Leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has promoted Jennifer Lee to general partner after six years with the firm. She has been appointed to help invest in her new $1.25 billion infrastructure fund, which will be managed by Martin Casado, a16z's long-time general partner.
The infrastructure fund is part of $7.2 billion in new funding from the Silicon Valley VC giant. Lee has been an investment partner on the infrastructure team for some time, meaning he has already been writing checks and taking a seat on the board. However, her promotion exposes her to a disturbing atmosphere. She becomes the firm's 27th general partner, reaching this career milestone in her early 30s.
That may sound like a lot of GPs, but a16z currently has over 500 employees. Additionally, she has infrastructure. She is one of only four GPs on her team. The others are his girlfriend Anjney Midha, who joined last summer; Zane Lackey joined the team two years ago. And Casado.
“Promoting Jennifer to general partner means that she will have significantly more autonomy in contract execution and, just as importantly, greater influence over the team's culture, investment philosophy and operating model. ,” Casado told TechCrunch via email.
In a blog post announcing Casado's promotion, she also noted that she and she were primarily responsible for building the infrastructure investment team. He described her as “an incredibly reliable and generous partner to work with, despite her low self-esteem.” She doesn't miss any details and no challenges are too difficult for her to tackle. As Ben Horowitz has said many times, “She embodies A16Z culture.”
During his time at a16z, Lee helped the company discover data connectivity startup Fivetran, valued at $5.6 billion in 2021. and dbt, a data analytics developer tools startup, reached a valuation of $4.2 billion in 2022 (both of those deals were led by Casado). She led the company's investment in her developer video platform Mux, which is a unicorn as of 2021. Database startup Motherduck was valued at $400 million earlier this year. AI voice startup Eleven Labs was a unicorn as of January, and she serves on its board.
Prior to joining a16z in 2018, he led product at Solvvy, an AI startup that was acquired by Zoom in 2022. He led self-service and analytics products at AppDynamics, which was acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion. In 2016, he was named a Kleiner Perkins Product Fellow.