Syntertainment

Andreessen Horowitz is one of the biggest venture firms around and an investor in some of the most prominent consumer startups in recent years, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Groupon and Zynga.

Scott Weiss sees a lot of companies that havent yet figured out a viable plan.

If you’re a consumer startup seeking a Series A round, however, you’re probably wasting your time knocking on its doors.

The firm has pretty much decided to stay away from Series A investments in such companies as a matter of policy, Partner Scott Weiss said. Too many consumer startups have yet to develop a viable product or identify a real market, he said, leading to so-called pivots in which startups flit from one idea to another.

The pivot culture of Silicon Valley has been seen as a strength—entrepreneurs should take risks and not be afraid of quickly shifting to a more promising idea, the thinking goes—but for Andreessen Horowitz, it can make for unappealing investments in some cases.

Many consumer companies are “like fruit fly experiments,” Mr. Weiss said. Asked whether Andreessen had bad experiences that led it to change its philosophy toward Series A rounds, Mr. Weiss said: “There have been pivots.”

The firm has made 23 first round investments in the consumer information services sector since 2010, and its still making some Series A consumer deals. Last year it made nine such deals and this year it has made five, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource.

Last year it led a $12 million Series A round in Anki. which is developing a game where toy cars race each other; provided a $15 million Series A round for Rap Genius. a website where users analyze text like hip hop lyrics; and backed social app MessageMe. In September it led a $5 million round in Syntertainment. a company co-founded by the creator of SimCity.

Too often, though, consumer startups are founded by “MBA types” rather than hard-core technologists, and helping companies that are already on their way to succeeding makes for better use of partners’ time at the firm, Mr. Weiss said.

Consumer-focused startups, in general, started getting a colder reception in the venture world after high-flyers Zynga and Groupon, portfolio companies of Andreessen, saw shares drop in price after their initial public offerings.

When the firm backed some of the most well-known consumer startups, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Groupon and Zynga, the firm waited for later rounds to go in. (Entrepreneur and blogger Danielle Morrill broke out many of Andreessen’s investments in a post ).

For a firm of Andreessens size, there are other considerations besides the likelihood of success of a certain company. A large fund needs to have really big successes to make a dent, and last year Andreessen Horowitz raised a $1.5 billion fund, one of the venture world’s largest.

For content-sharing company Pinterest and ride-sharing startup Lyft. two Andreessen investments, “we passed on A rounds and “came in hard on B,” he said. At that stage, he added, the firm can really sense whether there’s a real business behind an idea.

Andreessen does continue to invest in seed deals for consumer startups, however. It has a relationship with startup accelerator Y Combinator in which Andreessen makes available automatic seed investments for all of the graduates of Y Combinator classes.

Some of Y Combinator’s latest graduates are consumer startups like car-sharing company FlightCar, food website Goldbely and fashion advice company StyleUp.

For Andreessen to be interested in investing at the Series A level, though, such startups need to show real progress, according to Mr. Weiss.

In the meantime, Mr. Weiss is paying a lot of attention to the growth in enterprise software. “There isn’t a better time to be an enterprise investor,” he said. That’s because he expects a large-scale shift by corporations to cloud and mobile services, and startups are best equipped to provide software designed for that transition. He’s also interested in technology companies that reform the municipal government, as well as in hardware startups.

Write to Yuliya Chernova at yuliya.chernova@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @ychernova