Marc Andreessen’s 2 reasons for why founder-run companies are harder to disrupt

“If you just look historically at many of the important technology companies of the last 50-100 years, many of them are run by their founders for decades… And a lot of it has to do with disruption.”

Marc continues:

“There’s this cliché of founders that a lot of people believe which is that founders are too stubborn and founders get too locked into their original idea and they can’t adapt as times change. We’ve actually found the opposite to be true. We’ve found that when a company is going to get disrupted, the person in many cases with the best odds of countering the disruption is the founder, and I think there’s a couple of different reasons for that.”

The two reasons Marc shares are:

1. The founder remembers when the business was nothing, and are constantly haunted by the fact that the business could be a zero again: “The founder remembers what it was like when there was nobody else in the office with you and when you carried out your own trash can. The founder remembers this thing used to be zero.”

2. The founder carries enormous moral weight inside the company and can more easily make drastic changes: “When Steve Jobs goes into Apple and says times are changing we need to do X - and X is heresy… A Steve jobs - a founder - is going to be able to convince the company that they have to do that. Whereas if a professional CEO shows up and says that, everybody’s going to be like, ‘Ooh, I don’t know.’”

Full video: Startup Grind “Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma) & Marc Andreessen (a16z) | Startup Grind Global“ (Feb 2016)

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”