Power Law

From the New York Times bestselling author of More Money Than God comes the astonishingly frank and intimate story of Silicon Valley's dominant venture-capital firms and how their strategies and fates have shaped the path of innovation and the global economy

Innovations rarely come from experts. Elon Musk was not an electric car person before he started Tesla. When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very 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 the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the wider tech sector, and, by extension, the world.