Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Lowell Andreessenis an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the coauthor of Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser; cofounder of Netscape; and cofounder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a cofounder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook, eBay, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth9 July 1971
CityCedar Falls, IA
CountryUnited States of America
Amazon drove Borders out of business, and the vast majority of Borders employees are not qualified to work at Amazon. That's an actual, full-on problem. But should Amazon have been prevented from doing that? In my view, no.
It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.
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.
This is the best possible time for big companies to go after online opportunities, ... This is also the best possible time to start a company, if you're willing to build for the long-term.
First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s.
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.
I don't like to not call a spade a spade.
The hardest part is deciding which color you want, ... and that's the way it should be.
The idea that you can now build different types of devices, plug them into the network and they're all sort of equal in the eyes of the network, they're all equally able to access the services of the network, that's really profound.
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.
This is a consumer phenomenon and people will care about what it has to offer them. We are not the market going from here on out.
You know, magic markets don't appear all the time, so you take advantage of them.
If you're unhappy, you should change what you're doing.
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.