Marc Andreessen Quotes

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

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.

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

In short, software is eating the world

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

All's fair in love, war and ride-sharing.

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

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.

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

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.’

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.

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.

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

I hope to someday live in a world where there are lots more Silicon Valleys.

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

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.

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

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

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

I enjoy not being a public company.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

If you're unhappy, you should change what you're doing.

The transformation of Apple is probably the biggest tech story of the last 15 years.

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.

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

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.

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.'