One Startup’s Struggle to Survive Silicon Valley's Gold Rush

It was an unseasonably warm December, and somewhere nearby a rising tide in the San Francisco Bay was lifting all kite-surfers , but Nick Edwards and Chris Monberg were crouched at opposite rented desks in a shared coworking space near the Caltrain station in SoMa wondering if, by the middle of February, they would still have a company.

那是一个异常温暖的 12 月，旧金山湾附近某处不断上涨的潮水让所有风筝冲浪者都兴奋不已，但尼克·爱德华兹 (Nick Edwards) 和克里斯·蒙伯格 (Chris Monberg) 蹲在南马加州火车车站附近的共享办公空间对面租来的办公桌前，想知道到 2 月中旬，他们是否还会拥有一家公司。

At the moment Boomtrain , as the startup was called, technically had something like negative dollars, because it owed the state of New York a $30,000 fine after its payroll company had been six weeks late in telling them about a $400 unemployment-insurance bill for one of their remote engineers.

目前，Boomtrain（这家初创公司的名字）从技术上讲是负美元，因为它的薪资公司迟到六周才向纽约州告知其一名远程工程师的 400 美元失业保险账单，因此该公司欠纽约州 30,000 美元的罚款。

Boomtrain also had no revenue, though that was hardly a hurdle to raising investment capital in Silicon Valley .

Boomtrain 也没有收入，但这并不是在硅谷筹集投资资金的障碍。

Somewhat more problematically, it didn’t have a single customer, though there were several pilots in the wings.

更麻烦的是，尽管机翼上有几名飞行员，但它没有一个客户。

Almost inadvertently, Nick and Chris had found themselves building a business of enormous complexity—a personalization engine, based on machine-learning algorithms—and they were in over their heads.

几乎是在不经意间，尼克和克里斯发现自己正在构建一个极其复杂的业务——一个基于机器学习算法的个性化引擎——而他们却不知所措。

Neither man was having an easy time keeping it together.

两人的相处都不容易。

Chris was waking up every morning at 5 am grinding his teeth, and Nick’s belt was clearly two notches tighter than usual.

克里斯每天早上 5 点就起床磨牙，而尼克的腰带显然比平时紧了两格。

They had not taken paychecks in months; they’d be lucky, in fact, if they ended up paying themselves $30,000 apiece for the year.

他们已经好几个月没有领工资了；事实上，如果他们最终能在这一年中每人支付 30,000 美元，那他们就很幸运了。

Nick was making ends meet by Air­bnb-ing out his apartment a couple of blocks from their office and commuting an hour each way from his girlfriend’s place in Petaluma.

尼克靠 Airbnb 来维持收支平衡，他的公寓距离他们的办公室只有几个街区，从他女友位于佩塔卢马的住所单程需要一个小时。

Chris was leaning hard on his indefatigable wife.

克里斯紧紧地靠在他不知疲倦的妻子身上。

For this they had upended pleasant lives, and they could no longer quite remember why.

为此，他们颠覆了美好的生活，但他们已经记不清为什么了。

Nick, 32, has sandy hair prone to straw-pile disarray; he speaks in quick, tremulous bursts, and holds himself with a schoolboy’s fretful defiance.

尼克，32 岁，沙色头发，容易乱糟糟的稻草堆。他语气急促，语气颤抖，语气中带着小学生那种烦躁的蔑视。

He and his girlfriend have a lithe golden retriever, Emmy, and Nick often seems less like Emmy’s owner than he does her bewildered, affectionate older brother.

他和他的女朋友养了一只柔软的金毛猎犬艾美，而尼克看起来不像艾美的主人，而更像是她困惑而深情的哥哥。

Chris, also 32, is a calmer presence, with sunken eyes, a shaved head, and a slow, soft, pressurized voice.

同样 32 岁的克里斯则显得更加平静，眼睛凹陷，剃着光头，声音缓慢、柔和、充满压力。

His mien is both monkish and military, as if he ought to be wrapped in a dark tailored cloak.

他的神态既像僧侣，又像军人，仿佛他应该裹在一件黑色定制斗篷里。

Anxiety, as it had mounted steadily through the fall and into December, drove the two friends along opposite trajectories.

从秋天到十二月，焦虑情绪不断加剧，驱使这两个朋友走上了截然相反的道路。

Nick had become jumpier, more spastic, with the light threat that he might roll his eyes back into his head and faint; while the more out of control their circumstances seemed, the deeper and slower and more effortfully controlled were Chris’ voice and bearing.

尼克变得更加神经质，更加痉挛，轻微的威胁让他可能会翻白眼，昏过去。尽管他们的处境似乎越失控，克里斯的声音和举止却越低沉、缓慢、费力地控制着。

High-stakes entrepreneurship is an exercise in restraint, and Nick and Chris gave the impression of suppressing different things.

高风险的创业是一种克制的练习，尼克和克里斯给人的印象是压抑不同的事物。

Nick seemed as though he might at any moment unravel into fear; Chris, into anger.

尼克似乎随时都会陷入恐惧之中。克里斯，生气了。

When Nick began to mutter imprecation—“fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck," it went, almost Tourettically—Chris folded him into a stern bear hug.

当尼克开始咕哝着咒骂——“操操操操操操操”时，几乎是图雷特式的——克里斯把他紧紧地抱在怀里。

Nick is a fidgeter, constantly moving his cursor with his arrow keys and tapping his foot underneath his desk.

尼克是一个坐立不安的人，不断地用方向键移动光标，并用脚在桌子底下敲击。

Chris believes that what saved their relationship was moving to a carpeted office.

克里斯认为，挽救他们关系的方法是搬到铺着地毯的办公室。

Silicon Valley is not a place where one is invited to show frailty or despondence.

硅谷不是一个让人表现出脆弱或沮丧的地方。

It is, as Nick puts it, "the place where everybody is killing it all the time." This might seem peculiar, given that the lot of the small-business founder has always been a fragile one.

正如尼克所说，“这里是每个人一直在杀戮的地方。”鉴于小企业创始人的命运一直都很脆弱，这可能看起来很奇怪。

But in recent years the Valley has successfully elaborated the fantasy that entrepreneurship—and, more broadly, creativity—can be systematized.

但近年来，硅谷成功地阐述了创业精神（以及更广泛的创造力）可以系统化的幻想。

This is the basic promise of accelerators ( Y Combinator et al.), that success in the startup game can be not only taught but rationalized, made predictable.

这是加速器（Y Combinator 等人）的基本承诺，即创业游戏中的成功不仅可以传授，而且可以合理化、可预测。

Starting a company was once an urge felt only by the blindly ambitious and slightly unsound, but in the Valley it’s been ostensibly transformed into a scheduled path one can simply elect and apply for, rather as one might choose law school or Wall Street.

创办一家公司曾经是一种只有盲目雄心勃勃和有点不健全的人才会有的冲动，但在硅谷，它表面上已经转变为一条可以简单选择和申请的预定路径，而不是像人们可以选择法学院或华尔街一样。

And the promise of professionalized entrepreneurship has had a particular allure in recent years, since finance has been tarnished and a career in law made increasingly uncertain.

近年来，由于金融业受到玷污，法律职业也变得越来越不确定，专业化创业的前景尤其具有吸引力。

Starting a company has become the way for ambitious young people to do something that seems simultaneously careerist and heroic.

创办公司已成为雄心勃勃的年轻人做一些看似野心勃勃又英雄主义的事情的方式。

This daydream of constant killing-it has made it difficult to talk about how fearful and distraught the life of the founder can be.

这种不断杀戮的白日梦——让创始人的生活变得多么令人恐惧和心烦意乱。

But over drinks with close friends—on that rare occasion when an early-stage entrepreneur has time to have a drink or see a friend—almost any founder will tell a story that much more closely resembles Nick and Chris’ than it does the story of your favorite billionaire, reverse-engineered to seem a neat matter of destiny.

但在与亲密朋友喝酒时——在早期创业者有时间喝一杯或见朋友的罕见场合——几乎所有创始人都会讲述一个更类似于尼克和克里斯的故事，而不是你最喜欢的亿万富翁的故事，经过逆向工程，看起来似乎是一个纯粹的命运问题。

This is especially true today, in the era of what observers have come to call the "Series A crunch." Due in part to the rise of startup accelerators like Y Combinator, as well as to the surplus capital washing around the Valley from recent IPOs, it has never been easier to raise a small amount of money.

在今天这个被观察家称为“A 轮危机”的时代尤其如此。部分原因是像 Y Combinator 这样的创业加速器的兴起，以及最近 IPO 带来的剩余资本在硅谷的流动，筹集少量资金变得前所未有的容易。

And it has never been easier to build a company—especially a web or mobile product—from that small amount of money, thanks in part to the proliferation of cheap, easy development tools and such cloud platforms as Amazon Web Services.

用少量资金建立一家公司（尤其是网络或移动产品）从未如此简单，这在一定程度上要归功于廉价、简单的开发工具和亚马逊网络服务等云平台的普及。

But the amount of "real" VC funding (i.e., Series A rounds) to be allocated hasn’t kept pace.

但分配的“真正”风险投资资金（即 A 轮）的数量并没有跟上。

The institutions that write the big checks, those that might support and sustain real growth, can survey what a hundred companies have managed to do with a small check and put their real money on the propositions that promise the greatest yield and bear the least risk.

开出大额支票的机构，即那些可能支持和维持实际增长的机构，可以调查一百家公司用小额支票所做的事情，并将真正的资金投入到承诺最大收益和承担最小风险的主张上。

Nick and Chris no longer cared about "killing it." They were too honest and too tired for that language and that posturing.

尼克和克里斯不再关心“杀死它”。他们太诚实，太累了，不适合那种语言和那种姿态。

At this point they just wanted to survive.

此时他们只想活下去。

They had about a month to raise $1 million or they would no longer be able to make payroll.

他们大约有一个月的时间筹集 100 万美元，否则他们将无法再支付工资。

"It’s a story out of Dreiser," said the intellectual historian Fred Turner, referencing the late-19th-century novelist who bleakly chronicled the exploitative early days of American industrial capitalism.

“这是德莱塞的故事，”思想史学家弗雷德·特纳说道，他指的是这位 19 世纪末的小说家，他悲惨地记录了美国工业资本主义早期的剥削时期。

The Dreiserian was a particularly strange mood to reconcile that day, given that it was winter and, on the way into Turner’s office on the Stanford quad, I’d picked one kumquat from a heavy bunch on a laden tree.

那天德莱塞主义者的调和情绪特别奇怪，因为当时是冬天，在去斯坦福大学庭院的特纳办公室的路上，我从一棵挂满了树的沉重的一串金橘中摘了一个金橘。

"In Dreiser’s day it was the same," he went on.

“在德莱塞的时代也是一样，”他继续说道。

"New York didn’t care about Chicago, but Chicago was where the hogs were being slaughtered.

“纽约并不关心芝加哥，但芝加哥是屠宰生猪的地方。

Now New York doesn’t care about San Francisco, but today the hogs are being slaughtered in San Francisco." What Turner meant is that these are the charnel grounds of the new economy, and that there isn’t anything all that new about the new economy.

现在纽约不关心旧金山，但今天旧金山正在宰杀生猪。”特纳的意思是，这些都是新经济的埋葬地，新经济并没有什么新东西。

Turner’s work, most notably his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture , has described the contemporary ethos of the Valley as a synthesis of Cold War defense research and the ’60s spirit of New Communalism, creating—in theory—a nonhierarchical, networked approach to business.

特纳的作品，最著名的是他的《从反主流文化到网络文化》一书，将硅谷的当代精神描述为冷战国防研究和 60 年代新公社主义精神的综合体，在理论上创造了一种非等级的、网络化的商业方法。

But in practice, business in the Valley continued to run in a familiarly exploitative way.

但实际上，硅谷的商业继续以一种熟悉的剥削方式运作。

The Valley might not actually make much in the way of tangible goods, but like industrial centers before it, it’s the place where the astounding success of the very few has been held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy, and—well, their youth.

硅谷实际上可能并没有生产太多有形商品，但就像之前的工业中心一样，在这里，极少数人取得了惊人的成功，而年轻人则以他们的时间、精力和——好吧，他们的青春作为交换。

For that mild month of January 2014 I’d been renting a pallet at one of San Francisco’s many "hacker houses," so that I might meet some of those hopeful youths and see how they felt about their odds.

2014 年 1 月那个温和的月份，我在旧金山众多“黑客之家”之一租了一个托盘，这样我就可以见到一些充满希望的年轻人，看看他们对自己的胜算有何感想。

On Airbnb and craigslist and Facebook there are at least half a dozen of these shared living spaces, advertising themselves as frictionless on-ramps to Valley glory.

在 Airbnb、craigslist 和 Facebook 上，至少有六处这样的共享生活空间，宣传自己是通向硅谷荣耀的无障碍通道。

"We've got guys from every great startup here," the guy who ran the place said on the phone.

“我们这里有来自每家伟大初创公司的人，”负责这个地方的人在电话中说道。

"Square, Lyft, Uber, Dropbox, Twitter, Apple." Securing a bed there required no fewer than three interviews over Google+ Hangout—one of them a "technical" assessment—yet somehow he couldn’t find a way to email a photograph of the available room.

“Square、Lyft、Uber、Dropbox、Twitter、苹果。”要在那里找到床位，至少需要通过 Google+ Hangout 进行三次面试，其中一次是“技术”评估，但不知何故，他找不到通过电子邮件发送可用房间照片的方法。

I arrived to find I was paying $1,250 for a mattress on the floor, behind a panel of imbricated torn shower curtains, in an unheated rabbit warren of 20 bunk beds under a low converted-­warehouse ceiling.

当我到达时，我发现我花了 1,250 美元买了一张床垫，床垫放在地板上，后面是一块瓦状的撕裂的浴帘，在一个由仓库改建的低矮天花板下，有 20 张双层床的没有暖气的兔子窝里。

Unmarked from the outside, it was located on a deserted block in the vaguely disreputable neighborhood west of SoMa and south of the Civic Center, separated from the Mission by little tent cities under the highway.

从外面看，它位于索玛以西、市政中心以南一个声名狼藉的街区的一个荒废街区，与传教区之间被高速公路下的小帐篷城隔开。

To get inside, you had to pass through a bolted air lock piled with trash.

要进入里面，你必须穿过一个堆满垃圾的螺栓气闸。

My cohort hailed from all over: Mumbai, Sydney, Hamburg, Appalachia.

我的同伴来自世界各地：孟买、悉尼、汉堡、阿巴拉契亚。

They’d been in San Francisco two days or two weeks; the longest-standing resident had been there about four months.

他们在旧金山呆了两天或两周；居住时间最长的居民已经在那里呆了大约四个月。

At least at first, people referred to each other by vocation.

至少一开始，人们通过职业来互相称呼。

There was the iOS developer from Houston: a shy, gangly, endearing kid just a few months out of an Ivy; he’d stayed for his degree, which he worried might seem démodé, but he was only teased a little by the higher-status dropouts.

有一位来自休斯顿的 iOS 开发者：一个害羞、瘦长、讨人喜欢的孩子，刚从常春藤盟校毕业几个月；他留下来攻读学位，他担心这可能显得不合时宜，但他只是被地位较高的退学者们嘲笑了一下。

There was the bitcoin guy, wide-eyed with a bowl cut, who’d never before left his Appalachia backwater.

那个比特币家伙，睁大眼睛，留着碗形发型，以前从未离开过阿巴拉契亚的死水区。

And the Australian engineer who was starting an engineering employment marketplace when he wasn’t engaged in Tinder encounters.

还有一位澳大利亚工程师，他在没有参与 Tinder 约会时就创办了一个工程就业市场。

Then there was the doctor, who slept on the other side of the curtain from me.

然后是医生，他睡在窗帘的另一边，离我很远。

A heavyset guy of 23, he’d woken up in Mumbai one morning and could not bring himself to clock in at the large municipal hospital where he worked.

一天早上，他 23 岁，身材魁梧，在孟买醒来，无法前往自己工作的大型市立医院打卡。

He’d always been a coder but had obeyed his parents and gone to medical school.

他一直是一名程序员，但听从了父母的指示，去了医学院。

By 9 am India time he’d completed the flophouse’s technical interview via Google+ Hangout and bought a ticket leaving for SFO that night.

印度时间上午 9 点，他通过 Google+ Hangout 完成了旅馆的技术面试，并买了一张当晚前往 SFO 的机票。

His parents said, "Why today?

他的父母说：“为什么今天呢？

Why not tomorrow?

为什么不明天呢？

Or next week?" But he knew if he waited even a day he’d never go.

还是下周？”但他知道，哪怕等一天，他也永远不会去。

On his second day ever in America he had an informational interview at Google.

在美国的第二天，他在谷歌接受了一次信息面试。

He seemed disoriented but in good spirits.

他看起来神志不清，但精神很好。

He slept without a blanket and with three different devices charging beside him on his bed, lined up like kittens sleeping at the teat.

他睡觉时没有盖毯子，床上放着三个不同的设备在充电，它们排成一排，就像睡在奶头边的小猫一样。

His girlfriend always seemed available for videochat sex.

他的女朋友似乎总是可以进行视频聊天性爱。

He was really considerate about the whole thing.

他对整个事情考虑得很周到。

He usually waited until he thought I was sleeping, and even then he used headphones.

他通常会等到他认为我睡着了，即使这样他也会戴着耳机。

All I could really hear on his end was his muffled instructions, along with profuse apologies that he couldn’t be any louder.

我真正能听到的只是他低沉的指示，以及他不能再大声说话的连声道歉。

It occurred to me that his girlfriend was quite a good sport, since in India it was midmorning.

我发现他的女朋友是个很爱运动的人，因为在印度，那是上午十点左右。

I could tell he really missed her.

我看得出来他真的很想念她。

All these kids, who didn’t yet know what it was like to have a company of their own, or wind down a company of their own, or work for a giant company and ride the bus, seemed certain of one thing: that the longing for total revolution that had for so long been the hallmark of youth was, at last, about to be fulfilled.

所有这些孩子，还不知道拥有一家自己的公司，或者关闭自己的公司，或者为一家大公司工作并乘坐公共汽车是什么感觉，他们似乎确信一件事：长期以来一直是年轻人标志的对全面革命的渴望终于即将实现。

The only thing they could count on was that they were going to be the generation that partook of the process by which all would be rendered irrevocably different.

他们唯一可以指望的是，他们将成为这一代人，参与到一切都将发生不可挽回的改变的过程中。

It didn’t seem to matter what the difference was, or whom it helped or hurt.

差异是什么，或者它帮助了谁或伤害了谁，似乎并不重要。

It just mattered that things in the future would be unlike anything we’d seen before.

重要的是，未来的事情将与我们以前见过的不同。

And that, in the process, they were sure, many of them would get very rich.

他们确信，在这个过程中，他们中的许多人会变得非常富有。

On January 3, Nick and Chris met with two investors, Bobby and Ullas, part of a group of superangels centered—somewhat improbably—around a rug store in Palo Alto.

1 月 3 日，尼克和克里斯会见了两位投资者，鲍比和乌拉斯，他们是一群以帕洛阿尔托一家地毯店为中心（有点不可思议）的超级天使的成员。

How rug merchants got into tech investing is a long and complicated story, but the short version is that people who buy expensive hand-sold Persian rugs over mint tea in Palo Alto happen to be profitable people to know.

地毯商人如何进入科技投资是一个漫长而复杂的故事，但简单来说，那些在帕洛阿尔托购买昂贵的手工波斯地毯而不是薄荷茶的人恰好是有利可图的人。

The group had been involved in a lot of impressive early-stage deals, among them Uber and Dropbox .

该集团参与了许多令人印象深刻的早期交易，其中包括 Uber 和 Dropbox。

Nick and Chris had drawn up revenue projections, compared those to a burn rate based on the engineers they knew they had to hire, and concluded that they needed a runway of about $1 million to get them to strong revenue growth by Q3.

尼克和克里斯制定了收入预测，将其与基于他们知道必须雇用的工程师的烧钱率进行比较，并得出结论，他们需要大约 100 万美元的资金才能在第三季度实现强劲的收入增长。

Bobby and Ullas thought that they could reach out to their network and assure a commitment in the $700,000 to $900,000 range.

鲍比和乌拉斯认为他们可以联系他们的网络并确保承诺提供 700,000 美元到 900,000 美元的资金。

They wanted to see at least $200,000 in commitments from other investors to close out the round.

他们希望其他投资者承诺至少提供 20 万美元来结束本轮融资。

While they didn’t have to make this explicit to Nick and Chris, it’s standard practice for early commitments like this to be contingent on filling out the rest.

虽然他们不必向尼克和克里斯明确说明这一点，但像这样的早期承诺的标准做法是取决于填写其余部分。

All Valley offers are provisional until the money is actually in the bank, and if Boomtrain couldn’t find another big investor, the rug guys might very well back out.

Valley 的所有报价都是临时的，直到资金真正存入银行为止，如果 Boomtrain 找不到另一个大投资者，地毯商很可能会退出。

Also, Nick and Chris clearly hoped to have a big, recognizable VC firm in this round—both for the credibility, which would go far toward their ultimate success, and for the head start it would give them when they needed to try to raise an A round, perhaps in a year’s time.

此外，尼克和克里斯显然希望在这一轮中拥有一家大型的、知名的风险投资公司——这既是为了信誉，这将大大有助于他们最终的成功，也是为了在他们需要尝试筹集 A 轮资金时（也许是在一年的时间内），这可以为他们提供领先优势。

Still, even this soft commitment from Bobby and Ullas was great for morale.

尽管如此，即使是鲍比和乌拉斯的这种软承诺也极大地鼓舞了士气。

What they needed, perhaps even more than money, was a sense of momentum.

他们所需要的，也许比金钱更重要的是一种动力感。

Silicon Valley is where the astounding success of the very few is held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy, and—well, their youth.

在硅谷，年轻人获得了极少数人的惊人成功，以换取他们的时间、精力，还有——呃，他们的青春。

They also had a promising lead on the hiring front.

他们在招聘方面也取得了有希望的领先优势。

It’s extremely difficult to hire talented engineers in the Valley unless you’ve got incredible PR, can pay a fortune, or are offering the chance to work on an unusually difficult problem.

在硅谷聘请有才华的工程师是极其困难的，除非你有令人难以置信的公关，可以支付一大笔钱，或者提供解决异常困难问题的机会。

Nobody was buzzing about them, and they had no money, but the upside of having a business that relied on serious machine learning was that they had worthy challenges on the table.

没有人热议他们，他们也没有钱，但拥有一家依赖严格机器学习的企业的好处是，他们面临着值得挑战的挑战。

On January 4, they made an offer to exactly the sort of engineer they needed, Tevye.

1 月 4 日，他们向正是他们需要的工程师 Tevye 发出了邀请。

He had a PhD in AI from MIT.

他拥有麻省理工学院人工智能博士学位。

Just to contextualize what that means in Silicon Valley, an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million.

为了说明这在硅谷意味着什么，麻省理工学院的人工智能博士通常可以穿着椰壳胸罩独自走进投资者会议，进行一系列即兴的鸟叫声，然后带着 100 万美元离开。

Nick and Chris had gone to good schools of modest profile—Nick to the University of Puget Sound, Chris to the University of Vermont—and while Nick also had a Harvard business degree, both were skeptical about the credential fetish of the Valley.

尼克和克里斯就读于名气不大的好学校——尼克就读于普吉特海湾大学，克里斯就读于佛蒙特大学——虽然尼克也拥有哈佛商学院学位，但两人都对硅谷的学历迷信持怀疑态度。

They were happy to play the game when they could, though.

不过，只要有机会，他们就很乐意玩这个游戏。

They invited Tevye, along with a few technical advisers, to their shared office space for a Saturday "immersive," or strategy meeting.

他们邀请特维耶和几位技术顾问到他们的共享办公空间参加周六的“沉浸式”战略会议。

Nick and Chris fetched paleo plates for the tech advisers, and everyone gathered around a giant butcher block in front of a whiteboard.

尼克和克里斯为技术顾问取来古板，每个人都聚集在白板前的一个巨大的屠宰台周围。

Chris convened their meeting by saying, "We have 10 companies waiting to work with us, and we’re about to close a round of funding." These statements weren’t strictly true, but one couldn't hire engineers without projecting a sunlit-uplands future.

克里斯在召集会议时说道：“我们有 10 家公司正在等待与我们合作，我们即将完成一轮融资。”这些说法并不完全正确，但如果不预测阳光明媚的高地未来，就无法雇用工程师。

As Chris had put it to me, "Lying your way along puts you in a bad place.

正如克里斯对我所说的那样，“撒谎会让你处于一个糟糕的境地。

But you do have to balance transparency with optimism." And Tevye would be a real boon for the company, exactly what they needed to close their deals.

但你确实必须在透明度和乐观之间取得平衡。” Tevye 将为公司带来真正的好处，这正是他们完成交易所需的。

The only reason he was considering joining Nick and Chris was that he’d once thought of founding a similar sort of venture.

他考虑加入尼克和克里斯的唯一原因是他曾经想过创办一家类似的企业。

He’d be taking a 40 percent pay cut to join them, but he would have his hard problem and would get to run his own data-science team.

为了加入他们，他需要减薪 40%，但他会遇到自己的难题，并且可以管理自己的数据科学团队。

Nick and Chris had allotted an equity pool that was larger than average, and they were making Tevye a generous offer—in a highly theoretical sense.

尼克和克里斯分配的股权池高于平均水平，他们向特维耶提出了慷慨的报价——从高度理论的角度来看。

San Francisco was full of people walking around with their pockets stuffed with 1.2 percent of nothing.

旧金山到处都是口袋里装满了 1.2% 的东西的人。

Tevye signed up.

特维耶报名了。

He asked to begin on January 27, roughly two weeks before Nick and Chris’ money was set to run out.

他要求从 1 月 27 日开始，大约是尼克和克里斯的钱即将用完的两周前。

Now that they had an engineer, Nick felt pretty good going into his meeting on Sunday, January 5, with what would, with any luck, be their first paying customer.

现在他们有了一名工程师，尼克在 1 月 5 日星期日参加会议时感到非常高兴，如果幸运的话，他将成为他们的第一个付费客户。

He met the general manager of a small property that was part of a giant media concern.

他会见了一家小地产的总经理，该地产是一家大型媒体关注的一部分。

The GM knew how the game was played: He was happy to be a "customer" in exchange for a deep discount.

总经理知道这个游戏是怎么玩的：他很高兴成为一名“顾客”，以换取大幅折扣。

He looked over Nick’s fee schedule and selected the service he thought his company would need, then negotiated a 75 percent discount for a three-month trial.

他查看了尼克的费用表，选择了他认为公司需要的服务，然后协商获得了三个月试用期 75% 的折扣。

It wasn’t much in the way of revenue for Boomtrain but it was something, and if it was successful they could expect the parent company to be a great channel partner, maybe—who knew?—bringing them into their other properties across the board.

对于 Boomtrain 来说，这并不算什么收入，但也很重要，如果成功的话，他们可以期望母公司成为一个伟大的渠道合作伙伴，也许——谁知道呢？——将他们全面带入他们的其他产业。

On Monday morning, Nick and Chris took stock.

周一早上，尼克和克里斯进行了盘点。

They had one customer, a big name who was paying them almost nothing.

他们有一位客户，一位大名鼎鼎的客户，但几乎没有向他们支付任何费用。

They had one new engineer, sterling of credential and reputation, but in 25 days they might have no money to pay him.

他们有一位新工程师，拥有良好的资历和声誉，但 25 天内他们可能没有钱支付他的工资。

They had a syndicate of investors, who had soft-committed on the basis of revenue projections they feared they might have to downwardly revise and who might back out if they failed to secure a meaningfully large check from an unconnected, well-known, preferably institutional party.

他们有一个投资者财团，他们根据收入预测做出了软承诺，他们担心自己可能不得不向下修改，如果他们未能从一个无关联、知名、最好是机构的政党那里获得一笔有意义的大额支票，他们可能会退出。

Chris pointed at Nick as though he weren’t there.

克里斯指着尼克，好像他不在那里一样。

"He's 75 percent sure we'll pull this off."

“他 75% 确信我们会成功。”

“I’m 99 percent sure we’ll pull this off,” Nick said.

“我百分之九十九确信我们会成功，”尼克说。

“But then again, I’m the delusional one.”

“但话又说回来，我是个妄想者。”

Chris, for all his outward placidity, was the pessimist.

克里斯虽然表面上很平静，但他却是个悲观主义者。

"That's why we work so well together."

“这就是我们合作得如此顺利的原因。”

It was hard to imagine that Nick and Chris, coarsened and scarred by the gauntlet they’d endured, had ever partaken in the hacker-house dream of total disruption.

很难想象尼克和克里斯因经历过的考验而变得粗鲁和伤痕累累，他们曾经参与过彻底颠覆的黑客之家的梦想。

But in fact Boomtrain had begun with a very different, and similarly transfor­mational, vision for what it might do.

但事实上，Boomtrain 的出发点是一个非常不同但同样具有变革性的愿景。

They had friends who were making videos, young filmmakers shooting web shorts on a shoestring.

他们有制作视频的朋友，年轻的电影制片人靠小本经营拍摄网络短片。

Meanwhile, lots of people were looking for things to watch online.

与此同时，很多人都在寻找可以在线观看的内容。

But the online video marketplace was fragmented and liable to the power of moneyed interests.

但在线视频市场是分散的，容易受到金钱利益的影响。

There was stuff on Hulu and stuff on Netflix and stuff on YouTube and—most important, to them—stuff being made here and there by aspiring amateurs.

Hulu 上有东西，Netflix 上有东西，YouTube 上有东西，而且对他们来说最重要的是有抱负的业余爱好者到处制作的东西。

What the Internet needed, Nick and Chris reflected, was a clearinghouse to help make sense of it all.

尼克和克里斯认为，互联网需要的是一个信息交换所来帮助理解这一切。

It would be good for the makers and good for the consumers.

这对制造商有利，对消费者有利。

Nick and Chris met 10 years ago in Seattle, just after college, where Nick founded a magazine of international politics and Chris, who had graduated with an engineering degree, was working at a digital ad agency.

尼克和克里斯十年前在西雅图相识，当时尼克刚刚大学毕业，在那里创办了一本国际政治杂志，而拥有工程学位的克里斯则在一家数字广告公司工作。

On one of their first outings together they took to the water.

在他们第一次一起郊游时，他们去了水里。

Nick grew up sailing and had just bought a junky little boat for a few hundred dollars, around which Chris raced—in a boat he’d dipped into his savings to buy—in mocking circles.

尼克从小就航海长大，刚刚花了几百美元买了一艘破旧的小船，克里斯开着他用积蓄买的船绕着它赛跑，嘲笑着圈子。

From those very first days they talked about founding something together.

从第一天起，他们就讨论要一起创建一些东西。

At first, this was a form of courtship.

起初，这是一种求爱形式。

One would say, "I'd really like to start a business with you one day," but for a while it was just a way to communicate warmth and trust.

有人会说，“我真的很想有一天和你一起创业”，但有一段时间这只是一种表达温暖和信任的方式。

Over time they grew close; Nick’s sister became inseparable from Chris’ wife, Chris got along famously with Nick’s college friends, and so on.

随着时间的推移，他们的关系越来越亲密。尼克的妹妹与克里斯的妻子形影不离，克里斯与尼克的大学朋友相处得很好，等等。

It was as though they starred in a sitcom that lacked a budget to pay extras.

就好像他们主演了一部缺乏预算来支付额外费用的情景喜剧。

Nick went away to business school at Harvard; afterward, he turned down offers from Google and Wall Street and went to work for a medium-size technology company.

尼克去了哈佛大学商学院；之后，他拒绝了谷歌和华尔街的邀请，去了一家中型科技公司工作。

Chris, meanwhile, worked his way up to running the interactive division of the digital agency.

与此同时，克里斯逐渐晋升为数字代理公司互动部门的负责人。

Both were comfortable but longed to run their own shop, and to do so together.

两人都很自在，但都渴望经营自己的商店，并一起经营。

On a sailing trip in the Sea of Cortes for Nick’s 30th birthday, they filled a yellow legal pad with ideas.

在为尼克 30 岁生日而在科尔特斯海航行时，他们在一本黄色便签本上写满了想法。

They settled on that grand vision for Internet video, a social-discovery engine where all the fragmented content could be aggregated and then recommended based on algorithmic processing and social data.

他们确定了互联网视频的宏伟愿景，这是一个社交发现引擎，可以聚合所有碎片内容，然后根据算法处理和社交数据进行推荐。

If it worked the way they wanted it to, they could help small-budget producers circumvent the existing system’s gatekeepers.

如果它按照他们想要的方式运作，他们可以帮助小预算生产商绕过现有系统的看门人。

On the strength of an unsteady, ill-lit two-minute video they shot on a webcam, they were accepted into AngelPad, a local incubator run by an early Google employee.

凭借他们在网络摄像头上拍摄的一段不稳定、光线昏暗的两分钟视频，他们被 AngelPad 录取，这是一家由一名早期 Google 员工运营的当地孵化器。

Within eight weeks of their graduation, they’d collected $450,000 on a convertible note.

毕业后八周内，他们通过可兑换票据筹集了 45 万美元。

Chris showed me a picture of Nick’s hand, purple and swollen like a bony eggplant from the high five they’d given each other when they got their first commit.

克里斯给我看了一张尼克手的照片，紫色，肿得像一个瘦骨嶙峋的茄子，这是他们第一次提交时互相给予的高五分。

A few months out of AngelPad, however, they "pivoted." They'd learned, in part from investors they'd met and in part from just trying, that marketing a site to consumers is just too hard, at least if you don’t have a fortune to begin with.

然而，离开 AngelPad 几个月后，他们“发生了转变”。他们从遇到的投资者和尝试中了解到，向消费者推销网站太难了，至少如果你一开始就没有财富的话。

Selling to business customers—a structured, repeatable process—would be a lot easier.

向商业客户销售——一个结构化的、可重复的过程——会容易得多。

You need 10 customers, 100 customers, rather than 1 million or 10 million users.

你需要10个客户、100个客户，而不是100万或1000万用户。

And your investors can introduce you to potential customers, because they are already investing in many of them as well.

您的投资者可以将您介绍给潜在客户，因为他们也已经对其中许多客户进行了投资。

So before Nick and Chris really had the chance to realize it, they'd "ripped out the heart" of their original idea and put it to work in the service of a new idea: a "multichannel personalized notification platform." It was a software-as-a-service product that allowed corporations to tailor individualized recommendations to their millions of customers.

因此，在尼克和克里斯真正有机会实现这一目标之前，他们“掏出了最初想法的核心”，并将其用于一个新想法：“多渠道个性化通知平台”。它是一种软件即服务产品，允许企业为其数百万客户量身定制个性化建议。

It could be thought of as a Netflix-style recommendation engine that any business could plug into without building its own.

它可以被认为是一个 Netflix 风格的推荐引擎，任何企业都可以插入，而无需构建自己的引擎。

There were already a slate of companies that did this for on-site recommendations, the little boxes that suggest what videoclip, magazine article, or pair of pants you might want to see or consume next.

已经有一些公司这样做了，用于现场推荐，这些小盒子会建议您下一步可能想看或消费什么视频剪辑、杂志文章或裤子。

Boomtrain's value proposition was in using the same backend to drive personalized notifications across all platforms: they could offer onsite boxes, personalized emails, SMS reminders, or push messaging.

Boomtrain 的价值主张是使用相同的后端在所有平台上驱动个性化通知：他们可以提供现场盒子、个性化电子邮件、短信提醒或推送消息。

They decided to focus first on emails, mostly because big media companies already had seven-figure line items in their budgets for the undifferentiated mass emails they were sending—for a click rate of maybe 3 percent on a good day.

他们决定首先关注电子邮件，主要是因为大型媒体公司的预算中已经有七位数的订单项目，用于发送无差异的群发电子邮件——天气好的时候点击率可能为 3%。

Their long-range plan, however (what investors in the Valley like to call the "Google-sized" version of the company), involved creating a master identity system that would recognize customers across multiple sites.

然而，他们的长期计划（硅谷的投资者喜欢称之为公司的“谷歌规模”版本）涉及创建一个主身份系统，该系统可以跨多个站点识别客户。

It would be as if Netflix recommended movies based in part on what you’d read in The New York Times and bought at Zappos, and it would work out of the box for any site.

这就好像 Netflix 推荐的电影部分基于你在《纽约时报》上读到的内容以及在 Zappos 购买的内容，而且它可以在任何网站上开箱即用。

Like any company that collected data, it would grow exponentially more powerful and appealing as it achieved scale.

就像任何收集数据的公司一样，随着规模的扩大，它的实力和吸引力将呈指数级增长。

The more customers they had, the better their recommendations to all customers would be.

他们拥有的客户越多，他们向所有客户的推荐就越好。

Nick and Chris would never explicitly admit it, but in unguarded moments it seemed clear that they missed their old idea, the one they’d come up with on the boat, the one that had served a broad and stately social purpose.

尼克和克里斯永远不会明确承认这一点，但在毫无防备的时刻，他们似乎很明显怀念他们的旧想法，他们在船上想出的想法，服务于广泛而庄严的社会目的的想法。

Their moments of greatest animation were when they showed off their first demos and decks, when they seemed decades younger.

他们最伟大的动画时刻是当他们展示他们的第一个演示和套牌时，那时他们看起来年轻了几十年。

At the same time, however, one of their greatest regrets was that they hadn’t pivoted early enough, because now they had so little time.

然而，与此同时，他们最大的遗憾之一是他们没有尽早转向，因为现在他们的时间太少了。

In the Valley you can raise money on promise—as they’d done once—or on results, which they didn’t have quite yet.

在硅谷，你可以根据承诺筹​​集资金（就像他们曾经做过的那样），也可以根据结果筹集资金，而他们还没有取得成果。

They were left to brood over a list of if-onlys.

他们只能沉思一系列“如果”的愿望。

If only they’d pivoted two months earlier!

如果他们早两个月就转向就好了！

If only they’d stayed at their jobs slightly longer.

如果他们能在工作岗位上呆得更久一点就好了。

If only that one VC, a partner at a large brand-name East Coast investor, hadn’t suddenly left his firm just before they were to close on $500,000, a half million that would have led, effortlessly, to twice that amount.

如果不是那位风投公司（东海岸一家大型品牌投资公司的合伙人）在公司即将关闭时突然离开公司，筹集到 50 万美元的话，那么 50 万美元将毫不费力地达到这个数字的两倍。

At this point, they were forced to play a shell game with everyone they met.

此时，他们被迫与遇到的每个人玩骗局。

Without investors, they couldn’t afford to hire the engineers they required to sell a robust product to paying customers.

没有投资者，他们就无法聘请所需的工程师来向付费客户销售强大的产品。

Without customers, they had no market-traction data to show investors.

没有客户，他们就没有市场吸引力数据可以向投资者展示。

They needed investors to get customers and engineers; they needed customers to get investors and engineers; they needed engineers to get customers and investors.

他们需要投资者来吸引客户和工程师；他们需要客户来吸引投资者和工程师；他们需要工程师来吸引客户和投资者。

If they didn’t act as though it were all in place, there was no chance it would ever fall into place.

如果他们不表现得好像一切都已就位，那么事情就不可能落实到位。

By mid-February, they thought, either all their stories would come true or none of them would.

他们认为，到二月中旬，要么他们所有的故事都会成真，要么一个都不会。

"Techies" often get lumped together, but the lifestyle gap between startup founders and the employees of large companies is unbridgeable.

“技术人员”经常被混为一谈，但初创公司创始人和大公司员工之间的生活方式差距是不可逾越的。

One night I escaped the hacker house to go out with a group of founders from various startups: a dating app, two food-related apps, a videochat app, something that had to do with drone deployment, and an app that was, at last, going to help all of us communicate better.

一天晚上，我逃离了黑客之家，与一群来自不同初创公司的创始人一起出去：一个约会应用程序、两个与食品相关的应用程序、一个视频聊天应用程序、一个与无人机部署有关的应用程序，以及一个最终将帮助我们所有人更好地沟通的应用程序。

At 10:30 the waitress came over to take our orders for a second round.

10点30分，服务员过来帮我们点第二轮的菜。

I ordered another whiskey, but everybody else looked at their phones with muted anxiety.

我又点了一杯威士忌，但其他人都低声焦虑地看着手机。

At 11 pm the founders rose in pairs to leave, as if they had an exam in the morning.

晚上11点，创始人两人结伴起身离开，就像早上要考试一样。

One founder (his company was literally an app that optimized app stores for other apps), who’d ordered a water and had taken off neither his backpack nor his jacket, apologized on behalf of everybody for leaving so early.

一位创始人（他的公司实际上是一个为其他应用程序优化应用程序商店的应用程序），他点了一杯水，既没有脱下背包，也没有脱下夹克，他代表所有人为这么早离开而道歉。

"When you have an early-stage company," he said, "there’s no time to hang out at a cool, trendy bar." He was 23.

“当你拥有一家早期公司时，”他说，“就没有时间去酷炫、时尚的酒吧闲逛。”那年他23岁。

The bar might have been cool and trendy in Miami in 2004.

2004 年的迈阿密，酒吧可能很酷很时尚。

By contrast, on a weekend afternoon I went over to find my young cousin—a talented and good-humored UX designer for Google—with his friends in Alamo Square, where they were winding down a barbecue in the January sun.

相比之下，在一个周末的下午，我去阿拉莫广场找到了我年轻的表弟——一位才华横溢、幽默的谷歌用户体验设计师——和他的朋友们，他们在一月的阳光下正在烧烤。

I arrived late, as the fog was beginning to gather in the west over the Richmond, and the group assembled there was playing a game of mass footsie on some blankets they’d set out on the leeward slope.

我到得很晚，雾气开始在里士满河西边聚集，聚集在那里的人们正在背风坡上的毯子上玩集体踢脚游戏。

My cousin was perpetrating amateur reflexology on the feet of a giggling companion while she idly juggled the decapitated head of a pirate piñata.

我的表弟正在对一位咯咯笑的同伴的脚进行业余反射疗法，而她则懒洋洋地摆弄着海盗皮纳塔的斩首头。

The candies that had spilled from the piñata were scattered about in the grass, glinting.

皮纳塔里洒出来的糖果散落在草丛中，闪闪发光。

Silicon Valley is not a place where one is invited to show frailty or despondence.

硅谷不是一个让人表现出脆弱或沮丧的地方。

It is, as Nick puts it, "the place where everybody is killing it all the time."

正如尼克所说，“这里是每个人一直在杀戮的地方。”

A few of them worked for Google in one capacity or another, though nobody wore the company’s logo.

他们中的一些人以某种身份在谷歌工作，尽管没有人佩戴该公司的标志。

I asked if anybody there worked for a startup.

我问那里是否有人在初创公司工作过。

My cousin looked around and shook his head.

表弟环顾四周，摇了摇头。

"Some of these people used to," he said, and went back to planning the hourly activities of a party they’d be throwing when it got nicer out—though it didn’t seem possible that it could get nicer out, ever, than it was right then—where they’d begin one evening with dinner and conclude the following morning with brunch.

“其中一些人曾经这样做过，”他说，然后回去计划每小时的活动，当聚会变得更好时，他们将举办聚会——尽管聚会似乎不可能变得比当时更好——他们会在一天晚上用晚餐开始，在第二天早上用早午餐结束。

They’d gotten as far as dawn yoga.

他们已经进行了黎明瑜伽。

It began to get cold and everybody rolled up the blankets and went back to the house, which had several terraced floors of downtown views, where the gold late light flashed off the aquarium glass of new high-rises downtown.

天开始变冷，每个人都卷起毯子回到房子，房子有几层露台，可以看到市中心的景色，金色的晚光从市中心新建的高层建筑的水族馆玻璃上闪现出来。

The entrepreneurs, if they were old enough, could perhaps remember a time in their life devoted to such extracurriculars as spare time, drinking, or mass post-piñata footsie.

企业家们，如果他们足够大的话，也许还记得他们一生中曾有一段时间专门从事课外活动，比如业余时间、喝酒或在皮纳塔后进行大规模的足协活动。

My cousin was having the time of his life, but a lot of the startup guys—perhaps, in part, as a defense—saw riding the corporate bus as the most dismal of failures.

我的表弟正享受着他一生中最美好的时光，但许多初创公司的人——也许部分是出于辩护——将乘坐公司巴士视为最惨淡的失败。

Even Nick and Chris, who did not know contempt as a mode, were appalled at the thought.

即使尼克和克里斯不知道蔑视是一种模式，也对这个想法感到震惊。

This was a somewhat self-delusional attitude, as their second- through sixth-best-case scenarios were being acquired by one of the five giant, powerful, wealthy companies.

这是一种有点自欺欺人的态度，因为他们的第二到第六最好的情况正在被五家强大、富有的巨头公司之一收购。

Even if Nick and Chris survived another year, there was a good chance they’d just be surviving to put themselves in a position to get a nice signing bonus when they finally conceded to days framed by long bus commutes—just like the many other entrepreneurs who came to look at having a failed startup as an alternative to graduate school.

即使尼克和克里斯再活了一年，当他们最终承认要忍受长途公交车通勤的日子时，他们很有可能幸存下来，让自己能够获得丰厚的签约奖金——就像许多其他企业家一样，他们开始将失败的初创公司视为研究生院的替代方案。

The best-case scenario, of course, was an IPO; it was the only way to preserve the promised autonomy of a startup, even if it meant being beholden to shareholders.

当然，最好的情况是首次公开募股；这是保留初创公司所承诺的自主权的唯一方法，即使这意味着要对股东负责。

The dream was for your company to be the one in a thousand that became Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, Square.

你的梦想是成为 Uber、Dropbox、Airbnb、Square 等千分之一的公司。

They’re consumer-facing, first of all, and thus part of a celebrity matrix, and they make or enable something that people pay for.

首先，它们面向消费者，因此是名人矩阵的一部分，它们制造或启用人们付费的东西。

They aren’t just advertising companies, like Facebook and Google.

他们不仅仅是 Facebook 和 Google 等广告公司。

The guy at the flophouse with the most clout was a mop-headed coder who worked at Square.

这家廉价旅馆里最有影响力的人是一位在 Square 工作的拖着拖把头的程序员。

One night at dinner he slyly mocked another former flop-houser, this one a newly minted UX designer at Apple.

一天晚上，在晚餐时，他狡猾地嘲笑了另一位前失败者，这位是苹果公司新晋的用户体验设计师。

At Apple you sometimes couldn’t even work on your own bus, lest employees in different groups see what you were up to; at Square, everybody was emailed minutes of everybody else’s meetings.

在苹果公司，你有时甚至不能在自己的公交车上工作，以免不同团队的员工看到你在做什么；在 Square，每个人都会通过电子邮件收到其他人的会议记录。

The biggest status play at that dinner table, and at hundreds like it, was to work at the biggest company that maintained startup cred, the biggest place you could feel as though you were working on an imaginable whole rather than a tiny part.

在餐桌上，以及数百个类似的餐桌上，最大的地位游戏就是在一家保持初创企业信誉的最大公司工作，在这个最大的地方，你会感觉自己是在为一个可以想象的整体而不是一个小部分工作。

One day I was out with Chris picking up burritos when a car slowed and the driver waved.

有一天，我和克里斯出去买墨西哥卷饼，一辆汽车放慢了速度，司机向我招手。

"So this is your new car, eh?" Chris asked.

“所以这是你的新车，嗯？”克里斯问道。

It was his old and close friend Tony, whose company had just been bought by Dropbox.

这是他的老朋友托尼，他的公司刚刚被 Dropbox 收购。

I asked Chris how he thought Tony felt, going from the anxiety of being a founder to the easy life of a 9-to-7 engineer at Dropbox.

我问 Chris，他认为 Tony 从作为创始人的焦虑转变为 Dropbox 朝九晚七的工程师的轻松生活有何感受。

"You’d have to ask him," Chris said.

“你得问他，”克里斯说。

"But I bet it feels like a big fucking relief."

“但我敢打赌，这感觉就像是一种巨大的解脱。”

Boomtrain’s days at the office were a blur of sales calls, engineering meetings over Google+ Hangout, and pitches to investors.

Boomtrain 在办公室的日子很模糊，包括销售电话、通过 Google+ Hangout 召开的工程会议以及向投资者推销。

It seemed like an inhuman feat that Nick could keep himself awake for the sales calls, where he delivered the same pitch over and over to the same bored, nontechnical marketing people.

尼克在销售电话中保持清醒，一遍又一遍地向同样无聊、不懂技术的营销人员进行同样的推销，这似乎是一项不人道的壮举。

Chris seemed to derive a lot of energy from the engineering discussions; perhaps this wasn’t quite the company they’d intended to found, but Chris is an engineering autodidact, and he drew great pleasure from the technical details of network architecture and data structure.

克里斯似乎从工程讨论中获得了很多能量。也许这并不是他们想要创建的公司，但克里斯是一位工程自学者，他从网络架构和数据结构的技术细节中获得了极大的乐趣。

Nick and Chris tended to take investor calls together when they could.

尼克和克里斯倾向于尽可能一起接听投资者电话。

Nick leaned over the computer while Chris lay back in his seat.

尼克靠在电脑上，克里斯则靠在座位上。

"I don't know how fast you move," Nick often began his pitch, "but we're moving fast over here.

“我不知道你的行动有多快，”尼克经常开始他的演讲，“但我们在这里行动得很快。

We set out to raise $1 million, but we're already at $900,000 committed.

我们计划筹集 100 万美元，但目前已承诺筹集 90 万美元。

Now we’re considering letting the round get oversubscribed, so we could try to find some room for you."

现在我们正在考虑让这轮融资获得超额认购，这样我们就可以尝试为您找到一些空间。”

"Don't worry," the partner always said.

“别担心，”合作伙伴总是说。

"We can move fast."

“我们可以快速行动。”

Nick had good answers to questions about what differentiated them from their competitors and convincing estimates of the market size in the personalized-notification space.

对于他们与竞争对手的区别以及对个性化通知领域市场规模的令人信服的估计等问题，尼克给出了很好的答案。

Sometimes he had to scramble to look up the website of a competitor he’d never heard of, but he could usually bring that off.

有时他不得不忙着查找他从未听说过的竞争对手的网站，但他通常都能成功。

All invariably went swimmingly until they had to answer two questions.

一切都很顺利，直到他们必须回答两个问题。

The first: so, who’s leading the round?

第一：那么，谁在这轮比赛中领先？

"I'm sure you've heard of the Persian rug mafia," Nick would say.

“我相信你听说过波斯地毯黑手党，”尼克会说。

"Well, they're great investors.

“嗯，他们是伟大的投资者。

They were early at Uber and Dropbox."

他们很早就加入了 Uber 和 Dropbox。”

The invocation of Uber and Dropbox perked up any conversation in the Valley, but it rarely seemed all that reassuring to investors.

Uber 和 Dropbox 的出现让硅谷的讨论活跃起来，但投资者似乎并没有那么安心。

The second question, always, was this: What kind of data did they have?

第二个问题始终是：他们拥有什么样的数据？

By what metrics could they prove the value proposition of their product?

他们可以通过哪些指标来证明其产品的价值主张？

Nick and Chris had answers only about their internal tests on clickthrough rates for their first product, the one they’d abandoned.

尼克和克里斯只得到了关于他们的第一个产品（他们已经放弃的产品）点击率的内部测试的答案。

Under questioning, they eventually had to concede they’d just finished building out the new post-pivot technology and didn’t yet have meaningful numbers to show.

在质疑下，他们最终不得不承认，他们刚刚完成了新的枢轴后技术的构建，并且尚未提供有意义的数据。

This was the point when the accrued investor energy began to dissipate.

此时，投资者积累的能量开始消散。

At times like these Nick tended to jellify, as if all of his bones had suddenly fled his trembling body, and he would look to the steely, relaxed Chris for support.

每当这样的时候，尼克就会变得凝固，就好像他所有的骨头突然都逃离了他颤抖的身体，他会向钢铁般、放松的克里斯寻求支持。

"I have to admit, I just wonder," one investor said.

“我必须承认，我只是想知道，”一位投资者说。

"How special is the special sauce?"

“特制酱汁有多特别？”

"I love the product," another said, "but I just don't know your customers that well."

“我喜欢这个产品，”另一个人说，“但我只是不太了解你的客户。”

"It's a great team, but I worry that you guys are selling to content publishers, and I could only connect you to ecommerce customers." "Wonderful technology, but you guys are working in ecommerce, and my whole network is content publishing."

“这是一个很棒的团队，但我担心你们正在向内容出版商销售产品，而我只能将你们与电子商务客户联系起来。” “很棒的技术，但你们从事电子商务，而我的整个网络都是内容发布。”

"You might find a hundred customers, but I don't know if you'll find a thousand.

“你可能会找到一百个顾客，但我不知道你是否能找到一千个。

I can see you guys getting to $10 million in revenue, but it's hard to see how you’d get to $100 million."

我可以看到你们的收入达到 1000 万美元，但很难想象你们如何达到 1 亿美元。”

"Why now?

“为什么是现在？

When I was at Yahoo in 1996, we were working on the personalization problem then." ("Yeah," said Chris later, "and you didn’t solve it.")

1996 年我在雅虎时，我们正在研究个性化问题。” （“是的，”克里斯后来说，“但你没有解决这个问题。”）

And one of the biggest lies in town: "I love what you’re doing, but as an investor I just don’t know what my value add would be."

城里最大的问题之一是：“我喜欢你正在做的事情，但作为一名投资者，我只是不知道我的附加值是什么。”

At the end of these meetings, the investor would always say he had to talk to his partners and would get back to them.

在这些会议结束时，投资者总是说他必须与合伙人交谈，然后再回复他们。

"I give that one," Nick said once, "about a 9.467 percent chance of working out." "We just tell him," Chris said, "that we're focusing on product and customers for now.

“我认为，”尼克有一次说道，“锻炼的可能性约为 9.467%。” “我们只是告诉他，”克里斯说，“我们现在专注于产品和客户。

We're onboarding four customers next week." Even if they were just pilots, that was actually true, and it meant that within six weeks they'd have real answers to the metrics question.

下周我们将迎来四名客户。”即使他们只是飞行员，这实际上也是如此，这意味着他们将在六周内得到指标问题的真正答案。

"But we told him a week ago that we didn’t have any real customers yet," Nick countered, "because we've had to spend so much time fund-raising." Nick got an email from one of their earliest investors.

“但我们一周前告诉他，我们还没有任何真正的客户，”尼克反驳道，“因为我们不得不花很多时间筹集资金。”尼克收到了一封来自他们最早的投资者之一的电子邮件。

He was writing to them to suggest that now was the time for them to get press, to push their seed round along into completion.

他写信给他们建议，现在是他们接受媒体采访、推动种子轮完成的时候了。

He suggested they spin a story about their pivot to TechCrunch.

他建议他们编造一个关于转向 TechCrunch 的故事。

"What's the story going to be?" Nick asked.

“故事将会怎样？”尼克问道。

"We had an unsuccessful business," Chris said, "and now we have a marginally more successful business, which might be really successful if anybody trusts us enough to give us the money so we can actually stop fund-raising and focus on our product?"

“我们的业务不成功，”克里斯说，“现在我们的业务稍微成功了，如果有人足够信任我们给我们钱，这样我们就可以真正停止融资并专注于我们的产品，那么这可能会真正成功吗？”

"We pivoted from a business nobody’s ever heard of," Nick went on, "to another business nobody’s ever heard of, and we have big investors we can’t name and customers we can’t mention, but trust us, we’re a big deal?"

“我们从一个没人听说过的企业转向了另一个没人听说过的企业，我们有我们无法说出名字的大投资者和我们无法提及的客户，但相信我们，我们很重要吗？”

This was gallows humor, but it meant something.

这是绞刑架上的幽默，但它意味着什么。

It wasn't a lie, exactly, to get your business three or six or nine months down the road by talking about your business as if it already were six or nine months down the road.

确切地说，通过谈论你的业务就好像它已经有六或九个月的时间一样，让你的业务向前发展三、六或九个月，这并不是谎言。

The sorts of customers they were selling to, Chris explained, were big "legacy" companies that tend to move slowly and by committee, so Boomtrain could afford to make promises on delay.

克里斯解释说，他们销售的客户都是大型“传统”公司，这些公司往往行动缓慢且由委员会负责，因此 Boomtrain 有能力做出延迟承诺。

Push notifications, for example: That was something they couldn’t do quite yet, though they acted as though it was part of their standard package.

例如，推送通知：这是他们目前还无法做到的事情，尽管他们表现得好像这是他们标准包的一部分。

But they could easily prioritize it and get it done in three weeks.

但他们可以轻松地确定优先顺序并在三周内完成。

If a paying customer wanted it right away, they could drop everything and get it done in a week.

如果付费客户立即想要它，他们可以放弃一切并在一周内完成。

This was the accepted way.

这是公认的方式。

But trying to place a phony story of their impending greatness on TechCrunch felt a little sleazy to them.

但试图在 TechCrunch 上讲述他们即将取得的伟大成就的虚假故事对他们来说有点低俗。

They had too much heart for that.

他们对此太有心了。

At the end of one of their investor meetings, a partner said, "If I write a check and you close this round tomorrow, and the next day you get an acquisition offer for $100 million, what do you do?" Chris later explained that this was a trick question.

在一次投资者会议结束时，一位合伙人说道：“如果我写了一张支票，你明天结束这一轮融资，第二天你就收到了 1 亿美元的收购要约，你会怎么做？”克里斯后来解释说这是一个棘手的问题。

Everyone knows the right answer is "Hell no, I wouldn't sell.

每个人都知道正确的答案是“天啊，不，我不会卖。

This is a billion-dollar company!" This is the answer any flop-houser would give.

这是一家价值数十亿美元的公司！”这是任何失败者都会给出的答案。

"But that's such bullshit," Chris said.

“但这真是废话，”克里斯说。

"Of course we'd sell.

“我们当然会卖掉。

We'd provide really well for our engineers, we'd get out of this impossible-seeming situation and start over with a clean slate.

我们会为我们的工程师提供非常好的服务，我们会摆脱这种看似不可能的情况，并从头开始。

But you’re not allowed to say that."

但你不可以这么说。”

I asked what he’d do with his share of that $100 million.

我问他打算用这 1 亿美元中自己的那份做什么。

He didn’t hesitate.

他没有犹豫。

"I'd buy a boat, and Michelle and I would take off, spend four years sailing around the world." During the course of his career he’d canceled two vacations with Michelle, one to Turkey and one to Paris, and now that he was a founder he didn’t even bother scheduling one.

“我会买一艘船，然后米歇尔和我一起出发，花四年时间环游世界。”在他的职业生涯中，他取消了与米歇尔的两次假期，一次去土耳其，一次去巴黎，现在他成为了一名创始人，他甚至懒得安排一次。

Michelle had been amazing all the while; it was clear to Chris that she'd discovered vast reserves of strength she’d never known she had.

米歇尔一直都很出色。克里斯很清楚，她发现了自己从未意识到的巨大力量储备。

"But, still, I'd just like to take her away for a while."

“不过，我还是想带她走一段时间。”

By this point the contrast between the painful reality of Boomtrain and the vacuous optimism of my young roommates was becoming harder to bear.

至此，Boomtrain 的痛苦现实与我年轻室友的空洞乐观之间的对比变得越来越难以忍受。

The iOS developer got a job at a company called Scanadu.

这位 iOS 开发人员在一家名为 Scanadu 的公司找到了一份工作。

I asked what it did.

我问它做了什么。

"Basically it's this thing that’s going to disintermediate doctors.

“基本上，这就是让医生脱节的原因。

It checks your vitals for you, like that thing on Star Trek, and it's going to totally disrupt the medical industry.

它会为你检查你的生命体征，就像《星际迷航》中的那样，它将彻底颠覆医疗行业。

It’s going to make doctors obsolete."

这将使医生变得过时。”

These young men were only happy when they were talking or thinking about being in the business of wholesale transformation.

这些年轻人只有在谈论或思考从事大规模转型业务时才会感到高兴。

On the day the iOS developer got his job making doctors obsolete, a Ruby developer who had recently moved out came back to the house to cook dinner.

在这位 iOS 开发人员的工作让医生变得过时的那天，一位刚搬出去的 Ruby 开发人员回到家里做饭。

He was six months out of a technical institute in the Northeast and had just gotten his first job ever.

他从东北部的一所技术学院毕业六个月后，刚刚找到了第一份工作。

The company did payroll.

公司是做工资的。

"These guys raised $6.1 million in seed funding out of Y Combinator.

“这些人从 Y Combinator 筹集了 610 万美元的种子资金。

That’s probably the biggest seed round in Valley history.

这可能是硅谷历史上最大的种子轮融资。

We've got a ton of momentum, solving real problems.

我们有巨大的动力来解决实际问题。

It’s pretty awesome."

这真是太棒了。”

"The problem of payroll.

“工资问题。

You should hear the emails we're getting from our customers."

您应该听到我们从客户那里收到的电子邮件。”

The Ruby developer couldn’t name a problem with payroll that his company was solving; he thought they were just solving a problem called payroll.

Ruby 开发人员无法说出他的公司正在解决的薪资问题；他认为他们只是在解决一个叫做工资单的问题。

He was only on payroll for the first time in his life, and needless to say had never himself run into payroll problems.

他这辈子第一次拿到工资，不用说，他自己从来没有遇到过工资问题。

But he was working for a startup with YC credentials that had leveraged new technologies and raised a lot of money, so he could reasonably feel now that he hadn’t just joined a company that did something incremental—fixed the various problems with payroll, of which there are many—but something revolutionary, i.e., fixing the problem of payroll.

但他当时在一家拥有 YC 资质的初创公司工作，该公司利用了新技术并筹集了很多资金，所以他现在可以合理地感觉到，他加入的公司不仅仅是做一些渐进的事情——解决了薪资方面的各种问题，其中有很多——而是一些革命性的事情，即解决薪资问题。

The Ruby developer was advising the iOS developer, now that they both had jobs paying $120,000 a year, about moving out.

Ruby 开发人员正在向 iOS 开发人员提供搬迁建议，因为他们都有年薪 120,000 美元的工作。

The Ruby developer had liked the camaraderie of the place but had wanted to live somewhere he could bring girls ("in that unicorn of an event") or put up guests.

Ruby 开发人员喜欢这个地方的友情，但他想住在一个可以带女孩（“在活动的独角兽中”）或接待客人的地方。

The iOS guy didn’t want to pay more than $2,000 a month for a studio and was having a hard time finding something.

这位 iOS 开发者不想每月为工作室支付超过 2,000 美元，而且很难找到合适的东西。

"You can’t forget," said the Ruby developer, "that this city has produced more millionaires than any city in the history of the world." He was doling out glutinous scarlet clumps of Trader Joe’s tortellini beside heavy jaundiced globs of Annie’s shells and cheese.

“你不能忘记，”这位 Ruby 开发商说道，“这座城市比世界历史上任何城市都诞生了更多的百万富翁。”他正在分发一团团粘稠的猩红色的商人乔的意大利饺子，旁边是一大团安妮的贝壳和奶酪，旁边是黄疸病。

He’d been around long enough to make over a hundred grand a year, but not long enough to know that carbs were bad signaling.

他已经工作了足够长的时间，每年可以赚到一百多万，但还没有足够长的时间知道碳水化合物是不好的信号。

"Oh, you know, the actual city." I asked what that was.

“哦，你知道，真正的城市。”我问那是什么。

"SoMa, China Basin, Mission Bay.

“SoMa，中国盆地，使命湾。

What people like us call the city."

像我们这样的人称之为城市。”

He’d been in the city for something like three weeks, and most of what he knew about it came from people who themselves had only been around for eight to 10 weeks.

他在这座城市呆了大约三个星期，而他对这座城市的了解大部分来自于那些只在这座城市呆了八到十周的人。

Mission Bay was a landfill turned into a hospital that hadn’t even been finished yet.

使命湾是一个垃圾填埋场，后来变成了一家尚未完工的医院。

China Basin felt like some prefabricated drag-and-drop plot of blocks out of the original Sim­City.

中国盆地感觉就像是原始模拟城市中一些预制的拖放块。

And yet there still was, however dimly felt, the newcomer’s desire to feel a part of something that had been around awhile.

然而，无论感觉多么模糊，新来者仍然渴望感受到已经存在了一段时间的事物的一部分。

The guys wanted to go to a hookah bar on Haight, so we got a Lyft and got dropped off in front of where the Red Vic used to be.

他们想去海特的一家水烟吧，所以我们叫了一辆 Lyft，在 Red Vic 以前的位置下车。

"This really feels like the '60s," one of them said, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“这真的感觉就像 60 年代，”其中一位说道，我不知道他是否在开玩笑。

At last there was some very good news for Boomtrain.

最后，Boomtrain 迎来了一些非常好的消息。

Nick and Chris had gotten a meeting at Google Ventures, the company’s quasi-autonomous investment arm.

尼克和克里斯在谷歌风投公司会面，该公司是该公司的准自主投资部门。

Traffic on the southbound 101 had no momentum, and they were so preoccupied they didn’t seem to notice the spreading flares of copper sunrise over the Oakland Hills across the bay.

101 路南行的交通毫无动力，他们全神贯注，似乎没有注意到海湾对面奥克兰山上空的铜色日出。

Nick had woken up at 4:30 in the morning to get down to the city from Petaluma so they could make the drive together.

尼克凌晨 4:30 起床，准备从佩塔卢马前往市区，这样他们就可以一起开车前往。

"We're going to have to put our best foot forward," Chris said.

“我们必须竭尽全力，”克里斯说。

"That’s you," Nick said.

“那就是你，”尼克说。

"You are our best foot." He was giggly from so little sleep and such high stakes.

“你是我们最好的脚。”他因睡眠不足和赌注如此之高而咯咯地笑。

At Google Ventures, the receptionist let us into a cafeteria with an Odwalla refrigerator and some basketed fruit.

在 Google Ventures，接待员让我们走进一家自助餐厅，里面有一台奥德瓦拉冰箱和一些篮子里的水果。

The fruit was labeled.

水果上贴了标签。

The tangerine placard advised that the tangerines were from the Rising C Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley.

橘子标语牌上写着这些橘子来自圣华金河谷的 Rising C 牧场。

It went on to note that there was exactly one tangerine in a serving of tangerines.

它还指出，一份橘子中只有一个橘子。

There were no tangerines left.

没有剩下橘子了。

The partner didn’t want me in the meeting, so I told Nick and Chris I was going to drink my body weight in Odwalla.

合作伙伴不想让我参加会议，所以我告诉尼克和克里斯我要在奥德瓦拉喝我的体重。

"Please do," Nick said.

“请这样做，”尼克说。

"It’s the only thing we’re going to get from these guys."

“这是我们能从这些人那里得到的唯一东西。”

Nick and Chris went into the meeting and I sat across from the Odwalla trove.

尼克和克里斯参加了会议，我坐在奥德瓦拉宝藏对面。

On a large screen flashed the wisdom of founders.

大屏幕上闪烁着创始人的智慧。

Ask forgiveness, not permission.

请求宽恕，而不是许可。

Only traction matters.

只有牵引力才重要。

Have a great team.

拥有一支优秀的团队。

Lead from the front.

从前面引导。

If you think your product is perfect at launch, you waited way too long to launch it .

如果你认为你的产品在发布时就很完美，那么你就等了太久才发布它。

The receptionist was numb to the bromides.

接待员对这些溴化物已经麻木了。

She bounced almost imperceptibly to light house music.

她随着轻音乐的节奏几乎难以察觉地跳了起来。

I looked up the GV partner on Facebook, the one who hadn’t let me into the meeting.

我在 Facebook 上查找了 GV 合作伙伴，就是那个不让我参加会议的人。

He and I had a few friends in common, so I emailed one of them to do some side-channel due diligence of my own.

他和我有几个共同的朋友，所以我给其中一位发了电子邮件，让他们自己做一些旁道尽职调查。

She wrote back right away to say that he had just posted pictures on Facebook from a Miley Cyrus party he was at in Vegas.

她立即​​回信说，他刚刚在 Facebook 上发布了他在维加斯参加麦莉·赛勒斯 (Miley Cyrus) 派对的照片。

I felt like I was going to float away on a little antioxidant cloud of Odwalla but went to get some more anyway, and by the time I got back Nick and Chris were outside.

我觉得我要在奥德瓦拉的一点抗氧化剂云中飘走，但无论如何还是去买了一些，当我回来时尼克和克里斯已经在外面了。

They seemed loopy.

他们看起来很疯狂。

Chris had jumped onto a rickety free Google bike painted in Day-Glo colors, like something that might have been strapped to a Merry Prankster bus, and he was riding in unsteady little circles in the shade of the empty lot.

克里斯跳上一辆摇摇晃晃的免费谷歌自行车，车身涂着 Day-Glo 颜色，就像绑在快乐恶作剧者公共汽车上的东西一样，他在空地的阴影下摇摇晃晃地转着小圈。

The bike was too small for his large frame and crunched his knees.

对于他庞大的身躯来说，自行车太小了，导致他的膝盖嘎吱作响。

In the car Chris pounded on the dash.

克里斯在车里敲击仪表板。

Google Ventures was in!

谷歌风投来了！

Google Ventures was in!

谷歌风投来了！

They’d soft-committed to at least $100,000, maybe even $200,000.

他们软性承诺至少 10 万美元，甚至可能是 20 万美元。

The partner had really gotten it.

这位伙伴确实得到了它。

He’d totally agreed with their upmarket strategy, unlike the investors who wanted them to focus on a no-cost-to-deploy self-serve product.

他完全同意他们的高端策略，不像投资者希望他们专注于免费部署的自助产品。

All he wanted was a revised operational plan and a clear path to a Series A—a path that was a lot clearer when you had Google Ventures on your cap table.

他想要的只是修改后的运营计划和一条通往 A 轮融资的清晰路径——当你的股权结构表上有 Google Ventures 时，这条路径会变得更加清晰。

The final thing he wanted was for Nick to send their deck over to a guy he trusted on their market space, at a boutique firm in LA.

他想要的最后一件事是尼克将他们的套牌寄给他在洛杉矶一家精品公司的市场空间上信任的人。

I felt bad I’d written off the Google Ventures partner for his closed-meeting, Miley Cyrus–consorting ways.

我感觉很糟糕，因为我因为谷歌风投合伙人麦莉·赛勒斯（Miley Cyrus）在非公开会议上的交往方式而放弃了他。

Just as we got back to the city, a report came over the wire that Nest had been acquired by Google for $3.2 billion in cash.

正当我们回到市区时，电报传来消息称 Nest 已被谷歌以 32 亿美元现金收购。

Nest had been backed by Google Ventures, their biggest win so far.

Nest 得到了 Google Ventures 的支持，这是他们迄今为止最大的胜利。

This seemed like an auspicious bit of news.

这似乎是一个吉祥的消息。

Nick checked his email and got the signed offer letter from Tevye, the MIT AI PhD.

Nick 检查了电子邮件，收到了麻省理工学院人工智能博士 Tevye 签名的录取通知书。

And the paying customer, the one from the large media conglomerate, was integrated and about to go live.

来自大型媒体集团的付费客户已被整合并即将上线。

It all seemed as though, in the span of one hour, it was coming together at last.

一切似乎在一小时内终于走到了一起。

Boomtrain’s meeting with Bobby and Ullas had been set for the third week in January, by which point they were supposed to have almost filled out their financing round.

Boomtrain 与 Bobby 和 Ullas 的会面定于 1 月份的第三周进行，届时他们应该已经几乎完成了融资轮次。

In the three weeks leading up to the meeting, the interest from Google Ventures had been their only great stroke of good fortune; despite having talked to at least two dozen investors, they were essentially in the same place as when they’d left Bobby and Ullas at the beginning of the month.

在会议召开前的三周内，谷歌风险投资公司的兴趣是他们唯一的好运气；尽管已经与至少两打投资者进行了交谈，但他们的处境基本上与本月初离开鲍比和乌拉斯时的情况相同。

If the Google Ventures commit came through, they would be fine, but they had to be careful not to oversell the possibility.

如果谷歌风投的承诺得以实现，他们会没事的，但他们必须小心，不要过度吹嘘这种可能性。

It would be terrible if GV seemed to have been definitively in the round but backed out after due diligence.

如果 GV 似乎已经明确参与了本轮融资，但在尽职调查后又退出了，那就太糟糕了。

That was the kind of thing that really spooked investors, when a bigger investor backed out at the last minute.

当更大的投资者在最后一刻退出时，这种事情确实让投资者感到惊慌。

The potential coinvestor in LA—the one whose opinion the GV partner in Mountain View was counting on for his own decision—sent an email asking if he could fly up for a full partner meeting at the end of the week, which was a good sign, but it was two days after their meeting in Mountain View and their temporary elation had given way to the old anxiety.

洛杉矶的潜在共同投资者——山景城的 GV 合伙人在做出决定时依赖的是他的意见——发送了一封电子邮件，询问他是否可以在本周末飞去参加一次完整的合伙人会议，这是一个好兆头，但那是在他们在山景城会面两天后，他们暂时的兴高采烈已经被旧日的焦虑所取代。

There was no way to know how Bobby and Ullas would react to this state of affairs.

没有办法知道鲍比和乌拉斯对这种情况会作何反应。

If they didn’t agree to wire the money they’d committed, despite the fact that the round seemed very unlikely to close by the end of the month, Boomtrain would not make payroll, Tevye would likely disappear, and they’d have to tell their beloved engineers (whom they’d largely been protecting from their anxiety over the company’s uncertain future) that they’d be winding the venture down.

如果他们不同意汇出他们承诺的资金，尽管事实上该轮融资似乎不太可能在月底结束，Boomtrain 将无法发放工资，Tevye 可能会消失，他们将不得不告诉他们心爱的工程师（他们主要是在保护他们免受对公司不确定的未来的焦虑）他们将结束这家合资企业。

On the morning of the meeting, Nick arrived to find the front door of their coworking space smashed.

会议当天早上，尼克到达时发现他们的联合办公空间的前门被砸碎了。

Earlier arrivals had just crunched their way over the drifts of glass, so it was left to Nick to take up a broom and sweep the shards into a glittering pile.

早先到达的人刚刚踩过玻璃碎片，所以尼克拿起扫帚，把玻璃碎片扫成一堆闪闪发光的碎片。

Bobby came a little early, a good sign.

鲍比来得有点早，这是个好兆头。

He was a large man, his shoulders a rounded bulk rising over his neck, and on him was the scent of lather.

他身材魁梧，肩膀圆润，高过脖子，身上散发着肥皂泡的气味。

He very carefully turned his jacket inside out and folded it behind him.

他非常小心地将夹克翻过来，折叠在身后。

He rolled up his sleeves.

他卷起袖子。

Most investors ignored me at meetings, but Bobby addressed me right away.

大多数投资者在会议上忽视了我，但鲍比立即对我讲话。

"You're going to hear some very tough conversations of valuation." He gave the impression of groomed power.

“你会听到一些非常艰难的估值对话。”他给人的印象是训练有素的权力。

Nick leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

尼克向前倾身，手肘放在膝盖上。

Chris leaned back, his arms loose by his side.

克里斯向后靠去，双臂放松地放在身侧。

Ullas would join them later, but Bobby didn’t have a lot of time and there was a lot to cover: valuation, timeline, closing date, board seats.

乌拉斯后来加入了他们，但鲍比没有太多时间，而且有很多事情要处理：估值、时间表、截止日期、董事会席位。

Bobby wanted Ullas to take a board seat, because Ullas was the kind of guy who didn’t start shaking when things went wrong.

鲍比希望乌拉斯担任董事会席位，因为乌拉斯是那种在出现问题时不会开始发抖的人。

Bobby liked to stay off boards.

鲍比喜欢远离董事会。

He preferred an advisory role, so he could stay on the entrepreneur’s side.

他更喜欢担任顾问角色，这样他就可以站在企业家一边。

"So do you think it’s still reasonable to shoot for the end of the month?" Chris asked, with affected nonchalance.

“那你觉得月底拍摄还合理吗？”克里斯装出一副若无其事的样子问道。

Nick’s dog, Emmy, careered around a corner and bounded toward the center of the meeting.

尼克的狗艾美猛地绕过拐角，跳向会议中心。

I caught her and held her back so she wouldn’t leap onto Bobby’s expensive clothing.

我抓住她并拉住她，这样她就不会跳到鲍比昂贵的衣服上。

I could feel her heart beating madly under her ribs.

我能感觉到她的心脏在肋骨下疯狂地跳动。

Bobby thought the end of the month was fine, beginning of February—either way, it was all fine.

鲍比认为月底、二月初都很好——不管怎样，一切都很好。

Maybe the second or third week of February.

也许是二月的第二周或第三周。

It didn’t matter, there was no rush.

没关系，并不着急。

Bobby and Ullas were both more than happy to wait.

鲍比和乌拉斯都非常乐意等待。

First he wanted to see the latest operational plan.

首先他想看看最新的作战计划。

Nick opened his mouth as if to say something, then just brought up the plan on his laptop.

尼克张了张嘴，似乎要说什么，然后就在笔记本电脑上提出了这个计划。

Emmy looked across at her owner.

艾美看着她的主人。

Nick swallowed.

尼克咽了口口水。

"We've revised those aggressive numbers and moved it back into the fall, October or November.

“我们修改了这些激进的数字，并将其推迟到秋季、十月或十一月。

It’s a big cushion that allows us to slip a little.

这是一个很大的垫子，可以让我们稍微滑倒。

Though of course we’re not planning to.

虽然我们当然不打算这么做。

Slip, that is."

滑倒，就是这样。”

Ullas arrived.

乌拉斯来了。

Whereas Bobby had a heavy, settled, mountainous energy, Ullas was sharp, with a brilliantined thatch of thick hair, almond eyes, and a pointed chin.

鲍比有一种沉重、稳定、如山般的能量，而乌拉斯则很敏锐，有一头浓密的头发、杏仁眼和尖下巴。

He wore long shiny tapered shoes.

他穿着闪亮的锥形长鞋。

"We're both inclined to move forward," Ullas began.

“我们都倾向于向前迈进，”乌拉斯开始说道。

He wanted to finalize the investor list.

他想最终确定投资者名单。

Nick produced his yellow legal pad.

尼克拿出他的黄色便笺簿。

He’d written down investors with numbers by their names, labeling GV and their LA partner as soft commits.

他用数字写下了投资者的名字，将 GV 及其洛杉矶合作伙伴标记为软承诺。

Ullas pointed to them.

乌拉斯指着他们。

"Google Ventures," he said, clearly trying not to seem impressed.

“Google Ventures，”他说道，显然不想让自己显得印象深刻。

"I didn’t realize they could write small checks."

“我没有意识到他们可以写小额支票。”

"We're kicking the tires pretty hard with those guys," Nick said.

尼克说：“我们正在与这些人进行激烈的斗争。”

"We just want to make sure there’s room left in the round for them."

“我们只是想确保这一轮比赛为他们留下了空间。”

Next to Bobby’s and Ullas’ names Nick had written ranges, since they had never been very exact about what they were offering.

在鲍比和乌拉斯的名字旁边，尼克写下了范围，因为他们对自己提供的产品从来都不是很准确。

Ullas gestured that Nick should just go ahead and add up the list of numbers, but Nick hesitated; he wasn’t sure which numbers to use.

乌拉斯示意尼克直接把数字加起来，但尼克犹豫了；他不确定该使用哪些数字。

After a moment Ullas drew his slender fingers down the column of lower numbers.

过了一会儿，乌拉斯用纤细的手指划过较低的数字栏。

The total now came to about $750,000.

现在总额约为 750,000 美元。

If they were still talking about a $1 million round, the presumed contribution from GV would close it out.

如果他们还在谈论 100 万美元的融资，那么假定 GV 的出资将使其结束。

But they had to talk about hiring.

但他们必须谈论招聘问题。

Nick and Chris had planned to hire three more engineers right away, but Bobby and Ullas thought they needed a dedicated sales guy and a few people in biz dev.

尼克和克里斯计划立即再雇用三名工程师，但鲍比和乌拉斯认为他们需要一名专门的销售人员和一些业务开发人员。

Plus, with their revised revenue projections, Bobby thought they could use a few more months of runway.

另外，根据修改后的收入预测，鲍比认为他们可以再使用几个月的跑道。

So now Bobby and Ullas thought Boomtrain needed to raise something closer to $1.5 million.

因此，现在 Bobby 和 Ullas 认为 Boomtrain 需要筹集接近 150 万美元的资金。

Nick and Chris had started this meeting thinking they had $900,000 of a round of about $1 million.

尼克和克里斯在开始这次会议时认为他们在一轮约 100 万美元的融资中获得了 90 万美元。

Now they were learning they had only half of a much bigger round.

现在他们知道自己只有更大一轮的一半。

"So where's your other $750,000 going to come from?" Ullas said.

“那么你另外的75万美元从哪里来呢？”乌拉斯说道。

"Step up and get it.

“站起来，拿走它。

It’s good exercise for you to get out there and sell the company."

对你来说，出去卖掉公司是一次很好的锻炼。”

Worse, the question of the closing date had not been settled, and it seemed as though the meeting was in danger of ending before it could be brought up.

更糟糕的是，截止日期的问题还没有解决，会议似乎有还没来得及提出就结束的危险。

Nick hadn’t managed to find a good time to mention that without a more or less immediate infusion of cash, they wouldn’t even have the opportunity to find the money they’d need to close the round.

尼克没有找到一个合适的时机来提及，如果不立即注入现金，他们甚至没有机会找到完成本轮融资所需的资金。

Boomtrain hung in the balance.

Boomtrain 悬而未决。

Just then Tevye came in.

就在这时，泰维进来了。

Chris waved him over and introduced their new MIT AI PhD.

克里斯向他招手，并介绍了他们新的麻省理工学院人工智能博士。

He was perfectly badly dressed.

他衣着极其糟糕。

They welcomed him to the team, and he left.

他们欢迎他加入球队，然后他就离开了。

Tevye's cameo, brief as it was, seemed to change the tenor of the meeting.

特维的客串虽然很简短，但似乎改变了会议的基调。

"How much cash do you have in the bank?” Bobby asked.

“你银行里还有多少现金？”鲍比问道。

Nick stuttered.

尼克结结巴巴地说。

“You can make payroll this month, yes?"

“这个月你可以发工资，是吗？”

There was a long, heavy pause.

一阵漫长而沉重的停顿。

"But don’t worry, this happens all the time.

“不过别担心，这种事经常发生。

We’ll do a staged close.

我们将分阶段结束。

You’ll make payroll.

你会发工资。

Then you go out and find the rest of the money you need."

然后你出去寻找你需要的其余钱。”

Bobby rolled down his sleeves, carefully unfolded his jacket, and turned it right-side-out.

鲍比卷起袖子，小心地展开夹克，然后将它翻过来。

Nick and Chris thanked them for coming.

尼克和克里斯感谢他们的到来。

And, with that, they were still in business—a variety of it, at least.

尽管如此，他们仍然在做生意——至少是各种各样的生意。

In the Silicon Valley "ecosystem"—a troubling, pervasive word, often used in bad faith, that makes the problems of a place like Boomtrain seem organic, natural, cyclical—the job of Paul Martino is that of roving for-profit life support.

在硅谷的“生态系统”——一个令人不安的、普遍存在的词，经常被恶意使用，这使得像 Boomtrain 这样的地方的问题看起来是有机的、自然的、周期性的——保罗·马蒂诺的工作是流动的营利性生命支持。

Martino’s firm, Bullpen Capital, usually works with companies that are a little further along than Boomtrain; most of his clients have raised a million bucks or so and are stuck at a slightly higher elevation in the swamp that held Boomtrain fast—too late for promise, too early for results.

Martino 的公司 Bullpen Capital 通常与比 Boomtrain 发展稍远的公司合作。他的大多数客户都筹集了大约 100 万美元，但都被困在了 Boomtrain 快速行驶的沼泽地中，海拔稍高——承诺为时已晚，结果为时过早。

He helps bridge those companies on their way to raising an A, but the basic problem his portfolio companies face is the same one everybody faces.

他帮助这些公司在获得 A 级融资的道路上架起桥梁，但他的投资组合公司面临的基本问题与每个人都面临的问题相同。

It’s pretty easy to get enough money to get in over your head and pretty hard to get enough money to stay afloat.

获得足够的钱来满足自己的需要很容易，但获得足够的钱来维持生计却很难。

The fact is that the rising tide does more drowning than it does lifting.

事实是，上涨的潮水造成的溺水比上涨造成的影响更多。

Martino and I had made plans to meet at a coffee shop on the main drag in Mountain View, but when he got there he found it too full of nerds on laptops, so he called an audible in favor of the bar across the street, where he could watch the game.

马蒂诺和我本来计划在山景城主干道上的一家咖啡馆见面，但当他到达那里时，他发现那里挤满了使用笔记本电脑的书呆子，所以他打电话给街对面的酒吧，在那里他可以观看比赛。

He was killing a few hours before his red-eye back to Philadelphia, where he grew up and lives about half the time.

在他红眼返回费城之前几个小时，他正在杀人，他在那里长大并生活了大约一半的时间。

He was wearing a gold chain, a light gray windbreaker with a Garden City Casino logo, khaki shorts, and sockless loafers.

他戴着金链子，穿着带有花园城赌场标志的浅灰色风衣、卡其色短裤和无袜乐福鞋。

He cut an appealing figure in the Valley, a no-nonsense stoop-sitting type.

他在硅谷的形象颇具吸引力，是一位严肃、正派的人。

"Look," he said.

“看，”他说。

"The problem in 1999 was that to get $5 million you didn’t need very much." He talked as though he were chewing on mouthfuls of nuts.

“1999 年的问题是，要获得 500 万美元，你并不需要太多。”他说话的语气就像是在嚼坚果。

"You needed one or two Stanford résumés, an idea for a prototype, and a live body to give the money to." It’s hard to get that $5 million now in part because it’s so easy, as it was for Nick and Chris, to get $500,000, especially if you’re coming out of an accelerator.

“你需要一两份斯坦福大学的简历，一个原型的想法，以及一个可以提供资金的活体。”现在很难拿到 500 万美元，部分原因是像尼克和克里斯一样，拿到 50 万美元太容易了，特别是如果你是从加速器出来的。

One way to look at it is that the $5 million that went to one company of 10 people in 1999 is now going to 10 companies of two people.

一种看待方式是，1999 年，500 万美元流向了一家只有 10 名员工的公司，现在流向了 10 家只有两人的公司。

"You've lowered the bar 10X."

“你把标准降低了十倍。”

Which means you’re getting a lot of people starting companies who shouldn’t be starting companies.

这意味着有很多人创办了不应该创办公司的公司。

Another investor I talked to called this "buying a cheap call option on a guy who doesn't know that’s what you’re doing"—on a guy, that is, who thinks you’re investing in his success, not betting on the high-risk, high-yield chances of it.

我采访过的另一位投资者称之为“在一个不知道你在做什么的人身上购买廉价的看涨期权”——也就是说，在一个认为你正在投资他的成功的人身上，而不是押注于高风险、高收益的机会。

You know the odds on any given company’s success are long, but that’s why you make a lot of bets.

你知道任何一家公司成功的机会都很渺茫，但这就是你下很多赌注的原因。

In the first dotcom boom, the risk was largely carried by the investors, but now the risk has been returned to the youth.

在第一次互联网繁荣时期，风险主要由投资者承担，但现在风险又回到了年轻人身上。

Without mentioning the name of the company, I told him about Boomtrain, about what the past few weeks and months had been like for them.

我没有提及公司名称，而是向他介绍了 Boomtrain，以及他们过去几周和几个月的情况。

About how quickly they'd aged, how much weight they’d lost, the Airbnb-ing, the heavy mask of confidence, the number of mornings they’d woken up at 5 am grinding their teeth.

关于他们衰老的速度有多快，他们的体重减轻了多少，Airbnb-ing，厚重的自信面具，他们早上 5 点磨牙醒来的次数。

Martino was sympathetic but unmoved.

马蒂诺表示同情，但不为所动。

He didn’t expect them to make it.

他没想到他们能成功。

"They ran an experiment.

“他们做了一个实验。

None of their lives have been ruined." He knew they’d get good jobs, even if it meant the life of a project manager at Yahoo.

他们的生活没有被毁掉。”他知道他们会找到好工作，即使这意味着雅虎项目经理的生活。

"And none of their investors’ lives have been ruined either.

“他们的投资者的生活也没有被毁掉。

When they close up shop, their investors will say, ‘That’s one more off the books.

当他们关门时，他们的投资者会说，‘这又是一笔账外的事了。

I don’t need to help them anymore.

我不需要再帮助他们了。

I get my time back.'"

我的时间又回来了。’”

Martino watched the game for a minute, then turned back to me and held my gaze.

马蒂诺观看了比赛一分钟，然后转身看着我，凝视着我。

He could tell I’d come to like and admire and root for the Boomtrain guys.

他看得出我开始喜欢、钦佩并支持 Boomtrain 的成员。

I could understand the risk they thought they were taking.

我可以理解他们认为自己正在冒的风险。

I was glad it looked like they’d finally found the momentum they so badly needed.

我很高兴他们终于找到了他们急需的动力。

"Let me tell you what the worst thing would be.

“让我告诉你最糟糕的事情是什么。

The worst thing is that these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another year.

最糟糕的是，这些人明天就能拿到资金，而且还要再做一年。

So far, they only lost one."

到目前为止，他们只损失了一名。”

Boomtrain had planned a company retreat for the last weekend in January, to mark the one-year anniversary of their acceleration.

Boomtrain 计划在一月份的最后一个周末举行一次公司静修活动，以纪念他们加速一周年。

That week of Christmas, when they had 50 days of cash left, Nick told me that it would all be resolved one way or another by the time they got to Tahoe.

圣诞节那一周，他们的现金还剩下 50 天，尼克告诉我，当他们到达塔霍时，一切都会以某种方式解决。

"I guess we’ll either be getting really drunk," he said, "or we’ll be getting really drunk."

“我想我们要么会喝得很醉，”他说，“要么我们会喝得很醉。”

But by the time they arrived at the retreat, nothing had been resolved.

但当他们到达撤退地点时，一切都还没有解决。

Google Ventures’ coinvestor said he was keen to invest but had been instructed by the GV partner in Mountain View to hold off; the GV partner, when they finally heard from him, said he was waiting for a full meeting with his partnership.

谷歌风投的共同投资者表示，他很想投资，但山景城的 GV 合作伙伴指示他推迟投资；当 GV 合伙人最终收到他的消息时，他们表示他正在等待与合伙人举行全面会议。

So, on this Tahoe trip to which they’d been looking forward for so long, neither of them got drunk at all.

所以，在这次他们期待已久的太浩湖之旅中，他们都没有喝醉。

We drove past the sun- and salt-faded Stateline casinos to Nick’s family’s cabin, on the Nevada side, near Zephyr Cove.

我们开车经过阳光和盐渍褪色的斯德特莱恩赌场，来到尼克家的小屋，小屋位于内华达州一侧，靠近西风湾。

The engineers were coming in later in the day, but now it was quiet.

工程师们当天晚些时候才进来，但现在很安静。

Chris asked if I wanted to go down to the dock and look out at the water.

克里斯问我是否想去码头看看外面的水。

The unseasonably warm and dry December had lingered on into January, and the scant snow had melted into patches.

反常的温暖干燥的十二月一直持续到一月，稀少的积雪已经融化成一片片。

He thought about the other companies that had gone through AngelPad with them, a few of which had recently closed.

他想到了与他们一起通过 AngelPad 的其他公司，其中一些最近已经关闭。

"What happens to everything they did?

“他们所做的一切发生了什么？

Does it just wash away?" He knew that if Boomtrain had just six or nine more months, they could at the very least put themselves in a good position to be acquired by one of their customers, which would allow them to feel as though something—some self-respect, some emblem of the work they’d put in—had been salvaged.

就这么洗掉吗？”他知道，如果 Boomtrain 再有六到九个月的时间，他们至少可以让自己处于一个有利的位置，被他们的一位客户收购，这会让他们感觉好像有什么东西——一些自尊，一些他们所付出的工作的象征——被挽救了。

When Chris and I returned to the house, they got the bad news that they’d started to expect: Google Ventures was out.

当克里斯和我回到家时，他们得到了他们开始预料到的坏消息：谷歌风险投资公司退出了。

Chris seemed less resigned than he often was, a little angrier and a little more uncomprehending.

克里斯似乎不像往常那样顺从，有些愤怒，也有些不理解。

He wanted to know why they’d given such an enthusiastic commit only to retreat.

他想知道为什么他们如此热情地承诺却要撤退。

Apparently, Nick said, the full partner meeting had revealed that they’d already invested in companies in the personalization space.

尼克说，显然，全体合伙人会议表明他们已经投资了个性化领域的公司。

So that left Boomtrain to consider a scenario worse than bankruptcy: to get only $750,000 from Bobby and Ullas, meaning no end to fund-raising, no time to focus on sales or hiring, let alone their product.

因此，Boomtrain 不得不考虑一个比破产更糟糕的情况：从 Bobby 和 Ullas 那里只得到 75 万美元，这意味着融资没有结束，没有时间专注于销售或招聘，更不用说他们的产品了。

As it happens, they would avoid that fate.

碰巧的是，他们将避免这种命运。

Although their bank account would dip to less than $800 before the first money hit, Bobby and Ullas would bring along a few more investors, and by the last week in February the total round would be jostling up against that $1.5 million target.

尽管在第一笔资金到位之前，他们的银行账户将跌至不足 800 美元，但 Bobby 和 Ullas 仍会带来更多投资者，到 2 月最后一周，总融资额将接近 150 万美元的目标。

And then, all of a sudden, three small but respected institutional funds—one of whom hadn’t bothered to return Nick’s calls in January—would practically beg to get in on the round.

然后，突然之间，三个规模较小但受人尊敬的机构基金——其中一个在一月份没有费心回复尼克的电话——实际上会请求参与这一轮融资。

With Bobby and Ullas’ permission, they would let the round (still a large seed round, not a Series A) get oversubscribed and close with $2 million.

在 Bobby 和 Ullas 的许可下，他们会让这轮融资（仍然是大型种子轮，而不是 A 轮）获得超额认购，并以 200 万美元结束。

The customer pilots that began in January would look even better than expected, and the big media concern that took the deep discount would begin the process of figuring out how to use them in other ways.

一月份开始的客户试点看起来甚至比预期的还要好，而接受大幅折扣的大型媒体关注点将开始弄清楚如何以其他方式使用它们。

By early March, when the money finally closed and the numbers were in, Nick and Chris would feel approximately 12 minutes of elation before the anxieties of fundraising were replaced by the anxieties of delivery, both of products to customers and of shareholder value to their new investors.

到了 3 月初，当资金最终完成并且数据公布时，尼克和克里斯会感到大约 12 分钟的兴高采烈，然后融资的焦虑被交付的焦虑所取代，无论是向客户交付产品还是向新投资者交付股东价值。

All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors.

一直以来，马蒂诺的最终警告——他们有一天可能会后悔真正得到了他们想要的钱——仍然笼罩着这两个年轻人，这是一个旨在将奋斗者变成分包商的系统所固有的。

Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply.

而不是你想要构建的东西——面向消费者、重塑世界的东西——几乎总是被迫构建一个小技术，而有很多钱的人想要廉价地构建它。

As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent "the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions," doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants.

正如工程师兼作家亚历克斯·佩恩（Alex Payne）所说，这些初创公司代表了“风险资本家及其附属机构聚集的大量分散劳动力的现场办事处”，为五家企业巨头进行低管理、低风险的研发。

In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.

在这样的系统中，真正的幻灭并不是发现自己不太可能成为亿万富翁；而是发现自己不太可能成为亿万富翁。这是一种认识，即你的自主感是一种幻想，而你们中的绝大多数人都是注定要失败的。

In the house at Tahoe, Chris showed me his journal, which he hadn’t had the chance to write in for a while.

在塔霍的房子里，克里斯给我看了他的日记，他已经有一段时间没有机会写日记了。

Here and there the slanted, sensitive black text was broken by a crosshatched line drawing of a mountain, a trail, a fish.

倾斜的、敏感的黑色文字时不时地被一座山、一条小路、一条鱼的交叉阴影线图所打破。

There were two elaborate maps of trips he’d planned to take—a backpacking trip through Europe, a motorcycle tour of the Southwest—that he’d had to postpone.

有两张精心设计的旅行地图是他计划进行的——一次穿越欧洲的背包旅行，一次摩托车西南部旅行——但他不得不推迟。

The last thing he read to me was a line I’d heard him repeat as a kind of mantra: "It's not the load, it’s how you carry it."

他给我读的最后一句话是我听到他重复的一句话：“重要的不是负载，而是你如何承载它。”

After that, Chris built a fire and opened his laptop to work, but then thought they might feel better after a run.

之后，克里斯生了火，打开笔记本电脑开始工作，但后来他认为跑步后他们可能会感觉好一些。

He called to Nick and a few minutes later we were out on the trail, the pine needles wilting in the melted snow.

他打电话给尼克，几分钟后我们就上路了，松针在融化的雪中枯萎了。

Eventually we jogged down to the beach, the empty docks extending into the water like splayed and broken spokes.

最终，我们慢跑到了海滩，空荡荡的码头像张开且断裂的辐条一样延伸到水中。

The sun was almost down, the dilute pink winter light turning a glassy gray on the silent water.

太阳快落山了，淡粉色的冬日阳光在寂静的水面上变成了玻璃般的灰色。

They splashed off into the shallows like little boys in summer.

他们像夏天的小男孩一样溅入浅滩。

Chris swept up his hands and arched his back and then was under.

克里斯举起双手，弓起背，然后就倒在了地上。

Nick followed a moment later.

过了一会儿，尼克也跟了上去。

They shot back up through the surface at the same time, then waded, proud for once to feel in no particular hurry, back to the shore.

他们同时冲出水面，然后趟水回到岸边，这一次感到自豪，觉得自己并不特别匆忙。

­

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