Sebastian Mallaby - The Power Law : Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

The Man Who Knew

More Money Than God

The Worlds Banker

After Apartheid

Not far from the headquarters of Silicon Valleys venture-capital industry, which is clustered along Palo Altos Sand Hill Road, Patrick Brown strode out into his yard on the Stanford University campus. Atop a little hill behind his house, Brown got down on his hands and knees, a shaggy fifty-four-year-old professor in a T-shirt, peering at the vegetation through rounded glasses. Proceeding delicately, like a detective collecting samples that might yield a vital clue, Brown began digging out the roots of some wild clover plants. It might impress the ordinary gardener to know that those roots would soon yield $3 million.

Brown was one of the worlds leading geneticists. In 1995, his lab had published pioneering work on DNA microarrays, which help distinguish between normal and cancerous tissue. He had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He was the recipient of a Howard Hughes award, which guaranteed no-strings-attached research funding. But his objective on that hilltop had nothing to do with genetics. The year was 2010, and Brown was using a sabbatical to plot the downfall of the meat-industrial complex.

A friend had set him on this path by means of a stray comment. Possessed of a keen environmental conscience, Brown had been worrying that animal husbandry occupied one-third of the worlds land, causing significant greenhouse gas emissions, water degradation, and a loss of biodiversity. The planet was clearly going to need a better kind of food for the growing population of the twenty-first century. Then Browns friend mentioned that if you could make a vegetarian burger that tasted better than a beef burger, the free market would magically take care of the problem. Adventurous restaurants would serve it, and then McDonalds would serve it, and pretty soon you could eliminate meat from the food system.

The more Brown pondered this, the more he grew agitated. If you could make a yummier vegetarian burger? Of course you could make a yummier vegetarian burger! Why was nobody treating this as a solvable problem? People just figured we have this insanely destructive system and its just never going to go away, Brown fumed. They thought, Bummer, but there you are.

In most places and at most points in human history, Browns epiphany would have been inconsequential. But, as Brown himself reflected later, he had the very good fortune of living in the epicenter of venture capital. Because Stanford sat at the heart of Silicon Valley, its golf course laid out along the edge of Sand Hill Road, Brown was digging up his yard with a clear purpose. Those clover roots contained heme, an iron-carrying molecule found in hemoglobin, which gives blood its red color. If Brown could show how this plant molecule could mimic the properties of bloody meat, there was a good chance that a venture capitalist would fund a plantburger company.

Brown dissected the clover roots with a razor blade and blended them up to extract and culture the juices. Pretty soon, he had what he needed to fashion a vegetarian burger that smelled and sizzled and dripped and squished like 100 percent Grade A beef. I got to a point where, though I didnt have much data, Id enough to go and talk to some venture-capital companiesof which there are a ridiculous number in Silicon Valleyand hit them for some money.

A scientist friend mentioned that Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who ran the eponymous Khosla Ventures, was interested in environmentally friendly, cleantech projects. What he didnt mention was that Khosla was also a preacher of the Valleys most bracing creed: the belief that most social problems can be ameliorated by technological solutions, if only inventors can be goaded to be sufficiently ambitious. All progress depends upon the unreasonable man, the creatively maladjusted, Khosla declared, borrowing eclectically from George Bernard Shaw and Martin Luther King Jr. Khosla wanted radical dreams, the bolder and more improbable the better.