Communications of the ACM
The New New Andreessen
Gregg Segal
As Silicon Valley events go, it was an irresistible draw: Marc Andreessen, Web wunderkind turned venture capitalist, interviewing Michael Ovitz, former superagent and co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency.
The conversation between the pair of icons, staged last month in a packed conference room in the offices of Andreessen Horowitz—Silicon Valley's newest, hottest venture capital firm—turned out to be a lovefest. Ovitz, the most powerful man in Hollywood before his career imploded in the mid-1990s after a disastrous stint at Disney, called his friendship with Andreessen "one of the single most important relationships in my life." Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the Web browser company whose 1995 initial public offering kicked off the Internet era, said he modeled his VC firm on CAA. "A lot of what we're trying to do with Andreessen Horowitz is based on what Michael was doing at CAA and his theories about how to build a high-quality service firm," Andreessen said.
The pantheon of elite venture capitalists, as seen from Silicon Valley, is as indelible as the faces on Mount Rushmore. There's John Doerr, who invested in Intuit and Amazon.com; Mike Moritz, backer of Google and Yahoo!; and Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder who helped propel Silicon Valley's cleantech wave, among others. Every so often an upstart tries to carve his own visage into the granite. At 39, Marc Andreessen, who first made the cover of Time magazine almost 15 years ago, thinks now is his moment to grab a chisel.
From Businessweek
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