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
There is a broad-based transition going on throughout the next five to ten years in the software industry. This shift, to run on the Internet, is only just beginning. There is a huge unfulfilled demand right now.
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.
Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want. That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field.
The joke about SAP has always been, it's making '50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like, it's really - yeah, the incumbency - they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.
There is a constant need for new systems and new software.
In short, software is eating the world
We are single-mindedly focused on partnering with the best innovators pursuing the biggest markets.
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.
We're technically agnostic. Our services support Sun and Oracle, but a lot of customers have been asking that we support Microsoft as well.
You can't determine whether to build a bridge by counting the number of swimmers. Consumers don't care about technology at the end of the day.
Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.
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.
Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.