Top 172 Quotes & Sayings by Marc Andreessen - Page 3

I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.

Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it's actually hard to build a company because everybody's too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.

All's fair in love, war and ride-sharing.

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

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

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

The multipurpose device will always fail.

The great companies get built by their founders

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

More and more major industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. 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.

Smart tech investor thinks about: a) future product roadmap, b) bottoms-up market size & growth, c) talent and skill of team. Essentially you are valuing things that have not yet happened, and the likelihood of the CEO and team being able to make them happen. Finance people find this appalling, but investors who do this well can make a lot of money.

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

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

It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!

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

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.

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

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

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

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies

Tech stocks are trading at a 30-year-low when compared to the multiples of industrials (companies). Its the weirdest bubble when everyone hates everything.

In short, software is eating the world

Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'

The good news is we had this idea of cloud computing. The bad news is we were 10 years too early.

I think that every technology company that's more than 20 years old will break up

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.

Innovation accelerates and compounds.

People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

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.

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

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

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

Rule 1: All rules can be broken. Many (ex-legal and ethical) should be. Most people won't.

The transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.

Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts. It’s hard to think this way — I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change. O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders?

It's an old - and true - cliche that VCs rarely actually say 'no' - more often they say 'maybe', or 'not right now', or 'my partners aren't sure', or 'that's interesting, let me think about it'

At Microsoft, they all rock back and forth like Gates, they wear the same glasses, they have the same hair style. Maybe they grow them in tanks.

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

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

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

The most important thing is to get on the right horse.

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

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