Andreessen, Horowitz venture fund may be good news, if you're in the right ZIP code - Los Angeles Business from bizjournals:

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Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his longtimebusinesz partner, Ben Horowitz, are forming a new VC firm with a focusa on Silicon Valley tech companies. Andreessen writeds that the firm will back companies with stron g technical founders who want to be the CEOs of thecompaniese they’re founding. He wouldn’t rule out companiea outside Silicon Valley, but, “We do not thinm it is an accidentg that is inMountain View, Faceboolk is in Palo Alto, and Twitter is in San Francisco. We also think that ventures capital is a high touch activity that lends itselfr togeographic proximity, and our only officw will be in Silicon Valley,” Andreessen writes on his .
The new firm comez at a time when some are sayinbg the industry needsto shrink, not grow. But Andreesse n and Horowitz found $300 million from mostly institutionapl investors for theirfirsgt fund. The firm, Andreesen-Horowitz, will invest aggressively in seed-stagw startups in the hundreds of thusands of but will also invest in later staged funding rounds for promisinggrowthu companies. Consumer internet, cloud computing for mobile softwareand services, and software-poweredr consumer electronics are among the areas that will draw investments from the new “Across all of these categories, we are completely unafraid of all of the new businessa models,” Andreessen writes.
“We believe that many vibrant new forms of information technology are expressing themselves into markets in entirely new And Andreessen was equally emphatic about where hisfirm wouldn’ty be . "We are almost certainly not an appropriat e investor for any of thefollowing domains: 'clean,' 'green,' transportation, life sciences (biotech, drug medical devices), nanotech, movie production companies, consumef retail, electric cars, rocket ships, space elevators. We do not have the firstr clue about any ofthese fields.
" Andreessen-Horowitz will have the capacity to invesy anywhere from $50,000 to $50 million in new He said that at leas initially he and Horowitz would be the only two general partneras in the company, and they would be selective about the portfolio companies whose board s they join – generally limitint that level of involvement to firms in whicg Andreessen-Horowitz have a $5 million or more Andreessen believes his and Horowitz’s records as entrepreneursw will make them ideal venture capitalists. “We have buily companies, from scratch, to high scalre -- thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollarxs ofannual revenue. In we have done it ourselves.
And we are building our firm to be the firm we woulc want to work with as entrepreneurs Andreessen writes. Andreessen foundefd the pioneering web browsercompany , which was later sold to . Sinced then, he and Horowitz launched , a tech serviced provider sold toin 2007. Netscape and Opsware sold for acombined $11.7 billion. The two have been activ investors in the tech spacesince then. They’vw angel invested in 45 tech startups in the last five and Andreessen serves as chairman of and on the boards of Facebook and Word that the pair would be forminf their own venture capital firm was broken on the Charlide Rose show in But details cameon Monday.
The pair had initiallt planned onraising $250 millionb for the fund, but investor interest prompted them to boosyt the amount, BusinessWeek . The news magazinwe reports thatReid Hoffman, founder of social networking site LinkedIn, is amonbg the investors in the which raised most of its money from institutional investors. Andreessen-Horowitz launches at a tough time for the venturdcapital industry, one in which some are sayint the industry needs to not grow. Venture capital, like the rest of the financiap industry, has been hit hard by the economix downturn. Venture firms make money when theidr portfolio companiesgo public, or are sold to largerf companies.
But the IPO market has been anemic in recent months, making profitable exits more difficult to A recent argues that the industry needs to trim down to regainm effectiveness. "The venture industry needs to shrink its way to becominyg an economic forceonce again," said Robert E. vice president of Research and Policty at theKauffman Foundation. “To provides competitive returns, we expect ventur investing will be cut in half in coming At thesame time, lowering valuationws and improving overall exit multiples should help resuscitate the The Kauffman study finds that despite such high-profile success stories as Googls and , venture firmsd have relatively little to do with most new Only about 16 percent of the 900 companiews on the Inc.
500 list of fastestf growing companiesfrom 1997-2007 had venture backing.