Marc Andreessen and Charlie Songhurst on the past, present, and future of Silicon Valley

If that's how you move ecosystems, sort of same question but for companies.

What's the company that could have been a trillion that didn't, that you would have to change the least to make it a trillion? You know, they get that one exec, they get that one lawsuit.

It just goes differently.

I mean, there's many, many, many.

I mean, the all-time story of that is a company called Digital Research, which should have been Microsoft.

And there's a famous, I can tell the whole...

Please.

Oh, yeah, okay, okay.

So the story roughly goes as follows.

It's

in the books, but it roughly goes as follows.

So Bill Gates and Paul Allen had this little software company originally in Albuquerque down the street from Better Call Saul, I imagine, which they moved to Seattle.

And they were building programming tools for computers.

And so when I first used Microsoft as a kid, it was Microsoft Basic.

They were an interpreter company, not an OS company.

So, you know, and then there was this PC wave with all these like, you know, basically these sort of, you know, cat and dog kind of early PCs from like 76 to 82.

And they basically sold the basic interpreter to all those companies.

And that's how they got going.

But they weren't in the operating system business.

And then IBM decided, you know, famously to enter the PC business.

And, you know, and then there was a network connection with Bill Gates's mother and the CEO of IBM.

And they were on a board together.

And it resulted in the IBM team, you know, coming out.

and going up to Seattle and buying a license to Microsoft Basic, which is what everybody did in those days.

And then the IBM team asked Bill Gates, like, what operating system should we use? And he's like, oh, well, the standard operating system for PCs is called CPM, which at the time was true.