A few weeks ago, I sat down with my good friend Mike Preuss, the founder at Visible, to talk about the waterfall 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 aware of 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 luckily invested in a handful with outsized returns.

What that fails to acknowledge is the founder perspective, and the corresponding fact that the majority of venture investments fall into the "loser" bucket in the view of the investor. In other words, it's clear from the investor's perspective that it won't be a top decile company and a fund returner, so it's not worth the time or energy. That company then has a hard time raising additional capital and often times shut down or get left as a zombie company.

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

From the VC perspective, that's the cost of doing business. For founders and their teams, it's a devastating reality. We speak to this concept on 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 first hand both as an investor and a founder. But in time, outside of the impact of what we're building, we hope this all or nothing mentality will change within the technology ecosystem. The first step is to call attention to it and the companies that are affected by it.

You can watch that full conversation below.