18 ms·
Marc Andreessen: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas”
- nadermx 10y agoI guess with the growing remote work movement this becomes harder and harder to do since you spend less time with your peers whom you can "argue with" mentally since you lack time around them to get a better sense of how they think
- wonderous 10y ago(2016)
- 6stringmerc 10y ago>So if technological change were going to cause elimination of jobs, one presumes we would have seen it by now. ...considering this statement was delivered while the US Workforce Participation is at 30+ year lows while productivity and technological change has made significant inroads during that time (ex: Macintosh 512k vs. iPhone 7), I think he's missing a large chunk of the, uh, big picture. Then, contrast one of his well reasoned and very telling thoughts about the future: >All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? What if you get to spend that hour playing with your kid or reading the news or watching TV or actually working because you don’t have to worry about driving? Because in the United States, we should be working even while we are getting to work, because we don't work enough? SMDH. To me, the Working Class has plenty of reason to be cynical about this vision of the future..."playing with your kids in the car" time or not.
- sjg007 10y agoYeah, the problem is you still spend an hour in the car away from your family and friends. Are you taking your kid to work, or dropping them off somewhere (school?).. most kids go to their neighborhood school... I mean self driving cars will be great but the work commute will still be like taking the train. For that 1 hour long commute you can't work on your house, do chores, be present at home... A 10 minute walk or short drive is still far better. However, these commutes should get shorter just because the cars will drive better and maybe at higher speeds. Most people commuting are those with families who live further out for less cost and/or more house because they have families.
- bredren 10y agoThis commute thing is a big deal. Changing the way it feels to commute and what you can do while in motion will reduce housing pressure in urban places and has the potential to lift up previously rural communities. His quotes are more like anecdotal illustrations to a bigger point.
- TarpitCarnivore 10y agoBut why not encourage people to build offices closer to these rural places or places in need up an uptick (Cleveland, Detroit, etc)? Why is the solution always to commute into cities?
- goseeastarwar 10y agoDensity allows communities to be more efficient.
- TarpitCarnivore 10y agoAnd there's a lot of room in some of these mid-west cities and rural areas. It allows for cheaper COL and better space to build. The density will come if the business is there to support it.
- weaksauce 10y agoIt will likely be a race to the bottom where it's expected that you work during your commute as well pushing the urban sprawl further and further away from the main cities. This will be exacerbated by the fact that jobs are going to be more and more scarce with the impending automation of most things.
- taysic 10y agoI have a really hard time believing that jobs will be scarce. There are always new things to build - always new things that people want. People will come up with new products no one ever knew they needed but want - and need to hire people to come up with building something that can't be automated out of the box. I don't think there will be a problem for white collar workers or technical workers at all. Not sure about blue collar workers - I mean you always hear about how there is a shortage of people who are skilled in construction or whatnot. Will that be automated soon? I would be surprised. If not, perhaps some muscle-requiring jobs might even be more in demand.
- eanzenberg 10y agoCool, let's stop progress then cause life was so great in the 1980's with healthcare, communications, science and overall knowledge.
- teej 10y agoThere's a difference between making progress and recognizing the impact on real lives vs naively claiming we haven't seen any negative externalities of technology.
- eanzenberg 10y agoThat's right, everytime there's been progress there have been negative externalities of the tech produced for the progress. It's nearly impossible to have both, ie, progress and no negative consequences. So which would you rather have?
- goatlover 10y agoThis might be unrealistic, but it would be nice if the human race acquired some wisdom at some point instead of just blindly rushing ahead into whatever makes money. Maybe we could lessen the negative consequences with a little bit of restraint and foresight. For example, did nobody stop to ask what would happen to all that non-biodegradable plastic meant to service a disposable economy?
- mistermann 10y agoIs that really true? For example, plumbing.
- eanzenberg 10y agoSure, someone will argue that the outhouse makers are out of business. Or the well makers.
- Neliquat 10y ago
- smacktoward 10y agoWhen he talks about "what if you don't have to worry about driving," what I hear is: what if your car is one more place where we can show you ads? Right now we can't show you ads in your car, of course, because you're in command of two tons of steel moving at high speed, so your attention needs to be fully concentrated on that task. But if the car could drive itself, think of all the ways we could monetize that newly tappable reservoir of attention! It'd be a gold rush! He doesn't say that, of course, because the vision of a world where you can spend your commute playing with your kid is a much easier sell than the vision of a world where your car becomes a kind of rolling Skinner box, with you a literally captive audience (what are you going to do, step out of a moving vehicle?) to be bombarded with messages by the highest bidder. But... yeah.
- exclusiv 10y agoI'm sure people would take an ad-subsidized car (or ride). Nielsen pays people to walk around with radio tracking devices.
- goatlover 10y agoIf you own the car, surely you can install the equivalent of an ad-blocker.
- teddyh 10y agoYour would have to jailbreak your car to do that, of course…
- diminoten 10y agoIsn't it a... good thing, that workforce participation is down, assuming other indicators of economic health are holding steady/increasing steadily? Don't we, some day, want to get workforce participation down to zero, while maintaining other prosperity metrics? Also, I believe the theory is (assuming we even still have 8 hour work days), you work an hour in the car, work 6 at work, work an hour driving home.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago>assuming other indicators of economic health are holding steady/increasing steadily? They aren't. Which is a problem.
- losteric 10y agoWe want working hours to shrink not participation.... either see shorter working days or fewer days per week.
- Cpoll 10y ago> Because in the United States, we should be working even while we are getting to work, because we don't work enough? No, because if you work-day was originally 8hrs of work + 2hrs of commute, it's now just 6hrs of work + 2hrs of work.
- exclusiv 10y agoExactly. Although I don't think work in the car would be the same quality - if you use that time to handle emails it could be a big boost to get most emails addressed before you get to the office. I live about 12 miles from my office and going to the office removes about 1.5-2 hrs per day. Getting ready, 30 mins each way. I try to schedule phone calls for my commute but I don't always have calls to handle. I've worked with people with families who commuted 1.5 hrs each way every day. So yes, self-driving cars would impact a lot of people in a positive way if they optimize their workflow.
- ryandrake 10y agoI don't know. I've got a 2 hour commute each way. There's no way a company would accept my rolling in at 10AM and leaving at 4PM just because I'm working from 8-10 and 4-6 in my self-driving car. More than likely, self-driving cars will mean workers are still expected to get their 8-to-6 on-premesis face time, and then use their self-driving time to catch some shut-eye.
- goatlover 10y agoI feel like getting to your job should be part of the job, especially when it becomes possible to do your job on the way.
- graycat 10y ago> I feel like getting to your job should be part of the job I agree: I put 200,000+ miles on each of three cars, mostly commuting to work. Soooo, that was a lot of money, all after tax -- buy the car, usually on time so that there was interest, pay for insurance, fuel, maintenance, tolls, parking. All those expenses should have been pre-tax money, "unreimbursed business expenses" like, say, professional text books at least long were.
- tim333 10y agoThe US Workforce Participation figures have some explanations - more old folks retired, students studying longer and the like rather just tech change. https://qz.com/286213/the-chart-obama-haters-love-most-and-the-truth-behind-it/ https://qz.com/286213/the-chart-obama-haters-love-most-and-t...
- erikpukinskis 10y ago> >So if technological change were going to cause elimination of jobs, one presumes we would have seen it by now. > ...considering this statement was delivered while the US Workforce Participation is at 30+ year lows w... You cropped out "around the world" which was a prominent prepositional phrase in his sentence.
- justinmk 10y ago> Marc Andreessen: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas” Shouldn't it be: > Anonymous: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas”
- josefresco 10y agoThis.
- good_vibes 10y agoThat picture makes me want to not keep reading but then I remember Netscape.
- ronilan 10y agoThe shoes ruin it for you? http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1996/1101960219_400.jpg http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1996/110...
- good_vibes 10y agoyou guys are a little too serious sometimes. it was a joke. he looks like an ego with that scowl, like the critic from Ratatouille.
- username223 10y agoHe looks like a giant unhappy thumb. I can only laugh at the mental image of him "spar[ring] with the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Page" in some sort of super-sized thumb war. Anyone taking bets on Andreessen vs. Bezos?
- good_vibes 10y agoBezos would open a can of whoop ass with his AMZN suit on.
- wonderous 10y agoVideo & Transcript: Marc Andreessen on Change, Constraints, and Curiosity https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e40ca4a54cc35379d6052369f8a72968 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e40ca4a54cc35379d6052369f8...
- debt 10y agohe's a media vc. facebook is basically his crown jewel and that's it. facebook/media is cool i guess, but i don't see how he know much about anything else such as robotics or ai. just look at andreesen horowitz investments. many are largely media companies(buzzfeed, stack exchange). they've tried doing finance which is a much bigger market but like clinkle clearly imploded and coinbase probably is next(literally transfers went down the other day eek). so fb is still all he's got. he hasn't invested in any big winners yet beyond fb/media. so why should i listen to this guys advice(unless of course if i'm building a media company).
- tyingq 10y agoHe founded Opsware and sold it for $1.6 billion in cash. Netscape sold for more than that.
- colmvp 10y agoNot necessarily about Marc, but I honestly find it so frustrating to see media outlets interview people who have zero experience writing, doing research, or leading an AI related company/research institution but still ask them about their opinion on the future impact of AI, while completely ignoring individuals who are on the forefront of the field. If you read interviews on the topic of say, cancer research, it would make sense for journalists to talk to an oncologist or a person who works for the American Cancer Society, versus just any doctor or a philosopher.
- skynode 10y agoThe media (in 2017 at least) is not necessarily here to inform the public. Some of these vanilla interviews are staged by actors on both sides of the aisle just to keep the capitalist machine oiled and keep the relevant guys relevant. As an analogy, Marc can have an opinion (and y'all should hear it) about ML/AI not because he has great domain knowledge but because he's Marc Andreessen and he controls a large chunk of one of the most hallowed means of production.
- seppin 10y agohalo effect. what's worse, asking a guy like Mark Cuban what he thinks about anything just b/c he has money. And is on a TV show.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoI'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs. They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship at their feet. Their vision and goal for the future is simply more money for themselves at the expense of others. "Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?! I know that sounds harsh, but we seriously need to stop the hero worship in SV culture and begin building a society that benefits everyone, not a society that works itself to the bone just to eat the cake of a larger corporation and enrich the early investors. They will just as quickly dilute your quality of life as they will dilute the shares in your company.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stvswn 10y agoWhat makes you jump to the conclusion that technology investment, or capitalism, or whatever you think is "bad" is "at the expense of others?" Currently, about 10% of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. It was 12% in 2012. It was 40% in 1990. The history of the world, post-war 20th century, is one of extreme progress for the lives of real people -- especially really poor people. So, what do you think drove that change? Was it shaping a society that "works for everyone?" Or was it technology and the efficient allocation of capital? I'd argue that it was the latter, because I can look at the world and find the places where people have remained extremely poor, where people have starved to death in large numbers, and it's not hard to see that it happens in the places where technology and capital are stopped. Before modern markets were (slowly) permitted to function in China and India, lots and lots of people died of hunger. Way more than today. The lives of nearly everyone in the former USSR became much better when the wall fell. It's still pretty terrible to live in North Korea. Right now in Venezuala people are starving, and there are hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating on the streets. I'm fine with "the oligarchs" getting rich, by comparison.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- omegaworks 10y agoMark Andreessen: Get ready for White Flight 2 So much for the short-lived renaissance of the city. Will millennials still want short commutes when they can pass the time in their cars?
- smallboy 10y agoWasn't this the guy who said India should still be colonized? Not taking advice from him.
- d--b 10y agoI would say more broadly "take the ego out of work". In tech, we meet so many people who are emotionally attached to their work, who would treat their production as 'their baby'. This is a terribly common counterproductive bias. It prevents from: - taking criticism productively: people "put their soul" in their work, and then someone tells them it's perhaps not the best way. Do hear them. - assessing one's position objectively: people who are attached to their work often misconstrue their vision with the reality of the work. They tend to minimize weak points and emphasize strong points. - delegating your job away: people infatuated with their work have a hard time giving it away. Necessarily, the delegate will screw it up. That should be rule number 0 of all jobs: Be invested in the mission, not in the solution
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mvpu 10y ago"Take the ego out of ideas" is sound advice for investors, not entrepreneurs. Ego is a loaded word, but if you define it, in this context, as an irrational belief that you are right and the world will catch up, then it's essential for every entrepreneur. "New ideas" get no support. You're the only support. You have to strongly believe that the world will get there, do whatever it takes to convince them to get there, and survive long enough to bank on that moment. Without that ego in your idea, you probably won't survive long enough.
- brianberns 10y ago“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
- collyw 10y ago"Progress" isn't necessarily positive.
- jrs235 10y ago"You have to be ruthlessly open-minded and constantly willing to reexamine your assumptions. You have to take the ego out of ideas, which is a very hard thing to do." - Marc Andreesen Having ego in the idea means to equate the idea with yourself. So if someone criticizes the idea, ask questions, points out flaws, or issues with it a) don't take it personal and b) you need to be open to those and not dig your heels in refusing to adapt because "then it isn't my idea!"
- nostrademons 10y agoYou still need to be sharply realistic about your own ideas, though. Blindly charging ahead with the first idea that occurs to you, as an entrepreneur, is probably not going to work no matter how strongly you believe the world will get there. Neither will not charging ahead at all, assuming that because the last 10 ideas failed the next one will too. Many years ago on HN, I think before he even became part of YC, Paul Buchheit said "You have to be arrogant enough to believe that everybody else is wrong, but humble enough to believe that you may be wrong too." That about sums it up.
- zackmorris 10y ago"Take the Selfishness out of Profit"
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoOr possibly "Take the Profit out of Selfishness".
- BjoernKW 10y ago> All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? This is ridiculous. That's what our supposedly most innovative thinkers can come up with? Turning your car into a living room so we can have even more commuting (with all the wonderful side effects that come with it ...)? What about eliminating the need to commute in the first place?
- blhack 10y agoMaybe not everybody wants to live in a population dense metropolis? 1hr commute outside of Minneapolis, Duluth, St. Cloud, or any of the other metro areas in MN and you're living in a beautiful cabin in the woods.
- BjoernKW 10y agoSo, why not work from there while enjoying the beautiful view and only go to the city if personal presence really is required (which most of time it isn't)?
- collyw 10y agoTo be fair that is a culture problem rather than one that can be solved with tech (well it already is solved by tech).
- BjoernKW 10y agoIs it? In a larger context I think it's very much the job of tech and technological solutions to bring about cultural change. Keep in mind, sharing files and chat essentially were solved problems long before Dropbox and Slack came along, too. However, it was only with these two companies and their products that a wider audience adopted those solutions because finally someone got the UX right.
- T3RMINATED 10y agoNO BULLSH1T WHAT A STUPID COMMENT COMMON SENSE SH!T YOU GUYS ARE QUOTING.
- ashray5 10y ago“All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? What if you get to spend that hour playing with your kid or reading the news or watching TV or actually working because you don’t have to worry about driving?” I suppose one can find these answers from people who commute by company shuttles, trains or subways.
- spectistcles 10y agoHow about we take the ego out of Marc Andreessen
- lappet 10y ago> "Most of the good ideas are obvious, Andreessen says. They just might not work right away" That seems like a gross simplification of the way things usually work. Saying good ideas are obvious sounds a little egoistic, which seems ironic, considering the title
- 0xCMP 10y agoWe can't look/talk to each other at lunch without staring at our phones why do we think we're going to spend quality time with people in a self-driving car? The car isn't a solution to that problem.
- 0xCMP 10y agoI do like the idea of almost a rolling office. I've always wanted a sort of vagabond life fueled by tech. There so much out in the world and so many people. It's a shame that we're often stuck in the same places for such long periods of time. If I become a remote/work-from-home/smb-owner I'd love to just being a self-driving car doing stuff on the go and also changing where I am all the time.
- rqebmm 10y agoYeah I was having this thought the other day: Why own a home when you could own a self-driving RV? Obviously there will still be advantages to owning land, but there's some real appeal to having your home drive itself around for you. Imagine waking up, prepping for work, opening the door and being in the parking lot, then hopping inside after work, eating dinner, and stepping out in front of a park to meet some friends.d Maybe you own some land with a larger home that you can "dock" with, maybe you don't and you can roam the country while working remotely. Then you start to imagine what businesses could do with this. Self-driving food trucks is an obvious example: why pay a delivery driver when your restaurant drives itself?
- geomark 10y agoDoes nobody else get car sick when reading or looking at a screen in a moving car?
- Baeocystin 10y agoI spent a few months one year exploring the American West in my Westie camper van, and working from my laptop. This was in the late 90's, so no 3G modems or the like, just dialup when I could find a phone. Even with the difficulties, it was 100% worth it. I still dream of it, sometimes.
- LordHumungous 10y ago> All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? jack_off_motion.gif
- sctb 10y agoPlease don't post like this here.
- RichardHeart 10y agoWhomever wrote the title, didn't follow it's advice.
- wyc 10y agoRe: tech creates jobs, Tyler Cowen's Average is Over has an interesting passage about automation: "Keeping an unmanned Predator drone in the air for twenty-four hours requires about 168 workers laboring in the background. A larger drone, such as the Global Hawk surveillance drone, needs about 300 people...an F-16 fighter aircraft requires fewer than 100 people for a single mission." It's well known that the industrial revolution created countless new jobs that were unimaginable at the time, a sentiment echoed in The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson. But how do you pick the winners that will bring the most jobs? Some say disruptive innovation, but it still seems like an open question.
- troygoode 10y agoAn 4-16 fighter mission isn't 24 hours long though...
- davidf18 10y ago> "Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work....." On a work day, NYC subway provides 6 million trips. Think of all of the car drivers it is displacing. And then there are the buses! And that is in NYC alone. Just think of all of the drivers mass transit has already displaced throughout the nation! Then there is intercity transit: think of all of the drivers displaced by planes, trains, and buses! Self-driving trucks? Trucks have been displaced by trains, barges, container ships, .... Cars, even electric ones, create air pollution which impacts health as well as greenhouse gas. Electric cars are charged from electric power plants -- most of the US electricity is generated by carbon-based fuels -- coal and gas. Using Via which transports multiple passengers [part of Manhattan, part of Brooklyn, Chicago, Washington DC] (or Uber pool for example) at least helps to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas compared with single passenger vehicles that at least helps to reduce air pollution / greenhouse gas.
- rhapsodic 10y ago> On a work day, NYC subway provides 6 million trips. Think of all of the car drivers it is displacing. And then there are the buses! And that is in NYC alone. Just think of all of the drivers mass transit has already displaced throughout the nation! I think if you read history, you'll find that, overall, the automobile disrupted and reduced the size of the passenger rail industry, and public transportation in general. Not the other way around.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- davidf18 10y agoI was being sarcastic: The pendulum is swinging back the other direction....
- e2e4 10y agoCommuting to work with self driving car sounds like a faster horse carriage. I wonder why isn't telecommuting / virtual presence a big part of his predictions.
- bkohlmann 10y agoI was fortunate enough to be the one to interview him for this event. He's a remarkable intellect and kept me on my toes the entire time!
- graycat 10y agoSo, Andreessen is talking about "ideas" -- hmm .... His ideas seem to be (A) some large changes in the economy and society from (B) some exploitations of largely existing computer technology to meet some want/need previously unnoticed or infeasible to meet. But, even for just (A) and (B), there is potentially MUCH more potential in ideas that Andreessen seems to ignore. An example was Xerox: Copying paper documents was important. The main means was carbon paper. Xerox did quite a lot of engineering research based on some early research, IIRC, at Battelle. The result was one of the biggest business success stories of all time. Andreessen doesn't discuss research ideas -- how to have them, pursue them, apply them, evaluate them, etc.
- underwater 10y agoIs the attribution of the quote in this headline meant to lend it extra weight? Rather ironic.
- raspasov 10y agoPut science into ideas.
- 6d6b73 10y ago“every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and about 24.5 million are created,” Andreessen says FFS.. No. They are not destroyed and created. These jobs are just shifted from one company to another, and most of them are seasonal, or part-time jobs.
- blahman2 10y ago1 hour commute is fine? No. There were all these visions about how with the advent of the Industrial revolution people would have to work half a day because that's how long it would take them to finish their norm. Instead, they were asked to produce twice as much. Now we have our 'great' thought leader try to convince us about the virtues of hard work and 1 hour commute again. How about "Put the type of Ego in your ideas that will remove the need for you to have a job in a few years"? Because jobs will be going away, and we don't need an even more hard core rat race in the US.
- pdimitar 10y agoI'll never trust a VC on this topic, sorry. To me, "remove ego from X, Y, or Z" coming from a VC sounds a lot like "...so we have an easier time patenting your work behind your back and kick you out of your own innovation, for life". Biased by me? Surely. But I haven't seen a benevolent VC in my life, and I've met 10-12 of them. Anecdotal? Of course. None of us knows them all so there you have it, anecdotal evidence. I can't take this guy for real. Plus, he looks like he's in the rich bubble and "playing with your kids in the car" is a horribly misguided idea. So people should work even in their leisure / warmup time. Sure!
- julius_set 10y agoHey billionaires are people too.