Marc Andreessen Quotes

“A lot of things you want to do as part of daily life can now be done over the Internet.”

“A very large percentage of economic activity is shifting online and it makes sense that there are more services that are going to charge. It also means there are going to be more people willing to pay.”

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

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

“Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.”

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

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

“Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.”

“I don't waste time being depressed.”

“I hope to someday live in a world where there are lots more Silicon Valleys.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“If you're the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People's lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It's a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste.”

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

“In a startup, absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen.”

“In the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.”

“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.”

“Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.”

“Innovation doesn't come from the big company. It never has and never will. Innovation is something new that looks crazy at first glance. It comes from the 19-year-olds and the start-ups that no one's heard of.”

“It's really rare for people to have a successful start-up in this industry without a breakthrough product. I'll take it a step further. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, I don't get it, I don't understand it. I think it's too weird, I think it's too unusual.”

“Learning to code is the single best thing anyone can do to get the most out of the amazing future in front of us.”

“Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters.”

“My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.”

“My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.”

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

“One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it.”

“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.”

“Over the next ten 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.”

“People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out e-commerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications.”

“Software is eating the world.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.”

“The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.”

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

“The smartphone revolution is under-hyped, more people have access to phones than access to running water. We've never had anything like this before since the beginning of the planet.”

“The two hardest things you'll have to do when running a company are recruiting and talking people out of leaving.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is the opportunity to do more and better if you're smaller and more nimble.”

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

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

“To do original work, it is not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”

“TV and the press have always functioned according to the same sets of rules and technical standards. But the Internet is based on software. And anybody can write a new piece of software on the Internet that years later a billion people are using.”

“We call it the 'Rule of Crappy People'. Bad managers hire very, very bad employees, because they're threatened by anybody who is anywhere near as good as they are.”

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

“You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.”

“You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”