Marc Andreessen (Pmarca)

That's great. Companies need to start IPOing earlier again. http://blog.pmarca.com/2013/03/26/unshackle-the-middle-class/

His old blog is no longer online, but someone collected it here. Very much worth reading: http://pmarchive.com/ edit: Ah, it was published as an ebook as well this January: http://a16z.com/2015/01/09/pmarca-blog-ebook/ His current blog: http://blog.pmarca.com/archive/

Status games are very interesting. Some of the best people at manipulating status are kiosk sellers. "As he was rising from obscurity in Philadelphia and wanted the approval of some important man, Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unimportant favor, like lending Franklin a book. Thereafter, the man would admire and trust Franklin more because a nonadmired and nontrusted Franklin would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending Franklin the book." http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/the-psychology.html

Very strange, I tried searching http://blog.pmarca.com for obama and romney and there were no results. But I swear that back in 2007-2008 I remember him having blog posts about meeting Obama? edit: found it at the archive http://pmarchive.com/an_hour_and_a_half_with_barack_obama I guess it was just deleted over time as the blog.pmarca.com was made more professional.

+1. Think like an investor. Imagine this startup got as huge as it possibly could get and gobbled up a few adjacent markets. Could you imagine it selling to Google (or someone else) for $1B? $500m? Has there ever been any M&A activity anywhere near this market of consequence? No doubt that there is a business here, but I think most investors look for a larger TAM as well as a market that is getting ready to blow up (or starting to). http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html (good reading on the subject of startup markets)

Andreessen has a great post about the process of job interviews: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html . He recommends not to put too much weight on skill tests, and instead focus on things like drive, passion, ethics, etc... Having recently been through an interview that was a complete waste of time, I can sympathize with the author of the post.

See also: The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, part 2: Retaining great people: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/the-pmarca-gu-1.html "Don't do arbitrary large spot bonuses or restricted stock grants to try to give a small number of people huge financial upside....It sounds like a great idea at the time, but it causes a severe backlash among both the normal people who don't get it (who feel like they're the B team) and the great people who don't get it (who feel like they've been screwed)."

"There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work." I agree. But, isn't this an independent question? For such things an individual's flavor of "The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity" should help. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html Also, look at this gem posted by edw519, :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275 What do you think?

Marc Andreessen says, to "[raise] as much as you can. Without giving away control of your company, and without being insane." (http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/the-pmarca-guid.html) I don't have the experience to say whether or not I agree, but it's another viewpoint worth considering.

If you are giving a product or service away I don’t think you can assert that you have “product/market fit.” You have a very compelling application, but until you figure out who is going to pay you for it, and how much it’s worth to them, I don’t think you can put a check in the box next to “product/market fit” since you don’t pass this test from the same Marc Andreessen post you reference ( http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html ): And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account.

Mr. Andreessen posted an update on this article which includes some examples, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/open-social-scr.html the following quote is from this article and I believe it should answer your question "... You'll notice in those Ask A Ninja examples that the Flixster app is not as visually integrated as in the other examples. In a real production system, the Flixster app will pick up the styles of the parent page."

dude, give it a rest. and read: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_2.html yc's already given you something better than what you'd get out of a canned one-sentence response: a fantastic resource in which anyone can put up their site and get a lot of feedback, for free, from a lot of smart people. 100% of the "hey news.yc check out my site" posts i've seen, including yours, have gotten useful, actionable feedback and have consequently improved.

Hi Paul, I agree advice varies greatly in value. Bad advice is worth less than zero because it obscures the good. I think YC's advice is generally quite good. The thrust of my argument was that advice and connections are more commodities than most investors believe. Naval Ravikant, a YC speaker, says to assume investors are mostly money, as does Marc Andreesen: http://venturehacks.com/articles/dumb-money http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_1.html "Odds are, nothing your VC does, no matter how helpful or well-intentioned, is going to tip the balance between success and failure." Ironically, because you distribute a lot of advice freely in essays and events, and because YC's connections are high-profile enough to work outside YC, it's less necessary to join YC for them. To me, the other entrepreneurs in YC are the biggest value-add and worth a premium. I don't argue YC should match angel terms, just come closer to them than 1/10th. I mention all this because I'm a fan of YC and want to see it succeed. The #1 criticism I hear about YC is the terms.* Investing a bit more is a good way to address that and one that now seems feasible. Otherwise it remains an obstacle to some high-quality founders and a way the increasing number of incubators can compete with you. To use a mixed metaphor, I know I'm preaching against the choir in the lion's den, so I expect skepticism. I intend it as a friendly perspective. -Mark * #2 is that YC ideas aren't "big" enough, but…

It sounds like a terrible deal, but if you need the money you need the money. I'm curious what geographical area you are located in -- you'd never get something like that from a SV VC. Was this a verbal offer made quickly or do you have a term sheet? These guys are offering a valuation half what YC offers, and they are proposing a board structure that gives them defacto control over the company board and the company. And they aren't YC. Your response should be "how about convertible debt?" Convertible debt makes a lot more sense than setting up a board of directors that they control and it works out for everyone in the next round. I would recommend reading http://venturehacks.com in its entirety along with pmarca's relevant blog posts. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about.html, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_1.html, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_2.html, and more. After reading pmarca, you should be able to answer the question if you actually want to raise VC money or not. It only makes sense for a very specific type of company.

There model's not a bad one. Most analysts predictions is that in social networking, two things will happen: A) There will be a couple of massive players (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) B) There will be a ton of niche players--you already see this with sites that cater specifically to pet lovers (http://www.petcrash.com/, http://fuzzster.com), expectant fathers (http://www.brandnewdad.com), etc. Andreessen is betting (probably correctly) that people will be much more interested in using a service like Ning than going out and building their own social networking site from scratch. He can monitize on targeted ads and value-added features, and it seems like B (above) is in fact not only happening, but working well! Ning passes 200,000 social networks http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/ning-passes-200.html Some interesting elements: - "We're experiencing 0.5%+ day-over-day growth of number of networks on Ning, which means that we're adding more than 1,000 new networks per day -- and that's accelerating." - "Over 70% of the networks on Ning are active, as defined by 'used in the last 30 days'"

Marc Andreessen has talked about this and mentions a quote from Scott Adams (http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-guid.html): "If you want an average successful life, it doesn't take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: Become the best at one specific thing. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don't recommend anyone even try. The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I'm hardly an artist. And I'm not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I'm funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It's the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it." This is general advice though and doesn't necessarily apply to the question of "what should I work on now that would help my start-up the most?"

Let’s not forget this gem which with a straight face placed blockchain at the same level as the PC or the entire internet: http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why-bitcoin-matters/ Obviously he played a big role in Mosaic and Netscape back in the day, and a16z has also been quite innovative, but he gets way too much attention when he’s just talking his book.

You should read how Icahn destroyed TWA [1] before believing a word he says. [1] http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/03/18/when-carl-icahn-ran-a-company-the-st…

At some point the credit card industry is going to get disrupted. It's so broken + they take on so little risk that it's just a matter of time. My belief is that bitcoin coupled with the right payment experience will disrupt the industry at some point. I would highly suggest reading Marc Andreessen view on the subject: http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why-bitcoin-matters/

I was really just trying to make the points that 1) the minimum price variation of 1/8 of a dollar probably made sense at some point in the past (NYSE being started in the early 19th century) 2) sometimes it's more than just market makers who want larger tick sizes (consider this post from a managing partner at Andreesen Horowitz†) and 3) you can reduce the minimum price variation (the "tick size") without doing decimalization (i.e. smaller fractions) and vice versa -- you can set the minimum price variation at sizes larger than a penny even with decimalized quotations. † http://blog.pmarca.com/2013/03/26/unshackle-the-middle-class/

Permalink: http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/03/18/when-carl-icahn-ran-a-company-the-st…

You would probably spend your time writing blog posts criticizing other successful people [1], or invading small peninsulas like Crimea. [1] http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/03/18/when-carl-icahn-ran-a-company-the-st…

Andreessen responded: http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/03/03/my-statement-on-ebay-director-role-a…

IMHO http://betashop.com/ by jason goldberg http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ founder of duckduckgo http://blogmaverick.com/ by Mark Cuban http://blog.pmarca.com/ Marc Andreesen's blog ( again start from the older posts) http://avc.com "MBA mondays" by Fred Wilson( i get emailed as chapters via dailylit ) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ http://onstartups.com/ by dharmesh shah of hubspot http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ by mark suster "startup site:http://calacanis.com/ " ( on google to find good older posts while Jason Calacanis used to blog ) http://lsvp.wordpress.com http://www.chubbybrain.com/ http://tom.preston-werner.com/ apart from 37 signals, venturehacks, & lean startup blogs. ~B

He hasn't taken all of them down: http://blog.pmarca.com/2009/07/introducing-our-new-venture-capital-fir… Given the inaugural nature of that post and the new design, I'd say the site is being repurposed.

Link to original post: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/12/drive.html

Marc Andreessen's blog post on "only thing that matters" http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html

I fully agree with Steven that product/market fit is the most important item to focus on. Marc Andreesen echoes this very point in http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html

Paul may be referring to these seminal posts: The Only Thing That Matters: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html How much funding is too little? Too much? http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/the-pmarca-guid.html

I am a big fan of Marc Andreessen's blog (Ning promotion notwithstanding). I'm not sure how interesting his writing would be for high school students, but you can look around and see if there's anything appropriate. Maybe this series: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-pmarca-gu-1.html