Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…This issue aside, what have you been most wrong about in the last 10 years? Oh, my mistakes — the prior decade from 20 years ago to 10 years ago, my errors were almost all misevaluation of ideas, and in particular false negatives. “Oh, this won’t work,” and then, it turns out it worked. Basically, in my line of work, after you do that a while, you learn to stop, basically, as they say, subtracting value by opposing your own opinion on whether something will work. I have a whole different theory on that. I don’t have that problem anymore. Necessary disclaimer on that: in my line of work, a false negative — saying something is not going to work and then it works — is a much bigger mistake than the false positive of saying something’s going to work and then it doesn’t work. It goes to the asymmetry of returns. The big mistakes are always missing the big winners, almost 100 percent of the time. Anyway, I’ve cured myself of that. The last 10 years, my biggest mistakes have all been in the dimension of, “Okay, this might work, but if it does, it just won’t get that big.” This goes to the conversation we had earlier, which is, here’s something where things have changed — five billion people connected being able to click and do something new. For the things that work, they’re getting to be much, much larger than I would’ve ever thought possible, just much bigger, by orders and orders of magnitude. Again, this goes back in the day job. It’s like, okay, is it responsible to do what’s called market sizing? Are we supposed to estimate market size, which is what all the textbooks tell you to do? Or should we just say, “Maybe it’s not actually so easy to forecast market size anymore.” Maybe we should just basically say, “Look, if something’s going to work at all in this new world of five billion connected people, maybe just everything gets really big, or all the important things get really big.” That’s the one we’re trying to work out right now. Whom do you admire the most?…

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