A distinguished venture capitalist, Horowitz has backed ideas which have now become formidable IT companies, such as Oculus VR, Twitter, etc.

When George “Geohot” Hotz attempted to make available autonomous self-driving technology into today’s cars, not only did it raise eyebrows in industry circles but also raised Tesla’s ire.

However, with the backing of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent venture capitalist from Silicon Valley, the idea has now received a much needed support.

So as to help Hotz hire engineers and come up with a working solution Horowitz has written him a $3.1 million cheque. With this simple gesture, Hotz has joined the ranks of illustrious individuals who have gone ahead to form formidable companies such as Twitter, Oculus VR, Groupon, Jawbone, and Instagram.

Hotz, has been famous for his hardware hacks. He was known to many as

Geohot, since he cracked the PlayStation 3 as well as the first iPhone. Hotz has now founded Comma, a company that banks on the principle that affordable sensors and machine learning could make it possible to create a system equivalent to an autonomous automatic vehicle for just a few thousand bucks.

Tesla was quick to trash the very idea saying while it’s easy to build a system for a “known stretch of road,” to create a self-driven autonomous car that can traverse through every-day conditions is a much harder proposition.

Hotz, known for his hardware hacking abilities, has obviously a different take on the matter.