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Marc Andreessen thinks Google’s restructuring as Alphabet is an exciting experiment. He says that if humans used products like Soylent, it’d be a major blow to global warming. There may be “horror stories” at Amazon, but Andreessen is confident that they are isolated incidents.
These are just a few stray observations from Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and Silicon Valley venture capital doyen Marc Andreessen, in a special hour-long interview with Re/code Executive Editor Kara Swisher for this week’s “Re/code Decode” podcast.
Andreessen, the founder of the Web browser startup Netscape who later became an early-stage investor (he was one of Facebook’s first big backers and sits on the board), is one of the most influential thinkers in the tech industry. He was profiled in the New Yorker this past May, and the investment firm he co-founded with Ben Horowitz in 2009 is among the venture capital elite.
On the podcast, Andreessen dismisses skepticism of new media, saying “Anything that we don’t like on social media, it’s highly likely that it’s something we don’t like in humanity.” He says BuzzFeed is on “the right side of history” because it’s “entirely optimized for the new distribution and consumption,” and he calls out tech industry skeptics who have failed to shake off the hangover from the dot-com bubble. Also, he strongly believes sleep and food are overrated (try Andreessen-backed Soylent instead!).
If you like what you hear on “Re/code Decode,” you can also head over to “Re/code Replay,” an archive of audio content from our events and interviews by Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg, Peter Kafka, Ina Fried and more. We’ve already published about 30 episodes from past events, including all of the Code 2015 sessions, and we’ll add more over time.
Every episode of each show will be available in two places: On our site at http://recode.net/podcasts and on Apple iTunes (here for “Re/code Decode” and here for “Re/code Replay”). We’ll be adding more distributors soon and new episodes weekly. And you can follow @recode on Twitter for updates on upcoming guests.
If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on iTunes — and if you don’t, just strafe Kara on Twitter. You can also suggest guests for the show there and we’ll try our level best to nab them for a Red Chair interview.
