I worked a short internship as an analyst at a mid tier regional VC that was affiliated with a larger well-known Sand Hill firm. I won't claim to be an insider, nor will I claim to be especially knowledgeable about VC or visionary of the future. But I will tell you this: your description of Marc Andreessen as a lucky know-nothing fits 99.9% of VC partners out there, even in the top tier firms. They are all bumbling bufoons, spouting fortune-cookie wisdom and clinging to their solitary past success as an entrepreneur with unparalleled hindsight bias. They are completely unable to critically analyze anything. You could throw that description against any wall in Sand Hill and be guaranteed to hit at least one VC partner.

The thing is, the description doesn't really fit Marc. I don't believe in hero worship; I don't think he is invincible, nor do I think he is especially prescient about the future. And I don't give credence to everything he says as if it is some sort of unique nugget of wisdom. But he does do one thing well that the rest of Silicon Valley hasn't figured out yet: He forms his own opinion and when he likes something, he throws his whole weight behind it.

The rest of Silicon Valley relies heavily (and by heavily, I mean solely) on social proof. It's actually quite amusing to watch a forum of partners from different firms sit in the same room and listen to a pitch. They rarely listen to the pitch, cause they are so fucking busy looking around the room to try to gauge the reactions of the other VCs in the room. They are incapable of making decisions for themselves. They will only decide to invest if they see other VCs investing.

This groupthink behavior of most Silicon Valley VCs has a real effect beyond it's soundbite-ness: It bounds their upsides. If you are only willing to invest in a company if other investors also invest, you might get slightly better at picking winners, but you end up taking smaller stakes in those winners, and you end up spending more for those stakes because you essentially are bidding up their valuations. This kills the power law distribution of returns that is supposedly obvious to the VC industry. It dooms these firms to making the approximate same level of returns as everyone else in the industry.

Marc has been a successful entrepreneur no doubt. Even after three very large successes, you might be able to attribute that to luck. I still consider that to be mostly irrelevant. Marc has no problem throwing big money around to acquire as much as possible in a promising firm, and he gives zero shits about what other VC's think about the investment. This behavior is inherently risky. Throw your weight behind losers and you go bankrupt. But he got in on the ground floor of some of the biggest exits in the last decade, and the ground floor is where those power law exits really pay off. This makes him different, and worth listening to, even if you ultimately disagree with him.