Marc Andreessen: preference

Transcript context

…Do you see a difference between the funding the flying cars and the SpaceXs and Teslas versus something that improves the aesthetic heritage of humanity? But does one of them seem like a different category than the other to you? Or is that all included in the venture stuff you're interested in? It's a little bit like saying — should we fund Thomas Edison or Beethoven? If push comes to shove and we can only fund one of them, we probably should fund Edison and not Beethoven. Indoor lighting is probably more important than music. But I don't want to live without Beethoven. I think this is a very important point. People have lots and lots of views on human existence. There's lots and lots of people trying to figure out the point of human existence, religions and philosophies and so forth. But kind of what they all have in common, other than maybe Marxism, what they all have in common is — we're not just here to get up in the morning, work in a factory all day, go home at night, be depressed and sad, go to bed. We're not just material, right? Whatever this is all about, it's not just about materiality. There are higher aspirations and higher goals. And we create art, we create literature, we create paintings, we create sculptures, we create aesthetics, we create fashion, right, we create music, we create all of these things. And fiction. Why does fiction exist? Why is a fake story worth anything? Because it enhances your life to get wrapped up in a fake story. It makes your life better that these things exist. Imagine living in a world where there's no fiction, because everybody's like — “Oh, fiction is not useful. It's not real.” No, it's great. I want to live in a world where there's fiction. I like nothing more at the end of the day than having a couple hours to be able to get outside of my own head and watch a really good movie. And I don't want to live in a world where that doesn't happen. As a consequence, funding movies as another example of what you're talking about, is a thing that really makes the world better. And here's the other thing. The world we live in actually is the opposite of the world you're alluding to. The world we live in is not a world in which we have to choose between funding flying cars and funding NFTs or like in my example, funding Edison versus funding Beethoven. The world we live in is actually the opposite of that, where we have a massive oversupply of capital and not nearly enough things to fund. The nature of the modern economy is we have what Ben Bernanke called the global savings glut. We've just got this massive oversupply of capital that was generated by the last few 100 years of economic activity, and there's only one Elon. There's just this massive supply demand imbalance between the amount of capital that needs to generate a return and the actual number of viable investable projects and great entrepreneurs to actually create those projects. We certainly don’t have enough flying car startups, we also don't have enough art startups. We need more of all of this. I don't think there's a trade off, we need more of all of it. Have we reached the end of history when it comes to how venture capital works? For decades you get equity in these early stage companies, you invest more rounds, it's a 2-20 structure. Is that what venture is going to look like in 50 years, or what's going to change?…

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