Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z & Netscape

**David Senra** (0:02)
I wasn't expecting to start here. I want to talk about why you were consuming so much caffeine that you noticed that your heart was skipping a beat.

**Marc Andreessen** (0:10)
I love caffeine. So for a very long time, I always said that the ultimate day, like the perfect day was 12 hours of caffeine followed by four hours of alcohol. Like that's just like the ultimate.
I did cut out, or at least for now, I've cut out the four hours of alcohol. But caffeine is just like one of nature's most marvelous things. But it turns out you can overdo it. And so, yeah, a while ago, I was drinking so much coffee at work that I was sitting in a meeting a couple years ago, and I started to feel just a little bit something felt off. And I just took my pulse. And I realized I was skipping about every 10th heartbeat. So I had like an existential crisis, because I'm like, all right, I need to call 911 It's just like, am I about to have a heart attack? Am I about to die? And so I go under the table and I Google on it. I'm like, is this a problem? And Dr. Google said, no, it's OK. It's fine. You just might want to cut back a little bit on the caffeine.

**David Senra** (0:57)
You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs talk about, but I think it's super important, that you don't have any levels of introspection.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:03)
Yes, zero, as little as possible. Why? Move forward. Go. Yeah, I don't know. I've just found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home.

**David Senra** (1:14)
So I've read obviously 410 biographies of his huge-scale entrepreneurs, and that was one of the most surprising things. What's the most surprising thing that you've learned from this? Like, oh, they have little or zero introspection. Like Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like, I like building Walmart, I'm going to keep building Walmart, I'm going to make more Walmarts and just kept doing it over and over again.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:32)
And you probably know if you go back, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like the whole idea, I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are kind of manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s.

**David Senra** (1:44)
Say more about that.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:45)
A great amount of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. At any prior point, right, it's all a new construct.
It was, you know, first Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, right, which was like a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago. And then, and then, you know, for a long time, it was all right, the individual runs, right? And like does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology, does all these things. And then, you know, kind of this kind of guilt-based whammy, you know, kind of showed up from Europe, a lot of it from Vienna in the 1910s, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to like, you know, basically second guess the individual, we need to criticize the individual, the individual needs to self-criticize, right? The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to, you know, dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.

**David Senra** (2:32)
Do you find a lot of the greatest founders that you've spent time with and backed and partnered with are at low introspection?

**Marc Andreessen** (2:38)
Yeah, generally, although in fairness, you know, the introspection is probably linked to the personality trait of neuroticism, right? So, you know, a lot of the best founders are, you know, I think, like 0% neuroticism. Like, they just don't get emotionally phased by things that happen, which is a superpower when you're an entrepreneur. But having said that, some of the great entrepreneurs are, in fact, very neurotic. Like, you know, that's also the case. It's not a, you know, it's not, maybe it's a nice to have to be low neuroticism, but not necessary. And so, you know, there are some that kind of get wrapped around the axle on kind of personal issues. You know, as you know, these days, sometimes that then, you know, kind of turns into use of psychedelics, you know, different kinds of hallucinogenic drugs. And, you know, that's like one very interesting kind of trajectory for, you know, kind of the culture of the country, culture of the world. And, you know, we'll see where that goes.