Sebastian Mallaby on The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future: Nonfiction

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of five books, including The New York Times bestseller More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, and The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. His work has been published in various publications, including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times, where he spent two years as a contributing editor. In The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin Press), Mallaby tells the 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. It’s a story of iconic triumphs and infamous disasters, from the comedy of errors at the birth of Apple to the silly money that fed the hubris at WeWork and Uber. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that 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 the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world.