The Power Law. By Sebastian Mallaby. Penguin Press; 496 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25 N OT EVERYONE is a fan of venture capitalists ( VC s). One academic famously questioned whether they were "soulless agents of Satan, or just clumsy rapists?" Paul Graham, the co-founder of the Y Combinator startup incubator, published a "unified theory of VC suckage", in which he likened the industry's investment process to a body-cavity search by someone with a faulty knowledge of anatomy. Venture capitalists, he concluded, resembled classic villains: "alternately cowardly, greedy, sneaky and overbearing". More recently, VC s have been blamed for propagating some of the ills of Big Tech: the monopolisation of markets, the erosion of privacy and the degradation of workers' rights in the gig economy. By prioritising growth over governance at all costs, they stand accused of feeding a recklessly aggressive capitalist culture that contributed to scandals at Uber, WeWork and Theranos. In "The Power Law", Sebastian Mallaby acknowledges some of the industry's shortcomings, most notably its shocking lack of diversity. But he zealously defends the overall achievements of the VC industry, which has funded many of the modern world's most useful inventions (search engines, smartphones, vaccines), disrupted cosy monopolies… Read full this story
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