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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archive // Ben Horowitz
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…
More »Lead Bullets
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 »The New Possibilities
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 »Nobody Cares
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 »Management Quality Assurance
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 »Preparing To Fire an Executive
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 »The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage
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 »Meet Our Newest Portfolio Company, Airbnb
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 Employees Misinterpret Managers
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 »Why the Browser Matters
Before my partner Marc Andreessen and his friends at the University of Illinois invented the browser in 1993, most people thought only scientists and researchers would use the Internet. The Internet was thought to be too arcane, insecure and slow to meet real business needs. Even after the team introduced Mosaic, the world’s first browser,…
More »The Incredible Sinking Bubble (Debating the Tech Bubble with Steve Blank: Part III)
This post originally appeared as my closing argument in our debate in The Economist. Technology stocks currently trade at an all time low vs. industrial stocks based on forward P/E ratios. Nonetheless, the esteemed and brilliant Mr. Blank argues that we are in a technology bubble. When I pointed this out, Mr. Blank modified his argument…
More »Lytro and the Magic Camera
Way —Garth Because I spend a huge portion of my time looking at new technology companies, it’s getting more and more difficult for entrepreneurs to surprise me. Nonetheless, a young entrepreneur named Ren Ng recently walked into the firm and blew my brains to bits. You see my mind has been softened by the past…
More »Debating the Tech Bubble with Steve Blank: Part II
This post originally appeared as my rebuttal to my friend Steve Blank’s opening statement in our debate in The Economist. In reading my friend Steve Blank’s arguments, I found the bubble definition quite compelling: “A tech bubble is the rapid inflation in the valuation of public and private technology companies that exceeds their fundamental value by…
More »Debating the Tech Bubble with Steve Blank: Part I
This post originally appeared as my opening statement in my debate with my friend Steve Blank in The Economist. We are not in a technology bubble. We have not even taken a major step towards a technology bubble. Predicting such things is a bit like predicting the end of the world; the prediction will eventually…
More »Debating the Bubble with Steve Blank
My friend, Steve Blank, and I debate the bubble: http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/710
More »ShoeDazzle
John just wrote a great blog post on our newest investment, ShoeDazzle.
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