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《財(cái)富》：在你的幫助下，音樂(lè)流媒體服務(wù)公司Spotify發(fā)展成為了一家國(guó)際巨頭，而且在今年4月上市，估值達(dá)到了約300億美元。它的成功似乎圓了多年前你在音樂(lè)分享先驅(qū)Napster上未完成的夢(mèng)想。你與Spotify之間的合作是什么時(shí)候開始的？

肖恩·帕克：我托人將自己引薦給了丹尼爾·艾克，他是公司的創(chuàng)始人之一。我們?cè)诩~約見了面，談了很長(zhǎng)的時(shí)間，倒是找引薦人花了不少時(shí)間。我并未意識(shí)到，我們可能在某一地方曾有過(guò)交集，也就是在網(wǎng)上（在一個(gè)聊天室）。事實(shí)證明，那時(shí)候我確實(shí)認(rèn)識(shí)簡(jiǎn)·庫(kù)姆，但直到我和簡(jiǎn)見面之后才知道他是WhatsApp的聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人。當(dāng)時(shí)我想，“等等，不會(huì)吧。我們都來(lái)自于同一家公司，而且共同成立了一家價(jià)值數(shù)十億美元的公司。這太詭異了。”過(guò)去有一段時(shí)間，我覺得當(dāng)時(shí)那些癡迷于互聯(lián)網(wǎng)的人意識(shí)到了互聯(lián)網(wǎng)無(wú)限的可能性，那些互聯(lián)網(wǎng)可能性的純粹論者則會(huì)天馬行空地想象借助互聯(lián)網(wǎng)可以做的各類事情。進(jìn)入早期采納者這個(gè)圈子是有益的。你看待事物的角度會(huì)發(fā)生些許變化。

當(dāng)艾克和我在紐約見面時(shí)，他直截了當(dāng)?shù)貙?duì)我說(shuō)：“你知道自己是再次往火坑里跳吧。你真的想再經(jīng)歷一次嗎？你知道你的對(duì)手都是誰(shuí)吧，不是嗎？”

這里的對(duì)手就是唱片行業(yè)，它的起訴讓Napster關(guān)門大吉。

我知道。但我覺得我已經(jīng)認(rèn)識(shí)了大多數(shù)唱片公司的高管。我對(duì)他們有了更深入的了解。

你了解他們的擔(dān)憂吧。

是的，但更重要的是，唱片行業(yè)的大難已經(jīng)臨頭。這個(gè)行業(yè)已經(jīng)崩潰了。CD銷量的持續(xù)下滑也為嘗試新鮮的業(yè)務(wù)模式提供了一個(gè)合法的窗口。與此同時(shí)，其替代模式——蘋果采用的99美分下載——并沒(méi)有奏效。這一模式并未能彌補(bǔ)CD銷售的虧損。即便如此，我們?cè)诮?jīng)歷了兩年的談判之后才讓Spotify進(jìn)入了美國(guó)。這是一個(gè)很大的挑戰(zhàn)。

你擔(dān)任Spotify董事一職長(zhǎng)達(dá)7年之久。鑒于當(dāng)時(shí)的其他種種工作需要，包括你對(duì)免疫療法治療癌癥的探索，你都在那里忙些什么，是風(fēng)投公司的大量投資業(yè)務(wù)嗎？

有關(guān)音樂(lè)的事情。我一直都在思考這一問(wèn)題。因此有很長(zhǎng)一段時(shí)間（在Napster倒閉之后）我都在與社交媒體打交道，但我總是會(huì)轉(zhuǎn)而思考如何打造一個(gè)合理的互聯(lián)網(wǎng)音樂(lè)銷售模式。我完全可以組建一支團(tuán)隊(duì)來(lái)嘗試這件事，但是我得知Spotify已經(jīng)開始在瑞典萌芽。瑞典是全球的盜版之都，也是P2P下載和頗具實(shí)力的工程之都。它是p2p軟件Kazaa一名創(chuàng)始人的故鄉(xiāng)，下載工具BT的員工亦來(lái)自于瑞典。丹尼爾·艾克實(shí)際上還編寫了一款名為μTorrent的BT客戶端程序，在當(dāng)時(shí)非常受歡迎。此外，瑞典還是音樂(lè)的國(guó)度。

但阿巴樂(lè)隊(duì)除外。

即便不考慮阿巴樂(lè)隊(duì)，能夠以較低的薪資招聘工程師的事實(shí)對(duì)于我們來(lái)說(shuō)也是大有裨益。你能夠找到像丹尼爾和馬丁·洛倫森）這樣經(jīng)驗(yàn)異常豐富的人士，他們都賺了不少錢，也出售過(guò)公司，因此他們知道如何打造和運(yùn)營(yíng)企業(yè)，而且他們還擁有產(chǎn)品的核心技術(shù)，因此他們有這個(gè)基礎(chǔ)來(lái)做這件事。我們也知道，如果這個(gè)點(diǎn)子是你想出來(lái)的，你可能實(shí)際上就知道該怎么執(zhí)行，而不是在這一方面嘗試白手起家。

你從這次經(jīng)歷中學(xué)到了什么？

我覺得我對(duì)毅力和耐心有了更深刻的認(rèn)識(shí)。這項(xiàng)業(yè)務(wù)與Facebook“快突破，除舊立新”的理念完全不同。在這一行當(dāng)，你每天起來(lái)之后都得去和唱片公司軟磨硬泡，與數(shù)字音樂(lè)團(tuán)隊(duì)的每一位成員合作，不僅僅只是首席執(zhí)行官。你得花時(shí)間向很多人宣傳，而且還得在宣傳材料上下功夫，拿出能夠讓他們獲得安全感的策略，這樣，他們就不會(huì)因與你合作而被外人看作是傻瓜。

但是這一關(guān)系需要持續(xù)的維護(hù)。因此Spotify設(shè)立了一個(gè)龐大的團(tuán)隊(duì)來(lái)管理與所有唱片公司的關(guān)系。到了某一個(gè)階段之后，我無(wú)需做任何事情。我只是偶爾在需要幫助的時(shí)候才出現(xiàn)，因?yàn)槲疫€有一些人脈關(guān)系。但這并不是那種正式的談判，為了達(dá)成目的而絞盡腦汁。這種模式還是蠻有效的。

我記得我曾經(jīng)向一家公司的董事會(huì)進(jìn)行推銷，這幫人管理著一個(gè)巨大的法國(guó)集團(tuán)，而董事會(huì)不得不同意了這筆交易。在我看來(lái)，每一個(gè)節(jié)點(diǎn)都像是一場(chǎng)電子游戲，你在打敗小怪之后還得打大怪，最后才發(fā)現(xiàn)實(shí)際上還沒(méi)有獲得最終的勝利，因?yàn)檫€有一個(gè)終極怪物等待著你去征服。你必須得換一種思考方式。之后，我們必須將重心放在產(chǎn)品上。因此你必須強(qiáng)烈地意識(shí)到哪些內(nèi)容對(duì)于產(chǎn)品來(lái)說(shuō)是必要和必須的，哪些可以拋棄。

讓我們稍微談?wù)撘幌律缃灰魳?lè)組件。Spotify是否圓了你對(duì)Napster的夢(mèng)想？

回顧Spotify，我的一個(gè)遺憾在于未能實(shí)現(xiàn)自己的愿景，也就是打造一個(gè)真正的社交音樂(lè)網(wǎng)絡(luò)。我們?cè)谒阉?、播放、播放清單、推薦和電臺(tái)方面都做的非常出色。然而，我們一直未能實(shí)現(xiàn)一個(gè)夢(mèng)想——有著同樣愛好的朋友都在這里，不妨看看他們都喜歡什么。

而這剛好是你的追求。

在某種程度上，這一點(diǎn)是我們希望通過(guò)Napster實(shí)現(xiàn)的目標(biāo)之一。你在瀏覽某個(gè)人的收藏之后對(duì)其十分感興趣，并通過(guò)其他用戶來(lái)發(fā)現(xiàn)音樂(lè)。我們?cè)赟potify也提供了一部分這樣的功能，人們基本上也可以這樣做。但這一功能并未成為一項(xiàng)首要特色。公司基本的核心產(chǎn)品就是搜索、檢索或組織（例如組建播放清單）。作為一個(gè)產(chǎn)品來(lái)講，這些功能有足夠的吸引力，吸引了數(shù)億名用戶。

讓我們換個(gè)話題：除了最終解決整個(gè)音樂(lè)分享的問(wèn)題，你似乎特別熱衷于從事一些大部分人從來(lái)都沒(méi)聽說(shuō)過(guò)的事，并為此而驕傲，而且說(shuō)真的，人們很難想象一家風(fēng)投公司在硅谷的推介會(huì)上會(huì)對(duì)這類事情感興趣：新聯(lián)邦稅法的隱晦條款?！锻顿Y機(jī)會(huì)法案》是什么？為什么你會(huì)如此賣力地推動(dòng)這一法案？

一個(gè)簡(jiǎn)單的理念在于，如果某人擁有未實(shí)現(xiàn)的資本收益，他們會(huì)將資金投入基金，后者將尋找全國(guó)一些落后地區(qū)的投資機(jī)遇（或稱之為“機(jī)會(huì)區(qū)域”）。這一投資的任何納稅義務(wù)將被延期。如果人們持有這筆投資足夠長(zhǎng)的時(shí)間，那么基數(shù)就會(huì)有所增加。稅率方面的節(jié)省[根據(jù)投資持有期限而變動(dòng)]是一項(xiàng)相對(duì)溫和的鼓勵(lì)政策。真正的激勵(lì)在于，人們通過(guò)這一載體賺的每一分錢，在持有投資至少10年之后，都是免稅的。

也就是羅斯個(gè)人退休賬戶這類的鼓勵(lì)政策。

的確如此。

需要指出的是，你所提倡的并不僅僅是稅法變革。為了推動(dòng)這一動(dòng)議，你實(shí)際上創(chuàng)建了一個(gè)名為Economic Innovation Group的華盛頓智囊團(tuán)。

這是一個(gè)長(zhǎng)達(dá)10年的歷程。我從2008年開始認(rèn)真思考這個(gè)問(wèn)題。我們也看到，金融危機(jī)對(duì)某些地區(qū)造成了不同程度的影響，而且當(dāng)經(jīng)濟(jì)復(fù)蘇時(shí)，只有那些大型城市才會(huì)出現(xiàn)復(fù)蘇跡象，而且這些城市恢復(fù)的都相當(dāng)不錯(cuò)，并將大多數(shù)城市拋在了后面。

我覺得這是美國(guó)中部地區(qū)（為特朗普上臺(tái)提供了一臂之力的地區(qū)）感到沮喪的原因，而且這些沮喪來(lái)自于那些被落在后面的工業(yè)城鎮(zhèn)或曾經(jīng)的工業(yè)城鎮(zhèn)。但是我在特朗普上臺(tái)之前便已經(jīng)在思考這些問(wèn)題。處于這些經(jīng)濟(jì)荒漠中的民眾因?yàn)槠涞盅嘿J款或其社區(qū)而被困在了那里。我們一直在大談特談經(jīng)濟(jì)移動(dòng)性，但是因?yàn)檫@些原因，人們無(wú)法移動(dòng)。

是什么讓你覺得通過(guò)對(duì)稅法進(jìn)行調(diào)整能夠解決這個(gè)問(wèn)題？

我最先做的事情就是與美國(guó)的首席經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)家們討論我們可以采取哪些措施，這些經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)家包括哈佛大學(xué)的肯·羅格夫、芝加哥大學(xué)的史蒂夫·戴維斯、重點(diǎn)預(yù)算與政策中心的賈里德·伯恩斯坦，以及曾在美國(guó)企業(yè)學(xué)會(huì)工作的凱文·哈塞特（如今是特朗普政府的首席經(jīng)濟(jì)師）。由上述學(xué)者組成的智囊團(tuán)與我們合作了數(shù)年，并提出了《投資機(jī)遇法案》背后的支撐理念。

在經(jīng)歷了數(shù)年的股市強(qiáng)勁增長(zhǎng)之后，近6萬(wàn)億美元的未實(shí)現(xiàn)收益都處于閑置狀態(tài)。我們認(rèn)為，如果我們能夠讓這一部分資本運(yùn)轉(zhuǎn)起來(lái)，特別是回歸經(jīng)濟(jì)不發(fā)達(dá)的地區(qū)，那么就有可能見證這些地區(qū)發(fā)生顛覆性的變化。當(dāng)時(shí)的問(wèn)題在于，如何才能讓這部分資金運(yùn)轉(zhuǎn)起來(lái)？這種方式必須同時(shí)得到保守派和激進(jìn)派的首肯，同時(shí)最終還能夠讓城市或鄉(xiāng)村地區(qū)煥發(fā)新的面貌或推動(dòng)對(duì)最貧困地區(qū)的投資。

雖然，從其核心來(lái)看，它并不是什么新概念，不是嗎？我記得已故的眾議員杰克·肯普在數(shù)十年前曾提到過(guò)“企業(yè)區(qū)”這個(gè)類似的概念。為什么這個(gè)政策未能奏效呢？

最重要的區(qū)別在于，新法案是一個(gè)基于自由市場(chǎng)的鼓勵(lì)政策，并非是稅收抵免。因此，所有此前嘗試的種種政策，包括新市場(chǎng)稅收抵免或最終實(shí)現(xiàn)的企業(yè)區(qū)概念（由杰克·肯普提出，并由克林頓總統(tǒng)頒布為法令）實(shí)際上都是稅收抵免政策。

我覺得其中一個(gè)很有意思的機(jī)制是，它并未將所有經(jīng)濟(jì)不發(fā)達(dá)地區(qū)列為機(jī)會(huì)區(qū)，而是讓各州根據(jù)貧困和失業(yè)標(biāo)準(zhǔn)，在這些地區(qū)中選出四分之一可能符合條件的區(qū)域。

它的構(gòu)思是非常重要的。其理念在于，首先，在這一過(guò)程中你總得給州長(zhǎng)一些權(quán)力吧，不是嗎？州層面的控制異常重要，而且讓州長(zhǎng)根據(jù)各市市長(zhǎng)和社區(qū)提供的信息來(lái)做出決定亦是十分重要。此舉能夠讓他們專注于那些他們?cè)c社區(qū)領(lǐng)導(dǎo)打過(guò)交道的地區(qū)。第二，可能也是最重要的一點(diǎn)在于，此舉能夠?qū)崿F(xiàn)資本的集中。43%的人口普查區(qū)都符合成為機(jī)會(huì)區(qū)的條件。即便注入大量的資金，并非所有的地區(qū)都有能力實(shí)現(xiàn)飛躍式發(fā)展。可能有一些地區(qū)是如此之貧困和偏遠(yuǎn)，以至于他們都難以吸引到投資。但各州將負(fù)責(zé)選出最適合該項(xiàng)目的25%的地區(qū)。

你對(duì)哪些地區(qū)符合條件有什么想法嗎？

我們?yōu)橹蓍L(zhǎng)設(shè)定了指導(dǎo)原則。我說(shuō)：“它應(yīng)該鄰近一個(gè)較為發(fā)展的地區(qū)，人們可以以該地區(qū)為跳板，將投資吸引到那些發(fā)展的并不是很好的地區(qū)?！北容^好的一個(gè)案例就是帕洛阿爾托/東帕洛阿爾托地區(qū)。如果靠近學(xué)術(shù)中心或大學(xué)也是個(gè)不錯(cuò)的選擇。有不少地方有發(fā)展的潛力，但沒(méi)有獲取資本的渠道。并非所有的地區(qū)都會(huì)受益，然而只要那些原本沒(méi)有機(jī)會(huì)騰飛的地區(qū)實(shí)現(xiàn)了快速發(fā)展，或我們能夠推動(dòng)不發(fā)達(dá)地區(qū)的實(shí)際發(fā)展速度，那么我們就實(shí)現(xiàn)了我們的目標(biāo)。然后，人們就會(huì)過(guò)來(lái)修建廉價(jià)住房、商業(yè)空間，所有這些設(shè)施都將成為現(xiàn)實(shí)。這些地區(qū)必須留住那些能夠吸引員工的企業(yè)。

這一理念有點(diǎn)公有制的意味。引發(fā)了很多投資者的共鳴，這些投資者希望通過(guò)善舉來(lái)謀求發(fā)展，例如Quicken Loans的創(chuàng)始人丹·吉爾伯特以及在底特律投入大量資金的摩根大通首席執(zhí)行官杰米·戴蒙。而且此舉是對(duì)革命性首席執(zhí)行官史蒂夫·凱斯的復(fù)刻，他一直在推廣他所稱的“共同崛起”動(dòng)議。你曾經(jīng)和這些人討論過(guò)這一理念嗎？

丹·吉爾伯特是Economic Innovation Group的奠基人之一。我成立這一機(jī)構(gòu)的目的是推動(dòng)這一提案，并進(jìn)行宣傳。它屬于501(c)(4)條款所規(guī)定的組織。該提案最初由蒂姆·斯科特（南加州共和黨）與科里·布克（新澤西州民主黨）引入?yún)⒆h院。在整個(gè)過(guò)程中，我們一直保持著共和黨和民主黨支持人士數(shù)量的平衡。

你對(duì)這一提案獲得通過(guò)異常有自信，當(dāng)然，這種樂(lè)觀精神在任何與聯(lián)邦政府打交道的人看來(lái)都是不可思議的。

我對(duì)所有人說(shuō)：“大家都知道，我認(rèn)為這一法案肯定會(huì)得到通過(guò)。”大家的反應(yīng)是，“呵呵”。這些脾氣不好、小氣的稅收政策專家對(duì)我們的這一提案一笑了之，而這些人在其整個(gè)職業(yè)生涯都在嘗試對(duì)稅法進(jìn)行一些小打小鬧的改動(dòng)。他們說(shuō)：“這可是自大蕭條以來(lái)最宏大的發(fā)展經(jīng)濟(jì)項(xiàng)目，就算它是個(gè)不錯(cuò)的理念，但你不會(huì)連造勢(shì)都不去做就指望它能通過(guò)吧？好吧，能通過(guò)才怪了。”不過(guò)，它卻通過(guò)了。（財(cái)富中文網(wǎng)）

本采訪的刪減版刊登于《財(cái)富》2018年6月印刷版。

譯者：馮豐

審校：夏林

FORTUNE: Spotify, the music streaming service you helped turn into a global powerhouse, went public in April at a valuation of about $30 billion. Its success seems to close the loop on the adventure you began with music-sharing pioneer Napster so many years ago. How did your association with Spotify start?

SEAN PARKER: I asked around for an introduction to Daniel Ek, one of the founders. We met in New York and had a long conversation. It took me a while to find someone who knew him. I didn’t realize that he and I had potentially met at one point, online (in a chat room). As it turns out, I did know Jan Koum back then, but had no idea that he was the cofounder of WhatsApp until we later met, and I was like, “Wait a second here. This is weird, all of us from the same group, are have founded companies worth billions of dollars. That’s very weird.” There was a certain moment in time, where I think the people who were attracted to the Internet back then recognized its unlimited possibility and who were purists about its possibility, imagining all the things that it could be. It pays to be part of that community of early adopters. You see things a little differently, I think.

When Ek and I met in New York, he was very straightforward with me. He said, “You do realize you’re throwing yourself back into the furnace here. Do you really want to go through this again? You know who you’re dealing with on the other side, right?”

Meaning the music industry, which sued Napster out of existence.

Yeah. But I felt like I’d gotten to know most of the label executives. I understood them a lot better.

You understood their fear.

Yes, but more important, the apocalyptic scenario in the music industry had already come to pass. The industry had collapsed. There was a legitimate openness to trying something new because CD sales continued to drop. Meanwhile, the replacement model—the 99￠ download that Apple introduced—wasn’t working. It wasn’t compensating for the loss of CD sales. Even so, it was a two-year negotiation to bring Spotify to the U.S. That was the big challenge.

You were on Spotify’s board for seven years. What kept you engaged, given all the other demands on time: your quest to cure cancer through immunotherapy, your full plate of investments as a VC?

The music thing. I just never stopped thinking about it. And so there’s this long period [after Napster] where I’m working on social media, but I keep coming back to what I think is the right business model for selling music on the Internet. I could have built a team and tried to do it, but you had this little experiment starting in Sweden, the piracy capital of the world and also the peer-to-peer, hard-core engineering capital. It had one of the Kazaa founders. The BitTorrent stuff came out of Sweden. Daniel Ek actually wrote a BitTorrent client called μTorrent that was really popular. Plus, it’s a music country.

With the exception of ABBA.

Even if you don’t count ABBA. The fact that you can recruit engineers cheaply helped. And you had really experienced entrepreneurs in Daniel and Martin [Lorentzon]—they’d both made money and sold companies before, so they knew how to build and run a business. And they had the core of a product. So there was a base to build from. And you knew that if you contributed ideas, you could actually get execution versus trying to start something like that from scratch.

What did you learn from the experience?

I think I learned a lot about persistence and patience. It’s a very different business from the “Move fast and break things” philosophy of Facebook. It’s about getting up every day and schlepping over to the label—working with everybody on the digital music team, not just the CEO. You had to spend time evangelizing to a lot of people. You had to be creative on the fly to come up with strategies that would give them a sense of safety—that they could do this with you without looking like schmucks.

But it required constant maintenance. So at Spotify, there was a big team in place to manage all the labor relations. There came a certain point when I didn’t need to do anything. My presence was occasionally helpful because I had certain relationships. But it wasn’t the hard core negotiating, coming up with every ploy we could come up with in order to get the deals done. But it sort of worked.

I remember going to pitch one board of directors, a bunch of guys running this massive French conglomerate, and the board had to sign off on the deal. You realize, at every point, it was like a videogame when you beat the boss, and then you have to beat the big boss, and then it turns out that you haven’t actually won yet, because there’s still the big big boss you have to convince. It just required a different mentality. Then, we really had to hold our line on the product. So you had to have a very strong view of what was necessary and essential in the product and what was potentially disposable.

Talk a little about the social music component. Does Spotify scratch the itch you had with Napster?

My one regret, looking back on Spotify, was that the vision of a truly social music network never really materialized. We are really great at search, play, playlists, recommendations, and radio. But we never realized the dream of “Here are all your friends who have similar tastes—browse what they’re excited about.”

Which happens to be your passion.

It’s one of the things that we had with Napster to some extent. You’d look at someone’s collection, and you’d get interested in it and discover music through other users. We have some of that at Spotify; you can kind of do that. But it’s never been prioritized. The basic core product of search and retrieval, or organization—like building playlists—is compelling enough as a product to attract hundreds of millions of users.

So, changing gears here: Apart from finally solving the whole music-sharing thing, you seem rather excited and proud of something that most people have never heard of—and something that’s, frankly, hard to imagine a VC in a Silicon Valley pitch meeting getting excited about: an obscure provision in the new federal tax legislation. What’s the Investing in Opportunity Act, and why did you push so hard for it?

The simple notion is, If someone has unrealized capital gains, they can roll the money over into a fund that will go to find investment opportunities in certain distressed areas [or “opportunity zones”] across the country. And any tax liability from that investment is deferred. If the investment is held long enough, there is a step up in basis. The savings on the tax rate [which adjusts based on the investment holding period] is a relatively modest incentive. The real incentive is that any gains you make in that vehicle, after holding an investment for at least 10 years, are tax-free.

So it’s the Roth IRA of incentives.

Exactly.

I should point out, this isn’t a tax law change you simply advocated for. You actually created a Washington think tank, called the Economic Innovation Group, to push for it.

This has been a decade-long journey. I really began thinking about this around 2008. You could see that the financial crisis disproportionately affected certain communities, and that when the recovery happened, it really only happened in certain major cities. These places have rebounded nicely. Most everybody else is left behind.

That’s where I think a lot of the frustration in the heartland [that fueled the election of Donald Trump] came from—from many of these left-behind industrial towns or former industrial towns. But I was thinking about all this pre-Trump. People in these economic deserts were stuck there because of their mortgages or their community. We talk a lot about economic mobility, but there are all these reasons why people can’t move.

So what made you think that a tweak to the tax law could offer a solution?

One of the first things I did was talk to some of the country’s leading economist about what we could do about it, like [Harvard’s] Ken Rogoff, and Steven Davis at the University of Chicago, Jared Bernstein [at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities] and Kevin Hassett, who was at the American Enterprise Institute, who’s now in the Trump administration in the chief economist role. This brain trust of academics worked with us for years to develop the idea behind the Investing in Opportunity Act.

Following years of strong growth in the stock market, there’s something on the order of $6 trillion in unrealized gains sitting on the sidelines. And we thought if you could get that capital back into play—and specifically, in distressed communities—then you would potentially see a transformation. The question then was how to put that money to work. It had to be something that conservatives and progressive both liked, but in the end would lead to urban or rural renewal and drive investment in the poorest areas.

At its heart, though, this is an old idea, right? I remember the late Congressman Jack Kemp talking about “enterprise zones,” in much the same fashion, decades ago? Why didn’t that policy do the trick?

The essential distinction is that the new law is a free market-based incentive and not a tax credit. So all of these prior things that have been tried—like the New Markets Tax Credit or what ultimately became enterprise zones, which was the Jack Kemp concept that President Clinton signed into law—were essentially tax credits.

One of the mechanisms that I found really interesting was the decision not to include every economically distressed area as qualified opportunity zones, but rather making states choose only a quarter of those districts that might otherwise qualify, based on poverty and jobless metrics.

So the thinking there is really important. The idea is (1) you want to give governors some skin in the game, right? State control is really important, and letting governors make decisions with the input from their mayors and from their communities is important. It allows them to focus on the places where they have engaged leadership at the community level. And second, and perhaps most importantly, it concentrates capital. Forty three percent of the census tracts were eligible to be nominated as opportunity zones. Not all of these places are going to take off, even with an influx of investment. Some areas are probably so distressed or so disconnected that they’re going to have a hard time attracting investment. But states get to choose the 25 percent that are the best fit for the program.

And you have some thoughts on where those locales should be.

We laid out guidelines for governors. I said, “You’d like to be near an area that’s already doing well, where you can start to attract investment to a neighboring area that’s not doing as well.” A good example of that is Palo Alto/East Palo Alto. And it would be good if you were near an academic center or university. There’s a bunch of places that have the potential to take off but haven’t had access to capital. Not every area will benefit, but a win for us would be that some areas that just would not have taken off really explode—or we can accelerate the pace at which these underdeveloped areas actually develop. And then there are people who are going to come in and build affordable housing, commercial space, all of that stuff is going to be built out. You’re going to need anchor businesses that attract a work force.

This idea is having a kind of communal resurgence. It’s resonating with a lot of investors, who want to do well by doing good—people like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who have made a huge investment in Detroit. And this has been a refrain of Revolution CEO Steve Case, who has been championing what he calls “The rise of the rest.” Did you talk this idea through with some of these folks?

So Dan Gilbert is on our founders circle at the Economic Innovation Group, which is the organization I set up to push for this, to advocate. It’s a 501(c)(4). The bill was originally introduced in the Senate by Tim Scott [Republican of South Carolina] and Cory Booker [Democrat of New Jersey]. And we maintained an equal balance of Republicans and Democrats all the way through.

You were strangely confident this thing was going to pass—which is, of course, a remarkably optimistic perspective for anyone who’s dealt with the federal government.

I told everyone, ‘You know I think this is going to pass.’ And everybody was like, ‘Yeah right.’ The crusty, curmudgeonly tax policy experts, who had spent their whole career trying to advocate for some minor change in the tax code, laughed our idea off. They’d say, “You’re going to pass the most ambitious development economics program since the Great Depression, and you’re going do it without an advocacy campaign, just because it’s a great idea? Yeah. Uh-huh. That’s going to happen.” And well, it did.

An abridged and edited version of this interview is published in the June 2018 print edition of FORTUNE.