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.'"
age discrimination (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Only for some people (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting, I'm now late 30s and frequently run across 20-somethings who have little to no computer/Internet interest. Some personality types want to interact socially in person and others want to read paper.
Sure libraries are accommodating new media, but they aren't eliminating the old, which still gets used. Attorneys and doctors continue to need paper.
His perspective generally sounds like a good one, but doesn't seem to recognize an entire segment of our population--like nearly everyone at the BBQ I was at on the 4th.
A friend there was laughing when her sister called to ask where/when fireworks might be shown, despite them having a computer in the kids playroom and their kids being able to search it faster than she could call her!
Re:age discrimination (Score:4, Interesting)
Keeping up is one thing, pioneering is another. The myth of silicon valley whiz-kids is distasteful. But When you look at Microsoft, Apple, google, facebook, Sun, netscape,... it is hard to dismiss entirely.
He won't... (Score:5, Interesting)
And it doesn't matter. As the prototypical "obsolete" 29 year old from the example, I can tell you it doesn't matter whether the 24 year old is full of shit or not. Shit sells.
When I was applying to ivy league schools, literally every piece of advice I got was to lie out your ass. Lie about your achievements. Write your own recommendations. Just pull stuff out of thin air. Make it as flamboyant as possible, and as convincing as you can. As far as they know, you're a genius black inventor mathematician cellist who can write upside-down and backwards using your little toes. Books, articles, current and former students; they all said the same thing: Give admissions staffers the unbelievably entertaining bullshit they want to hear. Hell, you should even tell them that you have some plan to pay back the ridiculous loans they give you.
And judging by what I've witnessed over the last ten years, that was absolutely the correct advice. Yale, Harvard, the school doesn't even matter. Most of them didn't do well. Some didn't even graduate. But, one by one, a steady stream of the the best liars these institutions have to offer have stood up and lied over and over again to the rest of us and become filthy rich and wildly successful doing so. They have swindled us, stolen from us, violated our rights, led us into wars and destruction and profited greatly by it. All the while giving back to their alma maters in the process.
It doesn't matter that this group of people are investing millions of dollars into completely unproductive Web 2.0 bullshit with no viable revenue stream. It doesn't matter that the money they are frittering away is ultimately borrowed from foreigners, swindled from the elderlies' retirement funds, or doled out via government "stimulus".
It doesn't matter that they are sinking the US economy in the process, wasting an entire generation's productive efforts on shiny trinkets that will be unceremoniously duplicated by overseas competitors if by accident they ever attain any real value.
No, no. What matters is that they are productive, successful "entrepreneurs" who are "innovating". And if they can find an ambitious young 24-year-old with an idea to spy on his neighbor's porn surfing and advertise divorce lawyers to his wife, that'll be the next big thing. Because it'll be easy to patent and will give a 2% greater return than a business plan to manufacture automated fruit-pickers.
Endless race (Score:2, Interesting)
Whatever happened to taking pride in making something great, and then spending a large portion of your life refining that thing or your ability to make it? Sometimes I wish I was a furniture maker instead of a software developer. New and innovative products are great, but what's the end goal? More new and innovative products? Sure, fine, great. I'm sure it's all just a big race to the bank for most people, like Andreessen, but for some who just need enough money to live comfortably, it's about striving for excellence and enjoying what you're doing for as long as you are physically able.
Youth is a paradox. (Score:3, Interesting)
The advantage that young people have is two-fold; That of Time, and Easy Cross-Cultural Networking.
Back when you were a kid, you didn't have to work. (School work, even when hard, is minimal.) Kids don't have kids, they don't have to worry about car or house payments. They don't have to go grocery shopping. They have all their free time to think about and explore the new trends.
Second, they have the biggest water-cooler to chat around. All day. --After you grow up and enter the work force, you are suddenly segregated into one social category or another and with that, you lose perspective. When you are a kid in school, however, you are rubbing shoulders with everybody; kids who will grow up to become doctors and nuclear scientists and politicos and hair-stylists and crack-heads. You see it all and you have the time to process it. You live right there in the big picture. You just don't have the brains to realize the power of that scenario.
See, on the down side, when you are a kid, you have cognitive blinders on which are so big that when you reach your thirties, you are stunned at the fact that you managed to survive for all the stupid things you did and blind-spots you functioned within. Kids are functionally retarded. --And I say that in the nicest way, because it's a process of growing up and we all go through it. Or at least this has been my own experience, and when I ask others, they nod and sigh deeply. Perhaps you are different, but I doubt it. Brains don't stop growing until you turn 18 or 19 after all, and your internal knowledge processing networks don't really crystallize into a rich enough understanding of reality to be terribly useful for another ten years at least. There's nothing wrong with this. It's called, "Growing up".
So. . . The trick is to make sure that when you reach your thirties you work to put yourself into a position where you have tons of free time and where you can connect with every social class you can reach. If you can do that. . , well then, now you're getting somewhere.
How old were the guys who came up with the iPod?
I'm betting they weren't twenty year-olds.
-FL