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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

"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."

"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.""

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."