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.
Marc Andreessen
In short, software is eating the world.
The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.
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.
You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.
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.
Adaptability is key.
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.
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.
Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.
I know where I'm putting my money.
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.
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.
If I want to get work done, that's usually about 3 in the morning.
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.
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.
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.
It's much harder these days as a start-up to do physical devices.
Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them.
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.
Many of the best firms historically in venture capital have been multi-sector.
I am bullish on the global development. I am bullish on billions of people getting out of poverty.
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.
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.
Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.
Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.
I think the tech stock, the public market is still completely traumatized by the dotcom crash. I think the investors and reporters and analysts and everybody is determined to not get taken advantage of again, and that is what everybody who lived through 2000, what they kind of remember.
There's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.
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.
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.
I don't like to not call a spade a spade.
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.
China should be another United States from an economic standpoint. Beijing should be another Silicon Valley.
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.
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.
Consumers are freeing up an enormous amount of time that they were spending with stereotypical old media, and clearly, that time is going primarily two places: videogames and online.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.
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.'
Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries - without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.
Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.
I'm really excited about anything that is able to address the really big markets, so anything that's universally appealing.
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.
So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.
