Top 100 Marc Andreessen Quotes
#1. You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
Marc Andreessen
#2. 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
#3. We are single-mindedly focused on partnering with the best innovators pursuing the biggest markets.
Marc Andreessen
#4. My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.
Marc Andreessen
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. It's much harder these days as a start-up to do physical devices.
Marc Andreessen
#8. So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.
Marc Andreessen
#9. 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
#10. Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
Marc Andreessen
#12. I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.
Marc Andreessen
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
Marc Andreessen
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#26. 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
#27. Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'
Marc Andreessen
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. The good news is we had this idea of cloud computing. The bad news is we were 10 years too early.
Marc Andreessen
#32. I hope to someday live in a world where there are lots more Silicon Valleys.
Marc Andreessen
#33. Only two people have been on the cover of Time Magazine in bare feet. I'm one, the other is Gandhi.
Marc Andreessen
#34. Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.
Marc Andreessen
#35. 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
#36. Rule 1: All rules can be broken. Many (ex-legal and ethical) should be. Most people won't.
Marc Andreessen
#37. 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
#38. I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.
Marc Andreessen
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Marc Andreessen
#42. Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.
Marc Andreessen
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.
Marc Andreessen
#47. If you're unhappy, you should change what you're doing.
Marc Andreessen
#48. 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,
Marc Andreessen
#49. 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
#50. You know, magic markets don't appear all the time, so you take advantage of them.
Marc Andreessen
#51. 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
#53. Learning to code is the single best thing anyone can do to get the most out of the amazing future in front of us.
Marc Andreessen
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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.
Marc Andreessen
#61. 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
#62. 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.
Marc Andreessen
#63. The transformation of Apple is probably the biggest tech story of the last 15 years.
Marc Andreessen
#64. 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.
Marc Andreessen
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.
Marc Andreessen
#69. 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
#70. Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them.
Marc Andreessen
#71. 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
#72. Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.
Marc Andreessen
#73. 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
#74. I don't think objectively we are in a tech bubble when tech stocks are at a 30 year low.
Marc Andreessen
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies.
Marc Andreessen
#78. The 2 hardest things you'll have to do when running a company are recruiting and talking people out of leaving.
Marc Andreessen
#79. 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
#80. When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.
Marc Andreessen
#81. 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
#82. If you think you can execute a previously failed idea, you just have to be able to show that now is the time.
Marc Andreessen
#83. Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.
Marc Andreessen
#84. If I want to get work done, that's usually about 3 in the morning.
Marc Andreessen
#85. 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
#86. If we're in a bubble, it's the weirdest bubble I've ever seen, where everybody hates everything.
Marc Andreessen
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!
Marc Andreessen
#90. Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.
Marc Andreessen
#91. You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.
Marc Andreessen
#92. 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
#93. There is a constant need for new systems and new software.
Marc Andreessen
#94. There is the opportunity to do more and better if you're smaller and more nimble.
Marc Andreessen
#95. 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
#96. I'm really excited about anything that is able to address the really big markets, so anything that's universally appealing.
Marc Andreessen
#97. 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
#99. I think that every technology company that's more than 20 years old will break up
Marc Andreessen
#100. A lot of things you want to do as part of daily life can now be done over the Internet.
Marc Andreessen
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