
Marc Andreessen: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas” - allenleein
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/marc-andreessen-take-ego-out-ideas
======
6stringmerc
> _So if technological change were going to cause elimination of jobs, one
> presumes we would have seen it by now._

...considering this statement was delivered while the US Workforce
Participation is at 30+ year lows while productivity and technological change
has made significant inroads during that time (ex: Macintosh 512k vs. iPhone
7), I think he's missing a large chunk of the, uh, big picture.

Then, contrast one of his well reasoned and very telling thoughts about the
future:

> _All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually
> a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch
> through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? What if you get
> to spend that hour playing with your kid or reading the news or watching TV
> or actually working because you don’t have to worry about driving?_

Because in the United States, we should be working even while we are getting
to work, because we don't work enough? SMDH. To me, the Working Class has
plenty of reason to be cynical about this vision of the future..."playing with
your kids in the car" time or not.

~~~
Cpoll
> Because in the United States, we should be working even while we are getting
> to work, because we don't work enough?

No, because if you work-day was originally 8hrs of work + 2hrs of commute,
it's now just 6hrs of work + 2hrs of work.

~~~
jcoffland
A lot of people would puke of they did a hour of reading email in their car.

~~~
inanutshellus
Just turn off the windows. _Click_ Voila, no car sickness. ;)

~~~
concede_pluto
Motion you feel but don't see is the problem. Maybe a translucent display?

~~~
trevyn
Or an active suspension that cancels out all bumps. This is actually my
fantasy for self-driving cars; such a suspension is relatively expensive, but
if cars are shared and autonomous, each car can be more costly.

~~~
retsibsi
It's not just the bumps, though, it's the acceleration. The car is inevitably
going to speed up, slow down, and change direction, and I don't think there's
any way of canceling that out. I'm almost certain I couldn't read in even a
perfectly-suspended car without feeling sick.

~~~
trevyn
Sure there is, just change the gravity vector; this is how motion simulators
work.

------
mvpu
"Take the ego out of ideas" is sound advice for _investors_ , not
_entrepreneurs_. Ego is a loaded word, but if you define it, in this context,
as an irrational belief that you are right and the world will catch up, then
it's essential for every entrepreneur. "New ideas" get no support. You're the
only support. You have to _strongly believe_ that the world will get there, do
whatever it takes to convince them to get there, and survive long enough to
bank on that moment. Without that ego in your idea, you probably won't survive
long enough.

~~~
nostrademons
You still need to be sharply realistic about your own ideas, though. Blindly
charging ahead with the first idea that occurs to you, as an entrepreneur, is
probably not going to work no matter how strongly you believe the world will
get there. Neither will _not_ charging ahead at all, assuming that because the
last 10 ideas failed the next one will too.

Many years ago on HN, I think before he even became part of YC, Paul Buchheit
said "You have to be arrogant enough to believe that everybody else is wrong,
but humble enough to believe that you may be wrong too." That about sums it
up.

~~~
seppin
> Blindly charging ahead with the first idea that occurs to you, as an
> entrepreneur, is probably not going to work no matter how strongly you
> believe the world will get there.

Statically, you're just as likely to be right with the first idea as the one
you're sat on for months

~~~
nostrademons
Sure, but statistically, if each idea has a 10% chance of working, you're
significantly more likely to have one good idea if you test 10 ideas (1 -
0.9^10 = 65%) than if you test one idea (10%). And even if you work really
hard at that idea, so that its chance of success goes up to 20-30%, you still
would be better with the 10 quick tests.

In practice, that usually means do the minimum you can to verify the key
assumptions of each idea, back out and try something different if any key
assumption doesn't hold, and if you find something that has a good chance of
working, stick with it.

------
d--b
I would say more broadly "take the ego out of work".

In tech, we meet so many people who are emotionally attached to their work,
who would treat their production as 'their baby'. This is a terribly common
counterproductive bias. It prevents from:

\- taking criticism productively: people "put their soul" in their work, and
then someone tells them it's perhaps not the best way. Do hear them.

\- assessing one's position objectively: people who are attached to their work
often misconstrue their vision with the reality of the work. They tend to
minimize weak points and emphasize strong points.

\- delegating your job away: people infatuated with their work have a hard
time giving it away. Necessarily, the delegate will screw it up.

That should be rule number 0 of all jobs: Be invested in the mission, not in
the solution

------
BjoernKW
> All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually
> a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch
> through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room?

This is ridiculous. That's what our supposedly most innovative thinkers can
come up with? Turning your car into a living room so we can have even more
commuting (with all the wonderful side effects that come with it ...)?

What about eliminating the need to commute in the first place?

~~~
blhack
Maybe not everybody wants to live in a population dense metropolis?

1hr commute outside of Minneapolis, Duluth, St. Cloud, or any of the other
metro areas in MN and you're living in a beautiful cabin in the woods.

~~~
BjoernKW
So, why not work from there while enjoying the beautiful view and only go to
the city if personal presence really is required (which most of time it
isn't)?

~~~
collyw
To be fair that is a culture problem rather than one that can be solved with
tech (well it already is solved by tech).

~~~
BjoernKW
Is it? In a larger context I think it's very much the job of tech and
technological solutions to bring about cultural change.

Keep in mind, sharing files and chat essentially were solved problems long
before Dropbox and Slack came along, too. However, it was only with these two
companies and their products that a wider audience adopted those solutions
because finally someone got the UX right.

------
wyc
Re: tech creates jobs, Tyler Cowen's Average is Over has an interesting
passage about automation:

"Keeping an unmanned Predator drone in the air for twenty-four hours requires
about 168 workers laboring in the background. A larger drone, such as the
Global Hawk surveillance drone, needs about 300 people...an F-16 fighter
aircraft requires fewer than 100 people for a single mission."

It's well known that the industrial revolution created countless new jobs that
were unimaginable at the time, a sentiment echoed in The Second Machine Age by
Brynjolfsson. But how do you pick the winners that will bring the most jobs?
Some say disruptive innovation, but it still seems like an open question.

~~~
troygoode
An 4-16 fighter mission isn't 24 hours long though...

------
davidf18
> "Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people
> involved in transportation jobs out of work....."

On a work day, NYC subway provides 6 million trips. Think of all of the car
drivers it is displacing. And then there are the buses! And that is in NYC
alone. Just think of all of the drivers mass transit has already displaced
throughout the nation!

Then there is intercity transit: think of all of the drivers displaced by
planes, trains, and buses!

Self-driving trucks? Trucks have been displaced by trains, barges, container
ships, ....

Cars, even electric ones, create air pollution which impacts health as well as
greenhouse gas. Electric cars are charged from electric power plants -- most
of the US electricity is generated by carbon-based fuels -- coal and gas.

Using Via which transports multiple passengers [part of Manhattan, part of
Brooklyn, Chicago, Washington DC] (or Uber pool for example) at least helps to
reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas compared with single passenger
vehicles that at least helps to reduce air pollution / greenhouse gas.

~~~
rhapsodic
_> On a work day, NYC subway provides 6 million trips. Think of all of the car
drivers it is displacing. And then there are the buses! And that is in NYC
alone. Just think of all of the drivers mass transit has already displaced
throughout the nation!_

I think if you read history, you'll find that, overall, the automobile
disrupted and reduced the size of the passenger rail industry, and public
transportation in general. Not the other way around.

~~~
davidf18
I was being sarcastic: The pendulum is swinging back the other direction....

------
blahman2
1 hour commute is fine? No. There were all these visions about how with the
advent of the Industrial revolution people would have to work half a day
because that's how long it would take them to finish their norm. Instead, they
were asked to produce twice as much.

Now we have our 'great' thought leader try to convince us about the virtues of
hard work and 1 hour commute again.

How about "Put the type of Ego in your ideas that will remove the need for you
to have a job in a few years"? Because jobs will be going away, and we don't
need an even more hard core rat race in the US.

------
pdimitar
I'll never trust a VC on this topic, sorry. To me, "remove ego from X, Y, or
Z" coming from a VC sounds a lot like "...so we have an easier time patenting
your work behind your back and kick you out of your own innovation, for life".

Biased by me? Surely. But I haven't seen a benevolent VC in my life, and I've
met 10-12 of them. Anecdotal? Of course. None of us knows them all so there
you have it, anecdotal evidence.

I can't take this guy for real. Plus, he looks like he's in the rich bubble
and "playing with your kids in the car" is a horribly misguided idea. So
people should work even in their leisure / warmup time. Sure!

------
6d6b73
“every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and
about 24.5 million are created,” Andreessen says

FFS.. No. They are not destroyed and created. These jobs are just shifted from
one company to another, and most of them are seasonal, or part-time jobs.

------
e2e4
Commuting to work with self driving car sounds like a faster horse carriage.

I wonder why isn't telecommuting / virtual presence a big part of his
predictions.

------
graycat
So, Andreessen is talking about "ideas" \-- hmm ....

His ideas seem to be (A) some large changes in the economy and society from
(B) some exploitations of largely existing computer technology to meet some
want/need previously unnoticed or infeasible to meet.

But, even for just (A) and (B), there is potentially MUCH more potential in
_ideas_ that Andreessen seems to ignore.

An example was Xerox: Copying paper documents was important. The main means
was carbon paper. Xerox did quite a lot of engineering research based on some
early research, IIRC, at Battelle. The result was one of the biggest business
success stories of all time.

Andreessen doesn't discuss research _ideas_ \-- how to have them, pursue them,
apply them, evaluate them, etc.

------
nadermx
I guess with the growing remote work movement this becomes harder and harder
to do since you spend less time with your peers whom you can "argue with"
mentally since you lack time around them to get a better sense of how they
think

------
omegaworks
Mark Andreessen: Get ready for White Flight 2

So much for the short-lived renaissance of the city. Will millennials still
want short commutes when they can pass the time in their cars?

------
0xCMP
I do like the idea of almost a rolling office. I've always wanted a sort of
vagabond life fueled by tech. There so much out in the world and so many
people. It's a shame that we're often stuck in the same places for such long
periods of time.

If I become a remote/work-from-home/smb-owner I'd love to just being a self-
driving car doing stuff on the go and also changing where I am all the time.

~~~
geomark
Does nobody else get car sick when reading or looking at a screen in a moving
car?

------
bkohlmann
I was fortunate enough to be the one to interview him for this event. He's a
remarkable intellect and kept me on my toes the entire time!

------
zackmorris
"Take the Selfishness out of Profit"

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Or possibly "Take the Profit out of Selfishness".

------
lappet
> "Most of the good ideas are obvious, Andreessen says. They just might not
> work right away"

That seems like a gross simplification of the way things usually work. Saying
good ideas are obvious sounds a little egoistic, which seems ironic,
considering the title

------
debt
he's a media vc. facebook is basically his crown jewel and that's it.
facebook/media is cool i guess, but i don't see how he know much about
anything else such as robotics or ai.

just look at andreesen horowitz investments. many are largely media
companies(buzzfeed, stack exchange). they've tried doing finance which is a
much bigger market but like clinkle clearly imploded and coinbase probably is
next(literally transfers went down the other day eek). so fb is still all he's
got.

he hasn't invested in any big winners yet beyond fb/media. so why should i
listen to this guys advice(unless of course if i'm building a media company).

~~~
colmvp
Not necessarily about Marc, but I honestly find it so frustrating to see media
outlets interview people who have zero experience writing, doing research, or
leading an AI related company/research institution but still ask them about
their opinion on the future impact of AI, while completely ignoring
individuals who are on the forefront of the field.

If you read interviews on the topic of say, cancer research, it would make
sense for journalists to talk to an oncologist or a person who works for the
American Cancer Society, versus just any doctor or a philosopher.

~~~
skynode
The media (in 2017 at least) is not necessarily here to _inform_ the public.
Some of these vanilla interviews are staged by actors on both sides of the
aisle just to keep the capitalist machine oiled and keep the _relevant_ guys
relevant. As an analogy, Marc can have an opinion (and y'all should hear it)
about ML/AI not because he has great domain knowledge but because he's Marc
Andreessen and he controls a large chunk of one of the most hallowed means of
production.

------
ashray5
“All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually a
big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch
through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? What if you get to
spend that hour playing with your kid or reading the news or watching TV or
actually working because you don’t have to worry about driving?”

I suppose one can find these answers from people who commute by company
shuttles, trains or subways.

------
matt_wulfeck
I'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs.
They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship
at their feet. Their vision and goal for the future is simply more money for
themselves at the expense of others.

"Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can
spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?!

I know that sounds harsh, but we seriously need to stop the hero worship in SV
culture and begin building a society that benefits _everyone_ , not a society
that works itself to the bone just to eat the cake of a larger corporation and
enrich the early investors. They will just as quickly dilute your quality of
life as they will dilute the shares in your company.

~~~
whack
I only came to HN somewhat recently, around 2 years ago, but I've started to
notice a very major change in the culture of this forum lately. There is so
much vitriol and blanket insults being levied at anyone and everyone. The
linked article is almost always a sideshow, and simply acts as a prelude for
the battle in the comments section. A battle which has little to do with what
the article itself says, and is simply a dumping ground for the prior beliefs
and soapboxing that people actually come here for.

This above comment is a perfect example. I don't know much about Marc, but
where I'm concerned, he's just a guy who has experience in the VC scene, was
invited to talk at an event, and agreed to share his personal thoughts and
strategies. I read through the article, and nothing that he said really stood
out in any way, good or bad. The thing about self-driving cars was just him
saying "look at the potential upside for people who're currently wasting time
in daily commutes" and "don't nitpick so much on the things that can go wrong,
that you lose sight of the potential for things to go tremendously right".

A little platitude-like, sure. But not really objectionable in any way. I
certainly don't think anything he said in the article warranted a ranting
about _" hot air coming out of money-grubbing share-diluting quality-of-life-
ruining tech oligarchs whose feet we're worshipping"_. If you really want to
have a discussion about this tangent, write your own blog post, submit it, and
let's have a discussion there. But it's sad to see the comments thread get
hijacked by such superfluous soapboxing.

I realize that me posting this isn't going to do anything. This is a lost
cause, and my venting is more cathartic than anything. The culture of this
place has changed, and I don't think we can ever go back to how it used to be.
I guess it's time to start looking for another place to frequent.

~~~
delegate
Emotions are flying high in the comments, because the world (including the
virtual one) is changing fast(er) and not in the best direction.

There is also great disconnect between the tech billionaires and the real
problems in the world.

The numbers they base their worldview on are carefully curated and the story
is of course that 'things are greater than ever', but the rest of the people
(especially outside the US) are felling it very differently.

Proof of that is Brexit, Trump and populists + nationalists winning in many
countries - voted in by people who are finding it hard to adapt to the fast-
changing pace of the tech-driven world, in which they have no shares or say.

Compared to 'real' problems that the world faces, self-driving cars are, in my
humble opinion, irrelevant. From a passenger's perspective, self-driving
vehicles have existed since forever - called buses, trains or taxis, so I
don't see how the passenger experience will dramatically change when it's
driven by a computer rather than a human.

From the perspective of the owner of a self-driving fleet, though, this is a
potentially fantastic business.

Of course profits will be largely shared by a couple of shareholders and some
leftovers offered to the engineers in the form of yearly salaries and maybe
some equity, while the rest of us will get a new bill each month for the
miles/seconds driven.

I know it because I experienced it myself as an engineer in a company in which
Mark made billions, while those who built the whole thing received scraps from
the deal.

So I think the OP post is understandable - maybe the tone was a bit harsh, but
the main points I find hard to not agree with.

~~~
xj9
well, the world _is_ better than it ever has been, but it _feels_ worse.
objectively, we all have a higher standard of living, longer life expectancy,
and more opportunities for education than generation in (known) human history.
what we (as a whole) don't know how to deal with is having access to the
internet.

------
wonderous
Video & Transcript: Marc Andreessen on Change, Constraints, and Curiosity

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e40ca4a54cc35379d6052369f8...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e40ca4a54cc35379d6052369f8a72968)

------
smallboy
Wasn't this the guy who said India should still be colonized? Not taking
advice from him.

------
0xCMP
We can't look/talk to each other at lunch without staring at our phones why do
we think we're going to spend quality time with people in a self-driving car?
The car isn't a solution to that problem.

------
justinmk
> Marc Andreessen: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas”

Shouldn't it be:

> Anonymous: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas”

~~~
josefresco
This.

------
RichardHeart
Whomever wrote the title, didn't follow it's advice.

------
julius_set
Hey billionaires are people too.

------
wonderous
(2016)

------
raspasov
Put science into ideas.

------
underwater
Is the attribution of the quote in this headline meant to lend it extra
weight? Rather ironic.

------
spectistcles
How about we take the ego out of Marc Andreessen

------
good_vibes
That picture makes me want to not keep reading but then I remember Netscape.

~~~
good_vibes
you guys are a little too serious sometimes. it was a joke. he looks like an
ego with that scowl, like the critic from Ratatouille.

~~~
username223
He looks like a giant unhappy thumb. I can only laugh at the mental image of
him "spar[ring] with the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Page" in
some sort of super-sized thumb war. Anyone taking bets on Andreessen vs.
Bezos?

~~~
good_vibes
Bezos would open a can of whoop ass with his AMZN suit on.

