Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, delivered a keynote speech at the she++ conference today, sharing what technology is exciting him right now, what he thinks about current startup culture, and how Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, affected his view of Silicon Valley.
“I like to tell people that I’m beta testing the new Google Contact Lenses,” he joked.
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The Queen of England is not exactly known for being a digital-first champion of technology, but it looks like the British monarchy may be trying to change that association going forward, with a new award to recognize tech leaders, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The first £1 million ($ 1.5 million) prize has been awarded to five people: Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Louis Pouzin for their contributions to the Internet protocol, Tim Berners-Lee for creating the World Wide Web and Marc Andreessen for his work on the Mosaic browser.
When Andreessen Horowitz invested a whopping $ 15 million into RapGenius this past fall, they were keen to point out that the platform can be used for decoding more than song lyrics, and extend to other forms of wordplay — literature, historical texts, political speeches, and the like.
The venture capital firm has really put their mouths where their money is. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have both logged onto RapGenius to add their own decodings of the memo issued this past week by Groupon’s founder Andrew Mason after he’d been fired from his position as CEO.
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In doing research for a post on “The Enterprise Cool Kids” at the tail end of last year, I interviewed Silicon Valley veteran Marc Andreessen about where he thought the enterprise was headed.
While excerpts of that interview made it into the post, the transcript of the entire interview was so good it deserved to be published in its entirety.
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This evening at Andreessen Horowitz‘s offices in Menlo Park, founding partner Marc Andreessen sat down with William Janeway, recent author, to discuss “Capitalism in the Innovation Economy.” Janeway is a well-known investor, and theorist in the investment and software world.
It’s a very small event, but the conversation is lively. It’s Q&A style, and Andreessen is firing off questions, clearly the two are pals and have a deep connection. The room will be able to ask questions at some point as well.
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On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO and founder, only had good things to say about Facebook. “They have a great CEO, they are a great company,” he said. But Michael Arrington tried to get him to say what Facebook could have done better. According to Marc Benioff, Facebook should have done its IPO two years ago.
But he believes that the company still has a long way to go. He told the audience that only a few companies have had the potential to become as big as Google over the past few years. “Facebook has the opportunity to be the next Google,” Benioff said.
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The debate over whether the Facebook IPO was or wasn’t a disaster is probably getting a bit tired, but at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, the magazine’s managing editor Andy Serwer couldn’t resist asking venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, albeit indirectly.
Andreessen is on Facebook’s board of directors, which makes it irresistible to ask him about the IPO, but also means that he can’t talk about it specifically. Instead, he talked about the general IPO market, offering an argument that should be familiar to TechCrunch readers. He said there’s a conundrum with IPOs, because if you price them so that there’s a 100 percent pop in the price on the first day, it gets a lot of positive attention, but “the company has left an enormous amount of money on the table.”
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Some significant changes afoot at social and mobile games company Digital Chocolate: founder Trip Hawkins has stepped down as the CEO of the company. And we have also heard a report — yet to be confirmed directly by the company — that president Marc Metis has stepped up as interim CEO; and that Digital Chocolate has laid off up to 180 people across offices in India, San Mateo, Russia and elsewhere.
Hawkins’ news was made public by Trip himself in his company blog, where he notes that he is “transitioning into a consulting and advisory relationship with Digital Chocolate.” Without giving away much about the state of affairs at the company, the move, he writes, is being made as the company is “narrowing its focus.”
“It made sense to get more streamlined,” he explains. Hawkins founded the company eight years ago.
It wasn’t so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people “stop out of school.”
For these reasons, Thiel’s decision to teach a higher ed course was unexpected, even controversial. Last month, he began teaching a class at Stanford called “Computer Science 183: Startup.” One of his students, Blake Masters, provides a glimpse into Thiel’s lectures through his comprehensive class notes.
Masters has turned his notes into essays and posted them on his blog, one of which is a fascinating conversation between the investor and Marc Andreessen on the past, present, and future of the tech industry, which we’ve highlighted herein.
TechCrunch
If you’re aware of Ecko Unlimited, you know they’re apt to making clothing that’s aimed at the streetwear crowd, tending especially to those who love graffiti – this has translated rather enticingly, it would seem, to the tech and audio world with their new “Spray” bluetooth speaker. This device is essentially the same size as [...]
SlashGear
Well, well, well. The Oracle OpenWorld Conference is in full swing, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers tomorrow (Wednesday). “Was” being the operative word here. Thanks to a recent update from Benioff’s Twitter account, it seems that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has cancelled Mr. Benioff’s keynote tomorrow.
Hmmm. Instead, Larry will be king of the stage, with a one hour and forty-five minute keynote, kicking off at 2:45 p.m. PST. No word as of yet on why Ellison cancelled the Salesforce CEO’s keynote. Not even Benioff was sure: “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”
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