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This time of year, the floodgates open to a deluge of best-of lists and end-of-year recaps. But we at a16z have always been more interested in what’s to come. We asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one …
The post Big Ideas in Tech for 2023: An a16z Omnibus appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.
Warren Buffet famously quipped: “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
Every startup is a skinny dipper slipping into the ocean while swimmers are looking the other way. The hope is to find a suit before the tide goes out.
It’s fashionable among investors and many entrepreneurs to claim that being early in a really big market is better than trying to be profitable, or indeed that being early in a big market is all that really matters. Like many popular ideas, this one has lost it’s nuance: big ideas are not the same thing as business ideas, but they sometimes overlap.
As a result of this simplification, there’s a lot of money looking for startups with big ideas. The thinking goes: “Big idea? Big market? Might be a really big outcome!” And for many investors, that’s where the thinking ends. Anyone can — and some people do — get lucky this way, but great investors understand that there is a way to tip the scales in your favor by looking for big ideas that are underpinned by a real business proposition.
One idea in a big market that turned out not to be a business was MoviePass. The idea was very big: what if people could go to a movie in any theater, whenever they wanted, for a simple $10 monthly subscription?
Unfortunately, people who subscribed to MoviePass mostly went to more movies than could be purchased by their subscription fee, which (Read more...)
Warren Buffet famously quipped: “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
Every startup is a skinny dipper slipping into the ocean while swimmers are looking the other way. The hope is to find a suit before the tide goes out.
It’s fashionable among investors and many entrepreneurs to claim that being early in a really big market is better than trying to be profitable, or indeed that being early in a big market is all that really matters. Like many popular ideas, this one has lost it’s nuance: big ideas are not the same thing as business ideas, but they sometimes overlap.
As a result of this simplification, there’s a lot of money looking for startups with big ideas. The thinking goes: “Big idea? Big market? Might be a really big outcome!” And for many investors, that’s where the thinking ends. Anyone can — and some people do — get lucky this way, but great investors understand that there is a way to tip the scales in your favor by looking for big ideas that are underpinned by a real business proposition.
One idea in a big market that turned out not to be a business was MoviePass. The idea was very big: what if people could go to a movie in any theater, whenever they wanted, for a simple $10 monthly subscription?
Unfortunately, people who subscribed to MoviePass mostly went to more movies than could be purchased by their subscription fee, which (Read more...)