Marc Andreessen on how the best founders navigate the “idea maze”

“Entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation is what economists call decision making under uncertainty. Both parts of that are important. Decision making—you’re going to make a ton of decisions… And then uncertainty—the world’s a complicated place. In mathematical terms, the world is a complex adaptive system with feedback loops.”

Military commanders call this the fog of war: “You’re just dealing with a situation where the number of variables is just off the charts.”

And the best innovators deal with this in two steps.

First, they “try to pre-plan as much as they possibly can.” Marc and his partners at a16z call this “navigating the idea maze.” In their head, they have as complete of a map of possible futures as anybody possibly could.

Then on Day 1, they’re in the fog of war, and a lot of the assumptions of that idea maze turn out to be wrong. So the founder must reconstruct it on the fly day-by-day as they learn and discover new things.

“The great ones course-correct every single day. They take stock of what they’ve learned. They modify the plan.”

The great ones also tend to think in terms of hypotheses. They tend to think:

“OK, I’m going to go into the world and announce that I’m doing this for sure… And then I’m going to try it. And even though I sound like I have complete certainty, I know that I need to test to find out whether it’s going to work. And if it’s doesn’t, then I have to go back to all of those people and say we’re actually not going left, we’re going right.”

And then they have to run this loop thousands of times.

“You course-correct, you adjust, you evolve. Often, the businesses that end up working really well tend to be different than the original plan. But that’s part of the process of a really smart founder basically working their way through reality.”

Full video: Andrew Huberman “Marc Andreessen: How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience” (Sep 2023)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Marc Andreessen insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: "Best startup advice from Marc Andreessen