The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross · 4 Sep 2013 · 332pp · 97,325 words
? 12 HACKATHON 13 NEW IDEAS 14 RISK 15 MARRIED 16 FEARSOME 17 PAY ATTENTION 18 GROWTH 19 FIND A DROPBOX 20 DON’T QUIT 21 SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix: The Summer 2011 Batch Notes Index INTRODUCTION San Francisco Gray Line is the largest sightseeing tour company in Northern California. It
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there can never be a Gray Line tour of Silicon Valley’s future. It’s a shame, because this place is creating everyone’s future. Software is eating the world—the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has come up with a rather catchy way of describing the disruption, under way or coming soon, to industries
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’s innovation ecosystem. That ecosystem was the best place to observe startups working, out of public sight, on the largest business story of our times, Software is eating the world. The hallmarks of the earlier dot-com boom that preceded the bust—exuberant multimillion-dollar funding of silly ideas and momentarily successful IPOs of
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making lawyers obsolete.” Someone in the crowd shouts out, “Yeah!” Field describes how Clerky’s software drafts documents, collects signatures, and keeps the paperwork organized. “Software is eating the world,” he says, invoking the phrase used in Marc Andreessen’s Wall Street Journal essay that appeared three days earlier (Andreessen himself is sitting in
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happy to take their money in the future.” Of the sixty-three presentations, this is the one that is most perfectly aligned with the Zeitgeist. Software is eating the world and Codecademy is survival school. At the moment, its Web site offers nothing much beyond a placeholder for the school that has yet to
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OMGPOP, with the dizzying swing from near death to champagne celebration in just a few weeks, should provide spirit-lifting sustenance for lean times. 21 SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD The idea that programming was for everyone pervaded the air, or so it seemed as Codecademy’s two young founders, Zach Sims and Ryan
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way that software has outgrown its original boundaries, as a subindustry within the computer industry. It has become a pervasive presence in virtually all industries: Software is eating the world. No economic force of such size can be commandeered by coders in a single place. In many ways, it is Graham’s success with
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some programming skills at an age when it will not come as easily as it does to the young. Even if Marc Andreessen’s phrase Software is eating the world is not at the tip of everyone’s tongue, an inchoate sense of software’s centrality is widely understood. The warm reception that greeted
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to, the spread of software everywhere. All beginnings embody hope, and Y Combinator gives birth to beginnings by the dozens—with the propulsive power of Software is eating the world at their backs. This gives the group portrait a most hopeful cast. Like newly minted graduates, the founders step out into the daylight with
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Apple T-shirts and caps. See Mike Cassidy, “Silicon Valley Tour Travels Rough Road,” San Jose Mercury News, October 24, 2011. 2. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html. Andreessen devotes the essay to illustrating the phrase. Andreessen’s partner
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-blew-out-knee-win-national-championship/; part three, February 4, 2011, www.jasonshen.com/2011/part-3-blew-out-knee-win-national-championship/. 4. Andreessen, “Software Is Eating the World.” 5. PG, “Why to Move to a Startup Hub,” October 2007, www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html. CHAPTER 20: DON’T QUIT 1. “Ask PG
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Deal from the CEO, Investors and More!” TC, March 21, 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/21/zynga-omgpop-porter-sabet-david-ko/. CHAPTER 21: SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD 1. The Code Year Web site displays quotes from Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures (and one of Codecademy’s investors), who says, “A
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, 215–16, 227 Singapore, 154, 238 Skype, 17, 38, 124, 223, 265n1 Snapjoy, 43–44, 103, 130–33, 186–87, 194 Socialcam, 144, 147, 228 software is eating the world, 1–2, 6, 216, 238, 239 South Africa, 17 Spain, 238 Spanish (language), 213 Splitterbug, 123, 187, 209 Square, 91 Stamatiou, Paul, 219 Standard
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? 12: HACKATHON 13: NEW IDEAS 14: RISK 15: MARRIED 16: FEARSOME 17: PAY ATTENTION 18: GROWTH 19: FIND A DROPBOX 20: DON’T QUIT 21: SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix Notes Index
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words
life, as the code they weave changes, inexorably, the way society works—including in ways the creators struggle to foresee. I could say, again, that software is eating the world, though it might be more accurate at this point to say it’s “digesting” it. But what’s noticeable also is the fact that
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,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. “eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. trained machine learning: John Morris, “How Facebook Scales
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words
golden age for coders. Two strong partners with computer science backgrounds were ideally placed to capitalize on this moment, and they happily announced this fact. “Software is eating the world,” Andreessen proclaimed in a Wall Street Journal essay. The phrase brilliantly summed up the times. It surely explained more of a16z’s success than
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software that was transforming modern life. Anything that boosted the productivity of this small tribe would be immensely valuable. Predating Marc Andreessen’s declaration that “software is eating the world,” this last prepared-mind exercise became the springboard for a raft of Sequoia investments: Unity, a software development platform for 3-D movies and
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social networks. See networks SoftBank, 154–60, 171, 334 Alibaba, 229–31 Uber, 370–71 Webvan, 178 WeWork, 346–49, 370–73 Yahoo, 155–60 “software is eating the world,” 296, 309 Sohu, 226, 233, 279–82 Son, Masayoshi, 154–60, 171, 439n Alibaba investment, 229–31, 377, 446n background of, 154, 438n blitzscaling
Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons · 22 Oct 2018 · 252pp · 78,780 words
. They’ve seen other companies that once seemed invincible get destroyed by the Internet—Blockbuster, Tower Records, Borders Books. They fear they will be next. “Software is eating the world,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once famously said, meaning that tech companies were no longer content to sell computers and software to other industries and
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly · 6 Jun 2016 · 371pp · 108,317 words
to $3.58 in 2000: Figures adjusted for inflation. Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001. “Software eats everything”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. Toffler called in 1980 the “prosumer”: Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984). subscribe to Photoshop
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019
, and collectively mobilize; upend power structures and reinforce many others. As one made-in-the-Valley billionaire, Marc Andreessen, put it a few years back, “software is eating the world.”4 This book is about how we got to that world eaten by software. It’s the seven-decade-long tale of how one
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OF PLACE By the time Marc Andreessen took to the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2011 to pronounce that “software is eating the world,” the new tech platforms were not only altering entire industries. They were transforming the geography of tech as well.4 Across North America and
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Coach,” interview by John Brockman, 1996, Edge.org, https://www.edge.org/digerati/doerr/, archived at https://perma.cc/9KWX-GLWK. 4. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, C2. Billions of dollars of public investment later, many of the would-be Silicon Somethings have fallen
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VII, Kauffman Foundation Research paper, 2012; “International Students,” Stanford Engineering, accessed May 27, 2018, archived at https://perma.cc/EFS3-3X7N. 4. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. 5. Richard L. Florida and Martin Kenney, “Venture Capital, High Technology and Regional Development,” Regional Studies 22
Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale
by David N. Blank-Edelman · 16 Sep 2018
practice, SRE work and skills are being employed on a growing basis to keep services, networks, internal and external-facing infrastructure, and products reliable. As “software is eating the world”4 and capabilities that were once the province of custom silicon move to horizontally scaled general-purpose hardware complemented with the right software, SRE
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to Us 3 Lecture on “Electrical Units of Measurement” (May 3, 1883), published in Popular Lectures, Vol. I, p. 73. 4 Marc Andreessen [paywall], “Why Software Is Eating The World”, republished at Andreessen Horowitz. 5 Peng Huang, Chuanxiong Guo, Lidong Zhou, Jacob R. Lorch, Yingnong Dang, Murali Chintalapati, Randolph Yao, “Gray Failure: The Achilles
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear · 14 Jun 2017 · 708pp · 223,211 words
in this country—the privatization of the public schools.” Since that time, the notion no longer seems so outlandish. As Mark Andreessen has famously said, “Software is eating the world.” It seems that big business, including Silicon Valley, is more determined than ever to devour public education and turn it into a monetized business
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words
abandoned—but the world that Peter Thiel inhabited was absolutely booming. All the predictions about the ways that technology would subsume aspects of our lives—“Software is eating the world,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously put it—were suddenly, forcefully, coming true. Every primary and secondary school in America suddenly needed a
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, April, 18, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/4/18/21226372/coronavirus-tests-cdc-contaminated-delay-testing. “Software is eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Andreessen Horowitz, August 20, 2011, https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/. two more contracts, worth $25 million: Dave Nyczepir, “HHS Cites Coronavirus ‘Urgency’ in Speedy Palantir
System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein · 6 Sep 2021
firm would become an investor in Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Lyft, and Airbnb. In an oft-quoted 2011 piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Andreessen explained how the capital needs of tech companies had changed: On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it
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Entrepreneurship,” Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship 14, no. 2 (2018): 130–278, https://doi.org/10.1561/0300000074. “On the back end”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html. “most investments fail”: Dave McClure, “99 VC Problems but a Batch
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, Jeremy, xv–xvi, 72 Weld, William, 130 Western Union, 57 Westin, Alan, 137–38 WhatsApp, 127–28 Wheeler, Tom, 63, 76 Whitt, Richard, 149 “Why Software Is Eating the World” (Wall Street Journal), 42–43 Wikipedia, 195–96 Wikipedia conference, xxiii–xxiv Wilde, Oscar, 63 winner-take-all, disruption vs. democracy, 51–76 overview
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