Marc Andreessen's blog

Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger: a contrarian view

This post is not about the potential Microsoft/Yahoo merger.

Instead, let's just assume for the moment that Microsoft succeeds in its bid for Yahoo.

What would a Microsoft/Yahoo merger mean for startups in Silicon Valley?

Some smart people whom I respect a great deal believe that a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would be bad for Silicon Valley startups.

Says Bill Burnham, for example: "By swallowing up Yahoo, Microsoft will be removing one of the biggest and most active acquirors of start-ups in Silicon Valley... [making] M&A less competitive in general and [reducing] the # of potential exits... [which is] bad news for Internet [startups] and their VC backers anyway you look at it."

I respectfully disagree;… Read more

Education-centric Ning social networks proliferating like bunny rabbits

I'm incredibly excited to share with you something that our good friend Steve Hargadon just pointed out to us.

This is a list of user-created social networks on Ning in and around the world of education.

Each of these social networks was created by someone who signed up for an account on Ning, created a network, and then invited in friends, colleagues, and/or students to interact around specific educational topics.

I love this list because it is a vivid illustration of what it means for there to be almost 150,000 social networks on Ning already, with hundreds … Read more

Blogging agenda for 2008

First, a big thank you to all of my readers who made my first year (pro-rated) of blogging so much fun and so satisfying!

Second, here's my blogging plan for 2008:

* Continued blogging about startups, entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley, and related topics. Including many ongoing installments of the Pmarca Guide to Startups.

* Profiles and in-depth analysis of creative professionals across several domains. What do programmers, serial entrepreneurs, writers, artists, cartoonists, film directors, and stand-up comedians have in common? They're all creative professionals, who totally master their fields and then create on a sustained basis throughout a career that can … Read more

Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's image

Last week I posted a rather pointed polemic titled "Suicide by strike" in which I argued that the big entertainment companies were acting suicidally in picking a fight with the writers at precisely the wrong time.

In this post, I more dispassionately outline my theory of why that's the case, and what I think may happen next.

The writers' strike, and the studios' response to the strike, may radically accelerate a structural shift in the media industry -- a shift of power from studios and conglomerates towards creators and talent.

First, some context. In Hollywood, the talent … Read more

Building a state-of-the-art Emergency Room for Silicon Valley

Today I'm extremely excited to tell you about a philanthropic gift that my wife Laura and I are making:

We are giving $27.5 million to Stanford Hospital, for two purposes:

First, to significantly enhance and upgrade Stanford Hospital's current Emergency Department.

And second, to fund the creation of a new state-of-the-art emergency facility in the new hospital that Stanford will build -- assuming it is approved by the city of Palo Alto -- over the next several years.

As you can imagine, Laura and I are unbelievably excited by the opportunity to make this gift. In fact, … Read more

Suicide by strike

From the New York Times:

A strike by Hollywood writers began in New York just after midnight Monday...

[M]ore than 12,000 screenwriters represented by the Writer Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East in the early morning hours in New York began the first industry-wide strike since writers walked out in 1988. That strike lasted five months...

Throughout the weekend, guild leaders held orientation meetings for strike captains, who would supervise picketing teams, and otherwise prepared for an effort to shut down as much movie and television production as possible...

The sides have been … Read more

Report from the front: Tonight's launch of Open Social

Tonight, a small group of entrepreneurs, technologists, executives, bloggers, press, and professional campfire tenders gathered in Mountain View below the official Google tyrannosaurus rex and formally launched Open Social into the world.

As I write this, Google is about half an hour away from officially putting the Open Social spec and code on the Internet for general consumption. At that same time, the video from the launch event should be going live. Keep hitting this currently nonworking link until you get satisfaction! [Correction -- the official site is up at that location! Also, here's the video of the launch … Read more

Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web

My company, Ning, is participating in this week's launch of a new open web API called Open Social, which is being spearheaded by Google and joined by a wide range of partners including Google's own Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide.

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

* "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...

* "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds … Read more

Serial entrepreneurs and today's Silicon Valley

Several days ago, Gary Rivlin of the New York Times called me about a story he was writing about the brilliant Max Levchin of Paypal and Slide, and the general topic of serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The story came out yesterday; below are the notes I prepared for my conversation with Gary.

In a nutshell, Gary's question to me was: what makes serial entrepreneurs tick? Why do people like Max keep going and start new companies when they could just park it on a beach and suck down mai tais?

First, in my experience, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are … Read more