W/r/t Musk at least, I get the sense people don’t fully appreciate the Twitter factor: access journalists in tech found that they got more engagement (and thus clout, freelance or job opportunities, etc.) when they posted nice stuff about Musk on Twitter. That portended a lot, as it turned out
The funny thing is that if you go by personal technical achievement, bill gates was genuinely a nerd who contributed technically to his product. A lot of the modern techbro/vcs have contributed genuinely nothing to their respective products other than initial capital
I'm sure you know this, but fit the benefit of the young'uns: his other big contribution was that his mother knew the head of IBM. Without that family connection, he probably wouldn't have got the MS-DOS contract that led to Windows and Office monopolies.
I'm going to have to stop you there. Andreesen wrote a huge chunk of Mosaic and Netscape. He's a complete lunatic now, but he was probably a better engineer back in the day than Gates (Gates moved away from coding faster than he did).
But you are completely right about a vast majority of VCs.
I find it so bizarre that he’s seen as such a villain by all these conspiracy theorists. I used to know him very slightly in the 90s, and yes, a very clever if slightly arrogant nerd. Elon Musk, on the other hand is genuinely a bloody Bond villain!
I think somewhere deep down I think they know it and it's why they're so thin skinned and desperate for praise and validation. They have none of the confidence that comes from having actually achieved something to fall back on
Like Marc says the founders should be praised for [start company, create jobs, get rich, pay taxes, donate to philanthropy], but that's not what SV techbros do. It's "start rich, buy-in on some early round to an existing company, plan layoffs if staff get too uppity, lobby to not pay taxes"
Don’t forget both the general uselessness of the product compared to a PC, and then the total enshitification of said product to make it down right harmful.
Lobby not to pay taxes *or face any consequences for ignoring every other law*. Also the primary goal of modern tech companies is to turn jobs into gigs and gigs into computer chatbots.
Bill Gates has said that he would support a return to a fairer tax system that would result in 62% of the wealth he has today going to the collective good. That wouldn't prevent people from becoming disgustingly rich but would be better than the neo-feudalism that fuckers like Marc want to see.
I won't praise Gates for his statements on a fairer tax policy, because the rates should be even higher and because I presume that he could give that money to the government, even if he couldn't influence changes to the tax code. Still, that's superior to the idea that philanthropy excuses inequity.
Andreeson did get started by coding up Mosaic (the first graphical Web browser) though, didn't he? He has gone off the rails since for sure but was a real engineer once i thought (unlike say Musk)
Should prolly be a caveat to start rich b/c most of these people didn’t start rich. That being said, every single one of them got lucky at some point and then entered the process you laid out. The real message is that at a certain point, you’re insulated from failure.
After Netscape was acquired by AOL, it was basically impossible for Andreessen to go broke, which allowed him to take on enough risk that world-historic success and profit was inevitable.
Sometimes it's not even initial capital. It's just having a vague idea you can bullshit to a rich guy who will give you the money to hire the people that actually do the work.
Marc did develop Mosaic (while being paid to do it by a publicly funded institution before taking it private as his own commercial product, which ultimately failed in the market).
Come to think of it, what has he done since then besides whine?
Always thought Jamie Zawinski (Netscape employee 16) got it right. Sold all his AOL stock the day it vested, followed his passions & never played the game.
This is an overall wall street sickness though. Private equity firms have been shaking down organizations across the board in pretty much every industry. Quite a few of those guys are a part of that space.
People forget that Cis E. SpaceX *bought* the title of founder at Tesla. Everything since he sold Zip2 to PayPal has been money, not technical acumen or business sense, and it shows
tVCs fancy themselves as job-creating innovators when they are mostly just people who gamble with OPM. They are often very well compensated, but deserve zero accolades. Andreesen's only contribution to society was Mosaic (& then netscape), but he's angry that people do anything but bow down to him.
The only reason SpaceX is successful is because Musk is actually smart enough to keep his hands off it. You don't get aerospace contracts, particularly with NASA, if you're careless or capricious. You have to be rigorous, disciplined, incredibly competent. All things Musk himself isn't.
Also because SpaceX has people whose entire job, really, is to steer Musk away from interfering with anything to do with building the actual rockets. Tesla too, to a lesser extent, I think. But Twitter didn't get a chance to build itself that protective layer before he screwed it
Seems to me Gates mostly just stole ideas from other people. DOS. Windows. Office. InternetExplorer. Bing. A person with sharp business practices but very little in the way of nerdhood.
DOS wasn't stolen. It was purchased, openly. It was a perfectly legal implementation of a CP/M-86 compatible OS, not really unique in any particular way other than it was cheap to buy. Nothing was "stolen" there.
That story has been going around for years, but it's false. The licensing and later purchase of 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products was all above board. In discussions with IBM and Bill Gates mentioned the existence of 86-DOS, and IBM representative Jack Sams told him to get a license for it.
later, sure, but he also did things like personally write the FAT16 filesystem. Like he was actually a developer in a way that, say, Musk merely pretends to be.
there was a comment in the NCSA Mosaic source code to the effect of "I put this goto here because marca likes gotos" and that always amused me more than it probably should have
Microsoft's first product was the BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair. Gates and Allen personally wrote this themselves while Harvard undergrads, before dropping out of college to found Microsoft.
you see that bleed out in the culture of these bigtech companies a bit too, like how Microsoft's developer tools have always had pride of place at the center of their company, contrasted with, say, Apple where things like form factor and tactile design are very central, but devtools less so
In some ways it speaks to a general nature of wealth and getting rich. Sure once in a while it's someone with a good idea who happens to see it through, but often it's just some rich kid who fails up his whole life.
It's very rarely just the first case. Bezos absolutely build Amazon from. The ground up but having access to funding from his parents and their network made it happen
tbh I've not used the apple dev ecosystem for a bit, but I do remember wasting literally days of effort fighting xcode which would just repeatedly crash or not work, and took minutes to start. And not even doing anything particularly unusual. It was just a terrible product.
Yes: I have a M100 and a Model 200, (which uses a lot of the same firmware), and I'll give credit where it's due, it really is an elegant system that gets a lot out of the hardware, using BASIC to take the role that bash does today.
I see it more as he is reasonably technical and had good business sense. IBM tried to get Digital Research to provide an OS, and got blown off. Gates saw the potential and put together a deal.
Windows was going to get the axe. Gates saw a crude demo on a potentially better kernel, boom Win3…
And MS was (at least in some cases) willing to invest the dev resources to back a product. SQL Server was originally a joint effort with Sybase to port the DBMS to Windows. The 2 companies had some sort of falling out & MS continued the product development.
It seems that the Techbros who were in place prior to Dot Com had some substantive achievements to build on.
A lot of the guys who have appeared since? Not so much.
A certain kind of person saw fortunes being created for companies without products, services, or anything of value and they came like grifter moths to the flame.
which is why crypto, NFTs, etc. were so attractive: it was the final result of "I need to get rich quick but cannot actually provide any sort of good or service"
Hey, hey, Musk specified the shape of the door sills on the first Tesla! (Then threw his toys out of the pram when no-one talked about him as an engineer)
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Musk has Taken that to somewhere darker
But you are completely right about a vast majority of VCs.
Come to think of it, what has he done since then besides whine?
Cry-nanciers, if you will.
But Microsoft has drifted a bit from that tradition. While Apple’s dev environment has gotten quite good in recent years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
Windows was going to get the axe. Gates saw a crude demo on a potentially better kernel, boom Win3…
A lot of the guys who have appeared since? Not so much.