The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, by Sebastian Mallaby, Penguin Press, 496 pages, $30
"Liberation capital," as investor Arthur Rock called it, "was about much more than keeping a team together in the place where its members happened to own houses." In 1957, Rock took a gamble on the "traitorous eight"—a team of promising engineers at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory—and counseled them to free themselves of their authoritarian boss by quitting en masse and striking out to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
