Chris Dixon: From Quant Trading to Building a16z Crypto

21:07Chris Dixon:I mean, for sure. Like, I mean, you can use ChatGPT this way or any of these, you know, generalized foundation models. And they're pretty incredible. Like you can go and, you know, like a lot of what we were doing is like you paste in your, you know, 10 favorite movies. And it tells you what books to buy and what movies to buy and all that kind of stuff. And I think these models today do a pretty phenomenal job at it. And I guess, you know, one of the challenges, actually, I think, I don't do sort of pure AI investing today. But I imagine one of the challenges is it's kind of hard to build a product like this because the generalized foundation models are just so good.

21:41Chris Dixon:In some ways, they sort of subsume all of the specific applications, right? So, I think very much it's possible. But today, I think the challenge is how do you make a product that's better than Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and so forth? Because these generalized models are just so powerful and can do so many different things.

22:03Brian McCullough:Third thing I didn't know about you, that you, in parallel to all this, are helping to start Founder Collective. Yes. Tell me that story because, again, you're still not officially a VC yet. I think you're starting to angel invest around this time. But how did you do Founder Collective?

22:20Chris Dixon:Yeah. So I'll just maybe I'll go back a little bit. So I was one of my angel investors, Ron Conway, who's a legendary Silicon Valley VC and amazing person, a good friend. And he was incredibly helpful to me. And then when I sold my first company, I thought it was what he was doing was interesting, not as a full-time job, but as like kind of a side thing, as a way to kind of, I was just really excited about startups and really excited about and wanted to work with my friends and they were starting companies. And so I started angel investing. So writing a personal check into friends company, I'd literally, I think, wrote my first one like a week after I sold, I didn't have any money before that.

22:55Chris Dixon:But then I sold side advisor. I did. And so I started doing angel investing. And I had basically was doing that for a couple of years and had this, had for a long time wanted to really kind of more aggressively. Okay, a couple of things. Like, one, it was obvious to entrepreneurs at the time that kind of there was a mismatch between what entrepreneurs were doing in the 2000s, which is building, a lot of my friends at least and I were building consumer internet startups, building on top of cloud services like AWS, and being able to kind of get started and going at like$500K or a million dollars, like to build a product, as opposed to the venture market.

23:34Chris Dixon:Like when I was raising money, everyone was saying, well, we just write$10 million checks, right? So you had this venture world that was sort of built for like a different model. Like the 90s was much more CapEx intensive on the internet. And then enterprise companies typically need more money. But you had this rise of consumer startups built on, you know, outsourced cloud hosting. And they just need a lot less money. And so the insight was, shouldn't there be firms kind of set up for that? And I had two friends, Eric Paley and Dave Frankel, who had both been entrepreneurs and both sold their companies.

24:04Chris Dixon:And we were angel investing together. And then they, like at one point, Eric was getting like job offers to work at a VC firm. And we were all sitting around saying, hey, why are you going to work at a VC firm? We've been doing this together. Why don't we start something to do it together? And so then we, so we started this to the three of us started founder collective, which is a, you know, it's a, it's a great firm. It's still going. I left after the first fund, but you know, I'm still good friends with all the folks and they've done a great job. But so we started that and then I, you know, and then, and then we were like, well, do we want to all do it full time?

24:36Chris Dixon:And I was like, look, I really want to do a second startup. So I'll do it part time, work my startup full time and kind of help out. But Dave and Eric went and did it full time. So we started that. We raised money in 2008, I want to say. I think we did the launch announcement in 2009 and invested that first fund from 2009 to 12, roughly, I think. And in retrospect, that was a really good time to do that. And that's because you had the confluence of two things. You had the financial crisis meant that a lot of VC firms kind of stopped investing and very few funds were formed. So you just had not many people doing this.

25:16Chris Dixon:So sort of a lack of supply of kind of that type of venture capital. And then on the tech side, you had the iPhone and the rise of mobile phones, right? So the iPhone was, I think, 2007, the App Store 2008, and kind of the golden age. If you look at like Uber, Snapchat, a bunch of those apps were like 2009 through 11 or something. And so it turned out that was just a really good time to be doing what we were doing. I think we did a pretty good job, but I think a lot of it, honestly, like in retrospect, was just timing. And so we, you know, in that first fund, we had a whole bunch of like kind of really Uber, Venmo.

25:50Chris Dixon:BuzzFeed. Overflow. Yeah, BuzzFeed, Trade Desk. My partner Eric did that, which is now a big public company. So it was just a great, you know, fund. It was a great experience. But yeah, and then I fast forward, ended up joining Andrewson Horowitz and doing kind of bigger scale VC. And they kept, you know, growing, growing, trying to collect it.

26:07Brian McCullough:Hey, everybody, this is Brian cutting in here real quick. If you like the deep dives into tech history that I do on this show, you should know about my day jobs. First of all, I'm the host of the Tech Brew Ride Home podcast, part of the Morning Brew family. Every day in 15 minutes on that show, I tell you what happened that day in the world of tech. For almost a decade, it's like I'm telling you the tech history that is happening in real time. I'd love you to check it out because that show allows me to do this show. Search Tech Brew Ride Home and your podcast app of choice. But also, I have a rolling fund, the Ride Home Fund.

26:44Brian McCullough:We invest in early stage startups, have made dozens and dozens of investments over the years. So if you're an accredited investor, you can invest alongside me in the companies making the tech history of the future. You can find out more and sign up to invest alongside me at ridehomefund.com. Before we get to Andreessen, let me ask you something I've never asked people before, but you just incepted this question. Because now, like, pre-seed and seed is like a whole category of funds and things like that. So angel investing from former operators, you know, people that have made their money from a former startup or something like that.

27:27Brian McCullough:Do you feel like that there are waves where it is a good time to invest in your friends? Or is it always like the tide coming in? It's always going to come in because you're always on the – you've just had success and you kind of have sort of the idea of what the next wave is going to be. What I'm asking is, for operators out there, people that have had success, is it always a good idea to angel invest with that first success or not?

28:00Chris Dixon:You know, financially, I don't know if I want to advise anyone to angel invest. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very risky, and I'm not sure. I think you have to do it because, I mean, for me, a lot of it was honestly just because I enjoyed it. And it was sort of a way, like if you're a sports fan, I'm not a sports fan, but if you're like a startup fan, So it's like a way to kind of be a fan and like support. Or it's a social thing. It's your friends. It's a social thing. Yeah, social. You know, you may or may not be successful. Honestly, I think it's a very risky thing. You should certainly consider it like your risk capital bucket, not your life savings.

28:32Chris Dixon:So I don't want to advise it. But for me, a lot of it, and by the way, I still do that. Like if a friend's doing something, I want to support them in some way. And it's, you know, whether it's a startup or a fund or something else, right? It's the same mentality. And I do think that the kind of the one consistent thread in all of this is ultimately all of these things are talent businesses. And so if you know somebody well and have faith in them, you know, I've always believed that's a good thing to bet on. And, you know, so that as opposed to like having putting your finger in the wind and trying to predict, you know, exactly what's going to happen tech wise.

29:05Chris Dixon:My philosophy and this is I learned, like I mentioned Ron Conway, I learned a lot of it from him. He's just very, very people focused. in fact when I started SiteAdvisor I remember he liked me I think but then he introduced me to a bunch of security experts and I believe they all gave negative feedback and yet he still invested and I remember asking him and he's like well I just had faith in you and I just didn't you know he just doesn't think about the trends that much which is kind of you know there's some really there's wisdom in that because the tech the trends shift so much in tech it's very hard to know like the people are much more consistent so I would say with respect to the angel investing.

29:41Chris Dixon:I mean, it's become a much more, like back then there were maybe, there were some other funds started around Founder Collective. It was like lowercase and baseline and the first round had been around a couple of years. I think Betaworks, you know, obviously involved in the history of New York kind of anniversary thing. So there were others, but it was relatively small. I mean, it was, we all knew each other. In fact, we were all often co-investors in each other's funds. And it was just a very small group. And like you said, it was kind of a social club. It was like an investing club or something.

30:18Chris Dixon:And we'd often like work together and collaborate. And it's just a different thing. Now it's much, there's many, many more. It's much more institutionalized. That said, also the tech world is much more successful and there's many more successful to companies. So maybe it all balances out.

30:32Brian McCullough:All right, let's take it to Andreessen Horowitz. First of all, they recruited you?

30:38Chris Dixon:uh yeah i mean i mean i they i think uh someone at the firm reached out and i knew them i had in fact i without ever really having met them i had actually blogged about them as like an exciting new or i had mentioned them in a blog post about sort of exciting let me interrupt yeah why do you think they wanted to recruit you uh you know good question um i think initially it was you know probably a scouting mission. And then I went out and spent a lot of time with like Mark and Ben. You know, I think it was more of a probe or something. Hey, you want to have a conversation? And then I went out to, I was in New York, I went out to California and spent a bunch of time.

31:18Chris Dixon:And, you know, I think they were, so they started the firm in 2009. And at the time I joined, there were only a couple of investing partners and there's only one fund. Now we have sort of this complex of funds. And, you know, I think they were, I think they were probably looking, I was, you know, reasonably prominent sort of angel investor, blogger. They were probably, you know, looking at people that had some, had been doing it for some period of time. I mean, I don't know exactly why. But I think in the end, we just sort of hit it off. And specifically, I think my mind, I was like, hey, angel investing is fun.

31:52Chris Dixon:Like I sold my second company. I was like, look, I don't know if I can do another startup. It's just so taxing, personally stressful. And, you know, in this business, it's sort of a player-coach thing. You're either a player like an entrepreneur or you move on to coaching. I was like, it's time to move on to coaching. And then I was sort of, okay, I could do kind of smaller time investing. But, you know, at the time, you're in New York. You always feel like you're a little bit in the minor leagues. California's the big leagues. And then just the size of the checks. Like, I was like, okay, I think something that kind of bothered me.

32:18Chris Dixon:I was like, look, maybe I can make money doing this. But am I really having impact? Like, am I really, does it really matter that I'm doing this? Am I just sort of tagging along? And so what was appealing to me was the idea that you could go and like actually have impact. So one of the conversations I had with them was I was like, look, if I do this, I want to like do a bunch of like really kind of more out there futuristic things and like and potentially really risky things like, you know, big checks into kind of big new things, which we can jump forward to. But like in my first year, 2013, I think I did that.

32:51Chris Dixon:Maybe in some cases well, in some cases not. But that was sort of the appeal to me was the idea of kind of doing, trying that out in California at kind of the cutting edge and particularly kind of leaning into the more futuristic things. Yes.

33:07Brian McCullough:That was going to be my next question. So, you know, you're famous, and I quote you in my book is for the quote that the next big thing often starts out looking like a toy. So like you're famous for like, being into investing in things that seem like sci fi out there. So like, what's your framework for evaluating weird ideas that you're like, well, this isn't going to look so weird if it's right a decade on?

33:38Chris Dixon:Yeah. So I mean, first of all, this is like not a framework, but I actually just like the things and I use them. Like, this is what I do. Like, I like these things and I use them and I buy. Even today, I don't do hardware investing. I buy every new hardware device. I'm always using them. I'm playing with them. Just an example. Like, you know, I like all the AI stuff and I use it and I still like program a little bit and use the tools and mess with them. And I just think it's neat. I don't know. I've always liked technology. So part of it is that, that I think I actually do like it and use it. But part of it is, I guess I sort of have developed over the years kind of a framework, which I think of as sort of, as you said, the next big thing starts as a toy.

34:17Chris Dixon:but also this idea that sort of a lot of interesting things start with kind of cults and niche movements of smart people that are excited by things. And so I used to spend a lot of time on various like technology subreddits. And like, you know, I was into like biohacking and 3D printing and VR. And, you know, I would like fund all these little Kickstarter things and buy them and like see what's going on. And, you know, I don't know. So I was into this stuff. Right. And so the first year I was at the firm, I did a whole bunch of, I made a drone investment, 3D printing investment, a few crypto investments, a Bitcoin mining company, Coinbase was another one I did that year, a VR Oculus that year.

35:02Chris Dixon:What else? A couple of AI things over the years. you know so a whole kind of range of and each of those i think was like the kind of hypothesis was like crypto early on was relatively niche movement but they were like all these really smart people i knew were really into it and they had all these interesting theories and i would spend it was sort of these rabbit holes you go down and that the more you learn i always find it's interesting like certain rabbit holes i find the more you go you know flat earth people i'm just making it up and picking on the easy target but like you go down the flat earth rabbit hole i did that once it's not that interesting like do they actually believe the earth is flat like it's kind of silly right um you go down the bitcoin rabbit hole in 2013 it's pretty interesting there's all these smart people the technology is interesting you know there's a lot of like interesting computer scientists and economists and you know and and i got sort of really kind of sucked into that and all the anything about all the possibility where could this go and how could it evolve um and could it be more than a kind of niche kind of cryptocurrency could it be a payment system?

36:00Chris Dixon:Could it be this or that? Could you abstract parts of it and build other architectures? VR, you know, early VR was, you know, a lot of this stuff too, you kind of project it out. Like early VR, like the, you know, the graphics weren't very good and the ergonomics were bad and this and that. But, you know, you could imagine sort of Moore's law taking hold and all those things getting better and application developers coming on and where would it go, right? And I particularly think that's sort of one of the interesting things in computing, right as you have this interplay between the technology and the creative side of what you do with the technology like the applications and the infrastructure and the two like with the internet that was one of the fun things to watch it evolve the internet would get better and faster and more performing you know better bandwidth and mobile phones and so forth but then you had all these creative people building new applications like social media and youtube and just like and so it's just really kind of fun and creative and you just like you know i would just sit around for hours as an angel investor, as a VC, talking to friends, talking about the possibilities, getting excited about it.

36:57Chris Dixon:And then, and then trying to find kind of the way I would invest back then, sort of find the best in each of these rabbit holes. Like who are the smartest teams with the best products in those rabbit holes and try to make an investment. So that was the appeal to me of joining the firm, being able to do that. I did, I was able to do that. It was great. And, and, and yeah, and I just got involved with a bunch of exciting kind of projects And, you know, like all venture capital, the majority of them did not work. And that from the outside venture capital might seem like, oh, you make some investments, do this.

37:29Chris Dixon:The reality is you're spending a lot of time dealing with the things that don't work and, you know, the drama around that and the financial challenges and human challenges. So while on the one hand, it was exciting to do that, on the other hand, you know, that's just the reality of that job. This job is that you do a lot of that. And then, yeah, so did that until I eventually in 2015 or so decided to kind of really focus on one of those rabbit holes, the kind of crypto rabbit hole.

37:56Brian McCullough:Before we get to A16Z crypto, indulge me by telling two stories of companies you just mentioned. Tell me how you got conviction on Oculus.

38:08Chris Dixon:yeah so i had met uh like palmer and brendan brendan's the ceo um in i think early 2013 oh i i well i'd first seen them on kickstarter um and uh and then there was a sort of viral john carmack video that went around the internet john carmack the legendary programmer um was talking about how like vr might happen and of course if you're into technology and sci-fi like VR has been around as an idea. It's always going to happen.

38:36Brian McCullough:Yeah, it's the product.

38:37Chris Dixon:So it was like always around the corner, but never did. But then these sort of this Carmack video and you tried it out and like maybe now's the time. Like maybe this stuff has got, you know, and the kind of the insight partly was that mobile phones made it possible because you now have these screens that were cheap and high quality and processors in a lot of ways. In fact, some of the early products were literally phones you put on your face, right? And so, so sorry to get to know them. But I think it was, you know, over the course of the year, you know, and there's a whole kind of dance you play in venture capital of like you may want to invest in somebody, but you don't get the opportunity to.

39:08Chris Dixon:Eventually did by the end of the year in November, I think. But, you know, one of the big insights was I just, you know, if you're – I was out meeting with people doing VR and everyone was – every meeting you have, they're talking about how they're building something for Oculus. Oculus, Oculus. And you just sort of, you know, this is one of the things I've learned in this business is you just need to go and go talk to a lot of smart people. And when you do that, you start to hear common patterns and you start to hear about the companies they respect. And like everyone, this was clearly the center of gravity in this little growing universe.

39:44Chris Dixon:Whether that universe would be real or not was another question, but it was clearly like the, you know, they had kind of harnessed that energy. And so it felt like a, you know, an exciting place to be. Now, that said, I mean, it's one thing to have a theory. It's another thing to, like, make. It's a hardware company, and they have to, like, manage supply chain and inventory and all these other things. And it was a – the round we led was a$75 million round, which today you see that, you know, three times a day on Twitter, rounds like that. But back then, it was actually, like, a big, unusually big venture capital round.

40:13So that was that.

40:16Chris Dixon:What was the other one you asked? Sorry, the – The second one would be Coinbase. Coinbase was similar in that I'd met them early. they were in Y Combinator. And what often happens back then, at least, was Y Combinator. You know, we'd sort of go and meet all the interesting companies there. I think in the early part of the year, I met Fred and Brian. And I spent a lot of that year meeting like a lot of crypto companies. The big challenge then, like Bitcoin in 2013, Bitcoin itself was just sort of a bad word in the sense of like, people thought it was only used for, you know, like crime or something.

40:48And so, in fact,

40:50Chris Dixon:it was one of the things we wanted to do with the firm was to buy Bitcoin but all the lawyers like fought against it really hard and things. We eventually figured it out. But like that was like a big thing in Southern Valley is even the people that wanted to buy Bitcoin, it was like really hard to do. And then a lot of the teams we met were kind of came out of this kind of libertarian ethos of the early crypto world that were like, we don't need to be regulated. We don't need to follow rules. That's not how we felt. We felt like, look, this is interesting, but it needs to be, you know, needs to be regulated.

41:19There need to be guardrails around it.

41:23Chris Dixon:And so with Fred and Brian, they were the first team we met who were really kind of Silicon Valley, true technologists, wanted to build great products and wanted to take the regulation side seriously. Like we invested, there were eight employees, I think. And one of the like the eighth employee they hired was, I think, a senior compliance person from PayPal. That was a very important signal to us. So anyway, so that was all. And then it took a long time. We used to go over there. They were working out of an apartment. I used to go over there for dinner and we'd sit around and talk about crypto stuff.

41:52Chris Dixon:And I think they liked the fact that I had then invested in this, my friend Balaji Srinivasan, he had a Bitcoin mining company, which we let a$25 million investment in. And they were like, wow, this is like, I think that was maybe the first Silicon Valley VC investment in a crypto thing. And they were like, you're actually, you know, taking it seriously. You seem to really believe in it. So I think hopefully that kind of helped convince them that we were good people to work with. And then eventually, I think also in November, we around the same time as Oculus figured out a way to make an investment.

42:22Brian McCullough:I want to thank you because I first bought Bitcoin when I learned that A16Z had invested in Coinbase. So I appreciate that. But OK, I also have heard over the years that you were one of the key people inside Andreessen Horowitz that was pushing. we need to do a crypto fund. So if that is true, can you tell me the story of how hard that was either internally or with the lawyers, as you're saying, to say we need to do a fund to do this?

42:56Chris Dixon:Yeah, no, I was for sure. I mean, I was the one who started the crypto fund. So I started doing full-time crypto, I think in 2015, but at the time we didn't have a crypto fund. So I did it out of what we call the main fund. And so I started just making kind of crypto investments. The big difference with crypto, is that you're not generally what you want to eventually own are these digital assets, these tokens. And that's very different for a whole bunch of reasons. You have to custody them. You may have to buy and potentially sell them. You have to have a different kind of compliance regime. There's a whole regulatory regime in Dodd-Frank, the kind of the major governing regulatory framework of the financial services industry that exempts venture capital firms from some of the regulations.

43:43Chris Dixon:When you own crypto assets, you're no longer classified as a venture capital firm. You have to register to call an RIA instead, which is a much heavier compliance burden. In addition to the legal things, the LPs, meaning our investors, at the time were not familiar with these assets and they would get these financial statements and they'd say, what is this Bitcoin and other things on there? And they would have questions. a whole bunch of like so like a whole bunch of reasons why it was kind of complicated to do and so the idea was let's start a new fund from scratch that has a you know opt-in set of lps investors we go to the investors and we say here's what we're doing do you want to opt into it so like you understand what you're getting into and then also where we started from day one to have all of these kinds of capabilities to custody and trade and have compliance and all these other kinds of things you need to do and be an RIA, which at the time the firm was not the firm is today, but an RIA and you have to be audited and do all these other things by the SEC and you're overseeing.

44:50And so, and you have to have like a trading internal policies and just all these

44:56Chris Dixon:kind of complicated things. So that was the question. And then finally in 2017, I decided to do it. I think we announced it in 2018. And actually, we're like a whole separate set of entities. And yeah, so I was the one who spun that out and had been running that, you know, that we're now on our fourth fund, but have been running that since then. So yeah, and like a big part is part of the legal. Also, like I mentioned, like the LPs, the employees, like it's just, I just find if something's different, it's good to get everybody who's involved to opt into and not to feel like they're kind of being, you know, corralled into it, right?

45:29Chris Dixon:So like specifically, like with the LPs, this is like our investors, right? Our universities endowments. Um, I went out with a partner of mine and, uh, uh, talked to, I think 60 investors and these were like, you know, two hour meetings. It was a real thing for like four weeks. Um, and basically gave them kind of two pitches. So gave them a pitch as to why I thought this would be a good thing to invest in and then gave them an anti-pitch as to all the things that could go wrong and why they might not want to invest. And just was trying to be kind of fully transparent and say, you know, we want, we hope to get some subset of our investors to opt in.

46:04Chris Dixon:And, but we want the ones who opt in to like know what they're getting into and, you know, know that it's going to be, could be much more volatile and risky than even venture capital, which itself is already volatile and risky. And so we did that. And like kind of, I hoped and expected, we got a subset of the LPs to opt in. And, you know, that was a good thing because they've since then been sort of happy with that and feel like they got what they expected. And then went and recruited a whole new team of people that were also employees who were true believers. And that was important because that kind of creates the culture of the firm because we're really kind of creating a new.

46:40Chris Dixon:And this was also at the beginning. The firm as a whole has since kind of what we call verticalized. So there's a crypto fund, a bio fund, a growth fund, infrastructure, AI infrastructure, AI apps, and American Dynamism are the different groups. And each one kind of runs as a somewhat autonomous set. But this – at the time, we were the first one to do that. And so we were kind of building in some sense within the broader firm a new kind of entity within it. And so that was a whole set of interesting kind of challenges. I think in the end has worked out well. But, you know, it's a process to get there.

47:15Brian McCullough:uh we're running out of time i gotta get you out of here in a second so i'm gonna skip ahead to we last spoke when your book came out read write own um that was last year so before the current regulatory regime um so this is my only question for contemporary stuff um what how are you feeling about the the environment for your thesis on web 3 and crypto um in the current environment

47:45Chris Dixon:Yeah, I mean, so like for those interested, I, you know, as you mentioned, I wrote a book, Read Right On. And my long term, I think it's a long term thesis. My long term thesis is that what ultimately the value of blockchains is it's they allow you to build new networks that have new that have different implications in terms of the benefits to users and and network participants. Specifically, the argument I make in the book is that they have kind of the what I would call societal benefits of the early Internet networks, what I call protocol networks like the web and email. But a lot of the kind of modern affordances and competitive advantages of what I call corporate networks, which are things like, you know, Facebook and YouTube.

48:27Chris Dixon:And so it's fundamentally about a new way to build networks. We, I think, had a lot of, I mean, clearly had a lot of challenges the last couple of years, particularly around regulation. And I think as a result of that, my view generally is that unclear, ambiguous regulation, which is what we have, it both makes it harder for good actors, good entrepreneurs to know what to do, but also emboldens bad actors. And so we had a lot of scammers, you know, most prominently FTX and a lot of other damage to the industry. What I've worked very hard on for the last four years is working in D.C. to kind of get this fixed and cleared up.

49:11Chris Dixon:And very importantly, we got a bill passed recently that's called Genius that relates to stable coins, which now provides a federal regulatory framework for stable coins. And as a result, and for those who follow it will know, there's been a wave of innovation in that space. And we've also cleaned up a lot of the, I think all of the bad behavior essentially. And we're now in the process of trying to get a second piece of legislation passed called market structure, which will do that for the rest of the industry. So overall, I think it's, we were slowed down a lot by this, but I think things are kind of back on track and I'm long-term optimistic.

49:46Chris Dixon:And we're seeing like, we just put out a state of crypto report last week, which is our annual report on kind of the whole industry. Love it. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of really good trends of like real use cases, particularly around stable coins. Stable coins are now, you know, they've now, the volume surpassed Visa as a network. And it's very importantly uncorrelated with trading volume. Like it's not just people using kind of crypto for trading. It's real use cases.

50:09Brian McCullough:It's the actual infrastructure of money, sort of the original concept.

50:13Chris Dixon:Yes. It is. It's kind of come all around full circle. And particularly in like developing countries, you see a lot of people using this as a payment system, as a way to access dollars. You see big companies like Stripe and Visa just today. Western Union made a big announcement. You know, you pay 10 % on remittances right now a lot of times, sending money to another country. And this gets it down to basically zero. So there's a whole bunch of interesting benefits. And so I think it's been – we've had setbacks and it's been slower than I like. But I do feel like it's now getting back on track to the original vision.

50:43Chris Dixon:And we're hopefully cleaning up a lot of the kind of scammy behavior, which is what I – you know, which has really held things back and harmed consumers. And now kind of refocusing a lot of the energy on kind of constructive use cases. So, you know, it's been, I mean, look, I was talking earlier about AI. Like, I think that, you know, the original neural network paper, I think, was 1943. Alan Turing's famous test, 1950. I started my company in 2008. It really didn't hit until, I think, what was it, 2021 or 2022 when Shad's BT came out. So, sometimes my experience with these things is they do can take longer.

51:20Chris Dixon:But that, you know, I believe that eventually we'll get there in crypto the way that we have in AI. And I'm just, you know, I like working on things that I feel like I actually matter in it. Like I think if I were, if you're working on AI today, it's very hard outside of maybe a few people to be, it's such a big industry and so we can be working on it. Whereas this is an industry where I feel like if there weren't, you know, a handful of people who have stayed the course and worked hard on policy issues and things that the whole industry kind of kind of gone off course. And so I feel like, you know, it's a role is something where I can actually contribute and and try to kind of keep it on course.

51:59Chris Dixon:So I'm, you know, I'm enjoying doing that. And I think I think I think we're making good progress.

52:05Brian McCullough:Final two questions. First one is you've worked with Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz for the better part of 15 years right now. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from working with the two of them?

52:19Chris Dixon:Yeah, I've learned a lot from them. I mean, I learned, I mean, I've, you know, for years sat in meetings with them and got their advice on startups and entrepreneurship and markets and, I don't know, life. So I've just learned a ton from them on all of those things. You know, they have had a front row seat, Mark, you know, especially obviously since the beginning. Your book talks a lot about that. Great book, by the way. I recommend it to all of our employees and Ben also along with him. And so, you know, they just have seen so many interesting things. And so just a lot of it's in the details.

52:52Chris Dixon:You know, I think a lot of it too, I just, I think they do and our firm tries to do just set the example for what really, you know, like high integrity, first class business, you know, hard work, um, kind of excellence. Like I just, I, a lot of, I think, you know, I, I find a lot of the great thing about working with great people is just being able to see, you know, kind of what that looks like and setting the bar high. And, um, I don't know, I've just been, it felt like it's a privilege to work with all, to work at this firm and all with all these people that are, that are so good and people on our team.

53:27So it's hard to summarize.

53:29Chris Dixon:I mean, it's really a game. It's a business of specifics of a million nuances. It's hard to maybe summarize. What else? I don't know. It's hard. Yeah, I don't

53:41Brian McCullough:know of a single lesson. No worries. All right. This one maybe is easier. Final one. You've straddled, originally you were in New York City. You've straddled the coast. What makes New York City different as a tech hub, as a startup ecosystem than any other place, including the Valley?

54:05Chris Dixon:Yeah, I've always loved New York. I grew up in Ohio and then moved to New York for college and have spent most of my adult life in New York. I still have a place here. I'm in New York right now. I come here a lot. I love New York. I don't think there's any city, certainly in the country, that's like New York in the sense that you have just, you know, such a dynamic city, so many different industries, so many intersecting cultures. I found it, I've always found it to be such an exciting dynamic city. It's a, you know, you've got the financial industry, you've now got the significant tech industry, you've got the creative industry, you know, the creative world.

54:40Chris Dixon:Crypto and AI are very big. It's international. I, you know, like it's a, you know, I just, you know, today walk downtown, walk to the office and back and like just all the interesting things you see, the dynamism, the excitement, you know, it's a magnet for talent. San Francisco is great too. Like San Francisco is the heart of AI right now and sort of the deep tech side of things. And it's very hard to match in that way. San Francisco, you know, it's very much though an industry, right? You go there and it's very hard to kind of escape that. I do think that the kind of confluence of all these different industries and cultures makes for a real strength in New York.

55:19Chris Dixon:Um, and, and just the kind of, you know, the kind of creativity and dynamism, I guess I would say. Um, and I think it's natural that New York would be the kind of the other hub. I think if you're closer to an industry, like if you're doing something, application in AI for finance, for creative industry, there's a lot of reasons to be in New York. Maybe if you're doing kind of hardcore foundation models, you might want to be in San Francisco. I don't know, but I think there's a, there's a, there's an obvious argument for New York being the application town. You know, it's where the customers are.

55:49Chris Dixon:It's where the users are. It's much closer to kind of, you know, you get a much broader cross section of behaviors. People love to move here. It's very easy to recruit. I have my experience having, you know, two of my companies based here. It was very easy to recruit, you know, students out of technical universities and things to come to New York. They all want to come here. It continues to be a magnet. It was really depressing. I was here for part of COVID and just seeing it, you know, at that state. And I'm very excited to see how it's bounced back. It feels to me, having been here, I don't know, 25 years on and on, most of the time, you know, like more vibrant than ever maybe.

56:27Chris Dixon:And it's great to see the tech industry particularly. You know, it was always sort of this, had this sort of insecurity complex, you know, kind of, it was always trying to measure up to the Bay Area and things. It's not, you know, it's still, I don't think it's still at the scale Bay Area, but it's certainly a very real and kind of escape velocity tech community now. And I think a clear, and crypto, it's the number one. It's not even a question. It's the number one in the world. That's where our crypto firm headquarters are, as the majority of our companies are. and it's great. We have a lot of political support to try to make it the world headquarters of that if we get the right regulation.

57:06Chris Dixon:I think it clearly will be and then I think in every other area of tech it's a very serious probably number two in some areas and number one in others.

57:18Brian McCullough:You know, for this project I just interviewed Clem from Hugging Face and he said the key thing for him for New York City was the talent. It's easier to get talent to move to New York City. So it's interesting.

57:32Chris Dixon:I mean, it's been on since, you know, forever, right? I mean, it's just like, if you're an ambitious person who is social and wants to explore the world or something, I don't think there's a better place to come. I don't know. I came here and a lot of my friends came here and I've spent years recruiting people here and they always seem to want to come here. We actually had a bunch of folks when we post COVID, we just said you could be in either New York or SF. And I was surprised the number of like people who are lifetime Bay Area moved to New York and loved it. I mean, they love walking to work.

58:02They love the culture, you know, just the, like I

58:05Chris Dixon:said, I think the fact that there's different, there's so many different industries and variety of people, um, makes it, makes it so appealing. So,

58:13Brian McCullough:uh, Chris, thanks for coming on again to talk to me about all this. I love it. Great. Thank you, Brian. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

58:49Brian McCullough:This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy. Thank you.