Showing posts with label Marc Andreessen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marc Andreessen. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

Marc Andreessen



The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 2: When the VCs say "no"
Part 3 “But I don’t know any VCs!”
Part 4 The only thing that matters
Part 5 The Moby Dick theory of big companies



рдкрд╣िрдЪाрдирдХो рд╕рдкрдиा рджेрдЦाрдПрдХो рдоाрдУрд╡ाрджीрд▓े рдиै рд▓рдд्рддो рдЫाрдбेрдкрдЫि рдк्рд░рджेрд╢ рез рдХो рдиाрдо 'рдХोрд╢ी' рд░ाрдЦ्рдиे рдк्рд░рд╕्рддाрд╡рдоाрдеि рдмुрдзрдмाрд░ рд╕ंрд╕рджрдоा рдЫрд▓рдлрд▓ рдЪрд▓िрд░рд╣ँрджा рдЬрдирддा рд╕рдоाрдЬрд╡ाрджी рдкाрд░्рдЯी (рдЬрд╕рдкा) рдХी рдиेрддा рдиिрд░्рдорд▓ा рд▓िрдо्рдмूрдХा рдЖँрдЦाрдмाрдЯ рдЖँрд╕ुрдХो рдХोрд╢ी рдмрдЧ्рджै рдеिрдпो। ...... рдк्рд░рджेрд╢ рез рдпрд╕्рддो рдерд▓ो рд╣ो, рдЬрд╣ाँ рдкрд╣िрдЪाрдирдХा рд▓ाрдЧि рд▓ाрдоो рдЖрди्рджोрд▓рди рдЪрд▓ेрдХो рдеिрдпो। рдХुрдиै рдмेрд▓ा рдаूрд▓ो рдЖрдХाрд░рдХो рдЙрдХ्рдд рдЖрди्рджोрд▓рди рдЕрд╣िрд▓े рдЦुрдо्рдЪिँрджै рдЧрдПрдХो рдЫ। рддрд░ рдкрд╣िрдЪाрдирд╕рд╣िрддрдХो рд╕ंрдШीрдпрддाрдХा рд▓ाрдЧि рдЕрд╣िрд▓े рдкрдиि рдПрдЙрдЯा рддрдк्рдХा рдиिрд░рди्рддрд░ рд╕ंрдШрд░्рд╖рд░рдд рдЫ। ....... реирежремреи–ремрей рдХो рдЬрдирдЖрди्рджोрд▓рдирд▓рдЧрдд्рддै рдЙрдаेрдХो рдордзेрд╕ рд╡िрдж्рд░ोрд╣рд▓े рдоुрд▓ुрдХрдоा рд╕ंрдШीрдпрддाрд▓ाрдИ рдЕрд╡рд╢्рдпрдо्рднाрд╡ी рддुрд▓्рдпाрдПрдХो рдеिрдпो। рдд्рдпрд╕ рдХ्рд░рдордоा рдзेрд░ैрдХो рдЬ्рдпाрди рдЧрдПрдХो рдеिрдпो। рдд्рдпрд╕рдЕрдШि рдоाрдУрд╡ाрджी рд╕рд╢рд╕्рдд्рд░ рд╡िрдж्рд░ोрд╣рд▓े рдкрд╣िрдЪाрдирдоा рдЖрдзाрд░िрдд рдк्рд░рджेрд╢рд╣рд░ूрдХो рд╕рдкрдиा рджेрд╢рд╡्рдпाрдкी рдмрдиाрдЗрд╕рдХेрдХो рдеिрдпो। рдд्рдпो рд╕рдкрдиाрдоा рдк्рд░ाрдг рднрд░्рдиे рдХाрдо рдордзेрд╕, рдеाрд░ू рд░ рдкूрд░्рд╡рдХो рд▓िрдо्рдмूрд╡ाрди рдЖрди्рджोрд▓рдирд▓े рдЧрд░ेрдХो рдеिрдпो। ........ рдПрдоाрд▓े рд░ рдХांрдЧ्рд░ेрд╕ рдоिрд▓ेрдкрдЫि рдиाрдордХрд░рдг рдЧрд░्рди рджुрдИрддिрд╣ाрдЗ рдордд рдкुрдЧ्рде्рдпो। рдПрдоाрд▓ेрдХो рекреж рд░ рдХांрдЧ्рд░ेрд╕рдХो реиреп рдорддрдоा рд░ाрдк्рд░рдкाрдХो рем рдордд рдердкिँрджा рдЖрд░ाрдорджाрдпी рд╕ंрдЦ्рдпा рдкुрдЧ्рде्рдпो। рдпрд╕्рддो рдЕрд╡рд╕्рдеाрдоा рдлрд░рдХ рдк्рд░рд╕्рддाрд╡ рд▓ैрдЬाрди рдоाрдУрд╡ाрджी рддрдпाрд░ рднрдПрди। ........ 'рдиाрдо рдЪाрд╣िँ рдкрд╣िрдЪाрдирд╕рд╣िрддрдХो рдЪाрд╣िрдиे рдЕрдиि рднोрдЯ рдЪाрд╣िँ рдХांрдЧ्рд░ेрд╕ рд░ рдПрдоाрд▓ेрд▓ाрдИ рджिрдиे? рд╣ाрдоीрд▓े рдоाрдд्рд░ै рдХрддि рдоुрдж्рджा рдмोрдХ्рдиे?' ......... 'рдоाрдУрд╡ाрджी рдЕрдм рди рдкрд╣िрдЪाрдирдоा рдЫ, рди рд╡рд░्рдЧрдоा, рди рдХुрдиै рд╡ैрдЪाрд░िрдХीрдоा,' рдЙрдирд▓े рднрдиे, 'рдоाрдУрд╡ाрджी рдХेрд╡рд▓ рдХुрд░्рд╕ी рдЦेрд▓рдоा рдЫ। рдд्рдпрд╕ैрд▓े рдХोрд╢ी рд╣ोрд╕् рд╡ा рд╕рдЧрд░рдоाрдеा, рдЦाрд╕ рдиेрддृрдд्рд╡рдХा рдХेрд╣ी рд╕ाँрдШुрд░ा рд╕्рд╡ाрд░्рде рд╕рдо्рдмोрдзрди рднрдП рдК рд╕рд╣рднाрдЧी рднрдЗрд╣ाрд▓्рдЫ।' ...... рдХेрди्рдж्рд░ीрдп рдЧрдардмрди्рдзрдирдоा рд░ाрд╖्рдЯ्рд░рдкрддि рдЪुрдиाрд╡рд▓े рдЦрдЯрдкрдЯ рд▓्рдпाрдПрдХै рдмेрд▓ा рдоाрдУрд╡ाрджी, рдХांрдЧ्рд░ेрд╕ рд░ рд░ाрдк्рд░рдкाрдХो рд╕рдорд░्рдерди рдЬुрдЯाрдПрд░ рдиाрдо рд░ाрдЦ्рди рд╕рдлрд▓ рднрдПрдХो рдЬрд╕ рдоुрдЦ्рдпрдордирдд्рд░ी рд╣िрдХ्рдордд рдХाрд░्рдХीрд▓े рдкाрдЙрдиे рднрдПрдХा рдЫрди्। ........... рд╕рдд्рддाрд░ूрдв рдиेрдХрдкा рдПрдоाрд▓ेрдХो рдк्рд░рд╕्рддाрд╡рдоा рдоुрдЦ्рдп рд╡िрдкрдХ्рд╖ी рдХांрдЧ्рд░ेрд╕, рд╕рдд्рддाрд░ूрдв рдоाрдУрд╡ाрджी рдХेрди्рдж्рд░ рд░ рд░ाрдк्рд░рдкाрдХा рд╕ांрд╕рджрд╣рд░ूрд▓े рд╕рдорд░्рдерди рдЬрдиाрдЙँрджा рдк्рд░рджेрд╢ рдиाрдордХрд░рдг рджुрдИрддिрд╣ाрдЗрднрди्рджा рдмрдвी рдорддрд▓े рдкाрд░िрдд рднрдПрдХो рд╣ो। рд╕рднाрдоुрдЦ рдмाрдмुрд░ाрдо рдЧौрддрдорд▓े рдк्рд░рджेрд╢рдХो рдиाрдо рдХोрд╢ी рд░ाрдЦिрдиुрдкрд░्рдЫ рднрди्рдиे рдк्рд░рд╕्рддाрд╡рдХा рдкрдХ्рд╖рдоा реореи рдордд рдкрд░ेрдХो рдШोрд╖рдгा рдЧрд░ेрдХा рдЫрди्। рд╡िрдкрдХ्рд╖рдоा рднрдиे рдЬрдо्рдоा рек рдордд рдкрд░ेрдХो рдеिрдпो।

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

News: March 29

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Bitcoin: Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon: 2014/2013

Why Bitcoin Matters BY MARC ANDREESSEN JANUARY 21, 2014 . 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. ....... Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and – I believe – Bitcoin in 2014. ...... First, Bitcoin at its most fundamental level is a breakthrough in computer science – one that builds on 20 years of research into cryptographic currency, and 40 years of research in cryptography, by thousands of researchers around the world. ........... Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate. ........ What kinds of digital property might be transferred in this way? Think about digital signatures, digital contracts, digital keys (to physical locks, or to online lockers), digital ownership of physical assets such as cars and houses, digital stocks and bonds … and digital money. .......

Bitcoin is an Internet-wide distributed ledger.

...... Bitcoin is the first Internetwide payment system where transactions either happen with no fees or very low fees (down to fractions of pennies). Existing payment systems charge fees of about 2 to 3 percent – and that’s in the developed world. In lots of other places, there either are no modern payment systems or the rates are significantly higher. ........... It’s not as much that the Bitcoin currency has some arbitrary value and then people are trading with it; it’s more that people can trade with Bitcoin (anywhere, everywhere, with no fraud and no or very low fees) and as a result it has value. ........ Critics of Bitcoin point to limited usage by ordinary consumers and merchants, but that same criticism was leveled against PCs and the Internet at the same stage. ........ “Let’s say you sell electronics online. Profit margins in those businesses are usually under 5 percent, which means conventional 2.5 percent payment fees consume half the margin. That’s money that could be reinvested in the business, passed back to consumers or taxed by the government. Of all of those choices, handing 2.5 percent to banks to move bits around the Internet is the worst possible choice. Another challenge merchants have with payments is accepting international payments. If you are wondering why your favorite product or service isn’t available in your country, the answer is often payments.” ............. the claim made by some critics that Bitcoin is a haven for bad behavior, for criminals and terrorists to transfer money anonymously with impunity. This is a myth, fostered mostly by sensationalistic press coverage and an incomplete understanding of the technology. Much like email, which is quite traceable, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Further, every transaction in the Bitcoin network is tracked and logged forever in the Bitcoin blockchain, or permanent record, available for all to see. As a result, Bitcoin is considerably easier for law enforcement to trace than cash, gold or diamonds. .......... Bitcoin is a four-sided network effect. There are four constituencies that participate in expanding the value of Bitcoin as a consequence of their own self-interested participation. Those constituencies are (1) consumers who pay with Bitcoin, (2) merchants who accept Bitcoin, (3) “miners” who run the computers that process and validate all the transactions and enable the distributed trust network to exist, and (4) developers and entrepreneurs who are building new products and services with and on top of Bitcoin. ........... One immediately obvious and enormous area for Bitcoin-based innovation is international remittance. Every day, hundreds of millions of low-income people go to work in hard jobs in foreign countries to make money to send back to their families in their home countries – over $400 billion in total annually ............. banks and payment companies extract mind-boggling fees, up to 10 percent and sometimes even higher, to send this money. ........

it is hard to think of any one thing that would have a faster and more positive effect on so many people in the world’s poorest countries.

......... Bitcoin generally can be a powerful force to bring a much larger number of people around the world into the modern economic system. Only about 20 countries around the world have what we would consider to be fully modern banking and payment systems; the other roughly 175 have a long way to go. ........ Bitcoin, as a global payment system anyone can use from anywhere at any time, can be a powerful catalyst to extend the benefits of the modern economic system to virtually everyone on the planet. ........ A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. ........ Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. ......... So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free. ......... Future email systems and social networks could refuse to accept incoming messages unless they were accompanied with tiny amounts of Bitcoin – tiny enough to not matter to the sender, but large enough to deter spammers .......... Bitcoin is a financial technology dream come true for even the most hardened anticapitalist political organizer. ......... in 1999, the legendary economist Milton Friedman said: “One thing that’s missing but will soon be developed is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A – the way I can take a $20 bill and hand it over to you, and you may get that without knowing who I am.” ........ almost no country’s regulatory framework for banking and payments anticipated a technology like Bitcoin......... Far from a mere libertarian fairy tale or a simple Silicon Valley exercise in hype, Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era, and a catalyst to reshape that system in ways that are more powerful for individuals and businesses alike.
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Why I’m interested in Bitcoin . Some people assume that all Bitcoin advocates are motivated by a libertarian political agenda. That is certainly not my agenda. I’m a lifelong Democrat who supported Obama in the last two elections. I think the Federal Reserve plays an important function .......... it is also true that almost every significant computing movement had early proponents who were ideologically motivated ....... The developers of the first personal computers were closely aligned with the 60s counterculture movement. Open source software was originally created by people who believed that all software should be available for free. Early advocates of blogging and collaborative systems like Wikipedia were trying to democratize the production and dissemination of information. This isn’t coincidental: broad-based technology movements have depended on non-economic participants early on since it often took years for commercial participants to get involved. ........... the 2008 financial crisis. I thought the government did what it had to do at the peak of the crisis but missed an important opportunity afterwards to reform the financial system. ....... there were two ways to improve the system: from above through regulation (which I support), or from below through competition. ........ I started getting interested in Bitcoin about two years ago. Like a lot of people I initially dismissed Bitcoin as a speculative bubble (“Internet tulip bulbs”) or a place to stash money for people worried about inflation (“Internet gold”). At some point, I had an “aha!” moment and realized that Bitcoin was best understood as a new software protocol through which you could rebuild the payments industry in ways that are better and cheaper. ........

banks and payment companies charge $500B per year in fees to provide a service that mostly involves moving bits around the Internet

............. Let’s say you sell electronics online. Profit margins in those businesses are usually under 5%, which means the 2.5% payment fees consume half the margin. That’s money that could be reinvested in the business, passed back to consumers, or taxed by the government. Of all of those choices, handing 2.5% to banks to move bits around the Internet is the worst possible choice. ......... the most exciting aspect of Bitcoin (and this is admittedly more speculative) are all the interesting new business and technology models that “programmable money” could enable. .......... I think Bitcoin could enable a micropayment system for the open web, and thereby provide a business model beyond banner ads for many important services such as journalism. .......... Bitcoin is a serious proposal for dramatically improving the payments industry. There are plenty of open questions but I think it’s an experiment worth running.
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Coinbase The press tends to portray Bitcoin as either a speculative bubble or a scheme for supporting criminal activity. In Silicon Valley, by contrast, Bitcoin is generally viewed as a profound technological breakthrough......... The designers of the Web built placeholders for a system that moved money, but never successfully completed it. Bitcoin is the first plausible proposal for an economic protocol for the Internet........ But to proliferate widely, Bitcoin needs a killer app the same way HTTP had web browsers and SMTP had email clients. That’s why today I’m excited to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $25M financing of Coinbase, a service that provides an accessible interface to the Bitcoin protocol. ....... Consumers can use Coinbase to convert to and from other currencies and to pay for goods and services. Merchants can use Coinbase to accept payments and convert currencies. Developers can build new services using Coinbase’s API....... Coinbase has grown extremely fast and is now the most widely used Bitcoin service in the US.

The New California Dream Is in Portugal . a nation that now boasts an 89 percent vaccination rate, the world’s highest. Once derided as Europe’s budget-vacation destination, Portugal is now Europe’s top tourist spot several years running. ....... On so many levels, the country can seem like California’s European twin, albeit without the apocalyptic wildfires and lingering droughts. Lisbon especially teases Californians with echoes: as in San Francisco, there’s a stunning red-painted suspension bridge, this one straddling the Tagus River instead the Golden Gate (built by the same engineer who built the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge), seven steep hills, and iconic, many-hued cable cars. World-class surfing can be had 30 minutes away in Ericeira, and Nazar├й. ......... “It feels like San Francisco–it even has a Golden Gate Bridge, and then that coastline from Lisbon to Cascais – the surf’s incredible.” ....... Many Californians’ new freedom to work from anywhere only elevates Portugal’s allure. The pandemic laid bare fissures in the state that have been building for years: out-of-control housing prices, an intractable homeless crisis, rising crime rates. We’ve witnessed a massive exodus the past year for the supposedly greener pastures of Austin and Miami. Or maybe not. Postal data proved this “phenomenon” was grossly exaggerated; most Bay Area evacuees moved ten miles to Alameda County, up to Sacramento or south to San Diego. ...... The Portuguese prize California’s billions in venture capital, deep entrepreneurial networks, expertise in sales, marketing and scaling startups. In return they offer driven, gifted employees who are fluent in English (the country ranks 7th in the world in speaking English as a second language), and friendly to boot. ......... Family comes first in Portugal, and the country offers a work-life balance that younger Americans especially demand ......... “The challenging part of SF was the lack of infrastructure for families,” he recalls.

“The competitive nature of daycare and the costs…it’s like putting your kid through Harvard.”

Portugal promised a balance of “just a beautiful country to raise our children.” ......... She quickly made friends and business contacts; blasting out 250 LinkedIn emails to Portuguese CEOs in the hope that one of them might talk with “a skinny tattooed girl,” she was stunned when “twenty-five of them had coffee with me.” Fiorentini is now head of personnel at the Lisbon office of Kencko, a healthcare startup. ........ “They often joke that once upon a time Portugal and California were one, and they split” ..... “The climate is the same, the plants are the same, it’s pretty wild.”
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Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Marc Andreessen's For Profit Idea





Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Marc Andreessen Excited About Payday Loans



Liberty Street Economics
Except for the ten to twelve million people who use them every year, just about everybody hates payday loans. .... their “unconscionable” and “spiraling” fees and their “targeting” of minorities ..... the typical brick-and-mortar payday lender charges $15 per $100 borrowed per two weeks, implying an annual interest rate of 391 percent! ...... payday lending is very competitive ......

payday lenders outnumber Starbucks

as if they—payday lenders, not Starbucks—were a plague upon the land ..... each additional payday firm per 1,000 residents in a given Zip code was associated with a $4 decline in fees (compared with a mean finance charge of about $55). ...... fixed operating costs and

loan loss rates do justify a large part of the high APRs charged

.” ...... a 36 percent cap eliminates payday loans altogether. ..... payday lenders tend to locate in lower income, minority communities .....

contrary to tenets of classical economists, not all people always act in their own best interest

; they can make systematic mistakes (“cognitive errors”) that lower their own welfare. If chronic rollovers reflect behavioral problems, capping rollovers would benefit borrowers prone to such problems.


Saturday, May 23, 2015

The Laundry List From The Future



  1. A $1,000 Brain
  2. A Trillion Sensor Economy ("the Internet Of Things will create $19 trillion of newly created value")
  3. Perfect Knowledge
  4. 8 Billion Hyper Connected People ("We will grow from three to eight billion connected humans, adding five billion new consumers into the global economy. They represent tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy.")
  5. Disruption of Health Care ("$3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system.....Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.")
  6. Augmented and Virtual Reality ("a new generation of displays and user interfaces....a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.")
  7. Early Days Of JARVIS ("next-generation AI systems. In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense.")
  8. Blockchain 

Monday, May 18, 2015

The A16Z (AHo) Numbers

English: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and...
English: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, during his European Tour. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Each year, three thousand startups approach a16z with a “warm intro” from someone the firm knows. A16z invests in fifteen. Of those, at least ten will fold, three or four will prosper, and one might soar to be worth more than a billion dollars—a “unicorn,” in the local parlance.

With great luck, once a decade that unicorn will become a Google or a Facebook and return the V.C.’s money a thousand times over: the storied 1,000x. There are eight hundred and three V.C. firms in the U.S., and last year they spent forty-eight billion dollars chasing that dream........ Venture capitalists with a knack for the 1,000x know that true innovations don’t follow a pattern. The future is always stranger than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. .... “The biggest outcomes come when you break your previous mental model. ...... en Horowitz, who sits next to his co-founder at the head of the table, is an astute manager who quotes the rap lyrics of his friends Nas and Kanye West to inspire fearless thinking—but he doesn’t try to manage Andreessen. ..... A16z was designed to be a full-throated argument about the future, a design predicated on its founders’ comfort with conflict. In 1996, when Horowitz was a Netscape product manager, he wrote a note to Andreessen, accusing him of prematurely revealing the company’s new strategy to a reporter. Andreessen wrote back to say that it would be Horowitz’s fault if the company failed: “Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you.” Ordinarily, relationship over. “When he feels disrespected, Marc can cut you out of his life like a cancer,” one of Andreessen’s close friends said. “But Ben and Marc fight like cats and dogs, then forget about it.” ....... He also tweets a hundred and ten times a day, inundating his three hundred and ten thousand followers with aphorisms and statistics and tweetstorm jeremiads. Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because “reporters are obsessed with it. It’s like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world.” ...... “We have this theory of nerd nation, of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country. ...... Silicon Valley, the fifteen-hundred- square-mile shelf an hour south of San Francisco, was called the Santa Clara Valley until the rise of the microprocessor, in the nineteen-seventies. It remains contested ground. Armies of startups attack every incumbent, with early employees—and sometimes even their lawyers and landlords—taking deferred compensation, in the hope that their options and warrants will pay off down the line. Yet workers’ loyalty is not to a company or even to an idea but to the iterative promise of the region. “Uber is built on the efforts of thousands of people in the Valley,” the investor Naval Ravikant said. “On the back of the iPhone and Android and G.P.S. and battery technology and online credit-card payments, all stacked on themselves.”......... Apple and Microsoft got started with venture money; so did Starbucks, the Home Depot, Whole Foods Market, and JetBlue. V.C.s made their key introductions and stole from every page of Sun Tzu to help them penetrate markets. And yet V.C.s maintain a zone of embarrassed privacy around their activities. They tell strangers they’re investors, or work in technology, because, in a Valley that valorizes the entrepreneur, they don’t want to be seen as just the money. “I say I’m in the software industry,” one of the Valley’s best-known V.C.s told me. “I’m ashamed of the truth.” .......... they often follow one another, lemming-like, pursuing the latest innovation—pen-based computers, biotech, interactive television, superconductors, clean tech—off a cliff. ........ landing Sequoia, Peter Thiel, and a16z as seed investors “was a signal that was not lost on the banks we wanted to work with.” ....... The standard fee is “two and twenty”: two per cent of the fund each year, and twenty per cent of the ultimate profits. (The top firms, including a16z, charge thirty per cent.) ......... At the moment, venture funding accounts for less than 0.3 per cent of the U.S.’s G.D.P. “Venture is often called a rounding error in the economy” ....... the United States is as fossilized as Microsoft, and that the Valley has become stronger than Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., combined, Srinivasan believes that its denizens should “build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology.” ......... prescience. And then it’s removing every obstacle to the ferocious clarity of your vision: incumbents, regulations, folkways, people. Can you not just see the future but summon it? ....... A charismatic introvert, Andreessen draws people in but doesn’t really want them around. ..... has toyed with the idea of wearing a T-shirt that says “No hugging, no touching.” He doesn’t grasp the protocols of social chitchat, and prefers getting a memo to which he can e-mail a response, typing at a hundred and forty words a minute. He didn’t attend Netscape’s twentieth-anniversary celebration, because it combined two things from which he recoils: parties and reminiscing. ....... energetic and decisive, which makes him a valued counsellor. In 2006, Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars, and Accel Partners, Facebook’s lead investor, urged Mark Zuckerberg to accept. Andreessen said, “Every single person involved in Facebook wanted Mark to take the Yahoo! offer. The psychological pressure they put on this twenty-two-year-old was intense. Mark and I really bonded in that period, because I told him, ‘Don’t sell, don’t sell, don’t sell!’ ” Zuckerberg told me, “Marc has this really deep belief that when companies are executing well on their vision they can have a much bigger effect on the world than people think, not just as a business but as a steward of humanity—if they have the time to execute.” He didn’t sell; Facebook is now worth two hundred and eighteen billion dollars. ......... Andreessen’s range of reference extends from Ibn Khaldun to “South Park,” yet he approaches new topics as if starved, eating through men’s fashion or whiskey-making or congressional politics until it has yielded every micronutrient. ....... He turns to theory the way a drinker turns to the minibar. ....... Horowitz also routinely forces a founder to abandon her script and regroup. It’s a stress test intended to elicit biography, resilience, and the real story...... the “idea maze”: you want the entrepreneur to have spent years thinking her idea into—and out of—every conceivable dead end ...... “we’re not funding Mother Teresa. We’re funding imperial, will-to-power people who want to crush their competition. ......... sixty-five specialists in executive talent, tech talent, market development, corporate development, and marketing. A16z maintains a network of twenty thousand contacts and brings two thousand established companies a year to its executive briefing center to meet its startups (which has produced a pipeline of deals worth three billion dollars). Andreessen told me, “We give our founders the networking superpower, hyper-accelerating someone into a fully functional C.E.O. in five years.” ...... They’ve moved into next-gen agricultural products and wearables and drone software ...... fifteen technology companies a year reach a hundred million dollars in annual revenue—and they account for ninety-eight per cent of the market capitalization of companies that go public. ....... “Deal flow is everything” ...... “I put ninety per cent of my effort into seeking out deals from the top eight venture firms, ten per cent into the next twelve, and zero per cent into all the rest.” ........ the bottom three-quarters of venture firms didn’t beat the Nasdaq for the past five years ...... “Since 1997, less cash has been returned to V.C. investors than they have invested.” ........ most V.C.s subsist entirely on fees, which they compound by raising a new fund every three years ....... V.C.s also logo shop, buying into late rounds of hot companies at high prices so they can list them on their portfolio page. ..... The tech publicist Margit Wennmachers built an eight-person marketing department and helped to orchestrate stories in Forbes and Fortune. ........ “In twenty-four months, Andreessen Horowitz was the talk of the town.” ...... house in Atherton, five minutes from a16z’s office ..... The toilet in the powder room is so visionary, and the surrounding dimmer lights so flattering, that I had to study it for some time to figure out how it flushed. ....... be aggressive and to fight your instinct to pattern-match. “Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts” ..... I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change.” ....... “O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders?” .......... A16z passed on Airbnb’s A round in 2009. ..... Between 2004 and 2013, a mere 0.4 per cent of all venture investments returned at least 50x. The real mistakes aren’t the errors of commission, the companies that crash—all you can lose is your investment—but those of omission. There were good reasons that a16z passed on buying twelve per cent of Uber in 2011, including a deadline of just hours to make a decision. But the firm missed a profit, on paper, of more than three billion dollars. ................ Peter Thiel, who is four years older than Andreessen, observed that “the late nineties, for Gen Xers in Silicon Valley, was an experience as powerful as the late sixties was for the younger boomers. ....... “I always thought the entire venture thing was incredibly cool,” he told me. “Going to Kleiner Perkins”—the firm that funded Netscape—“with the high ceilings, the markers on the wall of all the great companies they’d I.P.O.’d, Larry Ellison walking through, and, at 11 A.M., the biggest buffet you’ve ever seen, at a time when I was eating at Subway? It was the closest thing to a cathedral for nerds.” Mark Zuckerberg told me, “When Marc started Andreessen Horowitz, I asked him why he didn’t start another company instead, and he said, ‘It would be like going back to kindergarten.’ ” .......... “Every firm we talk to now is ‘Hey, we’re doing all this recruiting, and we’ll introduce you to big customers.’ It’s become the table stakes.” ....... Andreessen is attempting to assuage the wound of the 2000 crash, by maintaining that it was an isolated event. “The argument in favor of concern is cyclical,” he told me—busts follow booms. “The counterargument is that stuff works now. In 2000, you had fifty million people on the Internet, and the number of smartphones was zero. Today, you have three billion Internet users and two billion smartphones. It’s Pong versus Nintendo. .......... “While Twitter is a lesser innovation than flying cars, it’s a much more valuable business. ........ Webvan was what he called a “ghost story”—a cautionary tale that still frightened investors. But Instacart proved that even haunted houses could be rehabilitated. ....... “This is an ‘I missed Uber, I don’t want to miss the next one’ climate.” ....... “Ordinary people love the iPhone, Facebook, Google Search, Airbnb, and Lyft. It’s only the intellectuals who worry.” ........ “Would the world be a better place if there were fifty Silicon Valleys?” he said. “Obviously, yes. ....... Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism ....... Software is already squeezing out other intermediaries—travel agents, financial advisers—and, at the end of the day, V.C.s are intermediaries. We’re all just selling cash.” ...... “What if we’re the most evolved dinosaur, and Naval is a bird?” ...... Already, more than half the tech companies that reached a billion-dollar valuation in the past decade were based outside Silicon Valley. ...... “Odds are, nothing your V.C. does, no matter how helpful or well-intentioned, is going to tip the balance between success and failure.” ........... “Over twenty years,” he continued, “our returns are going to come down to two or three or four investments ......... —you just don’t know which Tuesday Mark Zuckerberg is going to walk in.” ........ “Even if we could do perfect analysis, we just can’t know the future,” he said. “What if Google Ventures had access to all Google searches—could you predict hit products? Or perfect access to all of people’s conversations or purchases? You still wouldn’t know what’s going to happen. ....... If we could revise the industry completely, we’d just dump all the business plans and focus on people—the twenty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.” ......... “We’re imperfect people pursuing perfect ideas, and there’s tremendous frustration in the gap,” he said. “Writing code, one or two people, that’s the Platonic ideal. But when you want to impact the world you need one hundred people, then one thousand, then ten thousand—and people have all these people issues.” He examined the problem in silence. “A world of just computers wouldn’t work,” he concluded wistfully. “But a world of just people could certainly be improved.”

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Thiel



Seven Takeaways from Marc Andreessen's Interview With Peter Thiel
The eBay acquisition of PayPal was famously drawn-out and, in fact, took five separate negotiations to finally complete. .... "In June 2002, there was this eBay convention in Anaheim. We managed to get a booth there even though they weren’t that friendly to us at the time, so we sent 30 people down to the convention. And we handed out all these PayPal T-shirts. They saw all their power sellers wearing PayPal T-shirts, and at that point, they decided to buy the company.” ......... how Musk crashed his uninsured million-dollar sportscar with Thiel in the passenger seat on the way to a venture capital meeting
http://a16z.com/2014/10/17/a16z-podcast-the-definite-optimism-of-peter-thiel/

Thiel is a big picture person. He has a stellar track record. And he paints in broad strokes.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Micheal Jordan Playing Baseball

English: Chicago Bulls. Michael Jordan 1997
English: Chicago Bulls. Michael Jordan 1997 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Taking a Risk, and Hoping That Lightning Strikes Twice
Sean Parker .... “Every good entrepreneur I know ends up in the wasteland of being a venture capitalist. It’s really frustrating” ..... “How can you as an entrepreneur that’s had success, has a reputation, ever build the courage to go and do something again?” he asked, almost rhetorically. “Most entrepreneurs don’t remain entrepreneurs. It’s just too psychologically draining to have to constantly start over.” ..... the career trajectory of many tremendously successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley often looks like a rocket ship that stops in midair ...... “The list of people who have started from scratch over and over and succeeded systematically over a long period of time is incredibly short,” he said. “The only person I can think of off the cuff is Jobs who had Apple, Next, Pixar, continued doing Pixar and Next and then Apple again, which is really a different company.” ..... Peter Thiel ... Marc Andreessen ... surprisingly, Mr. Andreessen said of Mr. Parker’s theory: “I sort of agree with him.” ..... “You don’t want to be Michael Jordan playing baseball.” ..... Andreessen ... an entrepreneurial effort to “rethink the model of venture capital.” .... to Mr. Parker, most entrepreneurs who seek out investments do so as “a total cop-out.” He explained his thinking: “You have a whole portfolio, you only focus on your successes, you ignore your failures and you get to continue looking like a player, but you’re ultimately not in control of anything.” ..... “Everything is probabilistic, nothing is deterministic, so you never have that satisfaction of knowing that you’re in control of an outcome. So you spend all of your time managing your reputation, managing your relationships and you spend almost no time thinking creatively or doing the things that an entrepreneur is good at doing.” ..... Being worried about failure and its effect on one’s reputation, he said, is “very dangerous.”
I so desperately want AirTime to work for me. It keeps crashing. I could not even get it to work on Chrome. It worked on FireFox, but it still keeps crashing. Sean, this was not supposed to be baseball!


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