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Gary Edwards

The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker - 0 views

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    An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon
Gary Edwards

The 55 Unknown Rock Stars In Tech, According to Marc Andreessen - Business Insider - 0 views

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    "On Sunday, investor Marc Andreessen launched into another one of his famous tweetstorms. This time, Andreessen was inspired by Jessica Lessin's article in The Information, "Silicon Valley's Frontman Problem." In it, Lessin questioned whether Silicon Valley was accurately being represented by its figureheads who are most often cited - including Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. In response to Lessin's article, Andreessen tweeted out Twitter handles that belong to 55 people - "only a highly abridged selection," he mentioned - who "aren't widely famous (yet) but who routinely say interesting and provocative things," Andreessen noted. We've compiled a slideshow of the 55 people Andreessen included in his tweetstorm. They're investors, company CEOs and founders, doctoral candidates, pundits, and writers. There's even one high school senior on the list."
Gary Edwards

Meteor Is The App Platform For The New World Of Cloud-Client Computing - 0 views

  • To adequately understand the opportunity on which Meteor is trying to capitalize, you need a racewalk through the history of computing. Meteor CEO, Geoff Schmidt, put me through these paces in a recent meeting at his HQ in San Francisco. First there were mainframe computers that people accessed through dumb terminals. With the rise of the PC, networks of autonomous machines shared databases on servers over corporate networks. Software companies completely rewrote their applications to create better graphical user interface-based experiences that took advantage of the processing power on people’s desks. Superficially, the web seems to mimic this client-server model. But for most of its history it has resembled the mainframe era with the “cloud” of web servers sending entire web pages to dumb browsers. Web browsers (like the mainframe terminals before them) are “thin” clients in comparison to PCs which are “thick” clients.
  • Web browsers, however, had a “massive distribution advantage,” says Schmidt, which “overwhelmed the user experience advantage” of more powerful desktop app clients. The rise of the smartphone has made the mobile web or app client more and more powerful. 20 years on, we’re back to “thick” clients. That supercomputer in your pocket can do a lot more than render a web page on its screen, and this has shifted the pendulum back towards distributed processing.
  • The astounding scale of this revolution is captured by Benedict Evans, an a16z partner, in his presentation, Mobile: It Changes Everything. “An iPhone6 CPU has 625 times the transistors than a 1995 Pentium,” he points out. And on the launch weekend for the iPhone 6, “Apple sold ~25x more CPU transistors than were in all the PCs on earth in 1995.”
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  • My understanding of this alternation between periods of centralized and distributed computing leveled up when I read a16z partner Peter Levine’s trend piece on Cloud-Client Computing. He writes, “we have more processing power in our hands today through smartphones than we did in large computers decades ago. So why shouldn’t some of this processing move out of the cloud and back into the endpoint, into the phone?” This move has many advantages since Levine says, “the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server.” And smartphones don’t need to be cooled (a major cost for data centers), “so it’s almost like free computing at the endpoint.”
  • Levine has been Meteor’s champion at a16z since his first meeting with the founders post-Y Combinator in 2012. Javascript started as a client-side language that benefitted from the increasing compute power of the devices rendering web pages. Over time, javascript has gone from providing some animated touches to “running the application logic locally on the client [that] results in performance, usability and scale for users,” Levine wrote at the time. Meteor’s big breakthrough has been to run the same javascript code “isomorphically” on both the client and the server. If you put Levine’s perspective on distributed computing together with Meteor’s method for building apps for this environment it is easy to see how this becomes a significant story.
  • Levine concludes his piece with the observation that, “These endpoints aren’t just phones; they could be wearables and other small devices and screens connected to the internet. Beyond the devices themselves, it all adds up to a massive amount of compute power. The next decade of computing will be about doing something with it.” Clearly we are no longer in the land of apps as shiny novelties. Instead, we are talking about decentralizing computing power while making better use of it. From this perspective, utilization of these resources is dependent on the ease of app development and deployment.
  • Interestingly, Schmidt and his partners Matt DeBergalis and Nick Martin were originally planning to build a “local, mobile, social travel guide monetized with deals” at Y Combinator. (Schmidt writes this off as a “sign of the times.”) The partners noticed how much time the other teams were spending just getting their apps to work as opposed to working on their products. The Meteor team pivoted when they realized that their framework was their product.
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    "What is an app? Most people think of them as the little, self-contained bits of software on our phones. They have shiny icons, and we get them through app stores. Sometimes they are useful. Often they are amusing distractions. But there is another way to think about apps in terms of the data they consume and create. In this view, apps are what will turn the global network of smartphones into a massively distributed computing platform. Everything we know about user experience still applies in this world, but reducing friction for each user is only part of the problem. The bigger issue becomes how to coordinate the data bouncing around between all of these devices and servers in the cloud. This coordination is the primary problem that the JavaScript app platform Meteor has set itself to solve. In order to scale, the solution must be simple. Skilled app developers and data scientists are already in scarce supply. Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says, but not, in fact, nearly fast enough to keep pace with global problems it could be solving. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), has invested in both Meteor's A and B rounds (Matrix Partners led the B round with total funding now more than $30 million). Pointing to the road not taken by the browser company he co-founded, Andreessen has said "Meteor is what we should have built in 1994 at Netscape.""
Gary Edwards

Marc Andreessen is wrong. The IPO isn't dying. | Matt Barrie | LinkedIn - 0 views

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    Excellent explanation of how VC Companies work. CC Jason "Marc Andreessen recently lamented the death of the IPO in the United States, blaming over regulation and short sellers as the reason why the general public no longer gets to share in the spectacular capital returns that earlier technology stocks like Microsoft and Amazon delivered. While over regulation in the US with regimes like Sarbanes Oxley is a major problem, the data from the National Venture Capital Association shows that over the last five years that both the number of IPOs and the total amount offered is actually in an uptrend. In fact, the first quarter of 2014 saw the strongest three month period for new listings since 2000, and Alibaba is imminently coming to market which will lift the trend in 2014 significantly."
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