Top 100 Andreessen Quotes
#1. At Andreessen Horowitz, we talk about the notion of being 'too hungry to eat.' That's to say, we often see startups that are so entrenched in the product that the founders forget they need muscle to grow.
Scott Weiss
#2. Despite Marc Andreessen's and Peter Thiel's belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice - the result of the laws and taxes that we as a society choose to establish.
Jonathan Taplin
#3. You can express your generosity in ways that are virtually limitless. This was what I wanted to convey in 'Giving 2.0' - that whether you have $10 or $10 million to give, if you identify the right opportunities and make the most of your resources, your impact can be tremendous.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#4. You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
Marc Andreessen
#5. 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
#7. We are single-mindedly focused on partnering with the best innovators pursuing the biggest markets.
Marc Andreessen
#8. 'Giving 2.0' frames giving as a learning experience and encourages everyone to make giving a part of your year-round life.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#9. My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.
Marc Andreessen
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. It's much harder these days as a start-up to do physical devices.
Marc Andreessen
#13. 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.
Marc Andreessen
#14. So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.
Marc Andreessen
#15. As technology changes the way we communicate, connect, create, consume and innovate, it is democratizing access to opportunity. Education is no exception.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#16. 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
#17. Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
Marc Andreessen
#20. ANYONE WHO GIVES ANYTHING - TIME, MONEY, EXPERIENCE, SKILLS, AND NETWORKS - IN ANY AMOUNT, TO CREATE A BETTER WORLD.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#21. I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.
Marc Andreessen
#22. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. Working for a big company is, I believe, much risker than it looks.
Marc Andreessen
#43. Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'
Marc Andreessen
#44. I've been an entrepreneur three times. I started three companies.
Marc Andreessen
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. When I started teaching at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2000, no field-based courses in strategic philanthropy existed.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#48. 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
#49. The good news is we had this idea of cloud computing. The bad news is we were 10 years too early.
Marc Andreessen
#50. I hope to someday live in a world where there are lots more Silicon Valleys.
Marc Andreessen
#51. Only two people have been on the cover of Time Magazine in bare feet. I'm one, the other is Gandhi.
Marc Andreessen
#52. 'Giving 2.0' is about making your giving matter more to the people we all hope to help, and it's about making your giving matter more to you.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#53. 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
#54. Online, you can become much more than a reactive donor - you can become a proactive, strategic, collaborative philanthropist, improving your giving every day by tapping into the wealth of philanthropic resources available at the tap of a keyboard or the click of a mouse.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#55. When incomes and bonuses decrease, revenues falter, and businesses stumble, it's more important than ever to give - not necessarily more, but in a way that matters more. When incomes are down and wallets are stretched, the effectiveness of our giving is what really counts.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#56. Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.
Marc Andreessen
#57. Shouldn't you put the same amount of effort into your giving as you might for your for-profit investments? After all, philanthropy is an investment, and one in which lives - not profits - are at stake.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#58. 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
#59. Actively deciding to give to causes that move you deeply is far more fulfilling than the momentary gratification derived from signing a check and mailing it to a nonprofit about which you know little more than what's on the brochure they sent you.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#60. As technology breaks down the physical barriers of college campuses, the extraordinary intellectual capital of the educator community is becoming available to anyone committed to learning - regardless of age, income or location.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#61. Rule 1: All rules can be broken. Many (ex-legal and ethical) should be. Most people won't.
Marc Andreessen
#62. 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
#63. I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.
Marc Andreessen
#64. 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.
Marc Andreessen
#65. Philanthropic dollars are precious resources, so it's our responsibility to consider how we use them carefully. Yet few of us spend enough time doing so.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. My father taught me many important giving lessons, but two stand out. First, always give as much as you possibly can. And second, give equally from among your resources - your time, your mind and your capital. These are principles I live by.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#71. I want to empower and educate and inspire individuals who are giving to give in a way that is more meaningful. The more meaningful our giving is, the more giving we will do.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#72. Medical tests have shown that giving stimulates a part of the brain that gives us the same gratification as when we eat food or have sex.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#73. The fact that 35 percent of all American giving went to religious organizations in 2010 reflects how closely bound many of us are with our place of worship.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#74. Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.
Marc Andreessen
#75. As philanthropists, the most powerful legacy we can create is one that keeps on giving - through our children.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.
Marc Andreessen
#80. If you're unhappy, you should change what you're doing.
Marc Andreessen
#81. 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'
Marc Andreessen
#82. I have yet to take capital losses on any company. Then again, it's still early.
Marc Andreessen
#83. Too often we're happy to receive thanks from the nonprofits we fund, accepting gratitude instead of feedback or performance measurements.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. You know, magic markets don't appear all the time, so you take advantage of them.
Marc Andreessen
#87. 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
#89. Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.
Marc Andreessen
#90. 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
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. The word 'philanthropy' brings up an image of somebody who's had an illustrious career, has retired and is giving to highly established institutions that may or may not have ivy growing up their walls. I personally have felt the need to give philanthropy a reboot
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#95. Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.
Marc Andreessen
#96. When you give as a family, not only are you sharing the happiness that giving brings you by watching it translate into positive change, but you are also transmitting your giving values to your children by engaging them in the giving process itself.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
