This is a guest post by Margit Wennmachers, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Today we broaden our firm’s expertise with the appointment of our second special advisor, Adrian Fenty. Adrian is best known as the iconic former mayor of Washington, D.C., who threw out entrenched rulebooks to reform the public school system with unheard-of success. Adrian…
More »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 »By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same…
More »If you want to build an important company, then at some point you have to scale. People in startup land often talk about the magic of how few people built the original Google or the original Facebook, but today’s Google employs 20,000 people and today’s Facebook employs over 1,500 people. So, if you want to…
More »Often when super successful entrepreneurs found their second company, they suffer from a dangerous condition. In fact, the more successful the original startup, the more likely it is that the entrepreneur develops an acute case of Second Startup Syndrome. Second Startup Syndrome occurs when an entrepreneur wants to pick up in her second startup right…
More »Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself. —Andy Grove, High Output Management When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for hi-tech companies made sense,…
More »The other day I was talking to a couple of friends of mine, one a VC and the other a CEO. During the meeting, we were discussing one of the executives at the CEO’s company. The executive in question performs exceptionally, but lacks experience managing at larger scale. My friend the VC innocently advised the…
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…
More »You’re a small fry and I’m a Big Mac. —The Bingo Boys So you’ve achieved product market fit and you are ready to start building the company. The board encourages you to bring in some “been there done that” executives who will provide the right financial, sales and marketing expertise to help you transition from…
More »Who do you need to meet? I’m sure that we know them —Ron Conway Almost everybody knows that Ron Conway has invested in a huge percentage of the top technology companies in the world, but entrepreneurs often ask me why Ron would be a good investor for them. When I talk to venture capitalists, they…
More »[This blog post was originally published on Marc's blog on March 20, 2010.] Fred Wilson wrote a counter post to my The Case for the Fat Startup that you can find here. Before countering his counter, I’d like to say that Fred is one of my favorite VCs and has a marvelous track record of success. Further,…
More »[This blog post was originally published on All Things Digital on March 17, 2010.] Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008…
More »[This blog post was originally published at Marc's blog on March 1, 2010.] At our new venture fund, we’ve been spending time looking into new ways that will make the lives of entrepreneurs seeking funding easier. To that end, we’ve linked up with Ted Wang who has been working on an open source legal project…
More »I answered a provocative question on Quora earlier this year, and thought I’d repeat the answer here: I don’t have an MBA (I have an MS in Computer Science), so I can’t speak from direct experience. As CEO, I’ve managed dozens of MBAs in my career, so this answer is based on that experience. An…
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