The celebrated hedge-fund stock picker Julian Robertson used to say that he looked for shares that might plausibly double in three years, an outcome he would view as “fabulous.”[22] But if venture capitalists embarked on the same quest, they would almost guarantee failure, because the power law generates relatively few startups that merely double in value. Most fail completely, in which case the value of their equity rounds to zero—an unthinkable catastrophe for a stock market investor. But each year brings a handful of outliers that hit the proverbial grand slam, and the only thing that
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