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Andreessen Horowitz
- Scott Kupor, one of the earliest partners at Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, wanted to address the questions he gets from entrepreneurs most often in a blog series that has turned into his latest book, "The Secrets of Sand Hill Road."
- Kupor told Business Insider that he wanted to let entrepreneurs in on what makes venture investors tick, from how limited partners come into play to his theories on evaluating pitches or addressing the prospect of the dreaded down round.
- Although Kupor emphasized that his book isn't the one-size-fits-all guideline to raising money in Silicon Valley, the book is a comprehensive introduction to the world of venture capital for any entrepreneur considering a funding round.
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Sand Hill Road is a quiet tree-lined street in Menlo Park, a suburb just 33 miles south of San Francisco. This stretch of asphalt, and its unassuming office parks, is the subject of plenty of Silicon Valley lore because it is home to the purse strings on which the tech industry operates.
Andreessen Horowitz was not the first venture capital firm to set up shop on Sand Hill Road, but it is certainly one of the area resident's biggest household names. One of the firm's earliest partners, Scott Kupor, said he recognized that many entrepreneurs he met with were intimidated by a perceived power imbalance. In December 2017, he set out to write a series of blog posts to try and shed some light on the inner workings of the venture capital world.
Kupor told Business Insider he realized he was in need of some heavy-handed editing if the blog post was going to work. So instead he committed to writing a full-length book, which manifested as the recently-released "The Secrets of Sand Hill Road."
"If we can figure out a way to have everyone speak the same vocabulary, and not feel like people are getting taken advantage of because we've done this a thousand times and they've done it a few times, that was really the goal," Kupor told Business Insider of his decision to publish the book.
The book reads like a how-to manual for starting a venture-backed company in Silicon Valley's difficult to navigate and highly competitive ecosystem. Kupor relied on few anecdotes throughout the book, and so it reads more like a textbook than the blog series he had originally planned.
"It's certainly not the Bible because, obviously not every VC firm is the same and it's obviously heavily influenced by our views here and what we've seen over the past 10 years," Kupor said. "It's generalizable, though, to a broader set of venture interactions that entrepreneurs will have."
Here are some of the key secrets Kupor wanted to let entrepreneurs in on in "The Secrets of Sand Hill Road:"