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Marc Andreessen interview
- op03 6y agoToo boring.
- tosh 6y agointeresting diff to "don't keep a schedule" from 2007 which is also an interesting read https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoThe true secret to productivity is dealt with in the first paragraph :-) >> without the help of my amazing and indefatigable assistant Arsho Avetian. She's been my secret weapon for more than 20 years. All the other stuff is just gravy :-)
- awillen 6y agoI've had a couple of startup CEOs I worked for really resist the idea of an assistant then finally get talked into it and suddenly realize they've freed up like 30+% of their time and can never go back and curse their past selves for their stubbornness.
- BurningFrog 6y agoWhat are the main things an assistant does? I have a hard time "visualizing" it. If I had an assistant, I wouldn't know what to task them with...
- lacker 6y agoIf your day is booked solid with meetings, your assistant can both manage the scheduling of those meetings, and do stuff that you would do yourself if you weren’t so booked with meetings.
- coldtea 6y agoAlmost everything? If we're talking secretary style assistance, a lot. From proofing presentations, to making arrangements (travelling, accommodations, etc), arranging meetings, handling your schedule, act as a (second/third level?) filter for people contacting you, handle your social media, and so on... A more qualified assistant, even more so, down to knowing your general policy etc and acting as a go-between between you and your employees, customers, when you don't need to bother...
- BurningFrog 6y agoOK, so this is for a CEO type job. In my software engineer job, I can't come up with any task for an assistant to do, because there aren't any.
- influnza 6y agoHow about testing and writing documentation? The tasks that any developer wants to forget about :D
- croh 6y agoI don't know if I am alone or not but I indeed love testing and documentation along with coding. Testing itself is very challenging. Never understood why QA folks are underrated. While for me documentation is like a sharing my cool stuff.
- johannes1234321 6y agoAs a developer one typically has less assitant tasks, but dependent on organisation a shared assistant could do expense filing, (conference) travel arrangements, ensuring all things office (drinks, food, whatever) are setup ... tasks can differ widely. The more your job is to just sit on your desk and write code the less things you need an assistant for (while somebody else might have help from an assistant to ensure the environment is in that way)
- rintintone 6y agoThat’s easy: manage Jira (or whatever) for you so you have one less complex tool & workflow to know how to use.
- TaylorSwift 6y agoI can come up with a few things: managing the calendar ,sending emails printing, scanning, mailing buying lunch, handling documentation e-signatures
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoSort out meeting times without asking the PA (much). Here are my invoices, do the paperwork and put them in please. X is on the phone & wants to talk, I'm busy, deal with him please. (X's issue may be real but X may waste a lot of time getting to the point). I have to travel, I'm going to Y, sort out some travel & accommodation. That kind of thing, the time-sucking crap. (not speaking for myself but from observations of an old boss of mine).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- awillen 6y agoIt's just the little stuff like scheduling calls/meetings - you don't realize how much time you spend going back and forth with people getting stuff on the calendar. It's not about proactively assigning stuff for them to do as much as just directing menial tasks like paperwork and whatever else to them so you don't have to.
- Lightbody 6y agoWhile it can’t replace a real human, a lot of the system he describes can be helped with https://reclaim.ai https://reclaim.ai. This is my startup that was inspired in part by own experience running a system like this without having a full time EA to support me :P
- qznc 6y agoThere is also no commute in his calendar. Thursday and Friday morning is free?
- bretpiatt 6y agoI'll toss out a few hypothesis... Might be COVID-19 calendar. I believe Marc lives in Palo Alto so 15-20 minutes of commute on surface streets to a16z on Sand Hill Road. Commute could happen before scheduled items. It could also be his commute happens during UP before meetings on the calendar start. He has FREE on many mornings before UP so UP can't directly mean wake up, that 30 minutes could be the commute.
- Ericson2314 6y agoIt says thanksgiving holiday at the top, so that rules out the quarantine......unless this is future calendar haha.
- shuckles 6y agoYou can work in the back of a car while someone else drives you. Some cars are built to make this comfortable.
- bibinou 6y agoEither they include commute in the calendar* or they don't commute at all. Not sure a VC needs to come to people, just make people come to you and deal with the East Coast via video. * job of a very good assistant: know and estimate commute time to anywhere in the world and reschedule better than any staffing startup AI.
- ramraj07 6y agoThis seems to be the case fire sure. How does one go about finding reliable help and how does one retain said person over the long term?
- bing_dai 6y agoA related tip: make sure to be kind to the assistants. - Build rapport with them. - Shake their hands. - Talk to them with respect. Marc Andreessen probably has literally hundreds of tasks on his desk a day. Whether your task (say, a fundraising document you need him to sign today) would become his priority can 90% depend on whether you and his assistant have a good relationship or not.
- khazhoux 6y agoAmazing that she's been his "secret weapon" for 20 years, through his rise into a formidable VC. Given that he's a billionaire, she's gotta be worth at least $100 million herself. Good for her!
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoAndreessen popped up a a18z podcast and said something that really made me stop - to paraphrase, we know what worked for "western democracy" - capitalism, law, individual rights etc. now is not the time to throw those out now is the time to double down on what worked - double down on democracy. It takes some time to parse out but he strikes me as simple to a number of politicians in UK recently - I agree with his deep values, if not his surface choices.
- nl 6y agoThat was a pretty disappointing interview. If you have one of the most influential VCs on the planet and spend half the interview talking about personal productivity and how he runs his calendar then you've missed a great opportunity.
- kick 6y agoThe cult of MBAs pretending to be hackers believes that success is entirely self-determined and self-controlled; if they just rearranged their Rolodex and pulled their $300 hoodie strings slightly differently they'd surely become billionaires. And they will, never mind that they haven't done it yet despite ten to twenty years of adulthood spent failing to with no change in approach.
- Lightbody 6y agoI don’t know if that’s fair criticism. From their about page: > The Observer Effect studies interesting people and institutions and tries to understand how they work. Seems like they did what they said they do?
- bretpiatt 6y agoWhat would you want to ask him? I enjoyed it, great takeaway that even at a16z scale it is possible to focus on process improvement as the goal because quantitative lag measurements are too slow to iterate and improve efficiently.
- ecf 6y agoIsn’t he a big investor in Superhuman, that one email app? Expect Superhuman to announce new calendaring features soon and a follow up interview about how the thing he has a stake in has completely changed his life.
- Omnipresent 6y agoIs there a podcast/audio of this?
- dpweb 6y ago"Where are the schools? Where are the hospitals? Where are the houses?" The problem with healthcare, education, and housing is they become too expensive for the average person. This is not because we don't create enough of these things. We create enormous amounts of each. One of the main problems is precisely that we feel the need to create more of them and (in the name of benevolence), large amounts of money floods the system and causes inflation. Unlimited college loan limits, government paid for healthcare, 2% mortgage rates. Even allowing 8 year car loans! Notice that every overpriced essential item is backed by a massive government and/or credit stimulus. Clearly, the seemingly intractable "problems" of society are a) not intractable b) being perceived wrongly. Aside are the political games that manipulate public opinion and wrongly influence people on the issues.
- rogerkirkness 6y agoIt does seem like the future of humanity rests on those in offices learning how second and third order consequences work.
- pmohun 6y agoYou’ve probably seen this, but posting in case you haven’t: https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/ https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-w...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- take_a_breath 6y agoOther countries are able to provide these same things with even more government support. Somehow, they end up costing even less. How does your theory explain that fact?
- pxeboot 6y ago
- historyremade 6y agoThe guy who stole Netscape Source Code and claimed to be his own invention. Do nothing Marc!
- historyremade 6y agoPing Fu got nothing ;(
- historyremade 6y agohttps://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19971005&slug=2564359 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19971005&slug...
- CalChris 6y agoNetscape invented the browser like Google invented the search engine.
- draw_down 6y agoIf you’re not talking political economy, what are you really saying? If you can’t concretely address why things are how they are, you can’t redress the problem. Think very carefully about what would cause someone like this to avoid talking about the “why”. That is, beyond BS mystification like “oh we got polarized.” > Yeah, that was a single night. It was literally a single night. Anyone can dash off a memo in a night. It doesn’t do anything, which in this case is the point.
- memexy 6y agoLooks like he uses an interleaving strategy for reading books > It’s a pile of physical books and then the Kindle books. And you're reading them all at the same time. When you sit down to read, you just read the one that's the most interesting of that pile. It turns out those are the ones that you finish. A month later, there's a bunch that you're theoretically reading and you’re on Chapter Three and you're never gone back to it. That’s like having the shirt in your closet you haven’t worn in a year. It’s a signal to get rid of it.
- justin66 6y ago> This interview was recorded in mid May 2020 before we hit major crises in this country. That's a weird place to draw the "we hit major crises" line.
- KKKKkkkk1 6y agoWhen IT'S TIME TO BUILD was published, I was very curious about the specifics of what initiatives Marc was about to launch. Any info on that in the interview?
- koolhead17 6y agoSoftware is eating the world minus secretary?