Legendary VC Marc Andreessen's advice to 23-year-olds: 'Don't follow your passion'

"Your passion is likely more dumb and useless than anything else," Marc Andreessen says.

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• Marc Andreessen is the cofounder of the wildly successful VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.
• In a recent interview, Andreessen was asked to give his best advice to a smart 23-year-old American.
• "Your passion should be your hobby, not your work," he said. "Do it in your spare time."
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Marc Andreessen is one of the biggest and most successful names in tech.

He helped shape the early internet and cofounded Netscape as well as several other startups.

Through the venture capital firm he launched with Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, he has backed a dizzying array of tech companies from Twitter and Facebook to Roblox and Clubhouse.

In a recent interview with Noah Smith, Andreessen was asked what his best advice would be to a smart 23-year-old American today.

"Don't follow your passion," he said. "Your passion is likely more dumb and useless than anything else. Your passion should be your hobby, not your work. Do it in your spare time."

The legendary VC added that young people should look for jobs in the most vibrant areas of the economy and make themselves increasingly valuable to the customers and colleagues they work with.

"It can sometimes feel that all the exciting things have already happened, that the frontier is closed, that we're at the end of technological history and there's nothing left to do but maintain what already exists," he continued. "In fact, the opposite is true."

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Andreessen wrote a widely circulated essay in which he denounced the lack of imagination and initiative that left the world vulnerable to the catastrophe.

As the world emerges from the worst of the disruption, Andreessen says there's endless opportunity to shape a better future for people.

"We're surrounding by rotting incumbents that will all need to be replaced by new technologies," he told Smith. "Let's get on it."

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