
Marc Andreessen at Startup School [video] - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/10/marc-andreessen-at-startup-school/
======
timanglade
I grossly underestimated the value of a warm intro in Silicon Valley before
getting here, and still did before I started working for a VC firm. Coming in
as an entrepreneur from smaller startup ecosystems in Boston & Europe, I was a
bit puzzled by it — it seemed like unnecessary decorum or just a cheap ploy by
VCs to maintain their inbox zero streak. Beyond the a16z process explained by
Mr. Andreessen here, I should note that _any_ third-party intro (to say
nothing of a warm intro) will drastically enhance your chances at almost _any_
firm even if they don’t require it. It’s a sign of hustle, diligence & genuine
interest from entrepreneurs, even if the person that introduces you isn’t
particularly warm about you or friendly with the partner in question. You’d be
surprised how many founders fail to display that hustle/diligence/interest in
discussions with VCs!

I wouldn’t overthink the warm bit too much. Usually just by virtue of being
willing to make the intro your contact will be warm and exude warmth. But I’ve
also seen partner take intros from people they barely know/remember/trust if
the pitch is compelling. Just make sure you stay connected to partners and
potential connectors way ahead of time, and that they know you & your
business. When the time comes, an intro will be a no-brainer.

~~~
minimaxir
> I should note that any third-party intro (to say nothing of a warm intro)
> will drastically enhance your chances at almost any firm even if they don’t
> require it. It’s a sign of hustle, diligence & genuine interest from
> entrepreneurs

The counterargument is that this attitude reinforces Silicon Valley as a non-
meritocratic who-you-know culture instead of one that optimizes producing good
products. (case in point, Andreessen's investment in Lucas Duplan/Clinkle)

Many founders _can 't_ get that kind of access, often due to class or other
systemic factors. It's not "hustle," and in my opinion, that attitude is an
albatross on the startup ecosystem.

~~~
tlb
Many seed-stage investors don't require introductions. For instance, most
companies that YC funds were not introduced or previously known, they just
submitted a compelling application.

By the time a company is ready for series-A (where Andreessen invests),
companies normally have a connection to someone (investors, customers,
lawyers) who can make an intro. See
[http://www.paulgraham.com/fr.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/fr.html) under
"Get introductions to investors" for some tactics.

Angel investors have a huge incentive to find companies with good businesses
but no VC connections, invest personally, and then introduce them to their VC
contacts for further investment. (That huge incentive is a 10 - 1000x return
on their investment). So there are quite a few people scouting for these
opportunities.

But I'd be curious to hear about examples where this doesn't work.

~~~
sage76
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but weren't some stats released a while back
that said that 50% of the startups accepted by YC had been referred to them by
the YC alumni network?

~~~
tlb
54.7% of accepted companies in the last batch did not have a recommendation.
[http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/common-
misconceptions-a...](http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/common-
misconceptions-about-applying-to-yc/)

------
Dowwie
Would a YC member please create a youtube playlist for 2016?

~~~
craigcannon
Sure thing - [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-
uHSnFig5NUadFuTNjc...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-
uHSnFig5NUadFuTNjcpHsWUVBueHSh)

More videos coming :)

------
4714
What are the best tools for building and maintaining your network? Facebook?

------
graycat
I watched Marc's interview at

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NEOR...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NEOR0AJsziE)

Here are my reactions:

As a preliminary note, Silicon Valley, Marc, and the entrepreneurs are all
looking for things that are exceptionally good.

Then:

"Professional CEO".

What Marc describes is an SVP Marketing or at best a COO.

Marc lists as the tasks of a CEO as marketing, sales, finance, recruiting,
etc. Nope: For each of those there is a VP, SVP, etc. Over them all is maybe a
COO. The CEO is none of those things. Sorry, Marc.

The problem with his professional CEO as the actual CEO instead of the founder
is that the pro CEO doesn't have a good understanding of the vision for the
future of the industry or the company and is not able to evaluate technical
projects within the company or evaluate and hire technical people or leaders.
So, the pro CEO is basically and at best one trying to SELL, SELL, SELL the
EXISTING product/service.

So, right rush out and sell 300 bps dial up modems, and keep growing to 9600
bps but forget about coaxial cable modems, wireless, and fiber.

Marc wants the CEO to be a cracker jack buggy whip salesman, buggy whip
production manager, buggy whip sales channel expert, etc. when Henry Ford is
bringing out the Model T. Bummer.

Marc mentions Tom Watson, Jr. who one day, when IBM was still with punched
cards and electro mechanical equipment, mentioned to his father (IIRC):
"There's a guy at Columbia. I don't know what he's doing, but he's doing it
200,000 times a second."

Well, Tom, Jr. should have been much farther ahead on that theme. Being behind
that way is part of why IBM had to play desperate catchup with System 360 and
still missed out on a lot that Burroughs, DEC, etc. had. And soon IBM was just
blind to what was in Multics, DEC VAX, the future of x86, etc.

IBM VM? First done at IBM Cambridge Research Center as CP67/CMS just as a
means of time-sharing operating system development. The real power of VM was
missed for a long time.

IBM was awash in people ready, willing, able, and eager to do great things for
IBM in operating systems, system security, file systems, programming
languages, etc. \-- at one time one such person lamented "Three times in my
career I tried to help IBM in operating systems, and three times I broke my
pick trying.". Bummer.

Marc has general partners "who have been through the struggle". Well, that's
like having a lot of steam engine experts at the beginning of electric motors.

In fact, the nature of "the struggle" is changing. To do well seeing what's
new, Marc is looking in the wrong place.

There are better places to look: E.g., in 1940, the US military was really
smart and didn't plan the new weapons by talking to people who had "been
through the struggle" in WWI with artillery, battleships, and biplanes.
Instead, what was crucial was Reynold's number in fluid flow (the reason we
got rid of biplanes), radar, radio, high resolution cameras, sonar,
monoplanes, the proximity fuse, torpedoes, computers, super charged engines,
aluminum in airplanes, encryption, code breaking, and the A-bomb. Nearly all
of that was from people with more fundamental backgrounds than having been
"through the struggle" of WWI.

Marc needs people with more fundamental backgrounds.

Marc talks about "the shit", just "all the stuff that happens". Well, in
poorly planned and run projects, yes. But, J. Oppenheimer got the A-bomb ready
on time, about as soon as Nimitz, MacArthur, and Boeing had Guam and the B-29
ready. A well planned and run project has a lot less "shit". Admiral Rickover
did the same with the US nuclear submarines. The US Navy did the same with
their version of GPS, some years before GPS. Similarly for Keyhole -- before
the Hubble, essentially a Hubble but aimed at the earth. Lockheed did the same
with the SR-71 -- Mach 3, 80,000 feet, 2000 mile range, never shot down. Etc.

Marc has seen a lot of "shit" because he has seen a lot of poorly planned and
run projects because he doesn't know where to look for good projects.

Marc mentioned that his firm has a big "matrix" that helps a new CEO with
selling, buying, funding, recruiting, etc. Okay. At times that might help.

But, take recruiting: The whole goal of a VC funded company is to be
exceptional. Well, I question if Marc's firm is able to select the needed
exceptional people, and later in the interview there is good evidence that he
can't.

I have to move on. But, in short, to me, the worst thing Marc said was on how
a CEO should evaluate VCs and engineers: Marc's main technique was
recommendations.

Wrong. Badly wrong. Here Marc is asking the CEO of hopefully a very
exceptional company to draw from the knowledge of the general environment
instead of using his own exceptionally good abilities, which necessarily we
hope he has, to make much better, exceptionally good, decisions himself.

Similarly Marc is impressed by computer science, AI, and ML. Nope.

For the needed exceptional companies in information technology, f'get about
computer science: Instead look more broadly in the QA section of the library,
especially at selected topics in pure and applied math. There will see AI/ML
as mostly special cases of statistics which is a special case of applied math
which is a special case of pure math. Better to look at pure/applied math and
mathematical statistics.

~~~
david927
I think you're being a bit tough at times but you definitely hit a vein.

It's always funny when VCs give a talk like this because they will invariable
mention how they are down-to-earth ("been through the struggle") and how
modern they are, when the truth is that they are anything but.

Warm introduction? Really? Is this straight from an episode of Mad Men? They
know very well that they could hire one or two people to take decks from cold
sources and run a preliminary review. They don't do that because they _want_
to perpetuate the system. It's an "old boys network" and there's a real effort
made to keep it that way. Let me repeat that, the reason they will _never_ get
rid of the warm intro is that it's all about perpetuating the old boys
network.

Peter Thiel, when speaking to Stanford students, talked about vetting and
said, without irony, that coming from Stanford gives you that vetted quality
and that (IIRC)"you can give some song-and-dance about how your parents didn't
have enough money so you had to go to UC Berkeley, but we all know that's not
going to work." (Which is funny because my old roommate who went to UC
Berkeley was mentioned in Perlmutter's 2011 Nobel speech; I wonder if he knows
that he doesn't rate.) The difference between Cal and Stanford is about money
and the perpetuation of wealth across generations, and that's also what we're
talking about here: an old boys network.

Professional CEO = crony. Nothing else. The tragic part of all of this is that
there is serious innovation waiting to happen and the system that could
support and enable it is instead too busy preserving and extending antiquated
systems of power and wealth.

~~~
graycat
> Professional CEO = crony. Nothing else ....

Yup. The pro CEO totally owes his job and even his career, house mortgage, the
mother in law addition, the in ground back yard pool, the kids' college
tuition, new family SUV, wife's happiness, the family vacation home, his
retirement, his good medical plan and dental plan, his airline travel card,
his company car, country club membership, the respect of his circle of
friends, etc. to the VCs.

Then the BoD and CEO can agree on this and that and send the whole founding
team out without even their shirts. The founding team can sue, but without
even their shirts and against the money and power of the great company they
built, they don't have a chance.

So, we're talking CEO loyalty to the BoD, sit, lie down, roll over, stand,
heel, etc.

The VCs with the BoD are in a power struggle with the founders, and the ones
with more power get more money; the one with enough power can get ALL the
money.

I omitted, the people I could get a "warm introduction" from are so high up in
business and academics that the Silicon Valley VCs don't know them. And the
Silicon Valley VCs don't know the people I know and couldn't get a warm
introduction to me. E.g., in information technology, the people I respect and
are able to respect me all have good appropriate Ph.D. degrees, usually
pure/applied math, and nearly no Silicon Valley VCs do.

To put it bluntly, the Silicon Valley VCs are "too low class" for me! Really,
I don't care and am willing to give tutorials to people with poor technical
prerequisites for my work, but the VCs wanting "warm introductions" look too
arrogant to me. Or, I'm not going to go to one of my Ph.D. dissertation
advisers, since then a Dean at one famous university and President of another,
and ask for a "warm introduction" to a VC that likely does not know him.

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csinguva
His comments where awesome about ML. Must watch

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happytrails
Side note, guy sounds out of breath...

