數百萬客戶的企業 寥寥幾個的員工

The technology that followed the invention of the transistor in 1947 and later the microchip — and the subsequent speeding up and shrinking of electronic processes — has had many unexpected spin-offs.

1947年晶體管發明，隨後微芯片發明並帶來電子處理的加速和縮減。在這些發明之後出現的科技，已帶來了很多意外的副產品。

One that amuses me is the revival, as I see it, of letter writing. To those who thought the telephone had killed written communication, email, texting and a zillion forms of messaging must have come as quite a surprise.

一個讓我感到愉快的副產品是寫信的復興（在我看來）。對於那些本以爲電話消滅了書面交流的人而言，電子郵件、短信和無數種消息傳遞方式一定讓他們相當驚訝。

Another unimagined consequence of transistorisation (a word, incidentally, that has not appeared once in the FT in recent decades) has interested me of late. It is the way businesses can become global brands with millions of customers while having next to no staff or overheads. Uber, as it is often pointed out, owns no cars, Airbnb, no rooms.

近來，讓我感興趣的是“晶體管化”（順便一提，這個詞近幾十年來一次都未曾在英國《金融時報》上出現過）的另一個意外結果就是：企業可以變成擁有數百萬客戶的國際品牌，同時卻只有寥寥幾個員工、微乎其微的管理費用。就如人們經常指出的那樣，優步(Uber)不擁有任何車輛，Airbnb也不擁有任何房間。

Instagram is always the classic example of low headcount. When it was bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1bn, it had 13 employees and just under 100m users. Today, it has a still modest 400 staff, but 400m users.

Instagram始終是員工數量極少的經典例子。2012年Instagram被Facebook以10億美元的價格收購時，該公司僅有13名員工，用戶數量略低於1億人。今天，Instagram的員工數量依然不多（400名），但卻擁有4億用戶。

Two recent conversations with a pair of bouncy tech start-ups have vividly illustrated this continuing Instagram phenomenon.

近期我與兩家充滿活力的創業型科技公司創始人的談話，生動地體現出這種Instagram現象的延續。

The first was in New York with Emmanuel Marot, co-founder of LendingRobot, an automated platform for people putting money into peer-to-peer lending companies, primarily the US leader Lending Club, but also Prosper and Funding Circle.

第一次是在紐約與LendingRobot的聯合創始人埃馬紐埃爾•馬羅(Emmanuel Marot)的談話。LendingRobot是一個自動投資平臺，供人們將資金投入P2P借貸公司——主要是美國的領軍P2P借貸公司Lending Club，但也包括Prosper和Funding Circle。

Fintech is not particularly my thing, and as of last week, it didn’t seem to be the finance industry’s thing either, after Renaud Laplanche, Lending Club’s founder, resigned. Its shares duly plummeted following the results of an internal investigation, and the whole sector is not now at its most fragrant.

我對金融科技並不是特別感冒，就上週Lending Club創始人雷諾•拉普朗什(Renaud Laplanche)辭職時的情況來看，金融科技似乎沒有得到金融業的青睞。這家公司的股價在一次內部調查的結果公佈後應聲暴跌，整個行業也不復最景氣時的光景。

As an independent business, however, the two-year-old LendingRobot claims its business of robotically selecting the best borrowers available is proceeding as normal. It has 5,000 clients representing $80m, with investors staking from $200 to $4m.

然而，作爲一家獨立企業，創立已經2年的LendingRobot聲稱其自動選擇最佳可選借款人的業務正在照常開展。該公司擁有5000名客戶，這些客戶代表的資金達8000萬美元，股東對這家公司的投資從200美元到400萬美元不等。

My meeting with Mr Morot came just before the Lending Club debacle. And while the finance teach-in was educational, it was inevitably the technology behind the business that grabbed my imagination.

我與馬羅的會面是在Lending Club股價暴跌前不久進行的。儘管那場金融討論會很有教育意義，激發我想象力的難免還是支撐這家企業的技術。

LendingRobot’s algorithm rates 40 borrower characteristics to predict the probability of default. It can filter hundreds of thousands of borrowers in milliseconds and provide potential lenders with a selection of quality loans within five seconds.

LendingRobot的算法通過評定借款人的40項特質來預測違約的可能性。該算法能夠在數毫秒內篩完數十萬借款人，在5秒內爲潛在的貸款人提供一組優質貸款。

So how many staff does LendingRobot have? Seven. Does it plan to expand?

那麼LendingRobot有多少名員工呢？7名。該公司是否計劃擴大人員規模？

“There’s no need,” said Mr Morot. “We are electronic. To improve our machine learning algorithm, we use a team of scientists in Moscow. Actually, our app was developed by a guy in Sweden whom we’ve never met or even talked to.”

“沒有這個必要，”馬羅說，“我們是電子公司。我們聘用了莫斯科的一個科學家團隊來改善我們的機器學習算法。事實上，我們的應用是瑞典的一個人開發的，我們從來沒跟他見過面，甚至從沒跟他說過話。”

The Moscow team, he added, themselves outsource. “I believe there is even someone at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva working for us.”

他補充道，莫斯科那個團隊自己也把一些工作外包出去。“我相信，甚至有個在日內瓦大型強子對撞機(LHC)工作的人在幫我們幹活兒。”

Back in London, I discussed this palpable lack of bums-on-seats with Chris Sheldrick, founder of What3Words, a fascinating start-up I wrote about last October.

回到倫敦，我和What3Words的創始人克里斯•謝爾德里克(Chris Sheldrick)討論了企業僱員較少的明顯問題（我曾在去年10月寫過一篇有關這家有趣的創業型企業的文章）。

What3Words is in the course of revolutionising postal addresses. It divides the world into 57tn 3-metre squares, allocating each a three-word address. This makes it possible for packages to be delivered to a tent in the desert or a spot in a Gulf state devoid of reliable addresses.

What3Words正在給郵政地址帶來一場革命。該公司將地球表面分成了57萬億塊（每塊3米見方），給每一塊分配一個3個單詞的地址。這讓包裹能夠寄送到沙漠中的一個帳篷，或者某個缺乏可靠地址的海灣國家的某個位置。

Mr Sheldrick is becoming something of a British tech hero, as well as an interesting thinker on matters tech and start-up. Since I first met him in September, What3Words has expanded — from 12 people to 15. His estimate for the business’s headcount once it is a true global brand used, conceivably, by billions? No more than 30.

某種程度上，謝爾德里克正成爲一名英國科技英雄，他對科技和創業型公司方面的事情也有許多有趣的思考。比起我去年9月第一次見到他的時候，如今What3Words的人員規模擴大了——從12個人增加到了15個。如果這家公司真正成爲一個數十億人都使用的國際品牌，他估計這家公司的員工會有多少人呢？不超過30人。

“What3Words is an encoder and decoder of GPS co-ordinates. It doesn’t need a lot of people servicing it, and that was part of the appeal when we started it.”

“What3Words是全球定位系統(GPS)座標的編碼器和解碼器。不需要很多人維護它，這也是我們創立它時的部分吸引力所在。”

I asked Mr Sheldrick to suggest what makes such seemingly infinite scaleability possible. He thought about this for a while.

我請謝爾德里克說一說是什麼讓這種似乎無限的業務可擴展性成爲可能。他思索了一會兒。

“The value in today’s platforms,” he finally said, “is having a lot of people doing the same thing in sync. There’s probably a load of other things where people want to do something the same way and there could be a platform for them to do that.

“今天這些平臺的價值，”他最後說，“在於讓很多人協同做同一件事情。很可能還有很多其他事情，是人們想要以同樣的方式去做的，有可能會有一個平臺讓他們實現願望。”

“This time next year,” he concluded, “we’ll be talking about how someone else has done that.”

“明年的這個時候，”他總結道，“我們就會在討論其他人是怎麼實現這一點的。”