Marc Andreessen is one of the top ten entrepreneurs in the world, co-founder of Netscape, founder of OpsWare (which Hewlett-Packard bought last month for $1.6 billion), Ning, and other ventures. He has an eight-part analysis of startups on his blog.
- Why not do a startup: He talks about the roller coaster, hyperspace, etc. I posted Apples and Oranges as a comment on this one. Marc is talking only about the high-end, prestigious, venture-capital backed startups, which are only about 6,000 companies a year, compared to 650,000 new companies.
- When the VCs say no: How to review and revise your plan, and keep going.
- But I don’t know any VCs: Then develop contacts, read blogs, work on it.
- The only thing that matters: Product/market fit. This is a particularly strong section, boils it down to a very important essence. I posted Market Fit as a summary of this one.
- The Moby Dick theory of big companies: Don’t wait for the big deal from the big company, it might take forever and then never come anyhow.
- How much funding is too little? Too much? You need enough to get to product/market fit. What to do if you can’t raise enough, how to keep going.
- Why a Startup’s initial plan doesn’t matter that much. I posted a rebuttal of this one on Planning, Startups, Stories. I think it’s too easily misunderstood. The initial plan has to change, be revised and reviewed, but you can’t do that if you don’t have a plan to start with.
- Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives. This is very strong on the less obvious part, how to manage executives, and how and when to fire executives, and is a good general review that applies to most companies regardless of size.
So this is a collection of thoughts from somebody who’s been there. And he’s put a lot of thought into it to. Of course his thoughts reflect his own point of view, that of somebody who has been right at the top of the pyramid, remarkably successful. After coming off of Netscape, he was in a position to venture capitalists competing to offer him investment for other new companies he wanted to built. That is a built different from the norm, and it shows up in some of his opinions.
-Tim
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 6:50 pm and is filed under startup advice, startup financing, why startup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
