1-2-3 about Marc Andreessen
Happy Monday!
I hope you had an amazing weekend.
Let me give a brief about Marc Andreessen before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about and 3 short lessons from him for you to read this week.
Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley — and worldwide. Even in the epicentre of tech, it’s hard to find a more fascinating icon.
Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic Internet browser, the first widely used graphical web browser. He also co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. Then he co-founded Loudcloud, which sold as Opsware to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion.
1 STORY FOR YOU
Describing Marc
One day, while working at Lotus, one of my coworkers showed me a new product called Mosaic, which was developed by some students at the University of Illinois. Mosaic was essentially a graphical interface to the Internet — a technology formerly only used by scientists and researchers. It amazed me. It was so obviously the future, and I was so obviously wasting my time working on anything but the Internet.
Several months later, I read about a company called Netscape, which had been cofounded by former Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark and Mosaic inventor Marc Andreessen. I instantly decided that I should interview for a job there …
During the first interviews, I met everyone on the product management team. … The next day, the hiring manager called back to let me know that they wanted me to interview with co-founder and chief technical officer Marc Andreessen. He was 22 at the time. …
Interviewing with Marc was like no other job interview I’d ever had. Gone were questions about my resume, my career progression, and my work habits. He replaced them with a dizzying inquiry into the history of email, collaboration software, and what the future might hold. I was an expert in the topic because I’d spent the last several years working on the leading products in the category, but I was shocked by how much a 22-year-old kid knew about the history of the computer business. I’d met many really smart young people in my career, but never a young technology historian. Marc’s intellect and instincts took me aback, but beyond Marc’s historical knowledge, his insights about technologies such as replication were incisive and on point.
After the interview, I phoned my brother and told him that I’d just interviewed with Marc Andreessen, and I thought that he might be the smartest person I’d ever met.
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“In normal markets, you can have Pepsi and Coke. In technology markets, in the long run, you tend to only have one…. The big companies, though, in technology tend to have 90 percent market share. So we think that generally, these are winner-take-all markets. Generally, number one is going to get like 90 percent of the profits. Number two is going to get like 10 percent of the profits, and numbers three through 10 are going to get nothing."
“When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Always look forward
I will let this exchange speak for itself
TIM: “What advice would you give to Marc, the 20-something, at Netscape?”
MARC: “I’ve never for a moment even thought about that. I don’t do replays well. The question I’ll never answer is, ‘What would you have done differently had you known X?’ I never, ever play that game because you didn’t know X.
Disagree and then Commit
Each of their GPs [general partners] has the ability to pull the trigger on a deal without a vote or without consensus. If the person closest to the deal has a very strong degree of positive commitment and enthusiasm about it, then we should do that investment, even if everybody else in the room thinks it’s the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard. However, you don’t get to do that completely on your own without stress-testing. If necessary, they create a ‘red team.’ They’ll formally create the countervailing force to argue the other side.”
To avoid the potential problem of newer hires getting battered more than senior folks, Marc and his founding partner, Ben Horowitz, make a point of smashing each other.
“Whenever [Ben] brings in a deal, I just beat the shit out of it. I might think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard of, but I’ll just trash the crap out of it and try to get everybody else to pile on. And then, at the end of it, if he’s still pounding the table saying, ‘No, no, this is the thing…’ then we say we’re all in. We’re all behind you… It’s a ‘disagree and commit’ kind of culture. By the way, he does the same thing to me. It’s the torture test.”
Don’t fetishize failure
“I’m old-fashioned. Where I come from, people like to succeed … When I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn’t have the word ‘pivot.’ We didn’t have a fancy word for it. We just called it a fuck up.
“We do see companies that, literally, every time we meet them, they’ve pivoted. Every time, they’re off to something new, and it’s like watching a rabbit go through a maze or something. They’re never going to converge on anything because they’re never going to put the time into actually figuring it out and getting it right.”
That’s it from me, until next Monday!