean, hopefully a 5-year-old isn't driving a car, but you get where I'm going. It's like I mean, it it also it's like another way of kind of thinking about like schema versus schema list, right? It's like if you have all these knobs and switches, it's great. It's so advanced like the VP of sales like part of like or if you talk to finance people, they know all their buttons in Bloomberg,
>> 但是能够打造出好产品的途径之一，就是把它做得极其直观。对。
Original English >> but like one of the ways that you're able to build something great is just make it so intuitive. Yeah.
>> 甚至连 5 岁小孩都能操作。
Original English >> That like even a 5-year-old can do it.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> Reddit 上有一个叫 ELI5 的完整板块，解释得像我只有五岁一样（explain like I'm five），对吧？就像……
Original English >> Um there's a whole category on Reddit called Eli 5. explain like I'm five, right? Like
>> 感觉这就是很酷的事情。我是说，我不知道，你是老板我不是，但这感觉就是你拥有的东西，对吧？旧时代有大量的旋钮、开关以及其他所有东西，但同样，自然语言智能的部分优势就在于你不再需要这些东西了。它几乎显得过时了。
Original English >> uh so it it kind of feels like the cool thing. I mean, I don't know if you're the you're the boss, not me, but like it feels like that's kind of what you have, right? It's like you have this old era which like lots of knobs and switches and everything else, but again, part of the benefit of plain language intelligence is that you don't need any of those things. It's almost rendered inacronistic.
### 重塑销售工作流与自然语言指令 >> 是的，确实如此。我觉得我们在不同方面都会遇到这种情况，对吧？也就是说，我们在确定性仪表盘的争论上还没有完全取胜。我觉得每个人早上喝咖啡的时候，都想看同一个仪表盘。我也是。但它们都……
Original English >> Yeah, this is true. And we I feel like we we run into this in different ways, right? which is to say that uh we haven't won the war on uh you know deterministic dashboards. I think everyone wants to look at the same dashboard every morning when they're drinking get their coffee. Me too. Um but they're all
>> 但愿是收入一直在涨。
Original English >> hopefully it's revenue going up.
>> 永远，永远都在涨。
Original English >> It's always always up.
>> 但对于其中的一些旧工作流，我们进行了彻底的重塑。最经典的销售工作流之一就是序列（sequence）的概念……
Original English >> Um but I I think for for some of these like old workflows, we've completely reimagined them. Um one of the most classic sales workflows is the idea of a sequence,
>> 对吧？在不同时间、基于不同触发条件，向可能对你产品表达过兴趣的人发送五封邮件，过去你必须用这些东西来表达……
Original English >> right? of um you know you send out five emails at different times on different triggers to someone that you know might have expressed interest in your product and you used to have to express these things
>> 用箭头……
Original English >> with arrows
>> 还有条件和变量。
Original English >> and conditions and variables.
>> 而在 Lightfield 里，我们是说不，你只要跟智能体（agent）对话就行了。智能体会为你写出一个配方（recipe）。这个配方会结合你世界模型里的内容，然后直接运行起来。一开始我们遇到一些销售主管说：“我不信任这玩意儿。”
Original English >> Um whereas in in light field we're like no you just chat with the agent. The agent writes out a recipe for you. The recipe takes into account what's in your world model and it sort of runs with it. And um you know at first we had some sales leaders that were like I don't trust this thing.
>> “我需要我的旋钮。我需要我的开关。”但后来他们转变了态度：“等等，这实际上效率更高、更好。”
Original English >> Uh I need my knobs. I need my switches. Um but then they sort of come around to wait a minute this is actually efficient better.
>> “而且我要学习的东西更少了。”我认为我们在运营一支市场拓展（go-to-market）团队的各个方面都在遇到这种情况。
Original English >> Um and I have to learn less. Uh I think we're like running into this in in sort of every aspect of of running a go to market team.
### 自研 Harness 趋势与底座价值 >> 是的。当前当然存在这样一种风潮，人人都觉得他们基本上可以自己构建一切，软件已死，哪些是我可以自己做的，哪些不是。对于那些想尝试构建其中某些要素，或者正在尝试构建其中某些要素的客户，你如何跟他们沟通？请多谈一点这种风潮，以及 Lightfield 是如何应对的。
Original English >> Yeah. There's there's of course this whole movement right now of everyone thinks they can build basically everything themselves and you know software is dead and what can I do myself versus not. How do you talk to customers that want to try to build elements of this or trying to build elements of this and just say a little bit more about that movement and and and how you're responding at Lfield.
>> 首先，我认为单就作为记录系统而言，我们必须保持开放的心态。这是你的数据，不是我们的，对吧？我们告诉客户，我们对你业务的建模和准确性感到非常自豪。我们自研了自己的电子邮件同步，自研了自己的 Slack 同步，自研了自己的数据仓库同步，而且我们为自己数据库的高性能感到自豪。然后，你想把它带到哪里都可以。所以实际上我们有几个客户会把 Lightfield 用作核心记录系统，然后尝试在上面构建自己的测试框架/外壳（harness）。也许他们有一个公司的 harness，对吧？对此我们是支持的。你可以全部通过 MCP 或 CLI 导入。但是在几周后，他们几乎总是会意识到：“等等，你们的 harness 实际上做了相当多的事情。”
Original English >> First of all, I think just being a system of record, we have to be open-minded. You know, it's our com it's it's your data. It's not ours, right? Um, and we we we tell our customers that we take a lot of pride in the modeling and the accuracy of your business. Um, we built our own email sync, we built our own Slack sync, we built our own um data warehouse sync and um, we are proud of how high performance our our database is. Um, and then you can take that wherever you want. Uh, so we've actually had a couple of customers that would, you know, use Lightfield as the core system of record and then they'll try to build their own harness on top. Maybe they've got a company harness, right? Um, and, you know, we we're supportive of that. You could push it all through MCP or CLI. Uh, but after a few weeks, they almost always realize, wait a minute, your harness was actually doing quite a bit.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 它具有更好的实体识别能力，拥有更好的精确率和召回率，速度更快。我们就会说：“是啊，[笑声] 这就是我们的工作呀，你懂的。”所以我觉得我们的态度是，这是你的数据，你想怎么做就怎么做，但我们会努力争取每天为您提供生产力服务的权利。
Original English >> Um, it was it had better entity recognition. It had uh better precision and recall. It was faster. Uh and we're like, "Yeah, that's that's our job, you [laughter] know." Uh so I think our take is, you know, it's your day to do what you want, but we're going to work hard to earn the right to your productivity every day.
>> 是的。顺着这个话题，你觉得……我的意思是，定价在当下是一个非常疯狂的问题，因为存在按席位计费的模式，而现在席位已经说不通了。想象一下运营……谢天谢地你们运营的是 Lightfield 而不是 Zendesk，对吧，这就像是他们怎么……
Original English >> Yeah. Where do you think I mean, kind of on that topic, I mean, pricing is such a crazy question right now because there's seatbased pricing where the seats don't make sense anymore. Like imagine running like thank god you run lightfield and not zenesk right it's like what are they like how
### 定价模式与基于结果的定价 你需要多少个席位？也许是零，对吧？这挺吓人的。然后还有点像基于结果的定价，但结果到底是什么？就像是我把东西卖出去了吗？如果我只是永远拥有一个满意的客户呢？你知道，我仍然为此在使用 CRM。所以结果这事有点棘手。除此以外，还有这样一种观点——显然我并不同意——但有人觉得软件已死，整套 SaaS 启示录，就像你知道的，你也可以说超级市场死了，你得自己种粮食；汽车制造商死了，你得自己焊铝材。你可以把这推向极端。但我猜，首先想问的是，你们是怎么考虑定价的？你们当初是怎么确定定价模式的？然后，你对这个领域基于结果的定价怎么看？因为这不像客户支持，支持几乎说得通，它就是一项成本，我能把这项成本降下来吗？当然，你可以让软件来回答问题，就像知识库一样，答案数量是固定的，我只要把答案和问题匹配起来就行。而销售几乎感觉会是人类坚守的最后一份工作，对吧？
Original English many seats do you need maybe zero right that's pretty scary then there's kind of like outcome based pricing but like what is an outcome it's like am I selling the thing what if I just have like a happy customer forever like you know I'm still using CRM for that so outcomes are kind of tricky and then against all of that you have this idea which I don't agree with obviously but like people like software is dead the whole SAS apocalypse like you know you're also going to you know supermarket Markets are dead. You're going to grow your own food. Car manufacturers are dead. You're going to weld your own aluminum. Like, you know, there's you could take this to the extreme, but like I guess where do you think about how did you come up with pricing maybe is kind of question number one. And then what do you think about outcomebased pricing in this space? Because it's not as like support almost makes sense where it's like it's a cost. Can I bring down the cost? And of course like you know you can have software answer questions like it's a knowledge base. there's a fixed number of of answers. I kind of match it up with the question whereas like it almost feels like the last job standing for humans will be sales,
>> 对吧？不过无论如何，关于定价、结果、竞争，只是很好奇你们是怎么考虑的，比如你们是如何从负定价一步步走到现有定价的——当然我并不建议你们永远保持负定价——
Original English >> right? Um but anyway, like kind of pricing outcomes, competition, just curious how you thought about like how did you get to your pricing from negative pricing, which I would not recommend you keep in perpetuity,
[笑声]
Original English [laughter]
>> 但你们究竟是如何走到现有定价的，以及你们如何看待那个三角关系中发生的一切？
Original English >> but kind of how did you get to pricing and how do you think about everything that's going on in that triangle?
>> 是的。这是个好问题。我们从两个极端开始做起，我们觉得那是找到有效边界最快的路径。我们最开始采用纯席位定价，因为那刚好契合 Salesforce 和 HubSpot 的世界。
Original English >> Yeah. Uh it's a good question. We we started with both extremes and we figured that that is the fastest path to to to to find the efficient frontier. We started with pure seat pricing um because it just matched the sort of Salesforce HubSpot world.
>> 额，当时是——
Original English >> U it was
>> 我觉得它当时在客户那里的反响非常好。但随后头部客户的使用量比尾部客户足足高出 10,000 倍。是的。
Original English >> I think it was received really well by our customers. Uh but then the the head just the head was using 10,000x more than the tail. Yeah.
>> 额，我们意识到——
Original English >> Uh and we realized that
>> 在消耗量层面的使用。
Original English >> using in terms of consumption.
>> 是的，在消耗量层面上。而且如果按席位定价，我们在这行做不了多久。
Original English >> Yeah. In terms of consumption. and uh we weren't going to be in business for a long time with with per seat pricing.
>> 于是我们尝试了最纯粹的用量定价，在 Lightfield 里所有东西都折算成点数，接着我们发现根本没人愿意碰任何功能了。
Original English >> So then we tried purist consumption pricing where uh everything is a credit um in in light field and um then we found that nobody touched anything.
>> 是啊。[笑声]
Original English >> Yeah. [laughter]
>> 你能想象那真是公司历史上最糟糕的三周，[笑声] 我们有这么多注册用户，但他们什么都——
Original English >> You could imagine it was it was the worst three weeks of the company's life [laughter] of we have all of these signups but they're not doing
>> 不做。是的，这可不妙。
Original English >> anything. Yeah. This is not good.
>> 是的。所以后来我们开始和客户交谈。我们意识到，实际上，我和 Joe 把 Lightfield 所做的工作大致分成了四个大类，并且我们能够区分它们。第一类大致就是你日常的 CRM 工作：记录会议、填写记录、更新任务。我想我们的大多数客户只是希望这些涵盖在平台费中，或者涵盖在席位定价中。他们会觉得：“在看未来一年的预算时，我可不想去考虑核心 CRM 的误差范围。”所以他们希望：“把这部分做成固定的。”接着我们发现了另外两类。一类大致是销售线索生成。
Original English >> Yeah. Um so then we started talking to customers. We realized there's sort of like um and Joe actually we we divided like sort of four buckets of work that lightfield does uh and and we're able to distinguish between them. Um the first was sort of your like everyday CRM work of capture a meeting, fill out records, update tasks. Um I think most of our customers just expect that to be covered in a platform fee or expect that to be covered in perceived pricing. They're like, I don't want to think about the like error bounds of my core CRM when I look at my budget, you know, over the next year. So, they're like, make that fixed. Um, and then we found there were two other buckets. One was sort of pipeline generation.
>> 在线索生成这块，你是很愿意支付用量费用的。你知道这里有数据丰富化，对你来说确实存在额外收益，你会拿到更多会议机会，而这些能转化成收入。然后还有另一类是工作流自动化，我认为大家对这项收费也是有心理预期的。
Original English >> Um, where you're you're pretty down to pay consumption pricing and pipeline generation. You realize there's enrichment, there's actually alpha for you. You'll get more meetings, you know, um that that can convert to revenue. Um, and then there's this other bucket of of workflow automations of uh where I think there's just an expectation that you pay for those.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 嗯。
Original English >> Um,
>> 顺便问下，这方面有什么好例子吗？
Original English >> what's a good example of that, by the way?
>> 比如有人在我们网站上注册申请演示，然后 Lightfield 会做一些背景调研并发现：“噢，这应该分配给 Henry，因为这是一家深科技公司；或者这应该分配给 Matt，因为这是一家医疗健康科技公司。”
Original English >> It would be like uh someone signs up on our website for a demo and then Lightfield does a little bit of research and realizes, oh, this should go to Henry because uh, you know, it's a it's a deep tech company or it should go to Matt because it's a health tech company.
>> 我觉得这是在做实打实的工作，对吧？你能想象出它的投资回报率。所以你会愿意为它付费。最后一项坦白讲就是智能与预测分析。这可能是 Lightfield 目前最未被发掘的部分，这就好比你手头拥有公司的微缩水晶球或雪花球，现在你要将前沿智能应用到上面，开始进行情景规划并推演下一步。我认为在那种场景下，你绝对愿意为其中的额外收益买单。是的。
Original English >> Um, and I think that's doing real work, right? you can imagine the ROI on that. So, so you'll you'll pay for that. And then the last piece is honestly intelligence and forecasting. Um, which is, you know, maybe the most undiscovered part of Lightfield of you've got this, you know, little like crystal ball or snow globe of your company and now you're going to deploy frontier intelligence to it and start scenario planning and figuring out what's next. And um, I think in that world you'll definitely pay for the, you know, you you'll pay for the alpha there. Yeah.
好。我在周末让 GPT-6 在 Lightfield 上跑了几个小时后，就调整了我的销售流程。所以，说了这么多，我们最终落脚在了这种核心 CRM 收取平台费加席位费、其余所有按用量收费的模式，目前反响相当不错。回到你关于结果的另一个问题，我认为作为一家销售软件公司，最难的一点在于我们的结果某种程度上取决于你产品与市场匹配度的高低，对吧？当然。
Original English All right. of um I changed my sales process after letting GPT6 rip on Lifefield for for a couple of hours on the weekend. So, uh all of that is to say, we sort of landed in this platform fee plus seat for um core CRM and we do consumption for everything else and it's landed pretty well. Uh to your other question about outcomes, um I think the hardest thing about being uh a sales company is that our outcomes are sort of dependent on the strength of your product market fit, right? Of course.
>> 如果让我们给 OpenAI 做外发拓展获客，效率会极其高，[笑声] 他们会取得惊人的成果，而且——
Original English >> Um it would be incredibly effic efficient for us to do outbound prospecting for open AI [laughter] and they' be they'd have incredible outcomes and
>> 他们本身就备受关注。
Original English >> they are interested.
>> 是的，没错。而如果让我去给一家连网站都没有的种子轮初创公司做外推，那效率就会极其低下。
Original English >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh and it would be uh incredibly uh uh inefficient, you know, for me to uh do outbound prospecting for a seedstage startup with no website.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 对吧。所以我认为目前我们落脚的地方就是：我们必须对工作本身收费。
Original English >> Right. Um so I think where where we've landed at the moment is we have to charge for the work.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 目前在这个领域，我们还不能完全按照结果收费。
Original English >> Uh we can't quite charge for the outcome in the space uh for now.
>> 确实。
Original English >> Yeah.
### 从 Tome 到 Lightfield：组织文化与迭代速度 >> 是的。或许从你创立 Tome 到今天，实际的工作方式发生了怎样的变化？一年多前我们刚认识的时候，这家公司让我觉得惊艳、非常着迷的一点就是你们的产品交付速度就已经快得惊人，而现在感觉迭代速度更是彻底飙升了。所以很好奇你们是如何围绕速度，以及这种前后阶跃式的变化，去设计公司文化、工具链和所有决策机制的。聊聊这方面吧。
Original English >> Yeah. Maybe from when you started Tome to today, how has the actual like work changed? Something that I found amazing and just really fascinating about the company when we first met over a year ago was just how fast you guys were already shipping and it feels like the velocity has just gone through the roof. So I'd be curious how you've designed company culture and tooling and all the decision-m around basically velocity and just the the the step function change from before and after. Talk a little bit about that.
>> 好的。我认为，我的意思是，我对 Tome 感到遗憾并绝对在 Lightfield 加以修正的一件事就是——我的联合创始人 Henry 经常这么说——我们过去有很多人在“过家家”。也就是说，你有名义上的产品负责人、营销负责人、客户成功负责人，他们各自都有自己的专属界限，如果有人对他们界限内的事情提出反馈，他们就会非常生气。是的。我认为正因如此，我们的进展慢如龟爬。或者换句话说，当时根本不可能完成业务转型，对吧？因为你身上的所有肢体都无法与大脑沟通。所以我们当时就觉得，额，而且我们之前还试图把计划做得太长远。
Original English >> Yeah. So I think I mean one of the things I regret about Tome that we definitely uh fixed with Lightfield is uh Henry my co-founder says this all the time is like we had a lot of people playing house you know which is to say that you have the product leader and the marketing leader and the CS leader and they all have their swim lanes and they get really mad if someone gives them feedback about something in their swimblade. Yeah. Um, and I I think because of that it just, you know, we were sort of slowed to a crawl. And, you know, maybe put another way, it was impossible to pivot, right? Because you had all of these like appendages that weren't talking to the
>> 大脑。所以我们当时就决定不再搞那套，并且我们之前还试图规划得过于超前。
Original English >> the brain. So, we were like, uh, and then we also tried to plan too far in advance.
>> 我觉得在当前这个办公司的时代，这是极具挑战性的。所以我们决定全都不搞那一套，没有人拥有排他的业务界限。
Original English >> Um, which I think is sort of challenging, you know, in this era of company building. Um, so we're like, none of that. Uh, no one has a swim lane.
>> 你知道那句老话，“人类一规划，上帝就发笑”。现在是“人类一规划，OpenAI 就更新”。
Original English >> You know, the expression man plans and God laughs. Now it's man plans and open AI lives.
>> 没错。[笑声] 是的，完全正确。所以现在我们——
Original English >> Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Exactly. Um so now we um
>> 有趣的是，每个人都负责产品，每个人也都负责客户成功。
Original English >> it's funny everyone owns product and everyone owns customer success.
>> 这确实是一种挺有意思的架构。我们公司目前有 40 个人，每天早上大家都参加同一个站会。我们会对最重要的问题按优先级排期，有些是交付层面的，有些是工程层面的，有些是客户成功层面的。然后谁手头有空，谁就直接接手去办。
Original English >> Uh which is kind of a an interesting setup of we do we have 40 people at the company. Everyone shows up to the same standup every morning. Um we stack rank the most important problems. Some of them are delivery some of them are engineering. Some of them are CS. And then whoever's free just takes them.
挺有意思的。
Original English interesting.
>> 而且我们做的是持续规划。所以每天这个任务清单都可能发生变化，每周我们都会重新评估这份清单。然后谁手头空下来，谁就接下那个问题。而且因为我们所处的这个时代，任何人都能够通过 Lightfield 快速熟悉客户情况。没错，对吧。任何人都可以快速熟悉我们的设计系统组件库，因为大语言模型可以直接操作 Figma；然后任何人都能自动在 Linear 中创建任务，因为 Lightfield 已经与 Linear 实现了互通。所以我们打造了这样一种环境，基本上每个人都是通才——
Original English >> Um, and we're and we do continuous planning. So, every day the list can change. Every week we we we reassess the list. Um, and then whoever's free just picks up the problem. Um, but it's, you know, because of that, sorry, because of the age that we're in, you know, anyone can ramp up on a customer through Lightfield. Yep. Right. uh anyone can ramp up on our design system library because the LLM can touch Figma and then you know anyone can autocreate tasks in linear because of light fields connectivity to linear. So we sort of have this this this environment where basically everyone is a generalist
>> 工程师负责推进项目，设计师负责推进项目，客户成功经理也负责推进项目。然后如果你是某个领域的专家，你可能就会更多地去处理类似的项目，比起——
Original English >> um and engineers run projects, designers run projects, CSMs run projects. Um, and then if you're the specialist, you sort of like work on uh more of the similar projects than
不是。
Original English not.
>> 对。你是怎么做到让每个人都是全栈通才，而且每个人，你知道，都在不断提出想法并专注于最重要的事情？你又是怎么让这种状态与这样一个高度连贯的……
Original English >> Yeah. How do you keep that everyone's a generalist and everyone's, you know, kind of constantly coming up with something and working on the most important thing? Like how do you keep that aligned with this very coherent,
>> 你懂的，对未来的构想保持一致的？我真不知道你该如何，你该如何管理这个过程？
Original English >> you know, view of the future? I I just don't know how you how do you how do you manage that process?
我想说，这始终是一种拉扯。你知道，每周我们都会开会讨论路线图和进入市场策略（GTM），然后不断进行删改。
Original English Yeah, I would say that it's um it's always this push and pull of you know each week we like meet about road mapping in GTM and we just edit it
>> 然后我们就会觉得……
Original English >> and I were like
>> “是的，有个客户提出了这个要求，但这与我们的使命契合吗？”并不契合，你懂的。所以我觉得就是这样持续不断地删改，
Original English >> yes we had this customer that asked for this like how does it fit into the mission it doesn't you know um so I think it's just this like constant editing
>> 确保公司产出的东西是连贯一致的。另外我想说的是，在 Lightfield 启动一个项目的门槛非常低，但交付一个项目的门槛相当高。
Original English >> to make sure that what's coming out of the company is coherent um we also I would say that the bar to start a project is very low at lightfield but the bar to ship the project is pretty high
>> 所以，我们仍然会举办全公司范围的 Bug 扫荡测试（bug bashes）。这是我在 Instagram 工作时学到的东西：在推送给客户之前，全公司的人必须先认可它。
Original English >> um So, we uh we still do company bug bashes. Uh it was something I learned at Instagram when I was there. Uh the company needs to like this before it goes to customers.
>> 确实。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 我觉得这两点结合在一起，能让我们保持相当快的速度。
Original English >> Um and I feel like those things combined keep us moving pretty fast.
>> 太酷了。那最让你担忧的事情是什么？
Original English >> So cool. What's the thing that worries you the most?
### 速度、扩张与参考标杆 >> 我会说是速度。我们身处这样一个非常耐人寻味的环境中，或许我可以分享一件过去的事。在创办 Lightfield 之前，我读过所有那些关于人们如何从各种红极一时的 CRM 迁移到 Salesforce 的 Tegus 报告。我记得读过一篇关于你们的一家投资组合公司 ElevenLabs 的报告，他们当时用着其中一款初创企业的 CRM，然后他们无法让那家公司足够快地开发出仪表板功能，
Original English >> I would say speed. Um I just say we're in this really interesting uh environment and uh maybe I'll I'll I'll share something from the past. Before we started Lightfield, I read all of these like Teus reports about people moving off of, you know, flavor of the month CRM to Salesforce and um I remember reading this one about uh one of your portfolio companies, 11 Labs, where they run, you know, one of these startup CRM and um then uh the uh they couldn't get that company to build dashboards fast enough
>> 拖了大概四个月。ElevenLabs 的人问烦了仪表板的事，最终迁移到了 Salesforce。
Original English >> and it was like four months, you know, and uh you know, the the the folks at 11 Labs were tired of asking for dashboards. It moved to Salesforce.
>> 这实际上也是最让我感到危机感的一点。我认为我们拥有一个不可思议的切入点，
Original English >> Y and uh that's actually the thing that makes me the most paranoid of I think we've got this incredible wedge
>> 那就是成为新公司最出色的 CRM，而我们必须把所有的功能都做出来，这样那些客户就永远不会产生重回旧世界的念头。
Original English >> of being just like the best CRM for new companies and we just have to build everything. So that uh you know those folks never feel the desire to go to the old world.
>> 确实。顺着这一点，你到底该如何确定优先级？我是说，这就是新世界的疯狂之处，而且这其实又回到了你说的每个人都是全栈通才那一点上。在过去，你可能会有一个 10 人的产品、设计和工程小组，或者随便多少人，但绝不是 100 人，也不是两个人。
Original English >> Yeah. How do you actually on that how do you prioritize? I mean, this is like the craziness about the new world and it actually goes back to like your point on everybody being a generalist is that once upon a time you would have like a 10 person product design and engineering pod or pick your number, but not not 100, not two.
>> 你会有一名产品经理，一名设计师，然后大约有九名工程师，排期可能都排到 2028 年了。
Original English >> Uh you'd have the product manager, you'd have the designer, and then you'd have like nine engineers and you would have things that would be like booked out until like 2028.
>> 而现在，任何人都可以直接通过提示词做出一个产品，对吧？所以如果大家实际上都理解我们需要做什么，那么一方面，你确实能以快得多的速度构建一切，
Original English >> Um and now anybody can just prompt their way into a product, right? So like if everybody actually is understanding like what we need to do but so on the one hand it's like you could build everything much more quickly
>> 但你仍然需要做权衡取舍：比如“我是否要优先服务这个客户？”因为你知道，糟了，我有这么一家很棒的公司，除非我把这个做出来，否则他们就会流失——这是做那件事的一个非常充分的理由。但这可能并不是一件好事，因为你还有其他 15 个客户，除非你把另一件事做出来，否则他们就不会签约。从公元前的时代起这就是个老难题了，不过我想知道的是，在当下这种人人皆可构建任何东西、因此理论上你的公司可以拥有无限多产品经理和工程师的 AI 时代里，你学到了什么？又有哪些不同的做法？
Original English >> um but you still have to make tradeoffs of like am I prioritizing this customer that I know like shoot I have this amazing company they're going to churn unless I build this that's a really good reason to build that thing but actually that might not be a good thing because you have like 15 other customers that you're not going to sign up unless you build the other thing and this is a time this has been a problem since like you BC era, but I guess how have you is there anything that you've learned and done differently in this kind of AI era around anybody can build anything and therefore you could theoretically have like unlimited product managers and engineers in your company.
>> 很有意思，在 Lightfield，我们算是建立起了这样一种能力：我们会去审视一个客户账户的扩张潜力。我认为作为一家身处红海领域的 CRM 公司，我们必须成为一家靠客户扩张驱动的公司。对吧。在竞争激烈的领域，你往往无法获得预期的初始切入规模，因为拿下每一家公司才是当务之急；但你会想：等到第三年、第五年，这就无所谓了，因为你们会成为一家庞大的公司，而我们将是你们的重要组成部分。所以我们秉持这样一种视角：在三年的时间跨度内，这个客户账户的扩张价值大概是多少？我们又该如何排优先级？我认为正因如此，相比普通客户，我们更倾向于优先为那些增长最快的客户做开发。不过在同一时间，我们又必须把所有东西都做出来，你知道，现在也是一个比以往更加讲求极繁主义的时期。
Original English >> It's funny in light field we sort of uh built this um this skill where we we like look at the expansion potential of an account and I think as a CRM company in a red ocean space we have to be an expansion company. Yeah. Right. Um you know I think in a competitive space you often um don't get the initial land that you would have expected because it's just important to win every company but you're like by year three by year five this is not going to matter because you'll be a huge company we'll be an important part of you right so I think we take this perspective of like what's sort of the expansion value of this account over a threeyear time horizon and how do we prioritize I think because of that we've like leaned more towards building for our fastest growing customers than um you know our average customer but uh but I would say at the same time we have to build everything and you know it's sort of a time of being a little more maximalist than usual.
>> 另一件挺有意思的事是，据我观察——我常常喜欢开玩笑说——AI 在硅谷几乎被过度吹捧了。我倒不觉得真是这样，但在世界这个小角落之外，它却被极大地低估了。
Original English >> The other thing that's kind of interesting is that my observation is uh I kind of like to joke that's that AI is almost overhyped in Silicon Valley. I don't think it is but and it's like massively underhyped outside of this little region of the world.
>> 部分原因在于人们已经有好几年没去尝试新事物了。就像是：“噢，我在 2022 年 11 月试过 ChatGPT，它产生了幻觉。噢，这玩意儿根本不管用。”然后他们就把它搁置一边了。现在他们又觉得这东西不知怎地会要了他们的命。[笑声] 不过，我是指，你如何看待长远……这其实类似于绿地与棕地的关系，你能拿下硅谷，但跨越鸿沟进入这个国家的其他地区、进入世界的其他地方，那是完全不一样的……我的意思是，他们是同一类型的客户：他们有产品、有员工、有销售人员、卖东西、需要报表，但他们并没有那么紧跟前沿，你不能只是在 101 号公路打个广告就能触达他们。对于硅谷的过度炒作与世界其他地区的低估，你怎么看？
Original English >> Um and part of it is like people haven't tried things in years. like, "Oh, I tried chat GBT in November of 2022 and it hallucinated something. Oh, that doesn't work." And then they just kind of put it to bed. Now they think it's going to kill them somehow. [laughter] Um, but I mean, how do you think about like long like, you know, kind of it's it's related to Greenfield versus Brownfield, but like you can get Silicon Valley, but it's kind of crossing the chasm into like the rest of the country, the rest of the world where that's a very very I mean, it's the same type of customers. They have products, they have employees, they have salespeople, they sell things, they want reports, but they're not as plugged in to like you can't just like advertise on 101 uh and and reach them. How do you think about Silicon Valley overhype versus kind of rest of world underhype?
>> 确实。我认为对于大多数这类记录系统（System of Record）公司来说，最终你的大部分收入规模实际上都来自这里 50 英里开外乃至更远的地方。我一直把创业的这个阶段视作获取参考客户品牌标识（reference logos）的契机，那就是，你知道，我们有些客户融了大概 2 亿美元，却只有三个负责市场拓展的人，而他们将来有一天会变得极其庞大。所以我们只需要为他们提供极其出色的产品服务，这样等我们走向世界其他地区时，就能把他们的品牌拿出来背书，说：“好，我们已经拿下了医疗行业，或者我们拿下了金融科技，诸如此类。”所以，我并不觉得聚焦硅谷是一种高效的收入获取方式，而实际上它只是一个高效的市场营销抓手，便于我们走向市场并展示说：“好的，我们非常期待进入制造业。我们实际上已经在这里与一批优秀的制造企业展开合作了，现在我们也可以为你们提供同样的服务。”
Original English >> Yeah. Uh I think for most of these system of record companies, you end up getting most of your revenue scale from actually, you know, the the 50 miles out of here and and more. Um, I've always thought about this moment in company building as a trick to get reference logos, which is that, you know, we have customers that have raised like $200 million that have three go to market people and they're going to be huge one day. U, so we just need to do amazing work for them so we can take their logos when we go to the rest of the world and be like, "All right, we've got we've got healthcare, you know, or we've got uh, you know, fintech or or whatever it is." So, I I just see the focus on Silicon Valley not as a not as efficient revenue capture, but actually just like efficient marketing capture to go out there and be like, "All right, we're excited to get into manufacturing. We're actually working with a bunch of great manufacturing companies here and now we can do that for you."
>> 客户的想法多有意思，对吧？就像是：好吧，你们用的是一模一样的软件，但不知为何，要是乔和我不在同一个行业，即便他是一个超级满意的客户，即便我想用一模一样的东西——我这里用 Fields 的例子打比方，多担待一下——但就算我存的是一模一样的数据，我还是不知道自己能不能信任你，因为他是卖牙刷的，而我是卖可口可乐的。对。
Original English >> What is funny how customers think, right? It's like, all right, you're using the exact same software, but like somehow like if Joe is in a different industry than me and he's a super happy customer and like I want the exact same I'm going to use the Fields example, so just bear with me. But like I'm stoing the exact same stuff, but I don't know if I can trust you because he sells, you know, toothbrushes and I sell, you know, Coca-Cola. Yeah.
>> 但如果是卖牙刷的人，“噢，那我必须用另一家卖牙刷的人在用的东西。”这真的很奇怪。我一直觉得这很不可思议，但不知为何又绕回到了标杆可参考性上。就像客户只是想求个稳，就像过去那句老话“没人会因为买了 IBM 的产品而被解雇”。就像是我想要确保这套系统行之有效，尤其是作为记录系统这类关键工具；在下决心转型之前，我希望看到竞争对手、朋友，或者同一个垂直领域的同行已经在用这款产品了。所以，你觉得这是否近乎真实存在？因为就像你提到的制造业对比某某行业，归根结底，客户就是客户。对吧。
Original English >> But it's like if he sells toothbrush, oh, I must have the thing that the other toothbrush seller sells. It's it's really peculiar. I always found that where it's like it's the but like somehow that goes back to referenceability. It's like customers like they just want to know like it's like the old nobody gets fired for buying IBM. It's like I want to know that this works especially for something that is a system of record and I want to know that somebody that is a competitor to me or a friend of mine or like somebody in like the same you know kind of vertical is using the product before I'm willing to make the jump. So do do you find that that's true almost because it's like you mentioned manufacturing versus X. It's like at the end of the day, a customer is a customer. Yeah.
>> 确实。业务背景、联系方式，这一切信息都是相通的。但为什么……难道他们仅仅是因为这款产品承载了极高的信任度而在意这些吗？
Original English >> Right. Like the context and the the the contact information, like all that stuff is the same, but like why why do is it is it just like they care because they there's just so much trust associated with the product?
>> 我想是的。在很多方面，更换 CRM 或许比更换银行还要困难。
Original English >> I think so. I think in in many ways your your CRM is maybe harder to move off of than your bank.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 而且……
Original English >> Um and
>> 它是 Lightfield。
Original English >> it's a light field.
### 行业标杆效应与企业自研迷思 >> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 对，确实如此。然后我们、我们让它变得很简单。
Original English >> Yeah. Exactly. And then we we make it easy.
>> 我们、是的，我们让它变得容易多了。嗯，但我、我、我认为就心理负担而言，你就是不想选错。
Original English >> We Yeah, we've made it a lot easier. Um but I I I think in terms of like the the mental overhead you just do not want to choose the wrong one.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yes.
>> 嗯，正因如此，我认为可参考性（客户背书）能起到很大作用。嗯，来的路上我还跟 Joe 说，我们、呃，你知道，我们在医疗保健和健康科技领域做得非常好。呃，我认为部分原因在于，你知道，我们非常擅长处理那些有大约 50 个不同利益相关者的复杂交易。我们的上下文工程做得很棒，而且我们在初期就对安全要求极为严苛，所以我们签署了 BAA，你知道的，我们多年来进行渗透测试，嗯……
Original English >> Um and and because of that I I think that the referenceability goes a long way. Um on the way in I was telling Joe that we uh you know we we do great with um healthcare and health tech. Uh I think part of it is you know that we do really well in these complex deals where there's like 50 different stakeholders. our context engineering done really well and also we we were hardcore about security at the start so we signed baasa you know and we did penetration testing um for for years and
>> 嗯，现在对我们来说，赢得健康科技领域的交易太容易了，
Original English >> um now it's so easy you know for us to win a health tech deal
>> 呃，我认为这是因为我们拥有这样一张可以供人参考并继续推进的网络，而且我认为这就是游戏规则的一部分，你知道的。嗯，如果设想换作我自己，比如，你知道的，我不想选错 ERP，所以我可能会想选那些跟我类似的公司所选择的 ERP，
Original English >> uh and I think it's because we sort of have this like network that that we can reference and move on and I think that's just part of the game you know um if I imagine even myself like you know I don't want to choose the wrong ERP you know, so I probably want to choose the ERP that companies who look like me chose
>> 呃，这样我买了之后就再也不用操心这件事了。
Original English >> uh so that I never have to think about this after I buy it.
>> 是的。你、回到前面的一个问题，在这个疯狂的时代，你是否会遇到有人说：“不，我什么都不打算用。我就要自己造，因为那是最疯狂的，对吧？就像、像是我会一直在这家公司吗，比如在我们公司工作的那个人决定去氛围编码（vibe code）一个 CRM，就像它是免费的，对吧？但像支持服务，它是免费的吗？就像我付给他或她的薪水可不是免费的。但是你有没有遇到过试图自己动手造的人，还是说呃、还是说那有点被过度讨论了？
Original English >> Yeah. Do you do you run into kind of going back to an earlier question, do you run into people in this crazy era of saying, "No, I'm not going to use anything. I'm just going to build it myself because that's the craziest, right? It's like like am I going to be around like is the guy that is working at my company who's decided to vibe code a CRM like the it's free, right? But like the support, is it free? Like the salary that I'm paying him or her isn't free. But do you run into people that are trying to DIY or is that uh is that kind of over overtalked about?
>> 我觉得有点被过度讨论了。嗯，当我们的理想客户画像（ICP）是种子轮阶段创始人时，我们常常听到这种说法。
Original English >> I think it's a little overtalked about. Um we we heard it a lot when our ICP was like the the seed stage founder.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 嗯，那时我们常常听到：看，我们要么付给你们 X 块钱，要么……
Original English >> Um where we and we would often hear look we can either pay you X or
>> 我们可以在大概四个周末里搞定这个。我们当时就想：太好了，
Original English >> we can do this over like four weekends and we were like great
>> 祝你们好运。
Original English >> good luck.
>> 祝好运，你们确实该试试。五个周末后给我们打电话。
Original English >> Good luck. You should you should try it. call us in five weekends.
>> 是的，没错。呃，然后他们就变成：“呃，像这些东西完全没法正常工作。它在胡说八道（幻觉）。它在乱发糟糕的邮件。”我、我认为在大公司那边，嗯，我们听到的不是“我要构建自己的记录系统（system of record）”，我们听到的是“我要构建我们自己的企业大脑”。
Original English >> Yeah, exactly. Uh and then they were like, uh like none of this works right. It's hallucinating. It's sending out bad emails. I I think on the like larger company side, um we don't hear I'm going to build my own system of record. We hear I'm going to build my own company brain.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 嗯，经常听到。然后我们、我们遇到很多这样的人回过头来说：其实构建一个企业大脑，或者构建一个业务世界模型真的非常难。呃，我认为其中最难的部分也许是对客户进行建模。所以，我们尝试过了，但我们对结果不满意。所以我们现在来找你们了。
Original English >> Um a lot. And then we we we've had so many of these folks come back and be like, actually building a company brain or building building a business world model is really hard. Uh, and I think maybe the hardest part of it is modeling the customers. So, we tried and we don't like our results. So, we'll come to you now.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
### 产品远景与转型建议 >> 对于未来，你最感到兴奋的是什么？
Original English >> What are you most excited about for the future? I
>> 我是说，我认为我最兴奋的事情——挺有意思的。我、嗯，我对 Lightfield 成为你进行情景规划的某种水晶球感到非常兴奋。嗯，真正让我每天早上充满干劲起床的，其实是看着大家使用 Lightfield 来思考：呃，我应该招聘多少名销售代表？呃，我接下来应该做什么产品？我该走向何方？嗯，并且，呃，你知道，我们的一位做企业级销售的客户，呃，通过 Lightfield 发现他需要打造一款面向中端市场的产品，
Original English >> mean, I think the thing I'm most excited about, it's it's funny. I um I'm stoked about Lifefield becoming your sort of crystal ball for scenario planning. Um, and the the the thing that gets me up in the morning is actually having folks use Lightfield to think about u how many reps should I hire? Uh, what product should I build next? Where do I go? Um, and uh, you know, one of our customers uh, who sells to enterprise discovered through Lightfield he needs to build a mid-market product
>> 呃，正是基于他发现的这一点，他开发了这整条全新的产品线。而且我、我非常兴奋我们能成为那面镜子——
Original English >> uh, and built this whole new product line because of this thing he found. And I'm I'm just excited about us being that sort of like mirror.
>> 是的。让一家公司据此做出他们最艰难、影响最深远的决定。我认为这回到了 Alex 之前提到的观点，比如好吧，在这个极客盛行、你可以为任何人构建产品的世界里，实际上的答案是拥有像 Lightfield 这样的工具。就像如果你拥有了所有这些数据和所有这些上下文，你就能真正做到数据驱动，而这正是将前沿智能投入到极其复杂的决策中的绝佳机会，对吧？并且、并且这在历史上往往需要像真正聪明的人、大量运营人员、SQL 以及一堆其他东西，而现在你只需要跟 Lightfield 聊聊，你知道的，聊一个下午或者一个周末，就能拿出一个非常明智的前进计划。我认为这就是你们能够以如今这种方式经营公司的原因之一，这真的非常非常酷。嗯，也许我最后想问你的问题是：有很多人可能、我认为至少会有一小部分正在经历转型时刻的人正在看这个，你知道，他们在展望未来，想象自己成为 Keith，在谈论他们惊艳的新公司。如果你带着后见之明重新开始这段转型之旅，你会回去给自己的一条建议是什么？
Original English >> Yes. for a company to make their their hardest most consequential decision. I think this is this goes back to the point Alex was making on like okay in this world of like maximalist and you can you can build for anyone actually the answer is having a tool like lightfield like if you just have all of this data and all this context you can actually be data driven and this is the exact opportunity to throw frontier intelligence at a really complicated decision right and and it's something that historically would have required like really smart people and a lot of ops folks and SQL and a bunch of other stuff and instead now you just talk to Lightfield, you know, for an afternoon or a weekend and come up with a really intelligent plan to move forward. And I think that's one of the reasons that you can run your company the way you run it, which is really really cool. Um, maybe my last question for you is there's a lot of people that may I think there at least there will be a handful of people that are going through some pivot moment that are watching this and you know thinking about the future where they're Keith and they're talking about their new amazing company. What would be the one piece of advice that you'd go back and give yourself if you were just starting the pivot journey again with the benefit of hindsight?
>> 我认为最重要需要记住的事情是，呃，当你处于转型期时，你身边的杂音几乎没有什么是重要的。嗯，你只需要找到痛点。你需要受到启发去打造一款能够解决那个痛点的产品或服务，而且你需要像着了魔一样极度专注于你的客户。
Original English >> I think the the most important thing to to remember is that uh almost none of the noise around you matters when you're in a pivot. Um you just need to find pain. You need to be inspired to build a product or service that solves that pain and you need to be like maniacally focused on your customers.
>> 是的。
Original English >> Yeah.
>> 嗯，剩下的就完全是杂音了。我记得当我们经历那段时期时，人们在谈论办公室如何让他们回想起过去的美好时光，他们在谈论伙食怎么没有新意，他们在谈论说好吧那我的期权要怎么重新定价，而嗯，说实话，那些都不重要。我认为你只需要戴上眼罩，呃，你知道的，专注于核心。
Original English >> Um and then the rest is total noise. I remember when we were going near this, people were talking about how their office reminded our office reminded them of the good old days. They were talking about how like the food wasn't inspiring. They were talking about like well how are my options going to get repriced and um honestly like none of that matters. I think you can just put the blinders on and uh you know and f focus on the core.
>> 是的。嗯，我们对你所取得的成就感到无比钦佩。你打造的事业、这个产品绝对不可思议。如果你还没试过，你一定要去试试。它太不可思议了。去 lightfield.app 体验一下吧。Keith，能与你合作绝对是一件乐事，我们对未来无比期待。感谢你给予的荣幸。
Original English >> Yeah. Well, I we could not be more impressed with what you've done. the business you've built, the product is absolutely incredible. If you haven't tried it, you need to try it. It's incredible. Go check it out at lightfield.app. Keith, it's an absolute pleasure to work with you and we're so excited for the future. Thanks for the honor.
>> 感谢邀请我。
Original English >> Thanks for having me.
>> 好的。谢谢，Keith。
Original English >> Yeah. Thanks, Keith.