San Francisco, Jul 22 (IANS): Leading investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) has announced it is moving its headquarters to the Cloud, as nearly every technology company has moved to a remote or hybrid approach to work in the pandemic.

Founding partner Ben Horowitz said that the VC firm is also opening three new offices in Miami Beach, New York, and Santa Monica in addition to its existing Menlo Park and San Francisco locations.

"Our headquarters will be in the cloud and we will continue to create physical offices globally where needed to support our teams and partners," he announced late on Thursday.

In the firm's new operating model, it works primarily virtually, but will use its physical presence to develop its culture, help entrepreneurs and build relationships.

"Specifically, the firm is now virtual, but can materialise physically on command," said Horowitz.

In 2020, Covid-19 hit and technology companies were forced to figure out how to work remotely.

"It turns out that running a technology company remotely works pretty darned well. It's not perfect, but mitigating the cultural issues associated with remote work turns out to be easier than mitigating the employee satisfaction issues associated with forcing everyone into the office 5 days/week," Horowitz said.

Remote work is opening up many new locations for entrepreneurs and technology workers.

"We embrace that by changing our own operating model," said the A16Z founder.

A16Z in May announced a new $4.5 billion fund for crypto and blockchain companies and startups (or Web3.0 startups).

It marks Andreessen's fourth fund for the asset class and brings its total raised for crypto and Blockchain investments to $7.6 billion.

A16Z recently announced the creation of a16z crypto research, a new kind of multidisciplinary lab that will work closely with its portfolio and others toward solving the important problems in space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the Internet.