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 »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 »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 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 »This is a guest post by Marc Andreessen, co-founder and General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz Today I’m delighted to announce that economist and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is joining our team as a part-time Special Advisor. A lot of people already know who Larry is, but here are the highlights of a remarkable career to date: Admitted…
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 »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 »TOM HAGEN Mike, why am I out? MICHAEL CORLEONE You’re not a wartime consigliere. Things may get tough with the move we’re trying. —Scene from The Godfather Recently, Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google and founder Larry Page took over. Much of the news coverage focused on Page’s ability to be the “face…
More »In my career, I have never seen a position in any industry with more varying criteria than General Partner at a venture capital firm. Some firms hire pure investors, some firms hire operators, some Wall Street analysts, some firms hire sales people, some firms hire lawyers, and others hire reporters. Interestingly, many different models have…
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 »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 »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 »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 »“They smile in a n!*)#% face And for what They got the game f!@#^& up And want my thang f!@#^& up” —Dr. Dre After being an entrepreneur for most of my adult life, I’ve now been a part-time angel investor for 5 years and a full-time venture capitalist for the past 9 months. During that time,…
More »[This blog post was originally published on TechCrunch on March 14, 2010.] At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The reasons are many (and will be the topic of a future blog post). As a result, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the characteristics required to be a founding CEO.…
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