Marc Andreessen Quotes

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.

- Marc Andreessen

There was a point in the late '90s where all the graduating M.B.A.'s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.

- Marc Andreessen

Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.

- Marc Andreessen

Amazon drove Borders out of business, and the vast majority of Borders employees are not qualified to work at Amazon. That's an actual, full-on problem. But should Amazon have been prevented from doing that? In my view, no.

- Marc Andreessen

I'm quite bullish. We're coming up on year 15 of a flat stock market. Historically that's a pretty good sign. So I'm not a hedge-fund manager but if I was I think I'd be feeling pretty good.

- Marc Andreessen

Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.

- Marc Andreessen

Organizations spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars installing and implementing huge servers, new Web sites and applications. They have to continue to do that, but they also have to clean up the mess of the '90s.

- Marc Andreessen

A very large percentage of economic activity is shifting online and it makes sense that there are more services that are going to charge. It also means there are going to be more people willing to pay.

- Marc Andreessen

There will be certain points of time when everything collides together and reaches critical mass around a new concept or a new thing that ends up being hugely relevant to a high percentage of people or businesses. But it's really really hard to predict those. I don't believe anyone can.

- Marc Andreessen

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network.

- Marc Andreessen

The joke about SAP has always been, it's making '50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like, it's really - yeah, the incumbency - they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.

- Marc Andreessen

Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

- Marc Andreessen

Today's leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.

- Marc Andreessen

And once you get instantaneous communication with everybody, you have economic activity that's far more advanced, far more liquid, far more distributed than ever before.

- Marc Andreessen

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.

- Marc Andreessen

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.

- Marc Andreessen

I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying.

- Marc Andreessen

Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented and unparalleled in the world.

- Marc Andreessen

One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.

- Marc Andreessen

PCs don't suck. They're inadequate.

- Marc Andreessen

Once you understand that everybody's going to get connected, a lot of things follow from that. If everybody gets the Internet, they end up with a browser, so they look at web pages - but they can also leave comments, create web pages. They can even host their own server! So not only is everybody consuming, they can also produce.

- Marc Andreessen

The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

- Marc Andreessen

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

- Marc Andreessen

If you're the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People's lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It's a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste.

- Marc Andreessen

When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me.

- Marc Andreessen

If the Net becomes the center of the universe, which is what seems to be happening, then the dizzying array of machines that will be plugged into it will virtually guarantee that the specifics of which chip and which operating system you've got will be irrelevant.

- Marc Andreessen

We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies.

- Marc Andreessen

Working for a big company is, I believe, much risker than it looks.

- Marc Andreessen

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries - without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.

- Marc Andreessen

I don't think objectively we are in a tech bubble when tech stocks are at a 30 year low.

- Marc Andreessen

Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.

- Marc Andreessen

There is a constant need for new systems and new software.

- Marc Andreessen

Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

- Marc Andreessen

Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the DMV and look around, you're like, 'Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.'

- Marc Andreessen

Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.

- Marc Andreessen

People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.

- Marc Andreessen

Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it's actually hard to build a company because everybody's too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.

- Marc Andreessen

Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.

- Marc Andreessen

In the startup world, you're either a genius or an idiot. You're never just an ordinary guy trying to get through the day.

- Marc Andreessen

In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month.

- Marc Andreessen

Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.

- Marc Andreessen

Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.

- Marc Andreessen

I've been an entrepreneur three times. I started three companies.

- Marc Andreessen

Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.

- Marc Andreessen

People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out e-commerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications.

- Marc Andreessen

Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.

- Marc Andreessen

Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded.

- Marc Andreessen

Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.

- Marc Andreessen

It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.

- Marc Andreessen

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.

- Marc Andreessen

China is very entrepreneurial but has no rule of law. Europe has rule of law but isn't entrepreneurial. Combine rule of law, entrepreneurialism and a generally pro-business policy, and you have Apple.

- Marc Andreessen

When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are.

- Marc Andreessen

I think the tech stock, the public market is still completely traumatized by the dotcom crash. I think the investors and reporters and analysts and everybody is determined to not get taken advantage of again, and that is what everybody who lived through 2000, what they kind of remember.

- Marc Andreessen

First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s.

- Marc Andreessen

There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.

- Marc Andreessen

No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.

- Marc Andreessen

Nokia and Research in Motion needed a modern operating system. They could have bought Palm or Android before Google did, but they didn't. Today, it's probably too late, and at the time they would have been criticized for overpaying, but as they say - shift happens.

- Marc Andreessen

These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed.

- Marc Andreessen

Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.

- Marc Andreessen

Adaptability is key.

- Marc Andreessen

I don't waste time being depressed.

- Marc Andreessen

I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.

- Marc Andreessen

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

- Marc Andreessen

I always had the old-school model that I'm going to work for as long as I'm relevant and focus on for-profit activities and someday when I retire I'm going to learn about philanthropy.

- Marc Andreessen

There's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.

- Marc Andreessen

It's really rare for people to have a successful start-up in this industry without a breakthrough product. I'll take it a step further. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, 'I don't get it, I don't understand it. I think it's too weird, I think it's too unusual.'

- Marc Andreessen

If we're in a bubble, it's the weirdest bubble I've ever seen, where everybody hates everything.

- Marc Andreessen

Tech stocks are trading at a 30-year-low when compared to the multiples of industrials (companies). It's the weirdest bubble when everyone hates everything.

- Marc Andreessen

Aaron Sorkin was completely unable to understand the actual psychology of Mark or of Facebook. He can't conceive of a world where social status or getting laid or, for that matter, doing drugs, is not the most important thing.

- Marc Andreessen

There's always more demands than there's time to meet them, so it's constantly a matter of trying to balance them.

- Marc Andreessen

The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.

- Marc Andreessen

I have yet to take capital losses on any company. Then again, it's still early.

- Marc Andreessen

I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.

- Marc Andreessen

Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it's so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.

- Marc Andreessen

We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people.

- Marc Andreessen

Consumers are freeing up an enormous amount of time that they were spending with stereotypical old media, and clearly, that time is going primarily two places: videogames and online.

- Marc Andreessen

It's much harder these days as a start-up to do physical devices.

- Marc Andreessen

TV and the press have always functioned according to the same sets of rules and technical standards. But the Internet is based on software. And anybody can write a new piece of software on the Internet that years later a billion people are using.

- Marc Andreessen

I love the 'Daily Show,' and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally, the answer to every single problem is, 'Congress should pass a new law.' It's this unbelievably optimistic view of, 'We can pass a law, and then everybody will get along.'

- Marc Andreessen

In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

- Marc Andreessen

The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.

- Marc Andreessen

People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out ecommerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications. Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application.

- Marc Andreessen

The big advantage that we have as a venture capital firm over a hedge fund or a mutual fund is we have a 13-year lockup on our money. And so enterprise can go in and out of fashion four different times, and we can go and invest in one of these companies, and it's okay, because we can stay the course.

- Marc Andreessen

You know, magic markets don't appear all the time, so you take advantage of them.

- Marc Andreessen

So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.

- Marc Andreessen

One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.

- Marc Andreessen

I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.

- Marc Andreessen

I enjoy not being a public company.

- Marc Andreessen

Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them.

- Marc Andreessen

I need more raw experience. I've read and watched a lot of things, but I haven't done a lot of things.

- Marc Andreessen

Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.

- Marc Andreessen

You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.

- Marc Andreessen

Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.

- Marc Andreessen

Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better.

- Marc Andreessen

If there's been a crisis in a market, you don't tend to have a new crisis in that market until the people who went through the last crisis aren't in the system anymore.

- Marc Andreessen

There is an enormous market demand for information. It just has to be fulfilled in a way that fits with the technology of our times.

- Marc Andreessen

The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.

- Marc Andreessen

In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the '80s, and I got here too late. But then, I'm maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I'm incredibly optimistic.

- Marc Andreessen

I don't like to not call a spade a spade.

- Marc Andreessen

We are single-mindedly focused on partnering with the best innovators pursuing the biggest markets.

- Marc Andreessen

I'm really excited about anything that is able to address the really big markets, so anything that's universally appealing.

- Marc Andreessen

The smartphone revolution is under-hyped, more people have access to phones than access to running water. We've never had anything like this before since the beginning of the planet.

- Marc Andreessen

A lot of things you want to do as part of daily life can now be done over the Internet.

- Marc Andreessen

In short, software is eating the world.

- Marc Andreessen

If you're unhappy, you should change what you're doing.

- Marc Andreessen

I know where I'm putting my money.

- Marc Andreessen