Marc Andreessen on A.I., Crypto, Nietzsche, and Why We Need More Elon Musks
The venture capitalist and prognosticator on his hopes for the future and his fears about the present.
HD DownloadMarc Andreessen has helped a lot of people get rich—including Marc Andreessen. And he's made millions of people's lives more fun, more efficient, or just a little weirder.
He is the co-creator of the first widely used web browser. He's the co-founder of the venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz. Though he hates the industry term unicorn for a private tech firm valued at more than a billion dollars, he's a famously successful unicorn wrangler—he was an early investor in Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Lyft, and more.
Andreessen is also aggressively quotable, whether it's his classic 2011 pronouncement that "software is eating the world" or his more recent "There are no bad ideas, only early ones." And in 2014 he said, "In 20 years, we'll be talking about Bitcoin the way we talk about the Internet today." A born bull, Andreessen is an optimist who places his hope for the future squarely in the hands of "the 19-year-olds and the startups that no one's heard of."
As splashy artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and DALL-E begin to permeate our daily lives and the predictable panic revs up, Reason sat down with Andreessen to talk about what the future will look like, whether it's still going to emerge from Silicon Valley, the role of government in fostering or destroying innovation, and what you should read on your next beach vacation.
Produced by Katherine-Mangu-Ward; Edited by Adam Czarnecki and Danielle Thompson; Sound editing by Ian Keyser
Photo Credits: Tim Wagner/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Tim Wagner/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; Gado Images/Smith Collection/Gado/Sipa USA/Newscom; Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; Brigitte Stelzer/Splash News/Newscom