Marc Andreessen argues founders should explore different versions of their idea before raising money. He calls this the idea maze: testing customer, product form, and go-to-market strategy. Successful founders like the Google team and eBay's Pierre Omidyar had working prototypes and years of domain experience before they started companies.
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You see people sometimes who say, I want to start a company, and then they kind of work through the process of coming up with an idea. And generally those don't work as well as the case where somebody has the idea first, and then they kind of realize that there's an opportunity to build a company, and then they just turn out to be the right kind of person to do that. Success is never predictable, but it's more predictable if you start with a great idea and then back into starting the company. So this is what we did. You know, we had Mosaic before we had Netscape. The Google guys had the Google search engine working at Stanford. Pierre Omidyar had ebay working before he left his previous job. It's also far easier to raise money, right? Like, the ideal pitch that we receive is, here's the thing that works. Would you like to invest in our company or not? Like, that's so much easier than, here's 30 slides with a dream, right? And then we have this concept called the idea maze, which our Biology Srinivasan came up with when he was with us. There's a mythology that these ideas kind of arrive like magic, or people kind of stumble into them. It's like ebay with the pest dispensers or something. The reality, usually with the big successes, is that the founder has been chewing on the problem for five or ten years before they start the company. And they often worked on it in school or they even experimented on it when they were a kid. And they've been kind of training up over that period of time to be able to do the thing. So they're like a true domain expert. And this sort of sounds like mom and apple pie, which is, yeah, you want to be a domain expert in what you're doing, but you would, you know, the mythology is so strong of like, oh, I just, like, had this idea in the shower right Now I'm doing it. Like, it's generally not that we call it the idea maze, because for any idea, there's, like, all these different permutations. Who should the customer be, what shape, form should the product have, and how should we take it to market? And all these things. The really smart founders have thought through all these scenarios by the time they go out to raise money. And they have, like, detailed answers on every one of those fronts because they put so much thought into it. The sort of more haphazard founders haven't thought about any of that. And it's the detailed ones who tend to do much better.
