Marc Andreessen’s Latest Lesson in Strategy

European Straits #81

Dear all,

One of the most shared stories on my Twitter timeline these days is Elad Gil’s interview of Marc Andreessen on what it takes to grow a startup from 1 to 10,000. It’s an extract from Gil’s The High Growth Handbook, which was just released by Stripe’s new publishing arm.

The interview is well worth your time (as is probably the book, although I haven’t read it yet). Its content will sound familiar to those who are used to hearing Andreessen discussing entrepreneurship. But I find this particular interview to be a very interesting distillation of strategic wisdom.

The deepening of strategic thinking is always a sign of the maturity of a techno-economic paradigm. In his masterful The Lords of Strategy, Walter Kiechel tells the story of the big thinkers who revealed the complex secrets behind corporate success in the 20th century. But there are striking differences between the past age of the automobile and mass production and the current Entrepreneurial Age when it comes to strateg…