Marc Andreessen: recommendation

Transcript context

…In what sense are you still a thinker of the rural Midwest? I thought I was a fluke. I thought I was strange. It’s like, you leave the Midwest, you go to the coast, you get involved in tech. You’re on a very different path than the people I knew. I just assumed that I was weird and different. I got out here to Silicon Valley, and then I started to get oriented. Then I read this profile that I recommend to everybody, which is, Tom Wolfe, the great novelist, journalist, wrote a profile of Bob Noyce, who was the original founder of Intel and basically the father of the chip industry. I read this profile. I don’t mean to compare myself with Bob Noyce, but basically, Tom Wolfe describes an archetype. The archetype is the Midwestern tinkerer who basically comes out of a very practical, farming-oriented, mechanical, dirt under the fingernails, working with machines, with your hands, culture and background — literally for farming, for light mechanical work — and then basically ends up in advanced technology. So, I went in one shot, after reading that profile, from thinking of myself as a fluke to thinking of myself as a cliché. I think the cliché definitely applies. As a moralist, are you still rural Midwest?…

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