Andreessen, Horowitz venture fund may be good news, if you're in the right ZIP code - Boston Business Journal:

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Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his longtimesbusiness partner, Ben Horowitz, are forminy a new VC firm with a focus on Silicon Valley tech Andreessen writes that the firm will back companiesd with strong technical founders who want to be the CEOs of the companieds they’re founding. He wouldn’t rule out companiez outside Silicon Valley, but, “We do not think it is an accidenr that is inMountaih View, Facebook is in Palo Alto, and Twitte is in San Francisco. We also think that venturr capital is a high touch activity that lendxs itself togeographic proximity, and our only office will be in Silicojn Valley,” Andreessen writes on his .
The new firm comes at a time when some are sayin g the industry needs to not grow. But Andreessen and Horowitz founds $300 million from mostly institutional investore for theirfirst fund. The Andreesen-Horowitz, will invest aggressively in seed-stagd startups in the hundreds of thusands of but will also invest in later staged funding rounds for promising growth Consumer internet, cloud computing for mobile software and services, and software-powered consumer electronics are amonvg the areas that will draw investments from the new “Across all of these we are completely unafraid of all of the new business Andreessen writes.
“We believe that many vibrantt new forms of information technology are expressinbg themselves into markets in entirely new And Andreessen was equally emphatic about where hisfirm wouldn’t be . "Wed are almost certainly not an appropriate investord for any of thefollowing domains: 'clean,' energy, transportation, life sciences (biotech, drug design, medicak devices), nanotech, movie production companies, consumefr retail, electric cars, rocket space elevators. We do not have the first clue aboutt any ofthese fields." Andreessen-Horowitzs will have the capacity to invest anywherr from $50,000 to $50 millioj in new companies.
He said that at least initiallyh he and Horowitz would be the only two general partnere inthe company, and they would be selectived about the portfolio companies whosw boards they join – generally limiting that levepl of involvement to firms in whicbh Andreessen-Horowitz have a $5 million or more stake. Andreessej believes his and Horowitz’s records as entrepreneuras will make them idealventure capitalists.
“Wd have built companies, from scratch, to high scale -- thousands of employeee and hundreds of milliones of dollars of annual In short, we have done it And we are building our firm to be the firm we wouldf want to work with as entrepreneur s ourselves,” Andreessen writes. Andreessen founded the pioneerinhg web browsercompany , which was latedr sold to . Since he and Horowitz launched , a tech servicr provider sold toin 2007. Netscape and Opsware sold for acombinef $11.7 billion.
The two have been actives investors in the tech spacesince They’ve angel invested in 45 tech startups in the last five and Andreessen serves as chairman of Ning, and on the boardzs of Facebook and eBay. Word that the pair would be forminbg their own venture capital firm was brokem on the Charlie Rose show in But details came on The pair had initially planned onraisinb $250 million for the fund, but investore interest prompted them to boosg the amount, BusinessWeek . The news magazinre reports thatReid Hoffman, founder of social networking site is among the investors in the which raised most of its monet from institutional investors.
Andreessen-Horowitz launches at a toughn time for the venturecapital industry, one in whicnh some are saying the industry needs to shrink, not grow. Ventured capital, like the rest of the financiapl industry, has been hit hard by the economic Venture firms make money when their portfoliop companiesgo public, or are sold to larger But the IPO market has been anemiv in recent months, making profitable exits more difficuly to find. A recent argues that the industry needs to trim down toregaibn effectiveness. "The venture industry needxs to shrink its way to becoming an economic force once saidRobert E. Litan, vice president of Researcjh and Policy at theKauffman Foundation.
“To providde competitive returns, we expect venturs investing will be cut in half in coming At thesame time, lowering valuations and improvinbg overall exit multiples should help resuscitate the The Kauffman study finds that despite such high-profile succesws stories as Google and , ventur e firms have relatively little to do with most new companies. Only about 16 percent of the 900 companies onthe Inc. 500 list of fastesgt growing companiesfrom 1997-2007 had venture backing.