VC: AN AMERICAN HISTORY

A major exploration of venture financing in America, from its origins in the whaling industry to Silicon Valley, showing how venture capital created an epicenter for the development of high-tech innovation.

Contrary to popular belief, America's venture capital industry has a long and dynamic history. From nineteenth-century whaling to the multitude of firms pursuing entrepreneurial finance today, venture finance reflects a deep-seated tradition in the deployment of risk capital in the United States. Appreciating that history, Tom Nicholas shows, is essential to understanding the industry's future directions and possibilities, its challenges and prospects for surmounting them, and its place in America's exceptional style of capitalism.

VC tells the riveting story of how the industry arose from the United States' long-running orientation toward entrepreneurship. Venture capital has been driven from the start by the pull of outsized returns through a skewed distribution of payoffs—a faith in low-probability but substantial financial rewards that rarely materialize. Whether the gamble is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the newest startup in Silicon Valley, VC is not just a model of finance that has proven difficult to replicate in other countries. It is a state of mind
exemplified by an appetite for risk-taking, a bold spirit of adventure, and an unbridled quest for improbable wealth through investment in innovation.

Nicholas's history of the venture capital industry offers readers a ride on the roller coaster of setbacks and success in America's pursuit of financial gain.

Tom Nicholas is the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where his classes focus on entrepreneurship, innovation, and business development in the United States over the past 240 years. Prior to joining HBS, he taught at MIT's Sloan School of Management and the London School of Economics. He has received the Faculty Teaching Award at HBS multiple times, including the Charles M. Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching. He teaches in a wide range of executive education programs (intellectual property rights, venture capital and private equity, and entrepreneurship) and
developed Leading People and Investing to Build Sustainable Communities, a program for Native Americans, First Nations peoples in Canada, and other indigenous groups around the world.