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.…
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" filter.…
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 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 called…