Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got it. Now, let's talk a little about your past. So you sold Netscape for $10 billion. But today, Chrome has what, like 2.7 billion users or something. And then Opsware was sold for like $1.7 billion. AWS is gonna probably make close to $100 billion in revenue yearly. In retrospect, do you think if these companies had remained startups, they would have ended up dominating these large markets? So I spend virtually no time on the past. The one thing I know about the past is I can't change it. So I spend virtually no time revisiting old decisions. People I know who spend a lot of time revisiting old decisions are less effective because they mire themselves in what ifs and counterfactuals. So I really don't spend time on it. I really don't even have theories on it. The big thing I would just say is that reality plays out in really complicated ways. Everything on paper is straightforward. Reality is very complicated and messy. The technical way that I think about it is basically every startup is charting a path dependent course through a complex adaptive system. And because of that, if you’ve read about this, people had this obsession a while back with what's called Chaos Theory. It's sort of this thing where we're used to thinking about systems as if they're deterministic. So you start at point A, you end up at point B, and you can do that over and over again. You know what happens when you drop an apple out of a tree, or whatever. In the real world of humans and 8 billion people interacting, and trying to start companies that intersect in these markets and do all these complicated things and have all these employees, there's random elements all over the place. There's path dependence as a consequence. You run the same scenario, start with point A, one time you end up point B, one time you end up point Z. There's a million reasons why the branches fork. This is my advice to every founder who wants to revisit all decisions. It's not a useful and productive thing to do. The world is too complicated and messy. So you take whatever skills you think you have and you just do something new. Make sense. Are venture capitalists part of the managerial elite? Burnham says that “the rise of the finance capitalist is the decisive phase in the managerial revolution.” What would he think about venture capitalists?…

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