What’s So Special About Andreessen Horowitz?

A Boston entrepreneur’s take on the secret of a16z's success.

Mike Troiano
The Startup
Published in
7 min readApr 30, 2016

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Flying back from a few productive days at the Andreessen Horowitz Executive Briefing Center. That such a place even exists speaks volumes about their philosophy and approach, but it’s worth some deeper reflection for the benefit of my friends on both the entrepreneur and investor sides of the startup equation.

a16z has been an investor in my company, Actifio, for a few years now. Our board member, Peter Levine, is great — professional, engaged, grounded in real world experience, and looking to add value where he can. The same can be said of our other board members, though, so the differentiated value prop of a venture capital firm, beyond a certain threshold, has to come from something other than the quality of its partners.

For the uninitiated, the pressure to differentiate among VC firms today is huge. The holders of capital that invest in these firms know a disproportionate share of the returns come at the very top of the startup pile. Returns on the capital class as a whole are driven not by limiting strike outs and hitting doubles consistently, but by a handful of moonshot grand slams that separate the winners from the losers year in and year out. By the time most of these deals get done everyone knows about them, making the competition to get the buyer (meaning the entrepreneur) to purchase the commodity (meaning the cash) with still-unrealized enterprise value is often intense.

The usual dynamics are at play in this decision, of course… personal relationships, brand reputation, track record etc. I used to think Andreessen Horowitz’ success was rooted in the reputations of its founding partners and extended team, collectively representing a karmic goodwill repository of epic proportion in the valley and beyond. But that’s only part of the story.

Seeing it all up close and personal this week, I came up with a way to visualize what separates the firms I believe will dominate the venture landscape in the future, and those that will be left behind:

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Mike Troiano
The Startup

Storyteller. Consiglieri. Lyrical gangsta. Partner, G20 Ventures, thoughts here are my own. https://nf.td/miketrap