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I've always felt kind of sorry (is that the word?) for Marc Andreessen - he never quite could get a good exit out of anything he has ever done. This despite the
by confluence 14y ago
I've always felt kind of sorry (is that the word?) for Marc Andreessen - he never quite could get a good exit out of anything he has ever done. This despite the fact that his browser (and company) set off the feeding frenzy that we know as the dot com boom (and bust).
Netscape/Loudscloud/Opsware ended their lives as pity acquisitions, and Ning never did get off the ground.
Hopefully this venture fund works out and doesn't blow up in 2016 or so.
But he is right on the money with this though:
> From there he pivoted to an argument that the consumer electronics industry is coming back to the U.S. Yes, it’s true, he says, that products like iPhones and tablets get assembled in China, but they often include components made in the U.S. and run software that more often than not was designed in the U.S. “You have to ask where the profits go, and they really go to the U.S. The assembly part is really an arbitrage of labor and transport costs.”
The only reason we make stuff in China is because of the cheap labor (yes really). Robotics and more scalable production designs (you know things that don't require people to touch the production line) will destroy this advantage. Transporting goods thousands of kilometres from production to consumption is just insanely wasteful.
- benjaminwootton 14y agoI'm sure he isn't going hungry!
- confluence 14y agoHaha indeed - but that's not what I really mean :D. Netscape was the trigger for a great deal of what you see around you on the Internet today. Obviously, that doesn't mean that if they didn't exist - no one would've done it. But my point is this: for the first guy to IPO into what started the craze - he didn't get out with too much. Indeed, if you were to just look at Broadcast.com, which sold for ~$5 billion at the height of the dot com boom, Mark Cuban pulled ~$2 billion for something I think was quietly killed shortly thereafter (i.e. no real impact).
- dkrich 14y agoEh, I think I'll save my sympathy for somebody else. I don't really care if his fund implodes. He's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Frankly I don't really think his predictions have much historic validity. Obviously I give him all the credit in the world for his developments of Mosaic and Netscape but let's not confuse past successes with predictive ability. When I think of tech visionaries, Marc Andreesen doesn't really spring to mind.
- gaius 14y agoYou know, there was once a time when things were manufactured in Japan because it was cheap. But the Japanese showed they could get smart quicker than the US could get cheaper, and that's why Japanese cars, cameras, watches, etc dominate the US market now. Robotics didn't help... The Japanese got better than the US at that too. The ONLY thing that will stop China eating the USs lunch will be if its political class decide its merchant class are getting too powerful (as happened in 1425, when owning a ship with more than one mast was made a capital crime).