Quote of the Day: Marc Andreessen on Success

Before he became a Silicon Valley power broker, Marc Andreessen watched a “sure thing” collapse: Netscape, the company he helped build, rode meteoric hype straight into the brutal reality of platform wars and market physics. In that furnace, the glossy myth of the born executive, perfect hair, perfect pitch, perfect suit, wasn’t just unhelpful; it was dangerous. That hard-earned disillusionment is packed into his blunt reminder: “Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.”

The line skewers a stubborn corporate reflex: mistaking presentation for capacity. “Shiny hair and a tie” is shorthand for the reassuring archetype, polished, confident, fluent in boardroom dialect. But organizations don’t win on posture. They win on judgment under pressure, on the ability to choose a direction when data is incomplete, and on the stamina to keep choosing after being wrong in public.

Andreessen’s critique also widens the hiring lens. When we privilege the look of authority, we systematically miss the people with the scar tissue that actually predicts performance: the ones who have rebuilt trust after a botched launch, steadied a team through layoffs, or changed their mind when the facts changed. Great leadership is learned, through feedback, failure, and unglamorous repetition. That’s why leadership is less about charisma and more about resilience that shows up on ordinary Tuesdays.

As Marc Andreessen knows from co-founding Netscape and later leading Andreessen Horowitz, companies scale on decisive operators, not on stereotypes that photograph well.

If there’s a practical takeaway for this September Sunday: audit your own “CEO image” biases. Promote the quiet builder. Interview for narratives, not outfits. And remember that success is usually a craft, earned the hard way, not worn off the rack.