14 DAY TRIAL // Two Sillicon Valley heavyweights teamed up and created a new $300 million venture fund, which is set to become a large player in the market. Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen joined forces with Ben Horowitz to create the aptly named Andreeseen Horowitz fund, which will back up a number of technology companies with investments going from $50,000 to $50 million a piece.
The new fund is set to make investments in a series of enterprises, starting with $50,000 to $100,000 in 60 to 80 early startups, which are expected to make do with a total of $500,000 over their lifetime. A higher echelon of 12 to 15 companies will get several millions in investment money and the two plan to take board seats at several of them. Finally they plan to make two or three investments of up to $50 million in more developed companies, as Venture Beat reports.
Marc Andreessen is currently chairman at social networking platform Ning, which he cofounded, while he is also an investor at several high-profile companies like Digg and Twitter. He is best known for being one of the cofounders of Netscape, the popular browser company of the late nineties. The enterprise, which sparked the Internet revolution and arguably the web 1.0 bubble, was sold to AOL in a stock-swap deal valued at $4.2 billion at the time. While the browser itself has fallen into obscurity, mostly due to Microsoft's practices with Internet Explorer, its legacy lives on at the Mozilla Foundation, which took over the source code that was released as open source in 1998.
Ben Horowitz ran, until recently, HP's software division after selling Opsware, a company the two also founded for $1.6 billion to the computer maker. He has previously worked at AOL and held various positions at Netscape. The two have a long history together and have invested in a number of very popular companies like LinkedIn, Delicious and Twitter, while Andreessen also serves in Facebook's very small board of directors.