Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz studied computer science at the University of California Los Angeles and began his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics. He worked with Marc Andreessen at Netscape and joined him in founding Loudcloud in 1999 — a cloud computing startup that IPO'd in 2001. When the dot-com collapse devastated Loudcloud's business, Horowitz led a difficult pivot that transformed the company into Opsware, an enterprise software company that he ultimately sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. In 2009 he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Marc Andreessen. His book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" (2014) draws directly on his experiences building and nearly losing Loudcloud — describing the psychological and practical challenges of leading a company through existential crisis. The book is known for its unusual candour: Horowitz writes about specific moments of doubt and crisis with a directness rare in business literature. It has sold over one million copies and is widely assigned in entrepreneurship courses and read by founders and investors. At a16z, Horowitz has focused particularly on enterprise software, crypto/Web3, and culture-focused investments. He also writes extensively about hip-hop, Black culture, and technology culture through the a16z blog, bringing a distinctive personal voice to venture capital discourse.