Andreessen: Copying Apple's Last-Mover Strategy Has Massive Survivorship Bias
Marc Andreessen · Marc Andreessen on Why Apple Might Miss the Next Platform Shift · Aug 8, 2025 · at 8:45
a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen discusses platform shifts and explains why ordinary tech companies risk obsolescence if they copy Apple's patient product strategy.
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“And I guess, yeah, what I would say is like, look, that clearly works if you're Apple, right? Yeah. And so it clearly works if you're Apple. But I would say there's a fine line between that strategy and just, and simply becoming obsolete, right? And so the problem is like, if you're not Apple and you don't have all the other kind of super strengths and, you know, kind of now the market position that Apple has, you know, do you really want to be a company, you know, if you're not Apple, do you really want to be a company that basically sits there and says, yeah, the world's moving and we're very deliberately not going to lean as hard as we can into it. And so I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in these kinds of strategy discussions where people look at the one company That's able to pull this off, and they don't look at the 50 other companies that are in the graveyard, you know, because they, you know, because they didn't adapt.”
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