Marc Andreessen quotes
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.”
-- Marc AndreessenSource : "Jobs fight: Haves vs. the have-nots". Interview with Tim Mullaney, usatoday30.usatoday.com. September 16, 2012.
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“Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“In a startup, absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“If you're unhappy, you should change what you're doing.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“If we're in a bubble, it's the weirdest bubble I've ever seen, where everybody hates everything.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
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“I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“Working for a big company is, I believe, much risker than it looks.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“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 -
“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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?”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“There is the opportunity to do more and better if you're smaller and more nimble.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
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“We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
“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”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“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 -
“I've been an entrepreneur three times. I started three companies.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“I don't think objectively we are in a tech bubble when tech stocks are at a 30 year low.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 AndreessenSource : "The Charlie Rose Show", charlierose.com. February 19, 2009.
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“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters.. 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.’”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“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 -
“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 -
“Once you understand that everybody's going to get connected, a lot of things follow from that. If everybody gets the Internet, they end up with a browser, so they look at web pages - but they can also leave comments, create web pages. They can even host their own server! So not only is everybody consuming, they can also produce.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“If I want to get work done, that's usually about 3 in the morning.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 -
“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 -
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“There is a constant need for new systems and new software.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“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 AndreessenSource : "The Live Web: Building Event-Based Connections in the Cloud". Book by Phillip J. Windley, 2012.
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“An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.”
-- Marc Andreessen -
“You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”
-- Marc AndreessenSource : "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers". Book by Ben Horowitz, March 4, 2014.
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