Loudcloud is a company.
Key people at Loudcloud.
Loudcloud was founded by In Sik Rhee (Founder, Chief Tactician).
Key people at Loudcloud.
Loudcloud was a pioneering cloud infrastructure services company founded in 1999 that provided automated Internet operations outsourcing for businesses, enabling them to deploy, scale, manage, and monitor web applications without building their own infrastructure.[1][2][4] It served major clients like AOL (handling e-commerce technologies such as QuickCheckout), News Corporation sites (Foxsports.com, Foxnews.com, Fox.com), and USAToday.com, solving the problem of complex, manual web operations during the dot-com era by using its proprietary Opsware automation technology.[1] Amid explosive early growth—raising over $200 million in funding and going public in 2001—the dot-com crash forced drastic pivots, including layoffs and spinning off its services into software, leading to its evolution into Opsware, sold to HP for $1.6 billion in 2007.[2][3]
Loudcloud emerged at the height of the 1999 dot-com bubble, founded by Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder) and Ben Horowitz (former Netscape and AOL executive), alongside Tim Howes (LDAP co-inventor) and Sik Rhee (Kiva application server designer).[1][2] The idea stemmed from recognizing that companies lacked the expertise to manage scalable Internet infrastructure, so Loudcloud offered a fully managed service model. It launched in February 2000 with seven customers and $68 million raised, quickly securing another $120 million by mid-2000 despite the NASDAQ crash beginning in March.[1][2] Pivotal moments included a troubled March 2001 IPO—selling 25 million shares at $6 each (down from planned $10-12) to raise $150 million amid a hostile market—and European expansion into London, Paris, and Munich.[1][2]
Loudcloud rode the dot-com infrastructure boom, capitalizing on the explosion of web applications that overwhelmed companies' internal IT capabilities, effectively pioneering managed cloud services before AWS dominated.[1][2] Timing was critical: founded pre-crash, it raised funds at peak valuations (e.g., $700M pre-money Series C), but the 72% NASDAQ drop forced public markets to fund survival, highlighting market forces like investor skittishness and unprofitability scrutiny ($1.94M revenue vs. cash burn).[2] It influenced the ecosystem by validating automation in ops—Opsware's success prefigured DevOps and cloud management tools—while founders Andreessen and Horowitz later shaped VC via Andreessen Horowitz, applying hard-won lessons from near-bankruptcy.[3]
Loudcloud's saga—from dot-com darling to near-collapse and $1.6B exit as Opsware—exemplifies raw startup grit, with Horowitz's leadership turning crisis into a blueprint for endurance chronicled in *The Hard Thing About Hard Things*.[3] Post-HP acquisition, its legacy endures in modern cloud automation, but as a defunct entity by 2007, "what's next" lives through alumni impact: Andreessen Horowitz funds cloud innovators riding AI-driven infra trends like serverless and edge computing. As infrastructure-as-code evolves, Loudcloud's early bet on ops automation remains a foundational influence, underscoring how bubble-era survivors redefine tech's backbone.
Loudcloud was founded by In Sik Rhee (Founder, Chief Tactician).
