About
Ben Horowitz is co-founder and General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most consequential venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Before a16z, he co-founded and ran Loudcloud — later renamed Opsware — through the dot-com collapse, a brutal pivot from managed hosting to enterprise software, and a near-death cash crisis, ultimately selling the company to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.65 billion. That operator résumé is the source material for everything he writes.
Horowitz’s books — The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) and What You Do Is Who You Are (2019) — argue that running a company is less about strategy and more about absorbing impact: laying people off without losing the rest, firing executives you hired, telling investors bad news, choosing which crisis to fight first. His most-cited contribution to startup vocabulary is the Wartime CEO vs. Peacetime CEO distinction, which has shaped how a generation of founders talk about leadership-mode transitions.
He is known for an unusual willingness to write about CEO struggle in clinical detail — the emotional toll, the impossible decisions, the loneliness — at a moment when most operator literature was still skewed toward triumphalist case study. The result is a body of work that practitioners quote more often than business school textbooks.
