打败优步的柳青

For two years, Jean Liu and Travis Kalanick were mortal adversaries, as their businesses, the world’s two largest ride-sharing companies, fought an increasingly bitter and expensive war. Kalanick, CEO of Uber, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing app, was trying to muscle into China, where Liu is president of Didi Chuxing, Uber’s Chinese equivalent.

2年来，柳青(Jean Liu)和特拉维斯•卡兰尼克(Travis Kalanick)一直是死敌，他们各自的企业、世界上最大的两家共乘公司，打了一场日渐激烈和昂贵的战争。总部位于旧金山的打车应用公司优步(Uber)的首席执行官卡兰尼克试图以强力突入中国市场，而柳青则是类似优步的中国企业滴滴出行(Didi Chuxing)的总裁。

The hard-fought contest saw their respective companies spend in excess of $1bn a year in a battle to lock in market share and bankrupt each other. It also pitted the man who, for many, represents the macho culture of Silicon Valley against a woman who, at first glance, appears to typify the “gentle”, soft-spoken persona of the Chinese feminine ideal.

这场艰苦的较量让他们各自公司为了锁定市场份额并耗尽对方实力，一年花费逾10亿美元。这也是一场在很多人眼中代表硅谷男性文化的男人，与一个乍看之下似乎是“温柔”、轻言细语的中国女性理想典范的女人之间的较量。

Liu laughs when asked about the dynamic. Kalanick “is an aggressive businessman but a good player,” she says. The one detail that stands out, she says, is his taste for red sneakers. “Travis impressed me with his consistent taste . . . every time I saw him he wore the same pair of red sneakers,” she laughs. “He has a consistent taste in shoes so I guess that means he is a guy who is consistent and persistent — and focused.”

当被问到两人之间的这种互动时，柳青笑起来。她说，卡兰尼克“是一个强硬的商人，但也是一个优秀的竞争者”，有一个细节非常突出，那就是他对红色运动鞋的钟爱。“特拉维斯始终如一的品味让我印象深刻……每次我看到他，他都穿着同一双红色运动鞋，”她笑着说，“他对鞋子的品味一直不变，因此我猜想，这意味着他也是一个始终如一、坚持不懈的人——而且专注。”

And what about that female stereotype? Sitting in her Beijing office, Liu discusses the clichés she has to contend with each day. “In China, women should act more gently and speak more softly,” she says. “That’s a Chinese cultural stereotype from ancient history. So a lot of times if you speak too loudly, you’re being considered overly aggressive.”

那个有关女性的刻板印象呢?坐在她位于北京的办公室里，柳青谈到了她必须每天应对的陈词滥调。“在中国，女性应该表现得更温柔，说话应该更轻柔，”她说，“这是中国自古以来的文化定式。因此很多时候，如果你说话太大声，你会被认为过于咄咄逼人。”

Liu’s rise to fame in the tech world is not exactly testament to a gentle approach. This August, the 38-year-old — along with Didi’s chairman Cheng Wei — won the war against Uber, which sold its China operations for a 20 per cent stake in Didi. Uber is infamous for playing rough but Didi was rougher — or, at least, richer — and enjoyed home-court advantage. In what became a fantastically reckless round of poker, both companies spent an astronomical amount on subsidies in an attempt to grab market share.

柳青在科技企业界的声名鹊起并不只是证明了“温柔”策略的胜利。今年8月，38岁的柳青和滴滴董事长程维一同在与优步的战争中取得了胜利。后者将中国业务卖给滴滴，换得滴滴20%的股份。优步因为野蛮竞争而臭名昭彰，而滴滴更野蛮——或者，至少钱包更鼓——并且享有主场优势。在令人难以置信的一轮不计后果的比拼中，两家公司都为了夺取市场份额花掉了天文数字的资金用于补贴。

Winning took a lot of money, which Liu helped bring in, and also nerves. To raise billions and then essentially give it away in subsidies required something greater: a cast-iron belief in eventual success. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without burning cash,” boasted a distinctly bolder Liu, at the height of the war in September 2015. She might as well have lit a cigar with a $100 bill. “Cash burning” became a mantra for Didi and, eventually, Uber ended the epic battle.

胜利需要大量的金钱，柳青不仅帮助带来了这些资金，还带来了胆量。募集数十亿资金，再以补贴的形式实际上将这些资金送出去，需要一些更强大的东西：相信最终会成功的铁一般的信念。“不烧钱我们走不到今天这一步，”在2015年9月烧钱大战的顶峰，显然更为大胆的柳青夸口。她没准用一张100美元的钞票点过雪茄呢。“烧钱”成为了滴滴的真言，最终优步终结了这场史诗大战。

Liu continues to resist the idea that the outcome with Uber was anything other than a consensual, win-win affair. “The war with Uber . . .” She catches herself. “Actually, I didn’t mean to say war, because it wasn’t a war . . . War is short term but when we talk about building something, that is long term.”

柳青依然坚持，与优步的最终结果只是共识性的双赢局面，而不是这之外的任何情况。“与优步的战争……”她发现自己也出现了口误，“事实上，我并不是说那是一场战争，因为那并不是一场战争……战争是短期的，但当我们说到建立什么东西，那是长期的。”

Outside the cloister of Liu’s office lies the geometric concrete landscape of Zhongguancun — China’s answer to Silicon Valley — a northern suburb of Beijing, which is home to some of the country’s biggest tech companies. The latte-drinking, bike-sharing culture of Zhongguancun is heavily tilted towards a brand of Silicon Valley evangelism: the idea that advancing technology can be a game without losers. “[A] focus on winning and losing just limits your potential,” Liu says.

在柳青的办公室外是中关村几何式的混凝土实景。位于北京北部的中关村相当于美国的硅谷，是中国最大的一些科技公司的所在地。中关村喝拿铁咖啡、共享单车的文化明显带有硅谷特有的福音主义的痕迹：认为推进科技可以是一种没有输家的游戏。“只关心输赢只会限制你的潜力，”柳青说。

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The contest with Uber was just a warm-up for the real test that Liu now faces — transforming Didi from a $35bn taxi company into a global internet powerhouse. At its current valuation, Didi is approaching China’s behemoths Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, which, collectively, cater to the world’s largest internet market.

与柳青现在面临的真正考验——把滴滴从一家估值350亿美元的打车公司转变为一家全球性互联网巨擘——相比，和优步的较量只是一场热身。滴滴目前的估值正在接近中国的互联网巨头腾讯(Tencent)、阿里巴巴(Alibaba)和百度(Baidu)，这三家公司都服务于中国这个世界最大的互联网市场。

According to official figures, China outstrips everyone else in just about every metric one can find to measure internet business: its ecommerce market is greater than that of the US; its internet-payments industry accounts for two-thirds of global volumes; and it has one-fifth of the world’s smartphone users. Liu gives another example: Didi currently handles 20 million rides per day — that is three times larger than the global total for ride-hailing apps, she says.

官方数据显示，在衡量互联网业务的几乎所有指标上，中国都领先于其他国家：中国的电商市场规模大于美国;中国的互联网支付行业处理了全球三分之二的互联网支付额;中国拥有全球五分之一的智能手机用户。柳青还举了另外一个例子：滴滴目前每天要处理2000万个订单，是全球其他叫车应用公司订单总和的三倍。

Getting that number to grow may be tricky and, crucially, means redefining Didi’s mission: 20 million seems like a lot until you measure it against all rides, everywhere in China. This figure is somewhere around 700 million each day, according to Liu’s back-of-the-envelope calculation. “Twenty million daily rides — that only represents 2 per cent of everybody’s daily ride. That means huge potential in front of us. But, in order to achieve that, it means we have to make huge technology breakthroughs. We need to invest all of our capacity and manpower,” she says.

让这个数字继续增长可能难度很大，而且关键是，这意味着重新定义滴滴的使命：2000万看似很多，但把它跟全中国全部的出行次数相比，就不会这样觉得了。根据柳青的粗略计算，全中国每天大约有7亿人次乘车出行。柳青说：“每天2000万订单仅仅代表着出行总数的2%，这意味着巨大的市场潜力。不过，为了挖掘这个潜力，我们需要有重大的技术突破。我们需要投入我们全部的能量和人力。”

The end of the (non) war with Uber has given Liu and her team something they desperately crave — time to focus on these emerging challenges. She is just back from a round of meetings in the US aimed at recruiting big-data scientists. Burning cash to get a critical mass of customers, she says, was the way to get “from zero to one” but to get from “one to 100” you need technology such as big data and machine learning.

结束与优步的“非战争”给了柳青及其团队渴求的东西——有时间专注于这些新的挑战。她刚刚结束了在美国的一轮会议回国，此行旨在招聘大数据科学家。她表示，烧钱赢得临界数量的用户是“从0到1”，但要实现“从1到100”，你就需要大数据和机器学习等技术。

“If you go downstairs and try to get a car, that’s easy,” she says. “But if 100 people go downstairs and try to get a car, that wouldn’t work. Now think about it for a moment — what if the network knows that at this moment, 11.45am, there will always be 100 people coming out of this building? And what if the network knows which directions they will be going? And what if the network knows the drivers around this area — where their destinations are? Then we can match perfectly,” she says, every bit the technology evangelist.

“如果你要下楼打一辆车，这很容易。”她说，“但如果100个人同时下楼打车，就不好办了。现在，你想象一下，如果网络知道，在上午11点45分这个时候总是会有100个人到这座楼的楼下打车，如果网络知道他们去往哪个方向，如果网络知道有哪些司机在这周边，他们又去往哪里，我们就能完美地进行调配。”一个十足的技术布道者。

As a successful female business leader, Liu is still a rarity, but she insists that in China women face fewer obstacles in technology companies than they do elsewhere. While glass ceilings might be very hard to crack, they are comparatively easier in customer-driven, private-sector-dominated industries such as technology. A study by the Cyberspace Administration of China estimates that women founded 55 per cent of new internet companies in the country. This compares with the US, where only 22 per cent of start-ups have one or more women on their founding teams, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya, authors of Innovating Women (2014). “My feeling is that there are more women in China in tech than in other industries,” Liu says. “In the internet era, the key to a successful business is understanding the customers’ expectations — and half the customers are women.”

作为一名成功的女性企业领导人，柳青这样的女性仍属凤毛麟角，但她坚称，在中国，女性在科技公司面临的障碍比其他地方少。尽管玻璃天花板可能很难打破，但是在科技等客户驱动、私营企业主导的行业里，女性晋升相对容易些。中国国家互联网信息办公室(Cyberspace Administration of China，简称“网信办”)在一项研究中估计，中国55%的新互联网公司都是女性创立的。相比之下，《创新女性》(Innovating Women)(2014年出版)作者维维克•瓦德瓦(Vivek Wadhwa)和法拉伊•奇德亚(Farai Chideya)的研究显示，美国只有22%的初创企业在创始团队中有一名或一名以上的女性。柳青表示：“我感觉中国科技界的女性数量要比其他行业的多。在互联网时代，企业成功的关键是理解客户的期望，而一半的客户是女性。”

Still, gender discrimination remains brazen in China, where ads for senior positions often specify that only men need apply. Liu says that she has never experienced discrimination while at Goldman Sachs nor at Didi, but her experience is not typical of Chinese women. She has spent her life bouncing from elite institution to elite institution in a dizzying spiral of success.

不过，性别歧视在中国仍然大行其道，高级职位招聘广告往往指定只要男性。柳青说，她在高盛(Goldman Sachs)和滴滴从未遇到性别歧视，但这并非中国女性的典型经历。她的人生道路一帆风顺，从一个精英机构到另一个精英机构，接二连三地取得了令人目眩的成功。

Liu was born in 1978 into Chinese tech royalty, as the daughter of Liu Chuanzhi, who founded Lenovo, the computer maker that bought IBM’s PC business in 2005 and subsequently became the largest PC maker in the world. “My father said one thing that has stayed with me: ‘It’s supposed to be hard,’” she says. “When you have that mentality, you find nothing is so difficult. It’s supposed to be hard. Then you actually start to enjoy it and have fun.”

1978年，柳青生于中国科技企业界的一个显赫家庭。她是联想(Lenovo)创始人柳传志的女儿。计算机制造商联想在2005年收购了IBM的个人电脑(PC)业务，之后成为世界最大PC制造商。“我父亲说过的一句话我始终记得：‘做事情难是应该的，’”她说，“当你拥有这种心态，你会发现没有什么事情那么难。难是应该的。那么你就会真的开始享受，开始有乐趣。”

Indeed, Liu has made it all look easy. Graduating from Peking University with a degree in computer science, she went on to do a masters degree at Harvard, followed by 12 years at Goldman Sachs, mostly in Hong Kong. Leaving Goldman in 2014 was “one of the hardest decisions I ever made”, she says, but joining Didi was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.

的确，柳青让一切都看起来很简单。从北京大学(Peking University)计算机系本科毕业后，柳青前往哈佛大学(Harvard)攻读硕士学位，之后在高盛工作12年，期间主要是在香港。2014年离开高盛是“我做过的最艰难的决定之一”，她说，但加入滴滴是一个她无法错失的机会。

Didi’s chairman Cheng Wei recruited her by taking her and other senior executives on a road trip to Tibet. Ride-sharing at the time was a nascent industry — and something that Liu saw a market for. Navigating Chinese streets with small children, she found the state-regulated taxi services maddening. “When I first moved back to China from Hong Kong, I often found myself stuck in the middle of the street or curb with my kids, trying to hail a taxi. At that time, in 2012, obviously, there were no choices for people like us.”

滴滴的董事长程维让柳青加入滴滴的方式是带着她和其他滴滴高管进行一次西藏自驾之旅。当时共乘还是一个新兴行业——而柳青在其中看到了市场。在和孩子们在中国的街道上逛的时候，她发现受政府监管的出租车服务令人抓狂。“我最早从香港搬回内地的时候，常常发现自己为了打到一辆出租车而和孩子们被困在街道中央。当时，也就是2012年，像我们这样的人显然别无选择。”

But what really appealed was the chance to put her own stamp on the company. “When you join a company that’s only two years old, you don’t feel like a professional manager, that you are joining a mature business and your role is to just be a part of it. You feel you have the potential to shape this company and grow the culture together.”

但真正吸引她的是有机会给这家公司打上自己的印记。“当你加入一家只创立了两年的公司时，你不会感觉自己是加入一家成熟公司的职业经理人，你的角色是成为其中的一部分。你感到你有潜力塑造这家公司，能够一起发展公司文化。”

Her first challenge was to put Didi on the map with investors while also using her not inconsiderable contacts from the Chinese tech industry. Analysts put the number of investors in Didi at around 90; Liu says that while fundraising was part of her role that she “never met 95 per cent of our investors,” before coming to work at Didi. She did raise $1bn from Apple in a singularly audacious deal she personally oversaw, one which may have contributed to Uber throwing in the towel.

她的第一个挑战是让滴滴在投资者中出名，同时利用好她在中国科技界不可小视的人脉。分析师认为滴滴的投资者大概有90个;柳青表示，尽管筹资是她工作内容的一部分，她在加入滴滴之前“与我们95%的投资者从未会面”。她从苹果公司(Apple)那里募集到10亿美元，这是她亲自监督的一笔尤为大胆的交易，这笔交易可能也促成了优步的认输。

Among all this, Liu was treated for breast cancer last year. She has now recovered. “I was lucky to have the support from my family, my friends and my team here,” she says. Now she is focusing on the next professional hurdle: defeating or at least blunting the impact of regulations in Beijing and Shanghai aimed at limiting drivers to those with residence permits, or hukou. If this were implemented, it would decimate the ranks of Didi’s drivers, who are mainly migrants from other provinces.

去年柳青被诊断出乳腺癌。如今她已康复。“我很幸运得到了我的家庭、朋友和团队的支持，”她说。现在她正专注于下一个职业难关：击败、或者至少削弱北京和上海关于网约车司机必须有本地户口的规定的影响。如果这种法规得到实施，大批滴滴司机将因此无法上路，其中的主体是来自其他省份的移民。

Didi is no stranger to dealing with hostile regulation, and Liu and her colleagues are meeting regional mayors at a furious pace in an effort to convince them to allow the nascent ride-hailing-app industry to continue to thrive in their cities. “Innovation always outgrows regulation,” she says. Her approach to dealing with the challenges her company faces remains the same: “Be gentle but firm when you believe in yourself.”

对于应对不利的法规，滴滴并不陌生。柳青和她的同事正在以惊人的速度与地方市长会面，努力说服他们允许新生的打车应用行业继续在他们的城市繁荣发展。“创新总是超前于监管，”她说。在应对她的公司所面临的挑战时，她的策略还是一样：“当你相信自己的时候，你要温柔但坚定。”

Charles Clover is the FT’s Beijing correspondent

本文作者是英国《金融时报》北京通讯员