Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Ben Horowitz on IPOs from hell, the power of profanity, and why he likes a good fight

Before Ben Horowitz built one of the fastest-growing venture capital firms in Silicon Valley’s history, he was a CEO on the perpetual brink of disaster. Loudcloud, the early cloud-computing company Horowitz founded with Marc Andreessen after the sale of Netscape to AOL, nearly went bankrupt when the NASDAQ crashed in 2000. When fundraising proved impossible, Horowitz pursued a controversial initial public offering that Businessweek called “the IPO from hell.”


The business that emerged from Loudcloud’s assets, Opsware, was another journey through hell. When Horowitz finally unloaded Opsware on Hewlett-Packard — for $1.65 billion in cash — he felt more sick than he did relieved. “I couldn’t sleep, I had cold sweats, I...


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