So I don't know the introspection comment to be able to make a judgement.

Personally I love introspection. You work with a black box, yes? With introspection you have the ability to poke inside. That's useful. Is this what Marc meant? Is there another form of introspection?

> Andreessen also said that the "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff."

Well, that's also wrong in research. Biological cells carry an internal description (DNA almost exclusively; there are some RNA viruses but all viruses require a cell as amplifier, and cells have DNA as their genome. RNA-based genomes are quite limited, largest ones are e. g. coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus).

People first had to decipher the respective genome to understand the "feature set" available here. That's also introspection if you think about it, and with synthetic biology we'll get even more here - so why would that be negative? It's awesome. Marc needs to read more books - his imagination is too limited. He is approaching Bill Gates "540kb is enough" saga (which he never said verbatim, but people like to attribute it to him ... or perhaps it was 640).