There was a lot of good in Lecture 9; although I
watched the whole lecture, I eagerly got, saved, and
read the transcript.

The part I liked best was Ron Conway's suggestion,

Ron Conway: But in the process, when somebody makes
the commitment to you, you get in your car, and you
type an email to them that confirms what they just
said to you. Because a lot of investors have very
short memories and they forget that they were going
to finance you, that they were going to finance or
they forget what the valuation was, that they were
going to find a co-investor. You can get rid of all
that controversy just by putting it in writing and
when they try and get out of it you just resend the
email and say excuse me. And hopefully they have
replied to that email anyways so get it in writing.

This advice sounds a lot like the old technique of
writing a self-serving letter.

Maybe I'm the only one, but there in Lecture 9, from
both Andreessen and Conway, I saw some surprises.

Broadly it seemed to me that some of the messages
didn't fit well with some of the other messages.
And for some of the messages and examples on some of
the questions, maybe there are some better messages
and examples.

For one surprise there appeared to be a theme;
maybe we should notice the theme:

Andreessen and Conway get new investments mostly
only from people they already know and respect.

Then, with this theme, it would appear that in some
ways and to a significant extent Andreessen and
Conway are living in a Silicon Valley version of an
echo chamber.

Then what would be surprising about such an echo
chamber is that necessarily what Andreessen and
Conway are looking for are strongly exceptional
cases:

E.g., Andreessen mentioned

"companies that have the really extreme strengths"

and

"... the venture capital business is one hundred
percent a game of outliers, it is extreme outliers".

and

"And so the big thing that we're looking for, no
matter which sort of particular criteria we talked
about, they all have the characteristics that you
are looking for the extreme outlier.

Maybe I'm the only one, but it strikes me that an
echo chamber is a poor place to look for strongly
exceptional cases. That is, the cases Andreessen
and Conway are looking for happen only a few times
each decade, Facebook, Twitter, PInterest, and a few
more.

Or, for evidence of an echo chamber, there was,

Ron Conway: I think what’s interesting is, we don't
really take anything over the transome. Our network
is so huge now that we basically just take leads
from our own network.

So, either (A) Conway's "network" is really small
with, say, just Mark Zuckerberg, Dick Costolo, Ben
Silbermann, and a few more or (B) so big that most
of the sound in the echo chamber is not much like
what Conway is looking for.

and for more on an echo chamber there was,

Marc Andreessen: The other thing is, I mentioned
this already, but we get similar to what Ron said,
about two thousand referrals a year through our
referral network. A very large percentage of those
are referrals through the seed investors. So by far
the best way to get the introductions to the A stage
venture firms is to work through the seed investors.
Or work through something like Y Combinator.

Then what holds for Conway and other seed investors
means that Andreessen is drawing from what came from
the echo chamber of the seed investors.

Maybe I'm the only one who noticed this; seems
surprising to me.

The people I know and respect in information
technology and especially promising for very
valuable start-ups likely know no one in either the
Conway or Andreessen networks and, really, are not
known by those networks. Conway and Andreessen are
working hard to separate themselves from the people
I respect.

Maybe Andreessen and Conway would respond with the
remark in the lecture,

"The key to success is be so good they can't ignore
you."

So, then, it would seem that somehow all concerned
should try to avoid or circumvent the echo chamber.
E.g., get a lot of traction, publicity, etc. and
then the investors will call the entrepreneur.
Maybe.

But on

"The key to success is be so good they can't ignore
you.",

this characterization of success is not very clear
if only because, for the big winners Andreessen
wants, he also expects "serious flaws" as in,

Marc Andreessen: On the other side of that, the
companies that have the really extreme strengths
often have serious flaws. So one of the cautionary
lessons of venture capital is, if you don’t invest
in the bases with serious flaws, you don't invest in
most of the big winners. And we can go through
example after example after example of that. But
that would have ruled out almost all the big winners
over time. So what we aspire to do is to invest in
the startups that have a really extreme strength.
Along an important dimension, that we would be
willing to tolerate certain weaknesses.

So, for success, have to put up with "serious
flaws".

Also there is

Marc Andreessen: Even the big successful companies,
even Facebook, all these big companies that are now
considered to be very successful, all along the way
all kinds of shit hit the fan over, and over, and
over, and over again.

So, for success, can expect "serious flaws" and also
"all kinds of shit hit the fan over, and over, and
over, and over again".

So, here Andreessen admits, say, that the road to
success has a lot of bumps. Okay, maybe so.

So, what's the truth,

"The key to success is be so good they can't ignore
you."

or

"serious flaws" and the shit keeps hitting the fan?

To add to the confusion, there is

Marc Andreessen: You want to be very precise on
what you can accomplish with your A round and what
is going to be a successful execution of your A
round.

Would be nice! But we already know that, instead,
we can expect "all kinds of shit hit the fan over,
and over, and over, and over again".

Andreessen seems vacillate between (A) shit hitting
"the fan over and over" and (B) being "very precise".

I see some confusion.

There also appears to be some confusion on
planning:

So there is,

Ron Conway: What would convince us, is what usually
convinces us, is the founder and their team
themselves. So we invest in people first, not
necessarily the product idea. The product idea tends
to morph a lot. So we will invest in the team first.

which sounds like the planning is useless. For
more, commonly there are claims that in projects,
planning is important but that

"No plan survives contact with the enemy".

To me, this sounds too negative, that is, there have
been a lot of complicated, ambitious projects that
were executed as planned, on time, within budget.
And for military projects, this can also be the case
as in the Mother of All Briefings by General
Schwartzkopf as at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKi3NwLFkX4

And, on the air campaign

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6YP5OalP18

E.g., there we hear that the plan was that the air
war would take 4-6 weeks, and it did. Early on
several days were lost to some unusually bad
weather, but later the got caught up and back on
schedule.

The ground war? That was 100.000 hours. Period.
The plan was a lot of diversionary efforts and a big
left hook "Hail Mary" play -- worked just as
planned.

The tank battles? The US Abrams tanks could fire
accurately through fog and dust for two miles while
moving; the Iraqi tanks could fire accurately only
with clear sight, for only one mile, and only while
standing still; and the US tank crews were well
trained; any doubt about how that planning would
come out? The F-117 stealth? Did all the bombing
of Baghdad, through all the air defenses, and never
got so much as a single scratch -- just the way
Lockheed planned it. Similarly for the US F-15c
against the Iraqi fighters -- the score was some
dozens for the US and 0 for the Iraqis. Net, the
planning worked.

Lesson: Planning and then executing the plan as
planned really are possible, maybe not usual or
common but, still, possible.

I see Conway and Andreessen as asking too little
from planning. I can believe that in their echo
chamber, they have learned not to think much of
plans, but elsewhere in our economy and technology
are many cases where ambitious projects were planned
and then executed successfully essentially according
to plan.

Well, I can believe that Conway and Andreessen were
describing their experiences in Silicon Valley
looking for the next big thing or at least the next
big app to get middle school girls all excited and
sell out to Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.

And Conway has been at this game for a long time at
the earliest stages where the worst of the
unpredictability is.

For Andreessen, apparently he likes to argue; or as
at

http://avc.com/2014/10/getting-feedback-and-listening-to-it/

there is

"They definitely keep me on my toes, and we’ll see if
they’re able to convince me. I mean, part of it is,
I love arguing.

"The big thing about Twitter for me is it’s just more
people to argue with."

So, maybe Andreessen is mostly just arguing.

Maybe the bottom line is, often Silicon Valley is
not very clear on just what they are doing. That,
too, can be a valuable lesson for an entrepreneur
and worth watching the lecture.

I'm surprised: If with so little clarity I did my
applied math and wrote my software, I'm sure the
math would be awash in terrible errors and my
software would likely never run.

That's how I see it. YMMV.