Ben Horowitz
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Articles by Ben Horowitz
The Machine Age Fund
We’ve raised $1.1B for a16z’s newest fund: the Machine Age Fund. It’s time to open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI: the strongest tool ever developed for solving problems and bestowing abundance. It is our social and national imperative. For anyone paying attention, this shouldn’t be a surprise. We’re seeing an upward inflection point in utility and variety of work that AI can do, just over the past year.
American Innovation. Global Ambition.
a16z Global a16z is built for founders ready to go global, and the partners ready to back them. The World Doesn’t Wait. Neither Do We. Allied nations are rearming, modernizing, and turning to American technology to meet the challenge. Startups are reaching global scale earlier than ever before, and the stakes have never been higher. A16z was built to meet this moment.
Why Are We Here? Why Did We Raise $15B?
At Andreessen Horowitz, we just raised over $15B. With these new funds including American Dynamism ($1.176B), Apps ($1.7B), Bio + Health ($700M), Infrastructure ($1.7B), Growth ($6.75B), and other venture strategies ($3B), we raised over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025. Why did we raise the money and how do we plan to invest it? At a16z, we believe that the best thing that a society can do for a person is to give them a chance.
Raghu Raghuram | Andreessen Horowitz
Nearly 30 years ago, I hired Raghu Raghuram to be a product manager at Netscape. While I do not remember much from those days, I keenly remember how smart he was. He was also eager to learn absolutely everything. The problem for me was that he was so smart that I did not have much to teach him about the products or technology, so I narrowed our conversations to leadership. As with everything else, he was eager to learn and quickly became the top product manager in the organization.
Lead Bullets | Andreessen Horowitz
Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight. —Public Enemy (sampled from Thomas Todd), Fight the Power Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product.
AI for Startups
Artificial intelligence is the most consequential innovation we have seen in a generation, with the transformative power to address society’s most complex problems and create a whole new economy—much like what we saw with the advent of the printing press, electricity, and the internet. It is a moment so big that it would be shortsighted for us to ignore the power of collaborating across the AI ecosystem—and the possibilities and potential that stand to be born from it.
Safety First | Andreessen Horowitz
“You can hate me now, but I won’t stop now.” Nas It has come to my attention that Techcrunch is working on yet another piece on me. This time they seem to be curious about my donations to the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. To save everyone some time and from yet another unsubstantiated narrative, I thought I’d share how I’ve been helping the LVMPD become the most technologically advanced police department in the world.
The Little Tech agenda
Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents. Little Tech has run independent of politics for our entire careers. But as the old Soviet joke goes, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.” We believe bad government policies are now the number-one threat to Little Tech. When this cycle is allowed to play out, when big companies can weaponize the government against startups, the result is stagnation and then decline.
New Funds, New Era
I am pleased to announce that we have just raised $7.2B for the following venture strategies: American Dynamism ($600M), Apps ($1B), Games ($600M), Infrastructure ($1.25B), and Growth ($3.75B). This marks an important milestone for us. When Marc and I started the firm in 2009, the conventional wisdom in Venture Capital was that in any given year, only 15 companies would ever generate $100M in revenue and those 15 companies would drive almost all of VC returns.
Nobody Cares | Andreessen Horowitz
“Just win baby.” Al Davis This post is dedicated to the late Al Davis. Rest in peace. Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: how could I have possibly prepared for this? How could I know that half our customers would go out of business? How could I know that it would become impossible to raise money in the private markets? How could I have figured out that there would be 221 IPOs in 2000 and 19 in 2001?
Politics and the Future
As software has eaten the world, it has become integral to every industry and nearly every endeavor in our society. As a result, the governments around the world have become increasingly interested in the implications and how they might regulate the technology. As we’ve seen with Internet regulation in the 1990s, high quality regulation can enable an industry to thrive while protecting consumers.
Investing in Air Space Intelligence
Given the complexities involved with airline operations, air traffic management, air defense, and everything in-between, you might assume that major U.S. airlines and the U.S. government use only the most sophisticated, best-in-class technology to handle their flight and operations planning.
AI Will Save The World with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado
This week, a16z’s own cofounder Marc Andreessen published a nearly 7,000-word article that aimed to dispel fears over AI’s risks to our humanity – both real and imagined.
Growth vs Efficiency: Can You Have Both?
Despite the ease of product building, sustainable growth has become increasingly challenging as many traditional channels no longer deliver the same results. In these challenging times, we explore the remaining growth opportunities. How can we achieve a balance between efficiency, profitability, and growth? Which channels are still relevant and how can they be effectively mastered in 2023?
AI Food Fights in the Enterprise
This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, which features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.
The Hard Things About Scaling: Executive Hiring
The holy grail of company building is finding product-market fit. But what most people don’t tell you is that once you’ve found it, you then need to ramp up your business and operations exponentially to continue delivering value to customers. The unlock to this is to build your executive team, since the best growth-stage executives serve as beacons for talent. But one of the hardest yet most critical aspects of scaling is to find the right leaders at the right time.
Executive Hiring
Parts of this package were generated in partnership with AI. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z.
Ben Horowitz and Brian Armstrong on Building and Overcoming the Hard Things
If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably heard of the recent FTX scandal. While there’s much still unknown, in this episode we get the unique opportunity to hear from Brian Armstrong – co-founder and CEO of Coinbase – about what’s top of mind for the crypto industry.
Ben Horowitz and Brian Armstrong on Building and Overcoming the Hard Things on Apple Podcasts
If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably heard of the recent FTX scandal. While there’s much still unknown, in this episode we get the unique opportunity to hear from Brian Armstrong – co-founder and CEO of Coinbase – about what’s top of mind for the crypto industry.
Building and Overcoming the Hard Things on Apple Podcasts
with @brian_armstrong @bhorowitz A conversation on management, company culture, and much more on building and overcoming the hard things… beginning with what’s top of mind for so many in the crypto industry and in the news right now (FTX etc.).
Why Are You Here?
Interviewing for a new position can be insanely stressful, no matter which side of the table you’re sitting on at the time. Job interviews are part performance art, part police interrogation, and part awkward holiday dinner with dyspeptic relatives. Very few people enjoy interviews, and fewer still are trained in how to do them well. Interviewing often gets painfully difficult in the information technology field.
Ben Horowitz on How the Best Leaders Build Culture
Ben Horowitz discusses the leadership styles of Intel’s Andy Grove and Apple’s Bill Campbell, how Okta won its market with culture, and how to look for and hire the talent you don’t have in an interview with David Weiden, founding partner at Khosla Ventures, at the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit. Transcript David Weiden: I’m pleased to introduce Ben Horowitz. Ben, welcome. So, we’re talking about culture, and I thought we’d start with someone I know is one of your heroes, Andy Grove.
a16z is Moving to the Cloud
Since our inception in 2009, Andreessen Horowitz has been a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. This was highly intentional on our part. Historically, the largest number of great technology companies emerged from Silicon Valley for good reason – the network effect.
Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO
Recently, Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google and founder Larry Page took over. Much of the news coverage focused on Page’s ability to be the “face of Google” as Page is far more shy and introverted than the gregarious and articulate Schmidt. While an interesting issue, this analysis misses the main point. Eric Schmidt was much more than Google’s front man; as Google’s peacetime Chief Executive, he led the greatest technology business expansion in the last ten years.
VC Ben Horowitz and Databricks' Ali Ghodsi share their 3 most important management tips
Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi run a weekly show called Boss Talk. They talk about their experiences as bosses and what they've learned from it. Knowing what type of boss you are and having a deep understanding of your company's internal structure will set you up for success. In 2021, we started a weekly show called Boss Talk which aired live each week on Clubhouse and is also available as a podcast.
$9B to Build the Future
I am excited to announce that Andreessen Horowitz just raised a fresh $9B to invest via our Venture, Growth, and Bio Funds. We are grateful to our Limited Partners who have believed in us and stuck with us over the past 12 years and hope to earn their trust once again. We thank our many wonderful entrepreneurs who made this set of funds possible.
web3 Policy | Andreessen Horowitz
Prioritize the Development of World-class, Decentralized Digital Infrastructure We need an overarching strategy for the development of world-class, decentralized infrastructure solutions, including digital identity, digital property rights, secure financial systems, accessible financial services, individual data sovereignty, privacy architecture, and better cybersecurity.
Investing in Mem
I was supposed to do something last week. If I’m lucky, I’ll remember what it was. If I’m really lucky, I’ll remember the context around it. But counting on luck isn’t a strategy, and organizing all the information in our work lives is incredibly challenging. Sure, there are task managers, but that’s not where I keep my notes. Sure, there are note takers, but that’s not where I keep my tasks. And none of the current set of tools allow me to collaborate with my colleagues the way I want.
Investing in Cresta: Supercharging Agents in Real Time
Nailing customer experience is tough. Every conversation, across every channel, counts. And while much in our lives has changed since the 1960s, the site of these customer conversations has not: the contact center. Contact centers — with their 17M overworked, undertrained, and understaffed agents globally — remain the hubs of customer experience. Agents thus hold the keys to unlock more revenue, less churn, and greater customer satisfaction.
Boss Talk with Ben and Ali: Enterprise Selling for Technical Founders
This first appeared in the monthly a16z enterprise newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest in enterprise and B2B. For technical founders, building out a successful enterprise sales motion and team can be one of the most daunting tasks. After all, the skills and culture of enterprise selling are typically very different from the engineering and product culture that these founders come from.
Sriram Krishnan | Andreessen Horowitz
Welcome, Sriram Krishnan, our newest general partner, to Andreessen Horowitz! Sriram is a well-known and much-loved figure in the technology world of Silicon Valley and beyond. His product career spans four of the great companies of our era: Microsoft, Facebook, Snap, and Twitter.
Doubling Down on the Future
We embraced speaking directly to our audience — from the builders of the future to the tech-curious — right as the firm was started in 2009. It started out with blogging about why we invested in a founder/founding team. Initially, we did this because we wanted to share the reputational risk with the entrepreneurs. The tradition back then was that most investors would only “market” their companies publicly at the exit when there was reputational upside, along with the money.
Investing in Pave
People are a company’s biggest asset and investment. Companies spend billions of dollars on recruiting, paying, managing, and trying to retain talent, as people are the lifeblood of a company. In fact, the average Fortune 500 company spends 50-60% of total spend on labor, and that percentage is even higher for an early stage startup. Companies are now recognizing that transparency around compensation is at the heart of all recruiting, promotions, and employee retention conversations.
a16z Podcast: How to Decide, Convey vs. Convince, & More
It seems like investors are especially obsessed with the psychology of decision making — high stakes, after all — but all kinds of decisions, whether in life or business — like dating, product management, what to eat or watch on Netflix — are an “investment portfolio” of decisions… even if you sometimes feel like you’re making one big decision at a time (like, say, marriage or what product to develop next or who to hire).
‘Deep’ Job Platforms and How to Build Them - Andreessen Horowitz
Looking for a job in the 2020s will be very different from looking for a job in the 2000s, or even the 2010s. In this new era of reduced budgets, open-ended hiring freezes, and a shape-shifting workforce of career changers, relocators, and solopreneurs, the concept of a resume and a job board seems comically antiquated.
a16z Podcast: Designing a Culture of Reinvention
Since Netflix started in the late 90s as a DVD-by-mail rental service competing with Blockbuster, it has completely reinvented itself… twice – first, when it went from DVD rental to video streaming platform, and then again when it went from licensing to producing original content. But what does it take to create an organization capable of reinventing itself?
a16z Podcast: Heroes & Myths in Entrepreneurship - with Guy Raz
“I’m in a movie, but it’s the wrong movie.” For better or for worse, we tell the story of entrepreneurs as one of the mythical hero’s journey: that’s there’s a call, a test (multiple tests!), a destination… But nothing truly follows such a clean, linear, storytelling arc.
Black Spartacus — the mind of a revolutionary
One of the greatest stories in modern history has been under-reported.
Building a Better, Blacker Tech Pipeline
As two Black women from Detroit and Montgomery, Alabama, we never thought we’d end up working in technology, let alone venture capital. Growing up in the heyday of AIM, MySpace, and eBay, we thought of technology as a hobby, not an industry or a job option. Technology was like air—all around us, but abstract. We didn’t take the “typical” path to tech: We went to HBCUs, we didn’t major in computer science or engineering, we didn’t rise through the ranks at Facebook or Apple or Google.
16 Questions for Selling in COVID-19
During COVID-19, sales teams face a set of twin challenges – reduced IT budgets in an uncertain market and selling when business is virtual. Already half of B2B companies have reduced their budgets by over 40%. Overall, IT spend is predicted to drop 8% in 2020 – as enterprises spend roughly $300B less than they did in 2019. But there is a silver lining, downturns are typically when the most dramatic changes in relative market share happen.
What We Can't Reveal We Can't Heal
Given recent events around George Floyd and far beyond, this special episode of the a16z Podcast features Shaka Senghor, a leading advocate for criminal justice reform (and bestselling author), and Terry Brown, a former police officer in East Palo Alto (who has since run his own security firms) — who, incidentally, both grew up in Detroit but ended up on different sides of the law — in conversation with a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz.
Introducing the Talent x Opportunity Fund
“Picket lines and picket signs Don’t punish me with brutality Talk to me, so you can see Oh, what’s going on What’s going on” –Marvin Gaye Last week the country watched the slow and heart-wrenching murder of George Floyd and many exploded in outrage, protest, and desperation. Witnessing a murder would be jarring in isolation, but it followed several similar incidents in the immediate past from Ahmaud Arbery to Breonna Taylor and countless others before.
The Right Way to Lay People Off
I’m trying to write my wrongs, But it’s funny these same wrongs helped me write this song —Kanye West, Touch the Sky Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, I had a conversation with the legendary venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital. He wanted to hear the story of how we went from doomed in the eyes of the world to a $1.6B outcome with no recapitalization.
The Hustler's Guide to Nursing Jobs
This is the next cycle (Q1 2020) of Hustlin’ Tech, a podcast series (from the a16z Podcast) about technology platforms that create opportunities for people.
The Hustlers's Guide to Suing the Man
This is the next cycle (Q1 2020) of Hustlin’ Tech, a podcast series (from the a16z Podcast) about technology platforms that create opportunities for people.
The Hustler's Guide to Elder Care
This is the next cycle (Q1 2020) of Hustlin’ Tech, a podcast series (from the a16z Podcast) about technology platforms that create opportunities for people.
The Hustler's Guide to Nursing Jobs
This is the next cycle (Q1 2020) of Hustlin’ Tech, a podcast series (from the a16z Podcast) about technology platforms that create opportunities for people.
Black History’s Impact on Entrepreneurship - Andreessen Horowitz
This month, we recognize the importance of black history and the leaders who paved the way for future generations. African American culture is a driving force behind global culture, a staggering accomplishment. This collective cultural and entrepreneurial genius is what spurs the Cultural Leadership Fund’s mission: to advance more African Americans in technology and venture capital.
Kristina Shen - Andreessen Horowitz
Almost every new enterprise software company today is a SaaS company, so when we started our search for a new general partner to join our enterprise team, we knew it had to be someone who would bring tremendous expertise and enhance our ability to invest in and support great SaaS businesses. People who know the SaaS startup world know Kristina Shen.
a16z Podcast: The Stories and Code of Culture Change
There are some common tropes that can kill your company culture — whether it’s that corporate values can be weaponized; “fake it til you make it”; the “reality distortion fields” of visionaries vs. liars; and so on. All of this just reveals the confusing, sometimes blurry line between the yellow zones and red zones of behavior, because the very things that are strengths can also become weaknesses (and vice versa!).
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