Andreessen Horowitz

Adjacency-and-Network Expansion Test

Prioritize marketplace expansion by adjacency and network reinforcement, not by the size of the adjacent TAM

Self-Mastery4 steps

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

Self-Mastery3 steps

Anger as a Secondary Emotion

Before reacting in anger, name the fear or hurt beneath it — connecting emotions replace the distancing one

Influence5 steps

Behavioral Pricing: Compromise, Decoy and Framing

Raise revenue 30%+ by reframing tiers and framing prices — without touching the product.

Break the Chain of Bad Decisions

Disasters are chains of small bad decisions; eat the sunk cost to break the chain and start a chain of good ones

Leadership5 steps

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

Earn trust before you inflict change: the first 90 days of a leader inheriting a team.

Marketing4 steps

Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking

Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000

Curiosity Loops

Turn a hard decision into structured, contextual advice by asking the right people the right question.

Deliberate Team Scaling

Build the senior team paced to your ability to integrate and manage them, avoiding both fast-scaling and never-hiring-experience

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Leadership6 steps

Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

Only discussion belongs in the meeting; discovery and decision happen independently and asynchronously

Mindset4 steps

Don't Be the Frog: The Learning Trajectory Test

Judge whether to stay in a job by the direction of your learning curve, not by inertia.

Finance3 steps

Dual-Sided ROI Equation

Price each acquisition to include the cost of acquiring the other side it needs, then push to your payback threshold

Peak Performance4 steps

Eating Your Vegetables: The 10-12 Exposure Rule

Do a hard, avoided skill 10-12 deliberate times before judging whether you actually dislike it.

Explore and Exploit Career Strategy

Explore widely with a thesis early, then exploit a role for the specific learnings your next goal needs.

Fail Conclusively (Maximize the Treatment Effect)

Design experiments that kill an idea for good, so no future exec can resurrect it.

Fear-Origin Audit for Product Bets

Products built from competitive fear fail; audit the motivation before you audit the roadmap.

Productivity3 steps

Homogenize the Early Experience for Retention

Move retention by fixing unlucky bad first experiences, not by nudging people about to churn

How You Charge Beats How Much: Pricing-Model Design

Pick the monetization model, then the price metric, then the structure — the number comes last.

Innovation3 steps

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

Same inputs produce same ideas — mine your unique experience and starve the herd feed

Self-Mastery4 steps

Inner vs Outer Scorecard Values Filter

Rank your real values, then test whether a decision optimizes for them instead of for status.

Leadership4 steps

Inquiry Before Advice (Be a Thought Partner)

Resist giving advice — explore first, keep the monkey on their back, and develop the person instead of the answer

Influence3 steps

Invest in Strength, Not Lack of Weakness

Judge people by what they do best, not their worst mistake; back the world-class strength and manage around the flaws

Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

A premortem only works if each predicted failure signal is bound to a pre-committed action

Marketing5 steps

Leaders, Fillers and Killers

Sort every feature into leader, filler or killer to configure packages that unlock segments.

Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments

Excavate your gut into a rubric, then score the rubric against reality to learn where your gut is wrong

Managerial Leverage Test

You don't make reports great; you hire people who make you great, and you replace those you have to push

Mental Time Travel

Ask how you'll feel about this in ten years to dissolve the focusing effect of right now

Minimum Viable Experiment + The Dogfood Gate

Ship the cheapest version of an experiment — but use it yourself before you trust its null result

Marketing7 steps

Optimize the Second Screen (Post-Click Leverage)

Everyone crowds the ad; the compounding wins sit on the page people land on after it

Communication3 steps

Pinch Before Crunch

Raise small irritations early, while they're still a pinch, before they compound into a relationship-damaging crunch

Pre-Sell Before You Build

Do customer validation and line up buyers before writing code or raising money

Strategy6 steps

Price Before Product: The Willingness-to-Pay Conversation

Have the pricing conversation months before launch and use it to prioritize what you build.

Problem-First, Wheelhouse-Checked, Unit-Economics-Proven

Three gates a product idea must pass before you build the solution you already fell in love with.

Marketing5 steps

Productize to Segments (the 'You Can Act Differently' Test)

Segments are defined by needs and willingness to pay — and only count if you can act differently on them.

Product Manager as Leader Without Authority

The PM job isn't specs or interviews; it's leading via influence so the product wins in the market

Self-Mastery5 steps

Quit Before You're Certain (Would I Start This Today?)

If you're thinking about quitting, you're probably already late — waste is prospective, not retrospective

Repair: What Did You Hear Me Say?

When a response feels wildly off, ask 'what did you hear me say?' — then re-try from what they actually heard

Run Toward Fear

When both choices are horrible, decide fast toward the slightly-better one instead of avoiding the decision

Communication3 steps

Specific-Behavior Feedback

Never label the person; name the specific behavior, the role gap it creates, and offer to help fix it

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

Spot the seductive ideas that draw everyone in and trap them — they validate but never work

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

The 15% Rule

Step just 15% beyond your comfort zone to deepen relationships without triggering the danger zone

Marketing4 steps

The Acceptable / Expensive / Prohibitively Expensive Price Ladder

Three questions that reveal both a price range and the psychological cliffs you must hide behind.

Leadership5 steps

The Anti-Sell Coach Decision Framework

Most people don't need a coach — test the goal against cheaper alternatives, then select for vibe over credentials.

Communication3 steps

The Art of Inquiry

Ask genuine what/when/where/how questions from real curiosity — never 'why', never to confirm a hypothesis

Mindset5 steps

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the B-side of your career so a bad season doesn't read as a verdict on your life.

Mindset5 steps

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the failures between your highlights so setbacks read as moments, not verdicts

Mindset4 steps

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

The Break-Even Indifference Test

Offer economically identical pricing models and see which one people irrationally prefer.

The Broken Equation Test

No amount of product craft can fix a company whose underlying math doesn't close.

Sales3 steps

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

20-30% of your calendar should say 'customer meeting' — in person, not behind a keyboard

Sales3 steps

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live

The Confidence-Competency Curve

Founders fail by losing confidence after costly mistakes; normalize D-minuses and just never take the F

The Don't-Die Keep-Going / Give-Up Decision

Deciding whether to persist or shut down by testing love, energy, and remaining moves

Finance3 steps

The Downturn Pricing Playbook (Never Drop the Price)

Three moves that protect price integrity in a recession: de-feature, non-pricing actions, change the model.

The Four Marketplace Health Metrics

Track GMV, unit economics, liquidity, and share of wallet to know if a marketplace is truly healthy

The Gardener Mindset for Marketplaces

Run a marketplace like a gardener with a light touch, not a construction worker building linear features

The 'Going Home' Pivot

A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you

Strategy6 steps

The Growth Model Building Blocks

Build a spreadsheet formula of how your business grows, layer by layer, to find your real levers

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

Find a big incumbent customers hate with terrible software, then build the replacement

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow

The Marketplace Fragmentation Test

A marketplace only works if the market is fragmented and the per-transaction dollars are small enough to keep it in the middle

The Minimum Viable Experiment Trap

A lean test that strips out the mechanism doesn't test the idea — it buries it.

The Nevertheless Close

Let people be fully heard, then decide anyway — the word that separates listening from agreeing

Influence3 steps

The Panini Effect

Show your product line as an unfinished puzzle and attach rates jump from 20% to 40-50%.

There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop

Feedback loops are as long as you choose — shorten them with necessary-but-not-sufficient milestones

Communication6 steps

The Six Characteristics of Exceptional Relationships

A diagnostic checklist of six qualities that mark how far a relationship sits along the contact-to-exceptional continuum

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

The Three Realities and the Net

Stay on your side of the net — speak only to behavior and your own reaction, never the other person's motives

Communication7 steps

The Unique Voice Test

Ask of every line: could any other company have written this? If yes, rewrite it

Finance3 steps

The Unit-Economics Bubble Test

A real bubble is when the businesses don't work, not when prices are high; and if everyone calls it a bubble, it isn't one

The World-Class Proof Interview

Two questions: why here, and what are you world-class at — plus how do you know?

Leadership5 steps

The Worst Product You Ever Shipped

One interview question that separates PMs with real reps from PMs with a clean résumé.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Zero-CAC Consumer Subscription Engine

Mission, no paid ads, retention-as-value, and data rigor — why Duolingo survived where B2C subs die

Strategy6 steps

Treat the World as One Market

Default to one global version; localize only where law or platform forces you to

Vertical Unbundling Criteria

Only carve a vertical out of a horizontal marketplace if it has high value or frequency and a self-contained network