The man who popularized the Web browser has started a venture capital fund to back the next generation of new technologies.
Marc Andreessen, who cofounded Netscape, was to announce yesterday that he and Ben Horowitz, a longtime business associate, have raised US$300 million that they intend to invest in technology companies.
The venture capital company, Andreessen Horowitz, will risk small sums, as little as US$50,000, on new ideas.
Then, if they work, they will put in more money, as much as US$50 million, for the companies to grow globally. The fund will have its offices on Sand Hill Road, the stretch in Menlo Park, California, that is home to top venture firms.
Andreessen Horowitz will be testing a theory of investing, one that has lost favor in recent years in Silicon Valley, that smaller funds making smaller investments in very young companies will yield higher returns.
Five-year returns in the venture capital industry, which reached 48 percent in 2000 at the height of the dotcom bubble, were just 6 percent through last year, the National Venture Capital Association said. Venture investors make much of their money when their startups go public, but only four have sold shares to the public this year.
Andreessen Horowitz plans to look for companies like Facebook, where Andreessen is a director. Facebook started with just US$500,000 but has since raised US$600 million to grow.
The partners, who also cofounded Opsware, a software company they sold to Hewlett-Packard, said they planned to stick with what they know. Almost all of the companies in which they invest will be in Silicon Valley, they said.
That is unusual these days, when many funds set up shop in China, India and other countries.
They will also invest only in information technology companies — “anything with a chip or anything that runs software,” Andreessen said — another rarity these days.
“We will not be doing biotech or clean tech,” he said, then added jokingly: “We probably won’t even recycle.”
Instead, they will focus on startups that do networking and storage, consumer Internet services and cloud computing. They are also excited about consumer electronics.
“Silicon Valley companies are becoming a major force in consumer electronics again. It’s sort of back to the future,” Andreessen said, pointing to the success of the Flip video camera, whose maker, Pure Digital, was sold to Cisco in May.
Andreessen and Horowitz have already been making angel investments together for four years. They have put US$4 million into 45 firms, including Twitter; Qik, a service that publishes live video from mobile phones; and Aliph, which makes the Jawbone Bluetooth headset.
Through that investing, they have a method to figure out whether to bet on a new idea.
Andreessen focuses on a new technology and the potential market, while Horowitz analyzes whether an entrepreneur is capable of executing, they said.
“In the venture capital business, 15 companies a year still deliver 97 percent of returns,” Horowitz said. “The key to success is still finding those 15.”
Japanese technology giant Softbank Group Corp said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia Corp, raising US$5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier. Tokyo-based Softbank said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia last month, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. Softbank reported its profit in the April-to-September period soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about US$13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7 percent year-on-year
CRESTING WAVE: Companies are still buying in, but the shivers in the market could be the first signs that the AI wave has peaked and the collapse is upon the world Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported a new monthly record of NT$367.47 billion (US$11.85 billion) in consolidated sales for last month thanks to global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Last month’s figure represented 16.9 percent annual growth, the slowest pace since February last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 11 percent. Cumulative sales in the first 10 months of the year grew 33.8 percent year-on-year to NT$3.13 trillion, a record for the same period in the company’s history. However, the slowing growth in monthly sales last month highlights uncertainty over the sustainability of the AI boom even as
BUST FEARS: While a KMT legislator asked if an AI bubble could affect Taiwan, the DGBAS minister said the sector appears on track to continue growing The local property market has cooled down moderately following a series of credit control measures designed to contain speculation, the central bank said yesterday, while remaining tight-lipped about potential rule relaxations. Lawmakers in a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee voiced concerns to central bank officials that the credit control measures have adversely affected the government’s tax income and small and medium-sized property developers, with limited positive effects. Housing prices have been climbing since 2016, even when the central bank imposed its first set of control measures in 2020, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) said. “Since the second half of
Tax revenue from securities transactions last month increased 41.9 percent from a year earlier to NT$30.3 billion (US$975.8 million), rising on an annual basis for the third consecutive month and marking the highest for the month of October as Taiwanese stocks continued to perform strongly, data released by the Ministry of Finance showed yesterday. Last month, the TAIEX surged 2,412.81 points, or 9.34 percent, marking its largest-ever monthly rise for October as market sentiment was buoyed by a nearly 15 percent gain in contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which accounts for more than 40 percent of the
RSS