More About David
David Ulevitch is an entrepreneur and investor. As a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he leads the firm’s American Dynamism practice, which focuses on investing in companies advancing American interests — including supporting builders in areas such as housing, education, logistics, national security, aerospace, and public safety. Additionally, David invests in enterprise and SaaS software. He sits on the boards of Alloy Automation, Anduril, AnyRoad, Charthop, Firstbase, Flock Safety, Orderful, Rewatch, Skydio, Superhuman, Supermove, Vitally, and WorkBoard.
David was previously the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service that was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for $635 million. While at Cisco, David was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Security — a $2.4 billion annual revenue business with more than 5,000 team members — where he oversaw the company’s global cybersecurity strategy, product portfolio, and business. Prior to OpenDNS, David founded EveryDNS, an authoritative DNS service, and grew it into the world’s largest free DNS service. He sold it to Dyn (now Oracle) in 2010.
David holds a BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis (which turned out to be way more useful than he expected) and he currently serves on the university’s Board of Trustees. Additionally, David spent several years on the board of the Tony Hawk Foundation and is passionate about creating safe after-school activities (including skateboarding) for at-risk youth in the United States and abroad. He is an active supporter of the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center and is passionate about creating artist residency programs.
Outside of Soho (in New York City), David spends time in Big Sky, Montana — especially on epic powder days.
Latest Content
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These 50 companies aren’t just strengthening America’s ability to deter conflict, they’re re-industrializing America in the process.
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For over a century, the United States has been the birthplace of world-changing innovation – from the Wright brothers’ first flight to the invention of the transistor, the moon landing, and the birth of the internet. But...
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Brian Roberts is joining Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner, where he will work across the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds.
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Andy McCall is joining Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner. He will work across the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds.
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Logistics wins wars, and military logistics today means moving fuel. Advanced nuclear microreactors can replace fuel supply chains with on-site power, revolutionizing warfare and saving lives.
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This is a 12-month program for early-career engineers and researchers with expertise at the intersection of hardware and software.
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We are pleased to welcome Erin Price-Wright as our newest American Dynamism partner.
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In this episode recorded at a16z’s American Dynamism Summit in Washington DC, a16z podcast host Steph Smith is joined by a16z General Partner David Ulevich, Doug Bernauer – CEO of microreactor company Radiant – and Dr. Kathryn Huff, Assistant Secretary of the Office of Nuclear Energy.
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Mark Cuban discusses the importance of entrepreneurship for maintaining America’s status as the most innovative place on the planet.
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50 groundbreaking tech companies advancing the national interest, from the last mile to low Earth orbit.
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Respecting privacy and building trust with communities is essential to effectively integrate technology into public safety.
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Taken from a16z’s recent LP Summit, a16z General Partner David Ulevitch joins forces with Flock Safety’s founder, Garrett Langley, and Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Together, they cover the delicate balance between using technology to combat crime and respecting individual privacy, and explore the use of drones and facial recognition, building trust within communities, and the essence of objective policing.
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Air Space Intelligence is a modern aerospace company addressing the software crisis in aerospace in both the enterprise and government sectors.
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Taking a company from idea to household name is always difficult. But the past few years presented challenges that caught even the most-seasoned CEOs off guard. In this episode, you’ll hear from two CEOs that navigated these waters and somehow, came out on the other side. These recordings come straight from our exclusive Connect/Enterprise event, bringing together top executives across the a16z network.
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911 call centers – also known as public safety answering points (PSAPs) – are one of the most actively used public-safety infrastructure systems in the United States, fielding an estimated 240 million calls per year. Tha...
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New and emerging technology solutions are beginning to make up a veritable tech stack aimed at tackling public safety.
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American Dynamism doesn’t fit neatly into one vertical. It is a philosophy that encompasses nearly every aspect of American life and leadership.
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We are in the early stages of a generational defense cycle that requires unconventional thinking and tools. Here are some ideas for how to do it.
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Today’s episode is with a16z’s American Dynamism team: Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch. They are joined by a16z Bio + Health general partner Vijay Pande, and editorial lead Olivia Webb.
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Most people don’t know that nuclear energy — a clean, carbon-free energy source — accounts for 20% of electricity in the United States and over half of its carbon-free electricity. However, while large nuclear reactors a...
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The contractor payroll market is massive. Roughly one-third of U.S. workers have performed freelance work in the last year, and $1.4 trillion is paid out to contract workers annually. In many ways, contractors are the ba...
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Back in August, after a16z announced our investment into Adam Neumann’s new company, Flow, it felt like almost everyone – whether it was other VCs, founders, or journalists – had something to say. But the one person that you didn’t hear from was Adam himself. In this never-before shared footage from a16z’s American Dynamism Summit in Washington DC, Adam Neumann sits down with Marc Andreessen and David Ulevitch, to discuss the opportunities that have emerged from post-pandemic shifts in both work and home, and what Flow is doing to capitalize.
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Whether through COVID-19, climate change, or geopolitical conflict, the past few years have laid bare the tenuous connections underpinning key parts of our modern world. Wars, pandemics, ransomware attacks, and extreme w...
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Welcome to the American Dynamism newsletter, our update on the ideas, companies, and individuals building toward a more dynamic future.
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Today’s digital workplace moves faster than at any point in history. We can communicate and collaborate in real-time—and around the world—across text, voice, video, and documents. We can share massive files with a URL an...
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Every founder's journey is unique, and a16z general partner David Ulevitch's is no exception. From working in tech during the Dot Com boom to founding and guiding his own startups to successful exits to becoming an investor, he shares his story with The Modern CTO's Joel Beasley. But while every journey is different, some of the lessons remain the same.
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In 2010, global ecommerce sales were $572 billion. In 2020, it was $4.2 trillion, and it’s expected to grow by $11 trillion between 2021 and 2025 – accelerated by the pandemic, which drove many businesses online even in...
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The consumer moving experience stinks. For consumers, finding a quality mover, packing up, coordinating a move time, and even paying movers is logistically challenging. As it turns out, it’s even more complex for moving...
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We’re committed to working with and investing in the best founders who want to make American dynamism real.
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Over the last few years a number of us in the firm have been sharpening our focus on investing categories that promote “American dynamism.” These categories include defense, national security, public safety, and what we’...
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Product-led growth is one of the trends we’re most excited about at a16z and many of the fastest-growing and visionary companies today are product-led because it’s such an efficient distribution channel that aligns incen...
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Two decades into the cloud computing era of software eating the world, some corners of the economy are still far behind. Unfortunately law enforcement is one of them, which not only leaves around 800,000 law enforcement...
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Our investment in Pyn was announced earlier today. Joris and Jon are building a key aspect of enabling a future of work that we all want to be a part of with Pyn, and here’s why:
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Video is ubiquitous in the workplace today. We’ve long been excited about this growing trend of video for work (as evidenced by our investment in companies like Hopin, Loom, Mux, and Tandem) and in the future, whether it...
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Last year most of us experienced working from home full-time for the first time, and not by choice. Within weeks, many of us realized we needed a better chair, and then a better desk, a monitor, a keyboard, better lighti...
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I was supposed to do something last week. If I’m lucky, I’ll remember what it was. If I’m really lucky, I’ll remember the context around it. But counting on luck isn’t a strategy, and organizing all the information in ou...
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The new world of business growth, not just enterprise growth, has been optimized, fine-tuned, and is driven by data, tremendous amounts of data. The enterprise go-to-market funnel used to be: marketing makes leads, leads...
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The rise of developers -- as buyers, as influencers, as a creative class -- is a direct result of "software eating the world", since every company is a tech company (whether they know it or not). Developers are therefore the key to solving business problems and to thriving not just surviving, argues Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, in his new book, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century. Lawson shares hard-earned lessons learned, mindsets, and tactics -- from "build vs. buy" to "build vs. die", to the art and science ("mitosis") of small teams -- for leaders and companies of all sizes and kinds.
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This holiday break episode of 16 Minutes on the News (#36) covers two timely and still developing-news topics: 1) The National Science Foundation could rebrand as the National Science AND Technology Foundation. 2) A whole spate of companies announced they're going remote.
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Superhuman Founder Rahul Vohra and a16z General Partner David Ulevitch discuss how to build a product that can turn any user into a power user.
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For B2B startups, a downturn can be a boon – the trick is to survive.
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Many SaaS startups often find their initial product market fit with small and medium businesses (SMBs) and then move up market. Because it's easier to move up market rather than down, this motion often gives SaaS startups the advantage against incumbents. But moving up market comes with its own challenges. We cover how to make (and price for) the move.
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Will remote work be our new reality, even after the pandemic passes? And if so, what are the current technologIes and practices that support organizational communication and alignment for distributed teams, development and otherwise?
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Zoom has not only experienced unprecedented, rapid growth (from 10M to 200M daily active users) due to the coronavirus pandemic and shelter-in-place -- but is also seeing a shift in use cases from primarily enterprise to more consumer as well. At the same time, there have been several security issues and concerns around Zoom, including "zoombombing" porn; home-grown encryption; and key-management systems, servers, and engineers in China. What's hype/what's real in the headlines here? In this episode of 16 Minutes, a16z general partner David Ulevitch (former SVP/GM at Cisco), and operating partner for security Joel de la Garza (former CSO of Box) break it all down in 16+ minutes with Sonal Chokshi. What does it all mean for related tech trends in bottom-up SaaS -- from user onboarding and the flip side of "earning the right to be complicated" to pricing & packaging -- as well as for open source; and cloud security, particularly when it comes to video?
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How you handle a layoff, how you communicate it to the people impacted, and how you manage and lead throughout the process really matters. It takes careful thought and planning, but it may be the most important planning you ever do as a leader.
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We discuss the rise of remote work amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the platforms powering our newly homebound workforce (and student body) including creative use cases for video conferencing and streaming.
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Conway’s Law states “organizations which design systems... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” The common example of Conway’s Law is that an engine...
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Running a business is hard — there are many things a team could be doing, but only a small number they should be doing. Organizations waste a lot of mental calories figuring out where to focus and trying to track what’s...
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A former developer and anthropology major, a16z General Partner David Ulevitch has watched developers work for years. And he's noticed something beyond their coding skills, developers don't work like "us normals." They a...
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Almost every new enterprise software company today is a SaaS company, so when we started our search for a new general partner to join our enterprise team, we knew it had to be someone who would bring tremendous expertise...
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Product-market fit is “the only thing that matters” early on in the startup journey, wrote Marc Andreessen in June 2007. Conventionally, product-market fit comes down to early signals that the market has voted your produ...
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Editor’s note: This article is based on an episode of the a16z Podcast, which you can listen to here.
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For most enterprise startups, discovering which segment of the market to focus on is no trivial feat. Early on in the journey, the hunt is for product-market fit with happy customers, regardless of what segment of the ma...
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I spend hours and hours in my inbox every single day. When I was CEO of OpenDNS, I would triage constantly to not block some critical path for my team. In particular I dreaded the “death spiral” of threads that led to co...
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Software isn’t just eating the world, it’s also eating other software. We are in the earliest innings of SaaS becoming the dominant enterprise application paradigm, and there are still a massive amount of legacy applicat...