Marc Andreessen - Three Necessities for Start-up Success [video] | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen - Three Necessities for Start-up Success [video]

ecorner.stanford.edu

79 pointsaditya9 comments

I think 10x is a very good range. It's easy to convince yourself that your product needs to be earth shattering. It really doesn't. Just being way better is enough.

Was Dropbox 100x better than JungleDisk?

Was Wordpress 100x better than Movable Type?

Was Google 100x better than Yahoo?

When it launched the iPhone probably was 100x better. For everyone that isn't Steve Jobs I think 10x is a damn good place to start.

I think the hard part is evaluating up front whether the opportunity to be 10x better exists.

Dropbox: yes

WordPress: no, but MT pissed everyone off with their license change, so they picked up where MT left off

Google: yes (although AltaVista was the SE people were using back then)

I think Andreessen's words should be taken with a grain of salt. His underlying premise is that a startup's ultimate goal is to get really big. This may make sense for a guy who has his own VC fund, but I'm not sure it makes sense for every entrepeneur.

While having a market is certainly important, I don't think someone should disregard the niches that are out there. Is a large market more important than the product? While I agree with Marc on iteration and speed of execution, I can't quite convince myself that I would take a large market over a solid product and team. I'd love to see a response from DHH.

I think that Andreesen sorta assumes that anyone who's watching/reading his stuff is interested in the big hits. This talk was given at the "Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders" series, for example.

If that's not your goal, you should probably seek out other entrepreneurs who're in an area more like your own. That's sorta implied though - does it have to be spelled out?

I also wouldn't be surprised if DHH also said that the market was important. Without a market, you have nobody to buy your product, which doesn't make it much of a product after all. If you're willing to settle for a smaller market, there're more of them that you can go after and less competition for each, but that still doesn't absolve you from finding one.

I've been listening to the Podcast of these talks for over a year now. I highly recommended the whole series, it's called entrepreneurial thought leaders on itunes. Almost every speaker is fascinating, from the CEO of KLA Tencor to Zuckerberg in '05 saying he doesn't like using the term social network to describe facebook. Great stuff.

I definitely agree with the 3 necessities. Our co-founding team is composed of a technologist and a business guy. 'guess we need 1 more technologist for iterations (which is already foreseen) down the road.

I've just watched the whole thing. Thanks a lot to whoever posted it, that was really interesting.

I really like this format for uploading videos of a talk. Excellent to-the-point speaker as well.

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