Since our inception in 2009, Andreessen Horowitz has been a Silicon Valley enterprise capital agency. This was extremely intentional on our half. Traditionally, the most important variety of nice know-how firms emerged from Silicon Valley for good cause – the community impact. Many issues drove the community impact, however a very powerful was this: For those who have been an amazing know-how entrepreneur born wherever on this planet the place it was tough to start out an organization corresponding to Bangladesh or The Sudan or Marianna, Arkansas, and also you determined to maneuver, the place you have been most probably to maneuver to was Silicon Valley. Because of this, Silicon Valley grew to become the place that attracted a lot of the nice nationwide and worldwide expertise.
Then in 2020, COVID-19 hit and know-how firms have been pressured to determine the right way to work remotely. It seems that operating a know-how firm remotely works fairly darned nicely. It’s not excellent, however mitigating the cultural points related to distant work seems to be simpler than mitigating the worker satisfaction points related to forcing everybody into the workplace 5 days/week. Because of this, practically each know-how firm has moved to a distant or hybrid method to work and this variation is profoundly weakening the Silicon Valley community impact.
This can be a superb factor for the nation and the world. As my companion Marc wrote in his 2011 article, “Software program Is Consuming the World,” each essential new firm is prone to have a world-class software program workforce at its core. Concentrating all of these firms into one or two geographies cuts off nice alternatives from anybody who can contribute, however can’t simply transfer. Distant work is opening up many new places for entrepreneurs and know-how employees. We embrace that by altering our personal working mannequin.
In our agency’s new working mannequin, we work primarily nearly, however will use our bodily presence to develop our tradition, assist entrepreneurs, and construct relationships. Particularly, the agency is now digital, however can materialize bodily on command.
Because of this, we now have configured the agency to have the ability to bodily assemble wherever on this planet in a short time. To that finish, we’re opening 3 new workplaces in Miami Seashore, New York, and Santa Monica along with our current Menlo Park and San Francisco places. Our headquarters shall be within the cloud and we’ll proceed to create bodily workplaces globally the place wanted to assist our groups and companions.
