Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma) & Marc Andreessen (a16z) | Startup Grind Global

this next group is is quite the trio not only do you obviously have Derrick Anderson whom you know by now and clay Christensen coming back out to speak but we also have a new player for the for this session it's Marc Andreessen now who is heard of andreessen horowitz yeah all right the rest of you need to do some googling shortly okay because this is a name that you need to know andreessen horowitz is arguably one of the best VC firms in the world they are a very prominent fixture here in the US and obviously in Silicon Valley and they've done a lot to really move forward entrepreneurship and startups when I see someone with that level of success I often wonder where they came from and Marc Andreessen is again one of those people that can walk the walk because he can talk talk the talk because he can walk the walk he was building Internet companies back in the early 90s before many of us even knew that the internet existed his first one Netscape went IPO his next company did too that's pretty pretty good at attainment and we all know how hard it is to make it through and have that level of success on on numerous occasions so this guy not only has been very successful as a businessman and as an investor but he also gives back he it does charitable pledges and although right now although typically he is very active on social media he's on a self-prescribed vacation but I think we should show the world that we want him to come back from that vacation with a lot of Twitter love link all right people so join me in welcoming to the stage Derek clay and mark well welcome thank you both for being here I hate to start on a negative note but I just think I should clear the air because clay I thought in the pre meeting we all agreed to shave our heads for this this interview and you kind of left mark and I out to dry so it's like something we could probably deal with in the course of the panel forget it and get him back for it and somebody to bring out like that bring out a clipper so we could like we can take care of that right here how how has your theory on disruption evolved in the last 20 years since when since you released it almost none of the critical ideas that now are really important existed in the original theory but I think what we learned is that a good theory has to be able to confront and resolve anomalies I have a saw a sign outside of my office that says anomalies wanted because if somebody can bring to you something that's going on that the theory can explain then either have to put a boundary and say the theory doesn't apply to that or no there's something else going on and even change the way we define things you know and so things that are really important are there are some industries like hotels where disruption never happened and historically higher education was never been disrupted you know and then we realized that the trajectory of improvement in the theory is not a constant but the rate at which innovators make good pair good products better is a is a variable and so hotels have been disrupted now because Airbnb has changed the business model and and online learning is improving in such a rapid rate that Harvard Business School is getting disrupted and that was unconceivable the generation ago why does the theory Marx thought so much power with entres VCS in Silicon Valley 20 years later there are people that say hey it's not relevant anymore it's and what I had other people here think about it yeah so the way I think about it the way I think about it is we had algebra we had algebra business and I described algebra business was kind of a very straightforward theory this was the case when I came to the valley this is kind of what all the experts would tell you is that basically if big companies are well run then startups can't take them out and so you want to be very scared in wary of the companies that are that are well run and you basically as a as an entrepreneur you need to wait until a big company's poorly run and then they introduce them you know they get arrogance and they get they get lazy and that's when you attack for us for my generation for me disruption theory was sort of equivalent calculus which was it sort of flipped a lot of the assumptions in their head and it basically told you actually the opposite which is the companies that get disrupted the big companies get disrupted or not the poorly run pick companies as much as they're the well-run big companies right the thing that prevents a big company from adapting to disruption coming from below is that it's well run right to be part of close for first book on the topic which is it's big companies that are well-run are very focused on their current customers they're very focused in their current customer needs they're very focused on their current customers ability to pay the revenue that they'll support they're very focused on the margins that they can get off the current customers and it's because they're so well-run if this new thing comes out from below it looks like a toy and they say well that that's that's never going to work because all these customers that that we focus on are aren't interested in it and so the gap that opens up is a gap that opens up as a result of competence not incompetence and so and and out here that was kind of a that was kind of that was a sort of swallowed the red pill kind of moment from you know from the matrix which is basically the minute you wrap your head around that you're like oh right and then all of a sudden you can just like week oculus you can start to explain all these things that you see in business that otherwise don't make sense right these big successful important companies with all these resources and all these capabilities all these incredibly short people and I'll help you the all the magazine covers in the whole thing and yet they get taken apart you know sometimes extremely quickly with companies going private so much later now than they used to I'm sorry going public so much later now they use to where when does that start at what face do you see this with the companies you're working with the companies you've worked with when when does it start is it starting before they go public are people already starting to get disrupted the big venture-backed companies are they already starting to get disrupted today or does it happen after the IPO and and they you know people start to get complacent so this is the thing that I think I think so there's this thing outside the valley you see this a lot to press these days outside the valley there's this view that silicon silicon valley founders all of us are like you know basically arrogant and presumptuous and a big part of the arrogance and presumptuousness is the idea that basically we're starting all these companies that are trying to disrupt all of these establishing industries there is some truth to that but the other fundamental truth that we live with every day is the companies to get disruptive the fastest are our own companies and in fact one of the things I find just so amazing about the valley and I would say both scary as an investor and entrepreneur but also just can continuously invigorating and exciting is exactly your point which is our own companies that we start can start to get disrupted very quickly you know I think most rivet startups have maybe a five year window before they start to get locked into a pattern of doing business with the particular kind of customer and then these these these disruption opportunities emerge and as everybody everybody here knows the minute an opportunity like that emerges there are other valley entrepreneurs who will immediately attack and so I we see the the theory kicking it very quickly out here and I think it it's almost in a mirror way venture capital companies themselves become disrupted because there is so much money then what used to be a really interesting five million dollar deal as you get so big five million dollars just doesn't it isn't worth your while and so they go they become later in layer private private equity players not venture capitalists just because they have to put their money to use yeah you know yeah is it interesting trim because we have we have this we have a group of kind of these micro VCS or they have these kind of 50 million dollar funds some of them have stayed there and some of them have gone upstream and then you have people like the incubator so like YC who started at the really I mean when you talk about disruption that model I mean they started with those first companies who nobody really cared about and now look at them now with this huge fund I mean what Mark do you see how do you how do you work with people like that in the future because at some point they start competing with injuries and for those later stage fields they are now yeah so say venture capital is the case is sort of this term co-op petition and so you're sort of competing one day cooperating the next day and so it's been I guess I it's a general thing I'd say it's been a revolution like the fact that we now have YC the fact that we have all these accelerators the fact that we have all these seed investors right it's just a much more vigorous but much more diverse environment and for us in terms of funding sources and then just in terms of the run number of startups they get picked and so you know kind of to Clay's point we find ourselves in some cases making a bet to us now as small as a hundred thousand dollars in some cases as big as a hundred million dollars III think it's great for the valley it requires it requires everybody to continuously adapt but I think it's what's keeping the valley so vigorous Mark said something you want to build upon that is a part of my hope has been that if you have a theory that is useful and it describes a piece of how the world works and if smart people understand the theory they won't fail nearly as often and and when you look at it in that way historically the way we have built companies was trial and error and is a very inefficient way of starting new businesses and what you see is the funds that are the companies that you start are smart people you teach them the theory but that creates its own problems doesn't it because it G's if everybody does everything right then and this it's kind of creates the opportunity for the next wave of disruption yeah that's right because historically you succeeded because of their they're not not understanding they had to win by trial and error that was that was easy to catch yeah now if they do everything right what you ought to do is you should you should quit and become a professor at the Harvard Business School because what I mean I just have to talk I don't have to do anything you have to good stuff yeah do you think they love do you think that do you think they'd let me enter his her a trapdoor anybody would love to have you in when the you know the market in the climate that you can kind of feel this little bit of a cloud from what it's been this like huge you know huge party the last few years and kind of over the top at times when the market starts to turn when people start to get nervous about things the the venture capital the valuations are down and q4 when they've been up you know for the last couple of years so what happens is this a time or big companies as they look back right now if they look back three or four years in the future is this when they're getting disrupted or is this where when the when the bigger companies or or even the startups is this where they really buckle down and figure it out right now what what historically what's happened can I give a hypotheses for mark to shut down if this is wrong but the reason why I wanted to talk about the capitalist dilemma is that in fact there is capital everywhere and the cost of capital is I mean everybody would say that our return to capital is fifteen percent or whatever that's what we aspire to the reality is the return to venture capital over the last ten years overall has been nearly zero and yet you've got all of this capital you know and so it creates behavior that you just wouldn't imagine and the reason I wanted to talk about how there used to be abundance of bandwidth and so you could waste bandwidth I wonder if capital is doing the same thing to investment and that is it's a time when we shouldn't husband the use of capital but be aggressively putting the capital to work but that that also then dries up the value of the investments that were in the putting our money into I don't know yeah I think that's right so I think we can talk about what's happening specifically in the valley but there is a broader point that claims bringing up which i think is important understand which is we all want to talk about tech and when I talk about venture capital but the total amount of money going into all the tech companies all the unicorns is in the order of 50 billion dollars a year which is a large amount of money from an absolute standpoint right in terms of just how we think about money day to day it's a very very small amount of money from a from a global global context and so I'll just give you one example of how to think about that two examples how to think about that so one is but 50 billion dollars going into height going into high-tech this year alone more than a trillion dollars will be distributed from from just the US as 500 biggest companies just the SP 500 will distribute more than a trillion dollars of cash back to their shareholders right which is so those of you who are math majors 20 times more money is going to come out of big established companies than is going to go into startups right and so to me the real question the macro question is not what happens with the 50 billion that goes into startups the real question is what happens to the nine hundred and fifty billion that does it now where does that go the other macro fact that you can look at that helps explain this I think is right globally there's a lot more money and debt than there and it is an equity global bond markets are much much bigger than the global equity markets globally there's six trillion dollars of bonds globally that are returning negative yield and so there are six trillion dollars six trillion dollars worth of money in financial instruments in the world where you have to pay for the privilege of owning them right you not only don't get any money you have to pay to own them right and again I just compared 50 billion into startups versus six trillion where you have to pay to own a bond and so I think the critical the critical crisis in the economy at large is not that the unicorn circle for value the critical crisis in the economy at large is that there aren't there aren't enough unicorns and then the clays Point big companies I totally agree with them are not being nearly aggressive enough that investing for the future because what the markets are telling us is exactly your point capitals abundant opportunity is scarcity well historically there were about ten companies every year that mattered in the valley now we have about a hundred companies more than a hundred companies valued over a billion dollars did is have we gotten smarter people involved Steve Case it says that founder of AOL says that 50 years ago everyone's smart one in a government and today everyone that's smart is going into startups is this a case that we just widen widen the pool have we open it or or have we been fooled by some of these companies that just you know with the access of capital I think on average it's very exciting to be here and I think that we we teach marketing wrong at the business schools because when we will want to know whether there's a growth opportunity we look at the numbers about how many products are being sold and what's that trajectory upmarket but what's really interesting is all of the non consumption that's going on because nobody has yet made it so affordable and accessible that even more people have access to it so take for example the the boring business of management and we're trying to teach people how to be managers you know how many people can actually go to the Harvard Business School or there's a school out here that start starts it starts with an ass oh that's oh yeah yeah it's the it's the back up school isn't whatever but beautiful campus beautiful yeah but there is so much non consumption of about how to manage in the world and online learning and corporate universities are emerging and so that this that this the market for learning is ballooning because it is being disrupted yeah and there is so much non consumption of so many things around us that we just narrow our potential if we think about consumption as opposed to non consumption on education is the way to disrupt education to give it to everyone for free or is it to do with technology or what would you all have a take on that well so if you develop a product that is you can hire to get a job done almost always people will pay a premium price for a better product and the reason why people will make a premium price for a better product is if you hire a product that doesn't do a job very well at all then darn it you have to shop and try something else and it doesn't work and you have to return it and the cost of getting a product that doesn't work is so costly that when you develop a product that nails the job perfectly people are delighted to pay a premium price and so giving anything away free is absolutely the wrong way to think about the problem and so for example there's a job that arises in in the valley occasionally which is the third of our five children actually did come to stand for it for whatever built the blind the black sheep yeah to get a doctorate you know and he called this up after he'd been here for a week and he said mom and dad I found my apartment I need to furnish my pair of my apartment tomorrow as a job' hat I have to furnish the place tomorrow if I said that's a job is there something that you would hire to get this job done the brand that just pops into your mind IKEA right and they have designed their system so that anything that you need in order to furnish the apartment tomorrow it's there and you don't have to shop it is it's it's there and so the owner is the third richest guy in the world he got rich selling low quality furniture to the low end of humanity and he becomes rich right yeah and why is that it's people who pay a premium price for a better product and you don't have to go to Target and this and that and that to get the job done so there's a long way of saying I hope that we never think about free is a pathway to the total solution yeah okay let's talk about founders versus managers mark your firm is really this is one of your kind of core tenants what advantages as a founder CEO have over a hired CEO that comes in down the road yeah so we think that in tech we think founders are critically important we think that if you just look historically at many of the great you know important technology companies of the last 50 years hundred years and many of them are run by their founders for decades and I would say it's not a religious point of view which is it's not always the case like I was a founder I was never CEO and liked it so it's not a religious case that the founder always has to be the CEO but that there's something very important about the founder or the founders and there's something very important about the founder mentality and a lot of it has to do with with disruption a lot of it has to do with responding to disruption and so in particular I would say there's this there's this cliche of founders that a lot of people believe are used to believe which is that founders are too stubborn and founders get too locked into the original idea and they can't adapt as times change we've actually found the opposite to be true we 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 different reasons for that I think one is the founder remembers when the business was nothing the founder remembers any of those who the audience will notice a founder if the founder remembers what it was like when there was like nobody's office with you and when you carried out your own trashcan like the founder remembers this thing used to be zero and so the founders have a vision kind of in their heads they kind of haast them that says this thing used to be zero now it's something it could be zero again and so when an existential threat like somebody coming in with a disruptive product occurs the founder we often find is emotionally able to wrap their head around it and then able to actually figure out what to do about it because they know that if they don't they're they're going to be in real trouble the other thing we find with the founder with the founder mentality is that the founder can carry enormous moral weight inside the company to then be able to make the changes that are required right and so sort of though cliche of like having your name on the door it doesn't you know when Steve Jobs you know goes in Apple and says times are changing and we need to do X and X is heresy right as compared to everything Apple had done up until that point you know a Steve Jobs a founder is going to be able to convince the company that they have to do that whereas a professional CEO shows up and says that and everybody's kind of like ooh you know I don't know and so we try really hard in our companies to have the founder be central we in many cases have the founder as the CEO and then even when we don't have the founder as the CEO or even when the founder doesn't want to be the CEO we try hard to pair the founder with the CEO so that they can have those strengths yeah but wonder if we could talk about a couple of companies and and see which how you how you feel about them get your pinions on them in terms of where they're at let's start clay with you with Apple you know they just feel like we're getting in these cycles into this last year they've gone off the 2 year plan and now you can buy your iPhone very clearly very simply every 12 months get your new iPhone it's thinner it's a little bit more expensive what when you look at Apple and what they're doing did they follow this model of you know could be ripe for destruction disruption in the next few years what do you think well my wife calls me the Jewish mother of business because the Jewish mother is always worried about everything regardless of how well it's running you know so I worry about Apple and what I what I admire about jobs in his legacy is that he did his research in front of a mirror and if I have a need in my life and there isn't something I could hire to get that job done I bet you that job arises in lots of people's lives and and I worry that Apple can easily lose that and do their research by looking outside and not understanding the essence of what the job has to be you know and so historically they've been very disruptive at every step in the way in ways that I didn't even see myself coming but now I see modularity coming at the bottom of the market and accelerating the development cadence you know so conscious you guys will pray for the Harvard Business School I'll pray for Apple sure we'd be happy to do that I'm gonna have to think about that for a few minutes before I are you comment before I agree mark you've tweeted 88,000 times I just assume there's a group of 14 year olds in a like a windowless conference room it up on Sand Hill is this true yeah that's right are these yours is this you yeah all of them no it's a sweatshop it's a son thank you for being on it to child labor yeah yeah yeah no that's all me okay yeah what's what's going on Twitter you're a user you're a there been some things we've been talking about lately that you may become involved with Twitter I assume you don't want to comment on that or you may have made the announcement here already but what's what would you do to fix what do you think needs to be done in Twitter that is an interesting question so let me start by saying there's a lot that's going to write at Twitter and I think they say it's a sign of the times it's a sign of the times that we have a company in the valley that's ten years old this doing three billion dollars in revenue and there's 300 million active users and everybody's like wow they suck where I come from that's pretty good that's that's a pretty good skit but I think they have a lot to be proud of I mean I think their challenge is well-documented which is that the growth has slowed the it's a network effect on the growth of the network has slowed and so there's basically two schools of thought one is it's topping out and it just it is what it is and they've reached the limit and the other is that there are things that they could do in the product to expand the market and to have a lot more growth and so I think they're working through right now the this question which is I either they either I think have to accept that they are what they are and that they have to they have to lock in on that and they have to set expectations appropriately around that and then go on to become very successful doing that basically with their today or they need to do what I know they're you know what a know certainly jack is working hard on which is the reinvention and and product expansion the obvious challenge is that there are you know there was just Twitter for their use case and now there are other you know competition there's competition there's disruption and so in particular there's their services like Instagram a snapchat that have kind of that have taken some you know number of use cases from Twitter or in the process of doing that and so I would say it's a great case study of a company that what that has been very disruptive that now has disruptive challenges and is in the middle of trying to figure that out you know what part part of what causes this to happen is when you start out and you organize the company around an inside of a job that needed to be done and nobody's developed a product to get that job done well the data about that opportunity is passive data its data about the context what people are trying to get done in their lives and you then respond to that passive data to develop a product that just but then as the company becomes successful as mark describes it the nature of the data that surrounds the executives changes and now the data is all about products and competitors and features and in contrast to the first set of data which is passive in this Faye's the actin the data is very active and if these numbers aren't pointing up all the time you're in trouble and so the management loses their insight about the job and now they develop develop that they believe that their business is about products and features and so on and and it mem it buries what made you grade and then when you get even more mature and you have efficiency innovations the numbers change again and this is all about costs and growth and free cash and so on yeah and that's a different language then these other two and what you've got to do is somehow put out all of that noise and the data and come back and figure out there's a lot of non consumption and you know how could we do the job better and so you should never say no but if they go in that direction following the numbers they'll be finished very fast alphabet reported that they spent 3.6 billion on moonshot ideas last year that's almost double from the year before certainly a unique position with the founders there should they be I mean should they be investing internally like this is this a good way to avoid disruption do you think they should just be buying more startups what what what do you think well what they need is not more technologies in our praten or more products they need more business models that are new because this doesn't make a difference until it's this and it is it becomes the worst place in the world to create a new business model is with what is within the old business model and even a company as capable as them they I think stop short they have a great product and then they try to find a business model to stick it and investing in what our new business models that we could create that's where growth will come from otherwise it is what we would call sustaining innovations that don't lots of innovation that not mention growth I think it's very I mean it certainly wouldn't argue with that I think it's very exciting though that we have a company like Google that is basically declared right in a time where the lesson always for CEOs is focus focus focus do last give cash back right you know all the rest of it all the stuff that the clay talks about capitalist dilemma we have a company and we have a CEO and Larry Page who's willing to buck that entirely and willing to go full-throttle into new areas and and had and has the business has the resources to be able to do that I'll just give you a this is sort of a here's a way to think about it we think a lot about it from a product lands because we see the self-driving car and all this file this stuff and it's all very impressive there's a financial way of looking at it which is Google sitting on how much cash they've got probably 60 or 70 billion dollars of cash they've got 60 70 billion dollars worth of cash that's piled up from just running their business and they probably generate another I don't know 15 or 20 billion a year just by running their search business and so by default that cash either sits in their bank account returning 0% interest or negative negative interest or that cash gets distributed back to their shareholders who turn around and invest it in these negative yield bonds I pay for the privilege to own it and so you know to be able to take 3.6 billion a year for example out of the 15 or 20 that they're generating and be able to put it into these moon shots that may return zero but by the way that money was going to return zero anyway right or may return right may build a next giant you know an ED giant new self-driving car business or a giant new satellite business or whatever it's going to be you know if they get one or two or three of these moon shots to pay off the total return on their capital will be so much higher right then how any of the big established companies that are being more responsible can return and so as an alphabet shareholder I think you have to feel pretty good about that talking about this relationship of manager versus founder we yesterday we were scheduled to have pork Conrad speak here and he's recently fired as CEO and founder of a company zenefits which which you guys are part of resigning he resigned excuse me is is is this uh is this idea that we have kind of all been a part of break things and move fast do are these types of things will we see more of these things is this to be expected that that in the midst of building these huge companies in a matter of months that just things are going to happen and mistakes are going to get made so I don't want to comment zeniff it says is its own situation has its own it so I don't want to comment specifically on that we're very proud of what David Sachs and the team they are doing now but I don't really want to go into that I will say you know it is you know there is somebody who has received a tremendous amount of criticism in the valley for the last ten years for being too aggressive and moving too fast and actually had a model of move fast and break things and his name is Mark Zuckerberg and his company's net worth 300 billion dollars in his facebook and has ability and a half users so there is a there is a real there is a real art form and a real science and a very large number of people putting a huge amount of effort into building these companies this is not a business you know for the shy this is not a business for the passive this is a business for the aggressive and so I do think it's and I do think it's important for us to take things like corporate governance responsibly and seriously but I also think we need to not lose what makes the valley special and part of that is being able to go straight in to be able to go straight down or windy right yeah and are there are there you know we we've seen Steve Jobs come back we've seen other other founders come back the companies are there things that just make it impossible that you've seen four founders to come back two companies are there some things that just to battery or do you think in the long run having founders involved in getting involved is that it is it a positive thing historically in the long run I mean so I would say it's a matter it's out it's always always a matter of specific personalities I mean I think every company is different every company every person is different that it dynamics are different founder personality is actually very a tremendous amount probably something that doesn't get talked about enough you know there are many many different kinds of successful founders generally speaking as a principle I think it's a good idea to have the founders involved or to have the founders come back if they haven't been involved but I think you have to look at each situation on its own merits love to talk about as we kind of wrap up clay few years ago you wrote a book called how to measure your life personally had a huge impact on my life or basically outlines the this theory and these tactics behind not getting divorced not your kids not hating you and not going to jail which which is something I'm often one worried about and concerned about so what did you come up with this and and you know why did you put this out well going back to something Mark said what causes disruption to occur is not incompetence it is you do everything right and because you do everything right you get killed and nobody intended to get killed but because they did what they thought were the right thing it killed them and I look at my students and graduate every year not a single one of them has a strategy to go out and get divorced right or to raise kids that hate their guts you know and yet a shocking number of our graduating students actually implement that strategy that they did not intend to pursue and and so what is it that causes them to do what they would not want to happen you know and it turns out that it's the very same causal mechanism and that is I invest in things that pay off fast so if you are the kind of person who has a high need for achievement and that includes at least a hundred percent of us right if that's if that's what we need to do in our lives then when we have an extra thirty minutes of time or ounce of energy in our mind subconsciously we will try to find what could I do with this time and energy that would promote the most immediate and tangible evidence that I've achieved something and our careers provide tangible and immediate evidence of achievement every day we close a deal we ship a product we get promoted we get paid and our careers are just filled with tangible immediate evidence of achievement on the other hand when we go home it's very hard to see achievement frankly our children misbehave every day you know the house gets messy every day and so when we have a choice about how do we spend this extra ounce of time and energy in consciously we invest our time and energy where we get the immediate return and that's not at home and we don't intend to invest in things that because money doesn't bring happiness is just we know that right and yet we do it but it's because the way we allocate our time and energy driven by this achievement so just understand for me understanding that that's what happens then I might be able to deal with it in a more productive way you know so I'll just give you one example and but that's really what motivated by writing the book so when I got my MBA I got a job with the Boston Consulting Group and after I'd been there about a month the project manager came to me and said clay we need to meet on Sunday at 2:00 p.m. because we have a big client presentation on Monday we got to be sure everything is in place and I said oh gosh Mike I forgot to tell you I'm a religious guy and I just made a commitment that I wouldn't work on Sunday and he just went bonkers and he everybody here works on Sunday and I said well I made a commitment that I wouldn't and he said look I don't know anything about your church but my church if I need to do something that's a little bit shady I just do it and then I find a priest and I confess that I did it and I promise never to it again you know and and he said doesn't your church have some kind of escape galleries whatever and I said I've been looking for that out for a long time I don't think they have his Harvard trapdoors that's right and so I said I just can't do it I'm sorry and he said anyway so he bustard away and an hour later he came back and he said look clay I talked to everybody it's fine we'll meet on Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and I said oh man I forgot to tell you I made a commitment to my wife that I wouldn't work on I wouldn't work on Saturday and Mike was just even more bonkers about it and he said look clay whatever commitment you made to your wife unsaddle about Saturday just this once in this particular extenuating circumstance isn't going to be okay to do it just this once and I said Mike I am not on this earth to make the partners of BCG to become richer you know I really want to be a good husband a good father and if I spend my Saturday's here at BCG I will be implementing a strategy that I don't intend to pursue and he was really mad at that and so then he came back an hour later and he said look I talked to the team do you happen to work on Friday perchance you know yet it turns out that that decision is one of the most important decisions I ever made because it turns out that my whole life has been filled with an unending stream of extenuating circumstances and if I had said just this once the next time it occurred and the next time you say easier and easier and I decided that it is easier to hold to our principles a hundred percent of the time than it is 98 percent of the time and so anyway that's why I wrote the book mark anything you want to add to that I think I'm going to stop working on weekends mark and clay thank you very much for being here you

Channel: Startup Grind

Views: 68,524

Rating: 4.9093199 out of 5

Keywords: clayton christensen, Andreessen, startup, grind, entrepreneur, technology, marc andreessen, innovators dilemma, andreessen horowitz, startup grind, fundraising, venture capital, innovation, disruption, silicon valley, san francisco, disruptive innovation, harvard, business, accelerator, incubator, 500 startups, yc, y combinator, derek andersen, conference, interview, advice, future, how to, how to start a business, how to raise money, harvard business school, billionaire, unicorn, investor, clay

Id: IkBp1ntD3Zc

Length: 42min 29sec (2549 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 29 2016