Marc Andreessen Quotes

Books about technology start-ups have a pattern. First, there's the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally, the grand finale: immense wealth and secular sainthood. Let's call it the Jobs Narrative.

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.

Whether by design or circumstance, every startup will eventually get disrupted.

It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

It's important to remember that innovators in business don't always get a platform.

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.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

Don't stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want - freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

Great innovators like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie didn't rely on government. There was hardly any of it in those days. More recently, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison used genius to put brand-new ideas into production.

Did Google know much about media? Or Amazon about commerce? Tesla about cars? SpaceX about rockets? EBay about classifieds? What did I know about computing when I started Sun Microsystems? We should celebrate these entrepreneurs, not pillory them for fighting entrenched incumbent industries that have political influence and money.

The world is ready for a more sophisticated 'TMZ.' If there's one thing I've learned, it's that any dummy with a half-decent idea can become a billionaire.

Without disruptions, startups can't survive.

I hear entrepreneurs use the word 'disruption' on a daily basis and continuously hear the cliche change the world.

I'm in favour of entrepreneurial, risk-taking businesses that create great products and services.

Innovation means taking risks, and that is where the private sector can play a role.

The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we're all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.

I don't think the disruptor and the business model of a disruptor necessarily is an indication of the topography of the future. If it did, you would say then that everyone will make high-end electric cars, when the answer is clearly no.

When you look around Silicon Valley at new companies, there are very few ideas that are going to make a dent in the universe.