Andreessen, Horowitz venture fund may be good news, if you're in the right ZIP code - Los Angeles Business from bizjournals:

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Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his longtime business Ben Horowitz, are forming a new VC firm with a focus on Silicohn Valley tech companies. Andreessen writed that the firm will back companies with strong technical founder s who want to be the CEOs of thecompaniesx they’re founding. He wouldn’t rule out companies outside Silicon Valley, but, “Wse do not think it is an accident that is inMountaij View, Facebook is in Palo and Twitter is in San Francisco. We also thinki that venture capital is a high touch activith that lends itself to geographic and our only office will be in Silicon Andreessen writes onhis .
The new firm comes at a time when some are sayinvg the industry needsto shrink, not But Andreessen and Horowitza found $300 million from mostl y institutional investors for their first The firm, Andreesen-Horowitz, will invest aggressively in seed-stage startupa in the hundreds of thusandzs of dollars, but will also invest in late stage funding rounds for promising growth companies. Consumer cloud computing for business, mobilew software and services, and software-powered consumer electronics are amonf the areas that will draw investmentz from thenew fund.
“Across all of thesr categories, we are completely unafraidc of all of the newbusiness models,” Andreessen “We believe that many vibrant new forms of information technologuy are expressing themselves into markets in entirel new ways.” And Andreessem was equally emphatic about where his firm wouldn’ t be . "We are almost certainl not an appropriate investor for any of thefollowing 'clean,' 'green,' energy, life sciences (biotech, drug design, medical devices), movie production companies, consumer electric cars, rocket ships, space elevators. We do not have the firsty clue about any ofthese fields.
" Andreessen-Horowitzx will have the capacity to invest anywhere from $50,000p to $50 million in new He said that at least initially he and Horowitsz would be the only two general partners in the company, and they woulsd be selective about the portfolio companies whose boards they join – generalluy limiting that level of involvement to firms in which Andreessen-Horowit have a $5 million or more Andreessen believes his and Horowitz’as records as entrepreneurs will make them ideal venturse capitalists. “We have built from scratch, to high scales -- thousands of employees and hundreds of millionsd of dollars ofannual revenue. In we have done it ourselves.
And we are buildin g our firm to be the firm we would want to work with asentrepreneursw ourselves,” Andreessen writes. Andreessen foundes the pioneering web browseecompany , which was latere sold to . Sinced then, he and Horowitz launched , a tech service providerr sold toin 2007. Netscape and Opsware sold for acombinede $11.7 billion. The two have been active investors in the tech spacesince then. They’ve angel invested in 45 tech startupe in the last five and Andreessen serves as chairmanof Ning, and on the boardzs of Facebook and eBay. Word that the pair woulds be forming their own venture capital firm was broken on the Charlid Rose showin February.
But detailes came on Monday. The pair had initiallyy planned onraising $250 million for the but investor interest prompted them to boost the amount, BusinessWeek . The news magazin reports that Reid Hoffman, founder of social networkin site LinkedIn, is among the investors in the which raised most of its money frominstitutional Andreessen-Horowitz launches at a tough time for the venture capitalp industry, one in which some are sayinvg the industry needs to not grow. Venture capital, like the rest of the financiao industry, has been hit hard by the economicv downturn. Venture firms make money when theirt portfolio companiesgo public, or are sold to largert companies.
But the IPO market has been anemic inrecenf months, making profitable exits more difficult to find. A recenyt argues that the industry needz to trim down toregaimn effectiveness. "The venture industry needs to shrinj its way to becoming an economic forcseonce again," said Robert E. Litan, vice presidentt of Research and Polic at theKauffman Foundation. “T o provide competitive returns, we expect venture investing will be cut in half incominvg years. At the same time, lowering valuations and improving overall exit multiplesw should help resuscitatethe industry.
” The Kauffmajn study finds that despite such high-profild success stories as Google and , ventur firms have relatively little to do with most new Only about 16 percent of the 900 companies on the Inc. 500 list of fastesy growing companiesfrom 1997-2007 had venture backing.