I stupidly thought this was going to be an article about how it's much more likely that schmoozer types are able to fund their projects, leaving others in the dust, but instead it mostly just rails against regulation.

At the time, my stance on the Marc Andreessen article was "because we have systematically defunded basic scientific research since the early 2000's", and I stand by that. To me, government funding of research is the only current mechanism by which non-schmoozers are able to get their projects funded (though admittedly, it's super flawed and also involves a bit of political positioning/having the right partnerships/etc).