Communityplanet

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…

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.…

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...

Conventional wisdom: startups don't have the time or dollars to invest in training. Training is only for big companies who can afford it, both cash- and time-wise. Not surprisingly, Ben picks a fight with conventional wisdom in his latest post,...

A question I hear a lot at startup board meetings is this one: "is the current VP of Marketing or VP of Sales or CFO big enough to do this job in 18-24 months when we go international or need...

When I introduced our venture firm on this blog in July, I wrote extensively about the types of entrepreneurs and companies we want to fund: technical founders, brilliant and motivated entrepreneurs, product-focused companies, and so on. I got widespread head...

My good friend Steve Blank does a great job of describing the metamorphosis a scalable startup needs to undergo to become a big company. During that metamorphosis, many startups hire executives from big companies to help scale the business. Some...

My partner Ben and I have been active angel investors for years and now full-time venture capitalists for 9 months. But prior to that (and for most our lives), we've been entrepreneurs. Now that we've sat on both sides of the table—and have spent more time with other venture capitalists—my partner Ben has a few…