Andreessen Horowitz currently has two partners on the boards of companies that compete with each other: Ben Horowitz of Databricks and Martin Casado of FiveTran. On the surface, there’s nothing all that scandalous about the deal, except that the Justice Department has reportedly been investigating the deal for nearly a year in an effort to override 112-year-old antitrust laws that are rarely applied against VCs.
Board conflicts are nothing new, and when a16z first invested, these companies weren’t necessarily direct competitors. But as portfolio companies move into each other’s markets, the Justice Department’s oversight raises bigger questions for venture companies. It’s about how to manage board seats as the boundaries between portfolio companies continue to shift.
In this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Kolosek, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into the a16z study, what it means for VCs, and other headlines of the week.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about what’s next.
Why Stripe paid $7.5 billion for its AI model router OpenRouter, and why ‘singularity’ isn’t the real reason What happens to AI companies caught in the middle as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia further lead?
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