Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…If you want to be, but they’re just plain bankers, right? [laughs] Yes, sort of. People don’t know that when the Medici ruled Florence, they were plain bankers, but Cosimo de’ Medici — the line went that he had to take over the state in order to preserve the banking business, and then the family became very politically important. Then, of course, it was the sponsor for the arts and, basically, sciences — DaVinci and all these amazing people, Michelangelo — for decades and then centuries that followed. Aspirationally, I would have been a Medici. Had I not been a Medici, I would have tried to get as close to the Medici as I possibly could. I would like to think I would have been some form of either a proto-scientist or proto-engineer. DaVinci’s notebooks are full of engineering — he was an engineer — they were full of engineering diagrams and plans, including things that have, to this day, never been built. He actually built military machines at one point, and maybe there was proto-engineering going on there. Then, as you said, finance — they created an entire world of that really helped develop economy as we know it today, from a very early stage. Being part of that banking system, I think, would have been very exciting at that time. I hopefully would have been able to talk myself into one of those. Sculpting — I think I lack the talent, so maybe banking instead. Say we put you back in the Neolithic period. What are you doing?…

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