The Problem With Marc Andreessen(blogs.reuters.com) |
The Problem With Marc Andreessen(blogs.reuters.com) |
The man created the web browser, built multiple billion dollar companies, angel invested and sits on the board of Facebook, and is now one of the most well known VCs in the world - and this is saying what - that he's not as good as Felix thinks he could be?
What the hell has Felix Salmon ever done?
I'm seeing more and more of this: pundits and armchair entrepreneurs online who just can't help but tear down people who went in the arena and worked their asses off and built something.
Shut up and go build something people want.
What the hell has Felix Salmon ever done?
That he has not built a successful start-up is entirely unrelated to that point, much in the same way the fact Roger Ebert isn't a director is unrelated to his critique of films.
Exactly. Not being a successful VC does not preclude you from criticising a successful VC.
Except HP Server Automation[1], HP Operations Orchestration[2], HP Network Automation[3], and that's just Opsware products. That doesn't touch on the lasting transformational aspects of his work at UIUC, or Netscape.
[1] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro... [2] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro... [3] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro...
if the question is 'value' vs 'dollars'. Netscape was the enabler to the creation of trillions of dollars. That's value. He saw the opportunity and created it.
I don't think he needs to be an innovator to be a VC. He needs to be smart and recognize opportunities when they come to him. He's shown a knack for that.
But this line in particular stands out- "...buy its stake in the shadowy secondary market instead."
Come on. Shadowy? Really? Making it sound like he's buying plutonium or something.
[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870389970457620...
Also, I think making money on timing the market is not a bad thing. To each his own. However, timing the market does not create value. It is merely displacing value or what they call a zero-sum game. I don't think the article goes too far in displaying MA as someone playing that game. In fact, makes the point so valid that it's hard to argue that he has created some sort of permanent value. Other than netscape, the FB board seat is just a fancy chair...
Anyway, why would staring Netscape not be enough value already? After all he himself wrote the Mosic browser that became the basis for all of today's browser. I think very few people have produced more "value" in their lives.
I also don't like the tone of voice of the article. It's pretty much a personal attack only based on the fact that he makes a lot of money.
Opsware was purchased for $1.6bn by HP, hardly a failure...
Andreesen has a strong history of execution and value generation and Netscape was a pioneer, not a cheap shareholder exploitation vehicle. This article is grasping at straws.
Edit: Clearly HP the thought Opsware was extremely valuable at the time of purchase and the author provides no evidence to support his claim that it was not a good purchase for HP. According to comments on the article, Opsware's product still exists and has simply been rebranded.
The thesis of the article is that Marc has been very successful at selling things, but that these things have not been so successful for the people who bought them from him. I don't think you are at odds with the author if you're saying that Marc has been successful at making money.
I suppose I was trying to imply with the $1.6bn price tag that clearly HP thought the product was immensely valuable and I thought "who is the author to say that they were so wrong without a shard of evidence?" Admittedly, I failed to actually draw this line of reasoning in the post at all and have no reason to suppose others would infer it as well.
they’re primarily interested in buying into any company,
no matter how flash-in-the-pan, where Andreessen Horowitz
can exit its investment for a large multiple of whatever
it bought in at.
This also makes me wonder if this type of attitude might be hurting the long term prospects of our economy.
1. Man makes short-lived company that makes him rich quickly. 2. Man makes money investing in other short-lived companies that make their founders rich quickly. 3. Successful founders grow up to make money investing in still other short-lived companies.
Maybe I'm totally misinterpreting this, but if there's any truth to this version of the story, it seems like it's heading for disaster. I've already met a lot of startup founders who insist that profitability doesn't matter. How on earth is that attitude sustainable?
Fast Company is the worst offender. They rarely critically analyse anything.
Your opinion is fair and all, and I'll believe you follow those publications and have a basis for making the claim. But you could have easily written this comment without having read a word of the article - is that really the best comment for the top of the page?
I don't think my comment is tangential. It helps explain why the original WIRED article didn't offer legitimate criticism of Marc Andreessen.
> His single greatest achievement — the creation of the world’s first web browser, Mosaic — took place under the auspices of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
All correct, except for "first". The world's first web browser was WorldWideWeb[1], written by Tim Berners-Lee. But I suppose it is true that Mosaic was the first browser that got noticed by anyone other than the Chosen Few.
More here: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/04/0422mosaic-web-br...
Having his creations be acquired for substantial sums by nervous corporations (who proceed to let them die) serves no one but Andreeson himself and his investors.
As a consumer, I value programs like netpbm, feh, ffmpeg and mplayer far more than Netscape and all the monolithic browser crap that has followed. I can rely on the former programs year after year.
By contrast, Andreeson offers little to consumers. His best programmer at Netscape was put out of job and now runs a nightclub. I think that says it all. Andreeson is not improving the world of software and technology. He has no intention of building things that last. He's in it to make a quick buck. Quality and consumers be damned.
In a true Ponzi scheme, payouts come from either investors' own deposits or those of additional investors. There's no investment income in the fund itself.
In Andreeson's case, he's been surfing on the wave of success or perceived success, by inflating subsequent hype bubbles and cashing these out. There's not a strict connection between his ventures, investment funds, and cash-outs, though arguably there would be very little market value if he were perceived as no longer being the golden boy.
I've found myself increasing unimpressed by what he's had to say about the value and credibility of his activities over the past decade or so.
I have no idea if Marc actually has done anything at all with his life after mosaic apart from make a lot of terrible companies that sold well. The article seems to imply he's a total fraud. But I'll tell you who has.
Microsoft, Google, AOL, Yahoo, etc.
They all made lots of money and they're the ones paying silly sums of money to buy companies that they then almost consciously let rot, fester and die.
I think mainly so that no-one can accidentally get bigger than them and take them out. Imagine if someone bought facebook 5 years ago. It probably would be dead by now.
You're underestimating the "made man" effect. Once you have a really enormous hit, you become a Made Man; someone will always be willing to throw some money at you for future worthless businesses you found, because the people with the money know you and want to stay on your good side on the off chance lightning strikes a second time later on. So they're willing to throw some money away to keep you happy. (And not just you -- it lets them do a solid for the people who invested in your company, too, by letting them walk away without taking a loss. Why do that? Because the investors are usually also Made Men.)
It's not just Andreessen who illustrates this. Look at Google's recent acquisition of Milk:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/20/technology/startups/Google-D...
Milk only ever shipped one product, Oink, which was a total flop. But Google spent a reported $15-30 million dollars to acquire them.
Why?
Because Milk was founded by Kevin Rose, and Rose's hit with Digg made him a Made Man; and it had gotten ~$1.5 million in angel funding from a veritable Who's Who of other Made Men (see http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million-...).
If you had the same company, with the same team and track record, and subtracted Kevin Rose and the plugged-in investors from it -- the same company, just staffed in some podunk Midwestern town and funded by no-name investors -- I doubt Google would have spent a plugged nickel to buy it. But Milk was very plugged in, so Google bailed them out.
In other words, it's classic logrolling (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling). You bail me out when my venture tanks, and I'll bail you out when yours does. It's a pretty sweet deal. But it's a deal that's only available to Made Men.
However, these companies get bought by bigger companies, who drive some real value from buying them. If the big company screws it up or decides to integrate the product in their own, that does not make it a Ponzi-scheme.
Sure, he makes good points, but I'd take this type of critique a lot more seriously if a successful VC said it. Journalists are good at writing and doing a job of disseminating information. Given their role, they will never be completely accurate when it comes to making predictions of an industry in which they are often on the periphery of "the trenches".
Sadly, we made the classic mistake: Let's acquire this brilliant team that works well together, and then let's split up the team and sprinkle the individuals around our existing organization in the hope they'll influence our old-school thinking.
That's like trying to get a vaccination from a homeopath.
No, he was a part of the team that wrote the Mosaic browser. Eric Bina was the other major contributor. Mosaic was not a solo project like the first version of Linux. It was a team effort.
MS Paint is a graphical editor.
An application can have a GUI without being graphical. I'll confess to never having used WorldWideWeb on a NeXT box, though vids suggest it didn't do much in the way of typesetting or graphical rendering.
In fact, Opsware created products that (still) play an important role in large, private, datacenters. Hell, for what it's worth, their 3 main products were actually created to manage their own infrastructure. Which part of that is the joke?
Lack of a CLI accessible on managed nodes being a huge issue for datacenter work.
Staggeringly deficient database performance.
My recent experience has been with Puppet/Chef. They're still crufty in their own ways, but far more appropriate than Oopsware.