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On America’s 250th birthday, venture capitalist and Silicon Valley kingmaker Marc Andreessen is shamelessly optimistic about our country — and making the same audacious bet the Founding Fathers did: that our nation’s best days are ahead.
But the present American revolution is technology, and the danger isn’t primarily from foreign rivals but the country handicapping its own builders.
“We’re the best country in the world,” Andreessen told The Post. “The idea that America has both the level of size and scope and solidity and resources that we have, but that we still have that level of risk-taking spirit in the country … is a really, really special combination.”
And he’s evangelizing optimism to one place that seems strangely short on it: Silicon Valley.
Much of the tech world has become mired in doomerism, with the engineers who are creating the future convinced the very thing they are building — artificial intelligence — is apocalyptic and destructive.
Andreessen rejects that cynicism as, at least partly, performative and thinks expelling it is key to bettering on our future.
“Negativity always sounds more sophisticated than positivity,” he said. “If you’re optimistic, “you’re naive, you’re gullible.” But if you’re pessimistic? “You’re worldly, and you’re sophisticated, and you’re wise.”
That view also lines up with the self-interest of the big AI companies that are encouraging more regulation. A government-built moat, Andreessen explains, may be the best defense a company can have — and the surest way to block innovators desperately trying to catch up.
“One-hundred percent, there’s a regulatory capture element to it,” Andreessen said. “And they’re driving hard for that.”
That gloom and the push to regulate that inevitably follows is what he sees as one of the biggest threats to America’s next quarter-century.
“The economy,” he said, “could be growing at three times this current rate with a different set of policy choices” — and a century ago, it did.
What changed isn’t the country’s capacity, it is the regulatory burden. “We not only have ankle weights, we’ve got knee weights and arm weights, one arm tied behind our back — blindfolded and oxygen-deprived,” Andreessen said.
The 54-year-old has made a career of betting correctly on the future. He co-founded Netscape, which helped bring the internet to American homes and businesses, and later built Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) into one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture firms. The firm has backed many of today’s multi-billion (and trillion) dollar companies, including SpaceX, Anduril, Coinbase, Stripe and OpenAI.
Andreessen, who was early to bet on the internet and AI, sees his work, more generally, as betting on American innovation. In an essay, “It’s Time to Build,” that he wrote just weeks into pandemic lockdowns, he evangelized about the importance of creating and manufacturing in our own country — rather than outsourcing it globally.
A16z even green-lit an entire fund, “American Dynamism,” to back defense, manufacturing and hard-tech founders at a time when other funds were almost exclusively focused on software.
But Andreessen now sees his role as doing more than building the future. He is also advocating for the values that make this country successful.
Builders, he argued, have an obligation to make the case for what they build. “We want to change the world. OK, well, the world gets a vote. If you don’t explain yourself, other people are going to explain you for you — and you are not going to like their explanations.”
Here are the bets Andreessen is making on America’s future.
Health
Healthcare will benefit from AI’s ability to sift through vast quantities of data about medical conditions, new diseases and the impacts of medications — and Andreessen is bullish on systems that will more readily make that data available to doctors. A16z is backing companies like Abridge which quickly transcribes patient visits and Hippocratic AI which helps doctors make diagnoses. “No human doctor could possibly read all the medical literature … and an elderly patient juggling 10 medications needs exactly the drug-interaction math AI does best,” Andreessen said.
Transportation
Self-driving cars are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and Andreessen is betting that autonomy will improve and spread to transform everything from cars to rockets to boats. When it comes to cars, the future is already here. “Self-driving cars work now,” Andreessen said. In the next 10 years, Andreessen predicts “a renaissance moment for almost every kind of vehicle” — with autonomy becoming ubiquitous for boats, aircraft, submarines and rockets. A16z is investing in both the software and hardware driving autonomy forward, including Waymo and Infinite Machine.
Robots
Andreessen believes robots will be transformative for regular people — able to help around the house — and perform repetitive physical tasks in factories that free up humans for higher-value work. And he is very excited about the transformative impact of exoskeletons that can provide the physical ability for someone who is quadriplegic or paraplegic, has lost limbs or battles neurodegenerative disease to get out of a wheelchair and physically walk around. “I think it’s going to be incredible to see,” he said. A16z has bet on Mind Robotics, which is building and programming humanoid robots.
Defense Tech
Defense tech has become incredibly lucrative, but Andreessen sees it both as a savvy investment and a patriotic responsibility to protect service members domestically and abroad. “We have the opportunity to use technology to save the lives of our service people,” he said. In the Iraq War, special forces “literally had to go kick doors down” and search houses by hand — putting themselves at risk. But thanks to innovation now, “that’s completely a thing a drone can do, 100%.” A16z was an early investor in companies like Anduril, Shield AI and Saronic which are creating autonomous military systems.
Manufacturing
“There is not a single thing manufactured anywhere in the world that we could not manufacture in the US,” Andreessen said. “The stuff that moved [overseas] was the stuff that was easy to move. The stuff that stayed was the complicated stuff.” Ultimately, manufacturing fled because policy made building here “extremely difficult, expensive and in many cases illegal … It’s a political problem, not a knowledge problem.” A16z is backing companies like Hadrian, which builds automated machine shops to churn out aerospace and defense parts, and Apex, which mass-produces satellites on an assembly line.
Education
Andreessen sees AI tutors and chatbots, which are endlessly patient and always available, as augmenting rather than replacing human teachers, making personalized, on-demand learning broadly accessible. “I can’t call a teacher at 2 in the morning. They get actually quite upset if you do that,” Andreessen said. “But I can talk to the bot.” At places like Alpha School, AI handles two hours of academics a day while human teachers help with the rest. A16z recently bet on Prisms, whose virtual reality platform brings math and science to life.
English (US)