The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
“TWiST Book Club pick, chosen by Jason.”
Why it is worth your time
The Power Law is Sebastian Mallaby's 2022 history of venture capital. Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and wrote More Money Than God, on hedge funds. The book runs from Arthur Rock and the Fairchild founders in 1957 through Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Accel, Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz, to SoftBank's Vision Fund and the WeWork collapse. The title is the point: a small number of outsize wins carry the whole return, which shapes how investors behave. Jason chose it as his TWiST book club pick for September 2022. It is the history of the business he works in, and the power-law idea is the base of the method in his own book. It suits anyone entering venture or trying to understand its incentives. The caveats are length, at nearly 500 pages, and that the New Republic found Mallaby taking the venture industry's view of itself largely at face value.
