As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.

we studied the venture capital industry and we came across a potential problem with our approach. Historically, all the returns in venture capital had been concentrated in a tiny number of firms and consistently by a small number of the same firms. Of the more than eight hundred venture capital firms of the day, only about six had delivered great returns for their investors. As we dug deeper, we uncovered an excellent reason for this: The best entrepreneurs will only work with the best venture capital firms.

You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future. For the startup world, this means you should not necessarily start your own company, even if you are extraordinarily talented. If anything, too many people are starting their own companies today. People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast. The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you’ll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing).

A venture that doesn’t create value for others is a hobby. A venture that doesn’t attract attention is a flop. A venture that doesn’t sell the value it creates is a nonprofit. A venture that doesn’t deliver what it promises is a scam. A venture that doesn’t bring in enough money to keep operating will inevitably close.

every single company in a good venture portfolio must have the potential to succeed at vast scale.

You’ll learn more about this in chapter 4.1 on asset allocation, but for now, just know that if real estate’s mantra is “Location! Location! Location!” then the mantra for getting better returns while reducing risk is “Diversification! Diversification! Diversification!” Effective diversification not only reduces your risk but also offers you the opportunity to maximize your returns.

If you don’t envision your business growing one hundred times in size, your start-up probably won’t generate much interest [from venture capitalist]

among the failed startups, 80 percent never managed to innovate beyond their original vision for their companies. Among the successful startups, however, two-thirds had found success by discarding whatever founding vision had gotten them funded, because trial and error had led them to a new vision of success.

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

Facebook, the best investment in our 2005 fund, returned more than all the others combined. Palantir, the second-best investment, is set to return more than the sum of every other investment aside from Facebook. This highly uneven pattern is not unusual: we see it in all our other funds as well. The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

If you do start your own company, you must remember the power law to operate it well. The most important things are singular: One market will probably be better than all others, as we discussed in Chapter 5. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others, too — for that see Chapter 11. Time and decision-making themselves follow a power law, and some moments matter far more than others — see Chapter 9. However, you can’t trust a world that denies the power law to accurately frame your decisions for you, so what’s most important is rarely obvious. It might even be secret. But in a power law world, you can’t afford not to think hard about where your actions will fall on the curve.

Most company mergers fail, so let's not be absolutely naive about the benefits of scale.