After launching Netscape 20 years ago, Marc Andreessen has had a remarkable second act as a successful and prolific venture capitalist. His firm's portfolio includes some of Silicon Valley's most enviable investments, including Facebook, Airbnb, Twitter, Jawbone, Lyft, Pinterest, and Zenefits. 

On Wednesday, the super VC and avid Twitter user spoke with Bloomberg TV's Emily Chang at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, revealing to the audience some lessons he tries to instill in the startups he invests in.

The tech industry renews itself.

Andreessen first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1994. It was a time when investment prospects had slowed considerably following the PC era, and Andreessen initially believed the opportunities had dried up. But his faith in tech startups was renewed because he came to realize that tech companies operate differently than other companies.

"What I learned is that the Valley is self-renewing, self-revitalizing, and it never stops," he said. "Tech is always going into new areas: health care, real estate, education, financial services, transportation."

Tech companies are different.

According to Andreessen, General Motors has always and will always be in the business of making and selling cars. But what about businesses like Google? Andreessen said that a tech company's long-term success depends on the products in its pipeline. "What tech companies make and sell today no one is going to buy in five years," he said. "Tech companies are in the business of innovation."

The magic founder/CEO.

From IBM to Microsoft to Intel to Amazon, some of the greatest technology companies were built by their founders. Andreessen referred to this special founder/CEO combination as "magic."

But that doesn't mean that every founder has what it takes to take a company public and be a great CEO, Andreessen warned. "It's a real test for a company when the founder steps down," he said.

Don't overspend.

According to Andreessen, founders are getting used to raising money at higher valuations, but that won't always be the case. Many of these hot, headline-grabbing companies have high burn rates, something he advises against.

"If you're a new startup and spending $50 million a quarter, maybe switch to regular water instead of coconut water," he said. "We call it the 'edifice complex.' As soon as a company builds their fancy new headquarters they immediately fall off a cliff and collapse. It's peak ego building, something that doesn't work."

You're not Amazon.

A lot of new startups don't think about monetizing their products from the get-go because they are blinded by Amazon's profit-less business model, Andreessen said. "They don't understand how Amazon can pull that off," he said. "Wall Street sees Amazon as a portfolio business."

Jeff Bezos has spent years building his investors' trust to be able to deploy his company's profits into other ventures, he explained. That's a luxury most up-and-coming startups don't yet have.

You're not WhatsApp.

Everyone who has ever met Andreessen wants to know what will be the next WhatsApp, the next Uber, the next Dropbox.

"The common theory is that you want to be first to market, but actually you want to be last to market and close the door [on that industry] so no one can come after you," Andreessen said, referring how there will never be another WhatsApp.

The next big thing in tech, Andreessen predicts, will be something that seems bizarre and fringe. Toward the end of the session, he described Bitcoin as "truly radical" with potential to be a game-changer. "The global financial services industry is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 20," Andreessen said, in large part because of Bitcoin, Apple Pay, and Google's expected response to them.

SEE ALSO: How Marc Andreessen And Elon Musk Got Really Rich

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Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and early investor in Pinterest and Facebook, is an optimist.

In general, he believes optimists win, and pessimists lose.

In an interview with New York Magazine's Kevin Roose, he discusses why having a positive attitude has helped him make smart investments.

"There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists," Andreessen tells Roose. "And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right."

So when he's critiquing startup ideas, Andreessen says he tries not to ask the common question: "Will this idea work?"

Instead, he asks: "What if it does work?"

He uses his initial snubbing of eBay as an example.

"I  remember when eBay came along, and I thought, No f---ing way. A f---ing flea market? How much crap is there in people’s garages? And who would want all that crap?"Andreessen tells Roose. "But that was not the relevant question. The eBay guys and the people who invested early, they said, 'Let’s forget whether it’ll work or not. What if it does work?' If it does work, then you’ve got a global trading platform for the first time in the world, you’ve got liquidity for products of all kinds, you’re going to have true price discovery."

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New York Magazine tech columnist Kevin Roose recently sat down for an epic interview with Netscape creator and power-tweeter Marc Andreessen. They occasionally veered into talking about the future of the economy and particularly about how Silicon Valley's obsession with disrupting industries might affect our future economic system.

Here are the most interesting things that Andreessen had to say: 

The American middle class is a myth

Andreessen thinks the American middle class of the mid-20th century is an accident of history, created because much of the industrialized world was bombed out of existence during World War II. "The one major industrial country that wasn’t bombed was the United States. So the United States became the monopoly producer of industrial goods." However, by the late 1960s, Germany and Japan had rebuilt their economies, and it started to fall apart. "It was an accident of history."

We need a fairly robust social safety net

Capitalism mostly works, he says, but high taxes and a "vigorous safety net" are important, too. "I believe at the individual level, these changes are real and they matter," he says.

The new economy — even low-paid jobs — is an improvement

"The old farming jobs were f--king terrible jobs. I mean, farmers wake up at 6 in the morning and work 14-hour days. Industrial jobs — people would get killed in these factories all the time. Coal miners — people are trying to protect coal-mining jobs. They’re terrible, terrible jobs ... In developing countries, everybody’s dying to get into modern factory jobs, because the alternative is far worse."

Disruption is part of natural economic cycles

"We have this new magic machine that cleans hotel rooms, but we’re not going to use it because we want to keep the maids in business. Well, in the old days there used to be a job at the hotel called the guy who lights the coal fire ... If you follow that logic, you would unwind all the way back to where it all started, which was subsistence farming."

Silicon Valley disruption is dismantling cartels

Speaking specifically about the music and publishing industries, Andreessen says that it's not a bad thing that producers make so much less than they did a generation ago. For example, he says, "... recorded music was an oligopolistic cartel. The only reason why musicians were getting paid what they were getting paid in the 1990s off CDs was because the record labels were price-fixing." 

Specifically about the music industry, he notes that live music has become a much bigger industry and has become the main source of revenue for a lot of producers. As for whether musicians should get paid more when people listen to their songs online he says: "That’s when we get down into the sticky situation, which is, is our work actually worth what we think it is?"

NOW WATCH: 9 Animated Maps That Will Change The Way You See The World

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On Sunday, investor Marc Andreessen launched into another one of his famous tweetstorms.

This time, Andreessen was inspired by Jessica Lessin's article in The Information, “Silicon Valley’s Frontman Problem.” In it, Lessin questioned whether Silicon Valley was accurately being represented by its figureheads who are most often cited — including Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk.

In response to Lessin's article, Andreessen tweeted out Twitter handles that belong to 55 people — “only a highly abridged selection," he mentioned — who "aren't widely famous (yet) but who routinely say interesting and provocative things," Andreessen noted.

We've compiled a slideshow of the 55 people Andreessen included in his tweetstorm. They're investors, company CEOs and founders, doctoral candidates, pundits, and writers. There's even one high school senior on the list.

Sunil Rawat

What he does: Sunil Rawat is the founder and CEO of big data analytics company Omniscience.

Twitter handle:@_sunilrawat

Ahsan Rizvi

What he does: Ahsan Rizvi is the cofounder of Kiddom, an education platform that collects student learning data, provides blended learning content for teachers, and keeps parents updated on their kids' progress in the classroom.

Twitter handle:@ahsanhilal

Mohammed Al Saqqaf

What he does: Mohammed Al Saqqaf is the cofounder of Project Prepay, which aims to make digital payments available to everyone.

Twitter handle:@alsaqqaf

The technology industry has come under increasing scrutiny for the lack of diversity in its workforce, particularly when it comes to the number of black, Hispanic, and female employees at major players like Apple, Facebook, and Google.

But Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the high-powered tech venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, thinks Silicon Valley has been wrongly accused of intentionally discriminating against women and people of color.

In an interview with New York Magazine's Kevin Roose, he explains that in actuality, big tech companies are extremely diverse.

In fact, he says, Silicon Valley companies are "like the United Nations internally," even if 70% of engineering talent is white or Asian. Within those two broad categories, Andreessen says the industry has a melange of people from all over the place — including China, Japan, Russia, France, Thailand, and Vietnam.

"To believe in a systematic pattern of discrimination, you’d have to believe that we’re discriminatory toward certain people without being discriminatory at all toward an extremely broad range of ethnicities and religions," he tells New York Magazine.

Andreessen says the real cause of what outsiders see as discrimination boils down to two "fundamental problems": inequality of education, and a lack of access for some groups to influential people who can help them get ahead.

While upper-middle-class Americans might go to Stanford and get a technical education that puts them in a position to succeed at a startup after graduation, Andreessen says most people in the world will never have the opportunity to get that kind of education.

He adds that under-privileged people might not have the connections needed to get jobs in the industry. For instance, someone who doesn't have a relationship with a Facebook recruiter might not get a job there, and someone who doesn't know any venture capitalists might have trouble getting funding.

"We think access is broadening out the network so that everybody who could contribute can get access to the network," Andreessen says.

SEE ALSO: Why Google Asks Everyone Applying For A Job The Same Exact Questions

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Paul Krugman thinks Amazon is bad for America. He came out swinging in a recent column over Amazon's war with book publisher Hachette.

Super investor Marc Andreessen has jumped in with a little sarcasm aimed at Krugman. That might be considered odd, since Andreessen was, until a few days ago, a board member of eBay, perhaps the only real e-commerce competition Amazon has in the US. (He just resigned from the board effective immediately).

Krugman is siding with book publisher Hachette in its battle with Amazon. The story goes: When Amazon wanted Hachette to give it a bigger percentage on the Hachette books Amazon sold, Hachette balked. So Amazon began doing things like delaying the delivery of Hachette titles, raising prices, and steering customers to other publishers.

Krugman says Amazon is acting like a robber baron and suggests it must be stopped, just like the Standard Oil-era robber barons were stopped.

Andreessen took his shots at Krugman via the Genius website (better known as Rap Genius), a website backed by Andreessen's VC firm, that lets people annotate lyrics, articles, literature, etc., with verified names/identities.

Andreessen took his annotation pen to Krugman's article like this:

Krugman: ... in case you’re wondering, yes, I have Amazon Prime and use it a lot. But again, so what?

Andreessen: Amazon is hurting America, but not enough for Paul Krugman to take on a little inconvenience by using other ecommerce sites. Principles!

Krugman: You might be tempted to say that this is just business — no different from Standard Oil, back in the days before it was broken up, refusing to ship oil via railroads that refused to grant it special discounts.

Andreessen: Classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. “Just business” is not the same as “no different than Standard Oil”. Businesses of every shape size and description negotiate with their suppliers every day without in any way meriting a comparison to Standard Oil.

Krugman: So far Amazon has not tried to exploit consumers. In fact, it has systematically kept prices low, to reinforce its dominance.

Andreessen: Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping prices high would also be a sign of monopoly power.

Andreessen goes on to blast Krugman for a few other things.  The whole annotated argument is a pretty entertaining read. We've embedded it below.

SEE ALSO: Marc Andreessen: ALL Of The Biggest, Oldest Tech Companies Will Be Forced To Break Up

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Marc Andreessen is no stranger to Silicon Valley. He was around during the dot com boom and bust of the early aughts, and he's still there today. Netscape, which he co-founded in 1994, went on to become the first mainstream web browser. And his venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has backed some of the biggest startups around. 

His thoughts, which he abundantly shares on Twitter, have made him an icon. 

The venture capitalist recently sat down with New York Magazine's Kevin Roose to discuss the state of Silicon Valley and the worldwide tech industry.

Here are three entrepreneurial truisms upon which he consistently adheres: 

1. All feedback is good feedback. Andreessen loves to pour out his thoughts, and disagreements with others, on Twitter. These don't come without backlash, of course.

"Every morning," says Andreessen, "I wake up and several dozen people have explained to me in detail how I'm an idiot on Twitter, which is actually fairly helpful." 

This feedback keeps Andreessen from living inside of a bubble, which he warns is killer. "It’s very rare that billionaires actually stop and think, Everybody’s nicer to me than they were 10 years ago," says Andreessen. "This is not limited to billionaires. This applies to presidents, senators, congressmen, mayors, anybody who gets in a position of power." 

2. An investment is more than monetary. As a venture capitalist, Andreessen doesn't just throw money at companies and wait for a return to show up. 

"A lot of my time is working with founders and CEOs of companies in the portfolio," says Andreessen, "I'm basically permanently on call to all of them." 

3. Regulation is not your friend. Andreessen is a vocal opponent of new legislation and regulation. 

"There’s this myth that government regulation is well intentioned and benign, and implemented properly," says Andreessen. "That’s the myth. And then when people actually run into this in the real world, they’re, 'Oh, fuck, I didn’t realize.'"

At the end of the day, it's ideas that move a business forward, not cynicism. "My presumptive tendency," says Andreessen: "is not to ask, 'Is it going to work?' It's, 'Well, what if it does work?'"

Keep reading for Andreessen's full interview with New York Magazine.

SEE ALSO: Marc Andreessen Slams Paul Krugman's Attack On Amazon

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Famed Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen spoke earlier today at WSJD Live.

At the end of his sessions, someone from the audience asked him how his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is working to fix some of the gender inequality issues in the technology industry — specifically the pay gap.

Andreessen says he derived his current views on the topic from a report written by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin.

He said that, according to Goldin's report, the pay gap has almost completely closed in terms of getting paid the same for having the same skills.

The pay gap remains because there is a gap in industries where there’s not flexible time for women. 

For example, said Andreessen, in the pharmacy business, your particular hours don’t matter. Any hour you’re at work, you are productive. In that industry, the pay gap is non-existent.

In contrast, in law, it matters which hours you are able to work. You can't meet with clients after the kids are in bed. 

In that industry, the gap is wider.

Andreessen said the solution is for more companies to allow the women who work for them to work schedule's like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's.

Sandberg leaves Facebook every day at 5 P.M. sharp. She goes home and takes care of her kids for a few hours. Then, in the evening, she gets back online and hammers out a few more hours of work.

"It’s easy for Sheryl to [do] that because she’s in charge," said Andreessen. "We need to have that same capability available for everyone."

Click this link to download a .PDF of Claudia Goldin's report.

And here's a speech she gave just a couple days ago:

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Billionaire investor Marc Andreessen thinks the startups from the late '90s dot-com bubble years would have worked better if they were founded now.

Speaking at the WSJD Live conference, Andreessen said many startup ideas have become sustainable businesses in recent years because of new technologies, like the smartphone.

For example, he said, food-delivery service Instacart is doing well now, while Kozmo, another food-delivery startup with the same idea, ran out of business in the late '90s. He said:

“I basically think all the ideas of the '90s that everybody had about how this stuff was going to work, I think they were all right, they were all correct. I think they were just early.”

However, he did raise concerns over the growing number of startups with massive valuations, saying, it’s “running a little warm.” He also said the high cash burn rate of some of these startups is “getting out of hand.”

Andreessen is one of the most influential and experienced investors/entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, having founded Netscape and Opsware in the '90s. Last month, he warned startups these days are burning too much cash and taking on too much risk, by tweeting, "When the market turns, and it will turn, we will find out who has been swimming without trunks on. Many high burn rate companies will VAPORIZE." 

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Fortune asked 40 CEOs for their best advice to anyone looking to succeed.  

The whole thing is worth reading, but one of favorites comes from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

His advice comes via Steve Martin, and it's perfect: "Be so good they can’t ignore you."

This is somewhat obvious, though a bit frustrating perhaps, but it's the simple truth. If you want to turn heads, do something that's head turning. 

Our CEO Henry Blodget says the best advice he ever got was "make it happen." 

In general, most advice comes down to this. There is no handbook for how to succeed. You just have to work hard, and exploit your natural talents. 

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The 1980s and 1990s were a pivotal time for innovation in Silicon Valley. In 1981, shortly after Apple released the Apple 1, IBM introduced the first PC. A few years later, the World Wide Web would be born.

Documentary photographer Doug Menuez happened to be in Silicon Valley at the time. He had done freelance work with major publications like Fortune and TIME, but he found that tech companies were difficult to crack. 

"I would go to Silicon Valley occasionally, and it was terrible. There was this massive PR bubble keeping you from getting any access," Menuez told Business Insider. "You knew these people were going to change the world, but no one knew anything about them."

In 1985, shortly after Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, Menuez asked if he could document the Apple founder's new venture, a personal computing company he called NeXT. 

To his surprise, Jobs agreed.

"He knew he was a historical figure," Menuez said. "I just showed up at the right place at the right time."

Menuez spent the next three years documenting what was happening inside the young company.  Life magazine would underwrite and publish the photos. 

"At NeXT, they were constantly hiring absolutely brilliant people. Steve was constantly challenging, prodding people to work above their abilities," Menuez said. "Steve had a lot at risk here. The stakes were high. He wanted revenge. He was becoming a symbol of a whole new generation coming into the Valley."

Once word got out that the notoriously private Jobs had granted Menuez access to his fledgling company, other Silicon Valley leaders followed suit. Over the next 15 years, Menuez would spend time photographing intimate scenes at some of the most influential tech companies in the world. 

Menuez has assembled his work from that period in a book called "Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley," which Atria Books published in June. 

"Fearless Genius" features stark, black-and-white photos that capture influential personalities.

In 1990, Menuez photographed then-Apple CEO John Sculley before a press event in 1990. Sculley was shy, and he seemed withdrawn to reporters.

"After forcing Steve out, John grew Apple from $800 million to $8 billion a year in revenue," Menuez wrote in the below photo's caption. "Despite this significant achievement, he was often dismissed in the Valley as the man who fired Steve and, unfairly, as a technology lightweight without vision." 

"He didn't get credit for a lot of important things he did," Menuez told Business Insider.

Here, Sculley and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak check out an early Nintendo Game Boy backstage at a 1991 Apple product announcement.

Adobe was another favorite project of Menuez's. He was there when Photoshop was released in 1990. 

"As digital technology grew more powerful, Silicon Valley became an expected crossroads of culture. Artists arrived from all over the world, eager to experiment,"he writes in "Fearless Genius."

He continues: "Here, painter David Hockney, holding one of his beloved dachshunds, attends Russell Brown's first Adobe Photoshop Invitational,  where he learned how to use the first release version of Photoshop, happily smoking in the computer room and playing with his dogs on breaks."

Backstage at the Agenda '92 conference, Bill Gates debated cheap content and delayed vaporware upgrades to Windows. 

Menuez met Jeff Bezos during Kleiner Perkins' annual Aspen Summit in 1995. 

"He was wearing this shirt that said 'Amazon' on it. My wife is Brazilian, so she said, 'Let's go talk to him,'" Menuez said to Business Insider. "He gave us the whole pitch for Amazon, and it was amazing. Some things you hear and you just know it's going to work." 

Menuez captured Marc Andreessen and his publicist during a phone interview at the Netscape offices. 

"[He] was exhausted and riding a monstrous wave of digital global change he helped precipitate," Menuez writes in the photo's caption. "The press had been pleading for interviews with him ever since the Netscape Navigator browser was released, making internet access easy and fast for the masses."

Menuez had the opportunity to meet many notable figures, but he says it was Jobs who had the biggest impact on his life.

"Steve was the most inspiring person I ever met. As a photojournalist, I like to hide behind my lens and capture other people's moments," Menuez said. "He forced me to confront my own motivations, who I was. I wasn't trying to be his friend, but just being in the room was amazing."

Some may wonder why the photos are just being published now, two decades after they were taken.

After Menuez had finished his work with NeXT, Jobs decided Life magazine just wasn't cool anymore. Menuez put the photos away in boxes and completely forgot about them. 

"By 2000, I had burned out on the topic. There had been this crazy gold rush, and it all just burst," Menuez said.

Stanford later acquired his archives, and Menuez started going back through the notes to help with the scanning process.

Those scans would eventually become "Fearless Genius," which Menuez says is an imperfect history of the Valley at a pivotal time. He hopes to turn the project into a full digital experience, with a documentary, web series, educational program, and conference hopefully on the way. 

"I really want this book to reach young entrepreneurs to show how hard it was. The sacrifice isn't really understood," he said. "There are many lessons to be learned there."

SEE ALSO: How Larry Ellison's Vision For An Italian Sandwich Shop Started A New Era For Food In Silicon Valley

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It's sleek. It's easy to use. It's designed to give first time, small-scale investors a leg up on Wall Street hotshots.

And it just launched today.

Robinhood, a zero-commission brokerage app for iPhone, is unlike any existing stock-market app.

For starters, it's mobile first. That has allowed the company to rethink traditional brokerage cost structures. With no human traders to pay – or ancient infrastructure running the trades – they're able to cut out those overhead costs.

As a result, Robinhood doesn't charge a commission for standard trades, nor does it require any minimum deposits.

"Imagine you’re a first-time investor in your early 20s. You have a few hundred dollars – maybe a thousand dollars – to put in the market. You want to learn how it works. Seven to 10 dollars eats into that quite a bit," said cofounder Vladimir Tenev.

That's the going rate for most other apps. But Tenev and cofounder Baiju Bhatt think even a modest fee like that is prohibitive for younger, smaller-scale investors.

Their "freemium" model allows customers to buy and sell US-listed stocks and ETFs, place market orders and limit orders, track data in real time, and customize watchlists for free. The app will, however, charge customers for premium services like margin lending.

The co-founders were inspired to "democratize access to the financial markets" by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, in which protesters, upset about large bank bailouts, occupied Zuccotti Park and other financial districts for months, denouncing Wall Street and the government's leniency toward bankers.

At the time, Bhatt, now 29, and Tenev, 27, had just built their first finance startup, an equities-trading software company based out of California. They saw their institutional customers placing trades at no cost, and wanted to help everyday customers do the same.

"We kind of asked ourselves, ‘Could we do something bigger than this? Couldn’t we try to do something a little better than this?’" Bhatt said.

Tenev and Bhatt, former roommates who met while studying physics at Stanford, used their new finance experience and tech backgrounds to build Robinhood.

With it, they hope to inspire a new wave of investors.

In the 12 months since Robinhood was first announced, nearly 500,000 people have joined a wait list to download the app. Nearly all of those people are in their twenties, and the co-founders know that most of them won't be coughing up for its premium features.

But they're okay with that. 

"It’s true that a 20-something is going to have less funds than a 50-year-old, but they’ll become a 50-year-old at some point," said Tenev. He and Bhatt are confident they will still be there when that happens.

Robinhood's angel investors are confident too. The company has raised $16 million from an array of investors, including Snoop Dogg, Jared Leto, and Andreessen Horowitz.

"It’s really, really, important that this country as a whole trusts its financial system," said Bhatt. "I think it’s really important that there actually is a company that thinks like that."

Though the app rolls out on iPhone first, the founders plan to expand to Android and web as soon as possible.

You can go to Robinhood's website to join the waitlist. Once you make it to the front, it only takes a few minutes to download and set up. Here's what that process looks like:

Check out the app's pretty layout. This is where you'll need to enter your invite code. (They're being sent out in chronological order to each person on the waitlist.)

Once you log in, you can link your bank account and transfer funds to your Robinhood account by selecting your bank and entering your online banking password.

You'll need to answer a few personal questions:

Then you're pretty much set to go.

But before you can begin trading, you'll need to wait for your information to clear and your bank transfer to go through:

In the meantime, you can build a stock watchlist and start playing around with the app:

Then, trade away.

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Marc Andreessen is optimistic.

He believes US economy is not facing an era of secular stagnation.

Secular stagnation is the idea that the economy won't be able to create enough demand to sustain its growth trend unless interest rates are extraordinarily low. The idea has been much debated since Larry Summers addressed it in a speech at the IMF last year. 

In November, we highlighted comments from Goldman Sachs economist Jari Stehn, who revisited Summers' hypothesis about a year after his speech. Stehn argued that so far, the US economy is showing signs it might not be fated to secular stagnation.

And in a long, pre-dawn (in California time) tweetstorm, noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen also argued that the secular stagnation Summers and others are so worried about — namely that we are fated to a subpar economy for the foreseeable future — may be overblown. 

Andreessen sees an economy that faces the core problem of too much capital facing too few investment opportunities, rather than an economy that is simply stuck in the mud and can't get back to a pre-financial crisis growth trend. 

Here are Andreessen's full comments:

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Larry Summers is out with a new blog post (and tweetstorm) responding to Marc Andreessen's tweetstorm from late last month criticizing Summers' warning of secular stagnation. 

Secular stagnation is the idea that the economy won't be able to create enough demand to sustain its growth trend unless interest rates are extraordinarily low. (Summers' specific worry is that the zero lower bound on interest rates, or nominal interest rates at 0%, is too high for the economy to sustain its growth trend.)

Summers writes that Andreessen and he "are in agreement that the essence of the secular stagnation issue is not whether technology has stopped advancing; but rather whether there is a mismatch between desired saving and investment opportunities that results in low equilibrium real interest rates, precipitates financial instability, and may inhibit economic growth ...  [We] agree that we are headed into a period of soft real interest rates, where there will be more money available than great deals. This may, as he suggests, not be all bad; as it will make it easier for risky ideas to get funded."

But for Summers, this isn't all good.

Summers adds: "The danger which I think is very real is that the zero lower bound on nominal rates will prevent the attainment of full employment as desired investment falls short of desired saving. A related danger is that the very low interest rates will encourage risk-taking and asset price inflation in ways that will ultimately give rise to financial instability ... Recent good news about the state of the US economy should not blind us to this reality." 

Summers also wonders about some of Andreessen's assertions regarding the deflationary nature of technological change. 

Summers' whole post is worth reading in full, as the issue of whether the economy is mired in secular stagnation really can't be forgotten. 

It's not the sexiest idea in the world, and it is not an easy one to talk about, but a major part of today's economic debate is wrestling with this idea.

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It's time to welcome our robot overlords, says University of Manchester economist Diane Coyle in the Financial Times.

While there's a lot of fear out there about how machines will replace human jobs in the future, Coyle argues it's possible automation could be a really good thing for the economy.

This is particularly true if you are also worried about persistently low productivity growth, which Coyle connects with secular stagnation.

She's wrong on that point, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Coyle gives the historical example of the washing machine: very suddenly cleaning the household's clothes and linens went from a physically intensive, hours-long process to something that could be done more or less with the push of a button. That freed up women to use that time for other things, and their productivity went up in a way that people weren't expecting when laundry still had to be done by hand.

This isn't to say that as workers — particularly low skilled workers — become displaced by automation they won't have a tough time finding another job. But, Coyle says, anyone who is worried about secular stagnation should prefer the robots to anemic productivity growth.

Here's the thing: No one is quite sure that productivity growth is the answer.

Sure, if the robots come and take everyone's jobs, but then people find ways to work the same amount doing different things, productivity will increase drastically. The economy will probably boom. But this assumes that nothing blows up the global economy before we get to that point.

Here's Larry Summers, who has been beating the drum on secular stagnation, throwing some shade on this: 

The important point to recognize is that – as the experience of the US economy in the 1930s demonstrates – even with rapid innovation it is possible for economic performance to be very poor when finances are not successfully managed. Recent good news about the state of the US economy should not blind us to this reality.

If low interest rates continue to create asset bubbles that then pop dramatically — which seems to be the real fear of some people who are talking about secular stagnation — the economy could be in rough shape for a long time before the robot (or demographic) saviors come.

It is possible to be afraid of robots and of asset bubbles at the same time.

But should you be afraid of secular stagnation, robots or no?  

Secular stagnation is a theory that's become fashionable in economics circles recently. It came out of the Great Depression as a way to explain a possibly indefinite period of low growth. In 1939, economist Alvin Hansen said, "Hey, wait, maybe the crappy decade we've just had isn't something we can get out of. Maybe the economy has fundamentally changed, and we are stuck with low growth."

In 1939, that turned out not to be true, but that didn't exactly prove the theory wrong. The idea has made a comeback since 2013, when Summers made a speech at the IMF Economic Forumon the subject. Gauti Eggertsson and Neil Mehrotra at the National Bureau of Economic Research attempted to model the idea.

There are a few different versions of secular stagnation out there, but basically the idea is that people aren't buying enough (or they are saving too much), whether that's because of an aging population, or inequality, or some other reason. That, in turn, throws everything else off, and the economy gets stuck in a trap.

Here's Paul Krugman:

Secular stagnation is the claim that underlying changes in the economy, such as slowing growth in the working-age population, have made episodes like the past five years in Europe and the US, and the last 20 years in Japan, likely to happen often. That is, we will often find ourselves facing persistent shortfalls of demand, which can’t be overcome even with near-zero interest rates.  

Should you worry about that? The short answer is no. The longer answer is it's hard to say. Some smart economists are spending a lot of time worrying about it. Other people say it's a worthless concept. For the moment, it's a question to which the answer is no one knows.

If it's something you want to look into, here's a good ebook to get you started.

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It's sleek. It's easy to use. It's designed to give first time, small-scale investors a leg up on Wall Street hotshots.

And after months of waiting, it's now open to anyone who wants to join.

Robinhood, a zero-commission brokerage app for iPhone that launched in December to a 700,000-person waitlist, is now available to the general public.

Here's why Robinhood is unlike any existing stock market app.

For starters, it's mobile first. That has allowed the company to rethink traditional brokerage cost structures. With no human traders to pay – or ancient infrastructure running the trades – they're able to cut out those overhead costs.

As a result, Robinhood doesn't charge a commission for standard trades, nor does it require any minimum deposits.

"Imagine you’re a first-time investor in your early 20s. You have a few hundred dollars – maybe a thousand dollars – to put in the market. You want to learn how it works. Seven to 10 dollars eats into that quite a bit," said cofounder Vladimir Tenev.

That's the going rate for most other apps. But Tenev and cofounder Baiju Bhatt think even a modest fee like that is prohibitive for younger, smaller-scale investors.

Their "freemium" model allows customers to buy and sell US-listed stocks and ETFs, place market orders and limit orders, track data in real time, and customize watchlists for free. The app will, however, charge customers for premium services like margin lending.

The co-founders were inspired to "democratize access to the financial markets" by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, in which protesters, upset about large bank bailouts, occupied Zuccotti Park and other financial districts for months, denouncing Wall Street and the government's leniency toward bankers.

At the time, Bhatt, now 29, and Tenev, 27, had just built their first finance startup, an equities-trading software company based out of California. They saw their institutional customers placing trades at no cost, and wanted to help everyday customers do the same.

"We kind of asked ourselves, ‘Could we do something bigger than this? Couldn’t we try to do something a little better than this?’" Bhatt said.

Tenev and Bhatt, former roommates who met while studying physics at Stanford, used their new finance experience and tech backgrounds to build Robinhood.

With it, they hope to inspire a new wave of investors.

In the 12 months since Robinhood was first announced, nearly 500,000 people have joined a wait list to download the app. Nearly all of those people are in their twenties, and the co-founders know that most of them won't be coughing up for its premium features.

But they're okay with that. 

"It’s true that a 20-something is going to have less funds than a 50-year-old, but they’ll become a 50-year-old at some point," said Tenev. He and Bhatt are confident they will still be there when that happens.

Robinhood's angel investors are confident too. The company has raised $16 million from an array of investors, including Snoop Dogg, Jared Leto, and Andreessen Horowitz. Index Ventures led both its seed and Series A rounds.

"It’s really, really, important that this country as a whole trusts its financial system," said Bhatt. "I think it’s really important that there actually is a company that thinks like that."

Though the app rolls out on iPhone first, the founders plan to expand to Android and web as soon as possible.

You can download Robinhood over at the App Store. Here's what the set-up looks like:

Check out the app's pretty layout. This is where you'll need to enter your invite code. (They're being sent out in chronological order to each person on the waitlist.)

Once you log in, you can link your bank account and transfer funds to your Robinhood account by selecting your bank and entering your online banking password.

You'll need to answer a few personal questions:

Then you're pretty much set to go.

But before you can begin trading, you'll need to wait for your information to clear and your bank transfer to go through:

In the meantime, you can build a stock watchlist and start playing around with the app:

Then, trade away.

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Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on a tweetstorm last week about how the sharing economy reduces income inequality. It was interesting, but it was fundamentally flawed.

For ease of reading, I've posted the soliloquy in a series of screenshots. The original twitter version is here.

The problem is, it's not that simple.

The idea in this tweetstorm is that anyone who owns anything — or inhabits it, in the case of some Airbnbs, which are, in fact, rental units — can "share" it by renting it out when they aren't using it, thereby increasing their income and reducing income inequality.

The problem is, it's not true.

Airbnb may be transferring some wealth from hoteliers to homeowners, but the basic requirement of the service is that a person has extra space to rent out — either extra rooms or a second apartment or house. On the margin, perhaps some income inequality is reduced, but for the most part it's just a transfer from corporate America to moderately wealthy people, plus a healthy chunk to Airbnb — a corporation!

There's also very little sharing going on in the sharing economy.

For example, when my mother comes to visit me in New York City, from California, she has a favorite Airbnb she likes to stay at. The service has helped her a lot, since I live in a part of Brooklyn where there are very few traditional hotel options.

But the Airbnb she stays in is run by someone who owns a whole house in Brooklyn, and has rebuilt the ground floor into several small studios, which are always rented out. Rather than "sharing" his home, he basically runs a small inn. And the alternative to doing that is not leaving that space empty, but renting it out to a full-time Brooklyn resident at a (likely) lower rate.

My mom likes it better than other places she has stayed at, because it feels like a hotel. It's private. It's regularly cleaned. The closet is empty, and she can put her clothes in it. And, honestly, the alternative here is not her staying in a hotel. It's her staying on the fold-out couch in my cramped studio. It's a choice that she makes, and she has the discretionary income to do so. She gives her money to a man who owns a home worth millions in Brooklyn. Convenient? Yes. Reducing inequality? Not so much.

Beyond the income-inequality argument, there's a real question about whether the sharing economy can continue to exist as it is now.

In the case of Uber, Lyft, and Instacart, the companies are under siege from the people Andreessen purports to be benefiting from reduced income inequality. They are all being sued by their "drivers" or "shoppers" for being misclassified as contract workers rather than employees.

Rather than reducing income inequality, these companies are increasing the burden on workers in the economy by denying them the benefits of being employees.

Any moral outrage aside, if the workers win these lawsuits, the companies in the "sharing economy" are going to have to seriously rethink their business models.

It's likely not a coincidence that these companies proliferated during a time of high unemployment and depressed wages.

I was in an Uber in Washington, DC, a few weeks ago, and I asked my driver how he liked his job. He said it was OK. He had really liked it, until Uber recently lowered fares (presumably to be more competitive in the market). As a result, he was no longer making enough to make driving full-time worth it. He was looking for a new job.

At the same time, traditionalretailers are feeling the pressure to increase wages. This is going to catch up with these companies. They aren't immune to the markets they are disrupting.

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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the author of Lean In, has been outspoken about tech's miserable diversity numbers. 

In August, she told USA Today: "I also want to be clear that we are not on the path to get there. In tech, if women are 18% of the graduates, we are not getting to 50% of the jobs. We have got to change that."

In the past year, some companies have released diversity reports outlining their employee statistics, while others have instituted quotas to make sure women are included.

Sandberg enlisted the help of legendary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who used his venture capital firm's resources to create a two-day boot camp for qualified female and minority board candidates, Bloomberg reports.

Boot camp consists of courses led by Stanford professors and discussions with current board members. The inaugural group of 40 participants completed the boot camp this month.

Getting onto a startup or company's board of directors paradoxically means you have to have prior experience being on a board of directors. This disqualifies a number of people who may be qualified to sit on a company's board, but have never been given the opportunity.

"The goal is to arm the participants—all women and minorities who have yet to serve on boards other than their own companies'—with the knowledge to take seats on corporate and start-up boards," Bloomberg reports. "Andreessen Horowitz plans to publish the names of all the participants in the pilot program on its website and hopes to offer the course annually. The idea is that companies will use the list as a resource, and that some of the inaugural class will find seats on public and private boards." 

You can check out the full story over on Bloomberg.

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Many of the Valley's elite turned up for Wednesday's party promoting season two of "Silicon Valley," a satirical comedy that's grown into a full-fledged hit for HBO.

The new season premieres on Sunday, April 12, at 10 p.m. ET.

Most of the cast appeared at the event. Notably missing was T.J. Miller, who caused an uproar in February when he hosted the Valley's version of the Oscars, the "Crunchies," and delivered remarks viewed by many as offensive.

That was just the latest in the blurring of fact versus fiction, real versus unreal, in a show that has captured the absurdity of this singular place and time.

First off, there are no sacred cows. The show's intentions were clear from its first poster, in which its band of hapless entrepreneurs strike the same self-important pose as the one famously associated with Steve Jobs.

And who better to deliver cutting social satire than creator Mike Judge? He brought the world such unforgettable creations as the cult hit "Office Space" and '90s morons "Beavis and Butt-head," expertly skewering the world of work and meaningless culture.

In season one, main character Richard (in burgundy hoodie) creates a music app containing a revolutionary compression algorithm. Gavin Belson, founder of Hooli, offers Richard $10 million for the algorithm, but Richard decides instead to grow his own company, Pied Piper, and accepts a $200,000 investment from quirky venture capitalist Peter Gregory. Belson seeks revenge and builds Nucleus to rival Pied Piper's algorithm.

Also see, "Before He Died, Christopher Evan Welch Gave Us The Perfect Embodiment Of Tech-World Hubris."

Marc Andreessen says there's not a single female general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm he cofounded, because his offers to women keep getting turned down.

During an interview with Fortune’s Dan Primack, Andreessen said that the firm’s first GP offer (after him and cofounder Ben Horowitz) went out to a female partner — but she’s rejected it five times already.

“It’s been driving my crazy,” Andreessen said.

Andreessen Horowitz has much better female representation than other Silicon Valley tech companies, as more than 52% of its 107 employees are women. But none of the seven general partners, the firm’s top position, are female.

Andreessen wouldn’t name the female executive who has turned him down five times. But he said that he’s also offered the position to a number of other women, who all happened to reject him as well.

The reason for this, according to Andreessen, is quite simple: demand for female executives is high and the supply of women who work in tech is low.

“I think this is true in other firms, and I think this is true at the CEO level as well, is when you talk to female CEOs, they get so many offers,” he said.

“Because there are so few and the need is so intense, they get so many offers, that they’re just drowning in opportunity, which is why we think so much of the work has to be at the pipeline and access level, which is we have to get more people developed.”

In order to solve this problem, Andreessen said his firm has been doing a lot of grassroots work to improve female and minority employment in tech. It’s partnered with outside organizations like Code 20/40 for minority entrepreneurs and Girls Who Code, while it’s working with Google board member and VMware cofounder Diane Greene to further spread the word.

“We have to get more people rising up the ranks. We have to get more [female] executives,” Andreessen said.

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