Andreesen Horowitz, as you may know, is a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley. Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University and a prolific blogger at Marginal Revolution. They recently had a conversation:
This is a very interesting conversation, one which, from my point of view, hinges on and revolves around the difference between Hollywood as a producer of culture and Silicon Valley as a producer of technology. Will the twain meet, can they? [What do you think Disney was doing back in the 30s and 40s?] At about 19:22 Cowen mentions that has started a Cultural Leadership Fund. Horowitz observes that it’s an attempt to “apply culture to the venture capital model”, whatever that means.
He continues, c. 20:29:
We thought it was a good thing to share with the rest of the industry and so we would have these cultural geniuses, but geniuses who didn’t look like the geniuses our guys were used to like Mark Zuckerberg or Brian Chesky [Airbnb]; they kind of felt different. But our guys were interested in working with them so we put them together. They get to know each other, which has got value on both sides, and it also gives a lot of value to our CEOs, because not only do they get to kind of learn how to move culture, but they also get to learn about how a different kind of talent looks like. Which is very very valuable when you’re kinda’ in the war for talent.
And then we invest it back in a kind of young African-Americans who are wanting to come into tech. So we create a talent pipeline with the fund and we have straight access to the pipeline. So I would just say we get a lot of credit for being nice but really just winning. So its gone great. And I think it works well and
And look, the main thesis is if you’ve got like a very small group of people that created every new musical art form in the last century from jazz to blues to hip-hop to rock ‘n roll, you know, that’s a real thing. Like to be able to do that, and that’s a real talent base that we need to figure out how to get to.
There’s a lot wrapped up there and I don’t know what I think about it.
Basically, sure, it’s good. They’ll have to be fleet to achieve maximum benefit. But obviously they’ve done very well to date. And yet, something about this – I can't put my finger on it – seems a little old to me.
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As for that “very small group of people that created every new musical art form in the last century”, that’s very deep in the culture, African American and more generally American for it’s a niche that African Americans have been allowed to occupy. But can THAT be transferred to tech? Just what kind of transfer to they have in mind, coding skill, device design and fabrication or, you know, content creation?
That musical culture starts young. I’ve seen black five and six year olds who can dance more fluidly than most white college students, but then they likely started dancing before they could walk. How’s that possible? In their mother’s arms. Then there’s the church, which provided and continues to provide an institutional home for music. The music that happens in church may be restricted in some ways, but those restrictions aren’t of such a nature as to stand in the way of a rollicking good time. Musicians who come up learning to make music like that easily shed those restrictions in secular venues.
And then there's tech, the sampling culture of hip-hop is at least halfway there, no?
What about games, video games? Some years ago I’d thought that if I ran a games company that I’d hire Richard Pryor as a consultant. He’s brilliant and imaginative, and an interesting actor; he knows how to move. A video game infused with the spirit of Richard Pryor should have great appeal. Alas, spirit is all that’s left of him now. Who could take up the mantle? I’d go for Dave Chapelle.
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Getting back to my inchoate misgivings, which have to do with Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley and culture vs. tech. That first opposition, I assume, is about socio-cultural ecosystems. These two places developed as networks of interlocking goods, services, skill sets, and training grounds organized around different economic engines. But it’s not as though Los Angeles is devoid of tech; there’s a lot of aerospace and petroleum there, and the movie industry floats on underlying technology (hence my earlier remark about Disney). And Silicon Valley, it’s right around the corner from the old hippie mecca of Haight-Ashbury, with its sex, drugs, and rock and roll. My guess is that it’s more like high rank 3 culture (Hollywood) vs. emerging rank 4 culture (Silicon Valley) – but to explicate that I’d have to insert a mini-discussion of the theory of cultural ranks. There’s plenty of that on elsewhere New Savanna, so I don’t intend to do it here.
And then we have Horowitz’s paradigm examples of Silicon Valley genius, Mark Zuckerberg and Brian Chesky. Whatever those guys are, they aren’t technical types. They’re well, they’re entrepreneurs. Are we now recognizing that as a distinct type, maybe even rank 4 (though the term has an older provenance)? In a slightly different corner of the conversation he – or was it Andreeseen? – talked of systems thinking, a sort on catch-all phrase that may well correspond to a well-developed set of intuitions and perceptions (probably does), but that doesn’t mean much in itself.
I take it, then, that much was left unsaid. Some of it simply because they didn’t get around to it. But the most important part is unsaid because they don’t know how to articulate it. I’m thinking of that old cliché about icebergs: the visible portion is only 10% of the berg; it’s resting on a submerged 90%. That conversation, like all conversation, was a display of the visible 10%. It’s the invisible 90% that’s doing most of the work.
Cultural Leadership Fund? We’ll see.
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