Marc Andreessen: Every innovator faces “a wall of skepticism”

Once it works, the stories get adapted to where it's like, it was inevitable all along. Everybody always knew that this was a good idea. The person has won all these awards, society embraced them, and invariably, if you were with them when they were actually doing the work, it'd be like, no, that's not how it happened at all. They faced a wall of skepticism, just like a wall of basically social, essentially, denial, no, this is not going to work. No, I'm not going to join your lab. No, I'm not going to come work for your company. No, I'm not going to buy your product. No, I'm not going to meet with you. And so they get just, like, tremendous social resistance. This is why agreeableness is a problem for innovation. If you're agreeable, you're going to listen to the people around you. They're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid, end of story. You're not going to proceed. Then you'd be able to deal with social discomfort to the level of ostracism. So Sean Parker has the best line, by the way, on this. He says being an entrepreneur is like getting punched to the face over and over again. He said, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood. And I love that line because it makes everybody massively uncomfortable, but it gives you a sense of how basically painful the process is. If you talk to any entrepreneur who's been through it about that, they're like, oh, yeah, that's exactly what it's like.