The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

by Sebastian Mallaby

“If I’m building a health-care company, I don’t want a health-care CEO,” Khosla says. “If I’m building a manufacturing company, I don’t want a manufacturing CEO. I want somebody really smart to rethink the assumptions from the ground up.” After all, he continues, retail innovation did not come from Walmart; it came from Amazon. Media innovation did not come from Time magazine or CBS; it came from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. Space innovation did not come from Boeing and Lockheed; it came from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Next-generation cars did not come from GM and Volkswagen; they came from another Musk company, Tesla. “I can’t think of a single, major innovation coming from experts in the last thirty, forty years,” Khosla exclaims. “Think about it, isn’t that stunning?”