pmarca remote flipflop #

These two quotes from Marc Andreessen haunt me.

From June 29, 2021:

Generally speaking [remote] worked really well … Every company I know of that has knowledge work and knowledge workers, they all had good experiences with remote work across the board. If you think about the economy, no bank went down, no stock exchange went down, no internet company went down, nothing. No insurance company. This might fundamentally change what we know from 3000 years of economic history which is this idea that where you work and where you live need to be connected. And maybe fundamentally they really don’t. And then at that point, you’re in a whole new world. Housing as an example - it completely changes this housing question cause it’s like maybe people will separately optimize their work lives and their home lives. Maybe there going to live in a very different built environment. My favorite example is if I was in the real estate business, what I would be doing right now, which I’m not, but if I was, I’d be trying to find really nice mid size cities that are like really nice physcial environments, really safe, really good schools, and just generally really nice places to live, and then build basically news kinds of multi generational housing.

Marc Andreessen - Making the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 232] 29:50

From June 11, 2025:

And look, there’s a geographic component to that. And I think we all kind of wish it wasn’t the case, but there really is. And AI I think has very successfully unwound the geographic dispersion of what was happening in tech in a Huge way. It’s kind of slammed everything back in Northern California. I don’t think that’s good really for a lot of reasons, but I think it just is the case. And so I would say like, if you know, if you’re going to like, do AI get here.

Uncapped #12 | Marc Andreessen from a16z 1:32:54

Solve for the equilibrium #

I keep thinking how the Tyler Cowen “solve for the equilibrium” way of thinking.

• If AI needs physical space to build robots, etc - will we build factories in SF?
• A lot of people preferred to leave SF during COVID… is there any strength in that latent preference?
• If AI becomes a national security issue, will the center of gravity still be SF?
• If extremely low latency access to datacenters becomes an advantage, will they build datacenters near SF?

SF seems to have the greatest network effect of anything I’ve seen. It is both cliche to talk about, but also understudied.