Business writer Sebastian Mallaby takes a deep dive into the waves of success and failure inside Silicon Valley's dominant venture-capital firms, exploring how their strategies and fates have shaped the path of innovation and the global economy.
Mallaby’s angle is fresh. Most people who write about Silicon Valley do so from the viewpoint of entrepreneurs who built companies with the backing of venture capitalists. Mallaby writes from the perspective of the venture capitalists themselves. He tells his story through an accumulation of smaller stories, each one phenomenally detailed and engaging. In so doing, he’s written a book that is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand modern-day Silicon Valley and even our economy writ large ... Mallaby makes good points. He caused me to question some of my skepticism about venture capital.
Mr. Mallaby tells 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 ... Though the book focuses on the winners, Mr. Mallaby doesn’t shy away from criticism, especially in his description of the decline of Kleiner Perkins ...Telling stories of rich investors betting on young visionaries and earning insane profits could become tediously repetitive, but Mr. Mallaby writes a fast-paced narrative. He also has a journalist’s eye for revealing details[.]
Sebastian Mallaby’s sweeping and authoritative history of the venture capital revolution, from its cottage industry roots in the 1950s to its colossal influence today, tells an undercovered tale ... The Power Law is comprehensive to a degree that occasionally tests the reader’s patience, but Mallaby enlivens it by diving into the personalities, and the tensions, behind the industry’s evolution ... Mallaby concludes judiciously that 'venture capitalists as a group have a positive effect on economies and societies'.
