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Who Makes the List of the Top 20 VC Bloggers

September 22, 2009 By

Larry Cheng, a partner of Fidelity Ventures, has been keeping tabs on the top 100 VC bloggers since May, according to TechCrunch writer Erick Schonfeld. Cheng’s methogology is based on how many subscribers each VC has on Google Reader. You can see the entire top 100 VC’s here on Cheng’s blog, Thinking about Thinking. Note–Cheng’s own blog comes in at number 71.

Guy Kawasaki SXSWi 2008
Creative Commons License photo credit: deneyterrio

The top 20 VC blogs follow.

  1. Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, How To Change The World (24,356)
  2. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, A VC (21,881)
  3. Paul Graham, YCombinator, Paul Graham: Essays (16,721)
  4. Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital, Above The Crowd (8,897)
  5. David Hornik, August Capital, VentureBlog (8,037)
  6. Brad Feld, Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (7,543)
  7. Marc Andreesen, TBD, Blog.pmarca.com (5,727)
  8. Ed Sim, Dawntreader Ventures, Beyond VC (4,162)
  9. Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital, Redeye VC (4,071)
  10. Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Ventures Partners, LSVP (3,512)
  11. Seth Levine, Foundry Group, VC Adventure (1,569)
  12. David Cowan, Bessemer Venture Partners, Who Has Time For This? (1,526)
  13. Christopher Allen, Alacrity Ventures, Life With Alacrity (1,419)
  14. Dave McClure, Founders Fund, Master of 500 Hats (1,417)
  15. Multiple Authors, Union Square Ventures, Union Square Ventures Blog (1,365)
  16. Peter Rip, Crosslink Capital, EarlyStageVC (1,107)
  17. Rick Segal, JLA Ventures, The Post Money Value (1,043)
  18. Mike Hirshland, Polaris Venture Partners, VC Mike’s Blog (1,038)
  19. Jeff Bussgang, Flybridge Capital Partners, Seeing Both Sides (1,018)
  20. Mendelson/Feld, Foundry Group, Ask The VC (1,017)
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How to Score Funding, Andreessen’s New VC Firm has $300 Million

July 12, 2009 By

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, co-founder of Ning and co-author of Mosaic, recently announced, “the formation of our new venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and our first fund — $300 million in size — aimed purely at investing in the best new entrepreneurs, products, and companies in the technology industry.”

According to Andreessen, “We have the ability to invest between $50 thousand and $50 million in a company, depending on the stage and the opportunity. We plan to aggressively participate in funding brand new startups with seed-stage investments that will often be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But we will also invest in venture stage and late stage rounds of high-growth companies.”

bay bridge across troubled waters
Creative Commons License photo credit: Darwin Bell

In Andreessen’s post “Introducing our new venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz”,  he outlines seven characteristics he and his partner are looking for:

  • Above all else, we are looking for the brilliant and motivated entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team with a clear vision of what they want to build and how they will create or attack a big market. We cannot substitute for entrepreneurial vision and drive, but we can help such entrepreneurs build great companies around their ideas.
  • 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.
  • We are almost certainly not an appropriate investor for any of the following domains: “clean”, “green”, energy, transportation, life sciences (biotech, drug design, medical devices), nanotech, movie production companies, consumer retail, electric cars, rocket ships, space elevators. We do not have the first clue about any of these fields.
  • We are primarily but not entirely focused on investing in Silicon Valley firms. We do not think it is an accident that Google is in Mountain View, Facebook is in Palo Alto, and Twitter is in San Francisco. We also think that venture capital is a high touch activity that lends itself to geographic proximity, and our only office will be in Silicon Valley. That said, we will happily invest in exceptional companies wherever they are.

So, do you fit the bill?

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