Better than Business School
I have been hesitating as to whether or not I should link to this remarkable and practical series of posts on entrepreneurship and venture finance by Marc Andreessen on his new blog. My hesitation is twofold –
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(1) driven by jealousy and not wanting to fuel the fire (as his blog has zoomed to giddy heights of popularity, authority and influence in just a few short weeks)
and
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(2) driven by the thought that due to (1) nobody in the world hasn’t already seen them linked to a thousand times before.
Of course I want to believe that (1) is only due to the fact that he is a famous and rich serial entrepreneur and geek (a ready-made blogosphere rock star so-to-speak.) But of course, while this probably hasn’t hurt, I know deep down that the sheer quality, insight, and variety of his writing creates its own demand. I guess the intelligent thing for me to do is to applaud and celebrate the addition of yet more great (freely available) ideas and knowledge to the world and just work harder to articulate clear and intelligent views that resonate with people. (Just to be clear I’m not so worried about my Technorati ranking or page views, I just want to change the world and figure out how to make some money doing it, and figure my blog is a good way to put my stone in the river so-to-speak!)
As for (2) well, if you’ve seen it all before, skip this post, if not and given that I suspect many of my (non-west coast) readers may not have been swamped by the pmarca phenomenon in the last few weeks, I figured it was worth creating a handy index of these incredibly useful posts:
On Venture Capitalists:
The Pmarca Guide to Startups:
I hope you find these as interesting and valuable as I did, and I would highly recommend you add his feed to your newsreader and make reading pmarca part of your weekly routine, it is definitely in that most esteemed category of literary endeavour: brain food.
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been thinking about the world of venture funding (for all sorts of different reasons) and have been thinking about joining the conversation as to how this industry – this process – works. I’ll try to find the time to pull my thoughts together over the coming weeks but will probably assume familiarity with Marc’s guide if and when I do put pen to paper. (You see? prerequisites…(!)…the blogosphere is just like university. Only you learn more. And get drunk less. 
)
