(Photo: Daily Tech)

Quinn Norton speaks out on what life inside the Aaron Swartz investigation was like. "This will not be the final word on Aaron's story, nor is it intended to be. Two years later, these are the events as I remember them, and the feelings as I knew them." [The Atlantic]

Former dotcom millionaire Jennifer Sultan plead guilty to selling prescription drugs and conspiring to sell a firearm in exchange for four years in prison on Friday. Ms. Sultan, who sold her company Live Online during the first boom, burned through her fortune after becoming addicted to prescription pain killers. Let this be a cautionary tale for bubble 2.0. [New York Times]

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz took to Rap Genius this weekend to decode Andrew Mason's goodbye letter. Swag? [TechCrunch]

If you got an email this weekend from Evernote that it had reset your password, that’s because the company suffered a major security breach. [The Verge]

SpaceX Dragon has successfully docked at the International Space Station, which is great because we don't really need any more griping from Elon Musk right now. [Ars Technica]

(Photo: Tipster)

Your Name Here A Silicon Valley source had the pleasure of dining near Path cofounder Dave Morin and his wife, Brit.co founder Brit Morin recently. Mr. Morin spoke about the future of Path while Ms. Morin, a DIY enthusiast, used crayons provide by the restaurant to doodle on the paper table cloth, said the source. There were rainbows, flowers and balloons, but our favorite was a drawing of the Brit.co logo, with "Morin" written underneath and an arrow pointed towards Ms. Morin (just in case the restaurant staff didn't recognize her). That's one way to disrupt advertising, we suppose. Our tipster was kind enough to snap a pic on their way out.

Happy Internet, Mr. President Twice this week in conversation with tech types, Betabeat was asked when Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian was running for office already. The 29-year-old credited with helping to defeat SOPA/PIPA already toured the country (in a bus once leased for John McCain's  “Straight Talk Express") running for president of the Internet. But with Sheryl Sandberg hot on his heels, isn't it time to start campaigning for the real thing?

Last we heard, Mr. Ohanian was rumored to be launching his own startup reality show on MTV. However, he was recently spotted handing out awards on behalf of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who likes to call himself "the House GOP's chief watchdog."

We've reached out to Mr. Ohanian comment, but perhaps this lulzy tweet is response enough:

Lol RT @michaelpryor: I just realized why Alexis Ohanian's senate race hasn't yet begun. You have to be 30 years old to be a senator!

— Alexis Ohanian (@alexisohanian) March 1, 2013

(Photo: Instagram/Neil Blumenthal)

Here's Looking At You, Kid Warby Parker celebrated its third birthday last night. And what better way to mark a $41.5 million funding round and potential Google Glass partnership than champagne at Grand Central Terminal. Ain't startup life grand?

Duly Noted We're starting to wonder how the geniuses at Rap Genius get any work done. The beef-starting startup promptly uploaded Andrew Mason's farewell letter and started annotating. A sampling of the notes: "Seems like Andrew has too much swag for a public company, they need to find more of a “boring loser” type…" Can't imagine why this team would be so ready to defend "swag."

VC Ben Horowitz also chimed in with a more sedate contribution, saying, "Andrew does the stand up thing and claims accountability. Make no mistake though—although he’s the only one accountable, he’s certainly not the only one responsible for all the things that went wrong." Wait, was that a dig at Eric Lefkofsky?

No Micky D's Please Worth noting: Gross slideshows about how McDonald's terrible blunders of yore perform far better, numbers-wise, than flattering slideshows about a company-funded visit to HQ.

But since McDonald's paid for airfare + hotel, not such a big deal. Also, 4 kinds of mcnugget shapes! h/t @bupbin businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-four…

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 28, 2013

Star Power Hey, what'd you do for the Oscars? Presumably you went over to a friend's house and had a couple of beers and fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence, like most of America. Well, AllThingsD grand dame and Vanity Fair contributor Kara Swisher was there. Like, Hollywood there. NBD! She tweeted Sunday, "Weird Oscars, now onto the party," complete with Insta. On another snap, she added, "Observation on first and only Hollywood party: Celebs are just like us (except prettier and more insecure)."

Snacks You know what's a really great diet, according to former Google employee Mike Dudas? Quitting Google to work somewhere else without that cafeteria. We've always heard free suckling pig goes straight to the hips.

(Photo: theybf.com)

Real Genius Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Rap Genius to help its Ivy League cofounders to annotate the Internet. But how much will they have to pay to rein in the braggadocious Mahbod Moghadam?

In a recent issue of Wakefield, a newsletter covering "tech and startup insight not captured elsewhere," Maboo was up to his old shenanigans, volunteering information about a “feud” with Mark Zuckerberg, who also happens to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Apparently, Mr. Moghadam was at Ben Horowitz’s home, “chilling” with Zuck and Nas as is the new mode of Silicon Valley socializing. (Mr. Horowitz happens to be close friends with Steve Stoute, Nas’ former manager.) Despite Zuck's heightened privacy concerns (it's complicated?) Rap Genius cofounder couldn't resist Instagramming his good fortune.

Apparently Zuck never leaves his house because he’s so afraid of people photographing him, and then our investor – his house is one of the only places where Zuck feels safe – so our investor invited Zuck and Nas over. They were chilling together, and I asked if I could take a photo. He was like “Let’s hold off, let’s hold off,” and I just couldn’t resist – I was drunk, and I went paparazzi and Instagrammed it, and I didn’t even think it would be a thing.

But then the press picked it up and apparently Zuck gets home and his whole PR crew is calling him every five seconds, and he told us to take it down. We wrote a letter of apology and I feel sorry. I regret taking it, I hope this has taught me some maturity, it certainly got me in a lot of trouble. But then on the other hand, fuck that fool – that’s Nas the Don.

Asked by Wakefield if there was anything else he wanted to discuss, Mr. Moghadam again volunteered:

Alright so I told you the New York Times is Carlos Slim’s ho, I told you Zuck can suck my dick, what else is there?

When Betabeat asked Mr. Moghadam about the tenor of those comments on gChat, he said, “i am so sorry, i love zuck, i think he should've made the photo w nas his fb profile pic. I talked to nas, nas loved him and loved the photo.” It was all “tongue in cheek,” he added, “but obvi this offends mark, he got me my last girlfriend, i feel terrible!”

Later, Mr. Moghadam requested that we note that he had taken a Vyvanse to prepare for a UC Berkeley Rap Genius colloquium after the Wakefield interview and was therefore “being negative on the come up." He also noted that he was “not surprised that the ‘guy’ (pun intended) who runs [Wakefield] went to harvard since havartis (as i call them) are little bitches. Also ‘harvard = illuminati, yale = KILLuminati (princeton = chilluminati).’”

Wonder what he calls Andreessen Horowitz?

Bloglords Never Worry In Emily Nussbaum's review of "Girls" for the New Yorker this week, she defined "concern trolling," as "the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry." Valley regulars don't seem too familiar with the term. So for a fine example, let us direct you to Sarah Lacy's comments about her former coworker Alexia Tsotsis on Jason Calacanis' This Week In Tech. Whatever happened to putting the blog first?

The Bachelor: Silicon Valley Congratulations to investor Peter Thiel, who made Out magazine's third annual list of "Most Eligible Bachelors." Local suitors, please let us know if you get an invite to his raging Upper East Side dinner parties.

Nap Time Bre Pettis is a busy guy. Between running MakerBot Industries and traveling around for meetings and conferences, he has to get his zzz's in where he can. "Parking lot nap," he wrote alongside an Instagram of his car with a bridge in the background. Perhaps MakerBot should invest in some sweet nap pods a la Google.

(Photo: Instagram)

Be Mine If you didn't get enough fill of Valentine's Day yesterday, perhaps this tool for determining your Twitter crush will come in handy. Twitamore analyzes who you follow, @-reply and favorite to figure out who your Twitter Valentine is. Our favorites? The ones who love themselves.

Belly up the bar Wired editor Ryan Tate has a bone to pick with the makers of the bourbon Maker’s Mark, who recently announced they’d be adding just a little more water to their product. Quartz took questions for the company’s COO via Twitter, and here’s what Mr. Tate demanded to know: “What will you do for a living after burning the American bourbon industry’s reputation to the ground and destroying your company?” Two words, Mr. Tate: Woodford Reserve.

Attention, please Consider this a cri de coeur from your friendly neighborhood scolds: Please, please, please stop making these Harlem Shake videos. Rumor has it that even Sheryl Sandberg is somewhere in this Facebook video. It’s nice to break up the workday with a little caper, but unfortunately, tech companies seem to have trouble rounding up employees with rhythm.

There’s only one exception to this blanket condemnation, and that’s the dude who appears front and center in Google’s version, thrashing about in what appear to be lederhosen. He looks like he’s on serious party drugs, and he is mesmerizing, and he is now a GIF:

For those who read and run? When Atlantic Media launched Quartz, it positioned the digital only business publication as the news source for the new global elite: the type of jet-setting professionals more likely to read a news story from a tablet while sipping complementary champagne at 30,000 feet than to hunker over a desktop PC. It stood to reason then that Quartz would be an early adopter of the smart-watch Pebble.

Quartz reporter Christopher Mims also brushed off concerns that nerdlinger arm candy might look pretty goofy once it actually hit the market.

Rappers will gold-plate their iWatches and Google Glasses, and some guy will wear a phablet on a chain around his neck. You'll see.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) February 14, 2013

We think we know just the fella.

(Photo: flickr.com/kla4067)

In a talk at DLD, Ben Horowitz revealed that his VC firm had closed (non-seed) investments in a mere 24 companies, most of them created by “college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no way to monetize.” [TechCrunch]

France is considering creating an Internet tax, levied on the collection of personal information. As far as French ideas go, we prefer the croissant. [New York Times]

Speaking of Waterloo: Atari's U.S. arm has declared bankruptcy in an attempt to escape its French parent company. The second plank of this plan is presumably to time-travel back to the late 70s. [L.A. Times]

Some poor kid's been expelled from Montreal College for daring to discover a software vulnerability that left 250,000 students' information exposed. [National Post]

Graph search is a "privacy test" for Facebook. Given that users of the site freak out at phantom privacy crises, this'll be fun. [New York Times]

Mr. Lehman, Mr. Zechory, and Mr. Moghadam (Photo: Sumner Dilworth, courtesy of Vibe)

Visitors who search for Harlem rapper Azealia Banks’s breakout hit “212,” on Rap Genius, an online platform that crowdsources explanations of hip-hop lyrics, will find nearly every verse annotated by the site’s users, who clocked more than 2 million monthly uniques in August, according to comScore. Click on the line “Now she wanna lick my plum in the evening/ And fit that ton-tongue d-deep in,” and a pop-up immediately appears explaining that Ms. Banks is employing a metaphor for cunnilingus and that “She stutters the words tongue and deep to mimic the stuttering that occurs when one receives such a gift.” That exegesis received 11 upvotes, earning the contributor jamima-j, a female “slam poetry writer,” a healthy bump in “Rap IQ” points on the site.

Readers might find her analysis either amusing or unnecessary. But the reigning kings of Sand Hill Road, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, view Rap Genius as “one of the most important things we’ve ever funded,” co-founder Ben Horowitz told Betabeat last week. The prominent VC firm, which clawed its way into the Silicon Valley firmament in just three years by aggressively plowing millions into fast-growth tech startups like Facebook, Pinterest, foursquare and Airbnb, often at towering valuations, were the sole investors behind the site’s $15 million Series A.

Mr. Horowitz (Photo: C Flanigan/Getty Images)

“When I first brought it up, [Marc Andreessen] kind of laughed at it,” admitted Mr. Horowitz, the rare VC who can quote the appropriate Rick Ross rhyme for every occasion.“He was like, ‘Really? Rap Genius?’”

The site’s potential finally clicked for Mr. Andreessen after he used it to try to understand the Kanye West and Jay-Z song “No Church in the Wild.” Click on the lyric “Is pious pious because god loves pious?” and the site walks you through Plato’s Euthyphro, Pope Pius and Immanuel Kant. “It’s a big philosophical question just, like, dropped in the middle of a Jay verse,” Mr. Horowitz said with admiration.

Despite the platform’s name, contributors have already used Rap Genius to annotate a number of texts outside the world of hip-hop, including the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, the Mayflower Compact and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Last week, author and NYU professor Clay Shirky added the iTunes terms of service for dissection. Users obliged by appending a cartoon of the Human Centipede.

After the Jay-Z song, Mr. Andreessen went on to read annotations of The Great Gatsby contributed by high schoolers whose teacher added chapters to the site. His favorite part, Mr. Horowitz said, was a reference to old money versus new money that read, “In the days of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ it was better to have old money, unlike today, when it’s better to have new money.”

No doubt the investor and Netscape co-founder, who was photographed on a gold throne for Time’s “Golden Geeks” cover in 1996 and recently named No. 2 on Forbes’s “Midas Touch” list of tech investors, appreciated that reading.

Mr. Horowitz’s abiding obsession with rap has been well-documented. He notoriously starts every post on his business blog with a couple of expletive-laden lines from his favorite MCs, and has nicknamed his partner, Mr. Andreessen, “Big Tunechi,” in reference to Lil Wayne’s childhood nickname (just ask @LilTunechi’s 8.7 million Twitter followers), because he thinks the two moguls are similarly prolific. It ultimately fell to “Big Tune” to articulate the site’s grander vision: turning Rap Genius into an “Internet Talmud” that, Mr. Andreessen said, will drop the same “knowledge on knowledge” in other arenas, like law, the Bible, poetry and even country music—to eventually “annotate the world.”

The site’s three 20-something co-founders are currently beta-testing the idea of rolling out those content areas into separate verticals: Stereo IQ (for indie rock), Poetry Brain, Country Brain, Law Genius and Bible Genius.

“The criticism is: ‘Ben, I can’t believe you’d invest in something so frivolous as rap,’” Mr. Horowitz acknowledged, but he pointed out that Andreessen Horowitz engendered the same eye-rolls when the firm was part of a $2.75 billion deal to buy Skype from eBay. Two years later, Skype was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. “People who kind of understood the basics [of that deal] were like, ‘Oh, that’s stupid. Those guys are idiots.’ But if you looked a little deeper and saw what was really going on, you would say, well, this is a magical opportunity.”

Rap Genius’s co-founders, who met as undergraduates, have been expounding on the idea for some time now—that the Internet needed this kind of pop-technology, a Rosetta Stone by way of Urban Dictionary, to decode the Western canon—but it wasn’t until Andreessen Horowitz came along that anyone believed them.

If you spend any time with the trio, you can understand the skepticism.

As their origin story goes, the co-founders were treading lucrative career paths when they started the site, first called Rap Exegesis, as a side project. Tom Lehman was an engineer at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Ilan Zechory was a project manager at Google and a former writer for Deadwood, and Mahbod Moghadam, a Stanford law school grad, was on deferral from the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf.

In 2009, deferral was code for a recession-related year off for a fraction of the salary. With his free time, Mr. Moghadam was slated to start a free internship with Warren Buffett when Berkshire Hathaway found his blog, Beneficent Allah, in which he had drafted a satirical billable memo referencing the “Ballstate Insurance Company” (Allstate was a client) on “the probabilities of Inheriting the Earth.” Mr. Buffett's conglomerate didn’t appreciate the irony and neither did Dewey. The same day he was fired, Mr. Lehman built the site.

“We’re more into writing than underwriting, you feel me?” Mr. Moghadam told Betabeat last week, sitting in the startup’s new headquarters: a penthouse apartment in Williamsburg overlooking the East River.

Mr. Lehman, whose actual apartment is four floors down, had returned moments earlier with three trays of sushi for the team’s dinner. A handful of the company’s fresh-faced 20 to 30 employees were unwinding in the back bedrooms.

Mr. Moghadam was sporting a striped button-down and walnut-colored dress shoes that came to a masochistic point. He introduced Mr. Lehman as a “swagged-out Mark Zuckerberg,” but between Mr. Lehman’s upswept column of curls, electric blue T-shirt, neon Nikes and sweatshirt from A Bathing Ape, he looked more like a dubstep deejay just in from Tel Aviv. Mr. Zechory, in emerald green Nikes and a pastel button-down, fit somewhere in between.

Months before they raised that Series A, another New York startup entrepreneur described the braggadocious trio of Yale graduates, who sometimes borrow the vernacular of the rappers they admire, as “total characters and a pile of contradictions”—a representation that speaks to their awkward, if so far potent, positioning at the nexus of the tech and hip-hop worlds.

Sitting in the living room, amiable and unguarded, the co-founders seemed to suffer from the interloper’s dilemma: they’re one “swag” too cocky for the tech scene and a “tight” too Ivy League for the rap game.

Up until last month, outside of verified accounts from artists like Nas, 50 Cent, and 2Chainz, the startup was best known for two things. The first was an essay in The New York Times magazine that devoted considerable column inches to critiquing Rap Genius’s “wrongheaded conclusion” that every hip-hop rhyme had or was in need of an academic annotation.

The second was a misguided late-night video of a shirtless Mr. Moghadam mocking the rap group Das Racist, who met at Weselyan, after one of the MCs equated Rap Genius with “white devil sophistry.” The closing line? “I’m trying to diss you, but you ain’t even famous. You’re like a slim anus.”

“I’m embarrassed of my freestyle dis,” Mr. Moghadam admitted of the video. “I want to take it down, but these guys say, ‘Hey, it’s a meme now!’” He added, “My body looks all right, but I can do much better raps than that.”

Mr. Horowitz acknowledged the trio’s bluster. “They have a real personae-slash-performance art to them,” he said. “They play the part. It took me a little bit to get past the surface pretense, just because it is so unusual. At least in my world—in the tech world.”

“We used to want to be writers and artists and stuff like that,” Mr. Zechory said, when asked about the team's self-presentation. “Then we got really busy working on Rap Genius and we realized it’s all folding in on itself and we have to never break character.”

That routine has gotten them this far. In fact, Andreessen Horowitz wasn't the only firm eager to fund their vision.

“There were definitely other investors who gave them term sheets and there were other investors who thought that it could be important, but in their minds nobody else quite understood it or quite understood them, you know what I mean?” said Mr. Horowitz.

Rap Genius was the fastest-growing startup in its class at Y Combinator, the archetypal Mountain View incubator. (Mr. Zechory says their Quantcast numbers show 10 million uniques, but that account has been made private.) During their three months in the Valley, "The elders were kind of wary of it," said Mr. Moghadam. "They’re starting to come around now that they realize we’re gonna make a shit ton of money."

That last claim remains to be seen. After all, despite its ubiquity in search engine results, Urban Dictionary is still primarily a website that sells ads.

Rap Genius' business plan also calls for selling advertising, but according to the latest numbers from comScore, the site members occupy an industry sweet spot. Sixty-three percent of users are 18 to 34, 66 percent of them are male, and 29 percent boast a household income of $100,000 or more.

“We are gonna do the dopest ads of all time,” Mr. Moghadam declared, but they have other potential revenue streams in mind as well. “Law firms will pay 100K a year for Law Genius Premium,” he insisted over email. “Lexis and Westlaw are jank—you go from one case to another and it’s sloppy and wack ... Law Genius will be legal footnotes on crack! Also it can include ANYTHING ... video, audio ... instead of simply citing a Supreme Court case, you can embed the oral arguments!”

And then there’s the merchandising. “Girl, we finna have an entire STORE of gear for each site,” he wrote in an email that could benefit from some decoding itself, “not just shirts, you can get a Rap Genius onesie, a Poetry Brain parka ...” The possibilities were endless.

Rap Genius has been remarkably successful in getting rappers to sign up to explain their own double entendres, regionalisms, and allusions, partly by hosting the artists at Rap Genius headquarters both in Williamsburg and a villa they rent in “far Malibu,” where Mr. Moghadam said RZA and Black Cobain have both stayed.

The company is planning on moving closer to Los Angeles’s city center. “So with the Hollywood house, we’re always going to have rappers living with us,” he wrote. They even offer visitors use of a studio. “Our recording is decent it’s not wowzers, but it’s pretty dope,” he added, explaining that it was more of a “chill vibe type situation.”

Earning the trust of the rap world wasn’t easy. A breakthrough was provided by 50 Cent’s former manager, the late Chris Lighty—“RIP,” said Mr. Moghadam, tapping his heart twice. Over lunch a couple months ago, Mr. Zechory recalled, Lighty “was like, look, if you want 50 Cent to gamble on Rap Genius, just get Nas to do it. Because 50 Cent will see Nas doing it and be like, ‘Okay, cool.’”

In a similar vein, it was Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager and a startup investor, who encouraged the founders to come up with their “verified artists” section.

It remains to be seen whether Rap Genius will have the same luck with indie rockers. Mr. Moghadam said that he tried talking to Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, into explaining her lyrics when he ran into her in L.A. “She was like, ‘I don’t want anyone to know what these mean! It’s so deep to me! Get away from me,’” he said, his voice dropping to a stage whisper.

Had he tried Fiona Apple? we asked. “She’s my queen,” Mr. Moghadam responded, wistfully. “Fiona Apple, if I could, I would just want to take her to sushi. I know what [her lyrics] mean!”

If Rap Genius succeeds, it will be because its founders have no other choice, a dynamic that happens to be of the VC firm’s investment criteria, said Mr. Horowitz. “Their whole lives are dependent on them making this work, right? They are all-in,” he said with a laugh. “It’s not like they’ll go work at Facebook! Nuh-uh. This is it. They have to make this work. And we love that.”

ntiku@observer.com

A version of this story appeared in the October 17, 2012 issue of the New York Observer. 

Mr. Andreessen went as far as writing his funding announcement Rap Genius style--complete with line-by-line explanations!--to the tell the world why his firm invested in the Y Combinator whiz kids.

While rappers like Das Racist have described Rap Genius as "white devil sophistry," turning up their nose at it entirely, many others, like Nas, RZA, and 2 Chainz, have set up verified accounts to interpret their own lyrics for their confused fans.

But considering the recent freakout that erupted when Nicki Minaj's satirical lyrics were woefully mistaken for a Mitt Romney endorsement (no help from Rap Genius there!), we had to wonder if Mr. Andreessen's politics would affect the site's newly-established street cred?

After all, according to Open Secrets, Mr. Andreessen, one of the richest billionaires in tech, has contributed exclusively to Republican campaigns over the past two years. That includes donations to Mitt Romney, Tea Party favorite Paul Ryan, "race-baiting" Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, and Orrin Hatch. The dollar amount is a pittance of Mr. Andreessen's personal fortune, but donations also include giving $100,000 to Romney's main SuperPAC Restore Our Future, $30,800 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and $30,500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Earlier this year, Mr. Andreessen told CNBC that he was once "a big Clinton Gore supporter," before he decided to reverse his position for a "dyed in the wool" businessman like Romney.

One reason Rap Genius might not be sweating partisan backlash from rappers and hip hop fans? The founders, who all met at Yale University, have bigger goal in mind that just decoding rap lyrics. They want to annotate all the text.

That meshes with a vision Mr. Andreessen first had at the beginning of his career. The first version of Mosaic, the original browser, was supposed to include a feature that would let the entire internet comment on anything. As he explained in his Rap Genius post:

Back in 1993, when Eric Bina and I were first building Mosaic, it seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web – our idea was that each web page would be a launchpad for insight and debate about its own contents. So we built a feature called "group annotations" right into the browser – and it worked great – all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued. Unfortunately, our implementation at that time required a server to host all the annotations, and we didn't have the time to properly build that server, which would obviously have had to scale to enormous size. And so we dropped the entire feature.

So like all things today, perhaps his investment was inspired by a case of 90s nostalgia. Now that's he's got skin in the Rap Genius game, though, we'd love to hear his interpretation of one Kanye West lyric in particular.

That is a face that says, "Ha-HA!"

Ladies and gentleman, there is a shadow stalking the tech scene. First Google, then Facebook, and now a whole raft of up and comers. Yes, it is the founder-controlled company (typically achieved by the arcane means of a dual-class stock structure; don't worry about it), and today the Wall Street Journal is on it: "There's a power struggle underway in Silicon Valley. At stake: Power itself." (Pause for Bezosian cackle.) 

The Journal even singles out one firm in particular as the ultimate advocate of the trend:

"Andreessen Horowitz is telling entrepreneurs it prefers situations where the founders have controlling stakes, reckoning that they'll be better able to resist outside distraction and focus on making great products."

"We bet on boy kings" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

For example, the paper reports that the firm is currently supporting Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg as he negotiates for a dual-class voting structure, which would grant him more valuable stock and therefore tee him up for Zuckerbergian levels of control in the event of a future IPO. And we'd probably be doing the same thing, if we were hearing this kind of thing from the namesake Andreessen Horowitz cofounders:

"It is unsafe to go public today without a dual-class share structure,'' Mr. Andreessen said. When Andreessen Horowitz invests in a technology company run by the founder, "I feel better if another investor can't topple that person,'' said Ben Horowitz, Mr. Andreessen's co-founder.

We wouldn't want any activist shareholders intruding on that tech sandbox, now would we?

Maybe all the magazine cover boys will start donating?

For as much as venture capitalists like to position themselves as disruptors--they stood with the 99 percent and not the 1 percent during Occupy Wall Street--they are, after all, barons in their own right. And now they're following the philanthropic model of their corporate brethren and donating at the firm, rather than the individual, level. Today, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz promised to donate at least half of their venture capital income from Andreessen Horowitz to charity.

Historically, TechCrunch notes, "major philanthropy in the industry has mostly come from individuals, like John Doerr and Michael Moritz." Perhaps Mr. Andreessen has been influenced by some pillow talk? In December, the New York Times profiled his wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen's attempts to encourage "tech titans like her husband to become as famous for giving money as they are for making it," before they retire. She advised Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Priscilla Chan, for example, on their $100 million donation to Newark public schools.

As part of the pledge, the partners announced that they are jointly donating $1 million to six local charities today. Mr. Andreessen choose Fresh Lifelines for Youth, a charity for underprivileged children and Mr. Horowitz choose Via Services, a group that helps people with special needs, reports Dealbook.

The notion of "half-giving," of course, is best associated with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who have been encouraging their fellow billionaires to follow suit through the Giving Pledge. But Dealbook notes that Mr. Andreessen, who donated to Mitt Romney's campaign earlier this year,  did not reach out to Mr. Buffet.

In fact, it was Scott Weiss, a new addition to the firm, who initially brought up the notion. Andreeessen Horowitz raised a $1.5 billion fund in January, so many of its newer investments, such as Fab.com, Pinterest, and Foursquare, have yet to exit. But Dealbook says that the decision to donate as a firm was unanimous.

Mr. Horowitz. (Twitter)

Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz sits on Foursquare's board and serves as a close mentor to engineering lead Harry Heymann. His guest post yesterday over at AllThingsD is a how-to guide for demoting a loyal friend you've hired to work at your startup.

"There came a day when it was clear that I needed to hire someone with more experience to run the function I had previously entrusted to a loyal friend. Damn. How do you do that?" Mr. Horowitz writes. "As hard as it may be, you need to take a Confucian approach. You must consider first all of the other employees, and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole."

Remember the recent fallout between Foursquare's celebrity couple cofounders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai?

Seems relevant.

And for your moment of zen, here's Nada Surf's hit "Popular."

three important rules for breaking up
don't put off breaking up when you know you want to
prolonging the situation only makes it worse
tell him honestly, simply, kindly but firmly
don't make a big production
don't make up an elaborate story
this will help you avoid a big tear-jerking scene
if you want to date other people, say so
be prepared for the boy to feel hurt and rejected
even if you've gone together for only a short time
and haven't been too serious
there's still a feeling of rejection when somebody says she prefers the company of others to your exclusive company
but if you're honest and direct
and avoid making a flowery emotional speech when you break the news
the boy will respect you for your frankness
and honestly, he'll appreciate the kind straight-forward manner in which you told him your decision
unless he's a real jerk or a cry-baby
you'll remain friends

Mr. Horowitz

On his blog today, Ben Horowitz, the hip-hop loving half of Andreessen Horowitz, confirmed the news that Dealbook broke last week: The new VC kid on the block did indeed raise $1.5 billion for a third venture fund.

In the post, which begins with an existential epigraph from Outkast about the meaning of life, Mr. Horowitz sets about answering two questions: "Why did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money?" and "How did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money?"

See now, we woulda gone with: "Where are you going to $$$$$pend it???"

Like the rappers he's so fond of quoting, Mr. Horowitz starts by talking about his days on the streets as a lowly founding CEO who wasn't respected by his investors. That was part of the motivation for launching Andreessen Horowitz.

"Marc and I share a simple belief that became the basis for our new venture capital firm: in general, founding CEOs perform better than professional CEOs over the long term, and a venture capital firm that enables founding CEOs to succeed would help build the best companies and yield superior investment returns."

To that end, Andreessen Horowitz decided to open up its network so that it would provide,  "firm-wide, dead simple to access and comprehensive—supported by operating partners who work full-time to develop and manage each branch of the network." No more awkward conversations asking your VC to introduce you to potential customers. The results are paying off:

This approach has already lead to some stunning results:

• In 2011, we hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at our office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.
• We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio.
• We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies.
• We’ve had nearly 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies.

As Mr. Horowitz wrote in a press release “a16z’s Fund III is all about extending our capabilities to more disruptors and pioneers,” adding, “We’re remaking the modern venture capital firm, and entrepreneurs are responding to our unique approach.”

And here we thought they were responding to your ability to bestow a six month old concept with a $200 million valuation.