To the naked eye, Marc Andreessen appears like a giant mass removed from the base of Steve Ballmer’s spine. The Netscaper-cum-V.C.er is an interesting guy, but he’s also an extreme techno-optimist, a true believer to an obscene degree in the transformative power of Silicon Valley, and like most deeply devoted souls, he can be annoying as fuck. 

Tad Friend, an enormously enjoyable New Yorker writer who’s uncommonly gifted at simultaneously telling a macro and micro story, profiled the Northern California idolmaker and his milieu, an enchanted land where men (almost exclusively) with money dare to divine the next Google or Facebook, gambling in casinos still under construction, trying to identify black swans and ride unicorns. Along the way, Friend vividly depicts this modern strain of capitalism as well as reveals his subject, of whom he writes these two sentences: “Marc Andreessen mentions Thomas Edison often, his family never” and “Andreessen represents the Valley—both in its soaring vision and in its tendency to treat people as a fungible mass.”

The opening:

On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents’ Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world’s most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road’s newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm’s deal team and its seven general partners—the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong.

Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can’t help but think of words like “jumbo” and “Grade A.” Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes’s Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He’s an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon erase such primitive behaviors as paying cash (Bitcoin), eating cooked food (Soylent), and enduring a world unimproved by virtual reality (Oculus VR). He believes that Silicon Valley is mission control for mankind, which is therefore on a steep trajectory toward perfection. And when he so argues, fire-hosing you with syllogisms and data points and pre-refuting every potential rebuttal, he’s very persuasive.•