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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
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.
We have to make this stuff much more simple at every step of the chain. That's our opportunity. We've come a long way, but we still only reach three percent of the world population. We can make this more widespread.
We have to make this stuff much more simple at every step of the chain,
We have to try hard and liberate ourselves from assumptions.
I think the tech stock, the public market is still completely traumatized by the dotcom crash. I think the investors and reporters and analysts and everybody is determined to not get taken advantage of again, and that is what everybody who lived through 2000, what they kind of remember.
I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day.