Andreessen's Secret Plan To Find the Next Netscape 130
Hugh Pickens writes "CNN reports that Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen has raised $300 million to launch a new venture capital firm that aims to reinvent the way money is doled out in Silicon Valley while reflecting Andreessen's unwavering view that the Internet will soon take over all aspects of our lives and that online services won't merely supplement your TV viewing or newspaper reading, but will replace those activities altogether. Andreessen, on the board of Facebook and an angel investor in Twitter, says that technology moves so quickly that only the young can keep up with what the latest stuff can do. 'So the 24-year-old coming out of Stanford will have a view of technology that the 29-year-old — who was 24 just five years ago — would never think of,' say Andreessen. 'We love that kind of thing.' Andreessen thinks that when companies are acquired too quickly, innovation slows down, and he says that YouTube might have come up with a path to profitability faster if it wasn't a part of Google. 'It is hard for big ones to out-execute up-and-comers,' Andreessen says. 'Our secret plan is to watch what gets acquired and fund the next company. A good template is to fund companies doing whichever the next-generation product would have been.'"
Renew! Renew! (Score:3, Insightful)
Is anyone else getting the feeling that the board of Facebook just might be the founders of Carrousel in Logan's Run?
You could have the greatest development the tech world has ever seen, but if you're over 30, prepare to be recycled as fodder for Andreessen's mythical 24 yr old.
Re:age discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm obsolete at 36.
Don't worry about it. This is so brain dead ignorant on so many levels it is hardly even worth thinking about no less worrying.
Good luck, Marc. Good thing you are using mostly other people's money.
2nd is the first loser (Score:3, Insightful)
So they'll fund the also-ran companies that no one wanted to buy?
Let's see- for YouTube, that would have been Break.com, Dailymotion, and about ten zillion other video startups that I am having trouble recalling at this point.
This sounds like a strategy out of an airport business book, but it needs a snappier tagline- something like "The Goldilocks Effect." You don't want the company that's too hot...
Listen to me, I lost to IE (Score:5, Insightful)
It is hard for big ones to out-execute up-and-comers
Funny quote, coming from a guy whose company was crushed by Microsoft.
Re:Renew! Renew! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well since nobody from Marc Andreessen's examples would have a clue what Logan's Run [wikipedia.org] is you might have at least given them a link [imdb.com]. Or did they already create the mind machine interface that would download the info directly to their brains and nobody told those of us over 30?
Now if they could just get the laser from that movie mounted to a shark's head.
Re:age discrimination (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't bother getting hired, do your own thing and show them how it's done.
Re:age discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
"So the 24-year-old coming out of Stanford will have a view of technology that the 29-year-old â" who was 24 just five years ago â" would never think of," say Andreessen. "We love that kind of thing."
Great. More age discrimination in software development hiring practices.
I'm obsolete at 36.
I know a lot of 20-25 year old people in universities. My 60+ year old dad keeps up with technology, especially internet technology, better than any of them. Andreeson's delusional thinking shouldn't be trusted.
Re:age discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck, Marc. Good thing you are using mostly other people's money.
Smart people know it takes money to make more money.
Brilliant people realize it doesn't have to be their own money.
I call bullshit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:age discrimination (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. Not sure what is so "brilliant" about staying awake in Business 101. Establishing a track record and actually making it happen is something else entirely.
Re:Only for some people (Score:5, Insightful)
He doesn't have a perspective, he has a line of bullshit.
The "only the young can be this innovative" line is an old one. The basic premise is that the reason why the 50 year olds with all the money don't understand the idea is because they're old, not because the idea is full of shit. It works because a lot of 50 year olds are afraid they're old and out of touch and will pretend the idea is good to seem young, sort of an emperors new clothes type of thing if you see what I mean.
This guy doesn't really believe his own bullshit, he just wants to make a lot of money out of pretending he does.
Get your ideas from the young kids (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:CALL 911! And then tag article as -- SCAM -- (Score:3, Insightful)
interesting theory you have there. So, all people who engage in any activities which have risk associated with them only do so because they are unaware of the risks, therefor all risk-based activities are scams and should be illegal?
Youth is overrated. (Score:3, Insightful)
Working in the creative industries, it's easy to see that the arrogance and folly of youth might get you noticed and the attention of other young people -- but most great art is done by people with decades of experience. Compare the early work of any artist to their later work and you will see that in most cases.
The trouble with technology and the internet in particular -- is that it is seen as a "young person's medium". It's often just a get rich quick scheme for investors. Many of the new internet ideas have made a great deal of money for a small number of people, but they all have limited shelf life, and their users grow up and mature and seek other things. Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, are dwindling. Geocities, Altavista, Netscape, and many, many more are all but gone. Twitter will follow them shortly.
The problem is, these innovations are shallow and mostly only appeal to young people. Nobody under 25 is looking at sustainable, reliable, usable services for the over 30s. It's all just fad and fashion and plugging a gap to get rich quick. This is not really innovation.
I've seen very little innovation on the internet in the past 10 years. Google came, changed search, and stayed the same. Social networking and blogs are easier to use and more marketed, but not significantly different from many BBS and similar at the beginning of the web. Google Earth is innovative, bittorrent is innovative, and perhaps there are a few other things. But on the whole the legacy of developers and entrepreneurs in their 20s is just using the same old tech with lots of hype and buzzwords.
DaVinci, Edison, Tesla, and many, many, many, many more, kept truly innovating late into life. As their experience grew, they made better inventions.
Sorry, but this precocious, silly little boy needs slapped. He does not know as much as he thinks he knows. Maybe he will get rich. But it is not likely he will really do anything of any importance to future generations for many years to come.
Now get off my lawn...
"Eyeballs", not revenue - NOT (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the big problems with Internet businesses is that there's a huge disconnect between what will attract users and what will make money. In 1999, there were companies saying that growth was about "eyeballs", and only "old economy" people worried about revenue. That didn't work out too well. For a recap of this, see Downside's Deathwatch [downside.com], which I did back then. (Where it says "Chart is not available for this symbol", it means they're long gone.) So we've heard that particular line of bullshit before.
Similar claims have been heard for social networks, few of which have paid back their original investment. Myspace, in their best year, (2007) made only $10 million. [techdirt.com] News Corp paid $580 million for Myspace. They'll never see that back. Investors in other has-been social networks (AOL, GeoCities, Orkut, Tribe, Friendster, Classmates, Nerve, etc.) did even worse.
Andreessen has a point that YouTube would have had to find a way to become profitable by now if they weren't part of Google. Of course they would. No VC would continue to fund a money drain like YouTube. YouTube couldn't even survive as a zombie; they cost too much to run. ("zombie": VC term for companies which can't come close to paying their startup investment, but generate just enough revenue to cover their operating costs. They're the living dead of startups.)
Google still gets something like 97% of their revenue from AdWords. Everything else they've done loses money. Google had one great revenue product - AdWords. They've been frantically trying to find another, without success. Google has a great capability for deploying money-losing free services, but none of them, from Gmail to book-scanning, are generating serious revenue.
There are lots of things that are interesting to do technically, and even useful and popular, but don't make money. I've done a few myself. Andreessen probably has some good ideas like that, and I'm sure he can find more. But if he's going to run money as a VC, he'll have to do better.
Better than the average VC, in fact. There are currently too many venture capitalists. VCs as a group lose money, and have been losing money since 2003 or so. Venture capital as a business used to be highly profitable, but it no longer is. Too much dumb money came in during the first dot-com boom, and the VC business overexpanded. Silicon Valley venture capital used to be about funding a few engineers in a lab to do something great. Those startups often failed, but didn't cost more than a few million when they did. If one in 10 did something good, that was a win. During the dot-com boom, VCs started funding companies into the deployment and operating phase, which is when it starts to really cost. That's a way to lose hundreds of millions a pop.
So we'll see how Andreessen does. Remember, though, that it's not a win until long-term profitability is achieved and the original investment paid back.
Re:age discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
But When you look at Microsoft, Apple, google, facebook, Sun, netscape,... it is hard to dismiss entirely.
This really has a lot less to do with innovative ideas and pioneering and a lot more to do with risk. When you are 24, without a spouse, kids, and a mortgage to worry about, taking on the risk to build the "next big thing" is a lot easier.
However, taking the long shot on the next big thing while putting your children's ability to eat on the line is a lot harder, and some would say even irresponsible. For every Facebook and Twitter, there's a thousand things that failed in bankruptcy.
Re:age discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
What IT sectors are more important than the ones I listed
A few websites make up the sum of "IT Sectors"? Oh wow. You really do have a very narrow world-view.
Well okay then, let's try these on for size.
The Altair Microcomputer - Ed Roberts in his mid-thirties
The Java programming language - James Gossling, mid-thirties.
The Internet - Several people, all in the 30's and 40's -- including Vint Cerf, now VP at Google
C - K&R, thirties
Ruby - "Matz", early thirties
PKI - Several people, but Diffie, Hellman, etc were all in their thirties
The Mouse AND Graphical User Interface - Douglas Engelbart, forties
The Web - Tim Burners-Lee, mid-thirties
The relational database, Edgar F. Codd - late forties
I would say ALL of these far, FAR outweigh TWITTER in terms of "IT importance".