Andreessen: Top VC firms cannot invest in competing startups in one category
Marc Andreessen · a16z Podcast | Startups and Pendulum Swings Through Ideas, Time, Fame, and Money · Jan 2, 2019 · at 42:28
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, explains why venture capital cannot become a winner-take-all market during a talk at Stanford University.
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“The central challenge is any top-end venture capital firm that has a reputation that it wants to maintain, which is, I think, very important, can only invest in one company in a category. You can't, practically speaking, invest in competitors. The company you've already invested in will feel its betrayal if you invest in, in the new one. And then the new one will think, if you're willing to invest in them, you must be very, like, dishonorable, that you're willing to betray your previous one. So it just, it doesn't work.”
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