Packy McCormick: recommendation

Transcript context

…Like picking the brain. Yeah, take over the world. But I don't think it's compounding the same way that interest would where next week even cooler things will happen, and then next week even cooler things will happen. There will certainly be ebbs and flows. We're going to go into the holiday season here where everything, I'm going to get panicked because my graph looks a lot flatter than it would have otherwise. I'm actually taking some time off. So maybe this whole thing falls apart and we regret having this conversation in the first place. But hopefully, the ebbs and flows are just average higher over time. In terms of the a16z advisory, that's a really fun one when I think we're just mission and values aligned. I think Chris said that there's a lot of complex stuff happening and the overall arc is really good and really positive. But if you can't translate what's happening, why this is going to be actually good for people, and actually what's happening beneath the surface here, everybody's just going to miss out and dismiss this whole thing. I think really, the advisor there is like, working with some of the companies and their portfolio to think about how they tell their story, writing pieces like I wrote with Chris in The Economist, they'll introduce me to companies that they have invested in and are excited about. There's no guarantee that I have to write about them or anything like that, but maybe I invest in them, maybe I write about them. I think the main thrust of the partnership is that we're both out there just trying to explain what is going on, why this can be a potentially good thing, where it can go wrong, and why it's not as scary as it seems. So I think it's really all about that. We're both—this is going to sound way cornier than I want it to—just working in service of this thing that's happening. One of the things that I think really impressed me, I signed on, obviously, as you alluded to, in the middle of them hiring all these people. I was like, so excited to announce it and I was like, oh, man, everybody's out. I don't know about that. So I was like, can I do a snarky tweet? Not snarky, but I was going to do a tweet that was like I'm joining a16z too. I went to the offsite of the team in California. It was so clear that this big team of people was there because Andreessen was just throwing its resources behind and making sure that this nascent movement had the resources it needed to grow. So there's a bunch of people working on the regulatory side there. There's a bunch of people working on the technical side there. They have genius engineers with other Web 2.0 protocols and companies were trying to hire who are just in-house there working on behalf of portfolio companies. I know that I'm romanticizing the services model of venture capital right now. There's obviously a reason that they're doing that. We did a two-part series on it.…

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