Is Venture Capital Limited?

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Why has venture capital been so concentrated in tech, to some extent, biomedical and, in the old days, whaling voyages? And conceptually, how do you think about those limits? Private equity comes into industries and businesses that already exist. But there's always the business as alreaty there that exists. I like to say, wheat we do value investing,. but it's value that doesn't exist yet, hasn't been created yet. We learn all these things once they're up in running. It would be great to have the trying device that let us heellthat stuff at front.

Like the frontier characters from Deadwood, his favorite TV show, Marc Andreessen has discovered that the real challenge to building in new territory is not in the practicalities of learning a trade, but in developing a savviness for what makes people tick. Without understanding the deep patterns of human behavior, how can you know what to build, or who should build it, or how? For Marc, that means reading deeply in the humanities: “I spent the first 25 years of my life trying to understand how machines work,” Marc says. “Then I spent the second 25 years, so far, trying to figure out how people work. It turns out people are a lot more complicated.”

Marc joined Tyler to discuss his ever-growing appreciation for the humanities and more, including why he didn’t go to a better school, his contrarian take on Robert Heinlein, how Tom Wolfe helped Marc understand his own archetype, who he’d choose to be in Renaissance Florence, which books he’s reread the most, Twitter as an X-ray machine on public figures, where in the past he’d most like to time-travel, his favorite tech product that no longer exists, whether Web will improve podcasting, the civilization-level changes made possible by remote work, Peter Thiel’s secret to attracting talent, which data he thinks would be most helpful for finding good founders, how he’d organize his own bookstore, the kinds of people he admires most, and why Deadwood is equal to Shakespeare.

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Recorded April 14th, 2022 Other ways to connect

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