Marc Andreessen interview
theobservereffect.org
theobservereffect.org
>> without the help of my amazing and indefatigable assistant Arsho Avetian. She's been my secret weapon for more than 20 years.
All the other stuff is just gravy :-)
I have a hard time "visualizing" it. If I had an assistant, I wouldn't know what to task them with...
A more qualified assistant, even more so, down to knowing your general policy etc and acting as a go-between between you and your employees, customers, when you don't need to bother...
In my software engineer job, I can't come up with any task for an assistant to do, because there aren't any.
The more your job is to just sit on your desk and write code the less things you need an assistant for (while somebody else might have help from an assistant to ensure the environment is in that way)
If I had a full-time assistant... let’s see... travel arrangements (would save me a couple days per quarter), Jira and related bookkeeping, tracking down people who know stuff I need to learn, scheduling social events, comparison shopping for cars/schools/gyms, reading poorly written internal docs and summarizing them coherently, organizing my meeting notes, and even just reminding me what I’m supposed to be thinking about.
I once worked in a place where the executive assistant was available to help anyone on the team, with the manager having priority of course. The most I ever dared ask for was flight bookings because she seemed really busy and I was young and shy, but I bet the senior people had her doing random stuff.
Also the office admin would help with things like routing paperwork for approvals, planning for travel, ordering meals for lunch meetings. When I was on a business trip and my plans got switch around mid trip, they coordinated all the changes to flights and hotels.
- compile your updates to various bugs into a status report for your management based on each project
- nag you about your upcoming meetings, preparing for them
- errands you would run if you didn't have to focus
- etc etc
this is something you immediately must do to be successful as any sort of manager or leadership position.
Here are my invoices, do the paperwork and put them in please.
X is on the phone & wants to talk, I'm busy, deal with him please. (X's issue may be real but X may waste a lot of time getting to the point).
I have to travel, I'm going to Y, sort out some travel & accommodation.
That kind of thing, the time-sucking crap. (not speaking for myself but from observations of an old boss of mine).
This is my startup that was inspired in part by own experience running a system like this without having a full time EA to support me :P
Might be COVID-19 calendar.
I believe Marc lives in Palo Alto so 15-20 minutes of commute on surface streets to a16z on Sand Hill Road. Commute could happen before scheduled items.
It could also be his commute happens during UP before meetings on the calendar start. He has FREE on many mornings before UP so UP can't directly mean wake up, that 30 minutes could be the commute.
* job of a very good assistant: know and estimate commute time to anywhere in the world and reschedule better than any staffing startup AI.
- Build rapport with them. - Shake their hands. - Talk to them with respect.
Marc Andreessen probably has literally hundreds of tasks on his desk a day.
Whether your task (say, a fundraising document you need him to sign today) would become his priority can 90% depend on whether you and his assistant have a good relationship or not.
This is not because we don't create enough of these things. We create enormous amounts of each. One of the main problems is precisely that we feel the need to create more of them and (in the name of benevolence), large amounts of money floods the system and causes inflation. Unlimited college loan limits, government paid for healthcare, 2% mortgage rates. Even allowing 8 year car loans!
Notice that every overpriced essential item is backed by a massive government and/or credit stimulus.
Clearly, the seemingly intractable "problems" of society are a) not intractable b) being perceived wrongly. Aside are the political games that manipulate public opinion and wrongly influence people on the issues.
Compare that to, say, Sweden. Small physically, small population wise, although they are a lot more diverse than they used to be. Nevertheless, they can reasonably adopt policies that do not scale and target a group of people with very similar experiences.
For the US to provide Schools/Hospitals/Houses services comparable to the European countries it would be done at the State level. At the Federal level it is to some degree unprecedented to provide services at the level of quality and at the scale.
Of course there are some things that only work in very tiny places, like the prince of Liechtenstein inviting all citizens to a garden party at his place – and some things that only work in very big places, like a manned lunar program. But why wouldn't things like hospitals and schools scale well for the range "a few million" (Sweden in your example) to "a few hundred million" (the US in your example)? Sorry that I'm getting all worked up here, but I feel like a crazy person for being presented with this argument over and over and not grasping even a fraction of it!
Nobody says "oh, those things from Sweden won't scale to Germany (10x)", but for some reason this conversation keeps getting shut down with "oh, those things from Germany can't possibly scale to the US (4x)".
Above I'm only talking about population, because surely you don't actually mean that "small physically" has a positive effect on hospitals, schools and housing? If we were discussing transportation infrastructure, sure, but…
Different climates, industries, demographics and educational achievement change what diseases/health issues are present and how they are dealt with in the community. That sort of thing varies wildly in a population of 10s-100s of millions spread over a large geographic area.
A sparse rural population has different healthcare needs than an urban one, for example. Coordinating that sort of thing across a continent isn't that helpful. State level administration makes more sense than trying to coordinate a policy across a continent.
What is cross-continent coordination supposed to win anyone anyway? It just makes the politics harder to manage.
> Nobody says "oh, those things from Sweden won't scale to Germany (10x)", but for some reason this conversation keeps getting shut down with "oh, those things from Germany can't possibly scale to the US (4x)".
I'm happy to say that; there will be things Sweden is doing that are completely different to what Germany does because of scaling. Plus the fact that they have different laws and legal systems. Although I suspect neither of us speaks Swedish or German, so it would be hard to settle that one decisively.
> because surely you don't actually mean that "small physically" has a positive effect on hospitals, schools and housing?
I mean exactly that. Australia faces similar issues where West Australia has a decidedly different culture to the east coast states and it doesn't make sense to try and coordinate housing policy between them. We don't coordinate hospitals either for that matter, although there may have been some push towards a nationalised education standard.
I'm sorry, I'm not buying this without some source that shows that Americans need more healthcare than Swedes due to those factors.
> A sparse rural population has different healthcare needs than an urban one, for example.
Sure, but the US is 82% urban, Sweden is 88%, Germany 77%, France 81%, Norway 83%, Denmark 88%, Finland 85%, Switzerland 74% – I can go on [1]. All very much in a comparable range.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
> State level administration makes more sense than trying to coordinate a policy across a continent.
Fine. Many public hospitals in Germany and Switzerland – two countries with federal systems – are run at the equivalent of the state level.
> What is cross-continent coordination supposed to win anyone anyway? It just makes the politics harder to manage.
I'm not claiming that the US would have some gain in these areas for being huge! I'm merely questioning your claim that "it won't scale".
> I'm happy to say that; there will be things Sweden is doing that are completely different to what Germany does because of scaling.
This is incredibly vague. Of course there are "things done differently". That's not an argument for why the US can't do a version of the same.
> Plus the fact that they have different laws and legal systems.
Why is this relevant? That's like saying "the flags are very different".
> Although I suspect neither of us speaks Swedish or German, so it would be hard to settle that one decisively.
I can understand Swedish just fine, and rudimentary German. Even if I couldn't, the legal, healthcare and educational systems in both countries are well-described in English language sources.
> Australia faces similar issues where West Australia has a decidedly different culture to the east coast states and it doesn't make sense to try and coordinate housing policy between them.
I'll perhaps grant that the housing situation may be extremely different from place to place, and coordination can be hard, but I still don't understand an iota of what you mean when it comes to healthcare and education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
Alaska is substantially larger than any of the European countries you listed, and is not very urban.
> I'm merely questioning your claim that "it won't scale".
Given how badly the US has mucked it up? With that level of technology sophistication, social dynamism and money? Pretty solid evidence that it can't be done. It got stuck in the morass that is politics at the US Federal level.
> Why is this relevant? That's like saying "the flags are very different".
European countries are coordinating healthcare at the equivalent level of a US state and it is working. The US has made moves to coordinate at the Federal level and it is not. The separate legal systems indicates that these are highly independent policy-wise.
> I still don't understand an iota of what you mean when it comes to healthcare and education.
Healthcare is similar to housing. Sickness is location-specific and population-specific. For education the arguments take a slightly different flavour; but boil down to different industries have different educational needs and a one-size-fits-all educational system will either systematically under- or over- educate students in different cities with different industry needs/opportunities.
Sure, but hospital requirements don't scale with area. If the US had a horrible healthcare system in Alaska, and a great one in urban areas, maybe we wouldn't have this debate.
> Given how badly the US has mucked it up?
Is the mucking up due to size though? That is the crux of the matter, and I can see no evidence that that is the case.
> Pretty solid evidence that it can't be done.
This sounds like insanity to me. It's literally one datapoint! Isn't that a bit like saying "China hasn't gone to the moon, so that's pretty solid evidence that the preference of rice over potatoes as main starchy staple makes moon landings impossible".
> Healthcare is similar to housing. Sickness is location-specific and population-specific. For education the arguments take a slightly different flavour; but boil down to different industries have different educational needs and a one-size-fits-all educational system will either systematically under- or over- educate students in different cities with different industry needs/opportunities.
There's nothing of substance in what you're saying here. You made a very bold claim, and all your evidence for it seems to be "oh it could be that, it could be this, maybe that".
They absolutely do. How can you say the requirements of getting emergency response to a sparsely populated area is the same as a much smaller and more densely populated area? Getting a appropriate response times to cover the larger and more sparsely populated area is definitely going to be more costly and difficult.
>If the US had a horrible healthcare system in Alaska, and a great one in urban areas, maybe we wouldn't have this debate.
Actually yes healthcare in rural areas is significantly worse. Urban is not great, but that is not relevant to the point, also they are not disjoint systems they share significant funding. Saying urban US doesn't have great healthcare doesn't disprove the point that rural areas have higher healthcare costs and worse outcomes.
https://hpi.georgetown.edu/rural/#:~:text=The%20rural%20popu....
You are describing density.
> Saying urban US doesn't have great healthcare doesn't disprove the point that rural areas have higher healthcare costs and worse outcomes.
Nor does rural areas having higher costs prove that European-style public healthcare won't scale to the US.
No but now the burden of proof is to show how it does scale when the requirements and characteristics of the users are clearly very different. European population density is in general higher than US, and in general European countries are more homogeneous.
Almost any uniform Federal policy would be completely broken for some part of the US due to its geographic extent and diversity. This is a recurring issue for policy that has nothing to do with social services. For example, the fundamental legal axioms around water management are different between the eastern and western US because it would be a policy disaster for that to be uniform. See also the disaster of trying to apply uniform highway policy in the US, which have since partly devolved back to local control.
Social services are similar, including the implementation of medical care and schools. We already have cost problems in some regions of the US where required medical facilities are virtually never used because incidence varies widely across widely separated parts the US, it doesn't average together, a large part of which is explained by genetics, culture, and environment. Every aspect of schools vary wildly from region to region, virtually nothing about it is uniform, because States recognize that maximizing school participation -- a social good -- requires respecting local conditions, culture, and constraints. I grew up across several geographically diverse parts of the US and experienced the extreme range of local adaptation first hand. There were some questionable local policies here and there, but in the vast majority of cases those diverse social service policies were trying to optimize local outcomes.
If there was a uniform and in-depth Federal policy for all of these things, the amount of flexibility and leeway required to not produce objectively worse local outcomes for many people would asymptotically approximate having no uniform Federal policy at all.
All of the European countries you list have a geographic extent that fits within a single policy jurisdiction for both healthcare and education in the US. In the larger US jursidictions, they devolve considerable control of these to more local authorities, recognizing the limitations of uniform policies in large geographic jursidictions.
How will diversity of population keep approaches from scaling well? How similar in experience must a population be for a policy to work for them, for example a policy of universal health care. I would have thought that the experience of being mortal would suffice, but evidently not.
> I would have thought that the experience of being mortal would suffice, but evidently not.
If that's so, why do we see different approaches to social policy in different cultures? Surely, they are all mortal?
I suppose that universal health care will work for diverse populations because once that is introduced to the population the benefit should be clear, and that really the only thing that should be required for universal health care to work for diverse populations is that they be human - hence my reference to mortality.
I believed this chain of thought would be clear, unfortunately I was mistaken.
Do you see how it might be a thing that different cultures approach differently?
Is this perhaps some sort of code for people of one ethnicity do not want to pay for people of another ethnicity? That seems to argue that because a political strategy of fostering ethnic hatred worked to shut down social programs then social programs do not work because different ethnic groups hate each other. Which is sort of like me saying because I scored a goal in the game you can see how trying to keep me from scoring goals is not going to work - might as well go home now and leave me the trophy.
I'm not sure where this tangent is going, but in U.S. many of us feel like total federal government control of healthcare would lead to bad outcomes in the long run, whether that's from deteriorating investment in new technology or through lack of local accountability or through rationing and extended wait times.
Americans are nothing if not impatient. The wait times I hear of for even routine surgeries like tonsil removal in Israel and UK blow my mind, as an American. I would not expect to wait more than a week or two for something like that in the U.S. but have heard it can take a year or more to get an appointment in those countries.
Seems like something the “greatest” or “richest” country should be able to figure out.
Are you suggesting the culture of rural Japan is the same one-size-fits-all as Tokyo? Or that Melbourne and inner-Australia are culturally the same?
As soon as we figure out how calling yourself some superlative and speaking of your exceptionalism makes things happen, it probably will, yes.
> Are you suggesting the culture of rural Japan is the same one-size-fits-all as Tokyo?
Much, much, much, much more so than that of San Francisco vs rural Montana, yes. Is this really controversial?
The US culture is so fragmented that it matters what state you're in for plenty of things regarding taxes, laws, employment etc. That's unheard of in European countries.
Then compare USA and EU. I would argue EU is even more diverse (former east block countries, and western etc. or areas like Guayana in Overseas France on South America)
And they figured this out by putting different authority on different levels.
There is no EU-wide health system of any kind. The EU is much less integrated as the US, it's really not close to being the "United States of Europe", even though many are pushing towards that direction.
> And they figured this out by putting different authority on different levels.
As have the US, apparently. Each state does what its inhabitants want to do and pay for. The argument is that because European countries have federal systems, so should the US. If you now compare the US to the EU, then there is no federal level health care system in the EU, only at what would be the state level when compared in that way.
As in "there are public health care system in the EU", but that's not because of "the EU" but because of the nations making up the EU using similar approaches in that regard. It's not that we all had some random thing going and then the EU decided in 2004 that we should all do a public system when Eastern European countries joined.
Please don't change history here. There is no EU-level health care system, the EU has not created public health care systems in member states and European countries do have varying approaches to health care, with more and less concentration on state-run programs.
And yes, there is quite some freedom, as British didn't want to replace the NHS, while Germany wants to keep their complex system, with private and public insurances and the assistance for state servants and all that ...
Four instances of the word “much” with zero instances of any evidence to back up the claim. Meanwhile, plenty of people move to Montana from California.
In Italy, for example, Sicily is very different culturally from Turino. You haven’t proved that US differences are larger, you just claimed it had to be and moved on.
==That's unheard of in European countries.==
Until you get to the section on Germany. A country with 16 states and strong Federalism built into their constitution. Belgium has 3 official languages. Your view seems pretty US-centric.
Free tuition, free healthcare for all has been proposed. Not free of course, it's simply taxed to the general public. Politically in the US, it doesn't sell. Not knocking it, a good argument can be made for these systems, and its a debate that needs to occur.
"Socialism" (which it isn't really) evokes a visceral negative reaction in the US among many. Being stoked by the media (aka those who have an opposing financial interest) of course.
The tax structure of the US makes it very hard for states to provide this as so much of our tax dollars go to the Fed. Then, as a blue state resident, a bunch of those Federal taxes go to poorer states. We could do a lot with the ~$4 billion annually we pay in taxes that go to other states.
== At the Federal level it is to some degree unprecedented to provide services at the level of quality and at the scale.==
Medicare? US military? Us postal services? And on and on.
The US made up 33% of revenue of pharmaceutical companies in 2017, 50% more than 15 Western Europe countries combined. [0] One may argue that pharma companies use US revenue to subside their cost elsewhere.
The US spent $4.7T on healthcare in 2018, of those 40% were paid by Medicare and Medicaid. In general more than 70% are from federal and state governments, employers and other non-household sources, the rest is out of personal pocket.
So no, there's been enormous government support healthcare spending in the US. The issue is efficiency.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/784420/share-of-worldwid...
[1] - https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
College education spending is also very high, as public colleges and universities are highly subsidized (typically an in-state student only pays about 1/3 to 1/4 of total costs, which is why out-of-state is more expensive) [2]. Keep in mind, low income students are eligible for Pell grants. There's a lot of federal and state funding of research, etc.
I would wager U.S. is among the highest in per capita spending for education.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...). [2] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
In healthcare, for example, we have created specific socialized programs for each at-risk population: VA for veterans, Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor, and CHIP for children. Meanwhile, everyone else is forced to enter the private marketplace.
In education, we’ve drawn lines which make a “per capita” number meaningless. If I spend $15k on one kid and $5k on another, my per capita spending is $10k. That doesn’t tell me anything about the spending each kid received. When you mostly fund schools through local property taxes, areas with higher property values can afford better schools. If spending didn’t matter, we wouldn’t consistently see the richest areas spending the most. They obviously see a correlation between the spending and student success.
In other countries, the government provides the money directly to the Edu institution, and therefore acts as the single buyer of education, in a way. And so there isn't that inflationary incentive. I think this could have a downside, as well, which is less need to compete for student's attentions. Although even that is nuanced, as making fluffier, happier student life isn't necessarily good either!
> geographic size
That might matter for things like transportation infrastructure, but surely being graphically large doesn't make healthcare, schooling or housing harder? At worst, it's surely irrelevant, and at best it might even be an advantage for some of those?
> population size
I ask another commenter about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518452
> diversity
How does this matter?
> military responsibilities
Arguably, the US is spending far more on the military than her responsibilities necessitate.
The diversity of the population matters because, for example, different cultural practices result in many different health impacts that result in a more diverse set of healthcare challenges aside from the technical ones. Even something as seemingly simple as patients being able to effectively communicate their health issues and healthcare providers being able to understand these needs is a challenge due to cultural barriers. We can make specific comparisons, but in general EU countries populations are more homogeneous than the U.S. [2]. There is significant challenge to be able to train and maintain a healthcare work force that can understand needs of a diverse population.
I'm not sure how spending on military affects healthcare directly either, but the VA program is definitely a factor in how the US spends on healthcare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16...
That would perhaps be a valid starting point for further discussions if the urban parts of the US had a good healthcare system.
> The diversity of the population matters because, for example, different cultural practices result in many different health impacts that result in a more diverse set of healthcare challenges aside from the technical ones.
Citation needed! This is just armchairing.
They aren't disjoint systems. The increased cost of serving rural areas directly impacts urban areas as well. They share Federal funding. Actually comparing whether or not cities have have better healthcare systems than rural areas is much better than trying to define whatever "good" means. And yes in terms of access to specialists and emergency care, they definitely do.
>Citation needed! This is just armchairing.
Sure.
https://patientengagementhit.com/news/cultural-barriers-limi...
https://patientengagementhit.com/news/understanding-national...
That we think there's "enough" of health care, education, and housing indicates that our view of "enough" is warped. "Enough" housing doesn't mean that you have 2 bidders on each house instead of 10. It means that you have vacant units sitting empty, and so if a landlord tries to raise rents, you go rent from (or squat in) the unit next door. Similarly, "enough" education isn't that you get into half of the colleges you apply to. It's that when you want an education, you log onto the Internet and get one for free. "Enough" health care means that going to a doctor is as easy and cheap as getting a haircut (which, given the amount of training needed to be a good doctor, seems unlikely without some really good AI).
The loans and government stimulus don't help. You get inflation when you have lots of money chasing few goods, and so areas with a lot of money involved (housing, health care, and education) tend to get high prices. But providers wouldn't be able to charge those high prices in the first place unless there aren't enough goods & services to go around for everyone.
That's a weird place to draw the "we hit major crises" line.
> It’s a pile of physical books and then the Kindle books. And you're reading them all at the same time. When you sit down to read, you just read the one that's the most interesting of that pile. It turns out those are the ones that you finish. A month later, there's a bunch that you're theoretically reading and you’re on Chapter Three and you're never gone back to it. That’s like having the shirt in your closet you haven’t worn in a year. It’s a signal to get rid of it.
It takes some time to parse out but he strikes me as simple to a number of politicians in UK recently - I agree with his deep values, if not his surface choices.
> The Observer Effect studies interesting people and institutions and tries to understand how they work.
Seems like they did what they said they do?
I enjoyed it, great takeaway that even at a16z scale it is possible to focus on process improvement as the goal because quantitative lag measurements are too slow to iterate and improve efficiently.
Expect Superhuman to announce new calendaring features soon and a follow up interview about how the thing he has a stake in has completely changed his life.