{"id":243036,"date":"2026-01-13T22:18:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T22:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/243036\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T22:18:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T22:18:07","slug":"raise-prices-raise-prices-raise-prices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/243036\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Raise Prices, Raise Prices, Raise Prices’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Andreessen thinks things should cost more. Despite the fact that the US economy is stagnant, with unemployment on the rise<\/a> and the affordability crisis as bad as it\u2019s ever been<\/a>, Andreessen has been telling the companies that he invests in to squeeze more out of their customers. Why? Because they can.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe spend a lot of time working with our companies on pricing,\u201d Andreessen, the cofounder of venture capital giant a16z, said in a recent episode of The A16z Show<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s really this magical art and science that a lot of companies don\u2019t take seriously enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

That statement would probably confound every business school textbook, which would tell you to consider costs and competitors in the market to determine the optimal price that produces sufficient revenue to operate. But yeah, it\u2019s magic.<\/p>\n

\u201cA core principle of pricing is that you don\u2019t want to price by cost if you can avoid it. You want to price by value. Especially when you\u2019re selling to businesses, you want to price as a percentage of the business value you\u2019re creating,\u201d he explained. Of course, that should apply to businesses, but it should under no circumstances apply to employees, who are often significantly underpaid for the value they generate for a company<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The thing is, Andreessen says, it\u2019s actually better for your customers if you charge them more. They like it. \u201cThe naive view on pricing is the lower the pricing, the better it is for the customer. The more sophisticated way of looking at it is that higher prices are often good for the customer because the higher price means the vendor can make the product better, faster,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s just the kind of advice you get from Andreessen, who said that one of the selling points of doing business with him is that he\u2019s obnoxious and a nightmare to be around. \u201cGenerally speaking, the more out there we are, and the more outspoken we are, and the more controversial we are, the better for the business,\u201d Andreessen said on that same episode of the A16z Show<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that approach that has led Andreessen\u2019s company to hire Daniel Penny<\/a>, the marine who killed Jordan Neely on a New York subway, back a company that is intentionally flooding the internet with AI slop<\/a>, give money to disgraced WeWork founder Adam Neumann<\/a> for a new venture, and invest<\/a> in the likely destined-to-fail<\/a> \u201ccheating as a service\u201d app Cluely mostly because its founder annoyed people in academia.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unfortunately difficult to suggest that Andreessen\u2019s approach is wrong if your metric for success is money. Earlier this month, Andreessen Horowitz announced<\/a> that it raised $15 billion in new funding, accounting for nearly one-fifth of the total venture capital spending<\/a> in the United States in 2025. But hey, where else are you going to get groundbreaking insight like \u201ccharge more\u201d? It just hits different when it comes from a guy who lived in a house with seven fireplaces<\/a> and called the idea of an American middle class<\/a> an \u201cexperiment [that] has been run, and it was a catastrophic failure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marc Andreessen thinks things should cost more. Despite the fact that the US economy is stagnant, with unemployment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[41716,220,29668,218,219,61,60,65044,1884,80,195],"class_list":{"0":"post-243036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-a16z","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-andreessen-horowitz","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-marc-andreessen","16":"tag-startups","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-venture-capital"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}