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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and today's episode features Mark

Andreessen, an A6NZ board partner and co-founder of 21 Bologi Shrini Vassen. This conversation

took place in front of a group of Stanford engineering students as part of the Engineering

Honor Society, Tao Beta Pi's Distinguished Annual Speaker Series with Thought Leaders

and Technology. Let's talk about one of the things I'm sure every student here at once,

or not everyone, but a lot of them, you know, think about startups, think about technology

as an entrepreneur as a founder, as a potential employee. How should students today, you know,

graduating from Stanford think about startups in both the founder context and an employee context?

Yeah, so the traditional venture capitalists all have like a secret sauce kind of formula of how they think about startups as in both the founder context and an employee context. Yeah, so the traditional venture capitalists all have like a secret sauce kind of formula of how

they think about what they want to fund. And then it turns out I think the formula is all

reduced to the same handful of factors. With the exception, maybe a Peter Thiel, who has like

six other factors in his head that he hasn't told anybody about. But for everybody else,

basically always reduces down to some combination of market, product, and team.

If you talk to people who've been in venture for a long time, what they'll tell you is basically the difference between venture firms, you know, in a lot of ways,

is based on how do they rank the importance of founder of market, product, and team.

You know, as an example, Sequoia was legendary in prioritizing market over team.

Right. Sequoia was legendary and prioritizing market over team. So Don Valentine has, if you go online and Google, Don Valentine's talks, he talks a lot

about how the key to success of a startup is to land yourself in a giant market.

...