Rachleff's Law

Andreessen credits the framing to Andy Rachleff, cofounder of Benchmark Capital. Rachleff's Law of Startup Success: when a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

This is uncomfortable for founders because team and product are the things you control day to day. Market is the thing you mostly picked once, at the start. Rachleff's point is that the pick was the high-stakes decision.

There's a corollary too: if the market pulls product out of you, you can fail on almost everything else, sales, marketing, hiring, and still win. Plenty of successful startups were operational disasters during their run to PMF.