Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Named a Best Book of 2022 by The
EconomistA 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 JournalA must-read for anyone seeking to understand modern-day Silicon
Valley and even our economy writ large.” -Bethany McLean The Washington PostA rare and
unsettling look inside a subculture of unparalleled influence.” —Jane MayerA classic...A book
of exceptional reporting analysis and storytelling.” —Charles DuhiggFrom 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 economyInnovations 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.
