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Technology Saves the World

future.a16z.com

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Re: Technology Saves the World

#41

Post by andrewmutz »

mempko wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they got an enormous amount of VC money for years. They reached a $1 billion valuation in just two years after founding (2012), faster than Uber/Dropbox/Lyft etc did.

Ok, but ... https://seekingalpha.com/news/3609955-moderna-failed-to-disc... And Derrick Rossi's research was publicly funded which led to creation of Moderna... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Rossi > Rossi based his developments on the results of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on mRNA. He succeeded in finding investors for his plans to transfer these findings into new medications and vaccinations by founding…

In the real world, both government grants and VC funding create great things.

If your political views make you want to diminish the importance of either, then perhaps it's time to update those views.

Re: Technology Saves the World

#42

Post by drzaiusapelord »

mempko wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they got an enormous amount of VC money for years. They reached a $1 billion valuation in just two years after founding (2012), faster than Uber/Dropbox/Lyft etc did.

Ok, but ... https://seekingalpha.com/news/3609955-moderna-failed-to-disc... And Derrick Rossi's research was publicly funded which led to creation of Moderna... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Rossi > Rossi based his developments on the results of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on mRNA. He succeeded in finding investors for his plans to transfer these findings into new medications and vaccinations by founding…

Yep this. The actual nose to the grindstone basic research work is often publicly funded but the VC fundraising bragging is often things like jets and swanky offices. The un-sexy work of doing basic research is not something capitalism handles well at all and we expect the government to subsidize it so the VCs can walk in, claim the work of their own, claim it was done via capitalism and the VC process, and then sell themselves as our saviors by creating media outlets that serve them. This is very dystopian and anti-government.

Re: Technology Saves the World

#43

Post by h2odragon »

"we thought the world was gonna end, it didn't because we saved us!" ... or, possibly, the world wasn't going to end in the first place, and y'all selling fear caused much of the harm you're so proud to have mitigated now...

Re: Technology Saves the World

#44

Post by jaypeg25 »

mempko wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they got an enormous amount of VC money for years. They reached a $1 billion valuation in just two years after founding (2012), faster than Uber/Dropbox/Lyft etc did.

Ok, but ... https://seekingalpha.com/news/3609955-moderna-failed-to-disc... And Derrick Rossi's research was publicly funded which led to creation of Moderna... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Rossi > Rossi based his developments on the results of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on mRNA. He succeeded in finding investors for his plans to transfer these findings into new medications and vaccinations by founding…

You're taking a pretty pessimistic view of the funding and R&D process. A good idea with initial funding by the government is useless if the VC funding doesn't bring the idea to the finish line. The government can't afford to (and shouldn't) fund every good idea to their finish line.

Re: Technology Saves the World

#45

Post by jellicle »

klelatti wrote: post #17

> Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's own backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is unwarranted hyperbole.

> > Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people.

> This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's own backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is unwarranted hyperbole.

Well, let's run that through the VC->English converter:

"We hope to lay off all the first world engineers living in Silicon Valley and hire exclusively the cheapest possible people living in the cheapest countries. We can hire twice as many bodies (double the good jobs, just not in the USA!) for one-tenth as much money, pocket all the profits, and if anyone complains (perhaps all the laid off engineers) we can talk about how we're raising people out of poverty, how dare they complain."

My version is admittedly not as flowery as the original.

Re: Technology Saves the World

#46

Post by onion2k »

larsiusprime wrote: post #24

I love me some technology, don't get me wrong. But if the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct than technology is undoubtedly the very thing that put the world in peril in the first place, as far as COVID-19 is concerned, before you even consider increased air travel and globalization encouraging/increasing the instant spread of modern pathogens.

if the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct than technology is undoubtedly the very thing that put the world in peril in the first place

Whatever lessons we might learn if it were to turn out that COVID is a human-made experiment are lessons we should be taking heed of even if it isn't.

Re: Technology Saves the World

#47

Post by Swizec »

wangii wrote: post #36
blackoil wrote: post #19

Andreessen's posts are strongly biased towards what is beneficial for his position. I have read a lot of his posts since 2008 and before. They are intelligent and insightful, but in hindsight lot of them were not best advice for founders/readers but best for the VC.

indeed. I feel it's a lot more difficult to agree with the `SV elites` (az, pg, etc.) recently, wondering if I'm too old or they live in their own rdf.

The world looks different from a throne.

There was a great comment on reddit once that calculated a $50,000 car costs about the same to Jay-Z as a tank of gas does to a median person. That’s a huge difference in perspective.

Someone like az, pg, etc probably sees higher daily variations in their stock portfolio than my annual salary. Imagine what life is like when $200k rounds down to “daily noise”?

For me, after lots of saving, those fluctuations are in the $300 range and even that changed my perspective and way of thinking. Very different feel than when I was starting out and having $300 felt like unimaginable wealth.

For comparison, a $500 unexpected expense would bankrupt 41% of americans.

Re: Technology Saves the World

#48

Post by mavhc »

julbaxter wrote: post #11

"Technology has become the idol of our society, but technological progress is—more often than not—aimed at solving problems caused by earlier technical inventions." "Interesting possibilities arise when you combine old technology with new knowledge and new materials, or when you apply old concepts and traditional knowledge to modern technology." Quotes from https://www.lowtechmagazine.com

Isn't that the case for anything though? New problems only occur because of a previous change, and change usually only happens due to technology

Re: Technology Saves the World

#49

Post by XorNot »

bttrfl wrote: post #37
semiconduction wrote: post #14

Humanity has starved, struggled and regularly died in mass for millenia. Now the population is 100 times larger than it was a few centuries ago, and more and more people are living in a post-scarcity society. And yes, thanks to all the pioneers, entrepeneurs and geniuses that took an idea or insight into a mass market product. They are who truly deserve the credit.

What if all this is because we took a giant environmental credit that we won't be able to pay back? It's hard to argue that child mortality dropped, literacy increased and so on, but at the same time we are facing existential threats due to warming, lack of water, loss of biodiversity and so on. We are also enjoying a relatively peaceful period (despite what's happening in Syria and tens of other places) on a global…

No, let's absolutely praise it.

Because the existential threats only exist because of political malfeasance. This has never been a technological problem: even the potentially disastrous consequences of climate change only really manifest because of - again - politics. Because governments won't spend to protect their own citizens, because of corruption and greed.

Little has changed on that front in thousands of years. Technology enabled almost everything we have now - even those improvements in governance we got (i.e. mass communications and the telegraph made coordinating large empires and alleviating local resource shortages via logistics possible).

Re: Technology Saves the World

#50

Post by klelatti »

jellicle wrote: post #45
klelatti wrote: post #17

> Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's own backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is unwarranted hyperbole.

> > Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. > This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's own backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is unwarranted hyperbole. Well, let's run that through the…

Or maybe: "Some of our partners want to move to Texas. All the money they will spend there will move 10s of people out of poverty in Austin."
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