#129 Marc Andreessen: Interview with an Icon

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

Shane Parrish

Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2022

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Silicon Valley icon Marc Andreessen explores investing, decision making, and the art of solving unsolvable problems.

In this discussion, Andreessen reveals why the Internet has become the conduit for some people to disrupt traditional power structures and for others to enforce them, optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for the future of the Internet, assessing judgment, and the book he turns to for insight.

Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and has invested in companies such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Skype, among others. He co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time.

The books recommended by Marc Andreessen in this episode are:

The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, by James Burnham
The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, by Martin Gurri
The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What each of the top venture capitalists of all time has
0:02.1	in common is each of them missed almost all
0:03.9	of the great deals with their generation.
0:05.5	What we see this a lot, we do performance reviews.
0:07.0	We do performance reviews.
0:08.0	And so it's like, well, they've made 10 investments.
0:10.0	And one of them is this huge success
0:12.9	and the other nine are sucking wind.
0:15.1	And it's like, OK, is this a good venture capitalist
0:17.0	or a bad venture capitalist?
0:18.1	And it's like, well, in any domain that's not probabilistic,
0:21.3	you say this person's terrible.
0:22.8	It's batting average of 100 out of 1,000.
0:25.0	It's like this person's awful.
0:26.4	And there's always the temptation to say, well,
0:27.8	this one thing that's working is it's like it's a fluke.
0:29.9	Right?
0:30.4	And so who knows whether they'll ever get it again.
0:32.2	And it's at that point where I put my head up
0:33.5	and I say, we're in the fluke business.
0:34.9	The whole point is this is to get the fluke.
0:36.7	You don't have to score 100%.
	...

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