Promoting From Within
My partner Scott Weiss just wrote a blog post about promoting from within. You can read it here.
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Our Philanthropic Commitment
We are delighted to announce that the six General Partners of Andreessen Horowitz, with our families, are all committing to donate at least half of all income from our venture capital careers to philanthropic causes during our lifetimes. The reason is simple. We are fortunate to work with some of the best entrepreneurs and technologists…
More »Demoting A Loyal Friend
When I started Loudcloud, I hired the best people that I knew—people whom I respected, trusted and liked. Like me, many of them did not have deep experience in the jobs that I gave them, but they worked night and day to make it work and they made great contributions to the company. Yet for…
More »Two years ago we invested $250,000 in Instagram. Thanks to the spectacular vision and effort of Kevin Systrom and the Instagram team, the investment will be worth $78,000,000 when the Faceboook acquisition closes. The work that Kevin and team did will go down as legend in the industry and we thank them immensely. We also…
More »How to Start a Movement
A few months ago, my friend Joe Green sent me a video titled, “The Internet is My Religion”: In it, Jim Gilliam gives us a short tour of his life’s story. I encourage you to watch the entire mind-blowing twelve minutes. In it, Jim tells the story of how after contracting life-threatening cancer, he went…
More »Lies that Losers Tell
When a company starts to lose its major battles, the truth often becomes the first casualty. CEOs and employees work tirelessly to develop creative narratives that help them avoid dealing with the obvious facts. Despite their intense creativity, many companies often end up with the exact same false explanations. Some familiar lies “She left, but…
More »The Future of Networking
Major technology platforms tend to last about 25 to 30 years. This gives them time to gather sufficient developer momentum, enable a set of transformational ideas, build those ideas, and form a large industry around it. The platforms then sustain for an additional 5-10 years due to inertia and lock-in. Finally, when the shortcomings of…
More »Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years?
Since Marc and I founded Andreessen Horowitz three years ago, we have raised $2.7 billion. That statement begs a few questions. The two most obvious are: Why did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money? How did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money? To get to the answers,…
More »The Freaky Friday Management Technique
Many years ago, I encountered a particularly tricky management situation. Two excellent organizations in the company, Customer Support and Sales Engineering, went to war with each other. The Sales Engineers escalated a series of blistering complaints arguing that the Customer Support team did not respond with urgency, refused to fix issues in the product, and…
More »Management Debt
Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the metaphor technical debt is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back—with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off…
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