Tom Nicholas

Author of VC: An American History, the history of venture capital that Kyle read with the Investing 101 2.0 and Bifurcation of Investing threads explicitly in view. Nicholas’s book traces the asset class from nineteenth-century whaling syndicates and the early partnerships through the rise of the modern firm (Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Bessemer Venture Partners) and the Power Law dynamics that govern returns. Kyle’s book page treats Nicholas as the narrator of how VC’s risk-and-reward structure developed over time.

Context: Tom Nicholas is a professor at Harvard Business School, where he holds the William J. Abernathy chair and teaches the history of entrepreneurship and finance. His 2019 book VC: An American History is a standard scholarly account of the venture-capital industry’s origins.

Where this appears

• VC: An American History — author of the book; his history of VC frames Kyle’s investing-history reading