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With Andreessen Horowitz, visionary entrepreneur Marc Andreessen is trying to reinvent himself as a top-tier venture capitalist and world-class power broker
Gregg Segal
By Brad Stone
As Silicon Valley events go, it was an irresistible draw: Marc Andreessen, Web wunderkind turned venture capitalist, interviewing Michael Ovitz, former superagent and co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency.
The conversation between the pair of icons, staged last month in a packed conference room in the offices of Andreessen Horowitz—Silicon Valley's newest, hottest venture capital firm—turned out to be a lovefest. Ovitz, the most powerful man in Hollywood before his career imploded in the mid-1990s after a disastrous stint at Disney (DIS), called his friendship with Andreessen "one of the single most important relationships in my life." Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the Web browser company whose 1995 initial public offering kicked off the Internet era, said he modeled his VC firm on CAA. "A lot of what we're trying to do with Andreessen Horowitz is based on what Michael was doing at CAA and his theories about how to build a high-quality service firm," Andreessen said.
The pantheon of elite venture capitalists, as seen from Silicon Valley, is as indelible as the faces on Mount Rushmore. There's John Doerr, who invested in Intuit (INTU) and Amazon.com (AMZN); Mike Moritz, backer of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO); and Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder who helped propel Silicon Valley's cleantech wave, among others. Every so often an upstart tries to carve his own visage into the granite. At 39, Marc Andreessen, who first made the cover of Time magazine almost 15 years ago, thinks now is his moment to grab a chisel. With his longtime business partner, Ben Horowitz, 44, Andreessen raised $300 million last year amid the miasma of the recession and made big, loud bets on such companies as Foursquare, which lets people broadcast their arrival at shops, bars, and restaurants, and Skype, the Internet calling service. Skype, which could go public as early as next year, received $50 million from the pair, who were part of the syndicate of investors who spun it out of eBay (EBAY).
While many other VC firms are still reeling from a decade of weak returns and an influx of competing capital from Russia and China, Andreessen Horowitz is doubling down. On Nov. 3 the firm announced that it has raised a second $650 million fund. (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.) The firm also claims a new, Ovitz-inspired approach to venture capital. Andreessen wants to create a full-service VC firm that helps with all the needs of startups, from recruiting to public relations, just as CAA catered to every aspect of career development—and every personal demand—of film stars and directors.
Andreessen isn't simply trying to reinvent the Silicon Valley VC. He's also reinventing himself—morphing from visionary entrepreneur and small-time investor into a top-tier venture capitalist, an Ovitz-like power broker at the nexus of tech's largest companies, best deals, and most promising entrepreneurs. "We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. There is no magic in what they do. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies," Andreessen says, explaining his decision to enter the high-stakes VC game. "We have a hard time backing off a challenge."
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Gregg SegalBy Brad Stone
As Silicon Valley events go, it was an irresistible draw: Marc Andreessen, Web wunderkind turned venture capitalist, interviewing Michael Ovitz, former superagent and co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency.
The conversation between the pair of icons, staged last month in a packed conference room in the offices of Andreessen Horowitz—Silicon Valley's newest, hottest venture capital firm—turned out to be a lovefest. Ovitz, the most powerful man in Hollywood before his career imploded in the mid-1990s after a disastrous stint at Disney (DIS), called his friendship with Andreessen "one of the single most important relationships in my life." Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the Web browser company whose 1995 initial public offering kicked off the Internet era, said he modeled his VC firm on CAA. "A lot of what we're trying to do with Andreessen Horowitz is based on what Michael was doing at CAA and his theories about how to build a high-quality service firm," Andreessen said.
The pantheon of elite venture capitalists, as seen from Silicon Valley, is as indelible as the faces on Mount Rushmore. There's John Doerr, who invested in Intuit (INTU) and Amazon.com (AMZN); Mike Moritz, backer of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO); and Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder who helped propel Silicon Valley's cleantech wave, among others. Every so often an upstart tries to carve his own visage into the granite. At 39, Marc Andreessen, who first made the cover of Time magazine almost 15 years ago, thinks now is his moment to grab a chisel. With his longtime business partner, Ben Horowitz, 44, Andreessen raised $300 million last year amid the miasma of the recession and made big, loud bets on such companies as Foursquare, which lets people broadcast their arrival at shops, bars, and restaurants, and Skype, the Internet calling service. Skype, which could go public as early as next year, received $50 million from the pair, who were part of the syndicate of investors who spun it out of eBay (EBAY).
While many other VC firms are still reeling from a decade of weak returns and an influx of competing capital from Russia and China, Andreessen Horowitz is doubling down. On Nov. 3 the firm announced that it has raised a second $650 million fund. (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.) The firm also claims a new, Ovitz-inspired approach to venture capital. Andreessen wants to create a full-service VC firm that helps with all the needs of startups, from recruiting to public relations, just as CAA catered to every aspect of career development—and every personal demand—of film stars and directors.
Andreessen isn't simply trying to reinvent the Silicon Valley VC. He's also reinventing himself—morphing from visionary entrepreneur and small-time investor into a top-tier venture capitalist, an Ovitz-like power broker at the nexus of tech's largest companies, best deals, and most promising entrepreneurs. "We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. There is no magic in what they do. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies," Andreessen says, explaining his decision to enter the high-stakes VC game. "We have a hard time backing off a challenge."
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