“The thing that stands out is the thing that’s different.” “What else are feathers for? They just like to get ruffled,” Andreessen says with a smirk. And in doing so, the thinking goes, it’ll again make other firms feel like they have one hand tied behind their back. By renouncing its venture capital status, it’ll be able to go deeper on riskier bets: If the firm wants to put $1 billion into cryptocurrency or tokens, or buy unlimited shares in public companies or from other investors, it can. It was a tradeoff firms gladly made-until the age of crypto, a type of high-risk investment the SEC says requires more oversight. Why? Well, venture capitalists have long traded a lack of Wall Street-style oversight for the promise that they invest mainly in new shares of private companies. More aggressively, they tell Forbes that they are registering their entire firm-a costly move requiring reviews of all 150 people-as a financial advisor, renouncing Andreessen Horowitz’s status as a venture capital firm entirely. They just finished raising a soon-to-be announced $2 billion fund (bringing total assets under management to nearly $10 billion) to write even bigger checks for portfolio companies and unicorns the firm missed the first time. And one thing about saying you’re going to fix a broken industry-you create plenty of competitors who won’t hesitate to capitalize on even a whiff of doubt that you can back up the hype with results.Īnd so Andreessen and Horowitz, who rank 55th and 73rd, respectively, on this year’s Forbes Midas List, intend to be disagreeable themselves. Today there are a record number of rival billion-dollar funds and a newer kid on the block in SoftBank, which, armed with a $100 billion megafund, makes them all-Andreessen Horowitz included-look quaint. And in the conference rooms of Sand Hill Road, stakes in the next Instagram, Twitter or Skype-three of its best-known early deals-are no longer the upstart VC firm’s for the taking. Every revelation of social media’s tendency to foster society’s worst forces poses a challenge to his and his firm’s trademark techno-evangelism. Optimism that technology will transform the world for the better has soured with each successive Facebook data scandal (Andreessen, an early investor, still sits on Facebook’s board). Taying number one, however, is even harder than getting there.
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