Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. And today's podcast is based on a conversation between Mark Andreessen and Clayton Christensen, who is the father of disruption theory. It took place at Startup Grind in San Francisco recently, moderated by Derek Anderson. And here's the conversation.

How has your theory on disruption evolved in the last 20 years since you released it?

Almost none of the critical ideas that now are really important existed in the original theory.

But I think what we learned is that a good theory has to be able to confront and resolve anomalies.

I have a sign outside of my office that says anomalies want it.

Because if somebody can bring to you something that's going on that the theory can't explain,

then you either have to put a boundary and say the theory doesn't apply to that,

or, you know, there's something else going on and change the way we define things, you know.

And so things that are really important are there are some industries like hotels

where disruption never happened.

And historically, higher education was never been disrupted.

And then we realized that the trajectory of improvement in the theory is not a constant, but the

rate at which innovators make good products better is a variable.

And so hotels have been disrupted now because Airbnb has changed the business model.

And online learning is improving at such a rapid rate that Harvard Business School

is getting disrupted. And that was unconceivable a generation ago.

Why does the theory, Mark, still have so much power with entrepreneurs and VCs in Silicon

Valley 20 years later? There are people that say, hey, it's not relevant anymore.

And how do people here think about it?

Yeah, so the way I think about it is we had algebra of business,

and I've described algebra of business was kind of a very straightforward theory.

And this was the case when I came to the Valley.

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