This is a guest post by our newest board partner, John M. Jack. Is there any question in today’s economic environment that enterprises of all sizes continue to search for solutions that fit the “better, cheaper” mantra? Cloud, as we know, meets the criteria and offers other tremendous benefits to such enterprises. However, there has…
More »This is a guest post by Marc Andreessen, co-founder and partner at Andreessen Horowitz. I’m delighted to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is investing $15 million in Rap Genius. Given that Rap Genius is a website where people explain rap lyrics, and given that my partner Ben is a noted rap fanatic, your first reaction might be,…
More »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 »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 »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…
More »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 »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 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 »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 »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…
More »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 »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 »John just wrote a great blog post on our newest investment, ShoeDazzle.
More »Shortly after we started Andreessen Horowitz in mid-2009, we, along with our partners at Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, bought majority ownership of Skype from eBay for slightly more than $2B. The investment generated a tremendous amount of controversy for us. Marc and I were known as angel investors, so investing…
More »Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population. In mainstream thinking, the absolute success of the company determines the CEO’s…
More »Today we announced a new investment in TinyCo, a new mobile games company. We further announced that my partner Marc would be joining their board of directors. Here are the three reasons: 1. A Big Frackin’ Market IDC estimates that there will be 1 billion mobile Internet users by 2013 and that estimate may very…
More »Gaurav Dhillon was one of the great enterprise entrepreneurs of the ‘90s and early 2000s. He founded and ran the premier integration company of the era, Informatica, took it public and built it into the number one company in the market. Informatica is currently worth over $4B. Ordinarily, we would automatically disqualify an entrepreneur with…
More »Disclaimer: my business partner, Marc Andreessen, is on the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard. I note that I have no inside information, and this blog post is based purely on published material. In 2007, I sold Opsware, the company that I founded and ran to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6B. I worked at Hewlett-Packard from 2007 to 2008 as an executive in the software business.
Recently, my old company Hewlett-Packard has been in the news—and not in a good way. I’ve been watching the coverage from the sidelines up to this point, but felt increasingly compelled to join the conversation and share my point of view. So here goes.
More »A few months ago, Aneel Bhusri offered to introduce me to one his favorite entrepreneurs. Since Aneel is, for my money, the best enterprise venture capitalist in the world, I immediately agreed and Aneel did not disappoint. He introduced me to Christian Gheorghe, founder of TIAN Software, a predictive analytics company acquired by OutlookSoft, where, as Chief Technology Officer, he introduced important and innovative Enterprise Performance Management applications into the market. OutlookSoft was eventually acquired by
More »Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, I had a conversation with the legendary venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital. He wanted to hear the story of how we went from doomed in the eyes of the world to a $1.6B outcome with no recapitalization. After I took him through the details including several…
More »As former founder and CEO of Loudcloud, one of the original cloud computing companies, I am considered somewhat of a domain expert in all things “cloud.” Combine that with cloud being one of the hottest areas of new development and the most overloaded term in technology (well, maybe “real time” is more overloaded, not sure)…
More »Today we are extremely excited to announce that we are investing in Foursquare, a service that mixes social, locative, and gaming elements to encourage people to explore cities in which they live. Here are the three reasons we invested. 1. A great Founder/CEO: Dennis Crowley We prefer founding CEOs. In particular, we think the keeper…
More »No position in a company is more important than the CEO and, as a result, no job gets more scrutiny. Sadly, little of this analysis benefits CEOs as most of the discussions happen behind their backs. This post is a step in the opposite direction. By describing how Andreessen Horowitz evaluates CEOs, I am at the same time describing what I…
More »When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund…
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