Black Swan Farming

<img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=15 width=1> Want to start a startup?

<img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=15 width=1> 想要创业吗？

Get funded by Y Combinator .

获得 Y Combinator 的资助。

</td > September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.

</td> 2012 年 9 月 多年来，我做过多种类型的工作，但我不知道还有哪种工作像初创投资那样违反直觉。

The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look

作为一家企业，关于初创企业投资，需要了解的最重要的两件事是（1）实际上所有回报都集中在少数大赢家身上，以及（2）最好的想法看起来

initially like bad ideas.

最初喜欢坏主意。

The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us.

第一条规则我在理智上知道，但直到它发生在我们身上才真正掌握。

The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few.

我们投资的公司总价值大概有100亿左右。

But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.

但只有 Dropbox 和 Airbnb 两家公司就占据了其中的四分之三左右。

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation.

在初创企业中，大赢家的巨大程度超出了我们对变化的预期。

I don't know whether these expectations

不知道这些期待是否

are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.

是天生的还是后天习得的，但无论是什么原因，我们都没有准备好应对创业投资中结果千倍的变化。

That yields all sorts of strange consequences.

这会产生各种奇怪的后果。

For example, in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business.

例如，从纯粹的财务角度来看，每一批YC中最多可能有一家公司会对我们的回报产生重大影响，其余的只是做生意的成本。

[ 1 ] I haven't

[1]我没有

really assimilated that fact, partly because it's so counterintuitive, and partly because we're not doing this just for financial reasons; YC would be a pretty lonely place if we only had one company per batch.

我们真正理解了这一事实，部分是因为它是如此违反直觉，部分是因为我们这样做不仅仅是出于财务原因；如果我们每批次只有一家公司，YC 将是一个非常孤独的地方。

And yet it's true.

但这是真的。

To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds.

为了在违反直觉的领域取得成功，你需要能够像飞行员在云层中飞行时那样将其关闭。

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