Andreessen Horowitz

Skype: The inside story of the boffo $8.5 billion deal

How executive shuffles, product changes, and a delayed IPO paid off for a couple of private equity firms.

By Kevin Maney, contributor

FORTUNE -- In September 2009, Silver Lake Partners and venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz bought Skype from eBay, where it had become the Kurt Cobain of technology companies (wildly popular, deeply troubled). The value of that deal: $2.75 billion.

In May 2011 the new owners announced that they were selling the company to MORE

Can Lytro take on Canon and Nikon?

Take a picture with Lytro's soon to come camera and change the focus to any spot, with the click of a mouse. The only question most photo geeks have is "how much?"

FORTUNE -- There's a new player in the camera market: Lytro, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup with just 45 employees, is hoping to disrupt the industry with an innovative camera that lets users focus a picture after it's been MORE

Skype's long history of owners and also-rans: At an end?

The company has been the ultimate under-the-radar survivor, changing hands, taking on debt, and preparing to go public, only to find a white knight in Microsoft.

By Dan Mitchell, contributor

FORTUNE -- Given the premium price Microsoft is paying for Skype, it's striking that the Internet phone company has spent so much of its short life being passed around like a cheap bottle of holiday wine. Also striking is the eye-popping level MORE

Can Microsoft put Skype at its core?

The one company that wanted Skype: Microsoft. Can the service unite Microsoft's far flung empire and raise its tech profile?

FORTUNE -- You'll be hearing about video chat a lot more over the next few years thanks to Microsoft's headline-making $8.5 billion acquisition of the popular Internet telephony company Skype, which both companies confirmed in a joint announcement earlier today. It's the largest sum Microsoft (MSFT) has ever forked over for MORE

Silicon Valley's impatience: reckless or prudent?

Venture capitalists are hungrier than ever for next big startup, leading them to make some eye-popping investments -- which, for once, may be entirely justifiable.

By Aaron Levie, contributor

FORTUNE -- Having just closed a fourth round of funding, raising $48M from Andreessen Horowitz and other notable investors, I have the dubious distinction of having pitched Box more than a few dozen times on Sand Hill Road over the past five years. MORE

Cloud storage startup Box.net scores $48 million in funding

Andreessen Horowitz and others send a big signal that web-based enterprise software startups are gaining clout with their latest investment.

Back in 2005, Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith were college dropouts with a collective $11,000 and a not-so-sexy startup idea for an online storage and collaboration service. Today, the entrepreneurial duo announced that their company, Box.net, has closed a whopping $48 million series D funding round.

The large investment is the latest sign MORE

Andreessen Horowitz's cloud vision

Best known for its consumer tech investments, the fund ventures into enterprise cloud computing.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is best known for high-profile investments like Zynga, Foursquare and Skype. But the fund, headed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz, is also betting big on business-to-business upstarts, and these days that means backing companies that enable or rely on cloud computing.

Last summer Andreessen Horowitz made MORE

The right way to lay people off

By Ben Horowitz, contributor

Cloud computing company Opsware was nobody's darling. Then founders Andreessen and Horowitz put the company through three rounds of layoffs. The unlikely result was a big buyout -- here's how it happened.

"I'm tryin' to right my wrongs / But it's funny them same wrongs helped me write this song" -Kanye West

Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), I had a conversation with the legendary venture MORE