Hacker Culture and the New Rules of Innovation

Introduction

‘Software is eating the world!’ Marc Andreessen claimed in 2011. Andreessen, a Silicon Valley investor and cofounder of the web browser Netscape Navigator, was in a position to know. Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz, was riding a wave of innovation in software services, consumer electronics, biotech and computational medicine. Andreessen’s job ensured that software ate the world with gusto, in ever-expanding chunks.

Andreessen’s statement has become a mantra of the tech startup industry. Like the best insights, it became truer over time. In 2011, many people assumed that social media was the high-water mark of software’s intrusion into everyday life. Since then, a wave of new software products and services ...