Andreessen Horowitz Fund: Some interesting messages

This is from Marc's blog. Some interesting and positive messages for all Fellows who may sometimes wonder why the Founder inevitably gets replaced by the CEO. A year as a Fellow could teach a lot of things that would come in extremely handy to prevent that from happening.

"We are hugely in favor of the technical founder. We will generally focus on companies started by strong technologists who know exactly what they want to build and how they are going to build it.

We are hugely in favor of the founder who intends to be CEO. Not all founders can become great CEOs, but most of the great companies in our industry were run by a founder for a long period of time, often decades, and we believe that pattern will continue. We cannot guarantee that a founder can be a great CEO, but we can help that founder develop the skills necessary to reach his or her full CEO potential.

We believe that the product is the heart of any technology company. The company gets built around the product. Therefore, we believe it is critical that we as investors understand the product. We are ourselves computer scientists and information technologists by experience and training; therefore, we plan to focus on products in the domain of computer science and information technology.

Here are some of the areas we consider within our investment domain today: consumer Internet, business Internet (cloud computing, "software as a service"), mobile software and services, software-powered consumer electronics, infrastructure and applications software, networking, storage, databases, and other back-end systems. Across all of these categories, we are completely unafraid of all of the new business models -- we believe that many vibrant new forms of information technology are expressing themselves into markets in entirely new ways."

http://blog.pmarca.com/