Benjamin Abraham Horowitz is an American investor, businessman, blogger, author, and technology entrepreneur also known as the co-founder and CEO of the enterprise software company Opsware, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007.
Early life and education
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz was born on June 13, 1966, in London, England, and raised in Berkeley, California. Horowitz is the son of David Horowitz, a policy advocate, and Elissa Krauthamer.
In 1998, Horowitz earned a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University in the City of New York, and in 1990, an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Career
In 1990, Horowitz began his career at Silicon Graphics as an engineer. In 1995, Horowitz joined at Netscape with Marc Andreessen as a project manager. From 1997 to 1998, Horowitz was a Vice President at Netscape for the Directory and Security Product Line. After AOL acquired Netscape in 1998, Horowitz served AOL’s eCommerce Division as Vice President.
Horowitz cofounded Loudcloud with Andreessen, In Sik Rhee, and Tim Howes in September 1999. Loudcloud offered application hosting services and infrastructure to Internet customers and enterprises such as Gannett Company, Ford Motor Company, the United States Army, Nike, Inc., News Corporation, and other large organizations. On March 9, 2001, Horowitz took Loudcloud public.
Opsware
In June 2002, Horowitz began the Loudcloud’s transformation into Opsware, an enterprise software company. Horowitz took the first step by selling to Electronic Data Systems the Loudcloud’s core managed services business for $63.5 million in cash. This transaction transferred 100% of Loudcloud’s revenue to EDS while NASDAQ traded the company publicly. Horowitz turned Opsware to hundreds of enterprise customers, beginning with EDS as its first enterprise software customer, over $100 million in annual revenue, and 550 employees. In July 2007, Horowitz sold Opsware for $1.6 billion in cash to Hewlett-Packard.
Horowitz was the President and Chief Executive Officer for the entire Loudcloud’s and Opsware’s history. Along the way, stocks of Opsware was opened for IPO at $6, sank to $0.35 per share at its nadir and traded at $14.25 a share at the time of its sale to HP. Following the sale of Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, Horowitz then spent one year as Vice President and General Manager in HP Software at Hewlett-Packard, with responsibility for 3,000 employees and $2.8 billion in annual revenue.
Andreessen Horowitz
Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen launched Andreessen Horowitz on July 6, 2009, to invest in and advise both early-stage startups, and more established growth companies in high technology. Both actively invested in technology companies between 2006 and 2010. Separately, and together, the two invested in 45 start-ups for $80 million, including Twitter. During this time, the firm became well-known as the super angel investors.
Andreessen Horowitz launched their venture capital fund on July 6, 2009, with $300 million as an initial capitalization. For the second venture fund, Andreessen Horowitz raised another $650 million in November 2010. Under the two funds, the firm was managing a total of $1.2 billion in less than two years.
Based on the firm’s level of syndication and networks with other venture firms, Andreessen Horowitz ranked as the number 1 venture capital firm in May 2011. Horowitz ranked number 1 on CNET’s most influential investors’ list and number 6 on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List in 2011, while Andreessen ranked number 10 on the Forbes Midas List of Tech’s Top Investors in 2011.
The firm managed $4 billion in assets as of March 27, 2014, after the closing of its fourth fund at $1.5 billion. In addition to Andreessen and Horowitz, the firm’s general partners include Alex Rampell, Andrew Chen, Chris Dixon, Jeff Jordan, John O’Farrell, Martin Casado, Peter Levine, Scott Weiss, and Vijay Pande.
Andreessen Horowitz made its first two investments in 2009: one, in business management SaaS developer Apptio, and the other one in Skype stock. The investment was extensively seen as risky because many considered Skype would be crippled by intellectual property litigation (initiated by Skype’s founders) and direct aggressive attacks from Apple and Google. The gambit paid off when Microsoft acquired Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.
Andreessen Horowitz invested in Okta, a cloud company, for $10 million in 2010 while leading its Series A Round. Andreessen Horowitz also invested in Twitter for $80 million in the following year, becoming the first venture firm that owned assets in all four of the highest-valued, privately held social media companies at the time: Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, and Groupon. Andreessen Horowitz has also invested in Airbnb, Belly, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Stripe, and other high-tech companies.
Andreessen Horowitz invested in 156 companies in 2012, including 66 start-ups and the 90 companies in its portfolio through its funding of Y Combinator’s Start Fund. Andreessen Horowitz invested $100 million in GitHub, which made over $1 billion for the fund when Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. Andreessen Horowitz invested in Clinkle, Coinbase, Soylent, Databricks, Lyft, Oculus VR, PagerDuty, Pixlee, Ripple, Swiftype, and uBiome in 2013.
In 2016, the firm led in a Series A funding round of $8.1 million in Everlaw, a legal technology company; and led $3.5 million in a Series Seed round in RapidAPI, an API connection platform for developers. The firm also invested in a digital health company, Cardiogram, for $2 million. In 2016, the firm also invested in food science business Apeel Sciences. The firm invested in Sigma, Health IQ, Asimov, and Cadre. The firm rose for a dedicated cryptocurrency fund of $300 million in 2018. The firm invested in CryptoKitties, Dfinity, Earnin, Imply, PeerStreet, Smartcar, Tenfold, and Very Good Security.
Personal life
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz married Felicia in 1988 and has three children.