a16z Podcast

The Founder to Investor Journey

May 4, 2022

David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and former founder of OpenDNS, shares his transformative journey from tech intern to investor. He emphasizes the importance of product marketing and resilient leadership, particularly during challenging times. Ulevitch discusses OpenDNS's evolution into a cloud security powerhouse and the shift from founder to venture capitalist, focusing on nurturing relationships with startups. He unveils strategies for investing in technical entrepreneurs and discusses the dynamics of market challenges and pricing strategies in enterprise environments.

49:31

Creator website

Episode guests

David Ulevitch

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Intro

2min

From Intern to Innovator

8min

The Evolution of OpenDNS: From Consumer to Enterprise Security

9min

From Entrepreneurship to Venture Capital: A Journey of Support and Growth

6min

Navigating the Investment Landscape: Supporting Founders at Every Stage

2min

Navigating Market Challenges and Leadership Growth

23min

This week, we have a special crossover episode from June 2021: Joel Beasley, host of the Modern CTO podcast, interviews a16z general partner David Ulevitch about David’s journey from working at an ISP and Dot Com company mp3.com in high school; to starting, running, and selling his own enterprise security company, OpenDNS; to becoming an investor at a16z. They also discuss the value of product marketing for enterprise, David’s philosophy around pricing enterprise products how to survive and lead through hard times, new trends in startup investing, and more.

This is part of our occasional series where we feature relevant episodes from like-minded shows on the a16z Podcast, to surface other shows you might be interested in. The Modern CTO podcast is by and for CTOs and other technical leaders at places like Microsoft, NASA, Reddit, Launch Darkly, and more, all sharing how to build strong companies and organizations. It’s hosted by Joel Beasley, CTO of Leaderbits and author of the book, The Modern CTO. Check out more episodes of this show wherever you get your podcast.

And for more on how to grow from a technical to product to Sales CEO, check out David’s previous episode on this podcast called “What Time Is It”.