Marc Andreessen on venture capital & founders

2023–2026 · changed view

“So the main thesis on the essay is that what we're dealing with here is intelligence, and it's really important to kind of talk about the sort of very nature of what intelligence is. And fortunately we have a predecessor to machine intelligence, which is human intelligence, and we've got, you know, observations and theories over thousands of years for what intelligence is in the hands of humans. And what intelligence is, right, I mean what it literally is, is the way to, you know, capture, process, analyze, synthesize information, solve problems. But the observation of intelligence in human hands is that intelligence quite literally makes everything better. And what I mean by that is every kind of outcome of like human quality of life, whether it's education outcomes or success of your children or career success or health or lifetime satisfaction, by the way, propensity to peacefulness as opposed to violence, propensity for open-mindedness versus bigotry, those are all associated with higher levels of intelligence. Smarter people have better outcomes than almost as you, right, in almost every domain of activity.”

2023–2026

“So look, the only way civilization gets moved forward is when people like this do something new. Because civilization as a whole does not do new things. Groups of people do not do new things. These things don't happen automatically. By default nothing changes. The only way civilizational change on any of these axes ever happens is because one of these people stands up and says, no, I'm going to do something different than what everybody else has ever done before. So, this is progress, like, this is actually how it happens. Sometimes they get lionized or awarded. Sometimes they get crucified. Sometimes the crucifixion is literal. Sometimes it's just symbolic. But they are those kinds of people, and then martyrs when they go down in flames and again, this is where it really screws the people's moral judgments because everybody wants to have the sort of super clear story of like, okay, he did a bad thing and he was punished. And I'm like, no, he was the kind of person who was going to do great things and also was going to take on a level of risk and take on a level of sort of extreme behavior such that he was going to expose himself to flying too close to the sun, wings melt and crash to ground. But it's a package deal. The reason you have the Picasso's and the Beethovens and all these people is because they're willing to take these extreme level of risks. They are that creative and original, not just in their art or their business, but in everything else that they do that they will set themselves up to be able to fail psychologically.”

2023–2026

“So the ultimate definition of an elite is who can get who fired, right. That's the ultimate test. Who can get who fired, boycotted, blacklisted, ostracized. Like when push, prosecuted, jailed, like when push comes to shove. I think that's always the question, who can destroy whose career? And of course, you'll notice that that is heavily asymmetric when these fights play out. Like, it's very clear which side can get the other side fired and which side can't. And so, yeah, so, look, I think we live in a period of time where the elites have gotten to be extreme in a number of dimensions. I think it's characterized by, for sure, extreme groupthink, extreme sanctimony, extreme moral, I would say dudgeon, this weird sort of modern puritanism, and then an extreme sort of morality of punishment and terror against their perceived enemies.”

2014–2025 · changed view

“Software is a technology that, it's like a, you know, the concept of the philosopher stone. The philosopher stone in alchemy transmutes lead into gold, and Newton spent 20 years trying to find the philosopher stone, never got there, nobody's ever figured it out. Software is our modern philosopher stone, and in economic terms it transmutes labor into capital, which is like a super interesting thing.”