Mark Andressen: why optimism is always a winning strategy

Mark Andressen for the word in his pocket does not go. A tall, bald, energetic venture capitalist who invented the first popular Internet browser, co-founded Netscape, made a fortune by investing on Twitter and Facebook at an early stage, has since become the main resident philosopher of Silicon Valley. He is omnipresent on Twitter , where his machine-gun bursts of bold statements on various topics gathered an army of adherents (and engaged in several very large battles). At a controversial moment for the IT industry, Andressen is the main captain of the technology industry and a tireless advocate for his particular vision of the future.

I liked the moment when you first met Mark Zuckerberg and he said something like “What was Netscape ?”
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He did not know.

He was in high school when you founded Netscape. How does it work in an industry where everything changes so quickly that in ten years the collective memory is completely overwritten?

I think this is fantastic. For example, now it seems that there are two Silicon valleys. The first consists of people who were here during the collapse of 2000, and the second is from those who have not seen it, and their psychology is radically different. Those who survived the collapse of 2000 seemed to have scar tissue, because then everything went peddling and it was bad.

You came to Silicon Valley in 1994. What was it like?

Here everything is extinct. Complete silence. After the giant PC boom in the 80s, when Apple and Intel, and Microsoft in Seattle were active. And then the US was hit by the economic recession - in 1988, 1989 - and this against the background of a rapid ten-year rise in Japan. Silicon Valley had such a short-term bright flash, but Japan was going to pick up everything. And then the American economy went downhill. You take a newspaper, and there only endless suffering and misfortune. Technology in the US is dead; economic growth has stalled. All American children, idlers of generation X, have no ambitions, they will never achieve anything.

What did you do?

I just went to college. I went my own way. I appeared here in 1994, and Silicon Valley was in a lethargic dream. In high school, I generally thought I would have to learn Japanese to work in the technology industry. My main feeling was that I missed everything, everything was already over. The movement was in the 80s, and I came too late. But in general, I may be the most optimistic person among all I know. I mean, I'm incredibly optimistic. I am optimistic, perhaps to the point of error, especially with regard to new ideas. My typical tendency when meeting a new idea is not to ask “Will it work?”, But to ask, “And what will happen if it works?”.

I work a lot to maintain this setup, because it is very easy to slide into another mode. I remember when eBay began to make progress , I thought: “Oh, nafig. Damn the flea market? How much shit do people have in garages? Who needs it? ”But these were irrelevant questions. The eBay guys and early investors said, “Forget about whether it works or not. What happens if it works? If the project shoots, then you have the world's first global trading platform, you have a stream of goods of all kinds, you open the true market price of goods.

But you do not think that everything will work.

Not. But there are people who are programmed to be skeptics, and there are people who are programmed to be optimistic. And I can say, at least in the last 20 years, that if you are on the side of optimists, you are usually right.

On the other hand, if there were more skeptics in 1999, people could save their retirement savings. Is this the importance of skepticism in the technology industry?

I do not know what it gives you. I will say this. If you can point to periods of time in the last hundred years, when everything has calmed down and nothing has changed, then maybe it is. But it is unlikely that such a time will ever come. Skeptics are not right all the time.

Nowadays, Silicon Valley plays a cultural role that Wall Street could play in the 80s.

There are pros and cons. But entrepreneurs will tell you that it is better - not necessarily easier - to develop a company during a recession, because there is less turmoil around, it is easier to recruit people, less competitors. Entrepreneurs say that during the economic boom it is difficult to develop a business, because everything is agitated around and too much money is meant for too many marginal companies.

Today, there are several large companies in the technology industry: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple. Which of today's start-ups do you think will join them?

All our startups.

You have investments in many companies.

And you should love all your children equally.

One of the things that you really like, at least on Twitter, is to dig out the old pessimistic predictions of people like Paul Krugman, where they compare the Internet with the fax machine of the new generation and all that.

This is part of the overall feel of IT business. So strange, but in fact it is a fundamental part of American culture. You read Tocqueville , right? At the very heart of American culture, a paradox is hidden: in theory, we love change, but when change really manifests itself, they are greeted with hostility. We love the changes in general, but do not love them in particular. Absolutely about every thing that anyone here ever did, there were always people saying, “This is bullshit. It will never work. This is stupid".

The media is definitely more skeptical about technology than you are.

There is a kind of cultural criticism, individual manifestations. Obviously, I do not agree with many of them, but I am sure that a very correct set of topics has been chosen: will the technology take all the jobs? Uneven income distribution, this whole discussion about the destructive effect of technology.

I noticed that you didn’t like Jill Lepore’s essay on the destructive influence of technology in The New Yorker.

There is not so much analysis as primitive cry. But the argument that drives me the most is often met three years ago - that innovation has ended. "Great stagnation." There is such an economist in Chicago, Robert Gordon, he says: “Everything new now is nonsense. How can this be compared with the industrial revolution? There will be no more economic growth. ” Honestly, I would rather accept the criticism that technology is changing the world too much than the fact that they are insignificant.

If we talk about staffing Silicon Valley, you can probably use online education. But I have a question, who better cope with such training? These are self-taught people who can work independently. Studies show that the poor are a minority.

It is too early to judge, because we are at the initial stage of development of this technology. It's like criticizing DOS 1.0 and saying that it will never turn into Windows. We are still in the experimental stage of the prototype. We cannot use the old approach to education in the world. We can't build so many campuses. We do not have enough space, not enough money, not enough teachers. If you can go to Harvard, go to Harvard. But that is not the question. The question is how a 14-year-old teenager from Indonesia will start living: a natural economy or a Stanford quality education course that will allow him to choose a professional career.

There is one thing that people really underestimate: the influence of the entertainment economy on education. Right now, with massive online courses, the number of students is small - and you just video the professors in the audience. But let's project the situation for the future. Imagine that in ten years the basic course of mathematics (Math 101) is taught online, it is respected, fully accredited and a generally recognized certificate is issued. What if we have a million students expected every semester? And what if each one pays $ 100? If we know that we can get $ 100 million in revenue from this course in a semester? What budget will we allocate for course preparation?

You can hire James Cameron.

You can literally hire James Cameron to do an introductory math course. Or, for example, study the wars of the Roman Empire in virtual reality, walking around the battlefield or flying over it. And below there are fighting, and the program shows you the maneuvers that occurred in reality. Or how about recreating original Shakespearean productions in the Globus Theater?

Can we talk a bit about robots, one of your favorite topics?

Of course.

People have worried for decades that automation will destroy the economy.

Nobody likes to talk about the old. The former farm work was absolutely terrible. I mean, farmers got up at six in the morning and worked 14 hours a day. Work at the plant - people died there. Miners - they are trying to protect their mining jobs. This is terrible, terrible work. New works better. They are simply better. This is happening all over China, and now also in Indonesia and Vietnam. Every time Foxconn opens a factory, literally hundreds of thousands of people submit questionnaires in the hope of getting a job. In developing countries, people are ready for anything, just to get on modern production, because the alternative is much worse. So, in fact, thanks to technical progress, work is getting better.

But suppose a machine was invented that cleans hotel rooms. We can process rooms more efficiently, hotels reduce costs. But all the maids are now out of work. Your thesis is that they have to undergo retraining for another profession?

We are returning to libertarian things — I believe in the social safety net. I think that at the individual level such changes are real and they are important. I myself grew up in a rural area of ​​Wisconsin in the 70s. I grew up in an agricultural, industrialized country. We lived like that. So I believe in the social protection system on an individual level.

From an economic point of view, the situation you described is an example of maintaining a balance in the amount of working time (lump-of-labor fallacy), because housekeeping is not the only work in hotels. If you go to a modern hotel in a large city, you will see that there are many employees of other professions there. All these people who work in the spa, in fitness clubs, wine bars, guides. These are all new professions. If you went to the hotel a hundred years ago, no such professions existed. This is the cycle of development. You go up the welfare ladder, make more tax deductions - and this money goes back to the social security system.

Here I can not agree. You assume that this money will automatically flow into the social protection system, that it will react to growth and return resources back. To do this, we need a conscious change in legislation, to which many disagree.

I am not from these people. Our country has a very advanced benefit payment system.

Let's look at the situation with the hotel from the other side. Suppose we abandoned the upgrade. We have a magic machine that cleans the rooms, but we don’t use it because we want to leave jobs for the maids. Well, then in the old days you need to leave the work at the hotel to the guys who kindle the stove. Do we have to give up heating systems and return them? Before the refrigerators there was a whole layer of workers who stabbed and brought ice. Should we return to storing food on ice, which is prickled and delivered by hand? If you consider cars to be your enemy, then you must go back and put everything in its place, right? If you follow this logic, you need to go back to the very sources, that is, to a natural economy. And it's better to make clothes with your own hands.

Let's talk about the nature of labor. Keynes said that when everything is automated, we will have no material needs and no need for labor. All food will be delivered or synthesized ...

We are working on it. But we are not talking about the fact that there will be no need for labor. Keynes wrote in the 20s and 30s, when a serious problem for a man was to get food or to heat a house. But it’s a misconception that a person’s needs are limited, and once you satisfy them all, you don’t need anything else. We have food and clothes, and that's enough for us. We do not need a spa, do not need a psychologist, do not need video games, do not need space tourism, do not need artificial organs, do not need cornea implants for blind people, do not need thousands of other things that we discovered.

There is another point of view of Milton Friedman that I hold to. Friedman believed in the inaccuracy of Keynes's opinion for the same reason that I, too: human needs and needs are infinite. We will never be satisfied. Go to Keynes and tell him that every middle-class parent in the USA will want to enroll a child in violin lessons.

Last night, you posted a tweet that caused a great response: “It’s hard to be a billionaire, because no one will say that your stupid ideas are really stupid.” Was it autobiographical? I mean, do you care?

I'm not a billionaire! That is why it amuses me so much! Everyone immediately thought I was talking about myself.

But you are in such a position that if I worked for you, I would be afraid to call your stupid ideas stupid.

My tweet is about billionaires who do not understand what is happening to them. They will find out last. Because they do not feel how the situation is changing. They just feel something like "I am the one who I was before, I go my own way, I do everything right." And very rarely do they really stop and think: “Everything is somehow better related to me than ten years ago.” By the way, the phenomenon is not limited to billionaires. The same applies to presidents, senators, mayors, all those in power.

So how can you, Marc Andressen, be sure that you hear honest feedback?

Every morning I wake up and a few dozen people on Twitter explain to me in detail why I'm an idiot, which is actually very useful.

Have they ever convinced you?

They definitely keep me in shape, and we'll see if they can convince me. I mean, I love to argue.

Oh really?

For me, the important advantage of Twitter is that there are more people with whom you can argue.

Judging by your tweets, you sleep about three hours a day.

I would say intermittently.

Do you have a bed in the office where you can relax during the day?

Now for the first time in my life I have an office with a door, so for the first time in my life I have a sofa in my office. So I took a great nap yesterday afternoon, actually.

What does a venture capitalist do all day long? I was sure that you attend dozens of meetings a week, but what conclusion can I make when I read your tweets 24 hours a day?

In reality, our company [Andreessen Horowitz] makes about 15 decisions a year.

This is a pleasant life.

Yeah. The result of our work is investment income. We are trustees for investors. They entrusted big money to us, and not to other people. The task of the company is to make investments and get profit from them. And we make about 15 major investments per year. So these are important decisions. At the end of the day, what are we responsible for the most? Those 15 decisions and their consequences. I work a lot with the founders and CEOs of companies from our portfolio. In fact, I'm in constant communication with them.

Returning to free time. I know you love Deadwood. Is he still your favorite show?

Yes. Favorite of all time so far.

In fact, there can be no better choice for a venture capitalist, because there the action takes place during the gold rush, when the foundations of society are laid. Do you think you could become a gold prospector since the Wild West?

Oh, sure I could. Deadwood is in Dakota, but it is obvious that California is also suitable for him. So yes, without a doubt ... All my life I have admired the concept of the frontier.

Where I see the spirit of the frontier now is in the movement around the extension of life. I think many techies are annoyed that we have not yet conquered death.

On this occasion, the amazing thing is that if you do a survey of Americans and ask if they would like to prolong life, then amazingly many people say no. Something like 70% or 80% say they would not want to.

Do you share their point of view?

I think there are two pitfalls to beware of. One of them is the phenomenon that as people age, they become less and less susceptible to new ideas. Not individually, and there are many exceptions, but collectively, from the point of view of society. Another interesting point is inequality. If you give people another 20 or 50 years to accumulate wealth, the concentration of money by age group will become very noticeable.

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(Kevin Roose) New York Magazine, 20 2014
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