Top 80 Marc Andreessen Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The advantage of the consumer businesses is they tend to be much broader-based, much larger number of customers, that tend to over time be a lot more predictable. The advantage of the enterprise companies is they are not as subject to consumer trend, fad, behavior.

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

Whatever you’re selling, storage or networking or security, you’re going head to head with the incumbent players.

If I want to get work done, that’s usually about 3 in the morning.

I feel like I’m constantly falling behind. I feel like every day I’m out of the office I’m falling behind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You go on Facebook, you buy social advertising. And you can very cost-effectively target people who are in the market for your product from all over the world.

I know where I’m putting my money.

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.’

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.

In short, software is eating the world.

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.

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

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

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

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

China should be another United States from an economic standpoint. Beijing should be another Silicon Valley.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Many of the best firms historically in venture capital have been multi-sector.