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Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

• caiobegotti 7y ago
  Actual full interview, "Risky Business": https://www.startups.com/library/founder-stories/marc-andreessen https://www.startups.com/library/founder-stories/marc-andree...
  • dang 7y ago
    Yes, this submission broke the site guidelines by not posting the original source. Please don't do that. Url changed now from https://allenleein.github.io/2020/03/11/pmarca-flying-car.html https://allenleein.github.io/2020/03/11/pmarca-flying-car.ht....
• ExodusOrbitals1 7y ago
  Spot on. We'll try to be the next one.
• api 7y ago
  Whenever I hear someone like Andreessen who is still a cryptocurrency believer, I go and really look for what he's talking about. I find nothing. I also have a routine search that I do when I look for something built on cryptocurrency or the cryptocurrency ecosystem (e.g. Ethereum "dapps") that I might want to actually use. I always come up empty handed. Yet there are many smart people that believe in this stuff. Are they in a parallel universe? Where is it being transformational? All I see is gambling, speculation, scams, solutions in search of a problem, and a ton of vaporware. Beyond the core use cases of easier international wire transfer and black/grey market commerce, I don't see anything in this space that people actually use (excluding gambling and speculation). I'm puzzled when I hear them compare it to the Internet. The Internet had immediate real world use cases everywhere. I saw people all around me start to get online and actually use the Internet for a huge variety of things. I don't see any of that with cryptocurrency. Nobody is using this stuff for anything. It's got that classic worst-case solution in search of a problem vibe: you can't give it to people. I get why bag holders and speculators sound bullish on cryptocurrency. They're hoping more will buy in so they can dump at a higher price. I am genuinely and deeply puzzled when I hear bright people who aren't in those groups who are still believers. What do they see that I don't?
  • corporateslave5 7y ago
    The real issue with blockchain is it doesn’t work yet. It doesn’t scale, and complex trustless scalable guarantees aren’t possible yet. The technology is also really new. Bitcoin coin is only ten years old.
    • api 7y ago
      I think there's some validity to that view. The Internet was actually 30 years old when it went public. I find it hard to believe though that VCs are playing that long a game. That's way too long a time horizon for any conventional VC investment.
    • xkjkls 7y ago
      The iPhone is also 10 years old. It changed the world and has been the most profitable product in human history. What is Bitcoin's excuse?
      • pedalpete 7y ago
        A few problems I see with your argument. 1) The iPhone wasn't the start of the curve. It was building on the history of mobile phones, PDAs, WAP/mobile internet, portable music players, etc. It was a convergent device which brought together all of these other things, many of which had been successful in their own right. But you couldn't make the same argument about the Newton, or PalmPilot, could you? 2) iPhone is a product, Blockchain/Bitcoin is a network and protocol. Networks need mass adoption to be successful. You only needed one iPhone for it to be useful. Protocols are infrastructure to be built on top of. The iPhone didn't release with Apps (as we know them today) and could have still been successful without them. I'm not saying Bitcoin will be a success, and what would it be a success at is still the open question. But you can't put it in the same bucket as the iPhone.
  • aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >They're hoping more will buy in so they can dump at a higher price. We're seeing, right in this moment, why the ability to increase the supply of currency is a necessity for a functioning economy, especially in times of crisis. Somehow the hodlers take the exact opposite lesson from what's happening.
• thisisbrians 7y ago
  A huge issue here is that venture capital's classic business model isn't compatible with SpaceX-scale ventures because they take way too long to return value to investors. SpaceX took 6 years just to complete a demonstration flight to LEO, for instance, whereas a VC is looking for a liquidation event in the ~7 year timeframe.
  • forkerenok 7y ago
    I think VC game is evolving and there should be a group of VC investors or a chunk of VC money aiming at longer and riskier shots.
• starpilot 7y ago
  Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX. Knowing only what was public around that time, would it be possible to predict which company would flourish? SpaceX seemed riskier, Musk was all-in and he had a string of spectacular launch failures. BO had the Amazon warchest at its disposal, SpaceX just Musk's personal funds. Both looked like jokes at the time to my aerospace colleagues.
  • avmich 7y ago
    > would it be possible to predict which company would flourish? I'd say both have good chances. I'm actually surprised BO doesn't have better achievements by now. > Both looked like jokes at the time to my aerospace colleagues. I assume some aerospace professionals still consider them jokes, which weights on definition of professional. But SpaceX really does things differently - the pioneers of space era (like von Braun, Korolev) could, I'm sure, understand Musk, but aerospace professionals of 1990-2000 were trained in rather different world.
    • starpilot 7y ago
      One thing stands out is how hands-on Musk has been. He's got a physics degree and has the raw intelligence and passion to understand aerospace engineering. From his public statements, he shows an understanding of mechanical engineering WAY beyond most executives'. Bezos has been hands-off with BO and is not technical. Similar with Vern Raburn (Microsoftie pilot) trying to run Eclipse Aviation (nearly into the ground, as it was). The problem is finding someone who understands the science enough, but is not embedded in the old school culture that has been so limiting.
      • nickik 7y ago
        People are still slipping on Elon and how brilliant he is. He is legit the chief designer of the Falcon 9 rocket and of Starship not just the chief executive. That is not just some honorary title. He made every important choice on every important technical decision. He knows every detail of these rockets, he knows them inside and out. Nobody knows more about any of these rockets then Elon. People sometimes want to portray him about a guy that highers smart people and that it, but it is far from true.
• zackmorris 7y ago
  To me, the next great challenge of our time isn't finding the next SpaceX, but gradually dismantling the corporate dogma of full employment. The short-term goals should be along the lines of getting to a 30-hour work week, a single-payer healthcare system, free college and UBI from an automation moonshot. The long-term goals should be about how to get everyone in the world self-actualized, but doing it sustainably so we don't destroy the planet in the process. We'll be on renewable energy by 2030, but the real destruction is happening due to manufacturing that we don't actually need. Getting demand flipped so that we can get to a sustainable or non-growth based economy is going to be tricky and may not happen before 2040-2050 as the singularity looms. My dream for this would look like a 20-hour or less work week, with a great deal more capital available at the bottom with near-zero or negative interest rates. Young people would train for a few years in something like a peace corps doing the difficult work that nobody wants to do, then use the life skills they've learned to eliminate those hardships for everyone else going forward. Their degree or equivalent certificates would go towards hard disciplines, advancing things like medicine where devotion and commitment to a large organization is actually required. But the rest of their time would be spent in their own endeavors in the humanities or working in maker spaces to invent new things. That's where the real innovation will come from. So instead of a the next SpaceX requiring $300 million, it will just need a few people with access to shared computing resources so they can iterate unfettered by the time suck of the workaday world. We can look towards Star Trek for inspiration. In the meantime, I expect everything to go the opposite direction from the way I suggested, just like it has been for the last 20 years. We'll see more wealth inequality, more disenfranchisement, more neocolonialism. Unfortunately it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. But in spite of that, we can still envision the dream and work to manifest change locally in our own lives, as we plant seeds of hope globally.
  • kingludite 7y ago
    I wonder if we can re-purpose our [computer] networking jargon to network humans. Since in biology the function is what drives maintenance and upgrades simply using peoples thoughts (like yours) will expand the ability. (also by example, monkey see monkey do) Perhaps something like supper nodes could produce passable data sets.
  • 7y ago
• arikr 7y ago
  We need new staged financing models for projects like this. $500mm for x project, released upon these pre agreed milestones. Like the way it works in large scale infrastructure or some construction financing.
  • loganfrederick 7y ago
    This is similar to what Eric Reis outlines as an innovation financing model in his book "The Startup Way": https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Way-Companies-Entrepreneurial-Management-ebook/dp/B01MYG4MNA/ https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Way-Companies-Entrepreneurial... *No affiliation. Just thought that his innovation financing and accounting models were the most interesting part of the book.
• fit2rule 7y ago
  I'm kind of more interested in the political system that the first Martian base-camp will adhere to .. and how it will be organised at a socio-economic level - are the first Martians going to have economy based on Access to Earth, etc? I know its at least 20 - 50 years away from being any kind of reality, but surely there are smart people working on this problem. What's to stop Elons' Martian crew from mutiny and sedition .. a firm dependence on Earth? Should we, therefore, go there before we get a chance to be independent as a colony - clearly there is as lot more work to be done on the subject of a self-sufficient colony, but how is that going to work out economically and socially, I wonder? Doesn't seem to me to be getting enough attention. Or, are there existing structures and organisational models that would be exported to the Mars colony? Startups on Mars? Free oxygen and access to the Starship hub for anyone who wants to colonise?
  • nickik 7y ago
    F.A. Hayek always talked about local knowledge, and he picked up the idea of tacid knowledge from Polanyi. I think the specific conditions we will face in a second phase of mars expansion, are gone be limited and determined by local condition at that point in time. I think its a total fools ear fool's errandnd to try to reason this out in a theoretical setting such a long time ahead. Looking at research from Elenor Ostrom it seems pretty evident that a group of people with local knowledge can far easier and more efficiently solve most common resource problems then remote governments or cooperation can. And the same will very much be true on Mars.
  • usrusr 7y ago
    Company town. What else could it be? Whatever you do, you will never be more than a subcontractor.
• phkahler 7y ago
  >> Those companies have to be run completely differently because the stakes are so much higher. I can't dismiss Elons drive, ability to get his hands dirty, and many other characteristics. But the primary difference I see in this comparison is simply risk aversion. YC and their VCs are in it to make money by placing a number of small bets, knowing some will be losers. To go big like SpaceX requires you to be all in. Elon nearly went broke a couple times. He's willing to take that risk because he's in it for the results, not the money. I used to wonder if it was just hype for employees and investors to say that SpaceX goal was to make humanity multi planetary. The last couple years have convinced me he's for real. The man could retire now. SpaceX could just own the launch industry by cutting cost for a while, or sit back and enjoy higher profits from reusability. But starship and mass production of it? Nonsense unless the stated mission is for real. People can do so much more if it's about the mission and not the money, and that includes investors.
  • lukebuehler 7y ago
    > He's willing to take that risk because he's in it for the results, not the money. Well put. Whatever anyone has to say about the man, the most incredible thing about Elon is that he finds ways to pursue his crazy ideals while somehow staying profitable.
    • Diederich 7y ago
      > crazy ideals while somehow staying profitable His main ideal, making humanity multi-planetary, requires a great deal of profitability, because it's almost nobody else's goal. My opinion is that he will, when the time is right, sell his holdings in Tesla and dump all of that right back into SpaceX or whatever entity is pushing the ball forward.
      • njarboe 7y ago
        Which, if he meets all the goals of Musk's incentive schedule at Tesla, will be about $55 billion[1]. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-compensation-package-tranches-explainer https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-compensation...
• szczepano 7y ago
  Why can't we just build robots and lay at home while driving them across galactic or build a big aquarium for brain like in futurama ? Touching can be stimulated by hardware, people wake up.
• gwern 7y ago
  (2014) > Plenty of conferences and magazines feature interviews with Andreessen where he talks about the future. What’s difficult is getting a man so excited about the future to talk about the past. The following is the story of how Andreessen became Andreessen… rarely told at a Pando event in 2014.