Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner: Marc Andreessen
Great Q&A on entrepreneurship.
Marc Andreessen is soft-selling his new VC fund, but he does it in a way to provide a real value to listeners beyond letting them know about his investment philosophy.
On criteria for selecting a business idea.
It is quite similar to criteria of selecting an investment:
1. Biggest market (new or existing)
2. 10x change in technology (or economic change). The premise is that existing companies "generally do a good job" at what they do, so you need a leverage of a profound change to start a new company
3. Team that includes at least one technologist. Two is better than one.
4. A product that becomes a company is better than a company that decides to build a product.
Q: "Can a mobile app company have enough potential to fundable?"
A: "It depends".
He is avoiding category-based investment decisions or presuming anything about company's potential simply by the fact it belongs to one or the other category. Example he gave is "enterprise software" was considered dead category in the begging of 00s, but resulted in great investments.
On building a team:
Recruiting and talking people out of quitting are the two hardest things to do at a startup. Selling a vision is a key skill for the funding team.
Great point about the value of "polarizing" product. It is OK to have lots of people hate the product as long as there are people who really love it. Describing your company in stark terms helps filter out candidates who aren't the right fit anyway.



