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Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

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Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#61

Post by xkjkls »

3pt14159 wrote: post #60
xkjkls wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To go big like SpaceX requires you to be all in. Elon nearly went broke a couple times. He's willing to take that risk because he's in it for the results, not the money. You could also argue that this is exactly the problem with Elon. He constantly makes statements that are completely out of bounds or fraudulent ($420 funding secured, solar shingles, auto pilot claims, vehicle safety concerns, rocket explosions, et…

Musk has an expectant mind, not a cautious one. So take his pronouncements with a grain of salt, but he's good enough at math and physics to know that things like Starlink are fundamentally possible. Overall I think the world is better for him.

So when are his pronouncements, especially when self-serving fraud or reckless? $420 funding secured definitely seems to be. As does the Solar Roof rollout precisely in the middle of a merger that he had multiple entanglements. His auto-pilot predictions and statements have been extraordinarily reckless and have endangered many on the road.

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#62

Post by avmich »

xkjkls wrote: post #57
cowmix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm not sure what part of the SpaceX timeline you are talking about but his "money, enthusiasm, and naivety" certainly has brought the company very, very far in the past 17+ years.

It's still not a profitable company with alot of debt to payoff and a valuation to justify. I don't know if we can consider 17 years without any profitable sustainability a success.

Amazon roughly fits this profile, with their habit of investing money in expanding markets instead of keeping profits.

SpaceX is the only company which returns first stage after flight, in workable condition. In today's launch industry it's like a license to print money. It's really hard not to consider them profitable, even if they are private and don't show financial results.

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#63

Post by fragmede »

cowmix wrote: post #31
nikofeyn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's [Musk] got a physics degree and has the raw intelligence and passion to understand aerospace engineering. musk was nearly laughed out of early meetings because he basically knew nothing about aerospace engineering and was viewed as just a guy with a lot of money, enthusiasm, and naivety. i have never seen any indication that he understands as much as people freely give him credit for. > Bezos ... is not techni…

Well, I'm not sure what part of the SpaceX timeline you are talking about but his "money, enthusiasm, and naivety" certainly has brought the company very, very far in the past 17+ years.

As the story goes, Musk, interested in space, approaches the Russians and asks to buy an ICBM. The Russians laughed him out of the room. A year later, SpaceX was founded. 17 years later, here we are!

https://www.inverse.com/article/34976-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-t... https://www.fastcompany.com/3006829/spacex-founder-elon-musk...

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#64

Post by jason5543 »

zackmorris wrote: post #52
jason5543 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa! Zack, I am a reporter for a local paper and I'd like to interview you for a piece about humble internet futurists. Could you give me your email so that I could send you a couple questions about rolling back corporate dogma and achieving 30 hour work weeks?

Ya sure, although I'm not exactly on the inside enough to be a futurist. These are just insights that I've gleaned from the school of hard knocks. Probably the easiest way to reach me is to friend me on LinkedIn (the link is in my profile).

Im not actually a journalist in fact I think you are the opposite of someone that should be interviewed.

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#65

Post by pedalpete »

xkjkls wrote: post #59
corporateslave5 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue with blockchain is it doesn’t work yet. It doesn’t scale, and complex trustless scalable guarantees aren’t possible yet. The technology is also really new. Bitcoin coin is only ten years old.

The iPhone is also 10 years old. It changed the world and has been the most profitable product in human history. What is Bitcoin's excuse?

A few problems I see with your argument.

1) The iPhone wasn't the start of the curve. It was building on the history of mobile phones, PDAs, WAP/mobile internet, portable music players, etc. It was a convergent device which brought together all of these other things, many of which had been successful in their own right. But you couldn't make the same argument about the Newton, or PalmPilot, could you?

2) iPhone is a product, Blockchain/Bitcoin is a network and protocol. Networks need mass adoption to be successful. You only needed one iPhone for it to be useful. Protocols are infrastructure to be built on top of. The iPhone didn't release with Apps (as we know them today) and could have still been successful without them.

I'm not saying Bitcoin will be a success, and what would it be a success at is still the open question. But you can't put it in the same bucket as the iPhone.

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#66

Post by felipeko »

blobster wrote: post #43
felipeko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be way of my field here, but my understanding is that the whole point of the Austrian school is that human behavior is (purposeful, but) unpredictable. This is a testable claim, and you can bother to observe, experiment and test this claim. Austrians should accept they are wrong if you can empirically prove that humans behavior is predictable. But if this claim is correct, there's no reason for you to do empiri…

What Austrians fail to grasp is that human behavior is quite predictable at the population level, or for large groups in general. This is the entire basis of game theory, marketing, sociology, etc. Unsurprisingly, Austrians refuse to acknowledge that economics is subject to science and do not recognize entire fields such as statistics. It's true that the actions of single individuals cannot be fully predicted, but th…

You can predict trends, not laws, using large groups observation. Austrians would not deny that. Trends are not a useful tool for economic policy, are only good tools for entrepreneurship.

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#67

Post by felipeko »

api wrote: post #34
felipeko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be way of my field here, but my understanding is that the whole point of the Austrian school is that human behavior is (purposeful, but) unpredictable. This is a testable claim, and you can bother to observe, experiment and test this claim. Austrians should accept they are wrong if you can empirically prove that humans behavior is predictable. But if this claim is correct, there's no reason for you to do empiri…

The thing that really doesn't seem to work in the Austrian model is the whole "hard money" superstition... the idea that money should be an immutable store of value. I really think it is a superstition of sorts, since I don't think the rationale or the underlying model work in the real world. Not only does this seem to fall down in a variety of ways in practice, but I have philosophical issues with it. The value in t…

I don't see what is the point of your criticism. Either the epistemological grounds of Austrian economics is correct or it is not.

It should not matter what austrians feel about central banking.

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#68

Post by nikofeyn »

starpilot wrote: post #40
nikofeyn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's [Musk] got a physics degree and has the raw intelligence and passion to understand aerospace engineering. musk was nearly laughed out of early meetings because he basically knew nothing about aerospace engineering and was viewed as just a guy with a lot of money, enthusiasm, and naivety. i have never seen any indication that he understands as much as people freely give him credit for. > Bezos ... is not techni…

Yeah, EE/CS in aerospace is non-technical in this context. The key is physical understanding of mechanics, which programmers seem to lack. Understanding concepts of spatial vectors, summing up forces, adding/removing energy and the effects on temperature, you need to have a tangble feel of these concepts, as well as be able to calculate them rigorously, to design rockets. A physics student would have this, while some…

you didn't specify that you meant technical in aerospace. even then, many technical people have the skills to understand other fields just fine, especially to manage. and just to note, bezos also studied physics.

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#69

Post by zackmorris »

jason5543 wrote: post #64
zackmorris wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya sure, although I'm not exactly on the inside enough to be a futurist. These are just insights that I've gleaned from the school of hard knocks. Probably the easiest way to reach me is to friend me on LinkedIn (the link is in my profile).

Im not actually a journalist in fact I think you are the opposite of someone that should be interviewed.

I know, I realized that just now, you got me. Hah I love this site!

Re: Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)

#70

Post by [deleted] »

xkjkls wrote: post #53
phkahler wrote: post #28

>> Those companies have to be run completely differently because the stakes are so much higher. I can't dismiss Elons drive, ability to get his hands dirty, and many other characteristics. But the primary difference I see in this comparison is simply risk aversion. YC and their VCs are in it to make money by placing a number of small bets, knowing some will be losers. To go big like SpaceX requires you to be all in.…

> To go big like SpaceX requires you to be all in. Elon nearly went broke a couple times. He's willing to take that risk because he's in it for the results, not the money. You could also argue that this is exactly the problem with Elon. He constantly makes statements that are completely out of bounds or fraudulent ($420 funding secured, solar shingles, auto pilot claims, vehicle safety concerns, rocket explosions, et…

[deleted]
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