The Mind of Marc Andreessen (The New Yorker)
Plenty to learn here, even if sometimes the ‘wisdom’ seems trite. For example, Andreesen says of the dot-com crash, “we were five or six years too early”, but that insight is really nothing special. It is not a statement particular to the dot-com bust. There are always people who are, let’s say, five years too early. The essence of a boom and bust is that some people get too far ahead of reality.
As with the best New Yorker articles, the author (Tad Friend) sets that moment up very well. Many little tidbits appear, too, among them a reference to “sharing-economy shibboleths”.
Although presented in a positive way, Friend must have meant for the reader to see the contradiction in Peter Thiel and Andreessen agreeing that he “may not be as suited to making early, counterintuitive investments” as Thiel is, while he “is well positioned, because of his broad knowledge and flexible mind-set, to respond to incremental changes in an array of fields.” That’s never (in this piece, at least) the ‘visionary’ argument that Andreesen is making.
That point comes back again when Andreesen says to Horowitz, “What if we’re the most evolved dinosaur, and Naval is a bird?” He doesn’t say mammal, does he? Birds were only incrementally successful. Yes, they were very, very successful, but which animal class ends up inventing the Internet? It wasn’t the class Aves.
Here are some more of the pearls from the article, but there are many more, threaded together by Friend into an entertaining and educational tapestry.
“‘You can’t find a venture fund anywhere that’s not in the top quartile,’ one L.P. said sardonically.”
“Andreessen told his colleagues, ‘… If it’s marketplace, it’s defensible; if it’s enterprise, she can be undercut.’ If Ringwald’s customers were the workers, who would keep using LearnUp as they moved from job to job,” she could easily grow the business. “If her customers were actually the companies, they could start doing the training themselves—or another startup could.”
“In venture, it’s not batting average that matters; it’s slugging average.”
“‘Marc 1.0 was Jim Clark,’ Andreessen told me, referring to his impulsive co-founder. ‘Marc 2.0 was trying to get as polished as possible, more socialized. And Marc 3.0 is a combo.'”
“‘Venture doesn’t scale,’ Diane Mulcahy, the L.P. and venture critic, said. ‘Raising and investing more doesn’t increase the number of billion-dollar companies.'”
“I was struck by the parallels between Andreessen and both “Peanuts”—in which Charlie Brown has a massive bald head and the parents are kept offstage—and its creator.”