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Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Profile picture
@pmarca
Oct 4, 2022 • 34 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
An Internet news outlet is asking a lot of people I know, and some I don't, what I've been up to lately. Lord knows what they'll ultimately publish, so I thought I'd just write this instead. -->
We are in my 14th year of working to build our venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz. The overwhelming credit for A16Z's accomplishments goes to Ben and all our partners, but I do what I can to contribute.
We are about to pass 500 employees, we've dramatically expanded our investing scope, and we've implemented an entirely new operating model on the other side of COVID. I could not be more proud of the firm and our colleagues, and we're just getting started.
I work extensively with our many portfolio companies and their teams -- some where I'm on the board, but many where I'm not but can scrub in at key times, usually either when things are going really right or really wrong.
I am stunned daily by the creativity and courage of our founders, and I love working with all of them.
I spend much of the rest of my time helping to evaluate and close new investments. Most new investments A16Z makes are not led by me, but I often partner with my colleagues to land new deals, and I occasionally lead an investment with a founding team I particularly connect with.
I am currently on 12 boards, 9 private and 3 public, and try to always have at least one slot open for the next big thing.
Mainly I try to learn a lot. For example, the political events of 2014-2016 made clear to me that I didn't understand politics at all, so I deliberately withdrew from political engagement and fundraising.
Instead I've read my way back in history and as far to the political left and political right as I could. I'll list some books I've found particularly interesting at the end.
I keep up something of a public presence. I go back and forth on the virtues and faults of a daily social media presence. I write on occasion, and talk to interesting people in public. You may enjoy these recent podcasts:




After a surreal 2020, my family and I almost left California. In fact, we bought property in Las Vegas and almost bought in Manhattan, but decided to stay and double down on California instead.
We rationalize our decision as choosing to live in the ruins of a once great civilization -- like Rome in maybe 250 AD, we live amidst an enormous flowering of culture and creativity, but the roads are becoming unsafe and nobody is quite sure why.
Interesting books on culture and society I've read recently. I don't necessarily agree with any of them, but they're all useful and informative. -->
1. The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here.
2. The Machiavellians, and The Managerial Revolution, by James Burnham -- together, the best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics.
3. Four books on the Spanish Civil War, which was the trial run for the hundred years of Western history that followed.
The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
Spain In Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild
Mine Were Of Trouble by Peter Kemp
4. Six books on the deep history of the American right.
Lindbergh by Scott Berg
The Ambassador by Susan Ronald
The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent
The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon
War For Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum
The New Right by Michael Malice
5. Two comprehensive biographies of Adolf Hitler.
Hitler: A Global Biography by Brendan Simms
Hitler: Ascent and Hitler: Downfall by Volker Ullrich
6. Six books on the deep history of the American left.
The God That Failed by Richard Crossman
The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick
Witness by Whittaker Chambers
Joseph McCarthy by Arthur Herman
Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough
Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe
7. A comprehensive biography and a key chronicle of Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin by Victor Sebestyen
Lenin On The Train by Catherine Merridale
8. A New World Begins by Jeremy Popkin, on the French Revolution.
9. Two books on fascism and anti-fascism, titled Fascism and Anti-Fascism respectively, both by Paul Gottfried.
10. The True Believer by Eric Hoffer -- a brilliant book on the nature of mass movements and collective psychology.
11. The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz -- the definitive work on intellectual life under totalitarianism.
12. The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel -- the definitive work on practical life under totalitarianism.
13. Two books on the evolution of modern culture and civic religion, both by John Murray Cuddihy:
No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste
Ordeal of Civility
14. Two more books on who we are and how we got here, one on culture, the other on genetics:
The WEIRDest People In The World by Joseph Henrich
Who We Are And How We Got Here by David Reich
15. Two of Thomas Sowell's many brilliant books on how our current politics and culture came to be:
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
16. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy by Richard Hanania -- a sobering reexamination of how democratic governments actually make decisions.
17. History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America by Bruno Macaes -- on the country and culture the United States is evolving into, not necessarily decline, but something very different.
18. Three books on the philosophical underpinnings of our time:
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History by James Nichols
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
19. Two books on the nature of the public intellectuals who lead our society:
Intellectuals by Paul Johnson
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
End 🙂

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More from @pmarca

Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Nov 29, 2024
Thread of longform pieces on debanking:
thefp.com/p/debanking-am…
cooperkirk.com/wp-content/upl…Image
Read 30 tweets
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Jul 8, 2024
THE LITTLE TECH AGENDA

Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz
July 5, 2024

Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents.

Little Tech has run independent of politics for our entire careers. But, as the old Soviet joke goes, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”

We believe bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech.

We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.

The time has come to stand up for Little Tech.

Our political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech.[1] We do not engage in political fights outside of issues directly relevant to Little Tech. But we will fight for Little Tech – for the freedom to research, to invent, to create jobs, to build the future – with all of our resources.

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

* Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

* Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

* Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

We support or oppose politicians regardless of party and regardless of their positions on other issues.

We are in this for the long haul.

[1] a16z.com/politics-and-t…
AMERICA

America led the 20th Century because we are preeminent in three dimensions:

(1) Technology – America drove the Second Industrial Revolution through the 1930’s, and then the Computer Revolution since the 1940’s.

(2) Economy – America’s free market system created enormous societal wealth and dramatic improvements in quality of life for everyday people.

(3) Military – American military might drove victory in World War I and World War II, and then catalyzed the unilateral surrender and dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Each of these dimensions reinforces the other two:

* Our technology preeminence powers our economy and our military.

* Our economic growth pays for our massive investment in technology and in our military.

* And our military dominance keeps us safe from foreign threats and hostile ideologies that could crush our technology, our economy, and our people.

And, America’s success has positive global spillover effects to much of the rest of the world. American technology is the global standard. The American economy is the leading production and consumption partner of many other nations. And the American military has maintained overall global peace and prosperity since World War II to a level unprecedented in world history.

Naysayers say America’s best days are behind us, that the 21st Century will see America play a diminished role in all three dimensions.

We disagree.

There is no reason American technology, economic, and military leadership cannot continue for decades to come.

There is no reason the 21st Century cannot be a Second American Century.
STARTUPS

American technology leadership is the result of a complex system built over the last 150 years that includes our pioneering spirit, our work ethic, our rule of law, our deep capital markets, our higher education system, and long term government investment in scientific research. And university, government, and corporate labs have all played key roles.

But the vanguard of American technology supremacy has always been the startup. From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage.

A startup is what happens when a plucky group of outcasts and misfits comes together with a dream, ambition, courage, and a particular set of skills – to build something new in the world, to build a product that will improve peoples’ lives, and to build a company that may go on to create many more new things in the future.

The enormous advantage of any startup is a clean sheet of paper – a single shot to imagine and realize a different and better world.

But startups start with every other disadvantage. Specifically, they must go up against incumbent companies that have overwhelmingly superior brands, market positions, customer bases, and financial strength – incumbents that are out to strangle startup competition in the cradle.

Incumbents often have another enormous advantage – the ability to wire the government against startup competitors.

Dominant companies don’t start out that way. In fact, they start as startups, fighting their way uphill until they reach a position of power where they seek to lock in their gains, to pull the rope ladder up behind them. They inject themselves into the political system and seek regulatory capture – a wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions, and that new startups cannot possibly scale.

The historical result of regulatory capture in market after market has been government-enforced monopolies and cartels.

And the motto of every monopoly and cartel is, “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.”

When this cycle is allowed to play out, when big companies can weaponize the government against startups, the result is stagnation and then decline.

There are many signs of stagnation and decline in the American economy today.

Economists measure the rate of technology improvement in the economy as productivity growth. And productivity growth today, after 50 years of the proliferation of the profoundly powerful technologies of the computer and the Internet, is lower than before the 1970’s.

The real world consequences are staggering:

* Low productivity growth means low economic growth.

* Low economic growth means a low rate of improvement in quality of life for regular people, if not outright backsliding. See, for example, skyrocketing prices and stagnating quality of education, health care, and housing – sure signs of regulatory capture.

* Low economic growth also means the rise of smashmouth zero-sum politics, as gains for one group of people necessarily require taking things away from other people.

* Zero-sum politics lead to corrosion of the national spirit of opportunity and growth. We can feel this corrosion all around us.

The way to prevent this outcome is to encourage new startups – to drive innovation, competition, and growth – and to prevent big companies from weaponizing the government to crush them.
Read 5 tweets
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Jul 5, 2024
THE LITTLE TECH AGENDA

Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz
July 5, 2024

Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents.

Little Tech has run independent of politics for our entire careers. But, as the old Soviet joke goes, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”

We believe bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech.

We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.

The time has come to stand up for Little Tech.

Our political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech.[1] We do not engage in political fights outside of issues directly relevant to Little Tech. But we will fight for Little Tech – for the freedom to research, to invent, to create jobs, to build the future – with all of our resources.

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

* Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

* Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

* Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

We support or oppose politicians regardless of party and regardless of their positions on other issues.

We are in this for the long haul.

[1] a16z.com/politics-and-t…
AMERICA

America led the 20th Century because we are preeminent in three dimensions:

(1) Technology – America drove the Second Industrial Revolution through the 1930’s, and then the Computer Revolution since the 1940’s.

(2) Economy – America’s free market system created enormous societal wealth and dramatic improvements in quality of life for everyday people.

(3) Military – American military might drove victory in World War I and World War II, and then catalyzed the unilateral surrender and dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Each of these dimensions reinforces the other two:

* Our technology preeminence powers our economy and our military.

* Our economic growth pays for our massive investment in technology and in our military.

* And our military dominance keeps us safe from foreign threats and hostile ideologies that could crush our technology, our economy, and our people.

And, America’s success has positive global spillover effects to much of the rest of the world. American technology is the global standard. The American economy is the leading production and consumption partner of many other nations. And the American military has maintained overall global peace and prosperity since World War II to a level unprecedented in world history.

Naysayers say America’s best days are behind us, that the 21st Century will see America play a diminished role in all three dimensions.

We disagree.

There is no reason American technology, economic, and military leadership cannot continue for decades to come.

There is no reason the 21st Century cannot be a Second American Century.
STARTUPS

American technology leadership is the result of a complex system built over the last 150 years that includes our pioneering spirit, our work ethic, our rule of law, our deep capital markets, our higher education system, and long term government investment in scientific research. And university, government, and corporate labs have all played key roles.

But the vanguard of American technology supremacy has always been the startup. From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage.

A startup is what happens when a plucky group of outcasts and misfits comes together with a dream, ambition, courage, and a particular set of skills – to build something new in the world, to build a product that will improve peoples’ lives, and to build a company that may go on to create many more new things in the future.

The enormous advantage of any startup is a clean sheet of paper – a single shot to imagine and realize a different and better world.

But startups start with every other disadvantage. Specifically, they must go up against incumbent companies that have overwhelmingly superior brands, market positions, customer bases, and financial strength – incumbents that are out to strangle startup competition in the cradle.

Incumbents often have another enormous advantage – the ability to wire the government against startup competitors.

Dominant companies don’t start out that way. In fact, they start as startups, fighting their way uphill until they reach a position of power where they seek to lock in their gains, to pull the rope ladder up behind them. They inject themselves into the political system and seek regulatory capture – a wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions, and that new startups cannot possibly scale.

The historical result of regulatory capture in market after market has been government-enforced monopolies and cartels.

And the motto of every monopoly and cartel is, “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.”

When this cycle is allowed to play out, when big companies can weaponize the government against startups, the result is stagnation and then decline.

There are many signs of stagnation and decline in the American economy today.

Economists measure the rate of technology improvement in the economy as productivity growth. And productivity growth today, after 50 years of the proliferation of the profoundly powerful technologies of the computer and the Internet, is lower than before the 1970’s.

The real world consequences are staggering:

* Low productivity growth means low economic growth.

* Low economic growth means a low rate of improvement in quality of life for regular people, if not outright backsliding. See, for example, skyrocketing prices and stagnating quality of education, health care, and housing – sure signs of regulatory capture.

* Low economic growth also means the rise of smashmouth zero-sum politics, as gains for one group of people necessarily require taking things away from other people.

* Zero-sum politics lead to corrosion of the national spirit of opportunity and growth. We can feel this corrosion all around us.

The way to prevent this outcome is to encourage new startups – to drive innovation, competition, and growth – and to prevent big companies from weaponizing the government to crush them.
Read 5 tweets
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Oct 16, 2023
THE TECHNO-OPTIMIST MANIFESTO part 1

“You live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
— Walker Percy

“Our species is 300,000 years old. For the first 290,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting in a way that’s still observable among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo Sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow. A person born in Sumer in 4,000BC would find the resources, work, and technology available in England at the time of the Norman Conquest or in the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus quite familiar. Then, beginning in the 18th Century, many people’s standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why?”
— Marian Tupy

“There’s a way to do it better. Find it.”
— Thomas Edison

Lies

We are being lied to.

We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.

We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.

We are told to be pessimistic.

The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares.

We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.

We are told to be miserable about the future.
THE TECHNO-OPTIMIST MANIFESTO part 2

Truth

Our civilization was built on technology.

Our civilization is built on technology.

Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

I am here to bring the good news.

We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.

We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.

We have the will.

It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.

It is time to be Techno-Optimists.
THE TECHNO-OPTIMIST MANIFESTO part 3

Technology

Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.

We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.

We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

We believe everything good is downstream of growth.

We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.

There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.

Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.

National resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.

And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology.

In fact, technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne – has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible.

We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less.

Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.

We believe this is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us.

We believe this is why our descendents will live in the stars.

We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.

We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.

We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.

We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.

We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.

We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.

We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.

We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.

Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
Read 15 tweets
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Jun 6, 2023
Why AI Will Save The World
Screenshots edition!
🧵 twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
Why AI Can Make Everything We Care About Better twitter.com/i/web/status/1… ImageImageImage
So Why The Panic? twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
Read 12 tweets
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Jun 6, 2023
Why AI Will Save The World
By Marc Andreessen

The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out.

Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.
🧵 twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
First, a short description of what AI is: The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. AI is a computer program like any other – it runs, takes input, processes, and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
So Why The Panic?

In contrast to this positive view, the public conversation about AI is presently shot through with hysterical fear and paranoia.

We hear claims that AI will variously kill us all, ruin our society, take all our jobs, cause crippling inequality, and enable bad… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Read 12 tweets

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