Topics Covered

• Opsware's early history and origins as Loudcloud, the "second act" of internet wunderkind Marc Andreessen and Netscape product manager Ben Horowitz
• Ben's first person telling of the Loudcloud/Opsware history in The Hard Thing about Hard Things, as well as the great Wired "period piece" covering Loudcloud's launch in August 2000
• The importance of timing, and Loudcloud's too-early vision of—essentially—AWS before AWS (including eerie parallels between the metaphor Andreessen used to describe Loudcloud during the company's first press briefing, and Jeff Bezos's description of AWS at YC nearly a decade later)
• Creation of the "Opsware" tool inside of Loudcloud to automate deploying and configuring servers within Loudcloud's data centers
• Loudcloud's meteoric rise, crash following the burst of the internet bubble, and hard pivot as a public company into Opsware—now an enterprise software company selling datacenter tools
• Michel's role in HP's evaluation of the company as an acquisition target, and process leading to its $1.6B acquisition in July 2007
• Integration of the company into HP's culture and sales channel
• The creation of Ben & Marc's "third act", the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and what it's like for Michel now having Ben as an investor on her board at Usermind

Carve Outs

• Ben: StarStaX star trail photography software
• David: Jimmy Iovine on the Bill Simmons Podcast