Marc Andreessen is the co-creator of Mosaic, the first commercial web browser, and one of the founders of Netscape, a pioneering dotcom company that was eventually sold to AOL for $4 billion. Then he became a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, investing in the likes of Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Lyft, Slack, Pinterest, and many others. He's currently worth a couple billion dollars.
Smart guy! But somewhere along the line, like Elon Musk, he went crackers. Last week I wrote about his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan show, where he claimed the Biden administration was leaning on banks to blacklist political enemies and prevent them from using the banking system.
Now, unless you're deeply into MAGA, this probably doesn't sound like the Joe Biden we've known for the past 50 years. However, I hadn't listened to the whole podcast—it's three hours long!—and today I ran across something else Andreessen said:
The AI thing was very alarming. We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans.... Basically just full government control. Like there will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They told us, don't even start startups, like don't even bother. There's no way that they can succeed. There's no way that we're going to permit that to happen.
W-o-o-o-o-w.
They said this is already over, it's going to be two or three companies and we're going to control them and that's that. Like this is already finished.
Um . . . I don't think anyone said this. And I really don't think anyone said this in a meeting full of people like Andreessen. I mean, you'd keep this limited to a pretty tight circle if you were actually going to do it, right? You certainly wouldn't tell a guy who had been increasingly critical of the administration for years.
I dunno. Andreessen has been convinced for a while that the government—the Biden administration in particular—is deeply hostile toward startup companies. Regulatory agencies, he says, have been "green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain [and] Artificial Intelligence."
This doesn't make any sense. What is true is that Lina Khan has tightened up approvals for big company mergers and acquisitions, and the SEC and other regulators have cracked down on crypto fraud. Andreessen thinks this is terrible for startups, many of which hope to be acquired by large corporations. In fact, the result has been a reduction in big-dollar M&A but no change in the acquisition of seed-stage startups:
Nor is VC investment activity low except compared to the boom year of 2021:
Regardless, Khan's pressure on mergers combined with tons of crypto fraud that was prosecuted seems to have been what turned Andreessen into a Trump acolyte. It's really kind of weird.
But it's all part of the strange dynamics of Silicon Valley politics over the past few years. I admit I don't entirely understand it, and I probably should. What's the best evenhanded account of recent Silicon Valley history out there?
I don't know who Andreessen hangs out with but people like two of my old corporate bosses -- Larry Ellison of Oracle and Scott Mcnealy of Sun Microsystems have long been right-wing wackos who despise anything that might regulate their thirst for unfettered expansion. Andreessen is not such an outlier but in the past we just didn't know where they stood.
A friend of mine is Larry's first wife. That is why I know who paid for his nose job.
Andreesen was thought of as a bad human being from way back in the 1990s, when we innocently imagined people like Larry Ellison were as bad as spoiled entrepreneurs get.
Little did we know ...
I can't speak for the people who mostly run Silicon Valley, but the billionaires who invest there seem pretty much like billionaires anywhere else: totally insulated from the real world, receiving information from only a carefully curated list of sources, so who knows what they actually end up believing.
I was there in 1994 when Mosaic came out. Andreesen was the public face; Eric Bina (and a few others) was the one who did the heavy lifting. That's not downplaying Andreesen's work: it did require public outreach to get Mosaic adopted, after all. But he was in no wise the technical heavyweight. When Netscape started, they hired a bunch of hard-core hackers (in addition to the Mosaic core team), like Jaime Zawinski, to actually build the browser product. So again, Andreesen wasn't the key technical guy.
I think it's relevant to remember that he's been pushing a global money-laundering scheme (aka Bitcoin) for over a decade, and lying about it in detail since his first open letter about Bitcoin. You can go back and look at that open letter and see just how much BS and gaslighting he performed: I've done so a few times over the last decade, just to mark him to market.
He's been a con-man since then at least. So the idea that he's spinning bullshit stories now? Yeah, that's already priced-in.
Money conveys the belief that one's intelligence and abilities were granted by Nature/God, divining one's exceptionalism over the rest of us mediocre, unexceptional colony ants. And publications like Inc. and Forbes fawn over such folks, giving them needed feedback to boost their confidence of their righteousness.
And that, folks, is how we got a serial cheating, lying, convicted, immoral fucker voted back into the White House.
It isn't just "power" that corrupts. Big money also corrupts absolutely.
The Silicon Valley has always been chock full of Ayn Randian supermen who rose to the top soley due to their intellectual superiority and work effort. Those other millions of people that actually did the work? They're just losers. The crypto folks in particular are just con artists so they love having a kindred spirit like Trump in the Whitehouse.
I think the techbro phenomenon is more recent. Hewlett and Packard, the founders of the Valley, were standup guys, as were the Intel founders like Noyce and Moore. Things started to go off the rails with Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field. The Apple stuff was fine, but it was the look that sold it. Jobs was all about the vibe. Then there was so much money flooding in that it drew the sociopaths like Musk, Thiel, and Zuckerberg. Now it's all image and ruthless monopoly.
Met a woman who had worked at Apple while on vacation a few years ago. Her first day at work she was waiting in the lane to pull into the Apple employee parking garage when a guy in a big Mercedes with no plates pulled up and cut in front of her. She initially started flipping him off until she realized it was Steve Jobs. She spent her first morning at Apple waiting for a phone call firing her, but eventually realized he probably never even noticed her.
... and was used to it, because it happened all the time.
Speaking of things Bill and Dave... Andreesen had been a board member of Hewlett-Packard Company and later Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Sigh.
I think you've nailed the key piece of the puzzle. There are many, many different kinds of startups that are not tech-bro/AI/crypto startups, and they are thriving. But these SV guys are, without question, devotees of the Ayn Rand cult, so of course the only startups that matter are the ones they believe in. Ayn Rand Objectivism drips from Elon Musk with all his madness about fathering superior beings and geoengineering Mars. I'm sure the rest of the tech bros are afflicted with the same disease. I suspect they all view Trump -- although he is a "kindred spirit" in his worldview -- as a useful idiot that they can use to control the "inferior" masses while they work to create their Randian utopia.
Crypto and anti-trust sentiment are the primary reasons for the mind-rot among billionaires in Silicon Valley, if not a preexisting condition.
Crypto represents a "free enterprise government-free currency" even though the implicit guarantee of anti-fraud laws and the inability of anyone to use it as currency are conveniently ignored.
Anti-trust sentiment is really anti-anti-trust sentiment since the writing of simple code brings exclusivity on the writer for his genius [gender is on purpose] and the government should not be able to take it away...only enforce the writer's monopoly for all time.
Marc Andreesen was in the right place at the right time to get carried along with the Internet/dot.com wave, and either had the presence of mind, or good fortune to cash-out at the right time before it crashed on the shore.
I imaging there may be one, but of all the companies he's co-founded, which are actually still around as independent entities?
Being around as an independent entity is the goal of very few startups.
More’s the pity.
I am not immediately sure what's the best history of Silicon Valley recently.
I do think that in looking at the whole "debanking" question, NRA vs Vullo and all the material that came out in discovery in that and related case is probably worth looking at. The NY regulators were definitely pressuring financial entities to avoid dealing with the NRA, specifically because of its politics, using a very expansive definition of risk. I would find it unsurprising that the same had happened to other groups that were smaller and less able to fight back.
NRA was selling insurance against killing or injuring people through careless use of firearms. Insurance for intentional crimes is illegal. NRA had a case that regulators were using strong language but what Andersson really means is SEC and FCC were coming down on Sam Bankman-Fried's banker friends and others bankrolling questionable crypto exchanges or ventures.
Kara Swisher's *Burn Book* is pretty good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/books/review/burn-book-kara-swisher.html
Also, Folding Ideas' *Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFTs* is fantastic on just exactly how horrifying the overall goals of 'Crypto' actually are.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
folding ideas has several good video-essays about multiple forms of financial shenanigans. the one you mention is likely thwe most relevant but they have others.
What happened to Marc Andreesen? He's rich.
Also, I think that Peter Thiel is a bad influence on the other Gulch billionaires.
This has more to do with it than anything else except for the scarcity of persons with expertise in the industry at day 0.
Basically Michael Flynn with a few additional zeros on his net worth.
These entitled fucks basically think that, whenever the universe doesn’t give them exactly what they want, there must be a deep state conspiracy involved.
Russian mind control? I realize that’s insane but, just what the hell is going on with these entrepreneurs?
I'm really coming around to the idea that people have always been crazy, that the process of turning crazy is like a contagion, and it's only now with social media that we can truly see how it works in real time. So, if we had a list of what makes up Andreessen's information environment (and that of his buddies), I'm sure it'd help explain a lot.
Netscape Navigator was my idea, therefore anything I think is right! LOL, these guys are truly wacko...
Assholes gotta asshole. And SV is full of assholes.
I don't know what it is with these crypto lovers. There are some obvious big issues with crypto as a technology, but they wave it all off. They hate fiat currency, for reasons I don't fathom.
There's a mythology about crypto where it's somehow more "democratic" and "powered by the people". It's a lie. It's powered by money. The more servers you have the more coins you will mine.
And the "voting"? It's not one-person one-vote. It's one computer, one vote. Again, that translates to more money more votes.
crypto currencies are when idling your car generates worked sudokus which can be traded for heroin.
an nft is a heroin-sudoku with a drawing on the back.
More and more coming around to the idea that being extremely wealthy leads to mental decline and delusional states, it keeps you too far insulated from the real world and how it works.
Watched a Patrick Boyle video yesterday ("Yotta Bank & The Problem with Fintech!") that featured some of Andreeson's Rogan interview, and couldn't believe the crap the guy was spewing.
This is peculiar for Kevin Drum, who normally manages to track down all sorts of data sources to provide unique information.
I know Kevin is on Twitter. All he has to do is browse Marc Andreessen's stream to find the details. Names named. Details. There's a whole analysis by a law firm. (*Link included below).
The argument that Marc (and others) is making, is that power-brokers in the government are deciding which industries can succeed and which cannot. Crypto is one on that shit list. What happens if your company is on that list? Your company gets debanked. Your employees get debanked. All kinds of people are replying to Marc, saying, yes, yes, this happened to me, here's the details.
This is big enough now that there will be Congressional investigations. There will be prosecutions. (Whether successful or not, depends: is it against some law to debank someone who is starting up a company you think should not exist?)
(By the way, I voted for Harris, and have voted for Democrats in every Presidential election.)
What happened to Marc Andreessen? Arrogant power-wielders in the Biden administration. Did Biden know about it? Probably not, just like Republican Presidents probably never know the details of all the corruption done by assholes in their administrations.
* https://www.cooperkirk.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Operation-Choke-Point-2.0.pdf
So-called "Crypto currency" is a scam. It makes complete sense that regulators would try to use financial regulations to stop further illegal activities. It is straightforwardly illegal to ignore Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering laws. The whole entire point of Secret Money is to tie a blindfold over your eyes and plug your ears while shouting the national anthem at those laws.
The only reason there are going to be 'prosecutions' is that too many politicians are on the take and would like that cashflow to continue, please.
Legitimate crypto companies have been begging for reasonable regulatory compliance. Debanking somebody who has 'Crypto' in their title is not regulatory compliance, it is using the power of government to bully, without a hearing, without any means to plead one's case.
To look at an example of a legitimate crypto company (Coinbase):
1) Know Your Customer: https://www.coinbase.com/blog/identity-verification-and-financial-compliance
2) Most cryptocurrency is transparent and traceable (unlike gold, money, diamonds). See https://www.coinbase.com/blog/consumer-protection-tuesday-cryptos-vital-role-in-law-enforcement
3) Cooperation with law enforcement: https://www.coinbase.com/blog/u-s-marshals-service-chooses-coinbase-to-safeguard-trade-its-large-cap
4) Reducing cross-border fees: 'PayPal is supporting cross-border transfers for stablecoin users across about 160 countries – with no transaction fees, versus 4.45% to 6.39% in average charges in the $860 billion global remittance market' ( from https://www.coinbase.com/blog/the-state-of-crypto-the-fortune-500-moving-onchain )
If you want to know how crypto is being used for services other than cryptocurrency, ask your favorite AI the following question:
What are some examples of crypto companies providing a service, where they are not in the cryptocurrency business?
Uh huh. Sure.
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-102
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/business/coinbase-settlement-anti-money-laundering.html
Coinbase isn't the equivalent of an FTX or Mt Gox (yet) but they don't have to be the literal worst, to still be horrible.
Regarding the first link, that is an ongoing case, still being litigated. Coinbase and other crypto companies argue that crypto is different than typical securities. The industry has pled for sane regulation for this new instrument. I suspect the case will be dropped by the new administration and, one would hope, decent regulations for this new industry will be adopted.
Regarding the second link, yes, it looks like Coinbase was failing to comply to decent requirements. Shame on them. That was more than a year ago and they claim they have fixed things.
One should note that both Bank of America and Wells Fargo have had significant actions brought against them by regulators in recent years.
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-71/
Such effishuncy!
Very wise!
Bank bad!
(By the way, I voted for Harris, and have voted for Democrats in every Presidential election.)
I express doubt about this coming after "This is big enough now that there will be Congressional investigations. There will be prosecutions," those are right wing fantasies of retribution. You gotta wonder why people show up online to defend grifters...
Anyway, good time to remind y'all to look at https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ again to see what crypto is really all about. =)
My understanding is that the reason a crypto organization gets in trouble with the banking system is this: all of crypto is just a way to enable money laundering, and it is crypto's utility for money laundering alone that keeps Bitcoin's value up.
Money launderers need high volume mixers to hide their transactions, so they're naturally only going to use the most popular coins. And that's BTC and maybe ETH. And at any given time, if BTC is trading at $X, a launderer is happy to pay $1.01X for the coin, and take $0.99X for the coin, because that's way cheaper than actually running your cash through a pizza parlor, or whatever people do these days. And money launderers don't hold BTC for long, so they don't care that they're losing 2% on their transactions.
Innovation in Silicon Valley stopped around 2010. There was too much money to allow innovation that might disrupt the profits. Innovative startups were bought out and stripped for parts lest they become competitors in the future. Just about all of modern Silicon Valley innovation is bull session stuff familiar to anyone in grad school back in the 1970s.
Silicon Valley is like Detroit in the 1960s and IBM in the 1970s. They had cushy businesses and didn't want the technology to change so their business models were all about squelching new ideas and businesses. It works, but only for so long. Eventually, some new stuff leaks in and we get things like the rust belt and 50 year old legacy systems barely hanging on for decades.
Kevin always seems to equate successful-in-business with “smart”.
I think a lot of these guys thought that if they were tolerant of gays and minorities, the Dems would let them run wild with their ludicrous schemes. Turns out they aren't too bright.