Building Moonshots

WAY 5Plan to Adopt Shiny Things: Building an innovative team means you will always be learning new ideas and technologies.

About the Way

Innovator and investor Marc Andreessen—also the inventor of the world's first web browser—provoked the business community with an opinion piece in a major US newspaper entitled “why software is eating the world.”¹ Ten years after the rise of the web during the dot‐com era, a fundamental shift was happening. Writing in 2011, Andreessen explained how broadband internet and so‐called smartphones would enable a new breed of companies, such as Amazon, with software as their core capability “to take over large swathes of the economy.”  That truth has borne out.

His declaration also created a meme. As a quick sample, a tech reporter proclaimed “why analytics is eating the world”² in enterprise software in 2015, and financial expert Steve Denning discussed “why agile is eating the world​​” in 2018.³ In the next year, a trio of partners at Andreessen's venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z), responded with an updated piece that “we are living in the century of biology, and biology is eating the world.”⁴ The next month, elsewhere online, an AI startup founder and two data scientists argued that “now AI is eating software,” pointing to a new generation of solutions—specifically specialized hardware, large data sets coupled to clouds, and lowered training costs—that would be required by every company who wanted to lead, or at least ...