Last January, I changed three flights and landed in Cape Town to profile Africa’s top venture capitalist. Zachariah George, hailing from Kerala but raised in Oman, had attended Stanford, worked on Wall Street leading up to the Financial Crisis, and turned a soul-searching trip to Ghana into an investing career spanning the African continent over the next decade. 

Besides Cape Town’s eternally perfect weather and surprisingly exquisite Italian food, I was drawn to George–enough to spend 9,000 words on him–because his fund, Launch Africa, was breaking the most fundamental rule of venture capital: the power law, which dictates that a small minority of investments produce the overwhelming share of returns; the 80/20 rule.