Startup Archive

Naval Ravikant: “The future will be almost all startups” “I firmly believe that the efficient size of a company is shrinking very rapidly, and so the future will be almost all startups.” In the clip below from a 2012 interview, Naval speculates that information technology will reverse the centralizing force of economies of scale following the Industrial Revolution. “I think the contract work trend is going to increase, and I think the size of your average company is going to decrease. I think we’re going to see more and more billion dollar businesses built by four or five people, and it’ll stay at that.” He doesn’t think we’ll see many more companies like Facebook or Google with tens of thousands of employees: “I think any entrepreneur worth their salt could today build Facebook with a few hundred people… Facebook and Google are in the situation that large companies end up in where the founders know that 80% of the people are not really needed, they just don’t know which 80%.”

Marc Andreessen: “The best entrepreneurs of the future will be quite skilled at 6-8 things” Marc is asked how being a founder changes in the age of AI, to which he responds: “I think there are two ways to have a differentiated edge in general — go deep or go broad.” Going deep means becoming a specialized expert in your domain. “There are domains where that really matters,” Marc explains. “In biotech and working on AI foundation models, the deeper you are the better.” But as AI gets more powerful, Marc would bet that “going broad” will be the winning strategy for most fields. He recommends knowing a lot about many different fields and how the world works — then use AI tools to go deep whenever you need to. “If you talk to any of the great CEOs, you see this.” Mark explains. “The really great CEOs are great at product, sales, and marketing people, they’re great legal thinkers, and they’re great at finance and with investors and the press. It’s a multidisciplinary kind of approach.” He continues: “The best entrepreneurs of the future will probably be quite skilled at 6 or 8 things and then will be able to cross-pollinate and combine them.” Video source: @tbpn (2025)

Ben Horowitz on the 1 reason founders fail as CEO The a16z co-founder is asked for the #1 reason founders fail in the CEO role, to which he replies: “I would say the big thing is a lack of decision — hesitation . . . You can be really smart, but if you wait too long before you pull the trigger, you’re not smart anymore. There’s all kinds of excuses people tell themselves to not make a decision.” Ben gives firing an executive as an example of a situation where founders often wait too long to make a decision. Founders will often get stuck on issues like, “If we made such a big deal when we hired him, what is the press going to say?” or “What are the people in the company going to say?” or “I don’t have time to hire a new person to do the job.” He reflects: “There’s all these reasons not to make the decision. And if you think about them for more than five minutes, you go: Well that doesn’t make any sense because this guy is a f’ing up the whole org. Who cares what the press says? Just get rid of him and start rebuilding now.” Ben continues: “It’s the lack of confidence that generally causes a no-decision where there really needs to be a decision is what I would say is the common pattern.” How do founders become more confident? In Ben’s view, that’s personal: “At the end of the day, confidence is personal and you have to feel it yourself to have it . . . And the thing that causes the crisis in confidence is: you invent something, you hire a bunch of people, you make a decision, it’s wrong, and people really suffer from it. You feel horrible because you’re like, ‘Wow I don’t know what I’m doing, and I made a mistake and it had real consequences.’ Most people in life don’t have a situation like that until they become CEO. And so then it’s like, ‘Well how do I recover from that?’” In short, confidence has to be earned: You try. You fail. You get back up. You learn from your mistakes. Do that enough times and you’ll become confident in your ability to handle anything. Video source: @myfirstmilpod (2025)