331–340 of 1001 posts
You are a billionare Marc. You are probably one of the top 1000 people with the capacity to build in North America. So, how many of the things you list are you building?
The list of socially valuable things VCs are responsible for helping to build in the past 10+ years is pretty darn small. Considering their outsized influence and wealth, if they want to know why the future isn't what it should be, they can start by looking in the mirror.
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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 inv…
> Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital. This leaves out the most important problem though: regulatory capture and bureaucratic gridlock. Markets would love to build more housing. But they're prevented from doing so by the regulatory state. Markets would love to build nuclear power plants, but they're…
I'm not certain this is a problem outside of the Bay area.
OK, fair enough. If we have to build and do all those things, what is it that we should STOP doing, buying, investing in? There is only so much time, capital, skill, energy (both literal energy and human willpower). What can we sacrifice? Commuting to work in droves? MacMansions? Travel for pleasure? Sporting events, concerts, and mega payments to celebrities? Buying new car every 5 years? Luxury cars? Infrastructure…
Heck if aspirin were invented today, it's unlikely it would be approved by the FDA. Even if it was, it would be prescription-only. And if caffeine were invented today, the FDA would ban it and the DEA would find and arrest anyone manufacturing or using it.
This passage is followed by a long list of things we urgently need but don't have in America, from a great educational system to a great healthcare system. I agree 100% with that list of things and the urgent need for them. I'm also happy to see this on the front page of HN!
> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia.
"Lack of desire" and "inertia" are surely NOT the root of the problem. All of us already want all those good things.
The root of the problem, I think, is that during normal times people and companies have strong economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST in the kind of expensive, robust (i.e., inefficient/redundant) infrastructure that everyone agrees is necessary but on which the payback is highly uncertain, highly diffuse, or might not be recouped until after everyone today is dead.
For example, any company that during normal times heroically decides to make the investments necessary to survive rare events like a global pandemic or world war will quickly go out of business as more nimble competitors sidestep all those costs. Financially it makes more sense for the company "temporarily to ignore" the possibility of such rare events in the future so it can remain competitive today.
No amount of exhortation will change that.
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All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia. I really wouldnt give much praise to the great governing elite that failed to prevent this in the first place, despite scientists telling them about it a long time ago.
>All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia. That's not true. Swine flu came from Mexico and MERS, as the name implies, started in the Middle East
Swine flu has been around for much longer, at least for 100 years.
Ah yes, the lack of success in our nation is purely the individual’s fault. Your fault, my fault. There are no structural issues, misallocations of capitals, disincentives. You should be working harder on bigger problems! Quit your job at Walmart, and start working on things that matter. What the fuck Andreessen? Are you so out of touch with reality that you think if the working class just worked a little harder, a l…
Who created the structure? Who allocates capital? Who creates incentives?
These are not natural phenomena that arise without human intervention. Someone made the decisions that created them and someone has the power to make different decisions. Yes, even decisions that you personally make might contribute in some way.
Instead of throwing up your hands and blaming everything on "structural issues" look for something you can do that makes a difference. Maybe it's a small difference, but large societal change can often be the result of an accumulation of small actions.
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I may not have expressed that point very well, but it seems like the common law system would encourage less explicit regulation rather than more, so that seems like a bit of a contradiction. Does the need for more litigation drive a desire to be more explicit in how statues are written?
It means power is captured by those who can afford lawyers, and lawyers are expensive. There's no way to plan your risks up front in an area with not a lot of case-law, because you don't know them - your business plan now gets to be "hopefully we win this case in our favor in the next 3 years, but if it goes all the way to the supreme court..."
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Having been through the VC wringer I don't think you can be unprofitable for a decade.
Uber, Dropbox, AirBnB, Slack, Pinterest. Long term un-profitable venture backed software companies are practically a cliche at this point.
AirBnB for sure. Pretty sure Dropbox and Slack were in the black for awhile. Please feel free to educate me about Pinterest, I have no idea.
But personally, I think the idea of companies designed to corner a market and then get acquired are just a different kind of medium term investment strategy. For every unicorn you see, there are hundreds of failures where the plug got pulled and information got fed forward to preferential incarnations of the venture.
Ok, assume I'm bought into this idea - where would I even begin? What are some companies working on these kind of fundamental building things problems? I know of the Boring Company, though haven't really heard anything from them since the flamethrowers a few years back. Sidewalk labs was doing some cool things in Toronto, but I think they've been running into big regulatory issues too and it one point it sounded like…