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Andreessen Horowitz has plucked the head of growth at Uber and turned him into a venture capitalist at one of the top firms in Silicon Valley.
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Andrew Chen, who was well-known as a writer on startups in addition to his day job at Uber, is the newest general partner at Andreessen, the firm said Thursday. His arrival comes a week after the departure of Lars Dalgaard, and restores the number of decision-makers at the firm to 10.
Notable: The firm still doesn’t have any female general partners.
Ben Horowitz, the firm’s co-founder, said that he and Marc Andreessen had long followed Chen’s writing — as far back as 2007, according to Chen. Despite generally hiring GPs with successful track records as CEOs, Horowitz admitted that Chen’s startup, Kickball Labs, “did not succeed.”
“While Andrew had almost no luck, he had plenty of ingenuity and nobody worked harder,” Horowitz wrote Thursday. “So when Andrew called me up to talk about what he should do next in his career, I had a very clear idea.”
Chen’s move is another high-profile exit at Uber, which last year was reeling from executive departures as the company careened from scandal to scandal. New CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has somewhat stemmed the bleeding.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.