Day154：硅谷为什么成功？因为他们热爱失败！

[5]Yes,failure is the engine that drives Silicon Valley（失败是驱动硅谷的原动力）; it’s an integral part of the region’s creative ecology（它是这个地区创意生态的主要部分）– but not for the reasons that are so often touted（吹捧）.

硅谷包容失败的传统和风投的支持

[6]Silicon Valley’s failure fetishtraces back to its beginnings（追溯到他的一开始）, and is intertwined with its geography. It’s no coincidence that the world’s premier technology hub（世界顶级的技术中心）sprouted not in establishment East Coast cities like New York and Boston, but in the far West. California was – and to an extent still is – a place one flees to, a refuge for jilted lovers, bankrupt businessmen, lost souls（被抛弃的恋人，破产的银行家，失落的灵魂的避难所）. As one of the region’s high-tech pioneers, William Forrester of Stratus Computer, put it, “If you fail in Silicon Valley, your family won’t know and your neighbors won’t care.”

[7]And the Valley is, at least in part, a child of the 1960s counter-culture movement（20世纪60年代反文化运动的产物）, an era when failure, or at least contrariness, was a way of life.

[8]Today, the entire venture capital industry is built around failure. The financiers work on the assumption that the vast majority of their investments, at least 70%, will fail. They’re looking for the unicorns, the blockbuster success that will compensate for all those losses（一项轰动世人的成功将会弥补所有的失败）

[9]Vanity Fair recently compiled a slideshow of 14 of the region’s most spectacular failures, including Theranos, the scandal-plagued（丑闻缠身的）biotech company currently under federal investigation（正在接受联邦调查）. House-cleaning business Homejoy, and RDIO, a music streaming service, came and went so quickly they barely registered. The Valley buries its dead quickly and quietly（硅谷快速且悄无声息地宣布了它的死亡）.

[10]It’s no wonder I have such a hard time finding evidence of the Valley’s past failures – or, for that matter, its successes. Silicon Valley doesn’t do history. History is, at best（至多，充其量）, an afterthought in a region that has its gaze firmly fixed on the future. Its roots are there, though, provided you are willing to dig a bit.

[11]Determined history pilgrims（决定历史的朝圣者）typically head straight for 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. It’s not the house that interests them but what’s behind it: a small garage with a green door. Here, in 1938, two young Stanford graduates, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, spent hours experimenting. They were tinkering. They tried everything: a motor controller for a telescope（望远镜的电动机控制器）, a bowling alley device that chirped when someone crossed the foul line（当有人跨过犯规线时会发出声音的保龄球馆设备）, and more – all of them were failures. About a year later, the duo finally happened on a winning invention, an audio oscillator（声频振荡器）used to test sound equipment, but not until they churned out a series of epic failures.

讨论硅谷包容失败文化的本质

[12]I sat down one afternoon at a coffee shop in Mountain View, home to Google and boundless optimism. As I sipped my handcrafted, artisanal Ethiopian dark roast, driverless cars glided by silently, sharing road space with the Teslas. My companion was Chuck Darrah, an anthropologist who has spent most of his career studying the strange customs of the Valley inhabitants. Chuck is more observer than participant: skeptical of the Valley’s evangelical belief in the power of technology to improve the world（对硅谷所持有的技术能改变世界的狂热信仰持怀疑态度）, he doesn’t even own a mobile phone.

[13]One of the biggest myths about Silicon Valley, Chuck told me, is that people here take risks. It is a myth that is simultaneously true and untrue. Silicon Valley celebrates risk, yet at the same time “it has some of the best mechanisms for avoiding the consequences of risk in the world.”

[14]“Such as?” I asked.

[15]“Just think about it. These entrepreneurs, we’re told, deserve their money because of the risk they take. But you don’t see peoplejumping off the tops of buildings（跳下大楼楼顶）here. They tend to land on their feet. They tend to land in places like this, drinking cappuccinos, because the risk is a peculiar kind of risk. Most of the people in high tech will admit if they lost their job, they would find another one. They might even find a better one.”

[16]“So they’re working with a net?”

[17]“Yes. A huge net. It’s easier to take risk when you are insulated from it.”

[18]Chuck was equally quick to dismiss the old bromide about how the key to success is to embrace failure. The real questions is: what is the difference between failure that leads to innovation, and failure that leads to… more failure?

[19]The answer, researchers now believe, lies not in the failure itself, but how we recall it – or, more precisely, how we store it. Successful failures are those people who remember exactly where and how they failed（成功的失败是对于能清楚记得自己在哪里失败如何失败的人来说的）, so when they encounter the same problem again, even if in a different guise（伪装）, they are able to retrieve these “failure indices” quickly and efficiently. They are willing to backtrack.

[20]As we finished our coffee, the California sunlight softening to a golden glow, Chuck Darrah explained that the real symbol of Silicon Valley is not the open-plan office or the ping-pong table, but, rather, the moving van. I had spotted one earlier in the day, parked outside a nonde office block in Mountain View. The movers were busily carting off ergonomic chairs（符合人体工程学的椅子）and Danish desks, no doubt discarding the carcass of some failed venture and making room for the next（丢弃失败的风险投资的残骸为下一个项目腾出空间）. In Silicon Valley, there is always a next.返回搜狐，查看更多