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
Most of the software ideas of the late '90s which people tried and failed on--customer relationship management, marketing analytics, supply chain management, B2B procurement--those ideas all made sense and had good business justifications. But the tech wasn't quite there. Many customers who bought early feel bitter. But at some point those things will hit the mainstream and work.
To have people spending 55 minutes online is fascinating, because they are not doing something else. There are a fixed number of minutes in a day.
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.
The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.
It's really rare for people to have a successful start-up in this industry without a breakthrough product. I'll take it a step further. 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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.