On July 16, famous technology investor Marc Andreessen announced on his podcast that he would support Donald Trump’s second term as president. This is a major change in policy. Andreessen has supported every Democratic presidential candidate from Bill Clinton to Hillary Clinton.
I listened PodcastsListen to the full 85 minutes and you’ll see Andreessen’s take on many other Silicon Valley’s Big Names Trump’s supporters are legion, from investment partner Ben Horowitz to Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, and Andreessen explained the main reasons why: He is”The “Little Tech” AgendaThe manifesto denounces government regulation of technology and venture capital. The manifesto argues that small startups are the “vanguard of American tech hegemony”: they fuel rapid growth, improve the quality of life for all, and ensure American military superiority and global stability. The Little Tech agenda also includes a surprising nod to the defense industry. One of Silicon Valley’s early funders And almost Trusted Customers.
“Startups are when brave outcasts and misfits come together with their dreams, ambition, courage, and a particular set of skills to create something new for the world, build products that improve people’s lives, and create companies that have the potential to keep creating even more new things in the future,” Andreessen writes. And he believes Trump is the man to keep the government from getting in the way of these bold visionaries.
Listening to Andreessen explain his political change of heart, I became convinced of two things: (1) his Trumpian attitude doesn’t make sense, and (2) his Little Tech policies don’t make sense either.
I know this because for the past 20 years I’ve been reading the blogs of a brilliant and prolific tech blogger named Marc Andreessen.
Before Andreessen and Horowitz founded their venture capital firm in 2009, Andreessen was a keen observer of Silicon Valley. Andreessen was a leading investor in Silicon Valley back then, when he didn’t have much money in the game. He warned people not to be fooled by exaggerations. He’s throwing up now.
Back then, Andreessen’s concept of a startup was much simpler: “There are lots of great businesses out there, many of which are highly profitable and satisfying to run, but their business models lack the leverage to justify venture capital investment,” he wrote. In plain English, a startup worth VC backing is one that can make a 10x return on its investment over five years — that is, it can build something once, like a piece of software or a website, and sell it to 1,000 businesses and millions of consumers.
That’s it. Andreessen says this is what a venture-backed startup should be like. Not like Captain America’s shield or anything.
Big Andreessen (meaning the current bloated billionaire model) is at odds with Little Andreessen (the previous, leaner, bloated model) on regulatory issues. His partner, Horowitz, recently Top risks to American technology“Faulty regulatory policies” are at the root of America’s global hegemony, he said, and the government needs to move away from “decentralized technologies” like AI, biotechnology, and blockchain, and focus on “centralized, monopoly-enabling technologies like Web 2 and the industrial-age financial system.”
But 15 years ago, Andreessen told us that we were thinking about the Internet wrong. “Web 2.0,” he wrote. “The entrepreneurial community and its associates — venture capitalists, press, analysts, big media, Internet companies, and Wall Street — picked up the term Web 2.0 to describe a theoretical new category of startup companies.” But that was just branding, he explained. There was no “space” or ecosystem. “If your product is attractive to the market, you will succeed. If your product is not attractive to the market, you will fail.” The question is not whether the technology is good or bad for America. The question is whether the technology actually works and fills a need.
Andreessen is just using the Trumpian trick of falsely idealizing the past.
To be fair, Andreessen wasn’t so worried about regulation back in the day. The reason, he now argues, was that the government left Silicon Valley alone. In the podcast, he said the Democratic Party used to be “pro-tech, pro-startups, pro-American victory in tech, pro-entrepreneurship. You make a lot of money in business, you give that money to charity and get a huge amount of credit.” Venture capital investors operated in a magical techno-libertarian liminal space, a west so barbaric that you could make a tiny iPhone and make a lot of money. But the Biden administration has changed that, Andreessen argues, by trying to regulate the “math” of AI and going after Big Tech for its anti-competitive and deceptive practices.
In this case, Andreessen is simply playing a Trumpian trick to falsely idealize the past: The Biden administration didn’t invent tech regulation; it’s simply reviving regulatory practices that were common in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Department of Justice sued Microsoft Separated the web browser from the operating system. Or at least about a decade before that. The government broke up AT&T And it fostered new fertility for telecommunications companies. Regulation almost always opens the door for new startups and a variety of new technologies. Biden’s position is fundamentally that to make America great again, we need to make America innovate again.
I think part of Andreessen’s support for Trump is truly personal. Why he supported Barack Obama In short, “I had a very long meeting with him and was fascinated by him.” This time, Donald Trump met with Andreessen and Horowitz, but Joe Biden did not.
Andreessen’s biggest shift was his refusal to consider the larger consequences of supporting Trump, beyond his own stock price and dividends.
Either way, Andreessen’s support for Trump is no surprise. He and his fellow Silicon Valley billionaire investor class Slide right For years, they’ve been saying lofty things about how they’re going to save America through technological innovation, but in reality, Against Anti-competitive rules that allow innovation to flourish.
“The ‘Little Tech Agenda’ has nothing to do with innovation or technology.” Observe “This is nothing more than a venture capital wish list,” says political scientist and technology analyst Dave Karpf. “The investor class is no longer smart enough to invest in companies that bring useful products to market and make a profit. They need special treatment from the government to make their misinvestments pay off.”
Andreessen’s biggest shift was his refusal to consider the larger impact of supporting Trump beyond his own stock price and dividends. In 2016, Andreessen Explaining his support for Hillary Clinton At the Bloomberg Technology Conference, Trump listed four criteria for a president: science policy, market policy, trade and immigration. He said he was unhappy with Democrats’ restrictions on genetically modified crops. But the clincher for Trump was restrictive and racist immigration policy.
“Without the incredible influx of immigrants that’s happened over the last 80 years, Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t have done anything,” Andreessen said. “The idea of blocking that is just nauseating.”
Since then, Trump’s immigration policies have As much as was obtained badBut has Andresen’s digestion somehow improved?
I’d written about the tech industry on and off since before Andreessen’s company, Netscape, went public. I always thought the gadgets and connections coming out of Silicon Valley weren’t just toys; they were harbingers of a world in which people had better things and more knowledge. I believed Silicon Valley’s founding rhetoric: Technology would be the great democratic equalizer. Whether people got rich in the process seemed just a coincidence.
Now I realize I was wrong. Not because Andreessen has changed, or because his support of Donald Trump is hypocritical. I didn’t see that this was the direction Silicon Valley was always heading. For those who got rich in tech, getting rich has always been important. By supporting Trump, they are making it clear that other things don’t matter to them: human rights, the climate crisis, women’s reproductive health, the “phenomenal immigration flows” that helped them get rich in the first place. It’s easy to scoff at their claims now that they care about making America great. But I was foolish to believe that they cared about anything other than their own self-interest.
Adam Rogers I’m a senior correspondent for Business Insider.
