2022年的书，实际是在今年元旦假期读完的。Tom是KPCB的传奇创始人，其个人经历十分丰富，在学校时就创业成功，成功对外出售了，之后进入惠普，担任高管，还创办了VC界的传奇机构KPCB。照例做些摘录。
最为经典的是Tom对VC的理解：钱是最不能差异化的大宗商品，VC却是出售“钱”的生意，所以必须赋予钱之外的特殊价值才有意义。
I realized that leaving HP had been a mistake. I called Dave to see if I could come back.He said that I could, but maybe I should take a look, instead, at a company being put together in optics. He and Bill would be investing personally, along with the early Palo Alto venture capital firm of Draper Gaither and Anderson (DG&A) and a handful of other top HP executives, in a start-up to be called Optics Technology Inc. (OTI).
做人，能屈能伸最重要。发现离职错了，立即反悔寻求解药，而不是死撑着面子。
The new company would be headed by Dr. Narinder Kapany of the University of Chicago, and Kapany needed a business person to run the commercial side. Dave suggested that I consider the job.I flew back to Chicago and was blown away by Narinder—what a guy! He had a PhD in optics and had written numerous scholarly papers on “fiber optics.” I believe he even coined the term, and he had dozens of ideas on how profitably to “exploit” modern optics. He was a Sikh with a full beard and requisite turban, and he had a great sense of humor and an infectious booming laugh. After an interview with the key partner, Don Lucas, at DG&A, “ I was offered the job, at a fraction of my Booz pay but with cheap stock that would make me rich if we hit it commercially in our “exploitation.” I took the bait and signed on.” Ultimately, years after the demise of OTI, fiber optics became very important. Fiber use ranges from imaging bundles used in medical endoscopes and industrial camera probes to communications: virtually all high speed data transmission over long distances is via optical fiber today. But we had little or nothing to do with fiber optics’ final success.
光纤创业，最终获得了大发展，但是创业公司却是一条死路，太早了不行。又一个典型案例。
Things fell apart rapidly after the move to Palo Alto. I tried to make peace with Narinder and invited him and his very charming wife, Satinder, to dinner at our apartment. Tor, our son, had been recently born, and Gerd and I were feeling solid and confident in the world. The evening was a disaster. Too much was drunk by Narinder and me, and the personal insults exchanged, humiliating me in front of Gerd, could not be smoothed over with copious apologies during the following weeks.About this time Narinder announced the invention of “color translating radiography,” color X-ray, in short. He had filed for a patent on the idea, but little had been done to prove the principle in the form of a working device. There was nothing to see, even though a friendly reporter described the colors as being “as vivid as those in a stained-glass window.” I don’t know what the reporter thought he actually saw, but I saw red. I decided to quit by asking the board to choose between Narinder and me. There was never much doubt of the preference of Don Lucas, the venture capitalist from DG&A, who strongly influenced the board; they picked the glamorous and charismatic Dr. Kapany, and I was out. Over the next many months, the market became very hot for IPO technology stocks, in one of its endless cycles, and OTI indeed did become a public company. The stock rose very nicely (I had surrendered all of my stock back to the company, and never made a penny), but not too long thereafter, the company faltered after a number of acquisitions, and it ultimately simply passed out of existence.
彩色CT机项目，有了专利，但做成产品不容易。果断辞职。OTI赶上好机会，实现了公司上市，还不断收购，最终不过还是一场空。已经是非常不错的结局了。
In order to proceed I had to evolve risk-reduction and cost-saving strategies, which proved typical of those I would use subsequently in many venture situations. First, I had to persuade Gerd to let me stake our life’s savings in a risky laser development program. I had prepared quite a long train of argument for her. But after only about thirty seconds, she said, “Sure.” Her faith in me was total. More vital, I had to get Packard’s permission to moonlight, notoriously, on an idea that in no way would benefit HP. I explained the idea to him with a small technical sketch. Dave was one of America’s truly great entrepreneurs, and he admired that kind of thinking in others. Plus he didn’t think much of the OTI bunch either, and I am sure he didn’t object to my desire to stick it to them. So he said okay, with the proviso that I didn’t let it get too much in the way of my HP work.
过度关注成本、卷管理往往是不好的。核心还是要搞出来好东西。
Regardless, the picture was clear—I needed venture capital. At this time, though, there wasn’t much professional venture capital available. But our growth and profits were impressive, and I was able to persuade some fellow executives within HP, who had a sort of investment club, to invest. Some risk money was offered from the local brokerage firm of Davis Skaggs, and finally we raised some money from one of the first true VC firms, Sutter Hill. In total around two hundred thousand dollars were committed for about twenty percent of the company. This restructuring was also an opportunity for Dick and me to buy Henry out.
20万美元换20%股份的一笔VC投资。
That’s when Gene said, “When the money is available—take it.” I kidded him ever after that he had expostulated Kleiner’s First Law; there were more to come. His most profound, I always thought, was “The more difficult the decision, the less it matters what you choose.” Think about it.So, short of our goal at the end of 1972, we drew down the eight million and established Kleiner & Perkins. It seems incredible to point out that this pool of capital, tiny by today’s standards, was the largest fund in the entire world devoted to high-tech venture capital.
Kleiner第一定律：能拿钱时要多拿钱。越困难的决策，怎么选其实都不重要。
I confess, right now, that K & P and KPC & B has never financed any plan that arrived through the mail. If the entrepreneur can’t figure out some personal approach, it’s just too hopeless to consider. But we read them anyway.This was a tough time for Gene and me. We both had financial interests outside of the partnership—for Gene it was Intel, and for me it was Spectra Physics, the firm that had acquired my laser company.
从来没投过邮件上过来的项目。企业家连个投资人的介绍都搞不定，也不太配做企业家了。
Thankfully, Bill Draper of Sutter Hill let us participate in one of their investments with Qume, a printer company. It proved to be a good investment, and one on which we made a respectable return. But three start-ups we did thereafter were embarrassing disasters. The first was a semiconductor start-up in which we investors saw our money drain away like water poured onto desert sands by the inexperienced management.The second, Tread-Two, had a longer life, but it too failed. A young entrepreneur had the idea of resoling expensive tennis shoes with new bottoms. The venture began to succeed, and thousands of boxes of shoes arrived, each containing a ten-dollar bill to pay for the new sole—so the business was in effect self-financing. But when he decided to come out with his own brand of shoe he was up against Nike and Adidas, and the inventory requirements and advertising took an enormous infusion of cash that we couldn’t raise. We wouldn’t commit it ourselves, so it too failed.
难以避免的失败。
The third sounds the most ridiculous, and it was the idea that Jimmy and I talked Gene into having K & P back. It was called Snow-Job—admittedly a most dubious name, but that’s what it was really called. We met an inventor who had figured out how to convert a motorcycle into a snowmobile. It really worked. I had a ball with the prototype in the snow fields up in the foothills of the Sierras for a whole day. It was much faster and more maneuverable than a conventional snowmobile, and it could be converted from one to the other in a few minutes. We put the money in, but before we had Hell’s Angels and their biker girlfriends on their hogs tearing up the pristine fields of snow, the government, in response to one of the country’s fuel crises, outlawed the sale of gasoline for sports vehicles. That ban was later lifted, but at the critical moment we couldn’t get dealers to stock our Snow-Jobs, so that venture crashed too.If K & P hadn’t been on the threshold of becoming arguably the most successful investment vehicle in the history of man, I wouldn’t admit to all this stupidity. But after these failures, Gene and I changed our strategy. We decided to create our own start-ups.
从失败中学习，搞坏了几个项目，却发现了更适合自己的方式。这种失败是适合的。
I showed our business plan, which I had mostly written myself, to all the local potential investors with no luck. A trip with Jimmy back east fared no better. But the more we struck out, the more convinced we became that we were on the right track. The investors’ rejection was based solely on general worries over the companies in the field: IBM, DEC, and HP. They had little understanding of the technical breakthrough we had achieved and how difficult it would be for those competitors to duplicate our effort and circumvent our patents already in application. These were financiers, after all, who maybe were clever with money but who had no feeling for or confidence in technology, the kind of investors who relied upon hired experts to tell them what to think.
Gene and I decided to finance the whole company, staking a very significant portion of our fund on the idea. Probably it was a courageous decision, but at the time we thought it to be a sure bet. In fact, every time I have written a check, I have felt utterly confident of winning. Then when I lose, it somehow gets buried in a different part of my brain, and doesn’t get in the way of the next check. Gene and I were both on the Tandem board, with me as chairman; it was similar to University Labs, except that I could work on Tandem full-time, when needed. At the last instant before closing the contract, “Pitch” Johnson, a prominent Palo Alto private player, invested a token amount from his own pocket. The money wasn’t enough to make much difference, but his endorsement of the idea was gratifying, and his investment had the great advantage of involving his associate, Brook Byers, into our mix. Brook would, in due course, play a major role in our future.
Rather I will simply point out that it fully validated the K & P approach of hands-on management of ventures, which became our trademark. I, as chairman, participated in every major step in its history, even writing the prospectus for its initial public offering and guiding its road show. That IPO was a big success when it came out in 1977; it put K & P on the map—and it put me off investment bankers for the remainder of my business career.”
天腾电脑的传奇项目，起初也是没人投资。
After decades of dealing with investment bankers, I find them to be exceptionally short-term-oriented; their focus is entirely on the transaction of that instant and their specific fee for that transaction. As my partner Frank Caufield says, “They have all the self-restraint of lobotomized sharks.”You may well ask: “If you are so disgusted with investment bankers why do you continue to deal with them?” You have a good question there. It’s because they are the SEC-licensed gatekeepers to accessing the public market for capital; they are a necessary evil.
投行的思路会相对看眼前多一些，更关注交易费。
In our first year in the city we undertook our next significant venture, and we were also nearly wiped out financially—I’ll deal with that near-catastrophe first.Perhaps taking Kleiner’s First Law too literally, Gene and I drew down the investor’s full eight million dollars at the outset, rather than calling it down over time as the need for more cash arose, which was the practice we instituted in all subsequent partnerships. So we had cash in millions earning only the very low rates available from government bonds. We wanted to take no risk with this capital base; our ventures provided ample risk for the invested capital once committed. However, we heard about a prominent arbitrageur who was achieving excellent returns on playing bond spreads in the public market. When done properly every spread is hedged, so that the only risk possible is the loss of interest on the specific contract. By Sunday night I was in a state of the purest panic! The contracts weren’t even remotely hedged: our guru had put Gene and me into a naked, totally exposed short position of tens of millions of dollars!“They were still scolding me back in our offices when a messenger arrived with a check for the full amount. Apparently I had convinced the guy that I would, quite literally, kill him! We cashed the check. Nothing was lost. He went bust in a huge wipe-out some months later. And, to you Kleiner & Perkins partners of that period who are reading this for the first time, I apologize—it has taken me over thirty years to confess to this episode.
不成功的对冲差点毁了自己！好在最终没什么做损失。
To replace Jimmy Treybig, in 1975 we hired Bob Swanson, a fledgling venture capitalist working in San Francisco for Citicorp Ventures. He was, coincidentally, the roommate of Brook Byers, whom we were getting to know through his involvement with Tandem. Bob enabled us to use the Tandem formula again, of spinning out a venture directly from the partnership. Gene and Bob were both on the board of the early failed semiconductor company, and Gene believed that you could get a better handle on an investor’s character in adversity than when things were going well. He thought that Bob’s tenacity would be an asset, and when Bob became restless at Citicorp we offered him a partner’s role with K & P. He was from MIT with a degree in organic chemistry and a master’s from the Sloan School in business, both of which he obtained in just four years—smart guy!
基因泰克的故事，也是由基金直接孵化。
The more Bob pressed, the more Herb began to rethink. Maybe it really could be done faster. Over the weekend they continued to explore the idea of establishing a business right away. Within a week or so, Bob had drawn up a business plan that he put upon my desk, enthusiastically expounding on the idea and on why I should back the venture. Twice before I had mastered new technologies, in lasers and in computers, so the technical aspect didn’t daunt me too much. I figured that I could learn it. But it was immediately clear that this idea was verging upon pure research. Venture capitalists shouldn’t knowingly fund pure research, everyone knew that; that’s a ticket for losing millions—in pure research, by definition, there may be no payback—if the payback were guaranteed it wouldn’t be research. And Bob was proposing, literally, to create a new form of life.
一周写完BP的优秀执行力，亲力亲为。VC不应该投资科研项目，而是要投有确定回报的机会，不需要研究了，需要的是生产、执行和商业化。
Further, the plan called for an investment of nearly two million dollars. Space would be acquired, equipment purchased, scientists hired, and after all that, the experiment attempted—what if it didn’t work? I didn’t reject the idea out of hand. Instead, I asked to meet Dr. Boyer to hear his ideas directly. Bob quickly arranged the meeting, and for the first time Herb came up to our penthouse office in the Embarcadero Center to meet me. He was obviously brilliant. (What surprised me most, though, was his charm. That encounter was the beginning of a friendship continuing to this day.) Rather than get into an explanation of the scientific details, which I knew would quickly be over my head, all my questions were oriented along the lines of, what (specific) equipment will you need? How long will it take to the first step? How will you test to see if you have the expected results, and (again) what equipment will be required for the tests? Herb had all the answers. He had thought through each step in detail and could identify all the critical checkpoints. While he couldn’t guarantee the result of the experiment, he clearly knew how to undertake the experiment in a very specific way. I was impressed.
Keeping Genentech in cash took some financial inventions. Long before Enron’s Lay, Skilling, and Fastow thought of off-balance sheet partnerships to convert losses into profits, Fred Middleton, the CFO, and I invented the idea, and we used it to finance Food and Drug Administration clinical trials.
800万的基金单个项目要融资200万，肯定不行，也没有简单的拒绝。而是想法设法，通过创新的方法，最终10万能搞定的核心技巧。虽然不能保证试验结果，精确的知道每一个环节，也十分关键。
When we decided to put our new fund together, we still had about four million in cash, which, as promised in our Bill of Rights, we returned to our (very happy) limited partners.
基金只投资了50%，剩下50%居然就退回去了。也是够厉害的。
Money is, I think, the least differentiated of all commodities. With water, you’ve got Calistoga, Perrier, and San Pellegrino, all noticeably different. With sugar there’s the cane and beet variety; some can tell the difference. But with money it’s all the same. So, as a venture capitalist in the business of selling money, it’s commonplace to say that one must add value to differentiate oneself, and that’s quite true. Gene and I had evolved a different approach to the business by essentially financing our own start-ups. While our competitors seemed happy to wait for fully fleshed-out business plans, and full teams, to walk through their doors, we were incubating our own new ventures, then building the teams to suit the needs. We had found a way to harness our impatience. I have never been good at just waiting.
钱是最不能差异化的大宗商品，而VC是出售“钱”的生意，所以必须赋予钱之外的特殊价值才有意义。
Since we always distributed and never reinvested profits (according to our Investor’s Bill of Rights) we were, therefore, constantly running out of new money to invest. New partnerships were required for new money, and via new partnerships we could recarve the general partner’s ownership slice of the pie each time going forward, both to reward high achievers, and to bring aboard new talent. (Gene became less active after the first two partnerships and he gradually retired from KPC & B to spend more time on his personal investments. He continued to be a close friend and was active in the Valley until his death in 2003 in his eightieth year. He was a true pioneer—Time carried his obituary.)
通过不断的新基金、新结构来优化GP合伙人体系的权益分配，真是个绝妙的想法，这样才能避免坐便车，还能持续的吸纳新人。也是极其经典的安排。