Benjamin Abraham Horowitz (born June 13, 1966) is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and Co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz alongside Marc Andreessen. He is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups^[5], and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture^[4]. ^[1][2][3]

Early Life & Education

Ben Horowitz was born in London, England, and raised in Berkeley, California. He's the son of Elissa Krauthamer and conservative writer and policy advocate David Horowitz. He earned a Bachelor of Arts/Science in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1988 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990. ^[2][6]

Career

Horowitz began his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics in 1990. In 1995, he joined Marc Andreessen at Netscape as a product manager. From 1997 to 1998, Horowitz was vice president for the Directory and Security Product Line at Netscape. After Netscape was acquired by AOL in 1998, Horowitz served as Vice President of AOL's eCommerce Division. ^[7]

In September 1999, Horowitz co-founded Opsware (formerly Loudcloud) with Andreessen, Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee and served as the President and CEO. Opsware offered infrastructure and application hosting services to enterprise and Internet customers such as Ford Motor Company, Nike, Inc., Gannett Company, News Corporation, the United States Army, and other large organizations. In 2007, Hewlett-Packard acquired Opsware for $1.6 billion, making it one of the pioneers in software as a service and cloud hosting. ^[8]

Following the sale of Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, Horowitz then spent one year at Hewlett-Packard as Vice President and General Manager in HP Software with responsibility for 3,000 employees and $2.8 billion in annual revenue. ^[9]

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

On July 6, 2009, Horowitz and Andreessen launched Andreessen Horowitz to invest in and advise both early-stage startups and more established growth companies in high technology. Andreessen Horowitz began with an initial capitalization of $300 million and within three years had $2.7 billion under management across three funds. ^[11]

Early Investment & Notable Successes

Facebook

In 2010, a year after its founding, Andreessen Horowitz invested $80 million in Facebook. At the time, Facebook was already a social media giant but this investment was proof of the firm's vision and willingness to bet on tech companies with growth potential. ^[12]

Twitter

In 2011, Andreessen Horowitz alongside other investors provided $80 million in funding to Twitter (now X). This investment helped Twitter expand and solidify its position as a global social media platform. ^[12]

Airbnb

Andreessen Horowitz made an investment of $112 million in Airbnb in 2011. At the time, Airbnb was a leading company in the hospitality industry and this investment was a necessary capital for the company to grow and scale its operations worldwide. ^[12]

Optimizely

In May 2014, Andreessen Horowitz led a $57 million Series B funding for Optimizely with participation by Benchmark Capital and Bain Capital Ventures. ^[17]

Other Investments

The firm also made early investments in companies like LinkedIn, Slack, GitHub, Okta, Coinbase, Instabase, Pinterest, Groupon, etc. ^[12]

a16z crypto

a16z crypto is a media resource hosted on YouTube. It is a definitive channel for news and information in the web3 and cryptocurrency space. With over 10.5K subscribers and 185 videos, it provides overviews and insights from researchers, demos from developers and engineers, and more from product builders and creators. a16z is also hosted across podcast channels like Google Podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc. ^[10]

"The core idea of Bitcoin, this idea that you have a financial service that the community owns, is just an incredibly powerful idea that has really appealed to people." - Ben Horowitz on his opinion about Blockchain future^[15]

"One way to think about blockchains is they're doing for the service layer what open-source software did for the software layer."

Ventures

Ben serves on the board of Anyscale, Caffeine, Databricks, Mayvenn, NationBuilder, Okta ($OKTA), Tanium, Navan, and UnitedMasters. ^[7]

Industry Influence

Horowitz and Andreessen were ranked No. 6 on Vanity Fair's 2011 New Establishment List, No. 1 on CNET's 2011 Most Influential Investors list, and Nos. 2 and 21, respectively, on the 2012 Forbes Midas List of Tech's Top Investors. ^[13]

In April 2012, Horowitz and Andreessen Horowitz General Partners Marc Andreessen, Peter Levine, Jeff Jordan, John O'Farrell, and Scott Weiss pledged to donate half of their lifetime incomes from venture capital to charitable organizations. ^[14]

Views on AI

On Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ben Horowitz says humans should not be afraid of it because history suggests that it will create more jobs rather than erase them. ^[16]

“It is possible this time it’s different — it’s possible that this time technology just wipes out all the jobs and there’s nothing for people to do and we just have to put on plays, and write music and paint pictures — but that’s not the highly probable bet,” he said.

For every single technological shift, the implications for business and society are massive but hard to predict.

“I think you have to be careful about shorting human ambition and ingenuity,” said Horowitz. “The possibilities of the future — things that we might build or do — are just really hard to anticipate.”

Horowitz also predicts that Artificial intelligence will free humans from things machines do better, and people will be able to spend time doing the things machines are not good at, like interacting with people. ^[16]

"When it comes to things like business forecasting, machines will step in and do a better job than humans of doing certain things, like producing quarterly earnings forecasts, said Horowitz."

Producing an accurate business forecast requires analyzing huge volumes of data on things like the macroeconomic environment, a company’s customer usage, and the competitive landscape to create better quarterly earnings forecasts.

“No human being can analyze all that and put up a forecast, but a machine absolutely can do a better job, over time, which enables you to plan the business better, and enables you to hire the right number of people,” he said^[16]