WORK
It's Time to Build
Andreessen's April 2020 pandemic-era essay diagnosing America's institutional failure as a failure of building — a call to action whose urgency the AI transition has rendered more complex than the original text anticipated.
Published on the Andreessen Horowitz website in April 2020, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the essay argued that America's pandemic failures — inadequate hospitals, insufficient manufacturing capacity for basic medical supplies, absent testing infrastructure — revealed a deeper failure of building that long predated the specific crisis. The essay named the pattern across multiple domains: housing construction, transportation infrastructure, educational institutions, scientific research capacity. It called for a reorientation of American political and economic life toward the construction of physical and institutional infrastructure, arguing that debate was no longer sufficient — only building was.
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The essay appeared at a moment of acute institutional crisis. American hospitals were running out of personal protective equipment. Ventilator shortages were producing rationing debates. The testing infrastructure that other countries had built within weeks remained largely absent in the United States. The essay argued these failures were not the specific product of