Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…And WhatsApp allows you to scale and make it more efficient to build on these groups of heretical ideas bonded by humor. Yeah, exactly. Well, and this is the thing, and well, this is the running kind of thing about group chats. It’s not even a joke. It’s true. If you’ve noticed this principle of group chats, every group chat ends up being about memes and humor. And the game of group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable as you can get without actually tripping it. And literally every group chat that I have been in for the last decade, even if it starts some other direction, what ends up happening is it becomes the absolute comedy fest where, butt they walk right up the line and they’re constantly testing. And every once in a while somebody will trip the line and people will freak out. And it’s like, oh, too soon. Okay, we got to wait until next year to talk about that. They walk it back. And so it’s that same thing. And then group chats is a technological phenomenon. It was amazing to see. Number one, it was obviously the rise of smartphones, then it was the rise of the new messaging services, then it was the rise specifically of I would say combination of WhatsApp and Signal. And the reason for that is those were the two big systems that did the full encryption, so you actually felt safe. And then the real breakthrough I think was disappearing messages, which hit Signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago. And then the combination of encryption and disappearing messages I think really unleashed it. Well, then there’s the fight over the length of disappearing messages. And so it’s like I often get behind on my thing, so I set to seven day disappearing messages and my friends who are like, no, that’s way too much risk. It’s got to be a day. And then every once in a while somebody will set to five minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory. Yeah, 100%. One of the things that bothers me about WhatsApp, the choice is between 24 hours and seven days, one day or seven days. And I have to have an existential crisis deciding whether I can last for seven days with what I’m about to say.…

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