Netscape co-founder Mark Andreessen has teamed up with HP vice president Ben Horowitz to launch a new venture capital firm aimed at investing in the "best new entrepreneurs, products, and companies" in the tech industry.

The Andreessen Horowitz venture is offering up a pot of $300m for starters, with the ability to invest between $50,000 and $50m in an individual company, depending on the stage and opportunity.

"We plan to aggressively participate in funding brand new startups with seed-stage investments that will often be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars," wrote Andreessen in the firm's blog. "But we will also invest in venture stage and late stage rounds of high-growth companies."

So if you're a Silicon Valley startup and want in on a slice of the cash, here's what Andreessen and Horowitz are looking for.

A "brilliant and motivated entrepreneur", preferably a technologist, with a clear vision, whose focus is in one of the following areas: consumer internet, business internet (cloud computing, SaaS), mobile software and services, software-powered consumer electronics, infrastructure and applications software, networking, storage, databases and other back-end systems.

But a word of warning. If you're planning anything to do with clean, green, energy, transportation, life sciences (biotech, drug design, medical devices), nanotech, movie production companies, consumer retail, electric cars, rocket ships and space elevators, then forget it.

Good luck.

06 Jul 2009