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…
More »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…
More »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…
More »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…
More »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…
More »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 accentuating…
More »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…
More »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…
More »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" filter.…
More »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…
More »[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 up with Ted Wang who has been working on an open source legal project…
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