Success Quote by Marc Andreessen

Andreessen’s line is the cleanest possible defense of Silicon Valley’s signature vice: impatience dressed up as principle. “Moving quickly” isn’t just a preference; it’s a claim about how the world should work. Speed becomes a moral category, a kind of operational virtue that reframes risk as responsibility. The trick is in the second clause: “if you do something wrong you can change it.” That “can” does a lot of ideological lifting, implying that reversibility is always available, that consequences are modular, that damage comes with an undo button.

The intent is pragmatic - a permission slip for iteration - but the subtext is power. You can only treat mistakes as editable drafts when you control the platform, the timeline, and the narrative. In software, rollback is plausible. In labor practices, housing markets, political advertising, content moderation, or data privacy, “changing it” can mean apologizing after the fact while the costs sit permanently with users, workers, or communities.

Context matters: Andreessen’s worldview emerges from venture capital logic and the product culture built around “ship, measure, learn.” It’s the “move fast” ethos with the sharp edges sanded down into something that sounds humble. Yet it quietly shifts accountability from prevention to response: don’t be careful, be agile.

What makes the line work is its calming cadence. It offers certainty in an uncertain game: you don’t need perfect judgment, just velocity. That’s compelling for founders and investors, and unnerving for everyone who isn’t invited into the “we” who gets to change things.