Netscape founder on Twitter, startups and more [2]
Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape
Part 2.
Start here .
Boring and irrelevant pieces are omitted.
There are, as in the first part, a couple of interesting considerations.
Video and full transcript are here .
')
Mark will be denoted by the letter M, Charlie Rose (presenter) - the letter H, which seems logical to me ...
C. Now let's talk about venture capital investment. You, I know, opened a new fund.
M. Yes, opened, for the first time in my life. With one old friend - Ben Horowitz. I worked with him for 15 years, back in Netscape, then he was in HP, under him there were 3,000 people there. We are going to invest first in startups at an early stage. You see, we were before this many times guys who themselves were looking for money for our start-ups and we know this side of the matter well. In short, you can’t catch us on the chaff;
Ch. Fuck you need it - you and so have your dough full of pockets?
M. We have such a nature, man, and another - we are attracted by the scale of possibilities. In fact, we have already invested our own money in startups over the past three years, and invested 36 of them. This is about 1 startup per month.
Ch. Yes, and I read that the average size of your investment was of the type $ 100,000 - $ 200,000. So no?
M. Like that. Historically, they gave up to $ 200,000 per company. But now when we have a fund and we will suck in more money from private investors in it, I think we will give both $ 500,000 and $ 1,000,000. And we see right now until the start-ups fig, which generally do not need a lot of money for takeoff. I have already cited the example of cloud computing about this. Mobile applications or iPhone developers - such startups do not require a lot of money.
Ch. What is not a lot of money in your opinion?
M. Well, from $ 200,000 to $ 1,500,000. That's enough to make a product that works, right? Do that thread that you can use, right? And with this semi-finished product you can already go to collect the loot in the second round ...
Ch. I heard a funny story here, as one tricky guy started marketing a product that did not exist yet, to find out if there would be a demand ...
M. Well, sure, old man, I know this guy - we just invested in him. Right now, for his company, he is collecting more money from venture capitalists and is very close to sucking in real money. I'll tell you right now how he did. He had a very sensible idea and he used Google Ad Words. He bought these little advertisements on Google. People clicked, but there was no one there, and he received excellent query statistics, all these marketing things. There is no product yet, and he already knows what demand will be.
Ch. That is, if the demand is sufficient, does it produce it and how would it have guaranteed sales?
M. Well, yes, count it. In general, I heard such stories about antiquity, when poets who are smarter, first placed ads in magazines of the type, a new collection of poetry was released, is sold for $ 30. And if they collected 500 orders, then they actually wrote a book ... And if not, they returned the money. Well, now an advanced pretzel can make a whole business on the Internet out of this ... This guy (Andrew Chen) is going to implement this idea ...
C. And what is his idea specifically?
M. I won’t tell you, it’s a damn cool secret idea. But he washed it off in order to arrange a marketing analysis and advertising campaign before the product was released ...
Ch. Fuck with you. Tell us about Twitter then. Did you add money to it too?
M. Yasen stump. I invest in everything that moves. On Twitter, I am also an angel investor. And this is exactly the type of companies into which we want to continue to embed the loot of our future foundation.
Q. Do they (Twitter) have a profit?
M. No, of course. I think they have right now all income is zero.
<a little blah blah about Twitter is Twitter as a service - Mark explains to Charlie how cool it is to write 140-letter messages>
M. And this thing (Twitter) spreads like a fire in the steppe. They spun about a year, and then shot. The last two or three months of growth is vertical! The possibilities of use for users are unlimited. In the plane that fell into the Hudson, people with mobile phones at this time actually sent messages like “I hope they have inflatable rafts working on Twitter”. Thank God, the rafts worked ...
Ch. When did you give them money?
M. From the very beginning.
Ch. Seriously? But why? Tell me, what is there in your little brain ("in your little mind") made you believe that this will be a real chip?
M. Well, first of all, I knew the main guy (Evan Williams). He created a blogger. Then he made the company Odeo. Going to do podcasts. Collected $ 3.5 million. But the idea bent. And here he (Evan Williams) did something revolutionary - he returned the money to investors. Skoko added from his pocket was missing and returned everything. At this time, Twitter was their little left project. And he began to gain momentum, and they realized that Twitter is cooler than freaking podcasts. They closed the podcasts, returned the loot and began to develop Twitter. All investors who participated in a podcast startup started up with pleasure on Twitter, because the guys won such a reputation - either they win, or at least they act honestly (they return the money). Well, then we had toko to observe how everyone blew off the tower and got rid of Twitter is unreal. Money was invested a little, I do not know exactly how much they raised in the first round of investments - like a couple million or so ...
<small historical blah blah about how Microsoft bought the Mosaic code from the University of Illinois>
<long blah blah about the fact that soon printed newspapers will die, and for some reason this is important. Mark has already written the New York Times to turn off their printing presses and go online entirely ... in general, newspapers are a hot topic for Americans, but we don’t care, we’ll skip>
<then a very long dialogue about what a wonderful Internet thing it is, and who made a greater contribution to the development of IT - Gates, Groove, Bryn, etc. Mark believes that Grove is a former Intel CEO>
Ch. Explain to me about Google now.
M. Fantastic company, fantastic business. Two points. First, before Google was up to the search engine sites. But they all made lousy issuance. Google is the first who managed to make the issue sufficiently relevant. And at that time, by the way, it was not at all obvious how to chop up this loot. At first, they did not consider that advertising would bring profit, because other search engines had few advertisers - nobody wanted to advertise on pages with a lousy issue. But Google’s issue was much better, and here the second point - they came up with contextual advertising. In fact, I think it came up with Overture, which Yahoo then bought. But Google quickly skipped the chip and began to use this thing. Well, here's the result for you - once in about 10 years we are seeing a new star in IT, which is becoming a giant business. So it was with Cisco, Intel, Microsoft. Amazon the farther, the more looks like such a star. And when such happiness comes to you - to become a super-business star - you start thinking about size, about scaling. And Google has done a very successful job of scaling in the direction of a giant business and generating just an unreal amount of money.
Ch. Everything you said raises another topic - Amazon.
M. Yes, I know Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon) for many years. When in 2001 the next exchange bubble of technological shares was covered, many stupid people told me - Amazon will not survive, a paragraph to it. And I personally saw famous investors leaving, shaking his head, from his presentations at that time. They thought he was crazy. But he was absolutely right. He did not give up, he personally taxied the company almost all the time at that difficult time. On the way, he tried a bunch of different ideas. Some did not work. He was criticized for it. But the rest worked and now Amazon - a big fat huge monster.
<blah blah about some cool things Kindle, Hbox and Wii>
Ch. Now your opinion on how the crisis will affect the Valley.
M. During the crisis of 2000-2002, the actions of IT companies were the main catalyst for this crisis - we were the nose of a dog, and now we are the tail of a dog. And we have suffered less for the time being than the rest of our American national economy. One of the main reasons is that we were financed mainly by investing in our shares, and not by loans, as low-tech companies. Therefore, for example, my company has no debts at all. But of course the general decline in the economy will hit us, not without it. Sales will fall, there will be layoffs, they are already there. But our investment fund, for example, is focused on investments for 7-10 years, so we will go over and wait for the economy to grow - we have enough money. Without stopping work on products. And by the time when everything becomes back and forth nicely and gently, we will have a lot of innovation in the barns, this is something ...
<...>
================================================= =============
Part 2.
Start here .
Boring and irrelevant pieces are omitted.
There are, as in the first part, a couple of interesting considerations.
Video and full transcript are here .
')
Mark will be denoted by the letter M, Charlie Rose (presenter) - the letter H, which seems logical to me ...
C. Now let's talk about venture capital investment. You, I know, opened a new fund.
M. Yes, opened, for the first time in my life. With one old friend - Ben Horowitz. I worked with him for 15 years, back in Netscape, then he was in HP, under him there were 3,000 people there. We are going to invest first in startups at an early stage. You see, we were before this many times guys who themselves were looking for money for our start-ups and we know this side of the matter well. In short, you can’t catch us on the chaff;
Ch. Fuck you need it - you and so have your dough full of pockets?
M. We have such a nature, man, and another - we are attracted by the scale of possibilities. In fact, we have already invested our own money in startups over the past three years, and invested 36 of them. This is about 1 startup per month.
Ch. Yes, and I read that the average size of your investment was of the type $ 100,000 - $ 200,000. So no?
M. Like that. Historically, they gave up to $ 200,000 per company. But now when we have a fund and we will suck in more money from private investors in it, I think we will give both $ 500,000 and $ 1,000,000. And we see right now until the start-ups fig, which generally do not need a lot of money for takeoff. I have already cited the example of cloud computing about this. Mobile applications or iPhone developers - such startups do not require a lot of money.
Ch. What is not a lot of money in your opinion?
M. Well, from $ 200,000 to $ 1,500,000. That's enough to make a product that works, right? Do that thread that you can use, right? And with this semi-finished product you can already go to collect the loot in the second round ...
Ch. I heard a funny story here, as one tricky guy started marketing a product that did not exist yet, to find out if there would be a demand ...
M. Well, sure, old man, I know this guy - we just invested in him. Right now, for his company, he is collecting more money from venture capitalists and is very close to sucking in real money. I'll tell you right now how he did. He had a very sensible idea and he used Google Ad Words. He bought these little advertisements on Google. People clicked, but there was no one there, and he received excellent query statistics, all these marketing things. There is no product yet, and he already knows what demand will be.
Ch. That is, if the demand is sufficient, does it produce it and how would it have guaranteed sales?
M. Well, yes, count it. In general, I heard such stories about antiquity, when poets who are smarter, first placed ads in magazines of the type, a new collection of poetry was released, is sold for $ 30. And if they collected 500 orders, then they actually wrote a book ... And if not, they returned the money. Well, now an advanced pretzel can make a whole business on the Internet out of this ... This guy (Andrew Chen) is going to implement this idea ...
C. And what is his idea specifically?
M. I won’t tell you, it’s a damn cool secret idea. But he washed it off in order to arrange a marketing analysis and advertising campaign before the product was released ...
Ch. Fuck with you. Tell us about Twitter then. Did you add money to it too?
M. Yasen stump. I invest in everything that moves. On Twitter, I am also an angel investor. And this is exactly the type of companies into which we want to continue to embed the loot of our future foundation.
Q. Do they (Twitter) have a profit?
M. No, of course. I think they have right now all income is zero.
<a little blah blah about Twitter is Twitter as a service - Mark explains to Charlie how cool it is to write 140-letter messages>
M. And this thing (Twitter) spreads like a fire in the steppe. They spun about a year, and then shot. The last two or three months of growth is vertical! The possibilities of use for users are unlimited. In the plane that fell into the Hudson, people with mobile phones at this time actually sent messages like “I hope they have inflatable rafts working on Twitter”. Thank God, the rafts worked ...
Ch. When did you give them money?
M. From the very beginning.
Ch. Seriously? But why? Tell me, what is there in your little brain ("in your little mind") made you believe that this will be a real chip?
M. Well, first of all, I knew the main guy (Evan Williams). He created a blogger. Then he made the company Odeo. Going to do podcasts. Collected $ 3.5 million. But the idea bent. And here he (Evan Williams) did something revolutionary - he returned the money to investors. Skoko added from his pocket was missing and returned everything. At this time, Twitter was their little left project. And he began to gain momentum, and they realized that Twitter is cooler than freaking podcasts. They closed the podcasts, returned the loot and began to develop Twitter. All investors who participated in a podcast startup started up with pleasure on Twitter, because the guys won such a reputation - either they win, or at least they act honestly (they return the money). Well, then we had toko to observe how everyone blew off the tower and got rid of Twitter is unreal. Money was invested a little, I do not know exactly how much they raised in the first round of investments - like a couple million or so ...
<small historical blah blah about how Microsoft bought the Mosaic code from the University of Illinois>
<long blah blah about the fact that soon printed newspapers will die, and for some reason this is important. Mark has already written the New York Times to turn off their printing presses and go online entirely ... in general, newspapers are a hot topic for Americans, but we don’t care, we’ll skip>
<then a very long dialogue about what a wonderful Internet thing it is, and who made a greater contribution to the development of IT - Gates, Groove, Bryn, etc. Mark believes that Grove is a former Intel CEO>
Ch. Explain to me about Google now.
M. Fantastic company, fantastic business. Two points. First, before Google was up to the search engine sites. But they all made lousy issuance. Google is the first who managed to make the issue sufficiently relevant. And at that time, by the way, it was not at all obvious how to chop up this loot. At first, they did not consider that advertising would bring profit, because other search engines had few advertisers - nobody wanted to advertise on pages with a lousy issue. But Google’s issue was much better, and here the second point - they came up with contextual advertising. In fact, I think it came up with Overture, which Yahoo then bought. But Google quickly skipped the chip and began to use this thing. Well, here's the result for you - once in about 10 years we are seeing a new star in IT, which is becoming a giant business. So it was with Cisco, Intel, Microsoft. Amazon the farther, the more looks like such a star. And when such happiness comes to you - to become a super-business star - you start thinking about size, about scaling. And Google has done a very successful job of scaling in the direction of a giant business and generating just an unreal amount of money.
Ch. Everything you said raises another topic - Amazon.
M. Yes, I know Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon) for many years. When in 2001 the next exchange bubble of technological shares was covered, many stupid people told me - Amazon will not survive, a paragraph to it. And I personally saw famous investors leaving, shaking his head, from his presentations at that time. They thought he was crazy. But he was absolutely right. He did not give up, he personally taxied the company almost all the time at that difficult time. On the way, he tried a bunch of different ideas. Some did not work. He was criticized for it. But the rest worked and now Amazon - a big fat huge monster.
<blah blah about some cool things Kindle, Hbox and Wii>
Ch. Now your opinion on how the crisis will affect the Valley.
M. During the crisis of 2000-2002, the actions of IT companies were the main catalyst for this crisis - we were the nose of a dog, and now we are the tail of a dog. And we have suffered less for the time being than the rest of our American national economy. One of the main reasons is that we were financed mainly by investing in our shares, and not by loans, as low-tech companies. Therefore, for example, my company has no debts at all. But of course the general decline in the economy will hit us, not without it. Sales will fall, there will be layoffs, they are already there. But our investment fund, for example, is focused on investments for 7-10 years, so we will go over and wait for the economy to grow - we have enough money. Without stopping work on products. And by the time when everything becomes back and forth nicely and gently, we will have a lot of innovation in the barns, this is something ...
<...>
================================================= =============
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/52533/
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