Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…But you guys get preferred shares and board seats, and rightfully so, but wouldn't Burnham look at this and say — “You're not the owners and you do have some amount of control over your companies.” I think he would say that we're a hybrid, we're a managerial entity that is in the business of catalyzing and supporting bourgeois capitalist companies. He would clearly identify the startups that we fund. He would be like, “Oh yeah, that's the old model. That's the old model of Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford, or one of these guys.” You can just draw a straight line from Thomas Edison, Henry Ford to Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg. That's that model, it's a founder, it’s a CEO, at least when they started out owning 100%. They do have to raise money most of the time, but they're throwbacks. The modern tech founders are a throwback to this older model of bourgeois capitalism. So you're right in that he would view us as a managerial entity, but he would view us as a managerial entity that is in the business of causing new bourgeois capitalist institutions to at least be created. And I think he would credit us with that. And then he would also say — however, our fate is that most of the companies that we fund and most of the founders that we back end up over time, handing off control of their companies to a managerial class. When the companies we fund get to scale, they tend to get pulled into the managerial orbits, they tend to get pulled into the managerial matrix, which by the way, is when they stop being able to build new things, which is what causes the smart and aggressive people at those companies to leave and then come back to us and raise money and start a new bourgeois capitalist company. I view it as — the economy is like 99% managerial, and if we can just keep the 1% of the old model alive, we'll keep getting new things. By the way if venture capital ever gets snuffed, it's outlawed or whatever, it just fails and there is no more venture capital, there's no more tech startups or whatever then at that point the economy is going to be 100% managerial. And at that point, there will be no innovation forever. People might think they want that. I don't think they actually want that. I don't think we want to live in that world. Will this trend towards managerialism also happen to a16z as it scales? Or will it be immune? What happens to a16z in five decades?…

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