Emerging from the financial crisis in 2009, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz laid out their campaign to take on Silicon Valley. The pitch deck for their first venture capital fund that year promised to find a new generation of “megalomaniacal” founders—ambitious, assertive, singularly focused—who would, in the mold of CEO Steve Jobs, use technology to “put a dent in the universe.” In getting behind the likes of Facebook and Twitter, with a war chest that swelled into the billions, they proceeded to do exactly that....MUCH MORE
Perched on a couch in his office at Andreessen Horowitz’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Andreessen, whose Netscape browser and subsequent company IPO were touchstone moments of the digital age, understands that the original word choice doesn’t land so well in 2019. His new take: “The 21st century is the century of disagreeableness,” he says, sitting down with Forbes for his first extended interview in two years. In an era of hyper-connectivity, social media and information overload, he says, those “disagreeables” will challenge the status quo and create billion-dollar companies. Ego is out, anger—or dissidence, at least—is in.
If that’s an equally unpleasant prospect, consider Andreessen, who’s 47, the perfect messenger. From showy check-writing to weaponizing his popular blog and (before Trump) Twitter account to hiring an army of operational experts in a field built on low-key partnerships, he’s one of Silicon Valley’s poster boys for upending the rules. And it’s worked: In one decade, Andreessen Horowitz joined the elite VC gatekeepers of Silicon Valley while generating $10 billion-plus in estimated profits, at least on paper, to its investors. Over the next year or so, expect no less than five of its unicorns—Airbnb, Lyft, PagerDuty, Pinterest and Slack—to go public.
“What’s the number one form of differentiation in any industry? Being number one,” lectures Andreessen, who—at 6-foot-5 with a shaved dome that his wife, philanthropist Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, has been known to lovingly call “my egg”—carries himself with a brio to match his words.
Staying number one, however, is even harder than getting there. Optimism that technology will transform the world for the better has soured with each successive Facebook data scandal (Andreessen, an early investor, still sits on Facebook’s board). Every revelation of social media’s tendency to foster society’s worst forces poses a challenge to his and his firm’s trademark techno-evangelism. And in the conference rooms of Sand Hill Road, stakes in the next Instagram, Twitter or Skype—three of its best-known early deals—are no longer the upstart VC firm’s for the taking. Today there are a record number of rival billion-dollar funds and a newer kid on the block in SoftBank, which, armed with a $100 billion megafund, makes them all—Andreessen Horowitz included—look quaint. And one thing about saying you’re going to fix a broken industry—you create plenty of competitors who won’t hesitate to capitalize on even a whiff of doubt that you can back up the hype with results.
And so Andreessen and Horowitz, who rank 55th and 73rd, respectively, on this year’s Forbes Midas List, intend to be disagreeable themselves. They just finished raising a soon-to-be announced $2 billion fund (bringing total assets under management to nearly $10 billion) to write even bigger checks for portfolio companies and unicorns the firm missed the first time. More aggressively, they tell Forbes that they are registering their entire firm—a costly move requiring reviews of all 150 people—as a financial advisor, renouncing Andreessen Horowitz’s status as a venture capital firm entirely....
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