Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and has invested in companies such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Skype, among others. He co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time.
1.Mark Zuckerburg+Sheryl model
2.Bill Campbell+Scott Cook model (Intuit) / Dick Costolo model (twitter)/ Steve Jobs +John Scrulley model (apple)
The founders don’t have the capabilities to be a CEO. They hire a business person to be the CEO and the CEO understands the role of founders, product and tech strategy more. For example, Bill Campbell is not a tech or product person, but is an outstanding operator with profoundly deep respect for founders, tech and product.
a16z builds a disruptive model, providing value-added services, including hiring and marketing.
Many VC firms have tilted hard in the direction of professional sales driven CEO.
a16z partners & GPs almost all have founders/CEO experience and it is necessary to get somebody on the board who really has been through the war, really understands what things are like.
So when things went wrong, key engineer quits, the founders can’t get along, the biggest customer dumps you, competitor comes out with a much better product, can’t raise money……need an advisor in the board can say: I was in that situation before and I can give you some advices on what does work and what doesn’t.
You can have an enormous network of executives, know all the recruiters, reporters and editors, VCs and technical founders often don’t because they have been heads down, writing codes most of their lives. So we can inject him into the network that gives him the superpowers of the network that is comparable to what John Chambers (ex Cisco CEO) might have.
a16z has about 60 full time professionals, across five operating teams in the firm that are not GPs.
For example, when it comes to finding a Sheryl, we have built very deep relationships with all the Sheryls and will have very easy access to them.
Basic math component: about 4000 startups a year found in the tech industry want to raise capital, a16z can invest about 20, the fall off is significant.
The hard thing is deciding which ones we are going to invest in. About 200 deals a year can get funding by top VCs. Among the 200, 15 of those will generate 95%+ of all the economic return.
Even the top VCs will generally lose half of their deals. So even funded by top VC in not complete validation.
The thing all the top VC firms have in common is they did not invest in most of the great successful tech companies, which is incredibly frustrating.
The decision ultimately is around people, as like 90% of the decision.
The two things we really zero in people are courage and genius. Courage is the one people can learn, namely not giving up in the face of adversity, being absolutely determined to succeed. You can force yourself to do it. The genius part is hard to force yourself to do.
Courage without genius might not get you where you need to go, but genius without courage almost certainly won’t.
We are looking for some kind of magic combination of genius and courage. We are strongly biased towards people who are so determined to succeed that they just never give up.
1.Top-down thinking approach: Sequoia, Accel, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins
Very explicit about how they think about products and markets. Run an annual planning process at the beginning of the year and draw a value chain map of what they think markets are gonna like.
For example: Networking: fiber, optics, communication chips——routers——ISPs——wireless business
List boxes for each of the product categories. VCs can invest in one company per category and the goal for the year is to put a name in each box. At the end of the year, if they had invested in the best possible company in each box they identified.
2.Benchmark approach, Arthur Rock approach: a16z
thought the entire art of VC is the big breakthrough ideas, and the nature of ideas is unpredictable. The really breakthrough ideas often seem hard to be understood at the first time and the fact they seem nuts can be a very positive signal because：
1.explains why the thing is not being done by existing big companies, it’s too strange,
2.if it works, the bit flips at some point, then you know those are companies that can just explode and are gigantically huge.
Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber all seem nuts. We want to kinda tilt into the really radical ideas but it can’t be predicted so you just learn as much as you can, enter as close to a zen like blank slate as the beginning.
We are trying really hard to let ourselves be educated by the really smart entrepreneurs.
The worst pitch meeting: snapchat for dogs, airbnb for parents, infinite variations of all the successful ones (copycats)
The best: really bright founder who has done a tremendous amount of work and completely understands the domain, and walks in with a really crazy idea and in the course of an hour can basically walk you through “the idea of maze”.
The entrepreneurs who really have the radical ideas are generally not only uncoachable and generally react with hostility to being coached.
We will do a test:
Q：“Hey, how about doing this in another approach?”
A1: staring at you like you idiot, moron and explain in detail why you are wrong √
A2: “Oh, that’s a great idea!“ ×