More Words of Wisdom from Marc Andreessen

by Scott Edward Walker on November 16th, 2016

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To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Marc Andreessen, a brilliant entrepreneur, and co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

In this solid interview at Startup School 2016 last month, Mark shares some words of wisdom for founders, including the following:

  • “The way that most of the top-end venture capital firms work is [that] they will take you seriously if you [are] introduced by someone they have worked with before – and they won’t take you seriously if you don’t.” (at 7:37)
  • “The argument in favor of the warm referral is that it’s the first test – it’s the first test of the ability to network your way to the investor.” (at 8:01)
  • “The thing that I would do…is coming-in [to a VC firm] with the junior people and get networked into the firm by spending a lot of time with the junior people…” (at 9:40)
  • “In a hot environment, it takes days to weeks [to get an investment decision]…” (at 10:33)
  • “The way you really know you’re making progress is if you get invited to present to the full partnership.” (at 11:08)
  • “The formal presentation is another test.” (at 11:50)
  • “There are five key ways a founder can know whether an investor is good: references, references, references, references, references.” (at 14:21)
  • Reference checking “is an incredibly useful skill.” (at 17:11)
  • “We’ve entered a phase of the [tech] industry where things are just working now … the internet is working now.” (at 24:21)
  • “The big things that work are all platforms to build on top of – they’re opportunities for more things to be built right on top.” (at 23:08)
  • “The great founders almost always feel like you’re too late – and you’re almost always too early.” (at 29:06)
  • “We almost never see a qualified founder fail because they’re too late to market…”  (at 29:44)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott

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