This is a guest post by Christian Gheorghe, founder and CEO of Tidemark. In retrospect revolutions appear self-evident, yet at the time they seem unlikely. Today, the end of Communism in Eastern Europe seems so obvious, but in my home country of Romania, until the day Nicolae Ceausescu was shot dead, I thought he would…
More »At Opsware I used to teach a management expectations course because I deeply believed in training. In it, I made it clear that I expected every manager to meet with her people on a regular basis. I even gave instructions on how to conduct a 1:1 meeting so there could be no excuses. Then one…
More »Six months ago, I wrote a blog post called “The Future of Networking” about Nicira Inc., a company that I said would turn the data networking market upside down. Today, VMware arrived at the same conclusion and acquired Nicira for $1.26B in cash. Since Nicira only recently shipped its first production ready systems, this acquisition…
More »Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you. Together you will build a beautiful product that delights customers and makes the world just a little bit better. It’s going to be absolutely awesome. Then, after working night and…
More »Conventional wisdom among smart technology entrepreneurs says not to hire people with Masters in Business Administration (MBAs) into startups. Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint, expressed the sentiment well when he said: “When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract $250k for every MBA.” My friend Peter Thiel once warned a young entrepreneur:…
More »My partner Scott Weiss just wrote a blog post about promoting from within. You can read it here.
More »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 »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 »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…
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