Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, investing in early stage consumer startups — focused on the themes of marketplaces, micro-entrepreneurship, games/entertainment, and next-gen social products. He is on the boards of Clubhouse, Substack, Z League, Sleeper, Snackpass, All Day Kitchens, Sandbox VR, Reforge, Maven, and others.
He writes about user growth, metrics, and network effects at andrewchen.com and has been cited at Wired, WSJ, and New York Times. He holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington, where he graduated at the age of 19.
Books Recommended
Crossing the Chasm
Crossing the Chasm is the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets—now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing.
2014
Designing Interactions
A pioneer in interaction design tells the stories of designers who changed the way people use everyday things in the digital era, interviewing the founders of Google, the creator of The Sims, the inventors and developers of the mouse and the desktop, and many others.
2007
Founders at Work
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea?
2009
High Output Management
The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses—the art of the entrepreneur—can be summed up in a single word: managing. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, High Output Management is equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders.
1995
The Design of Everyday Things
The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.
2013
The Four Steps to the Epiphany
The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly.
2005
The Inmates are Running the Asylum
This book uses the author's experiences in corporate America to illustrate how talented people continuously design bad software-based products and why we need technology to work the way average people think. Somewhere out there is a happy medium that makes these types of products both user and bottom-line friendly; this book discusses why we need to quickly find that medium.
2004
The Innovator's Dilemma
The Innovator’s Dilemma is the revolutionary business book that has forever changed corporate America. Based on a truly radical idea—that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right—this is one of the most provocative and important business books ever written. Entrepreneurs, managers, and CEOs ignore its wisdom and its warnings at their great peril.
1997
The Mythical Man-Month
With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. Now, 20 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.
1995
Books Written
The Cold Start Problem
A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem”—by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users.
2021