Marc Andreessen on AI, crypto and why we need more Elon Musk

Marc Andreessen helped many people become rich—including Marc Andreessen. And he has made the lives of millions more fun, more efficient or just a little weirder

He co-created the first widely used web browser. He is the co-founder of venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz. Although he hates the word art Unicorn For a private tech firm worth over 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 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 puts his hopes for the future in the hands of “startups that are 19 years old and nobody’s heard of.”

As splashy artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and DALL-E begin to seep into our daily lives and predictable panic rises again, because I sat down with Andreessen to talk about what the future will look like, whether it will still 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 Catherine-Mangu-Ward; Edited by Adam Czarnecki and Daniel Thompson; Sound editing by Ian Kiser

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