I met Mr Draper once. I was staying at the SFO hyatt, or maybe the Mariott, and had a couple hours to kill after breakfast and noticed there was some sort of conference going on, so I crashed it. I walked into a talk room and sat in the front row and introduced myself to my neighbors. On one side was Steven Levy (author of many books in the industry) and the other was Bill Draper. I don't really remember the conversation, nor even the topic of the conference - it was a brief conversation in the 5 or 10 minutes before the talk started. At the time I didn't really know who he was but I was a little star-struck by Mr Levy, and it was Levy who told me I should be more impressed by being next to Draper. Mr Draper thought that was funny and the three of us chatted a bit more about whatever. I found it interesting that Mr. Draper was a surprisingly relatable guy (particularly given what I know about him know) and that he was very insightful of technology for someone who was in his 70 or 80s at the time.
RIP Mr. Draper. I didn't know it when we talked, but you helped make my career possible - thanks!
I got to meet Bill briefly while taking part in his grandson Adam’s Boost VC accelerator in the early bitcoin days.
Bill would attend both events in support of Tim and Adam. I had a great experience with both the Drapers as a founder.
One time, while living with my cofounder in the hotel Tim was restoring in downtown San Mateo, I broke the hotel elevator.
The laundry was on the basement level and ~everyone used this brick to prop open the door so could dash to the laundry move it to the dryer and dash back without loosing the car.
Well, the brick was not well propped and somehow the door pushed it to a point where it could close but also somehow carry it up the shaft.
Watching the door close it was just like, uh oh.
Up goes the elevator idk a few stories and then the sound of a brick tumbling down the shaft hitting who knows what.
Ya, the elevator stopped working immediately. I owned up to it the next day, writing Tim and offering to pay for what probably would have consumed all of our accelerator funds of damage I had caused.
He thanked me for my honesty and said not to worry about it.
Tim (and Adam) went on to invest in not one but two of my ventures.
Anyway, I realize this is about Bill but I think a person can be reflected in not only themselves but those that they raise and wanted to share this.
Oh and Bill, at least back then, did not think much of Bitcoin. :)
Also clearly, what's the expectation that we hear that Kiva or Room to Read is baked by DRK? Have you heard of these? Which non profits have you heard of?
Consider this:
"19% of all global Audacious Project awardees started out as DRK-funded entities and 10% of all Skoll Award for Social Innovation winners come from the DRK portfolio"
Does this help? Do you know who's Audacious or Skoll? And if, not perhaps can we reason when it's appropriate to challenge anything based on close to zero information about the subject?
I didn't know that was a real thing Marc Andreesen actually said. What is up with all these psychos masquerading as humans? It's so depressing because I used to idolize folks like Andreesen, Musk, Bezos, Page, etc. Now I find them all basically disgusting weirdos. Not sure if it's a mix of having to be kinds narcissistic/psychopathic to achieve that level of success in the first place, or if being so outlandishly wealthy insulated you from normal human guardrails (probably both).
But in any case, I don't quite get how folks who work at a16z can look at themselves in the mirror everyday.
I kinda idealized Marc. Not so much the other ones.
One thing about Marc's biography that I couldn't square: he was supposedly working for NCSA while an undergrad at UofI. My experience as an undergrad is that you could maybe get a guided tour of one of the labs. You may be able to get in the building if your professor worked there or something. The idea that a lab like NCSA would hire an undergrad for anything beyond menial work defies my experience.
Earlier I took it to be that he was such a genius that they decided to Doogie Howser him. But know that we know he's an idiot, that theory doesn't really stand up.
> Earlier I took it to be that he was such a genius that they decided to Doogie Howser him. But know that we know he's an idiot, that theory doesn't really stand up.
I don't think it's really a good idea to classify folks as "geniuses" or "idiots", because they can often be both. In Andreesen's case, he definitely does seem "genius level" (or at least highly intelligent) when it comes to software development and business. He seems "idiot level" to me when it comes to understanding society broadly and what kind of benefits people seek from technology.
This just feels like a common thread to me for most of these folks. Like I thought Page really was a genius, but when it came out that he's basically OK with AI wiping out humanity and to argue otherwise is "speciesest" (obviously that anecdote is through the grapevine, but others have corroborated that this is Page's general feeling about AI), I'm like "forget idiot level, these folks are psychopathic level".
There's something about becoming rich that seems to corrupt a high percentage of people. You can tell which ones, they are the ones who keep trying to get more money.
The ones who don't get corrupted tend to live quiet lives after they reach a high level of wealth.
The most common misunderstanding that people have about the extreme rich like Bezos or Musk, is that they're trying to get more money as their motivation. It's a remarkable failure of understanding, a kind of overly simplistic boiling down. Akin to: Iraq was about the oil (it was about power and control over the Middle East more broadly, oil is a trinket like the USD, secondary; the Middle East is a great powers battleground, between the US and Russia (and more recently China)).
They're trying to get their way, money is one means. They're trying to implement something they have in mind, outcomes, money is very useful for that in most cases. They're not trying to get more money as the thing unto itself, it's a tool of power/control/influence.
People that have never been near extreme wealth usually fall back to the very primitive reasoning of: it's just money grubbing, it's base greed. Because that's bumper sticker simple thinking that is easy to cuddle up to.
Back in reality, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al. these people are humans, they want things, they want outcomes, they have notions for how they think the world should be. Money helps them pursue that, it's nothing but a tool for them, a means to an end. It's comically foolish to think the money is the end.
> They're not trying to get more money as the thing unto itself, it's a tool of power/control/influence.
But this is exactly why people shouldn't be able to accumulate that level of wealth and progressive taxation levels should reach 100% beyond a certain level and we should fix the tax code to tax all wealth and not just standard income.
That much wealth accumulation is anti-democracy.
Nobody elected them to have as much power as that wealth buys them.
I don't think that's really as much of a misconception as you appear to think. Most folks understand these folks are more power hungry than money hungry.
I saw a recent interview with Bernie Sanders and they were asking him about how Elon Musk doesn't really want more money (i.e. an extremely small amount of his net worth is in cash). Sanders replied along the lines of "Sure, I agree with that, but the alternative is worse. Musk wants to buy elections, he wants to muscle his way into government in completely unelected positions, just to enforce his will on the rest of us."
This take is ill-informed. He's just saying you can't get hung up on your previous investments, decisions, etc. Keep moving forward. A16Z folks are very human, terrific at what they do and good people.
Frankly, if I had to compare that manifesto with the Unabombers', I think the Unabomber's makes a lot more sense. Everything I've ever heard out of Andreesen's mouth is "whatever advancements that have made me a mega billionaire are great, and anybody who says otherwise wants to murder children." The absolute cluelessness over even willing to contemplate that technological advancements have some real downsides is so self serving it's gross.
You say "A16Z folks are very human, terrific at what they do and good people." I accept they're very human and terrific at what they do, but no, I don't think they are good people. Hardly anybody ever really thinks "maybe we're the baddies?", and people can tell themselves all sorts of stories about why they're good people as they're raking in millions of dollars. But I'm sick of pretending that people at that level don't have a choice, and what they're choosing to do is cash in while investing in a shitload of things that have negative societal impact. I mean, someone at a16z greenlit the Doublespeed (aka "AI bot farm") investment, and I'm sure they think of themselves as a good person.
Can you please stop making mean comments about people's personal attributes on HN? This is not a site for people who think this is the way to discuss things, and eventually we have to ban people who keep doing it.
It's fine to debate and critique people's actions. But these repeated sneering, belittling snarls about someone's knowledge level and even physical characteristics are off limits here, no matter who they're about.
This is a site for people who have higher standards of themselves than this. Please read the guidelines carefully and have a think about if this is really the right place for your style of discourse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry, but I have no compunction when it comes to dunking on the appearance or tics of ultra wealthy white men who proudly proclaim their own free speech absolutism as cover for their support of rising authoritarianism.
I wouldn't say such things about a normal person, but punching up on powerful people who are actively harming society is always morally correct.
And what he said about the history of introspection was just absolute nonsense.
Please spare us the defiant flouncing. It's so tedious. The guidelines make it clear what this site is for, and combat is offtopic no matter who or what the target.
> punching up
You're not punching anyone. People like that aren't reading your garbage. The only people reading it are other HN readers who are almost all just employees and indie developers trying to make a living. If you want to make a difference to the world, come up with interesting new ideas that can actually change things. Otherwise, stop wasting everyone's time, your own most of all.
Try reading it as tough love. This isn’t a place where we flatter ourselves that we're fixing the world’s problems by posting venomous personal insults. Everyone can do much better than that if they want to.
I do wish that "Silicon Valley" would have been elsewhere less useful, though. As mentioned, before it became the tech hub, the Santa Clara valley was extremely productive agricultural land that is now paved over.
Water in California IS plentiful! But 85% of the water that is used is used by agriculture, leaving people and businesses to fight over the rest. Also, water "saved" in homes actually does not save any water, because it then gets used on a farm. Each gallon Californians reduce in homes produces one additional almond, but it gets used either way.
What's worse is that California is effectively exporting 40% of the water in the form of agricultural products. That is, half the food produced is exported. California sells their water, much like oil, to the rest of the world. And half of the exports are foreign exports (rather than to another state).
Did you know California exports a very large amount of rice to Asia? There are rice paddies surrounding Sacramento.
Davis has ride paddies… and ubiquitous grass fires every summer. The water problem in California likely wont be fixed, I suspect that once the aquifers give up it will allow the bigger interests to claim too big to fail and sponge up the lions share due to emergency conditions.
1. Transition water rights from basically unlimited (subject to priority) to a specific, generous amount (i.e. double your yearly average over last 5 years or something). This would still be subject to priority order, and the sum of amounts would still be far more than the available water. So in this step, practically nothing changes. But it moves the problem from unlimited rights to a shared resource, to limited rights.
2. Have the state do a reverse auction to start buying back the water rights, starting with very low bids. Remember that those at the back of the priority line still aren't getting any water anyway, so buying those rights should be very cheap. The state keeps buying back the rights until whatever our goal is has been achieved.
In some sense, everybody would win. The people of the state get back control of the water. The lowest value use gets sold back or shifted to higher-value use. And the farmers don't have their water taken from them - in fact they get to sell it back if and only if they want to.
A trip to Palm Springs is an eye-opener. You see so many sidewalks being watered at all hours of the day, and the water just flowing right into the drains. Such a shame in a desert area.
Out west, water rights are based in common law, sometimes formalized by legislation. And common law is based on how miners and prospectors resolved water conflicts while panning for gold.
While there may be no sane system, the legacy of "first come, first serve" and ",use it or lose it" is particularly insane.
His father is particularly intriguing with respect to wartime / postwar history, Good bet there’s probably more content there buried in the archives worth coming out.
I met Mr Draper once. I was staying at the SFO hyatt, or maybe the Mariott, and had a couple hours to kill after breakfast and noticed there was some sort of conference going on, so I crashed it. I walked into a talk room and sat in the front row and introduced myself to my neighbors. On one side was Steven Levy (author of many books in the industry) and the other was Bill Draper. I don't really remember the conversation, nor even the topic of the conference - it was a brief conversation in the 5 or 10 minutes before the talk started. At the time I didn't really know who he was but I was a little star-struck by Mr Levy, and it was Levy who told me I should be more impressed by being next to Draper. Mr Draper thought that was funny and the three of us chatted a bit more about whatever. I found it interesting that Mr. Draper was a surprisingly relatable guy (particularly given what I know about him know) and that he was very insightful of technology for someone who was in his 70 or 80s at the time.
RIP Mr. Draper. I didn't know it when we talked, but you helped make my career possible - thanks!
I got to meet Bill briefly while taking part in his grandson Adam’s Boost VC accelerator in the early bitcoin days.
Bill would attend both events in support of Tim and Adam. I had a great experience with both the Drapers as a founder.
One time, while living with my cofounder in the hotel Tim was restoring in downtown San Mateo, I broke the hotel elevator.
The laundry was on the basement level and ~everyone used this brick to prop open the door so could dash to the laundry move it to the dryer and dash back without loosing the car.
Well, the brick was not well propped and somehow the door pushed it to a point where it could close but also somehow carry it up the shaft.
Watching the door close it was just like, uh oh.
Up goes the elevator idk a few stories and then the sound of a brick tumbling down the shaft hitting who knows what.
Ya, the elevator stopped working immediately. I owned up to it the next day, writing Tim and offering to pay for what probably would have consumed all of our accelerator funds of damage I had caused.
He thanked me for my honesty and said not to worry about it.
Tim (and Adam) went on to invest in not one but two of my ventures.
Anyway, I realize this is about Bill but I think a person can be reflected in not only themselves but those that they raise and wanted to share this.
Oh and Bill, at least back then, did not think much of Bitcoin. :)
> Oh and Bill, at least back then, did not think much of Bitcoin.
Smart man!
Third generation of Drapers doing this, which is its own kind of rare.
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Have we heard of any of those nonprofits? Have any of them made a dent in anything? Why are people so mesmerized by nonprofits?
Who's "we"?
Also clearly, what's the expectation that we hear that Kiva or Room to Read is baked by DRK? Have you heard of these? Which non profits have you heard of?
Consider this: "19% of all global Audacious Project awardees started out as DRK-funded entities and 10% of all Skoll Award for Social Innovation winners come from the DRK portfolio"
Does this help? Do you know who's Audacious or Skoll? And if, not perhaps can we reason when it's appropriate to challenge anything based on close to zero information about the subject?
[flagged]
I didn't know that was a real thing Marc Andreesen actually said. What is up with all these psychos masquerading as humans? It's so depressing because I used to idolize folks like Andreesen, Musk, Bezos, Page, etc. Now I find them all basically disgusting weirdos. Not sure if it's a mix of having to be kinds narcissistic/psychopathic to achieve that level of success in the first place, or if being so outlandishly wealthy insulated you from normal human guardrails (probably both).
But in any case, I don't quite get how folks who work at a16z can look at themselves in the mirror everyday.
I kinda idealized Marc. Not so much the other ones.
One thing about Marc's biography that I couldn't square: he was supposedly working for NCSA while an undergrad at UofI. My experience as an undergrad is that you could maybe get a guided tour of one of the labs. You may be able to get in the building if your professor worked there or something. The idea that a lab like NCSA would hire an undergrad for anything beyond menial work defies my experience.
Earlier I took it to be that he was such a genius that they decided to Doogie Howser him. But know that we know he's an idiot, that theory doesn't really stand up.
> Earlier I took it to be that he was such a genius that they decided to Doogie Howser him. But know that we know he's an idiot, that theory doesn't really stand up.
I don't think it's really a good idea to classify folks as "geniuses" or "idiots", because they can often be both. In Andreesen's case, he definitely does seem "genius level" (or at least highly intelligent) when it comes to software development and business. He seems "idiot level" to me when it comes to understanding society broadly and what kind of benefits people seek from technology.
This just feels like a common thread to me for most of these folks. Like I thought Page really was a genius, but when it came out that he's basically OK with AI wiping out humanity and to argue otherwise is "speciesest" (obviously that anecdote is through the grapevine, but others have corroborated that this is Page's general feeling about AI), I'm like "forget idiot level, these folks are psychopathic level".
Mirrors are probably banned from the office.
There's something about becoming rich that seems to corrupt a high percentage of people. You can tell which ones, they are the ones who keep trying to get more money.
The ones who don't get corrupted tend to live quiet lives after they reach a high level of wealth.
The most common misunderstanding that people have about the extreme rich like Bezos or Musk, is that they're trying to get more money as their motivation. It's a remarkable failure of understanding, a kind of overly simplistic boiling down. Akin to: Iraq was about the oil (it was about power and control over the Middle East more broadly, oil is a trinket like the USD, secondary; the Middle East is a great powers battleground, between the US and Russia (and more recently China)).
They're trying to get their way, money is one means. They're trying to implement something they have in mind, outcomes, money is very useful for that in most cases. They're not trying to get more money as the thing unto itself, it's a tool of power/control/influence.
People that have never been near extreme wealth usually fall back to the very primitive reasoning of: it's just money grubbing, it's base greed. Because that's bumper sticker simple thinking that is easy to cuddle up to.
Back in reality, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al. these people are humans, they want things, they want outcomes, they have notions for how they think the world should be. Money helps them pursue that, it's nothing but a tool for them, a means to an end. It's comically foolish to think the money is the end.
> They're not trying to get more money as the thing unto itself, it's a tool of power/control/influence.
But this is exactly why people shouldn't be able to accumulate that level of wealth and progressive taxation levels should reach 100% beyond a certain level and we should fix the tax code to tax all wealth and not just standard income.
That much wealth accumulation is anti-democracy.
Nobody elected them to have as much power as that wealth buys them.
I don't think that's really as much of a misconception as you appear to think. Most folks understand these folks are more power hungry than money hungry.
I saw a recent interview with Bernie Sanders and they were asking him about how Elon Musk doesn't really want more money (i.e. an extremely small amount of his net worth is in cash). Sanders replied along the lines of "Sure, I agree with that, but the alternative is worse. Musk wants to buy elections, he wants to muscle his way into government in completely unelected positions, just to enforce his will on the rest of us."
Yes there are famously no poor pyschopaths or weirdos. Elon Musk was no flower child who got corrupted by money. He was always a piece of shit.
This take is ill-informed. He's just saying you can't get hung up on your previous investments, decisions, etc. Keep moving forward. A16Z folks are very human, terrific at what they do and good people.
I've read a ton of Andreesen's pronouncements over the recent years, including many things that were specifically in his own words, e.g. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Frankly, if I had to compare that manifesto with the Unabombers', I think the Unabomber's makes a lot more sense. Everything I've ever heard out of Andreesen's mouth is "whatever advancements that have made me a mega billionaire are great, and anybody who says otherwise wants to murder children." The absolute cluelessness over even willing to contemplate that technological advancements have some real downsides is so self serving it's gross.
You say "A16Z folks are very human, terrific at what they do and good people." I accept they're very human and terrific at what they do, but no, I don't think they are good people. Hardly anybody ever really thinks "maybe we're the baddies?", and people can tell themselves all sorts of stories about why they're good people as they're raking in millions of dollars. But I'm sick of pretending that people at that level don't have a choice, and what they're choosing to do is cash in while investing in a shitload of things that have negative societal impact. I mean, someone at a16z greenlit the Doublespeed (aka "AI bot farm") investment, and I'm sure they think of themselves as a good person.
[flagged]
Can you please stop making mean comments about people's personal attributes on HN? This is not a site for people who think this is the way to discuss things, and eventually we have to ban people who keep doing it.
It's fine to debate and critique people's actions. But these repeated sneering, belittling snarls about someone's knowledge level and even physical characteristics are off limits here, no matter who they're about.
This is a site for people who have higher standards of themselves than this. Please read the guidelines carefully and have a think about if this is really the right place for your style of discourse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ban me then.
Sorry, but I have no compunction when it comes to dunking on the appearance or tics of ultra wealthy white men who proudly proclaim their own free speech absolutism as cover for their support of rising authoritarianism.
I wouldn't say such things about a normal person, but punching up on powerful people who are actively harming society is always morally correct.
And what he said about the history of introspection was just absolute nonsense.
Please spare us the defiant flouncing. It's so tedious. The guidelines make it clear what this site is for, and combat is offtopic no matter who or what the target.
> punching up
You're not punching anyone. People like that aren't reading your garbage. The only people reading it are other HN readers who are almost all just employees and indie developers trying to make a living. If you want to make a difference to the world, come up with interesting new ideas that can actually change things. Otherwise, stop wasting everyone's time, your own most of all.
This is kind of a disappointing tone coming from an HN moderator.
Try reading it as tough love. This isn’t a place where we flatter ourselves that we're fixing the world’s problems by posting venomous personal insults. Everyone can do much better than that if they want to.
From observing next generation drapers, Bill have done really well wrt raising good people.
RIP Bill Draper. I never got to know you, but your legacy certainly lives on.
I do wish that "Silicon Valley" would have been elsewhere less useful, though. As mentioned, before it became the tech hub, the Santa Clara valley was extremely productive agricultural land that is now paved over.
Sort of metaphorical, eh?
Too on-the-nose to make for good fiction.
We have lots of agricultural land; too much, actually. This is a side effect of the green revolution.
What we in California don’t have is sustainably plentiful water, or a sane system of water rights to apportion it.
Water in California IS plentiful! But 85% of the water that is used is used by agriculture, leaving people and businesses to fight over the rest. Also, water "saved" in homes actually does not save any water, because it then gets used on a farm. Each gallon Californians reduce in homes produces one additional almond, but it gets used either way.
What's worse is that California is effectively exporting 40% of the water in the form of agricultural products. That is, half the food produced is exported. California sells their water, much like oil, to the rest of the world. And half of the exports are foreign exports (rather than to another state).
Did you know California exports a very large amount of rice to Asia? There are rice paddies surrounding Sacramento.
Davis has ride paddies… and ubiquitous grass fires every summer. The water problem in California likely wont be fixed, I suspect that once the aquifers give up it will allow the bigger interests to claim too big to fail and sponge up the lions share due to emergency conditions.
Here's a fix that I think could work:
1. Transition water rights from basically unlimited (subject to priority) to a specific, generous amount (i.e. double your yearly average over last 5 years or something). This would still be subject to priority order, and the sum of amounts would still be far more than the available water. So in this step, practically nothing changes. But it moves the problem from unlimited rights to a shared resource, to limited rights.
2. Have the state do a reverse auction to start buying back the water rights, starting with very low bids. Remember that those at the back of the priority line still aren't getting any water anyway, so buying those rights should be very cheap. The state keeps buying back the rights until whatever our goal is has been achieved.
In some sense, everybody would win. The people of the state get back control of the water. The lowest value use gets sold back or shifted to higher-value use. And the farmers don't have their water taken from them - in fact they get to sell it back if and only if they want to.
> Davis has ride paddies
Is this a bike joke or a typo?
Hmmm. Why not both?
In SoCal, yes, but things are (mostly) fine in the north and in the central valley.
More frustrating is all the water waste due to "use it or lose it" type policies around commercial and agricultural water allocations.
A trip to Palm Springs is an eye-opener. You see so many sidewalks being watered at all hours of the day, and the water just flowing right into the drains. Such a shame in a desert area.
In much of the US, water is a common good and there are no water rights.
There is no sane system of water rights which is why there are cotton fields in Arizona.
Out west, water rights are based in common law, sometimes formalized by legislation. And common law is based on how miners and prospectors resolved water conflicts while panning for gold.
While there may be no sane system, the legacy of "first come, first serve" and ",use it or lose it" is particularly insane.
His father is particularly intriguing with respect to wartime / postwar history, Good bet there’s probably more content there buried in the archives worth coming out.
Odd no mention of DFJ as started by his son, the single most familiar association with the name Draper in tech (with apologies to Charles Stark D..)
What a great read. RIP Bill!
Somewhat unrelated but both of Draper’s siblings, but not his own parents, lived to similar ages of ~97 and ~99
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Draper_Jr. (Personal life section)
https://archive.ph/YRgDY
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/technology/william-draper...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/technology/william-draper... an alternative URL for the post - a gift article URL
(passed away on Sept 8th, obituary from Sept 30th)
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You take the good, you take the bad. Take them both and there you have the facts of life.