Journalist, Author
Sebastian Mallaby is a British American journalist and the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book The Power Law is a definitive history of the venture capital industry.
by Sebastian Mallaby
Mallaby traces the rise of Silicon Valley venture capital from Arthur Rock and Kleiner Perkins through Sequoia, Benchmark, a16z, and Tiger, arguing that the power-law distribution of startup returns is what makes the VC model work and what distinguishes it from other forms of finance. Drawing on unprecedented access to leading partners, he shows how VC's contrarian, hands-on, portfolio-of-outliers approach produced companies like Apple, Cisco, Google, and Facebook, and how that playbook is now being exported globally.
The books Sebastian Mallaby references, cites, and recommends most frequently.
by Peter Thiel
Thiel argues that true innovation means creating something entirely new, not copying what exists. Competition is for losers, monopoly through unique value is how lasting companies are built.
by Ben Horowitz
Horowitz shares hard-won lessons from running a startup through near-death crises. There is no formula, leadership means making impossible decisions when there are no good options.
by Walter Isaacson
Isaacson traces the digital revolution from Ada Lovelace to the internet age. The key insight: the greatest breakthroughs came from collaboration between visionaries, not lone geniuses in isolation.
by Brad Stone
Stone chronicles Bezos's relentless, customer-obsessed drive to transform Amazon from online bookstore into global commerce and cloud empire. Visionary brilliance meets ruthless execution.
by Walter Isaacson
Isaacson portrays Jobs as a study in contradictions - visionary and cruel, obsessive and brilliant. His core thesis: Jobs' relentless pursuit of perfection and control over end-to-end products reshaped entire industries.
Who Sebastian draws from, and who draws from Sebastian — aggregated across every book in this collection. Counts show the number of citation links, not the depth of each one.