He then went on to found another company that had a $1.6 billion exit just 4 years after the AOL acquisition.
He then ran a VC that went from 300mm to 2.7bn in three years.
I would say he knows something about the world. Maybe he doesn't know anything on certain topics or you disagree with him, or he has an ego. But to write him off as a "programmer who got lucky" is wrong, especially considering that the fields he succeeded in were very cutting edge. He didn't just invest in Manhattan real estate or some crap.
Some life advice, go into every interaction with people assuming they know something you don't. You'll get a lot farther that way.
Btw - I made a bunch of money in the dotcom bubble of the late 90's and early 2000's without even trying that hard. It was like buying Bitcoin in 2013. Maybe you've forgotten that AOL bought Time-Warner for $182 billion in 2000. It was ridiculous at the time and seems even more astonishing in retrospect. Good times.
But re-read your original comment. It was an unnecessary personal attack on someone that has accomplished a lot and presumably knows a lot:
> He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius thought leader for the rest of his life.
Congrats on your success. There's a difference between "making money in early 2000's" and founding a hugely influential company that helped shaped the web in the 90s. His track record as a VC is also impressive. I think he's someone definitely worth listening to as he obviously sees things differently than others, otherwise he wouldn't have been such an outlier throughout his whole career.
I put a lot more weight on what people do when they had no name than what they did in this industry with its personality cults once they got the ball rolling.
Assuming that VCs are successful just because they have money is selection bias, because you mostly only hear about the successful VC funds.
Aside: VCs partners themselves can make money even if their fund doesn’t due to the 2% management fees of a normal 2+20 fund structure.
He's also very nerdy - and how could he not be if he was building browsers in his 20s while I was chasing skirts or trousers at that age - and I don't get along with super nerds outside of work. It's okay at work, they tend to do better than other psychological types. Is it me or him, then? I don't know, but I muted him, his takes have zero to negative effect on my mood.
I enjoy listening to their opinions on technology and business. They also throw in stuff on leadership, history and have interesting takes on the VC industry.
All VCs have this problem of missing big bets which they seem to want to figure out how to avoid making.
… okareaman typed into a web browser, the very technology Andreesen became wealthy pioneering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
He was even responsible for how various parts of the web standard coming into existence back then. For example, Tim Berners-Lee shared a different proposal than the img tag we now have. But Andreesen suggested the img tag for embedded images and shipped working code in the Mosaic browser.
After starting Netscape itself, the shift towards building entirely new technology and features only accelerated. That was an intense team effort but one he lead.
Getting so “lucky“ required working very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years.
A lot of people work very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years, and don't get rich. Sad but true. If you are one of them, I salute you and thank you for trying to make the world a better place. And if you did get rich but realized that "money doesn't make the man" so you did your good deeds in private, I also salute you. The world would be a much worse place without people like you. Frankly, the Marc Andreessens of the world are a dime a dozen and I don't mean to disparge Marc as a private person, I'm disparging the puffed up Wizard of Oz public image that people like him build on the advice of their PR people. It's good for business I hear.