Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…One emotional sense I get from your walk-on music, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, is just that the stakes are remarkably high. Now, if we’re looking for indicators to keep track of whether, in essence, things are going your way — greater dynamism, freedom to build, willingness to build, American dynamism — what should we track? What should we look at? How do we know if things are going well? Look, I do not come here and do not come to the world with comprehensive answers. The overall answer is, productivity growth in the economy is a great starting point. Economic growth is a great starting point. The overall questions are there. Most of our economy is dominated by incumbent institutions that have no intention, I don’t think, of changing or evolving unless they’re forced to. Certainly, most of the business world now is one form of oligopoly or another that has various markets locked up. I don’t think there’s some magic bullet to hugely accelerate things. Having said that, I think attacking from the edges is the thing that can be done, which is basically what we do, what Silicon Valley does. Then when you attack from the edges the way that our entrepreneurs do, a lot of the times, they don’t succeed. It’s a high-risk occupation with a lot of risk of failure. When they succeed, they can succeed spectacularly well. We have companies in American economy that were venture-backed in the 1970s and, actually, even some that were venture-backed in the 1990s and 2000s that are now bigger than most national economies, right? Was it Apple? I think Apple’s market cap is bigger than the entire market cap of the German stock market. I think that’s right.…

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