Communityplanet

Over the last several weeks, there have been erroneous reports in the press that my partner Jeff Jordan and/or I might become an operating executive of Yahoo in some capacity. To be crystal clear, neither Jeff, nor I, nor any of our partners at Andreessen Horowitz, are in the running for, or would accept, any…

Today, my company Ning, where I serve as chairman and cofounder, is announcing that it has agreed to merge into Glam Media.  In this post, I’d like to briefly explain the whats and whys, and to thank a lot of people who have worked very hard to get us to this point. Ning is my…

Andreessen Horowitz prefers funding companies whose CEO is a co-founder. We also prefer founders who are technical. Put the two together, and you often have a CEO who has to hire executives into roles (e.g., marketing, sales, customer support, finance) she has never done before. How in the world do you interview and recruit someone…

One of the best parts of my job as a venture capitalist is that I meet super-interesting and super-motivated cofounders all the time. As you might expect, most cofounders have compelling personal histories that have shaped them as entrepreneurs—stories such as “started coding at age 10 before ever seeing a computer”; “enrolled at Stanford at age…

Ben’s last post on minimizing corporate politics generated a bunch of interesting comments. One set of commenters essentially asked, “gee, why should an employee be motivated first by a company’s success rather than by their own success”? Frankly, this surprised both of us. So I suggested that Ben answer this line of questioning directly, which he…

As companies grow, they often get more political—by which I mean, people start advancing their own agendas by means other than merit or contribution. Ben explains in his latest blog post what a CEO can do to minimize corporate politics. It’s not intuitive. For example, Ben points out that CEOs need to give career guidance…

These days, entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about scaling their products. No one wants to build the next Facebook only to watch their technical infrastructure crumble when user growth takes off. Entrepreneurs rarely think as much or as deeply or as rigorously about how to scale their companies. Best practices for scaling human…

Ben Horowitz and I co-founded one of the first cloud computing companies which we named, appropriately enough, Loudcloud. So we’ve been thinking about the cloud longer than most folks. In fact, we had to call ourselves a “managed services provider” in those days since no one was talking about “cloud providers” in the year 2000.…

As the ranking officer, the CEO has a huge impact on their company’s culture. This is especially true in startups where the whole company is watching the CEO’s every move, every interaction, every decision. As a result of this micro-scrutiny, CEOs can feel like they need to be the company’s Chief Morale Officer, continuously and relentlessly accentuating…

Every job in a startup is (usually) hard: building a new product is hard, marketing a new product is hard, selling a new product is hard. But no job is harder than the job of a CEO. Also, no job...