Business Advice – Marc Andreessen

Forbes Magazine has this new feature called 10 minutes with xyz. They basically talk to a business personality and get some advice, sometimes a reflection, sometimes a lesson. All of it makes for interesting reading. Some of the stuff they come up with is inspiring and sometimes even weird. Here’s one that caught my eye with Marc Andreessen, co founder of Netscape, and one of the smartest business bloggers I have seen. His personal blog is up here. Recently he started a Capital Venture firm (in this climate???) and here’s what he had to tell Forbes in his 10 minutes.

At our first executive staff meeting, our CEO Jim said,  ”OK, I want you to listen very carefully to what I have to say.” He said, “We have three rules here at this company now. Rule No. 1 is when you see a snake, kill the snake.” In otherwords, when you see a problem, and there’s something that needs to be fixed, just go ahead and fix it. Don’t screw around. Don’t delay. Don’t overanalyze it. Just fix the problem. ”

And then he said, “Rule No. 2 is, don’t play with dead snakes.” He said, “When a problem has been solved, or you have taken an approach on something, do not revisit it. Simply move on down the road.” And that one was very helpful, because I think as a company at that point, we had a pattern of touching dead snakes.

And then the third thing he said was, “Often, the biggest opportunities start out looking like snakes … look for the points of disruption.” Look for the things where something is going wrong, because that may indicate a major opportunity. And that was essentially the operating manual for the company for several years.

You know, it lodged in our brains.

Gold stuff. Read the full post here.

Some of them aren’t that great reads. Here’s another great read of Josh James.

When you’re a young entrepreneur that’s crucial to remember, because you’ve got older people saying, “Look kid, I’ve been around this block before. You should do X.” It isn’t arrogance. It’s just a reality that no one’s better than you are. A lot of this is confidence, risk-taking and belief in yourself regardless of what the experts might say.

Successful people, smarter people are not that different from you. They put their pants on one leg at a time. You need to listen to your inner confidence.

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