First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s.
— Marc Andreessen
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.
Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.
In short, software is eating the world.
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.
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.
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.
Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.
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.
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.
We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their 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.
Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.
I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.
The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.
No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.
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.
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.
Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.
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.
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.
There's always more demands than there's time to meet them, so it's constantly a matter of trying to balance them.
