

Marc Andreessen On The Future Of The Enterprise - mirceagoia
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/27/marc-andreessen-on-the-future-of-the-enterprise/

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atdrummond
What are the valuations of all the discussed startups versus those of the old
guard enterprise businesses? What about revenue?

We live by the new style enterprise tools in our firm but I also interact on a
daily business with SMEs as well as large multinationals. By and large,
outside the software industry, this supposed wave being discussed is not
nearly as large or fast as suggested.

I'm not saying it won't eventually grow much larger but I'm also not convinced
that IBM, Oracle, SAP et al won't catch on in time to capture significant
market share themselves. Further the more I look at mature enterprise firms
like Salesforce the more they resemble a traditional big iron firm - only
without the hardware sales.

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cmbaus
I work in financial software and many of the tools used by large companies are
surprisingly archaic. I think there is a lot of opportunity in this space, but
change is slow. What I think is going to happen is that non tech startups
which heavily use new technology will displace the old.

For instance companies like wealthfront will eventually have an advantage over
most financial advisors because the company is built on technology from the
ground up. This might take awhile, but I think it is inevitable.

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don_draper
It's ironic that people in Silicon Valley talk about how the enterprise is
changing and yet almost all of them still practice one of the oldest customs
of keeping the workforce in the same physical location.

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tarr11
"And so all the software basically wants to be in the same place, and it wants
to be in the place where all the open source software is."

This doesn't really make sense to me. I can use open source software from
anywhere. I'm not convinced that there is some huge enterprise business out of
that logic.

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l1ghtm4n
What I got from that comment is that open source begets open source. With all
the forking, related projects want to be hosted together. And with all the
developers contributing to many projects, it's a social graph with a lot of
gravity.

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saosebastiao
His comments about github were great. It is refreshing to see entrepreneurs
that don't think the objective of entrepreneurship is landing a good valuation
from the VCs. It is more refreshing to see a VC that can respect that.

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OGinparadise
So Marc now knows it all?

Every day _they_ keep asking him about stuff and then "Marc this" and "Marc
that". I am about to switch morning cereal but gonna wait until he suggests
one...

edit: noticed the negative votes, still wouldn't change a word.

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nkohari
He does, you know, do this stuff for a living.

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OGinparadise
_He does, you know, do this stuff for a living._

What is "this stuff" exactly? All I know that he is very famous and had an
illustrious past. Now they are throwing lots of money around trying to buy
legitimacy as VCs. Maybe it's the sites I visit, but he's always in the news
saying something.

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nkohari
He doesn't need to "buy" anyone's legitimacy, and he's not just famous. Do
your research.

He's Marc fucking Andreessen. He founded Netscape Communications, which he
took public and then sold to AOL for $4.2B in 1999, becoming AOL's CTO. Then
he founded Loudcloud, which went public in 2001, later being acquired by HP
for $1.6B.

He's now a founding partner of one of the most prestigious software-oriented
venture capital firms, Andreessen-Horowitz. Their investment portfolio
includes Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, and GitHub.

I'd say if any single person is equipped to understand the ebb and flow of the
software industry as it relates to the financial markets, it'd be him.

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OGinparadise
_Their investment portfolio includes Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest,
and GitHub._

I've done my research. Do yours, especially his timing and price entry points.

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prpatel
Adding to your comment, here's a link:
[http://www.cnbc.com/id/50025913/HP039s_Autonomy_Fiasco_Look_...](http://www.cnbc.com/id/50025913/HP039s_Autonomy_Fiasco_Look_No_Further_Than_HP039s_Board)
There's no doubt that Marc is a success in the software & VC space - how much
of that is luck and opportunism is up to you to decide.

