Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac

I'm a working class kid and made my money in that era (money long gone). I moved my family into a wealthy neighborhood thinking it would be good for my kids to be around a better class of people. Boy was I wrong. There are a surprising number of rich people who are not smart at all. They got lucky, made a windfall and got lucky again to find a good financial advisor so they manage to hang on to their wealth. Not only that, but rich people have problems that I didn't experience growing up. When I lived in Menlo Park suicide among rich teenagers [1] was happening at an alarming rate due to status wars with other teens and pressure from parents to be successful. My high school graduate father didn't care at all if I went to college. I succeeded because I wanted to. I think it's better that way.

[1] THE SILICON VALLEY SUICIDES Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

While I am all for social justice.. i don't think a Marc or a Zucker or Jobs should be turned into villains. A corner of my mind forgives them because of how "the system" rewards specialization and how little of the outside world they see.

Keeping away from these personality caricatures, here is why i think this topic and these conversation are important, yet difficult to have in constructive ways:

1. It builds over our preexisting imaginations of how the world is, what runs it fundamentally, who governs it today and how these frameworks are changing. 2. People are fundamentally biased weather we are heading towards prosperity or slowdown. 3. We can't help adding our ideas of how the world should be - what systems should come etc. 4. Timeline of events - a truth 10 years down the road is practically a lie today. 5. Contradictory movements - as rural real estate crashes, urban might spike up and we can mostly only hold head or tail of the elephant. 6. To make the discussion simpler, one could use simpler analogies but the risk again is that complex systems don't follow simple linear paths. 7. These are conversations about the problems of the goats and not understood so easily by lions given little incentive to understand pastureland. Yet they do eventually affect them.

There are fundamentals to growth of every system and what weakens them will eventually simplify the system.

I am not as much interested in being "right" because that is a very naive way of looking at this. I am more interested in highlighting these trends because i fear we often build downstream of international trends (hyped areas vs fundamental changes that go unnotiticed).

Safer proven strategies do reduce risk but they also take away the upside of rewards. There is no replacement for ahead of the curve courage and societies, markets, time - all punish as well as reward forward thinking.

I see great opportunities when systems undergo large changes. As global energy economics, labour availability, localisation trends undergo fast changes, we have a real chance of riding these waves vs doing service delivery for NY and Valley. Cloud seeding was innovative till Dubai flooded. The world markets will quickly shift the narrative hanging us dry if we are not intellectually prepared for different possibilities.

As short term trends, i am noticing that there is a huge collapse in the middle of the economic pyramid. Without fundamental innovations in how we recalibrate our systems, only rich dog shampoo products would work and a lot of us and our people will be out of jobs and economy.Perhaps this isn't as applicable to the audience of this group as the members are incredibly well connected and can float away to greener smaller pastures but i also see counter trends to the "infinite growth for everyone, eventually" narrative. There are only so many rich dogs to shampoo and this is to address the "rest of us" part of the problem. It is already clear in product circles that we aren't building for our people and i feel that we can.

No answers here, to be honest. But an urge to highlight that these shifts are both opportunities and challenges and some of the hardest problems in the world. Having spent a few years in rural areas working on climate, i confess i have tilted my brains a little. :)

I have come to love the tech community, in large parts because of the sensitivity, nuance and accomodation tech bros also have here on HN. Honestly i've tried many times to judge the tech world but i also see enough balancing acts going on here at HN.

Many of us may fall, but I see great kindness and hope in Technologists to be able to inch the world towards great positivity. Few others have that agency in this tilted world, so it is also that.

I've yet to see any SV billionaires admit any of their success involves luck. They seem incapable of recognizing that being in the right time and place is a huge component of any sort of success. Their egos are so wrapped up in their fortunes that their success must be their omniscience and not the fact they won the tech stock lottery.

That's my reaction as well.

He sounds exactly like what many white male American (as opposed to immigrant) Silicon Valley guys would sound like if you got them to talk about politics or anything to do with non-tech humanity.

They're not well-informed outside of tech. They ARE well-paid and in-demand. Since they're "winning," there's very little motivation to update their world view.

I used to live next to the Menlo Park Caltrain station. All the time, we could hear the train stopping for hours ... for another suicide.

I know a lot of rich people who sent their kids to the fanciest private schools. My friends are legitimately smart, but their kids ... have serious problems. In hindsight, they might have done better to go to a comprehensive public school with "average" kids.