Marc Andreessen

It seems undeniable that we are in a consensus market.

Mark Andreessen says there are no more diamonds in the rough.

There are only diamonds.

Do you agree with that? I agree that we're in a consensus market.

So

I recognize you as my friend.

Imagine that I take a picture of you and then that picture is just zeros and ones and pixels and whatnot.

So now I tokenize this, which is I take the file that represents the picture of you and I put it into the computer and then that becomes vectors in a vector space.

And an average rich person who's rich enough to survive and not have to fight every day can think like that.

There is a claim that exists about people who are shaping our world.

People you know directly, people you've been friends with, people who probably share the same concern that you and I share.

And that idea is that they have a very specific theory of change.

He has kind of distanced himself from that persona.

During the Biden years, Richard built himself up as an anti-woke pundit online and quickly amassed a profile with some of the nation's richest and most powerful MAGA figures, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others.

And when it came out in 2023 that he had this background writing for white nationalist blogs, he managed to get through it reasonably intact.

Credit to Richard Harania.

J.D. Vance was calling him a friend, an interesting thinker.

Peter Thiel was talking about him.

Marc Andreessen was recording podcasts with him during lockdown, basically talking about the latest episodes of The Shield.

This was a guy that was gaining a lot of traction.

I don't know who entertained them.

It was probably Marc Andreessen or people like that, right? That they, you know, went out for dinner, et cetera.

They stayed there for like a week or a couple of weeks or something.

And suddenly they came back to the UK, all AI experts all of a sudden.

A fun one of this that Chauncey actually always thinks about and has been a great prompt for me in our work is just imagining what does the next great venture firm look like? And this is thinking about the media blitz.

that Andreessen did.

Certainly thinking about the compounding results of a Sequoia, thinking about the platform approach that First Round has done and building on services that give it scale and all these different attributes.

And firms all have them.

But I think it's an interesting prompt to figure out what is... what is your version of this look like that's highly differentiated and you spend calories and time and money into that and trying to, and that's an example of a builder.

That's not, I'll give you, without naming names, I'll give you a counter example.

There's a person that happened to be at Andreessen But it could be the story is not meant to be mean to them.

It's just of a big fund.

They'll, how will they look at me? And I feel like that is so important that you do it promptly, do it respectfully and give them, give them something to chew on.

Like, I feel like you, you know, the other, the only firm that I've heard of that does it really well is Andreessen because I've seen my founders approach partners at Andreessen and the kind of three paragraph response to get, I mean, I've read that and I'm like, holy shit, this is, this is called a respectful, conscientious response to a founder.

Yeah.

Because you're putting like every touch point is a, is a, is a, an opportunity to reinforce your brand and build a relationship.

Because your platform is almost like an engine.

And so, hey, I'm YC, I need money, and Team Ignite will always be there.

I'm right at the top with Andreessen as one of the most active funds, right? So those fundamentals that you've designed will play to your advantage, for sure.

Then the question becomes, where do you as a human being engage? And that's the beauty of what you have developed is that you can move in and out of different zones, whereas others who don't have the platform, their options are far more limited.

And the ultimate failure to organize effectively within tech led them to write against tech oligarchy, worker resistance in the world's most powerful industry in which they draw hard-earned lessons for future organizing.

In response to such organizing, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen described the tech workforce as having gone, quote, feral.

Jess, through the teens, there was the view, certainly on the Bay Area left, that tech workers saw their interests as aligned with their bosses.

So let's start by discussing those workers.

These were fundamentally progressive ideas.

And so in order to eliminate dissent, in order to eliminate the conditions under which tech workers would be activated in the first place, I think they knew that they needed to target the kind of progressive values that the tech industry previously embraced.

And, you know, that's part of the reason why We have people like Marc Andreessen, who's this very influential venture capitalist.

It's part of the reason why we have him on record in an interview with The New York Times talking about his own radicalization as being caused by tech workers, in his words, going feral.

You can be both those things at once, Bernie.

Because one thing, you know, Elon Musk, just as an individual, but also you can put Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, some of these other great humanitarians in that category.

They, and of course Trump, they deeply believe that they are not human in the way that you, me, Stephen, Chris, and our listeners are.

Right.

This techno-optimism that we have in the United States, every time I go, it shudders me.

As Marc Andreessen said, it's a crime to not let technology fully develop.

And you know who up here says, we're not going to do anything to stop AI to becoming the most dominant force for America.

That's not going to end well.