Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

Previous thread (featuring Ben Horowitz on 21.co): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485488

Two takeaways:

1. A response looks like this: https://monosnap.com/file/CbRNrj7TUUhaLolVTLYJhrPxUdsYOK

2. A16Z invested in 21.co when it still was a Bitcoin mining hardware startup: https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/18/what-is-21-co-really-doing...

I think it's just a really interesting way to gate a contact form and get people to think twice about sending off an email. Lots of people have thought about how to avoid spam: finding a way to have to pay to get into an inbox might just be the ticket.

I find it interesting that you can write RMS, the leader of the Free Software movement, and he'll respond to you within the day for no charge because he think's that's a morally important thing to do. You can in contrast write Marc Andreessen, one of the figure heads of the propriatary software and privacy violating movement of every bigger information companies, and he'll charge you for the pleasure.

Interesting dichotomy, at least to me.

What are you asking his advice for?

I'm not a VC industry insider, but I've spent enough time in the industry as a peon analyst to see the industry for what it is. I've written before about how nearly all VC partners are ridiculously conservative bandwagoners (they only invest if someone else invests), with the sole (to my knowledge) exception being Marc Andreessen. There might be other exceptions out there, but the thing I always admired about him is his ability to fully commit to a business without any social proof. And I believe that this attribute is what makes him successful. If you are taking his advice on whether to invest in something, it's probably worth the $100.

Never worked with him personally, but I'm sure his business advice is gonna be pretty sound even if I don't know how it rates relative to other VCs. But I think the real point is that it is important to know what you're asking him about before anybody can tell you if it is a good idea. You wouldn't ask him about plumbing, right?

No one's mentioned getting a response so far, but I'm intrigued enough to give it a try. I've sent in a question about genetic engineering.

Some notes about the process:

1. 21.co's signup form mandates an image, but the tool they use for file uploads breaks on PNGs (!) silently without any visible warning to the user (!!), you can click on the 'save' button many times with nothing happening and without any kind of error or warning in the web console (!!!), in both Firefox and Chromium with Noscript & Adblock disabled. Apparently even using an entire specialized file upload service, the second-most common image format in existence is just too exotic and confusing to support.

2. you have to confirm by email before you can do anything, which adds on another 10-15m to the process (amusingly, they spam you on signup to set up a public paid inbox - and that email arrived first, but you can't do anything unconfirmed)

3. it's not $100, it's actually $110, because 21co tacks on a $10 'service fee' (even though it's for charity). It's unclear if I have to pay this $10 regardless of whether Andreessen ever responds. I hope not. In any case this strikes me as a huge fee for such a trivial service, and I really hope it's a 10% fee rather than a fixed $10 fee...

4. the site is surprisingly slow despite being so barebones

5. browsing the interface, despite the prominence of Bitcoin, I'm not clear whether I am even allowed to deposit Bitcoin and pay that way; in any case I opted to use a credit card because the profile image bug wasted so much of my time and I was losing my patience. The cash out page indicates that should I ever earn anything via 21.co, I would need to jump through even more hoops, presumably even if I only wanted Bitcoin and not bank deposits or anything. I thought briefly about setting up a paid inbox because it's a fun concept but between a 10% (or worse) fee and all this invasiveness, I'm not interested.

6. signup form doesn't work with Lastpass, which failed to capture the username/password; always annoying to manually copy over generated passwords.

So, I'm not impressed but we'll see how it works out...

On a side note, how do people regard the expectation of privacy with these public inbox emails? I see someone has screenshotted a Horowitz response; are these responses considered 'commissioned' in a sense, rather than private emails with an expectation of privacy/confidentiality, and so it's OK to copy-paste any response publicly on HN or elsewhere?

whatever you want to ask him: I'll answer it for $1

It seems to me this is just an advanced (and probably very efficient) quasi-captcha. Except it distinguishes those with a real need for his attention (that is, those who are willing and able to pay) from the others, instead of separating humans from bots.

I made a donation, asked no questions, and thanked him for doing something different.

Good, bad, or indifferent I like the way Marc approached this given the amount of people clamoring to get access to him.

I like this service, but where can I see a full list of people I can pay to contact? I tried finding a link on the site, but couldn't.

Yes. I paid $100 because I want to encourage volunteering.

> To Marc Andreessen. From Joel Parker Henderson. Hi Marc, what are some of your favorite charity causes that could benefit from pro bono coding help? I work at [X] and we have many programmers who volunteer for social progressive causes; we love coding and we love to help. Thank you, Joel

He answered my $20 question regarding whether he thought the SoLaTiDo wearable keyboard/controller would be accepted by the mobile enterprise AR community, or was too early to the market. His answer was that it was cool, and that he wanted one on his wrist. This means he barely considered it, since it clearly requires both hands and all fingers, to offer workstation level control. My follow-up question (at $100) told him of the mistaken assumption, and asked him what he thought deskless workers would do to gain workstation level control of AR devices. His 48 hours to reply has just expired, so maybe he's swamped.

Yeah and here is my question - how much of your own money did you give to this meaningful cause?

He's making a tradeoff here. This is an ingenious way to filter the 'massive' noise-to-signal ratio on his inbox, but at the same time it makes some of the random but legitimate questions go away.

I believe Quora and Facebook tried it in various forms though there you could reach out just about anybody. I assume 21.co will do same thing going forward.

Someone should spend the money to ask him if he thinks the service is worth it, or if he would have used a similar service at any point in his career.

shouldn't this be marked with "Ask HN:"?

What advice could he have to offer? This is really stupid self aggrandizement. Get over yourself Marc.

maybe they are just testing their latest ai bot?

> "Was it worth it?"

The proceeds go to programs promoting underrepresented genders and ethnicities in tech, I'd say that yes it is quite "worth it".