Secrets of Sand Hill Road

The nature of venture capital has changed over the last few decades.

Nearly half a century ago, in the early 1970s, Silicon Valley found itself host to a number of new businesses operating in the world of venture capital. For the next thirty years, a very small number of these companies held the vast majority of venture capital in Silicon Valley. This meant, of course, that a select few companies had a lot of power over which entrepreneurs received funding.

But starting in the early 2000s, all this began to change. Two converging phenomena started coming together, transforming the nature of the VC-entrepreneur relationship.

Firstly, rapid advances in technology meant that the amount of capital required to found a start-up began to decline. On one side, servers, networking and data center space were getting cheaper by the day; on the other, with the advent of cloud computing, start-ups no longer needed office space to store their data on-site, thus saving on rent. All of a sudden, founding a start-up was less reliant on VC backing than it had been in the past.

The second development that transformed the VC-entrepreneur relationship was the founding of the Y Combinator, or YC, in 2005. The YC is a school that teaches entrepreneurs how to found companies and secure VC funding. Famous alumni include the founders of Airbnb and Dropbox. The YC helped a once-dispersed entrepreneurial community come together to share knowledge and, in doing so, also helped even the balance of power between VC firms and entrepreneurs.

It was at this point that the author’s VC firm entered the scene. In 2009, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz founded Andreessen Horowitz. Detecting a change in the Silicon Valley landscape, they realized that VCs needed to provide more than just capital to entrepreneurs. Sure, having CEOs with vision and good product-market fit was still as relevant as ever. But they might lack knowledge in other important areas like recruiting, marketing or sales.

This is where VCs like Kupor enter the equation. At Andreessen Horowitz, it’s his job to advise CEOs, particularly by helping them build networks and relationships with both people and institutions. In doing so, Andreessen Horowitz has concocted a winning formula that’s churned out several huge companies, such as Pinterest, Slack and GitHub.