Andreessen Horowitz Is Blowing Up the Venture Capital Model (Again)
Emerging from the financial crisis in 2009, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz laid out their campaign to take on Silicon Valley. The pitch deck for their first venture capital fund that year promised to find a new generation of “ megalomaniacal” founders—ambitious, assertive, singularly focused—who would, in the mold of CEO Steve Jobs, use technology to “ put a dent in the universe.” In getting behind the likes of Facebook and Twitter, with a war chest that swelled into the billions, they proceeded to do exactly that.
Perched on a couch in his office at Andreessen Horowitz’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Andreessen, whose Netscape browser and subsequent company IPO were touchstone moments of the digital age, understands that the original word choice doesn’t land so well in 2019. His new take: “The 21st century is the century of disagreeableness,” he says, sitting down with Forbes for his first extended interview in two years. In an era of hyper-connectivity, social media and information overload, he says, those “disagreeables” will challenge the status quo and create billion-dollar companies. Ego is out, anger—or dissidence, at least—is in.
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