Reading The Power Law: A Bridge Between Dreams and Reality

Venture capital builds a bridge between “dreams” and “reality.” The Wall Street Journal once called venture capital “humanity's last hope.” For a long time, in the unpredictable world of finance, VC has had an almost mythical presence. Many see it as able to turn stone into gold, alter the winds, and wield the means to change direction and create enormous wealth. VCs bridge dreams and reality. Among countless flights of imagination, they identify valuable seeds and nurture them with every available human, material, and financial resource. Eventually they take “it” by the hand, entrust “it” to someone better suited, and step back after completing their mission. Enormous wealth forms in the “mine” of time, while the economy continually adjusts its course under capital's sails. As a distinctive, internally coherent social network, VC is a powerful engine of social progress—far more powerful than people generally realize. The VC community has advanced with the times, moving from a laissez-faire style to a paternalistic one, then returning to its roots to build an enormous new industrial and commercial system with a more global outlook and more complex networks. The pioneers' exploration, hesitation, decline, and renewal intertwine with the new challengers' innovation, audacity, and falls. VC firms advance through sweat, bitterness, and tears. Their path may look unrestrained, yet beneath it lies a spiraling logic of industry development: growth, creation, frenzy, watchfulness… The author calls VC “the third great system of modern capitalism.” While it disrupts comfort and creates new life, it also has hidden corners. Its emphasis on growth can undermine governance. Scandals at Uber, WeWork, Theranos, and FTX warn that our understanding of VC remains incomplete. With global inflation out of control, weak economic growth, and macroeconomic management resembling a tightrope walk, it is especially important for the world to approach, understand, improve, and make good use of VC. The world is in a historically complex cycle: relations among major powers have entered a delicate era, AI is advancing rapidly, and the climate is changing dramatically. A new wave of internal dynamism to drive economic growth remains to be discovered and released. Who will pioneer the next development cycle? Perhaps VC, a bellwether of the times, can once again play a major role. #風險投資史 (The Power Law) #TranslatedIntoChineseByProfessorXuanTian ---- Robin: “VC is an engine driving the great wheel of our era. Taiwan's engine has stalled somewhat and is waiting to turn again. But I remain very confident that we can restart it, even increase its speed, to move Taiwan forward and make up for the stagnation of the past decade or more.” Robin: “VC carries dreams. People in this industry know that a few celebrated successes inevitably come with many more failures. Even when investments fail, we never abandon confidence or hope. Bruised all over on the investment journey, we must still shoulder the mission of our era. Bandage the wounds and keep crawling forward. Through wrong investments and missed opportunities, we continually temper our judgment and help this era cross successfully into the next.” Finally, borrowing a line from the science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, essential reading among China's VC peers, as we invest at the frontier of our era: “We will give civilization to time, rather than time to civilization.”