Top Book Recommendations by Ben Horowitz: Best Books for Success

Benjamin Abraham Horowitz is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He previously cofounded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.

Horowitz began his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics in 1990. In 1995, Horowitz joined Marc Andreessen at Netscape as a product manager. From 1997 to 1998, Horowitz was vice president for the Directory and Security Product Line at Netscape. After AOL acquired Netscape in 1998, Horowitz served as Vice President of AOL's eCommerce Division.

In September 1999, Horowitz cofounded Loudcloud with Andreessen, Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee. Loudcloud offered infrastructure and application hosting services to enterprise and Internet customers such as Ford Motor Company, Nike, Inc., Gannett Company, News Corporation, the United States Army, and other large organizations. Horowitz took Loudcloud public on March 9, 2001.

In June 2002, Horowitz began a transformation of Loudcloud into Opsware, an enterprise software company. He took the first step by selling Loudcloud's core managed services business to Electronic Data Systems for $63.5 million in cash. This transaction transferred 100% of Loudcloud's revenue to EDS while the company was publicly traded on NASDAQ. Beginning with EDS as its first enterprise software customer, Horowitz grew Opsware to hundreds of enterprise customers, over $100 million in annual revenue, and 550 employees. In July 2007, Horowitz sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in cash.

Horowitz was Loudcloud's and Opsware's President and Chief Executive Officer for the company's entire history. Along the way, shares of Opsware IPO'ed at $6, sank to $0.35 per share at its nadir and traded at $14.25 a claim at the time of its sale to HP. Following the sale of Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, Horowitz then spent one year at Hewlett-Packard as Vice President and General Manager in HP Software, responsible for 3,000 employees and $2.8 billion in annual revenue.