50 Quotes from Marc Andreessen

1. “If you’re unhappy, you should change what you’re doing.”

2. “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.”

3. “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.”

4. “I don’t think objectively we are in a tech bubble when tech stocks are at a 30 year low.”

5. “Whatever you’re selling, storage or networking or security, you’re going head to head with the incumbent players.”

6. “I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.”

7. “So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.”

8. “In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month.”

9. “An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network.”

10. “There’s a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They’re completely fearless.”

11. “With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.”

12. “More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services – from movies to agriculture to national defense.”

13. “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.”

14. “Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.”

15. “There’s no such thing as the middle class. It’s absolutely vanishing.”

16. “Today’s leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.”

17. “Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.”

18. “Out of ten swings at the bat, you get maybe seven strikeouts, two base hits, and if you are lucky, one home run. The base hits and the home runs pay for all the strikeouts.”

19. “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.”

20. “Around ’93, ’94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.”

21. “I’ve been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don’t do.”

22. “Start-ups should be based on radical ideas. There should be a high failure rate for start-ups, because if there isn’t their ideas aren’t bold enough.”

23. “The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.”

24. “Only two people have been on the cover of Time Magazine in bare feet. I’m one, the other is Gandhi.”

25. “When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.”

26. “Innovation accelerates and compounds.”

27. “An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.”

28. “I know where I’m putting my money.”

29. “We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people.”

30. “I think that every technology company that’s more than 20 years old will break up.”

31. “Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.”

32. “Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust – it has a business model that either works or it doesn’t.”

33. “I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.”

34. “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.”

35. “Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.”

36. “I am bullish on the global development. I am bullish on billions of people getting out of poverty.”

37. “The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.”

38. “Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.”

39. “If we’re in a bubble, it’s the weirdest bubble I’ve ever seen, where everybody hates everything.”

40. “No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.”

41. “When you’re dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn’t, no matter how good of a salesman you are.”

42. “The multipurpose device will always fail.”

43. “The gulf between what the press and many regular people believe Bitcoin is, and what a growing critical mass of technologists believe Bitcoin is, remains enormous.”

44. “If you think you can execute a previously failed idea, you just have to be able to show that now is the time.”

45. “If I want to get work done, that’s usually about 3 in the morning.”

46. “I enjoy not being a public company.”

47. “There’s always more demands than there’s time to meet them, so it’s constantly a matter of trying to balance them.”

48. “Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.”

49. “The transformation of Apple is probably the biggest tech story of the last 15 years.”

50. “If the Net becomes the center of the universe, which is what seems to be happening, then the dizzying array of machines that will be plugged into it will virtually guarantee that the specifics of which chip and which operating system you’ve got will be irrelevant.”