Andreessen Horowitz promotes Connie Chan to partner

It is the first time the firm has promoted someone from within to partner level. Andreessen Horowitz has dropped its no-promotion rule, which was underpinned by a promise to portfolio companies that it would only appoint founders or CEOs of significant technology businesses to their boards, thereby necessitating the recruitment of general partners from outside. Chan has also become only the second female partner in Andreessen Horowitz’s nine-year history.

Chan joined the firm in 2011, having previously worked for PE firm Elevation Partners and led Hewlett-Packard’s efforts to establish its open source webOS operating system in China. She initially focused on consumer internet deals. Ben Horowitz, one of the firm’s co-founders, said that Chan’s ability to view situations from the target customer point of view led to early investments in the likes of Pinterest and bike-sharing start-up Lime.

“After looking at the broader ecosystem, she decided that we needed to understand the innovations in China much better if our companies were going to compete, so she took that on personally. Yes, you read that right. She took on China,” Horowitz explained in a blog post. He said Chan is the industry’s leading authority in explaining Chinese technology products to people in the US.

Andreessen Horowitz has more than $7 billion in assets under management. It is not a prolific investor in Asia. Chan describes the role of the Asia network as bridging the gap between Silicon Valley companies looking to navigate Asia opportunities and companies in Asia seeking to better understand Silicon Valley. 

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