Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it? I see you can ask Marc Andreessen for advice at https://21.co/pmarca/ - It costs $100 if 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! |
Two takeaways:
1. A response looks like this: 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...
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.
That's quite expensive for $100. Also, doesn't sound like an advice, more like a judge for an elevator pitch.
Interesting dichotomy, at least to me.
Coincidentally I don't like using Google Chrome. I stopped using the browser after they removed that ad-confusion extension and switched to FireFox. I never used it but I think it's not right for google to do it. I mean, I expected it to happen but it broke the camals back.
If I had known that there was a $5 charge for chrome extensions I would have stopped using it sooner.
That excuse was made by Martin Sshkreli on a news show if memory serves me right. He was talking about the price hikes on one of their medical products.
In my opinion "It's fine! We're going to develop life saving drugs with this!" is a very similar argument to "It's fine! We're going to give the money to charity!".
I know these are very different but I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.
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.
contact: ideas@woz.org
It's listed at https://stallman.org/ under "Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org."
He'll happily explain or debate any points he has with you although there is a standard 24hr return time for every email because of the way he processes all of his emails he gets. He's got a post about how he does it efficiently somewhere.
If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.
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?
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...
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?
[1] "hey yeah, i don't really understand your product, but a few law firms you could google might be interested... also notice my lack of a warm intro for you... thanks"
Good, bad, or indifferent I like the way Marc approached this given the amount of people clamoring to get access to him.
> 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
No doubt. Paid $100 to ask Andreeesen what his favourite charities are? The SV hero worship is so intense.
A successful example is Benetech.org, a SF Bay Area technology charity that is doing wonderful work in tech and social good; I learned about Benetech because of direct personal advice.
Here are some of my favorite charities in case you're interested in learning more and/or donating. Thank you!
For tech: Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).
For social causes: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, Benetech for Global Literacy, Center for Environmental Health (CEH), Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch (HRW).
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.
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.
The proceeds go to programs promoting underrepresented genders and ethnicities in tech, I'd say that yes it is quite "worth it".
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.)
I once offered to create a front-end for GCC for a programming language that, at the time, was only supported by proprietary compilers. (This was back before GCC was eclipsed by clang, with its sane licensing that allows more organizations to contribute.) I got back a disjointed screed about how evil the company behind it was because not all their software was free and they were basically fascists who ate babies and if their kind wasn't defeated then the universe was doomed. (I'm paraphrasing because this was 20+ years ago, but that was the general theme.)
I've also had the displeasure of working with him more than once at conferences, and he brings the same sort of good-vs-evil delusion to even the simplest things in everyday life. He sought out opportunities to harangue volunteers about everything from lighting to the beverages available, prepped with hours of obviously practiced diatribe to "support" all his bizarre ideas. He even showed up in the middle of a conference once--the schedule for which had been finalized months earlier--and asked when he could speak, and complained about the time slot we managed to find for him and how there were speakers talking about things that weren't GPL-licensed and we shouldn't be giving them a platform to promote such evil, etc. Honestly, he's the biggest ass I've ever had to deal with at such an event.
He's an atheist, but he has way more in common with the nuttiest of religious nuts than he does with any kind of philosopher. He's right about a few things (perhaps by accident, given how many things he's wrong about), and because he happened to be right about them first, he continues to be treated with reverence and many of his ideas are given way more credence than they should be.
It's your representative's job to represent you. Marc has no obligation to answer your question.
How is it an excuse for a pharmaceutical company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be saving lives.
How is it an excuse for a technology company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be giving people technology.
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To put it in clearer terms, Marc Andreessen is with the crowd that has the most to gain from charity contributions. He's got his fingers in all the right pies to make a lot of money from the results of more charity activities. He can is described as "a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook,[5] eBay,[6] and Hewlett Packard Enterprise,[7] among others" according to wikipedia and he was apperently involved with Free Basics.
You can read more about this here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Criticism
The Free Basics thing is exactly the worst possible thing for any third world county I can think of. Getting spoon fed the "right" information from an overload mega-corp.
I think it's fair to say that his buisness is collecting data on people and manipulating them and that "just happens to include providing technology" which is one of the things he can do by finding selective charities.