Interview with a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen: Founders are better off not introspecting; humans are always accompanied by fear when it comes to new things.

Source: David Senra

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Podcast host David Senra recently had a nearly two-hour in-depth conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z. During the conversation, Marc shared his personal habits, entrepreneurial philosophy, and management methods. This article summarizes the highlights of the conversation.

Before we begin, let’s learn about Marc Andreessen’s past experience.

Marc Andreessen is the co-founder and general partner of a16z, one of the world's most influential venture capital firms. Before becoming an investor, he was a pragmatist. At the age of 22, Marc co-founded Mosaic, the first widely used graphical web browser; later, he co-founded Netscape, a company that brought the internet into mainstream American society. Netscape's IPO in 1995 triggered the first tech boom. The battle between Microsoft and Netscape became one of the most watched business battles in capitalist history.

After leaving Netscape, he co-founded Loudcloud. The company survived the dot-com bubble burst through corporate transformation, eventually changing its name to Opsware and being sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.65 billion.

In 2009, Marc and Ben Horowitz founded a16z, with a philosophy drastically different from traditional venture capital firms: they believed the best venture capital firms should truly help entrepreneurs, not just run financial operations. The firm's early investments included Facebook, Airbnb, GitHub, and Coinbase, and it actively expanded into cryptocurrency, biotechnology, defense, and AI. Marc's 2011 article, "Software Is Eating the World," reshaped the entire industry's understanding of the current situation and remains one of the most cited articles in Silicon Valley history.

Host: I didn't actually intend to start with this topic. I wanted to talk about why you consume so much caffeine that you find your heart skipping a beat.

Marc: I absolutely love caffeine. For a long time, I said the perfect day was 12 hours of coffee followed by 4 hours of alcohol – pure bliss. But for health reasons, I've at least given up those 4 hours of alcohol now. Caffeine truly is one of nature's most amazing products, though it's clear that it shouldn't be consumed in excess.

Host: You once said something that I really like, and it's something I rarely hear other entrepreneurs talk about: you think it's very important not to introspect.

Marc: Yes, zero introspection, the less the better. Why introspect? Just move forward and take action. I've found that people who dwell on the past are often trapped in it. This is a big problem, both at work and at home.

If you go back 100 years, nobody would have thought of "introspection." All the modern concepts of introspection, psychotherapy, and their derivatives were "manufactured" in the 1910s and 1920s. Great figures in history would never have sat down and done this before. Western civilization invented the concept of the "individual" centuries ago, and for a long time, the individual was seen as someone who created things, built empires and corporations. But then, in the 1910s and 1920s, Freud and others sparked a movement that turned everything inward, arguing that the individual needed self-criticism and deep introspection. These ideas have never resonated with me.

Host: Do you have founders you've invested in or partnered with who are also introspective?

Marc: That's usually the case. Introspection can be related to neurotic personality traits. Many of the best founders probably have zero neuroticism. They don't get emotionally affected by what's happened, which is a superpower for entrepreneurs. Of course, it's true that some great entrepreneurs are actually quite neurotic. So low neuroticism can be a plus, but it's not absolutely necessary.

Some people struggle with personal issues, which has now escalated to the use of various psychedelic drugs. I once spoke with neurobiologist Huberman about a phenomenon in Silicon Valley: some founders suffer from stress and anxiety, and someone suggested they try psychedelic drugs. After trying them, they did feel more at peace, like a different person. But the consequence was that they often resigned from their company positions, went to Indonesia to become surfing instructors, and completely "left" the company.

Huberman countered, "How do you know they're not happier now? Maybe what drove them to become great entrepreneurs was insecurity and unmet neurotic impulses. Now they're content sitting on the beach coaching, maybe that's better for them." But I replied, "Yes, but their companies failed." The best entrepreneurs don't pursue happiness, they pursue impact.

I tend to tell myself: I'm competing with myself. I get up every morning to strive to become a better version of myself, to become smarter and more professional.

Host: What is your current worldview and what do you want to do?

Marc: We firmly believe that technology is an extremely powerful balancing force in the world, and the biggest problem in the world is that we lack technology and intelligence. We live in a world that is still very primitive and rough compared to what it should be. Entrepreneurs possess very special personality traits that enable them to build products, establish companies, and have a profound impact. So what we at a16z have been trying to do for the past 17 years is to become the ideal partner for these founders who want to change the world.

Host: When you founded the company 17 years ago, were your core values the same as they are today?

Marc: The core idea remains the same: startups and their founders are the driving forces of global progress. In fact, when we first started, the idea that "founders should personally manage their companies" was still highly controversial. At the time, some high-profile companies even faced severe criticism for letting these "kids" run the business. There's a book called *The Machiavellians* that describes two fundamental models of business organization in the history of capitalism.

The first type is "bourgeois capitalism," where the founder runs the company, such as Henry Ford in the 1920s and Elon Musk today. This has been the norm for thousands of years of human history.

The second is "managerialism," a modern product that emerged between the 1880s and 1920s. It gave rise to management, Harvard and Stanford business schools, and advocated for professional managers to replace founders in managing companies. This idea holds that large systems require specially trained people to manage them, and that the personality traits of founders differ from those of managers. This theory dominated Silicon Valley for 50 years, but the problem is that it assumes managers can do the job well. Managers may excel at managing things that maintain the status quo (like banks or traditional car companies), but they are at a loss when things change. Take SpaceX as an example: for the past century, the entire rocket industry was based on the assumption that rockets could only be used once, then a "madman" came to California and invented reusable rockets. In this situation, what use are your traditional management skills?

So our core philosophy is that in the 21st century, it's far easier and more likely to create great things by training a founder from scratch to learn how to manage than by teaching a professional manager how to innovate. Zuckerberg is a prime example. Before founding Facebook, he had never had a formal job, let alone management experience, but his learning curve was vertical, and today he possesses the dual abilities of a founder and a manager.

Host: When you founded a16z, how did you observe and break the status quo of the industry at that time?

Marc: Between 2003 and 2004, there were very few angel investors like us. We invested in many early-stage companies, and because we had run our own companies for 20 years, we were often pulled in to resolve conflicts between founders and traditional venture capitalists. At the time, traditional VCs still believed that founders couldn't manage companies and were eager to bring in professional managers, which caused a lot of conflict. We spent a lot of time doing this "arbitration" work, and later we thought we might as well do venture capital ourselves. During our preparation, we did in-depth research on industries such as private equity, hedge funds, investment banks, and Hollywood talent agencies. Hollywood's CAA (Creative Artists Agency) gave us a lot of inspiration. In the 1970s, Hollywood agencies were all "lone wolf models," you only had one agent, and the resources of other agents in the company were irrelevant to you. The Silicon Valley venture capital scene in 2009 was also like this, with partners even disliking each other and fighting for power.

Therefore, we observe a "barbell effect": in any industry, you either stand on one end of the barbell as an early-stage, agile, solo angel investor, or on the other end as a large-scale platform with a vast network and substantial capital (like Walmart or Amazon). Traditional mid-sized venture capital firms that fall in between will be eliminated. We've seen this in investment banking as well; for example, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are now large, large-scale players on one end of the barbell, while many of the mid-sized investment banks of the past have disappeared.

Host: I'd like to talk about Jim Clark. He might be the first person in history to found three independent billion-dollar tech companies in a row. How was it working with him when you were in your early twenties?

Marc: Back then, SGI (Screen Graphics) was the coolest company in Silicon Valley. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the special effects in Terminator 2 were created using machines invented by Jim. Nvidia today is essentially a continuation of Jim's ideas. Jim was a founder with immense creativity and charisma, like Musk and Steve Jobs. But SGI's VC brought in a professional CEO with an HP background, resulting in the classic "founder vs. professional manager" conflict. Jim believed that in the future, all expensive graphics machines would become chips costing a few hundred dollars each installed in PCs, and all computers would be connected to the internet. The CEO refused to change the status quo, so Jim left. Later, he treated a dozen of us to dinner at a restaurant, trying to recruit a new team. I was the only one who agreed to join him. I remember that day was the first time I ever drank red wine; I had no idea how much to drink and got completely drunk.

Later, we founded Netscape. Before that, I developed Mosaic (an early graphical web browser) at university. Back then, the internet was primarily used by academics and government institutions; commercial use was explicitly prohibited. Then came "Eternal September" in 1993 (PANews note: "Eternal September" is an early internet slang term that accurately captures a permanent shift in internet culture after 1993. It refers to the surge in internet discussion due to a large influx of inexperienced newcomers starting in September 1993). I was single-handedly providing technical support for the entire internet, and my inbox was overflowing with requests for help. You can't imagine how difficult it was to explain this to ordinary people. Back then, when a CD player ejected, many people mistook it for a coffee cup holder, resulting in spilled coffee.

Host: People's reactions to new things have always been consistent throughout history. You mentioned the story of the "Bicycle face" earlier.

Marc: Yes, every new technology is accompanied by a "moral panic," a fear that it will ruin society and young people. In the 1880s, when bicycles were just becoming popular, young people could easily ride to the next town miles away. To discourage young women from wandering around, the media fabricated the concept of the "Bicycle face." They warned women that if they made too many exaggerated expressions while cycling, their faces would become permanently stiff, and they would never find a husband again. We see the exact same panic pattern in 1920s jazz, 1950s rock and roll, 1990s hip-hop, and even early portable music players and calculators.

Host: Besides Jim Clark, what else did you learn in your early days?

Marc: I had two mentors at the time, Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale. Clark was an insatiable source of creativity and a pure founder, while Barksdale was a "manager's manager," having fought his way up at large companies like IBM and FedEx. He taught me how to systematize and process these new ideas and integrate them into actual business operations. You can't completely change the direction of your company every day; that would destroy your organization.

Host: You just mentioned that you think Musk might be inventing a completely new way of managing things?

Marc: Yes. In traditional large organizations, such as IBM at its peak, there were as many as 12 layers of management between me and the CEO. This created a disaster: each level of manager would whitewash their superiors. The lies piled up, leaving the CEO completely unaware of the true situation at the grassroots level.

Musk, however, adopted a completely new management style. When problems arise in the company, he bypasses all levels and goes directly to the grassroots engineer responsible for the task. This requires the CEO himself to possess extremely deep technical capabilities. Musk can sit with engineers at 2 a.m. to troubleshoot specific problems with chips or rocket engines. He treats the companies he manages as a production line. Every week, he identifies the most critical "bottleneck" slowing down the entire production line and then personally resolves it. Tesla's leading position in the automotive industry is precisely because he personally addresses the most critical production bottlenecks for 52 weeks a year. Simultaneously, he conducts intensive reviews: each engineer reports for 5 minutes, he works over 10 hours a day, and can complete up to 120 technical reviews daily. This creates SpaceX's astonishing execution capabilities; the world's top engineers yearn to work under a CEO with whom they share a technical resonance, while those who cannot perform are immediately eliminated. His method perfectly combines "founder's innovation" with "systematic scaling." For example, Starlink. Others burned through billions of dollars on satellite networks and went bankrupt, but he made it a success as a "side business." Since rockets can be reused at low cost, you have to find something to put in them for launch, right? So I even jokingly said that we in the venture capital world should invent a new metric called "milli-Elon": to assess how many of Musk's qualities an entrepreneur possesses.