Day 14: Money makes money
（Thursday）
各位书友，今天我们一起阅读《Zero to One》第七章FOLLOW THE MONEY的82-87页。
What do you think: MONEY MAKES MONEY
钱生钱这句话，你怎么看？
01 FOLLOW THE MONEY
This chapter shows how the power law becomes visible when you follow the money: in venture capital, where investors try to profit from exponential growth in early-stage companies, a few companies attain exponentially greater value than all others. Most businesses never need to deal with venture capital, but everyone needs to know exactly one thing that even venture capitalists struggle to understand: we don’t live in a normal world; we live under a power law.
这一章将解释幂次法则在你向钱看时，是如何体现的：风险投资中，投资者都努力想从公司创立早期呈指数级的增长中获利，而只有一小部分公司较之其他公司获得了呈指数级增长的价值。大多数企业根本不需要和风险投资基金打交道，但是每个人都需要明确一件事，一件甚至是风险投资家也在努力去明确的事：我们所在的世界不是正常的世界，而是处在幂次法则之下。
MONEY MAKES MONEY. “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them”
(Matthew 25:29).
钱能生钱。“凡是有的，还要加给他，叫他有余。凡没有的，连他所有的，也要夺过来。”
（《马太福音》第 25 章 29 节）
Albert Einstein made the same observation when he stated that compound interest was “the eighth wonder of the world,” “the greatest mathematical discovery of all time,” or even “the most powerful force in the universe.”
当爱因斯坦宣称复利是“世界第八大奇迹”，是“有史以来最伟大的数学发现”，甚至是“宇宙最强大的力量”时，他同样对这句《圣经》箴言产生了共鸣。
Whichever version you prefer, you can’t miss his message: never underestimate exponential growth. Actually, there’s no evidence that Einstein ever said any of those things—the quotations are all apocryphal. But this very misattribution reinforces the message: having invested the principal of a lifetime’s brilliance, Einstein continues to earn interest on it from beyond the grave by receiving credit for things he never said.
不管你赞同哪种说法，其中的观点是一致的：不要低估了指数级增长。事实上，并没有什么证据显示爱因斯坦确实提到过这些。但是这样硬是把话塞给爱因斯坦恰恰强化了这样一个信息：爱因斯坦一生奉献出的智慧本金带来的利润直至他去世后仍源源不断，连他没有讲过的话都会归功给他。
Most sayings are forgotten. At the other extreme, a select few people like Einstein and Shakespeare are constantly quoted and ventriloquized. We shouldn’t be surprised, since small minorities often achieve disproportionate results.
大多数前人的话都已经被遗忘。只有少数人，如爱因斯坦和莎士比亚的话却一直被后人引用。不要惊讶，因为少数人往往会取得极大的成果。
In 1906, economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered what became the “Pareto principle,” or the 80-20 rule, when he noticed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy—a phenomenon that he found just as natural as the fact that 20% of the peapods in his garden produced 80% of the peas.
1906 年，经济学家维尔弗雷多·帕累托提出了后来的“帕累托法则”，也叫 80–20 法则。这是因为他发现意大利 80%的土地掌握在 20%的人手里——这个现象就好像他花园里 20%的豌豆荚产出了占总量 80%的豌豆一样自然。
This extraordinarily stark pattern, in which a small few radically outstrip all rivals, surrounds us everywhere in the natural and social world.
这个异乎寻常的以少胜多的模型在自然世界和人类社会中随处可见。
Monopoly businesses capture more value than millions of undifferentiated competitors. Whatever Einstein did or didn’t say, the power law—so named because exponential equations describe severely unequal distributions—is the law of the universe.
垄断企业捕获的价值比几百万大同小异的竞争者所捕获的还要多。不管爱因斯坦有没有说过那些话，幂次法则（power Law）都是宇宙的法则是宇宙最强大的力量，之所以会取这样的名字是因为指数方程描述的是最不平均的分配。
The power law defines our surroundings so completely that we usually don’t even see it.
幂次法则完整定义了我们周围的环境，而我们几乎毫无察觉。
02 THE POWER LAW OF VENTURE CAPITAL
风险投资中的幂次法则
Venture capitalists aim to identify, fund, and profit from promising early-stage companies. They raise money from institutions and wealthy people, pool it into a fund, and invest in technology companies that they believe will become more valuable. If they turn out to be right, they take a cut of the returns—usually 20%. A venture fund makes money when the companies in its portfolio become more valuable and either go public or get bought by larger companies. Venture funds usually have a 10-year lifespan since it takes time for successful companies to grow and “exit.”
风险投资家的任务是鉴定那些刚起步的前景光明的公司，投资这些公司并从中获利。他们从机构和富人那里筹到钱，以此为资本，投资到他们认为会升值的科技公司。如果结果证明他们的判断无误，他们就会获得一部分收益——通常是 20%。如果一家风险投资基金所投资的公司升值，或是投资的公司上市，或是被更大的公司收购，风险投资基金都会得到回报。风险投资基金通常要 10 年的时间才能退出，因为成功的公司需要时间成长。
But most venture-backed companies don’t IPO or get acquired; most fail, usually soon after they start. Due to these early failures, a venture fund typically loses money at first. VCs hope the value of the fund will increase dramatically in a few years’ time, to breakeven and beyond, when the successful portfolio companies hit their exponential growth spurts and start to scale.
但是风险投资基金所支持的大部分公司都等不到首次公开发行股票或是被收购，通常刚起步就失败了。因为这些早期的失败，风险投资基金一开始都会亏损。当投资组合里有成功的公司进入了指数级增长期，并且开始扩大规模时，风险投资家希望投资基金的价值能在几年的时间内得到极大的提升，达到收支平衡，甚至收入大于支出。
The big question is when this takeoff will happen. For most funds, the answer is never. Most startups fail, and most funds fail with them. Every VC knows that his task is to find the companies that will succeed. However, even seasoned investors understand this phenomenon only superficially. They know companies are different, but they underestimate the degree of difference.
最重要的问题是什么时候这种指数级增长会出现。对于大多数基金来说，答案是永远都不会。大多数初创企业失败了，投资也随之烟消云散。每个风险投资家都知道自己的任务是寻找可以成功的企业。但是，甚至是经验很丰富的投资者都只知道皮毛而已，他们知道公司都有差异，却低估了差异的程度。
The error lies in expecting that venture returns will be normally distributed: that is, bad companies will fail, mediocre ones will stay flat, and good ones will return 2x or even 4x. Assuming this bland pattern, investors assemble a diversified portfolio and hope that winners counterbalance losers.
错误就在于他们期待风险投资的回报呈正态分布：也就是说，没有希望的公司会倒闭，中等公司会一直持平，好公司的回报会达到两倍甚至四倍。假设了这个平淡无奇的模式后，投资者进行了多种投资组合，希望其中成功公司的回报可以抵消失败公司带来的亏损。
But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.
但是“撒网式投资，然后祈祷”这种方法通常会全盘皆输。这是因为风险投资的回报并不遵循正态分布，而是遵循幂次法则：一小部分公司完胜其他所有公司。如果你看重撒大网，而不是把注意力放在仅仅几个日后价值势不可当的公司，一开始你就会与这些稀有公司失之交臂。
This graph shows the stark reality versus the perceived relative homogeneity:
Our results at Founders Fund illustrate this skewed pattern: Facebook, the best investment in our 2005 fund, returned more than all the others combined. Palantir, the second-best investment, is set to return more than the sum of every other investment aside from Facebook. This highly uneven pattern is not unusual: we see it in all our other funds as well.
我们的创始人基金的绩效表现解释了这个扭曲的模式：Facebook，是我们 2005 年的投资组合里表现最好地，回报比其他所投资公司加起来的还要多。帕兰提尔, 是表现第二好的公司，带来的回报比刨除Facebook外所有公司加起来的还要多。这个高度不平均的模式并非偶然：我们其他的基金也都出现过这种情况。
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.
风险投资中最大的秘密是：成功基金的最佳投资所获的回报要等于或超过其他所有投资对象的总和。
This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.
这使风险投资家们总结了两个很奇怪的规则。第一个规则，只投资给获利可达整个投资基金总值的有潜力公司。这个规则太可怕了，它一下子就把大多数可能的投资消除了。（要知道即便是很成功的公司，规模通常都不怎么大。）这个规则导致了第二个规则出现：即因为第一条规则太严苛，所以不需要其他规则。
Of course, no one can know with certainty ex ante which companies will succeed, so even the best VC firms have a “portfolio.” However, every single company in a good venture portfolio must have the potential to succeed at vast scale. At Founders Fund, we focus on five to seven companies in a fund, each of which we think could become a multibillion-dollar business based on its unique fundamentals. Whenever you shift from the substance of a business to the financial question of whether or not it fits into a diversified hedging strategy, venture investing starts to look a lot like buying lottery tickets. And once you think that you’re playing the lottery, you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself to lose.
当然，没人能事先就确切知道哪些公司会成功，因此即使最好的风险投资公司也会有一个“投资组合”。但是，一个好的投资组合中，每家企业都必须真正具有取得极大成功的可能性。我们的创始人基金，大约只关注五到七家企业，这些企业都独具特色，我们认为以后都会拥有数十亿美元的价值。不管何时，如果你不看其实质，而是关注其是否适合这种多元化避险策略，那么投资就像是在买彩票。而一旦你认为自己在摇奖，你就已经做好了亏损的心理准备。
拓展
Simple Interest 单利 & Compound Interest复利
Simple Interest单利利息的计算
当本金为100元时，将这笔钱在年初的时候存入银行，年利率为10%，如果单利的方法被使用，则每年的利息为100乘以10%（即10元），在第一年，第二年以及第三年年末时的金额为110元，120元和130元。所以未来的某一年年末能够收到的本金及利息的和为：
FV=Principal amount *(1+n*interest rate)
Compound Interest复利利息的计算
还是以上面的例子来进行解释，第一年年末依旧能够收到110元，但是从第二年年末开始收到的金额就与在单利计算方法下有很大的区别。在第二年年末应该收到的利息是第一年的本息之和再乘以10%（即121元），这样以此类推，可以得到的是在复利的方法下计算的利息比在单利的方法下同期的利息要高。复利本息的计算公式为：
FV=Principal amount *(1+ interest rate)n
exponential growth指数生长; 按指数律增长
[例句]The policy tried to check the exponential growth of public expenditure.
该政策试图控制公共开支的迅猛增长。
☞ 领读达人：刘亚南
☞ 主播：Sal，来自美利坚合众国的大帅哥。
☞ 设计：刘莹
☞ 编校：陈珺洁