Is Marc Andreesen a Snowflake?

Speaking as a CEO Marc's fears are way overwrought

I recently read Ross Douthat’s interview of Marc. My following comments are based on my being the founder and CEO of Windward Studios. A company I grew, in liberal Boulder, to a bit under 50 employees. And we hired a lot of interns from the University of Colorado.

So we have Marc saying:

The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.

We hired some of the top students at C.U.¹ Yes they tended to be very liberal. Yes they were disappointed in our country when we first elected Trump. But I never heard any of them express hatred toward the country or capitalism.

We mostly hired Computer Science and Business school students with the occasional Physics, Journalism, and English majors. So these are students that went on to work at high tech companies, including Windward, upon graduation. These are not people who went to work for politicians.

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

I never saw anything like this. Employees would get in my face and argue. But they would argue about what we were doing or not doing to make the company more successful.

When Trump was elected in 2016² a lot of employees discussed going to protest marches, etc. There was a lot of support among the employees for that effort - that they did outside of their job.

I was asked about #MeToo movement in a company meeting and could we do anything. I walked them through why public statements by the company caused problems and helped no one. And they were all accepting of that.

I think it helped a bit that they all knew I was quite liberal, that the company was founded by my wife and me, and that treating any fellow employee unprofessionally would, at a minimum, have me tearing them a new one.

But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.

If this happened at a start-up the CEO of that start-up is incompetent. Everything else aside, you need the employees focused on getting the product out. Nothing else.

First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven’t already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.

Well sort-of. The top goal of most every startup is to own your market. Not for the money but because that’s how you measure success. Are you the dominant player in your market. Now if you are, then hey, lots of profit. But the driver is domination.

And then of course, Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.

WTF, no! I never heard of anything like this from a fellow CEO. Nor did I hear anything like this from people I knew working for the big tech companies. And the people talking to me all know I’m very in to politics. Occasionally I would get a question about what I thought of something going on politically. But then it was back to technical or business discussions.

I don’t know if Marc is a delicate flower or if the CEOs for his funded companies are some weird outliers. Or if those CEOs saw Marc’s concerns and now had a good excuse for missing targets.

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Look, I’ll agree that DEI was useless to harmful at most companies. I’ll agree that the government can get very heavy handed at times. I’ll agree that the Biden Administration did some really stupid things at times.

And the Trump administration had it’s own set of problems inflicted on us. That’s life in a Democracy. We all work to minimize those issues. But Biden was not more problematic than Trump for business. Under Biden oil & gas production increased. That’s not anti-hydrocarbons.

But complaining that the employees have taken over the company. I sure didn’t see it.

1. One year I was talking to the professor in charge of the student senior projects. She asked me how I managed to hire half the brilliant students.

2. By 2024 I had sold Windward so nothing on the 2nd trump election.