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Marc Andreessen on how to get people to join your 3-person startup

February 03, 2026

Marc says founders have two tools at their disposal to win new hires: 1) Stock options, and 2) vision. He explains:

“The best entrepreneurs are really good at selling people on their company precisely because they can explain how the world is going to look in a way that is so compelling.”

Marc points to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as the epitome of this:

“If you get within 10 feet of Steve Jobs, whatever he says in the next 20 minutes, you’re going to walk out of there believing. He can say that the sky is purple, and you’re like yep that makes total sense . . . The best entrepreneurs all tend to have that in common and tend to be really good at that. It’s essentially sales — selling to employees. It’s an incredibly valuable skill to be able to do that. That plus stock options.”

The other thing Marc has observed about hiring over the years is that right employees have to self-select into your company, even though that can be incredibly frustrating at times:

“If you hired all the people you interviewed, it would turn out that 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them you probably shouldn’t have hired anyway. So what the best companies do is they provide a very stark idea of what the company is and what is it isn’t: ‘We are a company where people are expected to work 18 hour days and if you don’t like that, don’t come here’ or ‘We are a company where people expect to go home at 5pm every day and if you think that’ll be frustrating’ — whatever it is.”

Marc gives the humorous example of Asana where it was a requirement that the whole company did yoga together:

“If you like yoga, this is the company for you. If you don’t like yoga, don’t go there. You’re going to be asked to put your feet in positions that you’re completely uncomfortable with.”

He continues:

“I think the very best companies tend to be polarizing. So if in your hiring process, you’re turning people off as much as you’re turning them on because they’re deciding ‘this is clearly not the right fit for me,’ I think that’s a good thing.”