At least, Marc Andreessen, founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz thinks that way. Twenty years ago, Anderson founded Netscape. This venture made him earn a lot of money. Later, he founded a venture capital company invested in many successful companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Slack, Lyft. Anderson is always in frequent contact with founders and investors. Now he wants to identify the next goal and build a new generation of great technology companies.
He believes that with the continuous progress of artificial intelligence, a new generation of technology giants like Google will emerge. However, he also admits that there are still some industries that have performed unpredictably before the wave of science and technology and refused to follow the pace of the new era. And this is what people urgently need to do now—to spread the benefits of software to all corners of economic development.
At the end of last month, Anderson received an interview with the VOX website. He talked about how the next generation of great technology companies will be born and how technology is changing the aspects of the existing social industry. The following is the interview compilation:
reporter:
Where do you think the next generation of technology giants will be born? There were Google and Amazon in the 1990s and Facebook and Uber after 2000. In the future, there will surely be a company I have never heard of before continuing to create business and technological miracles. But I still can't imagine which of the companies that have been established in the past six years will be able to develop as large as Google, Facebook, or Amazon.
Marc Andreessen:
According to traditional experience, great companies often appear with new platforms and new architectures. That is, the soil of new technologies will breed such enterprises. The rise of smartphones and APPs is the result of the last round of new technologies. Smartphones appeared in 2007, and by 2010 or 2011, many APPs have been finalized. Obviously, some mainstream companies with smart phones as their core business will become even more important. However, four years ago or even two years ago, the situation was not as clear as it is today.
Therefore, if we say that smart phones have emerged from the last wave of technology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, autonomous control, voice, and the Internet of Things may all be candidates for the next wave. The most obvious example now is artificial intelligence, and it feels like there will be a large number of products or companies that are based on artificial intelligence.
Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have done a lot. But we can also see that some small startups are forming their own climate. I think that a new generation of heavyweight artificial intelligence companies will emerge in the future, and they may be just getting started.