Ben Horowitz: Fueling the tech boom and learning from hip-hop

Ben Horowitz of Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz

(Credit: Andreessen Horowitz)

Never mind the slew of economic concerns -- hell, make that catastrophic concerns -- hanging over the world. Silicon Valley is riding high. And no venture firm is leading the charge harder than Andreessen Horowitz.

The company started three years ago this month by longtime business partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (first Netscape, then LoudCloud and Opsware). They've since raised $2.7 billion and have backed 150 companies, including newly-public Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, as well as hot private companies such as Pinterest and AirBnb. Earlier this month, Andreessen Horowitz made a $100 million bet on GitHub, a cloud/social play for software engineers to share and store their code.

I caught up with Ben Horowitz at the firm's offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., to talk about the impact of Facebook's messy IPO, t... [Read more]