Marc Andreessen’s New Deal
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No, not the Pentagon one. This one has roughly 300 very powerful people in it. They're Silicon Valley executives like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, billionaires like Mark Cuban, and right-wing media figures like The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro. But at the group's heart was one man, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. I called up journalist Zoe Schiffer to ask if she was surprised to see Andreessen at the chat center.

Not at all, no. Zoe is the director of business and industry at Wired Magazine.

Marc Andreessen is a really powerful figure in Silicon Valley. And aside from just having literal power because he is quite wealthy, he also is kind of at the center of Silicon Valley culture. And while the way that he impacted that culture might have been a little bit on the fringe like five years ago, now it really has become the dominant flavor in Silicon Valley and I would argue kind of the entire country.

One of the group chat's organizers, Sriram Krishnan, now advises the White House on AI. He used to work with Andreessen and, according to Semaphore, called the chat the mimetic upstream of mainstream opinion. You know, the image of this group text very much feels like one where powerful people are kind of working behind the scenes to influence narrative and opinion and outcome.

How do you think Marc Andreessen would feel about being described that way? That's a good question. I mean, I think that Marc likes being a provocateur. Like he...

is pretty vocal about his beliefs and I think takes pride, it looks like, in kind of setting the cultural tone. He also like believes what he believes very fervently. So I think there's a reason that his very, very long blog posts about like the future of the tech industry and where the world should be heading go viral. Like he's a very influential figure and that's by design. It's not an accident.

Today on the show, meet Marc Andreessen, the man whose influence stretches from Silicon Valley to the White House, and probably your house, even if you don't realize it. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

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Marc Andreessen is a Silicon Valley veteran. Not only did he co-found Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most influential venture capital firms, but he also created one of the first web browsers. Marc Andreessen actually is like an incredibly important entrepreneur. He founded Netscape when he was in his younger days. He's like

the father figure of the modern browser. And then he pivoted into venture capital and has created one of the most influential VC firms in the Valley, both in terms of like the sheer number of important companies that they have invested in and invested in early and because the way that they

involve themselves in those companies is definitely not write a check and tell them good luck. It's like they have a really specific POV on how these companies should be run, and it's founder first. You're not just investing in a company. You're investing in a founder and an idea, and you need to shepherd that person and help them grow. And...

They've taken lessons. Mark has taken lessons from, for example, sitting on the Facebook board or the meta board where he thought the way that Mark Zuckerberg was capitulating to the U.S. government was setting up content moderation rules and regulations to try and make liberals happy was a losing game and ultimately harmful to his business.

And if you look at, you know, a more recent investment like Substack, they've taken a very, very different approach. And while we don't have the behind-the-scenes reporting yet, I think it's safe to say that that's probably the A16Z, the Andreessen Horowitz influence at play. The fact that they didn't set up content moderation when they were being called out for having, you know, supposed Nazis on the platform. They kind of stuck to their guns, more or less.

Yeah. I mean, do you think it's fair to say that Andreessen Horowitz, A16Z, as it's sometimes called, is it the most powerful VC firm in Silicon Valley? I think so. I think A16Z and Founders Fund, you know, Peter Thiel's fund, like I think there's a few in this zone, but I think certainly Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most influential in the top three for sure.

I went back and read a 10-year-old New Yorker profile of Marc Andreessen, and it's really interesting. It describes him as a media soothsayer, Andreessen the Magnificent. He also tweets 110 times a day, inundating his 310,000 followers with aphorisms and statistics and tweetstorm Jeremiah ads. He seems like someone who's like, who really likes ideas. Yeah, for sure. I mean...

He is he's a poster. He is someone who posted a lot on X. He also was like, this is kind of tangential, but very famous for blocking journalists, like getting blocked by Mark Andrews. It would almost be embarrassing to not be blocked by Mark Andrews. It's like a rite of passage.

But similarly, as we saw from Ben Smith's piece on Semaphore about the group chats, you know, he's posting there all the time. He's kind of a central figure who is telling people what he thinks. And it seems like kind of going back and forth with people arguing for his point of view. For a very long time, Marc Andreessen openly supported Democratic candidates in 2016. He backed Hillary Clinton.

How would you describe his politics during, I guess, the earlier days of his prominence? Yeah, he was definitely kind of like a classic Democratic donor. He wasn't, he didn't seem particularly political at that point, but he kind of went along with the usual liberal causes and he donated to Democrats. None of his views particularly stood out at that point. Yeah, he seemed to not be super outspoken, but sort of have this, I guess, like

tacit understanding, bargain or deal that he seemed to feel like he'd agreed to.

Yeah, he actually does talk about this a lot. He calls it literally the deal. And the deal is basically an unspoken agreement wherein you're an entrepreneur like he was and is. You make a company. If the company does well, you also make a lot of money, as is exactly what happened to him. And in the process, you kind of like absolve yourself of all your sins. You're a Democrat and you support democratic causes and you give to those causes and maybe you give to philanthropy. And because of that, you're seen as...

to look up to in society. And in Mark's telling, the deal started to fall apart in recent years. Suddenly, if you had made a lot of money, if you were a billionaire, that was actually a sign of corruption or a signal that people should look into your past and really scrutinize you and what you did. And, you know, he kind of feels if you were a man, men are evil. Like, it all started to kind of fall apart and crumble. And he felt like

Like, he and his peers were very prosecuted by the people who he had thought he was part of the same group. Hmm. That he's a victim of cancel culture or that, I guess, maybe the people he surrounded himself with were in his thinking. Totally. I think that cancel culture is actually kind of the pivotal moment. He might say it's something else, but when you hear them talk, it's so clear that the shock of being...

Yeah.

that culture did not give people a way to make amends. And so you had kind of liberals. There was kind of a

a calling out, a calling in, a looking at people's past, asking people to be better on one side. And Mark kind of felt like, oh, there's nothing I can do to like win over these people anymore. And then you had the other side, the right, where there's basically nothing you can do to be cast out except for have liberal beliefs. Like you can do a whole host of things and you'll still be part of the group as long as you adhere to their policy beliefs. And so you saw a lot of people, Mark included, start to shift their

very prominently, very overtly to the right. In April of 2020, Andreessen publishes a now pretty famous essay on the Andreessen Horowitz website titled It's Time to Build. And it seems to be kind of this, I don't know, call to arms for his way of thinking. Can you tell me about that and I guess the role it seemed to play in Silicon Valley?

This was coming at an era where, you know, to be clear, we haven't had meaningful regulations of big tech in my lifetime or maybe ever. But there is definitely a feeling around this period that the U.S. government is becoming more antagonistic toward the tech industry, that more regulations are looming, if not in place, and also that

the kind of rank and file tech worker was rising up, was asking their companies to do better, to be better. You saw during this period a lot of people calling out tech companies after they had put out statements in support of Black Lives Matter's protests saying like, well, my experience at the company is actually that it's pretty racist. And those companies were then doing these big commitments, trying to be better, whatever.

Marc Andreessen, and this is my view, but I just want to be clear, like this is

my assessment of what happened, it looks like he starts to feel like all of these things are stopping companies from doing what they should be doing, which is building and building fast and pushing innovation. And really, we all need to kind of get behind that ethos, that mindset. You see it now, kind of the evolution of this same thought when they talk about

our relationship with China. They'll say like, look, the Chinese government, they try and help their companies. Again, like there's a lot of nuance here. If you kind of cross the Chinese government, certainly you're not going to be in a good space. Yes, technically the Chinese government does try to help their companies, but they also give them a lot of advantages and try and help them grow when they're, you know, for example, if you look at EVs or something, it's like they have propelled those companies in some cases ahead of Tesla. And meanwhile, you look at the United States and they're like, and, you know,

our government is regulating these companies or, you know, in the case of the crypto industry, they talk a lot about debanking, like they're kind of actively trying to slow down what they would say innovation. I think the people who are regulating them are just trying to say, hey, we're trying to put guardrails in place to make sure no one gets hurt.

It's very interesting because in this essay, he says,

And yes, that's true. But I think any historian would also read that and say, yes. And that comes with tradeoffs and thoughts about who does that building and what kind of protections they have. And, you know, there is a much more broad historical context. And what is

fascinating to me is that Andreessen does not seem to see this as a question of history. He seems it as sees it as a question of will. Yeah, that's a good distinction. I don't think these people inherently are like backward looking very much like I think that they're like entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are by their nature forward looking people. And another way to put that is that they can kind of forget

forget or gloss over the history and kind of set a narrative that lends itself nicely to their viewpoint while maybe not being 100% historically accurate or accounting for just alternate interpretations or alternate experiences. When we come back, Andreessen had problems with crypto policy and saw a solution in Donald Trump. ♪

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Andreessen donated $2.5 million to a pro-Trump PAC in 2024. He also said he spends time at Mar-a-Lago. He did an interview with Barry Weiss in which he said Trump brings out a lot of feelings in a lot of people. And then he kind of adds that he's not Mr. Foreign Policy or Mr. Abortion Policy or guns, that he's, you know, staying in his lane. And

That's really fascinating to me to know how he began to bend the president's ear and what got him that degree of closeness. Yeah, it's fascinating.

It's a really interesting thing. And I think it's a lot. It's something that a lot of different leaders in Silicon Valley are now discovering, which is that we have a very pay to play administration at this point. If you buy a five million dollar candlelight dinner seat at Mar-a-Lago, you may be able to have a conversation with Trump. And during that conversation, you could advocate for certain policies and perhaps you actually see those policies come to life.

You know, the reason that he, that Marc Andreessen says he got to this point is that he met with the Biden administration about a,

AI. And he was asking, he says in these conversations, like, what is a potential Harris administration going to do about this? Like, what's your stance on AI companies? What's your stance on regulation? And he left those conversations worried that essentially there was going to be too much regulation, that startups wouldn't be able to flourish. You know, he was really upset with how Biden had already dealt with the crypto industry. They, again, like, talk about deep banking. They felt like there was...

a lack of regulation that kind of left crypto companies in no man's land. And an SEC chair who did not look kindly on the crypto industry. To say the least, yes. And he would say like friends of his were debanked, like they didn't have access to a traditional banking system. This left them in a really bad space. OK, so they thought a similar thing was going to play out in AI. And

if you think that AI is a national security issue, a national defense issue, like this was a problem in his mind. It's also like a problem for his portfolio, which is full of a lot of AI companies and crypto companies. And so at that point, he went all in on Trump. And like Elon Musk, started spending a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago. Also, like it's worth saying that coming out in support of Trump

when these men did kind of changed the Silicon Valley culture. Because while there were people who supported Trump in Silicon Valley, obviously Peter Thiel is a really prominent name there, it was still almost taboo to say it out loud because it was a minority opinion for a while. Like the tech industry is historically pretty liberal.

suddenly you started to see this kind of like counterculture movement where it was OK to say you supported Trump. We saw, you know, during Trump's inauguration, like the row right behind him was all of these tech CEOs, which was a really stark change from Trump's first term. In contrast to an Elon Musk, though, Andreessen seems to operate

more quietly. He's not holding a chainsaw. He's not, you know, on the stage in front of a big crowd. Is that just his style or is that strategic?

I mean, I think they are just very different people and men. It's kind of part of Elon's brand to be that brash and chaotic and public. I mean, a lot of people close to Elon will say, like, look, when you sit down with him one-on-one, he's not the character you see on TV. Like, he's much, much more reasonable. He likes to play the part. He likes to get people riled up. Marc Andreessen does, too, but he's a little more behind the scenes, and he

He's having lots of conversations. Like, it's not to say he's, like, quiet or not talking publicly because he absolutely is. No, he goes on tons of podcasts. He talks a lot. It's that. It's kind of like those in-depth one-on-one conversations with other people who largely seem to, like, kind of agree with his viewpoint or hold similar beliefs. And so he's not out there in the way that Elon is, like, inviting controversy from the other side necessarily all the time. Although it still comes. Yeah.

Yeah, last year, A16Z opened an office in D.C. What does that tell you about their intentions? It's so interesting. And we're talking during the, I think it's called the Hill and Valley Forum, which is this kind of like...

conference that happens every year where Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill come together and talk. And it really did used to feel that way, that these two powerful nodes in the country were coming together for a weekend to have an important conversation. Now, when you look at the list, it's all

They're all one team now. It's not two sides coming together. It's like the people who were prominent in Silicon Valley now have really high-ranking positions in the U.S. government or they're high-level government contractors. Like, it's honestly kind of fascinating that the forum is still taking place. So I kind of see the Andreessen Horowitz office as, like, a big...

symbolic move in that direction where it used to feel like we're going to build over here in sunny California and we'll let kind of the U.S. government do its thing. Now they're like, no, no, no, actually being able to build, we have to have a critical role in the U.S. government. We have to decide how these regulations are going to be shaped and we can. And so we will. I mean, also Mark Zuckerberg just bought an enormous house in Washington, D.C. Do you think Mark Andreessen is

understand something about politics or the way

politics and the media come together that maybe some other people in Silicon Valley don't? Yeah, I kind of think of the line that Steve Bannon says, which is politics is downstream of culture. I feel like Marc Andreessen understands that very, very well. And so he's very intent on impacting the culture and thereby politics. What would the future look like if his vision came true?

I think you'd see a country where it was really... I mean, it's like not that different from what we're seeing now because a lot of regulations are being stripped away. But I think what he wants, my view, is like...

the U.S. government to be actively supporting its companies, to be pushing them to get bigger and more successful, to be rewarding the people that are behind these companies so that the U.S. can be dominant in the fields that he cares about, AI, crypto, all of that. You know, we've talked a lot about his successes. What has gotten in his way before?

You know, he's gotten a lot of criticism. I think that's probably like a constant part of his life. But in terms of like actual major failures, like we're talking about someone who is arguably at the apex of his wealth and power. And so it's hard for me to look at that and say like, oh, yeah, that's been like a real hardship. I'm sure they exist. But right now, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, these people feel like

almost untouchable, at least in the current framework, the current U.S. politics that we're seeing. Zoe Schiffer, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Zoe Schiffer is the director of business and industry for Wired. We reached out to Andreessen Horowitz for comment, but did not hear back by our deadline.

And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and Shana Roth. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. Slate is run by Hilary Fry, and TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you're looking for even more Slate podcasts to listen to, check out this past Wednesday's episode of What Next. Representative Ayanna Pressley talks with Mary Harris about what she saw during a visit to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.

And we'll be back on Sunday with another episode. Washington Post reporter Fez Siddiqui talking about his new book on Elon Musk, Hubris Maximus. All right. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.

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