Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz is co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a technology venture capital firm, and a public voice on startup leadership, company culture, and AI-era technology policy. He previously co-founded and led Opsware and is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Direct Distribution Is Replacing Old Media’s Gatekeeping Role
Ben Horowitz, a16z cofounder and general partner, argues in “This is New Media” that founders should stop treating legacy media as the source of prestige and legitimacy. The source presents old media as a system of scarce channels, fixed formats, and institutional brands, then contrasts it with a16z’s direct audience metrics, startup-heavy visual world, and willingness to try unproven production formats. Its case is that credibility and storytelling for founders can now be built outside the old media system.
AI Is Moving Venture Capital’s Bottlenecks to Compute, Power, and Policy
Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, uses a Stanford CS153 lecture with Anjney Midha to argue that venture capital is a systems business whose constraints keep moving. He says a16z was built in 2009 to serve entrepreneurs rather than merely allocate capital, using centralized control, small investment groups, and a deliberately constructed relationship network. In Horowitz’s account, AI has shifted the next bottlenecks toward capital, compute, electricity, policy, moats, and culture, forcing venture firms and startups to redesign around those constraints rather than rely on older software-era assumptions.
America’s AI Race Requires Silicon Valley to Build for National Interest
Ben Horowitz argues that a16z’s scale gives it responsibilities that now extend into national strategy. In a conversation with David Ulevitch following the firm’s largest-ever fundraise, Horowitz says Silicon Valley should treat U.S. technological leadership in AI, defense, manufacturing and allied supply chains as a national-interest obligation, not a side concern. His case is that if the next technological revolution determines global influence, venture capital and startups have to help America build, adopt and remain optimistic about the technologies that will shape it.