Interview with David Ulevitch about joining Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen
Horowitz General Partner David Ulevitch is best known as the
founder of OpenDNS.
Andreessen
Horowitz

• Andreessen Horowitz has hired David Ulevitch as its
  newest general partner.
• Ulevitch is best known as the CEO of OpenDNS, which he
  sold to Cisco for $635 million in 2015. 
• He stayed with Cisco for three years after the
  acquisition, but decided to stay on to help guide his team and
  technology.
• Now, he says he’s particularly interested in how AI can
  change enterprise software.

When Martin Casado first pitched David Ulevitch on the
prospect of joining Andreessen Horowitz — one of Silicon Valley’s
premier venture firms, where Casado is a general partner — he got
an unexpected response. 

“He’s like, ‘not now,'” Casado recalls. “Which I deeply
respected.” 

The reason for the reluctance, Ulevitch tells Business
Insider, was that he had some business at his former employer
Cisco to see through. Back in 2015, Ulevitch sold his web
security startup, OpenDNS, to
Cisco for $635 million. He stayed on with Cisco as an exec in
its security unit, helping guide his team and technology through
the acquisition.

Now, though, he’s finally ready for something new, as he
takes Casado up on his offer and joins Andreessen Horowitz as its
latest general partner. He worked with a lot of startups as an
advisor during his OpenDNS days, and says that he’s been itching
to get back to it.

“After three years [at Cisco], I decided there was a better
way to get closer to entrepreneurs,” Ulevitch says. 

He says the decision to join Andreessen Horowitz came as
the result of some soul-searching: He spent the summer deciding
what he wants to do with the next ten years of his life. That
might seem like a long time horizon to worry about, but OpenDNS
lasted ten years before the sale to Cisco, and he loved it. In
that light, he says, “a
 ten year decision
doesn’t seem that daunting.”

As both an entrepreneur and an advisor, Casado praises
Ulevitch as “kind of [embodying] the ethos of the firm” — until
recently, Andreessen Horowitz required all of its general
partners to have been a CEO at some point, with no exceptions.
The firm
scrapped the rule earlier this year, even as it
promoted its own Connie Chan to general partner. Like
Ulevitch, Casado was once a founder; he
sold his startup Nicira to VMware for $1.26 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Martin
Casado
a16z

At the firm, Ulevitch will be working most closely Casado
and their fellow general partner Peter Levine, handling
enterprise IT deals. Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in
enterprise and software developer-focused companies like
Mesosphere,
Kong (formerly Mashape), and even GitHub, which Microsoft
recently snapped up for $7.5 billion.

We’re in ‘the first days of AI’

Going forward, Ulevitch says that while his background is
in security, he intends to focus on the IT landscape at large.
Artificial intelligence, he says, is a particular area of
opportunity — especially as IT departments and developers are
called upon to analyze ever-larger amounts of data, and as
software companies work to integrate it into their
products.

“We’re just in the first days of AI changing our
opportunity,” says Ulevitch. “How do we analyze data in ways we
haven’t done previously?”

“It’s pretty clear that we’re seeing a massive platform
shift happening,” said Casado. 

Ulevitch says that he also shares Casado’s belief that
developers are only growing in importance as a market for
startups. Developers have an unprecedented ability to pick and
choose what software and tools they want to use to do their jobs,
which means opportunity for any company smart and savvy enough to
capitalize on it. 

Still, Ulevitch isn’t in any hurry to make his first deals,
he says. He’s going to spend his first few months taking
meetings, talking to entrepreneurs, and learning as much as he
can (though he also says that he’ll do that after his
first few months, too). And then, perhaps, he’ll meet the first
startup with which he wants to cut a deal. 

“When all the stars align, I’ll be ready to open a
checkbook and back a great company,” says Ulevitch.