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Marc Andreessen on what VCs look for in startups “The conventional statistics are that about 200 of the 4,000 venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About 15 of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue, and those 15 will generate something on the... order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year.” He continues: “Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. You’re either in one of the 15 or you’re not.” As Marc explains, VCs are looking for extreme outliers, and when they’re evaluating your startup, they’re asking themselves if this business is one of the 15 businesses that year that will get to $100MM in revenue. One principle Marc believes helps firms invest in outliers is investing in strength rather than lack of weakness. “The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. ‘Ok this is reasonable, I’ll put money into it.’ But what you find with those checkbox deals is that they don’t have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier.” The takeaway for founders here is to make sure they highlight to VCs during the funding process that they have a really extreme strength across an important dimension. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)show more

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Q: What are VCs looking for in the companies they fund? Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and venture firm a16z, explains in the clip below that venture capitalist business is a game of outliers: “The conventional statistics are that about 200 of the 4,000 venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About 15 of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue, and those 15 will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year.” He continues: “Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. You’re either in one of the 15 or you’re not.” Most VCs are looking for extreme outliers, and when they’re evaluating your startup, they’re asking themselves if this business is one of the 15 businesses that year that will get to $100MM in revenue. One principle Marc believes helps firms invest in outliers is: invest in strength rather than lack of weakness. “The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. ‘Ok this is reasonable, I’ll put money into it.’ But what you find with those checkbox deals is that they don’t have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier.” The takeaway for founders here is to make sure they highlight to VCs during the funding process that they have a really extreme strength across an important dimension.

Q: What are VCs looking for in the companies they fund? Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and venture firm a16z, explains in the clip below that venture capitalist business is a game of outliers: “The conventional statistics are that about 200 of the 4,000 venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About 15 of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue, and those 15 will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year.” He continues: “Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. You’re either in one of the 15 or you’re not.” Most VCs are looking for extreme outliers, and when they’re evaluating your startup, they’re asking themselves if this business is one of the 15 businesses that year that will get to $100MM in revenue. One principle Marc believes helps firms invest in outliers is: invest in strength rather than lack of weakness. “The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. ‘Ok this is reasonable, I’ll put money into it.’ But what you find with those checkbox deals is that they don’t have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier.” The takeaway for founders here is to make sure they highlight to VCs during the funding process that they have a really extreme strength across an important dimension.

Michael McGuiness

587,670 views • 3 years ago

Marc Andreessen: The VC business is a game of outliers. "We have this concept—invest in strength vs. lack of weakness." "The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check." "But what you find with those checkbox deals is, they often don't have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don't have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier." "On the other side, the companies that have really extreme strengths often have serious flaws. So one of the cautionary lessons of venture capital is—if you don't invest on the basis of serious flaws, you don't invest in most of the big winners." Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸, 2014 at Y Combinator

Marc Andreessen: The VC business is a game of outliers. "We have this concept—invest in strength vs. lack of weakness." "The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check." "But what you find with those checkbox deals is, they often don't have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don't have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier." "On the other side, the companies that have really extreme strengths often have serious flaws. So one of the cautionary lessons of venture capital is—if you don't invest on the basis of serious flaws, you don't invest in most of the big winners." Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸, 2014 at Y Combinator

a16z

82,454 views • 6 months ago

Fantastic breakdown from Ben Horowitz on the history of venture capital and how the industry has evolved over time If you are building a VC firm or an entrepreneur thinking about raising money from venture capital, this is worth a listen "In venture capital, the fundamental thing you have to be is top tier. If you are not top tier, the best entrepreneurs will not take your money. There are times when the market is so blazing hot that you can be a not-important VC firm and jump into good deals to make money. But most times, if you are not top tier, you will go out of business."

Fantastic breakdown from Ben Horowitz on the history of venture capital and how the industry has evolved over time If you are building a VC firm or an entrepreneur thinking about raising money from venture capital, this is worth a listen "In venture capital, the fundamental thing you have to be is top tier. If you are not top tier, the best entrepreneurs will not take your money. There are times when the market is so blazing hot that you can be a not-important VC firm and jump into good deals to make money. But most times, if you are not top tier, you will go out of business."

Boring_Business

21,897 views • 6 months ago

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”

Startup Archive

17,333 views • 6 months ago

Jensen Huang: “VCs don’t invest in business plans” When asked for advice on business plans and raising venture capital, Jensen tells the student audience at Stanford: “VCs don’t invest in business plans… They invest in great people. And so the question is: do they trust you? Your reputation matters. Your history matters.” He explains that a one of the key reasons Sequoia wrote the initial check into NVIDIA was because he had done great work with Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun. Jensen also argues that you need to have a vision that’s “sufficiently large to invest in.” Because of the nature of the businesses VCs invest in, the odds of success are rather low. “If they need to put in $10 million and the market is only $20 million, they’ll never get that $10 million back with a reasonable return.” But market size is secondary to people: “You might have to reinvent yourself over time, and if you want to reinvent yourself, you need to have great people. That’s why great people are so important.” Video source: Stanford Online (2011)

Jensen Huang: “VCs don’t invest in business plans” When asked for advice on business plans and raising venture capital, Jensen tells the student audience at Stanford: “VCs don’t invest in business plans… They invest in great people. And so the question is: do they trust you? Your reputation matters. Your history matters.” He explains that a one of the key reasons Sequoia wrote the initial check into NVIDIA was because he had done great work with Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun. Jensen also argues that you need to have a vision that’s “sufficiently large to invest in.” Because of the nature of the businesses VCs invest in, the odds of success are rather low. “If they need to put in $10 million and the market is only $20 million, they’ll never get that $10 million back with a reasonable return.” But market size is secondary to people: “You might have to reinvent yourself over time, and if you want to reinvent yourself, you need to have great people. That’s why great people are so important.” Video source: Stanford Online (2011)

Startup Archive

117,152 views • 1 year ago

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: 1. Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” 2. Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” 3.Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” 4. Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: 1. Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” 2. Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” 3.Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” 4. Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Startup Archive

57,689 views • 1 year ago

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Startup Archive

26,944 views • 1 month ago

David Sacks: Debt makes your company more fragile Friedberg: “I hate this business. I think venture debt's the worst vulture-like business in Silicon Valley. “ Sacks: “Right. I've always hated when founders take on venture debt. Part of it is that founders forget that they have to pay it back. They treat it like venture capital and they forget about that, and then they get surprised. But the other thing I've never liked about it is it makes you more fragile. It basically subjects you to a bunch of business covenants, and it makes it harder for you to do an abrupt shift in your business, because now you've got a bank looking over your shoulder and they want to make sure they get paid, and they have to review your financials and all the rest of it. And to your point, J Cal, the companies that have free cash flow right now are the ones that again, have the most maneuverability. I hate taking away maneuverability from founders, and that is what debt does because it subjects you to a fixed schedule of payments. And so this is always a thing to remember, whether you're a business or you are an individual, when you put on that debt, it makes you more vulnerable to big disruptions in the market.”

David Sacks: Debt makes your company more fragile Friedberg: “I hate this business. I think venture debt's the worst vulture-like business in Silicon Valley. “ Sacks: “Right. I've always hated when founders take on venture debt. Part of it is that founders forget that they have to pay it back. They treat it like venture capital and they forget about that, and then they get surprised. But the other thing I've never liked about it is it makes you more fragile. It basically subjects you to a bunch of business covenants, and it makes it harder for you to do an abrupt shift in your business, because now you've got a bank looking over your shoulder and they want to make sure they get paid, and they have to review your financials and all the rest of it. And to your point, J Cal, the companies that have free cash flow right now are the ones that again, have the most maneuverability. I hate taking away maneuverability from founders, and that is what debt does because it subjects you to a fixed schedule of payments. And so this is always a thing to remember, whether you're a business or you are an individual, when you put on that debt, it makes you more vulnerable to big disruptions in the market.”

The All-In Podcast

79,095 views • 3 months ago

Marc Andreessen explains IBM founder Thomas Watson‘s famous “Wild Ducks” program Marc believes that the organizational complexity is one reason you don’t see innovation at large companies. But that’s not the only reason: “I think there’s another deeper thing underneath that that people really don’t like to talk about, which is the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. You’re not going to have a hundred of them in a company… You’re going to have 3, 8, or 10, maybe.” Marc learned this early in his career at IBM, which was one of the most powerful companies in the world and had over 440,000 employees at the time. “They had a system that worked really well for 50 years. Most of the employees in the company were expected to basically follow rules… But they had this category of people they called ‘Wild Ducks.’ This was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson came up with. They often had the formal title of an IBM Fellow and they were the people who could make new things.” He continues: “There were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new, they didn’t have to report back, they got to pull people off of other projects to work with them, they got budget when they needed it, and they reported directly to the CEO.” Marc recalls one wild duck, Andy Heller, putting his cowboy boots on the conference room table “amongst an ocean of men in blue suits, white shirts, and red ties.” It was fine for Andy Heller to do that, but it was not fine for you to do that. “They very specifically identified almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play by different rules… Their job is to invent the next breakthrough product. We, IBM management, know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invent the next product. We know it’s going to be crazy Andy Heller and his cowboy boots.” Marc believes companies like IBM and HP ultimately collapsed when venture capital emerged as a parallel funding system for these wild ducks to start their own companies. Video source: Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (2023)

Marc Andreessen explains IBM founder Thomas Watson‘s famous “Wild Ducks” program Marc believes that the organizational complexity is one reason you don’t see innovation at large companies. But that’s not the only reason: “I think there’s another deeper thing underneath that that people really don’t like to talk about, which is the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. You’re not going to have a hundred of them in a company… You’re going to have 3, 8, or 10, maybe.” Marc learned this early in his career at IBM, which was one of the most powerful companies in the world and had over 440,000 employees at the time. “They had a system that worked really well for 50 years. Most of the employees in the company were expected to basically follow rules… But they had this category of people they called ‘Wild Ducks.’ This was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson came up with. They often had the formal title of an IBM Fellow and they were the people who could make new things.” He continues: “There were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new, they didn’t have to report back, they got to pull people off of other projects to work with them, they got budget when they needed it, and they reported directly to the CEO.” Marc recalls one wild duck, Andy Heller, putting his cowboy boots on the conference room table “amongst an ocean of men in blue suits, white shirts, and red ties.” It was fine for Andy Heller to do that, but it was not fine for you to do that. “They very specifically identified almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play by different rules… Their job is to invent the next breakthrough product. We, IBM management, know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invent the next product. We know it’s going to be crazy Andy Heller and his cowboy boots.” Marc believes companies like IBM and HP ultimately collapsed when venture capital emerged as a parallel funding system for these wild ducks to start their own companies. Video source: Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (2023)

Startup Archive

358,782 views • 1 year ago

From Charles Hudson on why it's potentially more dangerous to sit out of a bubble than to participate: "That's my lesson from 2021. Because it’s not as if the people who were sober and restrained during 2021 have gotten a lot of credit from their LPs for having not participated in the circus. So I’m like, is that really what modern venture capital is about today? If there’s a speculative frenzy, the rational thing to do, if your goal is to remain a venture capitalist, might be to participate in the frenzy. Even if you have deep skepticism about the final outcome. You need to remain relevant. You need to remain in business and be able to raise capital. And to do that, your firm has to be relevant. And feel like you get the message. And if that's true, that leads you in a really different set of directions than it would if you’re just like, “Hey, the people who go crazy and lose a bunch of money on bad things will be punished. And the punishment will be you will not raise another fund.” I don’t really think it works that way."

From Charles Hudson on why it's potentially more dangerous to sit out of a bubble than to participate: "That's my lesson from 2021. Because it’s not as if the people who were sober and restrained during 2021 have gotten a lot of credit from their LPs for having not participated in the circus. So I’m like, is that really what modern venture capital is about today? If there’s a speculative frenzy, the rational thing to do, if your goal is to remain a venture capitalist, might be to participate in the frenzy. Even if you have deep skepticism about the final outcome. You need to remain relevant. You need to remain in business and be able to raise capital. And to do that, your firm has to be relevant. And feel like you get the message. And if that's true, that leads you in a really different set of directions than it would if you’re just like, “Hey, the people who go crazy and lose a bunch of money on bad things will be punished. And the punishment will be you will not raise another fund.” I don’t really think it works that way."

Turner Novak 🍌🧢

100,376 views • 1 month ago

Marc Andreessen explains why warm referrals to venture capitalists are important As Marc explains in the clip below: “The way the top-end venture capitalist firms work is they’ll basically take you seriously if you come in introduced by somebody they’ve worked with before, and they won’t take you seriously if you don’t.” While this may seem unfair, Marc explains that securing a warm referral should be viewed as your first test: “It’s the first test of your ability to network your way to the investor… If you can’t figure out a way to network your way to a VC firm—which of course is in the business of meeting founders—then you’re unlikely to be able to network your way into hiring a great team or selling your product to customers.” He concludes: “The role of the warm referral is misinterpreted. I think you just need to view it as the first test, and it’s a test that you just want to pass.”

Marc Andreessen explains why warm referrals to venture capitalists are important As Marc explains in the clip below: “The way the top-end venture capitalist firms work is they’ll basically take you seriously if you come in introduced by somebody they’ve worked with before, and they won’t take you seriously if you don’t.” While this may seem unfair, Marc explains that securing a warm referral should be viewed as your first test: “It’s the first test of your ability to network your way to the investor… If you can’t figure out a way to network your way to a VC firm—which of course is in the business of meeting founders—then you’re unlikely to be able to network your way into hiring a great team or selling your product to customers.” He concludes: “The role of the warm referral is misinterpreted. I think you just need to view it as the first test, and it’s a test that you just want to pass.”

Michael McGuiness

456,518 views • 2 years ago

Marc Andreessen on how to get people to join your 3-person startup Marc says founders have two tools at their disposal to win new hires: 1) Stock options, and 2) vision. He explains: “The best entrepreneurs are really good at selling people on their company precisely because they can explain how the world is going to look in a way that is so compelling.” Marc points to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as the epitome of this: “If you get within 10 feet of Steve Jobs, whatever he says in the next 20 minutes, you’re going to walk out of there believing. He can say that the sky is purple, and you’re like yep that makes total sense . . . The best entrepreneurs all tend to have that in common and tend to be really good at that. It’s essentially sales — selling to employees. It’s an incredibly valuable skill to be able to do that. That plus stock options.” The other thing Marc has observed about hiring over the years is that right employees have to self-select into your company, even though that can be incredibly frustrating at times: “If you hired all the people you interviewed, it would turn out that 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them you probably shouldn’t have hired anyway. So what the best companies do is they provide a very stark idea of what the company is and what is it isn’t: ‘We are a company where people are expected to work 18 hour days and if you don’t like that, don’t come here’ or ‘We are a company where people expect to go home at 5pm every day and if you think that’ll be frustrating’ — whatever it is.” Marc gives the humorous example of Asana where it was a requirement that the whole company did yoga together: “If you like yoga, this is the company for you. If you don’t like yoga, don’t go there. You’re going to be asked to put your feet in positions that you’re completely uncomfortable with.” He continues: “I think the very best companies tend to be polarizing. So if in your hiring process, you’re turning people off as much as you’re turning them on because they’re deciding ‘this is clearly not the right fit for me,’ I think that’s a good thing.”

Marc Andreessen on how to get people to join your 3-person startup Marc says founders have two tools at their disposal to win new hires: 1) Stock options, and 2) vision. He explains: “The best entrepreneurs are really good at selling people on their company precisely because they can explain how the world is going to look in a way that is so compelling.” Marc points to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as the epitome of this: “If you get within 10 feet of Steve Jobs, whatever he says in the next 20 minutes, you’re going to walk out of there believing. He can say that the sky is purple, and you’re like yep that makes total sense . . . The best entrepreneurs all tend to have that in common and tend to be really good at that. It’s essentially sales — selling to employees. It’s an incredibly valuable skill to be able to do that. That plus stock options.” The other thing Marc has observed about hiring over the years is that right employees have to self-select into your company, even though that can be incredibly frustrating at times: “If you hired all the people you interviewed, it would turn out that 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them you probably shouldn’t have hired anyway. So what the best companies do is they provide a very stark idea of what the company is and what is it isn’t: ‘We are a company where people are expected to work 18 hour days and if you don’t like that, don’t come here’ or ‘We are a company where people expect to go home at 5pm every day and if you think that’ll be frustrating’ — whatever it is.” Marc gives the humorous example of Asana where it was a requirement that the whole company did yoga together: “If you like yoga, this is the company for you. If you don’t like yoga, don’t go there. You’re going to be asked to put your feet in positions that you’re completely uncomfortable with.” He continues: “I think the very best companies tend to be polarizing. So if in your hiring process, you’re turning people off as much as you’re turning them on because they’re deciding ‘this is clearly not the right fit for me,’ I think that’s a good thing.”

Startup Archive

69,518 views • 6 months ago

Marc Andreessen (Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸) on getting a job as a venture capitalist in 2025: "Have a track record early as somebody who is in the loop specifically on new product development." "Participate in the creation of a great new product and a great new company and really demonstrate that you know how to do that." “There are great VCs who have not done that, but that’s the foundational skill set founders want to see.” For aspiring investors: get in the trenches, ship something people love, then spot that same rocket fuel from the investor seat.

Marc Andreessen (Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸) on getting a job as a venture capitalist in 2025: "Have a track record early as somebody who is in the loop specifically on new product development." "Participate in the creation of a great new product and a great new company and really demonstrate that you know how to do that." “There are great VCs who have not done that, but that’s the foundational skill set founders want to see.” For aspiring investors: get in the trenches, ship something people love, then spot that same rocket fuel from the investor seat.

TBPN

22,720 views • 1 year ago

Peter Thiel on why all trends are overrated and one-of-a-kind companies are underrated Peter Thiel is asked what students should study in college. He thinks this is similar to the question “what are future trends in technology?” “What I will say about trends in technology and areas of study is that they’re probably all overrated,” Thiel explains. “When you have something that can be reduced to a buzzword, it means that a lot of people are doing it and they’re somehow inadequately differentiated in that field.” On the other hand, Thiel believes that one-of-a-kind companies that don’t easily fit into an existing narrative or trend are underrated. He gives Airbnb as an example—any existing category would miss the uniqueness of the business. “Great companies always have this one-of-a-kind attribute,” Thiel observes. And he suspects that areas of study are similar: “If you’re in a big area of study, where everyone’s studying the same thing, you’re not adequately differentiating yourself from other people… I think people are spending too much time studying the things everybody else is studying, and they’re spending too little time studying more particular things that they’re really passionate about.” Video source: Northwestern Engineering (2014)

Peter Thiel on why all trends are overrated and one-of-a-kind companies are underrated Peter Thiel is asked what students should study in college. He thinks this is similar to the question “what are future trends in technology?” “What I will say about trends in technology and areas of study is that they’re probably all overrated,” Thiel explains. “When you have something that can be reduced to a buzzword, it means that a lot of people are doing it and they’re somehow inadequately differentiated in that field.” On the other hand, Thiel believes that one-of-a-kind companies that don’t easily fit into an existing narrative or trend are underrated. He gives Airbnb as an example—any existing category would miss the uniqueness of the business. “Great companies always have this one-of-a-kind attribute,” Thiel observes. And he suspects that areas of study are similar: “If you’re in a big area of study, where everyone’s studying the same thing, you’re not adequately differentiating yourself from other people… I think people are spending too much time studying the things everybody else is studying, and they’re spending too little time studying more particular things that they’re really passionate about.” Video source: Northwestern Engineering (2014)

Startup Archive

139,271 views • 11 months ago

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10-year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10-year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Startup Archive

407,717 views • 2 years ago

There is no venture capital firm like Founders Fund, and there is no writer who tells venture capital firms' stories like Mario Gabriele. In their respective crafts, both have No Rivals. That is the title of Mario's epic four-part series on Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, and the topic of our conversation on Hyperlegible. Sometimes, someone writes something so good that it fills me with a healthy, respectful, chapeau-inducing jealousy. Rene Girard would probably have something to say about that. No Rivals is one of those pieces. On this week's Hyperlegible, we talked about how he got such in-depth access, how he wrangled everything he learned into the beautifully coherent story he told, and of course, we talked all about how Founders Fund has built one of the best, and certainly the most unique, venture capital firm in the world. And we end the conversation, as he ended the series, by discussing whether and how Founders Fund will be able to stay original and dominant when everyone is trying to copy them.

There is no venture capital firm like Founders Fund, and there is no writer who tells venture capital firms' stories like Mario Gabriele. In their respective crafts, both have No Rivals. That is the title of Mario's epic four-part series on Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, and the topic of our conversation on Hyperlegible. Sometimes, someone writes something so good that it fills me with a healthy, respectful, chapeau-inducing jealousy. Rene Girard would probably have something to say about that. No Rivals is one of those pieces. On this week's Hyperlegible, we talked about how he got such in-depth access, how he wrangled everything he learned into the beautifully coherent story he told, and of course, we talked all about how Founders Fund has built one of the best, and certainly the most unique, venture capital firm in the world. And we end the conversation, as he ended the series, by discussing whether and how Founders Fund will be able to stay original and dominant when everyone is trying to copy them.

Packy McCormick

47,192 views • 1 year ago

NVDIA CEO Jensen Huang: Your startup doesn't need a business plan “I didn’t know how to write a business plan… Making a financial forecast that nobody knows is going to be right or wrong turns out to not be that important.” Jensen continues: “I think that the art of writing a business plan ought to be much, much shorter. It should force you to concisely answer: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? What is the unmet need you believe will emerge? And what is it that you’re going to do that is sufficiently hard that when everybody else finds out it’s a good idea, they’re not going to swarm it and make you obsolete? It has to be sufficiently hard to do.” Marc Andreessen echoes similar points in a separate interview: “The process of planning is very valuable for forcing you to think hard about what you’re doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. In particular, now that we’re VCs, we’re evaluating pitches and when people come in, we want to hear their plan and we want to hear it in some detail because we want to see that they can think about the entire thing end-to-end. And if their initial plan doesn’t make sense, then obviously there’s an issue because they’re not quite capable of fully thinking this through. But when you get somebody who comes in and they present you the perfect plan and everything is fully integrated and makes sense, all you know from that is that they can come up with a good plan—which is good! But the odds that will be the plan they succeed on is still very small.” Video source: Acquired Podcast (2023)

NVDIA CEO Jensen Huang: Your startup doesn't need a business plan “I didn’t know how to write a business plan… Making a financial forecast that nobody knows is going to be right or wrong turns out to not be that important.” Jensen continues: “I think that the art of writing a business plan ought to be much, much shorter. It should force you to concisely answer: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? What is the unmet need you believe will emerge? And what is it that you’re going to do that is sufficiently hard that when everybody else finds out it’s a good idea, they’re not going to swarm it and make you obsolete? It has to be sufficiently hard to do.” Marc Andreessen echoes similar points in a separate interview: “The process of planning is very valuable for forcing you to think hard about what you’re doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. In particular, now that we’re VCs, we’re evaluating pitches and when people come in, we want to hear their plan and we want to hear it in some detail because we want to see that they can think about the entire thing end-to-end. And if their initial plan doesn’t make sense, then obviously there’s an issue because they’re not quite capable of fully thinking this through. But when you get somebody who comes in and they present you the perfect plan and everything is fully integrated and makes sense, all you know from that is that they can come up with a good plan—which is good! But the odds that will be the plan they succeed on is still very small.” Video source: Acquired Podcast (2023)

Startup Archive

34,028 views • 6 months ago

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Founder Mode

39,005 views • 6 months ago