
Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it? - wocg
I see you can ask Marc Andreessen for advice at  https:&#x2F;&#x2F;21.co&#x2F;pmarca&#x2F; - It costs $100 <i>if</i> he answers... Has anyone here asked him for advice and received it, and if so, was it worth the $100? I saw this a day or so ago, and at the time it was $20. The price seems to be inflating fast!
======
anton_tarasenko
Previous thread (featuring Ben Horowitz on 21.co):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485488)

Two takeaways:

1\. A response looks like this:
[https://monosnap.com/file/CbRNrj7TUUhaLolVTLYJhrPxUdsYOK](https://monosnap.com/file/CbRNrj7TUUhaLolVTLYJhrPxUdsYOK)

2\. A16Z invested in 21.co when it still was a Bitcoin mining hardware
startup: [https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/18/what-is-21-co-really-
doing...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/18/what-is-21-co-really-doing-an-
excerpt-from-digital-gold/)

~~~
tyingq
>1\. A response looks like this:
[https://monosnap.com/file/CbRNrj7TUUhaLolVTLYJhrPxUdsYOK](https://monosnap.com/file/CbRNrj7TUUhaLolVTLYJhrPxUdsYOK)

That seems reasonable for $20, but I'd be disappointed in that for $100.
Basically, it's

Q: "We have some tech that works in the law field, who should we talk to?"

A: "Talk to some big law firms"

Of course, the question itself invited that answer. Would love to see answers
from other questions.

~~~
unhelpful
Don't forget... now that person can call those firms and say "Ben Horowitz
said we should talk." :)

~~~
lftl
If Ben would kick off an email introduction with someone he knows at the firm
it'd be worth much more than $100.

------
EternalData
I think it's just a really interesting way to gate a contact form and get
people to think twice about sending off an email. Lots of people have thought
about how to avoid spam: finding a way to have to pay to get into an inbox
might just be the ticket.

~~~
jonlucc
I suppose this _is_ just a slightly more expensive version of the idea that we
could do away with spam by charging a penny or a tenth of a penny per email
sent.

------
gravypod
I find it interesting that you can write RMS, the leader of the Free Software
movement, and he'll respond to you within the day for no charge because he
think's that's a morally important thing to do. You can in contrast write Marc
Andreessen, one of the figure heads of the propriatary software and privacy
violating movement of every bigger information companies, and he'll charge you
for the pleasure.

Interesting dichotomy, at least to me.

~~~
vijayr
Never tried personally, but read somewhere Steve Wozniak does the same

~~~
gravypod
Well if someone ends up giving it a go after reading this comment please tell
him that there's a college student on the East Coast willing to buy a sheet of
$2 bills from him for the cost of the sheet and a free lunch.

Wozniak seems like your one friends dad who knows all the corniest jokes and
has a past that took him into some of the funniest situatins alive. He also
happens to be a great hardware guy which makes him infinitly cooler.

------
saosebastiao
What are you asking his advice for?

I'm not a VC industry insider, but I've spent enough time in the industry as a
peon analyst to see the industry for what it is. I've written before about how
nearly all VC partners are ridiculously conservative bandwagoners (they only
invest if someone else invests), with the sole (to my knowledge) exception
being Marc Andreessen. There might be other exceptions out there, but the
thing I always admired about him is his ability to fully commit to a business
without any social proof. And I believe that this attribute is what makes him
successful. If you are taking his advice on whether to invest in something,
it's probably worth the $100.

Never worked with him personally, but I'm sure his business advice is gonna be
pretty sound even if I don't know how it rates relative to other VCs. But I
think the real point is that it is important to know what you're asking him
about before anybody can tell you if it is a good idea. You wouldn't ask him
about plumbing, right?

~~~
mahyarm
If everyone is a bandwagoner, how does the bandwagon start? Without pmarca,
would VC grind to a halt?

~~~
saosebastiao
It's really slow. Someone gets interested, their interest piques someone
else's interest. This goes on practically forever until some point where there
are 2 or more VCs in a room together and then it becomes "I'll do it if you do
it".

They've co-opted a word for this process: syndication. If you ask them what it
means, they'll have some flowery language[0] for you. In reality all it means
is that they're too chickenshit to invest on merits alone, and really want to
know what other people think.

This process drives up pre-money valuations and thereby reduces returns. By
opting out of the process, Andreessen has outsized returns. It's a bigger risk
(he has abnormally large potential downsides), but he's good enough of a judge
of merit to make it work out phenomenally for him.

[0] [http://www.startable.com/2008/10/27/venture-capital-deal-
syn...](http://www.startable.com/2008/10/27/venture-capital-deal-syndication-
why-it-ought-to-take-two-to-tango/)

------
gwern
No one's mentioned getting a response so far, but I'm intrigued enough to give
it a try. I've sent in a question about genetic engineering.

Some notes about the process:

1\. 21.co's signup form mandates an image, but the tool they use for file
uploads breaks on PNGs (!) silently without any visible warning to the user
(!!), you can click on the 'save' button many times with nothing happening and
without any kind of error or warning in the web console (!!!), in both Firefox
and Chromium with Noscript & Adblock disabled. Apparently even using an entire
specialized file upload service, the second-most common image format in
existence is just too exotic and confusing to support.

2\. you have to confirm by email before you can do anything, which adds on
another 10-15m to the process (amusingly, they spam you on signup to set up a
public paid inbox - and that email arrived first, but you can't do anything
unconfirmed)

3\. it's not $100, it's actually _$110_ , because 21co tacks on a $10 'service
fee' (even though it's for charity). It's unclear if I have to pay this $10
regardless of whether Andreessen ever responds. I hope not. In any case this
strikes me as a huge fee for such a trivial service, and I really hope it's a
10% fee rather than a fixed $10 fee...

4\. the site is surprisingly slow despite being so barebones

5\. browsing the interface, despite the prominence of Bitcoin, I'm not clear
whether I am even allowed to deposit Bitcoin and pay that way; in any case I
opted to use a credit card because the profile image bug wasted so much of my
time and I was losing my patience. The cash out page indicates that should I
ever earn anything via 21.co, I would need to jump through even more hoops,
presumably even if I only wanted Bitcoin and not bank deposits or anything. I
thought briefly about setting up a paid inbox because it's a fun concept but
between a 10% (or worse) fee and all this invasiveness, I'm not interested.

6\. signup form doesn't work with Lastpass, which failed to capture the
username/password; always annoying to manually copy over generated passwords.

So, I'm not impressed but we'll see how it works out...

On a side note, how do people regard the expectation of privacy with these
public inbox emails? I see someone has screenshotted a Horowitz response; are
these responses considered 'commissioned' in a sense, rather than private
emails with an expectation of privacy/confidentiality, and so it's OK to copy-
paste any response publicly on HN or elsewhere?

~~~
gwern
To update:

My message idn't make it in the first time and 21co notified me it has been
canceled:

> Thanks for using 21 to contact Marc Andreessen and donate to Black Girls
> Code. Demand for Marc's time was extremely high and it was not feasible to
> respond to your message in 48 hours. As such, your credit card has not been
> charged. Marc still wants to hear from you though, so we encourage you to
> resubmit your message at 21.co/pmarca! The new estimated response time is
> one week given the high demand. We are working on adding code to dynamically
> update wait times in the presence of surges of demand, but in the interim we
> want to make sure you have a good experience. Thanks again for using 21 and
> supporting Black Girls Code!

I decided to try submitting again (I'm still curious and at least the price
didn't increase).

I also mentioned my comments to 21.co. To summarize their response:

1\. PNG: should be supported, they don't know why it didn't work 2\. they'll
check that the emails arrive in an actionable order 3\. it's a flat 10%; it is
to cover payment processing (so the user may be donating to charity but
they're not) 4\. performance is a known issue 5\. you are not allowed to
deposit Bitcoin, they have to be earned via the site; deposits may or may not
be available in the future. Verification for withdrawals are required because
of fear of abuse. 6\. the responses _are_ supposed to be private/confidential
(I guess Horowitz simply doesn't mind or know about that one being passed
around). So should I get an Andreessen response, I guess I will confine my
comment to whether it was a good response or not and whether it might be worth
the money.

(I don't entirely agree with some of the reasons.)

~~~
gwern
Got a reply this morning, 98 words. I think it was a good reply - it was
mostly what I was thinking but it's valuable knowing that someone like
Andreessen, who may know many secret things and has seen many tech sigmoids
come and go, takes a similar view of things.

------
lorenzop
whatever you want to ask him: I'll answer it for $1

~~~
scaradim
The question here is: does your answer worth $1? anybody here can share
experience on that? :)

~~~
astrodust
You have to pay $1 to find out.

~~~
tyingq
But you just established that you're willing to dole out freebies.

Edit: nope, as mentioned below. Oops.

~~~
Cyph0n
That wasn't him.

------
amenod
It seems to me this is just an advanced (and probably very efficient) quasi-
captcha. Except it distinguishes those with a real need for his attention
(that is, those who are willing and able to pay) from the others, instead of
separating humans from bots.

------
josh_carterPDX
I made a donation, asked no questions, and thanked him for doing something
different.

Good, bad, or indifferent I like the way Marc approached this given the amount
of people clamoring to get access to him.

------
sixQuarks
I like this service, but where can I see a full list of people I can pay to
contact? I tried finding a link on the site, but couldn't.

~~~
wocg
That is interesting, I also couldn't find a way to search or a complete list.
There's a sampling here: [https://21.co/](https://21.co/)

------
jph
Yes. I paid $100 because I want to encourage volunteering.

> To Marc Andreessen. From Joel Parker Henderson. Hi Marc, what are some of
> your favorite charity causes that could benefit from pro bono coding help? I
> work at [X] and we have many programmers who volunteer for social
> progressive causes; we love coding and we love to help. Thank you, Joel

~~~
bykovich
why didn't you just talk to your favorite charities instead of deferring that
judgement to Andreessen

~~~
idiot_stick
> _why didn 't you just talk to your favorite charities instead of deferring
> that judgement to Andreessen_

No doubt. Paid $100 to ask Andreeesen what _his_ favourite charities are? The
SV hero worship is so intense.

------
TomSherlock
He answered my $20 question regarding whether he thought the SoLaTiDo wearable
keyboard/controller would be accepted by the mobile enterprise AR community,
or was too early to the market. His answer was that it was cool, and that he
wanted one on his wrist. This means he barely considered it, since it clearly
requires both hands and all fingers, to offer workstation level control. My
follow-up question (at $100) told him of the mistaken assumption, and asked
him what he thought deskless workers would do to gain workstation level
control of AR devices. His 48 hours to reply has just expired, so maybe he's
swamped.

------
bsvalley
Yeah and here is my question - how much of your own money did you give to this
meaningful cause?

~~~
mosselman
How much did you? What are you doing to help?

Let me get this straight. Here is someone who makes it possible to a. get
access to his knowledge and experience in a pretty easy way and b. lets
charities benefit from an interest in this knowledge and suddenly HE is the
greedy bastard? Wow.

------
hrayr
He's making a tradeoff here. This is an ingenious way to filter the 'massive'
noise-to-signal ratio on his inbox, but at the same time it makes some of the
random but legitimate questions go away.

~~~
wocg
It sounded to me like you only have to pay _if_ your message gets a response.
So I just assumed it would be a lottery as to whether he even ever saw my
message. I figure he must devote only a very small amount of time to perusing
his messages, and then he must devote an equally small amount of time
composing an answer.

So I figured I'd have to get pretty lucky to actually wind up spending the
$100 (or $110) in the end. Even so, I'd hate to spend the $100 and find the
response was disappointing.

------
rgovind
I believe Quora and Facebook tried it in various forms though there you could
reach out just about anybody. I assume 21.co will do same thing going forward.

------
jplasmeier
Someone should spend the money to ask him if he thinks the service is worth
it, or if he would have used a similar service at any point in his career.

~~~
gwern
There's no need to ask that. Just see if he's still using it in a few months,
or if the price has escalated drastically.

------
imode
shouldn't this be marked with "Ask HN:"?

~~~
wocg
Maybe, but I don't see anything in the FAQ which says you have to do that
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

------
kapauldo
What advice could he have to offer? This is really stupid self aggrandizement.
Get over yourself Marc.

------
artur_makly
maybe they are just testing their latest ai bot?

------
hashset
> "Was it worth it?"

The proceeds go to programs promoting underrepresented genders and ethnicities
in tech, I'd say that yes it is quite "worth it".

~~~
pc86
I think the question was whether the advice was worth $100, not whether the
$100 went toward a meaningful cause.

~~~
wocg
That's correct. Clearly the worth of the advice would be different for
different people, depending upon how deep their pockets are. I was hoping to
get some examples of just what kind of advice was offered.

