Fascinating interview on Charlie Rose – From about minute 36, his discussion on Andy Grove, Intel and the vitality of Silicon Valley really makes this interview.  Really amazing interview – I am so psyched after listening to this…very inspiring

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/andreessen-on-charlie-rose-i-am-creating-a-fund-full-video/

 
Some other highpoints or things I found interesting that Andreessen said:

• Andreessen is an investor in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, on the board of Ebay and Facebook, and is starting his own fund and looking at investments from $200K-$1.5m which he considers a nominal seed investment for proof of concept
  

• Innovation will continue through the downturn: Facebook, Google, youtube developed through the previous bust

• Media companies can either play offense or defense, and he thinks companies like the NYTimes are playing defense rather than focusing on the new opportunities online.  He would recommend shutting down printing operations and focus all the resources and brainpower on developing internet strategies.  Later on he makes the case using Intel as an example – they deprioritised their largest business (memory chips) cause it was being destroyed by the cheaper Japanese fabs.

• MSFT purchased Andreessen’s original code for Netscape from the Univ. of Illinois to launch Internet Explorer

• There were at least 35 other venture backed Search engines before Google

• “Some products have the ‘it works feature’” (in reference to Google Search – from Bill Joy formerly of SUN)

• Once every ten years you have a magic business in tech – Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Google (and Amazon is evening emerging as one) are magic companies – the market looks endless for these companies

• The iPhone & Kindle as revolutionary devices (iPhone is a product from 5 years in the future)