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Exactly - good entrepreneurs/companies can raise money and hire employees in any capital climate. It's the companies that lack basic building blocks, like a mis

Exactly - good entrepreneurs/companies can raise money and hire employees in any capital climate. It's the companies that lack basic building blocks, like a mission that resonates with employees on a non-financial level and sustainable sources of revenue, that will go under. Square is a great example of a company that people joined for all the wrong reasons. Not only are they incredibly unfocused when it comes to their mission, products and customer base, but the people joining it seemed to be doing so out of a mercenary instinct triggered by an expectation that Jack's second company would of course be a hit.

scurvy 11y ago
Just like Andreesen's second company was destined to be a hit. Ex Loudclouder here. I'd say 90% of us were there for that reason.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  And Andreessen left Loudcloud in 2005, well before the final Opsware exit, to found his third company Ning (which he never talks about), which ate $134M in funding, only to be acquired for $150M. If you actually look at what Andreessen did at Netscape, he was little more than the pawn of Jim Barksdale and Jim Clark, who trotted him out as the "boy genius" every time they needed to do some PR or developer/community outreach. The vast majority of the code was written by the far better software engineers than Andreessen who joined the founding team (Lou Montulli, Jamie Zawinski, Ramanathan Guha, Aleksandar Totic, and more). Other than that, I'm not even sure why Clark approached Andreessen to co-found Netscape. There were multiple people who worked on NCSA Mosaic, which was itself based on open standards (and the source could be obtained). And Andreessen didn't really believe in its commercial potential at first - he moved to SV to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies, only to quit his job after a few months, when Clark emailed him.

scurvy 11y ago

Just like Andreesen's second company was destined to be a hit. Ex Loudclouder here. I'd say 90% of us were there for that reason.

w1ntermute 11y ago
And Andreessen left Loudcloud in 2005, well before the final Opsware exit, to found his third company Ning (which he never talks about), which ate $134M in funding, only to be acquired for $150M. If you actually look at what Andreessen did at Netscape, he was little more than the pawn of Jim Barksdale and Jim Clark, who trotted him out as the "boy genius" every time they needed to do some PR or developer/community outreach. The vast majority of the code was written by the far better software engineers than Andreessen who joined the founding team (Lou Montulli, Jamie Zawinski, Ramanathan Guha, Aleksandar Totic, and more). Other than that, I'm not even sure why Clark approached Andreessen to co-found Netscape. There were multiple people who worked on NCSA Mosaic, which was itself based on open standards (and the source could be obtained). And Andreessen didn't really believe in its commercial potential at first - he moved to SV to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies, only to quit his job after a few months, when Clark emailed him.