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Abstract: An emerging mechanism for intracellular organization is biomolecular phase separation into condensates of proteins and nucleic acids. However, the physical processes that govern the distribution of condensate sizes remain unclear. We utilize a combination of experimental synthetic and native condensates and simulations to probe the underlying coarsening mechanisms determining condensate size. Distributions range from exponential to power-law, reflecting the relative rates of nucleation and coalescence kinetics. We succinctly account for these differences by indentifying a “rich get richer” effect, whose extent may play a general role in the determination of condensate size distributions.