Meet Mr. 312x - Marc Andreessen

Wired created an "ICON" series which will be in-depth interviews with biggest heroes, the tenacious pioneers who built digital culture and evangelized it to the world over the past two decades. First interview is with Marc Andreessen. Here is an excerpt:

Anderson: And these aren’t copycats, or me-toos, but fundamentally new insights in software?

Andreessen: Yes, absolutely. I have another theory that I call the missing campus puzzle. When you drive down highway 101 through Silicon Valley, you pass the Oracle campus and then the Google campus and then the Cisco campus. And some people think, wow, they’re so big. But what I think is, I’ve been driving for close to an hour—why haven’t I passed a hundred more campuses? Why is there all this open space?

Anderson: What’s your answer?

Andreessen: Think about what it has meant to build a primary technology company up until now. In order to harness a large enough market, to attract the right kind of technical talent, to pay them adequately, to grow the company to critical mass—until now that’s only been possible with companies that are providing tools for all sectors, not just specific sectors. Technology has been just a slice of the economy. We’ve been making the building blocks to get us to today, when technology is poised to remake the whole economy.