On the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Silicon Valley kingmaker, is unabashedly optimistic about our country — and is making the same bold bet as the Founding Fathers: that our nation’s best days are coming.
But the current American revolution is technology, and the danger comes not primarily from foreign competitors, but from state obstruction of its creators.
“We are the best country in the world,” Andreessen told The Post. “The idea that America has the level of size, scope, toughness and resources that we have, but we still have this level of risk-taking spirit in the country…is a really special combination.”
And he heralds optimism in one place that seems strangely lacking: Silicon Valley.
Much of the technology world has become mired in doom, as the engineers who create the future become convinced that the thing they are building — artificial intelligence — is terrible and destructive.
Andersen rejects this cynicism as performative, at least in part, and believes that eliminating it is the key to improving our future.
“The negative always seems more complicated than the positive,” he said. “If you’re optimistic, you’re naive, you’re gullible.” But if you are a pessimist? “You are worldly, you are sophisticated, and you are wise.”
This view is also consistent with the self-interest of major AI companies encouraging greater regulation. Andreessen explains that the moat a government builds may be the best defense a company can have — and the surest way to stop innovators desperately trying to catch up.
“One hundred percent, there is a regulatory element to it,” Andreessen said. “And they drive hard for it.”
This gloom and the pressure for regulation that inevitably follows it is what he sees as one of the biggest threats facing America in the next quarter century.
“The economy could grow at three times this current rate with a different set of policy options,” he said — and it did a century ago.
What has changed is not the country’s capacity, but rather the regulatory burden. “Not only do we have ankle weights, we have knee weights and arm weights, and one arm is tied behind our back — blindfolded and deprived of oxygen,” Andreessen said.
The 54-year-old has made a career of betting right 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 investment firms. The company has backed many of today’s multi-billion (and trillion) dollar companies, including SpaceX, Anduril, Coinbase, Stripe, and OpenAI.
Andreessen, who was an early bet on the Internet and artificial intelligence, sees his business, in general, as betting on American innovation. In an article titled “Time to Build,” written just weeks after the pandemic lockdowns, he talked about the importance of innovation and manufacturing in our country — rather than outsourcing it globally.
A16z even greenlighted an entire fund, American Dynamism, to support defense, manufacturing, and hard technology founders at a time when other funds were focused almost exclusively on software.
But Andreessen now sees his role as merely building the future. He also stands for the values that make this country successful.
He said construction companies are obligated to prove what they build. “We want to change the world. Well, well, the world gets a vote. If you don’t explain yourself, other people will explain to you – and you won’t like their explanations.”
Here are the bets Andreessen places on America’s future.
health
Healthcare will benefit from AI’s ability to sift through massive amounts of data about medical conditions, new diseases, and drug effects, and Andreessen is optimistic about systems that will make this data more easily available to doctors. A16z supports companies like Abridge, which quickly records patient visits, and Hippocratic AI, which helps doctors make diagnoses. “No human doctor can read all the medical literature…and an elderly patient dealing with 10 medications needs exactly the best drug interaction mathematics that AI has to offer,” Andersen said.
communications
Self-driving cars are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and Andreessen is betting that self-driving 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 are working now,” Andreessen said. In the next 10 years, Andreessen predicts “a renaissance moment for almost every type of vehicle”—as autonomy becomes ubiquitous for boats, planes, submarines and missiles. A16z invests in both software and hardware that push autonomy forward, including Waymo and Infinite Machine.
Robots
Andreessen believes robots will be transformative for ordinary people – able to help around the house – and perform repetitive physical tasks in factories that free up humans to do higher-value work. He is very passionate about the transformative impact that exoskeletons can provide the physical ability for someone who is quadriplegic or paraplegic, has lost limbs or has a neurodegenerative disease, to be able to get out of a wheelchair and physically walk around. “I think it will be incredible to see,” he said. A16z bet on Mind Robotics, which builds and programs humanoid robots.
Defense technology
Defense technology has become incredibly profitable, but Andreessen sees it as a smart investment and a national responsibility to protect service members at home and abroad. “We have the opportunity to use technology to save the lives of our service members,” he said. In the Iraq War, Special Forces had to “literally break down doors” and manually search homes — putting themselves at risk. But now, thanks to innovation, “this is 100% something a drone can do.” A16z was an early investor in companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and Saronic that are working to create autonomous military systems.
manufacturing
“There is not a single thing manufactured anywhere in the world that we cannot manufacture in the United States,” Andersen said. “Things that moved [overseas] They were things that were easy to move. The things that remained were the complicated things. Ultimately, industrialization fled because politics made building here “extremely difficult, expensive, and in many cases illegal… It is a political problem, not a knowledge problem.” A16z supports companies like Hadrian, which builds automated machine shops to produce aerospace and defense parts, and Apex, which mass-produces satellites on an assembly line.
education
Andreessen sees AI tutors and chatbots, endlessly patient and always available, augmenting rather than replacing human teachers, making personalized, on-demand learning widely available. “I can’t call the teacher at 2 a.m. they actually get pretty upset if I do that,” Andreessen said. “But I can talk to the robot.” In places like Alpha School, AI handles two hours of academics daily while human teachers help with the rest. A16z recently bet on Prisms, whose VR platform brings math and science to life.