The company’s vision is to build “the first video games in the real world.”

Anki said it will launch its first product, Anki Drive, this fall on iOS for a retail price of $200. At a basic level, it’s a set of sensor-loaded cars controlled by iOS apps, but apparently the real magic is in the artificial intelligence of the device to make decisions on the fly, and in the app to give drivers “an immersive real-world experience.”

In a blog post today, Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen called Anki “the best robotics startup I have ever seen.”

Founded by a group of Carnegie Mellon robotics PhDs, Anki has raised $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Two Sigma; it has been in stealth mode for the past 16 months.

Here’s a teaser video that doesn’t show much, but looks like it’s about to go viral, and here’s a video of the founders talking about their ideas.

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He doesn’t ordinarily give interviews, so when I got the chance to sit down with him at Fenwick’s headquarters in Mountain View recently, I jumped at it. Not long after we spoke, Fenwick announced that Davidson would be stepping aside at the end of the year and handing the chairmanship over to Richard Dickson.

My first question was to ask Davidson to sum up what he does, as he sees it.

AllThingsD: Gordy, I think I have a pretty good idea what you do all day, but tell me, from your perspective, what is it that you do?

Davidson: I’m a general Silicon Valley lawyer. One day I may be at a Cisco board meeting, as I will be tomorrow. The other may be meeting with two kids out of Stanford with a business plan. Those literally happened on the same day a few years ago, and I said to myself that I find them both equally exhilirating. It’s part of the cycle of Silicon Valley. I worked at a startup company before I was a lawyer, so I’ve been there. I worked for a company that was started in an industrial garage out by the San Jose airport. Everyone was there in the big room, and it was fun. We’ve had a great run. About a year after I joined Fenwick, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak walked in and started Apple Computer. And everything has flowed from there. The work has involved startup companies, venture capital, intellectual property, technology licensing, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions. It runs the gamut, which is what makes it interesting. We’ve seen five complete business cycles since then.

And given that, where do you think the business cycle is now?

Well, the stock market is about as high as it has ever been, so it’s an up cycle. There’s a lot of activity. As a firm, we set revenue records in each of the last three years. I’m not sure why the stock market is up. It’s a little mysterious. But you can see other indicators of economic activity. You can measure it with traffic on Highway 101, and in job creation in Silicon Valley. Real estate prices are up, and foreclosures are down. I don’t think it’s a bubble, but then I’ll knock on wood when I say that. Nor do I see it as particulary robust. It’s not affecting all industries. But certainly technology is strong right now, with notable exceptions. Some companies are having trouble.

And there have certainly been a lot of IPOs in recent memory. Which ones have you been involved in?

We did Workday and ServiceNow. We did Fusion-io from the underwriting side. We did Vocera and Silver Spring Networks. Those are a few.

Many, if not all of those, if memory serves, took advantage of the JOBS Act when they initially filed to go public. Do you think that’s been helpful to companies?

The companies certainly like it. Companies are vulnerable to competitive sniping when they file, if they don’t get out on the fastest possible schedule. Competitors are ruthless. They point out to customers that the balance sheet may be running down, and start asking why the company in question can’t get out sooner, and sowing doubt by asking them if they really want to take a product from a company running out of money. And so the JOBS Act has largely solved that problem. I don’t think it’s as revolutionary as the authors thought it would be. The only useful provision of it has been the confidential submission rules for when a company first files to go public. Not many companies that we’ve worked with have wanted to take advantage of the provision that allows them to file only two years of financial data as opposed to three. If you want to be taken seriously, why not be audited for the third year? And the companies that are coming public now are companies of substance. They’re not just raising $10 million or $20 million. They’re raising $75 million or $100 million. At that rate, you probably ought to audit three years.

I’ve been talking to some startup companies at various stages, and they tell me that, in a lot of cases, the venture capital firms are coming to them and not the other way around. It’s almost like the VCs are shoving checks down founders’ throats a bit. Is there perhaps too much money in the system?

Well, there’s been a big shakeout in firms versus a few years ago, so there’s less money overall. Venture funds have been cut in half, and the amount of funds raised is coming down. But the hot companies are just getting money thrown at them. There are companies like GitHub, which is a client of mine. There’s a startup company that was under the radar, and they had a number of venture capitalists chasing them, until they finally went with Peter Levine at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen once said that there are really only 15 VC deals in Silicon Valley every year that really matter, and I think directionally speaking that’s true. And there is a bipolar distribution among the venture funds. There are probably only 15 that are successful, and the rest just aren’t as successful. It isn’t like 1999, when there was too much money chasing too few deals. Now there’s a lot of money chasing a lot of really good deals.

Do you think there is something different with the way that companies are conceived that makes them better now than before?

Well the Internet has changed everything. The infrastructure has changed everything. It doesn’t take much to start a company; with all the open source software and cloud services out there, you don’t really have to do all that much research and development. The tools are there. You can get to the product you are trying to develop quickly. So the time to market is much shorter. So companies can get up and running fast, and build up their scale fast. Think of Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, Square, and how fast they’re growing.

As an attorney, your job is to advise companies on pitfalls they may avoid. What’s the classic thing that you tell companies to avoid over and over again? There must be a million of them.

There are a million of them. One thing is to try and rein in their exhuberance. For example, when VC money is being thrown at them, it’s not always about the highest bidder that is the best source of capital. There’s a story I like to tell about Intuit. Scott Cook funded Intuit by kiting his credit cards for a long time, and almost went bankrupt twice. Finally, when it started to get traction, they went for venture capital, not to fund the company, but to pay off their debt. So they got five offers from five funds, and Scott asked me which one to take. He wouldn’t tell who made the higher or lower offers, but there was about a 50 percent difference in the valuation between the lower ones and the higher ones. I immediately connected the dots and told him to accept the lower offers. He couldn’t believe it, and he asked why. I said that the lower bidders brought with them John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Burt McMurtry of TVI. I said they would make more difference to the ultimate valuation of Intuit. He later remembered that advice, and acknowledged that it was right.

The firm announced the move in a blog post by Ben Horowitz, the text of which you can read below.

Dalgaard stepped down from his position at SAP amid a wider management shakeup there last week. After closing the deal to sell SuccessFactors to that company he had been a member of its Executive Board.

The late 2011 acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP was a watershed moment in the still-unfolding history of the transition of enterprise software to the cloud. For one thing, it kicked off a sequence of acquisitions by other companies.

Within two months, Oracle spent $1.9 billion to acquire Taleo, which like SuccessFactors was a player in cloud-based human resources software. Later, Salesforce.com acquired Rypple and turned it into Work.com. Both took place against the backdrop of the rise of Workday, which went public last year in a $637 million IPO.

I just got off the phone with Dalgaard and Horowitz. Dalgaard said he had spoken to three major private equity firms, but liked the fit with AH better. “At this time of my life I don’t want to be fixing other people’s companies,” he told me. “I want to help influence the future.”

And while he’s certainly going to bring considerable experience to cloud software companies and other enterprise-focused outfits that AH may want to invest in, he’s also got a fair set of chops on the consumer product front, having spent four years working for Darenas Denmark, a Danish division of consumer products giant Unilever.

“I don’t tend to think of myself as an enterprise guy, but with SuccessFactors I was just out to solve a problem that no one else was solving,” he said.

Horowitz said Dalgaard’s role as a general partner will be somewhat jack of all trades. “The general partner’s role is focused on whether or not you can help the founder develop into a CEO,” he said. “So he’ll have the freedom to look at a lot of categories. His experience at Unilever gives him sharp insight into how how you build up a consumer products brand.”

Here’s the text of the announcement.

It’s an honor, a privilege, and so supremely awesome to announce that our newest General Partner is Lars Dalgaard.

Lars is spectacularly qualified. He founded and ran Success Factors and led them to $364M in annual revenue ultimately resulting in a $3.5B acquisition by SAP in 2011. This was by far the largest and most important acquisition in the history of the SaaS category. SAP then put Lars in charge of its newly formed Cloud Business unit, which he promptly grew to $1B in annual revenue. He also served as a member of the SAP Executive Board and the SAP Global Managing Board. He holds a B.A. from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and an M.S. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business as a Sloan Fellow. And if you are an entrepreneur doing business internationally, Lars speaks 7 languages.

But that’s not why we are so fired up about Lars. Yes, he built one ofthe most important enterprise companies of the era. Yes, he fits our standard of Founder/CEOs advising Founder/CEOs. Those are the reasons why we were initially interested in Lars, but those are not the reasons why we absolutely had to have him on our team.

In venture capital, we spend lots of time thinking about business models, product market fit, inflection points, network effects, viral coefficients, and other points of leverage in a business. Those things are important, but they are not what building a company is about. Those are not the things that founders and CEOs spend all day doing. They are not why engineers, product managers, and sales people put in insane hours and make great sacrifices.

Building a company isn’t about business models and inflection points; it’s about doing something larger than yourself. It’s about working for each other. It’s about being part of a team trying to make possible the impossible. It’s about doing it in a way that no matter what the outcome, everyone was glad they were there.

When Lars’ last day finally came after 12 long years of building SuccessFactors, a long line of employees formed. There each team member waited patiently to tell him one last story, recall one last thrill and give him one more hug. One by one, they told him how they did it together and wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. That’s what building a company is about. That’s why we’re here and that’s why he’s here.

But imagine a world where you can buy a few hours worth of streaming audio or add unlimited email but only a modest amount of data for other purposes.

That’s just the kind of world being created by a Marc Andreessen-backed startup called ItsOn. The company’s main business plan is selling systems to carriers that would let them offer these kinds of services.

However, to get that business off the ground, ItsOn felt like it needed to create its own service. So on Monday the company is announcing Zact, a consumer cellphone service designed to be cheaper and far more flexible than others on the market.

“We need to do a service and become our own customers to show what’s possible,” ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh said in an interview.

Whether you want to give your kid more texts, boost your data plan or drop your ex from the account, all these kinds of options can be changed from the phone and on the fly. Want to buy just an hour of video or a month’s worth of email? You can do that, as well.

And if the plan you pick is more than you need, Zact will refund the difference between that plan and the least expensive one that would have matched your usage.

“There’s a way to give people exactly what they want and make a profit,” Raleigh said. Although Zact customers have to pay full price for their phone, they can still save thousands over a two-year contract, Raleigh said.

Another feature is controls that let parents choose not only how much voice, data and texts to give their kids, but also when they can use their device and which apps can run at which times.

Preorders for the service will start on Monday, with devices shipping to consumers by June. Though ItsOn created the service that enabled the flexibility, the underlying network for Zact is Sprint, with ItsOn buying capacity on a wholesale basis.

One big downside initially is Zact’s very limited device portfolio — and that’s putting it mildly. Zact initially only works with two Android phones, the $199 LG Optimus Elite and the $399 LG Viper 4G LTE.

Over time, Zact plans to add phone models as well as tablets and other devices.

But the goal is also to show carriers what’s possible using its service, so that eventually ItsOn can be used by the major operators. And the message is resonating, Raleigh said.

“You see it in their eyes,” he said. “They say, ‘We can be popular.’”

Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

It’s essentially a celebrity VC endorsement for the wearable computing device, which is supposed to be publicly available later this year.

The promise of venture capital investment could serve as validation for a product that, even before launching, seems to be alienating many people who are worried about the privacy, distraction and dorkiness implications of a computer that lives on your face.

The trio founding the collective are: Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen — famous for creating the Web browser and now a leading VC — Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr — investor in Andreessen’s Netscape and Google — and Google Ventures head Bill Maris.

Speaking at a press conference today, Doerr said he was eager for developers to get their hands on Glass. “More than any other platform I’ve seen before, I can’t imagine what they are going to do with this.”

Andreessen added that he thought Glass had much more potential to be a platform than any other wearable computing product on the market, and that it could potentially be as pervasive as the mobile phone is today.

Doerr, Maris and Andreessen said they would “share deal flow” for seed-stage investments in Glass applications, meaning when they see young startups in the space they will clue each other in.

This is not a dedicated fund, like Kleiner Perkins’ iFund for iOS apps, but a sort of united front and commitment to Glass as an interesting platform for development.

Given that Glass is such a strange and potentially controversial — but also potentially really cool — device, Google is going all-out to try to ensure a smooth launch.

So far, the company has hyped the device with skydiving stunts, had models wear prototypes on the fashion runway, promised developers early access and conducted a social media campaign using the hashtag #ifihadglass that made the opportunity to buy a $1,500 device a publicly coveted prize.

People who signed up to to buy the “Explorer Edition” of Glass are supposed to start receiving their own devices later this month, according to product director Steve Lee.

This latest step can be seen as another of these pre-launch strategies, which are actually pretty smart. Getting Google Ventures (the venture capital firm in which Google is the sole investor) and a couple of famous VCs to tempt developers with money is another effort to make Glass cool, and ensure it sticks around for a while.

But Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins are already the two firms that most frequently co-invest in startups with Google Ventures, so this is more of a stunt than a stretch.

So what applications are the Glass Collective VCs excited to invest in?

• Andreessen said he’d like to see apps for paramedics, and a live zombie game.
• Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he’d like to use Glass as a viewfinder for his fancy SLR camera, and to stream GoPro action-sports cameras.
• Maris said he’d like scientists in wet labs to be able to conduct hands-free experiments with Glass, and for paralyzed people to be able to more easily text. He also said he enjoyed an early timelapse app that people at Google built.
• Doerr said developers should read David Gelernter’s “Mirror Worlds” to find inspiration, and that he wanted to see Glass used in healthcare and education.
• Asked whether the Glass Collective would be willing to invest in facial recognition applications for Glass, given the privacy issues, Maris didn’t say no.

CEO Meg Whitman will make a presentation, essentially reiterating her plan to rebuild and repair HP’s foundations in 2013, and to nudge it back over the line to revenue and profit growth in 2014 and beyond. Analysts have generally turned cautiously optimistic toward HP, especially since its last quarterly earnings report.

Numerous shareholders are seeking to rattle both HP management and its board of directors by opposing the reelection of as many as five of those directors. One powerful proxy advisory firm, Institutional Shareholder Services, is urging shareholders to vote against Chairman Ray Lane and directors John Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson. Another proxy firm, Glass Lewis, is opposing four directors, including Hammergren and Thompson, as well as Marc Andreessen and Rajiv Gupta.

Calpers, the powerful California pension fund, has vowed to vote against all five: Lane, Andreessen, Hammergren, Thompson and Gupta, and will also vote against ratifying Ernst & Young as HP’s auditor.

The most likely outcome is that the directors under fire will survive the proxy vote, though of the five directors catching the most heat, Hammergren and Thompson are generally seen as the most vulnerable.

Of course, the day of HP’s shareholder meeting wouldn’t be complete without some fireworks from Mike Lynch, the former CEO of Autonomy, the British software company for which HP paid $11 billion in 2011, only to write its value down about half a year later.

In an open letter to HP shareholders, Lynch reiterated complaints, and asked some interesting questions about HP’s accusations that he and his lieutenants essentially inflated Autonomy’s value before HP acquired it. The text is below:

Open letter from Mike Lynch to the shareholders of Hewlett-Packard

20 March 2013

Today HP will hold its annual shareholder meeting. This meeting provides a moment of accountability for HP’s Board of Directors to all its stakeholders, and is an appropriate time for the Board to address material questions.

A significant issue for HP’s stakeholders is the allegations HP has made against the former management team of Autonomy in relation to the acquisition of that company, and the related impairment charge of $8.8 billion taken against shareholder funds. As a member of the former management team of Autonomy I have a shared interest with the shareholders of HP (of which I am not one) in getting to the bottom of those allegations, understanding exactly what happened within HP related to this situation and resolving it as soon as possible.

We therefore put forward some questions that we believe HP’s Board of Directors needs to answer at the shareholder meeting:

1. Can the Board provide details and evidence of the allegations it has made against the former management team of Autonomy to shareholders and to the people it has accused, so that everyone can understand the allegations that are being made and how it relates to the decisions and statements the Board has made? Can the Board confirm when it first became aware of these specific allegations? Will the Board provide the report from PwC on which its allegations are based to the former Autonomy management team so that this issue can move toward resolution? Will the Board also make available the conclusions of the findings of the recently appointed committee investigating the circumstances of the acquisition?

2. How did HP calculate the impairment charge it has taken against Autonomy? Several qualified commentators, including a former Chief Accountant of the SEC, have questioned how the alleged irregularities in Autonomy’s accounting could generate such a large write-down. How much of the impairment charge was related to the operating performance of Autonomy post-acquisition?

3. Did HP approach the UK Takeover Panel at any stage in an attempt to rescind its offer to buy Autonomy before completion? If so what was the reason it gave and why was this material change of view not communicated to shareholders?

4. The former management of Autonomy began alerting Ms Whitman as early as December 2011 to significant problems with the integration of Autonomy into HP that were negatively impacting its performance. When did Ms Whitman acknowledge that Autonomy was not performing against expectations? Why was this not communicated to shareholders at that time?

5. Will HP commit to behaving in a transparent manner in providing information about these allegations and the legal processes that have been set in motion? This includes not pre-empting announcements by regulatory authorities and not waiting long periods to disclose information.

We continue to reject the allegations made against us by HP and believe it is in the interests of all parties that these questions be addressed directly by the Board so this issue can be resolved as swiftly as possible. HP has acted in an aggressive and unusual manner throughout this episode, making highly damaging public accusations without providing any supporting evidence, either to the public or to the people they have accused.

As we have said before, we believe the problem with the Autonomy acquisition by HP lies in the mismanagement of that business by HP under its ownership, making it impossible for Autonomy to deliver on HP’s expectations. Autonomy’s accounts were fully audited by Deloitte throughout the period in question and Deloitte has confirmed that it conducted its audit work in full compliance with regulation and professional standards. We refuse to be a scapegoat for HP’s own failings.

Dr Mike Lynch

Creative Commons image via toolmantim

But honestly, Web sites that require you to repeatedly click through to see additional pages are often just crappy. Download counts can be easily inflated if an app developer is willing to pay. Registered user counts don’t show whether something is the next big hit or a passing fad.

Analytics company Mixpanel and its investor Andreessen Horowitz are trying to persuade the tech world to be more honest with itself by reporting numbers that are far more informative: Engagement and retention. (Yes, those happen to be the very things Mixpanel measures, but as I’ve written before, they make a lot of sense.)

Some people call page views and the like “vanity metrics,” but Marc Andreessen and Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi have decided they want to raise the shame level by calling them “bullshit metrics.”

Andreessen told me in an interview last week, “People think they’re richer if they have Zimbabwean dollars than U.S. dollars.”

“We and other investors need to get more vocal,” Andreessen said. “Page views and uniques are a waste of time.”

Andreessen said his firm won’t throw start-ups out the door if their pitches include bullshit metrics — but it’s perhaps something they might consider.

And it’s not only start-ups that try to push big numbers over reality; Google famously obfuscated Google+ user counts as it was getting its social efforts off the ground.

The problem is, once one company reports a bullshit metric — like how many registered users it has — its competitors don’t want to appear smaller by reporting something real — like how many monthly active users it has. So the bullshit metric shaming needs to be a broader movement for it to work.

(To which I say, where are the bumper stickers?)

“We can do better as an industry. We should do better because collectively we’re not benefiting — we’re all just fooling each other,” Doshi wrote in a blog post he’s publishing today.

Bullshit metrics do a disservice to the companies reporting them, Doshi said. When companies focus on numbers that are not meaningful, they aren’t optimizing their efforts for what could really help their business.

As an alternative, Doshi proposes — and he is not the first to do so — that every business has a natural goal that correlates with its success. For instance, Yelp benefits most when it has more reviews, and Instagram when it has more photos uploaded. Measuring that “one key metric” can lead to insights that are particular to that business, and optimizing for it can give the company an edge versus competitors that are not so fine tuned.

Here’s Doshi’s blog post:

Bullshit metrics

Every day feels the same. A fledgling startup tries to appear like the up-and-coming market leader while the market incumbent aims to protect its dominance. It has become exhausting to keep up with how fast everyone seems to grow: 100,000 new users per week here, 20 billion monthly pageviews there, and let’s not pass up a watershed moment like 3 million members total. These are the industry’s most praised metrics.

Sadly, we haven’t moved forward over the past decade despite our whole industry becoming smarter about how it measures and analyzes data. Companies still pitch investors with a cumulative user sign up graph, sell advertisers on how many pageviews they get, and bamboozle reporters with the biggest numbers they can find regardless of whether they correlate to success. We can do better as an industry. We should do better because collectively we’re not benefiting–we’re all just fooling each other.

So, enough with the bullshit metrics.

New metrics for the new world

The internet has evolved in the past decade. Websites are no longer static; they are dynamic. Businesses strive to build products instead of websites because they are more rich, more engaging, and more sophisticated. The web 2.0 era was characterized by its use of AJAX which made websites feel like applications instead of web pages. The concept of pageviews is dying. This is far more pervasive within applications we use on our mobile smart phones. Companies are still pressured to tout pageviews as a metric for success to entice advertisers to spend their dollars with them. And yet, users are not generating more pageviews while flipping through photos on Facebook. Extrapolating this idea further makes you consider what signups really mean. Facebook has done a great job with this. They undoubtedly passed their first billion signups long ago, but they’ve made a point to only talk about getting to their goal of 1 billion users who have been active in the past 30 days.

With any change in an industry, we need a mental model of mapping the old way of measurement to the new way.

Actionable metrics

Companies need to start using a new set of metrics that don’t simply make them feel good. They should use actionable metrics that provide insight, provide guidance, and help businesses make better decisions. I fundamentally believe that actionable metrics give companies a competitive edge.

Today, engagement is the better page view. Engagement is a specific action a user takes and it’s something specific to each business. Twitter can measure engagement by number of tweets and YouTube by the number of views a video receives. For Yelp, an actionable metric would be the number of reviews posted because more reviews likely lead to more users that find more value out of Yelp. More users means more reviews–a network effect. For Instagram, a mobile photo sharing application, an actionable metric would be the number of photos uploaded daily rather than the number of users that signed up and never did anything. Engagement helps us understand how actively people are using our products, whereas a pageview could simply be someone showing up to the product and leaving confused or unimpressed.

The most important metric today is retention. It tells you how often a customer comes back and uses your product again. Retention is an objective way to measure how valuable customers find your product so you can improve it if it’s not valuable enough. The best venture capital firms in Silicon Valley are beginning to expect this metric. Companies are starting to include this metric in their pitch decks to provide transparency into whether they can actually get a high percentage of their 100,000 newly signed up users per day to come back weeks later. The truth is, if less than 10% of people come back, then people don’t find the product valuable. To make matters worse, the percentage of people that come back as time goes on usually declines. Gaming best characterizes this decline because consumers eventually get tired as the replay value of a game diminishes. Now, only a small percentage of the original people who signed up are staying engaged. This particular situation is a reason the number of sign ups a company has attained is not an actionable metric.

But the most important thing is that companies find a specific, actionable metric they can focus vigilantly on.

Your One Key Metric

My experience (I am the co-founder of Mixpanel, an analytics company that helps companies like Airbnb, Khan Academy, Dictionary.com, Match.com, and Path) has shown that companies should start by tracking a single actionable metric that they can literally bet the company on. I call this their One Key Metric (OKM). Companies choosing their OKM realize they must pick an actionable metric because pageviews or sign ups aren’t harsh enough and don’t correlate highly enough with the success of their business.

The best part of OKM is that companies can measure other things related to it, to understand how to improve it. In the case of Instagram, their OKM is likely to be photos uploaded. They can measure the percentage of people that download the app and uploaded a photo, the percentage of people who come back and upload a photo a week later, the growth rate of photos uploaded month after month.

Understanding your OKM often leads to deeper, more valuable questions. The answers often surprise businesses and guide them better than before.

Cutting through

Despite the internet’s evolution, bullshit metrics perpetuate a constant cycle of poor understanding. Let’s strive to understand how our businesses are doing and to pick better metrics–the harsher, the better. Let’s stop fooling ourselves with numbers that don’t represent reality. And let’s push the industry forward as a whole because collectively we’ll all benefit.

That might take a whole bottle.

–Marc Andreessen, to Andrew Ross Sorkin on how much Johnny Walker Blue would be required for him to openly discuss everything he thinks about HP (on whose board he sits) at Dealbook’s Opportunities for Tomorrow conference

Chris Dixon will indeed be the latest VC to join Andreessen Horowitz, as I had reported earlier was likely, starting in January.

Dixon is a lively and interesting choice for the high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firm, having been a successful serial entrepreneur, a savvy angel investor and also a voluble tech scene commenter in blogs and on Twitter.

Perhaps most interesting is that Dixon, who is largely based in New York, will move to California to join what Marc Andreessen describes as a “single-office” firm.

In other words, Chris, get ready to be force-fed at Hobee’s!

In all seriousness, Andreessen said in an interview today that his big criteria for picking Dixon was because, “when the next Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room, we want them to say, ‘I want that person.’”

In addition, he noted that Andreessen Horowitz has a “bias for entrepreneurs … and Chris is the real deal when it comes to being an entrepreneur.”

Indeed, Dixon was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Dixon, whose job at Bessemer was junior, said that he became interested in Andreessen Horowitz once he learned more about them after helping the start-ups he had invested in with fundings. He was especially struck by all the added help the firm provided in areas such as recruiting.

While he said his investing as a partner there would be “non-thematic,” he noted that it was likely he would “tilt more toward consumer” investments.

“I am going to try to pick the special bird,” he said, paraphrasing a quote by famed Sequoia Capital VC Mike Moritz. “And not the flock.”

Here is a blog post on the move by Dixon and one by Andreessen, in which he apparently thinks I leak for a living.

“Most people don’t use the majority of the service they purchase,” says ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh. Imagine a world where one could buy a day of streaming video, or a week’s worth of Facebook.

ItsOn says its technology — which requires special software on a smartphone — can do that and more. However, ItsOn doesn’t plan to reveal exactly the kinds of service options it will power until it is ready to launch commercially with carriers next year.

ItsOn is announcing on Monday that it has raised a further $15.5 million from backers, including Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake AG Fund and SV Angel.

“We like the big challenges and this is definitely a big challenge and a big opportunity,” Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen told AllThingsD.

Andreessen notes that carriers have had to spend a fortune on capacity to meet growing data demand, but still don’t have all of the commercial options they need to profitably deliver that service without overcharging the average user.

“Today,” he said, “a large number [of customers] who don’t use much data are subsidizing a small number of people who use a ton of data.”

Technology such as ItsOn’s also opens up the ability for sponsors to pay for specific types of data use. A commerce company like eBay or Amazon might happily pay for high-speed access for those browsing the virtual shopping aisles. Indeed, eBay already does something similar for inflight Wi-Fi access on Virgin America. Meanwhile, a snack company might pay to sponsor a streaming sporting event.

Other options, Andreessen said, include being able to split work and personal data use, or allowing parents to reward a child who does his or her chores with extra Facebook time.

“ItsOn,” he said, “is the way all these problems, we think, get solved.”

Levie will be debuting an array of partnerships with Oracle, NetSuite, Concur, Jive, FuzeBox, Cornerstone, SugarCRM, Zendesk and others, where Box has developed hooks to HTML5-ify what they are doing, so customers of these applications can use all their tools together, instead of in different silos. The company calls this Box Embed, and it was announced earlier this morning.

His openers today are venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and eBay CEO John Donahoe.

8:41 am: Andreessen and Donahoe kick off with some political jokes (the eBay CEO’s wife, Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, is U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council). Andreessen notes that he joined the eBay board shortly after Donahoe was hired.

Andreessen hypes recent eBay progress, including mobile growth, acquisitions of Milo and RedLaser, and the spinoff of Skype (a big deal for him at Andreessen Horowitz). Then he talks about the great stock price. Eventually, he may let Donahoe talk, but we’ll see.

8:48 am: Donahoe says that five years ago it was clear that the eBay user experience was behind. “I started using the ‘T’ word,” he said — with the eBay turnaround being user experience, pricing, policies.

Andreessen asks about company culture. Donahoe says he has replaced 80 of the top 100 people at eBay. The outsiders bring objectivity and new skills. “You can’t change the culture unless you change the people,” he says.

Donahoe says that even though he’s not a founder-CEO, he can inject that energy into the company with acquisitions where the founders take leadership roles — like how 25-year-old Milo CEO Jack Abraham is now head of all of eBay Local, and Zong CEO David Marcus now leads PayPal.

Andreessen sets up two competing mobile theories: Peter Thiel versus Aneel Bhusri of Workday. Thiel says the Yelp of mobile with be Yelp, etc. Meanwhile, Bhusri says mobile is an architecture change that’s fundamental, so there will be new leaders. Which do you believe, he asks Donahoe — clearly a loaded question, considering that eBay is the e-commerce incumbent. EBay apps have been downloaded 100 million times, Donahoe replies. And payments are going to change more in the next three years than they did in the past 20.

9:08 am: Andreessen: Talk about the cloud. Oh, maybe they are going to finally talk about stuff that’s more related to Box!

Donahoe says eBay has always been a cloud company, but it’s increasingly so. He uses Box on his iPad, and his product team loves it, too. Infomercial time!

9:14 am: Donahoe says his big takeaway for the next five years is: “Most people are underestimating how fundamentally the shopping and paying experience is going to change.”

9:17 am: Time for Aaron Levie, who leaps out doing the “Gangnam Style” dance.

He says Box started in 2005 with the goal of helping people manage content from any device.

Today, Box has more than 140,000 active businesses, 14 million users, and 92 percent of the Fortune 500. That’s more than double a year ago.

Now he’s doing some light stand-up about the state of the tech industry. “Larry Ellison joined Twitter, did exactly one tweet, then celebrated by buying an island.”

Box works faster than the competition, Levie says, as much as 10 million times faster in Tokyo. This part is vague, but there is a pretty map.

Box has had a 10x increase in iOS usage, and a 30x increase on Android in the past year.

And there’s been a 72 percent increase in the number of businesses that have taken the product through their entire enterprise.

9:27 am: Levie’s big themes — and these are shockers — are: social, cloud and mobile.

Microsoft was founded around the idea of a PC on every desk in every home — Levie notes this was before his time, though not his COO’s. The challenges were that you needed to move data around physically; it was hard to collaborate; there were lots of error messages; the limit of client-server was met. So now it’s time for post-PC, where we can share and work from anywhere.

Now, instead of a computer on every desk, it’s a computer in every hand.

So Box wants to integrate the world of users and the world of IT.

9:40 am: Following a customer video, Levie says he’s getting to the news, which is around getting to and sharing data in more easy and elegant ways.

Box had never really highlighted search — some users didn’t even know Box had it. A new version of the site moves search to the top center of the page. Levie says his own Box account has access to 100,000 files, so search is critical for him. In the redesign, users will also be able to “Like” content and use other social Facebook-y features.

Users can do things like create Microsoft Word documents directly from the site, and there’s more of a sense of a company network where anyone with an email domain on the same URL can work together.

Levie talks about how customers often feel pressured to buy from one particular vendor. He’s after Larry Ellison again, showing an image of Darth Vader while talking about lock-in.

So Box is launching Box Embed (as I noted way up top in the intro) with 10 partners: Concur, Cornerstone, DocuSign, Eloqua, Zendesk, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM and FuzeBox.

Demo shows how all this sharing, creating and viewing stuff can be built directly into NetSuite.

Folks from NetSuite and Jive come up to talk about how working together with Box is great. But still, it’s clear that everyone wants to be a platform, not an app on someone else’s platform.

10:10 am: On to mobile. The number of enterprise-relevant apps has doubled in the past year, Levie says. Given how fast mobile devices change, and how pervasive they are, companies should embrace BYOD (bring your own device), he argues. So Box is adding to its existing OneCloud platform for mobile (launched six months ago).

50 percent of Box traffic is now from mobile, which is a big increase.

So today there are 100 more new OneCloud apps, doubling the available amount.

More demos: This time, Mindjet jumping between iPad and Web app.

The new Box vision, says Levie, is to give people the ability to work with anyone, anywhere, from any device.

“I love my job and I’m staying.”

–Sheryl Sandberg, on whether she’ll be sticking around Facebook for long, onstage at AdWeek 2012

At least by Wall Street’s estimation: After falling to an all-time low of $17.55 after Labor Day, FB shares are up 25 percent, to $22.

Again, you always want to be wary of turning lots of buy/sell decisions into a single narrative. That said, here’s the new conventional wisdom about the way investors see the company:

• IPO pricing aside, it’s still a giant Web site with a newish ad business, so even in a worst-case scenario it has lots of growth left. It does have a big mobile problem, but every Web publisher has a big mobile problem.
• Mark Zuckerberg appeared onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt and did not melt! So that’s good.
• All of these new product lines Facebook is showing off or hinting at — e-commerce, “premium services” for big users, search — are promising.

And today is a chance for Facebook to polish that story a bit more. COO Sheryl Sandberg is scheduled for two high-profile appearances: First, Charlie Rose, the two-show TV interviewer, will chat up Sandberg and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen at a Web ad conference in New York. Then Sandberg and her top lieutenants will host a press conference, where the rest of us can lob questions.

Hard to imagine any surprises coming out of their event, as Sandberg is very practiced and controlled when it comes to these kinds of interactions. See, for example, her interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, which aired yesterday.

Still, at a minimum, it’s a chance for Facebook to distribute its sales pitch — we’re huge/we’re still growing! — to lots of different outlets. We’ll see if investors want to hear anything else.

Vanity Fair magazine published its annual “The New Establishment” list, out now in its October issue, and Silicon Valley disruptors dominate again over media mavens.

In fact, the top 10 selections of the 50 overall are all from tech, with Apple CEO Tim Cook and head product design guru Jonathan Ive in the No. 1 slot, up from No. 4 last year.

In 2011, that first slot was held by Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who this year was moved to No. 4, which is certainly not as bad a drop as the stock of his social networking site of late.

In the other slots: No. 2 is Google’s twin search engine founders, Sergey Brin and CEO Larry Page; No. 3 is Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos; No. 5 is Twitter and Square impresario Jack Dorsey; No. 6 is venture capital’s Batman and Robin, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz; No. 7, on the list for the first time, is former Googler and new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer; No. 8 is Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann, also new; No. 9 is SpaceX and Tesla Motors kingpin Elon Musk; and No. 10 are LinkedIn’s dynamic duo, Chairman Reid Hoffman and CEO Jeff Weiner.

Singer extraordinaire Adele clocks in at No. 11, the first media appearance on the list.

The rest of the list is chock full of the usual tech suspects, including my All Things Digital partner Walt Mossberg and me at No. 34. (There is also a very nice portrait photo of me with a group of much more accomplished tech women, photographed at Buck’s in Woodside — in which I appear to be oddly staring at something besides the camera lens, while all the rest behave.)

You can peruse the whole list here.

(Full disclosure: Readers who look closely at the list will notice that ATD senior editor Peter Kafka is listed as a contributor, as he was last year. This is true! Also true: Peter wrote biographical entries for several people on the list, and had some input on its composition, although not about us. In addition, I have been asked to write some freelance articles for Vanity Fair going forward, but have not started as yet.)

In a regulatory filing today, seeking to steady its declining shares, Facebook said that its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg will not sell any of his over 500 million in shares of the social networking company, including to pay taxes related to compensation awards he receives.

The move is part of damage control by Facebook, whose stock closed today at $17.73, a new low. That’s more than 50 percent off its May IPO price of $38 a share.

In addition, the filing said that Facebook board members Marc Andreessen and Don Graham would also refrain from share sales, except to pay taxes.

Finally, the company said it would use cash or credit to pay about $1.9 billion in taxes due on the awarding of upcoming employee restricted stock units. Facebook could have sold shares to pay the bill, which might have further depressed the price of the stock. Facebook would not do anything to prevent most staffers from selling their shares.

More than 1.5 billion Facebook shares will be hitting the market over the next year, which has caused investors to shy away from the stock.

Facebook’s stock rose 1.75 percent on the news in after-hours trading, to $18.04.

Here is the full 8-K filed by Facebook:

FACEBOOK_INC_8K_20120904

At least four Groupon investors who held stock in the daily-deals company before it went public have sold or significantly pared back their holdings in recent months. Since its initial public offering in November, Groupon has shed more than three-quarters of its stock-market value, or about $10 billion.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It’s not well known, but last year, before it went public, Groupon almost didn’t.

With pressure from former board member Howard Schultz, and also doubts about timing expressed to CEO Andrew Mason by outside investors such as Silicon Valley luminaries Marc Andreessen and Mary Meeker, the Chicago-based daily deals site pressed forward, anyway.

Since then, it has been a tough ride for Groupon and, perhaps most of all, for Mason.

Yesterday afternoon, I got on Skype to do a video interview with him about the continued swirl — much of it very negative — around the company he co-founded and leads.

“I love Groupon,” he said. “Groupon is my life.”

Not so much everyone else these days — who are starting to compare the company to Web 1.0 flameout Webvan and even, in the ultimate digital insult, Pets.com.

That’s a false comparison — those were both never profitable, and had negative cash flow, unlike the much larger Groupon.

Still, Groupon’s stock has been under pressure pretty much since the time of its IPO last year, with critics hammering on everything from whether its business plan is fundamentally flawed to its controversial accounting to the goofy nature of Mason himself.

He even got dinged for drinking a beer at a Groupon all-hands employee meeting. (I’m fine with that one, by the way.)

Groupon shares hit a new low last week, after it reported second-quarter earnings that showed better profits, but a revenue miss. Growth prospects in its core coupon business, or lack thereof, was pointed to by Wall Street investors for the continued sell-off.

One bright spot was its nine-month-old Groupon Goods, which sells a variety of products and which has grown to $200 million in annualized revenue. But the lower-margin offering makes up a smaller part of the company’s overall results, as does its impressive improvements in mobile commerce.

These two positive developments have failed to impress, though, with the stock at even lower lows today — at $4.74 a share. That’s down 82 percent since Groupon went public, making the company worth $3 billion, or about half of what Google had once offered to buy it, and a little more than double its cash on hand.

In other words, it is crunch time for Mason, who must answer to shareholders, employees and his board, and must somehow get Groupon to a better place, and fast.

Among the myriad of risks for him as he does: Everything from new management to the sale of Groupon.

That is not in the cards right now, of course. And, as usual, the affable exec talks with confidence about the company.

To his credit, in this long interview, he is also pretty candid about the struggle.

It’s well worth a watch (except for me looking like I just got off a red-eye flight, which I did).

Here’s Mason:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120817/video-exclusive-heres-groupons-andrew-mason-talking-about-daily-deals-sites-stock-smack-future-plans-and-ipo-regrets-or-lack-thereof/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120802/marc-andreessen-steps-down-from-dalton-caldwells-mixed-media-labs-board/ http://allthingsd.com/20120802/marc-andreessen-steps-down-from-dalton-caldwells-mixed-media-labs-board/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:07:01 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=237197 Wednesday was an ugly day for infighting in the Valley, after Dalton Caldwell, a Silicon Valley veteran and serial entrepreneur, posted a withering missive to his personal blog on Wednesday, in which he accused Facebook of engaging in shady, bullying negotiation tactics when dealing with his company.

But as I pointed out yesterday, this wasn’t just a bruise on Facebook’s reputation. It’s a problem for venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, as Marc Andreessen sits on the board of both Facebook and Caldwell’s company, Mixed Media Labs.

At least, it was a problem. I called up Andreessen Horowitz partner Margit Wennmachers yesterday to see what, if anything, the firm planned to do. After the very public dustup, Margit told me, Marc Andreessen will step down from the board of Mixed Media Labs, the team of technologists behind App.net.

To avoid any conflict of interest, Andreessen Horowitz partner Scott Weiss — who has nothing to do with Facebook — will fill the empty seat on Mixed Media Labs’ board. Andreessen, of course, will continue to hold his seat on the Facebook board.

“Andreessen Horowitz has consistently supported me as an entrepreneur, and continues to do so,” Caldwell told me after I got ahold of him Thursday morning. “Their support of me through thick and thin demonstrates that their commitment to founders is more than just marketing.”

Andreessen and Caldwell have had a relationship for some time, since Andreessen invested $5 million and took a board seat on Caldwell’s last start-up, Picplz, in 2010. Andreessen was also an investor in Instagram, a direct Picplz competitor, but only for about a quarter of a million dollars. When Picplz failed in the wake of Instagram’s rise, Caldwell and company parlayed Andreessen’s funding over for his new start-up, which he spent the last year working on, with a 13-man team.

That start-up never launched. It was a discovery app built atop the Facebook platform, which aimed to help users find what apps their friends are using on Facebook. According to Caldwell, Facebook originally gave him the blessing to work on the application when he first told the company about it. But later on, when he brought a finished version to a number of high-ranking members of the Platform team, Caldwell says Facebook essentially insinuated it would bulldoze his app with Facebook’s App Center initiative, were Caldwell ever to launch it. Instead, Facebook offered to “acqhire” Caldwell — an offer he subsequently rejected.

Caldwell’s original post, titled “Dear Mark Zuckerberg,” is damning. “Bad-faith negotiations are inexcusable, and I didn’t want to believe your company would stoop this low,” Caldwell wrote. “My mistake.”

It’s a no-brainer for Andreessen to continue sticking it out on Facebook’s board, and Weiss will continue to advise Caldwell’s team on Mixed Media Labs’ new project, App.net. Born out of Caldwell’s distaste for Twitter’s and Facebook’s restrictive and amorphous platform policies, App.net aims to be “a paid service for mobile application developers,” alternative to the major social network platforms, funded by user subscriptions and not backed by advertising. The company has a goal of raising $500,000 in a Kickstarter-like campaign, yet may not have enough time to pull it off — App.net has raised less than a third of the amount it needs with 11 days to go.

It will be interesting to see where Caldwell heads next if App.net doesn’t take off. He’ll just have to do it without Marc Andreessen on his board.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120802/marc-andreessen-steps-down-from-dalton-caldwells-mixed-media-labs-board/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20120726/25-things-about-ben-horowitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20120726/25-things-about-ben-horowitz/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2012 15:00:54 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://allthingsd.com/?p=233882 In Silicon Valley, where VCs are routinely regarded as superstars, the dynamic duo of Andreessen Horowitz occupies a special niche. The seemingly effortless business sense and high profile of the company are typified by founding partner Ben Horowitz, whose regular blog posts combine management and entrepreneurial know-how with hip-hop lyrics. Here, he offers a glimpse into his priorities and thought process, while becoming the first person to answer all 25 of our Ten Things questions.

What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
“Good Times.”

What qualities do you like in a person?
Courage, humor, original thinking, loyalty.

What qualities do you dislike?
Insecurity, narrow thinking, prejudices, bitch-assness.

Name one thing you will regret never having done (if you never do it).
Ending the oppression of women worldwide.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
Global women’s rights.

Do you still buy CDs or rent DVDs?
Yes.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
CEO of a technology company.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Professional: Helping turn LoudCloud into Opsware and making Opsware successful.
Personal: Marrying up.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
iPhone.

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Thomas Clarkson.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
Twitter.

What was the last thing you fixed?
My mom’s MacBook.

What was your first computer?
TRS-80.

What was your biggest mistake?
Signing a $30,000,000 letter of credit on a building lease for company expansion in early 2000.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
Nope.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
Adidas.

What was the last book you read?
“The Tanning of America” by Steve Stoute.

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?
Speed like The Flash.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Drinking Hine Cognac, listing to old Lil Weezy mixtapes.

What was your biggest most recent purchase?
Professional insulated neoprene BBQ gloves from Ole Hickory Pits.

Whom do you idolize?
Andy Grove, Michael Ovitz, Kanye West.

What do you drive/ride?
BMW b7 Alpina.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
My singing voice.

Who was your biggest influence growing up?
My mom.

Describe an ideal day.
Wake up early, but not too early.
Breakfast at Lois the Pie Queen.
Meet with an entrepreneur who has a great new idea.
Help a CEO figure out an impossible problem.
Write a good blog post.
Dinner with my family.
Read something good.
Watch Manny Pacquiao fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. while drinking yak with my fight buddies Sebastian, Jagoda, Joey, Cartheu and Michel, then listen to Prince, Kanyeezy and Weezy on my Krells.
No throwing up.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120726/25-things-about-ben-horowitz/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120716/marc-andreessen-says-nows-the-time-to-build-companies-like-its-1999/ http://allthingsd.com/20120716/marc-andreessen-says-nows-the-time-to-build-companies-like-its-1999/#comments Mon, 16 Jul 2012 23:59:35 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=230618 Few people have the perspective of living and working in the tech industry that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has. Founder of the browser company Netscape and then of the software company LoudCloud, later renamed Opsware, he’s seen the boom and bust cycles and the shrill choruses of hype (tempered by reality) that go with them. Now, as one of the two primary partners in the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, he’s playing the completely different role of shepherding what he hopes are the next great tech companies.

Andreessen (pictured from a legendary Time Magazine cover on which he appeared in the late 1990s) was the first speaker today at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference being held in a very rainy — but still beautiful — Aspen, Colo. Asked by interviewer Andy Serwer what he’s excited about right now, Andreessen looked back.

“It feels like a lot of the work we put into building the PC industry and the Internet and now the smartphone industry, a lot of that work got us to the point where we have the Internet in everyone’s hands,” he said. “It seems like now the game is really beginning, and we’re going to see what the great killer apps and the great Internet franchise businesses are that are going to be built. That was the conversation that everyone was having in 1999. We were all just early. Back then there were only 50 million people using the Internet versus two billion, and now and we’re on our way to five billion smartphones. Now we have the chance to build the businesses that we thought we were going to build in 1999.”

Asked about Andreessen Horowitz’s huge investment last week in GitHub, he referred to his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about how software is eating the world and described GitHub as “software eats software development.” Another recent investment in Solum he described as “software eats the soil sampling business.”

From there he pivoted to an argument that the consumer electronics industry is coming back to the U.S. Yes, it’s true, he says, that products like iPhones and tablets get assembled in China, but they often include components made in the U.S. and run software that more often than not was designed in the U.S. “You have to ask where the profits go, and they really go to the U.S. The assembly part is really an arbitrage of labor and transport costs.”

And while Andreessen Horowitz has tended to invest more heavily in software plays, it does have a few bets on hardware. Lytro, which demoed at last year’s AsiaD conference, and Jawbone are two examples.

Andreessen said the firm has made an investment in a third hardware company that he declined to name. “We’ve recently made a stealthy investment that we can’t talk about, but hopefully next year everyone will get to take one home to the kids.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120716/marc-andreessen-says-nows-the-time-to-build-companies-like-its-1999/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120710/ning-gets-glammed-up-with-site-wide-update/ http://allthingsd.com/20120710/ning-gets-glammed-up-with-site-wide-update/#comments Wed, 11 Jul 2012 04:09:08 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=228903 Ning, the social network network, announced its largest new release since being acquired by Glam Media last year, the next version of Ning targeted primarily at businesses and professional customers.

The new product, Ning VIP, is a subscription-based service starting at $1,000 monthly, offering a suite of tools for larger-scale social networks. It’s appropriate for a site with a larger customer base like an MTV or a Food Network, rather than a smaller niche community. Some of the new tools combine attributes found on other social networks, like activity feeds, badging and other game-like features.

“Call it Facebook in a box,” said Samir Arora, Glam Media CEO and Chairman. Only Ning’s networks give more granular control over community management features, Arora argues.

The fruits of the Glam acquisition seem to be found in the other half of Wednesday’s announcement, dubbed Glam Social. It’s essentially an entire ad tech platform wrapped up in a bow for the network owner, complete with a social analytics dashboard that tracks engagement inside Ning as well as social metrics on other integrated networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Glam can build ads for users inside of their own network, making it simpler on the network owner.

The other claim Arora trumpets: A full mobile Web autocreation package set up for network owners. So, for new Ning customers, an HTML5-optimized version of their network is set up for them, as well.

Since the acquisition, Arora says, Ning has been growing well, with more than 50 million monthly active users across Ning networks, adding more than 2,000 new networks per month to the nearly 80,000 that already exist.

Will the new, glammed-up version of Ning bolster those ranks? Perhaps, especially for those who don’t want to look to an outside ad tech platform to monitor community engagement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120710/ning-gets-glammed-up-with-site-wide-update/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120622/hp-lawyers-have-one-less-lawsuit-to-worry-about/ http://allthingsd.com/20120622/hp-lawyers-have-one-less-lawsuit-to-worry-about/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:12:03 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=223347 Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors now officially has one less lawsuit stemming from its various fits of corporate drama to worry about. Today, a judge in a Delaware Chancery Court threw out a shareholder lawsuit over the $40 million severance package that former CEO Mark Hurd received after abruptly resigning in 2010, according to a Reuters report.

Lawrence Zucker, an HP shareholder, sued the company’s directors, arguing that they had wasted company money by agreeing to such a large severance package, and that directors could have fired Hurd for cause and thus paid him nothing.

However, doing so, wrote Judge Donald Parsons in his opinion, would have made it more difficult to attract and hire a possible replacement, though he conceded that the amount “may appear extremely rich or altogether distasteful to some.”

Hurd resigned from HP in August of 2010, after complaints by a female marketing contractor led to the discovery of irregularities in Hurd’s expense reports that appeared intended to conceal a relationship. Aside from the expenses, Hurd was cleared by HP of any wrongdoing, but he was forced by the board to resign.

The severance package soon shrunk. A month later, Hurd accepted a job as president at HP rival Oracle, which prompted HP to sue Hurd and Oracle. The two companies later settled that lawsuit and, as part of the settlement agreement, Hurd forfeited 346,000 stock options that had initially been included in the severance, options then worth $13.6 million (though they would be worth a lot less today).

And, of course, we know that the Hurd settlement is central to the current legal mishegas under way between HP and Oracle over Intel’s Itanium chip. HP says there’s a section of the agreement that requires Oracle to port its software to HP’s Integrity servers, which use the Itanium chip. Oracle says there’s no such agreement in force, and that the Itanium chip is on its way to the graveyard, anyway. That trial is still going on in a San Jose, Calif., courtroom.

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