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Here are10 ways to grievously damage your high-growth tech startup and hurt the perception of Silicon Valley in the process.None of these are specific to any one company ; theyre general patterns weve observed across multiple cycles of tech startups. MORE

  The popular recipe for creating the next Silicon Valley goes something like this: *Build a big, beautiful, fully equipped technology park; *Mix in R&D labs and university centers; *Provide incentives to attract scientists, firms, and users; *Interconnect the industry through consortia and specialized suppliers; *Protect intellectual prop...

THE ROBOT TWEETSTORMS by @PMARCA One of the most interesting topics in modern times is the robots eat all the jobs thesis. It boils down to this: Computers can increasingly substitute for human labor, thus displacing jobs and creating unemployment. Your job, and every job, goes to a machine. This sort of thinking is textbook …Read More

From "TWA – Death Of A Legend" by Elaine X. Grant in St. Louis Magazine, October 2005. Ask any ex-staffer what went wrong with the [bankrupt] airline, and youll get one answer: Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who took over TWA in 1985 and systematically stripped it of its assets… In 1985, Icahn launched …Read More

On Monday, Carl Icahn claimed to have uncovered evidence of a "workaround of the technology that was the subject of the licensing dispute between eBay and Skypes founders and that was reportedly the cause of Microsoft ‘walking away' [from buying Skype as an alternative to eBay selling Skype to the Silver Lake syndicate]." (1) There …Rea...

Excerpts from James B. Stewart's book "Den of Thieves": Ivan Boeskys longtime friend, Carl Icahn, suggested that Boesky look into the shares of Gulf + Western, a force both in Hollywood, with its Paramount Pictures unit, and in publishing, with Simon & Schuster. Both businesses appealed strongly to Boeskys escalating ambitions, and Icahn told B...

Carl Icahn 2014, on eBay: "I have never seen what looks to me to be such blatant disregard for fiduciary obligations to stockholders. (1) Carl Icahn 2005, according to the Washington Post: (2) Carl Icahn is chairman of the board of XO and owns more than 60 percent of the company, a telecom-crash survivor that …Read More

Carl Icahn,March 5 2014, on CNBC: "Don't tell me that Microsoft suddenly had an epiphany … and decided only a year and a half later, ‘Wow, we're only going to pay $6 billion more.'" (1) Carl Icahn has repeatedly alleged both in interviews (1) and in letters (3) that I had some kind of secret …Read More

ON THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY, EXPERIENCED DIRECTORS, AND CONFLICTS: Carl Icahn 2014: "MarcAndreessen and Scott Cook… are two of the most respected, accomplished and value-driven leaders in Silicon Valley. And I sort of agree. I think theyre respected. I think theyre accomplished. And I agree mostly theyre value-driven leaders. The trouble is th...

According to Carl Icahn, venture capital board members are fine for Carl Icahn in 2011 but not fine for eBay in 2014. When Carl Icahn's board nomineesbusinessactivities created conflicts, Mr. Icahn has argued forcefully that a board should and could manage those conflicts if his nominees were elected by shareholders. Contrary to Mr. Icahns theory &...

False and misleading accusations have been made against eBay and against me in my role as an eBay director. This post provides my perspective on those accusations and their surrounding context. On the accusations: I dispute all accusations that I have violated any of my duties to eBay shareholders. Specifically: * Throughout the eBay board's …...

I am more bullish about the future of the news industry over the next 20 years than almost anyone I know. You are going to see it grow 10X to 100X from where it is today. That is my starting point for any discussion about the future of journalism. Here’s why I believe it, and …Read More

A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers. Political idealists project visions of liberation and revolution onto it; establishment elites heap contempt and scorn on it. On the other hand, technologists – nerds – are transf...

Follow me on my new highly active Twitter account @pmarca. And as always, thanks for reading my blog  – more soon.Filed under: Uncategorized

I’m very excited to announce that Balaji S. Srinivasan is joining Andreessen Horowitz as our newest General Partner. Balaji is both an entrepreneur and an academic. He was the cofounder and CTO of Counsyl, where he developed a new pre-pregnancy genomic test for a variety of heritable diseases. Counsyl’s test won the Wall Street Journal’s …Rea...

This is a guest post by our newest board partner, Steven Sinofsky. In much of the world’s urban areas, it can seem like there are more cars than people. In the U.S., there are nearly 800 cars per 1,000 people. With that comes increasing congestion, pollution, and resource consumption. Yet, surprisingly, the utilization of vehicles is at…

Today I am delighted to help unveil the best robotics startup I have ever seen — Anki. Andreessen Horowitz has been the main venture investor in Anki, which has been operating in stealth mode until today, since February 2012. Keeping my mouth shut about this company for 16 months has been one of the hardest…

I am tickled pink to announce Andreessen Horowitz's participation in a new project called the Glass Collective. Along with our friends at Google Ventures and our old partners in crime at Kleiner Perkins, we are working with Google to encourage a new generation of startup entrepreneurs to build applications for Google’s new breakthrough Glass platfo...

This is a guest post by Scott Kupor, managing partner, Andreessen Horowitz. We are holding back the middle class in America. But it’s not for the reasons you think, and the culprits are not those most people think of. Rather, the US government has systematically cut the middle class out of the most important wealth…

I am humbled and grateful to be a co-winner of the 2013 Queen Elizabeth Prize. Thank you to the judges, and congratulations to Robert, Vint, Louis, and Tim. I would first like to acknowledge my partner in creating Mosaic, Eric Bina. Eric co-wrote the original code for Mosaic with me — specifically all the difficult parts.…

I'm excited to welcome Chris Dixon to Andreessen Horowitz as our seventh General Partner! Chris has an extensive and distinguished track record in Internet entrepreneurship and angel investing, including all of the following: Cofounder of two prominent startups of the last decade, SiteAdvisor and Hunch, both of which had successful exits to McAfee ...

In his latest blog post, my partner Scott Weiss offers a few suggestions for what a CEO should be doing on top of his or her expected responsibilities. You can read his checklist here. Filed under: Uncategorized

We are delighted to announce that the six General Partners of Andreessen Horowitz, with our families, are all committing to donate at least half of all income from our venture capital careers to philanthropic causes during our lifetimes. The reason is simple.  We are fortunate to work with some of the best entrepreneurs and technologists…

Over the last several weeks, there have been erroneous reports in the press that my partner Jeff Jordan and/or I might become an operating executive of Yahoo in some capacity. To be crystal clear, neither Jeff, nor I, nor any of our partners at Andreessen Horowitz, are in the running for, or would accept, any…

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 people who have worked very hard to get us to this point. Ning is my…

Andreessen Horowitz prefers funding companies whose CEO is a co-founder. We also prefer founders who are technical. Put the two together, and you often have a CEO who has to hire executives into roles (e.g., marketing, sales, customer support, finance) she has never done before. How in the world do you interview and recruit someone…

One of the best parts of my job as a venture capitalist is that I meet super-interesting and super-motivated cofounders all the time. As you might expect, most cofounders have compelling personal histories that have shaped them as?entrepreneurs?stories such as "started coding at age 10 before ever seeing a computer"; "enrolled at Stanford at age...

Ben's last post on minimizing corporate politics generated a bunch of interesting comments. One set of commenters essentially asked, "gee, why should an employee be motivated first by a company?s success rather than by their own success"??Frankly, this surprised both of us. So I suggested that Ben answer this line of questioning directly, which he&...

As companies grow, they often get more political?by which I mean, people start advancing their own agendas by means other than merit or contribution. Ben explains in his latest blog post what a CEO can do to minimize corporate politics. It's not intuitive. For example, Ben points out that CEOs need to give career guidance…

These days, entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about scaling their products. No one wants to build the next Facebook only to watch their technical infrastructure crumble when user growth takes off. Entrepreneurs rarely think as much or as deeply or as rigorously about how to scale their companies. Best practices for scaling human…

Ben Horowitz and I co-founded one of the first cloud computing companies which we named, appropriately enough, Loudcloud. So we've been thinking about the cloud longer than most folks. In fact, we had to call ourselves a "managed services provider" in those days since no one was talking about "cloud providers" in the year 2000.…...

As the ranking officer, the CEO has a huge impact on their company's culture. This is especially true in startups where the whole company is watching the CEO's every move, every interaction, every decision. As a result of this micro-scrutiny, CEOs can feel like they need to be the company's Chief Morale Officer,?continuously?and relentlessly accent...

Every job in a startup is (usually) hard: building a new product is hard, marketing a new product is hard, selling a new product is hard. But no job is harder than the job of a CEO. Also, no job is murkier: what do the best startup CEO focus on day after day? Ben walks…

Conventional wisdom: startups don't have the time or dollars to invest in training. Training is only for big companies who can afford it, both cash- and time-wise. Not surprisingly, Ben picks a fight with conventional wisdom in his latest post,?Why Startups Should Train Their People. The post describes why and how even startups should invest…...

A question I hear a lot at startup board meetings is this one: "is the current VP of Marketing or VP of Sales or CFO big enough to do this job in 18-24 months when we go international or need to build an indirect sales channel or do the roadshow for our IPO?" While you…

When I introduced our venture firm on this blog in July, I wrote extensively about the types of entrepreneurs and companies we want to fund: technical founders, brilliant and motivated entrepreneurs, product-focused companies, and so on. I got widespread head nods on most of the criteria. But many people were skeptical about the "founder-as-CEO...

My good friend Steve Blank does a great job of describing the metamorphosis a scalable startup needs to undergo to become a big company. During that metamorphosis, many startups hire executives from big companies to help scale the business. Some go on to do a good job.  But I've seen more than a few of those…

My partner Ben and I have been active angel investors for years and now full-time venture capitalists for 9 months. But prior to that (and for most our lives), we've been entrepreneurs. Now that we've sat on both sides of the table?and have spent more time with other venture capitalists?my partner Ben has a few…

For those of you who have been keeping up with this blog, you?ll know that my partner Ben Horowitz has been very actively blogging?and folks are paying attention. His post on All Things Digital called The Case for the Fat Startup struck a nerve in the startup community, prompting my good friend Fred Wilson to write a counter-post&...

[This post is by Ben Horowitz.] 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...

These days, nearly all the entrepreneurs who come pitch at our venture firm Andreessen Horowitz highlight how little money they are raising and how "lean" they are planning to run the company. While we don't want to invest a single...

Hot off the virtual press: my partner Ben has posted a great essay on leadership over at TechCrunch. The post should be of particular interest to entrepreneurs who are raising money from our venture fund, as Ben articulates the three...

[This blog post is by Ben Horowitz, the Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz.] 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...

My partner Ben Horowitz and I are delighted to announce the formation of our new venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and our first fund -- $300 million in size -- aimed purely at investing in the best new entrepreneurs, products,...