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…
Visit Site »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,…
Visit Site »When I was a kid, I read tons of superhero comic books. I fantasized about superpowers, but the storylines about heroes with massive Achilles’ heels really held my attention the most. They saved the world but had screwed up personal lives, made lots of mistakes, and often acted like complete assholes. In retrospect, l related…
Visit Site »In part I, I talked about how up-front investment in a high-caliber strategic business development function helped to save Loudcloud when an existential crisis hit in 2002. But the value of strategic business development didn’t end there. In fact, it was only beginning. Opsware V1: Single product, single customer The EDS transaction closed in mid-August, and…
Visit Site »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 in the…
Visit Site »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…
Visit Site »Businesses don’t grow themselves. One of the most important jobs of a CEO is to aggressively define and pursue a growth agenda for his or her business. Why is this important? Growth typically improves a company’s competitive position and provides increased scale and leverage, and investors clearly value growth. The pursuit of growth continues to…
Visit Site »This series of posts starts off with a short quiz for the startup CEO: Q: Who’s responsible for developing your product? A: That’s easy—Engineering! Q: Who in your company is responsible for selling your product? A: That’s easy, too—Sales! Q: Who in your company has primary responsibility for: Mapping and networking your ecosystem? Building long-term relationships and driving deals…
Visit Site »In Europe, most sports leagues participate in a system of Promotion and Relegation. At the end of each season, the top three teams in the second league get promoted to the first league and the bottom three teams in the first league get relegated to the second league. This maintains the intensity of games for…
Visit Site »Marc and Ben founded Andreessen Horowitz with some very explicit beliefs. We would invest in Information Technology companies, and not in things medical, green or clean. We would have a preference for companies with deep technical roots and innovations. We would have one office, in Silicon Valley, and would not seek to invest in companies…
Visit Site »When I went away to college, my father was home alone. He didn’t have many close friends and spent most of his time reading and in front of the TV. As my visits stretched from every few months to a couple times a year, I began to notice him developing some strange behaviors. He had…
Read »I recently had the privilege of attending F.ounders, a unique event for a select group of tech founders and others from Europe, the US and Asia, held in my hometown of Dublin, Ireland. In the best Irish tradition of limericks, this is a tribute to the event and its own remarkable founder, Paddy Cosgrave. (For…
Visit Site »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…
Visit Site »In 1950, my Uncle Ed Kalin opened a small designer furniture store. After years of hard work, he saved up and opened a larger one. Growing up working there, I’d observe him doing things that, at first, were hard for me to understand. First of all, when he walked around the store, he was constantly…
Visit Site »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…
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