Summary: Marc Andreessen advice to Lex Fridman on how to start a company

In this Lex Fridman podcast clip, Marc Andreessen gives advice about how to start a company. I found this interesting, here are a few points —

• Great founders are super smart, super energetic and super courageous. Smart and energetic are traits and couragous is a choice.
• Courage is about how many times you can have people say no to you and get called stupid but continue going forward. Starting a company gets romanticized, but most of it in the early days is being told no by people and people telling you your idea won’t work.
• For most startup founders, on a risk adjusted basis, they will be more successful if they instead got a real job and just worked for a big company. Marc suggests basically only starting a company if you cannot not start a company (“the best reason to start a company is because you cannot tolerate not starting it”). If you are questions if starting a company is the right thing for you to do, then the answer is no it is not.
• Most successful founders do not set out to create a company. Most successful founders are experts in a space, they realize an opportunity in that space and then they just by luck happen to be the right type of person to found a company.
• Ideas for good businesses do not tend to just magically appear in someones head. The reality is that most founders have been chewing on a problem space for 5–10 years before they found a business in the space. These folks often have already worked in this problem space in school or in industry before they actually start a company.
• Marc has this idea called the idea maze. The idea is that for every business there are a bunch of permutations of what that business or product could actually look like (who are the customers, what is the sales model, what does the MVP look like etc…). The real successful founders are the ones that have already chewed on a problem for long enough that they already have though through this maze and already have strong opinions. So by the time the founder goes to start a company they are implementing their strongly held opinions as a domain expert rather than trying to figure it out.
• Starting a business is going to involve a lot of pain. Its extremely hard work, most people fail and you will face huge amounts of rejection.
• Forget work/life balance if you starting a company.