There have already been more than 3000 tweets in March alone; more than 10,000 since January 1st—a staggering torrent of 140-character-at-a-time comments, jokes, retweets, even multi-part lectures extending over a dozen or more consecutive tweets.
Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capital investor, is one of the seminal figures of the technology world. He arrived on the scene in the early 90s, the towheaded and self-assured boy-wonder developer of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, who would join Jim Clark to found Netscape and help jumpstart the Web era.
Twenty years later, the hair is gone, but based on the sheer variety of topics he's got an opinion about, the know-it-all self-assurance remains (a gushing fan on Twitter recently labeled him a "genius polymath").
In the last month alone, we've seen Andreessen the management sage, opining in 12 tweets on the Wall Street Journal's insider's report on the way Bill Gross was running bond firm PIMCO: "This exact same behavior/pattern is often found in both the best-performing companies in any space AND in the worst-performing."
There's Andreessen the advertising expert, dressing down the industry: "My view: Agencies can only fulfill demand. Suppliers (publishers) need to go to CMO & in-house marketing people directly."
Andreessen the Bitcoin booster appears repeatedly. His firm Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Coinbase, a startup offering digital wallets for Bitcoin. There's been a 7-tweet attack on West Virginia senator Joe Manchin for proposing a Bitcoin ban ("Manchin FOR suppressing pro-consumer & pro-small business innovation in financial services to increase choices, lower fees, sell globally"). There's a 10-tweet critique of Newsweek's claim it had discovered the man who! created Bitcoin, which devolved into a back-and-forth exchange with several journalists about the media coverage of technology in general.
And, most recently, an off-hand jibe at Warren Buffett for dismissing Bitcoin.
Andreessen the historian, in a Bitcoin sidebar, offers up a 12-part introduction to King Louis XV's finance minister: "The most interesting person in Western history who most people have never heard of is John Law, inventor of concept of paper money."
Andreessen the ethicist unleashes a 12-tweet broadside apparently prompted by the funding of Secret, the anonymous commenting social media app which raised $8.6 million in mid-March. "I think as designers, investors, commentators, we need to seriously ask ourselves whether some of these systems are legitimate and worthy. Not from a user engagement point of view, not from an investment return point of view, but from an ethical and moral point of view."
The list of topics goes on: San Francisco housing. Free trade. Chinese bond markets. And, with the 20th anniversary of the founding of Netscape on the horizon, a series of nostalgic memories about that era, and about Jim Clark, his Netscape co-founder and early mentor.
None of Andreessen's recent Twitter lectures received wider exposure than his bullish prognostications in February about the future of news, with his outrageous forecast that the business could grow as much as 100 times larger than its current size over the next 20 years, which prompted an endless round of navel-gazing responses from the media industry itself, most of it ranging from disbelief to horror (no industry indulges self-loathing more than the media).
It's not like Andreessen needs to be doing any of this for the publicity, or to generate deal flow from prospective startups. He and his firm have already made themselves into perhaps the pre-eminent VC firm of this era, having hit recent home runs with its investments in Skype, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, among others.
On T! hursday, ! Andreessen Horowitz closed the financing on its latest investment fund, raising $1.5 billion from its limited partners to invest in even more companies.
Pure ego may be at work, as this isn't the first time he's taken to a digital media platform to post in volume: several years ago when personal blogging was at its height, Andreessen engaged in a similar exercise, churning out a well-received series of posts on his personal blog over several months which together served as a primer for aspiring entrepreneurs.
And, of course his early mentors, including Clark and Netscape investor John Doerr (Andreessen's predecessor atop the Silicon Valley VC ziggurat) certainly were never shy about self-promotion in their day, and Andreessen has always been a quick study when it came to taking lessons from his elders.
The timing of the launch of his current Twitter frenzy has also proved fortuitous in helping him ward off a set of attacks against his personal integrity. The attacks were launched by noted corporate raider Carl Icahn, who has accused Andreessen of double-dealing while serving as an eBay board member by convincing eBay to divest itself of two businesses — Skype and Kynectic — at prices that were too low.
Andreessen Horowitz subsequently invested in both independent businesses, earning a handsome profit in particular on Skype when it was sold to Microsoft. In between his tweets on other subjects, Andreessen has sprinkled in a series of links rebutting and even counterattacking against Icahn.
How long this lasts is anyone's guess: Andreessen told Recode's Kara Swisher back in January that he intended to keep this up all year. But he launched his blogging career with similar promise, only to run dry in a few months. "Well I started a VC firm, so I was busy," was the excuse he offered Swisher. If you don't want to miss the high-volume phase of his Twitter career, better follow @pmarca before it's too late.
Chip Bayers is a N.Y.-based journalist covering technology and! business! . He has been an editor at Adweek, Newser and Wired Digital, and was previously a staff writer for Wired Magazine.
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