4 min read · 07 July 2011
4 min read · 07 July 2011
1 min read · 01 July 2011
When entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz burst onto the venture scene two short years ago, they planned to be a different kind of venture firm, one that would have a very small number of GPs, and pour the “majority” of its capital into seed-stage companies along with “two to three late-stage deals, or something like that,” Andreessen told me at the time. Even the best laid plans change. Andresseen Horowitz suddenly has four five GPs, a venture partner, and a very special, special advisor: former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Meanwhile, it has sunk enormous chunks of its capital into Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Kno, Aliph, Skype, RockMelt, Zynga, Fusion-io. It’s no big deal, except that Andreessen Horowitz is beginning to less like a pioneer and more like Kleiner Perkins with its own numerous GPs, part-time partners, and love of late-stage deals. Certainly, there are worse firms to emulate. And Andreessen no doubt learned much at the knee of John Doerr, who long sat on the board of Netscape. (In 1994, KP scored 25 percent of the company for $4 million, profiting handsomely when it went public the following year.) Still, the growing similarities are striking, even a little comical -- or so we think in our current, overtired state. (No one has ever accused us of having the world’s greatest sense of humor.) Herewith, a slideshow to make our case:
5 min read · 30 June 2011
4 min read · 30 June 2011
4 min read · 29 June 2011
2 min read · 28 June 2011
2 min read · 24 June 2011
6 min read · 23 June 2011
In the wake of numerous high-profile attacks by the notorious hacker groups LulzSec and Anonymous, Britain's top policeman yesterday called the “challenges created by cybercrime extraordinarily significant and deeply worrying." Steve Blank thinks that’s putting it mildly. “LulzSec and Anonymous are little more than disorganized gangs that can shoot straight, but they’ve exposed how weak our systems are,” says Blank, a renowned entrepreneur who now lectures on entrepreneurship at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Columbia University. “Imagine that instead of using a ballistic missile or expensive planes, you have 1,000 people who are financed by a nation and whose only job, 24/7, is to take out another country’s infrastructure” through hacking.
3 min read · 23 June 2011
