As OpenAI and Anthropic both race toward blockbuster IPOs, there are not many investors who can claim the distinction of backing both companies early.
Bradley Horowitz, through his venture firm, Wisdom Ventures, wrote early checks to OpenAI in 2023 and to Anthropic in 2024. He was also an angel investor in Cerebras, which soared in its public market debut last week. His other seed investments include Slack, Miro, Ramp, and ScaleAI, a remarkable track record that has made Horowitz a perennial top VC on Business Insider’s Seed 100.
After 15 years as a Google product executive helping build the very tools that define our digital lives—from Gmail to Google Photos— Horowitz now wants to focus on “tech-enabled well-being,” seeking out founders who can use technology to reduce screen time and foster genuine, real-world human connection.
He says it was while working on Google Photos a decade ago that he realized machine learning was advancing rapidly, when it could accurately identify objects in photos.
“We were able to do automatic image recognition, so you no longer needed tagging,” he remembers. “I had worked on that problem for 20 years, so to see it finally starting to work was a leading indicator that there were some fundamental changes coming.”
Horowitz had known OpenAI CEO Sam Altman since he was a young founder in Y Combinator at his previous company, Loopt. They stayed in touch, and when Wisdom Ventures was investing its first fund, Horowitz and his partners called Altman.
Wisdom also backed Anthropic the next year, bucking the conventional Silicon Valley prohibition against backing competitors.
“We’re not picking a winner in this race,” Horowitz said. “We want humanity to be the winner.”
The flat tire test
When evaluating founders, Horowitz tries to understand how they would act when things go wrong, which he calls the “flat tire test.”
“If you go on a road trip with a group of people and you get a flat tire three miles into it, some people are Debbie Downers and bummed out at your bad luck,” he said, while others roll up their sleeves and make the best of a bad situation. “I find it more fun to work with the latter.”
Horowitz gravitates toward founders who have worked in a bustling kitchen or as a camp counselor, environments where things break, stress runs high, and decisions matter in real time. “There are some people who crumble under chaos, and there are other people who thrive under chaos,” he said. “The drama that happens in a restaurant is really good training for what it means to ship a product.”
After decades at Google and backing multiple breakout startups, Horowitz could more than afford to enjoy a comfortable retirement. Instead, Wisdom Ventures just closed an oversubscribed Fund II of around $80 million.
“To go sit on a beach or something like that would almost be an ethical violation,” he said. “I feel obligated to take what I’ve learned and help people who are smarter and younger and have more energy than I do, but maybe spare them some grief they would otherwise experience by dint of my experience. That gives me tremendous joy.”
With the addition of former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, Wisdom will be focusing more on “tech-enabled well-being,” a shift that reflects both personal motivation and a broader critique of the industry.
“We’re looking at technologies that actually bring people together literally and get them off of screens,” Horowitz said.
Horowitz spent years building products designed to increase digital engagement, and he acknowledges the industry’s mixed record. Technology, he says, has a “balance sheet” that includes both benefits and harm. Now he wants to help tilt that balance.
“I want to make sure that in the remaining time I have left, I’m putting all my focus on the good that technology can do for us,” he said.
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