Welcome back to the 8th edition of the Roundtable Weekly 👋
Here’s what we have for you this week:
📙 Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer
There are very few people who come off less “buttoned-up” in an interview than Marc Andreessen, and this one with Noah Smith is no exception. Andreessen built one of the first graphical web browsers (Mosaic), co-founded Netscape, and now leads Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the leading Silicon Valley-based venture firms.
The trade-off in a long, written interview like this vs. audio is that while you miss the off-the-cuff spontaneity, you get much more thought out, high quality answers. This is basically ten mini-blogs from Andreessen on loosely related topics, including:
The top priorities Andreessen thinks the US needs to build solutions for, and that a16z is investing in: housing, education, and healthcare
New forms of media, including a16z’s investments in Clubhouse and Substack
Andreessen’s famous “software eats the world” thesis and how he sees that playing out over the next decade
Crypto, distributed work, and competition with China
Here’s one of my favorite excerpts on how he thinks about software:
First, a common criticism of software is that it’s not something that takes physical form in the real world. For example, software is not a house, or a school, or a hospital. This is of course true on the surface, but it misses a key point.
Software is a lever on the real world.
Someone writes code, and all of a sudden riders and drivers coordinate a completely new kind of real-world transportation system, and we call it Lyft…
…Software is our modern alchemy. Isaac Newton spent much of his life trying and failing to transmute a base element -- lead -- into a valuable material -- gold. Software is alchemy that turns bytes into actions by and on atoms. It’s the closest thing we have to magic.
So instead of feeling like we are failing if we’re not building in atoms, we should lean as hard into software as we possibly can. Everywhere software touches the real world, the real world gets better, and less expensive, and more efficient, and more adaptable, and better for people. And this is especially true for the real world domains that have been least touched by software until now -- such as housing, education, and health care.
—Mike
🎧 Expedia & Zillow: Rich Barton
How I Built This—June 14th | 65 min
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Everybody knows How I Built This, but not everyone knows Rich Barton… however, you probably know some of the companies he’s co-founded: Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor. It’s funny that despite starting 3 extremely well-known billion dollar tech companies, Barton is not a household name. Given his repeated successes in the notoriously competitive space of consumer, you could make the case he’s one of the best consumer tech founders to ever do it. In listening to this episode, the opportunities seem so obvious knowing what we know now, but it’s incredible how clearly he was able to see things.
One of my favorite parts of the episode is how he and his partners went about naming their ventures:
“Creating a new word is very ambitious. And very long-term and very difficult. But if you’re successful, you can infuse whatever you want into it and it’s way more valuable. We liked Expedia because it had an ‘X’ in it and that’s a high point scrabble letter. If it’s a good dogs name, if it can be turned into a verb, those are good signs.”
When naming Zillow, he was trying to combine words that sounded financial and emotional given the home buying process is both. This is how he arrived at Zillow…
Zillow = Zillion + Pillow.
Extra: Here’s an analysis from Kevin Kwok about what he calls the Rich Barton Playbook, specifically related to how each of his companies leverage data content loops.
—Thomas
📺 Intern Q&A with the President
August 2016 | 10 min
It’s pretty cool former President Obama made a tradition of speaking with each year’s class of White House interns—this is the Q&A from his last year in office. Regardless of what you think about his politics, you can’t help but admire his demeanor, sense of humor, and fatherly wisdom. A few simple lessons that are universally applicable:
On how he remains optimistic: “Certainly in this job, what helps me is taking the long view on things. So much pessimism and stress arises out of looking at things in this very narrow here and now. But the day-to-day ups and downs is like the weather…”
On when to compromise versus standing your ground: “If you have an objective and the compromise thwarts that objective, a compromise is bad. But if the compromise gets you closer to the objective, but not as good as you want it to be, it’s a good compromise.”
—Thomas
🐦 Tweet from Conor White-Sullivan (Co-Founder of Roam Research)
This is so simple, yet so profound. The President of the United States (at least Clinton and Obama, based on the thread) used to be delivered memos requiring decisions on some of the most complex issues in the world and the output was one of three multiple choice answers. It’s hard to imagine most decisions weren’t “let’s discuss” given the complexity of the job but I think the beauty of this is the framing demands the one putting forth the proposal to work through every last detail before presenting it to you, the decision maker, so you can maximize the number of decisions you can make.
It’s interesting Obama and Bezos (6-page memos) both publicly prefer written word vs spoken and for good reason: clear writing equals clear thinking. This actually reminds me about the early days at Away where written proposals were the norm—it drove better decision making and when you received an “agree”, you knew you did your job well.
—Thomas
As always, drop us a note if you have any feedback. And if you enjoyed this, please forward this to any friends or colleagues.
We’ll be taking off next week for the 4th so see you in two Sundays.