Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s Time to Build

a16z.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 1001 posts

Re: It’s Time to Build

#251

Post by solidasparagus »

jimnotgym wrote: post #226
solidasparagus wrote: post #203

Well Marc, one problem is the world of VC-driven innovation. Building truly revolutionary work takes time and commitment, while the VC ecosystem and entrepreneurial culture actively works against this. - Telling founders to be underpaid and commit their entire finances to the success of their startups forces startups to spend more time finding product-market fit than building what the world needs long-term. - Hiring…

I think you have identified a real problem. There needs to be a vehicle for long term investing in companies. In the UK at least the major vehicle for long-term, even multi-generational, investing is property because of the special protections it has. The richest family in Britain recently transferred £9bn to the next son, tax-free, in this way. It is low risk, and the costs of holding non- devoloped land is low. Thi…

Maybe! I wonder how that would work with the internal dynamics of VCs. OpenAI is an interesting case study here. But they ran into the problem that working on transformative long-term projects is expensive and it is very hard to continue to fund it solely on what are essentially group charitable contributions. Maybe the right domain to address this problem is via the government - help shift incentives towards long-term investments in innovation in some way.

The only model I've seen work effectively so far is having on extremely rich person decide on a long-term goal and financially drive that work over a long-period of time - Musk with electric vehicles, Musk/Bezos with spaceflight, Gates with global health.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#252

Post by kshmir »

jimnotgym wrote: post #207

Seriously, whilst I agree, what can I do about it. I can't raise the capital to start any business that could challenge these things. I work too many hours to sustain my family to do anything serious as a side project. I can't find anywhere more progressive to work than where I am, if I could I would move. I have a set of skills which seem to match what Marc wants, yet I earn less than the sales and marketing people.…

Learn a new skill that allows you to build something that is meaningful to you.

If you give up, you've already lost.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#253

Post by Spooky23 »

oxymoron wrote: post #70

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…

Answer is pretty easy. People are assholes.

Those rules and regulatory frameworks exist for a reason, and with something like health insurance you don’t see better outcomes in states with lower regulatory burden.

Same with the financial burdens that companies cry about. Enron, GlobalCrossing, etc all demonstrated that corporate governance required the federal stick to behave.

Anderseen’s article is pretty lame with respect to why we can’t do things. We can and we have. The difference is now that you have executive leadership that is batshit crazy people have taken over the government. That happened because of the absence of regulation that gives extremists like Alex Jones, who were relegated to public access cable and weird newsletters in the 1980s access to the public at large.

Taking off what rails remain isn’t a strategy for success.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#254

Post by dikaio »

Such great ideas, both in this article and here in the comments, yet, none of these ideas will bear fruit. Why? Partly due to the fact that the people like Marc Andreessen and others here in this thread that you can clearly see are very capable of thinking through and helping solve some of the issues touched on in Marc’s article don’t run for office. Instead you have glass eyed Attorneys and puppets on both the right and left side in office. I’m embarrassed often while watching our federal and state leaders talk. I’m watching in utter disbelief, wondering how so many of these people got elected... we voted for them. It’s our fault. If we really want change we need to start with the people running the country, all of them and the system in which it allows politicians to be elected (selected) based on the amount of money they’ve accumulated.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#255

Post by loteck »

MattGaiser wrote: post #157
tlb wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting an answer from a court (is X legal?) takes a long time: at least a few years and several hundred thousand dollars. Far too long to wait before building a business around X. Asking people to build the business first and then find out if it's legal isn't how a society of laws is supposed to work. Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.

I also don't think you can just ask a court to answer a hypothetical in a binding way. You basically need to get into the legal problem first.

Pre-enforcement lawsuits do exist to answer questions for parties prior to taking actions that would result in liability. One was just recently decided in favor of the ACLU.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/13055544225/dc-co...

Re: It’s Time to Build

#256

Post by wbl »

khuey wrote: post #213
wbl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany also faced the China shock and Japan. They didn't deindustrialize. Policy choices matter. Leadership matters. And the social factors that lead to devaluing competence and doing things matter.

The US didn't actually deindustrialize. US manufacturing by value added is larger than Germany and Japan put together. What we did do is get rid of a bunch of low value manufacturing. We're finding out the hard way that some of that low value manufacturing is actually useful though when you need a hundred million facemasks or ten million test swabs or whatever.

Taiwan didn't make millions of facemasks before January. Ventilators are also made in the US and are very high value.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#257

Post by wwweston »

KirinDave wrote: post #167

I find this essay to be extremely frustrating, and a good example of the attitude I've personally witnessed Andreessen have in the few interactions I've had with him directly. > Is the problem capitalism? I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, goo…

Yep.

Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital.

Public institutions build and manage in response to electoral incentives.

If we're not prepared, it's because the incentives are wrong.

On the market front, once incentives and maybe even insights become opaque at the level of the abstraction of return on investment -- especially on a horizon within which a generation can live and die w/o experiencing a risk event like a pandemic -- then investors will be essentially blind to this.

On the public front, we have at least one political movement in the US that generally stands on the idea that government shouldn't do things like this for the common welfare. That movement is a minority, but knows how to use countermajoritarian features of the US political system to maintain control and is determined to do so (demonstrably well past limits of defensible public stewardship at this point).

That leaves philanthropy, which is helpful, but often scales poorly and is distributed first by proximity to various privileges on the social graph.

And maybe some degree of private capacity to re-think incentives and how long-term value could be structured into short-term incentives in private markets.

If anyone is in a position to do the last two, it's someone like Marc, so it's weird to read this as someone who's in a position nothing like his. Perhaps I'm not the audience. Perhaps others in his wealth class and investor circle are.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#258

Post by sanj »

mikedilger wrote: post #192

I'm in favor of building things. But we build in response to demand. Once people need more of something (e.g. PPE), production ramps up. That effect has been in place and has worked quite well for thousands of years. It doesn't require any policy or government, or even a new social movement, it's just an emergent property of humans being free. You might argue that we could be smarter, and that we should build excess…

I've spent the last month setting up a company to build PPEs, so I hope to bring an interesting perspective here.

Most importantly: production ramps slowly because of the implications of structural organization.

1. From what I can tell, our supply chains are carefully tuned for efficient output of known, predictable, quantities

2. If you want to suddenly double, triple, or 10x production, it isn't easy: the reconfiguration necessary is hard. Building new injection molds is hard, the surrounding transport chains are hard.

3. In light of those two facts, our existing manufacturing infrastructure is wholly unequipped to change or to help.

This is exactly where a strategic, savvy reserve would make a huge difference.

You can see this in the flurry of press releases from three weeks ago which have largely turned into nothing. Bupkis.

By contrast, my small, scrappy, and deeply dedicated team of volunteers has designed, prototyped, iterated, refined, and is now shipping emergency PPE in quantity.

Go visit https://maskson.org

We're ramping up to 2000 masks shipped a day.

That's going to take $100k/day in capital: http://gofundme.com/f/maskson

Re: It’s Time to Build

#259

Post by javajosh »

BurningFrog wrote: post #206
csallen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts What incentives do lawmakers have to make laws simpler?

How can we change incentives for lawmakers?

Introduce a rule that any new law should be submitted in the handwriting of its actual authors. And not the handwriting of interns, or staffers of the official authors, the author themselves.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#260

Post by oxymoron »

betocmn wrote: post #225
oxymoron wrote: post #70

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…

"Why Nation Fails" is a phenomenal book. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time to think of US institutions as reasonable examples of how the author portraits creative destruction and extractive institutions. I understand there might be some broken things in your nation's systems. Still, the fact you're able to discuss them here or work towards changing them through legal methods, shows the US is far off on the right trac…

Yeah, I generally agree. The book does highlight how much of it is hinged on contingency, though. The US has strong institutions, but the dynamic of having elites opposing change is still present, obviously. High barriers of entry is a prime example of how it can be done when other options are unavailable.
Post reply on HN