Ben Horowitz and Raghu Raghuram first met at Netscape, in very different lives.<\/p>\n
Horowitz took on the then-very-early-career Raghuram as a product manager at the seminal dotcom era browser company<\/a>. In the decades since, Horowitz went on to build VC giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), while Raghuram took his own path to VMware<\/a>, rising to CEO in 2021, and two years later shepherding the cloud infrastructure giant through its $69 billion acquisition<\/a> by Broadcom<\/a>.<\/p>\n This week, the two former colleagues were reunited with Raghuram joining a16z as a managing partner. Raghuram, who will be a general partner on the firm\u2019s AI infrastructure and growth teams, is joining a16z at a time of great change\u2014both in the VC business and, thanks to AI, across the tech industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n I sat down with Horowitz and Raghuram to discuss some of these changes, and to learn more about the opportunities and challenges that the VC firm, and its newest partner, are thinking about.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re moving from a deterministic way of computing to a probabilistic way of computing,\u201d said Raghuram, adding that the AI shift means everything about \u201cwhat the world of computing should look like\u201d needs to be rethought.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cReasoning capability is going to become plentiful and very cheap over time,\u201d Raghuram explained. \u201cOnce you fundamentally understand that we\u2019re building for the world of reasoning abundance, there\u2019s opportunity in enterprise, consumer, and across various sectors.\u201d<\/p>\n Horowitz described it as \u201cprobably the biggest opportunity set that we\u2019ve seen since we were a firm, as we\u2019ve kind of reinvented all of computing.\u201d<\/p>\n Now 16 years old, Andreessen Horowitz has evolved a lot since its founding in 2009. The VC firm, with more than $40 billion in assets under management, has expanded into private wealth management and public market investing<\/a>, and stunned Silicon Valley during the 2024 presidential election by coming out as a vocal supporter of Trump<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n AI opens up even more opportunities to invest and to build startups, with the VC industry more reliant on AI investments than ever before<\/a>. Still, Horowitz stressed that a16z\u2019s vision remains firmly rooted in founders.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to become a private equity firm where we buy a bunch of companies, roll them up, and use AI to, say, fire the employees more efficiently,\u201d said Horowitz. \u201cThat\u2019s just not our thing. We\u2019re dream builders, and we want to help people build new things.\u201d<\/p>\n In some sense, Horowitz told Fortune, Raghuram is now filling a gap left vacant by Scott Kupor<\/a>, who joined the Trump administration to lead the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from a16z in April. I asked Horowitz what role politics plays in how he\u2019s thinking about the investing landscape. He emphasized three areas: increased clarity around crypto, his optimism about Trump\u2019s AI executive order, and his hopes around rare earth mineral mining and manufacturing, especially for defense. He also addressed immigration, as controversy mounts around how the Trump administration is handling H-1B visas<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe immigration thing is just very complicated,\u201d he said. \u201cHalf the H-1B visas have gone to these big consulting firms, looking for cheaper labor, particularly the big Indian consulting firms. That needs to be cleaned up.\u201d<\/p>\n Horowitz authored The Hard Thing About Hard Things more than a decade ago, and I asked him and Raghuram about an observation from the book I\u2019ve thought about many times: That what makes hard things hard is that there are \u201cno easy answers or playbooks.\u201d What are each of them currently thinking about, where there are no easy answers?<\/p>\n For Horowitz: \u201cI would say the biggest one is the relationship with China. There are so many tremendously talented Chinese-Americans, and there are many Chinese nationals in the U.S. who are helping our companies. We do have this tough diplomatic situation with them, both on trade and national security. Right now, we\u2019re definitely not investing in China for obvious reasons. Long-term, how that situation is going to play out and how we should think about it is tricky.\u201d<\/p>\n For Raghuram, he\u2019s grappling with how labor will be affected by AI: \u201cHow do you deploy your resources?\u201d he said. \u201cAs you lay out people to do a job or AI, what is the right point of the spectrum at that point in time, and how do you navigate it? And if you aggregate that across our companies, and society, how do you deal with that change?\u201d<\/p>\n