#240 - Sebastian Mallaby on THE POWER LAW

Journalist and author Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, chats with Trey Elling about THE POWER LAW: VENTURE CAPITAL AND THE MAKING OF THE NEW FUTURE. Topics include:

• A definition of "power law" (0:35)
• An explanation of venture capital (VC) (2:05)
• The "Traitorous Eight" and their influence on the beginnings of Silicon Valley and VC (3:00)
• VC's investment in Atari factoring in "wild-man risk" (6:59)
• VC's responsibility in accelerating DNA-editing technology in the 1970s (12:02)
• Apple is an example of a successful venture network (14:41)
• The counterintuitive concept that weak ties generating a better circulation of info than strong times (18:34)
• What Don Valentine's achievements with Cisco in the `1980s unlocked going forward (21:38)
• Mosaic Communications (aka Netscape) serving as another major step in the Power Law's evolution (26:11)
• How Yahoo's insistence that its search engine remained free altered the way VCs approached internet technology investments (29:44)
• VCs' responsibility with the tech bubble bursting in 2000 (32:59)
• Google playing the investment game so well that created another massive shift with VC (36:08)
• The cause of Peter Thiel's disdain for VCs in the last 1990s and early 2000s (41:37)
• Why Thiel is so good at the VC game (44:52)
• VC's significant role in China's financial advances (49:08)
• Whether Venture Capital has fueled the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies (54:27)
• If VCs are making the world a better place, more often than not (55:33)