The Ronco Principle

January 2015 No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway.

2015 年 1 月 没有人比罗恩·康威 (Ron Conway) 投资更多的顶级初创企业，无论是风险投资还是天使投资。

He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it.

他知道硅谷的每笔交易发生了什么，有一半的时间是因为他安排了这些交易。

And yet he's a super nice guy.

但他是一个超级好人。

In fact, nice is not the word.

事实上，美好并不是这个词。

Ronco is good.

龙科不错啊

I know of zero instances in which he has behaved badly.

据我所知，他表现不佳的例子为零。

It's hard even to imagine.

甚至很难想象。

When I first came to Silicon Valley I thought "How lucky that someone

当我第一次来到硅谷时，我想“多么幸运，有人

so powerful is so benevolent." But gradually I realized it wasn't luck.

如此强大，如此仁慈。”但渐渐地我发现这并不是运气。

It was by being benevolent that Ronco became so powerful.

正是因为仁慈，朗科才变得如此强大。

All the deals he gets to invest in come to him through referrals.

他投资的所有交易都是通过推荐而来的。

Google did.

谷歌做到了。

Facebook did.

脸书做到了。

Twitter was a referral from Evan Williams himself.

Twitter 是埃文·威廉姆斯本人推荐的。

And the reason so many people refer deals to him is that he's proven himself to be a good guy.

这么多人向他推荐交易的原因是他已经证明自己是一个好人。

Good does not mean being a pushover.

优秀并不意味着容易被人欺负。

I would not want to face an

我不想面对

angry Ronco.

愤怒的龙科

But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did something wrong.

但如果罗恩对你生气，那是因为你做错了什么。

Ron is so old school he's Old Testament.

罗恩太老派了，他是旧约圣经。

He will smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it.

他会在愤怒中击打你，但其中没有恶意。

In almost every domain there are advantages to seeming good.

几乎在每个领域，看起来不错都有好处。

It makes people trust you.

它让人们信任你。

But actually being good is an expensive way to seem good.

但实际上，要表现得很好，要付出昂贵的代价。

To an amoral person it might seem to be overkill.

对于一个不道德的人来说，这似乎有些过分了。

In some fields it might be, but apparently not in the startup world.

在某些领域可能是这样，但在创业界显然不是。

Though plenty of investors are jerks, there is a clear trend among them: the most successful investors are also the most upstanding.

尽管很多投资者都是混蛋，但他们中间有一个明显的趋势：最成功的投资者也是最正直的。

[ 1 ] It was not always this way.

[1] 情况并非总是如此。

I would not feel confident saying that about investors twenty years ago.

二十年前，我不会有信心这样评价投资者。

What changed?

发生了什么变化？

The startup world became more transparent and more unpredictable.

创业世界变得更加透明，也更加不可预测。

Both make it harder to seem good without actually being good.

两者都让我们很难在实际上表现良好的情况下表现得很好。

It's obvious why transparency has that effect.

透明度具有这种效果的原因是显而易见的。

When an investor

当投资者

maltreats a founder now, it gets out.

现在虐待创始人，就出去了。

Maybe not all the way to the press, but other founders hear about it, and that investor starts to lose deals.

也许不会一直传到媒体，但其他创始人听说了这件事，而该投资者开始失去交易。

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