Web2.0 Keynote A Conversation with Marc Andreessen

I am blogging live from Web2.0 Expo SF.

I caught some of Marc Andreessen's keynote structured as a conversation with John Battelle .

Marc was pitching for Ning here are some highlights of his conversation:

• He summarized it as a platform, open with interoperable data, part of Opensocial
• Growth of 1 Million users/day and 1000s of networks added/day.
• He compared with Facebook and made it sound like a past on how they built social networks and Ning was the future. It sure helps justify Ning's valuation to be built upon Facebook model
• Ning has been validated Valley style by their recent round of funding.
• Marc seems to have made a comment that Ning's funding was for an upcoming economic downtime. He explained this very articulately.
  

He explained how Silicon valley does not operate on Debt but on equity and the current economic trouble is because of debt but it can cause a slowdown.

Questions: Audience had questions about Bill Gates, Browsers today , role of academian in innovation and transitioning to industry etc all bringing back nostalgia of Marc and how he was responsible for Netscape and creating the Web evolution.

This is the first time I got to see Marc live and he was smart and articulate but was clearly media trained and focused on promoting Ning.