I’ve been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don’t do.
Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it’s so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.
It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it!
You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.
Learning to code is the single best thing anyone can do to get the most out of the amazing future in front of us.
If I want to get work done, that’s usually about 3 in the morning.
Out of ten swings at the bat, you get maybe seven strikeouts, two base hits, and if you are lucky, one home run. The base hits and the home runs pay for all the strikeouts.
The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.
If the Net becomes the center of the universe, which is what seems to be happening, then the dizzying array of machines that will be plugged into it will virtually guarantee that the specifics of which chip and which operating system you’ve got will be irrelevant.
Nokia and Research in Motion needed a modern operating system. They could have bought Palm or Android before Google did, but they didn’t. Today, it’s probably too late, and at the time they would have been criticized for overpaying, but as they say – shift happens.
On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries – without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.
I don’t think objectively we are in a tech bubble when tech stocks are at a 30 year low.
There’s no such thing as the middle class. It’s absolutely vanishing.
Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.
Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.
Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.
I don’t waste time being depressed.
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.
Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.
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.