source: GigaOm
… when compared with a professional CEO”. I had to complete the sentence because some of the founder CEO’s go on to become great CEOs but they don’t always start that way. I finished reading the book “The Hard Things about Hard Things” over the weekend and the last chapter captured the essence of where Startup Founder need help and how Andreessen Horowitz Venture firm was created to solve that. According to Ben Horowitz the two key deficits are:
- The CEO skill set – Managing executives, organizational design, running sales organizations and the like were all important skills that technical founders lacked.
- The CEO network – Professional CEOs knew lots of executives, potential customers and partners, people in the press, investors, and other important business connections. Technical founders on the other hand, knew some good engineers and how to program.
I think this is spot on in terms of the technical founders that I have worked with in the past. In addition to the above, I have seen investors who put money on technical founders with absolutely no idea of how to resolve the above two deficits and they expect magic to happen with the startup. I cannot imagine investing in a company and not knowing how I was going to help the startup founder in some tangible way to bridge the above two deficits. Ben goes on to explain the question that he and Marc Andreeseen tired to answer through their new venture Andreeseen Horowitz Ventures,
How might a venture capital firm help founder CEOs close those gaps?
http://a16z.com there is a story behind the URL as well. Go get the book, it is a must have for startup founders and investors alike.
Coming back to our small island north of the atlantic, what is lacking in Iceland is a venture firm that has the core mission of trying to solve the challenges entrepreneurs and startup founders have here in Iceland. I have written about this a while back when I had been working with the Team at CLARA.
What if a venture firm in addition to investing capital at all stages of the company development also provided the kind of mentorship that would accelerate the learning process for the founders? Also, what if the venture firm also systematize and professionalize the network and made the connections and helped build bridges from Iceland? That is exactly what Andreeseen Horowitz Ventures has done. This is not very different from what Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre and Seth Levin have done in Foundry Group… here is an excerpt from Foundry Group’s website:
What We Do
As true early-stage investors, we are comfortable making small seed investments (as little as $250,000 – $500,000) to help promising entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground. We are equally comfortable participating in larger, more traditional Series A venture financing rounds. Regardless of the size of our initial investment, the size of our fund allows us to continue to support our portfolio companies through their entire financing lifecycles.
In addition to providing the necessary venture capital to get a company up and running, we are committed to leveraging our experience in starting and growing companies, our expertise in the technology industry, and our network of relationships to help great entrepreneurs turn great ideas into great companies.
How We Do It
We believe that success comes from building a collaborative and supportive relationship between Foundry Group and the entrepreneurs and executives in whom we invest. Having walked the proverbial mile in the entrepreneur’s shoes, we understand where we can add value—such as helping build out a management team, thinking through strategic business development and growth opportunities, or providing advice on exit strategies—and we aren’t afraid to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty.
Rest assured, however, that we also know the difference between being value-added investors and being micro-managing investors. As venture capitalists, we believe our role is to identify, help build and support the team that will make our companies successful, not to run those companies ourselves.
We also believe that, in early-stage investing, it is critical we maintain a direct relationship between our entrepreneurs and our managing directors, rather than using junior professionals to manage the work load. Foundry Group’s team structure, fund size, and investment process have been intentionally created to ensure this philosophy guides our interactions with all of our investments.
In most cases, Foundry Group will be the first institutional investor in the companies that we back. Because of our active engagement with our companies, we typically will take a correspondingly substantial ownership position in our investments and will join as a member of the company’s board of directors.
We recognize that sometimes the best ideas aren’t ones that generate broad investor consensus. Though we are happy to co-invest with other venture firms as part of a syndicate, we look to our own evaluation and interpretation of an entrepreneur, a market opportunity and a company’s prospects to guide our investment decisions. As a result, we view ourselves as “syndication agnostic” and are entirely comfortable investing in an early-stage company as its sole investor rather than seeking the validation of co-investors.
Would it not be great if we could combine the Andreeseen Horowitz and Foundry Group’s “How we do it” philosophy and have that firm based in Iceland to invest in Icelandic Startups? If you have read this far then it is not difficult for you to connect the dots… 🙂 keep watching this space for more news on this.
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