Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. This may sound shocking, but sales people are different than engineers and treating them like engineers does not work well at all.…
More »When I was 20 years old, I was a computer science major at Columbia University and I needed a summer job. It was 1986 and I was barely aware of a place called Silicon Valley. In those days there was no “startup culture or entrepreneurship movement”. Most people were only recently becoming aware that computers…
More »As CEO, you know that you cannot build a world-class company unless you maintain a world-class team. But how do you know if an executive is world-class? Beyond that, if she was world-class when you hired her, will she stay world-class? If she doesn’t, will she become world-class again? These are complex questions and are…
More »Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers. It’s about office design, it’s about screening out the wrong kinds of employees, it’s about values, it’s about fun, it’s about alignment, it’s about finding like-minded employees, it’s about being cult-like. So what is culture? Does culture matter? If…
More »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 »The other day, a friend of mine asked me whether CEOs were born or made. I said, “That’s kind of like asking if Jolly Ranchers are grown or made. CEO is a very unnatural job.” After saying it and seeing the surprised look on his face, I realized that perhaps it wasn’t as obvious as…
More »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 »After I wrote A Good Place to Work, people flooded me with feedback about one-on-ones. About half the responders chastised me, saying that one-on-ones were useless and that I shouldn’t put so much emphasis on them. The other half wanted to know how to run more effective one-on-ones. It seems to me that both groups…
More »Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you. Together you will build a beautiful product that delights customers and makes the world just a little bit better. It’s going to be absolutely awesome. Then, after working night and…
More »Conventional wisdom among smart technology entrepreneurs says not to hire people with Masters in Business Administration (MBAs) into startups. Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint, expressed the sentiment well when he said: “When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract $250k for every MBA.” My friend Peter Thiel once warned a young entrepreneur:…
More »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
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