A Local Revolution?

April 2009 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined.

2009 年 4 月 最近我意识到我脑子里一直有两个想法，如果结合起来就会爆炸。

The first is that startups may represent a new economic phase , on the scale of the Industrial Revolution.

首先，初创企业可能代表着工业革命规模的新经济阶段。

I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true.

我不确定这一点，但这似乎很有可能是真的。

People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups—imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would have achieved if they'd gone to work for a big company—and that scale of improvement can change social customs.

作为初创公司的创始人或早期员工，人们的生产力显着提高——想象一下，如果拉里和谢尔盖去一家大公司工作，他们取得的成就会少得多——而且这种改进的规模可以改变社会习俗。

The second idea is that startups are a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it—that Silicon Valley specializes in startups in the same way Los Angeles specializes in movies, or New York in finance.

第二个想法是，初创企业是一种在某些专门从事初创企业的地方蓬勃发展的企业——硅谷专注于初创企业，就像洛杉矶专注于电影或纽约专注于金融一样。

[ 1 ] What if both are true?

[1] 如果两者都为真怎么办？

What if startups are both a new economic phase and also a type of business that only flourishes in certain centers?

如果初创企业既是一个新的经济阶段，又是一种只在某些中心蓬勃发展的企业类型，该怎么办？

If so, this revolution is going to be particularly revolutionary.

如果是这样，这场革命将特别具有革命性。

All previous revolutions have spread.

以前所有的革命都已经蔓延开来。

Agriculture, cities, and industrialization all spread widely.

农业、城市和工业化都广泛传播。

If startups end up being like the movie business, with just a handful of centers and one dominant one, that's going to have novel consequences.

如果初创企业最终像电影行业一样，只有少数几个中心和一个占主导地位的中心，那将会产生新的后果。

There are already signs that startups may not spread particularly well.

已经有迹象表明，初创企业的传播可能不会特别好。

The spread of startups seems to be proceeding slower than the spread of the Industrial Revolution, despite the fact that communication is so much faster now.

尽管现在的通讯速度快得多，但初创企业的传播速度似乎比工业革命的传播速度要慢。

Within a few decades of the founding of Boulton & Watt there were steam engines scattered over northern Europe and North America.

博尔顿瓦特公司成立后的几十年内，蒸汽机就遍布北欧和北美。

Industrialization didn't spread much beyond those regions for a while.

有一段时间，工业化并没有扩展到这些地区以外的地方。

It only spread to places where there was a strong middle class—countries where a private citizen could make a fortune without having it confiscated.

它只传播到拥有强大中产阶级的地方，即私人公民可以发财而不会被没收的国家。

Otherwise it wasn't worth investing in factories.

否则就不值得投资工厂。

But in a country with a strong middle class it was easy for industrial techniques to take root.

但在一个拥有强大中产阶级的国家，工业技术很容易扎根。

An individual mine or factory owner could decide to install a steam engine, and within a few years he could probably find someone local to make him one.

单个矿山或工厂主可以决定安装一台蒸汽机，几年之内他可能会找到当地人为他制造一台。

So steam engines spread fast.

因此蒸汽机传播得很快。

And they spread widely, because the locations of mines and factories were determined by features like rivers, harbors, and sources of raw materials.

它们分布广泛，因为矿山和工厂的位置是由河流、港口和原材料来源等特征决定的。