Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Named a Best Book of 2022 by
The Economist “A gripping fly-on-the-wall story of the rise of this unique and important
industry based on extensive interviews with some of the most successful venture capitalists.” -
Daniel Rasmussen Wall Street Journal “A must-read for anyone seeking to understand
modern-day Silicon Valley and even our economy writ large.” -Bethany McLean The Washington
Post "A rare and unsettling look inside a subculture of unparalleled influence.” —Jane Mayer
"A classic...A book of exceptional reporting analysis and storytelling.” —Charles Duhigg
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. In The Power Law Sebastian Mallaby has parlayed unprecedented access to the most
celebrated venture capitalists of all time—the key figures at Sequoia Kleiner Perkins Accel
Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz as well as Chinese partnerships such as Qiming and Capital
Today—into a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis that unfurls the history of tech
incubation in the Valley and ultimately worldwide. We learn the unvarnished truth often for
the first time about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in Valley history
from the comedy of errors at the birth of Apple to the avalanche of venture money that fostered
hubris at WeWork and Uber. VCs’ relentless search for grand slams brews an obsession with
the ideal of the lone entrepreneur-genius and companies seen as potential “unicorns” are given
intoxicating amounts of power with sometimes disastrous results. On a more systemic level the
need to make outsized bets on unproven talent reinforces bias with women and minorities still
represented at woefully low levels. This does not just have social justice implications: as
Mallaby relates China’s homegrown VC sector having learned at the Valley’s feet is exploding
and now has more women VC luminaries than America has ever had. Still Silicon Valley VC
remains the top incubator of business innovation anywhere—it is not where ideas come from so
much as where they go to become the products and companies that create the future. By taking us
so deeply into the VCs’ game The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their
eyes.
