Market Wins

This line comes from Marc Andreessen’s 2007 essay “The only thing that matters” (Pmarchive, June 25, 2007), where Andreessen credits it to Andy Rachleff, formerly of Benchmark Capital, as part of what he names “Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success”: “The #1 company-killer is lack of market.”

Of the three things a startup has going for it (team, product, market), the team is the one founders prize most: it’s the part they hire and motivate, and the part they take credit for. The law says it’s the one that matters least. A great team can’t conjure demand that isn’t there, and a weak team riding real demand gets carried anyway. (The full version adds a third line, for a great team in a great market: “something special happens.” The two-sentence cut keeps only the half where the team flips and the result doesn’t.)

When a startup stalls, the instinct is to fix the team. But if the market is what’s holding the company back, that’s the wrong fight: a stronger team in the same market still loses. The move is to get into a better market, which is where Andreessen takes the essay next, to “Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success”: “The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.” Rachleff is the one who named product/market fit, though he credits Sequoia founder Don Valentine with the underlying concept.