It's Time to Build

The article is a good read, but I love the reactions on social media even more. Seems like career VCs – the people NOT building – are retweeting this left-and-right, while founders– the folks building – seem.... okay with it.... but almost unimpressed.

Emotional. I can only suggest he was talking about building for the impact. Our fathers and grand fathers were building to make an impact. They were building for us, for future generations. It was a time of believers. And countries (governments) supported that type of building.

Now everything changed. We are building for today. We are building for instant profit. And we have no other way. The whole world switched to “make me feel good today” or “be profitable from day 1”. So we have a lot of small painkillers or vitamins to solve our today’s issues and no BIG future plans. Except Elon Musk of course))

It seams like that was the main point. We need to start building for the future impact, not profitable nowadays. Honestly, I can not imagine that without reverting the current mindset. Do I want to impact the future for the better? Yes. What am I doing now? Looking how to sell another vitamin to and be profitable today.

Every Western institution is part of colonization's legacy ... and more of the same isn't going to help it.

They want to think bigger, but if one can't think outside of the bounds/comfort of whiteness ... nothing will change

I find the exhortation to "just build it!" to be too abstract. Who is Andreesen talking to? Founders? The government? Non-profits and educational institutions? Seems like all of the above, and at the same time, no one in particular.

Founders and companies are generally bound by market demand. The reason why most things haven't been built is because the market demand isn't there. Here's an example that comes to mind. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-imagine-that-a-local-business-making-surgical-face-masks-is-working-247-guess-again/

For investments that serve the long-term public interest (e.g. infrastructure, emergency preparedness) I think that means that the government has to step in and build the things that the public needs but that markets don't naturally support. But how? Will Andreesen's words inspire politicians to suddenly change their priorities? I wouldn't hold my breath.

As a voter and citizen, I have no idea how to have any influence on this process. Should I write to my senators and congressmen demanding these changes happen? Start petitions? I don't even know what works.

Every year the U.S. spends over $600B on the military. Do we really need that much? How much do we need? And let's say everyone agrees that maybe $400B is enough and we should use $200B to build the things that Andreesen says we should build. How do we make that happen?

I think certain nonprofits (The Gates Foundation comes to mind) can also help fill in the gap where markets fail. It's hard to measure how impactful these nonprofits are and how to extend their influence.

I don't think anyone would disagree with what Andreesen wants. We all want the same thing. I just don't think anyone (him included) has a good roadmap to get there.

I cannot do anything but agree with the author. However, I have the feeling we spent to much time in non-important work, meetings and a really small amount of time on research and understanding the foundations. I've seen this pattern in many entrepreneurs that are too focused on showing off their capacity to build, instead of spending time on meaningful work.

It was a good emotional read during the weekend under confinement.

I think what happens after (reactions, actions, non-actions, etc.) is all up to individuals and their interpretations. Some people may feel underwhelmed, others may feel inspired.

At the least, it gave us in the maker community some food for thought and distracted us from lockdown for a few hours.

I feel that a huge problem lies within the rocky foundation this nation is built upon. We've never valued the proper education and fair employment of those who are now in "marginalized communities." Blacks and browns are twice as likely to be unemployed than white peers. Blacks and Latinx folks make up 2% and 3% of the tech workforce, respectively. We're in the age of information and frankly, the information that marginalized communities receive is engrained in addictive social media apps, "built", designed, and marketed to them without their input, yet are fueled by their cultural contributions or outdated outlets that are still capitalizing on the sensationalist divides across political and racial lines.

Our nation never properly equipped black, brown, and poor communities to build the tools we'd need in a pandemic. Our education system has failed our children in preparing them for the tech revolution. Students that depended on schools for free lunch are now expected to just find the technical means to learn remotely out of thin air.

Our employment system has failed in re-training the working class who are working "essential" jobs and are exposed to health risks, endangering their own and their family's well-being, contributing to the ever-growing existing problems in our social economy.

Why is there so much VC capital funneled into failing companies when it can be invested into advancing the education in marginalized communities so that they can attain the skills and tools needed to thrive in a pandemic as such and build more useful tools for their communities, for the nation, for the society at large?

Why isn't there a focus on channeling resources from tech companies that are squeezing cultural gems from disenfranchised communities into scaling efforts that educate folks at scale to build tools that will advance the state of our nation, of our world?

The more focus we put into creating these social painkillers, the deeper we dig the ditch in our shithole of a nation. We've lost 40,000 in 3 months. An Associated Press analysis showed that in a group of 13,000 recorded Covid-related deaths, 42% were black, whereas blacks only constituted 21% of that group.

Damn right it's time to build because this collapse has been building itself up for centuries, for decades and now is NOT the time to be vague or abstract about these underlying issues.

Who agrees that it's been time to build?

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

When I read this I was blown away; how could this incredibly intelligent person miss the solution by such a wide margin?

My original career was in mass manufacturing, whereas small problems in the production process could manifest in large scale defects, rework, scrap material, and recalls. So imagine that as a loose metaphor for sick people, treatment, deaths, and quarantine. In these instances you have to decide quickly to halt production while you diagnose and correct the process, or continue production and add inspection to discover the defects as they're created, while diagnosing and correcting the process. You also have to determine when the production problem started, and where the potentially defective products are now, including in products that are already in the hands of customers. (reference JIT, just-in-time manufacturing)

In the time of crisis you have to focus on correcting the problem, but after you have to think how to prevent it from happening again. So in the case of MA's writing that I highlighted you might think this is what he's saying, but I don't agree. Continuing the manufacturing metaphor, what he's saying to me is that we add millions of dollars of inspection systems to the end of the production line to look for defects, rather than focusing on the source of the defect.

This is where things get controversial. MA uses "we" a lot in his writing; well, as it turns out, "we" know where these problems originate, but the focus is not being put here. I understand the difficult balance of diplomatic relations, trade agreements, and global economies - but crises like these are where we need to cut the bullshit diplomacy, as the "customer", and say, "hey, fix your shit or we'll take our contracts elsewhere." (finishing the manufacturing metaphor)

Now, before you virtue signal on me - I've been to the PRC a couple of times and like it a lot, in fact I tried to move there in 2018 but couldn't make the finances work. I have many friends and colleagues from there, and know that the government and the problematic wildlife market shoppers don't represent all Chinese.

Also, I'm not suggesting that the US doesn't need to do any preparation as MA is saying, (I'm Canadian), but having warehouses full of medical equipment collecting dust and getting chewed up by rats is not how you PREVENT a crisis. This is how you could possibly prevent the SCALE of it. When the next virus hits the shore it'll be the same thing, spreading around and taking people down while the government tries to decide whether to unlock those warehouses or not. And this is when you'll find out that your tests can't accurately predict this strain, and the certification of much of the equipment and rooms is expired.

If you want to catch it closer to the source, and actually try to prevent it from getting to the US, then just make everyone leaving the PRC to come to North America take a test while going through airport security. A positive test and that plane doesn't leave while everyone is temporarily quarantined until the positive ones can be taken away for treatment, and the other ones can be decontaminated as best as possible. Putting something like this in place for a while will not only greatly prevent a possible crisis, it will put pressure on the PRC government to actually go and fix the source of the problem. (I just came up with this and may not agree with myself in the morning.)

OKAY, so what about reciprocity? Of course the PRC will demand all Americans going there will need to be tested the same... well how many coronviruses originated in the US and traveled to the PRC?? NONE, so there won't be any grounded planes in the US.

The rest of the article, fine, build things, but don't think that manufacturing ventilators is the solution to the coronavirus problem. RANT OVER

Edit: If you want a recent example of how the PRC reacted to a very North American problem that we spread over there, you can reference how they cut-off shipments of plastic "recycling" materials there early last year. They just put an immediate stop to it with no explanation required - cutting off the problem at the source.