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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#871

Post by tempsy »

danimal88 wrote: post #784

I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions for buildings. People do want them. VCs, less so, unless it's as high margin as a photo sharing app, destructive and lucrative as consumable businesses like Kurig, etc. Consumers don't know what they want until the possibilities are presented to them. VCs are literally the gate keepers of much innovative possibilty at the early phases of enterprises.…

this sounds like it’s more directed at governments. To build whole institutions at the scale he’s referring to requires trillions.

Biggest problem I see is that we consistently elect people into political positions who are biased toward maintaining the status quo. The word “radical” is a dirty word to voters. We don’t like change. Until we change that mindset we won’t ever have people in government who could even begin to think about what building the future looks like.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#872

Post by 8iterations »

pdonis wrote: post #411
KirinDave wrote: post #167

I find this essay to be extremely frustrating, and a good example of the attitude I've personally witnessed Andreessen have in the few interactions I've had with him directly. > Is the problem capitalism? I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, goo…

> This overlooks the fact that Marc is in fact one of these folks who has a profoundly outsized role in deciding what he wants. He says what he wants, but then he expects someone else to build it. He's rich: if he wants these things, why doesn't he just pay to get them built? Sure, not all of them, but just pick one and pay to get it built. But, as you point out, he's not interested in long term investments--and that…

Exactly, him & his firm have been leading the bandwagon on crypto investments, social/mobile, ads, "scooters", and all the other sectors which are all hype & no build.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#873

Post by jeremyjh »

kyletns wrote: post #860
jeremyjh wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Democrats did a fine job "gatekeeping" Sanders from the 2016 and 2020 nomination, to what end? I don't understand this perspective. Sanders lost because he lost primary elections. That happened because democrats didn't believe in him as a candidate. Many of us have been steadfast in our disbelief for years due only to listening to what he himself says about what he wants to do. Why discredit our opinions this w…

Sorry, but if you don't think the entire Democratic machine has been working against a Sanders win for 5 years, you haven't been doing enough research. I know you don't like him, and you are 100% entitled to dislike and vote against him - but to pretend that he lost only because he wasn't popular enough is pretty blind to how our democracy runs.

Was "the democratic machine" casting ballots in the primaries? Were they controlling the minds of the people who did? The "republican machine" tried to stop Trump and failed, because at the end of the day people voted for Trump in the primaries. He was popular in a way that Sanders wasn't.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#874

Post by hysan »

They way he glossed over money being the problem really shows how much of a position of privilege he is in.

Of course money is the problem.

More specifically, the subset of money that is profits. How can you build if you don’t feel secure in you and your loved one’s futures? Whether that future is just enough to scrape by to making sure your children have a safety net. The majority of people simply do not have the luxury of ignoring money to divert their attention on building. If this current pandemic hasn’t made that abundantly clear, I don’t know what will.

(Yes, I’m aware of the outliers on both ends. I’m choosing to ignore them because to build something meaningful for the future requires the majority. And that is precisely the population that is most concerned about money.)

Regulatory capture? That’s because those in government know how quickly money can be earned and lost. So why not let this happen to secure their own future?

Startups and investors? Everyone is focused on ROI and the short term because that optimized for your wealth. Long term spreads the wealth among employees which ultimately does not help secure your future. If this hurts to hear, it’s because deep down you know it to be true.

It takes a lot of wealth and time for outliers to see that they aren’t building for the future. It’s great if Andreessen sees this issue and is trying to solve for it, but money is not so easily solved for.

> Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?

Sure. I’d love to take the time to flesh out and propose my ideas to you. Then build and iterate on them. But first, give me stable income. Promise to take care of me.

I’ve just been part of a mass layoff for the third time in my life! Every time I’ve built up some sort of financial safety net, it’s been burnt to ashes by a recession. I left teaching and returned to engineering precisely because I realized how impossible it would be to build a financially secure life for my family (parents included).

So that is my challenge to you, Mr. Horowitz and everyone who agrees. What will you do to feed the desire to build?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#875

Post by Wistar »

ausbah wrote: post #814
jekoeoe9njdjr wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather he cram this letter up his arse and lead by example with a letter announcing deep investment in infra Otherwise this is just someone with the freedom to sit around rambling at length trying to look woke The model of investing he got rich on is part of the problem Is he actually going to change that or peddle warm fuzzies and never follow up? Academia knows where the problems are States know where the probl…

success in one sphere subconsciously molds people to believing their opinion matters in other spheres - even if they are completely disjoint?

Absolutely. Even when the first success was largely luck. I know a lot of early Microsoft employees who became successful (read: wealthy) very quickly and many of them harbored a belief that they were capable of success at anything and that their advice was of a superior caliber. This belief has, through the subsequent years, proven to not be all that true.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#876

Post by cloverich »

lucio wrote: post #853
silexia wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think of my proposals to fight regulatory capture? https://joelx.com/how-to-beat-regulatory-capture/15780/

>allowing someone to own an idea is insane Let's say you have an inspiration, then you work hard on that for 5 years designing up to the last detail of a [business online idea/product]. You put your service online/start selling your product. It's a hit. Aware of your early success. $BIG COMPANY$ with thousands of engineers and millions of users copies all the details that make your idea a success. Your early users mi…

Good implementations of good ideas are rarely easy to copy, which is why so many acquisitions ask not only to buy the product but the team that made it as well. Moreover the last part of your argument also omits that big companies regularly buy the ideas (patent) meaning idea ownership mostly translates into big co idea ownership. Couple that with trivial ideas being patentable (eg website shopping cart), frivolous lawsuits abound, etc. I think your argument sounds good in theory but in practice leads to the exact detriment it proclaims to protect.

Lastly I think the last part of your argument is less compelling if you view it from the customers angle: you shouldn’t be able to go to a different company just because they can offer something you want (better / cheaper), you should have to stick with whoever came up with it first.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#877

Post by GuiA »

pascalxus wrote: post #870
GuiA wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine for a second, that you declare a region, say 1 square mile, somewhere as almost completely free of all regulations. Can you murder your competitors in this 1 square mile? Can you steal their inventory? Can you hijack their equipment? Can you threaten their employees? Can you force your employees to work overtime till they drop? Can you dump all your industrial waste wherever you want in that 1 square mile?…

I'm talking about the regulation that prevents stuff from being built. obviously all the normal laws like no murder would still be in place.

Ah yes, that's not a subjective thing at all, all we have to do is query our database for all laws where the PREVENTS_STUFF_FROM_BEING_BUILT flag is set to TRUE, and we disable all of those. Easy.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#878

Post by otisfunkmeyer »

supernova87a wrote: post #601

Well, the thing about building is that when a people achieve comfort and are well-fed and happy, there's very little incentive to build. Countries get old. They get middle-aged and a little tired or complacent. It really does happen. The question is how you keep on renewing a country and a people when things are going "just fine". There is really something to the idea that strife / disaster / starting with nothing ca…

Best response in this entire thread imo.

And I have yet to hear from pmarca or anyone else an answer to this puzzle that is even slightly convincing.

Which gives me pause.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#879

Post by Balgair »

zelly wrote: post #487

This was one of the best posts I've ever read. Thinking about printing it out and framing it. It's more inspirational than anything I've read, and it articulates the elephant-in-the-room problem we all know but aren't talking about. No one is innovating anymore. Everyone copies each other. Even in the YC crowd, every other thing is a dumb CRUD app or AI snake oil project that has been rehashed since the 80s. Where's…

I think there is a ton of innovation occurring. Biotech is exploding right now with CRISPR-CAS9, optogenetic application to mind-machine interfaces are already in rats and monkeys. Medicine, despite covid, is doing great stuff. I'd bet that the large scale testing we're doing will be somewhat sticky and our risk tolerance at the FDA will expand a lot. EE is about to take off again when someone can come up with a cheap and workable memristor; it'll completely change how we do logic at the substrate level, going from discrete to 'analog' math. We're revolutionizing history and literature with tools like google trends. I think a lot of the 'malaise' is just cyclical. Innovation comes in spurts, we're at the end of a business cycle, it's kinda normal.

That said, yeah, the elephant in the room is the massive concentration of wealth and regulatory capture. All the innovations I just mentioned are kinda happening in the back-rooms and on obscure boards like HN. Getting these things to markets and in the hands of professionals is really just terribly difficult. I get the FDA pushing back on things (and largely agree with it), but the big players just seem to push down really hard on innovators. I mean, look at the App-store, it's nutters. Paradoxically, more government intervention is needed, but against the big fish.

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