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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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It's been a very long time since Andressen was checking in code. It is obvious from reading e.g. Paul Graham's essays that VCs and successful founders see themselves as a different kind of person to top technical talent (tl;dr - Altman said that James Bond was fundable but Q would not be) - and the things that Paul Graham is saying are conventional wisdom in the valley. My impression is that both founders/VCs and top technical talent see the gap between top technical talent and mid-tier technical talent as so large that the average FAANG Senior is closer to QA and HR than to themselves.

My take is that Andressen is one of the main people pushing the theory (which I think originated with Musk) that FAANG were roughly 2x overstaffed and that this was a bad thing because they were outbidding startups for talent. I remember him tweeting "Nature heals itself" in response to a post about tech layoffs and coming to the conclusion that he resented his (indirect via portfolio companies) employees.

I will admit to also disliking Andressen because a16z seems to be disproportionately likely to invest in ethically dubious startups like crypto scams, Adam Neumann's Flow and the AI "cheating" app Cluely.

I (a former FAANG engineer) would agree with him that founders are different sorts of people than top technical talent; at least most of them are. (Steve Wozniak is one obvious exception: it was Jobs who had the non-technical talent in spades). And that Google, at least, is ridiculously overstaffed. That's different than resenting "code monkeys" making a lot of money; wanting technical talent to be available to startups is valuing them highly, not considering them lower organisms of some sort. It might be better for the engineers to phone it in and collect a paycheck on the latest obviously-doomed FAANG project rather than bust their butt at a startup, but Andressen's desire for them to do the latter is based on greed, not resentment.

(Steve Wozniak is one obvious exception: it was Jobs who had the non-technical talent in spades)

There is a fairly common pattern (Jobs-Wozniak may be the ur-example) of a pair of cofounders where one is the "founder type" and the other is top technical talent. My read of Valley culture is that given the chance they will (as mostly happened in the case of Apple) try to retcon the pair as solo founder and employee number one.

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