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...

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

That seems reasonable for $20, but I'd be disappointed in that for $100. Basically, it's

Q: "We have some tech that works in the law field, who should we talk to?"

A: "Talk to some big law firms"

Of course, the question itself invited that answer. Would love to see answers from other questions.

Don't forget... now that person can call those firms and say "Ben Horowitz said we should talk." :)

If Ben would kick off an email introduction with someone he knows at the firm it'd be worth much more than $100.

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

That's quite expensive for $100. Also, doesn't sound like an advice, more like a judge for an elevator pitch.

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 suppose this is just a slightly more expensive version of the idea that we could do away with spam by charging a penny or a tenth of a penny per email sent.

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.

RMS contributed some incredibly influential and useful software back in the day, but you'd have to pay me a lot more than Andreessen is charging to read the ranting drivel he passes off as philosophy.

I don't think that's a fair or charitable charictatization of his opinions and if you do feel that way, even after you've read his works, you can still email him about technical questions. I don't know how much of a help he'd be but you can always try and ask his opinion on how to do something.

I have emailed him about technical stuff. I used to treat the guy like a hero until I talked with and met him.

I once offered to create a front-end for GCC for a programming language that, at the time, was only supported by proprietary compilers. (This was back before GCC was eclipsed by clang, with its sane licensing that allows more organizations to contribute.) I got back a disjointed screed about how evil the company behind it was because not all their software was free and they were basically fascists who ate babies and if their kind wasn't defeated then the universe was doomed. (I'm paraphrasing because this was 20+ years ago, but that was the general theme.)

I've also had the displeasure of working with him more than once at conferences, and he brings the same sort of good-vs-evil delusion to even the simplest things in everyday life. He sought out opportunities to harangue volunteers about everything from lighting to the beverages available, prepped with hours of obviously practiced diatribe to "support" all his bizarre ideas. He even showed up in the middle of a conference once--the schedule for which had been finalized months earlier--and asked when he could speak, and complained about the time slot we managed to find for him and how there were speakers talking about things that weren't GPL-licensed and we shouldn't be giving them a platform to promote such evil, etc. Honestly, he's the biggest ass I've ever had to deal with at such an event.

He's an atheist, but he has way more in common with the nuttiest of religious nuts than he does with any kind of philosopher. He's right about a few things (perhaps by accident, given how many things he's wrong about), and because he happened to be right about them first, he continues to be treated with reverence and many of his ideas are given way more credence than they should be.

Not implying this is the case here but sometimes people charge like Google chrome store charges $5 for submitting a chrome extension. The small investment is like a filter for really in-demand people to separate the wheat from the chaff.

> sometimes people charge like Google chrome store charges $5 for submitting a chrome extension

Coincidentally I don't like using Google Chrome. I stopped using the browser after they removed that ad-confusion extension and switched to FireFox. I never used it but I think it's not right for google to do it. I mean, I expected it to happen but it broke the camals back.

If I had known that there was a $5 charge for chrome extensions I would have stopped using it sooner.

Just to be clear, the $5 is a one time charge to be able submit extensions to their store, not a charge for users to download extensions. I think it's a good solution to help keep pure garbage from being uploaded... if you upload something, you think it's worth $5 (hopefully a trivial sum to you.) If you don't want to pay the fee, you can tell people to download your extension from your own page and manually install it. Uploading it to the store just helps people discover your extension and makes installing the extension a one click thing.

Which extension are you referring to?

The one that clicked on ads in the background to pretend you visited the site. It was an attempt at hiding your identiy by making it difficult to track click behavior.

The money's all being donated. It's a fundraiser.

You know what's funny... I heard a very similar thing said by a company making a device for medical purposes. They said that they needed to charge a high price because it was for the betterment of humanity. They were planning on donating some of the raised funds to charity and put the rest of the money back into R&D to make more life saving drugs.

That excuse was made by Martin Sshkreli on a news show if memory serves me right. He was talking about the price hikes on one of their medical products.

In my opinion "It's fine! We're going to develop life saving drugs with this!" is a very similar argument to "It's fine! We're going to give the money to charity!".

I know these are very different but I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.

In Martin Shkreli's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV.

How is it an excuse for a pharmaceutical company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be saving lives.

In Marc Andreessen's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV.

How is it an excuse for a technology company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be giving people technology.

-----

To put it in clearer terms, Marc Andreessen is with the crowd that has the most to gain from charity contributions. He's got his fingers in all the right pies to make a lot of money from the results of more charity activities. He can is described as "a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook,[5] eBay,[6] and Hewlett Packard Enterprise,[7] among others" according to wikipedia and he was apperently involved with Free Basics.

You can read more about this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Criticism

The Free Basics thing is exactly the worst possible thing for any third world county I can think of. Getting spoon fed the "right" information from an overload mega-corp.

I think it's fair to say that his buisness is collecting data on people and manipulating them and that "just happens to include providing technology" which is one of the things he can do by finding selective charities.

Sometimes RMS's access to technology limits the value of his responses, however.. ;-) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.linux.advoca...

The people in that link are being plain jerks.

Never tried personally, but read somewhere Steve Wozniak does the same

Well if someone ends up giving it a go after reading this comment please tell him that there's a college student on the East Coast willing to buy a sheet of $2 bills from him for the cost of the sheet and a free lunch.

Wozniak seems like your one friends dad who knows all the corniest jokes and has a past that took him into some of the funniest situatins alive. He also happens to be a great hardware guy which makes him infinitly cooler.

Yeah, I cold-emailed Woz once with a bunch of questions and he replied to me.

from his LinkedIn:

contact: ideas@woz.org

Interesting. Have you ever written to RMS?

Two or three times. Once about emacs, and I think the others were either questions about the morality of specific program distrobution methods. His responces were long winded and tailored to my situation although they did include his talking points.

It's listed at https://stallman.org/ under "Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org."

He'll happily explain or debate any points he has with you although there is a standard 24hr return time for every email because of the way he processes all of his emails he gets. He's got a post about how he does it efficiently somewhere.

Oh man I went down the RMS rabbit hole and found this : https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/bos/533096562.html?lan....

while i see your point, one important thing to note is that Marc's fee goes to charity.

I would regard that $100 as an indicator that you have a real question that is important to you. Marc doesn't need or care about the money.

Makes total sense. Let's suggest the same thing to our local, state, and federal representatives. They should charge $100 to get their ear to make sure people only raise important questions. Maybe we should even set it at $1000! Raising the bar really filters out all of those annoying and pesky people.

If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.

Not endorsing it. For starters, $100 means a lot more to some people than others. But it's not like this is a money making venture for him, it pretty well has to be operating as a filter.

> If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.

It's your representative's job to represent you. Marc has no obligation to answer your question.

Isn't this exactly how it works? If you're a big contributor, the rep hears your concerns. If not, they're filtered through multiple layers of staffers or dropped on the floor.

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?

Right, it's a business-related question. $100 to me is worth a lot more than it is to him, so I just wondered whether what I'd be getting would be worth what I'm spending. If the response is anything like the Ben Horowitz example above, I'm thinking no.

If everyone is a bandwagoner, how does the bandwagon start? Without pmarca, would VC grind to a halt?

It's really slow. Someone gets interested, their interest piques someone else's interest. This goes on practically forever until some point where there are 2 or more VCs in a room together and then it becomes "I'll do it if you do it".

They've co-opted a word for this process: syndication. If you ask them what it means, they'll have some flowery language[0] for you. In reality all it means is that they're too chickenshit to invest on merits alone, and really want to know what other people think.

This process drives up pre-money valuations and thereby reduces returns. By opting out of the process, Andreessen has outsized returns. It's a bigger risk (he has abnormally large potential downsides), but he's good enough of a judge of merit to make it work out phenomenally for him.

[0] http://www.startable.com/2008/10/27/venture-capital-deal-syn...

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?

To update:

My message idn't make it in the first time and 21co notified me it has been canceled:

> Thanks for using 21 to contact Marc Andreessen and donate to Black Girls Code. Demand for Marc's time was extremely high and it was not feasible to respond to your message in 48 hours. As such, your credit card has not been charged. Marc still wants to hear from you though, so we encourage you to resubmit your message at 21.co/pmarca! The new estimated response time is one week given the high demand. We are working on adding code to dynamically update wait times in the presence of surges of demand, but in the interim we want to make sure you have a good experience. Thanks again for using 21 and supporting Black Girls Code!

I decided to try submitting again (I'm still curious and at least the price didn't increase).

I also mentioned my comments to 21.co. To summarize their response:

1. PNG: should be supported, they don't know why it didn't work 2. they'll check that the emails arrive in an actionable order 3. it's a flat 10%; it is to cover payment processing (so the user may be donating to charity but they're not) 4. performance is a known issue 5. you are not allowed to deposit Bitcoin, they have to be earned via the site; deposits may or may not be available in the future. Verification for withdrawals are required because of fear of abuse. 6. the responses are supposed to be private/confidential (I guess Horowitz simply doesn't mind or know about that one being passed around). So should I get an Andreessen response, I guess I will confine my comment to whether it was a good response or not and whether it might be worth the money.

(I don't entirely agree with some of the reasons.)

Got a reply this morning, 98 words. I think it was a good reply - it was mostly what I was thinking but it's valuable knowing that someone like Andreessen, who may know many secret things and has seen many tech sigmoids come and go, takes a similar view of things.

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

The question here is: does your answer worth $1? anybody here can share experience on that? :)

You have to pay $1 to find out.

But you just established that you're willing to dole out freebies.

Edit: nope, as mentioned below. Oops.

That wasn't him.

with an example answer like what was linked in an earlier comment [1], i will answer as many as i can for free, if you reply directly to this comment

[1] "hey yeah, i don't really understand your product, but a few law firms you could google might be interested... also notice my lack of a warm intro for you... thanks"

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.

That is interesting, I also couldn't find a way to search or a complete list. There's a sampling here: https://21.co/

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

Normally volunteers are not paid $100 / answer to question, just saying.

The proceeds go to charity.

why didn't you just talk to your favorite charities instead of deferring that judgement to Andreessen

>why didn't you just talk to your favorite charities instead of deferring that judgement to Andreessen

No doubt. Paid $100 to ask Andreeesen what his favourite charities are? The SV hero worship is so intense.

I talk with many charities. I also like to ask people about charities where pro bono programming may be especially helpful. If you have ideas, that's great.

A successful example is Benetech.org, a SF Bay Area technology charity that is doing wonderful work in tech and social good; I learned about Benetech because of direct personal advice.

Here are some of my favorite charities in case you're interested in learning more and/or donating. Thank you!

For tech: Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).

For social causes: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, Benetech for Global Literacy, Center for Environmental Health (CEH), Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch (HRW).

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?

How much did you? What are you doing to help?

Let me get this straight. Here is someone who makes it possible to a. get access to his knowledge and experience in a pretty easy way and b. lets charities benefit from an interest in this knowledge and suddenly HE is the greedy bastard? Wow.

What was his response?

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.

It sounded to me like you only have to pay if your message gets a response. So I just assumed it would be a lottery as to whether he even ever saw my message. I figure he must devote only a very small amount of time to perusing his messages, and then he must devote an equally small amount of time composing an answer.

So I figured I'd have to get pretty lucky to actually wind up spending the $100 (or $110) in the end. Even so, I'd hate to spend the $100 and find the response was disappointing.

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.

There's no need to ask that. Just see if he's still using it in a few months, or if the price has escalated drastically.

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

Maybe, but I don't see anything in the FAQ which says you have to do that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

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?

I think the question was whether the advice was worth $100, not whether the $100 went toward a meaningful cause.

That's correct. Clearly the worth of the advice would be different for different people, depending upon how deep their pockets are. I was hoping to get some examples of just what kind of advice was offered.

It also appears to be optional to donate the money earned through this service, as the payee may opt to keep the proceeds instead.