Marc Andreessen Quotes

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

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.'

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

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?

Adaptability is key.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

PCs don't suck. They're inadequate.

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.

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.

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

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 think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I'd rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who's done it before and isn't that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I enjoy not being a public company.

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'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The multipurpose device will always fail.

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,

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The great companies get built by their founders

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.

Software is eating the world

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

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

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

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.

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

In short, software is eating the world.

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

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.'

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.

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

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

People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out ecommerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications. Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application.

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.