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The founders and namesakes of the famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm A16Z decided to back Trump, and discussed why on a podcast.

Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge took one for the team and listened to the whole thing. It sounds like their sole reason for backing this extreme party, ultimately, is money:

this VC cabal is trading against the basic principles of America — not merely against personal freedom, but democracy itself — in the hopes of profit.

(From: The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - The Verge)

Selfishness and motivation by money isn't new (or inherently wrong). But A16Z-backed companies used to allude to more inspiring ideals, like changing the world for the better by connecting everyone. The marketing/morality ratio increasingly seems off.

Molly White wrote an excellent review of a book written by Chris Dixon, an investor specialised in crypto companies and blockchain at Andreessen Horowitz. Like Molly, I’m very scepticical of crypto companies. While I understand people want to try and get rich from tech investments, and that creating hype could help with such goals, I continue to not get the premise of this particular hype.

We’ve now had many years of solid crypto and blockchain criticism. From Molly’s review I gather Dixon’s book doesn’t really engage with that criticism, at all. He just dismisses it. While bashing on other technologies, like RSS. Strikes me as ironic that Dixon can’t see the use cases for RSS, while advocating for blockchaim, a technology still in search for a compelling application. Is it that RSS isn’t ‘monetised’, and that the ’value‘ he’s looking for is ’value as in money‘? Rather than ‘is how podcasts work and lots of people use this to keep up to date with content’?

Or, as Ahmet A. Sabanc wrote, in RSS is not dead:

RSS was never dead. I don’t know why people claimed that just because a tech overlord decided something is not profitable for them. People are still using it and it’s as good and alive as it’s always been.