Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971) is a billionaire venture capitalist who co-authored the Mosaic web browser and co-founded Netscape Communications Corporation and the Andreessen Horowitz startup investment firm.

Quotes

Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?
- On the Indian rejection of Free Basics, Twitter, February 20, 2016
- "India would have been better off under British rule: Facebook board member", Business Standard (February 10, 2016)

I'm glad there's OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.
- Remark (2017) to journalist Rick Perlstein at Andreessen's Atherton mansion, on the topic of small towns. See Perlstein, Rick; "My Dinner With Andreessen" The American Prospect (April 24, 2024)

The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here.
- Tweet (October 4, 2022)

The two premodern religions were ancestor worship and nature worship (see "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges). The two postmodern religions are evidently identitarianism and environmentalism. Is this a coincidence, or something deeper?
- Tweet (March 22, 2022)

Senra: You don't have any levels of introspection.
Andreessen: Yes. Zero. As little as possible.
Senra: Why?
Andreessen: Move forward. Go. Yeah, I don't— I don't know. I just have found people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It's— It's just— It's a real problem and it's very— It's a problem at work and it's a problem at home.
- Interview with David Senra (March 2026)

We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.

We have the will.

It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.

It is time to be Techno-Optimists.

The whole idea, I mean all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s.… Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff at any prior point, right? It's all a new construct. It was— It was, you know— Well, first western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, right, which was a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago. And then for a long time it was, all right, the individual runs, right, and like, does all these things, and builds things, and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology and does all these things. And then you know, kind of this kind of guilt-based whammy, you know, kind of showed up from Europe, a lot of it from Vienna in the, you know, 1910s, 1920s — Freud and all that entire movement — and kind of turned all that inward and basically said, "Okay, now we need to like, you know, basically second-guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self-criticize, right? The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to, you know, dwell on the past." It never resonated with me.
- Interview with David Senra (March 2026)

[Netscape products] would turn Windows 95, for example, into just a mundane collection of not entirely debugged device drivers.
- From Metcalfe, Bob; "Without case of vapors, Netscape's tools will give Blackbird reason to squawk" Infoworld (September 18, 1995). Andreessen disputed the quotation in 2012, attributing it back to Metcalfe.