My problem with Marc Andreessen’s blog
I read very few blogs because I hate being overloaded with information. My favorite mainstream ones are Scobleizer (Robert Scoble), Blog Maverick (Mark Cuban), and TechCrunch (Michael Arrington). I subscribe to all my friends that write blogs too, which is about 8 in total (yeah, I don't live in Silicon Valley... yet).
So the other day I came across Marc Andreessen's [new] blog, blog.pmarca.com. I have a lot of respect for Marc, I've never met him, but he is definitely an internet pioneer who showed the world you don't need revenues to have an IPO and sell for billions (Netscape). This guy must be 1) extremely lucky or 2) very intelligent. I think he is the latter, because he is on his third startup, Ning, and it looks like it is going to sell in the hundreds of millions when all is said and done.
But with that said, I have a big problem with how this guy blogs. Here are my questions to Marc:
1) How on earth do you write such long posts every day AND run a startup that is gaining tons of traction? Your posts are WAAAAY too long for me to read all the way through, especially since they are almost daily that you post them. Mark Cuban posts his thoughts about once a week/once every two weeks, and writes long articles when he does.
2) A lot of your advice is definitely valid, since you have seen over 50 startups from start -> exit/failure. But you spend too much time talking about VC's IMO.
Dude, this is Web 2.0, there is no such thing as a "barrier to entry" ESPECIALLY with Amazon S3 and Amazon Compute.
I can't think of anything else I'd ask him. Well, I'd ask him for like $50,000,000 just so I don't have to worry about making money for the rest of my life. And my kids. And my grandkids (hopefully all of the money would be blown by then).
Anyways. Back to Summer Vacation, I'm going to go watch a movie.
June 26th, 2007 - 00:53
Hi Sam — thanks very much for the kind words!
Just a few comments:
* Netscape did $20 million in revenue the quarter it went public in 1995, and did $600 million in revenue the year it was sold to AOL in 1998. Just fyi :-).
* Answer to the first question: I have lots of repressed opinions that are now tumbling out :-).
And the posts all start short…
* Answer to the second question, first part: you’re right, and I’m not going to talk about VC’s that much anymore — I’m going to focus much more, I Just wanted to get the VC stuff out of the way since raising money is important for many new ventures. And people ask about that topic a lot.
* Answer to the second question, second part: I disagree with that, there are tons of barriers to entry, and Amazon’s S3 and EC2, while fantastic services, are not substitutes for a lot of the hard work that most Internet startups need to do to scale and succeed!
Enjoy the movie :-).
Marc
June 26th, 2007 - 01:34
Wow, impossible for me to say that any of your responses are wrong when your it’s straight from the horse’s mouth :)
But I’m still trying to figure out how you can balance running Ning and blogging (quickly becoming an A-lister) at the same time? I have huge respect for bloggers like you; guys that not only talk the talk but actually do something about it (like Mark Cuban). I hope we will run into each other sometime in the future when I’m down in Silicon Valley :)
Sam