Return and Ridicule

2）回报与嘲笑

原文来自 USV 合伙人 Fred Wilson 的 blog，他去普林斯顿做了一个分享，主题就是：回报和嘲笑。

他发现，对自己而言，回报和嘲笑高度相关。他们从那些被人广为嘲笑的投资上赚的钱超过了其他任何一类。所以，当他看到有人嘲笑他们投资的想法和公司的时候，还挺淡定的。

类似想法 Benchmark 合伙人 Bill Gurley 也提过。他认为，决策的时候有个 2×2 矩阵很好用。横轴代表决策的对/错，纵轴代表决策与市场共识是一致/相悖。

如果你错了，会失败；对了呢？未必成功。最大的回报来自于非共识且正确。

而非共识在一开始总是会被嘲笑的。

原文见——http://avc.com/2013/04/return-and-ridicule/，

这里还有个中文版——https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/R4Z9Qn7jCCw2Y7wOZq-9zw

我的翻译练习

Return and Ridicule

回报与嘲笑

I am going down to Princeton today to talk to Ed Zschau’s class on entrepreneurship today. Ed asked me what I wanted to talk about. I told him “return and ridicule”.

我今天去了趟普林斯顿和Ed Zschau’s班上的人聊了聊创业这回事。Ed问我想说些什么，我告诉他——“回报与嘲笑”

I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years. We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

这些年来，我发现回报和嘲笑是高度相关的。在那些被高度嘲笑的事情里，我们已经比别的同行挣了更多的钱。当我看到人们在嘲笑我们支持的想法和公司的时候，我也笑了。那意味着我们将在那些投资上赚一大笔钱。

I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can’t make money by being wrong. And you can’t make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong. I really like that framework.

我看过Bill Gurley（Benchmark 合伙人）说，你只有在实际上正确，但大多数人认为是错误的事情中赚得到钱。他的逻辑是，你不可能靠犯错赚钱，以及你不可能在大多数人都知道的事情中赚钱。所以你必须在大多数人认为是错误的事情中找到正确的路。我真的很喜欢这个框架。

The same logic applies to starting companies. If you start a company in a market everyone knows is going to be big, then you will have a ton of competition. If, however, you start a company in a market everyone is laughing at, you won’t have too many competitors.

同样的逻辑也可以应用到创办公司。如果你在一个所有人都知道会发展壮大的市场中创立公司，你就会面对一堆竞争。然而，如果你在一个所有人都在嘲笑的市场里创立公司，你就不会有很多竞争者。

This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen‘s framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls “toys”. The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers.

这个概念在克里斯坦森的颠覆性创新理论中也可以起作用。大多数颠覆性技术都是从被称之为“玩具”的雏形中开始的。PC就是一个很好的例子。PC诞生于家庭自制电脑运动，极客们在他们的车库里建造了电脑，大家都认为他们是头脑发热，但是苹果电脑和IBM的pc电脑就诞生于此，从那时候开始，在个人电脑领域竞争了。个人电脑的竞争从此开始

Chris Dixon has a great post about hobbyists. He likes to look at what the next homebrew computer club type activities are these days. When I saw Chris yesterday he was talking about drones and asteroids. I laughed. He grinned ear to ear. Chris knows that it’s good to be ridiculed.

Chris Dixon（a16z掌门人）有一篇关于业余爱好者的文章。这些日子，他喜欢去看观察下一个家庭自制电脑俱乐部类型的活动是什么样的。昨天我见到Chris的时候，他谈到了无人机和小行星，我大笑起来，他也笑得咧牙露齿。Chiris知道被嘲笑是件好事。

So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster. Momentum investing works in highly liquid markets (sometimes). From what I can tell, it almost never works in private markets.

有太多经典的风险投资企业就是跟着群羊的羊。他们是购买高度非流动性投资的顺势趋势投资者，那也是灾祸的根源。顺势投资在高度流动性的市场行得通（有时候），据我所知，在私人私募投资市场几乎从来没奏效。

Better to invest in laughing stocks. Becuase she who laughs last, laughs best.

最好是去投资被嘲笑的股盘，因为笑到最后的才是笑得最好的。