On Thursday night, at a StrictlyVC insider event, I interviewed famed entrepreneur-investor Marc Andreessen, whose most recent headline-grabbing maneuver (intentionally or not) was to take a Twitter break one week ago. I talked with Andreessen about why he has had enough of the social media platform for now, along with a lot of other things. For […]
Andreessen Horowitz
SkySafe Lands $3 Million to Disable Badly Behaving Drones
SkySafe, a six-month-old, San Diego, Ca.-based company whose technology can disable drones that are flying where they shouldn’t, has raised $3 million in seed funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Founder Collective, SV Angel, and BoxGroup. No doubt the company is serving a fast-growing need, particularly given the number of drones poised to […]
Chris Dixon on Competing with Internet Giants for AI and VR Talent
VC Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz thinks it’s a lot harder to predict financial cycles than it is to see a new computing platform coming down the pike. As he noted in a recent post, new cycles tend to begin every 10 to 15 years; assuming the 2007 introduction of the iPhone kicked off the last […]
Ground Delivery Robots — Passing Fancy or Next Wave?
“Every failed on demand startup will reappear as a successful robotics driven business in five to 10 years.” So tweeted Jeremy Conrad, founding partner of the San Francisco-based hardware fund Lemnos Labs, one recent afternoon. Conrad apparently means what he tweets, having investing in Marble, a new, San Francisco-based ground-delivery robot that will focus on […]
Andreessen Horowitz Talking with LPs About a New $1.5 Billion Fund
The venture firm Andreessen Horowitz is talking with investors about a fresh $1.5 billion fund, according to several sources who note the fund could always close at a higher number. It was almost exactly two years ago that the firm closed its forth, multi-stage venture capital fund, Andreessen Horowitz Fund IV, with $1.5 billion. The […]
TrialPay Cofounder Back with Fractional Home Ownership Startup
Point — an 11-month-old, Palo Alto-based home equity marketplace that plans to take people’s homes and make them completely liquid, divisible and tradable by letting owners sell fractional equity in them — is raising funding, shows a new SEC filing. It’s a fascinating concept that we think has only been tried in the past with […]
uBiome’s Founders Launch a Microbiome Syndicate on AngelList
Ubiome is an unusual startup. The three-year-old sequences the collected microbes in the human body and sells $89 kits to those curious to understand their own microbiome better. Now uBiome founders and academics Jessica Richman and Zachary Apte — who’ve raised$6.5 million from investors like Andreessen Horowitz for the San Francisco company — are taking an even more unusual step. […]
Andreessen Horowitz Lands a New GP — and a New Fund
Andreessen Horowitz is making a big move into biotech, and it’s using a $200 million new fund called the AH Bio Fund – and new general partner, Vijay Pande — to plant its stake in the ground. The fund will be used to invest in mostly early-stage startups at the intersection of computer science and […]
Quick Chat with Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt
By Semil Shah Though not quite two years old, Product Hunt has become a highly popular platform for an expanding community of users who vote on and discuss tech tools. VCs clearly like it, too. The company has already raised $7.5 million from some notable investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Slow Ventures, and investor-entrepeneur Alexis Ohanian. […]
Big-League LP: “It’s a Good Time to Be Asking Questions”
Roughly one year ago, FLAG Capital Management, the limited partnership, revealed that after 20 years, Diana Frazier would step down from her role as co-head of U.S. venture capital, and that Peter Denious, who formerly headed the firm’s emerging markets efforts, would assume her role. Denious has been fairly quiet since then, possibly because the […]