There’s at least one distinct advantage of startups having a billion dollar-plus valuation, says Marc Andreessen, the famed venture capitalist behind companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Lyft.

“I think where it helps a lot is on recruiting," Andreessen told Fortune's Dan Primack in an interview.

To be clear, Andreessen thinks the actual "substance" of the business — not the big number hanging over the company — has to be the deciding factor for talented people.

"I don’t think valuations should be like the main topic of discussion ... I think when employees are looking for companies to go work at, I think that they should think about the substance of the companies they’re going to," he said.

Describing some outsized valuations as an "ego-driven, arms race kind of thing," Andreessen said companies are increasingly feeling as if having that big valuation number helps them recruit better talent.

"I think the feeling is if somebody else has a valuation at a certain level and you don’t, you’re going to be at a recruiting disadvantage," he added.

He continued, "But there is no question having this sort of bright shining spotlight at the top of your website, with that big number on it. At least people right now think it helps."

In fact, this is exactly one of the reasons why Slack, an Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company, insisted on getting a valuation over $1 billion in its last funding round in October. Its CEO Stewart Butterfield said he wanted his company to get over that billion dollar mark because it helps find better talent and more customers. 

“One billion is better than $800 million because it’s the psychological threshold for potential customers, employees, and the press," Butterfield said at the time.

But that doesn't mean Andreessen believes the current tech market is in a bubble like in the early 2000s. It's because the total private tech investment stands at about $50 billion a year, or only 1/20th of the $1 trillion S&P 500 companies spend on buybacks and dividends, he said.

"It feels like there should be some level of growth and innovation in the world. It seems like maybe 1/20th of the amount of money being returned from the big companies might be appropriate," he said.

Instead, he implied that the real bubble might be in the government bond market, where negative yields are becoming more common. 

"The Swiss Central Bank today for the first time I think in history issued new 10-year debt that carries with it a negative yield on Day 1, where you literally have to pay the Swiss Central Bank every 6 months for the honor of holding their debt," he said.

SEE ALSO: Marc Andreessen says there's a good reason his VC firm doesn't have a single female general partner

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When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz started their VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, they set out to make things better for entrepreneurs.

They saw Benchmark Capital, a boutique VC firm "with no back-office specialists to provide the services they’d craved" as the antithesis of what they were trying to build with a16z.

"We were always the anti-Benchmark," Horowitz says in a New Yorker profile. "Our design was to not do what they did."

According to Horowitz, a Benchmark partner once asked him in front of his cofounders:  "When are you going to get a real C.E.O.?"

Additionally, "Benchmark’s best-known venture capitalist, the six-foot-eight Bill Gurley, another outspoken giant with a large Twitter following, advised Horowitz to cut Andreessen and his six-million-dollar investment out of the company," according to The New Yorker's profile.

So it comes as no surprise that Marc Andreessen had this to say about Bill Gurley: "I can’t stand him. If you’ve seen ‘Seinfeld,’ Bill Gurley is my Newman." One CEO described Andreessen and Gurley's relationship as being "like watching Coke and Pepsi go head to head."

From the New Yorker:

When I pressed Andreessen on a16z’s fund size, he said that even if the basic assumptions haven’t changed—even if only fifteen companies a year reach a hundred million dollars in revenue—those companies generate more money now. And, he said, “I’d bet the number of companies that reach that revenue is going up.” With a playful smile, he referred to Gurley: “If there’s no profit opportunity beyond the first four hundred million, Bill’s making the case that everyone who follows Benchmark in a later investment round is a moron. I wouldn’t say that.”

Like other investors, Bill Gurley has spent a significant amount of time this year talking about the bubble in Silicon Valley's tech sector. At a SXSW keynote, he warned that Silicon Valley's optimism — the same optimism perpetuated by VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz — could eventually lead to the demise of some of these unicorn companies. "I do think you'll see some dead unicorns this year," he said. 

SEE ALSO: The founders of one of the most famous VC firms in the world 'fight like cats and dogs, then forget about it'

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Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, is one of the most famous and powerful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

In 2006, he married Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, daughter of real estate mogul John Arrillaga.

Many credit Arrillaga with creating the modern Silicon Valley office landscape.

According to a New Yorker profile of Andreessen, the prominent venture capitalist met his future wife at a New Year's Eve party hosted by an investor in eHarmony.

They talked for six and a half hours, and the next day, he sent her a total of seventeen emails. 

After asking her, "What's your ideal evening?" she replied, "Stay home, do e-mail, make an omelette, watch TV, take a bath, go to bed." 

Before they went on their second date, Andreessen delivered a speech that sounds a lot like a pitch a startup founder might make to an investor.

As Arrillaga-Andressen described it to the New Yorker, it was "a twenty-five-minute monologue on why we should go steady, with a full intellectual decision tree in anticipation of my own decision tree."

Obviously it worked — the couple was married nine months later. They currently live in a modern, 9,000-square-foot home in Atherton, just a few minutes away from the Andreessen Horowitz offices.

SEE ALSO: The founders of one of the most famous VC firms in the world 'fight like cats and dogs, then forget about it'

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In the same way that saying you went to Stanford holds a certain caché in Silicon Valley, having the right venture capital firm invest in your startup is important, too. 

Entrepreneurs will sometimes accept 25% lower valuations if it means being associated with the right firm, according to Tad Friend, who profiled Marc Andreessen for the New Yorker. 

Stewart Butterfield, cofounder and CEO of the billion-dollar business messaging startup Slack, told Friend that he thinks signing on a name-brand firm — like Andreessen Horowitz — is crucial for companies. 

"It’s hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you’re with matters—the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press," Butterfield said. "It’s like where you went to college."

Butterfield definitely believes in the magic of perception: He told Fortune earlier this year that Slack gunned for a higher valuation since "one billion is better than $800 million because it’s the psychological threshold for potential customers, employees, and the press."

Last month, Slack raised $160 million at a hefty $2.8 billion valuation.

The cofounder and CEO of payments app Stripe echoed Stewart's thoughts.

Two big names — Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital — participated in Stripe's seed round of funding, which "was a signal that was not lost on the banks we wanted to work with" when the startup was ready for its Series A, Patrick Collison says.

Stripe ended up landing a $100 million valuation even though it hadn't launched yet. 

Read the rest of The New Yorker profile here. 

SEE ALSO: How a quirky 28-year-old plowed through $150 million and almost destroyed his startup

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Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, is one of the most powerful Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

He's invested in some of the most well-known Internet companies in the world, including Facebook, Foursquare, and Pinterest.

And despite warnings from investors  like Benchmark partner Bill Gurley — who, incidentally, Marc Andreessen "can't stand"— about the tech bubble and excessive Silicon Valley optimism, Marc Andreessen says he isn't concerned about another tech bubble mirroring that of the late 1990s.

In a New Yorker profile, Andreessen says the burst tech bubble of 2000 was an isolated incident, referring to companies like the now-dead Webvan as "ghost stories," which still scare investors to this day.

“The argument in favor of concern is cyclical. The counterargument is that stuff works now," he says.

"In 2000, you had fifty million people on the Internet, and the number of smartphones was zero. Today, you have three billion Internet users and two billion smartphones. It’s Pong versus Nintendo. It’s Carlota Perez’s argument that technology is adopted on an S curve: the installation phase, the crash—because the technology isn’t ready yet—and then the deployment phase, when technology gets adopted by everyone and the real money gets made.” 

However, he said on Twitter recently that startups' burn rates are too high. “Nobody will want to buy your cash-incinerating startup. There will be no Plan B. VAPORIZE," he tweeted.

In addition, he doesn't always necessarily think it's wise to raise too much capital at one time. From the New Yorker:

In one pitch meeting where a portfolio company sought a billion-dollar growth round, Andreessen raised his arms overhead and made an explosive sound to warn of what can happen when your valuation vastly exceeds your revenues: “Thanks for playing—game over!” The company went on to secure its round, with only a token contribution from a16z. Andreessen later said that, as in an increasing number of deals, growth investors had paid one round ahead of progress—paid in other words, for the results they hoped to see in the following round. Though the company’s lofty valuation buoyed a16z’s portfolio, his body language suggested that buying at such valuations was maybe not smart—“but, as long as they’re sophisticated investors, it’s not our job to moralize on whether they’re overpaying.” 

You can check out the full New Yorker profile here.

SEE ALSO: Marc Andreessen on rival venture capitalist Bill Gurley: 'I can’t stand him'

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Marc Andreessen is the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most prolific venture-capital firms.

One of the biggest investments Andreessen has ever made may very well be Facebook.

According to a New Yorker profile, Andreessen became a valuable mentor to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in 2006, when Yahoo made a bid to buy Facebook for $1 billion.

At the time, Facebook's lead investor, Accel Partners, told a 22-year-old Zuckerberg to accept the offer and sell to Yahoo for $1 billion. But Andreessen urged Zuckerberg not to sell.

"Every single person involved in Facebook wanted Mark to take the Yahoo offer," Andreessen recalled. "The psychological pressure they put on this 22-year-old was intense. Mark and I really bonded in that period, because I told him, 'Don't sell, don't sell, don't sell!'"

Zuckerberg took Andreessen's advice and didn't sell to Yahoo. "Marc has this really deep belief that when companies are executing well on their vision they can have a much bigger effect on the world than people think, not just as a business but as a steward of humanity — if they have the time to execute," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg ended up making the right choice by listening to Andreessen: Today Facebook is valued at more than $200 billion. And Andreessen joined Facebook's board of directors in 2008.

You can check out the full New Yorker profile here.

SEE ALSO: One of the most legendary venture capitalists in the world doesn't think we're in a bubble

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On Wednesday, hedge fund manager John Paulson donated $400 million to endow Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, making it the largest gift in the school's history.

Soon after the news broke, the internet exploded with criticism.

The ire really picked up when best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell trashed the billionaire on Twitter.

"It came down to helping the poor or giving the world's richest university $400 [million] it doesn't need. Wise choice John!"Gladwell tweeted.

That initial Tweet was followed by a series of Tweets suggesting Paulson should volunteer at the "[Hermès] store on Madison [Avenue]" or work the "coat check at Art Basel."

But is this a fair criticism?

We spoke to a number to hedge fund folks, and they don't think so. Nearly everyone we spoke with, both on record and anonymously, came to Paulson's defense. 

• T. Boone Pickens, BP Capital:"I was amused by the criticism. My first thought was, hey, wait a minute, get the critic up there and ask, 'Wait a minute, pal, how much have you given?' You may find out he has given, but I have a hard time imagining anyone being critical of a charitable gift."
• Daniel Loeb, Third Point LLC:"Would they criticize him if he just sat on his wealth and 'compounded it' like certain others? It's a fabulous and impactful gift to a great institution. It will lead to discovery, life-saving innovation in biomedical engineering, opportunity, job growth and increased competitiveness in the United States. I don’t see why Malcolm Gladwell or others have a problem with that."
• Bill Ackman, Pershing Square Capital (Harvard/HBS alum):"Here's how I think about it: This money will go to help Harvard build one of the great engineering and science schools in the country. What comes out of that? Great research in biomedicine, software and other sciences, and a large number of talented graduates that will help improve the world. The people who go there aren't likely wealthy people. I'm sure a chunk of his money is going toward scholarships for graduates who will create the next great healthcare or software company that will employee hundreds of thousands of people. The leverage of helping build a great science and engineering school has global implications in a hugely positive way. This is not about subsidizing rich people."
• Anthony Scaramucci, SkyBridge Capital: "Malcolm Gladwell must have sustained some sort of head injury that has lowered his high IQ. That could be the only thing that could explain his tweets. We are very lucky to have people like John Paulson in our society. I would be long a John Paulson and short a basket of Gladwells." 
• Hedge fund manager 1:"Putting capital in the hands of our brightest people has often had great multiplier effects for society as a whole. Think wartime innovations (Penicillin, radar, etc), the Royal Academy during the Enlightenment (Newton, etc.), the Medici (Leonardo da Vinci)."
• Hedge fund manager 2:"Who the f--- can criticize a guy who donated $400 million to his alma mater?!"... What's to criticize? Extremely generous and he is to be applauded. But maybe I'm an idiot. The inmates are running the asylum."
• Hedge fund manager 3: "It's his money, he doesn't have to give it away at all if he doesn't want. Here, he is plainly helping others and society. I can’t imagine criticizing that."
• Marc Andreessen tweeted: "America's research universities are our wellspring of scientific and economic growth. Gifts to them are moral virtues, full stop"

Paulson, a 1980 graduate of Harvard Business School, explained why he made the donation in a speech at the signing ceremony.

"There is nothing more important to improve humanity than education," he said.

"To become a leading school in Engineering and Applied Sciences it is essential that SEAS have a substantial unrestricted endowment to support faculty development, research, scholarships and financial aid."

He continued: "Today will mark the beginning of a new center of engineering and sciences. Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will be transformational for Harvard, for Allston, for Boston, for the East Coast, for the United States and for the world."

Harvard actually helped Paulson with his tuition when he was working toward his MBA. He said that Harvard has been instrumental in his success.

"There is no question that the support and education I received at Harvard was critical in helping me achieve success in my career," he said.

What's more is Paulson, like many others in the hedge fund space, comes from humble beginnings. He grew up in a middle-class family in Queens.

Paulson is now the 113th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion.

He launched his hedge fund in 1994 with about $2 million in capital. He shot to fame after making billions betting against subprime during the housing crisis. He now manages close to $20 billion in assets.

He's also one of the top philanthropists in the country. Some of his recent donations include $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy; $20 million to NYU Stern; $22 million to the Children's Hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where his father grew up; $5 million to the Southampton Hospital for the emergency room.

Those are just some of the gifts that are publicly known. Sources who know Paulson said that he makes many donations privately.

"John has been very generous in making anonymous gifts that directly benefit the poor," one source said.

Still, others felt like Gladwell had a right to his opinion, but Paulson also had the right to donate his money.

"I think that guy, Malcolm Gladwell, actually has an argument from a social standpoint," acknowledged one hedge fund portfolio manager. "The disparity of wealth in this country is going to be a problem. The middle class is shrinking. It's harder and harder for people to make it. Gladwell has the right to his opinion, but John Paulson has the right to do what he wants with his money."

He added, Gladwell "is technically part of the 1 percent. What's he doing to help people?"

That's a fair question too.

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Something weird is happening in markets right now, according to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Public companies are being forced to take an extremely short-term view of investing while private companies are being given more time than ever to make investments in their business.

"The irony is that it's the same investors driving that," Andreessen said in an interview with Fortune reporter Dan Primack at a hotel where Andreessen Horowitz was hosting its limited partner investors.

Andreessen said big institutional investors such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price were pouring money into private companies while telling big public companies to do buybacks and dividends.

Buybacks and dividends on the S&P will top $1 trillion this year, and Andreessen said the time frame for a public company to invest had shortened more than he had ever seen in his life. Andreessen said public companies today aren't being given an opportunity to invest in new ventures to build their business.

At the same time, the time frame for private companies has elongated, giving private companies the time to experiment, figure out what works, and build value.

"They tell the public company CEO, 'Give us the money back this quarter,'" Andreessen said. "They tell the private CEO, 'No problem! Go for 10 years!'"

He added, "If there's a grand unifying theory for how markets operate, I think that's it."

This behavior is driving a lot of what we're seeing in the private markets in terms of valuation. It's also what is leading to what we're seeing in the public markets in terms of mergers and acquisitions.

Primack has been warning that there's a crisis in VC-land right now. While ~100 private companies are valued at over $1 billion, IPOs and M&A have slowed considerably. Therefore, there is a bit of a liquidity problem. VCs aren't getting real "cash on cash" returns. They're getting only paper returns.

Andreessen's theory is that big companies that aren't led by founders don't have the leeway with investors to go make $1 billion-plus acquisitions. Weirdly, the investors that are impatient with the big companies are patient with the private companies.

As a result, the investors are pumping money into the private market, inflating valuations, making it even harder for public companies to buy the private companies.

You can listen to Primack's conversation with Andreessen below.

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Marc Andreessen is best known for cofounding the internet browser Netscape and launching Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most famous venture-capital firms.

Today, a16z has $4.2 billion under management. Andreessen was an early investor in tech companies like Facebook and Twitter and has overseen its investments in hot billion-dollar startups like Airbnb.

Andreessen's net worth was an estimated $600 million in 2012 and has likely increased since — not bad for someone who grew up in a sleepy "no-stoplight town" in rural Wisconsin.

Marc Andreessen grew up in the rural town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin. His dad, Lowell, worked for a seed company. His mom, Pat, worked for retailer Lands' End in customer service.

Source

Andreessen doesn't like to talk about family: “We’ve never had a conversation about his parents or his brother — all he said was, ‘They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them all that much, either,'" a friend of Andreessen told The New Yorker's Tad Friend.

Source

When he was 9 years old, Andreessen taught himself BASIC programming from a library book. Once he hit high school, he'd already grown bored of his TRS-80, an early personal computer.

Source

You don't need to be born in Silicon Valley to make it as a tech entrepreneur.

As this list proves, founders come from every corner of the U.S., and each state has someone who has changed the tech landscape.

Here's a list of the biggest founders from each state plus Washington D.C.

And if you think we've overlooked someone big in your state, leave a note in the comments or tweet at @sai.

SEE ALSO: THE SILICON VALLEY 100: The most amazing and inspiring people in tech right now

Alabama: Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, credits his upbringing in Huntsville, Alabama for his passion for education. Despite running the fifth most popular website in the world, his net worth is estimated to be slightly over $1 million.

Alaska: Larry Sanger, the other co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Infobitt, moved to Anchorage when he was seven.

Arizona: Phoenician Joan Ganz Cooney changed television forever when she helped found the Children's Television Network, the creators of Sesame Street. Her career didn't stop in showtime, though. She founded the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which specializes in increasing literacy through digital technology. The eponymous center has hosted things like the National STEM Video Game Challenge and launched a news site dedicated to reporting on educational gaming.

For some, the darkest moments of the global financial crisis that started eight years ago seem like yesterday. But for younger people, it may may seem like more than a lifetime ago.

Think about it: There are employees on Wall Street today who probably didn't even have their driver's license when the meltdown came. For many young professionals, the stock market and the value of their 401(k) plans have only gone up.

Well, Marc Andreessen, founder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of the biggest venture capitalists in tech, laid out a reminder of how bad it got in a late-Monday tweetstorm.

It all started with a tweet from a younger employee of Andreessen Horowitz. She described not remembering the details of the financial crisis because she was she was just starting high school:

From there Andreessen went on a tweetstorm to describe just how dire the situation got. Here's Andreessen:

Andreesen is surely remembering the evening of Sunday, September 14, which is when Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were collapsing. The former went bankrupt and the latter got acquired by Bank of America.

For the second time in history, a money market fund "broke the buck" and reported a per share value of less than $1. The next day, the Fed threw AIG an $85 billion rescue package.

Remember Wachovia and Washington Mutual? They got taken over for pennies.

In one of the most stunning moments of the crisis, the House of Representatives voted down a $700 bailout package. The Dow fell 788 points that day.

Eventually, the Fed and the US government unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars worth of monetary and fiscal stimulus. But that didn't stop the massive wave of layoffs.

Andreessen isn't the only one who felt this way. A survey of news coverage shows that many outlets were reporting the end of the economic system as we knew it.

The Washington Post's editorial board asked "Is Capitalism Dead?"

Arianna Huffington argued on her eponymous website that "Lassiez Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism."

The Economist said that the crisis had put "Capitalism at Bay."

Reuters reported Karl Marx's screed against capitalism "Das Kapital" jumped to the bestseller list in Germany.

So yeah, it was bad.

SEE ALSO: 'This feels a lot different than it did in 2001 or 2008'

AND: It's time to start talking about a US recession

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In Silicon Valley, you can't escape bubble talk.

On one side of the ring, Benchmark investor Bill Gurley, who was an investor during the dot-com bubble, has been sounding the alarm that companies are overvalued.

In a few years, Gurley has predicted that we'll have a lot of dead unicorns on our hands. "Unicorn" is the current Silicon Valley term for a startup valued at more than $1 billion.

On the other side is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who cofounded his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, in 2009, right after the bursting of the debt bubble sent the economy into a tailspin.

In an appearance at the Fortune Global Forum, Andreessen reiterated that tech is not in a bubble. Rather, these valuations are still startlingly low for the potential of some of these companies.

"I think we're in a bust. We're in a long-term technology bust. I think technology has been undervalued since 2000, and we're still undervalued," Andreessen said. "The entire basket of unicorns is worth half of Microsoft."

In Silicon Valley, people are excited about new tech companies, whereas outsiders — especially the stock market — are still depressed, following the equity bust and then the economic downturn, according to Andreessen.

"The public market just doesn't like tech," Andreessen said.

That's created the situation we see now, Andreessen said, where we have a lot of companies staying private.

For one, there's no incentives to go public because a lot of shareholder bases don't allow companies to continue innovating and evolving who they are. The exceptions are companies like Google — or Alphabet — and Facebook.

The lack of a warm embrace from the public markets has created three paths to exit. Some will go public, some will get acquired, but some will create more inventive private trading so investors can cash out and other investors can come in.

"The innovation is going to have to come from the private side," Andreessen said.

Andreessen is not the only tech investor calling the current situation a tech bust rather than a tech bubble. Y Combinator President Sam Altman made a similar argument in his own blog post on the tech bust.

Altman's argument is similar— just ask Box or Twitter if there's a tech bubble and they'll laugh you out of the room. He also said these humongous late-stage rounds are really more like debt dressed up as equity, so the valuations can become a recruitment tool.

SEE ALSO: Here's the dirty secret that's inflating the tech bubble

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Marc Andreessen has sold about 15% of his stake in Facebook for $31.9 million, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to an SEC filing, the venture capitalist and Facebook board member sold a total of 309,464 shares in a prearranged trading plan on Friday and Monday.

Today, Facebook is announcing its Q3 earnings results.

This isn't the first time Andreessen has sold Facebook shares; in late 2013, he sold 1.65 million class A shares of Facebook, worth almost $91 million. And in September 2012 he sold some shares to cover a tax bill.

Andreessen became a mentor to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in 2006, when Yahoo made a bid to buy Facebook for $1 billion. Zuckerberg took Andreessen's advice and didn't sell to Yahoo. He ended up making the right choice by listening to Andreessen: Today Facebook's market cap is about $290 billion.

Andreessen joined Facebook's board of directors in 2008.

SEE ALSO: Investors just poured $500 million into Jet.com, the buzzy Amazon-killer that's now worth $1.5 billion

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Marc Andreessen has sold a whopping proportion of his Facebook stock in the last two weeks, Re/code's Kurt Wagner points out, based on SEC filings. 

Andreessen's spree started on October 30 and has continued via a prearranged trading plan, amounting to a grand total of 1.5 million shares valued around $160 million. 

That's more than 73% of Andreessen's ownership of the company, Wagner calculates. 

Andreessen, a Facebook board member since 2008, mentored CEO Mark Zuckerberg back when Yahoo tried to buy the company for $1 billion in 2006.

"Every single person involved in Facebook wanted Mark to take the Yahoo offer," Andreessen recently said in a New Yorker profile. "The psychological pressure they put on this 22-year-old was intense. Mark and I really bonded in that period, because I told him, 'Don't sell, don't sell, don't sell!'"

As far as selling goes, Business Insider reached out to Andreessen via his firm Andreessen Horowitz for any explanation for his off-loading of Facebook stock. 

SEE ALSO: Marissa Mayer may have spent $70K so top execs could dress up as 'Wizard of Oz' characters

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Facebook shares was down almost 3% on Monday following news that board member Marc Andreessen has sold about three quarters of his stake in the company over the past two weeks.

Now the stock has recovered and is down only about 1%. 

Andreessen sold 1.5 million Facebook shares, valued around $160 million, through pre-arranged trading plans beginning on October 30, according to calculations by Recode, which first reported the share sales.

Andreessen's venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz was one of Facebook's backers before it went public in 2012. So the fact that it is cashing out is not completely unusual — VC firms often sell shares of their portfolio companies during or after IPOs in order to give their limited partners a return. 

But the amount of shares that Andreessen is selling in such a short period of time, and the fact that he sits on Facebook's board, appears to be troubling investors. 

In a long profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Fast Company that was published on Monday, Andreessen calls Zuckerberg "one of the best CEOs in the world."

The share sales come a few weeks after Facebook reported a blockbuster third quarter, handily beating Wall Street financial targets and sending its stock to a new all-time high. 

Facebook shares were down as much as 2.7% on Monday, before recovering slightly with shares down 1.4% at $102.54 in midday trading. 

SEE ALSO: Marc Andreessen has sold nearly 75% of his Facebook stock in two weeks

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Good morning. Here's everything you need to know in the world of advertising today.

1. DraftKings is asking TV networks to delay airing its ads. The company is delaying its ad commitments as the debate around whether daily fantasy sports games fall into the gambling category heats up.

2. Facebook's stock was down almost 3% on Monday. Board member Marc Andreessen has sold about three quarters of his stake in the company over the past two weeks.

3. UFC champ Holly Holm, who KO'd the previously undefeated Ronda Rousey on Sunday, is sponsored by a company that sold illegal PEDs. Texas-based Intel Pharma has sold at least two products that are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the US Anti-Doping Agency — although there's no evidence to suggest Holm has ever taken any banned or illegal substances.

4. Google's mobile search has got a boost from Facebook. Google searches from Android smartphones will now display information from public Facebook profiles, pages, groups, and events.

5. Pandora acquired streaming competitor Rdio for $75 million in cash.Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews hinted that his company bought technology and intellectual property from Rdio so it could compete with the likes of Spotify in the area of on-demand streaming.

6. Several employees from ad agencies Publicis and Havas were killed in the Paris terrorist attacks. Adweek reports that a number of agencies have been blacking out their social media cover and photo profiles as a mark of respect.

7. McDonald's has ended its Dollar Menu. In its place, McDonald's is offering a new McPick 2 deal that lets customers select two items for $2.

8. These are the 20 brands millennial women love. The latest Teen Vogue-Goldman Sachs Love List is out.

9. Black Friday might be a bust this year. Research from retail analysis firm Conlumino found seven in 10 Americans are unimpressed by Black Friday discounts, and three in five say they would rather shop online than fight the crowds in stores.

10. Here's how to use YouNow. It's a livestreaming app that teens are obsessed with.

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Marc Andreessen is best known for cofounding the internet browser Netscape and launching Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most famous venture-capital firms.

Today, a16z has $4.2 billion under management. Andreessen was an early investor in tech companies like Facebook and Twitter and has overseen its investments in hot billion-dollar startups like Airbnb.

Andreessen's net worth was an estimated $600 million in 2012 and has likely increased since — not bad for someone who grew up in a sleepy "no-stoplight town" in rural Wisconsin.

SEE ALSO: The 25 hottest startups that launched in 2015

Marc Andreessen grew up in the rural town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin. His dad, Lowell, worked for a seed company. His mom, Pat, worked for retailer Lands' End in customer service.

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Andreessen doesn't like to talk about family: “We’ve never had a conversation about his parents or his brother — all he said was, ‘They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them all that much, either,'" a friend of Andreessen told The New Yorker's Tad Friend.

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When he was 9 years old, Andreessen taught himself BASIC programming from a library book. Once he hit high school, he'd already grown bored of his TRS-80, an early personal computer.

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SEE ALSO: This app-powered home security camera turned me into an overbearing dog dad

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GoPro shares are tanking more than 20% after the sports video camera maker warned of holiday sales that were lower than expected and announced plans to slash its headcount by 7%.

It's a remarkable turn of events for GoPro, a hardware-industry success story that had a blockbuster initial public offering in 2014.

But even back when GoPro was basking in glowing investor sentiment, there were already warning signs that the company could face problems, as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen pointed out on Twitter at the time GoPro filed to go public.

In February 2014, the day after news broke that GoPro had filed to go public, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon tweeted, "GoPro is a company that develops communities of sports enthusiasts and happens monetize by selling electronics."

Andreessen's response?

Andreessen warned that GoPro faced many of the same commoditization threats that hurt Flip, another once high-flying video camera hardware company that was shut down after being acquired by Cisco.

The whole thread is worth reading.

Andreessen closed the argument with:

That was 704 days ago.

SEE ALSO: GoPro cuts jobs and warns its sales are a disaster

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Potential buyers are circling around Twitter again, according to a report by Jessica Lessin in The Information. This time it's big-time tech investor Marc Andreessen in conjunction with private equity firm Silver Lake. 

Why would they buy it?

Because Twitter, despite all its problems, still has 300 million users and is on track to book $3 billion in revenue this year, up 50% from last year. Plus, as of last Friday, Twitter stock was cheaper than it's ever been since the company went public, as this chart from Statista shows. It's up about 8% this morning, but still well below its IPO price, with a market cap under $13 billion.

SEE ALSO: Amazon's relentless focus on long-term growth

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