Marc Andreessen at Startup School [video]
I watched Marc&#x27;s interview at<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=NEOR0AJsziE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=NEOR...</a><p>Here are my reactions:<p>As a preliminary note, Silicon Valley,
Marc, and the entrepreneurs are all
looking for things that are exceptionally
good.<p>Then:<p>&quot;Professional CEO&quot;.<p>What Marc describes is an SVP Marketing or
at best a COO.<p>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.<p>The problem with his professional CEO as
the actual CEO instead of the founder is
that the pro CEO doesn&#x27;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&#x2F;service.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Marc mentions Tom Watson, Jr. who one day,
when IBM was still with punched cards and
electro mechanical equipment, mentioned to
his father (IIRC):  &quot;There&#x27;s a guy at
Columbia.  I don&#x27;t know what he&#x27;s doing,
but he&#x27;s doing it 200,000 times a second.&quot;<p>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.<p>IBM VM?  First done at IBM Cambridge
Research Center as CP67&#x2F;CMS just as a
means of time-sharing operating system
development.  The real power of VM was
missed for a long time.<p>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
&quot;Three times in my career I tried to
help IBM in operating systems, and three
times I broke my pick trying.&quot;. Bummer.<p>Marc has general partners &quot;who have been
through the struggle&quot;.  Well, that&#x27;s like
having a lot of steam engine experts at
the beginning of electric motors.<p>In fact, the nature of &quot;the struggle&quot; is
changing.  To do well seeing what&#x27;s new,
Marc is looking in the wrong place.<p>There are better places to look:  E.g., in
1940, the US military was really smart and
didn&#x27;t plan the new
weapons by talking to people who had &quot;been
through the struggle&quot; in WWI with
artillery, battleships, and biplanes.
Instead, what was crucial was Reynold&#x27;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 &quot;through the struggle&quot; of
WWI.<p>Marc needs people with more fundamental
backgrounds.<p>Marc talks about &quot;the shit&quot;, just &quot;all the
stuff that happens&quot;.  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 &quot;shit&quot;.  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.<p>Marc has seen a lot of &quot;shit&quot; because he
has seen a lot of poorly planned and run
projects because he doesn&#x27;t know where to
look for good projects.<p>Marc mentioned that his firm has a big
&quot;matrix&quot; that helps a new CEO with
selling, buying, funding, recruiting, etc.
Okay.  At times that might help.<p>But, take recruiting:  The whole goal of a
VC funded company is to be exceptional.
Well, I question if Marc&#x27;s firm is able to
select the needed exceptional people, and
later in the interview there is good
evidence that he can&#x27;t.<p>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&#x27;s
main technique was recommendations.<p>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.<p>Similarly Marc is impressed by computer
science, AI, and ML. Nope.<p>For the needed exceptional companies in
information technology, f&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;applied math and mathematical
statistics.