It is pretty typical for an investor to pronounce one thing and then do something totally different.
Investors are driven by the "feel" of the opportunities they get to look at and any pronouncements "we are funding this, not this" are merely looks in the rearview mirror. Trying to read the investors' minds and predict their actions is a lot like Kremlinology, it is best to focus on building a solid business and not worry about their opinions too much.
> It is pretty typical for an investor to pronounce one thing and then do something totally different.
They didn't do that. The original article was one of their partners saying they weren't doing as many consumer Series As anymore, and were shifting toward doing A rounds for enterprise companies and B rounds for consumer.
A bunch of commenters on Hacker News misinterpreted the article as "A16Z isn't doing any Series As", so Marc Andreessen jumped in himself to clarify their original point.
Now it's being misinterpreted again. Read the original article and Marc's comments--they've been consistent with this message the entire time.
Interesting how things change. 5-6 years ago I was working for an enterprise startup and our CEO reported that VCs were generally uninterested in enterprise products. Now they seem to be the higher probability bet. Does this reflect an increasing openness to new products among enterprises?
VCs as a group move as a herd just like every other class of investors. Enterprise startups performed very poorly between 2000 and 2008 (in large part because enterprises all but stopped buying new technology from new companies) and so they went badly out of fashion. This naturally created a shortage of innovation in important categories which started to get rectified by a new wave of enterprise startups starting about then, and then those startups collectively have performed very well financially including as IPOs, which now has VCs as a group all lathered up for enterprise startups.
We like to think that we are observing this phenomenon but still differentiated enough in our thinking and our network that we can pick a new set of winners now. Time will tell if we are right or if we are just part of the herd :-).
