[blader]

I don't understand.

The man created the web browser, built multiple billion dollar companies, angel invested and sits on the board of Facebook, and is now one of the most well known VCs in the world - and this is saying what - that he's not as good as Felix thinks he could be?

What the hell has Felix Salmon ever done?

I'm seeing more and more of this: pundits and armchair entrepreneurs online who just can't help but tear down people who went in the arena and worked their asses off and built something.

Shut up and go build something people want.

[ReadEvalPost]

    What the hell has Felix Salmon ever done?

Felix Salmon is a journalist. He provides value to the world by reporting or critiquing -- in this case, critiquing the notion that Andreessen and his business practices are worth venerating or emulating.

That he has not built a successful start-up is entirely unrelated to that point, much in the same way the fact Roger Ebert isn't a director is unrelated to his critique of films.

[andrewfelix]

>Felix Salmon is a journalist.

Exactly. Not being a successful VC does not preclude you from criticising a successful VC.

[nullflux]

However, Salmon's incentives aren't aligned the same and regardless of his desire to show a lack of bias to be a "good journalist", there is a point that he stands a lot to gain if his critique of Andreessen becomes popular.

Sure, he makes good points, but I'd take this type of critique a lot more seriously if a successful VC said it. Journalists are good at writing and doing a job of disseminating information. Given their role, they will never be completely accurate when it comes to making predictions of an industry in which they are often on the periphery of "the trenches".

[unreal37]

I think there is a point in the original article that is perhaps overstated but nonetheless mainly true - Andreessen is being hailed as one of the great entrepreneurs of our time by Wired. But really, his main skill is building companies that don't make much money and selling them to other companies. He has never really created anything of long-term value. He's no Warren Buffet or Bill Gates.

[jmj42]

> He has never really created anything of long-term value

Except HP Server Automation[1], HP Operations Orchestration[2], HP Network Automation[3], and that's just Opsware products. That doesn't touch on the lasting transformational aspects of his work at UIUC, or Netscape.

[1] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro... [2] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro... [3] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro...

[dredmorbius]

Opsware is a freaking joke.

[jmj42]

Do mind elaborating?

In fact, Opsware created products that (still) play an important role in large, private, datacenters. Hell, for what it's worth, their 3 main products were actually created to manage their own infrastructure. Which part of that is the joke?

[dredmorbius]

The deployment attempts I've seen have been spectacular failures. This goes back a few years (~2008), some things may have changed.

Lack of a CLI accessible on managed nodes being a huge issue for datacenter work.

Staggeringly deficient database performance.

My recent experience has been with Puppet/Chef. They're still crufty in their own ways, but far more appropriate than Oopsware.

[pedalpete]

> He has never really created anything of long-term value

if the question is 'value' vs 'dollars'. Netscape was the enabler to the creation of trillions of dollars. That's value. He saw the opportunity and created it.

I don't think he needs to be an innovator to be a VC. He needs to be smart and recognize opportunities when they come to him. He's shown a knack for that.

[jaylevitt]

And as for " I’ve never met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL": Netscape could have been a great acquisition for AOL if we had any idea how to properly acquire a company. It brought years of true, native Internet experience at a time when we were just starting to transition away from being a proprietary thick client.

Sadly, we made the classic mistake: Let's acquire this brilliant team that works well together, and then let's split up the team and sprinkle the individuals around our existing organization in the hope they'll influence our old-school thinking.

That's like trying to get a vaccination from a homeopath.

[ma2rten]

And why is this a bad thing? I don't see why it makes a difference if the company continues to exist on it's own or as part of another company.

[wmf]

True. I think the point is more that these companies made no profits while they were independent and then continued to make no profits after they were acquired; thus in retrospect the acquirers must have overpaid.

[ma2rten]

Except that this line of reasoning assumes that the people who run the acquiring company are morons. This is quite a strong assumption to make without any further evidence. I think neither of us knows enough about HP's fiances to make that claim (I presume you were talking about Opsware).

[gaius]

Because it's a zero-sum game.

[wslh]

I agree more with Felix than with you. Probably many other people built the same "unsuccessful" companies but can't only sell those companies if they are well connected.

[RedwoodCity]

I'm sure this article keeps Anderson up at night thinking could be as amazing as Felix. Perhaps Anderson could have created the next great thing himself, instead he chose to help other people bring their ideas to the market place. Mentors have a greatly under appreciated roll in the success or failure of companies.