Nearly 30 years ago, I hired Raghu Raghuram to be a product manager at Netscape. While I do not remember much from those days, I keenly remember how smart he was. He was also eager to learn absolutely everything. The problem for me was that he was so smart that I did not have much to teach him about the products or technology, so I narrowed our conversations to leadership. As with everything else, he was eager to learn and quickly became the top product manager in the organization. I had a glimpse, but I honestly had no idea what a great leader he would become. 

I watched from afar as he took over product leadership at VMware. That was quite a feat as the company was founded by my friend Diane Greene, who held her product people to the highest standard in the industry. Naturally, he went on to become Chief Executive Officer where he grew VMware into a platform company with over $13B in revenue and more than 300K customers in 60+ countries; shepherded industry-disrupting acquisitions such as Nicira; and deftly and uniquely steered VMware from on-premise to multi-cloud technology. As a result, he became known as the greatest infrastructure strategist in the game. Ultimately, he led the company through challenging times to the largest software exit ever in the sale to Broadcom.  

He is an amazing strategist and leader, and I am proud of my small association with him.

That is why I am thrilled to announce that Raghu has joined Andreessen Horowitz to push us forward in 3 important areas with 3 significant roles:

• A General Partner on our AI Infra team where his incredible infrastructure expertise will serve us well.
• A General Partner on our Growth team where his comprehensive understanding of how to go to market, scale organizations, globalize, and navigate industry changes will be a huge boost for our growth companies.
• A Managing Partner and my consigliere who will help me run the firm – I could not be more excited to have a partner whose management and leadership skills exceed my own in many areas.

This is a dream come true for me and a giant step forward for Andreessen Horowitz.