Andreessen Horowitz

Crypto Fund II

We’re excited to announce a new $515 million fund that will be used to invest in crypto entrepreneurs, networks and businesses.

Biology Is Eating the World

We are at the beginning of a new era, where biology has shifted from an empirical science to an engineering discipline. After a millennia of using man-made approaches for controlling or manipulating biology, we have finally begun using nature’s own machinery—through biological engineering—to design, scale, and…

If SaaS Products Sell Themselves, Why Do We Need Sales?

BY MARK CRANNEY One of the myths of SaaS is that the products are so good, so easy to use, so quick to deploy … that the product sells itself. Given the popularity of try-before-you-buy and freemium-to-premium models for software as a service, it’s easy to see where that myth comes from. But as many...

Blockspring: Do anything in a spreadsheet

“Learn to code,” they say. But most working professionals don’t have the time to do that. They know that software is becoming more central to their business, and they’d love to learn how to code, but they can’t spare months or years to self-educate in computer science. They just need an easier on-ramp to their...

“Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading

Conventional wisdom holds that passive trading is the rational investing strategy. Active traders are often portrayed as gambling rubes or lucky opportunists who will (eventually) be handily beaten by index funds. But the steady growth of platforms like eToro and Robinhood, coupled with the acceleration of investing…

When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China

listen to the audio version of this article: This post is all about WeChat, but it’s also about more than just WeChat. While seemingly just a messaging app, WeChat is actually more of a portal, a platform, and even a mobile operating system depending on how you look at it. Much has been written...

The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.

Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

Open source software powers the world’s technology. In the past decade, there has been an inexorable adoption of open source in most aspects of computing. Without open source, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other modern technology company would not exist. Thanks to an amazing community of innovative…

Field Notes: Highlights from Huawei

Editor’s note: Since we closely follow China and the global nature of tech in general, among other topics related to innovation, here are highlights from a two-hour interview that Ren Zhengfei, the founder and CEO of Huawei (the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and second largest…

Doing old things better vs. doing brand new things

The most common mistake people make when evaluating new technologies is to focus too much on how they improve existing use cases.

The “$20M to $500M” Question: Adding Top Down Sales

Self driving cars and beyond

The story of technology is not unlike what often happens in dramatic stories and plays, where a “deus ex machina” or character drops down magically from the skies onto our world stage. But in reality, technology never comes so suddenly, or in such an isolated manner: There’s an entire ecosystem that grows up around…

Resources for understanding cryptocurrency and blockchain technology

If you are interested in learning more about cryptocurrencies, crypto networks, and blockchain technology, here's a short collection of some of our pieces.

Lyft

Making Sense of Dell and EMC and VMware

Dell recently announced an agreement to acquire EMC [NYSE: EMC] — and with it, control of VMware [NYSE: VMW] — in a deal valued at $67 billion at the time of the announcement. While analyses of the deal so far have been devoted to the (more straightforward) implications for the computing, storage, and networking…

The Empty Promise of Data Moats

Data has long been lauded as a competitive moat for companies, and that narrative’s been further hyped with the recent wave of AI startups. Network effects have been similarly promoted as a defensible force in building software businesses. So of course, we constantly hear about the combination of the two: “data…

How China is Cashing in on Group Chats

One sunny afternoon this April, a Chinese teenager nicknamed Gallen was backpacking through Bali, hunting for things to do. But he didn’t turn to TripAdvisor for crowd-sourced suggestions (too time consuming) or scroll through Instagram for local geotags (too imprecise). Instead, Gallen enlisted recommendations from…

How to Ruin a Company with One Bad Process (2014)

“Real quick, whole squad on that real sh*t 0 to 100, n***a, real quick” —Drake, “0 to 100/The Catch Up” I am a giant advocate for technical founders running their own companies, but one consistent way that technical founders deeply harm their businesses is by screwing up the budgeting process. Yes, the budgeting…

The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

Very Good Security

“Never answer an anonymous letter” —Yogi Berra Did you ever wonder why doctor offices ask for your social security number? They don’t want to keep your SSN, but it’s the primary “key” that identifies you to an insurance company. In computer science/math terms, they need to call a function. Let’s call it: int…

Understanding SaaS: Why the Pundits Have It Wrong

Tune into any cable network stock market channel and the airwaves resonate with one consistent theme: SaaS companies are simply too expensive. In fact, we might even be in a bubble! The argument goes as follows — high revenue growth coupled with lack of profits means these businesses are fundamentally broken. Just as…

Anime is eating the world

New tech & business models are accelerating anime to even greater heights.

The Lack of Options for Startup Employees’ Options

One of the many tradeoffs that early startup employees choose to make is between cash, and options. For some employees however this may end up being a Faustian bargain of sorts. At first glance, the calculus seems simple: the employee will take more stock options for less cash, because over time the payoff could be...

Nobody Cares (2011)

All the mental energy you waste complaining would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.

When Is a “Mark” Not a Mark? When It’s a Venture Capital Mark

Venture capital marks are highly variable based on different valuation methods. These are the main "mark" valuation methods used by venture firms.

Lead Bullets (2011)

Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight. —Public Enemy (sampled from Thomas Todd), Fight the Power Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a...

Distribution vs. Innovation

The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation. The TiVo Problem In 1999, ReplayTV and TiVo invented the Digital Video Recorder (DVR). It was an incredible innovation — allowing you to “pause” live television. But TiVo had no…

Network Effects That Don’t Look Like Network Effects

Many of the most consequential projects of the internet era — from Wikipedia to Facebook and bitcoin — have all been predicated on network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it. As a result, we’ve become really good at analyzing and measuring network effects. Whether it’s…

What “working” means in the era of AI apps

New revenue benchmarks for gen AI startups in year one, based on dozens of enterprise and consumer AI companies we’ve spent significant time with.

Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?

Control over important internet services has shifted from open source to proprietary services operated by big tech. As a result, people got access to technology, but that shift also created serious problems.