Marc Andreessen is ready to throw money around with Andreessen Horowitz, his newly named venture capital unit devoted to technology startups. But the Netscape co-founder is also throwing some bold predictions around, too: Andreessen Monday predicted that Facebook, on whose board Andreessen sits, would crack the $1 billion mark in revenue within five years.
Andreessen made the comments to Reuters, suggesting that if Facebook focused harder on advertising revenue, it would see ten-figure returns. Facebook, which is privately held, does not provide revenue figures but told news outlets it expects 70 percent growth this year. Andreessen in his comments put Facebook's figure at $500 million for the calendar year 2009.
"If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year," Andressen said to Reuters, disussing Facebook. "There's every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now."
Andreessen added that Facebook and other social networking heavyweights like Twitter (in which Andresssen has also invested) need to focus on user retention, and grow their revenue gradually instead of making huge profits out of the gate.
Gradual returns seem to be one philosophy of Andreessen's officially announced venture capital firm with business partner Ben Horowitz. Andreessen and Horowitz, who have been investing in various technology concerns for much of the past decade, have thus far raised an initial $300 million for Andreessen Horowitz, and will offer sums as low as $50,000 to fledgling technology companies.
"We plan to aggressively participate in funding brand-new startups with seed-stage investments that will often be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars," wrote Andreessen in a blog post confirming what various news outlets began reporting Sunday night. "But we will also invest in venture stage and late stage rounds of high-growth companies."
Andreessen's long history in the tech trenches include his co-founding of Netscape in the early '90s and other ventures like Loudloud, the cloud services company that later became Opsware and was sold to Hewlett-Packard. In recent years, Andreessen and Horowitz have invested everywhere from Twitter to Aliph, which makes Jawbone Bluetooth headsets.
