Marc Andreessen — AI, crypto, 1000 Elon Musks, regrets, vulnerabilities, & managerial revolution

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:01)
Okay, today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Marc Andreessen, which means for the first time on the podcast, the guest and the host playback speed will actually match. So Marc, welcome to The Lunar Society.

**Marc Andreessen** (0:13)
Good morning, and thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:16)
My pleasure. So have you been tempted any time in the last 14 years to start a company? Not A16Z, but another company?

**Marc Andreessen** (0:24)
No, it's, I mean, we have. I mean, so the short answer is we did. Yeah, so we started our venture firm in 2009 And so it's sort of given my partner Ben and I a chance to kind of fully exercise our entrepreneurial ambitions and energies to build this firm. We're over 500 people now at the firm, which is small for a tech company, but it's big for a venture capital firm.
And so it's let us kind of fully get all those urges up.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:50)
But there's no product where you think, oh, God, this needs to exist, and I should be the one to make it happen?

**Marc Andreessen** (0:56)
I mean, we look at this kind of through the lens of what would I do if I were 23 again? And so I always have those ideas. But starting a company is really... Look, starting a company is like a real commitment. It really changes your life.
My favorite all-time quote on being a startup founder is from Sean Parker, who says, starting a company is like chewing glass. Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood.
That quote always gives people like this. I always get this queasy look on the face of people I'm talking to when I roll that quote out. But it really is. I mean, it's really intense. And so I always tell people... Whenever anybody asks me if I should start a company, the answer is always no.
Because it's such a gigantic, emotional, irrational kind of thing to do. The implications of that decision are so profound in terms of how you live your life. Yeah, I mean, look, there are plenty of great ideas and plenty of interesting things to do, but the actual process is so difficult. It gets romanticized a lot, and it's not romantic. It's a very difficult thing to do. And I did it multiple times before, so at least for now, I don't revisit that.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:04)
But being a venture capitalist is not like that? When you're in the 30th pitch of the day, you're not wondering if chewing glass might not be more comfortable?

**Marc Andreessen** (2:11)
No, it's different. So it's different. Well, I'll tell you how I experienced it. People are wired to respond to stress in different ways, and I think there are people who are wired to be extremely productive and actually get very happy under extreme levels of stress. I'm fine with stress. In fact, I incline towards it, and if I don't have any, I seek it out. But past a certain level, I don't really enjoy it. It degrades the quality of my life, not improves it.
Maybe I have an affinity for self-torture. And so there's stress in everything, and there's stress in every profession, and there's certainly stress in being an investor, but it's a completely different kind of stress. Because when you're a startup founder, it's all on you. It's like everything that happens is on you. Everything that goes wrong is on you. When there's an issue in the company, a crisis in the company, it's on you to fix it. You're up at four in the morning all the time worrying about things. And investors, there's just a layer of buffer.
We have no end of problems, and we help our portfolio companies as best we can with all kinds of issues. But some crisis inside a company, it's not my company, not everything is my fault.
So it's a more diffuse kind of stress, and honestly, easier to deal with.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:33)
Got it. That made sense.
Why did you stop your blog? Would you ever start it again?

**Marc Andreessen** (3:38)
So I write intermittently. The original blog was like 2007 to 2009 kind of thing.
And then we started the firm, and then that kind of, it's like having a new baby, that kind of soaked up all my time. And then I write intermittently, and then I do social media intermittently. Basically it's just, part of it is I have a lot to say and a lot that I'm interested in, but also I like to experiment with the new formats, and I like to kind of, we do live in a fundamentally different world as a result of social media and the internet and blogging and Twitter and all the rest of it. So I try to keep my hand in it and experiment, but I kind of rotate. I rotate both how I spend my time and rotate what I think makes sense.