According to Inc, Marc Andreessen recently outlined his philosophy on AI adoption for founders on the a16z podcast. He argued that while hundreds of millions of people now have access to AI tools, most are only using them for basic tasks like editing emails. Andreessen compared casual AI use to someone who can only play “Chopsticks” on a piano trying to perform Chopin, stating that AI mastery is a distinct skill that requires study and regular practice. He highlighted that a small slice of users who integrate AI into their workflow “all day for everything” are reporting enormous benefits. His core advice is that to beat the competition, founders must learn the art of prompting and use AI relentlessly.
The skill gap is real
Andreessen’s piano analogy is spot on, and it points to a huge, emerging divide. We’re all playing with the same instrument—ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot—but very few are learning the scales. The immediate impact here is on the founder and startup ecosystem. If you’re building a company right now, your competitor isn’t just the other startup in your space. It’s the founder who has trained themselves to think *with* an AI co-pilot, who’s getting 10x the output on strategy, coding, and marketing. That’s a terrifying advantage. So the question isn’t “are you using AI?” It’s “how fluent are you?”
What “all day” actually means
Here’s the thing: “Use it all day for everything” sounds exhausting and maybe a bit fanatical. But I think he’s getting at a deeper integration. It’s not about asking it to write a tweet and calling it a day. It’s about feeding it your meeting notes to draft follow-ups, having it critique your business plan, using it to simulate customer support responses, and letting it reorganize your chaotic to-do list. It’s treating the AI less like a magic 8-ball you consult occasionally and more like a tireless, hyper-intelligent intern sitting in every single meeting and working on every single task. That level of immersion is how you learn its quirks, its strengths, and how to push it.
The stakeholder ripple effect
This mindset shift affects everyone. For developers, it means prompt engineering is becoming as fundamental as knowing how to Google an error message. For enterprises, the ROI on AI won’t come from buying a fancy enterprise license and doing a few workshops. It’ll come from creating a culture where this deep, tool-in-hand fluency is expected and rewarded. And for markets? We’re going to see a wave of products built by these “AI-native” founders that feel completely different—faster to market, more personalized, and built on assumptions that old-school competitors can’t even see. The gap between the casual plunker and the concert pianist is about to get a lot wider, and a lot more expensive for those left behind.
How to start today
So, what’s the first step if you’re not already living in a chat window? Basically, pick one core work process and commit to doing it *only* with AI assistance for a week. Writing investor updates? Coding a new module? Researching a market? Don’t just use the AI for a first draft. Argue with it. Ask it to take the opposite side. Make it iterate ten times. You’ll be painfully slow at first. But that’s the practice. That’s you moving from “Chopsticks” to something more complex. The podcast, “How Marc Andreessen Actually Uses AI”, is probably a good place for more direct insight. The bottom line is that the tool is now a commodity. The skill is not. And that skill is what you’re really competing on.
