Blowing Up The Venture Capital Model (Again)

In just a decade, Andreessen Horowitz has backed a bevy of startup blockbusters—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, Skype, Slack—and made just as many Silicon Valley enemies. To stay ahead, it took the unusual step of renouncing its venture capital status—and making even bigger, riskier bets.

- Alex Konrad

Emerging from the financial crisis in 2009, Marc An-dreessen 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 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.

Andreessen, whose Netscape browser and his company’s IPO were touchstone moments of the early digital age, understands that the choice of words back then doesn’t land so well in 2019. His new take: “The 21st century is the century of disagreeableness,” he says, sitting down with Forbes at Andreessen Horowitz’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. 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.

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 Twitter account to hiring an army of operational experts in a field built on lowkey 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 profits, at least on paper, for its investors. Four of its unicorns—Lyft, PagerDuty, Pinterest and most recently Uber—went public in the last few months. Over the next year or so, expect several more, headlined by Airbnb and Slack, to follow.