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Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

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61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#61
post #55

What are you asking his advice for? I'm not a VC industry insider, but I've spent enough time in the industry as a peon analyst to see the industry for what it is. I've written before about how nearly all VC partners are ridiculously conservative bandwagoners (they only invest if someone else invests), with the sole (to my knowledge) exception being Marc Andreessen. There might be other exceptions out there, but the…

If everyone is a bandwagoner, how does the bandwagon start? Without pmarca, would VC grind to a halt?

It's really slow. Someone gets interested, their interest piques someone else's interest. This goes on practically forever until some point where there are 2 or more VCs in a room together and then it becomes "I'll do it if you do it".

They've co-opted a word for this process: syndication. If you ask them what it means, they'll have some flowery language[0] for you. In reality all it means is that they're too chickenshit to invest on merits alone, and really want to know what other people think.

This process drives up pre-money valuations and thereby reduces returns. By opting out of the process, Andreessen has outsized returns. It's a bigger risk (he has abnormally large potential downsides), but he's good enough of a judge of merit to make it work out phenomenally for him.

[0] http://www.startable.com/2008/10/27/venture-capital-deal-syn...

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#62
No one's mentioned getting a response so far, but I'm intrigued enough to give it a try. I've sent in a question about genetic engineering.

Some notes about the process:

1. 21.co's signup form mandates an image, but the tool they use for file uploads breaks on PNGs (!) silently without any visible warning to the user (!!), you can click on the 'save' button many times with nothing happening and without any kind of error or warning in the web console (!!!), in both Firefox and Chromium with Noscript & Adblock disabled. Apparently even using an entire specialized file upload service, the second-most common image format in existence is just too exotic and confusing to support.

2. you have to confirm by email before you can do anything, which adds on another 10-15m to the process (amusingly, they spam you on signup to set up a public paid inbox - and that email arrived first, but you can't do anything unconfirmed)

3. it's not $100, it's actually $110, because 21co tacks on a $10 'service fee' (even though it's for charity). It's unclear if I have to pay this $10 regardless of whether Andreessen ever responds. I hope not. In any case this strikes me as a huge fee for such a trivial service, and I really hope it's a 10% fee rather than a fixed $10 fee...

4. the site is surprisingly slow despite being so barebones

5. browsing the interface, despite the prominence of Bitcoin, I'm not clear whether I am even allowed to deposit Bitcoin and pay that way; in any case I opted to use a credit card because the profile image bug wasted so much of my time and I was losing my patience. The cash out page indicates that should I ever earn anything via 21.co, I would need to jump through even more hoops, presumably even if I only wanted Bitcoin and not bank deposits or anything. I thought briefly about setting up a paid inbox because it's a fun concept but between a 10% (or worse) fee and all this invasiveness, I'm not interested.

6. signup form doesn't work with Lastpass, which failed to capture the username/password; always annoying to manually copy over generated passwords.

So, I'm not impressed but we'll see how it works out...

On a side note, how do people regard the expectation of privacy with these public inbox emails? I see someone has screenshotted a Horowitz response; are these responses considered 'commissioned' in a sense, rather than private emails with an expectation of privacy/confidentiality, and so it's OK to copy-paste any response publicly on HN or elsewhere?

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#63

whatever you want to ask him: I'll answer it for $1

The question here is: does your answer worth $1? anybody here can share experience on that? :)

with an example answer like what was linked in an earlier comment [1], i will answer as many as i can for free, if you reply directly to this comment

[1] "hey yeah, i don't really understand your product, but a few law firms you could google might be interested... also notice my lack of a warm intro for you... thanks"

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#65

What are you asking his advice for? I'm not a VC industry insider, but I've spent enough time in the industry as a peon analyst to see the industry for what it is. I've written before about how nearly all VC partners are ridiculously conservative bandwagoners (they only invest if someone else invests), with the sole (to my knowledge) exception being Marc Andreessen. There might be other exceptions out there, but the…

Right, it's a business-related question. $100 to me is worth a lot more than it is to him, so I just wondered whether what I'd be getting would be worth what I'm spending. If the response is anything like the Ben Horowitz example above, I'm thinking no.

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#67
post #3
post #2

> "Was it worth it?" The proceeds go to programs promoting underrepresented genders and ethnicities in tech, I'd say that yes it is quite "worth it".

I think the question was whether the advice was worth $100, not whether the $100 went toward a meaningful cause.

That's correct. Clearly the worth of the advice would be different for different people, depending upon how deep their pockets are. I was hoping to get some examples of just what kind of advice was offered.

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#68
post #9

He's making a tradeoff here. This is an ingenious way to filter the 'massive' noise-to-signal ratio on his inbox, but at the same time it makes some of the random but legitimate questions go away.

It sounded to me like you only have to pay if your message gets a response. So I just assumed it would be a lottery as to whether he even ever saw my message. I figure he must devote only a very small amount of time to perusing his messages, and then he must devote an equally small amount of time composing an answer.

So I figured I'd have to get pretty lucky to actually wind up spending the $100 (or $110) in the end. Even so, I'd hate to spend the $100 and find the response was disappointing.

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#69

I like this service, but where can I see a full list of people I can pay to contact? I tried finding a link on the site, but couldn't.

That is interesting, I also couldn't find a way to search or a complete list. There's a sampling here: https://21.co/

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would regard that $100 as an indicator that you have a real question that is important to you. Marc doesn't need or care about the money.

Makes total sense. Let's suggest the same thing to our local, state, and federal representatives. They should charge $100 to get their ear to make sure people only raise important questions. Maybe we should even set it at $1000! Raising the bar really filters out all of those annoying and pesky people. If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.

> If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.

It's your representative's job to represent you. Marc has no obligation to answer your question.

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