[Quote of the Day] Burn the Boats

“You gotta burn the boats…you gotta commit.”

~Marc Andreessen to TechCrunch’s Erick Schoenfeld, on how old media companies should look at the future of the media industry.

The analogy is fantastic (I still stick to my – er, Clay Shirky’s – kayaking upstream metaphor as my go-to metaphor), and Schoenfeld explained it in a weekend post about his exchange with Andreessen:

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. [Andreesen] has the same advice for old media companies…