Jeff Jordan Airbnb Backer And Midas List Investor Steps Back At A16Z

 

Longtime Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist Jeff Jordan is stepping back from active investments. The fifth-ever general partner at a16z who joined in 2011, Jordan said in a blog post Friday that he would continue to work with his existing portfolio and board positions on the firm’s behalf, but would not write new checks.

A managing partner at the firm, Jordan, 64, was also known for investments in home-rental business Airbnb, social media site Pinterest and grocery delivery unicorn Instacart, among others. The Midas List fixture was No. 57 on the 2023 list of the world’s top venture capitalists, his eleventh consecutive appearance.

In an interview, Jordan told Forbes that his decision was one several years in the making after the “wild-ass roller coaster ride” of the pandemic, including Airbnb’s tumultuous year that culminated in its December 2020 public offering.

“I’m already one of the older active venture capitalists, and I’ve been on three boards for over 12 years. So you start doing the math, and you’re like, holy shit,” Jordan said. “The other part is that the firm’s in a pretty decent place right now. I take some pride of ownership over what I’ve tried to help build, and it’s doing pretty well at this point.”

Jordan started his career in consulting and in finance roles, including as a chief financial officer for Hollywood Entertainment, before breaking into tech. At eBay, he helped lead the acquisition of PayPal, later serving as the subsidiary’s president. Then as CEO and later chairman of OpenTable, he took that reservation booking platform public in 2009 before signing on with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s venture capital firm, then a two-year-old upstart to the traditional powers on Sand Hill Road, in 2011.

Jordan’s Midas List status was assured when he led a $112 million Series B funding round into Airbnb that year. Its then-lofty valuation of $1.2 billion had soared by the time the company went public at a market capitalization of $47 billion nine years later. (That market cap would top $100 billion at its highs; it now sits at about $70 billion.) That same first year at the firm, Jordan also led a Series B investment into another buzzy startup at the time, Pinterest, at a valuation of about $250 million. The social site reached a valuation of nearly $13 billion at its 2019 public offering; it trades at a market cap of about $15 billion today.

The throughline of Jordan’s investment wins at a16z, he said, was his focus on marketplace businesses in which he held a specialist’s information advantage and perspective, what he said his firm called a “prepared mind.” “I’m a big believer that you really should specialize,” Jordan said. A16z has taken that approach further than many firms, Jordan argued, through its vertical-focused funds in biology, crypto, gaming and others.

Another lesson from his 12 years in venture, Jordan said, included embracing the “cyclical” nature of the tech sector, including its corrections. “The only constant is that market corrections come out of nowhere, and change your world for some amount of time,” he said. “You have to get used to it and not freak out when it comes.”

And Jordan said he’d also learned to appreciate that many of his firm’s biggest investment successes came in the wake of paradigm shifts, such as the rise of the iPhone, bitcoin, or more recently, large language models and AI. “All the interesting stuff seems to follow platform shifts,” he said. “Without the iPhone, I don’t think you have Pinterest or Instacart at anywhere near what they became.”

For his next steps, Jordan said his announcement is a “bat signal” for new opportunities in other areas of interest, including sustainability, sports and mentorship. At least half of Jordan’s profits from a16z, he wrote in his blog post, are pledged to philanthropy. “It might be a few things,” he said. “I still have a day job.”

Once profiled by The Ringer in 2017 in part for those sports ties dating back to a collegiate basketball career at Amherst and more recently rubbing shoulders with the Golden State Warriors, Jordan said he plans to keep up the 6:45am basketball games he organizes at Stanford, where he received his MBA 36 years ago. He had 22 signups for Friday morning’s game, the day of his announcement, he said proudly.

“I’m so fortunate to have had the opportunities I’ve been afforded, and the life experiences,” said Jordan. “I wouldn’t change it for anything, and I hope they’re not over.”