jebmo’s posthaven

The first time I walked into the lobby of Andreessen Horowitz, four guys were waiting near the wall. Two sat in chairs. Two stood. And all four peered into open laptops, anxiously reviewing the slide decks they would soon pitch to the firm’s partners. Founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and his buddy Ben Horowitz, the firm is one of more than 40 venture capital shops lined up along Sand Hill Road, a short stretch of asphalt in Palo Alto, California, that winds into the heart of Stanford University. Sand Hill Road is where people pitch their ideas to Silicon Valley, and the Andreessen lobby is now the highest-profile, highest-stakes lobby of them all.

These 800 books are a microcosm of both Hollywood and Silicon Valley—at the same time.

I came to chat with a few of the firm’s partners and maybe stumble onto a story or two. I didn’t have a slide deck to review. But this lobby is also a library, with books stretching nearly from the floor to the ceiling. So I stepped to the closest shelf and scanned a few spines. Then I did a double-take and scanned them again. Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By. Neil Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own. A. Scott Berg’s Samuel Goldwyn. Carol Beauchamp’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents. All these books explore the early days of Hollywood, and every one of them also sits on a shelf in my living room at home. I happen to be a film buff, you see, and so was someone at Andreessen Horowitz.

The lobby also offers myriad books on computer programming and the Silicon Valley ethos, like John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. And other sections extend beyond Hollywood. There’s the history of news media. The history of radio. David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be. Leslie Klinger’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes. The complete works of Charles Schulz (you know: Peanuts). A shelf and half of Pogo (The hipster’s Peanuts). But the movie books are what hooked me. The Parade’s Gone By is the definitive history of the silent era. Samuel Goldwyn is the very best of the Hollywood biographies. These weren’t books chosen at random. They belonged to someone with a very real and very deep interest.

So I started asking where these books came from and what they meant. And eventually, I found some answers. But it wasn’t easy. The Andreessen library is very real, but it’s also surrounded by several layers of artifice. These 800 books are a microcosm of both Hollywood and Silicon Valley, at the same time.

Who the Devil Made It

In 1908, the country’s nine largest filmmakers formed the Movie Picture Patents Company, insisting that no one else could make movies because they controlled the patents on the original movie camera, co-created by Thomas Edison at his lab in New Jersey. The patents belonged to Edison, and he backed the Patents Company. So a new wave of filmmakers moved to the West Coast, where the courts were less friendly to Edison. Hollywood became a place to make movies in part because it was so sunny—you could film outdoors more often and with fewer lights—but also because it was so far away from New Jersey.

Who the Devil Made It—an oral history of Hollywood collected by the director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich—begins in the days of the Patents Company. Allan Dwan, who started making movies in the 1910s, tells Bogdanovich that as independent filmmakers moved west, the Patents Company hired strongmen to enforce its patents. Dwan remembers snipers climbing trees overlooking movie sets and taking shots at the cameras they deemed illegal. He would film as far as he could from the railroad stops, so he and his crew were harder to find.

The story of early Hollywood is very much the story of Silicon Valley, full of innovators fleeing the old rules in search of the new. It only makes sense that the lobby of Andreessen Horowitz is stocked with books on early Hollywood, including Who The Devil Made It. Bogdanovich and Dwan tell a story not unlike the one told in What the Dormouse Said, where a group of freethinkers rise up in the 1960s and create the personal computer, pushing against entrenched giants like IBM.

I asked Chris Dixon, one of the firm’s partners, about the books. “That’s all Marc,” he said. He meant Marc Andreessen, and if you spend even a little time following Silicon Valley—or if you subscribe to The New Yorker, which published a 13,000-word profile on the man last summer—you know who he is. If you didn’t read the profile, I can summarize: Marc Andreessen helped create the web browser that launched the Internet age. He’s now a VC. He has a really big noggin.

The story of early Hollywood is very much the story of Silicon Valley, full of innovators fleeing the old rules in search of the new.

Dixon says that in the firm’s earliest days, Andreessen pulled most of those books from his personal collection at home. And that’s all he really knew. But if it was all Marc, it was also a little bit Michael Ovitz. As The New Yorker explains, Andreessen and Horowitz are pals with Ovitz, the guy behind CAA, one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies. When they started their firm, they went to Ovitz for advice.

“Call everyone a partner, offer services the others don’t, and help people who aren’t your clients,” he said. “Disrupt to differentiate by becoming a dream-execution machine.” They did all that. And, in contrast to typical Silicon Valley VCs, they hired a whole team of publicists who guided Andreessen Horowitz stories into Fortune and Forbes. They hung some Rauschenbergs around the office—just like CAA. And when people pitched them, they drank from glassware rather than plastic. The books complement the Rauschenbergs and the glassware. They, too, lend authority.

Ovitz is also a connection to Hollywood. But that’s not why so many of the books are about Hollywood. That really is all Marc.

The Star Machine

Old Hollywood, writes Jeanine Basinger in The Star Machine, another book in the Andreessen lobby, was a factory that built illusions. It transformed ordinary men and women into “the gods and goddesses known as a movie stars.” Take Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner. Born in an Idaho mining town, she landed a Hollywood agent after the editor of The Hollywood Reporter spotted her drinking a Coke in Currie’s Candy and Cigar Store, across the street from Hollywood High School.

Later, as she rose to fame at MGM, the star machine didn’t just change her name and her clothes and her voice. It remade her story. She wasn’t Julia Jean Mildred Francis. She was Lana. She wasn’t discovered at Currie’s drinking a Coke. She was discovered at Schwab’s Drugstore drinking a chocolate malted, because that sounded better. The studios were shameless about spinning things their way, and the press was shameless about spinning things the same way to keep on the good side of the studios.

This is how Silicon Valley works too. It makes stars, shaping their origin stories into legends like the one about Lana Turner and Schwab’s Drugstore.

This is how Silicon Valley works too. It makes stars, shaping their origin stories into legends like the one about Lana Turner and Schwab’s Drugstore. Evan Williams and Biz Stone creating Twitter with Jack Dorsey at Odeo. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and the Paris cab shortage. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her childhood fear of needles.

After discussing all those books with all sorts of people, I pitched the story to my editors: The tale of Silicon Valley told through Marc Andreessen’s library, including the Pogo. They liked it, but they wanted pictures of the library. So I asked the firm’s PR team for an interview with Andreessen and a chance to photograph the books. And they said no.

They were very nice about it, but they said the firm was overexposed, pointing to that New Yorker profile. Then they added that Andreessen was a new dad. And I have to say: None of that quite made sense to me. After all, Andreessen Horowitz is a firm built on overexposure. On Twitter, Marc Andreessen broadcasts his thoughts to the world with a fervor that outstrips almost anyone. He invented the “tweet storm.” All I wanted to do was talk about the books in the lobby. I wanted to write about something real, and the artifice got in the way.

The Whole Equation

The title of David Thompson’s 2006 Hollywood history, The Whole Equation, is a nod to an oft-quoted passage about Hollywood in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. “It can be understood,” it reads, “but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

That’s a fair assessment of early Hollywood. It was an ever-changing mix of business, technology, art, and, yes, artifice. Some people, like Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of President John Kennedy, understood the financial side. Some, like Kennedy’s partner, David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, understood how the technology drove the business. Some, like D.W. Griffith, understood how the technology drove the art. Everybody was good at artifice. And a few people, like Irving Thalberg, the head of production at MGM, understood it all—or at least they understood it all as well anyone really could.

Silicon Valley blends these same threads, including the art. Today, after all, it’s even subsuming what Hollywood does, making its own movies and TV shows. Rather than go to the theater, we go to our smartphones and tablets. Netflix and Amazon are now movie studios. Facebook and Oculus are building the kind of immersive media that Hollywood never could—a movement driven, in part, by Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz. Of course the lobby is lined with movie books.

I finally talked to Andreessen, and I asked him about the book collection. He said he didn’t like the lobbies at other VC firms. They looked like “monuments to themselves” filled with “tombstones”—framed IPO prospectus covers and Lucite statues that investment bankers give out when you sell a startup. “It felt like visiting the lobby of an insurance company—instead of somebody you would presumably really want to talk to,” he says. So he filled his own lobby with books. He spent three nights sorting the titles for maximum effect. Programming books on one set of shelves, Hollywood books on another, business books on a third, and so on.

The arrangement didn’t last. As people move through that lobby, they browse the books, flip through them, and inevitably put them back in the wrong place. Sometimes a Steve Jobs book winds up in the middle of all those books about Orson Welles. And as authors and publicists come through, many of them slot in their own books—sometimes in bulk. When I mention the collection to Antonio García Martínez, a startup founder and former Facebooker who wrote the Silicon Valley memoir Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, he asks how he can get a copy into the lobby. The misplaced books and volunteer titles annoy Andreessen. “I don’t sit in that room,” he says, “so I can’t control it.” But make no mistake: Andreessen is the room. And the room still has the desired effect: It makes you want to talk to the people inside.

Make no mistake: Andreessen is the room. And the room still has the desired effect: It makes you want to talk to the people inside.

What’s more, it doesn’t mislead. These really are people worth talking to. Andreessen has a wonderfully entertaining way of deconstructing just about anything that comes up, whether it’s AI healthcare or Joseph P. Kennedy. Andreessen says that Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, which chronicles the banker’s time as a Hollywood movie mogul, is one of his favorite books, and he calls Kennedy “the one who wasn’t like the others.” That sums up Kennedy, and it sums up Andreessen too. Both were outsiders (Kennedy an Irish Catholic Bostonian among Jewish immigrant traders from New York, Andreessen a computer nerd among financiers). “He’s someone who looks at society and says interesting things,” García Martínez says of Andreessen, “which is unlike most VCs, who are total followers and don’t have much interesting to say about the world.”

Many of Andreessen’s partners are cut from the same cloth, including Dixon. That doesn’t necessarily mean these folks will outperform the Valley’s other VCs. After a recent article in The Wall Street Journal questioning the firm’s performance to date—and a carefully constructed response from Andreessen Horowitz—Valley insiders continue to debate the firm’s money-making talents. But the Andreessen partners certainly get the equation.

An Empire of Their Own

Neil Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own chronicles the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who created Hollywood from nothing. Adolph Zukor of Paramount. Louis B. Mayer of MGM. Carl Laemmle of Universal. William Fox (born Wilhelm Fried) of Fox. The Warner Brothers (previously Wonskolaser). In the 1920s and 1930s, their studios grew to dominate the industry and American popular culture.

In the beginning, Andreessen tells me, Hollywood was a frontier, just as Silicon Valley is a frontier today. He calls the movie business the other great “organic” California industry. “The idea of going West for unclaimed land? That era was over by the 1870s, the 1880s,” he says. “But California remained the frontier for the purpose of creating new industries—starting first with entertainment and then with tech.”

Today, Andreessen says, we think of Hollywood as the establishment. But in the early days, it pushed against the establishment. As we chat, he mentions the Patents Company and how the filmmakers went west in an effort to escape its patents, strongmen, and snipers. “Talk about disruption,” he says, with an all-out belly laugh. When you read about the early days of Hollywood, he says, you’re apt to think that happened in Cupertino last week. Patents Company or no Patents Company, Silicon Valley moves ahead. It’s an attitude that drives Google and Facebook and Uber and Airbnb. “If everybody obeyed the rules all the time,” Andreessen says, “nothing would ever happen.”

Of course, Hollywood changed. And, well, Silicon Valley is changing too. Just like Hollywood in the late ’20s and early ’30s, it’s becoming a power center. Just as Paramount, MGM, Universal, Fox, and Warner Brothers came to dominate film, a few big players are taking control of the tech world. Google. Facebook. Apple. Amazon. They control the infrastructure that makes everything go.

That’s why so many people build their companies in Silicon Valley. It’s where the big players are, and it’s where the money is—VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, who control so much of the funding and have so many hooks into those big tech players. For all the talk of frontiers and disruption, Silicon Valley is now morphing into the thing it once fought against. “It’s going from being the Steve Jobs/Wozniak thing of disrupting the establishment to becoming the establishment,” says García Martínez. That’s what happens to frontiers: They get civilized.

Right before I plan to ask Andreessen about that, his PR handler cuts the interview short. That’s what happens when you’re part of the establishment. But as always, the answer lies in his book collection. It also includes a book called Pictures at a Revolution. It’s about the Hollywood studio system losing its grip in the 1960s, as it was undercut by new, outside forces including television, the European New Wave, and the American counterculture. Eventually, the new establishment always buckles under something even newer.