Marc Andreessen Quotations

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.

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.

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.

I am bullish on the global development. I am bullish on billions of people getting out of poverty.

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.

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.

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

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.

At a certain point in your career - I mean, part of the answer is a personal answer, which is that at a certain point in your career, it becomes more satisfying to help entrepreneurs than to be one.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I would say the consumer Internet companies - in a lot of ways, if you go inside the consumer Internet companies and you see how they run, it's how all their businesses are going to run.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Most of the software ideas of the late '90s which people tried and failed on--customer relationship management, marketing analytics, supply chain management, B2B procurement--those ideas all made sense and had good business justifications. But the tech wasn't quite there. Many customers who bought early feel bitter. But at some point those things will hit the mainstream and work.

From there, we all benefit even if we're not related to these apps, because they're now online.

I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it's all really positive for the industry. It will force the industry to make the changes that are required to make the Internet viable in the long run.

Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want. That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field.

We have to make this stuff much more simple at every step of the chain,

We have to make this stuff much more simple at every step of the chain. That's our opportunity. We've come a long way, but we still only reach three percent of the world population. We can make this more widespread.

We have to try hard and liberate ourselves from assumptions.

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

There is a broad-based transition going on throughout the next five to ten years in the software industry. This shift, to run on the Internet, is only just beginning. There is a huge unfulfilled demand right now.

We're seeing it now with a big migration from Java to PHP in Web development.

We're being deliberately vague. We're going to come back in early 2000 and have more details.

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

You can't determine whether to build a bridge by counting the number of swimmers. Consumers don't care about technology at the end of the day.

We're technically agnostic. Our services support Sun and Oracle, but a lot of customers have been asking that we support Microsoft as well.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

This is the best possible time for big companies to go after online opportunities, ... This is also the best possible time to start a company, if you're willing to build for the long-term.

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

I'm looking forward to my new role, which will allow me to combine my desire to focus more time on getting involved with start-ups with the opportunity to contribute to AOL's future success.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with these URLs. Hopefully they'll take advantage of them.

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

The Net used to be 50 percent men and 50 percent men pretending to be women,

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Internet sites themselves are becoming incredibly sophisticated and complex, and every company is under intense pressure to move as fast as possible to address increasing competitive challenges,

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.

The hardest part is deciding which color you want, ... and that's the way it should be.

The idea that you can now build different types of devices, plug them into the network and they're all sort of equal in the eyes of the network, they're all equally able to access the services of the network, that's really profound.

This is a consumer phenomenon and people will care about what it has to offer them. We are not the market going from here on out.

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

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.

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

To have people spending 55 minutes online is fascinating, because they are not doing something else. There are a fixed number of minutes in a day.

This is the start of a revolution unlike any we've ever seen.

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

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

There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.

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

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

In short, software is eating the world

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

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

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

My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.

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

People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

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

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

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

The 2 hardest things you'll have to do when running a company are recruiting and talking people out of leaving.

Rule 1: All rules can be broken. Many (ex-legal and ethical) should be. Most people won't.

Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters.. 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.’

The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.

In a startup, absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen.

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

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