few startup advisers and venture capitalists have any experience

Highly recommend that every would-be investor start a company first. It's hard to understand pain in the abstract.

Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four requirements: It requires, first, a focus on the market. It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead. It requires, third, building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one. And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and relationships.

The most important prerequisite for becoming an entrepreneur is the ownership of capital.

You hired for scale too soon. The most consistently wrong advice that venture capitalists and executive recruiters give CEOs is to hire someone “bigger” than required. “Think about the next three to five years and how you will be a large company” is how the bad advice usually sounds.

We decided that while we would not be able to give a founder CEO all the skills she needed, we would be able to provide the kind of mentorship that would accelerate the learning process. As a result, we decided that all of our general partners would need to be effective mentors for a founder striving to be a CEO.

You don’t need an MBA, a certificate, a fancy suit, a briefcase, or an above-average tolerance for risk. You just need an idea, a touch of confidence, and a push to get started.

Anyone who creates a new business is a starter. You don’t need an MBA, a certificate, a fancy suit, a briefcase, or an above-average tolerance for risk. You just need an idea, a touch of confidence, and a push to get started.

Marc and I discussed this paradox often. We wondered aloud why as founders we had to prove to our investors beyond a shadow of a doubt that we could run the company, rather than our investors assuming that we would run the company we’d created. This conversation ultimately became the inspiration for Andreessen Horowitz.

Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together — otherwise they’re just rolling dice.

Harvard is an asset management business cloaked as a college.
but if you are a start-up, do you want VC money funded by Harvard?

Los fundadores deberían compartir una historia previa antes de fundar juntos una compañía, de lo contrario quedarán a merced del azar.

You don't need to know more than the most obvious things about business to start a startup, but you need to be at least decent at building things, in order to build sufficiently good initial versions.

“When you want to start any company – and this is my advice to all entrepreneurs- start where you are and with whatever you have.