Marc Andreessen: Building Startups Is Like Baking A Cake In 3 Minutes

In my opinion, Marc's segment was the most interesting because his perspective / experience cannot be found in any other living human being:

1) Being in the Internet business longer than anyone else (1994 or 1993)

2) Being a hacker, who turned into co-founder, who turned into CEO / executive chairman

3) Inventing some of the most foundational components of the Internet infrastructure

4) Co-founding and co-managing one of the biggest hypergrowth stories ever (Netscape, where baking the cake metaphor comes from)

5) Becoming a serial entrepreneur (OpsWare, Ning)

6) Becoming an independent board member of major technology companies (HP, Facebook)

7) Starting a VC firm that is on track to become one of the biggest disruptors of Silicon Valley investor business model

What I especially enjoyed are some of Marc's speculations of what could have happened IF Netscape would have added things like payment or social features they have not pursued. Small decisions we make today could have enormous implications on what becomes our future.

I'm very curious about the following issue by Mark:

"When a company like Netscape hired one top engineer, that person usually came from a top company such as Sun, Oracle, or Silicon Graphics (today Google or Facebook)...That can be really good and immediately infuse your company with skills and knowledge from somewhere else,” he says. “But that can also be really bad. Sometimes that’s not consistent with a coherent culture.”

Is there any danger to lose creative and entrepreneurial culture in hyper growing ventures by hiring massive talents from big firms?

The hyper growth is fantastic for startups because our past efforts are well payed off, but, if it may cause the lose of creative and entrepreneurial culture that we are going to establish at the same time, we have to do something to avoid. Or I don't have to worry about this?

If it's true, I'd like to know how great ventures in SV have dealt with this issue more concretely. I will not count my chickens before they hatch. :) I'm just curious as an entrepreneur.

Video from the session (at Startup School yesterday, conversation with PG):

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298661410 from 16:00 which continues to: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298670703