Andreessen: New universities face network effects, upside-down economics, and cartels
Marc Andreessen · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities · Jan 23, 2024 · at 1:08:52
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), outlines the structural barriers facing new competitors in higher education.
0:00 / 0:35exact quote · 36.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I'll just list the three reasons why this would be very difficult. Number one is existing institutions just have very powerful network effects, which is why they, you know, they, they're so, you know, which is why the big ones are like hundreds of years old. Two is it would take a lot of money for a long time because of the network of, you need to boot up a network effect and that would just be very expensive, right? In other words, like it's hard to get the great students until you have the great faculty. It's hard to get the great faculty and have the great Students. And so like, for example, you'd have to like really overpay faculty to get them to come over and you'd probably have to have a, you know, much cheaper student proposition. So you'd have like upside down economics for a while while you're booting it, which means you would need a lot of funding. And then third is you'd be trying to break into a cartel.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Marc Andreessen
Andreessen: US institutions recruit African immigrants to avoid hiring African Americans
“Both the universities and the corporate employers are literally, this is true, they're literally, they literally import Africans so that they don't have to hire African Americans because they still count as black.”
Andreessen: Big Tech is aggressively lobbying for regulatory capture against startups
“Quite honestly, I mean, part of what's happening is big tech is against us. There, there's a, there's basically a lot of the political issues now are a civil war inside the tech industry where, The big tech companies are lobbying very aggressively for what the…”
Andreessen: Vinod Khosla lobbied Congress to ban open-source AI
“Vinod has been lobbying to ban open source AI. And by the way, he denies that he's been doing this, but I saw him with my own eyes when the US Congressional China Committee came to Stanford I was in the meeting where he was with, you know, 30 20 or 30 congress…”
Andreessen: Automated and AI-augmented warfare will make conflict much safer
“I actually think warfare is going to get a lot safer. Like, I think, actually, automated warfare would be much, much safer.”
Andreessen: Biden officials explicitly told a16z they planned to ban open-source AI
“They told us that explicitly. And yeah. And they told us exactly what you just said. They told us they're gonna ban open source. And when we challenged them on the ability to ban open source, because it's, you know, we're talking about, you know, math, you kno…”
Andreessen: Paul Thomas Anderson's new film is 'Antifa the movie'
“Arguably, it is kind of salient to our times, because I think if you were to retitle the movie, you would just title it Antifa the movie. Like, it's, like, it's like a full-throated celebration of basically violent social change, violent social revolution, lik…”