Marc Andreessen Quotations | Page 2

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If you think you can execute a previously failed idea, you just have to be able to show that now is the time.

At Microsoft, they all rock back and forth like Gates, they wear the same glasses, they have the same hair style. Maybe they grow them in tanks.

Innovation accelerates and compounds.

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.

The great companies get built by their founders

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.

One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it.

Innovation doesn't come from the big company. It never has and never will. Innovation is something new that looks crazy at first glance. It comes from the 19-year-olds and the start-ups that no one's heard of.

We call it the 'Rule of Crappy People'. Bad managers hire very, very bad employees, because they're threatened by anybody who is anywhere near as good as they are.

I hope to someday live in a world where there are lots more Silicon Valleys.

Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'

The transformation of Apple is probably the biggest tech story of the last 15 years.

The good news is we had this idea of cloud computing. The bad news is we were 10 years too early.

When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.

Only two people have been on the cover of Time Magazine in bare feet. I'm one, the other is Gandhi.

The multipurpose device will always fail.

All's fair in love, war and ride-sharing.

Smart tech investor thinks about: a) future product roadmap, b) bottoms-up market size & growth, c) talent and skill of team. Essentially you are valuing things that have not yet happened, and the likelihood of the CEO and team being able to make them happen. Finance people find this appalling, but investors who do this well can make a lot of money.

I think that every technology company that's more than 20 years old will break up

Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts. It’s hard to think this way — I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change. O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders?

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.

Start-ups should be based on radical ideas. There should be a high failure rate for start-ups, because if there isn't their ideas aren't bold enough.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know where I'm putting my money

More and more major industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. 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.

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

The gulf between what the press and many regular people believe Bitcoin is, and what a growing critical mass of technologists believe Bitcoin is, remains enormous.

The transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate,

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.

I don't waste time being depressed.

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

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

There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.

Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.

You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's an old - and true - cliche that VCs rarely actually say 'no' - more often they say 'maybe', or 'not right now', or 'my partners aren't sure', or 'that's interesting, let me think about it'

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.

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

There is the opportunity to do more and better if you're smaller and more nimble.

It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!

Learning to code is the single best thing anyone can do to get the most out of the amazing future in front of us.

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

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.

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.

I enjoy not being a public company.

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

Out of ten swings at the bat, you get maybe seven strikeouts, two base hits, and if you are lucky, one home run. The base hits and the home runs pay for all the strikeouts