Marc Andreessen: prediction

Transcript context

…Don’t worry, I didn't have enough views to be monetized anyway. If something horrible happens then you could be in a ditch for 20 years. But if things continue the way that they have, for the last 50 years or 80 years. There'll be multiple cycles, and there'll be a chance to make money for people who make good investments. So it's probably not that, and then there'll be the micro explanation, which is we just make bad investments. We invest the money, but we just invest in the wrong companies and we screw up. And that's of course always a possibility. And probably the most likely downside case. The other downside case is — I would build on what I was mentioning earlier, from Bill Janeway. The other downside case would just be that there's just not enough technological change happening. There wasn't enough investment in basic research in the preceding 50 years in areas that actually paid off. There wasn't enough underlying technological change that provided an opportunity for new entrepreneurial innovation. And the entrepreneurs started the companies and they tried to build products and we funded them and for whatever reason, the sectors in which everybody was operating just didn't pay off. If we hit five clean-tech sectors in a row or something like that, the whole thing just doesn't work. In a sense, that's the scariest one because that's the one that's most out of our control. That's purely exogenous. We can't wish new science into existence. And so that would be a scary one. I don't think that's the case. And in fact, I think quite possibly the opposite is happening. But that would be the downside scenario. How vulnerable is a16z to any given single tech sector not working out? Whether it's because of technical immaturity, or by their regulation or anything else? But if your top sector doesn't work out, how vulnerable is the whole firm?…

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