Three new technologies leaders should exploit: Marc Andreessen

Technology brings opportunities for leaders to try and sample new ways of working, new solutions or completely different ways to approach problems.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who helped create the Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape has highlighted the technology that executives should test out.

Andreessen and his partner Chris Dixon coined the term “hill mode” and “search mode”, hill mode is when leaders exploit new technology or market and search mode is when leaders are in new territories looking for those hills to climb.

He tells the McKinsey podcast the Quarterly Interview: Provocations to Ponder hosts the three current hills available for leaders to climb at the moment.

The first is AI, he said, “there are all these amazing technologies around deep learning, machine learning, GPT-3 [generative pretrained transformer 3], DALL-E, this new, image-generation thing from open AI, and so forth.”

Secondly, is biotech, with genomics and now the mRNA revolution, and the revolution of bringing together the disciplines of biology and engineering, he said.

Lastly, it is crypto and Web3, which Andreessen said is a revolution around distributed consensus, building trusted networks on the internet, and all the things that follow from that.

He explained why these are the technologies leaders should invest in, “Now, why are we confident that those are the hills to climb? If you check stock prices on any given day, it sure seems like people are less fired up about these technologies than they were six months ago.

“The core thing that we do is track talent flows. And the thing that we know for sure is that the smartest people in the world, the smartest kids graduating from college, and the smartest industry professionals are flooding into those three sectors.”

He continued, “There’s an incredible wave of talent in the form of top-end engineers, scientists, executives, and founders flooding into those three sectors. In our world, that’s not completely predictive, but that’s as predictive as you can get.”

Andreessen said Web3 brings up a negative response from many leaders within and outside of technology.

He said, “There is something about crypto and Web3 that triggers responses that go way beyond, ‘I wish we didn’t have to do this’. I would describe it more as fear and loathing. Something about it triggers an extremely negative response.”

There are two reasons for these “visceral” responses, according to Andreessen.

“One possibility, of course, is that they’re right. You always have to concede that the critics may be right. There’s a possibility that the future of the economy is See’s Candies, not blockchain.

“But maybe crypto sets people on edge because it involves money. It’s so fundamental. When people think, 'it’s this new form of money,' or 'it’s these new theories about money,' or even, 'it’s this new form of technology that involves money,' they get emotional. That’s maybe the most obvious observation in the world: money makes people emotional.”

He added, “As people who invest in contrarian ideas, that reaction gets us all excited, right? We look at the criticism as an incredible gift to our founders and to our firm. If all of these other people are going to rule something out, and if we’re right that it’s a big deal, then entrepreneurs who are focused on this are going to have a magic opportunity.”