Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product. Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were…
More »A year ago I wrote about a very special entrepreneur, Christian Gheorghe, who escaped Communist Romania, migrated to America, and—after starting here with $27 as a limo driver and construction worker—eventually became a computer scientist and an entrepreneur. I indicated that just as he broke from an oppressive, totalitarian regime, he planned to free his customers from…
More »This post is dedicated to the late Al Davis. Rest in peace. “Just win baby.” —Al Davis Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: how could I have possibly prepared for this? How could I know that half our customers would go out of business? How could…
More »Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization—Human Resources—should look like. The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want. In theory, they want a well-managed company with a…
More »This is a guest post by Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Today, my company Ning, where I serve as chairman and cofounder, is announcing that it has agreed to merge into Glam Media. In this post, I’d like to briefly explain the whats and whys, and to thank a lot of…
More »When you recruit an executive, you paint a beautiful picture of her future in your company. You describe in great depth and color how awesome it will be for her to accept your offer and how much better it will be for her than joining that other company. Then one day you realize you must…
More »I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got…
More »This is a guest post by Jeff Jordan, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Talk about a business with humble roots. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia met at the Rhode Island School of Design and became roommates in San Francisco in 2007. A prominent design conference was coming to town and the nearby hotels were sold…
More »When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of…
More »This is a guest post by Marc Andreessen, co-founder and General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Today I’m delighted to announce that legendary Internet industry CEO and executive Jeff Jordan has joined Andreessen Horowitz as our fifth General Partner. I say “legendary” for two reasons. First, Jeff has run three of the iconic businesses of the…
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