Andreessen, Horowitz venture fund may be good news, if you're in the right ZIP code - Los Angeles Business from bizjournals:

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Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his longtimebusinessw partner, Ben Horowitz, are forming a new VC firm with a focud on Silicon Valley tech Andreessen writes that the firm will back companies with strong technica l founders who want to be the CEOs of the companies they’re founding. He wouldn’y rule out companies outside Silicon Valley, but, “Wes do not think it is an accident that is inMountain View, Facebook is in Palo Alto, and Twittet is in San Francisco. We also thinl that venture capital is a high touch activithy that lends itself togeographic proximity, and our only officd will be in Silicon Valley,” Andreessenj writes on his .
The new firm comee at a time when some are saying the industrgy needsto shrink, not grow. But Andreessen and Horowita found $300 million from mostlgy institutional investors for theirfirsrt fund. The firm, Andreesen-Horowitz, will invest aggressively in seed-stags startups in the hundreds of thusandsof dollars, but will also inves t in later stage funding rounds for promisingh growth companies. Consumer internet, cloud computin for business, mobile software and services, and software-powered consumer electronics are among the areazs that will draw investmentsa from thenew fund. “Across all of these we are completely unafraid of all of the new business Andreessen writes.
“We believe that many vibrant new forms of informatioh technology are expressing themselves into markets in entirelgynew ways.” And Andreessemn was equally emphatic about where his firm wouldn’tt be . "We are almost certainly not an appropriatre investor for any of thefollowinyg domains: 'clean,' 'green,' transportation, life sciences drug design, medical devices), nanotech, movir production companies, consumer retail, electric rocket ships, space elevators.
We do not have the firstt clue about any ofthese Andreessen-Horowitz will have the capacity to invest anywhered from $50,000 to $50 million in new He said that at least initially he and Horowits would be the only two general partners in the and they would be selective about the portfolio companiesd whose boards they join – generally limitinyg that level of involvement to firm s in which Andreessen-Horowitz have a $5 million or more stake. Andreessej believes his and Horowitz’s records as entrepreneures will make them idealventure “We have built from scratch, to high scalw -- thousands of employeex and hundreds of millions of dollarss of annual revenue.
In we have done it ourselves. And we are buildinvg our firm to be the firm we wouldc want to work with asentrepreneurs ourselves,” Andreessebn writes. Andreessen founded the pioneering web browsercompany , which was latert sold to . Since then, he and Horowitz launched , a tech servicd provider sold toin 2007. Netscape and Opsware sold for acombinede $11.7 billion. The two have been activde investors in the tech spacesince then. They’ves angel invested in 45 tech startupz in the lastfive years, and Andreessen serves as chairma of Ning, and on the boards of Faceboomk and eBay.
Word that the pair would be forming their own venture capital firm was broken on the Charlie Rose show in But details cameon Monday. The pair had initially planned onraisingg $250 million for the fund, but investotr interest prompted them to boostg the amount, BusinessWeek . The news magazin e reports thatReid Hoffman, founder of social networkinb site LinkedIn, is among the investors in the which raised most of its monet from institutional investors. Andreessen-Horowitz launchesw at a tough time for the venture capital industry, one in which some are sayingy the industry needs to shrink, not grow.
Venture capital, like the rest of the financiall industry, has been hit hard by the economif downturn. Venture firms make money when their portfolio companiesgo public, or are sold to largedr companies. But the IPO market has been anemic in recent making profitable exits more difficultto find. A recent arguesz that the industry needs to trim down toregainj effectiveness. "The venture industry needs to shrink its way to becoming an economic forcewonce again," said Robert E. Litan, vice president of Research and Policy at theKauffman Foundation.
“Tl provide competitive returns, we expect venturd investing will be cut in half in coming At thesame time, lowerinbg valuations and improving overall exit multiples should help resuscitated the industry.” The Kauffman study finde that despite such high-profile success stories as Google and , venturd firms have relatively little to do with most new Only about 16 percent of the 900 companiees on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growingy companiesfrom 1997-2007 had venture backing.