Photo by Jan van der Wolf.
We have this line. It’s not ours. We’re pretty sure it belongs to Picasso. But only pretty sure. Our youngest kid will tell you, Picasso stole from everyone. Shamelessly. So even when you think of something as Picasso’s, there’s a good chance it’s borrowed. Anyway, the line is this.
“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”
We love this line. Not only because of the profound delineation between theory and practice. But also because we live it. And nowhere does this show up more consistently than at the tail end of our youngest’s weekly art class.
There’s the official end of art class. The time when the kids are theoretically supposed to get picked up. But depending on which activity they’re doing, you may arrive to find the kids with backpacks on, ready to go. Or you may find them elbows deep in papier maché, making pleading eyes that they just need one more minute to finish before the glue dries.
For the more complex projects, it’s never just one more minute.
This is how we’ve come to know a lot of the other parents who are waiting for their children to hang up aprons. It’s an after-school program so most of the adults come directly from work. And so in response to a friendly “How’s it going?,” people may go off about whatever was happening in the 5 minutes before they bolted out the door.
If you’d met at a cocktail party or networking event, everyone would have a prepared and professional answer. But because folks are harried and their guards are down, the discussions aren’t about form or structure or meaning.
They’re about cheap turpentine.
What it actually sounds like
Picasso’s point, borrowed or not, is that when practitioners get together, there’s a way that it sounds. And it’s not usually the prepared or professional version.
It’s about the big projects that are on the ropes. The impact of tariffs, not on cost of goods sold but on consumer confidence and perceived financial stability. And what that may or may not mean for main street storefronts. Why commercial HVAC is so obnoxiously expensive in the winter months and what to do about it. And what all of it means for renewing (or not renewing) commercial leases.
And this is just in the five minutes while we wait for the kids to wash acrylic paint off their hands. Like, there’s a way that it sounds when people in the thick of it are talking to other people in the thick of it. Practical. Grounded. Applied. Urgent.
You know what it doesn’t sound like? It doesn’t sound like posturing. It doesn’t sound like gatekeeping. It doesn’t sound like competing for whose problems are bigger, or whose are smaller. Or pontificating about what counts as a real business. Or real work. Or real struggle. Every adult there is trying to get a kid, get home, and figure out what the fuck is for dinner. That struggle is real enough to unite any room of working parents. Except.
Except that there’s a reason the first half of the Picasso quote starts with the critics.
The poser manifesto
Marc Andreessen wrote It’s Time to Build in the early days of the pandemic. If you’re anywhere in tech or a tech-adjacent orbit, we’re so certain you’ve had someone quote it at you. We’re sorry to bring it up again. Taken on its face as an argument for a position or policy, it’s fatally flawed in ways that would have any undergrad writing a make-up assignment to pass the class. But it isn’t an argument for a position or policy. Not really. It’s a rallying cry for a set of people to assemble around, and it worked, and they did.
The people who started parroting this everywhere describe themselves as builders. It’s a good rhetorical trick because as a word, it dares you to disagree. If you’re not a builder, then what are you? They never really say. But generally speaking the strong implication is that you are the other. The lazy. The ambition-less. The parasitic non-builders.
We’ve been here before. Ten years before builder, a strikingly similar set of people were on about meritocracy. That was their word that made them feel like big shots, and dared you to disagree. Who would be anti-merit, right? Occasionally you’ll see someone stumble out into the sunlight, apparently devoid of any context or critical analysis, to hold it up as a big new iconoclastic idea. But the rest of us figured out long ago that it’s a word with a lot of racist, sexist, ableist baggage. And that anyone pitching meritocracy today is either profoundly ignorant, or knows exactly what they’re doing.
Builder has assembled an impressive assortment of its own baggage. On the one hand, anyone can be a builder, sure, but really you should be in tech. Or maybe weapons. Definitely not public service or the arts! Preferably an engineer. At a startup, would be ideal. Mostly those are the real builders. Everyone else just sort of supports them or rides their coattails. And they can be from a diverse set of backgrounds, too, as long as it’s one of MIT, Stanford, or Waterloo. Huge range.
These self-proclaimed spokespeople have a pretty consistent message on what builders need, too. They tell us that builders need less financial oversight, and more at-will employment. Probably fewer climate regulations, while we’re at it. Three years ago they told us builders needed a crypto strategy, then the bottom fell out of venture capital for a while. Now apparently builders need lower taxes, but also massive government investment in AI.
If you were a builder — a real builder — you’d want this, too.
This isn’t what builders sound like
The thing is that this crew is very bad at actually building. They talk about it a lot. They bring builders on their podcasts. But when actually in the seat, they are a shitshow. Elon bought Twitter as a nexus of builder energy. He asked then-CEO Parag Agrawal “What did you get done this week?” Great builder question. Fired him when he didn’t get an answer he liked. Super-based builder move. He brought in a whole squad of Noted Silicon Valley Builders like David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, and Alex Spiro with him to turn the ship around. Truly a war room of the builder-est builders that ever built. Two years later, users and advertisers dwindling, relevance obliterated, Elon sold Twitter for $10B less than he paid. To himself.
That’s not a builder story. We talk with people building amazing things all the time, from founders to interns, and none of them sound like this. None of them are this boorish, this uncurious about where they might be wrong, this insistent that they are owed something. They’re all too busy with real shit, and that is scary work. To make a thing you care about happen in the world is a hard, tempestuous, vulnerable thing. Believe us, we know.
We’ve been building Raw Signal Group since 2017. And, while it’s not our only scoreboard, in those eight years RSG has probably generated more revenue than many of a16z’s portfolio companies. So Marc we’re gonna kindly ask you not to tell us we aren’t real builders. We’ve learned a lot, and we know we still have a lot to learn. We still find things to learn in almost every conversation we have with someone about what they’re building. But we don’t take advice on how to build from people who constantly leave ruins in their wake. And we don’t think you should either.
Your work is valid. Your work that repairs, or cares, or manages, or supports, or protects is valid even if it doesn’t build a new app. Your work that lives in complex trade-offs and uncomfortable but important compromise is valid even if it doesn’t maximize shareholder value. Even when the tools of your work are regulation, or accountability, or sometimes having to say “no, you cannot build that here, in that way, without addressing these impacts” — that work is valid. And let us know if you find a good deal on turpentine.
— Melissa & Johnathan
