The Channel Wire

July 06, 2009

Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen confirmed to various news outlets Monday that he will launch a venture capital firm devoted to supporting technology companies. Andreessen and a longtime business partner, Ben Horowitz, have raised an initial $300 million for Menlo Park, Calif.-based Andreessen Horowitz, which will use small sums as low as five figures to bolster fledgling tech startups and other tech interests. That was the word from various news outlets Sunday night, confirmed by a Monday blog post from Andreessen himself.

"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. "But we will also invest in venture stage and late stage rounds of high-growth companies."

Andreessen went on to say that Andreessen Horowitz will favor startups founded by people with not only leadership vision but also a strong technical background.

"We are hugely in favor of the technical founder," Andreessen said in the post. "We are hugely in favor of the founder who intends to be CEO. Not all founders can become great CEOs, but most of the great companies in our industry were run by a founder for a long period of time, often decades, and we believe that pattern will continue."

Andreessen also noted that Andreessen Horowitz will be entirely separate from his roles on the boards of Facebook and eBay.

Andreessen is most famous in tech circles for being the co-founder of Netscape Communications 16 years ago. He was also the founder of Loudcloud, a cloud services company that later became Opsware and was sold to Hewlett-Packard and Electronic Data Systems (which HP also now owns).

Andreessen and Horowitz have made various investments over the past few years, including one in Aliph, maker of Jawbone Bluuetooth headsets, and one in social networking and microblogging upstart Twitter.

In an interview with The New York Times, Andreessen expressed confidence in the new venture capital partnership, emphasizing how "15 companies a year still deliver 97 percent of returns" and that the key was "finding those 15."