# It's Time to Build **"It's Time to Build"** is an essay by [[Marc Andreessen]], published on the [[Andreessen Horowitz]] website on April 18, 2020, about a month into the COVID-19 lockdowns. It argued that America's pandemic failures came from a long-running unwillingness to build things, not from a lack of money or know-how. It spread quickly through tech and Washington policy circles. It's now read as an early founding text of the [[Tech Right]]. The paradox is in what came after. An essay that named housing as a prime example of American paralysis was followed, two years later, by its author's written demand that his own town drop plans for apartments. Its most lasting product turned out to be a network of private group chats, not anything physical. ## The argument The essay opens by saying every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus despite many warnings. Andreessen listed the shortages: tests, ventilators, ICU beds, masks and gowns. He pointed to New York City reportedly looking for rain ponchos to use as medical gowns, and to a federal government that passed a $2 trillion rescue package but had no fast way to get the money to workers and businesses. He then widened the charge to housing, education, manufacturing, health care and transportation, arguing that the things America builds in volume get cheaper while the things it doesn't, like housing, schools and hospitals, keep getting more expensive. He rejected money, capitalism and technical skill as the cause. "The problem is desire," he wrote, followed by inertia, regulatory capture and will. The essay made a demand of each side of politics. Andreessen wanted the right to give building full support and to fight crony capitalism and regulatory capture. He challenged the left to stop protecting "the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant" and to prove its public-sector models could deliver. He closed by asking every reader what they were building. Trump isn't named in the essay. ## Reception TechCrunch called it a "call to arms." The Week reported it had become required reading for Washington policy wonks and Silicon Valley founders. Critics, including a Stanford Daily columnist, said it ignored how other places had handled the virus, and that its framing of San Francisco's housing crisis left out the role of wealthy companies in driving up costs. Its blame on regulators and "the entrenched" fit the deregulatory turn that Andreessen's firm later formalized in its [[American Dynamism]] practice and in his 2023 [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]]. [[Where Is My Flying Car]] made a similar argument earlier. ## The Atherton letter (2022) In June 2022, Andreessen and his wife, [[Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen]], emailed officials in Atherton, California, one of the country's richest towns, to oppose a state-required plan to allow multifamily housing there. "I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton," they wrote, warning that the zones would "MASSIVELY decrease our home values." The Atlantic's Jerusalem Demsas reported the letter in August 2022, and Fortune, Bloomberg and Vice all set it beside the essay. The overlay zones were dropped from the town's draft plan. See [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]]. ## The group chats According to Semafor, the essay was also a starting point for the private network of [[Tech Right Group Chats]]. Discussion of it, and of the pandemic, ran through [[Clubhouse]] that spring. Afterward, Andreessen and [[Sriram Krishnan]] decided to build group chats instead of a public forum. Krishnan's first, launched that spring, was a WhatsApp group called **Build**. That network became, in Semafor's account, the main place where Silicon Valley's alliance with the Trump-era right was negotiated. ## Why it's on the map - **A founding text.** It set the tech right's core story that America's failures are failures of will and regulation, not of markets or capital. - **The test of sincerity.** The Atherton letter is a clear documented case of the essay's author opposing the building it called for when it reached his neighborhood. - **Build what, exactly?** The essay asked for factories, housing and hospitals. What its author's circle built in 2020 was [[Clubhouse]] rooms and private chats: a network of influence, not physical things. See [[Social Audio]]. ## Connections - [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Andreessen Horowitz]] · [[Sriram Krishnan]] - [[Tech Right Group Chats]] · [[Clubhouse]] · [[Social Audio]] · [[Tech Right]] - [[American Dynamism]] · [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] · [[Where Is My Flying Car]] - [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]]