Frank Chen

About

Frank Chen heads our Early Stage Venture (ESV) Programs team and is responsible for developing company-building enablement products, including the Founder Library and an LLM-based chatbot interface. He also organizes programs like Time to Build and Master Class events. These initiatives, designed for founders and their leadership teams, are a crucial part of the support offered by the ESV operating team.

Prior to this role, Frank helped launch a16z’s Talent x Opportunity (TxO) Initiative to discover and support cultural geniuses in building large, enduring businesses around their cultural breakthroughs. At a16z, Frank also built and scaled the firm’s deal and research team whose goals were to find and invest in great entrepreneurs and build a comprehensive knowledge base of trends, technologies, products, and people along the way.

Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Frank held a series of product management, user experience design, developer relations, and executive roles at HP Software, Opsware, Loudcloud, Respond.com, Netscape Communications, Oracle Corporation GO Corporation, Apple, and IBM Research.

Frank holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University where he graduated with distinction. Back in the stone age when he did this, AI was going through a deep winter, but he was too clueless to know this. But he’s now enjoying a Revenge of the Nerds moment given how critical artificial intelligence is to so many different startups solving the world’s most challenging and important problems.