Marc Andreessen’s Entrepreneurial Insights were rescued from bit rot and decay first by Jed Christiansen and then by the Internet Archive.
Marc Andreessen’s Entrepreneurial Insights
Rescued from Bit Rot by Jed Christiansen
Marc Andreessen started a new VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, in July but has yet to explain why he deleted his excellent series of articles on entrepreneurship from his site.
I am glad that Jed Christiansen has rescued them from bit rot. Two posts that are definitely worth reading are
- The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
- Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data
Marc Andreessen’s Entrepreneurial Insights on Product/Market Fit
The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters which talks about “product market fit” and how to achieve it.
If you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you.
- First obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success — some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.
- Second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup — team, product, and market.
At any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose. […]
The #1 company-killer is lack of market.
Andy Rachleff puts it this way:
- When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
- When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
- When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure.
Market matters most. […]
The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
- You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
- And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. […]
Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens. My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit.
Marc Andreessen in The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
Marc Andreessen’s Entrepreneurial Insights on Entrepreneur Age
Andreessen takes “Age and Outstanding Achievement: What Do We Know After a Century of Research?” by Dean Simonton and draw several conclusions:
- Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.
- This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.
- Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.
- The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.
- Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.
Marc Andreessen in Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data
(also read Naval Ravikant‘s response “The Aging Entrepreneur“)
Related Blog Posts
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- Product-Market Fit is a Fraction Not a Bit
- Three Advantages of Older Entrepreneurs in B2B Startups
- Three Advantages of Younger Entrepreneurs in B2B Startups
- Vinod Khosla on the Need for Vision and the Value of Youth
Khosla seems to suggest that if you work at it you can keep yourself mentally flexible. I am guided in part by David Galenson‘s research in “Young Geniuses and Old Masters” (also a book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses” that there are two distinct styles of innovation: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual innovators work deductively and make breakthroughs when they are young and first enter a field, formulating new approaches that obsolete existing paradigms. Experimental innovators work inductively and make their major contributions later in life, after a long period of tinkering, exploration and trial and error. Galenson essentially agrees with Khosla that “breakthrough ideas” come from younger conceptual innovators but suggests that “Old Masters” continue to refine and deepen their understanding of old ideas with additional experimentation yielding further–often significant–improvements.