Sebastian Mallaby The Power Law : Venture Capital & the Art of Disruption

From an awardwinning financial historian comes the gripping, characterdriven story of venture capital and the world it madeInnovations rarely come from "experts." Jeff Bezos was not a bookseller Elon Musk was not in the auto industry. When it comes to innovation, a legendary venture capitalist told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. Most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives venture capital, Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world. Drawing on unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time, awardwinning financial historian Sebastian Mallaby tells the story of this strange tribe of financiers who have funded the worlds most successful companies, from Google to SpaceX to Alibaba. With a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis, The Power Law makes sense of the seeming randomness of success in venture capital, an industry that relies, for good and ill, on gut instinct and personality rather than spreadsheets and data. We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in the history of tech, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the venture funding that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber to the industrys notorious lack of women and ethnic minorities. Now the power law echoes around... | Sebastian Mallaby The Power Law : Venture Capital & the Art of Disruption