When I was a kid, I read tons of superhero comic books. I fantasized about superpowers, but the storylines about heroes with massive Achilles’ heels really held my attention the most. They saved the world but had screwed up personal lives, made lots of mistakes, and often acted like complete assholes. In retrospect, l related…
Visit Site »I recently had the privilege of attending F.ounders, a unique event for a select group of tech founders and others from Europe, the US and Asia, held in my hometown of Dublin, Ireland. In the best Irish tradition of limericks, this is a tribute to the event and its own remarkable founder, Paddy Cosgrave. (For…
Visit Site »A year ago I wrote about a very special entrepreneur, Christian Gheorghe, who escaped Communist Romania, migrated to America, and—after starting here with $27 as a limo driver and construction worker—eventually became a computer scientist and an entrepreneur. I indicated that just as he broke from an oppressive, totalitarian regime, he planned to free his customers from…
Visit Site »Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: “how could I have possibly prepared for this? How could I know that half our customers would go out of business? How could I know that it would become impossible to raise money in the private markets? How could I…
Visit Site »Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization—Human Resources—should look like. The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want. In theory, they want a well-managed company with a…
Visit Site »Today I’m delighted to announce that legendary Internet industry CEO and executive Jeff Jordan has joined Andreessen Horowitz as our fifth General Partner. I say “legendary” for two reasons. First, Jeff has run three of the iconic businesses of the Internet revolution. Most recently, Jeff has been CEO and remains an active executive chairman of…
Visit Site »Today I’m delighted to announce that economist and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is joining our team as a part-time Special Advisor. A lot of people already know who Larry is, but here are the highlights of a remarkable career to date: Admitted to MIT at age 16, originally to study physics—clearly our kind of nerd. Became tenured…
Visit Site »Before my partner Marc Andreessen and his friends at the University of Illinois invented the browser in 1993, most people thought only scientists and researchers would use the Internet. The Internet was thought to be too arcane, insecure and slow to meet real business needs. Even after the team introduced Mosaic, the world’s first browser,…
Visit Site »Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population. In mainstream thinking, the absolute success of the company determines the CEO’s…
Visit Site »Recently, Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google and founder Larry Page took over. Much of the news coverage focused on Page’s ability to be the “face of Google” as Page is far more shy and introverted than the gregarious and articulate Schmidt. While an interesting issue, this analysis misses the main point. Eric…
Visit Site »In my career, I have never seen a position in any industry with more varying criteria than General Partner at a venture capital firm. Some firms hire pure investors, some firms hire operators, some Wall Street analysts, some firms hire sales people, some firms hire lawyers, and others hire reporters. Interestingly, many different models have…
Gaurav Dhillon was one of the great enterprise entrepreneurs of the ‘90s and early 2000s. He founded and ran the premier integration company of the era, Informatica, took it public and built it into the number one company in the market. Informatica is currently worth over $4B. Ordinarily, we would automatically disqualify an entrepreneur with…
A few months ago, Aneel Bhusri offered to introduce me to one his favorite entrepreneurs. Since Aneel is, for my money, the best enterprise venture capitalist in the world, I immediately agreed and Aneel did not disappoint. He introduced…
As former founder and CEO of Loudcloud, one of the original cloud computing companies, I am considered somewhat of a domain expert in all things “cloud.” Combine that with cloud being one of the hottest areas of new development and the…