Ben Horowitz joined Chicagoland entrepreneurs at 1871 Thursday, sharing childhood anecdotes, quoting Lupe Fiasco and laying out hard-won insights also highlighted in his latest book, "The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers."
Horowitz, former CEO of cloud services company Loudcloud which later became enterprise software company Opsware, now operates tech venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with Marc Andreessen.
His stories of making spectacularly difficult decisions come from experience in manning a tech company through volatile conditions of the dot-com era (having helped kickstart it while a project manager at Netscape). These volatile situations throughout his career include: taking Loudcloud public “30 days from bankruptcy" in 2001, transferring Loudcloud's revenue to Electronic Data Systems shortly after, resulting in two rounds of layoffs and budget nightmares. But he bounced back from the tumultous times, rebuilding the company as Opsware and selling it to HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion.
"When I was a CEO, I slept like a baby,” said Horowitz. “I woke up every two hours and cried.”
J.B. Pritzker of Pritzker Group, who moderated the discussion, addressed the difficulty of bouncing back from failure here in Chicago: “I remember a while back, tech companies would start up and fail and Crain's or the Tribune would write about them as if they were the dumbest people in the world – a number of those companies never started up again.”
While that is changing, Horowitz acknowledged the difficulty for tech companies to survive in an ecosystem that predicates failure for many before coming to a success: “That’s a problem of the ‘can’t do’ culture,” Horowitz said. He shared the pressing challenges faced by other tech founders such as Stuart Butterfield, who turned his bad luck from developing TinySpeck into the seed for Flickr.
“What we’re looking for is somebody who’s figured out something that nobody else does, and sometimes you do that by failing,” Horowitz said.
He addressed the concerns about Andreesen Horowitz’s investment in Bitcoin as coming from the same line of reasoning: “Bitcoin is a financial platform that nobody owns, that solves a number of problems today,” he said, pointing out similarities to the early days of the Internet.
Horowitz encouraged Chicago entrepreneurs to continue to build on the successes of the currently thriving tech companies to serve as the seeds for the next round of talent, while continuing to create policies that gave tech entrepreneurs to experiment and test different technological fields (giving the example of drone testing) and building upon educational initiatives.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel made an appearance to introduce Horowitz and to also touch on the city’s need for continued growth in the tech field. He also pointed out that the city is in the growing stages with 10 innovation centers and labs in Chicago, half of them recently opened.
