在顶尖创业公司中，不论是风险投资还是天使投资人，没有谁投的项目比朗·康威（Ron Conway，昵称 Ronco）还要多。硅谷的每一笔交易，他都对内情了如指掌——甚至有一半的交易本就是他一手促成的。
No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it.
然而，他却是一个极度友善的人。事实上，“友善”这个词还不够分量。朗科是真正的善良。在我的印象中，他没有任何一次表现得不体面。甚至连想象一下他举止得体之外的样子都很困难。
And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved badly. It's hard even to imagine.
刚来硅谷时，我曾想：“如此有权势的人竟然如此仁慈，真是太幸运了。”但渐渐地我意识到，这并非运气。正是因为仁慈，朗科才变得如此强大。他能投到的所有项目，全都是别人推荐给他的。Google 是，Facebook 也是。Twitter 则是埃文·威廉姆斯（Evan Williams）本人亲自引荐的。而这么多人乐意把项目介绍给他，原因就在于他用行动证明了自己是一个好人。
When I first came to Silicon Valley I thought "How lucky that someone so powerful is so benevolent." But gradually I realized it wasn't luck. It was by being benevolent that Ronco became so powerful. All the deals he gets to invest in come to him through referrals. Google did. Facebook did. Twitter was a referral from Evan Williams himself. And the reason so many people refer deals to him is that he's proven himself to be a good guy.
善良并不意味着是个软柿子。我可不想面对一个愤怒的朗科。但如果朗对你发火，那一定是因为你做错了事。朗非常传统，传统得就像《旧约》里的人物。他会在公义的愤怒中惩戒你，但其中绝无恶意。
Good does not mean being a pushover. I would not want to face an angry Ronco. But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did something wrong. Ron is so old school he's Old Testament. He will smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it.
在几乎所有领域，显得善良都是有好处的。这能让人信任你。但实际上，“真正善良”是一种为了“显得善良”而付出的昂贵代价。对于一个没有道德感的人来说，这似乎有些用力过猛了。
In almost every domain there are advantages to seeming good. It makes people trust you. But actually being good is an expensive way to seem good. To an amoral person it might seem to be overkill.
在某些领域或许确实如此，但在创业界显然不是。虽然投资人里有很多混蛋，但他们之中有一个明显的趋势：最成功的投资人，往往也是最正直的。[1]
In some fields it might be, but apparently not in the startup world. Though plenty of investors are jerks, there is a clear trend among them: the most successful investors are also the most upstanding. [1]
过去并非总是如此。如果是二十年前，我可不敢这么肯定地评价投资人。
It was not always this way. I would not feel confident saying that about investors twenty years ago.
改变了什么？创业界变得更加透明，也更加不可预测。这两者都让人很难在不真正善良的情况下，还能显得善良。
What changed? The startup world became more transparent and more unpredictable. Both make it harder to seem good without actually being good.
透明度的影响显而易见。现在，一旦有投资人虐待创始人，消息就会传开。也许不至于闹到媒体上，但其他创始人会听说，该投资人就会开始错失好项目。[2]
It's obvious why transparency has that effect. When an investor maltreats a founder now, it gets out. Maybe not all the way to the press, but other founders hear about it, and that investor starts to lose deals. [2]
不可预测性的影响则更为微妙。它增加了“表里不一”的维护成本。如果你想做个两面派，你就必须清楚该对谁和颜悦色，又可以对谁肆无忌惮。但在创业界，变化太快了，你根本无法预料。今天和你聊天的某个普通大学生，几年后可能就是硅谷最炙手可热的创业公司的 CEO。如果你无法预知该对谁友善，你就必须对每个人都友善。而大概只有那些真正善良的人，才能自然而然地做到这一点。
The effect of unpredictability is more subtle. It increases the work of being inconsistent. If you're going to be two-faced, you have to know who you should be nice to and who you can get away with being nasty to. In the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can't tell. The random college kid you talk to today might in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley. If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.
在一个高度互联且不可预测的世界里，你必须真正善良，才能显得善良。
In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can't seem good without being good.
正如许多事情的发生一样，朗纯属偶然地发现了如何成为未来的投资人。他并没有预见创业投资的未来，也没有意识到保持正直会有回报而强迫自己去那样做。对他来说，不那样做反而会觉得不自然。他其实早已生活在未来了。
As often happens, Ron discovered how to be the investor of the future by accident. He didn't foresee the future of startup investing, realize it would pay to be upstanding, and force himself to behave that way. It would feel unnatural to him to behave any other way. He was already living in the future.
幸运的是，这个未来并不局限于创业界。虽然创业界比大多数行业更透明、更不可预测，但几乎所有的领域都在朝着这个方向发展。
Fortunately that future is not limited to the startup world. The startup world is more transparent and unpredictable than most, but almost everywhere the trend is in that direction.
注
Notes
[1] 我并不是说如果把投资人按仁慈程度排序，他们的回报率也会呈现相同的顺序；而是说，如果画一张散点图，横轴是仁慈程度，纵轴是回报率，你会看到一条明显的上升趋势线。
[1] I'm not saying that if you sort investors by benevolence you've also sorted them by returns, but rather that if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the x axis and returns on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend.
[2] 特别是 Y Combinator，因为汇集了如此多创业公司的数据，所以对投资人的行为有着非常全面的了解。
[2] Y Combinator in particular, because it aggregates data from so many startups, has a pretty comprehensive view of investor behavior.
感谢 Sam Altman 和 Jessica Livingston 阅读本文草稿。
Thanks to Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.