Marc Andreessen: da Mosaic a un VC da 300 M$
Marc Andreessen, lo studente dell'NCSA che nel 1993 scrisse Mosaic, il browser che scatenò la diffusione del World Wide Web (che a 4 anni dalla proposta di Tim Berners-Lee sonnecchiava ancora), ha appena annunciato la creazione di un fondo di venture capital per l'ICT del valore di 300 M$ (corrispondente, per dare un'idea, a circa 50 volte il fondo Working Capital lanciato qualche mese fa da Franco Bernabè).
Nel suo blog Marc spiega l'iniziativa e qui riprendo i punti a mio parere più interessanti:
My partner Ben Horowitz and I are delighted to announce the formation of our new venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and our first fund -- $300 million in size -- aimed purely at investing in the best new entrepreneurs, products, and companies in the technology industry
Technology and its advancement is absolutely central to human progress
While
broad investor psychology whips wildly between euphoria and depression,
technology change not only continues but is accelerating
many
of the best new technology companies require far less money up front to
build the first product, but far more money later to scale into today's
enormous global market
While
there are many exciting new entrepreneurial opportunities in fields
like energy and transportation, there continues to be gigantic
opportunity in information technology -- which is where we will focus
while
there are many extremely bright and capable entrepreneurs all over the
world, there continues to be a special magic to Silicon Valley -- which
is where we will focus
We have the ability to invest between $50 thousand and $50 million in a company, depending on the stage and the opportunity
we don't even think today's raw startups should have boards
Above
all else, we are looking for the brilliant and motivated entrepreneur
or entrepreneurial team with a clear vision of what they want to build
and how they will create or attack a big market
We
are hugely in favor of the technical founder. We will generally focus
on companies started by strong technologists who know exactly what they
want to build and how they are going to build it.
We
are hugely in favor of the founder who intends to be CEO. Not all
founders can become great CEOs, but most of the great companies in our
industry were run by a founder for a long period of time
We
believe that the product is the heart of any technology company. The
company gets built around the product. Therefore, we believe it is
critical that we as investors understand the product
Here
are some of the areas we consider within our investment domain today:
consumer Internet, business Internet (cloud computing, "software as a
service"), mobile software and services, software-powered consumer
electronics, infrastructure and applications software, networking,
storage, databases, and other back-end systems
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