Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen: If We’re In A Bubble, It Is The Weirdest One

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:30:03 +0000

Marc Andreessen was interviewed at the Wired Business Conference today. When asked about whether we are in a tech bubble, Andreessen said “If we’re in a bubble, it’s the weirdest bubble I’ve ever seen where everyone hates everything. If you check tech stocks that went public recently, it’s nose down to the ground. We’re now 15 years of flat stock market returns. That’s a weird bubble.” Tech companies like Pandora, Demand Media, and Groupon have seen their stock prices plunge since going public unlike the times when we actually were in a tech bubble during the dot-com bubble between 1995 and 2000.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom Started The Facebook Negotiations By Asking For $2 Billion

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:42:20 +0000

When Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, people were questioning whether the large social networking company got ripped off because Instagram was not making any money. However this deal turned out to be a bargain because Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom started off by asking for $2 billion. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg conducted the negotiations at his $7 million home in Palo Alto. There were no bankers or lawyers there to help with the deal. Just two startup CEOs.

Zuckerberg called Systrom on Thursday April 5th after talking to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg telling her that he wanted to buy Instagram. He reached out to Systrom directly because he was afraid that going through lawyers would have turned Systrom off.

Systrom drove back and forth from his home in San Francisco to Palo Alto repeatedly over three days to hammer out the deal. Zuckerberg only told the board of directors at the company about it after the deal was made on Sunday April 8th.

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen was sitting in Zuckerberg’s living room waiting for one of his regular meetings with Zuckerberg, but he had no idea Systrom was there until he walked out of the room. Andreessen invested $250,000 as a seed round into Instagram.

Systrom knew how bad Zuckerberg wanted Instagram because he tried to buy it the previous summer. Zuckerberg’s direct call made it clear that he was concerned about Instagram’s rapid growth. They were growing even faster than Facebook on mobile devices. Instagram had 30 million iOS users and signed up 1 million Android users in one day.

Asking for $2 billion is a lot, but considering Facebook will eventually be worth $200 billion, Systrom had the power to make such a big request, 1% of the company’s net worth. Zuckerberg is the majority shareholder in Facebook and Systrom owned 45% of Instagram.

Grafitti Artist David Choe May Make $200 Million When Facebook Goes Public

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:47:23 +0000

Grafitti artist David Choe took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls at the company’s first headquarters. That was a great move because his stock may be worth $200 million when the company goes public later this year. Facebook announced a $5 billion public offering on Wednesday afternoon that would value the company at between $75-$100 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg himself has 533.8 million shares, which would be worth $28.4 billion based on a company valuation of $100 billion ($53 per share). Zuckerberg also owns 28.4% of the company outright and has 57% of the voting rights of the company.

Facebook’s first outside investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel put $500,000 into the company, which gave him 44.7 million shares that could be worth over $2 billion. Accel Partners owns 201.4 million shares and they could have a thousandfold return on their investment. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has 1.9 million shares, which is about 0.1% of the company and she may collect 38.1 million additional shares. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has 3.6 million shares worth nearly $200 million. Facebook was founded in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard University 8 years ago.

Mark Zuckerberg’s father was given 2 million shares of stock “in satisfaction of funds provided for our initial working capital.”

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss own 1.2 million shares as part of their settlement with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. The twins claimed that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea when they were students at Harvard. Zuckerberg acknowledged working on them on a similar project, but it was not the same idea as Facebook. Eduardo Saverin was a co-founder in the social network, but his shares were diluted. Saverin sued Facebook and ended up settling for 5% of the company.

David Choe, the grafitti artist, may end up making more money from his graffiti than Sotheby’s was able to get for another artist named Damien Hirst. Hirst made $200.7 million in art auctions in 2008.

Choe was invited to paint the walls at Facebook by Sean Parker, the company’s former president. Choe was offered a choice between cash in the “thousands of dollars” or stock that was worth about the same back then. Back then, Choe thought that Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless,” but ended up choosing the stock anyway.

Andreessen Horowitz Raises $1.5 Billion

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:59:18 +0000

Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital company run by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz has raised $1.5 billion. Ben Horowitz confirmed the investment on his blog today. The company has raised a total of $2.7 billion thus far.

The $1.5 billion will be going towards Fund III. Fund III will be used for extending their capabilities to more “disruptors and pioneers.” In 2011, Andreessen Horowitz hosted over 600 presentations to corporate customers and partners at their Menlo Park office. The presentations resulted in over 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies.

The company has relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers, and product managers. Andreessen Horowitz has added over 550 executives to their network in 2011. Some of AH’s investments include Zynga, Foursquare, Groupon, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Jawbone.

Sarah Lacy’s PandoDaily Raises $2.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:09:03 +0000

Sarah Lacy is the author of “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” and a columnist at BusinessWeek. Michael Arrington hired her to write for TechCrunch.com, but she quit shortly after the technology blog was acquired by AOL. Today it was announced that Lacy has started a new website called PandoDaily and it is backed with $2.5 million in funding. PandoDaily is a daily technology news blog and it will focus on the startup community. The website name was inspired by a colony of trees in Utah called Pando Trees.

PandoDaily will feature regular columns from Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler, and Paul Carr. Farhad Manjoo will also be a columnist at the website. The $2.5 million in funding came from individual investments from Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, Jeff Jordan and Matt Cohler. Aside from these seed investors, PandoDaily has also received funding from CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.

Lacy said that she has no intentions of ever selling PandoDaily and if she does, then she believes she has failed. She was heavily opposed to TechCrunch being sold to AOL at the time, but believed that Arrington deserved to get rich. Personally I’m excited for Sarah and the fact that another tech blog has received funding reaffirms the business model.

[PandoDaily]

Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Other Tech Company Execs Sign Petition Against SOPA

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:49:35 +0000

Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2011 by Lamar Smith (R-TX). This Act would allow the Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement that would prevent online ad networks and payment facilitators from doing business with those websites. Opponents in this bill believe that this is Internet censorship. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang oppose the bill. Their letter will appear as a paid ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

The timing of this letter coincides with the scheduled committee vote taking place tomorrow with a revised version of the Act. The revision of SOPA will “give the U.S. government the power to censor the Web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran.” Below is the full letter from the Internet executives:

An Open Letter to Washington
We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.
However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act–which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online–will undermine that framework.
These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
* Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
* Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
* Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
* Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.
We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

Andreessen Horowitz Preparing To Raise $900 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:34:14 +0000

Andreessen Horowitz is preparing to raise $900 million for their newest fund, known as Fund III. The company’s first fund was worth about $300 million. The company used that funding to put money into Skype and Fusion.io. In late 2010, Andreessen Horowitz raised $650 million for Fund II. They used this fund to invest in Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga. Now the company is preparing to raise $900 million, which means that the company will have $2.15 billion in assets to distribute to companies. Andreesen Horowitz has invested in about 70 companies. The new fund will be used to make investments from between $10,000 to $100 million. [Uncrunched]

Glam Acquires Ning For Around $200 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:41:44 +0000

Glam Media is a company that is considered a social content platform for websites that focuses primarily on women’s interests. Glam will be acquiring Ning.com, a website that allows you to easily create your own social network. Ning.com was co-founded by Silicon Valley Internet tycoon Marc Andreessen. The price is rumored to be about $200 million in cash, stock, or some combination. It is believed that Glam Media is going public soon so Ning is likely to have received a substantial amount of shares.

A couple of years ago, Ning was given a valuation of about $750 million. Venture capital companies have put in about $120 million into the company since they started in 2004. Investors include Andreessen himself, Reid Hoffman, Allen & Company, Legg Mason, and Lightspeed Ventures. Ning currently has 100,000 subscribers and 60 million monthly active users.

Below is the press release:

GLAM MEDIA TO ACQUIRE NING, THE LEADING PLATFORM FOR CREATING SOCIAL NETWORKS AND OWNED BRAND FAN WEBSITES

Silicon Valley Pioneer Marc Andreessen to Join Glam Media’s Board of Directors

Acquisition Will Create One of the Largest Social Media Content Companies with over 240 Million Users & 100,000 Publishers — Creating the First Paid, Owned & Earned Media Platforms for Brands

Silicon Valley, CA — Sept 20, 2011 – Glam Media, Inc. (www.GlamMedia.com), the number one vertical social content platform company with the largest online global reach for women, today announced that it is acquiring Ning (www.ning.com), the leading online platform for building social websites, including more than 100,000 custom branded fan sites.

“Ning is the clear leader for creating custom social websites and communities. Acquiring Ning adds a natural extension to our social media platform, new distribution channels and a talented Silicon Valley team, all of which support our aim to connect brands with engaged, passionate audiences,” said Samir Arora, Chairman and CEO of Glam Media.
“With the addition of Ning, Glam Media will truly become the first next generation media company in the post-social world.”

Since launching the first social blog community in 2005, Glam Media has experienced tremendous success, growing from just seven publishers and 12 authors to more than 2,500 publishers and 4,000 authors globally today. The company has trusted relationships with more than 1,000 leading brand advertisers and is a Top 10 web property with more than 85 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. and more than 200 million globally.

Combining Ning’s world-class technology and deeply engaging social platforms with Glam Media’s super premium advertising solutions and reach will accelerate the company’s vision of bringing brand marketers online by helping them to engage with passionate social communities across all digital mediums.
Glam Media together with Ning will set the standard for the future of media by providing their clients with the reach of portals, the deep connections and interests of Facebook, and the influence of trusted conversations.

“Social media is transforming the way brands are reaching their audiences. The Ning platform and its Network Creators, combined with the power of Glam’s advertising solutions, will ignite the delivery of our Brands+Social integrated programs at significant scale,” said Fernando Ruarte, CTO & EVP Platform & Products at Glam Media. “Together, Glam and Ning will address

important challenges that currently exist for marketers by enabling social media-activated brand campaigns to run in contextual environments that go beyond the few large social networking sites that exist today.”

Ning
Founded in 2004, Ning is the world’s largest custom platform for social communities and networks. The company has experienced explosive growth since it successfully moved to a subscription-based business model led by CEO Jason Rosenthal. Since 2010, Ning has increased the number of paying customers from 17,000 to more than 100,000 and grown its revenue by over 500 percent. Today, Ning has more than 100 million registered user social profiles and reaches more than 60 million monthly unique visitors. The company’s customers are the most active champions of brands, causes and organizations seeking to make an impact in the world using social media.

Ning makes it easy for brands of all sizes to build custom and powerful social brand fan pages and web sites as diverse as Linkin Park’s fan social network, Martha Stewart’s mentorship community, Scott Brown’s virtual campaign office and the collaborative hub for the Peace Corps. More than 50 percent of Ning sites are integrated with social applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, which helps to amplify messages across each member’s social graph.
Ning will operate as a new business unit within Glam Media. Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s CEO, will join Glam as EVP Social Media & General Manager of Ning, and will be a member of the Glam Media executive team.

“Our passion at Ning has always been to make social and mobile core to every web experience, and to leverage the power of community to change the world
and drive value for customers,” said Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Ning. “Connecting our customers with super premium brand advertisers has been a core part of our vision from the earliest days of the company and joining with Glam Media — which shares our roots and belief in the power of social — delivers on that promise.”
Additionally, Marc Andreessen will join Glam Media’s board of directors, joining the top venture firm investors in Glam — Accel’s Thereisa Ranzetta and DFJ’s Tim Draper — as well as Co-Founder of Glam Media Fernando Ruarte, Dr. Marcel Reichart from print media leader Hubert Burda Media, and Glam Media Founder & Chairman Samir Arora. Marc is a Silicon Valley pioneer who created Mosaic, the first web-browser and was the co-founder of Netscape Communications. In 2009, Marc created the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz that invests in leading edge technology companies. He currently serves on the boards of Facebook, HP, eBay and other leading technology companies.

“Glam Media is one of the most dynamic companies in the digital media space, and I am excited to help guide their further expansion,” said Marc
Andreessen. “With the fusion of Ning’s leadership and social networking technology, and Glam’s solid stake in the world of digital advertising, publishing and content creation, there’s no limit to where we can take the company.”

Platforms and Products for Brands and Publishers

Ning joins Glam Media’s suite of next-generation advertising, social, and content platforms, which include:
GlamAdapt — super premium ad serving platform
GlamMobile — full-scale mobile advertising, content and social platform
GlamCreate — content creation management platform
GlamEnable — content platform to enable mobile sites and applications
GlamConnect — first social networking platform for professional authors and bloggers

The acquisition of Ning will allow Glam Media to provide its 2,500 publishers and 4,000 authors with even more innovative ways to connect, create and broadcast authentic content across multiple mediums and social streams — all in one place. Glam publishers will be able to leverage new services that enable them to grow their audiences on desktop, mobile and video and increase frequency, leading to higher levels of engagement.
Additionally, Ning Creators running active online communities will have new opportunities on desktop and mobile devices to monetize their sites and grow successful businesses.

[AllThingsD]

GoodData Raises $15 Million Funding Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:01:55 +0000

GoodData is a cloud-based company that focuses on business intelligence. GoodData has raised $15 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell will be joining GoodData’s board of directors. Google’s president of Enterprise Dave Girouard is also joining the board of directors although Google did not invest.

GoodData plans on using the funding to accelerate their company. The company has 2,500 customers including Time Warner Cable, Zendesk, Twilio, Pandora, and Capgemini.

This is Andreessen Horowitz’s second investment in GoodData. The first round was $2.5 million in seed funding in 2009. GoodData raised $6.5 million in its Series A round of funding. The other investors in this round include General Catalyst Partners and Windcrest Partners.

[AllThingsD]

Rumor: Ning Being Shopped Around For $150 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:09:50 +0000

Ning has recently been shopping around themselves for roughly $150 million according to sources with AllThingsD. Ning, co-founded by Marc Andreessen, gave a pitch to Google, Groupon, and several private equity companies.

The sale would be a break-even for investors. Venture capitalists have put in about $120 million into Ning since the company was founded in 2004. Investors in Ning include Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Legg Mason, Allen & Company, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Rumor has it that AOL, Demand Media, and GoDaddy approached Ning with interest in an acquisition. The companies are interested in Ning’s technology, which has the ability to create custom social networks. Ning had 400% year-on-year revenue growth. They went from 17,000 to more than 100,000 subscribers with about 60 million monthly active users.