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He is a smart person, but not as brilliant as I thought he was (and I am not getting this impression just from this interview, I have been following him for a l

He is a smart person, but not as brilliant as I thought he was (and I am not getting this impression just from this interview, I have been following him for a long time). And the same is true for many other VC types, who, if it were not for the fact that founders and companies need their money, would have the same intellectual and "lived-life" weight of your run-of-the-mills 9-to-5 office worker. He speaks way too fast which gives the impression is "throwing up" words instead of making a point. Chill. It is an interview, not a slam poetry the-quickest-wins contest. He is asked how to identify talent and after working in VC for 15-20 years he gives a made-up answer on the spot. I don't think he is guarding some secrets, it appears he has not developed a theory. Which is fine, or the theory is implicit, he is looking for "vibes" more than "hard" traits after all the necessary boxes are checked (smart, persistent, able to articulate thoughts). Hard to disagree. If there were a secret, it'd be out there already found. But the made-up answer was not impressive at all (a videotape of when they were kids? Come on). He talks about web3 and he comes up with ways of monetizing, say, podcasts with proposals that you would expect from a teenager. At the end, he basically admits he has no clue and the future will take care of itself. He has watched many movies, but he doesn't have a favorite one. He seems unfazed by selection biases. Peter Thiel is a great at recognizing talent, he says. How many would be recognize with 1/1000th of his money and how many he did not recognize? He repeats "insights" and "talking points" gotten from twitter, social media, the usual playgrounds that myself, a total nobody, could repeat with more flavor. He had a few interesting insights (saying they were "brilliant" would be quite arrogant on my part), surely. Not enough to be considered "brilliant".

CalChris 4y ago
It's hard to take A16Z seriously after they opened a crypto fund and invested in Adam Neumann.
- Kiro 4y ago
  I'm not a crypto advocate but isn't it too early to say crypto has failed?
  - groby_b 4y ago
    While some people still believe crypto isn't a complete failure just yet, let's focus on two things: 1) It's a haven for grifters right now 2) They're investing in Adam Neuman Any explanation I can think of - outside of incompetence - veers pretty close to "might be criminal enterprise".
    - no_butterscotch 4y ago
      Yikes, I agree. I thought you were talking about an investment in WeWork way back in the day, for which I think that could be forgiven. But no, they RECENTLY invested in Neumann's new crypto start-up: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/flowcarbon-wework-adam-neumann-blockchain-crypto-carbon-credit-startup-raises-funding-from-a16z/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/flowcarbon-wework-adam-neu...
  - p1necone 4y ago
    Saying that one specific obvious crypto scam is a bad investment !=== saying that crypto has failed.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      I thought the poster was talking about two different things (crypto fund and WeWork). Now I understand they meant the crypto fund investing in his new project.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    If you have to go from a) it's a private P2P e-cash system, to b) it's a digital asset and a hedge against inflation, to c) it's saving people in Venezuela the Central African Republic .... maybe it's failed.
- api 4y ago
  Is that “mother Earth token?” It’s such an obvious grift that anyone investing in that is either foolish or knowingly investing in a grift. Neither is a good look.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Agree about crypto. I never never seen anything hyped so much which is otherwise useless. The World Wide Web proved useful and caught on quickly such as Amazon, Yahoo, Lycos, etc., but a decade later and crypto is still slow, unusable, a niche.
FanaHOVA 4y ago
HN comments are hilarious. Someone who has created the first internet browser, built two companies worth $4.3B and $1.6B, and then a $30B VC firm doesn't have "the same intellectual and "lived-life" weight of your run-of-the-mills 9-to-5 office worker."
- bigcat12345678 4y ago
  If you believe the money amount correspondence to intellectual and lived life weight is linear, then Marc must be astronomical huge. But in the end, no one knows the correspondence between money amount and intellectual and lived life weight. That's a market thing. Everyone's option is mixed together and give to a weight of collective market dynamism.
- CalChris 4y ago
  Netscape Navigator wasn't the first internet browser. It wasn't the second either. It came along in 1994, four years after Tim Berners-Lee introduced the WorldWideWeb browser.
  - steego 4y ago
    That’s true, but Netscape wasn’t his first browser. He and Eric Bina also releasedd the first version of Mosaic in 1993, which was the first graphical browser to inline images with the text. Oh yeah, it ran on 5 operating systems (I used the OS/2 version myself) The breadth of features that were added between Netscape 1.0 and Netscape 3.0 in 2 year span was pretty astounding at that time. People forget how many critical features were added to Netscape 3.0 that would define so much of the web today and make it commercially viable.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    And the company only lasted a few years! Good for him on being in the right place at the right time and jumping on the opportunity. But if we're going to use it as a yardstick of his genius, surely we have to also look at how it turned out.
- jjulius 4y ago
kache_ 4y ago
>marc andreessen bad
davesque 4y ago
Couldn't agree more. All the billionaire worship on HN is super cringe.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
paulpauper 4y ago
what would be brilliant in your eyes? If he just solved a the Riemann hypothesis on the spot or something. What should he be saying instead? who is someone who is really smart then, excluding mathematicians or physicists?
- borroka 4y ago
  He is a brilliant, genius technologist. I don't find him a brilliant intellectual. Einstein was a brilliant physicist. Otherwise he was not a paragon of human virtues. Maradona was a brilliant soccer player. As a coach he was a disaster. I have nothing against Andreessen, and, of course, he is 1,000 the professional that I could not even aspire but dream of being. But outside of technology, I don't find him convincing. He is very articulate and can speak without thinking, and that is a huge and massive advantage when you are in a position of professional and intellectual power. Obama's success has undoubtedly and largely been aided by his ability to be tremendously effective in public speaking.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    Is he a brilliant technologist if he pivoted to being an investor like 25 years ago? I'm not here to bash VCs but they're not really active contributors to the advancement of technology.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  Honestly I think the person he was having this conversation with - Tyler Cowen - is a pretty good example. His insights are typically more novel and more interesting than the kinds of things Andreessen was saying.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 4y ago
> He is a smart person, but not as brilliant as I thought he was Yeah, one of the things that I keep coming back to is Acquired Situational Narcissism. I can name a number of very successful people who I used to listen to as insightful that now seem banal to me. I'm sure I've gotten more discerning, but I'm also sure, as in Andreessen's case, that there's been a real decline. A pretty easy explanation here is that being truly insightful is partly a function of circumstance. If you can say basically anything and have people around you exclaim, "Amazing! Brilliant!" then you don't have a lot of incentive for working harder. If you're insulated from reality by vast swathes of power and money, you don't get the corrective-whack-on-the-nose feeling from unpleasant encounters with reality. It's akin to how I think getting a permanent newspaper columnist is a curse. A lot of those people used to be really interesting once upon a time. But I think it's the very rare one who doesn't devolve into being almost cartoonishly predictable.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  What is wrong with predictability. When you buy an album by your favorite musician or whatever, you expect a certain kind of sound
cato_the_elder 4y ago
> He has watched many movies, but he doesn't have a favorite one. Not sure why that's supposed to be a bad thing. > And the same is true for many other VC types Andreessen isn't just one of those "VC types". He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser. [1] If you don't consider him to be brilliant, I'm curious to know who in the same space do think is? [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen
- borroka 4y ago
  It is not a "bad thing" per se. But say, you meet up with someone and they say they watch plenty of baseball games. And you ask them, "who is your favorite baseball player?". If they answer, "can I answer with my favorite tennis player?" or they say "I don't have a favorite player", I would find equally bizarre and suspicious. It reminded of an episode that happened to me a few years ago. A colleague was talking about a person we both knew (apparently) and he said, of course I know her, we spend time together, we went on vacation together, man, I don't remember her name now. Did they go on vacation together? Did they know each other? Did he have cognitive problems? Now MA is a VC guy, a few decades ago he built Mosaic. I'm not saying he's not fantastic at building web browsers, he is a genius, but I find that if the same interview had been given by someone who gets less credit than the inventor of Mosaic, he would have been taken little seriously from that point on. But I could say the same about Gross, who was interviewed along with Cowen during their "book tour." He has made tens of millions or more from technology, but during their interviews he appeared rather light on the intellectual side.

CalChris 4y ago

It's hard to take A16Z seriously after they opened a crypto fund and invested in Adam Neumann.

Kiro 4y ago
I'm not a crypto advocate but isn't it too early to say crypto has failed?
- groby_b 4y ago
  While some people still believe crypto isn't a complete failure just yet, let's focus on two things: 1) It's a haven for grifters right now 2) They're investing in Adam Neuman Any explanation I can think of - outside of incompetence - veers pretty close to "might be criminal enterprise".
  - no_butterscotch 4y ago
    Yikes, I agree. I thought you were talking about an investment in WeWork way back in the day, for which I think that could be forgiven. But no, they RECENTLY invested in Neumann's new crypto start-up: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/flowcarbon-wework-adam-neumann-blockchain-crypto-carbon-credit-startup-raises-funding-from-a16z/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/flowcarbon-wework-adam-neu...
- p1necone 4y ago
  Saying that one specific obvious crypto scam is a bad investment !=== saying that crypto has failed.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    I thought the poster was talking about two different things (crypto fund and WeWork). Now I understand they meant the crypto fund investing in his new project.
- rchaud 4y ago
  If you have to go from a) it's a private P2P e-cash system, to b) it's a digital asset and a hedge against inflation, to c) it's saving people in Venezuela the Central African Republic .... maybe it's failed.
api 4y ago
Is that “mother Earth token?” It’s such an obvious grift that anyone investing in that is either foolish or knowingly investing in a grift. Neither is a good look.
paulpauper 4y ago
Agree about crypto. I never never seen anything hyped so much which is otherwise useless. The World Wide Web proved useful and caught on quickly such as Amazon, Yahoo, Lycos, etc., but a decade later and crypto is still slow, unusable, a niche.

FanaHOVA 4y ago

HN comments are hilarious. Someone who has created the first internet browser, built two companies worth $4.3B and $1.6B, and then a $30B VC firm doesn't have "the same intellectual and "lived-life" weight of your run-of-the-mills 9-to-5 office worker."

bigcat12345678 4y ago
If you believe the money amount correspondence to intellectual and lived life weight is linear, then Marc must be astronomical huge. But in the end, no one knows the correspondence between money amount and intellectual and lived life weight. That's a market thing. Everyone's option is mixed together and give to a weight of collective market dynamism.
CalChris 4y ago
Netscape Navigator wasn't the first internet browser. It wasn't the second either. It came along in 1994, four years after Tim Berners-Lee introduced the WorldWideWeb browser.
- steego 4y ago
  That’s true, but Netscape wasn’t his first browser. He and Eric Bina also releasedd the first version of Mosaic in 1993, which was the first graphical browser to inline images with the text. Oh yeah, it ran on 5 operating systems (I used the OS/2 version myself) The breadth of features that were added between Netscape 1.0 and Netscape 3.0 in 2 year span was pretty astounding at that time. People forget how many critical features were added to Netscape 3.0 that would define so much of the web today and make it commercially viable.
- wpietri 4y ago
  And the company only lasted a few years! Good for him on being in the right place at the right time and jumping on the opportunity. But if we're going to use it as a yardstick of his genius, surely we have to also look at how it turned out.
jjulius 4y ago

kache_ 4y ago

>marc andreessen bad

davesque 4y ago

Couldn't agree more. All the billionaire worship on HN is super cringe.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

paulpauper 4y ago

what would be brilliant in your eyes? If he just solved a the Riemann hypothesis on the spot or something. What should he be saying instead? who is someone who is really smart then, excluding mathematicians or physicists?

borroka 4y ago
He is a brilliant, genius technologist. I don't find him a brilliant intellectual. Einstein was a brilliant physicist. Otherwise he was not a paragon of human virtues. Maradona was a brilliant soccer player. As a coach he was a disaster. I have nothing against Andreessen, and, of course, he is 1,000 the professional that I could not even aspire but dream of being. But outside of technology, I don't find him convincing. He is very articulate and can speak without thinking, and that is a huge and massive advantage when you are in a position of professional and intellectual power. Obama's success has undoubtedly and largely been aided by his ability to be tremendously effective in public speaking.
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  Is he a brilliant technologist if he pivoted to being an investor like 25 years ago? I'm not here to bash VCs but they're not really active contributors to the advancement of technology.
sanderjd 4y ago
Honestly I think the person he was having this conversation with - Tyler Cowen - is a pretty good example. His insights are typically more novel and more interesting than the kinds of things Andreessen was saying.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wpietri 4y ago

> He is a smart person, but not as brilliant as I thought he was Yeah, one of the things that I keep coming back to is Acquired Situational Narcissism. I can name a number of very successful people who I used to listen to as insightful that now seem banal to me. I'm sure I've gotten more discerning, but I'm also sure, as in Andreessen's case, that there's been a real decline. A pretty easy explanation here is that being truly insightful is partly a function of circumstance. If you can say basically anything and have people around you exclaim, "Amazing! Brilliant!" then you don't have a lot of incentive for working harder. If you're insulated from reality by vast swathes of power and money, you don't get the corrective-whack-on-the-nose feeling from unpleasant encounters with reality. It's akin to how I think getting a permanent newspaper columnist is a curse. A lot of those people used to be really interesting once upon a time. But I think it's the very rare one who doesn't devolve into being almost cartoonishly predictable.

paulpauper 4y ago
What is wrong with predictability. When you buy an album by your favorite musician or whatever, you expect a certain kind of sound

cato_the_elder 4y ago

> He has watched many movies, but he doesn't have a favorite one. Not sure why that's supposed to be a bad thing. > And the same is true for many other VC types Andreessen isn't just one of those "VC types". He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser. [1] If you don't consider him to be brilliant, I'm curious to know who in the same space do think is? [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen

borroka 4y ago
It is not a "bad thing" per se. But say, you meet up with someone and they say they watch plenty of baseball games. And you ask them, "who is your favorite baseball player?". If they answer, "can I answer with my favorite tennis player?" or they say "I don't have a favorite player", I would find equally bizarre and suspicious. It reminded of an episode that happened to me a few years ago. A colleague was talking about a person we both knew (apparently) and he said, of course I know her, we spend time together, we went on vacation together, man, I don't remember her name now. Did they go on vacation together? Did they know each other? Did he have cognitive problems? Now MA is a VC guy, a few decades ago he built Mosaic. I'm not saying he's not fantastic at building web browsers, he is a genius, but I find that if the same interview had been given by someone who gets less credit than the inventor of Mosaic, he would have been taken little seriously from that point on. But I could say the same about Gross, who was interviewed along with Cowen during their "book tour." He has made tens of millions or more from technology, but during their interviews he appeared rather light on the intellectual side.