A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
frankzliu.com
frankzliu.com
It's not a terrible fact, but it's one to be aware of. All the `"X Technology" [that Y VC firm has recently raised $4Bn of capital to chase, cough cough] has massive potential to upend [big industry], here's why` articles are compensated-for boosterism.
There's still signal in there, although it's mostly in the meta-facts of what they choose to talk about and what they choose not to talk about.
Tom Scott made an interesting video about internet advertising regulations a while back. [1]
Thypicaly, there are "majority advertisers". Their [combined] advertising spend is itself negotiating power, which typically includes PR fluff articles for agencies.
On top of that, PR agency gives instructions what to write and organizes utterly expensive ads from unrelated entities. Everytime you see an article that screams "that's an ad" or is disclosed as such, well... It is most likely payment for something else.
They were and remain big crypto investors and it's pretty weird that the essay doesn't acknowledge how much talent and money crypto sucked up. He asks where the supersonic aircraft are and - ignoring that they have awful externalities - there is actually a supersonic jet startup. A16Z hasn't invested in Boom, though, near as I can tell.
A16Z is a leading venture fund - if anyone's gonna build the future, they could use A16Z's money. So why is so much of what Andreesen wants from the future not what they've invested in?
A quick review of their website and some cursory googling reveals that while boom is not in their portfolio they have invested in a company developing a super sonic jet engine technology (Astro Mechanica) [1] as well as a company producing precision machine parts for aerospace (Hadrian) [1] and various other companies that intersect with the area. [3] Perhaps they wanted to invest in Boom but the deal wasn’t right or they are skeptical of that particular company or they simply never got the chance but clearly they are putting their money into this area and it’s worth researching before judging them.
1. https://www.notboring.co/p/astro-mechanica
3. https://a16z.com/portfolio/ (Look under American dynamism)
You still want to invest in a particular company or people who you believe will make you tons of money. Just because someone is active directionally in what you believe will be the future does not necessarily mean you should put your money with them.
I loved it. Something about a famous rich person putting that much effort into something so amateurish and clumsy, while apparently being so confident, in an eager-college-freshman sort of way… I dunno, call it endearing, maybe.
I mean it’s either that or it’s horrifying. I choose to pretend it’s endearing because there’s too much horrifying already.
This is basically what "longtermism" is. It's "we will amass huge amounts of capital to rule you now, because we know best, and we promise that as a result your (great-great-...)grandkids will have it better than if we hadn't".
It's just getting rich and playing with toys but with an ethical justification for it.
It reminds me of how back in the day there was all sorts of Creative Bible scholarship around it being "easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven". Like they were all "actually the 'eye of the needle's is the name of this big gate in Jerusalem. It's super easy to get a camel through it!"
EA has done some neat stuff in the here and now in terms of looking at charities et al. But anything claiming to benefit the unborn trillions of the far, far future is just someone making excuses for themselves.
- AI safety is an imminent threat and the best solution is to form an AI company and sell large amounts of stock to big tech
- I’m super smart so I need to be the one to work on this
- I need to earn loads of money so that I have the resources and focus to save humanity
0. 2nd century softening: https://www.academia.edu/40130012/Widening_the_Eye_of_the_Ne...
Do small players in the US economy have equal access to the market, or are they overshadowed by near oligarchies?
Are you always so bicameral?
as far as control of media, traditional media is becoming increasingly irrelevant and when free speech is allowed on social media the economy becomes more free.
and small players seem to disrupt all the time. openai being the most obvious recent example. twitch being another notable example before that.
i usually don't respond to distracting personal questions, but your use of bicameral confused me a little. did you mean to say binary?
It is extremely common for large private firms to have weighted control in an economy. Sometimes their control is bolstered by government and sometimes it is hindered by it. But in a completely unregulated market it would be common for monopolies to pop up which could then control large sections of the economy. There simply is no simple linear relationship between "free markets" and government intervention.
> when free speech is allowed on social media the economy becomes more free
Sadly the loudest "free speech proponents" who run social media firms are actually just interested in allowing the speech they want. They will still do everything they can to limit the speech of those they disagree with.
Let's go to the extreme with your logic. If you completely remove the government you end up with the mafia textbook. The easier way to win at the game is taking out the competition with lethal force. Once that's done there's no one to compete with you, no "free market", congratulations you won.
Why compete in bringing value when you can just use your money to takeout the competition.
> i usually don't respond to distracting personal questions
These were specific questions to tease out why you're presenting free market OR planned economies as the only choices- it smacked of certain type of central north american libertarianism that uses Heinlein's early teen reader simplifications.
OpenAi being described as a small player is laughable, small players don't appear with one billion US pledged in backing and sheperded by core established technocrats.
BTW, the question was: "Is the US as it operates today a free market?"
Do you have a clear answer there?
i think a more useful question is "what about the existing US economy is what makes it work/effective?" another useful question is "what about other economies make them less effective than the US economy?"
to answer the first question, the US economy works better when it's a freer market. magatte wade gives a convincing answer to the second question about africa when she points out it's generally very difficult to start a business in african countries.
i'm curious about what alternative you are interested in promoting and how. are you against free markets or do you have ideas on how to make markets more free?
I don't: that is a different question which isn't as useful as the one actually asked. Like the person you responded to without answering, I, too, am interested in hearing your direct and clear answer to the question, "Is the US as it operates today a free market?"
Would you mind answering that question, please?
While I don't think the existing economy is so binary (bicameral?), you are free to assume either a free market or not and make your arguments accordingly to explore the principles of free markets versus planned economies. I don't think a critique of the general principles of free market versus not relief on my specific answer. We are talking about ideals espoused in a self-proclaimed manifesto, so it's appropriate to speak about the ideals.
That has been my observation, too: it is not a free market, but rather a composite.
Why do you think Americans chose to implement the "non-free" parts? What do you imagine they want out of government intervention, and why? Why do you think that Americans believe intervention is better than no intervention?
Those are the questions I think are worth discussing along the lines of the initial question, if the goal is to change what people want. You first must understand, empathize with, and internalize their motivation for what they currently want.
As a call back to how this started you yourself partitioned global(?) economies into
> you have free markets (which the manifesto supports) or planned economies
so you did in fact think that economies are this OR that.
For those of us in the real world many G20 and othe economies are hybrid with a mix of both features and "free market" is a loose term of idealogy that can mean one thing to readers of Adam Smith in his contemporous context and other things to various flavours of modern US libertarians.
Very good in the feudalist’s worldview though!
Believe it or not, humanity's economic markets cannot be fully described by two simple categories.
i am arguing that the word was misapplied to the essay since the essay was promoting free markets and it's central planning that offers opportunity for totalitarian control.
In reality, you start with a state and then have increasing regulatory capture by large private entities who turn the state into a system that exists purely to enforce their property rights. As they do so they eliminate public purpose.
Whether you have planned totalitarianism or anarcho capitalist totalitarianism the result is the same. If you have 100% returns to either labour or capital, or you try to eliminate either public or private purpose, then you must have totalitarianism.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto imagines that you can have no state AND no regulatory capture, it's garbage. There are only 2 things in the economy: labour and capital. You have public purpose and private purpose. You balance those things, you have social democracy and innovation. You let it slip to any extreme and you're gonna have a bad time.
You could have a natural monopoly form in anarcho-capitalism but unless they also grabbed a monopoly on the use of force and barred competition (basically became the state) then if they did abuse their monopoly position they would inevitably have competition arise even if it was required to route around whatever their monopoly was.
That's absolutely inevitable.
That's why I call it feudalism. What you just described is like the middle ages with various independent scattered kingdoms, or like a collapsed state where rival warlords compete for control, with the occassional uprising.
So the obvious assumption is that Ben and the other leadership is supportive of it.
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Like he's the author of the post, at the top of the page.
It’s funny how the better way is never “end aristocracy” and secure equality of condition
Just more feudalism with the rich never fighting just betting
and what is "equality of condition" and how do you achieve it?
It's quite common to gloss over arguments or ignore data that don't support their cause.
I have tremendous respect for a16z, a firm that helped pioneer the practice of working with and nurturing founders rather than forcing them out pre-IPO or minmaxing term sheets.
but to do so under the guise of being helpful and impartial is just plain silly.These 'emerging stack' articles do promote their own companies, but are nevertheless useful for newcomers into a field, to quickly grasp the process and the players. If you don't like it, compile your own version.
I've used some companies recommended in their data architecture and it worked very well.
"Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week."
Maybe I am ignorant in thinking that by now everyone knows that they are just pump and dump operators. Even without financial implications lot of their blogs appear clueless about technology. They seem to target folks who may find Gartner quadrants too advanced.
Winners in the tech space are increasingly pre-determined by VC-influencer cos/ individuals, who create the buzz around products.
Marketing for - conservative agenda, liberal agenda, gun ownership, gun safety, biden laptop, trump files.
If you ask "who is paying for this piece of writing" many times you'll find a pretty clear slant.
It's A16z's blog. What did you want them to do?
What was interesting was once things turned for our fund, we must have fired whoever was their source because the paper went hostile and published some really detailed and damaging articles.
That or the press is just trend following - always backwards looking trying to come up with reasons for what already happened. (CEO was great until CEO was awful). You will see many cases of this in how the press covers particular companies/CEOs. Guys like Bezos who jump before the worm turns are smart.
But I think a16z has spent a lot more time and money on their marketing efforts, especially as it relates to crypto. I for one am sick of hearing news stories, only to find that they're thinly veiled a16z marketing pitches for crypto scams.
Some of us do it more than others, depending on the topic or point of the post. Market maps do it a lot more than position pieces, as you'd expect, for instance. Anyways, the feedback is good.
Now you have complete moron GP/MD level people in echo chambers talking about technology and you cannot determine if it is a real technical discussion or they are simply targeting YOU as the next mark.
There is a HUGE difference between being successful by identifying trends and doing straight up rug-pulls. As a VC, their record is tainted and I would be suspicious of everything out of their mouths.
1. Help to create a deal-flow by writing about a current thing or their specialization in tech;
2. Promote its portfolio and pump it in every possible way for it to increase in value;
3. Promote its agendas and narratives like regulation/untiregulation.
So, yes. A16Z's media channels are a marketing tool.
I have no idea what the OPs company does, but I do agree with the title.
Availability entrepreneurs are “social agents who understand the dynamics of availability cascades and seek to exploit their insights. Located anywhere in the social system, including the government, the media, nonprofit organizations, the business sector, and even households, these entrepreneurs attempt to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their own agendas. They do so by fixing people's attention on specific problems, interpreting phenomena in particular ways, and attempting to raise the salience of certain information.”
Marc goes on to say very transparently...
"What am I doing with this blog post? Trying to spark an availability cascade about availability cascades."
It appears that a16z's strategy was successful. You are posting about a16z's blog posts thus contributing to the spread of the blog posts ideas.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010066447/stung-by-media-cov...
Now some genius might respond with "people have always been like this" and that is likely true, but the scale nowadays is vastly different. The omnipresence/constant exposure is making it worse and, because parents aren't actually raising their kids anymore, there is no entity left to correct all this nonsense in the minds of the next generation.
Or it's being outlawed doing so, of course.
just stop
nfx has good stuff about network effects
avc talks about stuff from Fred Wilson’s point of view
But my favorite is https://worldaftercapital.org by Albert Wenger, a partner at USV. Because it is clearly NOT about marketing and it’s about sharing his worldview. A venture capitalist talking about a post-capital world!
https://medium.com/mcdonalds-technical-blog/strangulating-th...