Founder CEOs
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm , the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its CEO. The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built
Why We Prefer Founding CEOs // ben's blog
My partner Ben Horowitz and I are delighted to announce the formation of our new venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and our first fund — $300 million in size — aimed purely at investing in the best new entrepreneurs, products, and companies in the technology industry. Between the two of us, Ben and I have started three companies directly, created many new products and services, run operating businesses at high levels of scale, angel invested in 45 tech startups in the last five years, and served on a broad cross-section of company boards with some of the best entrepreneurs and investors in the industry. Through all this, we have worked closely together for 15 years, and we could not be more excited to extend our partnership into venture capital.
blog.pmarca.com: Introducing our new venture capital firm Andree
If you’ve come here from Ben Horowitz’s blog , below is the research he cited evaluating founding vs. professional (hired) CEO performance in the Software as a Service (SaaS) Industry. This research was conducted as part of a sponsored study project with Yujin Chung ( LinkedIn , Twitter ), a graduate of the Wharton School ‘10, Professor David Wessels of the Finance department, and Frank Chen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz . Feel free to @ him with any questions.
[UGC] Founding vs. Professional CEO Performance Analysis « Enabl
Steve Blank
One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. I was in Washington D.C. last week presenting at the ARPA-E conference. I spent the next day working with the National Science Foundation on the Innovation Corps , and talking to congressional staffs about how entrepreneurial educational programs can reshape our economy.
Posted by Tom Foremski - April 29, 2010 Over the years there has been much written about startup teams and how different stages of a startup require a different mix of skills and thus different teams. I've spoken with Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies and a serial entrepreneur about this topic many times. He says that in the beginning you need a startup team where individuals have a broader set of skills, and as the company matures, you need to bring in people with more specialist skills. That same thinking has been applied to the founding CEO. There is a widespread belief in Silicon Valley that founding CEOs need to be replaced with professional CEOs to take companies to the next level.
Why Founders Are Important To Startups - Demolishing Myths About
In 1990, IBM had its most profitable year ever. By 1993, the computer industry had changed so rapidly the company was on its way to losing $16 billion and IBM was on a watch list for extinction -- victimized by its own lumbering size, an insular corporate culture, and the PC era IBM had itself helped invent. Then Lou Gerstner was brought in to run IBM. Almost everyone watching the rapid demise of this American icon presumed Gerstner had joined IBM to preside over its continued dissolution into a confederation of autonomous business units.
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround
blog.pmarca.com
Today, my company Ning, where I serve as chairman and cofounder, is announcing that it has agreed to merge into Glam Media. In this post, I’d like to briefly explain the whats and whys, and to thank a lot of people who have worked very hard to get us to this point. Ning is my third company, founded several years ago by Gina Bianchini and myself, and run for the last couple years by my close friend and colleague Jason Rosenthal. Over the last two years, Jason and his team have brilliantly executed a dramatic transformation of the company and today Ning hosts over 100,000 social networks covering every conceivable topic and interest, from 50 Cent to Sarah Palin and beyond.Nine years later does Google still need 'adult supervision?' | T
In preparing Google for its IPO, its VC investors convinced Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to bring in an older executive to assure potential investors that there was some ‘adult supervision.’ This worked and the GOOG IPO in 2004 was a huge success. Now nine years later since Mr Schmidt joined as CEO and chairman, the adult supervision is still in place, the three share power in a ‘triumvirate.’ But what type of ‘adult supervision’ does Mr Schmidt provide? He doesn’t seem to be carrying out a traditional leadership role as CEO at Google. In an article written three years ago, “Who’s Really Running Google?”
It is a busy week in San Francisco with the Intel Developer Forum (Intel is a sponsor of SVW), the Clean Tech California Awards, the software as a service conference , and in San Diego DEMO is happening. I stayed close to home this week. Monday, I managed to miss a lunch time media roundtable about software on demand because I was trying to catch up with tons of stories, and trying to tweek my CSS style sheet on SVW. . . . Cisco rolls its own instead of buying
