Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the main problem that needs to be solved by tech for hybrid meetings or hybrid workplaces to really succeed over the longer run? Yes I’m not convinced . . . Look, in the long, long run . . . I’ll pick a new science fiction. The movie Kingsman, which is a funny spy movie spoof — they have the conference room scenes, where all the British agents are meeting around the conference table, and it turns out, they’re all virtual. They’re all wearing their augmented reality glasses, and so, they’re all seeing holograms of each other. There are going to be technological approaches — virtual reality, augmented reality — in the future that give you basically the recreation of a physical meeting environment. They already exist. These things already exist. Our friend Balaji [Srinivasan] is teaching courses right now in VR in a virtual classroom. These technologies do already exist. That will happen. I think that will be a big deal. Having said that, I don’t think that’s necessarily the goal. I don’t think that a hybrid meeting is necessarily an equilibrium, or at least a primary equilibrium. I’m not sure if it’s something that you need to center in on. The reason I say that is because, one, it’s reductive, or it’s looking backwards, which is to say, we used to have in-person meetings, and now we have some people remote, so now we need hybrid meetings. It’s working backwards from that. Well, there’s another way to think about that, which is, actually, maybe we shouldn’t try to have hybrid meetings. Maybe, in fact, hybrid meetings are the exact wrong idea. Maybe they’re the wrong idea because, maybe, instead of combining the best elements of being local and being remote, maybe they combine the worst elements of being local and being remote. And maybe instead, what we want to do is shift more to the edges, and we want to have — number one, we want to have communication systems and management systems that are really built for remote work, first and primarily. And we have some of those, and some of those now work really well. Then maybe, when we get people together, we don’t want to have meetings. Maybe we want to have very immersive, very social, very human bonding — a much more intense level of actual human interaction and relationship building than you have in a meeting. Take a step back on this. The office is an artifact of the technology of a time and place. I mentioned the Second Industrial Revolution. The office is a derivation of the factory. There was the factory and the idea of mass production, and then there was the idea of all the time-and-motion studies and all these guys who did that. And out of that, you go back, look at the history — you’ve got schools, you’ve got jails as you see them today, and then you’ve got offices. It’s this idea that you have to bring people together in this highly orchestrated, mechanistic, mass way. Empires — fun historical fact: The Roman Empire was not run out of offices. They ran the world, yet there was no office. There was no office building. this highly orchestrated, mechanistic, mass way. Empires — fun historical fact: The Roman Empire was not run out of offices. They ran the world, yet there was no office. There was no office building. The Roman aristocrats worked out of their homes, and then they went to the Senate, and then [laughs] they went to their country house. There was no office building for administering the Roman Empire. I don’t know about the British Empire. I’m guessing they probably didn’t have a lot of offices. They maybe had a couple of offices in London, but they probably didn’t have a lot of offices either. This office construct is a time-and-place-kind of thing. You need some punch card. You need to get people in at eight o’clock. They need to leave at five o’clock. The calendar is regimented by half-hour or hour-long meetings. In a school or prison, the bell goes off at 8:00 a.m. In the office environment, the iPhone alarm goes off, and it’s time for me to go to my meeting. That’s an artifact of a time and place. We now have all of these new technologies they didn’t have a hundred years ago. We’ve got video. We’ve got Slack. We’ve got text. We’ve got WhatsApp. We’ve got this endless array of all of these new technologies making it possible to go more portable. The cell phone was obviously a huge breakthrough. This was actually an incredible cause agent for the cell phone, which is just crazy. The desk phone — why are you at your desk? Big part is because that’s where your phone is, and that doesn’t make any sense. Your phone should be in your pocket. So we’ve been on these technological trends to liberate ourselves from this artificial construct. But again, human nature being what it is, the artificial construct makes sense at a moment in time. A hundred years later, it doesn’t, but somebody actually has to step up and reinvent it. I suspect the best-run companies over the next 10 years are not going to be the companies that are the best at hybrid. I suspect they’re going to be the best companies that are great at remote, or they’re going to be companies that take the choice of having people have actually a much deeper level of human interaction much more frequently. They’re going to push it on those extremes as compared to half-hour, hour-long meetings in the office.…

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