如果你是一个传统的公共股票基金的投资组合经理，你投资了一堆股票，股票如果下跌（或跑输指数），你很可能失去你的工作，因为你的其他投资无法弥补这一损失。如果一家上市公司归零了，这将那意味着很多人都要搞砸才可能——上市公司通常不会归零，只要正常运营。

　　But venture capital funds invest in a different kind of company - they invest in a particular type of startup, one that is much more likely to go to zero, but which has the potential, if it does succeed, to produce something very big. The enormous value created by the startups that really work is possiblein a way that's not really true in many other places. It's possible for a few people to take an idea and create a real company worth billions of dollars in less than a decade - to go from an idea and a few notes to Google or Facebook, or for that matter Dollar Shave Club or Nervana. It's possible for entrepreneurs to create something with huge impact.

　　但是，风险投资基金投资于不同类型的公司 — 他们投资于一种特殊类型的创业公司，一个非常可能归零，但如果成功，它有潜力能成为非常大的生意。这种价值的巨大创造是可能的，但在其他地方并不多见。一群人，有一个想法，用不到十年的时间创造一个价值数十亿美元的公司 —— 谷歌或Facebook就是这么来的，Dollar Shave Club或Nervana也是。创业者可以创造出那些有巨大影响的东西。

　　But equally, anything with that much potential has a high likelihood of failure - if it was obviously a good idea with no risks, everyone would be doing it. Indeed, it's inherent in really transformative ideas that they look like badideas - Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon all did, sometimes several times over. In hindsight the things that worked look like good ideas and the ones that failed look stupid, but sadly it's not that obvious at the time. Rather, this is how the process of invention and creation works. We try things - we try to create companies, products and ideas, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they change the world. And so, we see, in our world around half such attempts fail completely, and 5% or so go to the moon.

　　但同样，任何事情有这么大的潜力就有很高的的失败可能性 —— 如果它显然是一个没有风险的好主意，每个人都会这样去做。事实上，这些真正充满变革的想法天然看上去都不是什么好想法 —— 谷歌，苹果，Facebook和亚马逊莫不如此，有时反复多次。事后看，那些成功了的想法看起来都是好想法，失败了的看起来很愚蠢，但遗憾的是它当时显然不是如此。相反，这是发明创造本来该有的过程。我们不断尝试 — 我们尝试创建公司、产品和想法，有时他们有效，有时他们改变世界。所以，我们看到，在我们VC这个世界里，一半左右这样的尝试会彻底失败，5％左右的去了月球（获得巨大成功）。

　　Clearly, not every new company or new business idea fits this model - not every startup has the potential or the risk we see here, and not every 'startup' is right for VC. Other, these are companies that sit right out at one end of the risk/reward curve, and you have to understand both the scale of the potential risk and the scale of the potential reward.

　　显然，并非每一个新公司或新的商业想法都符合这个模型 — 不是每个创业公司都有我们说的潜力或风险，并且不是每一个“创业公司” 都是适合VC投资。其余的公司，这些都是处于风险/回报曲线另一端的公司。你必须了解潜在风险的大小同时了解潜在回报的规模。

　　This is an interesting intellectual challenge for a VC or, more importantly, an entrepreneur: you need to ask not whether this idea will fail, let alone whether it could fail, but rather, ‘what would it be if it worked?’ You need, in a sense, to ‘suspend disbelief’ - to put aside your normal human risk-aversion and skepticism, accept the probability that it could go to zero, and ask if this could 'put a dent in the world', and if so, how big.

　　这对VC是一个有趣的智力挑战，或者更重要的是，对一个创业家的挑战：你不需要问这个想法是否会失败，不管它是否真会失败，而是要问“如果成了，它会是什么样？” 你需要， 在某种意义上，“搁置怀疑” — 抛开一切人类正常的风险厌恶和怀疑，接受的它归零的可能性，并询问这能否“在世界上留下凹痕”，如果可以，有多大。

　　Indeed, all of this applies to entrepreneurs even more than it does to VCs. Just as VCs would like only to do the deals that succeed, so would entrepreneurs. But entrepreneurs only get to do one at a time (normally). So an entrepreneur is committing years of their life to just one brilliant, terrible idea, that probably won't work, but if it does, will be enormous. And around half of those commitments fail - there are lots of risks, and lots of ways that these attempts can fail, without it being anyone's fault. If you take a normal, mature company to zero in a few years, you probably screwed up, but if a startup doesn't make it, generally that's just the risk you took. Pulling a company into reality out of thin air, through sheer force of will, isn't easy. But you're only reading this because of the entrepreneurs who took that bet. This is how invention works.