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 along with Marc Andreessen. He previously co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups,[1][2] and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.[3]
Horowitz was born Benjamin Abraham Horowitz[4] in London, England and raised in Berkeley, California, the son of Elissa Krauthamer and conservative writer and policy advocate David Horowitz. Horowitz's great-grandparents were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire who arrived in the U.S. in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.[5]
Horowitz began his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics in 1990.[6] In 1995, Horowitz joined Marc Andreessen at Netscape as a product manager.[8] From 1997 to 1998, Horowitz was vice president for the Directory and Security Product Line at Netscape.[6] After Netscape was acquired by AOL in 1998, Horowitz served as Vice President of AOL's eCommerce Division.[9]
In June 2002, Horowitz began a transformation of Loudcloud into Opsware, an enterprise software company.[12] He took the first step by selling Loudcloud's core managed services business to Electronic Data Systems for $63.5 million in cash.[13] This transaction transferred 100% of Loudcloud's revenue to EDS while the company was publicly traded on NASDAQ. Beginning with EDS as its first enterprise software customer, Horowitz grew Opsware to hundreds of enterprise customers, over $100 million in annual revenue, and 550 employees. In July 2007, Horowitz sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in cash.[14]
Horowitz was Loudcloud's and Opsware's President and Chief Executive Officer for the entire history of the company. Along the way, shares of Opsware IPO'ed 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.[10]
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[15] with responsibility for 3,000 employees and $2.8 billion in annual revenue.
On July 6, 2009, Horowitz and Andreessen launched Andreessen Horowitz,[16] 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[17] and within three years had $2.7 billion under management across three funds.[18]
