VC

“In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time...[A] first-rate history.” —New Yorker “An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “It is an article of faith that ready access to venture capital makes an economy more dynamic. Nicholas frames the case historically.” —Wall Street Journal “A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.” —New Republic VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford (as in VC’s infancy) or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth. Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why it is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.