A few weeks ago, I sat down with my good friend Mike Preuss, the founder of Visible, to talk about the cascading effects of the Power Law in venture capital.

If you've spent time within the technology ecosystem, either as a founder or investor, you're likely intimately familiar with the power law. From the investor standpoint, it's viewed as the secret sauce of VC—the concept that you can place many bets, have a majority of them fail, but still come out ahead (often multiple times over) because you invested in a handful of companies with outsized returns.

What this perspective fails to acknowledge is the founder's experience, and the harsh reality that the majority of venture investments fall into what investors consider the "loser" bucket. In other words, once it becomes clear from the investor's perspective that a company won't be a top-decile performer or fund returner, it's no longer worth their time or energy. These companies then struggle to raise additional capital and oftentimes get shut down or left as zombie companies.

This is the reality for a majority of startups, not a minority of them.

From the VC perspective, that's simply the cost of doing business. For founders and their teams, it's a devastating reality. We address this concept on the Approach section of our website, but Mike and I felt it was important to cover this topic at length.

It's one of the reasons why Curious exists—after seeing this firsthand both as an investor and a founder. Over time, beyond the impact of what we're building, we hope this all-or-nothing mentality will change within the technology ecosystem. The first step is calling attention to it and the companies affected by it.

You can watch that full conversation below.