
Marc Andreessen “tried really hard not to invent anything new” - oscar-the-horse
http://www.horsesaysinternet.com/startup/marc-andreessen-hard-problem/
======
confluence
Let me just ask - When has anyone ever actually invented anything totally new?

The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph +
speakers).

The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes)

The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not
flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a
primitive heavy engine on board. Gliders already existed - you just couldn't
go anywhere with them! You can't just jump off a cliff and glide to China.

Google? A more advanced MITS algorithm + inktomi's commodity cluster map-
reduce architecture + inktomi's PPC. Indeed, had inktomi doubled down on
search instead of their CDN, we might well be talking about inktomi and not
Google.

General and Special Relativity? Nope - [http://www.quora.com/If-Albert-
Einstein-had-never-existed-at...](http://www.quora.com/If-Albert-Einstein-had-
never-existed-at-all-in-the-world-would-relativity-theory-have-been-found-and-
proposed-by-others-by-now).

There are no really new ideas out there - merely combinations old ones that
"hang in the air". There are no new ideas - merely old ones combined in unique
ways.

Everything is a remix (<https://vimeo.com/14912890>).

~~~
Confusion
Upvoted, but I disagree. I think you are spot on with suggesting actual
progress does not happen by inventing anything 'new' from scratch. But I do
not agree nothing new is ever invented.

Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small,
'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the
state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean
that no 'completely new' things have been created.

This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology. Of the
countless intermediate forms, you cannot point to a single one as a
'completely new' species. However, 1000 generations after an earthquake, the
species on both sides of the created ravine have diverged so much they can no
longer interbreed. There are now two species where there was one, so a new one
must have come into existence, right?

Andreessen is completely right in suggesting you don't want to aim to invent
something 'completely new' on the spot. Nevertheless, if you can see where
something could be going, you could aim for something new say 10 years down
the road.

~~~
confluence
Wait long enough and things will appear new and magical. My point is merely
that any invention is still the gradual accumulation and unique combination of
previous ideas (and so forth). Even if you lack the knowledge about how
something came to be it does not change the fact that: Everything is a remix.

 _> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic._

 _> if you can see where something could be going_

This is kind of a punctuated intellectual evolution. The idea is to "go where
the puck is going to be" - which is perfectly reasonable as intelligence is
not constrained by natural evolutionary mechanisms.

YouTube's Jawed Karim said this exactly when he stated that their success was
a "confluence" (see what I did there) of Dot-com bust dark fibre lighting back
up, the introduction of cheap DSL broadband, the integration of computers in
all American households, the domination of Adobe Flash and the rapidly
decreasing cost of storage/computation.

He also stated that YouTube was nothing new. It was merely a combination of
other technologies which arrived at the right time to be held up by a rich
society and progressive technology to become one of the biggest internet
properties the world has ever seen.

A confluence of events if you will.

~~~
crusso
_Wait long enough and things will appear new and magical. My point is merely
that any invention is still the gradual accumulation and unique combination of
previous ideas (and so forth). Even if you lack the knowledge about how
something came to be it does not change the fact that: Everything is a remix._

No one disagrees that all inventions build upon older ideas and inventions.

Your attempt to redefine what the word "new" means in the realm of inventions
doesn't logically prove anything. It's just kind of a semantically-induced
logical dead-end.

 _A confluence of events if you will._

This reminds me of arguing with a Creationist about the statistical likelihood
that DNA would have assembled randomly from the primordial ooze. They claim
that man must have been "created" because of the statistical unlikelihood that
base chemicals would just randomly assemble into a living creature. Their
arguments always ignore the electro-chemical and evolutionary forces that
drive the "confluence" and turn it from a random coincidence to a statistical
likelihood. Likewise, you appear to ignore the drive of the individual
inventor in assembling and delivering pre-existing technologies.

Were the technologies unavailable to make YouTube before it was made? No. What
was new was the assembly of those technologies at the proper time when they
could be supported by the environment. As individual technologies, nothing was
"new". As a whole, it was definitely new.

Once again, I perceive your argument as an exercise in semantics to denigrate
the new by redefining "new" in order to make some larger argument about the
incremental contribution of inventions made by inventors. In order to reach
your same conclusions, one would have to pretend that there was no novelty in
the way that pre-existing things were assembled.

There are negligibly few atoms on the Earth that weren't here 4 billion years
ago, yet I doubt you'd argue that nothing new has appeared on the Earth since
then.

[Edit: Clarified the Creationist point]

~~~
confluence
You do realize that there were other video hosting sites founded just before
and just after YouTube. If they didn't exist someone else would have taken
their place. Any individual person or team is not special. There are always
equivalent teams out there that would have gladly taken their place. If you
understand the concepts of evolution, path dependence, statistical randomness,
catastrophic failure and causality you would realise that ideas and people are
a product of their times and not the other way around.

Whoever said that DNA was the only thing to have been created from randomness.
There were probably many self-reproducing molecules created by randomness. It
does not follow that DNA was special or that any one strand was - there were
always analogues ready to take its place. What was special was the environment
these molecules evolved in.

~~~
crusso
_Any individual person or team is not special._

Completely contradictory to my personal experience as well as to my
observations in society.

In my personal life, I've known a few special people who are smart enough to
be visionaries with acceptably unique visions in their fields. They inspired
and drove others around them and produced successful enterprises while our
competitors floundered. Without them, we would have been mediocre like our
competitors.

If Steve Jobs had not returned to Apple, Apple would not have become dominant
and might just have gone out of business. I was there. We had Sculley, Amelio,
etc. They put the lie to your "no one is special" theory. They failed and
almost drove the company out of business. Jobs came along and completely
turned the company around. He made it look easy.

 _there are always analogues ready to take its place._

Citation for successful analogues to DNA driving multi-cellular life, please.
We know of none. Any analogues that may have developed to prevent or replace
DNA's rise may well have never advanced beyond simple single cells. I'd say
it's a ridiculous notion that an analogue to DNA would have filled the vacuum
if DNA hadn't come to pass.

~~~
confluence
_> Completely contradictory to my personal experience as well as to my
observations in society._

Irrelevant. These observations are coloured by selection bias.

 _> successful enterprises while our competitors floundered_

What about all the visionaries that failed? What about the non-visionaries
that succeeded?

 _> Without them, we would have been mediocre like our competitors._

Presumption that competitors would not have done what you had done given
enough time. Presumption also that your success makes you not mediocre - when
in fact it merely indicates success.

 _> If Steve Jobs had not returned to Apple_

Some other company would've released a mp3 player, a tablet and a smart phone.
Your not that special - it is foolish to be arrogant enough to think that you
deserve what you get and that because your sole reason for success is your own
work. This is a fundamental attribution error.

 _> They failed and almost drove the company out of business_

Jobs came back in 1997 correct? After Windows reached its dominance correct?
So the cash stops bleeding just after Windows has dominated and there is
really nothing left to do but join up with them.

 _> He made it look easy._

Maybe because it was.

 _> Citation for successful analogues to DNA driving multi-cellular life_

Well how do you know DNA was unique and special? Because it succeeded? That
does not follow. What if the environment changed - such that it favoured DNA
molecules over another just through randomness - well then the other molecules
get wiped out.

It is foolhardy to assume that DNA could be the only useful substrate for
multi-cellular life. But we can't rerun the damn test because - wait for it -
EXTREME PATH DEPENDENCE.

I end this conversation.

~~~
crusso
_I end this conversation._

I guess it shouldn't really matter since someone else equivalent to both of us
will step in to continue it. I mean, if Albert Einstein is easily replaceable
as you said, you and I can't be important for the continuation of anything.

------
paulsutter
It's really hard to build a company. It's really admirable to build a
successful tech company, no matter how lofty or straightforward the project.
The Instagram guys are also heroes to me.

Zip2, Elon's first company, didn't invent anything new or solve any hard
problems either (it started out as an online yellow pages). But it was really
important that Elon learned from that process. And I know that he enjoyed it,
I remember meeting with him when they were 10 guys in one room. And Zip2 was
worth $300M to Altavista, which is how Elon paid for the Maclaren mentioned in
the recent video.

I'm also glad that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and others have started to
create social pressure for us to think about how to do big things that really
benefit society. And maybe we only need to feel that pressure after we've done
one or two successful things. As individuals it's also ok to ignore it and say
hey I really enjoy building companies and don't need to change the world in a
huge way.

~~~
confluence
Did Elon get screwed by the VCs during the formation and sale of Zip2?
Apparently his brother, their friend and Elon got diluted out during later
funding rounds. They squeezed his take down to a "measly" $20 million.

At least that's what I've read (it's also probably the reason he started all
over again with X.com which eventually morphed into PayPal).

------
ippisl
"we borrowed protocols, formats and even code from the world wide web project
... our goal:easy to use, fun graphical front end"

It's a classic university commercialization effort:take ip from university for
some important problem, integrate it together and give it a commercial appeal,
and sell.

But it's not as easy as writing some crud site.

------
stcredzero
Be real with yourself: Cleverness is a finite resource, even yours. Leverage
it in the most efficient way possible.

(So alpha-geek pissing matches are clearly a waste. Everything should be
focused towards furthering your company's goals while avoiding bugs and making
refactoring easier.)

~~~
dman
It takes all kinds. The world would be a duller place if all of us were
chasing current goals.

~~~
stcredzero
Note: I never said "current." 2nd and 3rd order goals are fine and sometimes
require cleverness.

~~~
dman
Alpha geek matches are often about people arriving at problems that are not
widely realised.

~~~
stcredzero
We are vehemently agreeing here, seemingly in part to defend the good name of
alpha geeks everywhere. Alpha-geek behavior isn't going to go away. It's such
a potent force, a company better damned well harness it for its own good.
Otherwise, it's like a rocket without a dependable guidance system. To neglect
this is to court disaster.

(Even better, an Alpha Geek better damned well harness it for her/his own
enlightened self interest, or I won't work with them.)

(Or, did you just want me to say that Alpha Geeks are all just like saints?
They often wish they were _kensei_.)

~~~
dman
I think we are in agreement - the part about good companies finding a way to
tap alpha geek energy rings very true.

------
oscar-the-horse
Here's one of the quotes from the video (Marc): "We tried really hard not to
invent anything new. And we also tried not to solve any hard problems. Which
makes it a lot easier to actually get something done"

------
gleb
Note that he is talking about NCSA Mosaic, not Netscape

------
DivisibleByZero
_There’s an ongoing debate about whether startups should focus on harder
problems._

Is there a really a debate or am I missing something? This is honestly the
first thing I have seen supporting _not_ solving a problem.

Really I think there is a place for both. He mentions avoiding the problem of
search, which happened to be the foundation of a particularly successful
company.

~~~
cbsmith
> Really I think there is a place for both.

There is, but the sense is that things have shifted out of proportion.

------
pmboyd
Netscape no longer exists as a company (or meaningful subdivision of AOL) so
that might not have been the best strategy. Copying got them ahead quickly but
didn't keep them there.

~~~
adestefan
Poor business decisions and copying by a competitor is what killed Netscape.

------
mdonahoe
My favorite part of the video is when he advanced the slide, and you realize
you are looking at an overhead project with printed transparency instead of
PowerPoint.

1994, simpler times.

------
_delirium
Seems pretty standard for a commercializer. The goal is to take some existing
research funded by someone else (out of a university usually, though sometimes
a corporate lab or government lab) and turn it into a product with the minimum
additional modifications.

