Since our inception in 2009, Andreessen Horowitz has been a Silicon Valley enterprise capital agency. This was extremely intentional on our half. Traditionally, the biggest variety of nice expertise firms emerged from Silicon Valley for good motive – the community impact. Many issues drove the community impact, however a very powerful was this: Should you have been an incredible expertise entrepreneur born wherever on this planet the place it was troublesome to start out an organization akin to Bangladesh or The Sudan or Marianna, Arkansas, and also you determined to maneuver, the place you have been 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 expertise firms have been pressured to determine how one can work remotely. It seems that operating a expertise firm remotely works fairly darned effectively. 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, almost each expertise firm has moved to a distant or hybrid strategy to work and this modification is profoundly weakening the Silicon Valley community impact.
It is a excellent factor for the nation and the world. As my companion Marc wrote in his 2011 article, “Software program Is Consuming the World,” each necessary new firm is prone to have a world-class software program crew at its core. Concentrating all of these firms into one or two geographies cuts off nice alternatives from anybody who can contribute, however can not simply transfer. Distant work is opening up many new areas for entrepreneurs and expertise 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, now we 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 present Menlo Park and San Francisco areas. Our headquarters shall be within the cloud and we’ll proceed to create bodily workplaces globally the place wanted to help our groups and companions.
