Marc Andreessen - Making the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 232]

My guest today is Silicon Valley icon, Marc Andreessen. Before co-founding the legendary venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc was an early pioneer of the internet. At age 22, he built Mosaic, the first widely adopted web browser and the technology that underpinned Netscape Communications. Marc was an early proponent of cloud computing, social networks, and the software business model. In each case, Marc seemed to be well ahead of the crowd. During our conversation, we explore how software is making the world better, how slow sectors like education, healthcare, and housing are eating the economy, and Marc’s vision of the future for A16Z. Please enjoy my conversation with Marc Andreessen. Before we transition to the episode, I wanted to highlight our newest series, Business Breakdowns. Each week we do a deep dive into an individual business to understand what makes it great. Find more information on joincolossus.com or search for and sign up to the Business Breakdowns feed on your preferred podcast player. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here. ------ This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus has built the most extensive primary information platform available for investors. With Tegus, you can learn everything you’d want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 10,000 calls on Affirm, Teladoc, Roblox, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Visit tegus.co/patrick to learn more. ------ This episode is brought to you by Paxos. Paxos offers your customers crypto buying, selling, transferring, and more with easy to integrate APIs. Whether you’re a small fintech or a large financial institution, Paxos takes care of everything in the backend – from licensing and compliance to custody and exchange. You can start offering crypto to your customers within months. To learn more, visit paxos.com/patrick. ------ Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:04:10] - [First question] The ways in which software is eating the world [00:06:25] - The power of transitioning from atoms to bits and its impacts [00:09:57] - Potential downsides and credible concerns as we shift into an automated world [00:16:00] - Major impediments of productive growth over the coming decades [00:23:12] - Real change versus false change due to COVID-19 writ large [00:30:06] - Thoughts on the rising cost of post-secondary education in light of the internet [00:37:03] - Why doesn’t Google have their own university and if they might in the future [00:41:30] - Whether or not an entrepreneurial focus on generally slower sectors may produce excess returns [00:44:17] - Thoughts on hardware, its unit economics, and its role in shaping society [00:47:52] - How to think about investing in immensely complicated, large-scale projects [00:54:10] - What they’re building at A16Z, a new crypto fund, and where their sights are set [01:03:09] - East coast investing styles and things we can borrow from them [01:06:01] - Potential plans to step into the public equity space [01:11:09] - Defining why it’s time to build and the imperative it sets [01:15:13] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him