What’s the hard thing about hard things? Ben Horowitz will tell you at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015

Yeah, this the real one, baby
Uh, Chi-Town stand up
Southside, Southside
We gon’ set this party off right
-Kanye West, “All Falls Down”

Are you ready for this party?

Today, we’ve got some great news to end the week with: Ben Horowitz, co-founder and partner of VC firm Andreessen/Horowitz (a16z), will be speaking at our flagship Tokyo conference! It is a distinct privilege to have him on-board with our ever-growing list of speakers, joining founders Bertrand Schmitt (App Annie) and Ken Suzuki (SmartNews) as well as Katsuaki Sato (Metaps) and Jed McCaleb (Stellar).

In addition to his investments, Ben is widely known for writing the New York Times bestselling book The Hard Thing About Hard Things. A brutally honest and gripping account of the challenges founders must overcome to create successful companies, the book is a must-read for anyone thinking about joining or founding a startup.

With co-founder Marc Andreessen, Ben has built a16z into one of the most powerful players in Silicon Valley. When a16z started in 2009, it only had an initial capitalization of US$300 million. In just six years, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm has grown to managing US$4.2 billion. That track record is one of the reasons why the firm ranks as the number one VC firm by Entrepreneur.com.

During his career with Andreessen Horowitz, Ben co-led the firm’s investments in Twitter and Skype, and sold Nicira to VMWare for US$1.3 billion in 2012. He also leads the firm’s investments in wearables and speaker maker Jawbone.

Prior to this, Ben was co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud). After selling the firm to Hewlett Packard (HP) in 2007 for US$1.6 billion, he was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP. Earlier in his career, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship Shop@AOL service.

Ben regularly updates his own blog where he distills the lessons learned in his career, covering everything around entrepreneurship, building and leading organizations, and venture capital. Each post starts with a rap lyric that’s relevant to the topic at hand, a style we adopted for this announcement.

In our very special fireside chat with Ben, he will share some of his hard-earned insights on how to navigate the unpredictable world of tech. There will be some time for audience Q&A – bonus points if you can rap your question!

Check out our freshly updated agenda page for more details.

Mark your calendars for September 8 & 9 and get ready to meet Ben in person. Tickets are going for sale at 20% off (code: tiatokyo20) Grab yours now!