It's sad to see so much misplaced cynicism here. If the partners had decided to keep 100% of their carry (as is typical) and used it to buy a bigger house or jet or something, nobody would comment or care. Instead, they've pledged to give half to some of their favorite charities, and some of you are acting as if it's a crime against humanity. Put away your Ayn Rand books (or whatever it is that drives you to such opinions) and go make some money of your own. Perhaps you'll discover that Andreessen and friends aren't as foolish as you imagine.

When people complain about entrepreneurs building social networks instead of curing cancer, they need to understand that this is a big part of the reason. The internet attracts so much innovation in large part because it's very open to innovation. In more regulated/corrupt (the two are closely related) fields, such as health care, there are many barriers to competition that kill innovative new companies. Mobile was actually very similar to this in the pre-iPhone era (because you needed to make deals with carriers). This in turn leads to less investment, since it's kind of dumb to invest in a doomed company.

We're at a point in history where most of our problems are social/political. Our technology is good enough to make the world into a nice place for everyone, but we don't do it because our social "software" is broken. It's easy to make fun of Facebook or Reddit as being all about sharing cat picture, but the reality is that they also are changing the flow of information and influence to be much more peer-to-peer instead of top down (e.g. three television networks). Many will disagree, but I believe that in the long term society will evolve to match this more egalitarian structure. The most effective way to cure cancer may be to first cure the social disfunctions that lead to the types of situations described in this article.

God I hope this becomes a trend in other fields as well.

Spending time in universities has made me very cynical of the research that comes out of them. There is just too much incentives for profs to ignore biases in their research. I've seen it happen many times. For them, it is the difference between becoming a prof or a lab tech and it is literally worth millions.

You can not trust any research done where the career of the researcher depends on them finding results.

Universities, by hiring based on research credentials that currently translate roughly in the amount of positive results a person has generated, completely render worthless the research going on in their departments.

Aggravating the situation is the fact that the peer review system is too incestuous to be relied on especially when the peers are probably also 'bias ignorers' with incentives to keep the flaws in the system.

I strongly believe that for hiring purposes, the research skills of profs should be evaluated on criterion that are incidental to research. Mostly math, probability, statistics (yes even for psychology) then methodology skills and also maybe leadership, communication skills and dedication to science (last only because it is difficult to measure).

update:typos