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's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.
There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.
Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.
In the startup world, you're either a genius or an idiot. You're never just an ordinary guy trying to get through the day
Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.
We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people.
Once you understand that everybody's going to get connected, a lot of things follow from that. If everybody gets the Internet, they end up with a browser, so they look at web pages - but they can also leave comments, create web pages. They can even host their own server! So not only is everybody consuming, they can also produce.
A lot of things you want to do as part of daily life can now be done over the Internet.
Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.
Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded
Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not
Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.
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.
Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.