#50 Marc Andreessen's Blog Archive

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso, or four energy drinks before or during the show, so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. In this series of posts, I will walk through some of my accumulated knowledge and experience in building high-tech startups.
My specific experience is from three companies I have co-founded, Netscape, Opsware, and Ning. But more generally, I've been fortunate enough to be involved in and exposed to a broad range of other startups, maybe 40 or 50 in enough detail to know what I'm talking about. As a board member, as an angel investor, as an advisor, as a friend of various founders, and as a participant in various venture capital funds.
Much of my perspective is based on Silicon Valley and the environment that we have here, the culture, the people, the venture capital base, and so on. Some of it will travel well to other regions and countries. Some probably will not. With all that out of the way, let's start at the beginning.
Why not to do a startup?
Okay, so that is from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today. So this is going to be a little different. If you're new to Founders, the premise of this podcast is really simple. I read a biography of an entrepreneur every week and then pull out ideas that I found interesting, usually from their early life, how they got started, how they think about business, things like that. But today, I wanted to cover Marc Andreessen. The reason I say this is different is because, as far as I know, there's not a biography or an autobiography of Marc. I was introduced to Marc through, I think I found out about him through Twitter, and I've come to know his ideas and thoughts, mainly through podcasts. Personally, I find him very interesting. I like how fast he talks, and he seems to have a wide, he's able to talk about a wide subject matter, a wide array of different subjects, rather. So what I did not know, though, was about 10 years ago, he was quite the prolific blogger. I stumbled upon this link that led me to downloading a free ebook. So I'm going to leave that link in the show notes, of course. And that ebook is a collection. So Marc runs a venture capital firm, and I don't know if he did this or the firm did this or somebody else did, but they selected some of his blog posts, which as far as I know are not online anymore. And they put them into an ebook that's free to download. So this isn't going to be a biography of Marc, but this is going to be an explicit way he thinks about building companies, which I think is still valuable to you, the listener. And like I said, I think it's definitely worth checking out. I've read the ebook now twice, and it's I think close to 200 pages, and there's just not a lot of fluff in there. So let me just go ahead and jump into that. It's true that there are a lot of great things about doing a startup. They include, based on my experience, the opportunity to be in control of your own destiny. So he says that's most fundamental, and he's going to explain. He goes, you get to succeed or fail on your own, and you don't have some bozo telling you what to do. For a certain kind of personality, this alone is reason enough to do a startup. The second reason, the opportunity to create something new, also super important, the proverbial blank sheet of paper. You have the ability, actually the obligation, to imagine a product that does not exist yet and bring it into existence without any of the constraints normally faced by larger companies.