Blog 4: Is It The Time to Build?
Marc Andreessen, founder and venture capitalist, generated energetic debate this week with his latest essay . Called ‘It’s Time To Build’, it makes a passionate case for a restatement of the American dream and using the current crisis to redirect effort towards that dream. He argues that through aggressive investment in new products, industries, factories, science, and in big leaps forward, we can ‘build’ solutions to the biggest challenges in housing, education and healthcare - as well as solving less ‘rocket science’ problems like lack of medical equipment and lack of systems to disburse financial support. While Andreessen’s scope is broad ranging and speaks to the purpose and activity of a nation, it prompted me to ask questions about the more specific worlds of banking and payments. In particular, when is the right time to innovate and what should we be innovating on? The ‘when’ question is possibly easier to answer. Having worked in innovation for some years, one thing