It’s Time to Build MORE THAN SOFTWARE

Marc Andreessen’s essay “IT’S TIME TO BUILD” is being lauded as a “call to arms” and “rallying cry” for addressing the pandemic. I think the thesis is exactly right, but like most writing, it handily exculpates the writer and their close friends from any wrongdoing. I recommend you read the entire essay, but with this definition in mind: every time Marc says “we”, substitute “political leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and investors.” Whether that is what Marc intended or not, I think it makes the essay clearer, more honest, and more actionable than if you think “we” refers to “the American people.”

It is certainly time to build. It’s time to build on the software that *we* have gotten really good at building over many years. It’s also time to admit that physical building of the sort we have to do now is not as easy as building software. Being a genius at scaling software startups does not give you superpowers over the laws of physics. We should take advantage of Moore’s law, software, and lessons from building successful software startups in the world of bits. At the same time, we should set realistic expectations, defeat short-term thinking, and stop being afraid of the longer timescales and hard work that drive growth in the physical world of atoms. Anyway, here are some thoughts about the essay.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.

The opening suggests that Marc may be about to admit some culpability on behalf of political leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and investors for the current state of institutional decay that we find ourselves in. With my reframing, he does.

Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard.

We have avoided building the hard things (therapeutics, vaccines), because it is so comparatively easy and so lucrative to build the “easy” things (money transfer apps). VCs have spent years profiting on and supporting software startups, rewarding founders who are not tied to physical resource constraints. Marc is particularly responsible for the obsession with hockey stick growth and 10x returns delivered on a short timescale that only a software startup can deliver. His “software is eating the world” thesis and its supporters have shifted perception to such a degree that efforts to *build* in the physical world are seen as hopelessly naive and ill-fated. Every company must be a software company. Every engineering undergraduate student must work for a software company. I don’t think this was Marc’s intention. He was following the money, like everybody else.

In 2015 Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) launched the bio fund to fund software companies that focus on biology applications. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but looking at the a16z bio portfolio shows that they are still unsure about what to do with startups operating in the world of atoms. Bizarrely, we find Rigetti Computing, a quantum computing startup, listed in the bio portfolio. The only other sectors in a16z’s portfolio are “crypto”, “consumer”, and “enterprise,” so you won’t find a lot of *building* in the sense that Marc seems to mean in the essay.

We could have these things but we chose not to — specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.

This is an interesting take. The message seems to be that we could have been building hardtech startups this whole time and chose not to, rather than that the outsized gains to be had in making pure software has mobilized an entire generation of VCs and engineers to forgo attempting offline innovation.

You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.

I’m not sure I know many “smugly complacent” folks who are OK with our current healthcare system, our pandemic response capabilities, and our decrepit infrastructure. Probably this complacency is concentrated among the people who have benefited the most from the explosion of software, who are more or less satisfied with the status quo enjoyed by those of their status. Maybe “throughout American life” means “throughout the lives of Americans who can afford to spend their way around failing infrastructure.”

We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?

Trapped in the imaginations of political leaders and executives who would love to have such luxuries, but balk at the idea of incurring short-term losses and spending their own money for things that less well-off people would also get to enjoy.

We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. Why not educate every 18 year old? Isn’t that the most important thing we can possibly do? Why not build a far larger number of universities, or scale the ones we have way up?

…Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard? Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build?

A particularly Silicon Valley-style solution to education inequality is to take the best universities and scale them way up. I think this entirely misses the point that the differential between elite universities and less-elite universities has almost nothing to do with the quality of classroom instruction and everything to do with per capita resources, institutional reputation tied to perceptions of exclusivity, and in-person access to research faculty and other similarly positioned students. It’s nice that Harvard and MIT offer many online courses for free and anyone can listen to the same lectures about algorithms and data structures that Harvard undergraduates get. Of course, more and higher quality education for everyone is a fantastic goal, but it is not purely a software problem or a *building* problem.

We know how to build highly automated factories…Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our country?

“Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.” — Elon Musk, April 13, 2018.

Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?

Sitting on the backburner while many of the most motivated founders, VCs, and engineers make much more money, much faster, delivering targeted ads than they could working on high speed trains.

The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will.

Again, I think most people who can’t afford to avoid the subways, the cramped, overpriced city apartments, and the most disastrous consequences of the pandemic, do *want* these things. I think Marc’s “we” refers specifically to the other VCs, technologists, bankers, politicians, and executives who are directly responsible for preventing these things. In which case, in a roundabout way, he is accepting responsibility for our current situation on behalf of his cohort.

It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.

Yes! I would add: it’s time for the right to stop kneecapping the public sector. I’d also probably change the wording of “big leaps forward.”

Demonstrate that the public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, better transportation, better cities, better housing. Stop trying to protect the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future. Milton Friedman once said the great public sector mistake is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. Instead of taking that as an insult, take it as a challenge — build new things and show the results!

I think most scientists, engineers, and progressives in general would love to accept that challenge, given some time and resources to recover from the aforementioned kneecapping.

The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price…We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

We definitely need to build more housing, but the problem of exploding costs in these crucial sectors is due to more than a lack of economies of scale. I’m not sure that the *only way* to deal with rising healthcare costs is building more hospitals.

Building isn’t easy, or we’d already be doing all this. We need to demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another.

Here is what I’m taking to be the definition of the “we” used throughout the essay: political leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and investors. The American people should demand more of that culture and that society. And members of that group should demand more from one another.

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building.

This is a fantastic goal. Our political leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and investors should be working tirelessly to help all Americans get into a position where they are either contributing to building or taking care of others. They should be taking care of builders and taking care of caregivers.

I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own!

I don’t think there’s a lot of room to criticize the proposal to build or *what* to build. Rather, I think it’s helpful to think about why we are where we are and how to fix it, and be clear about where the responsibility lies. I don’t think the American people lack the will to build, only the opportunity.