Ben Horowitz explains why a16z doesn't invest in neoclouds after living through the dotcom bubble "If you get into a pathological debt situation, that can wreck anybody. It's why, by the way, we're not invested in any of these neoclouds, for that reason. That whole thing scares me, having been through it." "It can end up being a very dangerous arbitrage business where you can get upside down easily." "You look at Loud Cloud just as an example, here's a simple thing that happened to us in 1999. Bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it, it was very hard to get. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years." "By 2001 it was $50 a megabit. So if you were holding bandwidth, you were just dead." "So that kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur. And so different than what we'd like to fund. That, you know, it just scared me to death."

Kids, I don't know what advice you are getting, but ragebaiting investors and then sending them SAFE docs to just wire you money is NOT how investing works..

18 largest VC firms. 1. Andreessen Horowitz (@a16z) - $105.5B 2. Insight Partners (@insightpartners) - $92.2B 3. Sequoia Capital (@sequoia) - $82.2B 4. Tiger Global Management - $78.0B 5. Founders Fund (@foundersfund) - $58.9B 6. Thrive Capital - $50.5B 7. Lightspeed (@lightspeedvp) - $50.0B 8. Accel (@Accel) - $46.8B 9. General Catalyst (@generalcatalyst) - $45.5B 10. Dragoneer Investment Group - $37.0B 11. New Enterprise Associates (@NEA) - $35.6B 12. Index Ventures (@IndexVentures) - $25.3B 13. TCV - $22.5B 14. Khosla Ventures (@khoslaventures) - $21.7B 15. OrbiMed - $20.6B 16. Bessemer Venture Partners (@BessemerVP) - $20.2B 17. Deerfield Management - $19.1B 18. Battery Ventures (@BatteryVentures) - $15.6B

Everyone would love capitalism if housing and healthcare worked like this. The biggest reason people turn against capitalism isn’t that markets don’t work. It’s that basic necessities keep getting more expensive, while things exposed to real competition tend to get dramatically better and cheaper. Where markets truly work, products improve and relative prices fall. Where supply is constrained, regulation limits competition, or local monopolies dominate, costs rise. Especially in housing, healthcare and education. And those are the basic needs people use to judge whether the system is actually working for them. @paulg

Serious question: how do you still motivate your employees when the average joe is worth $25M

the more people you consult for advice, the more likely you’ll make a bad/average decision. (1) ppl are, on average, risk averse...and, in quantity, will blunt your boldness. (2) ppl may hate/envy opportunities they lack. (3) ppl tend to mix cynicism (bad) w/ criticism (good)