Andreessen is a board member at Facebook and a longtime adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But, as he confessed to PEHub, Andreessen passed on a chance to make an angel investment in the social network years ago:

Did you have an opportunity invest in Facebook as an angel?

Damn, she asked the question. [Laughs.] Let's put it this way, I've known them from the beginning. I probably could have if I had tried hard, but I didn't.

Because?

Because I didn't. [Smiles.] ...things just really happen fast, and Facebook was happening at a super high rate of speed and things just didn't click.

So there's that. Then there's the fact that, save for one year at Netscape, Andreessen's companies have consistently lost money; one, Opsware, lost money for six years straight before it was acquired by HP.

In an interview with Yahoo's Sarah Lacy, Andreessen claims his new fund's edge will be its ability to pick the winners (see excerpt above). Happily for the software maven and his investors, history is no guarantee of future performance.

I have been a great admirer of Andreesen since the mid '90s. He is no doubt one of the fathers of the modern internet. But really, he should can it about people using "his" ideas. He of all people should know that the internet abounds with ideas. Everyone has an idea.

Ideas are overrated and rarely original. The know-how to implement ideas, and to know which ones are good, that's where the real genius comes in.

I've edited down Om Malik's report on the talk.

• “Any desktop application that has not been implemented in the browser is now going to be implemented in the browser.”
• Chrome's speed, especially its advanced JavaScript engine, will push Firefox and Internet Explorer developers to make massive upgrades to their own products. “Microsoft can build good products when they want to."
• “If JavaScript gets any faster, then developers will question if they should develop in Flash or Silverlight."
• “Super interactive browser that sits atop a super-fast connection…now interesting things will happen over the next 5-10 years."

(Photo by Joi Ito)

"I have gotten none until now," he replied. "Which makes this one the worst by default."

The press corps may have forgotten Zawinski, but fans of his screensaver for Linux and Unix systems, XScreenSaver, haven't. One suggested that Google use Zawinski's Pipes screensaver for Chrome's "about:internets" Easter egg, which displays a series of tubes. If you don't get the joke, you probably don't remember who Jamie Zawinski is, either.

On Microsoft:

Microsoft can build software, when they choose to.

On investing in startups:

I usually put in $25,000 to $100,000 per company. My philosophy is to put in a small enough amount of money that I won't get mad at the founder if I lose it.

Translation: Marc Andreessen is so rich that he can lose $100,000 and feel nothing.

On the failure of Friendster:

Friendster was very restrictive on what users did. You were supposed to connect because you know each other in real life, not, as [founder Jonathan] Abrams said, 'because you both like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.' But sometimes you want to put your chocolate in her peanut butter.

Yes, he really said that.

On his deathwatch for the New York Times:

I don't want to become the crazy anti-New York Times guy. You have to do what Intel did in 1985. The Japanese chipmakers were killing Intel in the memory-chip market. It got out of memory chips and focused on the much-smaller microprocessor market. I would turn off the printing presses.

On his mentor and Netscape cofounder, Jim Clark:

I could tell you a lot of stories about his life [in Florida], but I won't. He's dating a 26-year-old Australian swimsuit model. I just ran into an entrepreneur who said, "I just ran into Jim Clark at a resort town in Italy. Jim was in a hot tub carved into the side of a mountain." I said, "Yes! That was Jim Clark."

On the iPhone's price:

Give it a year, it will be down to $99. Give it another year, it will be free.

On his motives for giving away his money:

My wife teaches philanthropy at Stanford Business School. I would be in big trouble if I weren't hugely committed to it.

On his relationship with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

He's my Facebook friend. He's my Facebook 'friend.' [makes air-quotes gesture] I'll stop there.

Because Zuckerberg doesn't have to. Microsoft owns 1.6 percent of Facebook; Li, even after doubling his take, only 0.8 percent. Neither stake is large enough to merit a board seat. Andreessen is, like Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, an entrepreneur-friendly choice; he bypassed Sand Hill Road altogether to raise Ning's $100-million-plus in funding.

Just yesterday, we'd heard that Zuckerberg, who owns 27 percent of Facebook, had the right to appoint two board members. That leaves him one more seat at the table to fill. Anyone want to take odds on the moneymen getting left out once again?

Big mergers and acquisitions, particularly among public companies, particularly among public companies that have large shares of their respective markets, can take a year or more between the day the deal is signed and announced, to the day the deal is actually executed and closed. During that year plus, all kinds of things can happen that could cause the deal to fall apart.

Isn't Andreessen obviously thinking of AOL-Time Warner, a deal which faced intense opposition from competitors and regulatory scrutiny, and which Andreessen has called a "rolling catastrophe"? Come on, Marc, look on your keyboard. There's an "a" key on the left. An "o" on the right. And just below it, an "l." It can't be that hard to type.

Andreessen's conclusion is worth quoting in full:

We are learning that hostile takeovers have arrived in our industry. This is the second major hostile takeover so far — the other was Oracle's takeover of Peoplesoft — but there will be more.

This is significant because historically hostile takeovers practically never happened in technology. Potential hostile acquirors assumed that hostile takeovers wouldn't work because the target company's employees would bail and the target company's business would collapse.

It turns out that as technology companies become larger and more mature, acquirors are becoming increasingly convinced that neither of these assumptions hold. Perhaps employees of large tech companies aren't that bonded to current management, and perhaps many of them would actually prefer to work for a larger, more dominant combined company. And maybe as a consequence, the target's business would do just fine in the wake of a hostile takeover — in fact, maybe it would do better, due to advantages of combined size and scale.

My bet is that hostile takeovers, particularly of larger and more mature companies, are going to become increasingly common in our industry.

The excitement may be just beginning.

What has changed in the near-decade since then? Yahoo, which grew up alongside Netscape — at one point, Netscape hosted Yahoo's servers — is that much farther from being a startup. Working there offers less risk, and less reward. Andreessen doesn't come out and say it, but he strongly suggests the place has become infested with careerists who would be just as happy working at Microsoft.

After the Netscape acquisition, Andreessen worked briefly and unhappily as AOL's CTO. For Yahoos, wheeling and dealing may be fine; but for him, it's the startup life or nothing. Andreessen may feign nonchalance at the prospect of more hostile takeovers in tech. But that doesn't mean he personally wants any part in them.

A recent Fast Company article on Andreessen's current venture, Ning, went no better. You can practically hear the writer propping his eyelids open as Andreessen goes on, and on, and on, about "viral expansion loops."

What happened to the Andreessen who once ridiculed Windows as "a set of poorly debugged device drivers"? Why, he's gone online. Andreessen's blog is relentlessly entertaining. His verbal fisticuffs with the New York Times are must-reads; the vitriol oozes out of every line. And he posts just infrequently enough to keep us hanging on every word.

The only surprise, really, is that Andreessen took so long to start blogging. This world was not made for him. In the Web, he created one to suit.

(Photo by mathoov)

That was Jamie Zawinski, the Netscape engineer who helped "free the lizard" by open-sourcing Mozilla, even though he apparently offered up his SoMa nightclub, DNA Lounge, for the event. Zawinski did, however, build a time capsule of the early Web — including early iterations of the Mosaic browser and website — for those of you who couldn't make the party but would like to wallow in the nostalgia. Who did show up? Dozens who RSVP'd after Valleywag's calendar listing yesterday, forcing Mozilla to open up the bar when the drink tickets ran out. Photos, including our own Owen Thomas making nice with Anglosexual Flickr engineer Cal Henderson, by Randal Alan Smith.

I'm largely to blame for several innovations on the web including, cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, proxy authentication, HTTP byte ranges, HTTPS over SSL, and encouraging the implementation of animated GIFS into the browser.

"I never thought I was going to date an older man," Hinze told the Australian magazine. Clark's daughter Kathy is 10 years older than Hinze — and married to YouTube founder Chad Hurley. Hurley's site currently only has one video of his prospective mother-in-law, but that's sure to increase after her TV career takes off.

Eich credits Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus. The story goes that around the turn of the century, AOL agreed to spin off the Mozilla Foundation, but only wanted to fund it with a "get lost package," according to the Chronicle.

Eich says that Kapor, himself a victim of the Microsoft hegemony, leaned on a friend, AOL exec Ted Leonsis, to get the Mozilla Foundation a better sendoff. Eventually AOL agreed to set up the foundation with $2 million. It was enough to keep Mozilla alive and thriving.

Now, Mozilla's browser Firefox owns around 16 percent market share and Mozilla is more profitable than its new CEO would like you to think about.

The pair also face a potential lawsuit from residents upset at never getting the spa, restaurant and lounge Clark and Jermoluk promised for the building. "When we closed on the unit and walked through the lobby, we were like 'O.K., this looks kind of bland,'" one resident told the Times. "There's nothing for me to do but try and sell it." The buyer might have tried checking out the pair's full business records — something even the Times didn't bother to do. While he made a mint with Netscape, Clark's Healtheon struggled before merging with rival WebMD. SGI is on life support, a shadow of its former self. And Jermoluk is best known among Valley insiders for steering Excite@Home towards bankruptcy amid persistent rumors of a nose-candy problem.

Ram Shriram actually came in about a month after we closed our round. At the time we only had about $200k open in the round. Unlike most investors (who wait a week, talk to their friends, bring you back for multiple meetings), Ram said "Okay, I'm in" before I was done with the presentation. He then explained that he had no upper limit on what he could invest (good problem to have!), but that his accountants lose track if he doesn't invest at least $500k. So needless to say, we opened the round up a bit.