Charlie Rose interviewt Marc Andreessen (oprichter Netscape)

Marc Andreessen is een van de meest succesvolle ondernemers en investeerders in Sillicon Valley. Hij is de oprichter van Netscape (verkocht voor veel aan AOL in 1999) verkocht een ander bedrijf aan HP en is de oprichter van Ning. Verder zit Andreessen in de board van Facebook: we hebben te maken met een zwaargewicht. Charlie Rose ontfutseld Andreessen van alles. Op TechCrunch staat het transcript van het hele interview.

Over Facebook, en het gegeven dat deze social networksite in een keer, aldus Andreessen, 1 miljard dollar kan verdienen met advertising als het dat wil:

There’s a lot of confusion out there. Facebook is deliberately not taking a lot of the kind of normal brand advertising that a lot of Web sites will take. So you go to — a company like Yahoo which is another fantastic business and they’ve got these you know banner ads and brand ads all over the place, Facebook has made a strategic decision to not take a lot of that business in favor of building its own sort of more organic business model and it’s still in the process of doing that and if they crack the code on that which I think that we will, then I think it will be very successful and will be very large.

Over de vergelijking tussen Microsoft, IBM, Facebook en Google:

IBM was not the next IBM. Microsoft wasn’t the next IBM. Google — Google’s its own company, it’s a fantastic company, it’s its own company with its own model. Facebook is a fantastically successful company with a huge amount of potential. Google is you know just a gigantically successful business you know I think for anybody to voluntarily step up and compare themselves to that I think would be hubris, I think that would be a bit much in general. But Facebook’s got huge potential and frankly I think it deserves to be evaluated on its own.