Marc Andreessen
46 quotes
Biography
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman, venture capitalist, and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first web browser to display inline images; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
"[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers."
"Software is eating the world"
"Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?"
"The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here."
"The two premodern religions were ancestor worship and nature worship (see "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges). The two postmodern religions are evidently identitarianism and environmentalism. Is this a coincidence, or something deeper?"
"I'm glad there's OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."
"Bertrand de Jouvenel"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content."
"Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today."
"If you're unhappy, you should change what you're doing."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation."
"I need more raw experience. I've read and watched a lot of things, but I haven't done a lot of things."
"Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation."
"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."
"I know where I'm putting my money."
"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."