Marc Andreessen teaches startups what disruption is really about (in 17 tweets)

You’ve probably heard about “disruptive innovation,” a concept from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. But prominent Silicon Valley Marc Andreessen wants to be sure that you actually understand disruption — because the term does get thrown around a lot.

In his latest onslaught of tweets, Andreessen this morning first quoted from Christensen’s writings and then went on to provide examples. And then he went on to show why people really should be in favor of disruption.

And it’s worth paying attention to Andreessen on disruption, given that he was one of the key people behind the Netscape Navigator web browser, a hit among consumers that improved on the Mosaic web browser he had developed for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The position from Andreessen, a cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, amounts to a strong defense of the concept. It’s quite a bit different from New Yorker writer Jill Lepore’s critical take on it.

Andreessen’s newly articulated stance could well bring on a whole new round of discussion about the already widely cited term.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539825429947744257

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539825778397958145

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539826109362081792

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539826405584805888

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539826661022134272

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539826880291930112

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539827109611311105

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539827298740887552

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539827731618201600

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539827902435450880

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539828198511374336

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539828560567873536

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539828812079325184

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539828973413228545

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539829073678065664

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539829272592912384

Andreessen dutifully included footnotes to bring his tweetstorm to a close.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/539829604043595778