Ben Horowitz

The stock of the company Ben Horowitz was running fell to roughly 35 cents a share. Five years later Hewlett-Packard paid $1.6 billion for what he had rebuilt out of the wreckage, and that salvage job, not the venture firm that followed, is the credential he still invokes.¹

Horowitz is a co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that funds and advises technology startups in exchange for equity. Before becoming an investor, he built and ran two companies of his own through the collapse and recovery of the dot-com market. He is also the author of a widely read management book drawn from that experience.

Background

Horowitz was born in London and raised in Berkeley, California, the son of Elissa Krauthamer and David Horowitz, a writer and political commentator. He grew up in a household oriented around ideas and argument rather than business, and has said his lasting interest in hip-hop culture, which he later carried into his professional writing and speaking, took hold during his teenage years in the Bay Area. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Columbia University in 1988 and a master's degree in the same field from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990.

Getting started

Horowitz began his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics in 1990. In 1995 he joined Netscape Communications, the company that had commercialized the first mass-market web browser, working as a product manager under Marc Andreessen, Netscape's co-founder. He rose to vice president of Netscape's directory and security product line before AOL acquired Netscape in 1998, after which he ran AOL's e-commerce division.

In September 1999, Horowitz co-founded LoudCloud with Andreessen, Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee. LoudCloud offered managed web hosting and infrastructure services to businesses that did not want to run their own data centers, positioning itself as an early version of what cloud computing would later become. Horowitz served as chief executive. The company raised a $120 million round in mid-2000, at the time the largest second-round venture financing on record, and pushed through a $162.5 million initial public offering in the first quarter of 2001, even as the broader dot-com market was collapsing around it.

What he built

The crash gutted LoudCloud's customer base and revenue, and its stock fell to roughly 35 cents a share, a fraction of its IPO price. Rather than let the company fail, Horowitz sold its managed-hosting business to Electronic Data Systems in 2002 for about $63.5 million in cash and refocused the remaining company, renamed Opsware, around the internal software it had built to automate data center operations. That software became a standalone product for automating IT infrastructure at large enterprises. Opsware recovered over the following years, and in 2007 Hewlett-Packard acquired it for $1.6 billion in cash, at roughly $14.25 a share, a return from a company that had traded near worthlessness five years earlier.¹

In 2009, Horowitz and Andreessen co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, planning the firm for about a year and a half while Horowitz was still at HP following the Opsware sale. The founding idea, according to Horowitz, grew partly out of repeatedly being asked to arbitrate disputes between venture investors and founders and consistently finding himself on the founder's side; he and Andreessen built a firm explicitly oriented toward founder-friendly terms and hands-on operating support. The first fund raised $300 million from traditional US limited partners such as endowments and foundations. The firm grew steadily through subsequent funds and, in 2026, closed a single raise of $15 billion spread across four of its seven active funds, roughly 35 percent of it from international limited partners, a marked shift from the US-only base of fund one.¹ Horowitz sits on the boards of several portfolio companies, including Deel, a payroll and workforce-management platform.

How he operates

Horowitz traces his authority as an investor to having run companies through genuine near-death experiences rather than only advising from the sidelines; the LoudCloud-to-Opsware pivot is the lived material behind his 2014 book, "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," which argues that most of the hardest calls a chief executive faces have no clean answer and have to be made anyway. He distinguishes between what he calls wartime and peacetime modes of running a company: peacetime management optimizes broad opportunity and process, while wartime management narrows to survival and requires a single, forceful decision-maker, a distinction Deel chief executive Alex Bouaziz has cited as directly shaping his own approach to a competitor lawsuit: say nothing publicly, win in the market and in court.² Horowitz also holds contrarian staffing views, including a stated preference for chief marketing officers with engineering backgrounds over conventional marketing pedigrees.²

In venture terms, Horowitz has argued publicly that assumptions underlying decades of enterprise software investing no longer hold. He believes capital and computing power can now substitute for the years of engineering effort that used to make a software lead defensible, and that the customer lock-ins software companies once relied on, migration friction, data gravity, and interface habituation, have largely eroded as software increasingly serves other software rather than humans: "AIs are really flexible on how they use user interfaces."¹ He frames Andreessen Horowitz's scaled fundraising as a bet on the physical infrastructure, chips, power, and memory, that AI systems require, deploying capital and platform resources across many portfolio companies at once rather than building a single business himself. His argument for the bet is that the constraint is physical and slow to relieve: chips will arrive before electricity does, and a new DRAM factory takes five years to build.¹

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Horowitz remains a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which has grown from a single $300 million fund in 2009 into a multi-fund platform managing tens of billions of dollars, and continues to sit on several of its portfolio company boards. He and his wife, Felicia Horowitz, are active philanthropists through the Horowitz Family Foundation and through the Paid in Full Foundation, which supports early hip-hop pioneers. Horowitz has remained a visible public commentator on venture capital, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency, and has become more politically active in recent years alongside Andreessen.

Key facts

• Co-founded LoudCloud with Marc Andreessen, Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee in 1999; the company's managed-hosting business was sold to EDS in 2002 for about $63.5 million as it pivoted into the software company Opsware.
• Opsware was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.6 billion, after its stock had traded as low as roughly 35 cents a share during the dot-com bust.
• Co-founded Andreessen Horowitz with Marc Andreessen in 2009, starting with a $300 million first fund raised from US limited partners.
• By 2026, Andreessen Horowitz had raised $15 billion across four of its seven funds in a single raise, with a sizable share of the capital reportedly from international limited partners.
• Author of "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" (2014), a management book built on his experience running LoudCloud and Opsware through the dot-com collapse.
• Sits on the board of Deel, where the company's chief executive has credited Horowitz's wartime-versus-peacetime CEO framework as directly shaping company strategy.