Mark Andreessen

“So the big thing happening in the world right now is the smartphone, and the significance of the smartphone is, for the first time in human history, we're going to get a computer in everybody's hands, and by everybody, I mean everybody on the planet and by eve…”

“The Lean Startup book by Eric Reese is very, very good and that book should be read front to back. Second is, ah, Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, I can't recommend too highly. And the third is Peter Thiel just wrote a book called Zero to…”

“Most firms, the general partners put in their pocket, take it home and buy vineyards and yachts. In our case, it pays for all this.”

“I think the really big success has only come from serious long-term commitment. So it has a role early on, but at some point you, at some point the founder and the company have to commit to something. And have to really slog it out.”

“My nickname for Cheryl at the time was T-Rex because, you know, having met, you know, it's like, talk about strong personalities, like.”

“What the startup founders don't understand is how big the world is and how busy people are and all the existing investments people have made and all the existing time people are spending on things, you know, so in a world of seven billion people, if you really…”

“They'll be like, well, the customers shouldn't need to be sold to, because they should just buy the best product, and then you have this long explanation as to why that doesn't happen, and so we try to say, you know, you don't, just because you're like a maste…”

“The struggle on the other side, the serial entrepreneur, what often happens is it becomes basically all science, no art. Often the desire to start another company kind of overwhelms the process of coming up with a really great idea.”

“In terms of where, if you're here as a student, or if you're going to be graduating, my personal recommendation would be to focus much more on team. And the reason is just because I think we struggle from a distance to evaluate market, and we also actually str…”

“And of course, the risk is, as that sentiment builds, that it leads to policies that actually impair the ability to be able to make progress in the economy, make progress with Productivity growth. Make progress with job creation. Make progress with wage creati…”

“Many of the smartest programmers and mathematicians and economists and theorists and systems builders in the world and Photographers in the world are obsessed with this. Like they're just magnetically drawn to it, not because of the money or this or that or th…”

“We're at the point now, three billion smartphones on its way to six, seven billion on the planet. We're going to be able to connect everybody. We're going to be able to get, over time, we're going to be able to get everybody all the things that I went through,…”

“Blockchain is the first new third thing in, I don't know, probably 40 years, right? Free software open source is like 40 years old. It's the first new structure in 40 years, and it's an interesting one because it's a hybrid.”

“The way I think about it is, it's more important to me that we have the successful partnership than it is that I'm right on any particular issue.”

“And so I've been running a big experiment this year, which is I've been trying to do a barbell. I've been trying to polarize it, and so I've stopped completely reading newspapers, magazines, basically anything that has a time horizon basically greater than, le…”

“We see 2000 inbound startups a year.”

“This version of the thesis is, in any industry as a result of this dynamic, in the long run, the winning company in the industry will be the best software company, right?”

“It has to be more important to each of you that the other one gets to make the decision than that you get to prove yourself right, and you have to both have that attitude.”

“And like self-driving cars, if it makes, if some other doctor in some other state had a patient last week, and it made a mistake, and they fixed The mistake. It will not make the mistake again on your patient.”

“The Turing, you know, Alan Turing was a genius, but the Turing test is malformed. Humans are too easy to trick. But that's too low of a bar, because tricking a person is not that hard, and does not prove anything other than that you've tricked the person.”

“I'm a little less convinced that the tech, software technologies we have now are, like, on some linear path towards just, like, quote, unquote, AGI, or just, quote, unquote, like, consciousness, like, I don't, It's hard for me to believe that consciousness is …”

“And we're going to be sitting here 30 years from now and we're still not going to have any more knowledge, you know, barring other scientific breakthroughs of the kind that you're talking about.”

“Yeah, nuclear, civilian nuclear power globally in the last 70 years has been responsible for a number of deaths very close to zero. In contrast to basically every other form of energy we know of.”

“It feels eerily to me like history is repeating itself, like a lot more directly than I would prefer, exactly like it happened, you know, in Oppenheimer's time with the Russians. I think there are a lot of lessons to draw from the mistakes that were made in th…”

“Utilitarianism has become very trendy among our current intellectual elite, who has gotten very fond of sitting on Mount Olympus and making these calls and deciding, you know, which eggs you break to make an omelet, and, like, I think that's a bad road.”

“Directors are going to be able to, you know, composite, you know, movie, you're going to be able to pre-render an entire movie ahead of time on your laptop so that by the time you show up and you're pitching the studio and trying to raise the money to film the…”

“The capabilities are going to become available over the next few years, including, you know, rendering video, you know, we're going to get to the point now where like, for example, an actor is going to be able to do a scan of their face and body, and they're g…”

“These systems and all the variations that are coming up you know, the capabilities are going to become available over the next few years, including, you know, rendering video, you know, we're going to get to the point now where like, for example, an actor is g…”

“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”

“If you're a homelessness nonprofit, do you make money by actually solving homelessness or having to be there, Be more of it, right? You make money by having there be more of it. You feed the problem.”

“We spend, you know, like a billion plus dollars to these you know, quote unquote homelessness nonprofits in San Francisco every year. And homelessness keeps getting worse.”

“It's generally worse. Overseas. Cause you end up with especially when you end up basically with, you essentially bring the unions onto the board at a lot of like European multinationals, and then you basically bring European, you bring, sorry, union politics o…”

“The way the boards get information is it's the information to a board is really still piped through the management team and in particularly the CEO. And so it's very hard to it's very hard for boards in practice. It's nearly impossible to have an independent k…”

“And then basically by the time you get all the pieces together, you have like two or one or zero people on the board who actually are actually like from the business.”

“Three ways to deal with this psychologically. One is denial which is what most people do. Most people just pretend the world around them is actually real, even when it's not, because it's a psychologically safe thing to do. And, you know, and by the way, and w…”

“One of the key ways you evaluate founders is like, what difficult challenges have they been through in their lives that they were able to overcome? And the best forecast of being able to overcome a profound challenge in the future, which every entrepreneur dea…”

“He was clearly, like, clearly, clearly, clearly, like, as Mark said, you know, top two in one thing. There's just very few people on Earth that are top two in anything.”

“What's happening is what Ted Kaczynski Famous philosopher, Takasinski, what's called over socialization, right? People are too worried about what everybody else thinks, right? And so people, people get too wrapped up in the sort of mob scapegoating cycle of, y…”

“Specifically though, if you want to control the actual customer experience end to end, you have to vertically integrate. It's the only way to actually do it.”

“This actually reminds me of one of the first things Mark Andreessen ever said to me when we were talking about Substack. He said, you're gonna do to media what the venture capital industry did to software companies or to tech.”

“They told us that explicitly. And yeah. And they told us exactly what you just said. They told us they're gonna ban open source. And when we challenged them on the ability to ban open source, because it's, you know, we're talking about, you know, math, you kno…”

“AI is actually hyper democratized. It has spread to more individuals both in the country and around the world in the shortest period of time of any new technology, I think in history, you know, we're, it's something like six hundred million, you know, users to…”

“And then the best AI's in the world are in the consumer products, right? And so if you use the, if you use, you know, current day chat GPT or Grok or any of these things, like, you know, I can't spend more money. You know and, get access to a better AI. It's i…”

“I think every successful company in the future is gonna need this kind of personality. They're gonna need somebody who can do this, and it's a different leadership profile.”

“My new version of this, my, the new test I think is happening is what we might call the GPT test, which is, okay, if what somebody says is indistinguishable from chat GPT output, like not going to make it. Right. And then the more advanced version of the test …”

“The leaders who have very, a large number of interesting things to say and know how to communicate it are going to do disproportionately well in the years ahead. And the leaders who don't, even if they're professionally skilled, I think are going to have a har…”

“If you watch what Palmer Luckey does, or if you watch what, you know, Alex Karp does, or if you watch what Elon does, or if you watch what any of the great communicators do, like, that's what they're doing. You know, I'd say put Jensen in the, in that rank, yo…”