13 ms·

Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech

140 points by MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago
> you can see in the data the scandals cause people to use them more. I often wonder if all that negative press about leaks, facebook's privacy violations etc. are just publicity stunts. So many tech articles seeking outrage and smell of fake.
daxuak 5y ago
For some reason I read the title as Mac Address on Investing and Tech.
- boringg 5y ago
  Too long in the trenches in my guess.
hncurious 5y ago
I hadn't even dared to think that Sturgeon's Law might apply to output in the field of science. Yikes. "Anyway, science right now is in an existential crisis. This is a real, real issue, and there’s now a generation of scientists who specialize in pointing this out and analyzing it. Andrew Gelman and others. I’ll give you an example: I had a conversation with the long-time head of one of the big federal funding agencies for healthcare research who is also a very accomplished entrepreneur, and I said, “do you really think it’s true that 50-70% of biomedical research is fake?” This is a guy who has spent his life in this world. And he said “oh no, that’s not true at all. It’s 90%.” [Richard laughs]. I was like “holy shit,” I was flabbergasted that it could be 90%. He’s like “well look, 90% of everything is shit”, which is literally this thing called Sturgeon’s law which says that 90% of everything is bad. 90% of every novel written is bad, 90% of music, 90% of art… 90% of everything is bad. So his analysis was, anything you get in the field of medical experimentation, biomedical development, and this is going to be true of any field, there’s like five labs total in the world that are really good at what they’re doing and doing really cutting edge work. And this is true of quantum computing; pick any field for advanced technology you want. So those five labs have a pretty good shot at doing interesting work, even some of that is going to reproduce and some of it isn’t. But once you get out of those top five labs, it’s pretty much make-work, incremental, marginal improvements at best, and a complete waste of time otherwise. And I said “good God, why does the other 90% continue to get funded if you know this?” And he said, “well, there are all these universities and professors who have tenure, there are all these journals, there are all these systems and people have been promised lifetime employment.” Anyway, a longwinded way of saying that we have pretty serious structural and incentive problems in the research complex. "
- satellite2 5y ago
  As if we are capable of determining who is doing the top 10% best science and are not glued to the 10% most shining project according to the fad of the day.
- dotcommand 5y ago
  > He’s like “well look, 90% of everything is shit” I think there is a difference between "being shit" and "being fake" though. 'do you really think it’s true that 50-70% of biomedical research is fake?' Fake seems more insidious and problematic. Also this brings up a very troubling issue. If 90% of the "research is fake/shit" and lets say that means that 90% of the researchers are "fake/shit", then it means that 'scientific' consensus is also likely "fake/shit". This is why I'm always skeptical of 'scientific' consensus. Science is about evidence, testing, etc. Not consensus - which is the realm of politics, law, etc. And I'd suspect 99.99% of social 'sciences' is probably 'fake/shit' and that is used to push/change society/government/etc.
  - techfoolery 5y ago
    I think it's irrelevant to what was being said in their conversation. In Marc's context, being fake/shit equated to non-replicable simply. Before that quote, I believe he was talking about the replication crisis briefly.
- petermcneeley 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law This law seems to lack any kind of rigor or theoretical basis and seems like a purely rhetorical device.
  - ysavir 5y ago
    As are most of these "laws". The idea isn't to do a conclusive, thorough examination of all things under the sun and render a statement that reflects that particular moment in time. The idea is to make an observation--perhaps true, perhaps false--that helps us maintain a healthy mindset when examining and comprehending things. It's not meant to be insightful, it's meant to encourage us to strive for better insight.
mym1990 5y ago
Genuinely curious question: how does something come to be defined as cutting edge? Is it more of a feeling when someone is working on something that just seems so far away from the norm? Is everyone who is researching ways to cure cancer on the cutting edge, or is it a very small subset of that group? Is it defined by how close someone is to actually achieving a discovery?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
abvdasker 5y ago
On immigration policy: > Traditionally if I wanted to work at a company in another country I would have to go to that country. I’d have to be an immigrant from my country, at least for a while. In a world of remote work and Zoom and Slack, I can now work for people anywhere in the world. I can work for companies doing any kind of knowledge work. Immigration policies apply to the atoms of human beings, they don’t apply to the bits. I can go to work for some company anywhere in the world if it’s a remote-friendly company. I may never travel there, I may never have to travel there. Marc Andreessen is getting very close to saying the quiet part out loud. This is the clearest statement I've seen to date from a venture capitalist that white collar offshoring is almost certainly going to accelerate due to the shift towards remote work brought on by the pandemic.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Marc Andreessen is getting very close to saying the quiet part out loud. This is the clearest statement I've seen to date from a venture capitalist that white collar offshoring is almost certainly going to accelerate due to the shift towards remote work brought on by the pandemic. If anyone isn't hiring international remote right now they are losing a huge opportunity. Lots of people are looking at jumping ships, and western companies can outbid almost anyone for top talent.
- exolymph 5y ago
  Well, it's a free market (for capital, but even then not really, but close enough for rhetorical purposes). Outcompete those offshore workers, there was never any other option.
  - abvdasker 5y ago
    Hard to outcompete such dramatic cost savings. An engineer India is going to cost a tiny fraction of one in the Bay Area. Not sure that's a winnable competition unless you accept a massive pay cut.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
petermcneeley 5y ago
> Marc: I think there’s a real argument, and this is the most uncomfortable form of argument, there is a real argument that there are just a certain number of super-elite people. I really enjoy it when people say exactly what they think.
- abvdasker 5y ago
  I can't tell whether these types of guys are totally ignorant of concepts like the Nietzschean Übermensch or whether they're just careful to avoid referring to it too directly.
  - thewarrior 5y ago
    They are totally aware and believe that they are the Übermensch while funding and working on the Clubhouse app and sneering at all the people in broken institutions delivering things like healthcare or education. "Imagine you're an expert in only one thing and it's computer programming. Books are a waste of time except as quick references; you can achieve full expertise just by teaching yourself through internet searches, discussion forums, and maybe the occasional blog post if you're really keen. When you have to solve a problem, you strip away as much of the context as possible, until you can isolate it down to a single phrase of logic. As soon as you solve that one isolated microproblem, the results blow up exponentially to satisfy all kinds of needs and desires you haven't even thought of. Now imagine that even though you're doing journeyman skilled labor like a plumber or electrician (except it doesn't even require professional certification), you earn a salary well into the six figures - or even equity that grows to the millions or billions - in a Wall Street-like testosterone bubble where you and your colleagues unabashedly believe you're the smartest people in the room, the beneficiaries of a pure meritocracy, and you're Changing The World as much as you can when unimpeded by the hordes of fuzzies who just don't know how to think. Of course you come to believe that anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert, and says this or that issue is actually much more complicated and contextual than you appreciate, is probably just a big faker whose whole field of study could be solved elegantly if a smart person like you just spent some hobby time stripping away the context to isolate that one neat trick of logic." Not sure who wrote this originally found it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/i7a24j/tech_brain_is_a_sort_of_constant_willful/g10x2hr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/i7a24j/tech_brai...
WalterBright 5y ago
> Moderna, which innovated the concept of mRNA vaccines, it was a classic venture capital company. That company would not have existed without venture capital, these vaccines would not exist without venture capital. Interesting. I commonly hear asserted that breakthrough fundamental inventions don't come from capitalism.
- yborg 5y ago
  The fundamental inventions on mRNA vaccines were grant-funded academic work. But I don't know that anyone asserts that breakthrough inventions don't come from capitalism, certainly in the 19th and early 20th century many inventions were created by individual entrepreneurs, for example the Wright Brothers.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > But I don't know that anyone asserts that breakthrough inventions don't come from capitalism, I hear it all the time. > certainly in the 19th and early 20th century many inventions were created by individual entrepreneurs, for example the Wright Brothers. The Wright Bros are my usual reply to such assertions. Also the light bulb, transistor, jet engines, liquid fueled rocket engines, and on and on.
    - geomark 5y ago
      The transistor? (at Bell Labs, the research arm of the very capitalistic company AT&T)
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      Well, "breakthrough inventions" are mostly funded by the government, whether military or academic. Silicon Valley's origin is closely tied to the military for example. All aviation either had military R&D funding, or they were an early customer (true for most of your examples: the Wright Brothers, and rocket and jet engines in your example. Transistor production was scaled up for the US military.) Incremental advancements and commercial production are very capitalistic though. What patent lawyers do say is that companies do invention, not individuals, which is pretty accurate these days. The reason you're hearing anti-capitalist rhetoric these days is that young people hope a Marxist government will forgive their student loans. We now have a Marxist government, but they've resisted that so far. Most young people don't even know what capitalism or Marxism are, or why Marxism has failed everywhere that it was tried.
WalterBright 5y ago
> The technologies behind computer networking that ultimately resulted in the internet were funded by DARPA starting in the 1950s. Much of it came from the telegraph network that had been developed in the previous century. See "The Victorian Internet" by Standage. Also, in the 1970s working on computers, everybody with two computers invented ways to hook them together, i.e. invented networking. Many became commercial, like Compuserve and MCImail, some became free, like the BBS systems. Then there's Ethernet and TokenRing for LAN networks. (Note that DARPA figured out how to connect two computers as soon as they had two. It's just inevitable, not something coming from nowhere. Given two computers and the telephone lines, inventing a way to network them is going to happen in short order, just as water flows downhill.) We'd have had an internet one way or another.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Yes but I think he means that these people were the first to have two computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
  - acchow 5y ago
    They were the FIRST to have 2 computers? How can we even keep accurate historical info about computer ownership?
    - svachalek 5y ago
      Early computers weren't mass produced objects, they were huge, expensive, custom built machines. It's like where was the first city to have two skyscrapers or who was the first person to fly to space twice. The records would be there unless they were deliberately hiding them (as many national intelligence agencies do).
    - thanhhaimai 5y ago
      > Each SAGE Direction Center (DC) housed an FSQ-7 which occupied an entire floor, approximately 22,000 square feet (2,000 m2) not including supporting equipment. The FSQ-7 was actually two computers, "A" side and "B" side. If one computer takes more than 10000sqft, then it's should be rare enough and verifiable. For comparison, a large California house with 5+ bedrooms are around 3000sqft.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
One of my big career disappointments was having a meeting with Marc Andreessen with regard to a project he needed us for, not as an "investee". I didn't idolize him or anything before that but I had it in mind that he would at least have something to offer. In our conversation I realized almost immediately he was a total buffoon and had just been in the right place at the right time.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > In our conversation I realized almost immediately he was a total buffoon and had just been in the right place at the right time. Sometimes it takes a while, and some deep context, and then some more context, ideally in a different set of circumstances, before you can assess someone's capabilities fairly. Some people shine in their specialty domain, and flail outside of it. Others are good in fair weather, but fragile in a crisis. Others are kind of the opposite, losing steam day to day, but rising to the occasion when shit happens. Seasoned salespeople know all this. They do well consistently in spite of it all by presenting themselves credibly irrespective of their competency in any domain. They dress right for their audience, and they speak persuasively, always mindful of what their audience wants and needs to hear. But listen to Andreesen talk! He sounds like he's never had to learn how to persuade anybody of anything. Well, not any regular people. https://audioboom.com/posts/7923122-flying-x-wings-into-the-death-star-andreessen-on-investing-and-tech https://audioboom.com/posts/7923122-flying-x-wings-into-the-...
  - jereees 5y ago
    He sounds like he had too many Adderall mixed with coffee. I would know.
  - hamburgerwah 5y ago
    And some people are just dolts. It's just my opinion but I believe he falls into that camp based on first hand interactions.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
WalterBright 5y ago
> So it’s very hard to make time scales match for 20-year intellectual journeys. Xerox did it with the copy machine. Which then remade the business world. They did it again with the user interface, though it was Apple that capitalized on it. Frank Whittle soldiered on for many years trying to invent the jet engine, funded by venture capitalism at the time. The government wasn't interested until he demonstrated flying jet aircraft. In the meantime the US government shut down Lockheed's nascent jet engine project.
highenergystar 5y ago
It's difficult to speak off-the-cuff on any topic that might come up in an interview, but I expected better than 'at least it's not boring' about QAnon when attempting to reply on the social impacts of technology. Social media definitely has negative impacts (e.g. directly tied to mobs in India and Burma) and positive impacts (so much easier to stay connected across the world) - it would've been 'interesting' to hear a more nuanced take from one of the inventors of the modern internet
lumost 5y ago
The super elite hypothesis is interesting, in that it lacks a plausible mechanism. By and large you would expect that educating and equipping more people would produce more progress in any field, up until there is more coordination tax than benefit from adding more people. Is it possible that the sciences and other fields have exceptionally high coordination taxes? Or is it likely that we’ve structured them such that only a small number of slots exist for people to move the needle. The latter seems eminently true given the finite number of conference slots and the former seems true given the the need to convince more people of a given direction. If such a dynamic exists than the advent of communication technologies may actually hamper forward progress due to elimination of smaller research networks.
quantified 5y ago
> I think it’s possible we as a society spent 50 years assembling these systems and these games in the first half the 20th century, and then we spent the last half of the 20th century gaming the games. Interesting perception, seems to have explanatory power. I’ll note that building games and gaming them has accelerated with tech. (Facebook, Tiktok, Amazon, REvil, Robinhood.) These aren’t institutional games, these are societal games. Different and fluid yet roughly defined groups.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
Richard's argument starting with > But I think of sociability or socializing as a collective action problem. is excellent. He nails it in a way I hadn't articulated before. Marc disagrees, but I'm really with Richard on this one.
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  I like what strongtowns has to say on the topic. Also, it does seem like circumstances bringing people together for some amount of time seems necessary for bonding. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/6/college-campuses-as-a-model-for-urban-planning https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/6/college-campuse... https://news.ku.edu/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it-takes-make-friend https://news.ku.edu/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it...
birdyrooster 5y ago
Marc looks more and more like Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth the older he gets

140 points by MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

> you can see in the data the scandals cause people to use them more. I often wonder if all that negative press about leaks, facebook's privacy violations etc. are just publicity stunts. So many tech articles seeking outrage and smell of fake.

daxuak 5y ago

For some reason I read the title as Mac Address on Investing and Tech.

boringg 5y ago
Too long in the trenches in my guess.

hncurious 5y ago

I hadn't even dared to think that Sturgeon's Law might apply to output in the field of science. Yikes. "Anyway, science right now is in an existential crisis. This is a real, real issue, and there’s now a generation of scientists who specialize in pointing this out and analyzing it. Andrew Gelman and others. I’ll give you an example: I had a conversation with the long-time head of one of the big federal funding agencies for healthcare research who is also a very accomplished entrepreneur, and I said, “do you really think it’s true that 50-70% of biomedical research is fake?” This is a guy who has spent his life in this world. And he said “oh no, that’s not true at all. It’s 90%.” [Richard laughs]. I was like “holy shit,” I was flabbergasted that it could be 90%. He’s like “well look, 90% of everything is shit”, which is literally this thing called Sturgeon’s law which says that 90% of everything is bad. 90% of every novel written is bad, 90% of music, 90% of art… 90% of everything is bad. So his analysis was, anything you get in the field of medical experimentation, biomedical development, and this is going to be true of any field, there’s like five labs total in the world that are really good at what they’re doing and doing really cutting edge work. And this is true of quantum computing; pick any field for advanced technology you want. So those five labs have a pretty good shot at doing interesting work, even some of that is going to reproduce and some of it isn’t. But once you get out of those top five labs, it’s pretty much make-work, incremental, marginal improvements at best, and a complete waste of time otherwise. And I said “good God, why does the other 90% continue to get funded if you know this?” And he said, “well, there are all these universities and professors who have tenure, there are all these journals, there are all these systems and people have been promised lifetime employment.” Anyway, a longwinded way of saying that we have pretty serious structural and incentive problems in the research complex. "

satellite2 5y ago
As if we are capable of determining who is doing the top 10% best science and are not glued to the 10% most shining project according to the fad of the day.
dotcommand 5y ago
> He’s like “well look, 90% of everything is shit” I think there is a difference between "being shit" and "being fake" though. 'do you really think it’s true that 50-70% of biomedical research is fake?' Fake seems more insidious and problematic. Also this brings up a very troubling issue. If 90% of the "research is fake/shit" and lets say that means that 90% of the researchers are "fake/shit", then it means that 'scientific' consensus is also likely "fake/shit". This is why I'm always skeptical of 'scientific' consensus. Science is about evidence, testing, etc. Not consensus - which is the realm of politics, law, etc. And I'd suspect 99.99% of social 'sciences' is probably 'fake/shit' and that is used to push/change society/government/etc.
- techfoolery 5y ago
  I think it's irrelevant to what was being said in their conversation. In Marc's context, being fake/shit equated to non-replicable simply. Before that quote, I believe he was talking about the replication crisis briefly.
petermcneeley 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law This law seems to lack any kind of rigor or theoretical basis and seems like a purely rhetorical device.
- ysavir 5y ago
  As are most of these "laws". The idea isn't to do a conclusive, thorough examination of all things under the sun and render a statement that reflects that particular moment in time. The idea is to make an observation--perhaps true, perhaps false--that helps us maintain a healthy mindset when examining and comprehending things. It's not meant to be insightful, it's meant to encourage us to strive for better insight.

mym1990 5y ago

Genuinely curious question: how does something come to be defined as cutting edge? Is it more of a feeling when someone is working on something that just seems so far away from the norm? Is everyone who is researching ways to cure cancer on the cutting edge, or is it a very small subset of that group? Is it defined by how close someone is to actually achieving a discovery?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

abvdasker 5y ago

On immigration policy: > Traditionally if I wanted to work at a company in another country I would have to go to that country. I’d have to be an immigrant from my country, at least for a while. In a world of remote work and Zoom and Slack, I can now work for people anywhere in the world. I can work for companies doing any kind of knowledge work. Immigration policies apply to the atoms of human beings, they don’t apply to the bits. I can go to work for some company anywhere in the world if it’s a remote-friendly company. I may never travel there, I may never have to travel there. Marc Andreessen is getting very close to saying the quiet part out loud. This is the clearest statement I've seen to date from a venture capitalist that white collar offshoring is almost certainly going to accelerate due to the shift towards remote work brought on by the pandemic.

908B64B197 5y ago
> Marc Andreessen is getting very close to saying the quiet part out loud. This is the clearest statement I've seen to date from a venture capitalist that white collar offshoring is almost certainly going to accelerate due to the shift towards remote work brought on by the pandemic. If anyone isn't hiring international remote right now they are losing a huge opportunity. Lots of people are looking at jumping ships, and western companies can outbid almost anyone for top talent.
exolymph 5y ago
Well, it's a free market (for capital, but even then not really, but close enough for rhetorical purposes). Outcompete those offshore workers, there was never any other option.
- abvdasker 5y ago
  Hard to outcompete such dramatic cost savings. An engineer India is going to cost a tiny fraction of one in the Bay Area. Not sure that's a winnable competition unless you accept a massive pay cut.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

petermcneeley 5y ago

> Marc: I think there’s a real argument, and this is the most uncomfortable form of argument, there is a real argument that there are just a certain number of super-elite people. I really enjoy it when people say exactly what they think.

abvdasker 5y ago
I can't tell whether these types of guys are totally ignorant of concepts like the Nietzschean Übermensch or whether they're just careful to avoid referring to it too directly.
- thewarrior 5y ago
  They are totally aware and believe that they are the Übermensch while funding and working on the Clubhouse app and sneering at all the people in broken institutions delivering things like healthcare or education. "Imagine you're an expert in only one thing and it's computer programming. Books are a waste of time except as quick references; you can achieve full expertise just by teaching yourself through internet searches, discussion forums, and maybe the occasional blog post if you're really keen. When you have to solve a problem, you strip away as much of the context as possible, until you can isolate it down to a single phrase of logic. As soon as you solve that one isolated microproblem, the results blow up exponentially to satisfy all kinds of needs and desires you haven't even thought of. Now imagine that even though you're doing journeyman skilled labor like a plumber or electrician (except it doesn't even require professional certification), you earn a salary well into the six figures - or even equity that grows to the millions or billions - in a Wall Street-like testosterone bubble where you and your colleagues unabashedly believe you're the smartest people in the room, the beneficiaries of a pure meritocracy, and you're Changing The World as much as you can when unimpeded by the hordes of fuzzies who just don't know how to think. Of course you come to believe that anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert, and says this or that issue is actually much more complicated and contextual than you appreciate, is probably just a big faker whose whole field of study could be solved elegantly if a smart person like you just spent some hobby time stripping away the context to isolate that one neat trick of logic." Not sure who wrote this originally found it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/i7a24j/tech_brain_is_a_sort_of_constant_willful/g10x2hr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/i7a24j/tech_brai...

WalterBright 5y ago

> Moderna, which innovated the concept of mRNA vaccines, it was a classic venture capital company. That company would not have existed without venture capital, these vaccines would not exist without venture capital. Interesting. I commonly hear asserted that breakthrough fundamental inventions don't come from capitalism.

yborg 5y ago
The fundamental inventions on mRNA vaccines were grant-funded academic work. But I don't know that anyone asserts that breakthrough inventions don't come from capitalism, certainly in the 19th and early 20th century many inventions were created by individual entrepreneurs, for example the Wright Brothers.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > But I don't know that anyone asserts that breakthrough inventions don't come from capitalism, I hear it all the time. > certainly in the 19th and early 20th century many inventions were created by individual entrepreneurs, for example the Wright Brothers. The Wright Bros are my usual reply to such assertions. Also the light bulb, transistor, jet engines, liquid fueled rocket engines, and on and on.
  - geomark 5y ago
    The transistor? (at Bell Labs, the research arm of the very capitalistic company AT&T)
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Well, "breakthrough inventions" are mostly funded by the government, whether military or academic. Silicon Valley's origin is closely tied to the military for example. All aviation either had military R&D funding, or they were an early customer (true for most of your examples: the Wright Brothers, and rocket and jet engines in your example. Transistor production was scaled up for the US military.) Incremental advancements and commercial production are very capitalistic though. What patent lawyers do say is that companies do invention, not individuals, which is pretty accurate these days. The reason you're hearing anti-capitalist rhetoric these days is that young people hope a Marxist government will forgive their student loans. We now have a Marxist government, but they've resisted that so far. Most young people don't even know what capitalism or Marxism are, or why Marxism has failed everywhere that it was tried.

WalterBright 5y ago

> The technologies behind computer networking that ultimately resulted in the internet were funded by DARPA starting in the 1950s. Much of it came from the telegraph network that had been developed in the previous century. See "The Victorian Internet" by Standage. Also, in the 1970s working on computers, everybody with two computers invented ways to hook them together, i.e. invented networking. Many became commercial, like Compuserve and MCImail, some became free, like the BBS systems. Then there's Ethernet and TokenRing for LAN networks. (Note that DARPA figured out how to connect two computers as soon as they had two. It's just inevitable, not something coming from nowhere. Given two computers and the telephone lines, inventing a way to network them is going to happen in short order, just as water flows downhill.) We'd have had an internet one way or another.

dboreham 5y ago
Yes but I think he means that these people were the first to have two computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
- acchow 5y ago
  They were the FIRST to have 2 computers? How can we even keep accurate historical info about computer ownership?
  - svachalek 5y ago
    Early computers weren't mass produced objects, they were huge, expensive, custom built machines. It's like where was the first city to have two skyscrapers or who was the first person to fly to space twice. The records would be there unless they were deliberately hiding them (as many national intelligence agencies do).
  - thanhhaimai 5y ago
    > Each SAGE Direction Center (DC) housed an FSQ-7 which occupied an entire floor, approximately 22,000 square feet (2,000 m2) not including supporting equipment. The FSQ-7 was actually two computers, "A" side and "B" side. If one computer takes more than 10000sqft, then it's should be rare enough and verifiable. For comparison, a large California house with 5+ bedrooms are around 3000sqft.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

One of my big career disappointments was having a meeting with Marc Andreessen with regard to a project he needed us for, not as an "investee". I didn't idolize him or anything before that but I had it in mind that he would at least have something to offer. In our conversation I realized almost immediately he was a total buffoon and had just been in the right place at the right time.

wombatmobile 5y ago
> In our conversation I realized almost immediately he was a total buffoon and had just been in the right place at the right time. Sometimes it takes a while, and some deep context, and then some more context, ideally in a different set of circumstances, before you can assess someone's capabilities fairly. Some people shine in their specialty domain, and flail outside of it. Others are good in fair weather, but fragile in a crisis. Others are kind of the opposite, losing steam day to day, but rising to the occasion when shit happens. Seasoned salespeople know all this. They do well consistently in spite of it all by presenting themselves credibly irrespective of their competency in any domain. They dress right for their audience, and they speak persuasively, always mindful of what their audience wants and needs to hear. But listen to Andreesen talk! He sounds like he's never had to learn how to persuade anybody of anything. Well, not any regular people. https://audioboom.com/posts/7923122-flying-x-wings-into-the-death-star-andreessen-on-investing-and-tech https://audioboom.com/posts/7923122-flying-x-wings-into-the-...
- jereees 5y ago
  He sounds like he had too many Adderall mixed with coffee. I would know.
- hamburgerwah 5y ago
  And some people are just dolts. It's just my opinion but I believe he falls into that camp based on first hand interactions.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

> So it’s very hard to make time scales match for 20-year intellectual journeys. Xerox did it with the copy machine. Which then remade the business world. They did it again with the user interface, though it was Apple that capitalized on it. Frank Whittle soldiered on for many years trying to invent the jet engine, funded by venture capitalism at the time. The government wasn't interested until he demonstrated flying jet aircraft. In the meantime the US government shut down Lockheed's nascent jet engine project.

highenergystar 5y ago

It's difficult to speak off-the-cuff on any topic that might come up in an interview, but I expected better than 'at least it's not boring' about QAnon when attempting to reply on the social impacts of technology. Social media definitely has negative impacts (e.g. directly tied to mobs in India and Burma) and positive impacts (so much easier to stay connected across the world) - it would've been 'interesting' to hear a more nuanced take from one of the inventors of the modern internet

lumost 5y ago

The super elite hypothesis is interesting, in that it lacks a plausible mechanism. By and large you would expect that educating and equipping more people would produce more progress in any field, up until there is more coordination tax than benefit from adding more people. Is it possible that the sciences and other fields have exceptionally high coordination taxes? Or is it likely that we’ve structured them such that only a small number of slots exist for people to move the needle. The latter seems eminently true given the finite number of conference slots and the former seems true given the the need to convince more people of a given direction. If such a dynamic exists than the advent of communication technologies may actually hamper forward progress due to elimination of smaller research networks.

quantified 5y ago

> I think it’s possible we as a society spent 50 years assembling these systems and these games in the first half the 20th century, and then we spent the last half of the 20th century gaming the games. Interesting perception, seems to have explanatory power. I’ll note that building games and gaming them has accelerated with tech. (Facebook, Tiktok, Amazon, REvil, Robinhood.) These aren’t institutional games, these are societal games. Different and fluid yet roughly defined groups.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

Richard's argument starting with > But I think of sociability or socializing as a collective action problem. is excellent. He nails it in a way I hadn't articulated before. Marc disagrees, but I'm really with Richard on this one.

lambdatronics 5y ago
I like what strongtowns has to say on the topic. Also, it does seem like circumstances bringing people together for some amount of time seems necessary for bonding. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/6/college-campuses-as-a-model-for-urban-planning https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/6/college-campuse... https://news.ku.edu/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it-takes-make-friend https://news.ku.edu/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it...

birdyrooster 5y ago

Marc looks more and more like Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth the older he gets