Marc Andreessen
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.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Computers
The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.Collection: Computers
Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the DMV and look around, you're like, 'Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.'Collection: Car
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.Collection: Technology
In short, software is eating the world.Collection: Computers
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.Collection: Wisdom
Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better.Collection: Computers
There was a point in the late '90s where all the graduating M.B.A.'s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.Collection: Business
People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.Collection: Computers
To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something.Collection: Technology
In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the '80s, and I got here too late. But then, I'm maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I'm incredibly optimistic.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Computers
And once you get instantaneous communication with everybody, you have economic activity that's far more advanced, far more liquid, far more distributed than ever before.Collection: Communication
Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Technology
Tech stocks are trading at a 30-year-low when compared to the multiples of industrials (companies). It's the weirdest bubble when everyone hates everything.
You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.
Aaron Sorkin was completely unable to understand the actual psychology of Mark or of Facebook. He can't conceive of a world where social status or getting laid or, for that matter, doing drugs, is not the most important thing.
I'm quite bullish. We're coming up on year 15 of a flat stock market. Historically that's a pretty good sign. So I'm not a hedge-fund manager but if I was I think I'd be feeling pretty good.
Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.
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.
I don't waste time being depressed.
Adaptability is key.
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.
A lot of things you want to do as part of daily life can now be done over the Internet.
You go on Facebook, you buy social advertising. And you can very cost-effectively target people who are in the market for your product from all over the world.
I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.
Nokia and Research in Motion needed a modern operating system. They could have bought Palm or Android before Google did, but they didn't. Today, it's probably too late, and at the time they would have been criticized for overpaying, but as they say - shift happens.
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.
Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.
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.
I don't like to not call a spade a spade.
Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.
There's always more demands than there's time to meet them, so it's constantly a matter of trying to balance them.
The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.
One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.
I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.
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.
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.
When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me.
Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.
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.
We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies.
Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.
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.
No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.
Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented and unparalleled in the world.