benahorowitz.eth engagement report

Best tweets

• Apr 30, 202556x their median

  Rest in Peace to my father @horowitz39 . We love you Dad. David Joel Horowitz was born January 10, 1939 to Phil and Blanche Horowitz in Queens, New York. David was raised in Queens along with his sister Ruth. Phil and Blanche were high school teachers and members of the American Communist Party. Their lives included secret meetings, secret identities and a secret revolutionary plan. As such, they steeped David in Marxist philosophy and world affairs. We sometimes joked that he was the “Tiger Woods of Communism” as he was raised to be the Party’s next great player. He thought that was funny, because like Tiger he never had a choice in the matter. The impact of his upbringing was profound, but David's life would prove to be shaped by his own self-described irrational desire to “save the world.” While this impulse began as a highly abstract concept, David would spend a lifetime refining it, sharpening it, completely revising it and ultimately making it his life’s mission. David attended Bryant High School in Queens, NY. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in 1959 majoring in English. He then earned a master's degree in English literature from University of California, Berkeley. In 1959, he instantly fell in love with and married Elissa Krauthamer. They would have four children: Jonathan Daniel, Sarah Rose, Benjamin Abraham, and Anne Deborah. In 1962, at 23 years old, David wrote and published his first book, Student, which detailed the political activities of students on the UC Berkeley campus. While at Berkeley, David became frustrated with his Shakespeare professor, so he wrote his own lecture series which he delivered and was widely attended by students all across the campus. He eventually published the series in his second book: Shakespeare: an Existential View. This superhuman confidence and ability to back it up would become thematic throughout David’s life. Later David and Elissa moved to London, England where David studied under Ralph Miliband and became close friends with Isaac Deutscher. Later David would write Deutscher’s biography. Also while in London, in 1965 David wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, which became the book that made him a force on the new left. In 1968, David and Elissa moved the family back to the United States and purchased a home in Berkeley, California where they would raise their four children. In his continued mission to save the world, in 1968 David became co-editor of the new left magazine Ramparts. While at Ramparts, David developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. As part of their work together, David helped raise money for, and assisted the Panthers with, the running of a school for poor children in Oakland. He later recommended that Newton hire his friend Betty Van Patter as bookkeeper; she was then working for Ramparts. In December 1974, Van Patter's body was found floating in San Francisco Harbor; she had been murdered by the Panthers for knowing too much. The murder forced David to confront a truth that he had long suspected. It made clear to him that the pursuit of a marxist utopia was a false and unachievable goal. Diabolically, the goal created a religion. The religion then cloaked the movement’s leaders with an invincible moral standing enabling them to commit atrocities with impunity for their own gain. He was horrified that he had been part of it and it caused him to rethink his entire life. The decision was not easy. His family, friends, and career were all deeply tied to “the movement.” If he were to make this change, he would essentially need to start from scratch. So, he stayed away from politics for a while and changed to a neutral career. He became a biographer and journalist. It was a hugely risky move to change careers at 34 years old with a family of 6 in tow. In a testament to David’s supreme confidence, indomitable will and massive talent, he was an instant success. His first biography The Rockefeller’s An American Dynasty – written with his best friend and long time colleague Peter Collier – was a blockbuster bestseller. Their next biography The Kennedy’s An American Drama was an even bigger success becoming a number 1 New York Times bestseller. All the while, David kept an eye on and a hand in politics. While he needed a break to sort out his life, nothing in life would deter him from his mission. In 1981, San Francisco Chronicle writer Randy Schiltz tipped David and Peter to a potential epidemic known as AIDS, which was rapidly spreading through the bath houses in San Francisco. Schiltz was concerned that the leaders in the Gay Community were intimidating the medical establishment into covering up the way it was transmitted and therefore keeping the bath houses open, which would cause it to spread out of control . Randy was too terrified to write about it himself as he did not want to be attacked by the community. David, never one to fear anything, took on the story. In 1981, he and Peter published Whitewash: Gay Leaders in California Have Obscured Vital Information About How the AIDS Disease Spreads. The aggressive reaction to the story (references to the article still call David a “homophobe”) reinforced David’s suspicions. If leaders on the left were willing to sacrifice millions of gay lives to preserve their power and orthodoxy, what wouldn’t they do? The article, the experience, and the ocean of death that followed were the final straw in David’s conversion from his Marxist roots to a leading thinker on the right. He formalized his position on March 17, 1985 when he and Peter published Lefties for Reagan in The Washington Post. David departed the left for good. The change would cost him nearly everything – all of his friends, coverage in the New York Times Book Review (essential for authors at the time), and countless lost earnings. He would have to start all over. But if the world needed saving from his former comrades on the left, that’s exactly what he would do. Later he would note that the right never excommunicated apostates the way he had been abandoned by the left. He often complained that he had “the rescue gene.” For David, this meant nothing animated him more than someone in need of help. He would instantly leap into action, making every phone call, raising every dollar, and doing anything in his power to save that person. The realization that he had been party to the destructive force activated his rescue gene and infused him with an energy that would produce dozens of books, countless public appearances, and nearly nonstop work for the next 4 decades. In 1996, he captured this saga in his autobiography Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey where he retraced his life’s and political journey. 1998 proved to be a seminal year for David when he met his angel April Mullivain whom he would marry and who, along with her son John Jay, would watch over him until his passing. In 1998, he also founded The Horowitz Freedom Center, where he recruited an inspired group of new young intellectuals to join his cause. The name “Freedom Center” meant much more than most ever understood. While David became known for his change in views, in a sense he never changed at all. His personal style represented the place and community from which he came. Even when he wore a suit, he looked like a radical forced into it due to a court date or a wedding. More importantly, his mission to save the world centered around freedom. When David went to rescue people, it was always from oppression imposed by some person or group. Early on, he had been trained to think the rich capitalists were the oppressors. His political change came from the realization that his side was doing the oppressing. Protected by the guise of being “for the people”, the Panthers took Betty’s life. The progressives left millions to die of AIDS, so they could preserve their leadership positions. His former friends on the left brutally excommunicated him from all their social relationships to reign power over him. It became clear that to fight for freedom, he had to be on the right and so the Freedom Center was born. From the Freedom Center, he published thousands of high impact articles and books. He understood the systematic implications of seemingly benign cultural changes and used that knowledge to predict much of the future. Notably, he precisely forecast the intense campus antisemitism of 2024 in his book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America published in 2006. In 2007, David was crushed by the passing of his beloved daughter Sarah Rose who, more than any of his other children, inherited his indomitable spirit and passion for politics. She had finally succumbed to long-time chronic degeneration from her genetic condition Turner’s Syndrome. He captured the experience in his most intimate and perhaps his best book A Cracking of the Heart in 2009. By the twenty teens, David had long been frustrated by what he referred to as the “soft, gentlemanly” tactics of the Republican Party. He lamented that the Republicans were bringing a nerf gun to a nuclear war. He intimately knew the left’s tactics and desperately wanted his party to match them. His wish was granted when a new kind of candidate, Donald J. Trump, won the Republican nomination. David responded instantly with the best articulation of the Trump strategy in Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America. Later, in 2024, his son Benjamin would meet President Trump and mention David. President Trump’s face immediately lit up and he insisted that Benjamin get David on the phone immediately. Hospitalized and weak, David was still delighted to speak with the President and know that his message was heard and heeded. In 2024, David published America Betrayed: How a Christian Monk Created America & Why the Left Is Determined to Destroy Her. In it, he carefully explained how the Catholic Church – through the indulgences – had removed the freedom inherent in being accountable to God and replaced them with the oppression of being accountable to the church. He then explained how that same idea had come back into vogue in the U.S. Right up until the final moments, David fought for freedom. In the end, David helped countless people and expended every fiber of his being pushing society towards freedom. He may not have saved the world, but he most certainly made it a better place – especially for us. He was our super hero and we will love him forever.

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• Jul 23, 202634x their median

  We’ve raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix. Our mission is to run the world's inference. This round accelerates production of our inference clusters. We've opened an 80,000-sqft, 10-MW facility 15 minutes from our office to expedite production and prototyping.

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• Jun 24, 202615x their median

  Today, I’m excited to formally announce @mirendil with my amazing co-founders Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei! We’re fortunate to work with @a16z and @kleinerperkins, who led our seed round of $200M, followed by a major investment from NVIDIA, among others. Mirendil exists to accelerate science and technology, and through them, to help solve humanity's most pressing problems. Self-accelerating AI R&D is the most direct path to delivering on AI's broader promise, which is why we believe the most important application of AI is AI itself. Get this loop right, and it compounds. It fundamentally changes the rate of progress itself across all domains. We believe this capability should be democratized. It should be used to power all scientific efforts trying to innovate at the frontier. There are far more important problems—and broader ones—than any single lab can take on, so more groups should be able to pursue them. This pulls concentration of power away from a few labs: businesses and science labs can own their AI and infrastructure, keep their margins, and control their own destiny instead of ceding it all to a single AI lab. We’re a small team with a singular focus. Our founding team consists of 20 researchers and engineers from frontier institutions including Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI, united by a passion for science and a drive to build the technologies that move it faster. If you want to build the system that builds systems, join us! @HarshMeh1a, @shayan_, @tararezaeikh

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• Aug 4, 20268.9x their median

  Ask a cop what happens if a kidnapped child isn’t found in the first 24 hours. Then ask yourself if you’d want cops to use Flock if that nightmare happened to your family. Flock isn’t looking for you. Moms and dads know exactly who Flock is looking for. https://t.co/RU3w7G2mf6

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• Jul 24, 20267.4x their median

  America’s software leadership was built on openness. We have the same opportunity in AI. If we want a competitive, secure AI ecosystem whose benefits extend far beyond a handful of companies, we need to preserve access to open-weight models. https://t.co/oD6YeYVwaW

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• Jul 22, 20265.9x their median

  https://t.co/BFVk0lICVh

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• Jul 22, 20263.3x their median

  When hiring executives, @travisk prioritizes one skill above all others: the ability to solve hard problems. "There's two things you want an executive to do. You want them to be able to organize, manage, and lead at scale. You also want them to be epic and strategic problem solvers... the best executives are the ones that are doing both well." "I have come to the conclusion over my years, that problem solving is the most important thing. If you get somebody who organizes and manages well but cannot solve a problem, they're going to be doing ridiculous stuff in a super organized way. The only constraint on your imagination is management capacity. But what is management capacity? It's really problem solving at scale."

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• Jul 22, 20262.8x their median

  They asked if I was ever coming back. The thing is I never left. https://t.co/Ce967WAb28

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• Aug 13, 20262.8x their median

  Today we're announcing our $40M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by @a16z , with participation from existing investors @8vc, @pearvc, and @BloombergBeta and new investors @HRTVentures and @nextladder. Alongside the fundraise, three more announcements: - Vals Smith: is now generally available. Anyone can create a custom coding benchmark from any GitHub repo with 120 free credits to get started. - Frontier Risk Benchmarks: We are releasing the RSI Index in collaboration with @CoreWeave and just launched ReverseEngBench, a new cyber benchmark built with Columbia University, Tufts University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. We are also sharing our initial work in mental health, with more to come across environmental impact, military, and biosecurity. - Website + Vals Index 2.0: We completely rebuilt the Vals website and have released Vals Index 2.0, with coverage of more of the economy. Our revenue has already grown 8x compared to all of 2025. Our customer base doubled and the team tripled in 6 months. Our results have been cited in model cards from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI. The AI economy runs on self-reported grades. When a model ships, the scores come from the company that built it. No other trillion-dollar industry works this way. Finance has ratings agencies. Medicine has the FDA. AI has vibes and vendor benchmarks. We built Vals to be the independent evaluation layer the industry is missing. Check out our new website and try Vals Smith!

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• Jun 16, 20261.5x their median

  Folks, I am closing the books on—gasp—15 years at Andreessen Horowitz. I am still in awe of what we’ve built and do not take for granted these past 15 years, which have felt like 15 minutes in some respects. When the inimitable @wennmachers invited me onboard (I think I was employee number 20-something and thought we were already a sizable firm!), it was to build the brand of a16z and to raise the profile of one @bhorowitz. (Fun fact: One of my first announcements was how the firm had raised a combined $2.7B in our first three years, and one of my last was the $15B we’d closed in January, with now over $100B under management across multiple funds.) While Ben has been a key throughline in my journey, along the way I also had the tremendous privilege and responsibility of leading marketing—first, for our enterprise investing team and portfolio, and later, for our growth fund and portfolio. Both of my boys, now 11 and 7, also came into the world during this time, so a16z is interwoven into the fabric of our lives. I remain beyond proud of the work that we, the marketing team, did over the years, so much of it unsung and behind the scenes. Maybe this time around, I should write the book and Ben, as he once jokingly told me, would do the marketing for it. To know that the brand of a16z is now part of my legacy is remarkable. What makes a place is the people and I take with me some of my deepest friendships. You know who you are and I cannot imagine these past many years without you. ❤️ And to Margit, who made this journey possible, so much love and respect for you. 🙏 As for what’s ahead, I’m fully embracing what I believe to be the true ethos of the firm, which is to expect the unexpected. After a tenure like mine, I really have to close this door before I can even think about opening another, so the only plan I have is to take a well-earned break this summer with my family. 🙌 In the words of my own TeamG, more TK!

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