Inbox: - ## Tom Holland and Dom Sanbrook interview We really suck at predicting the effects of technology. Steve Jobs came down from the mountain with a tablet. Andy Grove, who ran Intel, was a Hungarian immigrant. ## Technlogy saves the world > What we have learned — what we were forced to learn — during the COVID lockdowns has permanently shattered these assumptions. It turns out many of the best jobs really can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. It turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere and still be just as productive as if they lived in a tiny one-room walk-up in a big city. It turns out companies really are capable of organizing and sustaining remote work even — perhaps especially — in the most sophisticated and complex fields. > > This is, I believe, a permanent civilizational shift. It is perhaps the most important thing that's happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that's maybe even more important than the internet. Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. We may, at long last, shatter the geographic lottery, opening up opportunity to countless people who weren't lucky enough to be born in the right place. And people are leaping at the opportunities this shift is already creating, moving both homes and jobs at furious rates. It will take years to understand where this leads, but I am extremely optimistic. ## Fisted by Foucault interview https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-dubrovnik-interviews-marc-andreessen I think it's clear the Internet is both an engine and a camera. To some extent it does drive behavior, but it also shows us ourselves in vivid detail. the Internet makes it far easier to discover when an authority Jgure is lying to us, which is an overwhelming good. I hope a new generation of city founders will try to create new and much better places for people to live. I for one would love to fund them. This is a very old and very important debate that traces back to classical Greece. Socrates himself was famously on the other side of your position, an Oral Supremacist versus your Text Supremacist. Socrates argued that text is markedly inferior to oral information conveyance, precisely because text can't interact, it can't talk back. He predicted that a future of text would stultify cultural development and the transmission of virtue, to which [waves hands and points in all directions]. Joseph Henrich in his ultra-important new book "The WEIRDest People In The World" shows how growing up in a Textual culture literally changes your brain's physical structure; your brain reallocates processing power normally devoted to analyzing faces to processing text. Which explains a LOT. *_Underline [page 1]:_* your brain reallocates processing power normally devoted to analyzing faces to processing text. Which explains a LOT Twitter, which Antonio Garcia-Martinez argues is actually Oral masquerading as Textual -- on Twitter, you think you're reading and writing text, but you're actually absorbing and spitting Oral Jre. I think Clubhouse is quite literally Socrates' Athenian Agora; it's Oral Culture implemented online in its full glory, for the Jrst time. Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges." A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *_all_* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege -- their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulJlling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world. The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build -- and we are building -- online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they Jnd themselves in. *_Underline [page 1]:_* A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overOowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. I also think it's true that the Internet has given all of humanity full read/write access to one another's minds for the Jrst time, and this is a massive shil in individual and collective psychology that we are just starting to grapple with Their kids, and their kids' kids, are going to grow up on the Internet at least as much as they grow up in the real world, and the pull of WEIRD culture will overwhelm all existing non-WEIRD cultures. I realize this is a very strong claim, but this process is already underway; at this point I think it's inevitable. The cost of this will be a collapse of global cultural diversity exactly as you and Rozin predict. This is the legacy of Hegel, Marx, and Kojeve: the core progressive idea of WEIRD, that history is advancing toward a single, uniJed, optimized global way of thinking and being. I think these two legacies are at war within WEIRD, and the outcome will determine whether the Internetpowered WEIRDiJcation of the world ultimately leads to an explosion of cultural creativity, or its absolute death. I think what you are describing is a cold, virtual, extended, cultural World War III. And I mean that seriously. I don't think a "real" World War III ever happens, because of the mutually assured destruction of nukes, and quite frankly our postmodern lack of energy to go kill other people in the tens or hundreds of millions. But, I think we are already in *_virtual_* World War III, the Great Information War, both within and between countries, and it's primarily caused by the WEIRDiJcation process I described above. Macron at this point is actively Jghting woke from the French lel, which is double plus ironic, since that's where it started. ## [https://www.theobservereffect.org/marc.html](https://www.theobservereffect.org/marc.html) ![[Pasted image 20210616124828.png]] In a sense, that’s the same as having no schedule.The challenge obviously shows up when you're trying to do anything that involves either running an organization or being in a customer service role. That is how we think about parts of what we do now. If part of your job is to deal with a large amount of incoming, you actually need to respond in a timely manner and not let people down. Maybe some people can do that off the cuff. I don't know how to do that. The big thing is basically *everything* is on the calendar. Sleep is on the calendar, going to bed is in there and so is free time. Free time is critical because that's the release valve. You can work full tilt for a long time as long as you know you have actual time for yourself coming up. I find if you don't schedule enough free time, you get resentful of your own calendar. When I was younger, I didn't really have the concept of turning off. But there comes a time, a little bit with age, when your body rebels. And obviously, if you have a family, that’s not great with a system where you're just always working. One of the things I find interesting about your calendar is that there is a lot of allocated open space. We've often spoken about how some of the most interesting, influential people in the world tend to have large chunks of open space. As opposed to executives who are scheduled for every 30 minutes back to back from 8am to 7pm. You know, we’ve both worked with executives where they were scheduled to the ‘nth’ degree. The three things you tend to notice with executives like that. One, they just never have any time to actually think. And that turns out to be a fairly important thing. Two, they have a hard time adjusting to changes in circumstances. In our business of venture capital, you get a lot of problems that come up. There is a lot of firefighting. It's like those classic movie scenes when there's a huge crisis and somebody calls out to their secretary “Cancel my schedule!”. Well, maybe you wouldn’t need to do that if you had some flexibility in your calendar. Then the other thing you’ve probably seen is the managers who are regimented to that degree end up being micro managers. You’ve probably seen examples of this where some of these folks end up in the weeds on everything. The good news is they've got the pulse of everything happening in the organization. The bad news is they’ve become the bottleneck. There’s no mountain top dammit! Keep me off the mountaintop! No mosquitoes. No, no, none of that. So a couple of things happen. One, about every six months or so I feel overwhelmed. It all starts to kind of get away from me. And so typically about every six months, I'll basically sit down and do a come-to-Jesus with myself. Which is ‘Okay, you've got this great system, but it's becoming overloaded’. And ‘you're saying yes to too many things and are involved in too many things’. You really have to uplevel and figure out what's important. I usually take a good hour to look at what I've been doing. It’s basically figuring out the threshold for ‘yes’ versus ‘no’. I try to revise that about once a year. Also about once a year, I rewrite my personal plan. I just write from scratch what I'm actually trying to do and my goals and then line up the activities that are below that. I would say a couple things about time allocation. One, it's not spreadsheet driven. You read about these executives/CEOs having this very complex exercise and they use a spreadsheet for their calendar... That's such an interesting topic, because, as you know, there's two schools of thought on how to set goals. Either on a personal level or at an organizational level. One is you use OKRs and metrics and you look at something very quantifiable to measure results objectively. The other school of thought is to just focus on the inputs and the process, not the actual results themselves. And to add to that, your job is unique in the sense that it has such a multi year long term feedback loop as opposed to a business unit with quarterly results. Yeah, we're basically all about inputs. It's basically process versus outcome. And it's exactly for the reason you said. Venture capital is too elongated an activity. We don't really know whether something is going to work or not work in the first five years of its life after we passed. And so it’s - okay, what do I learn? Like, what, what do I learn in the first three years when it's not working? Because sometimes these companies really struggle for a while and then they really succeed. Sometimes it’s the opposite - they really succeed fast and then they have serious issues later. It's really hard to get good metaphors but it's poker, right? It's really, really, really hard to be a good poker player. And if you're kicking yourself every time you have a bad hand, the bad habits just simply happen. You just need to be able to have a system that lets you think through the process… The thing I've tried to do the last few years is really ‘barbell’ the inputs. I basically read things that are either up to this minute or things that are timeless… Yeah. I’m trying to strip out all the stuff in the middle. What I've discovered is the number of people who can write something in the middle zone - when they're trying to explain something that happened last week, month, a year or even a decade - and who I trust to actually give me an objective read on the situation is just a really, really short list. There's a handful but there aren't very many.We have one situation currently - what’s literally happening right now [with COVID-19]. Coronavirus is one where everyday I'm looking at all the science and all the economics because these are critical issues. And I'm trying to avoid all the commentary and all of the interpretation. And then the other, as you said, there's just a very large amount of timeless stuff that really has been proven right over time. You could spend your entire life only reading timeless works which is what smart people used to do. One of the things I talk a lot about is this concept of ‘strong views weakly held’.I think in any business you do want to commit, you do want to act, you do want to bias towards action. Now, obviously, as you know, venture capitalists are on the opposite side of the spectrum from the hedge fund example since we have to wait like 10 years. We do end up much more committed to these things. Well, I will pick three! It's kind of the holy trinity of our modern dilemma. It’s health care, it’s education and it's housing. It's the big three. So basically, what's happened is the industries in which we build like crazy, they have crashing prices. And so we build TVs like crazy, we build cars like crazy, we make food like crazy. The price on all that stuff has really fallen dramatically over the last 20 years which is an incredibly good thing for ordinary people. Falling prices are really, really good for people because you can buy more for every dollar. # Pmararchive The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them. You look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? I focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full of highly successful startups that were staffed primarily by people who had never "done it before". pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 15-18 --- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 38-42 --- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product. In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 38-43 --- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product. In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy. And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 38-44 --- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product. In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy. And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly. This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 38-45 --- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product. In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy. And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly. This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 38-46 --- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product. In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy. And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly. This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail. You'll break your pick for years trying to find customers who don't exist for your marvelous product, and your wonderful team will eventually get demoralized and quit, and your startup will die. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 38-48 --- The #1 company-killer is lack of market. Andy puts it this way: When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 50-52 --- The #1 company-killer is lack of market. Andy puts it this way: When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. You can obviously screw up a great market -- and that has been done, and not infrequently -- but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 50-54 --- The #1 company-killer is lack of market. Andy puts it this way: When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. You can obviously screw up a great market -- and that has been done, and not infrequently -- but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 50-54 --- The #1 company-killer is lack of market. Andy puts it this way: When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. You can obviously screw up a great market -- and that has been done, and not infrequently -- but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 50-55 --- The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck's. Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens. My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit. Carried a step further, I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this "BPMF") and after product/market fit ("APMF"). When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit. Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required. When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. I'm not suggesting that you do ignore everything else -- just that judging from what I've seen in successful startups, you can. Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit -- and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful. Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board -- heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit. Ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 77-101 --- The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 77-80 --- The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck's. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 77-84 --- The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck's. Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens. My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit. pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 77-86 --- The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck's. Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens. My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit. Carried a step further, I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this "BPMF") and after product/market fit ("APMF"). pmarchive.com, Pmarchive - The only thing that matters, loc. 77-88 ---