Sometimes a person is in the right place at the right time and has an opportunity to become rich. It's important to resist the human urge to account success as a product of one's own intelligence.
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.
There's luck involved, but if you listen or read some of Marc Andreesen's ideas there's no doubt he's highly intelligent and thoughtful. Ben Horowitz even said he was the smartest person he'd ever met in his book. While he was obviously working on the right thing at the right time, his fortune is not what I would consider
blind luck.
"... it's both massively luck and massively hard work. Sometimes it's more luck than hard work, and sometimes it's more hard work than luck. But every success requires both." -- Reid Hoffman
https://www.businessinsider.in/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman...
"I'm a lucky guy. I mean, I certainly had a lot of near misses, but I was very lucky in terms of actually achieving success." -- Elon Musk, CNBC, May 2017
I always took the opposite insight from this. It's easy to find some bit of luck in anyone's trajectory and attribute their position to it. However, it's important to remember that for most, there were millions (or at least thousands) of people with the same economic resources, in the same place at the same time, and they haven't achieved the same position. So it's far more important (and useful) to look at individual actions.
It's interesting that in a way these are meta with some of the Andreessen's (or Thiel's, he had a whole essay about this) beliefs. Mine is a belief in the power of agency. The above, I view as "excusitis". It's always possible to find an excuse...
Marc is likely a controversial character, which leads to people disagreeing about comments.
Lots of conflicting up votes and down votes is a signal HN uses to detect disagreement.
The HN algorithm is designed to promote good discussions, explicitly at the expense of discussions where people interact poorly with each other, even if those other conversations are important. Lots of disagreement is a common precursor to bad behavior, and the algorithm automatically pushes those posts down in the ranking.
Not a conspiracy. An algorithm that intentionally and successfully encourages well behaved commenters here, at the expense of some important topics algorithmically being pushed down.
The broad topic of this post might be especially relevant to HN: are we in danger of manipulating society through arrogance, elitism, greed, skewed perspective, bullying, collusion, influence-peddling, throwing around money/power, etc., and how would we know when we are.
>>It's never been clearer that the VC founder's whole outlook on life revolves around how great it is to be rich and how shameful it is to be anything else.
Quite a few "successful" founders who invariably also turn angels/VCs seem to share this idea. If you aren't hustling and getting rich then that's a life wasted.
In my view, Andreessen has always been more on the "hawkish" side - going back to 2016. He supported Clinton over Trump when it looked like Trump was going to be more Dove-ish on US foreign policy (ultimately he wasn't, but that was the general view during that era).
Just speaking as an American, my biggest fear with SV getting involved in the defense sector is that founders and VCs tend to be very opinionated about how their products actually get used, and I'd be worried they rug-pull key defense technologies away from the US military should be applied in a manner contrary to their interests. Maybe those interests align with mine, maybe they don't, but I can hold my electeds accountable: I can't do that with Andreessen or his "Gundo Bros"
Quotes like “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep [rural Americans] docile” are really bad… so it’s quite the achievement for the words outside the quotes to be even worse.
Every other sentence by the author feels like it’s practically bursting at the seams with spite, barely containing the writer’s apoplectic rage. A very off-putting read.
This is always personally kind of curious to me, because, at the same time Andreessen was the young "hayseed with the know-how" (as I think JWZ once called him) working on NCSA Mosaic and then mcom/Netscape... I was also a (slightly younger) Internet-savvy Unix workstations programmer, working in a science park out in Oregon farm country.
My own awareness and leanings were more towards traditional Internet altruistic/egalitarian, with a healthy skepticism of government and business in practice, and keeping an eye out against exploiters.
(Separately, a more libertarian school of thought was also represented among the early Internet-savvy, but I had less exposure to that.)
Sometimes I wonder what would've happened to the modern Web and tech industry, if certain formative figures in dotcoms had been of the more traditional altruistic/egalitarian Internet kind.
But maybe they wouldn't have been able to get that influence, given their mindset and motivations.
Maybe big money would've bought and colluded their way to shaping the Internet how they wanted, in any case.
Certainly, a bit into dotcoms, the Google founders sounded to me like "one of us". But I think I was also quick to assume they were, when they did some smart things, and said some things ("don't be evil") that I expected from one of us.
I only realized how far down the rabbit hole Marc was when he was one of the first interviewees for a guy who came out of the neo-Nazi Salo forum, which means he was almost certainly reading Salo forum.
A gizmodo commenter made a good suggestion: replace "maniac" with "psychopath."
I endorse this because mania is a medically recognized condition that can be managed successfully with treatment.
Do we have evidence that MA is bipolar or otherwise verifiably maniacal? Or is he just another unscrupulous capitalist? I think it's the latter.
MA: If you're reading this, just know that whatever trendy "ism" is making its rounds at the yacht club will not justify the awful, inhumane business decision you are about to make.
My issue with American programmers and technologists who get rich is that it goes to their head and suddenly they think they're an intellectual on a wide range of subjects. It happened to me but I grew out of it when I got old. Marc Andreeson is no different. Have you ever really listened to Peter Theil in an interview? He's all over the map, saying things that sound profound but when you think about it actually make no sense at all. He's great at some things, but he's not great at everything. Same with Andreeson. At least he's not as bad as Musk in this regard.
Peter Thiel was like that before he got rich. He was very politically active in his Stanford law days.
I don't think the problem is limited to American programmers. Actors and musicians have been behaving that way in this country before personal computers were even a thing.
Actors and musicians have been behaving that way in this country before personal computers were even a thing.
I always think of Jessica Lang, Sissy Spacek, and Jane Fonda testifying before Congress about the family farm, because they each played the part of a farmer's wife in a movie once.
Reminds me of listening to Vitalik Buterin when I was younger. He's a smart guy in many respects (probably moreso than Thiel and Andreessen), but his whitepapers, talks and presentations were all characterized with a hopeless idealism. You want changemakers in tech to be pragmatic, not just focused on old stuff but the things that people want and already use. The latest wave of entrepreneurs and investors both feel like pie-in-the-sky populations that intend to disrupt everything or let their business go bust.
You have the direction mixed up. They became this successful because they always had conviction in non-mainstream ideas.
This is frequently shown in criticism of the Internet Archive. "How could they think that Outrageous Thing X could be legal? The Archive is reasonable but this new thing is not". Well, none of the people who thought that did the original Internet Archive in the first place.
Those who only take well-worn roads rarely discover new places. And to them, discovery seems serendipitous. Why would this explorer not just take the well-worn road now that he's discovered something, they wonder. He thinks he's a visionary just because he found this. If I found it I'd never leave the road.
I looked into Marc Andreeson's genius once and it surprised me that there were several GUI web browsers before Mosaic. Marc made a better one at the right time for it to take off. He's a coder, a good one, but to say he's a maverick following his own path is incorrect. It was a no brainer to start Netscape, so that's not so original either.
Q: What were some GUI web browsers before Marc Andreeson wrote Mosaic
A: Before Marc Andreessen and his team developed Mosaic in 1993, there were a few early GUI web browsers:
WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus): Developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in 1990. It was the first web browser with a graphical user interface. (WorldWideWeb on Wikipedia)
ViolaWWW: Created by Pei-Yuan Wei in 1992, it was the first browser to support scripting and stylesheets. (ViolaWWW on Wikipedia)
Erwise: Developed by a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology in 1992, it was the first browser to support inline images. (Erwise on Wikipedia)
Midas: Created by Tony Johnson at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1992, it was another early graphical web browser. (Midas on Wikipedia)
These early browsers paved the way for Mosaic, which became widely popular and laid the foundation for modern web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
I read it. No one is first with anything. There isn't a single thing that someone is first with. Given some thing x, and some \eps, you can find some x_0 that precedes x in time such |x-x_0|<\eps. It's just a matter of looking. That's just how human knowledge is formed. Who can tell, perhaps William Gibson was the originator of the Internet and everyone else just did the highly obvious thing of making it.
>My issue with American programmers and technologists who get rich is that it goes to their head and suddenly they think they're an intellectual on a wide range of subjects.
Bill Gates is also a good example of that but there are countless others.
This is especially true for a lot of the people that got rich pre-dotcom bubble. Literally the easiest time in the world to make big money on dumb stuff. Then they could take that money and "buy the dip" post-war and post-crash. It basically describes all of these people.
And I've always found it intriguing that these people happen to get real libertarian after they get rich. It's beyond me how someone has such a blind eye regarding the luck that they had. Jim Simons is the only billionaire I've seen explicitly state that his success had a lot to do with luck, honestly addressing what his skills were that helped with his success.
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.
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.
Physicists and engineers are a lot like this too. I think software people have more of a chance getting rich very easily based upon some dumb idea that just happens to make them rich when the company sells.
Yes, when home copmputers hit in the 80's and the internet hit in the 90's, if you were a half-way decent programmer the odds were pretty good that you'd make a lot of money. Physicists and non-microchip engineers didn't strike it rich like that
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.
It goes at least as far back as Silicon Valley's earliest days with William Shockley. Smart guy when it comes to transistors. Less so when it comes to other people.
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.
Looks like a moderator downweighted it, probably because it's a sensational-indignant article, which is not what HN is supposed to be for.
Angry articles about how awful rich people or celebrities are a sure hit with upvoters, but their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity, which is the organizing principle of this site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So it's standard moderation practice to downweight them here; otherwise the front page would consist of little else.
Edit: it's also the case that users heavily flagged it, which has a similar effect. I'm not sure whether the moderation chicken or the user eggs were first in the downranking of this piece, but it doesn't matter much in the sense that both are the system functioning as usual.
> their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity
Unless you're interested in human behavior and see finance as part of a natural process. From a biology perspective there's an obvious line of thinking around resource sequestration you can't really discuss in public, so I'm always interested in seeing the shape its eventual expression takes.
The articles are also rage bait and I agree with the moderation fwiw. We aren't really here to square this particular circle.
"While Andreessen may be all over the place ideologically, when you burrow down to his core beliefs they seem pretty simple. He’s a big fan of power. That is power for certain people—i.e., people like him. Rich people, in other words."
Good luck. And I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, just that it won't be easy. Look at what happened in Canada when they increased capital tax rate few weeks ago. It was a ton of articles and opinion pieces about how it will destroy the economy and innovation. You try taxing more in US and it will likely be an even harder push back given the larger ultra-high net worth population.
What's interesting is that taxing the super wealthy would actually increase the health of the economy. They are leaches on the economy, hoarding up more and more money, land, assets, etc. just to make more money. Decreasing wealth inequality will help the economy.
And I think there's also a point of culture. I think the startup culture and Silicon Valley culture is damaging the American economy, hyper focusing on short term results. What startup has been actually influential in recent times, in terms of a benefit to society? There's very few, and there's plenty of examples of these startups harming things.
Lastly, these billionaires are actually a security threat. They start to become so powerful, with so much money and power concentrated, that they can literally affect laws, policies, wars, and even elections. Trump won because of Robert Mercer, yet another libertarian extremist billionaire.
It helps to think of our current super-rich as an outcome of the asset bubble that currently exists in our economy, due to the fed’s post-2008 money printing; because it’s stock that accounts for most of their net worth.
So what happens if we tax away the majority of that wealth? It’s a huge amount - enough to have a marked effect on the economic system. Well, we get a lot more money spread around the system, but we didn’t get any more products, services, or value being created. What do we get? Inflation. We have the same amount of everything - it just costs more.
So the super rich end up being a place to park inflated dollars to keep them out of the real economy. They’re actually a useful deflationary mechanism.
I’d prefer if we would get out of this asset bubble and return to a “normal” economy but this is the situation we are in.
Yes, it would. Wealth inequality drives all sorts of bad things in society and the economy. Reducing it, i.e., increasing wealth equality, would reduce the effects.
No you’re missing the point - the good intentions don’t matter because they have no impact on the monetary reality - what actually happens is you unleash inflation, just like Trump’s tax cuts, Bidens’s stimulus and ironically-named “Inflation Reduction Act” and of course the Fed’s 2008 money printing which we’re only now paying for.
The super-rich whose net worth consists of large unrealised gains in stock are simply a product of this bad fiscal policy and are, believe it or not, helping, by acting as a buffer to absorb asset inflation. Remember that their wealth is imaginary - stock they can never sell in significant quantities - by forcing them to sell it and pumping the money back into the bottom half of the economy, what was previously imaginary money would now be real money flowing through the economy, causing the price of things consumers care about (i.e. not stocks) to go up.
The only solution is to fix the fiscal policy and stop printing money and running up deficits. Asset prices can return to normal levels and the super-rich’s net worth falls with them because it’s all stocks.
There’s nothing wild about this position, it’s just monetarism. If you expand the money supply without expanding the productive output of the economy, all you’ve done is make money worth less than it was before. The number of goods and services hasn’t changed, the cost to produce/import them hasn’t changed, demand hasn’t changed. You simply have slightly more money that represents a smaller fraction of the total money supply.
If the institution by the people and for the people has flaws, then we the people should work together to improve it.
We would rather not throw all of our hopes and dreams at the feet of greedy capitalists who would sell their own grandma's walker for a powerball ticket.
