#297 David Ulevitch - General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Today we are talking to David Ulevitch, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And we discuss the founders' journey from raising capital to successful exit, the need to communicate the value of your product, why you may not be charging enough for your goods and services.
All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!
About David:
David Ulevitch is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise and SaaS investments.
He was previously the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service that was acquired by Cisco in 2015. His vision and leadership were responsible for creating a cloud-delivered security service that today protects over 85 million people worldwide across more than 10,000 enterprise customers. While at Cisco, David was a senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Security — a $2.4 billion annual revenue business — where he oversaw the company's global security strategy, portfolio, and architecture.
Prior to OpenDNS, David founded EveryDNS, an authoritative DNS service, and grew it into the world's largest free DNS service, which he sold to Dyn (now Oracle) in 2010.
David holds a BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, which turned out to be way more useful than he expected.
David grew up in Del Mar, California, and began his internet career early in life. Before entering high school, he worked for ElectriCiti, a small regional ISP where he picked up his first states of system and network administration.
David serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: AnyRoad, Orderful, Superhuman, Tandem, and WorkBoard.
About Andreessen Horowitz
Founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz (known as "a16z") is a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, California, that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We are stage agnostic: we invest in seed to late-stage technology companies, across the consumer, enterprise, bio/healthcare, crypto, and fintech spaces. a16z has $16.6B in assets under management across multiple funds, including the $1.4B Bio funds, the $865M Crypto fund, and the Cultural Leadership Fund.
a16z is defined by respect for the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial company building process; we know what it’s like to be in the founder’s shoes. The firm is led by general partners, many of whom are former founders/operators, CEOs, or CTOs of successful technology companies, and who have domain expertise ranging from biology to crypto to distributed systems to security to marketplaces to financial services.