Got a crazy new media startup idea bouncing around in your head at 9:01am? Recession fears keeping you from pursuing your Web 2.0 dreams? Fear not! Amidst the doom and gloom of the slump, tech veterans Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz just put up a $300 million venture capital fund for startups of all sizes, with investments ranging from a paltry $50,000 to a princely $50 million.
You might remember Horowitz from Opsware, a network software company eventually sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. You might remember Andreessen for inventing something far more ubiquitous: the Web browser. Andreessen himself counts household names among his investment portfolio: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The partners believe in such geeky things as developing founders into executives, building userbase before revenue, and investing in actual innovation — you know, the things really successful tech companies do.
These guys are Silicon Valley technologists, not Wall Street suits. That’s why we can expect exciting things from their fund.
(Via Sarah Lacy.)
Originally posted on July 6, 2009 @ 9:15 am
This is a really interesting idea, but I am becoming increasingly weary of these start-up tech companies that get a lot of upfront private capital for an idea that can pull together a userbase, but doesn’t have a revenue model.
Like many industries in the past and present, it seems like there’s a growing bubble in social networks – every day there’s another great site to connect with people and enhance your Internet experience. However, you can count on two hands (if you even need that many) how many of these companies actually have a sustainable way to earn money. I’m not saying there’s going to be as much gloom and doom as there was with the dot-com bust in early 2000, but I wouldn’t be surprised if soon, very soon, we start seeing some of these networking sites fold and we’re left with 3 or 4 major social institutions.