It's time to build and solve real-world problems

"Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?" - Mark Andreesen, decrying in his 2020 essay titled, It's time to build. 

What Andreessen also acknowledges in this essay is that that tech has chosen an easier path to innovate. We haven't grappled real-world problems but instead relied exclusively on software as the means for innovation. We have retreated to Silicon Valley to avoid fighting inertia and regulatory capture, pursuing an infinite upside on zero marginal cost. However, as this pandemic unfolded, what we see today are things we urgently need but don't' have. 

Software eating the world, with zero marginal costs, all from Silicon Valley. Ben Thompson of Stratechery's fame on his take on this essay poignantly remarked, "Human progress in this view is solely online."

Andreessen states: 

You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.

You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. We can't build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential — which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future. We also can't build the cities themselves anymore. When the producers of HBO's "Westworld" wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn't film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin — they went to Singapore. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?

You see it in education…manufacturing…transportation…

At Compass, we are on a mission to help everyone find their place in the world. 

What we are building here at Compass is a fully integrated operating system for real estate. The end-to-end platform brings the complexity of the real estate transactions to a simplified, augmented, efficient, and joyful experience for buyers, sellers, and agents.

What we are building at Compass are AI-driven tools for real estate agents/entrepreneurs to manage their entire business, unlike other tech solutions that start and stop at being listing aggregators.

What we are building at Compass is the future of the real estate industry with mobile technology in the post COVID world.

We are creating distributed teams with our offices in over 20 major US cities, and a new development center in Hyderabad, India.

We are hiring across our technology stack and across all levels. If you want to build and solve real-world problems, you can check out Compass’s job portal.

To end this with Andreesan's preference and vision:

Building isn’t easy, or we’d already be doing all this. We need to demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?