Marc Andreessen's Guide to Productivity

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Garry Tan on why the size of your round doesn’t matter (Link)

• Truepill was acquired for $525M but the founders made $0 (Link)

• If you want to get a peek behind the angel investor curtain, this online conference tomorrow looks interesting (Link)

Growth

• Promise-market fit is an early signal that product-market fit is possible (Link)

• How to build an AI product that will grow (Link)

• Why founders need to hire a CRO pre-product (Link)

ICYMI

• Hire a world-class fractional recruiter starting at $45/hour. (Link)*

• Why Linear started prioritizing bugs ahead of their own roadmap (Link)

• Agent-assisted coding is getting scary good (Link)

• Ben Horowitz’s guide on hiring execs (Link)

• Daniel Ek went back to building after realizing status games aren’t fulfilling (Link)

• How this founder consistently closes sales in 30-min Zoom calls (Link)

• The #1 lesson Brian Chesky learned from Steve Jobs (Link)

• Jeff Bezos on why high velocity needs to be in your culture (Link)

• Former Google CEO’s advice for startups building in the age of AI (Link)

• Perplexity CEO on expanding your luck surface area (Link)

• Ideas on how to compete with $100B SaaS companies (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Ag Tech

This week I’m highlighting an industry that has a bunch of likely opportunities right now.

It’s ripe for continued disruption.

And no, it’s not just because of AI.

The agricultural industry gets taken for granted by basically everyone who isn’t inside it but, without it, we wouldn’t be able to survive.

And while there’s been some advancement over the last decade, there are a growing number of low-hanging fruit opportunities.

There’s already a newsletter in the space making $18M ARR (yes, really — here’s the founder’s My First Million episode).

Here’s the bull case:

🧠 Framework: Marc Andreessen’s Guide to Productivity

Hacking your way to be more productive with tools and frameworks can help you get more done.

But is getting more done really the goal?

The most successful people, like Marc Andreessen, focus on getting the right things done. They’re aiming for step-change growth opportunities, not incremental improvements.

If you think that way then a lot of conventional productivity advice seems silly and unimportant.

Instead, here are some behaviors Marc’s mentioned (like “strategic incompetence” and “structured procrastination”) that allow and encourage you to stay focused on your big picture goals:

📈 Trend: Startup Shutdowns

When Elad Gil says startup shutdowns should accelerate, it’s a good idea to listen.

We’re still feeling the impact of the ZIRP boom where tons of new LP capital entered the venture markets. Interest rates were low and risk appetite was high.

GPs rushed to deploy that capital so they could raise more, which made more ideas seem like good bets than was actually true.

Some founders took the capital assuming they’d figure things out as they went along while others had a misplaced sense of how their own market would develop. It happens, startups are risky.

But now here’s what happens a few years later:

We’re not at the end of this cycle yet. Founders of these companies are now falling into a few buckets:

1. Continue to run the startup as a zombie, hoping that lightning strikes in terms of growth. Unable to raise more due to the slowed growth, but with multiple years worth of runway. I don’t recommend this, good founders are probably better suited to take a new shot on goal.

2. Recapitalize the company. These founders raise a down round and work with existing investors to reduce everyone’s existing stakes proportionally. This only makes sense if the founder and lead investors want to continue pulling on a thread together (either in the same market or a new one).

3. Return capital to investors and shut down. This sounds bad or maybe even embarrassing but actually this can help maintain good relationships with investors to back your next company.

4. Running out of runway without the ability to raise more. No real good option here. Probably should have returned capital to investors earlier than this.

The founders who initially chose #1 or #2 in 2022-2023 are now starting to either be successful with their turnarounds or not.

(And, if you are or know someone who is, I’d recommend taking a look at Sunset and seeing if they can help.)

I was in this position at the end of 2022 — we could have either shut Launch House down and returned capital to investors, or recapitalize the company.

There was an easy argument to be made for us to recapitalize — we had some fantastic investors who we had strong relationships with — and my co-founder smartly went ahead with this after I decided to break off and build solo.

💬 Quote: “Making it” is a Mirage

It’s good to be paranoid as a founder.

It keeps you on edge and looking forward. What can I do to limit my worries about the future growth and survival of my startup?

If you ever hit complacency and feel like you’ve “made it” then you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.

There are hungrier founders who are coming to compete with you. And inertia is real — it’s a lot harder to start moving faster again once you’ve slowed down.

Here’s a good perspective on this from a former Brex employee who went on to become a founder:

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