This interview ‘Blowing Up The Venture Capital Model Again‘ with Marc Andreessen was a fun read.

Marc is a great founder and venture capitalist, but maybe even better at media. He can talk his book and build brand better than anyone.

I love this point he always makes about venture investing:

Andreessen Horowitz’s well-publicized view, one it still holds, was that what matters is not how many companies you back that fail but how many become massive, outlier successes.

I make a living in this business and Marc is correct.

I still remember my first meeting with Mark Scatterday at Pro-Innovative Concepts, Todd Davis at Lifelock, Mike Lazerow at Buddy Media and Baiju and Vlad at Robinhood. They all described what they were going to do and ‘I knew’.

At Social Leverage we work hard at all the companies we invest in, but the massive successes drive the results, and the dialog.

This week Pager Duty went public and it was fun to read what Paul Graham at Y Combinator wrote to TechCrunch back in 2010:

Aaron Levie, founder of $BOX had this to say about the genius of Pagerduty:

In hindsight, all the great companies and businesses sound so simple!

That said, sometimes you know!

A toast to the massive outliers!