JC Rolison 🔺

Marc Andreessen revealed how Harvard Business School was built on a broken 1941 theory, and how it's now collapsing... Andreessen co-founded Netscape in 1994 and a16z in 2009. He has sat on Meta's board since 2008. He has spent 30 years backing founders and watching managerial CEOs lose to them. The pattern traces back to one book: James Burnham's The Machiavellians (1941). Burnham argued every great company had been founder-run. Henry Ford ran Ford. Bob Noyce ran Intel. Today, Elon Musk runs Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. Then, he said, something broke. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, a new philosophy replaced the founder. It was called managerialism. The professional manager would now hold a portable skill, usable across any business. The consequences were: - Harvard Business School - Stanford Business School - Management as a universal skill - The 1970s conglomerate "That assumes the managers are going to do a good job," Andreessen says. For 30 years, they haven't. Managers can run something static, he says. Soup is soup. A bank is a bank. A car is a car. But when the industry changes, the manager freezes. Look at SpaceX. "Imagine being a professionally trained manager, trained at a top management school, working for a rocket launch company, competing with SpaceX." Then Elon's rockets started landing on their butt. "Your management skills ... what good are they at that point?" Andreessen's conclusion: "You're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century if you start with the founder and train them on management."