幂律定律，是今年出的新书，一本当代VC史的最好作品，没有之一，值得从业者反复读几遍，收获非常大。
按惯例做些摘要，同时再补充些个人评论和体会。
What he didn’t mention was that Khosla was also a preacher of the Valley’s most bracing creed: the belief that most social problems can be ameliorated by technological solutions, if only inventors can be goaded to be sufficiently ambitious. “All progress depends upon the unreasonable man,” the “creatively maladjusted,” Khosla declared, borrowing eclectically from George Bernard Shaw and Martin Luther King Jr. “Most people think improbable ideas are unimportant,” he loved to add, “but the only thing that’s important is something that’s improbable.” Khosla wanted radical dreams, the bolder and more improbable the better.”
Joining the storied venture partnership of Kleiner Perkins, Khosla discovered his true métier. His unreasonable impatience—his determination that anything might be possible and everything should work his way—made him one part tyrant, two parts visionary.
VC是需要有特质的人的，也需要特别的思路。科斯拉Khosla其实就很有代表性，相信大部分的社会问题可以通过技术和商业来解决，那些看似不可能的事情才是重要的，或者说突破后才是价值巨大的。那些看似疯狂的梦想，越是大胆、越是看起来不可能，就越有价值。
He noted matter-of-factly that it’s a trillion-and-a-half-dollar global market being served by prehistoric technology.
要寻找全球万里级市场中依然在使用古老的史前技术的赛道，这就是十分有机会的赛道。
Which is better: to try and fail, or to fail to try? Reasonable people—well-adjusted people, people without hubris or naïveté—routinely fail in life’s important missions by not even attempting them; the way Khosla saw things.
大多数人是没有勇气去尝试，能通过尝试验证后知道失败是十分难能可贵的。
This sort of skewed distribution is sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule.In reality, there is nothing magical about the numbers 80 or 20: it could be that just 10 percent of the people hold 80 percent of the wealth, or perhaps 90 percent of it. But whatever the precise numbers, all these distributions are examples of the power law, so called because the winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate, so that they explode upward far more rapidly than in a linear progression.
Horsley Bridge is an investment company with stakes in venture funds that backed 7,000 startups between 1985 and 2014. A small subset of these deals, accounting for just 5 percent of the total capital deployed, generated fully 60 percent of all the Horsley Bridge returns during this period.
幂律分布其实是VC生意的市值，不只是80/20，而是5%的好项目获得了60%的回报，是大满贯游戏。
Khosla made extraordinary claims for his work. Venture capital was not merely a business; it was a mindset, a philosophy, a theory of progress. Seven hundred million people enjoyed the lifestyle that seven billion wanted, he liked to say. Bold innovators goaded by even bolder venture capitalists offered the best shot at satisfying human aspirations.
VC不只是一个生意，也是一种能带来社会进步的方法、思维方式和哲学，通过大胆支持勇敢的创新者来更好满足人类的需求和欲望。
The revolutions that will matter—the big disruptions that create wealth for inventors and anxiety for workers, or that scramble the geopolitical balance and alter human relations—cannot be predicted based on extrapolations of past data, precisely because such revolutions are so thoroughly disruptive. The future can be discovered by means of iterative, venture-backed experiments. It cannot be predicted.
技术革命和破坏性创新是无法基于过去的数据被预测出来的，而是要通过持续迭代来试验出来的。所以风险投资很大程度上其实不是什么理论，而是一门实实在在的实践科学，一件创造未来的事情。
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