
How Tech Can Build - feross
https://stratechery.com/2020/how-tech-can-build/
======
burlesona
This is an interesting commentary on Andreesen’s piece, but it doesn’t really
change or contradict anything.

At the end of the day, the US is a litigious society covered in Byzantine
regulation that most people aren’t even aware of. This covers the most basic
things: would you like to build a townhouse for your family with just one
parking space? Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+
parking spaces per home are required by law. Want to build an apartment
building in San Francisco to capitalize on the incredible demand for housing?
You’ll spend at least 6 years getting a building permit, and what you’re
actually allowed to build will be mostly the result of ugly haggling with
special interest groups along the way. These are just a few examples I happen
to be familiar with.

We’ve chosen for things to be like this by the way we allow our government at
every level to be captured by lobbyists, special interests, and partisanship.
Realistically, to change things, we need reform that fixes the way the
government itself operates, and while there are many ideas that sound good,
everything has unexpected side effects. That is a very, very hard problem, to
solve.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
This is so very, very wrong.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence)

"Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the
reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."

What you've written is an all-too typical complaint of people who don't bother
to understand the history of our existing legal, political and social
structures. It's easy to hand wave and vent about "regulatory capture" (I do
it all the time).

But go and dig down and find out why that 2+ parking space rule exists. You
will find a massively more complex, and much more pro-public, pro-people, pro-
progress agenda in play than anything you just wrote suggests.

I remember an example of this sort of thing that I came across in eastern WA
about 20+ years ago. A small town there was facing protests because it was
about to put down ("execute") several wild horses that were hanging about the
town. The law was very clear about what had to be done, but the public, both
in town and elsewhere in the state were aghast. The horses were healthy,
beautiful and there seemed to be no good justification for killing the as the
law required. People complained about the law being an ass (no pun intended)
and said that this was the perfect example of government inflexibility and law
making by people with selfish interests.

But all it took was a little history detour to go back and find out why the
law(s) in question had come into being. It had indeed been the case that in
the not too distant past (by global standards, not necessarily those of the
western US), wild horses had indeed been a problem in town, and that the towns
people had tried several approaches to dealing with and/or fixing the
problems. None of them had been very successful, and some 80 years earlier,
the town had reluctantly adopted a law where an unowned horse, if not claimed
by anyone within a reasonable period of notice, must be put down.

This wasn't government inflexibility, or stupid law, or selfish interests: it
was a community improvising to deal with a tricky situation, and doing so
imperfectly. Improving this particular law, and others like it (such as your
2+ parking space case) isn't going to happen by assuming that the existing
legal framework exists because of malintent. It's going to happen by carefully
understanding the context and motivations and knowledge that led to the
current laws, and only then setting out change them, hopefully for the better.

~~~
wbl
The parking space rule exists so black people can't move into cheap apartments
that would exist without it.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
Assuming this to be true (though see my reply about zoning below - I think
this is an incomplete answer), then that's great, you have now cleared
Chesterton's Fence, and are in a position to propose a replacement.

But notice how utterly different your argument is to the OP, who talked about
excessive government regulation, regulatory capture and so on.

(and yes, one can make a case that codification of racism in law statutes is a
_kind_ of regulatory capture, but it's really not what most people mean when
they use that term)

------
renewiltord
This is just the nature of the world. There are enough defensible reasons to
screw your own team so people will do that anyway. The real reason is that
once you've hit some degree of prosperity, loss aversion overtakes gain
seeking. Today's America is therefore focused on maintenance of its wealth.

You can try anything you like, but it won't work. America cannot build in the
real world because it constrains itself out of fear of losing what it has,
because it has so much.

All these articles and open letters and appeals are just the same as internal
company memos at massive corporations exhorting innovation. But IBM can't
innovate, no matter how many innovation labs it funds. It just can't. The fire
is dead and that's a property of what it's hit: the upper limit of prosperity.
The next innovation won't come from IBM and it will rocket past IBM and then
hit its own upper limit.

Perhaps the only recent big companies that have innovated are Apple and
Amazon. Maybe there's something to be learned from their relative approaches.
But America as it stands won't build, because it can't build. The excuses will
be numerous: "law written in blood", "do we want to end up like X who built
but built wrong", "America is big", "America is sparse". But the problem is
none of that. The problem is that America won, that America is prosperous and
glorious, and so it can no longer countenance any risk of loss.

~~~
nmfisher
"It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you've been sleeping
in silk pajamas” - Marvin Hagler

I think there's definitely something to be said for Elon Musk sinking his
entire Paypal fortune into Tesla. Hitting the reset button and starting again
from ground zero is one hell of an incentive to succeed.

------
ealexhudson
I want to like a lot of this. The UK is full of "crap towns" with poor
housing, poor design and environs that are generally anti-human (as well as
anti- a lot of other things). I don't particularly agree the problem is
"regulatory capture" unless that's simply a shorthand way of saying, "we, as
society, have agreed that inertia is our preferred approach". In some cases it
may well be regulatory capture; in most I don't believe it is (obvious case in
point for housing is green belt: we know it's a nonsense, but it's an absolute
political impediment, not a regulatory one. The people do not want to build
there).

There shouldn't be problems with people having access to healthcare, or living
in housing which is not just healthy but is also pleasant. People should have
access to nature as well as all their other conveniences, working should not
require long commutes and we shouldn't be generating the absolute tsunamis of
waste we currently do just to survive.

There are constructivist answers to all these problems. Andreesen appears to
be suggesting it's just a matter of willpower. I don't believe the solution is
that simple.

------
michaelt
_> has tech [...] been the primary source of American innovation because it
represented the future? Or has it been the future because it was the only
space where innovation was possible, because of things like inertia and
regulatory capture in the real world?_

Here's a third option: Due to Baumol's cost disease, if the wages for Java
programmers rise, the wages for CNC milling machine programmers are going to
go in the same direction - and if manufacturers can't pay, there will be a
"skills shortage"

Why would a graduate who can program _and_ design electronics do the latter,
if the former pays 3x as much straight out of college?

~~~
alextheparrot
Are you familiar enough with Baumol’s to comment on why we don’t see this
effect in, for example, medicine vs basic biochemistry? Presumably there is a
lot of overlap in these cohorts, but most research jobs pay significantly less
than research jobs.

Both industries seem to be “more productive” these days as well, with massive
gains in biological research techniques over the last 20 years.

I guess it is easy to see something and give it a name, but the wikipedia
description didn’t leave me with a very solid understanding.

~~~
MattGaiser
> but most research jobs pay significantly less than research jobs.

I think your comment has a typo, but my answer to the question I believe you
are asking would be that there are far more people seeking to have medical
jobs than there are positions available in licensed medical schools.

There is no shortage of qualified people seeking to do medicine. They just
can't do it as there are hard licensing restrictions on who can do it and
those restrictions require formal degrees.

Of the people I know in the more poorly paid biochemistry research field, most
have tried or are trying to jump over to medicine/medical research. They just
can't get admitted to med school or can't get approved in some other way.
There is no rise in the price of labour because there are just so many
potential and willing workers that medicine is not altering the supply of
labour for biochemistry research in a meaningful way.

In the case of the developers, there are no restrictions on who can be one.
There are no formal requirements at all. You could be a high school dropout
and if you can code well, there is work for you. If you have the skills, you
can go be a developer. It is more as though nobody wanted to be in medicine as
biochem paid more. In that scenario, there would be very few doctors.

~~~
alextheparrot
Your correction was correct, thanks for still seeking to answer the question.

I think I generally agree with your premise -- there are large gates in place
and the licensing is much harder to achieve than a college degree. Though I
think this setup breaks down partially (But not completely) when we view that
PhD biochemists are still paid far less than doctors even with roughly
equivalent time horizons and some level of institutional gating (4-6 years for
PhD, maybe a PostDoc).

Either way, this is a fun new frame to play around with. Thanks for your time!

------
romanovtexas
>"First, tech should embrace and accelerate distributed work. It makes tech
more accessible to more people. It seeds more parts of the country with
potential entrepreneurs. It dramatically decreases the cost of living for
employees. It creates the conditions for more stable companies that can take
on less risky yet still necessary opportunities that may throw off a nice
dividend instead of an IPO. And, critically, it gives tech companies a weapon
to wield against overbearing regulation, because companies can always pick-up-
and-leave."

The next big "tech" revolution is working from home -- and distributed
working. It has been around, like the way smartphones were around before the
iPhone -- in concept, but never realized in practicality. It is an imperative
that tech should accelerate and develop a cohesive set of products that will
enable iPhone like working from home.

~~~
TuringNYC
This is so true. Half the VCs you talk to want you to re-locate to the Bay
Area.

What does that mean to someone mid-career (you know, the type with enough
experience to really do something big and build) - it means:

\- They often have kids.

\- They may have student loans from advanced degrees

\- They have to worry about healthcare for their whole family

\- They may be willing to live on ramen-noodle salaries, but dont want to
subject their kids to it.

Unless seed funds and VCs start allowing more reasonable founders salaries,
___or allow non-bay-area founding locations with reasonable cost of living_
__, the numbers often just _dont work out_

At this point in the discussion, I will often have a load of people jumping on
me to "get roomates" or "eat pasta" or the "all schools are good" argument.
Let me pre-answer those:

1\. OK, so you have a family with children. Do you really want roommates?

2\. Yes theoretically I can eat pasta everyday and save money. But is that
really the life I want to give to my family (FYI, I can easily work on wall
street and make a half-million salary, so really...)

3\. No, not all schools are good. My high school for example had metal
detectors on entrance. A staff member died from a heart attach after a
confrontation from a student. No, not all schools are good. Perhaps you want
to subject your kids to that, I dont.

So what do you end up with? Rich kids funding other rich kids building juice
squeezers, after which they will just join the VC firm and perpetuate the
cycle.

And as for the eggheads, present them with a shitty enough "deal" and it makes
total sense to either go to a big firm or go work on Wall St. "Thought
Leadership" is cheap.

~~~
troughway
I'm surprised that things have gotten to a point where these points have to be
considered as salient.

What the fuck.

------
naringas
nice constructive counterpoint to [https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-
build/](https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/)

a key point (IMO) innovation happened online becuase being a new space enabled
by novel technology, it wasn't regulated yet. But now it's mainstream, so
inovation will decrease.

also, this quote from an intervier questioning Marc Andreessen

> a “primary technology” would need to involve, you know, some fundamental new
> insight in code, some proprietary set of algorithms.

tells me that so many people just don't get it. software due to being
immaterial just doesn't play by the same rules as other mechanical machines.

I know I cannot explain it properly; but why is open source such a superior
way to develop infrastructure software?

finally

> Human progress in this view is solely online.

IMO, we don't need a new cleverer algorithm. I believe that Amazon's success
is not some really sophisitcated piece of code, but the way in which they
integrated computer technology into the very core of the organization.

~~~
meheleventyone
> I know I cannot explain it properly; but why is open source such a superior
> way to develop infrastructure software?

Isn't it just cost? As you say software is immaterial and so the only real
cost is in the labor to create it which open source neatly does away with.

~~~
NortySpock
Well, there's still the operational cost of setting up and running the
hardware (again, skilled labor), but at least the software is free.

~~~
naringas
yes, but at least until everything went back into the (mainframe) cloud, the
opreational cost of running the software was coverd by the user.

My pc's hardware is mine, and the electricity bill is also mine.

So 'licensing' software is very much a form of rent.

Quite frankly this is an open problem. e.g. the debate about AWS suddenly
providing, redis, elastcisearch, etc as a service and making the original
developers redundant.

------
pascalxus
I can identify with this essay. And, I've always wondered why people don't
want to build, why people are so hell bent on preventing others from building.
I mean, what on earth is the problem with letting others build? build more
housing, build more transportation? Even when a start up wants to do something
as simple as put more buses on the road, it quickly gets shut down by
regulation (at least in the bay area)

------
generalpass
I tend to think the technology industry could benefit from a heavy dose of
humility. This isn't just a problem for people at the top - it is pervasive at
all levels and professions within the technology industry.

That would go a long ways towards the ends being discussed.

~~~
coffeefirst
I'm surprised this is being downvoted. Again and again we've seen really smart
people who made a great photo app try to bring their approach to something
that's genuinely hard for reasons that go beyond how to write code or build a
SaaS business, and leave a trail of wreckage in their wake.

Healthcare, education, civic life, etc. are all extremely valuable problems,
but only if you actually get it right. Humility doesn't mean don't tackle
them, it means recognizing that your expertise in one thing doesn't translate
to another automatically.

There are counterexamples, and they'll all tell you that the code was the easy
part.

------
tschellenbach
_Third — and related to both of the above — figure out an investing model that
is suited to outcomes that have a higher liklihood of success along with a
lower upside._

The tricky part is that the type of build projects Andreesen argues for are
more costly, have a higher risk and a lower upside compared to most software
startups.

We need substantially more capital allocated to the VC segment before the
focus will shift to these projects.

------
seibelj
I'm amused by these morality screeds from rich tech thought leaders.

"Why don't the talented sacrifice easy money in software by getting into
[insert super regulated, low-margin business]?" says profit-maximizing tech
capitalists who ignored said businesses for a decade.

I will make the best decisions for me, and you will make the best decisions
for you. If you want to charity-fund a business that helps society more than
your profit margin, then pay me the same amount of money and eat the loss on
your end. I'll keep working at what pays me the most, as will 99% of everyone.

~~~
bhl
For that reason, I prefer Chamath Palihapitiya's 2019 annual letter [1] over
pmarca's essay. It's not merely descriptive of societal problems at large, but
calls out actor and makes prescriptions. Two lines from the letter

> Governments can do a lot to make it more expensive for Big Tech to hoard
> human capital and allow this talent to flow more naturally to small
> businesses and startups so that they can more effectively compete and create
> vibrant ecosystems.

> The intellectual lobotomization of smart, young STEM talent has been an
> explicit strategy by Big Tech fueled by unseemly profitability and hi flying
> stock prices.

I think the reason why pmarca's essay is so tame in comparison, is that pmarca
believes you can have the best of both worlds: high venture returns and non-
tech societal progress that doesn't necessitate government.

[1] [https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-
letters/2019](https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019)

~~~
seibelj
This is excellent and I enjoyed it deeply. Thank you for linking it. I didn’t
agree with everything but I especially liked his focus on friends, family,
health, and being true with oneself over the opinion of others. This VC seems
very respectable.

------
cvaidya1986
Can VCs co invest in trillion dollar government infrastructure projects? Roads
bridges hospitals online education healthcare etc. ?

~~~
hpoe
They already have in several of the things you listed.

Online Education? Coursera, Lynda, Pluralsight, Kahn Academy, Youtube for
crying out loud.

Healthcare? - Healthtech is becoming a big thing, I had the opportunity to
interview at a company that is currently working on a private health cloud
where they aggregate all of the info about you, your smart watch, your phone,
etc. (Note: That you choose and opt into) to make it available to determine
the best outcomes for you personally and help the Dr. working with you
practice individualized medicine.

You list other things, but hospitals are being changed by technology at an
amazing pace, the fact that now during a pandemic I don't have to leave my
home to see my PCP, you think that was the burdened bloated Hospital
beracuracy that came up with that?

You then list roads and bridges, but the point is that yes, VCs and
entrepenuers could figure out how to solve those too given time and a enough
freedom, even we can't see it right now, it may be because our vision is just
too limited to see what could be, that's what makes entrepreneurs, real
entrepreneurs, different they are visionary.

~~~
ryan93
How is a healthcare app going to replace surgery, radiation or intensive care?

~~~
hpoe
How did Amazon replace you reading a book in your house? It didn't alter the
underlying fundamentals but it changed the way we think about it, and again
you miss my point, most of us can't figure out things like that, we can't see
how we would do that. Some people can, make it so they have the freedom to
build and create and they can do things you've never dreamed of.

Also a healthcare app won't replace those things but robots, computer vision,
and ML could. Or they could make it so that a Dr. instead of doing 8 surgeries
a day could do 80, or a Radiation machine that is totally self managed. You
pop in it runs the test then it can interpret results with a 99.99% accuracy.
There are lots of ways tech can augment and improve healthcare.

------
antisocial
FWIW, NIMBYism, self-interest are ruining all that is great about America -
[https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/01/the-upper-
middle...](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/01/the-upper-middle-class-
is-ruining-all-that-is-great-about-america.html)

~~~
TuringNYC
Thanks for posting this excellent article. This really resonated both as a
Brooklyner and as a full-time founder of a health-tech startup (for 3yrs.)

Lesson Learned: whatever doctors or hospitals say in their "Thought
Leadership" pieces...if you end up making medicine more efficient and threaten
their fee-per-use system, you will get tons of of pushback from the first-do-
no-harm crowd. Talk is cheap, you should focus on what the AMA and individual
medical Boards do, not what they say.

Epilogue: I'm back at a larger startup.

------
gkanai
Ben's analysis is fine. It's not really relevant to the big picture imo.

Andreesen needed to do more than just call for action in his blog post. He
should have committed his own funds towards the goals he is calling for. Gates
is doing a lot via his foundation. Dorsey is committing a significant portion
of his net worth towards goals Dorsey wants. Without something more than a
blog post, it's just a blog post.

This virus won't be defeated by 'software' in the Silicon Valley sense. It
will be defeated by vaccines. So help the labs create and distribute a
vaccine. Or if that's too short-term, look at any of the problems that this
pandemic has laid bare- there's lots to fix that is not VC-funded startups.

~~~
MattGaiser
> Andreesen needed to do more than just call for action in his blog post. He
> should have committed his own funds towards the goals he is calling for.

That was the part I found frustrating about his original post. He talks of the
need to build and the need to push people to build, but when he is one of the
1000 most capable people of building in North America (between his past
experience building, his vast network, and his billionaire level of wealth),
he prefers to sit back, sit on plenty of corporate boards, and wait for
solutions to walk in the door.

------
julianeon
I wrote a writeup about this article, and the "Time to Build" article that
inspired it, here. Kind of a tl;dr and hopefully a useful summary.

Of Stratechery's points, I think I agree the most with the one about
distributed work.

[https://www.reactever.com/time-to-build-
reflections](https://www.reactever.com/time-to-build-reflections)

------
carapace
We have known what to do since the 70's, e.g.:

    
    
        Permaculture (Bill Mollison)
        Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander)
        Design Science Revolution (Bucky Fuller)
    

Plus things like the _hypercar_ and passive solar architecture, etc. All of
this was worked out decades ago. But then... in the 80's everyone got high on
cocaine; in the 90's it was raves; in the 00's it was the internet (and war);
and in the 10's our phones.

I am glossing over hella stuff, of course, but my point is that we have all
the answers already (just as Bucky calculated half a century ago.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercar_(concept_car)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercar_\(concept_car\))

------
jasode
_> Third — and related to both of the above — figure out an investing model
that is suited to outcomes that have a higher liklihood of success along with
a lower upside. This is truly the most important piece — and where Andreessen,
given his position, can make the most impact. Andreessen Horowitz has thought
more about how to change venture capital than anyone else, but the fundamental
constraint has remained the assumption of high costs, high risk, and grand
slam outcomes. We should keep that model, but surely there is room for
another?_

I'm puzzled that the above paragraph was written by Ben Thompson with his
background including an MBA and the writing of insightful articles about
startups.

The reason VCs don't invest in other non-VC things like "boring" and "low-
return" city infrastructure projects, or small/medium businesses to help
communities -- is because _that 's not what the people who put money into
their fund expected them to do_.

Some folks seem to forget that VCs are ultimately managing _other people 's
money_. Pension funds, university endowments, charities, some wealthy
families, etc. The investment officer working as custodian of a teachers'
pension fund didn't give money to a VC like a16z to build a new sewer system.
The pension fund is looking for 15-20% returns and looked to a16z's expertise
on evaluating startup founders. That's what they _specialize_ in. Previous
comment about the complexity of different investments leads to specialization:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365966)

I think Ben's idea is that Marc A (and a16z) is _influential_ and so they can
put out a prospectus for a new type of fund with a _different investment
thesis_ that avoids YC software startups and focuses on low-risk low-return
low-margin "hard" projects. Well here's the problem, the pension fund officers
will not think it's a good use of their money and will invest their money
elsewhere. Therefore, the VC fund using Ben's ideas does not raise any money.

The customers (Limited Partners) with the millions to invest is the constraint
that any person raising a new fund with "feel good" ideas faces. E.g. let's
say you want to create an investment fund that _" feeds poor 5-year old
children nutritious meals and reads books to them because children are the
investment into our future."_ Ok, it sounds noble but when the investment
officer of the Firemen Retirement Fund asks how it makes money, you need to
have a credible answer. Otherwise, your fund gets no money and the feel-good
investment thesis goes nowhere.

My previous comment on why alternative investment ideas don't need essays
about it. They just need financial mavericks to pursue it and everybody will
copy them.
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588264))

However, Andreessen Horowitz is probably not the financial maverick that can
prove the alternative investment idea will work. Their firm and their staff
are built to understand software startups. Somebody else has to lead with
Ben's ideas.

~~~
sanderjd
You're right about a lot of this, but I think what you're missing is that Marc
Andreessen did this financial maverick thing once, which is why he is
influential. So it is probably right that Andreessen Horowitz the fund is not
the right vehicle for such a thing, but having written his open letter, and
with a deep well of influence and (presumably) some unique talent for setting
up investment vehicles, _Marc Andreessen_ the person is well positioned to put
his money where his mouth is and work toward making this new kind of
investment vehicle work.

Yes, this would involve finding new kinds of LPs or selling the same LPs on a
new vision with different trade-offs, but that finding-LPs-and-selling-them
work is exactly what it took to launch Andreessen Horowitz, so it is not crazy
to suggest that perhaps Marc Andreessen is well positioned to get to work on
this.

The response to your other comment you linked (edit, this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588626))
is also interesting and meshes with my intuition that there might be more of a
market for this than your giving credence to. I would also add that a benefit
of this possible market may be that it could be a lot bigger than the pool VCs
are currently constricted to. I think one interpretation of what we've seen
with unicorns (and SoftBank, which is increasingly looking like a debacle) is
that there is more money that wants in than there are businesses with the
right model for the kind of VC money they are getting. It is plausible that a
more sustainable model might be found in a much broader market of less risky
companies.

------
analog31
We're great at building private wealth. We suck at building public wealth. We
built a database worth a trillion dollars. We've built oligopolies in vital
industries.

The newspaper reports on "the economy" by a private wealth measure -- the
stock index. Another measure -- jobs -- is reported in numbers and not
dollars, because the numbers are a leading indicator of public support for
private wealth.

We haven't begun to fight for our survival until we agree to tap into private
wealth.

