Unchained - Chris Dixon on How Trust Is the Best Lego Block - Ep.70

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

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 Unconfirmed: http://unconfirmed.libsyn.com/sxsw-episode-former-doj-prosecutor-kathryn-haun-on-what-the-sec-subpoenas-and-fincen-letter-likely-mean 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 is an international blockchain accelerator, offering a wide range of token sale advisory services to promising blockchain-based ventures. With the leading advisor network, BCW is at the forefront of building landscape-changing blockchain companies and hosting successful token sales with more than $20 million raised so far.

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in the strength of community. Who will be recognized today? Stay tuned. My guest today is Chris Dixon, partner at Entries and Horowitz. Welcome, Chris. Thanks for having me. We're recording this episode just a couple days after your big news. Congrats on your new crypto fund.

Thank you. And also on nabbing Katie Hawn as your new GP. We're very excited about her. Let's talk first about the new fund. You raise $300 million for a crypto-only fund through Andresen, although Andresen 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? Yeah, I mean, the main reason is we wanted to have,

you know, kind of a first-class effort to, we think crypto is incredibly important, and we wanted to have a first-class kind of organization and effort to approach the opportunity. So this allows us to have a full team. I think we have eight now. Four, kind of on the, sorry, three on the kind of technical side. Me, Katie, general counsel, operations, things like this. So as you know, crypto just kind of has a whole bunch of complexities and, and is just different in a lot of ways. So the main thing was to have kind of a first class organization devoted to doing this and to really make it kind of a key focus for the firm. And out of all the technologies that you do invest in, why create a crypto-only fund, as opposed to, like, you know, a VR-only fund?

We do have a bio fund. So we thought, you know, bio, kind of the intersection of computer science and bio was an interesting enough area and different enough. I mean, sort of one way we think about it is, you know, is the knowledge specialized enough that you need a dedicated team? So on the bio side, for example, like, you know, we have two partners there who have deep backgrounds in biology, and they also have, have also computer science. But, you know, one, one sort of 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, like, a significant portion of the bio stuff. So it's just a different domain, right? And crypto, you know, although it's computer science, there's so much, as you know,

and you focus on this on your podcast, there's so much kind of specialized knowledge. You've got to read all these white papers. You've got to kind of like 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 kind of a whole, you know, a whole kind of separate effort. And I'm so not surprised that you guys hired Katie Hahn because I think she's so

brilliant. She's awesome. 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? 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. She, she, and has just been incredibly valuable there.

and is super actively involved in all aspects of the kind of company. And I think she's just an outstanding board member. You know, a lot of how we think about it is, you know, there's really two, you know, I think sometimes people outside of the venture world think what you do in venture capital is, you know, 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, you know, try to help the company, right? And so I got to see firsthand how helpful she was. And then I just heard, and as you know, like she's in the community.

I just, her name comes up all the time, you know, founders all want to meet her. they want to work with her. And so, you know, and then she's also on the board of Hacker 1, for example. She also has security expertise. And so just getting to see her work firsthand and just being super impressed by her. And so, yeah, I think it was a real, real coup to be able to recruit her. So I'm excited to work with her. And what do you think about the fact that she is the first female GP?

I think that's great. You know, obviously, we want to have more diversity in our, you know, in our general partner ranks. but, you know, she's just an outstanding person for this and founders want to work with her. And so, yeah. Yeah, but it is so exciting, I think, because everybody talks in this space. And 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 on the line.

Hopefully that will change, right? I mean, I hope that over, I mean, I hope as the space grows, it will change in multiple ways. I think both in terms of, you know, gender diversity and things like that. But also I think in terms of, you know, like just sort of skill diversity, I think for the space to grow, we need, you know, people who, you know, aren't, like right now, as you know, the community tends to be very technical, kind of focused on, you know, consensus mechanisms and all these kind of very technical things. And that's very important and we need to continue to have that. But I think we also need people with, with different, both, you know, kind of backgrounds in, yeah, you know, let's product design and general management and engineering and just like all sorts of other things. So I, you know, I think that a really important thing over the next couple of years is to make kind of the space more inclusive and grow it and have more people, you know, have people leaving, you know, other industries, other tech companies,

universities coming into the space. And I think that's the way we kind of succeed. I kind of, I saw this, you know, it reminds me a little bit. I was involved in the kind of what, people call the Web 2 movement, you know, so kind of I'd started a company in 2004. It was a consumer internet security company. And I was sort of, you know, like there was a sort of all these people that were into like, you know, these new ideas around like RSS and tagging and like delicious and flicker and I don't know. There's this whole kind of thing that was going on back then. And, and you know, and the early people into that, you know, we're really into like kind of, you know, the ethos of it and the, you know, all the, you know, all the, sort of nitty gritty. But then as

the space grew, right, you kind of, you brought in, the space brought in a much broader set of people and companies like Facebook and other, you know, successful companies did that. And so I think that's the way we kind of get to the next stage is to really kind of, you know, if, you know, hopefully three years from now, we're, you know, the space is 10 times, if not more people working in it and much more reflective of the general, you know, at least tech population and hopefully the general population. And I'm sure her regular or her government background is a big factor? Yeah, certainly her regulatory expertise is important.

I mean, that's a key. That is, I mean, she's got a lot of skills, but that certainly is an important skill. You know, 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. And so every founder that we're working with is sort of, hey, can you help me just figure out what I need to do? You know, there obviously are bad actors. Like none of the people we're working with the bad actors, and there's lots of good actors.

despite what, you know, sometimes the impressions some people have in the space. The good actors want to, want to comply, but frankly don't know how right now. And so helping projects with those issues is very important right now, yeah. So we're going to come back to that in a moment, but I wanted to also ask, you know, 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 startups and how does that affect your decision process around which projects you invest in? Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, I think of it as we're investing in, well, yeah, so, I mean, we, it's not that difference. So, for example, we've been investing, you know, in our, in our traditional VC, you know, practice and just generally in Silicon Valley, people have been investing kind of open source. I mean, not directly in open source, but things around open source. So, you know, like Mongo and GitHub and all these other kinds of things. So there's, you know, a big open source component, but then there's some other kind of component layered on, which, you know, provides a business model or something, right?

But I think, like, for example, we don't, like, we're generally, like, I'll speak for myself. I'm very opposed to things like software patents. I generally don't believe that defensibility and technology comes through things like patents or trade secrets or close source things. They generally come through network effects, communities, kind of other kinds of things like this. So, I mean, just think about, you know, take Bitcoin's an obvious example. you could, you know, as people have forked Bitcoin, you could, I could fork, I could have Chris's Bitcoin tomorrow. I don't think anyone would use Chris's Bitcoin.

Actually, well, in your case, they might. But, you know, the point is, like, you know, but this goes back. Like, I mean, like, I like to give the example, like Wikipedia, for example, Wikipedia is all, you know, all the, all the information there's open source, right? I could download it. I could create chris's Wikipedia.org, right? But, like, no one's going to go to it, right? It's just not, it's not how the real, how actual defensibility happens on the internet. it comes through the fact that Wikipedia, you know, it's almost like, think of it as almost like,

it's almost like a restaurant, it's like a venue or something like Wikipedia, right? It's like a place you go. Like you go there because the other people are there because the community is there, right? Because, and the community creates great content, and then you go because of the content is there, right? So you can replicate that. You can replicate the data, but you can't replicate the community, right? So that's how we think about it. It's sort of who is, if it's very, you know, who's going to build a network that,

that is going to have defensibility through technology, obviously good technology, but that can be copied. And then ultimately through good governance, good community, ethos, kind of, you know, those kind of, you know, and that leads to second order network effects. So then, you know, 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,

TCIP, right, one of the core protocols of the internet. Like if I, you know, I can make my own version of I-TCPIP, but it's not going to be baked into, you know, T-CP-P-A-Bs baked into every computer, every router, every sort of thing in the world. Like 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 the lens of who's going to create kind of the best technology that leads to the best community and network. And so when it comes to looking at, you know, the different types of technology that could be developed in this space, I'm sure you're probably thinking like, oh, these certain things need to be developed or these certain problems. need to be resolved. So what do you think are some of the biggest problems right now that crypto networks need to resolve? Yeah, I mean, some of this will be obvious. So for example, scaling is a big issue, right, obviously. And so that, that means different things and

different networks. But, you know, I think, I think of it as, so like the way I like to frame it is we have this, crypto creates this great, this incredible new software primitive, which is trust, right, which is this idea that from a bunch of non-trusted network nodes, through these consensus mechanisms, you know, like, you know, Nakamoto consensus and it's a Bitcoin or like there's a whole bunch of other consensus mechanisms. Through these consensus mechanisms, you get this sort of emergent property of trust where you can trust the network. And that trust lets you build things like money or smart contracts and other things, right?

But you pay a price for trust, which is you have to kind of waste network resources or, you know, or use redundant network resources, which makes these networks harder to scale. right so you know so let's take ethereum as an example um so every piece of code that you run every smart contract that you run on ethereum has to run redundantly on all these different you know on all the miners right so whatever it is 30 000 miners or something that's not an efficient you know if you're looking at it it through the lens of uh you know you're a google engineer looking at through the lens of like how you you design traditional distributed systems that's not going to look like an efficient way to do it right and so how do you so the question is how do you you know 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. I mean, there's stuff going on at the core. There's new projects every day coming out with kind of new kind of consensus mechanism breakthroughs. You know, there's a whole bunch of stuff, you know, ideas around like how you can shard these networks, which is sort of, you know, that's kind of a basic, you know, basic,

but like a standard computer science move to kind of create more parallelism is to do sharding. There's a sort of related idea, things called like plasma and like kind of subchains. There's on the Bitcoin side, there's lightning network and, you know, kind of payment channels. You know, in the Ethereum side, there's something equivalent thing called state channels. There's sort of side networks of things like, you know, like Truebit, which is sort of this side. Almost think of it like a GPU next to your CPU, like kind of gives you additional. horsepower. There's a whole bunch of interesting, like, kind of brand new cryptographic research around things called like Starks, for example, where you can do more computation off-chain and just

use the blockchain for, and 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, right? Because right now, like, I think Ethereum supports, for example, 1.2 million transaction today. You know, on the Bitcoin side, this is reflected in the cost of a transaction, which I think is, you know, right now it's sort of, it's fine in the digital gold use. case, it's not fine if you want to, you know, use it for small casual payments, which was sort of the original, you know, that's the original white paper talked about. So that's obviously a big issue. 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 and go on and on about infrastructure. And then there's sort of, I sort of see there's just two big buckets, right? There's infrastructure and applications, right? And so there's a whole bunch of stuff going on the infrastructure side. I personally spent 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, right? Like, How do you actually, you know, in the end, you know, crypto wins when we have a billion people using these networks who don't even know why, you know, know what crypto is, right? Like that's sort of how I think of how we win, right? Like, no one cares, you know, people that use whatever Facebook or something don't need to understand the underlying technology, right?

So, 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, you know, crypto finance, kind of we call it, which is, you know, people creating like decentralized note, decentralized exchanges and other kinds of interesting financial instruments, lending, you know, sort of things you would find in the traditional financial industry. There's a whole area of called traditional asset tokenizations of taking kind of, you know, traditional assets, quote unquote, which is like real estate as an example and making a tokenized version that can be traded in the blockchain.

A bunch of stuff happening around kind of 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. You know, I think a particularly interesting area for that is the billions, something like a billion people who have Android phones. You know, you can get a $15 Android phone now. There's something in the order of a billion people that have Android phones that don't have bank accounts. I think providing kind of financial services, those people also, most of them don't have identification either. Like literally don't have like a government-issued ID. so let alone can't get a bank account.

I think providing financial services to those people was a really exciting opportunity. Anyways, there's a whole bunch of interesting things going on the application side, and I expect, you know, 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 kind of medium. And so 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-fundgungible tokens, i.e. crypto goods. That really didn't, that was kind of a new, I mean, I think people had sort of thought about it, but like it really was a new concept in the last 12 months and unlocks this whole other area. And I think not only unlocks like new possibilities, but unlocks, what 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, you know, million people excited about crypto who were more on the creative side, the gaming side. So I know a bunch of kind of game entrepreneurs who were early entrepreneurs around, you know, Facebook and iPhone gaming. And until crypto goods came along, NFTs, they were like, okay, this crypto thing is like, you guys, I don't know what you guys are doing over there, but like it's not for me. And now all of a sudden they're, hey Chris, let's get together. You know, this stuff is suddenly interesting, right? Because what is a crypto good? It's, it's sort of proof of existence. It's like a token, but with graphics. And it has this kind of whole other

dimension to it that appeals to a whole other set of kind of whole different sensibility. And so that's really exciting because I think of it as like the way we win is we grow the army. We need, we need 10 million people of programmers and researchers and entrepreneurs and product designers and you know, creative people and just like we need this big army to just go and create like all this awesome stuff. And that's how we win. And so anything we can do to kind of bring more people into the fold, that's great. Right. And so. So I think there will be more, 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 kind of this really interesting kind of flywheel going with kind of people and talent and then software. And the two kind of feeding back on each other.

Yeah. I was talking with Olaf the other day and we were talking about video games and about how now because of things like Crypto goodies and what you call Crypto Goods, which by the way, I love that. the term. I had not heard that until I wrote your blog post. I realized, oh, wow, like, I could have a digital good or multiple digital goods in these virtual worlds, and then I could carry them from game to game. And then it's, it's not that dissimilar from how I am in the real world, where I have sort of unique things that are, you know, that signify who I am, like this necklace and this shirt and, you know, that purse or whatever. And so it's like, oh, this is kind of interesting. and I also did an interview with Philip Rosedale who had done Second Life,

now he was doing high fidelity. And he had mentioned to me that in the virtual world, like 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 like, oh, there's like a lot of possibilities here. And I haven't played venue games in forever. But like just thinking about the possibilities there, I got excited. And I agree.

And I think, you know, 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 in, I think generally in society, kind of with the internet, where we still think of the digital world. A lot of people still think of the digital world as kind of second tier, second class to the offline world. And you hear that even in the language we use. So, you know, there's commerce, which is offline commerce and there's e-commerce, right? And so whenever you have like the modifier, you're sort of saying that's that's the subordinate world, right? So there's email, you know, e-commerce, you know, the fact that we say digital goods versus goods, like, et cetera, where, you know, e-sports. 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, is in many ways primary. It's where you, you know, meet your, you know, meet friends.

It's where you make earn a living. It's where you do, you know, all of these important things. And this idea that, like, I think it will seem funny that, that we once didn't have a notion of money and ownership in this world. And so for me, goods, like, of course goods are going to be important to digital world, because look how important. I mean, you certainly like owning, people seem to like owning things in the offline world, why wouldn't want to own things in the online world?

And right now, you do have this notion of virtual goods and games and things like this, but you're really kind of borrowing them. The game, you know, I guarantee you that your goods and whatever, you name the game, like 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. And so, you know, I see it as taking what is obviously a very important thing we do in the offline world, which is just like, you know, just what Bitcoin did. So Bitcoin took, obviously, money is really important in the offline world. Of course, it's going to be important in the online world. In the same way, you know, owning, having property rights in the offline world and owning stuff is going to be important in the online world.

And so I think it's just a matter of time before it's seen is like, just sort of almost like a basic right that you would, that you would be able to own things in the digital world. Yeah. And going back to how the digital is always seen as not the default, I experienced this shift where in the past, if I'd been writing for Forbes.com, I would have noted Forbes.com because Forbes meant magazine.

Because that's the real one. And then at a certain point, it was no, I was running for Forbes. And that meant the website. And then if I was writing for the magazine, then I would say Forbes magazine. Yeah, yeah. 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 know, you've seen this process both as a successful entrepreneur in the traditional startup mode and obviously on the investor side as well. But how do you think crypto and decentralization are changing entrepreneurship and business models? Yeah. I mean, decentralization is a very broad topic and it can mean a lot of different things. You know, I think one lens through which to look at it is, is through the kind of where we are in the tech world today, right, which is, we're in a period now, a highly centralized period, right, where four or five tech companies, right, Google, Apple,

Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, you know, the vast majority of time people spend online and products they interact with and things like that are owned by those companies, right? And those companies are, you know, 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 sort of what we've seen now over 30 years of tech platforms.

So by platform, by the way, I mean a network where developers can build something for users, sort of that provides kind of an intermediate point. So it could be Windows, it could be Facebook, it could be Twitter. You know, Facebook in the case of like when you have like third-party developers like Zinga, et cetera. it could be iOS. And these things typically go through a life cycle, where in the beginning, you know, Facebook starts off, they really, they're, they're trying to get Forbes to put their content on there. So in the beginning, they're like, please, please, come over, you know, we need your content, right? Because they need it to make a better experience, right?

Fast forward to today, and I think it's a very different story, right? I mean, they're like, hey, we're going to change the rules. We're going to flag you. We're going to, you know, lower your take rate. I don't know, whatever. You know, there's a whole bunch of stuff, right? Because now they don't need you anymore because they're big, right? And so this, and this is sort of this S curve I show, which is that you basically have this life cycle, these networks where in the beginning they try to attract what economists call complement, sort of the things that go with it, you know, the complementary goods and services. But then at the end, they just sort of say, hey, like there's a certain amount of money to be made, and we want, we want most of the money. And so we're going to, you know, we're going to let you kind of hang around the sidelines, but we're going to take all the profits, right? And that's why, you know, you have Yelp going up in front of the Senate, talking about Google, you know, like, so now you type a restaurant and it's like you have to scroll down.

on to like page two to get to yelp is like even though like i don't know about you but i always want to find yelp and it's got to go to page two and so you know and so and so what happened right because like google's google's doing what they you know they're for profit business i'm not criticized i think it's a you know fantastic company and they provide an amazing free service and it's you know they've done they've 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 kind of organic means and so they're now trying to monetize more and things like that. It's just what happens. And that's, you know, I think, but I think now 30, 40 years into

the tech world, kind of the tech revolution, it's fine that those companies do that. But as, you know, investors, entrepreneurs, et cetera, we also should be wise to this as well. Like, this is what happens, right? So, and in our business and venture, everyone, every VC will tell you this. They talk about platform risk. This platform risk is the risk when you're building another platform. And it's a massive, massive risk. So, you know, and so, so, so, so, but contrast where we are today, where if you want to build something and 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.

You know, rewind 20 years ago when the web was starting out. And, you know, really the dominant, quote unquote, platforms were these decentralized protocols that, you know, thankfully the academics and the government and the various people who created the Internet created these wonderful open protocols. So, you know, TCPI, P, H, TPS, MTP, et cetera. and those were the kind of the rules that governed the internet. And so it was a decentralized network. And what that did was it allowed creativity and entrepreneurship to blossom.

And so you had, you know, and that's why, you know, and Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg and people like that benefited from that, right? Mark Zuckerberg could put up a website and as long as, you know, they got traffic and they got users, like the, you know, the IETF or the W3C or whatever, the web committee wasn't going to say, hey, Mark, you know, we're going to take your profits now, right? 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. And I'm not blaming them for it. I think they're doing what for-profit centralized platforms do, and it has its own kind of a deep internal logic. If they didn't do it, they'd probably, you know, 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, right? And so this is, 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 kind of the rules of the platform in a way that won't hurt entrepreneurship later on. 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 most? I think it depends on the network. I think, yeah. I mean, so I think that's an important part of being a good network is giving, you know, is baking into both the code. and the governance that, you know, the assurance is that that won't change. And, you know, and I think, but we also have other mechanisms, for example, forking, right? If, you know, I, I, I mean, take Ethereum. Like, if I think Ethereum is a very well-governed network, I think, I don't, I can't imagine

that, that the Ethereum network would, would ever go and say, hey, we're going to, we have some smart contract that's wildly successful. We're going to, you know, change the rules and take more of their money for the, you know, foundation or for the platform. But if they ever did, I think they would run a real risk of getting forked. And so, you know, I think there's sort of inherent, I think there's both, you know, there's kind of inherent guarantees built into the nature of the networks and the fact that they're open code and, you know, and I think, and the fact that, you know, that there

aren't like the people of the foundation don't really control the network, right? I mean, it's, it's the various, as we've seen with, with, you know, the Bitcoin debates and things. There's multiple constituencies, right? There's miners. There's note operators. There's developers. And I think that, you know, that, and then you also have then the threat of kind of exit of for forking people leaving the network. I mean, there's actually two forms of exit, right? One is you can just say, you know what, I'm going to take my, I'm going to take my software and move somewhere else. By the way, that's another form of exit, right? I mean, and like you're seeing this more and more with a lot of the competing smart contracts to Ethereum, smart contract platforms are building in like they're

using the EVM and a bunch of being very like, they're making it switching costs very, low, right? So there's a whole bunch of kind 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, right? So shackling, meaning like we're putting constraints on it so that it can't become a bad actor. And 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 like, there's no good luck. What are you going to do? Use some other, you know, get all your friends who moves and other social

network like it's just not going to happen. So. Bet mode activated. The score bet app here with trusted stats and real time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking.

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That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. Interesting. So it's a, you know, it's not, it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out in the future,

but it's a much more attractive. I would say these platforms in the crypto world are a much more attractive platforms to build on it for entrepreneurs. And as investors, we think they're much more attractive to invest, you know, to invest in. Something else that I've been so curious about is Facebook recently formed a group to explore how it could use blockchain technology, and then we've got these other companies and startups that have announced plans to either launch coins or crypto networks. You know, there's KIC and Kodak and Telegram. I tend to view the business model of centralized companies as kind of antithetical to 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 if they're centralized service? It's definitely, I mean, it's, I would definitely call the crypto both kind of ethos and business model. I put quotes on that because it's a different, you know, it's sort of 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 kind of traditional centralized tech companies. You know, it's, the phrase disruptive is thrown around a lot in Silicon Valley.

there's sort of a technical word of it, meaning of it from Clay Christensen's books, Innovator's dilemma, where you have, you know, his definition is you have this new, you know, a new technology that is, you know, fundamentally misaligned with the existing technology. And in fact, the really interesting about his book is that, you know, is that if you're a smart incumbent and you're doing what you normally do, which is kind of making your best customers happy, this new thing will look like this kind of crappy thing that doesn't satisfy. satisfy the needs of your best customers. And so actually the smart manager will ignore them.

Now, he does have a lot of writings about, you know, how do you address these disruptive technologies? And what Christensen says is you really just have to create a new organization. He says you literally, like, should put it in like a different, like, location and like different management team and like different incentive structure. And so I think it falls into that bucket of like 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, right? And it's just fundamental.

I mean, if you just take an example of like take a, you know, among other things, these, these business models will probably be deflationary. This is generally what happens in tech is that each new wave is sort of deflationary. What I mean by that is it, it lowers the margin. So, you know, and it shrinks the market size rather. And so, you know, Craigslist shrunk the market of classified ads, right? I mean, it's just like the dollar spent. I mean, which is great for consumers.

They spend less money. Terrible for media. It's terrible for media. And so, you know, and Craigslist can do quite well if they capture like a big share of it and they have a really low cost structure and everything else. Generally, like it's bad for media, good for consumers, good for the disruptor, right? It's generally how the pattern works. And so, you know, if you think about a crypto decentralized file storage system, like,

and then you think about Amazon and S3 or something like they're, you know, they're sort of the incumbent. Like, it's going to be inherently deflationary. And so it's, as a good manager of S3, it's going to be really hard to say, hey, let's go, like, 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, like, kind of a new organization. I mean, look, but look, I'm putting our bets almost all, almost exclusively are on brand new companies that are first principles designed, you know, in this new, from this new world. I mean. 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 blockchains, and more. But first, I'd like to take a quick break to tell you about our fabulous sponsors. 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 like Atlas Quantum, Coin Mint, Securitize, Smart Valor, and Verbex, Clarity PR can move quickly to differentiate the value of your business in the noisy blockchain and crypto space. Named as one of the fastest growing agencies in PR Week's top 150, Clarity is well-versed in providing guidance to a wide range of companies looking to build their reputation and deliver high-profile media relations campaigns

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Aren't you? I'm from Ohio. Springfield, Ohio, yeah. Really? Oh, awesome. This is like the Ohio episode where Adam has done everything from demonstrate solidity code to facilitate panel discussions. Adam and DeCin are all about blockchain and the greater good. Thank you to Adam for leading the charge for crypto, blockchain, and all this amazing new technology that it can bring to our world.

Go to Preachate.org to learn more about the Preachate community and recognize someone. Raising the bar together with Appreciate, launching this summer. I'm speaking with Chris Dixon, partner ad entries in Horowitz. We're about to see this race develop between various smart contract platforms. Ethereum has the first move of advantage, and you've called it the most important technology of the decade. But it has serious parts, which we've mentioned, scaling. there's some governance issues, there's been bugs in the code. Now we've got Eos, DFINITY, and TASOS.

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? Yeah, just to clarify, but I think what I did, I sort of said that. But I think what I'd like to say is, I think crypto is the most important technology of the decade for sure. And I think, you know, and Ethereum is sort of the leading, to my mind right now, the leading, you know, certainly the leading smart contract platform and embodiment of that. But, you know, anyway, so just a.

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. You know, Ethereum is, you know, it's hard for me to, I'm such a big fan that it will, I will sound like I am just, I just think what Vitalik did and what the kind of Ethereum community did

was so important because it really revitalized the space, you know, after all of the kind of the block size debate and just kind of all the bitterness and things, it just provided this kind of whole fresh kind of perspective on things, inspired a new wave of entrepreneurs. It's now really kind of inspired Silicon Valley.

So it's just a hugely important thing. And, you know, it's, and they've got just incredible momentum. So I'll tell you what I do. You know, what I do obviously is part of, a big part of my week is meeting with entrepreneurs and they're building various crypto things. And it's just, you know,

I'd say 90, of them are building something on Ethereum. And so it's really just kind of captured, you know, the imaginations of people. I think it's... And are any of them planning to try out any of these others? Yeah, well, so that's the other question. So, I mean, so I think they, I think if you're building an application, you want, you ultimately want to get a lot of users using your application, right?

And if you, if you build an application, it's successful and you start to be kind of rate limited by the platform, you know, I think a lot of those people will think about switching. And, you know, switching costs are, you know, it's not trivial, but a lot of other platforms are deliberately supporting like solidity and a lot of the other things to make it easier. You would have to replicate some of the tooling, you know, like the browsers and all those other kinds of things, but it's not that much right now. So I think it's kind of just, to me it's a big question of, I mean, look, it sort of falls on a prior question. We first need applications that really break out, which, you know, that break out to, you know, tens and then hundreds of millions of people.

And at that point, maybe sometime in the next year or two, the applications that do that will probably be kingmakers of whatever smart contract platform satisfies their needs, right? Interesting. You know, so, look, it sort of happened on, you know, imagine if, you know, let's, you know, when the iPhone came out, you know, you had, I forgot what, like, Instagram and, you know, Snapchat and all the early kind of hit apps. If, you know, the iPhone just, you know, whatever, 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 of, or Windows phone, for that matter, or whatever it might be. and that could have. So I think it's really too early to call. I mean, I think it'll be really important. It's 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, you know, figure out these scaling issues. So I think if it's 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, you know, on the other side, the smart contract platform is getting kind of enough sort of scalability and features and everything else to satisfy those applications, right? There's always this kind of yin and yang in technology between applications and infrastructure.

And so I think it's just, I think it's too early to call until we see more development on the application side. Okay. So one other factor that I know a lot of people think 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?

I do for sure. You know, I think the governance is interesting. There's kind of the formal governance and like, you know, all these debates around kind of like on chain and off chain governance. You know, so like the most extreme example on one side, I think, is something like Tezos where there's this very rich kind of on-chain governance system. And then you have, you know, as I understand the folks at the Ethereum Foundation, they want to have kind of a more more kind of checks and balances.

So you have sort of the people that, you know, running nodes and the miners and then the, you know, and then you'd have also the ability for, you know, in the proof of stake when they moved to proof of stake for people that, that own the currency to have some influence. But they would argue, I think, that. and I hope I'm not mischaracterizing it, but I think they would argue that if you just do it all on chain through voting by stakers, that you might end up with a plutocracy.

So I think it's a very interesting debate. I don't have an answer. I tend to think, I tend to think that the kind of 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, you know, the U.S. system where you have kind of multiple branches of government,

right? So when those branches are sort of on-chain, off-chain, then miners, et cetera. I tend to think that some kind of mixed model like that seems to be working. Look, it's kind of what happened. I mean, I'm also looking, if you look back to pre-Crypto and you look at how, you know, how was HTTP and all the sort of web protocols governed? I mean, the reality is it was kind of a complicated thing, but you had standards bodies.

So, you know, you'd have to W3C or something like this, and they would come up with specs. But then you also have the software maker. So, like, Chrome and Internet Explorer and Firefox have a big influence on, like, how HTTP I'm sorry, HTML and HTTP, with that matter, but how those protocols evolve, right? And you kind of have this, you know, these multiple parties and people kind of, you know, it's a little bit of messy process, but they kind of come together and it generally works. It's a little slower than, you know, a centralized for-profit company would move. But so I think we kind of have models and I'm optimistic about it.

But I do think it's very important. I mean, you see these debates around like, you know, EOS and all these other kinds of new networks where there's like, you know, more controversial kind of governance. models. I think the key, to me the key is that I guess the two things you need to balance, on the one hand, you know, the key idea here in all the crypto stuff is trust, right? And so if you don't trust, you know, 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 kind of flow from the trust in the platform. So I think it's very, very important that

these networks be trusted, right? And so there's trust, but you want to trade out. And so trust kind of leans you towards conservatism, right, and not changing much. On the other hand, this is software, and you need to evolve and you need to scale and you need to all sorts of other things. So there's this kind of delicate balance that needs to be walked. And I think, you know, it probably, it will probably very likely be a major determinant of which of these platforms win is which ones are best governed. You talk often about how what people work on on nights and weekends is usually what ends up becoming the revolutionary technologies that take of our lives. Based on that theory, how do you think crypto networks will have changed our lives

three, five, ten years or pick your time scale from now? Yeah. So, yeah, so that theory is just, if you just kind of go, I mean, I was thinking about, is it just a coincidence that so many tech stories, you know, I read a lot of history books and biographies and things. And so many of them start with like, you know, the homebrew hacker club and the weekend club and the, you know, hacking on the weekend and all these other things. And so. So, so. So, So kind of, you know, I was reading those and I was like, is that, is that just like a coincidence that all these things that all these things sort of start off as hobbies? Or is there's some logic to it? And then I kind of came up with a view that that there's a logic to it. And so you sort of think about it is, if you're a smart engineer, you kind of have two, you have two different lives, right? You have your nine to five life and you have your non nine to five life. Your nine to five life is controlled. What you work on is controlled by probably a business person who's probably thinking on a, you know, one to two year horizon.

you know, or something like that, right? I mean, that's sort of how most businesses ended up. And then you're non, you know, it's your nights and weekends where you're able to do what you want, which is really where you're sort of taking a much longer term horizon. So I kind of see it as there's sort of, you know, there's other places like research labs and governments and places, I'm sorry, and universities and government funded projects where people are able to take a longer term horizon. But in the kind of, in the programming world, a lot of the longer term horizon is really just sort of done ad hoc. buy engineers on places like GitHub and Reddit and whatever and they're just up you know it's

what you do and you think it's fun and interesting and 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 like a whole bunch of other things started off as sort of nights and weekend projects so you know I think so what were the world looking five 10 years out so I think that um I guess the way I imagine things kind of playing out is we're going to continue to see I'm very optimistic that, for example, all of these questions around kind of smart contract platform scaling and kind of layer one scaling and all these kinds of these will all get, I'm very sure these will all get worked out. These are a lot of smart people working on, a lot of good ideas. So we'll have these highly scalable networks. We'll have networks that were where you can truly build kind of trust as a primitive and build other components around it. I think one thing people underestimate with software. I think software is misunderstood in a lot of ways as a sort of engineering analogous to, you know, building a bridge or something like this.

You're kind of like you're given a spec and you build the software to build it. I think software is much more analogous to writing, like, you know, writing a novel or something. It's a – so software is – one of the key features of software is the composability, meaning you can take pieces like Lego bricks and you can compose new pieces, and then you can take those pieces and build new pieces. And 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 paragraph, right?

You know, and just like, you know, no one would ever say, you know, you know, when people say things like, you can never build a piece of software that does X, Y, and Z, you know, the smart contract that does it, it'll never work, right? It's, to me, it's sort of equivalent to saying, you could never write a novel that involves, you know, I don't know, a whale and a ship captain, and it's really moving and blah, well, you know, like, really you want to bet that, like,

no human can ever put words together in a certain way to, like, you know, have this emotional effect and this story and this, it's just like, it's such a rich, malleable medium, very much like the English language or something. It's different because you're using, you know, you're using logical components to build other logical components as opposed to maybe like emotional components or something. So I don't want to take the analogy too far. But that composability is such a key feature. And 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 like the best Lego block. awesome. That's why I was so excited. So it's like, you know, it just totally changes what you can build with the Lego blocks, right? So you got this new thing. And you can build, so now you have trust, you can build money, right? And then, okay, so money, that unlocks like a whole bunch of stuff, right? So then you can build finance and lending and also, and that's a whole, like, the whole, right? And then you got like goods, crypto goods we were talking about, and that's going to be a whole tree. That tree is going to get built out of the next two years, or the next two to 10 years. And you got all this, anyway, so you got this, so it's all going to be kind of,

And so I guess it's a long 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. And what I'm excited about is that we got this awesome new Lego block and in a field that's as malleable and as broad and as expansive as, you know, 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 kind of an inside out adoption pattern. And what I mean by that is you're going to see, okay, so like a bunch of people are building lending platforms and Ethereum.

And right now it's going to start off. It's totally crypto. So you're going to lend it. You're going to be able to lend like your ether to the smart contract. And the smart contract will in turn lend it out to other people, right? And it's weird. It's crypto. And, you know, people will say, oh, but it's only for Ethereum.

And I like, that's not for mainstream people. But then, look, you add into stable coins. And I think stable coins will be working. And, you know, you'll have some like scaled out working stable coins in a couple of years. And stable coins, you know, what that means is you've got a crypto asset that's pegged to something like a dollar, right? And so suddenly then you've got, okay, so you combine those two Lego bricks, right? You take lending and you take stable coins.

And suddenly you have dollar lending platforms, right? I mean, so it's not that weird anymore. And then you, you know, you add on a nice iPhone user interface, app interface. And suddenly you have, you know, basically the core function of Citibank replicated, you know, from a crypto network, right? But I think it's going to, when I say inside out, what I mean, it's going to start with, like, crypto people doing it and it'll be like crypto traders. and all this other stuff, and everyone will say, oh, this is a weird thing. But, like, it just takes a few small steps to, like, boom, okay, then you, like, plug this thing in,

and it's a mainstream thing, right? And it's not going to be, like, you're not going to be, it's not going to be, I don't think the way it's going to have, like, crypto bank and, like, everyone's going to go to crypto bank instead of city bank. It'll just become, like, the legacy banks just become less relevant because, like, more and more stuff is going to happen to digital world. You're going to be in your, you know, virtual world, like, you're in the metaverse and buying some virtual goods.

and you just naturally will go and, like, get it from a smart contract through a state, with using a stable coin. Like, why would you go and work with one of these, like, you know, janky user interfaces with the legacy bank and all this other stuff? So it'll just become, you know, it's sort of like, it's very similar to how, if you look at the adoption patterns of, like, Twitter and Facebook, and so it's not like people, like, said, okay, I'm going to, you know, 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 or something.

It's just like, like, and the way it starts, by the way, is like, you know, for years, Twitter and all these other networks were just people, people like, you know, like me and my friends or whatever, and we just like talk about Texas. Twitter used to be a tech chat room or something back when, back in the old days. I kind of miss those those days. But it used to be like a tech chat room. And then over time, you know, you had like kind of more and more mainstream people come on.

And it's just like eventually it just becomes like the other stuff is just becomes kind of like you still go there and it still exists. But it's just not as relevant, right? And so I think that and that's why I call inside out because it's not like you just one day like have a replacement or something like a substitute and everyone just like stops going to the bank and goes to this other bank or something. It's just more that like more and more and more and more inside out meaning it's going to happen more. And I think most of it's going to happen like with crypto native people and this kind of crypto world and you have this kind of alternative crypto kind of economy financial system.

And then, you know, but then there's just like 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. Well, so I do have a question about this because I agree with you at what. probably happens something like that. But I think, you know, 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 kind of wealthier you're going to be in this system. And 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, you know, just by definition, not a top-down system? Yeah. I mean, so first, 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. And I think there'll be plenty of, you know, there's, I think there's going to be a ton of things that will become incredibly valuable. And so there's still, you know, we're still very, very, this is, you know, early days. Although so many people already have become millionaires and billionaires off of crypto. So. Yeah. But I still think it's early days. I don't know. I mean, I don't

I don't know, we're investing as if it's early days and we're, you know, I believe that. Obviously, I'm putting my money where my mouth is. But so I think it's very early days. And so, but I do, like, I think your point is great. We need to, you know, the more we can do to bring more people in. And look, I think it's, 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 a very early days.

So I think if you're, you know, a person looking for a career move or a new thing to work on, you know, you should come, you know, listen to your podcast, listen to our podcast. like don't read the negative stuff, read the positive stuff. I don't know if you, at least I would call ourselves the, you know, we're certainly positive. You know, 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.

And what do you think about kind of the regulatory influence? Because sometimes I look at what that SEC is doing and I totally understand why they're doing it. And yet I do feel like it's also still perpetuating the 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... Yeah. I think, for example, like, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a regulator, but I think this idea that, that, okay, I mean, so let's look at why these rules are there. The rules are there, for good reasons, to protect kind of Main Street investors from, you know, from people that are tricking them out of their money, essentially, right? And that, and if you don't have those rules, that will happen, right? And so you need to

have regulation. And so regulation is important. And I think, The question is, you know, is, for example, with the definition of an accredited investor, is it is 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, right, is you have to go through all the, like, there are certain exemptions where you're allowed to sell. So, for example, when we invest in startups, we're operating through an exemption that says because we're a qualified institute accredited or qualified institution, you know, we can the, we can not go through. all of the kind of onerous stuff that someone would go through like an IPO, right? So like with that, for example, that definition of credit investor, like I think a more modern version, like, okay, I think that if somebody knows is a sophisticated software developer who has spent years studying cryptocurrency, but isn't a millionaire, are they a sophisticated investor and able to make their own decisions? I think so, you know, should there be an alternative way to become an accredited investor, for example, like you can go and take a test or a programming test or, you know, a crypto test or something? Like, I think that would be a great idea. I'm not, I don't control these. rules, but I've had to actually somebody pitch me that or mentioned something like that. Yeah, I mean, I think about, you could imagine more creative ways to decide. I think what you want, look, you do want to avoid this thing where you don't want, you know, you've seen, I've seen

these people like with these Yahoo ads and things like trying to sell some random cryptocurrency none of us ever heard of to some person, you know, this would, this is a bad thing, right? We don't want this. None of us want this. We don't want this in the community. We don't want this ethically, like, and that will happen if you don't have rules. So the, so the, the, the, because the tricky question is, how do you come up with a set of rules that allow sophisticated people who aren't rich to participate in the system while also protecting kind of, you know, quote unquote, but they call mainstream investors, you know, who aren't going to get, you know, kind of tricked by these people. And, you know, I don't have all the answers, but I agree with the

sentiment. But I don't think, but I will say, I don't think the answer is just like the sort of the, what I think some people want to do, which is sort of get rid of all the rules. I think you do need these protections. I think they're very important. I think what we, 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 mainstream investors. I know you're a fan of Carlotta 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 know this is, like I was thinking this is kind of a tough question, but I'm just so curious, do you think that 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? I just sort of unintended consequences here. Yeah, kind of like where we are with the Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, data privacy situation. No, I think that's, look, I, I, you know, I think a lot about the fact that I was, I was involved in the sort of the, you know, the Web 2 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, you know, I mean, frankly, we were maybe, you know, kind of this utopian,

so maybe, maybe in retrospect, somewhat naive view that by creating these giant new information networks, it would have this, you know, awesome democratizing impact. And so, you know, I was hoping it would have this sort of awesome democratizing impact. And, you know, I think it did have a lot of very positive impacts, but I think the idea that, like, now we've ended up with sort of five companies running the internet was not where I wanted to. And so, for example, one obvious, you know, kind of failure mode here is, you know, we end up just creating new kind of giant monopolies that control everything or something. And maybe that's, you know, maybe they're decentralized and there's a few giant, you know, kind of coin holders who own that and end up running things.

And that would certainly wouldn't be a good outcome, right? Yeah, that's where I was going with that other question, too. I mean, that's what we had this. The, you know, you probably know the placeholder folks. They had a, they had a conference where one of the sessions I was part of was what they called recentralization vectors. So, you know, so new ways in which we sort of unintentionally get re-centralized. And how do we make sure this time that this movement, you know, keeps true to the ideals. And so, so I think, I think keeping, you know, keep being aware of where those kind of recentralization vectors could be is an important point. I think that's, to me,

that's an obvious failure mode. 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 this space? Yeah. So putting aside, so I think the UBI thing is a whole separate thing. I think, for example, Brian Armstrong just launched a new charity called Give Crypto, which one of the ideas is there's been a lot of studies around kind of how to sort of provide assistance to people in the developing world. And it turns out, I don't know, intuitively or counterintuitively or whatever,

that just kind of 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 actually inadvertently like 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. And 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. And so, for example, Well, one of the things they're working on, I think it's an exciting idea, is how do you use, you know, this technology to make sure that it goes to the rightful person. And so you can do a whole bunch of interesting things around identity and, you know, 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.

There's a whole, I mean, the whole UBI thing, I think it's also interesting. It's a whole separate can of worms, qualified to talk on. All right. Well, we're going to end on something that. in your podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy he 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, and I mentioned this to you before. You may not remember, but my major was called Modern Thought and 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 could live a good life. So I just wondered, you know, here we've got these new networks that sort of create incentive structures that could incentivize people to do different things. And I wondered if you thought crypto assets couldn't anyway help people live better lives. Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe, you know, actually when we're seeing, there's all these scammers and stuff. But I wondered, you know, what your thoughts were around, like merging those two things. Yeah, no, I think there's definitely, I mean, I think this is very, I mean, so I think, for example, the idea that you could have new.

So, okay, so my assumptions are the inner. is the most important technology of this century or something, and we'll control, and we're already seeing this happen, like politics, economics. So, you know, if you, maybe people, listeners don't agree with me, but I think it's just obviously the case, and that who controls the internet, you know, probably controls all of these other very powerful things in society, right? And how the money flows and a whole bunch of other things. And so, and I think, for example, this should be a golden period for creators. So for writers, you know, like you, for musicians, for all sorts of people. We now have, you know, soon to have almost everyone on Earth with

the 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 that we've constructed the networks that govern the internet today is not doing a good job at that. And so I think this is a chance to try to improve that and more like kind of in a more meritocratic way share information share knowledge share education share money have a better way of you know having a information network that creates better politics not worse politics um i don't think we've succeeded as at that so far we the technology no it's not it's not a good thing and i think i think it's the most important thing this is what

gets me excited about this, frankly, is that I am not excited about, I was not, I mean, you know, the crypto thing, this is why I'm doing the crypto fund, this is why, because I feel like this is a, this has gravitas, this has a, this movement has a chance to do something very important, you know, for the internet, which is such an, which is going to be an increasingly important thing. And, you know, I personally had no interest in like sort of another, whatever, you know, chat app or whatever, like 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 like sound, you know, 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 huge, important topic. And I hope that we can construct new information networks that do a better job than the current ones are doing. 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? Oh, where can they learn more? And your new crypto fund. Yeah, A6CC crypto.com. and so we have a blog post there, and then we've done some podcasts in the past and things like that.

Great. Please check that. All right. Perfect. Well, thanks for coming on Unchained. Okay. Thank you. 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 Zelvie, Fractal recording, Jenny Josephson, Rojoz, Sengenruly, and Daniel Ness. Thanks for listening.