By Kevin Maney, for Portfolio.com
Marc
Andreessen would rather blog from home in his underwear than give an interview to a journalist, especially in front of an audience. That’s what he wrote in his blog earlier this year. Thankfully, this one time,
Andreessen got dressed and stepped onstage.
At
37, Andreessen is a legend in Silicon Valley. He created, with Eric
Bina, the first graphical browser while at the University of Illinois, then co-founded Netscape Communications with überentrepreneur Jim Clark in the early 1990s.
Netscape’s browser brought the internet to the masses, set off the dotcom boom, and so angered Microsoft at the time that Steve Ballmer, now the software giant’s C.E.O., led employees in “Kill Netscape!”
chants. By bundling its Internet Explorer browser into Windows,
Microsoft eventually drove Netscape into the arms of a suitor: AOL
bought Netscape in 1999 for $4.2 billion.
Andreessen hasn’t had a success of that magnitude since. But he did create another billion-dollar company, Loudcloud, a tech-services outfit that later changed its name to Opsware and was sold to 
Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. More recently, Andreessen started Ning, a website that lets anyone create a mini social network. Its most prominent customer: 50 Cent.
Andreessen joined Facebook’s board this year, invested in Twitter, and generally manages to show up on the front end of new technology trends. His blog, Blog.pmarca.com, has been a tech-industry must-read, in part because he’s willing to be brutally outspoken. In February, Andreessen ignited emotions when he blogged that he was starting a “New York Times Deathwatch.” (
Watch an exclusive video of Andreessen talking about the future of newspapers.)
Condé Nast Portfolio’s
Kevin Maney interviewed Andreessen at a gathering of Silicon Valley’s
Churchill Club in Palo Alto, California. The following is an edited transcript.
How’s your relationship with Steve Ballmer now?
He’s my Facebook [makes air quotes with his fingers] friend. I’m going to stop there while I’m still ahead.
__Do you carry around any bitterness? __
I’m a big believer that it’s like in The Godfather—it’s business, not personal. Netscape was an unbelievable experience for me.
We sold the company for a lot of money. After that, I’m on to the next one.
I have to ask the guy who created the browser: What do you think of Google Chrome browser, introduced in September?
It’s very meaningful. It’s going to force Firefox and Internet Explorer to accelerate their performance. Basically, the barriers to doing everything in the browser are falling fast. And that includes a whole range of things, like Google Docs, spreadsheets, presentation packages.
The Chrome browser is going to really push forward the wave.
Does this open up possibilities for companies you’re working with?
I’ll give you one example: I just announced this company called Qik. It will turn every phone that contains a camera into a source of streaming video and audio [which works better in a faster browser like Chrome].
Anybody can watch live, and then it can all get recorded. It’s almost the reverse of George Orwell. In 1984, the government had cameras mounted everywhere. In a Qik-based world, it’s the exact opposite.
Literally, everybody on the planet is going to be streaming video.
Excellent reason to stay at home.
And blog in your underwear.
Exactly.
__Qik raises some issues, like what if 10,000 people at a concert all broadcast the show live? __
About a year ago, we went to see one of the major sports leagues—I
won’t mention which one. We presented how they can have social networks and users can post videos shot at games and photos and all this stuff.
And the main topic of conversation was how they could prevent people from recording video with their mobile phones and posting it online.
You won’t tell us which league?
I won’t. But, you know, it’s a whole new world. The presumption is that there’s going to be live video all the time.
You seem to have your fingers in a lot of Valley companies. Walk us through Marc Andreessen’s daily life now.
My third company, Ning, is my day job. The only corporate board I’m on is Facebook, which I think is a very important company. I’m doing angel investing with Ben Horowitz, my business partner from my previous company. We’ve invested in 15 companies or so in the past year and a half. Maybe one a month, give or take.
__
What’s your approach to investing in startups?__
Have it be a small enough amount of money that if it fails, we can still talk to the founder without getting mad.
How much is that?
I usually put in $25,000 to $100,000 per company. So far, so good—which is to say, I haven’t gotten really mad at anybody.
You said Facebook is a very important company. That’s not always the opinion you get, right? __
I’m on Facebook’s board because Facebook is a true, old-fashioned
Silicon Valley company in the best sense of that term:
super-technology-focused, super-product-focused, very innovative—much more than it gets credit for—and very determined to build out a service that’s going to reach a very large number of people.
__
Qik, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks—who has time for all of it?
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.
If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?
Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense.
You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing. [The interview took place before the Christian Science Monitor announced it drop its print edition.]
The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.
__What’s your relationship like with Jim Clark after all these years? __
I’ve had two critical mentors in my career. One was Clark. Another was
Jim Barksdale, who was Netscape’s C.E.O. And it’s funny because they worked extremely well together, but they have almost polar opposite personalities.
Clark is intensely entrepreneurial, extremely passionate, extremely emotional, completely fearless, absolutely delighted to create a new business, loves if it causes a lot of controversy. Barksdale is a builder and an operator and a manager.
Clark is off in Florida. He has largely opted out of the tech industry.
Yeah, we haven’t seen him in a long time. He is having a lot of fun. He is dating an Australian swimsuit model. Seriously. He’s been in the real estate business in Miami doing a bunch of different business things. He sails a tremendous amount. I’m pretty much the exact opposite. I don’t like to leave Palo Alto.
So you’re 37, and you’ve taken on this mentoring role to people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other entrepreneurs.
There’s a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They’re completely fearless.
Does that create the danger of a new tech bubble?
If there’s been a crisis in a market, you don’t tend to have a new crisis in that market until the people who went through the last crisis aren’t in the system anymore. It was only eight years ago. So here we are in 2008, and there’s still no sign of a bubble in technology, which
I can encapsulate in two words: no I.P.O.’s.
__No tech I.P.O.’s—is that a good thing or a bad thing? __
Well, a very important thing. Through the 1980s and ’90s, tech companies would basically get into their expansion stage and then go public. In part, it was to have access to capital, in part to have an
M&A currency, in part as a branding and a credibility event, and in part because there was a base of investors who wanted to invest in high-growth technology companies. Those days are just over. It’s just frozen. Is it a crisis in terms of company formation? Not yet.
We haven’t talked at all about mobile internet.
There was mobile before this thing [holds up an iPhone], and then there’s mobile after. If you were trying to build software for mobile phones last year, you were in a world of pain, of incompatibility—you had probably seven different operating-system platforms you had to deal with. You didn’t have any way to do over-the-air distribution of software or content. The carriers, especially in the U.S., had a choke hold on distribution and would put up huge barriers. It was an absolute nightmare.
As of now, that hasn’t changed.
That hasn’t changed, unless you’re on an iPhone. The iPhone is going to be at 100 million units before you know it. This is going to force everybody else to raise their game.
Is Google the new Microsoft—the new big, scary, monster company in tech?
It is true that Google is doing a lot of different things, and some will compete with other Valley companies. But the pros outweigh any future competitive threat. Google does so much to make other startups possible. Google makes new internet efforts easy to find. Google runs a large advertising network that distributes money to people who run ads.
It is training and educating a very large base of really sharp people, many straight out of college, many of whom are not going to spend their entire careers at Google. Google is fertilizing the base. So I think it’s been very, very positive.
How about all the fears that Google is too powerful?
I don’t see it yet—and a big part of why is Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt. Eric literally does not want to run a company whose M.O. is to just gratuitously go around and stomp on people.
You’ve probably got a good 30 to 40 years left in the business. What do you ultimately want to accomplish?
I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups.
I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying. And I think the outcome can be big and important and profound.
I hear you’re getting deeper into philanthropy—Stanford Hospital, Room to Read.
That is increasingly important to me, for a couple different reasons.
Partly, it’s wanting to give back. And partly, my wife of almost two years teaches philanthropy at Stanford. So I am completely committed to philanthropy because if I’m not, I’m in a great deal of trouble. I can’t even tell you.
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