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Comment by throwoutway | Hacker News Reader

The story here is one where the public finds a man who claims one thing publicly and but does the opposite privately. The man wrote this essay [1] complaining that America needs to build, but turns out he is a NIMBY when it comes to his own home. This, on the same day the man invests in WeWork’s Adam Neumann's [2] new residential real estate company that surely will just make the problems worse, while trying to enrich investors (though the actual company's plans are pretty sparse in detail). What a spectacle of irony.

[1] https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/15/a16z-to-invest-in-adam-neuma...

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Marc Andreessen: "Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?"

https://www.zdnet.com/index.php/article/india-anti-colonial-...

Maybe its time to stop listening to Marc Andreessen.

Why on earth would anyone trust Adam Neumann with their money nowadays?

That was my first reaction too.

Forget about WeWork and put ethics aside, the guy turned (pretty much) nothing into billions, they're betting he will do it again. i.e. Neumann has a very high ROI.

He turned 22 Billion of funding into a 4 Billion market cap.

My read is he turned something into almost nothing. Or maybe you can say he scammed long enough for a few to profit off of later suckers. But I'm not seeing value creation at all.

If you are early, there is tremendous value creation. Greater fool theory.

It’s a dingy look on the industry.

I didn’t want to be the one to say it.

Early investors made a bunch of money, before bankruptcy lost everyone else’s money

The same reason people buy crypto.

They expect to resell it at a profit to a bigger sucker before the whole thing collapses.

Yea but investors didn't make money on Wework. So it's not like he's got a great track record.

Why would anyone trust Sean Parker with their money after he ran a music pirating service, got hooked on drugs, acted crazy, and burned out? Well, it worked out okay for Peter Thiel.

Look at the economics that a16z needs with fund sizes in the billions. Funding small companies won't do it for them unless they invest in a lot, probably more than they can manage duedil or spend time on; they need investments who can deploy a lot of cash. With, obviously, some chance of success.

Hopefully for their LPs Adam learned some lessons.

well if he repeats the wework arc then the you want early in and early out

I feel like I’m in a different dimension here. I thought this guy JUST raised millions from a16z for some shitty crypto startup, but absolutely nobody brought that up when talking about Flow. So I had to go google it, and sure enough, it did actually happen. This guy must have some Epstein levels of dirt on these VCs to rake in money at this scale for companies that don’t generate any revenue or in the case of Flowcarbon, have any tangible product.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-16/adam-n...

> The story here is one where the public finds a man who claims one thing publicly and but does the opposite privately.

They say things to sound they are challenging Status Quo but behind the scenes - it's business as usual.

And I am surprised that anybody is surprised about a public person using the “do as I say, not as I do” rule :)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2021/11/05/118-...

Or a man who claims one thing publicly and whose wife signs his name to the opposite privately.

It's almost as if spouses aren't always of one mind when it comes to politics.

>> he is a NIMBY when it comes to his own home.

There’s not a drop of irony here. It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods. You’re not temporarily embarrassed millionaires - you’re just embarrassing.

Let's call it hypocrisy then.

The thing about Marc Andreessen is that of all VC-types of people he seemed like one with a modicum of tech legitimacy, given his history/role in the development of the web.

Unfortunately it seems to be quickly evaporating.

I was at UIUC shortly after he graduated and the general impression was that he basically just stole Mosaic from the University to create Netscape. Not sure that bestows him with any tech legitimacy. He's certainly a good businessman.

Well, Page/Brin's BackRub was basically a science citation index, yet here we're. Add FB into that collection too. Ideas are nothing (we all have a lot of them), execution is everything.

...and timing, and connections, and money, and education, and mental health

exactly @paulryanrogers

Evidence refuting this, and showing him very actively involved:

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...

he could have been actively involved in creating Mosaic as a university project, and still be accused of leaving the university and stealing the software to create a new commercial product.

The source code was public so not much to steal other than the knowledge he already had.

Having worked directly with several of the people involved and spent many years at UIUC.

My impression has been that UIUC is/was jealous and wanted the IP / recognition. They admit he built it, but wanted a cut.

Marc named the image tag. 'IMG'. Even better, it's standalone! No closing tag!

So simple. And yet sublime. Given a million years, I'm not sure I could have come up with that solution.

this made me smile

What if that legitimacy is merely a story crafted by his press department? It so obviously will help interacting with his target audience: devs who take pride in technical skills and knowledge.

Why do you give people who can easily afford to have a team craft an image the benefit of believing it? I categorically don't. Not because I am of bad faith, no, precisely because I trust people to do what's in their interest: make sure your fund gets to talking with your audience.

Is it so hard to believe that people with “technical skills and knowledge” can be hypocrites?

The fact is, pmarca’s engineering chops are not a conspiracy invented by non engineers. He did in fact create a brilliant piece of software (Mosaic and, at some greater distance, Netscape), and the technical elites of Silicon Valley saw this and are responsible for much of his wealth and influence.

But the mundane truth is that engineering chops do not automatically translate into virtue, tact, political acumen, investment prowess, or any number of other skills or positive attributes. It is understandable that engineers want to believe they are on a higher plane of human existence but the evidence is inconclusive.

No publicist tricked us into thinking Andreessen was a brilliant programmer, we tricked ourselves into thinking brilliant programmers are necessarily superhuman.

> Is it so hard to believe that people with “technical skills and knowledge” can be hypocrites?

It is not, just as it is not that PR departments know how to appeal to hypocrites.

>It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods

Link to some examples? My impression is that many HN users are associated with the startup community, and therefore like what Andreessen or PG is doing, but I don't think they prop them up "like gods" or even demigods for that matter. You can like what someone is doing in one area (ie. startups/VC), without thinking they're gods or blindly believing whatever they say.

Or just honesty.

I frankly don’t want housing the kinds of people who can’t afford houses anywhere near me. I don’t say this publicly, but the council candidate who “protects home values” has my vote.

I agree housing affordability is an important problem. I am not willing to have so much as ruffians in the nearby grocery store to fix it though.

What a sad frightened person you must be.

Their real name must be Poe Slaw.

As a parent I also prioritize cleanliness and low crime over pretty much anything else. The difference between Marc and I is that I don't pretend to not be a NIMBY. If this causes me to be labeled online as a sad frightened person, so be it.

Can understand this, as I own a home in the East Bay, but I fight the urge to be a NIMBY, because I've come to realize, it's not good for the area in the long run.

One of the main causes of our homeless problem is our high-housing cost. At least from what I've read, the Bay Area has such a high-level of homelessness because people who normally can afford apartments can't and are forced on to the streets. We have some of the highest housing costs in the world, and if prices keep going up, homelessness and crime will get worse and worse. We need to bring prices down (or at least keep them from going up like crazy as they have been) so that we can support a range of workers, from cooks and teachers to well-educated techies and business people.

Just my two cents.

Or they can move to someplace they can afford?

Then who will do the lawn care, cook, and serve? Will they have to commute hours everyday to make coffee and clean floors?

It's absurd. Communities are most healthy with a mix of income levels intermingled.

>Then who will do the lawn care, cook, and serve? Will they have to commute hours everyday to make coffee and clean floors?

Sure, why not? They can then charge a fortune for these services because of the commute time.

And for restaurants and the like, they can simply charge extremely high prices to eat there, to pay for workers needing to commute so far. And if the wealthy people refuse to pay for that, the restaurants can just go out of business, and the wealthy people can just cook their own food at home.

I don't really see the problem here, except that this wouldn't result in a healthy community, but it seems these wealthy assholes don't actually want healthy communities. So maybe the healthy communities should be elsewhere, and the wealthy NIMBYs can just live in their own enclave and cook their own food and clean their own floors.

Seems like a huge leap to go from apartment shopping to sleeping on the sidewalk.

I’m not sure it’s the same population.

It’s called not being able to pay rent.

Are a disproportionate number of those people suffering from addiction and or mental health issues? Yes. But make no mistake, the gap between people apartment shopping and people living on the street is frighteningly small in a housing market as expensive as SF.

It came as a surprise to me too when I first heard about it, but it kind of makes sense. There are a lot of people living at lower incomes (not necessarily poor, just low), and in the Bay Area, their biggest expense is rent. All it takes is for them to lose their job or incur a big medical expense and they can't afford their apartment. So a lot of people who would normally live in cheaper apartments are eventually forced on to the street.

Yeah, i'm not opposed to high rent costs, but San Francisco is in the top two in the world in cost for renting apartments. This is just insane and it seems better for the city in the long run if this could be brought down.

https://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-cities-worldw...

By reducing housing affordability, you are generating the exact problems you so fear.

Your children will be worse off for your antiseptic attitude. The world is not a shopping mall.

The "affordable housing" in Atherton would likely be $2.5M townhomes. Dunno what sort of ruffians you think would be buying those.

I am sure we are relative ruffians to wealthy people. Simply could be the difference between executives and entrepreneurs to whiny employee types like myself.

If the home values drop from 7MM to 6.5MM, it's not exactly let the riffraff in.

It's a good thing you don't own your neighborhood then I guess.

I don’t need to own it. I just need my neighbours to agree and elect politicians who agree.

NIMBYism doesn’t require ownership to succeed. Just that the existing population resist.

With sparkling rhetoric like “don’t let the ruffians in the neighborhood” you are well on your way, godspeed

There are regular employed people who are poor, prople who only male $100k per year and they don’t fit into your neighboorhood? Why not move out if you don’t like that part of the city evolve? Cities change over time, just accept that.

Just to give you another perspective, it seems like they're not building low-income housing, they're just building denser housing than is normal for the area ("multifamily overlay zones").

As someone who lives in the Bay Area, guessing that if they went ahead and these were actually built, the housing/rental prices of these units would still be ultra high. Yeah, housing is so bad here, they'd probably just to attract young tech workers or people with at least decent jobs.

The SF market alone was 100K >$750K 2Br units ten years ago.

Unless someone supports paving Dolores Park, they’re a NIMBY.

Why Dolores park specifically? Or is it all parks should be paved to create new units: Central Park in NY, Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo, etc

It triggers all the FAANGr YIYBY tyoes.

Who let that dual income family in?

Income? Yuck. There goes the neighborhood

>I frankly don’t want housing the kinds of people who can’t afford houses anywhere near me.

how near is near? Should they be placed into a ghetto? or taken off the planet?

>I am not willing to have so much as ruffians in the nearby grocery store to fix it though.

To me it sounds like being poor is already a crime according to you.

Not only this but ppl simping Brian Armstrong at the height of Coinbase's stock price .... who didn't own any coinbase shares

You understand that people's qualities are across multiple dimensions, right?

Also, just because someone makes the wrong choice or says the wrong things does not make them a charlatan?

That seems to be too nuanced for today's generation.

You're either 100% good or 100% bad, no in between.

And of course there is no 100% good, only the 100% good who have yet been discovered to be 100% bad.

The power of marketing works best when least expected, and for some reason this data-driven fact-based engineering bunch is either just not (surprisingly!) not cognisant of the mechanics of investors using their brains and are gullible, star struck, almost willfully ignorant (seeing the lengths the innocence of the wealthy is sometimes defended). Or people are cognisant, and then must be participating in the charade, on the basis of greed; not biting the hand that feeds you is good exercise for pitching.

What other mechanisms could be at play for this worship?

Anyway thanks for your concise comment; it could not be more on point!

I read that essay and did not get the impression Andreessen was necessarily talking about some ugly steal box to house people (the proposal). Particularly one you'd regulate into existence in someones neighborhood. It was more about inspiring people to want what you want to build.

They may be a hypocrite, but that doesn't make them incorrect or bad at identifying markets.

In other news: Fat man says eating less reduces weight and sells pizza

My own view is that we should build more, and that new buildings should be of a higher quality than existing buildings in the area. The exception is if the existing buildings is very new, in which case equal quality is acceptable. Furthermore, there's absolutely no lack of low quality areas to upgrade in US. Is the difference between NIMBY and YIMBY simply that YIMBYs disregard quality?

It's not the quality of the building so much as the socioeconomic status of the occupants that they object to.

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