Three years ago this month, Marc Andreessen posted 5,200 words to the a16z website.
Founders screenshotted it.
They put “We believe in ambition” in their LinkedIn headlines.
Then on Monday morning they ran their company exactly the way they had on Friday.
The manifesto gets quoted as a mood. It was written as a set of rules.
Let’s dive in 👇
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The Manifesto in 60 Seconds ⏱️
If you never read all 5,200 words, here’s what’s in it:
🚀 Growth is everything. Every good thing sits downstream of it. Stop growing and you get zero-sum infighting, then decline.
🧠 AI is alchemy. Sand, taught to think.
💸 Cheap beats expensive. Rich beats poor. Abundant beats scarce.
🏆 Merit and radical competence. Plus an absolute rejection of resentment.
🌍 Technology doesn’t care who you are. A positive attitude and a cheap laptop are enough to contribute.
⚔️ An enemies list. Stagnation, bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, regulatory capture, cartels.
It got savaged on arrival. The SF Standard compared the prose to LinkedIn “bro-etry”. Political scientist Henry Farrell likened it to a religious creed.
Yet even critics conceded ground. Nate Silver said he agreed with roughly 84% of it.
My First Ever AMA
You know the email.
“Loved meeting you. Not quite right for us at this stage. Keep us posted.”
Translation: no. And no idea why.
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The Line That Actually Matters 🎯
Our enemy is stagnation.
Most readers took it as a shot at Washington.
Jeff Bezos had already written the startup version. In his 2016 letter to shareholders, he called it Day 2. First stasis. Then irrelevance. Then painful decline. Then death.
Here’s the uncomfortable part.
Day 2 doesn’t arrive from outside. Founders build it themselves, one reasonable-sounding approval at a time.
And every company that dies of it was run by people who believed in ambition.
Five of the 113 beliefs are the antidote. Most founders adopted the other 108.
