Sebastian Mallaby

Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Economist“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 DuhiggFrom 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 economyInnovations 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 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 New York Times bestseller“The bright light shed by More Money Than God is particularly welcome. Mr. Mallaby . . . brings a keen sense of financial theory to his subject and a vivid narrative style.” — Wall Street Journal“Splendid . . . the definitive history of the hedge fund history, a compelling narrative full of larger-than-life characters and dramatic tales of their financial triumphs and reversals.” — The Washington PostThe first authoritative history of hedge funds-from their rebel beginnings to their role in defining the future of finance, from the author of The Power LawWealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of twenty-first-century capitalism. Beating the market was long thought to be impossible, but hedge funds cracked its mysteries and made fortunes in the process. Drawing on his unprecedented access to the industry, esteemed financial writer Sebastian Mallaby tells the inside story of the hedge funds, from their origins in the 1960s to their role in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 — and explains why understanding the history of hedge funds is key to predicting the future of finance.

The definitive biography of the most important economic statesman of our time Sebastian Mallaby's magisterial biography of Alan Greenspan, the product of over five years of research based on untrammeled access to his subject and his closest professional and personal intimates, brings into vivid focus the mysterious point where the government and the economy meet. To understand Greenspan's story is to see the economic and political landscape of the last 30 years--and the presidency from Reagan to George W. Bush--in a whole new light. As the most influential economic statesman of his age, Greenspan spent a lifetime grappling with a momentous shift: the transformation of finance from the fixed and regulated system of the post-war era to the free-for-all of the past quarter century. The story of Greenspan is also the story of the making of modern finance, for good and for ill. Greenspan's life is a quintessential American success story: raised by a single mother in the Jewish émigré community of Washington Heights, he was a math prodigy who found a niche as a stats-crunching consultant. A master at explaining the economic weather to captains of industry, he translated that skill into advising Richard Nixon in his 1968 campaign. This led to a perch on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and then to a dazzling array of business and government roles, from which the path to the Fed was relatively clear. A fire-breathing libertarian and disciple of Ayn Rand in his youth who once called the Fed's creation a historic mistake, Mallaby shows how Greenspan reinvented himself as a pragmatist once in power. In his analysis, and in his core mission of keeping inflation in check, he was a maestro indeed, and hailed as such. At his retirement in 2006, he was lauded as the age's necessary man, the veritable God in the machine, the global economy's avatar. His memoirs sold for record sums to publishers around the world. But then came 2008. Mallaby's story lands with both feet on the great crash which did so much to damage Alan Greenspan's reputation. Mallaby argues that the conventional wisdom is off base: Greenspan wasn't a naïve ideologue who believed greater regulation was unnecessary. He had pressed for greater regulation of some key areas of finance over the years, and had gotten nowhere. To argue that he didn't know the risks in irrational markets is to miss the point. He knew more than almost anyone; the question is why he didn't act, and whether anyone else could or would have. A close reading of Greenspan's life provides fascinating answers to these questions, answers whose lessons we would do well to heed. Because perhaps Mallaby's greatest lesson is that economic statesmanship, like political statesmanship, is the art of the possible. The Man Who Knew is a searching reckoning with what exactly comprised the art, and the possible, in the career of Alan Greenspan.

Never has the World Bank's relief work been more important than in the last nine years, when crises as huge as AIDS and the emergence of terrorist sanctuaries have threatened the prosperity of billions. This journalistic masterpiece by Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby charts those controversial years at the Bank under the leadership of James Wolfensohn—the unstoppable power broker whose daring efforts to enlarge the planet's wealth in an age of globalization and terror were matched only by the force of his polarizing personality. Based on unprecedented access to its subject, this captivating tour through the messy reality of global development is that rare triumph—an emblematic story through which a gifted author has channeled the spirit of the age.This edition features a new afterword by the author that analyzes the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz as Wolfensohn's successor at the World bank

Book by Mallaby, Sebastian

É parte da natureza do jogo do capital de risco que a maioria das tentativas falhem. No entanto, os poucos investimentos bem-sucedidos atingem números tão altos que mais do que compensam todas as perdas. Essa desproporção extrema entre sucesso e fracasso é a lei de potência responsável por impulsionar todo esse campo, desde start-ups até as grandes empresas do Vale do Silício e do setor de tecnologia em geral.Em A lei de potência, Sebastian Mallaby faz uma incursão profunda na indústria do capital de risco para esclarecer o papel que a aleatoriedade exerce nas escolhas dos investidores. Inserindo-se nos bastidores desse mundo exclusivo, o jornalista revela a história de alguns dos triunfos mais emblemáticos e dos desastres mais infames do Vale do Silício — o pouco convencional nascimento da Apple, o carro elétrico de Elon Musk, e até a avalanche de dinheiro que estimulou a postura arrogante de empresas como a WeWork e a Uber.Ao acompanhar esses investidores de risco na busca pela próxima grande inovação, Mallaby explora o equilíbrio necessário entre intuição e dados para alcançar êxito nos investimentos e evidencia que o futuro não é uma questão de mera previsão: precisa ser desbravado.

Brought to you by Penguin.It is no exaggeration to say that venture capital has been central to the greatest legal creation of wealth anywhere and has enabled much of the world we live in, yet we know surprisingly little about this strange tribe of financiers.In The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby turns his unprecedented access to the industry's central players into a riveting, character-driven account of venture capital and the world it has made. Most of the tech start-ups funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalists fail, but a very few hits succeed at such a scale that they will more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives venture capital, and the wider tech sector.Mallaby make sense of the seeming randomness of success in venture capital, an industry that supposedly relies on gut instinct and personality rather than spreadsheets and data. We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic hits and infamous disasters in Silicon Valley history - from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the avalanche of venture money that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber. And he shows how the power law now echoes around the world.

Basándose en el inicio de las carreras de los empresarios más aventurados de todos los tiempos, el historiador financiero Sebastian Mallaby nos explicará en este libro cómo se fundaron las compañías más exitosas del mundo como Google o Alibaba, y cuáles son las probabilidades de éxito.A partir de historias e investigaciones, El poder del instinto nos enseñará la aleatoriedad del éxito en el capital de riesgo, una industria que depende más de las agallas que del análisis de datos, y cómo esta proporción de triunfo y fracaso es la ley del poder que determina la economía de todo el mundo.Gracias a este práctico manual, aprenderemos la verdad sin tapujos sobre algunos de los triunfos y desastres más icónicos de la industria para entender que el futuro no se puede predecir, sino que tiene que ser descubierto.

'Extraordinary... beautifully written, clear-eyed and engaged in the deepest ethical questions of our day' Rory Stewart A revelatory portrait of the visionary behind Google DeepMind, the race to control the future – and what it means to winEven in a tech world crowded with visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. Born to working class, immigrant parents in North London, a chess prodigy by five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven-figure job offer from a video-game studio to study science at Cambridge. Long before the current obsession with AI, he founded the path-breaking company DeepMind in order to pursue a single, audacious the dream of artificial superintelligence, which would solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe. For his scientific achievements, he won a Nobel Prize in 2024, and his company, now Google DeepMind, is considered the tech giant’s engine room. For the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his inner circle as well as detractors and rivals at other companies. The result is a revelation-packed portrait of a singular mind and a historic reckoning with the AI revolution, a shift potentially more significant than any since the dawn of complex thought 70,000 years ago. As Mallaby chronicles, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby become the keeper of humanity’s future. Yet this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis has remained in Britain, and unlike his rivals, his aims are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment. Like them, however, he is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. He aims to control the technology, but the technology may ultimately control him – and humanity writ large.

From one of our leading chroniclers of the intersection of innovation and capitalism, a landmark reckoning—based on unprecedented access—with one of the world’s most brilliant and driven tech visionaries, and his game-changing companyEven by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents—a chess prodigy by age five, and a wizard coder in his teens—he turned down a seven-figure job offer before turning eighteen to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at the University of Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in superabundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the Nobel Prize–winning path he is still on—imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis’s detractors, such as his estranged DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI’s leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company, and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, regard him as an “evil genius.” He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs—for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery; others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often their technology controls them.This is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside—and furiously critical—of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis’s quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.

From one of our leading chroniclers of the intersection of innovation and capitalism, a landmark reckoning — based on unprecedented access — with one of the world’s most brilliant and driven tech visionaries and his game-changing company.Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called visionary leaders possessed of the godspark of genius, Demis Hassabis is universally recognized as a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a dominant chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before he turned 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, his ultimate goal to solve the world’s hardest problems and usher in an era of super-abundance. And along with a small group of fellow travelers around the world, that is the path he is very much still on, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will unlock the deepest mysteries of the universe.Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his own time, sitting still for over thirty hours of probing conversations, and has opened up his company to him, allowing Mallaby to spend hundreds of hours talking to all its key players, including people still there, like Shane Legg, and those who’ve left, like Mustafa Suleyman. The result is a revelation-packed account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this whole protean field in the crucial, indeed historic era, when it went from the periphery to the center of the world.No one questions Demis Hassabis’s brilliance, commitment, or the worthiness of his ultimate goals. There are those who do flinch at the heat of his fire, and question some of his strategies. His competitors, of course, want to beat him. He is in a game at a moment where the sense of the stakes is matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Faustian bargains abound. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because, like Robert Oppenheimer, they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.THE INFINITY MACHINE surfaces Hassabis’s story’s importance across a number of dimensions. Not least, crucially, this is not at heart a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but he has remained outside of it, and indeed, furiously critical of it, often lambasting its leaders in his conversations with Mallaby. DeepMind has never seen large language models as the one path to the AGI mountaintop. That left them blindsided by the OpenAI ChatGPT breakthrough, but it has also caused them to advance on a much broader front, and arguably have a bigger real world impact than their competitors. So far. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, the place of Demis Hassabis and DeepMind in the history of tech, capitalism, and science is secure.

The Power Law” è un’affascinante miscela di narrazione e analisi che svela la storia del Venture Capital (fondi di investimento ad alto rischio specializzati in start-up o comunque in aziende con una elevata potenzialità di fallimento), dell’incubazione tecnologica nella Silicon Valley e infine dell’innovazione nell’economia globale.Apprendiamo così, per la prima volta, la verità nuda e cruda su alcuni dei trionfi più iconici (e su alcuni famigerati disastri) nella storia dell’innovazione digitale, dalla commedia degli errori alla nascita di Apple, alla valanga di denaro di rischio che ha favorito l’arroganza di WeWork e Uber”.E “L’incessante ricerca di grandi slam da parte dei Venture Capitalist alimenta un’ossessione per l’ideale del genio imprenditore solitario, e le aziende viste come potenziali ‘unicorni’ ricevono quantità inebrianti di potere, con risultati a volte disastrosi. A un livello più sistemico, la necessità di fare scommesse enormi su talenti non provati rafforza i pregiudizi, con le donne e le minoranze ancora rappresentate a livelli deplorevolmente bassi.Ciò non ha solo implicazioni di giustizia come riferisce l’autore Mallaby, il settore Venture Capital locale della Cina, avendo imparato dai pionieri della Valle del Silicio, sta esplodendo e ora ha più luminari donne VC di quante ne abbia mai avute l’America. Tuttavia, il Venture Capital della Silicon Valley rimane il principale incubatore di innovazione aziendale non è tanto da dove vengono le idee, ma dove vanno a finire le aziende che creano il futuro”.Le innovazioni raramente provengono da ‘esperti’. Elon Musk non era una ‘persona da auto elettrica’ prima di fondare Tesla. Quando si tratta di innovazioni improbabili, il futuro non può essere può solo essere scoperto. È nella natura del gioco del capitale di rischio che la maggior parte dei tentativi di scoperta falliscano, ma i pochissimi che ce la fanno vi riescono su una scala tale da compensare ampiamente tutto il resto. Quel rapporto estremo tra successo e fallimento è la “legge di potenza” che guida il business Venture Capital e tutta la Silicon Valley.

Wealthy, powerful and potentially dangerous, hedge fund managers have emerged as the stars of twenty-first-century capitalism. Based on unprecedented access to the industry, More Money Than God provides the first authoritative history of hedge funds.A saga of riches and rich egos, this is also a history of discovery. Drawing on insights from mathematics, economics and psychology to crack the mysteries of the market, hedge funds have transformed the world, spawning new markets in exotic financial instruments and rewriting the rules of capitalism.