Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…But being a venture capitalist is not like that? When you're in the 38th pitch of the day, you're not wondering if chewing glass might not be more comfortable? No, it's different. I'll tell you how I experienced it. People are wired to respond to stress in different ways. And I think there are people who are wired to be extremely productive and get very happy under extreme levels of stress. I have a different… I'm fine with stress. In fact, I incline towards it and if I don't have any, I seek it out. But past a certain level, I don't really enjoy it. It degrades the quality of my life, not improves it. Maybe you have an affinity for self torture. Look, there's stress in every profession and there's certainly stress in being an investor, but it's a completely different kind of stress. Because when you're a startup founder, it's all on you. Everything that happens is on you, everything that goes wrong is on you. When there's an issue in the company, a crisis in the company, it's on you to fix it. You're up at four in the morning all the time worrying about things. With investors, there's just a layer of buffer. We have no end of problems and we help our portfolio companies as best we can with all kinds of issues, like some crisis inside a company. But it's not my company, not everything is my fault. So it’s a more diffused kind of stress, and honestly easier to deal with. Got it, that makes sense. Why did you stop your blog? Would you ever start it again?…

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