Ben Horowitz Co-Founded VC Firm Andreessen Horowitz, Made a Fortune

The internet is fuzzy on Ben Horowitz’s exact net worth — with sketchy reports ranking him among America’s billionaires — but he and business partner Marc Andreessen certainly seem to have vast resources at their disposal at their venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. The company is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Flow, a new venture from Adam Neumann, the once-disgraced founder of WeWork.

According to The New York Times, Andreessen Horowitz is investing about $350 million in Flow — a residential real estate startup — marking the largest individual check the VC firm has ever cut in a round of funding to a company. The Times reports the investment values Flow at more than $1 billion. And Andreessen wrote in a blog post that “we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned.”

In light of this big news for the firm, read on for more about Horowitz.

According to his Andreessen Horowitz bio, Horowitz has a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.S. from University of California, Los Angeles, both in computer science.

Early in his career, Horowitz held senior product marketing positions at Lotus Development Corporation. In 1995, he joined Netscape Communications and ran several of the company’s product divisions and worked as VP of the Directory and Security product line. Once America Online acquired Netscape, Horowitz became vice president and general manager of AOL’s e-commerce division, overseeing the development of the Shop@AOL service.

Horowitz and Andreessen were two of the co-founders of Loudcloud, the software company later called Opsware, which HP bought for $1.6 billion in 2007. Following that acquisition, Horowitz became vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP.

“At Hewlett Packard at the end, nobody felt like it was their company,” he recalled in a new episode of the a16z Live podcast. “They were on their fourth professional CEO and everybody was there for a paycheck.”

Horowitz and Andreessen launched their VC firm in 2009. Dubbed a16z, the firm has invested in Airbnb, Instagram, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley faves.

In addition to his VC career, Horowitz is also the author of the books The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.

In the absence of reputable estimates of his net worth, various websites report Horowitz has a fortune of $3.5 billion.