Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year “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.

The author, founder and General Secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), chronicles work and related events surrounding campaigns against several perpetrators of human rights violations around the world.

This is the age of the common man, of the ordinary citizen. But will the ordinary citizen concern himself with the amenities and frills of better living, and will he concern himself with the problem of the control of power? His liberty, and the liberty of his children, will eventually depend upon his answer to that question. The author here is concerned with those concentrations or regions of power which by their weight or their nature conduce to the oppression of the individual: the power of prosecution, the power of Parliament, the power of the executive, of wealth and of status, of monopoly and restrictive association, and the biggest problem of all, the power of numbers. How and to what extent does the law react towards power of that order? How far does it succour those upon whom such power bears? Is it the law's function to keep a fair balance between those who have and those who are subject to such power? And, if so, does the law discharge that function? In the final analysis, the common weal requires that the ordinary citizen concern himself with such questions. He must be eternally vigilant - to ensure that our law stands for what is fair and just and good.

"This book defines law as applied politics and examines United States politics, a government created by Founders who did not believe political parties to be necessary. The book is a course whose lectures set out a jurisprudence applicable to civil and scientific as well as common law. The thesis of the course is that an understanding of the role of precedent in the common law explains both the human condition and what has happened to United States law since the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The use of questions and dialog within the course involves the reader in the development of a jurisprudence grounded in a philosophy of law."--Publisher's website.

This volume provides different disciplinary and cultural perspectives on the ethical and political ramifications of the incommensurable yet inextricable relationships among law, justice, and power.

The Law of the Executive Branch: Presidential Power places the law of the executive branch firmly in the context of constitutional language, framers' intent, and more than two centuries of practice. Each provision of the US Constitution is analyzed to reveal its contemporary meaning and in concert with the application of presidential power.