Marc Andreessen Quotes

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

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'

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 know where I'm putting my money.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Innovation accelerates and compounds.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The great companies get built by their founders

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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