Let's discuss this egghead. He's a summation of the current Technology industry, its values, virtues and vices. He is the tech industry in a nutshell.

He has only one "invention" under his belt which isn't exactly an invention since Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea and a prototype, but in the classic Silicon Valley Edisonian way, the entrepreneur who made things "accessible" is more of a hero in Western mythology than the inventor who deemed himself above the exploits of capital.

Anyways, just one invention in 1993. And that was his rise to fame.

Till date, I haven't heard him say a single insightful thing yet he's been the hero of silicon valley for as long as I remember. Of course being the president of a16z had a lot to do with it -- founders love to suck up to VCs.

Some examples of his shallow thinking:

1. He said 80% of what he reads consists of twitter, blogs, and forum threads, and 20% is the 'eternal' stuff like classical books etc.

2. He said the great men of history weren't "introspective". They were just like him, incapable of self-reflection.

3. He wrote the techno-optimist manifesto which reads like a techbro wet dream but is really just techno-fascism if you read between the lines.

I could go on but his twitter timeline offers better entertainment.

A shallow man, with shallow thoughts, with little substance to his overinflated ego, who talks fast so people don't see the contradictions in what he says, who never pauses to consider what the consequences maybe, who has a religious belief in the complete goodness of his ideas and the complete evil of everyone else's.

Are we really surprised that the tech industry has become what it has?

In a way, I owe him something. He made me question: Can we imagine a different tech industry?

Not like the Richard Stallman "free software" hippie movement where everything is open source and everyone codes for fun, not necessarily.

But an industry actually focused on doing good, not just improving shareholder (i.e., eggheads) value. Imagine a tech industry that is focused on solving food insecurity, climate crisis, ecological preservation, poverty alleviation, medical research that doesn't enrich the big pharma only, and so on ...

So far, my answer has been to just invert every single one of his opinions. Starting with his love for capitalism ...