I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses.

To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something.

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.

So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.

In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the '80s, and I got here too late. But then, I'm maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I'm incredibly optimistic.

I'm really excited about anything that is able to address the really big markets, so anything that's universally appealing.

Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.

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.

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.

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.'

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.

Consumers are freeing up an enormous amount of time that they were spending with stereotypical old media, and clearly, that time is going primarily two places: videogames and online.

The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.

There was a point in the late '90s where all the graduating M.B.A.'s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.

China should be another United States from an economic standpoint. Beijing should be another Silicon Valley.

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 like to not call a spade a spade.

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.

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.

There's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.

I think the tech stock, the public market is still completely traumatized by the dotcom crash. I think the investors and reporters and analysts and everybody is determined to not get taken advantage of again, and that is what everybody who lived through 2000, what they kind of remember.

Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.

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.