"Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with  Marc Andreessen, which means for the first time   on the podcast, the guest’s and the host’s  playback speed will actually match. Marc,   welcome to ..."

"Because it's such a gigantic, emotional,  irrational thing to do. The implications of that   decision are so profound in terms of how you live  your life. Look, there are plenty of great ideas,   and ..."

"Before AWS, deploying applications was  probably the bottleneck on new software.   What is the biggest bottleneck today? At what  layer of abstraction do we need new tools?   Literally sitting here to..."

"past. So you sold Netscape for $10  billion. But today, Chrome has what,   like 2.7 billion users or something. And  then Opsware was sold for like $1.7 billion.   AWS is gonna probably make close to ..."

"So you take whatever skills you think  you have and you just do something new.   Make sense. Are venture capitalists part of  the managerial elite? Burnham says that “the   rise of the finance capita..."

"A consequence of that, that I think is pretty  obvious, is that managerial capitalism has a   big advantage that Burnham identified, which is  that the managers are often very good at running   things..."

"When the companies we fund get to scale, they  tend to get pulled into the managerial orbits,   they tend to get pulled into the managerial  matrix, which by the way, is when they stop being   able to..."

"When it goes from being in the bourgeois  model to being in the managerial model.  And then this gets to sort of the philosophy of  succession in tech companies. And the general   thing that happens t..."

"they're not working with customers. They just  start to become bubbles of their own reality.   Contact with the real world is difficult every  single time. The real world is a pain in the butt.   And ..."

"would be — what if you just had more zeros on  the amount of money? What if instead of funding   companies for $20 million, you could fund them  for $2 billion, or $20 billion? In other words,   maybe..."

"venture capitalist in his career. He became a  hands-on investor at the firm Warburg Pincus   and funded some really interesting companies.  And so he's one of these rare people who's   both theoretic..."

"he ran the numbers and computer sciences work  twice as well as biotech or something like that.   And then what he said is this is a direct result  of federal research funding over the previous 50   y..."

"I think there's a lot to his argument. I'm a  little more optimistic about a broader spread of   categories. A big reason I'm more optimistic about  a broader set of categories is because computer   s..."

"who might require the capital to do something  grand. Last I checked, you guys have $35 billion   or something under management. Do we need  to add a few more zeros to that as well?   Will a16z’s asse..."

"So to put another zero on that, as I said,  we would need a theory on a different kind   of venture capital model, which would be  trying to back much larger scale projects.   And again, there's a rea..."

"which is — What makes a great entrepreneur? Are  they born? Are they trained? What made Elon, Elon?   What would you need to do to get ten more Elons?  What would you need to do to get 100 more Elons?..."

"their companies. We work with a lot of great  founders and we also work with Elon and he's   still special. He's still highly unusual even  relative to the other great entrepreneurs.   Yeah. Let's ta..."

"Yeah, there are people who make  their living on baseball cards.   Look, art has been a part of the economy  for thousands of years. Art is one of the   original things that people bought and sold.  A..."

"I don't mean to get hung up on this — but if you  think of something like the stock market or the   bond market, fundamentally you can tell a story  there. Where the reason what these stockbrokers or ..."

"Have we reached the end of history when it comes  to how venture capital works? For decades you get   equity in these early stage companies, you  invest more rounds, it's a 2-20 structure.   Is that w..."

"Okay, so there's a clear pipeline of successful  founders, who then become venture capitalists   like yourself, obviously. But I'm curious why the  opposite is not more true? So if you're a venture   ..."

"eight or ten or twelve people on a daily basis. And then how do you become trained as a manager?   The way you become trained as a manager  initially is you manage a team of individual   contributors...."

"And by “might want to do it” I mean, 20 years from  now, they still want to be running their company.  And enough of them where we get the success  cases. But having said that as an entrepreneur,   yo..."

"The degenerate version of that is a manager  running a company of people who in theory can   build your products. But in the Burnham sense,  if the CEO is the manager who is running a team   of people..."

"So it's probably not that, and then there'll be  the micro explanation, which is we just make bad   investments. We invest the money, but we just  invest in the wrong companies and we screw up.   And ..."

"And then I don't know, let's say crypto  gets regulated or it's just not ready yet.   It doesn't have to be crypto specifically.  But what happens to a16z as a whole? I mean,   does a whole firm carry..."

"Yeah. What did the old management of Twitter  fail to see about the potential of the platform?   So first I'd say that I have a very hard  time second guessing management teams,   because like I said,..."

"politics operates, this ought to be where every  creative profession operates, this ought to be   where a huge amount of the economy operates. They were always on to such a big idea.   Like with every..."

"was just this overwhelming critique from  all the smart people, as I like to say.   That was basically — this thing is useless.  This is narcissism. This is just pointless   self ego stroking, like na..."

"But let's say you build a better education  system somehow. The government is still going   to be dumping trillions of dollars into the old  education system or the old healthcare system.   Do you jus..."

"of how employers are going to staff. That’s  probably not where people are actually going   to learn valuable marketable skills. The  last thing they want is to actually teach   somebody a marketable ..."

"fundamental and obvious ways. Healthcare, same thing.   It’s extraordinarily difficult to find positive  outcomes in healthcare. In other words,   there’s lots of activity in healthcare. It’s very  ha..."

"how overstaffed do you think venture capital is?  How many partners and associates could we let go   and there really wouldn’t be a difference  in the performance of venture capital.   My friend Andy ..."

"that all the endowments and foundations have  today and increasingly sovereign wealth funds,   where they invest in alternative assets. Which  means hedge funds, venture capital, real estate   and thi..."

"That can happen. At the early stages the best  companies tend to raise at less than the optimal   price because the signal of who invests is more  important than the absolute price. And so almost   ev..."