Andrew Chen

He recalls that he does not remember being a “nerd” before fifth grade. In fifth grade, when he was about 10 or 11, his math teacher Kent Daniels had a classroom with sofas for students and a set of old Macs, and began teaching him BASIC even though he knew nothing about computers. With a friend, Kelsey Woods, who already knew some BASIC, he wrote a BASIC program on a Mac Plus that simulated dice probabilities; he writes that in 1992 this was a big deal, and describes the teacher as one who “would change my life forever.”⁠[1]

He also recalls that before the web he had access to gopher and telnet through the Seattle Community Network, took part in the pre-web BBS scene, and had a fifth-grade classroom filled with Macs.⁠[2]

He writes that during college he worked at various tech startups and that his first job after graduating was at a venture capital firm. He began his career as a Seattle-based analyst at Mohr Davidow Ventures.⁠[2][3]

He then worked in online advertising in Seattle at Revenue Science, a behaviorally targeted ad network that he later called his “previous company.” He recalls starting a small group inside the company, made up of a couple of inside sales people, to sign up publishers; in 2004 the company was in talks with YahooYahooYahoo is an internet brand founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, with email, search, news, finance, sports, and advertising businesses. It developed from a web directory into a portal, underwent major acquisitions and security incidents, and sold its operating business in 2017, when the original listed company became Altaba. Apollo-managed funds acquired the brand’s operating business in 2021. Yahoo launched the AI answer service Scout in 2026.Open the full entry and OvertureOvertureOverture was a paid-search advertising company, formerly GoTo.com, acquired by Yahoo in 2003.Open the full entry to experiment with behaviorally targeted ads within the Yahoo network; around the end of 2004 it began contacting some of the larger sites on its list, and after meeting several MySpace executives it began planning a custom integration in which MySpace would pass it relevant keywords about user segments for ad targeting.⁠[4][5]

He writes that he left Seattle after 2006; the question that decided it was: “Post-bubble, when was the last time Seattle produced a world-changing consumer internet company?”⁠[2]

In a post he writes that he was working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures after leaving Revenue Science in late November, coming from industry with a background in advertising; he was working to establish himself in Silicon Valley, had attended events at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry such as its Entrepreneurship Conference and the Mobile Persuasion conference, and was writing a weekly newsletter on startups, marketing and mobile.⁠[6][7]

He said that he moved to the Bay Area in 2007 at the age of 25 and at first lived in Palo Alto, in a house passed down among Stanford University business-school students that he had found on Craigslist.⁠[8]

He said that his blog “was completely an accident,” probably first hosted on Blogger, and that he “forcibly subscribed” his mother, his sister and all of his friends to it.⁠[8]

In 2007 Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and Ben HorowitzBen HorowitzBen Horowitz is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and business author who co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Marc Andreessen in 2009. He previously led Loudcloud’s transition into Opsware and its 2007 sale to Hewlett-Packard. His writing and investing address startup management, organizational culture and the relationship between technology and cultural industries.Open the full entry, then still angel investors, read his blog and reached out to him. He writes that a few months after he arrived Marc Andreessen sent him a cold email and later introduced him to Ben Horowitz, and that the two gave him regular advice over breakfasts at diners in Palo Alto. Ben Horowitz later wrote that the blog explained consumer product distribution techniques and “turned product distribution into a science.”⁠[3][9][10]

In a post looking back on his first year in the Bay Area he writes that he spent his time as entrepreneur-in-residence not on a company but on networking and getting to know the Bay Area tech community: he spent time with people from PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry, hung out at the hi5 offices for a few months (“All those guys are smarter than me, so I learned a lot”), and helped with a couple of conferences; along the way he also looked at the games sector.⁠[4][7]

He said that he had been the founder of a company, with Matt Rubens, an early Y Combinator founder, as his co-founder, and that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz led its seed round. Ben Horowitz wrote that the company struggled to find product/market fit and did not succeed. On joining Uber in 2015 he wrote that this was the last chapter of a startup he had founded “a couple years ago,” which “achieved some success but didn’t take off the way we all wanted”; he later said that when the company did not work out he was acquired into Uber to work on growth, and that the team “soft-landed” at Uber.⁠[8][10][11][9]

He wrote that he was joining Uber’s growth team to head up “everything related to driver signups, referral programs, and top-of-funnel” for the supply side, and that “I’m joining Uber because it’s changing the world.” He thanked Ed Baker, Travis VanderZanden and Travis KalanickTravis KalanickTravis Kalanick is an American entrepreneur, a co-founder of the ride-hailing platform Uber, and Uber’s chief executive officer from 2010 to 2017. He drove Uber’s expansion to hundreds of cities worldwide with a hard-line approach to taxi regulation, resigned as CEO in 2017 amid scandals over company culture and pressure from investors, and left the board in 2019. He went on to lead City Storage Systems, the parent company of CloudKitchens, which he reorganized in 2026 into the robotics and artificial intelligence company Atoms.Open the full entry for bringing him on; thanked Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Danny Rimer and others, as well as the teams at Docomo and Recruit; and named John Richmond and Arnor Sigurdsson as close friends on his team.⁠[11]

At the end of 2015 he wrote that he had joined Uber “A few months back,” had taken time to settle into the new role, and was ending his break from writing.⁠[12]

He went on to lead Uber’s Rider Growth teams. Gold House’s profile states that the work covered acquisition, the new-user experience, churn and notifications and email, that Uber grew several hundred percent during his time and had more than 100 million active riders worldwide; his own website states that he led growth teams during Uber’s pre-IPO growth phase, when the company entered 800 markets and reached 100 million active riders.⁠[13][14][8]

In his annual post at the start of 2018 he writes that in his last two years at Uber he had learned a great deal about the “flywheel” that made Uber’s core business grow so fast, including geographic density, driver supply and how surge works, and that in 2017 “things got a little crazy at Uber too.” He writes that he had lived in the Bay Area for the last decade and had run a professional blog for about ten years; that in 2017 he started more books than he finished, read Principles, and read Area X before seeing its film adaptation. One of his goals for 2018 was to spend more time writing.⁠[15]

On February 15, 2018 Ben Horowitz announced that “Andrew Chen will be our newest General Partner.” He wrote that a former boss had called Andrew Chen “Jimmy Neutron” because he was so much smarter than everyone else there, called him “the world’s leading expert at consumer and bottom-up SaaS product distribution,” and wrote that he had invested in or advised companies including Dropbox, AngelListAngelListAngelList is a startup investment platform company based in San Francisco, United States. Founded in 2010 by Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, it began as a mailing list recommending startups to angel investors, went on to launch online fundraising, Syndicates (co-investing), rolling funds, and other products, and later shifted into a fund administration and back-office services platform for venture capital funds and private markets.Open the full entry, Gusto, Barkbox, Front and Boba Guys while continuing to write and organize conferences.⁠[10]

The same day it was announced that he was stepping down as head of growth at Uber to join Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner. Ben Horowitz said: “The single most important characteristic for a partner here is integrity.”⁠[3]

In his announcement post he writes that he would start in April and focus on consumer startups, bottoms-up SaaS, marketplaces and growth, calling the move “returning to my roots”; he had spent about two and a half years at Uber and chose Andreessen Horowitz because he shared its values, including the investing team’s empathy for entrepreneurs and the operating team’s support for founders. He signed the post from San Francisco.⁠[9]

He later wrote that when he joined in 2018 Andreessen Horowitz had about 100 people, and that he rented a small place in Palo Alto so that he could get to the Menlo Park office every day.⁠[16]

On September 10, 2018 the legal-technology company Atrium announced a $65 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz; he took a board seat as the firm’s partner, Marc Andreessen joined as a board observer, and Michael SeibelMichael SeibelMichael Seibel is an American entrepreneur and investor and a co-founder of Justin.tv (which became Twitch) and Socialcam. He led the Y Combinator startup accelerator from 2016 to 2024 and became a Partner Emeritus in March 2025. He has been a director of Reddit since June 2020 and a director of Dropbox since the same year.Open the full entry of Y Combinator also joined the board. In his note on the investment he wrote that over $300 billion is spent each year in the enterprise legal market.⁠[17]

On December 19, 2019 he led the $21 million Series A of the ordering app Snackpass, joined by Y Combinator, General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry, Inspired Capital and First Round CapitalFirst Round CapitalVenture capital firm.Open the full entry, with angels including the musician Nas, the NFLNFLThe NFL (National Football League) is a U.S. professional American football league of 32 clubs. Founded in 1920 as the APFA and renamed in 1922, it is organized into the AFC and NFC, with the season culminating in the Super Bowl.Open the full entry player Larry Fitzgerald and the talent agent Michael OvitzMichael OvitzMichael Ovitz is an American Hollywood agent and businessman, a co-founder of the talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which he chaired from 1975 to 1995, and was once regarded as one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood. He briefly served as President of The Walt Disney Company from 1995 to 1996, and his severance gave rise to shareholder litigation lasting nearly a decade; he later headed Artists Management Group and turned to technology investing and advisory work.Open the full entry. In his investment note of the same day he named the co-founders Kevin Tan, Jamie MarshallJamie MarshallJamie Marshall is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief operating officer of Snackpass, an order-ahead and social rewards app that started with college students; she co-founded it with Kevin Tan and Jonathan Cameron while studying at Yale University and became a Thiel Fellow in 2019.Open the full entry and Jonathan Cameron, wrote that they started Snackpass from their dorm rooms and launched it in 2017, that it had grown from Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry to dozens of campuses, often reaching 75% adoption in a student body within a few months, and that takeout is “huge … and fragmented.”⁠[18][19]

During the COVID-19 pandemic he first sheltered in the Bay Area and later drove around the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, writing and taking Zoom calls on the road. His accounts of the length differ: in a 2021 post he wrote of driving a van for almost three months; in a December 2021 interview he said he drove around in a van for four or five months and then stayed in Austin for about as long; in 2024 he wrote of driving an RV around America.⁠[20][8][16]

He said that while in Austin he set up a WhatsApp group for San Francisco people visiting Austin, which still had around 200 to 300 members at the end of 2021.⁠[8]

On May 7, 2020 Andreessen Horowitz published the podcast episode “What’s Next in Gaming,” in which he interviewed John RiccitielloJohn RiccitielloJohn Riccitiello is a games industry executive who served as chief executive of the video game company Electronic Arts and of the game engine company Unity Technologies, and co-founded the private equity firm Elevation Partners.Open the full entry, chief executive of Unity Technologies, about the rise of esports and game streaming, the potential of cloud gaming and uses of game technology beyond games; the conversation was recorded at the a16z Summit.⁠[21]

On January 24, 2021 he published “Investing in Clubhouse” on the Andreessen Horowitz website, announcing the firm’s investment in the audio social app Clubhouse, founded by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. He wrote soon afterward that he had led Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Clubhouse and joined its board of directors.⁠[22][20]

The same 2021 post announced his first book, The Cold Start Problem, to be published by Harper Business later in 2021. He wrote that after “nearly three years and many late nights and long weekends” a small research project had grown from about 20 interviews to nearly 200, with people from companies such as Uber, AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry, SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry, Zoom, Dropbox and Tinder; the first outline alone ran to 30 pages and the manuscript to more than 300, written in places including Miami, Cabo, his sofa and a van on a cross-country drive. He wrote that “OMG IT IS SO MUCH WORK,” and that he wanted to organize the stories of network-effect products and the “cold start problem” into a framework and to make sense of his own time at Uber; he had been away from his blog for almost a year.⁠[20]

On May 20, 2021 he published “Investing in Maven,” announcing that Andreessen Horowitz was leading the Series A of Maven, a platform for cohort-based online courses, and that he would join Maven’s board. He wrote that Maven was led by Gagan BiyaniGagan BiyaniGagan Biyani is an edtech entrepreneur, a co-founder of Udemy, Sprig, and Maven, and currently the CEO and a board member of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, he worked early on online courses and food delivery, and later built Maven, which is centered on expert-taught courses in which learners study together as a cohort. In September 2026, he announced plans for a new education program in San Francisco for high school graduates.Open the full entry, a co-founder of Udemy, with co-founders Wes Kao, who started altMBA, and Shreyans Bhansali, who started Socratic; that since its launch in January 2021 instructors had sold more than $1 million of courses, with four courses each earning over $100,000 in their first three months; and that cohort-based courses have a completion rate above 75%, against 3–7% for MOOCs.⁠[23]

On October 13, 2021 the expert-advice app Intro.coIntro (Expert Marketplace)Intro is an online expert-consultation platform based in Los Angeles, United States, where users pay by the length of a session to book one-on-one video calls with entrepreneurs, designers, celebrities, and other experts; experts set their own prices and the platform takes a commission. It was founded by Raad Mobrem in 2020 and raised a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2021.Open the full entry announced a $10 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total funding to $12 million. In a written statement as a general partner of Andreessen Horowitz he said that the Intro team was building “a beautiful product in the form of a marketplace.”⁠[24]

On December 1, 2021 Tim Ferriss published the transcript of his interview with him (The Tim Ferriss Show, episode 550), covering growth lessons from Tinder, Uber and Twitch, the metaverse, the future of startup investing, games as the next social networks and how to pick the right metrics. At the time he was investing in consumer technology at Andreessen Horowitz, was a board member and instructor at Reforge, and also sat on boards including those of Substack and Sandbox VR.⁠[8]

In the interview he said that he collects random daily opinions in a notes file; that writing the book needed “five plus hours of writing time each day,” for which he used timed lockboxes and blocked websites — “I’m self-parenting”; and he joked that he is “a B2B influencer or B2B content creator.”⁠[8]

On December 7, 2021 Harper Business published his book The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects, a 400-page hardcover (ISBN 9780062969743). At the time he was investing in early-stage consumer startups at Andreessen Horowitz and sat on the boards of several fast-growing companies, and his writing had been featured in Wired, The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry and The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry.⁠[25]

On May 18, 2022 he, Jonathan Lai and James Gwertzman published “GAMES FUND ONE: Building the Future of Games,” announcing Andreessen Horowitz’s first games fund at $600 million, investing in game studios, games and consumer, and infrastructure; games-industry figures who joined it included David BaszuckiDavid BaszuckiDavid Baszucki is an entrepreneur and engineer, and the founder, president, and CEO of Roblox, also known as Builderman. He founded the physics simulation software company Knowledge Revolution, later built Roblox with Erik Cassel, and in 2021 co-founded Baszucki Group with his wife.Open the full entry of Roblox, Jason CitronJason CitronJason Citron is an entrepreneur who founded the social mobile gaming platform OpenFeint in 2008 and sold it to GREE in 2011; he then founded a game studio and co-founded the communication platform Discord with Stanislav Vishnevskiy, serving as its chief executive from inception until April 2025, when he became a board member and adviser to the new chief executive.Open the full entry of Discord, Marc Merrill of Riot Games, Mike Morhaime of Blizzard, Aleks Larsen and Jeffrey Zirlin of Sky Mavis, Kevin Lin of Twitch, Mark Pincus of Zynga and Riccardo Zacconi of King.⁠[26]

He later wrote that in 2022 he made a “big career decision” to specialize in games rather than invest across consumer, choosing to “go deep rather than float”; when the debut fund began, he and his co-general partner Jonathan Lai were its only two full-time investors.⁠[16]

He writes that in 2020 he and his colleague Jon Lai began investing at the intersection of games and technology, and that they then rallied a team inside Andreessen Horowitz to develop SPEEDRUN, an accelerator for very early startups in that area, which was announced “earlier this year”; the post invites applications for SPEEDRUN 2024 by September 30, 2023. He writes that the first cycle invested $500,000 in each company, drew more than 1,600 applications and selected a few dozen companies, a conversion rate below 2%, over a program of just under two months with talks by founders or creators from Zynga, Valorant, Twitch, Supercell and King and founder lunches joined by Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen; more than 80% of the first cycle’s startups went on to raise more money. The second cycle drew more than 2,000 applications, with $75 million committed from the games fund, a full-time team and a longer program. He wrote that the first cycle took so much work that “we might all suffer some burnout.”⁠[27]

In a 2023 post he published the fundraising deck for the games fund that had been put together “a little over a year ago,” writing that “A year ago, we raised GAMES FUND ONE, our first $660M fund focused on games” — a figure that differs from the $600 million in the 2022 launch post; he writes that the first year brought 25 investments and 10 new hires, including Doug McCracken from Supercell to lead marketing, Lester Chen from YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry to lead creators and Jordan Mazer from Riot Games to lead talent, and that in 2023 80% of the games fund’s investments had a major AI component.⁠[28][26]

On January 24, 2023 he and Jack Soslow published “Investing in Voldex,” announcing that Andreessen Horowitz was leading the Series A of Voldex, the games company founded by Alex SingerAlex SingerAlex Singer is a game entrepreneur and the founder and chief executive of Voldex, a company that began with Minecraft servers and later concentrated on acquiring, improving and operating user-generated games on Roblox, and that in 2025 acquired Brookhaven, the most visited game on Roblox. He is a member of the 2023 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry; they wrote that Voldex acquires, improves and builds games on Roblox and Minecraft, that Alex Singer started building Minecraft games at 13, that Voldex had become a multimillion-dollar business whose game library served more than 14 million monthly active users, and that the money would go toward more large game acquisitions and a larger team.⁠[29]

On May 9, 2024 he wrote that he had reached six years at Andreessen Horowitz. The new Games Fund Two was $600 million, the same size as the 2022 fund, and part of a $7.2 billion firm-wide raise, investing in areas including AI, web3 games, VR/AR, 3D tooling and game studios; SPEEDRUN invested $750,000 per startup in several dozen companies per cycle, with a Los Angeles cohort starting on July 29. He also wrote that he had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, spending about a month at a time back in San Francisco, and that Andreessen Horowitz was opening a flagship Los Angeles office in downtown Santa Monica.⁠[16]

On March 31, 2025 he wrote that a16z speedrun invests up to $1 million in very early-stage startups, together with $5 million in credits from partners including AWSAmazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing business of Amazon. Launched in July 2002, it made its public debut with the Amazon S3 storage service on March 14, 2006, and has since added hundreds of services, including Amazon EC2; its segment net sales were about $46.0 billion in the third quarter of 2026.Open the full entry, GCP, OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry, Stripe and Deel, over a 90-day program that ends with a launch, focusing on tech, entertainment and AI and the areas around them; the program had started about 18 months earlier and was heading into its fifth cycle, with the next program running from July 28 to October 10, 2025. He wrote that he was “very involved” in building it, working one-on-one and in small groups with early founders; the Andreessen Horowitz team was by then nearly 600 strong, and speakers included founders of Figma, Zynga, ZillowZillow GroupZillow Group is an American online real estate marketplace company with its principal executive offices in Seattle, Washington, and Class A and Class C shares listed on Nasdaq. It announced the wind-down of its home-buying business Zillow Offers in November 2021, has been led by chief executive Jeremy Wacksman since August 2024, and in October 2026 agreed to pay $212.5 million in cash to settle an investor class action covering share buyers from August to November 2021.Open the full entry, DoorDashDoorDashDoorDash is a local commerce platform co-founded in 2013 by Tony Xu and others that connects consumers, merchants, and delivery couriers, with its business expanding from restaurant delivery to groceries, retail goods, merchant software, and on-demand logistics. The company went public in 2020, and its businesses include Wolt, Deliveroo, and SevenRooms.Open the full entry and Twilio.⁠[30]

As of November 2026 he is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and leads a16z speedrun, which invests up to $1 million in brand-new startups.⁠[31][14]

His family moved to Seattle when he was five, and he grew up and went to school there; he writes that from the age of five until four years after college he called Seattle home. He said that as a child he loved writing journals and kept a diary but never shared it.⁠[32][2][8]

He graduated from the University of Washington with a B.S. in applied mathematics at the age of 19. He said that a University of Washington course on the study of animal populations later informed the meerkat and sardine analogies in The Cold Start Problem.⁠[14][31][25][8]

When he joined Uber in 2015 he thanked “My family, Ada Chen and Sachin Rekhi,” for listening to his constant hand-wringing as he made the final decision.⁠[11]

He writes that he met his wife, Emma, online; they later decided to spend a few days together in Austin, a snowstorm shut the city down, and after that they decided to spend all their time together; they married after the lockdown.⁠[16]

In the Bay Area he lived in Palo Alto, Menlo Park and San Francisco, signing several posts from San Francisco; he later moved to Los Angeles and splits his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco.⁠[8][32][12][15][20][33][25]

He said that one of his favorite things to do in the Bay Area is to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium.⁠[8]

The monthly archive of his personal website, andrewchen.com, begins in September 2006; its essay index groups the essays by topic, including growth, product/market fit, viral marketing and user acquisition, engagement and product design, freemium and online-ad monetization, metrics, media and games, and entrepreneurship and startup life in San Francisco, and includes an 80-slide deck on the “red flags” and “magic numbers” that investors look for in growth metrics, which he writes he created as part of his interview process at Andreessen Horowitz. He later moved his writing to Substack and kept the website up as an archive.⁠[7][14]

In his essay “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing” he writes that “Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder,” who answer the traditional question of how to get customers with A/B tests, landing pages and viral mechanics and who work with engineers rather than managing non-technical marketers; he argues that large platforms such as Facebook and Apple give new products access to tens of millions of users, that marketing is shifting from people-based channels such as agencies, PR and business development to API-based distribution, and that the traditional VP of Marketing role is fading. As an example he cites Airbnb’s reverse-engineered integration with Craigslist, which has no public API, calling it a low-competition, high-volume channel that a traditional marketer would be unlikely to conceive of.⁠[34][7]

His essays focus on go-to-market strategies, and he popularized the term “growth hacker.”⁠[3][13]

Accounts of how many essays he has written differ: the Andreessen Horowitz bio says hundreds, his Substack profile says more than 650, and Gold House’s profile says nearly a thousand. His Substack newsletter covers venture capital in technology, entertainment and AI and has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.⁠[31][33][13]

He said that he had packaged his lessons on metrics, growth and marketing into multi-week programs with Reforge, calling it “a really interesting vehicle for me to be able to publish more of my thoughts,” and that an email list is “the one thing that you really control.”⁠[8]

The Cold Start Problem examines how technology products overcome the “cold start problem,” the difficulty of attracting users before a product has value; he argues that network effects, in which a product becomes more valuable as more people use it, can drive viral growth and help products scale. The book draws on interviews with founders and chief executives of companies such as LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, Twitch, Zoom, Airbnb and Uber, and with founders or teams behind Slack, Clubhouse, Tinder, RedditRedditReddit is an online platform that organizes content and discussion around interest-based communities, founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Users take part in communities by posting, commenting, and voting; its operating company, Reddit, Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024.Open the full entry and PayPal.⁠[25][35]

Before joining Andreessen Horowitz he invested in or advised a number of companies; Gold House’s profile also lists Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry and Workato among them. He said that he had been an adviser to Dropbox on and off over the years.⁠[13][8]

Investment announcements that he wrote or co-wrote on the Andreessen Horowitz website cover Backflip, Promise, Series AI, Believer, Snapser, Voldex, PLAI Labs, Seidr, Nash, Omni Creator Products, Metatheory, Bounce, Maven, Reforge, Clubhouse, Sleeper, Snackpass, Virtual Kitchen Co, Singularity 6, Substack, Atrium and Hilbert.⁠[31]

In a 2021 interview he advised angel investors to think in terms of a portfolio, make 20 or more investments, scale individual checks down to about $5,000 to $10,000, and be cautious about advising companies that need a lot of help.⁠[8]

Personal website: https://andrewchen.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

Substack: Personal newsletter: https://andrewchen.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33][14]

The Cold Start Problem: Book website: https://www.coldstart.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35][14]

X: Public account: https://x.com/andrewchen (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewchen/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

Andreessen Horowitz: Official website: https://a16z.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

Uber: Official website: https://www.uber.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[37]