> Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our country?
> Where are the supersonic aircraft?
From an interview[1] with Sarah Lacy in 2018, Marc Andreessen already had the answers:
Q: Is there a way Andreessen Horowitz could stop backing more apps and throw some of the money towards the next SpaceX?
Andreessen:
The capital efficiency of having a small group of software programmers that build amazing software, who then go in and do something in an industry that’s 100 billion or trillion-dollar industry, existing venture capital structure and framework is very good at doing that.
It works very well when it works, and I think that’s very valuable. I always accuse Peter of dismissing all that stuff out of hand, which is probably an overstatement.
The part that I struggle with, and I’m on the verge of agreeing with, it’s SpaceX, it’s Tesla. The trenchant critique comes from Larry Page, Elon, and Peter. It’s like, “OK, software. Got it. What about electric cars? What about the Hyperloop? What about the SpaceX private rocketry?”
What about these bigger, more transformational things? In particular, what about the things that operate more in the real world? What about the things that are really going to affect natural resources, pollution, livability of cities, and all the things that are outside of whatever’s running on the screen?
I think that there’s a validity. Google is doing the self-driving car. The self-driving car is going to work. By the time it works, it will have cost hundreds of millions, and possibly billions of dollars to make work. The self-driving car is not a lean startup. Not in any way.
SpaceX and Tesla were not lean startups. They were very big, ambitious. They raised a lot of money. The big question, the question I’m noodling around, is what about the efforts where you have to say, “This thing is going to take $300 million?” It just is. There’s no shortcut and there’s no minimum viable product. It is going to take $300 million, and that $300 million has to be reserved ahead of time.
Those companies have to be run completely differently because the stakes are so much higher.
What kind of entrepreneur can do that? Elon has proven he can do it. There are not a lot of other people in the Valley today who have done things at that level of scale.
There’s a different kind of entrepreneur. There’s a different kind of idea. There’s a different kind of financing method. I think we’ll all collectively figure it out, but we don’t actually have it today.
What you get is you have a very special entrepreneur like Elon, and then he can do it. What I always say is, “OK, who is the next Elon? And then we’ll talk.”
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We need more VCs to bet on these ambitious ideas. No more Tiktok, please.
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[1]Original source: https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/marc-andreess...
[1]Snippet: https://allenleein.github.io/2020/03/11/pmarca-flying-car.ht...