Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…And there's also just this culture in tech, Silicon Valley, in particular, of sharing, or not trying to keep these secrets. Everyone on LinkedIn is always like, "How is this free?" Like, it's just the way it works. Yeah. Somebody said, "Silicon Valley is a company town, but they company is Silicon Valley." Right? And again, at the loneliest coast, again, is one of these great n equals one. If the level of n equals one is somebody, and I've run startups before, I've run companies before, if the level of n equals one of, like, running a company, that's just a giant pain in the fucking butt. Because your secrets are walking out the door, and your employees are walking out the door, and the whole thing sucks. But the other side of it is you also benefit from that, right? Because you get to hire people with all these skills and experiences, right, and you're in this ecosystem that adapts and channels talents and skill and knowledge and people into the new fields. So there's kind of the push and pull of that at the level of just being an individual CEO. At the level of just being in the ecosystem to your point, yeah, it's an absolutely magical phenomenon. And by the way, for all of the issues in Silicon Valley, I did the count once, I think AI is the ninth major technology platform in the history of Silicon Valley. Right? Silicon Valley is still called Silicon Valley, we haven't made Silicon here in decades. Right? We used to actually... You know it's called Silicon Valley because they used to make chips, right? They used to have the actual fabs were in Silicon Valley. And then they designed them and they made the chips. And so, and that was wave one starting in the 19... No, that was actually, no, that was more wave three or whatever. But that was when the area was named in the 1950s. But now we're on wave nine. Right? And the company town phenomenon where the company is, the industry, again, the indeterminate optimism, nobody had to sit and plan and say, "Okay, in the 1990s Silicon Valley's going to do the internet, in the 2000s they're going to do the smartphone, in the 2010s they're going to do the cloud, in the 2020s they're going to do AI." It's just, right, the indeterminate optimism of ecosystem flexibility of the ecosystem that they Silicon Valley could morph into all these categories, and again, maybe a testimony to indeterminate optimism. This reminds me of the meme of how we're all just wrappers over sand, everything we're building is just wrapper over wrapper, wrapper, wrapper.…

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