When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are.
I'm really excited about anything that is able to address the really big markets, so anything that's universally appealing.
Adaptability is key.
PCs don't suck. They're inadequate.
Organizations spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars installing and implementing huge servers, new Web sites and applications. They have to continue to do that, but they also have to clean up the mess of the '90s.
Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them.
Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it's actually hard to build a company because everybody's too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.
In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month.
A very large percentage of economic activity is shifting online and it makes sense that there are more services that are going to charge. It also means there are going to be more people willing to pay.
I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.
Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the DMV and look around, you're like, 'Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.'
I always had the old-school model that I'm going to work for as long as I'm relevant and focus on for-profit activities and someday when I retire I'm going to learn about philanthropy.
These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed.
China should be another United States from an economic standpoint. Beijing should be another Silicon Valley.
Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.
There's always more demands than there's time to meet them, so it's constantly a matter of trying to balance them.
One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.
I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.
Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.
When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me.
