You’re just a rent-a-rapper, your rhymes are minute-maid
I’ll be here when it fade to watch you flip like a renegade”
—Rakim, Follow the Leader
When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its CEO.
The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built
At Andreessen Horowitz, our primary goal is to invest in the great technology franchises. As we looked at the history of great technology companies, we discovered that founders ran an overwhelming majority of them for a very long time, including:
- Acer—Stan Shih
- Adobe—John Warnock
- Amazon – Jeff Bezos
- AMD—Jerry Sanders III
- Apple – Steve Jobs
- DEC—Ken Olsen
- Dell—Michael Dell
- EA—Trip Hawkins
- EDS —Ross Perot
- Hewlett-Packard—Dave Packard
- IBM—Thomas Watson, Sr. (*)
- Intel—Andy Grove (*)
- Intuit—Scott Cook
- Microsoft —Bill Gates
- Motorola—Paul Galvin
- nVidia—Jen-Hsun Huang
- Oracle—Larry Ellison
- Peoplesoft—Dave Duffield
- Salesforce.com—Marc Benioff
- Seagate—Al Shugart
- Siebel—Tom Siebel
- Sony—Akio Morita
- Sun—Scott McNeely
- VMware—Diane Greene
I’ll be here when it fade to watch you flip like a renegade”
—Rakim, Follow the Leader
When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its CEO.
The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built
At Andreessen Horowitz, our primary goal is to invest in the great technology franchises. As we looked at the history of great technology companies, we discovered that founders ran an overwhelming majority of them for a very long time, including:
- Acer—Stan Shih
- Adobe—John Warnock
- Amazon – Jeff Bezos
- AMD—Jerry Sanders III
- Apple – Steve Jobs
- DEC—Ken Olsen
- Dell—Michael Dell
- EA—Trip Hawkins
- EDS —Ross Perot
- Hewlett-Packard—Dave Packard
- IBM—Thomas Watson, Sr. (*)
- Intel—Andy Grove (*)
- Intuit—Scott Cook
- Microsoft —Bill Gates
- Motorola—Paul Galvin
- nVidia—Jen-Hsun Huang
- Oracle—Larry Ellison
- Peoplesoft—Dave Duffield
- Salesforce.com—Marc Benioff
- Seagate—Al Shugart
- Siebel—Tom Siebel
- Sony—Akio Morita
- Sun—Scott McNeely
- VMware—Diane Greene
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