Chris Dixon, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, talks about the new $300 million crypto fund he is leading with Kathryn Haun, the new general partner of Andreessen, and how a16z came to hire its first female GP. The long-time crypto entrepreneur also discusses his theory of how crypto will grow — and why Cryptokitties was one example of how that might happen — his nights-and-weekend theory of technological change, and his view that writing software and smart contracts is similar to writing a novel. Additionally, he explains how someday, it will seem funny we didn’t have concepts of ownership and money in the digital world, why Andreessen is investing almost exclusively in crypto-first projects and why he believes that the ability to create trust software will be the best Lego block for building things like money, finance, digital goods and more.
Thank you to our sponsors!
Blockchain Warehouse: https://www.blockchainwarehouse.com
Clarity PR: http://clarity.pr
Preciate: https://preciate.org
LINKS:
The a16z $300 million crypto fund: https://a16zcrypto.com
Katie Haun’s appointment as GP: https://a16z.com/2018/06/25/katie-haun/
My previous interviews with Katie Haun — Unchained: http://unchainedpodcast.co/federal-prosecutor-kathryn-haun-on-how-criminals-use-bitcoin-and-how-she-catches-them
Chris on decentralization: https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f79f7638e
On how tokens can reverse the centralization of the internet: https://medium.com/@cdixon/crypto-tokens-a-breakthrough-in-open-network-design-e600975be2ef
Chris mentioned Placeholder Ventures — if you haven’t heard my interview with the firm’s Joel Monegro, check it out: http://unchainedpodcast.co/placeholders-joel-monegro-on-the-fat-protocols-thesis-today-ep65
Transcript:
Laura Shin:
Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin. If you’ve been enjoying Unchained, pop into iTunes to give us a top rating and review. That helps other listeners find the show.
Blockchain Warehouse:
Blockchain Warehouse is an international blockchain accelerator, offering a wide range of token sale advisory services to promising blockchain based ventures. With a leading advisor network, BCW is at the forefront of building landscape changing blockchain companies and hosting successful token sales with more than 20 million dollars raised so far.
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Clarity PR is a global strategic communications agency that shapes market leading narratives for brands in crypto and blockchain to drive awareness and grow business. Working with clients, including Atlas Quantum and Securitize, Clarity can move quickly to differentiate the value of your business. Please visit clarity.pr to learn more.
Preciate:
Raising the bar together with Preciate, launching this summer. As a sponsor of Unchained, Preciate has recognized amazing people because Preciate believes in the strength of recognition and relationships, and the strength of community. Who will be recognized today? Stay tuned.
Laura Shin:
My guest today is Chris Dixon, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Dixon:
Thanks for having me.
Laura Shin:
We’re recording this episode just a couple days after your big news. Congrats on your new crypto fund.
Chris Dixon:
Thank you, thank you.
Laura Shin:
And also on nabbing Katie Haun as your new GP.
Chris Dixon:
We’re very excited about her.
Laura Shin: Let’s talk first about the new fund. You raised three hundred million dollars for a crypto only fund through Andreessen, although Andreessen has been investing in crypto for a while now. Aside from the fact that you were bumping up against the limits of how much you could invest in crypto via the regular fund, why create a crypto only fund?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, the main reason is we wanted to have a first class effort to … we think crypto’s incredibly important and we wanted to have a first class organization and effort to approach the opportunity, so this allows us to have a full team of … I think we have eight now, three on the technical side, me, Katie, General Council operation things like this. So as you know, crypto has a whole bunch of complexities and is just different in a lot of ways so the main thing is to have a first class organization devoted to doing this and to really make it a key focus for the firm.
Laura Shin:
Out of all of the technologies that you do invest in, why create a crypto-only fund as oppose to a VR-only fund?
Chris Dixon:
We do have a bio-fund, so we thought, bio, kind of the intersection of computer science and bio was an interesting enough area and different enough. One way we think about it is, is the knowledge specialized enough that you need a dedicated team? So on the bio side, for example, we have two partners there who have deep backgrounds in biology and they also have also computer science but one simple way to think about it is, if I go to a bio meeting, I understand maybe the business stuff and the computer science stuff, but I don’t really understand a significant portion of the bio stuff.
Chris Dixon:
So it’s just a different domain. Crypto, although it’s computer science, there’s so much, as you know, and you focus on this on your podcast, there’s so much specialized knowledge, you’ve got to read all these white papers, you’ve got to study consensus mechanisms and just this whole world and the people involved, and it was different. We felt like it was different enough that it really required a whole kind of separate effort.
Laura Shin:
I’m so not surprised that you guys hired Katie Haun, because I think she’s so brilliant-
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, she’s awesome.
Laura Shin:
… and she has the exact background, in my opinion, that would help crypto gain legitimacy. How did you come to bring her on as a GP?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, so I got the privilege of working with her on the Coinbase board, so she’s been on the board for over a year and has just been incredibly valuable there and is super actively involved in all aspects of the company and I think she’s an outstanding board member. A lot of how we think about it is, I think sometimes people outside of the venture world think what you do in venture capital is pick companies to invest in which, of course, is some of what you do, but a lot of what we do is, after we invest, try to help the company. So I got to see first hand how helpful she was.
As you know, she’s in the community, her name comes up all the time, founders all want to meet her, they want to work with her. Then she’s also on the board of HackerOne, for example, she also has security expertise and so just getting to see her work first hand, and just being super impressed by her. Yeah, I think it was a real coup to be able to recruit her, so I’m excited to work with her.
Laura Shin:
What do you think about the fact that she is the first female GP?
Chris Dixon:
I think it’s great. Obviously we want to have more diversity in our General Partner ranks, but she’s an outstanding person for this and founders want to work with her.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, but it is so exciting, I think, because everybody talks in this space. I think it’s just true, if I look at the numbers and when I go to conferences, I can see that there are so few women but she’s definitely so deserving of this.
Chris Dixon:
Hopefully that will change. I hope as the space grows, it will change in multiple ways. I think both in terms of gender diversity and things like that, but also I think in terms of skill diversity. I think for the space to grow, we need people who aren’t … Right now, as you know, the community tends to be very technical, kind of focused on consensus mechanisms and all these very technical things and that’s very important and we need to continue to have that but I think we also need people with different … both backgrounds in product design and general management and engineering and just all sorts of other things. I think that a really important thing over the next couple of years is to make the space more inclusive and grow it and have more people … I have people leaving other industries, other tech companies, universities coming into the space and I think that’s the way we succeed, I saw this … it reminds me a bit, I was involved in what people call the Web 2.0 movement.
I’d started a company in 2004, it was a consumer internet security company and I was sort of … it was just all these people who were into these new ideas around, like RSS and tagging, and Delicious and Flickr and it was this whole kind of thing that was going on back then. The early people into that were really into the ethos of it and all the nitty gritty but then as the space grew, the space brought in a much broader set of people and companies like Facebook and other successful companies did that. So, I think that’s the way we get to the next stage is to really … Hopefully three years from now, the space is 10 times, if not more, people working in it and much more reflective of the general, at least tech population, and hopefully the general population.
Laura Shin:
I’m sure her government background is a big factor?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, certainly her regulatory expertise is important, that’s key, she’s got a lot of skills but that certainly is an important skill. I think it’s, as you know, and I’m sure you know a lot about this, but the biggest issue right now is just the uncertainty. So every founder that we’re working with is sort of, “Hey, can you help me just figure out what I need to do?” There obviously are bad actors, none of the people we’re working with are bad actors, and there’s lots of good actors, despite what sometimes is the impression people have of the space. The good actors want to comply but frankly don’t know how right now. So, helping projects with those issues is very important right now, yeah.
Laura Shin:
So we’re going to come back to that in a moment, but I wanted to also ask, when you invest in crypto, you’re investing in open source projects. So how does that investing process differ from when you’re investing in traditional start ups? How does that affect your decision process around which projects to invest in?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think of it as we’re investing in … So yeah, it’s not that different. So for example, we’ve been investing in our traditional VC practice, and just generally in Silicone Valley, people have been investing in open source. Not directly in open source, but things around open source, so you know, things like Mongo and GitHub and all these other kinds of things. So there’s a big open source component, but then there’s some other kind of component layered on which provides a business model, or something.
But I think, for example, we’re generally … I’ll speak for myself, I’m very opposed to things like software patterns, I generally don’t believe that defensibility in technology comes through things like patterns or trade secrets, or closed source things. They generally come through network effects, communities, other kinds of things like this. Take bitcoin as an obviously example, people have forked bitcoin, I could have Chris’ bitcoin tomorrow, I don’t think anyone would use Chris’ bitcoin.
Laura Shin:
Actually well, in your case they might, but-
Chris Dixon:
… but the point is … But this goes back. I like to give the example of Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia’s all lead information is open source. I could download it, I could create chriswikipedia.org but no one’s going to go to it, it’s just not how actual defensibility happens on the internet. It comes through the fact that … think of it as almost like … it’s like a venue or something, Wikipedia. It’s like a place you go. You go there because the other people are there, because the community is there, and the community creates great content and then you go because the content is there. So you can replicate that, you can replicate the data, but you can’t replicate the community.
So that’s how we think about it. It’s sort of who’s going to build a network that is going to have defensibility through … obviously good technology but that can be copied, and then ultimately through good governance, good community ethos, those kind of … and that leads to second order network effects. Then I expect as these networks become larger, they’ll start to get integrated into more things in the world.
So if you look at historical internet protocols, TCP/IP, one of the core protocols of the internet, I could make my own version of TCP/IP but it’s not going to be baked in … TCP’s baked into every computer, every router, every thing in the world. As these things become more important, they’ll start to get baked in, these integration points and things like that. Yeah, so we really look at it through the lens of who’s going to create the best technology that leads to the best community network.
Laura Shin:
So when it comes to looking at the different types of technology that could be developed in this space, I’m sure you’re probably thinking, “Oh, these certain things need to be developed, or these certain problems need to be resolved.”
Chris Dixon:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
So what do you think are some of the biggest problems right now that crypto networks need to resolve?
Chris Dixon:
Some of this will be obvious, so for example scaling is a big issue, obviously, and that means different things in different networks but I think of it as … The way I like to frame it is we have this … Crypto creates this incredible new software primitive which is trust. Which is this idea that from a bunch of non-trusted network nodes, through these consensus mechanisms, like Nakamoto consensus in the case of bitcoin, or there’s a whole bunch of other consensus mechanisms. Through these consensus mechanisms, you get this emerging property of trust, where you can trust the network. That trust lets you build things like money, or smart contracts and other things. But you pay a price for trust, which is you have to waste network resources, or use redundant network resources, which makes these networks harder to scale.
So take Ethereum as an example. Every piece of code that you run, every smart contract that you run on Ethereum has to run redundantly on all the miners. So whatever it is 30,000 miners or something, that’s not an efficient … If you’re looking at it through the lens of … You’re a Google engineer looking at it through the lens of how you design traditionally distributed systems, that’s not going to look like an efficient way to do it. So the question is, how do you keep that important feature of trust while also scaling these networks to what I call web scale, which is hundreds of millions and really billions of users, which is kind of what Facebook and all these other kinds of networks are at today. There’s a ton of good work going on there in many different areas.
There’s stuff going on at the core. There’s new projects every day coming out with new consensus mechanism breakthroughs, there’s a whole bunch of stuff, ideas around how you can shard these networks, which is kind of a basic, not basic, but a standard computer science move to create more parallelism, is to do sharding. There’s a related idea, things called plasma and subchains. On the bitcoin side, there’s Lightening Network and payment channels. On the Ethereum side, there’s some equivalent thing called State Channels.
There’s sort of side networks of things like TrueBit, which I almost think of it like GPU next to your CPU, kind of gives you additional horsepower. There’s a whole bunch of interesting cryptographic research around things called STARKs, for example, where you can do more computation off chain and just use the blockchain for … I’m happy to go into more of this but there’s a ton of interesting work going on there, I’m very optimistic about it, but that has to happen because right now, Ethereum, I think it supports 1.2 million transactions a day on the bitcoin side. This is reflected in the cost of a transaction, which I think is right now, it’s fine in the digital gold use case, it’s not fine if you want to use if for small casual payments, which one of the original, that’s … the original white paper talked about.
So that’s obviously a big issues, that’s something we’ve invested in, a bunch of projects around that. So that’s on the infrastructure side and then there’s a whole long … I could go on and on about infrastructure. But then I see it as there’s two big buckets, there’s infrastructure and applications. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on the infrastructure side, I personally spend a lot of time on that, I think it’s very interesting. Then there’s the application side, so what do you do with these things? How do you actually … In the end, crypto wins when we have a billion people using these networks who don’t even know what crypto is. That’s sort of how I think of how we win. No one cares, people that use, whatever, Facebook or something, don’t need to understand the underlying technology.
So what do we fundamentally use these things for? And there there’s just a ton of interesting stuff happening in many different areas. Everything from crypto finance, we call it, which is people creating decentralized exchanges and other kinds of financial instruments, lending, things you would find in the traditional financial industry. There’s a whole area called traditional asset tokenization, so taking “traditional assets” quote unquote, which is like real estate, as an example, and making a tokenized version that can be traded on the blockchain. A bunch of stuff happening around crypto goods, like virtual goods, and gaming, and I think it’s very exciting from a media and gaming point of view. Things around payments, I think a particularly interesting area for that is something like a billion people who have Android phones, you can get a $15 Android phone now, there’s something in the order of a billion people who have Android phones that don’t have bank accounts. I think providing financial services … those people also, most of them don’t have identification either, literally don’t have a government issued ID let alone can’t get a bank account. I think providing financial services to those people is a really exciting opportunity.
Anyway, so there’s a whole bunch of interesting things going on in the application side, and I think one of the things that’s so exciting about this area is it’s pure software and software is this very rich, malleable medium. I would expect, if we talk again a year from now, two years from now, the list I give there will be much longer and in fact, it is much longer than it was a year ago.
So just to give you a simple example, NFTs, non fundable tokens, i.e. crypto goods, that was kind of a new … I think people had thought about it but it really was a new concept in the last 12 months and unlocks this whole other area. I think not only unlocks new possibilities, but unlocks … I always look at things through the lens of talent and one of the things that really excited me about crypto goods is it got another million people excited about crypto who were more on the creative side, the gaming side. So I know a bunch of game entrepreneurs who were early entrepreneurs around Facebook and iPhone gaming and until crypto goods came along, NFTs, they were like, “Okay this crypto thing is … I don’t know what you guys are doing over there but it’s not for me.” Now all of a sudden, they’re, “Hey Chris, let’s get together, this stuff is suddenly interesting.” Because what is a crypto good? It’s sort of proof of existence, it’s like a token but with graphics and it has this whole other dimension to it that appeals to a whole nother set of … kind of whole different sensibility.
So that’s really exciting because I think of it as the way we win, is we grow the army. We need 10 million people of programmers and researchers and entrepreneurs and product designers and creative people and we need this big army to just go and create all this awesome stuff and that’s how we win. So anything we can do to bring more people into the fold, that’s great, right?
Laura Shin:
Yeah.
Chris Dixon:
So, I think what we’re going to see over the next year or two is more creative ideas like that, that in turn excite new groups of people who then come in and we get this really interesting kind of flywheel going with people and talent and software and the two kind of feeding back on each other.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, I was talking with Olaf the other day and we were talking about video games and about how now, because of things like CryptoKitties and what you call crypto goods, which by the way love the term, I’d not heard that until I read your blog post. I realized, oh wow, I could have a digital good, or multiple digital goods in these virtual worlds and then I could carry them from game to game. Then it’s not that dissimilar from how I am in the real world, where I have unique things that signify who I am. Like this necklace and this shirt, and that purse or whatever. So it’s like, oh this is kind of interesting. Then I also did an interview with Philip Rosedale who had done Second Life, now is doing High Fidelity, and had mentioned to me that in the virtual world your height matters a lot less than it does in the normal world and I was like, “Oh, that’s a bonus.” And so I was thinking, “Oh there’s a lot of possibilities here.” And I haven’t played video games in forever but just thinking about the possibilities there, I got excited.
Chris Dixon:
I agree and I think we’re at a moment now where I would argue we’re in a moment … We’re in this kind of interesting transition period, I think generally in society with the internet, where we still think of the digital world … A lot of people still think of the digital world as second tier, second class, to the offline world. You hear that even in the language we use. So there’s commerce, which is offline commerce, and there’s eCommerce, so whenever you have the modifier, you’re sort of saying that’s the subordinate-
Laura Shin:
A different thing.
Chris Dixon:
… that’s the subordinate world right?
Laura Shin:
Right.
Chris Dixon:
And so there’s email, eCommerce, the fact that we say digital goods versus goods, et cetera, eSports. I think we’re in this transition period. I think that 20 years from now, it’s going to be obvious that the digital world is in many ways primary. It’s where you meet friends, it’s where you earn a living, it’s where you do all these important things and this idea that … I think it will seem funny that we once didn’t have a notion of money and ownership in this world. So for me, of course goods are going to be important in the digital world, because look how important … people seem to like owning things in the offline world, why wouldn’t they want to own things in the online world? Right now, you do have this notion of virtual goods and games and things like this, but you’re really kind of borrowing them. I guarantee you that your goods and whatever, you name the game, they could change the rules, the game will eventually go away, you don’t really own those goods. They’re not yours, you can’t take them, you can’t trade them, you can’t really keep them.
So I see it as taking what is obviously a very important thing we do in the offline world, which is … Just like what bitcoin did. Bitcoin took … obviously money’s really important in the offline world, so of course it’s going to be important in the online world. In the same way, having property rights in the offline world, and owning stuff is going to be important in the offline world. So I think it’s just a matter of time before it’s seen as almost like a basic right that you would be able to own things in the digital world.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and going back to how the digital’s always seen as not the default, I experienced this shift where, in the past if I’ve been writing for forbes.com, I would’ve noted forbes.com because Forbes meant a magazine-
Chris Dixon:
Yeah because that’s the real one and this is a-
Laura Shin:
… at a certain point it was, no, I was writing for Forbes and that meant the website. Then if I was writing for the magazine, then I would say Forbes magazine. So I did live through that shift. You’ve been talking and writing a lot about decentralization and I wanted to get you to talk a little bit about … You’ve seen this process both as a successful entrepreneur in the traditional sort of mode and obviously in the investor side as well, but how do you think crypto and decentralization are changing entrepreneurship emphasis models?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, decentralization is a very broad topic and it can mean a lot of different things. I think one lens through which to look at it is through the kind of, where we are in the tech world today. Which is we’re in a period now … a highly centralized period where four or five, probably five, tech companies, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, the vast majority of time people spend online and products they interact with and things like that are owned by those companies.
Those companies are, if you’re an entrepreneur, they’re challenging to work with because they … I wrote a blog post about this, it’s called Why Decentralization Matters, where I have this kind of S curve I show which is basically the life cycle of these platforms, of just what we’ve seen now over about 40 years of tech platforms. By platform, by the way, I mean a network where developers can build something for users sort of that provides an intermediate point. So it could be Windows, it could be Facebook, it could be Twitter. Facebook, it could be the case of when you have third party developers like Zynga et cetera. It could be iOS and these things typically go through a life cycle where in the beginning, Facebook starts off, they’re trying to get Forbes to put their content on there. So in the beginning, they’re like, “Please, please come over, we need your content.” Because they need it to make a better experience.
Fast forward to today and I think it’s a very different story. They’re like, “Hey, we’re going to change the rules, we’re going to flag you, we’re going to lower your take rate.” I don’t know, whatever, there’s a whole bunch of stuff because now they don’t need you anymore because they’re big. This is sort of this S curve I show which is that you basically have this life cycle of these networks where in the beginning, they try to attract what economists call complements, the things that go with it, the complementary goods and services. But then at the end they just say, “Hey, there’s a certain amount of money to be made and we want most of the money and so we’re going to let you hang around the sideline, but we’re going to take all the profits.”
That’s why you have Yelp going up in front of the Senate talking about Google. So now you type a restaurant and it’s like you have to scroll down to page two to get to Yelp, even though, I don’t know about you, but I always want to find Yelp and I’ve got to go to page two. Look Google’s doing what they … they’re a for profit business, I’m not criticizing. I think it’s a fantastic company and they provide an amazing free service and I think they’ve created awesome things for the world and they’re doing what any company would do which is they’re now a mature company and they need to keep growing and they can only grow so much through organic means. So they’re now trying to monetize more and things like that, it’s just what happens. But I think now, 30, 40 years into the tech revolution, it’s fine those companies do that, but as investors, entrepreneurs, et cetera, we also should be wise to this as well. This is what happens, right? And in our business, in venture, every VC will tell you this, they talk about platform risk, platform risk is the risk when you’re building another platform, and it’s a massive, massive risk.
But contrast where we are today, where if you want to build something, you want to get exposure, you almost have to get exposure through Facebook or Google, or something else, they just control how all the traffic on the web flows. Rewind 20 years ago when the web was starting out, and really the dominant quote unquote “platforms”, were these decentralized platforms that thankfully the academics and the government and the various people who created the internet, created these wonderful open protocols. So, TCP/IP, HTPS, MTP et cetera.
Those were the rules that governed the internet, so it was a decentralized network. Was that did was it allowed creativity and entrepreneurship to blossom, and Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg and people like that benefited from that. Mark Zuckerberg had put up a website and as long as they got traffic and they got users, like the ITF or W3C or whatever, the web community wasn’t going to say, “Hey Mark, we’re going to take your profits now.” Because that’s not how the decentralized networks worked.
So that was great but I think now, we’re kind of harvesting today as a society, and those companies, the seeds that were planted 20 years ago, and we need to plant new seeds. We’re harvesting that and I think it’s dangerous now because I worry that the next entrepreneurs in a garage or dorm room don’t have the same opportunity that those founders had. I’m not blaming them for it, I think they’re doing what for profit centralized platforms do and that has it’s own deep internal logic. If they didn’t do it, they’d probably … whatever, Wall Street would fire them or something, I don’t know what would happen, but that’s the logic of that structure.
What’s great now, though, is we have alternative structures, and specifically a lot of the ideas that have come out of the crypto community and the idea that you can build platforms that are very powerful and have very rich functionality but also enforce the rules of the platform in a way that won’t hurt entrepreneurship later on.
Laura Shin:
But I do have a question about that, because some of them have governance baked in in a way where the platform could actually change. So wouldn’t it sort of be somewhat similar to how Facebook or Google might have changed the rules?
Chris Dixon:
Well I think it depends on the network, I think that’s an important part of being a good network, is baking into both the code and the governance the assurances that that won’t change. And I think we also have other mechanisms, for example forking. Let’s just take Ethereum, I think Ethereum’s a very well governed network, I can’t imagine that the Ethereum network would ever go and say, “Hey we have some smart contract that’s wildly successful, we’re going to change the rules and take more of their money for the foundation or for the platform.” But if they ever did, I think they would run a real risk of getting forked.
So, I think there’s inherent guarantees built into the nature of the networks and the fact that they’re open code and the fact that there aren’t … the people at the foundation don’t really control the network. As we’ve seen with the bitcoin debates and things, there’s multiple constituencies, there’s miners, there’s node operators, there’s developers, and I think that … and then you also have then the threat of exit for forking, people leaving the network.
There’s actually two forms of exit. One is you can just say, “I’m going to take my software and move somewhere else.” By the way, that’s another form of exit, you’ve seen this more and more with a lot of the smart contracts through Ethereum. Smart contracts are building in … they’re using [BBM 00:29:10] and they’re making switching costs very low, right?
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Chris Dixon:
So there’s a whole bunch of things. I think Vitalik has a great phrase. He said, “It’s not that we’re removing the platform, it’s that we’re shackling the platform. We’re not removing the intermediary, we’re shackling the intermediary.” So shackling meaning we’re putting constraints on it so that it can’t become a bad actor.
Laura Shin:
Oh, interesting.
Chris Dixon:
There’s a ton of different constraints put on these networks in a way that … I mean you have no constraints on a Google or Facebook, they literally just decide, “Okay, we’re going to change the algorithm.” And there’s no … good luck, what are you going to do? Use some other … get all your friends to use another social network, it’s just not going to happen.
Laura Shin:
Interesting.
Chris Dixon:
So it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out in the future but I would say these platforms in the crypto world are a much more attractive platforms to build on for entrepreneurs, and as investors, we think they’re much more attractive to invest in.
Laura Shin:
Something else I’ve been so curious about is Facebook recently formed a group to explore how it could use blockchain technology, and they’ve got these other companies and start ups who have announced plans to either launch coins or crypto networks, you know, there’s Kick and Kodak and Telegram.
Chris Dixon:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
I tend to view the business model of centralized companies as kind of antithetical the organizational structures that are optimal for building blockchains, or blockchain technology projects. So do you think it’s possible for a company to create a successful crypto network or product using blockchain?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
If they’re a centralized service?
Chris Dixon:
I would definitely call the crypto, both ethos and business model, I’d put quotes on that because it’s a business model, a model of having tokens and owning tokens, things like that. It’s certainly highly misaligned with the ethos and business model of traditional, centralized tech companies. The phrase disruptive is thrown around a lot in Silicone Valley, there’s a technical meaning of it from Clay Christensen’s books, Innovator’s Dilemma, where you have … his definition is you have a new technology that is fundamentally misaligned with the existing technology. In fact, the really interesting thing about his book is that if you’re a smart incumbent and you’re doing what you normally do, which is making your best customers happy, this new thing will look like this kind of crappy thing that doesn’t satisfy the needs of your best customers. So actually the smart manager will ignore them.
Now, he does have a lot of writings about how do you address these disruptive technologies, and what Christensen says is you really have to just create a new organization. He says you literally should put it in a different location and different management team and different incentive structure and so I think it falls into that bucket of challenges. So I don’t think it’s completely impossible but I think it needs … a lot of care and thought needs to go into the organization and how to do it because it’s just very, very different. It’s just fundamental. If you just take an example of like … Among other things, these business models will probably be deflationary, this is generally what happens in tech, is that each new wave is deflationary. What I mean by that is it lowers the margins, it shrinks the market size, rather. So Craigslist shrunk the market of classified ads, the dollars spent on it … which is great for consumers, they spend less money-
Laura Shin:
Terrible for media.
Chris Dixon:
… it’s terrible for media. And Craigslist can do quite well if they capture a big share of it and they have a really low cost structure and everything else. Generally, life gets bad for media, good for consumers, good for the disrupter. That’s generally how the pattern works and so if you think about a crypto decentralized file storage system, and then you think about Amazon and S3 or something, they’re sort of the incumbent, it’s going to be inherently deflationary and so as a good manager of S3, it’s going to be really hard to say, “Hey, let’s go ruin this great business we have.” So I think the only way to address it is to do something that’s really kind of radical and really create a new organization. But look, I’m putting … our bets, almost exclusively, are on brand new companies that are first principles designed from this new world.
Laura Shin:
Right, well I’m not an investor, but I think I understand why you’re doing that. We’re going to discuss governance, virtual reality, the democratizing potential of blockchain and more but first I’d like to take a quick break to tell you about our fabulous sponsors.
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Chris Dixon:
I’m from Springfield, Ohio, yeah.
Laura Shin:
Really?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah.
Laura Shin: Oh awesome, this is like the Ohio episode …
Preciate:
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Laura Shin:
I’m speaking with Chris Dixon, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. We’re about to see this race develop between various different smart contract platforms. Ethereum has the first mover advantage, and you’ve called it, “The most important technology of the decade,” but it has serious problems which we’ve mentioned, scaling, there’s some governance issues, there’s been bugs in the code. Now we’ve got EOS, Dfinity and Tezos, they’re all launching, how do you think this competition will play out, and is there room for more than one successful smart contract platform?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, just to clarify, I think … I did, I sort of said that but what I’d like to say is, I think crypto’s the most important technology of the decade for sure and Ethereum is sort of the leading, to my mind right now, certainly the leading smart contract platform embodiment of that. Anyway, just to put a little more nuance on it, but I’m a huge fan of Ethereum and I think what they’ve done is incredible. So you’re saying how will this kind of play out? So I think, yeah, it’s a great question. Ethereum, it’s hard for me to … I’m such a big fan that I will sound like I’m just … I just think that what Vitalik did and what the Ethereum community did was so important because it really revitalized the space. After all of the block size debate and just kind of the bitterness and things, it just provided this whole fresh perspective in things, inspired a new wave of entrepreneurs. It’s now really inspired Silicone Valley, so it’s just a hugely important thing and it got just incredible momentum.
So I’ll tell you what I do, what I do obviously is … a big part of my week is meeting with entrepreneurs and they’re building various crypto things and it’s just, I’d say 90% of them are building something on Ethereum and so it’s really just captured the imaginations of people, I think it’s-
Laura Shin:
And are any of them planning to try out any of these other ones?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, so that’s the other question. So I think if you’re building an application, you ultimately want to get a lot of users using your application. If you build an application that’s successful and you start to be rate limited by the platform, I think a lot of those people will think about switching. Switching costs are … it’s not trivial but a lot of other platforms are deliberately supporting Solidity and a lot of the other things to make it easier. You would have to replicate some of the tooling, like the browsers and all those other kinds of things, but it’s not that much right now. So to me, it’s a big question of … Look, it sort of falls on a prior question, we first need applications that really break out, that break out to tens and then hundreds of millions of people and at that point, maybe some time in the next year or two, the applications that do that will probably be king makers of whatever smart contract platform satisfies their needs.
Laura Shin:
Interesting.
Chris Dixon:
So, look, it sort of happened on … Imagine if when the iPhone came out, you had … I forgot what, like Instagram and Snapchat and all the really kind of hit apps, if the iPhone at a million users wouldn’t let you have more users or something, those people would have seriously considered Android or something, and that could have led to the development … or Windows phone, or whatever it might be, and that could have … So I think it’s really too early to call. I think it really is important that through this variety of things, both things being worked on by the Ethereum foundation, by related companies, by layer two projects, it’s important that a lot of these things … that figure out these scaling issues before … So I think of it as sort of a race between those two things. So applications that start to grow really quickly and are able to kind of decide which smart contract platforms are the winners and then on the other side, the smart contract platforms getting enough scalability and features and everything else to satisfy those applications.
There’s always this kind of yin and yang in technology, between applications and infrastructure and so I think it’s too early to call until we see more development on the application side.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So one further factor that I know a lot of people will be one of the determinants of which blockchains will become dominant is governance, but I don’t feel like I’ve heard you talk about it that much. What types of governance do you find most promising and do you think it really will be a big determining factor?
Chris Dixon:
I do, for sure. I think the governance is interesting. There’s kind of the formal governance and all these debates around onchain and offchain governance, so the most extreme example on one side I think is something like Tezos where there’s this very rich onchain governance system. And then you have, as I understand, the folks at the Ethereum Foundation, they want to have more kind of checks and balances. So you have sort of the people running nodes and the miners and then you’d have also the ability, and the proof of stake when they moved to proof of stake for people that own the currency to have some influence. But they would argue, I think that … I hope I’m not mischaracterizing it, but I think they would argue that if you just do it all onchain through voting by stakers, that you might end up with a plutocracy.
So I think that’s a very interesting debate. I don’t have an answer, I tend to think that the model that Ethereum and bitcoin have kind of come to which is you do have a kind of … it’s a little bit like the US system, where you have multiple branches of government. So those branches are sort of onchain, offchain then miners et cetera. I tend to think that that’s some kind of mixed model, like that seems to be working.
If you look back to pre-crypto and you look at how was HTTP and all the web protocols governed? The reality is it was kind of a complicated thing but you had standards bodies, so you had the W3C or something like this and they would come up with specs, but then you also had the software makers. So like, Chrome and Internet Explorer and Firefox have a big influence on how HTML, and HTTP for that matter, but how those protocols evolved. You kind of had these multiple parties and people kind of … it was a little bit of a messy process, but they kind of come together and it generally works. It’s a little slower than a centralized for profit company would move. So I think we kind of have models and I’m optimistic about it, but I do think it’s very important.
You see these debates around EOS and all these other kinds of new networks where there’s more controversial kind of governance models. To me, the key is that … I guess the two things you need to balance, on the one hand, the key idea here in all the crypto stuff is trust. So if you don’t trust … the only way that end users are going to trust that they really own a virtual good, or they really own this digital money, or something, is ultimately that trust has to flow from the trust in the platform.
So I think it’s very, very important that these networks be trusted. So there’s trust, but you want to trade … So trust kind of leads you towards conservatism and not changing much. On the other hand, it’s a software and you need to evolve and you need to scale and you need to do all sorts of tother things, so there’s this kind of delicate balance that needs to be walked and I think it will probably, very likely, be a major determinant of which of these platforms win, is which ones are best governed.
Laura Shin:
You talk often about how what people work on at nights and weekends is usually what ends up becoming the revolutionary technologies that take over our lives. Based on that theory, how do you think crypto networks will have changed our lives, three, five, ten years, or pick your timescale, from now?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, so that theory is if you just kind of go … I was thinking about, is it just kind of a coincidence that so many tech stories, I read a lot of history books and biographies and things, and so many of them start with the home brew hacker club, and the weekend club, and the hacking on a weekend and all these other things. So I was reading those and I was like, “Is that just a coincidence that all these things start off as hobbies, or is there some logic to it?” I kind of came up with the view that there’s a logic to it.
So you sort of think about it like if you’re a smart engineer, you have two different lives. You have your 9 to 5 life and you have your non 9 to 5 life. Your 9 to 5 life, what you work on is controlled by probably a business person who’s probably thinking on a one to two year horizon or something like that. That’s sort of how most businesses are set up. Then it’s your nights and weekends where you’re able to do what you want which is really where you’re taking a much longer term horizon.
So I kind of see it as there’s other places, like research labs, and universities and government funded projects where people are able to take a longer term horizon. But in the programing world, a lot of the longer term horizon is really just sort of done ad hoc by engineers on places like GitHub and Reddit, and whatever, and it’s what you do and you think it’s fun and interesting. So I think there’s sort of a deep logic as to why a lot of things that have ended up being really important, the PC, the internet, a whole bunch of other things, started off as nights and weekend projects.
So what will the world look in five or ten years time? So I guess the way I imagine things playing out is we’re going to continue to see … I’m very optimistic that for example, all of these questions around smart contract platforms, scaling and layer one scaling, and all these kinds of … I’m fairly sure these will all get worked out. There’s a lot of smart people working on a lot of good ideas. So we’ll have these highly scalable networks, we’ve have networks where you can truly build trust as a primitive and build other components around it.
I think one people underestimate with software, I think software is misunderstood in a lot of ways, as engineering analogous to building a bridge or something like this. You’re given a spec and you build the software to build it. I think software is much more analogous to writing. Like writing a novel or something, one of the key features of software is the composiblity, meaning you can take pieces like Lego bricks and you can compose new pieces. Then you can take those pieces and build new pieces.
It’s very much like English or something, where you can take words and build sentences. You can take sentences and build paragraphs, you can take paragraphs … Right? When people say things like, “You could never build a piece of software that does x, y and z. A smart contract that does … it’ll never work.” To me it’s sort of equivalent to saying, “You could never write a novel that involves …” I don’t know, ” … a whale and a ship captain and it’s really moving and blah, blah.” Really? You want to bet that no human can ever put words together in a certain way to have this emotional effect and this story and this … It’s such a rich, malleable medium, very much like the English language or something. It’s different because you’re using logical components to build other logical components, as opposed to maybe emotional components or something, so I don’t want to take the analogy too far, but that composibility is such a key feature.
So we’re in this very interesting period now where we’ve got this new major new Lego block, which is this idea that you can build trusted things, and then this Lego block . .. and it’s the best Lego block, it’s awesome, that’s why I’m so excited. So it just totally changes what you can build with Lego blocks. So you got this new thing, so now you have trust, you can build money. Okay, so money, that unlocks a whole bunch of stuff, so then you can build finance and lending and all of a sudden, that’s a whole thread of a tree. Then you got goods, crypto goods we were talking about, and that’s going to be a whole tree, that tree’s going to get built out over the next two years, or the next two to 10 years.
Anyway, so it’s all going to be kind of … I guess it’s a long winded way of saying, I expect to be surprised and I expect that other people are much smarter and more creative than me and there’s going to be all sorts of awesome stuff. What I’m excited about is that we got this awesome new Lego block in a field that’s as malleable and as broad and as expansive as writing in the English language, or something. I think the way it’s going to play out is you’re going to see more and more stuff … I think what I talk about a lot, is you’re going to have an inside out adoption pattern. What I mean by that is you’re going to see … So a bunch of people are building lending platforms in Ethereum and right now, it’s going start off as totally crypto. So you’re going to lend it, you’re going to be able to lend your Ether to the smart contract and the smart contract will, in turn, lend it out to other people. It’s weird and it’s crypto and people will say, “But it’s only for Ethereum and that’s not for mainstream people.”
But then look, you add in a stable coins and I think stable coins will be working … you’ll have some scaled out working stable coins in a couple of years. Stable coins, what that means is you’ve got a crypto asset that pegged as something like a dollar. So suddenly then you’ve got … So you combine those two Lego bricks. You take lending and you take stable coins and suddenly you have dollar lending platforms, so it’s not that weird anymore. Then you add on a nice iPhone user interface, app interface, and suddenly you have basically the core function of Citibank replicated from a crypto network.
But when I say inside out, what I mean, it’s going to start with crypto people doing it and be like crypto traders and all this other stuff and everyone will say, “Oh this is a weird thing.” But it just takes a few small steps to boom, okay then you plug this thing in and it’s a mainstream thing, right?
Laura Shin:
Right.
Chris Dixon:
And I don’t think the way it’s going to be is, you’re not going to have like Crypto Bank and everyone’s going to go to Crypto Bank instead of Citibank, it’ll just become that the … The legacy banks just become less relevant because more and more stuff is going to happen in the digital world. You’re going to be in your virtual world, like you’re in the metaverse and buying some virtual goods and you just naturally will go and get it from a smart contract. With using a stable coin, why would you go and work with one of these janky user interfaces with a legacy bank and all this other stuff?
So it’s really similar to how, if you look at the adoption patterns of Twitter and Facebook, it’s not like one day everyone said, “Hey, let’s stop going to the New York Times and let’s just go to Twitter.” And the way it starts by the way is like for years, Twitter and all these other networks were just people like me and my friends, or whatever, and we’d just talk about tech, Twitter used to be like tech chatroom or something, back in the old days. I kind of miss those days, but it used to be like a tech chatroom. Then over time, you had more mainstream people come on and it eventually just becomes like … the other stuff it just becomes kind of … you still go there and it still exists but it’s just not as relevant and that’s why I call it inside out.
It’s not like one day you just have a replacement or something, like a substitute, and everyone stops going to the bank and goes to this other bank or something. It’s just more that more and more of these functions just kind of happen. Inside out meaning it’s going to happen more … I think most of it’s going to happen with crypto-native people in this crypto world and you have this alternative crypto economy, financial system. But then there’s just a few little moves you need to make like stable coins and interfaces and a few other things to suddenly make it much more mainstream accessible.
Laura Shin:
Well, so I do have a question about this because I agree with you, it will probably happen something like that but I think a lot of people, when they extol the virtues of crypto, they talk about its potential to democratize access to financial services, but the thing is that the earlier you are, the wealthier you’re going to be in this system. So far, most of the early wealthy holders in crypto tend to be white and Asian men. So do you think it’s important to change that, and if so, how can we do it with a decentralized network that is just by definition not a top down system?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, so first of all, I believe we’re in the very early innings of this. So there’s plenty of time, if you want to be part of it to join in, I think there’s going to be a ton of things that will become incredibly valuable and so this is early days, and so-
Laura Shin:
Although so many people already have become millionaires and billionaires off of crypto, so …
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, but I still think it’s early days, I don’t know. I think it’s very early days. Look, I don’t know, we’re investing as if it’s early days and I believe that obviously, because I put my money where my mouth is. So I think it’s very early days but I think your point is great, the more we can do to bring more people in and be inclusive and make this a welcoming community, the better, so I think it’s a great point. But I think it’s still very early days, so I think if you’re a person looking for a career move, or a new thing to work on, you should come listen to your podcast, listen to our podcast, don’t read the negatives stuff-
Laura Shin:
Thanks for the recommendation.
Chris Dixon:
… read the positive stuff. At least, I would call our stuff the … we’re certainly positive. Go, really learn about it, it’s an incredibly interesting area, we want more people to come enter the ecosystem and I think it’s still early days.
Laura Shin:
What do you think about the regulatory influence? Because sometimes I look at what the SEC is doing and I totally understand why they’re doing it and yet I do feel like it’s still perpetuating this system of the status quo, where the wealthy accredited investors get in early and yet at the same time, I understand why they’re doing it. But do you think that there’s any way that-
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, I think for example, look, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a regulator, but I think this idea that … okay, so let’s look at why these rules are there. The rules are there for good reasons, to protect main street investors from people that are tricking them out of their money, essentially. If you don’t have those rules, that will happen and so you need to have regulation, and so regulation is important. I think the question is, is for example, with the definition of an accredited investor, is it … the basic assumption implicit in that that you have to have a million dollars, or whatever it is, to be able to … Essentially the way it works is you have to go through all the … There are certain exemptions where you’re allowed to sell, so for example, when we invest in start ups, we’re operating through an exemption that says because we’re an accredited and qualified institution, we can not go through all the onerous stuff that someone would go through like in an IPO. So with that definition of accredited investor, I think a more modern …
Okay, I think that if somebody knows … is a sophisticated software developer who has spent years studying crypto currency but isn’t a millionaire, are they a sophisticated investor and able to make their own decision? I think so. Should there be an alternative way to become an accredited investor, for example, like you can go and take a test or programing test, or a crypto test or something? I think that would be a great idea. I don’t control these rules but-
Laura Shin:
I’ve had, actually, somebody pitch me that or mention something like that to me, some knowledge based-
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, you can imagine more creative ways to decide. I think what you want … Look, you do want to avoid this thing where you don’t want … I’ve seen these people with these Yahoo ads and things, trying to sell some random cryptocurrency none of us have ever heard of to some person … this is a bad thing. We don’t want this, none of us want this and we don’t want this in the community, we don’t want this ethically, and that will happen if you don’t have rules. So the tricky question is, how do you come you with a set of rules that allow sophisticated people who aren’t rich to participate in the system, while also protecting quote unquote what they call “main street” investors, who aren’t going to get kind of tricked by these people. I don’t have all the answers, but I agree with the sentiment.
Chris Dixon:
But I will say, I don’t think the answer is just like sort of the … what I think what some people want to do which is just sort of get rid of all the rules. I think you do need these protections, I think they’re very important. I think ideally we have a regulatory system that balances those two things and balances innovation, provides clarity to people in the space, and also protects main street investors.
Laura Shin:
I know you’re a fan of Carlota Perez’s book Technological Revolutions And Financial Capital, and in that book, she talks about how new technologies come along and they solve the problems that became apparent with the full maturation of the previous technological revolution. So I just wondered, and I was thinking this is kind of a tough question, but I’m just so curious, do you think there are certain problems that decentralization will bring that aren’t apparent now but will become apparent decades from now and if so, what might those be?
Chris Dixon:
Are you talking about sort of unintended consequences here?
Laura Shin:
Yeah, kind of like, where we are with the Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, data privacy situation.
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, look, I think a lot about the fact that I was involved in sort of the Web 2.0 movement and it didn’t end the way that I wanted it, and I think a lot of other people wanted it to end, which was this kind of … frankly, we were maybe this kind of utopian, so maybe in retrospect, somewhat naïve view, that by creating these giant new information networks, we’d have this awesome democratizing impact. So I was hoping we would have this awesome democratizing impact and I think it did have a lot of very positive impacts, but I think the idea that now we’ve ended up with five companies running the internet, was not where I wanted it to end.
So, for example, one obvious failure mode here is we end up just creating new giant monopolies that control everything or something, and maybe they’re decentralized and there’s a few giant coin holders who own that and end up running things and that certainly wouldn’t be a good outcome, right?
Laura Shin:
Yeah that’s where I was going with that other question, too.
Chris Dixon:
You probably know the Placeholder folks-
Laura Shin:
Yeah.
Chris Dixon:
… they had a conference where one of the sessions I was what they call recentralization vectors, so new ways in which we unintentionally get recentralized and how do we make sure, this time, that this movement keeps true to the ideals? So I think keeping aware of where those recentralization vectors could be is an important point. To me, that’s an obvious failure mode.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, well one thing I wanted to also ask about is universal basic income is an idea that’s been bandied about a lot in recent years and I do feel like a blockchain could be an ideal way to dispense such an income. Have you seen any projects like this and do you think that’s an interesting idea or something that you think could democratize the space?
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, so putting aside … I think the UBI thing is a whole separate thing. I think for example, Brian Armstrong just launched a new charity called GiveCrypto, which one of the ideas is, there’s been a lot of studies around how to provide assistance to people in the developing world and it turns out, I don’t know intuitively or counterintuitively, whatever, that just directly giving people money is actually a very effective way to do it as opposed to providing them … you provide them with shoes and you end up inadvertently putting the shoe vendor out of business and hurting the local economy, or whatever, or the shoes get lost along the way, or they don’t fit or whatever. So it turns out, just directly giving money, but that’s actually very hard to do in a lot of the places in the world.
So for example, one of the things they’re working on is an exciting idea, is how do you use this technology to make sure that it goes to the rightful person? So you can do a whole bunch of interesting things around identity and taking advantage of the fact that there’s so many more Android phones out there and things like that. So I think things like that are super interesting. The whole UBI thing, I think it’s also interesting and it’s a whole separate can of worms, I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk on.
Laura Shin
Okay, all right, well we’re going to end on something that in your podcast with Patrick O’Shaughnessy you started with, and I wanted to start with it but I was like, “I can’t start with the same question he started with.” So you studied philosophy as your major-
Chris Dixon:
I did.
Laura Shin:
… I mentioned this to you before, you may not remember, but my major was called Modern Thought Literature, so it’s sort of like philosophy and literature but I heard you on another podcast where you were saying that in recent years, you’ve been turning to philosophers like the Ancient Greeks and thinking about ways in which one can live a good life, so I just wondered, here we’ve got these new networks that create incentive structures that could incentivize people do to different things and I wondered if you thought crypto assets could in any way help people live better lives, or maybe it’s the opposite? Maybe actually we’ve got worse things, there’s all these scammers and stuff. But I wondered what your thoughts were around merging those two things?
Chris Dixon:
I think, for example, the idea that you could have new … my assumptions are the internet is the most important technology of this century or something, and will control, and we’re already seeing this happen, politics, economics, so maybe listeners don’t agree with me, but I think this is obviously the case and that who controls the internet can probably controls all these other very powerful things in society, and how the money flows and a whole bunch of other things. I think for example, this should be a golden period for creators. So for writers like you, for musicians, for all sorts of people. We now have, soon to have, almost everyone on earth with internet access, it should be an amazing time for coordinating human activity, for sharing knowledge, for sharing creative acts, for having the people that create those things participate in the economics of those things.
I think that the way we’ve constructed the networks that govern the internet today is not doing a good job at that, and so I think that this is a chance to improve that and in a more meritocratic way share information, share knowledge, share education, share money, have a better way of … having an information network that creates better politics not worse politics. I don’t think that we’ve succeeded at that so far-
Laura Shin:
Definitely not.
Chris Dixon:
… technology Community. No, and it’s not a good thing. I think it’s the most important thing. This is what gets me excited about this, frankly is that I am not excited about … This is why I’m doing the crypto fund, because I feel like this has gravitas, this movement has a chance to do something very important for the internet, which is becoming an increasingly important thing and I personally have no interest in another, whatever, chat app, or whatever, this kind of stuff that was happening in the venture world that was not exciting to me. This is exciting, this is important. So, look, I don’t want to sound naively utopian, I realize that this could not work, that this could go wrong, that there’s all sorts of things, but I think it’s a problem worth working on and I think this is by far the most likely technology for improving these things and so I don’t know, I’ve decided to effectively devote my life to it and I’m excited to work with people who are excited about it and I think it’s a hugely important topic. I hope that we can construct new information networks that do a better job than the current ones are doing.
Laura Shin:
Yeah, yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. Well this has been such a great discussion. Where can people learn more about you and Andreessen Horowitz?
Chris Dixon:
Oh where can they learn more?
Laura Shin:
Yeah, and your new crypto fund.
Chris Dixon:
Yeah, a16zcrypto.com and so we have a blog post there and we’ve some podcasts in the past and things like that, so you should check that out.
Laura Shin:
Great, all right, perfect, well thanks for coming on Unchained.
Chris Dixon:
Okay, thank you.
Laura Shin:
Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Chris, check out the show notes inside your podcast episode. New episodes of Unchained come out every Tuesday. If you haven’t already, rate, review and subscribe on Apple podcasts. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and if you’re not yet subscribed to my other podcast, Unconfirmed, I highly recommend you check it out and subscribe now. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Elaine Zelby, Fractal Recording, Jenny Josephson, Rahul Singireddy and Daniel Nuss. Thanks for listening.
