Qik raises some issues, like what if 10,000 people at a concert all broadcast the show live?

About a year ago, we went to see one of the major sports leagues—I won’t mention which one. We presented how they can have social networks and users can post videos shot at games and photos and all this stuff. And the main topic of conversation was how they could prevent people from recording video with their mobile phones and posting it online.
 
You won’t tell us which league?
I won’t. But, you know, it’s a whole new world. The presumption is that there’s going to be live video all the time.

You seem to have your fingers in a lot of Valley companies. Walk us through Marc Andreessen’s daily life now.
My third company, Ning, is my day job. The only corporate board I’m on is Facebook, which I think is a very important company. I’m doing angel investing with Ben Horowitz, my business partner from my previous company. We’ve invested in 15 companies or so in the past year and a half. Maybe one a month, give or take.

What’s your approach to investing in startups?
Have it be a small enough amount of money that if it fails, we can still talk to the founder without getting mad.

How much is that?
I usually put in $25,000 to $100,000 per company. So far, so good—which is to say, I haven’t gotten really mad at anybody.

You said Facebook is a very important company. That’s not always the opinion you get, right?
I’m on Facebook’s board because Face­book is a true, old-fashioned Silicon Valley company in the best sense of that term: super-technology-focused, super-product-focused, very innovative—much more than it gets credit for—and very determined to build out a service that’s going to reach a very large number of people.

Qik, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks—who has time for all of it?
Consumers are freeing up an enormous amount of time that they were spending with stereotypical old media, and clearly, that time is going primarily two places: videogames and online.

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?
Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

What’s your relationship like with Jim Clark after all these years?
I’ve had two critical mentors in my career. One was Clark. Another was Jim Barksdale, who was Netscape’s C.E.O. And it’s funny because they worked extremely well together, but they have almost polar opposite personalities.

Clark is intensely entrepreneurial, extremely passionate, extremely emotional, completely fearless, absolutely delighted to create a new business, loves if it causes a lot of controversy. Barksdale is a builder and an operator and a manager. Clark is off in Florida. He has largely opted out of the tech industry.

Yeah, we haven’t seen him in a long time. He is having a lot of fun. He is dating an Australian swimsuit model. Seriously. He’s been in the real estate business in Miami doing a bunch of different business things. He sails a tremendous amount. I’m pretty much the exact opposite. I don’t like to leave Palo Alto.