10:20do you do that to a company yeah so alot of this is actually you can actuallyborrow concepts actually from militarystrategy on this which is sort of thedifference between sort of strategy andtactics right at a difference betweengoals and tactics so I think it’sincredibly important to have a reallyvivid clear idea about where you want toget in the long run that you stick toand that you’re very solid on and thateverybody agrees to and then I think youwant to be very very flexible in thetactics and I think the problem is youit’s a dichotomy right it’s a it’s acontradiction so you have to you have tothink about terms you have to think itfrom a long-term standpoint but also youhave to think in terms of day-to-daytactics and this is where you know I’vebeen very critical in the past to thisidea of like fail fast because like Ialways things like fail fast is like thekey word in there is not fast it’s failand failure sucks and success is awesomeand we should be trying to succeed notfail and I think the fail fast thing ispeople thinking because I think failfast makes a lot of sense on tactics ifthe tactics Network doesn’t work find adifferent tactic I think fail fast iscatastrophic if it’s applied to strategyand if it’s applied to goals and I thinka lot of founders frankly even stilllike talk themselves out of what aregoing to be good ideas in the long runbecause they’re not getting immediatetraction and so again it goes back tolong term like we just ruled by data andwhat cited by their gut that’s actuallyso that is actually a racing point sothat is one of the things that happenswhich is in the old day in the old dayswhen I when I was running short pantsyou just didn’t hat you didn’t have allthe data it was much harder to get asense of how well you were doing and solike on the one hand you you you feltless concrete connection to what you’redoing but on the other hand you didn’thave this cascade of data coming at youand now is you know like in all of thesebusinesses today you have daily weeklyif you want you have data to the minuteto the second to the microsecond of howwell or poorly you’re doing and it’sreally easy to get distracted by that bythat short term data and it’s reallyeasy to draw a long termLucian’s based on short-term data andyou do see companies that have gotten inreal trouble over that mm-hmmconversely you see companies you knowthat worked for a very long time onsomething that people think is justcompletely nutty and they get heavilycriticized along the way and by the waysometimes those work and sometimes theydon’t but when they do work that is howyou do something like for all this wholething about how everything’s supposed tobe speeding up it still takes a decadeor more to build something reallysignificant I mean it you know in thisworld like it still really does so whenit comes to like interesting productsthat seem to be sort of jerked around bytheir own data or were for a long time
Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs
Marc Andreessen, Co-Founder & Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses his philosophy on investing in technical founders and the role of technology in today’s startups. Andreessen also addresses the kind of entrepreneurs and ideas his venture capital firm look for: “Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.”
Marc Andreessen: “Take the Ego out of Ideas”
“every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and about 24.5 million are created,”
.. it’s wise to understand the difference between two types of errors. Mistakes of commission — losing everything you invest in a company — can be tough, but you’ll get over them in time. Errors of omission — not investing in the first place — will scar you for life.
.. “Just because MySpace didn’t reach Facebook levels of scale didn’t mean Facebook wouldn’t be able to. So you have to be ruthlessly open-minded and constantly willing to reexamine your assumptions,”
.. Instead of spending time overanalyzing whether something will work, he advises, try asking what happens when it does.
Lunch with the FT: Marc Andreessen
The Netscape founder and tech investor talks about the trouble with stock markets, what he looks for in entrepreneurs and why illegal immigration is good for America
His extended family farmed in Iowa. His father, Lowell, sold seed corn for an agricultural company; his mother, Patricia, was a housewife.
.. Deferral of gratification is a huge thing. Calvinism runs very deep. It sets you up pretty well for engineering.”
.. Andreessen sees technology as enabling what he calls the “great awakening”. Waggling his iPhone affectionately, he says: “This little guy right here is the equivalent power capability of the $20m supercomputer I was using. This thing is in two billion people’s hands.”
.. Within six months he had posted 22,300 tweets, and now, according to Bloomberg, averages more than 100 a day to his almost 250,000 followers.
.. His tech-optimism attracts both admiration and mockery. Last June, a Salon article said he used Twitter as a “personal pulpit for delivering Silicon Valley’s version of the Sermon from the Mount”.
.. it is not so much his voice as the speed at which he talks that makes lunch like navigating conversational rapids. He rushes at sentences, starting so many with “And”, or “So”, it is as if his speech cannot keep pace with his ideas. The transcript of our two-hour conversation comes to 20,000 words.
.. I’m really boring. My wife and I have no social life. We don’t travel. We don’t go on vacation. We don’t go out.”
.. We watch an unbelievable amount of TV or movies.” He gossips about The Honourable Woman series, and attributes the creative renaissance of television to its expanding internet audience.
.. He likes television, he says, because it puts the writer in charge, and compares it to the best tech companies which are also built when you put founders in charge for long periods. “By the way, writers are often crazy; they’re unpredictable, they don’t necessarily operate on a budget or timetable you might want. They argue a lot. Which is the same thing we deal with, with founders. But you get the magic.”
.. “We look for the ones who have been programming since 10.”
.. While the position of minorities and women are obviously things Andreessen has thought about, he is bluffly dismissive of too much hand-wringing. “In 2004, it was outsourcing. In 1989, it was Japan. Now it’s China. There’s always some bogeyman. I think the destiny of the US is in our hands.”
.. All will be well, he says, provided we allow more technology. “If we don’t get it quite quickly, we will not be able to afford things like social security, Medicare. We need far higher productivity for the shrinking percentage of people who are going to be working.”All will be well, he says, provided we allow more technology. “If we don’t get it quite quickly, we will not be able to afford things like social security, Medicare. We need far higher productivity for the shrinking percentage of people who are going to be working.”
.. “There is no backlash,” he continues: technology companies remain popular with the public. “There is only the tech backlash of the New Yorker and the New York Times and of the New Republic and of Harvard University.”
.. “They’re threatened. It’s a power recalibration. There’s a coastal element to it. There’s a liberal arts versus engineering element to it.
.. It’s a CP Snow thing.” Snow, a British chemist and novelist, in the 1950s identified two camps: a liberal arts culture and a science one.
.. “Business journalism ought to do extremely well … [people need to] know what’s going on.” But “for general news people want their biases and prejudices confirmed”.
.. In the US, growth would be slowing were it not for “illegal immigration. It’s the best thing that can possibly be happening to us, and I find it ironic; nobody wants to talk about that.”
.. His biggest worry? “There are so many people paid to make the problem worse: paid to regulate, to short-sell; to activists, to the governance experts, to the analysts. The pressure that comes to bear when you’re a public company is just astonishing and it comes at you from a dozen dimensions and you’re, “I can’t believe all these people are out there getting paid to attack me like this.”
.. Besides, tech groups have access to multimillions of private capital to fund growth, so have less need for public markets. Any gains, therefore, accrue to a narrow group of wealthy private investors, such as Andreessen, rather than pension funds.