Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, California, investing in bold founders, innovators, and entrepreneurs building the future through technology.
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As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partner Peter Levine is constantly asked “Why sales?” by entrepreneurs and technical founders. He…
#1 “If everyone loves your idea, I might be worried that it’s not forward thinking enough.” Anyone thinking about starting a business should be searching for mispriced opportunities. While markets are mostly efficient in eliminating opportunities for extraordinary profit, there are always areas of an economy in which…
A lot of people have been asking me what my upcoming book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, will be like. Here’s a piece that I wrote for the book that did not make the cut. I still think it’s a pretty good story and gives you a flavor. I just tell the truth so...
How you handle a layoff, how you communicate it to the people impacted, and how you manage and lead throughout the process really matters. It takes careful thought and planning, but it may be the most important planning you ever do as a leader.
One of the things that struck me most during our recent pieces on startup employee option plans is how things that impact the value of those options aren’t well understood, even if communicated or known at the onset. Many people reported feelings of a sort of “sticker shock” (or reverse!) on leaving their first…
I have never fired anyone too early. How many founders have been in the position of hiring a senior executive — having gone through all the interviews, reference checks, board approvals, and negotiations — only to have doubts creep in all too soon after they start? Your hire doesn’t seem to be delivering on the...
The difference between a good CEO and a great one? Trusting your gut and confronting your fears head on.
“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…
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...
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.
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...
Whatsapp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired. Imgur scaled to over 40 billion monthly image views with just seven engineers. Instagram had 30 million users and just 13 engineers when it was acquired for $1 billion dollars. This is the new normal: fewer engineers and dollars to…