Marc Andreessen is the ultimate NIMBY
And SoftBank is the biggest loser
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Yesterday I was lucky enough to guest-write the excellent newsletter Numlock News for my friend Walt Hickey, who is taking an unplugged vacation (which we should all do!). If smart, pithy, hilarious news roundups are your thing, you should absolutely check Numlock out.
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No time to build.
Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development in his town of Atherton, California, aka America’s most expensive zip code. The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demas happened on a public comment apparently signed by Andreessen and his philanthropist wife declaring their all-caps opposition to proposed zoning changes in Atherton that would allow the construction of a modest 130 multifamily housing units by 2031. (A local planning official confirmed the comment was authentic while the Andreessens have remained notably silent on the matter.)
Andreessen co-founded eponymous VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, and Skype, and rose to Silicon Valley celebrity status with thought-leadery pronouncements like “software is eating the world.” Not too long ago, Andreessen also used his influential platform to share some thoughts on housing. In April 2020, he published an essay titled “It’s Time to Build” which pilloried the failed government response to covid-19 and tied it to a greater inability to build in American society. Specifically, Andreessen condemned the lack of “housing in our cities with surging economic potential—which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future.”
Right, totally! It’s no secret that the U.S. has a housing crisis, one that only worsened during the pandemic. In the Bay Area, where the number of people experiencing homelessness has exploded in recent years, average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is around $3,400 (£2,800) and home prices average around $1.3 million (£1.1 million).1 The cost of living crisis is so severe that some schools are building affordable housing to retain teachers while college and grad students routinely sleep in their cars. This extreme poverty is coupled with extreme wealth. The top 10% of earners in the Bay Area have annual incomes of $384,000, twelve times the $32,000 made by the bottom 10%. An estimated one in four Bay Area families no longer earns enough to live there.
The man who wrote “It’s Time to Build” surely knows all of this, and yet when it came time to build in his own neighborhood he and his wife Laura (herself the daughter of a prominent Silicon Valley developer) demanded the mayor and city council IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily housing plans, which they claimed would MASSIVELY decrease their home values. I would like to point out that on top of everything else, this is an absurd statement from a man worth $1.7 billion and who in April picked up his third multimillion-dollar beachfront home in Malibu in six months. If anyone can afford to see their home values drop a bit so that more people can afford to live in America, it’s the Andreessens.
The broader point is not just that Marc Andreessen is a NIMBY, it’s that he publicly professes to support the very housing policies he opposes in private. Silicon Valley likes to talk about innovation, but it is also in the business of branding and reputation laundering, and Andreessen is a master of personal image, so much so that he once enjoyed a glowing New Yorker profile declaring him “Tomorrow’s Advance Man.” Andreessen wants to have it both ways, proselytizing the need for more housing in American cities while killing an effort to build new homes in his own backyard. He is, in other words, the ultimate NIMBY.
Cloud atlas.
Elsewhere in a16z, the firm is moving to the cloud (h/t Eliot Brown). Co-founder Ben Horowitz writes that the pandemic forced tech companies to figure out how to work remotely, which overall has been “a very good thing for the country and the world”:
It turns out that running a technology company remotely works pretty darned well. It’s not perfect, but mitigating the cultural issues associated with remote work turns out to be easier than mitigating the employee satisfaction issues associated with forcing everyone into the office 5 days/week. As a result, nearly every technology company has moved to a remote or hybrid approach to work and this change is profoundly weakening the Silicon Valley network effect.
To aid their move to the cloud, a16z will open three new physical offices in Miami Beach, New York, and Santa Monica. “In our firm’s new operating model, we work primarily virtually, but will use our physical presence to develop our culture, help entrepreneurs, and build relationships,” Horowitz writes. “Specifically, the firm is now virtual, but can materialize physically on command.” While I was writing this I tried commanding a16z to appear in my flat and nothing happened, but maybe there’s a bug in the software. I would also point out that an underappreciated element of Oversharing is that this newsletter is virtual but can materialize physically on command, you just need to print it out.
Biggest loser.
It’s never a great sign when you open your investor presentation like this:
That is from the quarterly earnings presentation of global investment firm SoftBank, which reported a stunning, record $23 billion quarterly loss yesterday. At a press conference, CEO Masa Son took responsibility, saying previous big profits made him “somewhat delirious, and looking back at myself now, I am quite embarrassed and remorseful.” SoftBank has in recent years become known for big speculative bets on companies including Uber, WeWork, Didi, and Klarna. Last year, SoftBank put $38 billion into 183 companies, the most ever by any VC firm in a single year. SoftBank’s signature startup investing arm, the Vision Fund unit, has now wiped out more than $50 billion in gains from its peak, with losses spread across the portfolio.
Once upon a time SoftBank took its losses with good humor, filling its investor presentations with images like “Valley of the Coronavirus” and other bizarre but whimsical clip-art. These days there seems to be little joy or whimsy—there certainly isn’t any in that Vision Funds chart—but Son still has some hope. Per the Wall Street Journal, Tokugawa returned from defeat to become shogun controlling all of Japan.
Hot trash summer.
I was delighted to discover it’s Hot Garbage Month in Curbed, a monthlong look at the “chutes, bags, bins, and trucks of New York City,” in sweltering 90-degree weather. One interesting fact in that intro piece is that when cities increase the frequency of garbage pickup the total volume of garbage also goes up. According to Curbed, no one knows why this is, but it suggests why my local council in London may have decided earlier this year to reduce household waste collection to once every two weeks while keeping recycling and compost pickup every week.
With that in mind, it’s also good news that New York City plans to pilot “no drama” curbside compost and yard waste pickup in Queens starting in October. Compost pickup is not commonly available in New York City, one reason why organic waste makes up a third of the garbage the city sends to landfills, where it emits the potent greenhouse gas methane. Widespread composting would reduce waste, cut emissions, make regular garbage (and by extension the streets and sidewalks it occupies) cleaner and less smelly, as well as help to tackle the city’s growing rat problem, a personal obsession of mayor Eric Adams. The program is expected to cost $2 million, which seems like a bargain at less than $1 per Queens resident.
In other fun garbage bits, I enjoyed this Curbed piece on the city Department of Sanitation’s oddly popular TikTok account (@nycsanitation), which has more than 45,000 followers and a handful of viral posts, including a PSA about illegal dumping by recently retired sanitation commissioner Edward Grayson with more than 2 million views, proof that nothing unites New Yorkers like the quest for cleaner streets. If your city has trash problems or innovations you want to talk about, shoot me an email. For more garbage content, check out my interview from a few weeks ago with Uber policy director and lifelong New Yorker Josh Gold on traffic and trash.
Paid posts.
Other stuff.
Antiabortion Democrat Henry Cuellar Is Now Seeking to Gut Labor Rights. New York taxi workers call for pay bump, worker protections. New York City Council looks to limit 15-minute delivery companies. UPS drivers push for air conditioning as temperatures soar. DoorDash shrugs off inflation worries with record delivery orders. Lyft Belt-Tightening Aids Second-Quarter Results. Airbnb benefits from high booking prices and predicts ‘strong’ summer. Instacart Aims to Go Public Before Year’s End, Defying a Frozen IPO Market. Lyft doubles down on in-car ads. Lyft spends $15 million on California ballot initiative for electric cars. Just Eat Takeaway sets up dark store in Berlin. Gorillas retreats further in Germany. NYC could get 10,000 curbside chargers by 2030. Uber adds Eurostar tickets to its booking options. Airbnb-for-boats startup raises $38 million. Driverless vehicle startup Pony.ai alleges two ex-employees pulled an Anthony Levandowski. Airbnb deletes former slave quarters from platform. Is downtown Tampa ready for golf carts? The Guru Burns Out. The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety. The world needs a better way to regulate Big Tech’s unchecked power. The urban garden transforming lives after prison. Eastern Parkway Was Never Meant to Be a Highway.
Updated 15 August 2022 to correct the average Bay Area home price in GBP. Despite the recent strength of the dollar, $1.3 million is not yet worth £1.1 billion.
I wonder if we'll reach the stage of the gig economy where there's an "uber-for-X" for composting, to connect home owners' backyard compost bins to environmentally-minded apartment dwellers to dump their food scraps. It probably won't work given the number of actual composting companies around, but "it probably won't work" hasn't stopped plenty of gig-apps before