Rap Genius, the Brooklyn-based site that lets the hive mind take a stab at explaining hip hop lyrics, announced today that they have received $15 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The powerful venture capital firm is run by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and rap fanatic Ben Horowitz, notorious for starting his business-minded blog posts with a hip-hop epigraph. Read More
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: Read More
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. Read More
The last time we checked in with social commerce startup Fancy was back in February, around the time Kanye West tweeted out his approval for “My friend Joseph’s site.” The Joseph in question is ThingD founder Joe Einhorn, the wunderkind entrepreneur trying to create “the Facebook of stuff” as Ben Popper wrote in a profile of Mr. Einhorn in The Observer in 2010. (Somewhere along the way, The Fancy opted to drop the “The.”)
Like Pinterest, Fancy is focused on discovering and collecting images of things. Unlike Pinterest, which relies on affiliate marketing links, anything on Fancy can be bought. You “fancy” a thing and Fancy lets brands and retailers sign up to sell that item on the site. That photo of the Eiffel Tower, for example, comes attached to a deal for hotel nights in Paris. Read More
It's Hard Out There For a Pimp
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???” Read More
With $1.2 billion under management across three funds, Andreessen Horowitz has the capital and connections to invest in, well, pretty much any damn startup it sees fit, even at later stages when a company’s valuation starts to look a little bubbilicious.
Last February, for example, Andreessen Horowitz invested more than $80 million in Twitter through stock in the secondary markets. And that was despite not being part of Twitter’s recent (at the time) $200 million round led by Kleiner Perkins. The Journal chimed in: between Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon, Andreessen Horowitz could connect all four!
More recently, between leading sought after rounds in Fab, Airbnb, Foursquare, and Pinterest, it’s hard to come up with a hot Internet startup that Andreessen Horowitz isn’t involved in.
But as Dealbook’s Evelyn Rusli reports, it’s reach might grow even bigger. Read More
In this weekend’s New York Times magazine, Talk columnist Andrew Goldman (or The Softer Side of Deborah Soloman, as we like to think of him) sits down Marc Andreessen, poster VC for the current boom, to ask if it’s really more like a bubble. Read More
The Atlantic‘s Nicholas Jackson wrote a curious post about Ashton Kutcher yesterday in which Mr. Jackson alleges that Mr. Kutcher’s “smart decisions in the start-up space make most venture capitalists look like amateurs.” Despite that, Mr. Jackson points out:
“But he doesn’t get a lot of coverage. At least not as much, in the tech press that is, as Peter Thiel or Ron Conway or Paul Graham. And that’s probably because he still describes himself as an actor.”
Guess all that stage time about his approach to investment at TechCrunch Disrupt wasn’t enough. If you ask Mr. Jackson, “Kutcher has invested in so many–and had so much success with– startup companies, that he might be called a venture capitalist first and an actor second.”
Let’s look a little closer at this premise, shall we? Read More
The current wave of IPOs that investors hope will extend from LinkedIn through Groupon and onto Facebook is making some venture capitalists very, very wealthy. But the bonkers bubble money isn’t exactly getting spread around. Bloomberg reports that the success of firms like Sequoia, Greylock, Accel, and Andreessen Horowitz, all of whom have equity in the most valuable start-ups, is driving a massive wedge between “the venture-capital industry’s haves and have-nots.” Read More
