Tomorrow's Producer (Part 1)
Plan of Conquest of the Future by Mark Andriessen
In his company, a venture investor constantly thinks about what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years.
On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi (Suhail Doshi ★ ) on his father’s Honda Civic heads for Silicon Valley. A 12-page presentation is stored in his laptop, which undoubtedly costs at least fifty million dollars. Doshi twenty-six, he is the CEO of a data analysis startup called Mixapanel. He arrived from San Francisco at Menlo Park, on Sand Hill Road ★ , the most prestigious place for venture capital companies from all over the world. Doshi plans to conquer the Andreessen Horowitz ★ foundation, the newest and most unusual company on this street. Once in the office, he settled down at the head of a heavy beech table. Speech Doshi is listened to by the team responsible for the transactions in the company, and its seven main partners are people who risk their money, take seats on the board of directors, and fire employers if something goes wrong.
Marc Andreessen (Marc Andreessen ★ ), co-founder of the company, wipes his hands with a napkin and stares Dosha intently. Andreassen is forty-three years old, his height is six feet five inches (195 cm), he has a huge, bald and elongated skull. The words "giant" and "upper class" suggest themselves. A couple of decades ago, he was the inspiration for Netscape ★ , a web browser at the origin of the Internet boom. In many ways, he is the quintessence of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an impressive, forty-year-old, long-acclaimed white male. (The Forbes ★ rich list, consisting of the best hundreds of venture capitalists, includes only five women.) While other entrepreneurs enjoy an “informal Friday” ★ , Andriessen remains faithful to beliefs. He is an evangelist of the church of technologies, burning with the desire to bring the world we are used to a new order. He firmly believes that technology will soon save us from such simple habits as cash payment (Bitcoin ★ ), cooking (Soylent ★ ) and staying in a world not changed by virtual reality (Oculus ★ ). He is confident that Silicon Valley determines the path of human development, leading him to a sharp turn in the direction of perfection. He is very convincing, throwing you with syllogisms and facts, refuting all possible objections beforehand.
')
Doshi, skinny and faddish, in a chestnut-colored T-shirt and simple jeans, began his presentation with the statement: “Most decisions in the world are made either at random or intuitively. They are either successful or not. ”It leads to the fact that it is much more sensible to use Maxpanel ★ analytics, which allows companies to know exactly who their customers are and how they use their applications. Doshi is rapidly glowing rhetoric: "We want to take on data processing for virtually every market in the world." It might sound overconfidently anywhere, but not on Sand Hill Road. Here and now a young guy in jeans is obliged to hit mature husbands in cashmere sweaters. “The mediocre capitalist wants to see that your company is capable of attracting users,” Doshi explains to me. “The coolest venture investors want you to convince them of your ability to invent the future.”
If you have a cool idea, then on your Sand Hill Road trip you will definitely find yourself in Andreessen Horowitz. The company is often referred to as the alpha-numeric URL "a16z" ★ . (16 letters are placed between “a” in Andreessen and “z” in Horowitz.) The company was created six years ago, and since then has managed to move to the top echelon of venture enterprises. Competitors, concerned about the speed, power and generous financing of transactions, gave the company the nickname "AHo" ★ . Every year, three thousand startups find “warm contact” through someone whom the company knows. A16z invests at fifteen. Of these, no less than ten will bend, three or four will succeed, and only one can soar above a billion dollar estimate — the “unicorn,” as they say here. With great luck, once a decade such a unicorn grows into Google or Facebook, and pays for the investor's investment a thousand times: the legendary 1000x ★ . Last year, eight hundred and three US venture corporations spent forty eight billion dollars trying to catch this dream.
Doshi is not the first time "passes through the system." In 2012, he managed to catch Andreessen and his co-founder with a no less brilliant bald head, Ben Horowitz, in Ritz-Carlton, not far from Tucson. After making sure that his father’s Honda (along with his father himself) is hidden from view, Doshi “pitches” ★ them in the hotel lobby. He then mentioned that he was so disappointed with the databases on the market that he was going to write his own. Andriessen later told me what it looked like as an aspiring writer said: “I need to finish War and Peace before taking up your story.” A16z gave Dosha ten million dollars, and he gave them twenty-five percent of his company .
Now he is back for the "supplement." He clicked on his slides: one hundred percent growth; the number of employees doubles every six to nine months; and he still has all the money he received for the first time. Andrissen drank his iced tea in two sips and began pacing around the room. Doshi displayed a slide showing competitors - Localytics ★ , Amplitude ★ , Google Analytics ★ - grouped into sectors. Then he told how he was going to crush each of these sectors. “I'm going to buy people into the machine learning team, I want to buy the freshest server hardware,” he said. Pointing to his inevitably defeated competitors, he adds: “I want to buy something that none of them can afford.” And he put his hands in his pockets: they say questions?
Entrepreneurs are attacking with references to history: “Great people change history, and I’m just such a great person!” Venture investors evasively defend themselves: “You will definitely receive funding!” Meaning: “But not from us.” Voproshaya: "Who else is in the business?" - they mean: "Except us." Well, the phrase: "I'm not sure that I would use your product myself." - means: "Goodbye!" But the best investors feel the courage of entrepreneurs as well as well as own assumptions. Andreessen squeezed the back of his chair. “So what you do can be described as the network effect ★ ”, he says. “The more data, the more customers. This allows you to add new services, which gives you even more data, which allows you to attract even more customers, but you just keep turning the knob. ”Doshi thought it over and replied:“ Exactly! ”Andriessen grinned: as a person with system thinking, he understood how Mixpanel fits into the system. After the pitch, he explained to me that Mixpanel is “how to sell picks and shovels right in the middle of the gold rush”.
When a startup consists of an idea and several employees, it searches for the money of the seed round. When he has a product with first followers, or when the seed money ran out, the startup tries to raise Round A. As soon as the product starts to gain popularity, it is time for Round B, then the chain of rounds continues. Most venture investors who consider investing in these early stages take into account the same factors. “The bottom seventy percent of investors are simply listed on the checklist,” says Jordan Cooper ★ , an entrepreneur from New York. “Monthly revenue? The experience of the founders? Reliable sales pipeline? X percent of growth each month? ”Venture capitalists also think pattern. If kids like Snapchat ★ , fund similar things: Yik Yak, Streetchat, ooVoo. By digging a little deeper, if two computer graduates from Stanford founded Google ★ , invest money in others like computer science because they successfully combine incredible potential and monetized dissatisfaction with the state of affairs.
Venture investors who managed to catch their 1000x know that true innovation cannot be found on the model. The future is always even more amazing than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. Douglas Leone ★ , one of the leaders of Sequoia Capital ★ , the avowed leader of Silicon Valley, says: “You get the biggest results when you break your previous mental model. Remember the “Black Swans” of the last forty years: a personal computer, a router, the Internet, an iPhone — no one thought about anything like that. So it's good for us to hang our ears. ”Great investors keep their ears pending, waiting for an exciting story with elements of a fairy tale. This story begins in the distant past (which turn out to be our future), and glorifies the hero from the bottom, who learned a certain secret from the experience of his difficult life. The hero meets with a member of the royal family (investor) who is experiencing it. Only by invoking magic (technology), the hero manages to triumph. At the end of the tale, the treasures must be folded into chests, and the unicorn will carry them home on his back. ▼
Part 1 | → Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
About the author: Ted Friend has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1998. Author of various reports and investigations, multiple winner of awards in the field of journalism.
Photo: Joe Pugliese
In his company, a venture investor constantly thinks about what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years.
On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi (Suhail Doshi ★ ) on his father’s Honda Civic heads for Silicon Valley. A 12-page presentation is stored in his laptop, which undoubtedly costs at least fifty million dollars. Doshi twenty-six, he is the CEO of a data analysis startup called Mixapanel. He arrived from San Francisco at Menlo Park, on Sand Hill Road ★ , the most prestigious place for venture capital companies from all over the world. Doshi plans to conquer the Andreessen Horowitz ★ foundation, the newest and most unusual company on this street. Once in the office, he settled down at the head of a heavy beech table. Speech Doshi is listened to by the team responsible for the transactions in the company, and its seven main partners are people who risk their money, take seats on the board of directors, and fire employers if something goes wrong.
Marc Andreessen (Marc Andreessen ★ ), co-founder of the company, wipes his hands with a napkin and stares Dosha intently. Andreassen is forty-three years old, his height is six feet five inches (195 cm), he has a huge, bald and elongated skull. The words "giant" and "upper class" suggest themselves. A couple of decades ago, he was the inspiration for Netscape ★ , a web browser at the origin of the Internet boom. In many ways, he is the quintessence of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an impressive, forty-year-old, long-acclaimed white male. (The Forbes ★ rich list, consisting of the best hundreds of venture capitalists, includes only five women.) While other entrepreneurs enjoy an “informal Friday” ★ , Andriessen remains faithful to beliefs. He is an evangelist of the church of technologies, burning with the desire to bring the world we are used to a new order. He firmly believes that technology will soon save us from such simple habits as cash payment (Bitcoin ★ ), cooking (Soylent ★ ) and staying in a world not changed by virtual reality (Oculus ★ ). He is confident that Silicon Valley determines the path of human development, leading him to a sharp turn in the direction of perfection. He is very convincing, throwing you with syllogisms and facts, refuting all possible objections beforehand.
')
Doshi, skinny and faddish, in a chestnut-colored T-shirt and simple jeans, began his presentation with the statement: “Most decisions in the world are made either at random or intuitively. They are either successful or not. ”It leads to the fact that it is much more sensible to use Maxpanel ★ analytics, which allows companies to know exactly who their customers are and how they use their applications. Doshi is rapidly glowing rhetoric: "We want to take on data processing for virtually every market in the world." It might sound overconfidently anywhere, but not on Sand Hill Road. Here and now a young guy in jeans is obliged to hit mature husbands in cashmere sweaters. “The mediocre capitalist wants to see that your company is capable of attracting users,” Doshi explains to me. “The coolest venture investors want you to convince them of your ability to invent the future.”
If you have a cool idea, then on your Sand Hill Road trip you will definitely find yourself in Andreessen Horowitz. The company is often referred to as the alpha-numeric URL "a16z" ★ . (16 letters are placed between “a” in Andreessen and “z” in Horowitz.) The company was created six years ago, and since then has managed to move to the top echelon of venture enterprises. Competitors, concerned about the speed, power and generous financing of transactions, gave the company the nickname "AHo" ★ . Every year, three thousand startups find “warm contact” through someone whom the company knows. A16z invests at fifteen. Of these, no less than ten will bend, three or four will succeed, and only one can soar above a billion dollar estimate — the “unicorn,” as they say here. With great luck, once a decade such a unicorn grows into Google or Facebook, and pays for the investor's investment a thousand times: the legendary 1000x ★ . Last year, eight hundred and three US venture corporations spent forty eight billion dollars trying to catch this dream.
Doshi is not the first time "passes through the system." In 2012, he managed to catch Andreessen and his co-founder with a no less brilliant bald head, Ben Horowitz, in Ritz-Carlton, not far from Tucson. After making sure that his father’s Honda (along with his father himself) is hidden from view, Doshi “pitches” ★ them in the hotel lobby. He then mentioned that he was so disappointed with the databases on the market that he was going to write his own. Andriessen later told me what it looked like as an aspiring writer said: “I need to finish War and Peace before taking up your story.” A16z gave Dosha ten million dollars, and he gave them twenty-five percent of his company .
Now he is back for the "supplement." He clicked on his slides: one hundred percent growth; the number of employees doubles every six to nine months; and he still has all the money he received for the first time. Andrissen drank his iced tea in two sips and began pacing around the room. Doshi displayed a slide showing competitors - Localytics ★ , Amplitude ★ , Google Analytics ★ - grouped into sectors. Then he told how he was going to crush each of these sectors. “I'm going to buy people into the machine learning team, I want to buy the freshest server hardware,” he said. Pointing to his inevitably defeated competitors, he adds: “I want to buy something that none of them can afford.” And he put his hands in his pockets: they say questions?
Entrepreneurs are attacking with references to history: “Great people change history, and I’m just such a great person!” Venture investors evasively defend themselves: “You will definitely receive funding!” Meaning: “But not from us.” Voproshaya: "Who else is in the business?" - they mean: "Except us." Well, the phrase: "I'm not sure that I would use your product myself." - means: "Goodbye!" But the best investors feel the courage of entrepreneurs as well as well as own assumptions. Andreessen squeezed the back of his chair. “So what you do can be described as the network effect ★ ”, he says. “The more data, the more customers. This allows you to add new services, which gives you even more data, which allows you to attract even more customers, but you just keep turning the knob. ”Doshi thought it over and replied:“ Exactly! ”Andriessen grinned: as a person with system thinking, he understood how Mixpanel fits into the system. After the pitch, he explained to me that Mixpanel is “how to sell picks and shovels right in the middle of the gold rush”.
When a startup consists of an idea and several employees, it searches for the money of the seed round. When he has a product with first followers, or when the seed money ran out, the startup tries to raise Round A. As soon as the product starts to gain popularity, it is time for Round B, then the chain of rounds continues. Most venture investors who consider investing in these early stages take into account the same factors. “The bottom seventy percent of investors are simply listed on the checklist,” says Jordan Cooper ★ , an entrepreneur from New York. “Monthly revenue? The experience of the founders? Reliable sales pipeline? X percent of growth each month? ”Venture capitalists also think pattern. If kids like Snapchat ★ , fund similar things: Yik Yak, Streetchat, ooVoo. By digging a little deeper, if two computer graduates from Stanford founded Google ★ , invest money in others like computer science because they successfully combine incredible potential and monetized dissatisfaction with the state of affairs.
Venture investors who managed to catch their 1000x know that true innovation cannot be found on the model. The future is always even more amazing than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. Douglas Leone ★ , one of the leaders of Sequoia Capital ★ , the avowed leader of Silicon Valley, says: “You get the biggest results when you break your previous mental model. Remember the “Black Swans” of the last forty years: a personal computer, a router, the Internet, an iPhone — no one thought about anything like that. So it's good for us to hang our ears. ”Great investors keep their ears pending, waiting for an exciting story with elements of a fairy tale. This story begins in the distant past (which turn out to be our future), and glorifies the hero from the bottom, who learned a certain secret from the experience of his difficult life. The hero meets with a member of the royal family (investor) who is experiencing it. Only by invoking magic (technology), the hero manages to triumph. At the end of the tale, the treasures must be folded into chests, and the unicorn will carry them home on his back. ▼
Part 1 | → Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
About the author: Ted Friend has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1998. Author of various reports and investigations, multiple winner of awards in the field of journalism.
Photo: Joe Pugliese
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292638/
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