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.
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.