Andreessen Horowitz

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One of the most famous VC firms in Silicon Valley will no longer be (technically) a VC firm. Founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz told Forbes they’ve registered the entire company to become a registered investment advisor, or RIA.

Why become an RIA?

• Crypto bets: You say crypto’s a bubble, Andreessen Horowitz says this feels like the early days of the internet—painfully slow, but you might meet a cool Estonian in a chatroom. The firm would like to invest more in crypto, but as a traditional VC, regulators limit its ability to make riskier bets.
• Secondary transactions: Those regulations also hamstring VCs from doing other non-VC things, like acquiring equity in secondary transactions. That’s a missed opportunity for VCs as startups stay private longer.

Zoom out: On its way from VC to RIA, Andreessen Horowitz has become a unicorn farm. At least five of the billion-dollar companies in which it’s invested are in IPO mode: Airbnb, PagerDuty, Pinterest, Slack, and Lyft.

For it’s next act, the firm will reportedly announce a new growth fund of $2-2.5 billion in the coming weeks, its first as an RIA.