Bonus: Why Marc Andreessen is a Key Character in My Book

A bonus post for paid subscribers: I explain how Marc Andreessen was a much bigger part of my original outline, and show you an 'outtake' I wrote about his 2004 activities.

Marc Andreessen, bare feet and all, on the cover of TIME magazine in Feb 1996.

When I was planning the book that turned into Bubble Blog, Marc Andreessen was to be one of the main characters. He and I are the same age, so I thought it’d be a neat idea to track my career alongside his. How cool would it be to have the Ultimate Insider’s narrative threaded through my own Outsider narrative? I even had a book title lined up: “Eating the World” (in reference to Andreessen’s influential 2011 essay, Why Software Is Eating the World).

I began writing the book with this plan in mind, but I soon discovered that actually my own story was enough to propel the narrative — that the book should be a straight memoir plus internet history. I labeled the revised book plan a “Web 2.0 memoir”, a term I continue to use today to describe Bubble Blog. So I largely abandoned the Andreessen narrative, although I did fold bits of it more subtly into my own story (since I still think he’s the perfect insider foil to my outsider main character).

Anyway, I thought a good bonus post for paid subscribers would be to show you part of what I originally wrote, when Andreessen was a bigger part of my outline.