Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's venture capital firms, announced this week that it has raised a $650 million fund. The firm was created in June 2009 as a joint venture between Ben Horowitz, co-founder and early CEO of Opsware (which sold to HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion in cash), and Marc Andreessen, the man credited with creating the first Web browser, Mosaic and founder of Netscape. Andreessen Horowitz first closed a $300 million fund near the time of its founding. That money has since been invested in several well-known startup companies, including Digg, Foursquare, Skype and Zynga. Impressively, the firm says it raised this second fund in just three weeks' time, a quarter of the three months it took to raise half the capital a year ago. All of the original investors and some new ones joined the second fund.  For further information about this fund, see the article on Vator tv. The NextWomen has two questions relating to this news: 1. Is the raising of this fund will be positive news for firms raising funds at this time, such as July Meyer of Ariadne Capital and Gita Patel of Trapezia in the UK, Cilian Jansen Verplanke of Karmijnkapitaal in The Netherlands, and Golden Seeds in the US? 2. Will this fund of Andreessen Horowitz invest in more women-led companies than the general -low- percentage of around 7%? This is what the blog says:

Andreessen Horowitz prefers funding companies whose CEO is a co-founder. We also prefer founders who are technical. Put the two together, and you often have a CEO who has to hire executives into roles (e.g., marketing, sales, customer support, finance) she has never done before.

We'll see in the next months how these questions will be answered.