"No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." For a startup, the enemy is the world at large—you will probably have to rapidly evolve every aspect of your plan as you go.

Andreessen invoking the military maxim to frame startup planning.

It is much more important for a startup to aggressively seek out a big market, and product/market fit within that market, once the startup is up and running, than it is to plan out what you are going to do in great detail ahead of time.

Microsoft started as a programming tools company before IBM all but forced Bill Gates into operating systems; Oracle was a CIA consultancy before Ellison productized the relational database; Intel was a memory chip company until the Japanese onslaught forced Andy Grove to pivot to CPUs. The canonical successes all looked nothing like their original plans.

Edison invented the phonograph in July 1877 while trying to build better equipment for telegraph operators—then failed to appreciate what he had. He later lied about the date, moving it to December, because in July he and his team were too busy chasing Western Union to notice they'd just invented recorded sound.

The central anecdote from Randall Stross's The Wizard of Menlo Park.

Edison's staff brainstormed names like "chronophone," "didaskophone," "climatophone," and "hulagmophone" (barking sounder), and initially filed the invention under "speaking telegraph"—a vivid illustration that even geniuses cannot see the real market from inside the original frame.

Edison "had been perfectly placed to receive the technical inspiration for the phonograph. But that same world, oriented to a handful of giant industrial customers, had nothing in common with the consumer marketplace." The skills that produce the invention are often disconnected from the market that buys it.