Risky Business: Interview with Marc Andreessen (2018)
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Url changed now from https://allenleein.github.io/2020/03/11/pmarca-flying-car.ht....
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. 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.
I used to wonder if it was just hype for employees and investors to say that SpaceX goal was to make humanity multi planetary. The last couple years have convinced me he's for real. The man could retire now. SpaceX could just own the launch industry by cutting cost for a while, or sit back and enjoy higher profits from reusability. But starship and mass production of it? Nonsense unless the stated mission is for real.
People can do so much more if it's about the mission and not the money, and that includes investors.
Well put. Whatever anyone has to say about the man, the most incredible thing about Elon is that he finds ways to pursue his crazy ideals while somehow staying profitable.
His main ideal, making humanity multi-planetary, requires a great deal of profitability, because it's almost nobody else's goal.
My opinion is that he will, when the time is right, sell his holdings in Tesla and dump all of that right back into SpaceX or whatever entity is pushing the ball forward.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-compensation...
Something to the effect of 'When I was in college, I tested how little I could live on. Turns out rice and beans are really cheap. So even if I fail, I'm not going to starve.'
Admittedly, kids and spouses change ones opinion on that, but it's a fair way to keep perspective, even after becoming rich.
Or one can hedge their bets and optimize for retaining creature comforts at all costs.
Point of this thread being, Elon could certainly be forgiven for doing the latter, but he still seems to be tacking closer to the former.
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, etc).
I would argue this is reckless and will end up causing way more harm than good at the end of this. If you don't have risk management, you aren't going to be effectively run safety critical companies.
> SpaceX could just own the launch industry by cutting cost for a while, or sit back and enjoy higher profits from reusability.
The launch industry is extraordinarily small all things considered, and there's no way SpaceX would be able to justify its valuation without pie-in-the-sky dreams like Starlink as well.
The long-term goals should be about how to get everyone in the world self-actualized, but doing it sustainably so we don't destroy the planet in the process. We'll be on renewable energy by 2030, but the real destruction is happening due to manufacturing that we don't actually need. Getting demand flipped so that we can get to a sustainable or non-growth based economy is going to be tricky and may not happen before 2040-2050 as the singularity looms.
My dream for this would look like a 20-hour or less work week, with a great deal more capital available at the bottom with near-zero or negative interest rates. Young people would train for a few years in something like a peace corps doing the difficult work that nobody wants to do, then use the life skills they've learned to eliminate those hardships for everyone else going forward. Their degree or equivalent certificates would go towards hard disciplines, advancing things like medicine where devotion and commitment to a large organization is actually required.
But the rest of their time would be spent in their own endeavors in the humanities or working in maker spaces to invent new things. That's where the real innovation will come from. So instead of a the next SpaceX requiring $300 million, it will just need a few people with access to shared computing resources so they can iterate unfettered by the time suck of the workaday world.
We can look towards Star Trek for inspiration. In the meantime, I expect everything to go the opposite direction from the way I suggested, just like it has been for the last 20 years. We'll see more wealth inequality, more disenfranchisement, more neocolonialism. Unfortunately it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. But in spite of that, we can still envision the dream and work to manifest change locally in our own lives, as we plant seeds of hope globally.
This study reviews evidence on the effects of zoning and land-use regulation in three related areas: housing supply, housing affordability, and economic growth. The academic research on property regulation indicates that increased regulation is associated with a decline in supply, affordability, and growth. The literature indicates the effects are large, with a recent study suggesting that—because of regulation—economic growth declined by 50 percent and economic output declined by 8.9 percent between 1964 and 2009.
Imagine having everyone's usable income rise between 8.9% and as much as 50%! That's a huge benefit. We are seeing some efforts in that direction: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/585765/golden-gates... but not as much as we should.
star trek is inspirational to what future should go toward "betterment of one self" instead of getting gold.
I also have a routine search that I do when I look for something built on cryptocurrency or the cryptocurrency ecosystem (e.g. Ethereum "dapps") that I might want to actually use. I always come up empty handed.
Yet there are many smart people that believe in this stuff. Are they in a parallel universe?
Where is it being transformational? All I see is gambling, speculation, scams, solutions in search of a problem, and a ton of vaporware.
Beyond the core use cases of easier international wire transfer and black/grey market commerce, I don't see anything in this space that people actually use (excluding gambling and speculation).
I'm puzzled when I hear them compare it to the Internet. The Internet had immediate real world use cases everywhere. I saw people all around me start to get online and actually use the Internet for a huge variety of things. I don't see any of that with cryptocurrency. Nobody is using this stuff for anything. It's got that classic worst-case solution in search of a problem vibe: you can't give it to people.
I get why bag holders and speculators sound bullish on cryptocurrency. They're hoping more will buy in so they can dump at a higher price. I am genuinely and deeply puzzled when I hear bright people who aren't in those groups who are still believers. What do they see that I don't?
I find it hard to believe though that VCs are playing that long a game. That's way too long a time horizon for any conventional VC investment.
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.
We're seeing, right in this moment, why the ability to increase the supply of currency is a necessity for a functioning economy, especially in times of crisis.
Somehow the hodlers take the exact opposite lesson from what's happening.
Austrianism is a rationalistic theory of economics. By rationalistic in this context I mean it's not empirical. It's the sort of thing you get when smart people sit around and reason through something and come to a conclusion based on that alone without bothering to observe, experiment, or evaluate their ideas in practice.
A wonderful classical example of this kind of rationalism is Aristotle reasoning that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. Of course they do! Heavier objects are subject to more force, therefore they fall faster. It's perfectly rational.
BTW I'm not saying that other economic schools of thought have it all correct either. They clearly continue to make incorrect predictions all the time. I really don't think anyone understands economics very well. It's a subset of complex auto-adaptive systems, but with an added layer of adversarial behavior. In economics when a major economist, government, central bank, or business makes a prediction, the market acts so as to attempt to invalidate that prediction. Economic systems actively attempt to invalidate theories about them.
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 empirical economic observations to prove or disprove economic laws. Any empirical conclusion will have no predictive power as a law, only as a trend.
Not only that, but any logical consequence of human behavior being purposeful and unpredictable is as correct as the original claim.
Is anything here that I am missing?
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 the economy is in capital, goods, and services. Money has no value. You can't eat it, drink it, live in it, or use it for anything. It's a medium of value exchange, not a value of its own.
In fact one of the desirable characteristics of money is that it's useless for other purposes, otherwise those other purposes compete with its money use case. Cryptocurrency does check that box, but so far all popular cryptocurrencies are built on hard money assumptions. It would be theoretically possible to build a cryptocurrency that wasn't, but there are issues like how to make the inflation targeting algorithm not be trivially game-able by 'whales.' (Real world whales do in fact try to game central banks, so this is not fiction... of course central banks are AI-complete so they have a better chance of resisting this.)
Most of the affinity for Austrianism is really rooted in a dislike for central banking and the assumed authoritarianism that goes with it, but I am not convinced that these issues are intrinsically inseparable. I don't see why libertarianism necessitates Austrian hard money finance or why hard money prohibits totalitarianism in any way. Since totalitarians have guns they can easily just confiscate and monopolize any hard currency. Cryptocurrency is no different, since rubber hose cryptography is highly effective.
It should not matter what austrians feel about central banking.
It's true that the actions of single individuals cannot be fully predicted, but that's not necessary. Any level of insight is enough to form the basis of a scientific theory. In other words, mainstream economists do not claim that they can perfectly model human behavior, but they do (rightly) claim that they can make educated guesses which are correct more often than not.
Also, I don't really believe "trustless" is possible, as close as blockchain may get. I'm not an expert here, but don't you still have to trust DNS, certificate issuers, code maintainers, etc.? Can't any of these be compromised with a big enough profit motive?
- Slow transaction need
- Accounting-related items.
In my mind Supply Chain on a batch scale looks to be the the most promising area, but there don't seem to be many places that can't, or don't want to, manage this centrally. Ergo the network trust is not necessary.
dApps are promising, but why add the extra expense?
I mean, project requirements to build infrastructures, for the private sector companies to bid. The results of those adjudications. Civil servants payroll and bonuses...
That would mean no suspicios document shredding when a new party enters the goverment. An open standard way for everybody to access the data. Even different applications on top of those databases.
Setting aside political considerations, what would be the drawbacks of this approach?
This interview was in 2014 (not 2018 or 2020, read the introduction). He might have a different opinion now.
I'd say both have good chances. I'm actually surprised BO doesn't have better achievements by now.
> Both looked like jokes at the time to my aerospace colleagues.
I assume some aerospace professionals still consider them jokes, which weights on definition of professional. But SpaceX really does things differently - the pioneers of space era (like von Braun, Korolev) could, I'm sure, understand Musk, but aerospace professionals of 1990-2000 were trained in rather different world.
The problem is finding someone who understands the science enough, but is not embedded in the old school culture that has been so limiting.
He is legit the chief designer of the Falcon 9 rocket and of Starship not just the chief executive. That is not just some honorary title. He made every important choice on every important technical decision.
He knows every detail of these rockets, he knows them inside and out. Nobody knows more about any of these rockets then Elon.
People sometimes want to portray him about a guy that highers smart people and that it, but it is far from true.
https://youtu.be/GNG6ZzDh9C8?t=383
I'm a fan of Musk's work, but there's plenty to criticize about the man.
However, there's little doubt that he's an extremely smart person.
This should really not be surprising to anybody who follows SpaceX in any detail.
I would argue the burden of prove is on people who deny what he does. What evidence do you have that he is not the chief engineer. Is there a 'hidden' chief engineer working on the project? Who makes the important engineering decisions if its not Elon?
titles are not sufficient proof, and marketing is a thing.
If you are saying 'that title is a total sham' and 'the title does not accuratly represent Musk role' then you need to provide evidence.
And yes, that is how burdon of proove works.
As I said before, ever single high level engineer that worked with him has repeated over and over again what a genius he is. I don't know what more evidence you could want.
Of course you can just continue to repeat and cast dought because you don't like him. But please show me a single piece of evidence that Elon Musk is not a capable rocket sientists and engineer.
you claim that musk is the chief designer beyond just title. specifically, you said:
> He made every important choice on every important technical decision.
and
> He knows every detail of these rockets, he knows them inside and out. Nobody knows more about any of these rockets then Elon.
those are claims. simply stating he has the title of chief designer is not sufficient evidence. neither is citing anecdotal evidence from people who work for him (and you didn't even give quotes, you just stated the supposed conclusions). i asked if you had evidence and didn't make a claim otherwise in my response to you. the burden of proof fully lies on you to backup what you said. i didn't say it.
if people are still "slipping on elon and how brilliant he is", maybe you and his fanboys should provide more evidence than "omg, he's such a genius".
Its the Chief Engineers jobs to make choices about high level direction and to be the ultimate decision maker. In my book anybody who has that role for the most successful rocket company in human history is a genius.
If you want to claim he is not, claiming it all some sort of evil genius marketing scheme to hype up Elon, you need to provide an actual argument, no matter how many times you want to deny it.
> simply stating he has the title of chief designer is not sufficient evidence.
Its a private company, the evidence you ask for simply doesn't exists in the public domain. Essentially you have put yourself into a position where you have a opinion, and no evidence that exists in the public domain will convince you.
> neither is citing anecdotal evidence from people who work for him (and you didn't even give quotes, you just stated the supposed conclusions)
The best evidence we have is what people who have worked with him and multiple people in this thread have mentioned this to you. Yet you seem unwilling to do even a minimal amount of work yourself and neither me nor anybody else has time to go threw hours of video materials to provide quotes for you.
The fact is, you have a clearly uninformed opinion that disagrees with all the public knowledge we have and you have no evidence what so ever. This is clearly a stupid position to be in, but be my guest, I will no longer argue this.
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 technical.
bezos has a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from princeton. not sure what you consider technical.
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.
> 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.
Every report on their financial results says they are unprofitable, and they continue to want to raise more and more money.
https://www.inverse.com/article/34976-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-t... https://www.fastcompany.com/3006829/spacex-founder-elon-musk...
I'm almost sure he'd be laughed out of many meetings today, if his name would be different - i.e. nobody would think he's behind SpaceX vision. Not all meetings, but many. Imagining an aerospace professional - somebody in a position of Tony Bruno talking with a guy John Smith, when that John Smith describes similar vision and approaches to SpaceX, I can too easily imagine that aerospace professional dismissing him too easily.
That's not about Musk. That's about modern aerospace.
> i have never seen any indication that he understands as much as people freely give him credit for.
Hm. I didn't catch Musk on too blatant physical errors (I might be not a perfect examiner though :) ), but the thing is, "the rocket science is not a rocket science". Building rockets these days is many, many times easier that half a century ago. You don't need Einstein's level of sharpness to get pretty good results.
> bezos has a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from princeton. not sure what you consider technical.
Well, title of CEO in Amazon may have a large negative effect on technical abilities of a person. I've seen people with cum laude science Ph.D's from top world technical universities which are much happier with management and don't demonstrate technical abilities too much. So, "Bezos ...is not technical" may be unrelated to his degrees.
I don't think it's fair, but in aerospace companies, the programmers, even doing important avionics work, are considered closer to IT than they are to core vehicle design. If you got rid of all of them you could still design a vehicle, as we did before.
So your disregarding what every single engineer that work for him says. It seem like you are going out of your way to ignore evidence.
Elon is and was the Chief Engineer on the Falcon 1/Falcon 9 rocket. That is a fact.
Elon Musk wants to live on Mars and he's been very public about it. Everything he's done has been to further technology to make that possible within his lifetime. He's working hard and betting everything to make it happen.
Jeff Bezos is working to build a "road to space", but he doesn't see the technology for space or planetary colonization being viable for a few generations.
My dad recently retired as an aerospace professional. There was an event which he said removed any doubt from the entire industry that SpaceX was real; I don't remember when exactly it was, but SpaceX had a launch, aborted the launch fairly late in the countdown, and then re-prepped and launched in time to make the launch window.
He said any other orbital rocket would require a minimum of several hours turnaround when aborting that late. Fixing this in a legacy rocket was just not going to happen, and SpaceX made it look easy.
$500mm for x project, released upon these pre agreed milestones. Like the way it works in large scale infrastructure or some construction financing.
*No affiliation. Just thought that his innovation financing and accounting models were the most interesting part of the book.
I know its at least 20 - 50 years away from being any kind of reality, but surely there are smart people working on this problem. What's to stop Elons' Martian crew from mutiny and sedition .. a firm dependence on Earth?
Should we, therefore, go there before we get a chance to be independent as a colony - clearly there is as lot more work to be done on the subject of a self-sufficient colony, but how is that going to work out economically and socially, I wonder?
Doesn't seem to me to be getting enough attention. Or, are there existing structures and organisational models that would be exported to the Mars colony?
Startups on Mars? Free oxygen and access to the Starship hub for anyone who wants to colonise?
I think the specific conditions we will face in a second phase of mars expansion, are gone be limited and determined by local condition at that point in time.
I think its a total fools ear fool's errandnd to try to reason this out in a theoretical setting such a long time ahead.
Looking at research from Elenor Ostrom it seems pretty evident that a group of people with local knowledge can far easier and more efficiently solve most common resource problems then remote governments or cooperation can. And the same will very much be true on Mars.
Whatever you do, you will never be more than a subcontractor.
> Plenty of conferences and magazines feature interviews with Andreessen where he talks about the future. What’s difficult is getting a man so excited about the future to talk about the past. The following is the story of how Andreessen became Andreessen… rarely told at a Pando event in 2014.