The next issue of Fortune is about to hit newsstands. In it, there’s a months-long collaboration between Fortune‘s Jessica Mathews and prominent substacker, Eric Newcomer. The pair dug into the bold ambitions of famed Silicon Valley investors, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who are attempting to scale their firm Andreessen Horowitz into a global financial juggernaut while navigating the worst tech market since the firm was founded ten years ago.
From Jessica and Eric:
“This evolution, begun a few years ago but all the more pressing today, aims to position the firm as a sort of Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan of the West…And an expanding collection of academics and policy wonks are being added to the payroll, which now numbers more than 500 people compared with 240 in July 2021.
In a sense a16z is following its own recipe for turning startups into large companies—prioritizing growth while hoping to dodge the potentially fatal dangers that come with it. Based on the more than $35 billion the firm has raised in the past seven years, a16z is almost certainly reaping about $500 million a year on management fees alone—a sum that stands to grow even more as the firm sprawls into new markets.
“They are running a lot of experiments,” says a former Andreessen Horowitz investment partner. “It seems to me relatively obvious that some will fail. The flip side is that some of them will work out.”
Read the full feature on Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s moonshot below.
