Back when I still believed in Silicon Valley’s VC Community

Image: CBS coverage of Daniel Penny, a former marine who was acquitted after choking a mentally ill subway passenger to death.

Here is an article about who Andreessen Horowitz hired for their American Dynamism team. I applied for a position on their American Dynamism team several years ago. Here is my cover letter.

Jordan Neely, the NYC subway rider who was choked to death, was a Michael Jackson impersonator who regularly danced in the Times Square transit hub. According to reporting by the Associated Press, on that Monday afternoon, he was yelling and pacing back and forth on an F train in Manhattan when he was restrained by at least three people, including a U.S. Marine veteran who pulled one arm tightly around his neck. That was Daniel Penny.

I understand the acquittal of Penny. He did not act alone. But it’s important to remember that Jordan Neely suffered a violent death, and one that was more likely to happen because of his family history — that same AP article uncovered that Neely’s mother, Christie Neely, was strangled in New Jersey in 2007, according to news accounts at the time. Her body was found days later in a suitcase along a roadway. Neely, who was 14 when she died, testified against his mother’s boyfriend at his murder trial.

Angry outbursts do not happen in a vacuum. Is shouting angrily in a public space — the public display of a mental health crisis — a crime punishable by death? Can justice be meted out using a vigilante approach? Andressen Horowitz would have you believe this to be true. So much so that it is a core tenet of their version of American Dynamism.

I mourn the death of Jordan Neely. And I mourn the death of a very different version of American Dynamism, one that I had always hoped could take hold of the public’s imagination.