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
From there, we all benefit even if we're not related to these apps, because they're now online.
There is an enormous market demand for information. It just has to be fulfilled in a way that fits with the technology of our times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
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.
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.
This is the start of a revolution unlike any we've ever seen.
Organizations spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars installing and implementing huge servers, new Web sites and applications. They have to continue to do that, but they also have to clean up the mess of the '90s.