I’m a compulsive note-taker.
I have recorded nearly every workout since age 18 or so. Roughly 8 feet of shelf space in my home is occupied by spine upon spine of notebook upon notebook. That, mind you, is one subject. It extends to dozens.
Some people would call this OCD, and many would consider it a manic wild goose chase. I simply view it as the collection of my life’s recipes.
My goal is to learn things once and use them forever.
That’s why I wrote my new book, “Tools of Titans,” which is a compendium of recipes for high performance that I gathered for my own use.
In this exclusive first look, I wanted to share some of what I learned from one of the smartest investors in the world: Marc Andreessen. If you’re not familiar, Andreessen is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley, and his creations have changed the world. Even in the epicenter of tech, it’s hard to find a more fascinating icon.
Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic browser: The first widely used graphical web browser. He also co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He then co-founded Loudcloud, which sold as Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion.
He’s considered one of the founding fathers of the modern Internet, alongside pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and early HTML standards.
This makes him one of the few humans ever to create software categories used by more than a billion people and establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc is now co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he has become one of the most influential and dominant tech investors on the planet.
Here’s some of the wisdom he shared with me about the keys to a successful business.
Lesson #1: Raise prices
This was Marc’s response to “If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say?”
He’d put it right in the heart of San Francisco, and here’s the reason:
“The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said.
“And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”
Lesson #2: Don’t fetishize failure
Here’s what Marc says about failure:
“I’m old-fashioned. Where I come from, people like to succeed … When I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn’t have the word ‘pivot.’ We didn’t have a fancy word for it. We just called it a f---up.
“We do see companies that, literally, every time we meet them, they’ve pivoted. Every time, they’re off to something new, and it’s like watching a rabbit go through a maze or something. They’re never going to converge on anything because they’re never going to put the time into actually figuring it out and getting it right.”
Lesson #3: Apply the ‘nerds at night’ test
How does Marc look for new opportunities? He has dozens of tools, but one of his heuristics is simple:
“We call our test ‘What do the nerds do on nights and weekends?’ Their day job is Oracle, Salesforce.com, Adobe or Apple or Intel or one of these companies, or an insurance company, or a bank. Or they’re a student. Whatever. That’s fine. They go do whatever they need to do to make a living. The question is: What’s the hobby? What’s the thing at night or on the weekend? Then things get really interesting.”
See the rest of the story at Business Insider