Andreessen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz Talks About Fat Start-Ups, Being a New VC and What's Hot and Not!

Yesterday, BoomTown motored down lovely I-280 to meet with (relatively) newly minted VC Ben Horowitz, the other half of the high-profile venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Started last summer by the pair–who have worked together since they met not-so-cute at Netscape Communications, with co-founder Marc Andreessen flaming worker-bee Horowitz in an email–it’s a $300 million fund that has plunked itself in the middle of just about every hot thing in Silicon Valley and beyond of late.

That includes being part of a recent huge round in online games rocket ship Zynga, a controversial consortium that grabbed Skype (Horowitz is on the Internet telephony giant’s board), as well as being a key investor in smoking stealths such as Kakai and RockMelt.

Of course, the pair is also in the race to fund mobile geolocation phenom Foursquare against a possible Yahoo (YHOO) acquisition.

Horowitz, who has long had a much lower profile than one-time digital golden boy Andreessen, is now emerging a little more publicly via a new blog, called simply Ben’s Blog.

With the apt quote at the top of the homepage by legendary mathematician and computer pioneer John von Neumann, “There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about,” it’s a pretty saucy effort, especially if Horowitz keeps it up.

Recent posts included “Four Things Some VCs Do That I Don’t Like” and “The Case for the Fat Start-Up,” which he first published on All Things Digital.

We talked about this and more in a breakfast interview at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road near Andreessen Horowitz’s offices, so here’s the video: