Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…Got it. How soon can you tell whether somebody will make for a good CEO of a large company specifically? So can you tell as soon as they've got a new startup that they're pitching you? Or does it become more clear over time as they get more and more employees? The big thing with being able to run things at scale, there's actually a very big breakthrough that people either make or they don't make. And the very big breakthrough is whether they know how to manage managers. Say you're running a company with a hundred thousand employees, you don't have a hundred thousand direct reports. You still only have like eight or ten direct reports. And then each of them have eight or ten direct reports and each of them have eight or ten direct reports. And so even the CEOs of really big companies, they're only really dealing with eight or ten or twelve people on a daily basis. And then how do you become trained as a manager? The way you become trained as a manager initially is you manage a team of individual contributors. I'm an engineering manager, I have eight or ten coders working for me. And then the breakthrough is — am I trained in how to become a manager of managers? If I'm early in my career, the way I think about that is I start out as an individual contributor, let's say an engineer. I get trained on how to be a manager of individual contributors, and that makes me an engineering manager. And then if I get promoted to what they call engineering director, which is one level up, now I'm a director and now I'm managing a team of managers. Anybody who can make that jump now has a generalizable skill of being able to manage managers, and then what makes that skill so great is that skill can scale. Because then you can get promoted to the VP of engineering, now you have a team of directors who have teams of managers who have teams of ICs and so forth. And then at some point, if you keep climbing that ladder, at some point you get promoted to CEO. And then you have a team of managers who are the executives of the company, and then everything spans out from there. And so if you can manage managers, at least in theory, you have the basic skill and temperament required to be able to scale all the way up. Then it becomes a question of how much complexity can you deal with? Can you learn enough about all the different domains of what it means to run a business? Are you going to enjoy being in the job and being on the hot seat? All those kinds of questions. I think 100% of the people we back have the intelligence to do it, maybe half of them have the temperament to do it, and then maybe half of those have the intelligence and the temperament and they really want to do it. And by “might want to do it” I mean, 20 years from now, they still want to be running their company. And enough of them where we get the success cases. But having said that as an entrepreneur, you have to really want that. You have to be smart enough and you have to have the temperament and you have to actually want to learn the skills. And not everybody is able to line those up. Got it, got it. Managing the managerial revolution.…

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