Marc Andreessen on rival venture capitalist Bill Gurley: 'I can't stand him'
They saw Benchmark Capital, a boutique VC firm "with no back-office specialists to provide the services they'd craved" as the antithesis of what they were trying to build with a16z.
"We were always the anti-Benchmark," Horowitz says in a New Yorker profile. "Our design was to not do what they did."
According to Horowitz, a Benchmark partner once asked him in front of his cofounders: "When are you going to get a real C.E.O.?"
Additionally, "Benchmark's best-known venture capitalist, the six-foot-eight Bill Gurley, another outspoken giant with a large Twitter following, advised Horowitz to cut Andreessen and his six-million-dollar investment out of the company," according to The New Yorker's profile.
So it comes as no surprise that Marc Andreessen had this to say about Bill Gurley: "I can't stand him. If you've seen 'Seinfeld,' Bill Gurley is my Newman." One CEO described Andreessen and Gurley's relationship as being "like watching Coke and Pepsi go head to head."
From the New Yorker:
Like other investors, Bill Gurley has spent a significant amount of time this year talking about the bubble in Silicon Valley's tech sector. At a SXSW keynote, he warned that Silicon Valley's optimism - the same optimism perpetuated by VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz - could eventually lead to the demise of some of these unicorn companies. "I do think you'll see some dead unicorns this year," he said.
Disclosure: Marc Andreessen is an investor in Business Insider.