We can see this effect in data from the venture capital industry. One study looked at companies backed by US venture capitalists (VCs) between 1986 and 1997, comparing them with a sample of companies chosen randomly to be the same age, size and from the same industry. (These results were published in this summer’s Journal of Economic Perspectives in an article titled “Entrepreneurship as Experimentation”.)

我们可以从风险投资业的数据中看到这种效应。有一项研究考察了1986年到1997年间由美国风险资本家支持的企业，将这些企业与一组企业样本相比较，样本是从同行业中创建时长相同、规模相同的公司中随机抽取的。（研究结果发表在今年夏天出版的《经济展望期刊》(Journal of Economic Perspectives)上，文章标题为《创业试验》(Entrepreneurship as Experimentation)。）

By 2007, only a quarter of the VC-backed firms had survived, while one-third of the comparison group was still in business. However, the surviving VC-backed firms were big successes, employing more than five times as many people as the surviving comparison firms. We can’t tell from this data whether the VCs are creating winners or merely spotting them in advance but we can see that big successes on an aggregate scale are entwined with a very high failure rate.

到2007年，仅有四分之一由风险资本家支持的企业存活了下来，而比照组中有三分之一的企业还在继续经营。然而，前一类企业获得了巨大的成功，员工数量是后一类企业的5倍多。我们无法从这个数据中推断风险资本家到底是缔造了成功还是仅仅提前预见了成功，但我们能从中发现，从总体上看，巨大的成功总是与极高的失败率紧密相连。

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