The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen | Wired Business | Wired.com GEAR SCIENCE ENTERTAINMENT BUSINESS SECURITY DESIGN VIDEO INSIDER MAGAZINE SUBSCRIBE BUSINESS people entrepreneurs innovation FOLLOW WIRED BUSINESS Like The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired 63 Icon Marc Andreessen Tweet 75 141 BY CHRIS ANDERSON 04.24.12 7:35 PM 27 He’s not a household name like Gates, Jobs, or Zuckerberg. His face isn’t known to millions. But during his remarkable 20-year career, no one has done more than Marc Andreessen to change the way we communicate. At 22, he invented Mosaic, the first graphical web browser —an innovation that is perhaps more responsible than any other for popularizing the Internet and bringing it into hundreds of millions of homes. He cofounded Netscape and took it public in a massive (for that time) stock offering that helped catalyze the dotcom boom. He started Loudcloud, a visionary service to bring cloud computing to business clients. And more recently, as a venture capitalist, he has backed an astonishing array of web 2.0 companies, from Twitter to Skype to Groupon to Instagram to Airbnb. As Wired prepares for its 20th anniversary issue Photo: Nigel Parry in January 2013, we are launching a series called Wired Icons: in-depth interviews with our biggest heroes, the tenacious pioneers who built digital culture and evangelized it to the world over the past two decades. There’s not a more fitting choice for our first icon than Andreessen—a man whose career, which almost exactly spans the history of our magazine, is a lesson in how to spot the future. In an interview at Andreessen’s office in Palo Alto, California, Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson talked with him about technological transformation, and about the five big ideas that Andreessen had before everyone else. SUBSCRIBE TO WIRED MAGAZINE IDEA ONE Everyone Will Have the Web Subscribe to 1992 WIRED Renew As a 22-year-old undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Andreessen developed Mosaic, the first Give a gift International graphical browser for the World Wide Web, then brought the technology to Silicon Valley and Orders cofounded Netscape. By August 1995, Netscape had gone public and was worth $2.9 billion. Chris Anderson: At 22, you’re a random kid from small-town Wisconsin, working at a supercomputer center at the University of Illinois. How were you able to see the future of the web so clearly? Marc Andreessen: It was probably the juxtaposition of the two— being from a small town and having access to a supercomputer. Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors’ phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away. So I came from an environment http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/[10/19/2012 10:37:28 AM] The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen | Wired Business | Wired.com where I was starved for information, starved for connection. Anderson: And then at Illinois, you found the Internet. PATENT ARMS RACE FUELS Also in this issue MOBILE'S DOOMSDAY MACHINE How to Spot the Future Andreessen: Right, which could make information so abundant. 8 Visionaries on How They Spot the The future was much easier to see if you were on a college Future campus. Remember, it was feast or famine in those days. Trying The Rise of the Robot Reporter to do dialup was miserable. If you were a trained computer scientist and you put in a tremendous amount of effort, you could WIRED do it: You could go get a Netcom account, you could set up your own TCP/IP stack, you could get a 2,400-baud modem. But at the university, you were on the Internet business in a way that was actually very modern even by today’s standards. At the time, we had a T3 line—45 megabits, which is actually still considered broadband. Sure, that was for the entire campus, and it cost EDITOR them $35,000 a month! But we had an actual broadband experience. And it convinced me that Michael V. Copeland everybody was going to want to be connected, to have that experience for themselves. Anderson: But the notion that everyday consumers would want it over dialup—that was pretty radical. SENIOR WRITER Ryan Tate Andreessen: True. At the time, there were four presumptions made against dialup Internet access, and after Mosaic took off I could see that they were all wrong. The first presumption was that dialup STAFF WRITER flat-out wouldn’t work. Marcus Wohlsen Anderson: That it would always be too slow, too clunky. REPORTER Sarah Mitroff Andreessen: Right. The second presumption was that it was too expensive—and that it would always stay as expensive as it was. The third presumption was that people wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out how to get it working at home. But the most interesting presumption was the fourth one: that CONTRIBUTOR consumers wouldn’t want it, that they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Fred Vogelstein Anderson: Your big idea, really, was that they would want it—and they’d eventually get it. Andreessen: Yeah. It was essentially knocking through all four of those assumptions. I thought it was MOST RECENT WIRED POSTS obvious that everyone would want this and that they would be able to do lots of things with it. And I License Plate Frame Foils Irksome Traffic-Light thought it was obvious that the technology would advance to a point where you wouldn’t need a Cameras computer science degree to do it. Next Door to Facebook, Apple Starts Work on Next Data Center Anderson: Which was the one problem you could do something about. After Libya, U.S. Seeks to LoJack Its Diplomats Why Windows Just Can't Win Andreessen: Well, actually, I think that Mosaic helped address a few of the problems at once. It did Taking a Cue From The X-Files, Spy Thriller Hunted make the Internet much easier to use. But making it easier to use also made it more apparent how to Keeps Things Complex use it, all the different things that people could do with it—which then made people want it more. And Oct. 19, 1941: Electric Turbines Get First Wind it’s also clear that we helped drive faster bandwidth: By creating the demand, we helped increase the BloomReach Makes Search Sell supply. Make the Ultimate Wired Haunted Halloween Lair TicketBud Is Fighting Greed, One Stub at a Time Anderson: I remember the first time I interviewed you, back in 1995 when I was at The Economist. I Google's Woes Show Mobile Isn't Just a Facebook thought we were going to talk about, you know, TCP/IP and HTTP. But you wanted to talk about Problem globalization, about international trade. You were already thinking about the Internet in macroeconomic terms. Have you always seen the world that way, or was there an awakening somewhere in the process? SERVICES Subscription: Subscribe | Give a Gift | Renew | Andreessen: The awakening probably happened for me during that period. Once you understand that International | Questions | Change Address everybody’s going to get connected, a lot of things follow from that. If everybody gets the Internet, they Quick Links: Contact Us | Newsletter | RSS Feeds | end up with a browser, so they look at web pages—but they can also leave comments, create web Tech Jobs | Wired Mobile | FAQ | Site Map pages. They can even host their own server! So not only is everybody consuming, they can also produce. And once you get instantaneous communication with everybody, you have economic activity that’s far more advanced, far more liquid, far more distributed than ever before. Anderson: Looking back on the browser after 20 years, what are the biggest surprises? What did you not expect? http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/[10/19/2012 10:37:28 AM] The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen | Wired Business | Wired.com Andreessen: Number one, that it worked. The big turning point for me was when Mosaic worked. I was like, wait a minute, you can actually change the world! Anderson: But you got that surprise early on. Mosaic was a huge success within 12 months. Andreessen: Yeah, that’s true. But the second surprise is that it has kept working. Notwithstanding certain cover stories in certain magazines, I think the browser is as relevant today as it’s ever been. IDEA TWO 1995 The Browser Will Be the Operating System During the browser wars with Microsoft, when Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer vied for domination on the PC desktop, Andreessen prophesied a future where computers would dispense with Tech Jobs feature-heavy operating systems entirely. Instead, we would use a browser to run programs over the Senior Technical Support Specialist network. Netscape lost its battle with Microsoft, but in key respects Andreessen’s vision has come to Scranton, ... pass. Google Chrome OS, for example, is a fully browser-based operating system, while most of our Web Developer favorite applications, from email to social networks, now live entirely on the network. Competent Sys... Atlanta, G... COMSEC Engineer Immersion Con... Arlington,... Anderson (left) and Andreessen in Palo Alto in January 2012. Photo: Nigel Parry Anderson: A quote of yours that I’ve always loved is that Netscape would render Windows “a poorly debugged set of device drivers.” Andreessen: In fairness, you have to give credit for that quote to Bob Metcalfe, the 3Com founder.