20VC: a16z's Chris Dixon on Who Will Win the Next Generation of Venture, The Two Ways to Make Great Venture Investments and Find the Best Entrepreneurs & Why AI Will Strengthen the Position of the Incumbents Moving Forward

22:38The timing is a question, as it was, where they are and other things. But you can do a lot of work to try to understand the timing too. Speaking of the timing and moving more to crypto specifically, you said to me before that big tech is stifling the internet, but blockchain networks can break the stranglehold. Again, moving to very much today and to the crypto space, why is Big Tech for a strongly in the internet just so we have an element of causation? You know, in my book, in Read Write -On, I go through in the first couple of chapters. I sort of think of the book as split between on the first half, diagnosing what happened.

23:12So how did the internet go from an open and democratic controlled system in the 90s to the internet that's essentially controlled by five companies today? The big five companies have 95 % 5 % plus of the traffic and the money and AI is exciting as it is Well, we'll very likely accelerate that consolidation because it rewards companies with large stores of data at capital And so you know, why did that happen? I go through in detail and my argument is you know We started off with the internet as a network of networks So like there's the base layer the internet protocol that connects hardware and then we build networks on top and the 90's The dominant networks were email in the web which are what I call protocol networks people call them protocols they are networks that are more like, you know, they're standards among a community and the network effects, which is don't accrue to a company, they accrue to the community.

23:58And then in the 2000s, there were a lot of great things that happened including kind of the democratization of the internet that went from a couple hundred million to five billion people, people got lots of great services. But in that process, we adopted internet services that had a different architecture that were controlled by companies and not by communities. And that sort of seemed fine in the 2000s and even the early 2010s when those companies acted in very open ways and supported, allowed for creators and software developers and entrepreneurs, double businesses on top of them, but they've since changed the way they're doing that.

24:28And that's why, look at Consumer Internet investing today. There's very few successful consumer Internet companies the last 10 years. That's because you have this sort of chokehold with these five companies. My argument then is that what blockchains let you do is create a new way of Internet services, which have the societal benefits of those early protocol networks. but a lot of sort of what I say is called the competitive advantages, sort of the advanced functionality, the ability to do a lot of financial things that make them competitive with these corporate networks. Well does that look like in reality Chris?

24:58So just to take it down to a more human level, what does that actually look like in reality for these networks? So for example, I'll just give you an example. We have a, it's a blockchain -based social network called Forecaster, is it where investors are in? In Forecaster, you can download it and use it, Scuttlecub 100 ,000 active users today, it will feel a lot like a Twitter or something. You know, it's the user experience, everything else. The difference is that on Twitter, when I have C -Dixon and I have an audience, that's controlled by Twitter. And they can change the algorithm, they can change the economics, they can change the rules, they can remove me from the platform.

25:32On Forecaster, I control my name and I control my audience. Much more of the way, like with an email list, like you think about you, you know, you have your email list on Substack, you own that list. If you have a sub stack messes with you, you can switch to another provider. That's how Farcaster works. There's many farcasters, the protocol, and there's many different clients. It provides the advanced functionality of social network that you want and all the features, but it pushes control to the users. They can choose different software providers. That's just one example. We have dozens in our portfolio of new services where the functionality is very advanced and modern, but it has different economic and control properties because using blockchain shifts power to the edges of the network that users, the creators, and the software developers.

26:14Chris, you're a student of history and you mentioned the power of incumbents there. I've never been more worried about the size of incumbents. As we mentioned, the size of their data is enormous. The free cash flows of their businesses is enormous. Having incumbents ever been this dangerously large. And is it not too big to use up some with a far -caster, where or at high of MAPA, or you know many of your innovations, given the free cash flow machines that these businesses have? So I have a chapter for those interested in the book. It's called Community Creative Software, where I kind of walk through this.

26:47But if you look at the history of the technology industry, the competition has moved to different layers of the stack. So, you know, prior to Microsoft, the business of computing with Cecil Hardware, companies like IBM, would sell mainframe computers, they'd bundle it with software and services, but the business was hardware. The contrairing, innovative idea of Bill Gates was that software would be the next layer of value. And that was the idea behind Microsoft, and it turned out to be correct. And so they had very high cash flows, very high margins, and essentially began to commoditize the hardware layer.

27:16You didn't care if you got Compact or Dell as long as you had Windows and Office. And then what happened was open -source software came along, particularly Linux, fast forward today by far the dominant operating system in the world. And it turned out that sort of a rag tag group of people could create a better operating system than this giant high -cashable company. The rise of open source software I think is a very underappreciated thing. Every Android phone is running open source software, a lot of your Apple computers running it, and certainly every backend system runs all open source stacks, all the new devices do.

27:49This was a movement that was crazy left -wing political movement in the 80s and then dismissed in the 90s. Go read, was it 98, was the DOJ case having a mic against Microsoft? Go read the documents, like Linux doesn't occur. It's all about Sun and Java, and yet that was when Linux was growing. And so I think that there's a famous essay from the 90s Eric Raymond, the Cathedral in the Bazaar, and he talks about these sort of different ways to make software. Like one is the Cathedral is Microsoft, it's this Cathedral, the product managers of the priests, they speak in secret incantations, and then the Bazaar is this Cacophonous marketplace of brilliant people and crazy people and all the sort of things you get with the internet and humanity.

28:27But in the end, his prediction and he was right is that the bizarre would win because you would have, as Bill Joy famously said, the co -founder of Sun, no matter how many smart people you have working for you, most of the smart people work for somebody else. How many people at these big cash flow companies actually work on cutting -edge new products? All right. I mean, Google has 300 ,000 employees or something. The vast majority are doing customer service product management, they're maintaining old products, they're doing bureaucratic, you know, power points, arguing over politics, I don't know what they do.

28:56But like, I bet you there's a thousand people that are really doing cutting -edge new products for as big as these companies are. And you know, there's that many people working on Ethereum that are very, very smart and they have people from all over the world. Blockchains are to centralized services as open source software was to centralized operating systems. Sorry, that's what we're doing here. We're trying to open the services layer of the internet. Historically, this pendulum has swung back and forth between the cathedral and the Bazaar, and I think there's a lot of pent -up energy to support the Bazaar.

29:26And I can't predict the future. You may be right. Maybe it's too late. Maybe it's over. I think that there's a lot of strong forces that will ultimately support a more community -built internet services layer than we have today. Can I ask, what do you think is the biggest challenge to the National Generation Community Built Services layer that we both want to see? What are the biggest barriers that the community -led net generation has to break to enable or to be what it could be? I think there's two things. In the book I talk about what I call a computer in the casino. And so this idea is that around blockchains there are two communities that are developed.

30:00The casino is a set of folks who are more interested in kind of the trading and gambling aspects of meme coins. And to me this is where FTX and Luna and a bunch of these catastrophes kind of came out of that community. And the computer is people who like me view blockchains as a computing movement. I was just a De -tenver. Ethereum has these series of community organised conferences. You go there and it's awesome. It's like early Linux days, thousands of nerds talking about computing and stuff like I love it. And that world is kind of ignored, I think most people that think about the blockchain world don't realise that exists, how big it is and how lively it is.

30:35That's the world I'm part of. That's what we invest in. I think of it as there's the blockchain as a computer movement. And then we're on the one side, we have people that are I think co -opting that movement for this kind of casino activities. And on the other side, we have mainstream world, the policymakers, media, the establishment, all these forces that are against us, the big banks, hey crypto, the big tech companies, hey crypto, media seems to hey crypto, certain elements of the government seem to hey crypto. So we've got that on one side and we've got these kind of co -opters on the other side.

31:03So, and I think what's going on is that the reason those people don't like it is they see the casino side and they don't understand that there's two sides to it and that in an ideal world what we would do is come up with policy prescriptions and this is what we've been calling for for years long before FTX we've had stuff on our website we've been you know advocating for is policy that encourages the innovative use cases and discourages the harmful use cases right in an ideal world you that's what you'd have is you'd have something that sort of rains in the speculation the casino stuff but allows somebody to when they're building a new social network using blockchains to have a path to be compliant.

31:38Instead, what we have today is actually the opposite, which is we actually have a regulatory system, which, so just to give you an example, you can creating a meme coin. You know, a meme coin is just an utterly stupid token that has no purpose by design. You can create a meme coin, you can own 10 % of it, you can dump it, and get rich. And as long as you don't manipulate the markets and things like this, basically that's legal. If you then take that meme coin and try to build something useful, like a game or a financial service, that's when you get tripped up with regulators today. So we have a system now that literally encourages the casino behavior and discourages the productive use cases.

32:11So you ask me what the biggest challenge is, that's the biggest challenge. We have this harmful community in one side. It is if we had an AI policy that allowed you to create dangerous bio -weapons, but didn't let you create customer service chatbots. Like it's just opposite land of what we should be doing. I asked from here in position, why does everyone throw the accusation and then against Andries and crypto for pump and dump. It's just factually incorrect. I don't know where they get their ledges facts. So first of all, all of our funds are 10 -year venture funds. Throughout the lifetime of the crypto funds, we today hold 94 % of our investments.

32:44And not only that, the length of the lockup in some ways is limited by the market. So we've been advocates, in other words, if we go too far, the entrepreneurship will work with us, we've been advocating for a long time for regulatory guardrails that make longer lockups. I don't understand where this comes from. You don't have to believe that we're good people or something, but just look at all the charts, look at the history of venture capital, like selling your winners is the worst possible strategy, and the things that aren't winners don't move the needle on funds. Like, it's just not how venture capital works.

33:12There's a J -curve, and that holding things for a long time is always, if it's a growing market that's growing in value, which crypto has, is always a good strategy. So, yeah, I don't know. That's just misinformation. Can I also mention that, that kind of casino like culture? and you mention the word speculation. Inspeculation bad, always. Can it not be an in -road for interest? Look, I don't think speculation's always bad, so the housing market. To me, the point of a blockchain is to enable digital ownership. Like an NFT is a digital object, and it can represent a name and a social network that can represent a game, an object and a video game.

33:47It can represent a piece of art. It can represent whatever the creator wants to represent. Similar to the offline world, like I think we'd all agree that home ownership has a positive societal value. It's psychologically, personally rewarding to own a home and have a family. And I think we think societally, like people that own homes are more likely to improve their homes, and more likely to contribute to their community. So home ownership is a good thing. We also have speculation around real estate. People flip houses, reets, and all this other kind of stuff. I don't think the speculation is bad.

34:14But I think that the point is home ownership. And in fact, speculation pays a purpose, right? You have price discovery, liquidity. And I think generally society, we allow speculative, I mean, stock markets are similar, right? like the purpose of a stock market is to productively allocate capital to companies that are building products. The buy product is you have hedge funds and other folks like that. They do provide liquidity and they play a service, right? My issue with the casino community in around blockchains is the focus. The focus should be on building useful services that enable digital ownership.

34:45As a buy product, there should be markets around that and those markets should be regulated and there should be, tamp down. The issue is you ask most people, you read the media, etc. like all of the focuses on the casino and that skews incorrectly the perception of the technology. If you could make one change to the regulatory environments, say, what would it be? Look, I just think the main thing is that as an entrepreneur and this ends up affecting our business because as an entrepreneur, you don't want There's gray area, so there's some percent chance, and no matter what you do, you get a subpoena or something.

35:25A lot of people just won't do that. And on the flip side, with the gray area, if you're a bad actor, and you know, your other career choices are stealing money or something, like creating a meme coin, seems like a good idea. Right? It just took me a while to appreciate. I had to work in the space. Like, I didn't understand how the kind of policy worked and how policy interacted with entrepreneurship. But I will say that my chief learning there is that gray areas discourage good entrepreneurs and encourage bad actors. And so my main thing is we talk about this a lot, like clarity. Now obviously we want not just clarity, bright line rules.

35:55Here's what you do, here's what you don't do. And of course, a path way, it could be a, it could be a onerous pathway, but a pathway to building these products. And so there's very specific proposals out there that we've been advocates of that do that and tamp down the speculation and allow for entrepreneurs to build products and have long lockups and disclosures and security audits. And like all these things that should be happening that in a sensible policy environment would be happening, just aren't happening today. Like you have these hacks and things, because there's no requirements around security audits.

36:23Like there should be requirements around that. We can try to force it, but if we go too far with entrepreneurs, they won't work with, like we can't, we're not the referee. Can I ask a blunt one, how would a Trump administration impact the regulatory environment for crypto? I mean, it's complicated. There's obviously three branches of government, all matter. In fact, a lot of it's playing on the courts right now. I think ultimately this will get resolved. I hope through congressional legislation so that matters a lot. The executive branch matters too in who they pick. Look, a lot of it just comes down to who they pick as the head of agencies and you could imagine Trump, I don't know, but like Republicans tend to skew more pro -business, but ultimately really comes down to the specific people they choose to run these agencies.

37:01Chris, why did you decide to write the book now? You've been in this space and the IS Plus. Why now? Well, I've won as I needed time to write it and the, you know, after last downturn I had more time, so if it was a good opportunity. But really it was that I feel like the technology is very misunderstood and I wanted to have like a one -stop shop for somebody who wanted to understand it to be able to and to hear the other side of the story. Because I think they hear the negative side a lot and I wanted to provide the other side of the story and the full kind of treatment of it. I often think like who's the customer for the book?

37:34Is this a net new entry to crypto? Is this an existing crypto enthusiast for you writing it? Who was that customer in your mind? Yeah, I think of it as concentric circles. There's the crypto community, which I think embraced it honestly, in a very nice way as sort of the best explainer. And then there's the next ring of the circle is all the people they know. So you're joining Coinbase and your family's like, isn't that that thing with Dogecoin? You're like, no, family member, it's actually more than that. Here's a book to read. And I'm very excited to say that I've heard a lot of feedback that that's happening now.

38:06So it's becoming that book that people kind of give to, let's call it crypto adjacent people. which is a lot of. There's 50 ,000 to work in the industry. I don't know what the exact number is. You know, one thing about books, this is one thing I debated is, if you actually look at the book, sales figures of all books, it's sort of surprising how, like when you're used to the internet, it's just small number. Like there's a kind of, I don't know, a million people that still read nonfiction books in the country. There's something, I mean, the best selling nonfiction book last year was 400 ,000 books or something, and that was like a self -help book.

38:34It's just a smaller set of people. So you're, you know, when you write a book, it's a smaller set of people, but I'm hoping, you know, are important set of people that read books. I also think about this, which is, like I had books that really influenced my life. It would be cool if 10 years from now, I meet somebody who's an entrepreneur who's done some really interesting stuff and the book was part of that. So I think if it is like a blog post can reach millions of people, a tweet can reach millions of people, books reach a smaller group, but they can be canon events. They can really affect people's lives.

38:59I think if it both is like a way to explain it to the people that are adjacent, but also potentially a way to kind of influence entrepreneurs. And particularly like what they talk about the computer in the casino, I'm trying to influence those entrepreneurs to go towards the computer and explain the whole thing to them and explain why this is the right path to take. So I'm hoping to kind of nudge the industry in that direction. Chris, do you think Brown is more important than ever in Venture? To be honest, I don't think about Venture as a category. I mean, I think that the internet changed the way that information flowed for sure.

39:26And I think probably unbundled a lot of brand in Venture. When I started off, there were just these kind of like, it was just these black boxes. It was like Sequoia and Cliner and Benchmark and Excel and you'd hear rumors about who the people are. You'd hear literally like rumors about how term sheets work because they were blogging about it. They were running really books on it. And so it was sort of like this mysterious thing that you didn't really understand. But you bet the firms carried a lot of weight, right? Like the firm name was the thing. Like it was a big deal and you read about the history and the companies they'd funded.

39:58And I think that's how fundraising worked too, right, with LPs. And this is a lot of what's happened with the unbundling I was talking about before where you have the barbell and like the rise of seed funds, right? Is if you're someone like you, the calculus has changed versus 20 years ago where then you had to join a big firm to raise money and now you don't because you have your own brand. And so I think the sort of unbundling of the branding where you can just build your brand with your podcast and put the other things you do and then of course over time with your investing and everything is very different.

40:27The thing that I worry about on a C -Crist is the weight of capital is different. You know, $5 million to me is very different to $5 million to you and Andreson. And so you can do a $5 on 25 with ease. Whereas for me, that's a big bet in a early company with absolutely no traction and very little to go on. When the weight of capital is different, it makes it very hard for boutiques to survive, I think. If you think that I found a collective... I'll speak for my own vertical here, my own area, which is we do very little scene investing. And the reason is we take conflicts very seriously, meaning we invest in one company per category.

41:05If we go too early, that's sort of our bet the category. Most of our stuff is like a true series A and not seed that I do for that reason, and I try to work very hard to collaborate with seed funds and they go earlier. So that's just speaking for myself. To agree with if the cash is on the table, you should take it. Because if you have a two on 10 versus a 5 on 25, It's a lot more money. It's a much better price. It's hard to argue and tell a founder that know the two on ten is better Honestly, I think and then maybe this sounds like I'm talking my book But I would say this even if I were a founder like I think there's many factors So this is a ten this is a ten plus year relationship with your investors It's it's a long -term thing look obviously the dilution and everything matters and so you shouldn't be crazy And but you know, I think one it's an important factor But the way I think about it is you're building a company you're thinking about how do I kind of assemble an excellent team of excellence both in my company and around my company and some of those decisions are like who you take an investor is basically irreversible.

41:59I do think you should know who you're dealing with. The final one for you to do a quick fire which is as part of that partnership often it comes with a board seat. What are your biggest lessons on what it takes to be a great board member and how is your style of board membership changed over time as an investor? A lot of it is good governance and unfortunately, I think it's relatively easy to be in the top core tile of that. If you care about it, if you're supportive in both up cycles and down cycles, like to your point earlier, there's just a lot of stuff that goes on when the market drops. And I'm not just talking about crypto, I'm talking about regular venture when the downturn happens.

42:35You have somebody who's early in their career adventure, they made three investments, they told their partners, this is their hot company and now it's struggling, they're worried, this happens a lot. Or maybe the fund isn't doing well and they need to recover money. I just had a situation where the investors came in into high valuation and they have a high preference stack and so they would financially be better off if the company sold themselves right now versus the early stage investors because of the way preferences work. You have different incentives. So you have people who micromanage and try to board members who don't really have the expertise, trying to give granular product advice.

43:10So I think I don't mean it's not negative, but I do think a lot of it is just not being bad. It helps a lot. Carrying being there for downturns, it's complicated when you're an investor right, because you were kind of wearing two hats, you're wearing the board member hat and you're wearing the investor hat and so being able to sort of separate those. If you bring some detailed expertise, like operating expertise or financial expertise, that's a bonus, but I think just that alone is just an important thing when it's scrum. Final one for a quick fight. You enjoy the size and scale of Andrews since day.

43:35It's very different to the fun that you joined 11 years ago. Do you prefer it today than you did when it was much smaller and more boutiquey and I'm sure less process driven and I will say first of all we you know we're very verticalized now we're a big firm but you know I run a vertical and pretty independent and that's important because I think we actually avoid a lot of the bureaucracy and other things we know we had a period where that that was a transition period where we weren't like that always but I think we're in a very good spot there but at some point I think my interest kind of shifted from just investing in startups to sort of having impact I remember when I joined the firm I was considering joining 2012, I joined in 2013, thinking a lot about the fact that it was starting to really bug me that I'd put some money into an investment and they would either do well or not and I would think to myself that I actually have any impact or if I didn't do it with somebody else, I'd just put that in my hands and over a subscribe round like someone else would have invested.

44:27Maybe I gave some advice and this is that, this is what I want to do. So what really appealed to me why I joined is when I talked to Mark and Ben. I was like, look, I just went through the three, the era of mobile social cloud, these are the three big computing trends. I think there will be the next 10 years, we'll have another wave of multiple computing trends. And I want to aggressively invest in those areas. I think there were a handful of organizations in the world who at that time would have supported a plan like that. And Jason Harlow, it's the market bend, we're one of them, right? That's what we've been doing.

44:54So that was just to go back. That was my motivation, and that's still very much my motivation today. I think about it in terms of impact. Obviously, we manage the fund, and there's all the kind of financial aspects of it, but But that's a lot of my motivation, is not just riding along, but actually having some influence. Speaking of influence, I guess my question is how do you assess your own relationship to money and has that changed over time? I think the healthiest relationship is to think of money mostly as capital, as mostly as a way to invest in people and ideas that you believe in. Mark and Jason and I have been for a long time both first individually and for the last seven years together, investing in funds, supporting new managers, starting venture funds.

45:33We do other kind of things like we, I don't know if you've seen this California forever. This was something we did. It's a new city in northern California. At the time, didn't fit into the venture fund model. So we did that, you know, as a personal thing we did later on it. That change in the firm did a mess. I'm very interested in sort of internet freedom, blockchains, open source software, being able to support some of those causes. Like, I think that's the healthiest relationship with money. I've seen a lot of, as you do this kind of job over time, you see a lot of unhealthy relationships with money.

46:00And you see people that kind of make money and their career or get on the hedonistic treadmill or something and like I don't know. So there's lots of unhealthy relationships. I'll say that. I think that's a healthy way to think about it. It's just a resource to kind of do things that help people you like or causes you like. Chris, we're going to do a quick fire on because otherwise I could do it all day. One, what few changed your mind on in the last 12 months? Probably a lot of things. One that might be interesting is COVID. I like a lot of everyone I guess we went remote and I really wanted to believe this was the new world and all these kinds of, you know, tweet threads that you read about how the world changed and I wanted to believe that, you know, just that you could have now a globally distributed workforce, people could live wherever they want.

46:41I've come to think it's especially in our business, just doesn't work and that, you know, we've now returning our, like, lease on our investment team, you know, back in one place in New York. In some ways, I think what works in remote teams is that you're, you know, you're kind of piggybacking out past relationships and it's very hard to build new relationships, it's hard to sort of share knowledge. What are you most concerned about in the world, Stakers? Well, the issue I spend the most time on that I'm concerned about is are these issues we're discussing? I think sort of I would call broadly internet freedom little tech versus big tech I think that the outside world Proceeds would say that someone like me and you work in the tech industry.

47:13I see myself as working on the behalf of sort of little tech of startups I think that having a dynamic internet economy and software economy is good for the world I think it's good for innovation. I think it's good for a whole bunch of reasons And I think we're at serious risk of losing that to me the two issues are there's a real effort to band open -source AI and there's a real effort to band blockchains and I care a lot about those two issues and spend a lot of time thinking about that and working on that. I've got to ask, should open AI be open sourced? Look, I think everyone should choose their own strategy.

47:41That's fine. I just think that open -source should be leap. Frontier open -source model should be legal and if you look at the Biden executive order, it looks like you're going to have to register and there'll be export controls. So I just think every project should have a choice and they can do whatever they want. but Mistrel and all the other like llama with Facebook they should all be allowed to open their silk code, open their weights. I think there's just a lot of crazy panic right now about this. The obvious thing that's going to happen if they do put regulations around this is just further entrench the power of the big five companies.

48:08What's the biggest lesson from working with Malcolm Van Ferver decade? You know we used to for the first five or so years out of the firm we'd sit in this room and there were relatively small number of us at the firm and to sit around and talk about mostly investing. Entrepreneurs would come in and then we talk about it. It's be hard to enumerate all the things I've learned and hopefully I've taught them some things but mostly I've probably learned from them. We have a couple frameworks like there's a bent, this is in our, when you join the firm, it's in our onboarding, it's first -class business in a first -class way and it's just sort of everything we do no matter how seemingly small it is needs to be conducted in sort of a high integrity way and I think if you talk to people who interact with our firm regardless of who at the firm, they'll view often here, we'll hear that.

48:48It's just everything is done in a very high integrity way in which we really care about and we care about very much about who we are and the culture we create. We like to say invest in strength, not lack of weakness, that applies both to portfolio company investing, but also hiring. So we try to find people that have some very special ability, often that comes bundled with issues, but like the issues are things that we can try to work through. As opposed to looking for people that are kind of perfect and well -rounded, but maybe not exceptional. We're in the exception business. Venture Capital is the exception business.

49:18It's the exception business with investing, it's the exception because of the hiring, like you can't lose sight of that, and you have to always remind yourself of it. Well, it's your biggest miss, and how did that impact your mindset? Well, I had a lot of misses. I've had a lot of, I mean, everyone, I think it's an important moment in your investing career to have like high conviction pass and then have it become a big thing, and everyone I know has had to happen. And then you're like, oh, wow, I've got to go readjust my mental model. I mean, I had a lot, I started investing in, I guess it was 2006 -07 when I saw in my first company.

49:48Well, I remember one thing that was funny. My company was security company. I sold a Maca -Fee. And so one might think that I'm knowledgeable about internet security. And I remember like four years into it, noticing that my best investments were non -security and my worst investments were security. And I sort of thought about why that is. And I came to the conclusion is because in the security ones, I was over waiting the idea. Because I had a whole bunch of ideas. I thought things should be built. And someone came in that matched one of those ideas. And I was like, okay, here's some money. Whereas in the non -security areas, I was much more agnostic about the ideas and just sort of met the people and was like, wow, that person is really smart.

50:24So my conclusion was, yeah, I needed to significantly increase the kind of weighting I put on the people. And I actually eventually developed kind of a methodology that I think about now, which is there's a very interesting balancing act you do in venture, which is you do need to become an expert on something. Like obviously I spend a lot of time on crypto and blockchains and I know a lot about it, but you also have to be willing to throw out your expertise and just say like wow that person knows more than me that person smarter than me And so there's this kind of balancing act between prepared mind and humility that took me a long time to kind of get right I think and so yeah, and that was through a series of misses a whole bunch of stuff early on Penalcimate one was the most memorable first found a meeting you've had?

51:02I mean, I remember the first time I met Brian Armstrong the first time I met Patrick Hollis and I was in personal investors stripe like and it is probably selective memory or something because I don't know that's a good question I had I just feel like I had a lot of interesting memorable meetings sort of I walk in and and you know in this business you do a lot of meetings and you know obviously a lot of them you don't invest it's always striking when you have kind of lightning strikes and you're kind of odd by something I'm a huge VR fan and I you know I let our investment in Oculus years ago 2013 and I remember like that demo a lot of interesting I levered a lot of demos that was to me just just like one of the times I felt like I was stepping into the future.

51:40Final one for you, Chris. Where do you want to be in 10 years? What is Chris' age in the 20th or all that? I mean, I'm very focused on this mission of the space I work in. So I very much see myself focusing on that until the mission is done. And by that, I mean, it's sort of past all these growing pains. You don't have too much cash to this pay fee. People often say, ah, four and a half billion, it's too big a fund for the space. Like, I mean, we announced it. We had two, there were two funds. There was a venture fund and a seed fund. And part of our charter is we can invest in over the counter assets like Bitcoin Ethereum the market cap of all the crypto Assets today is something like two and a half trillion you just do the math having a fund of that size It's a very small percentage of the market Chris listen.

52:19I've wanted to do this for a long time I so appreciate you putting up with my flexible questions. You've been fanning that great. So thank you so much Thank you, Harry. Yeah, I really appreciate it So I want to say huge thank you to Chris for being so fantastic in that episode So if you want to see the full episode in video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC, but before we leave you today, I need to tell you about Hive. 2024 is shaping up to be a big year for the markets with a number of iconic unicorns rumoured to be going public, whether you're a fun manager or invest solo, Hive is the best way for you to access the coming wave of IPOs before they hit the market.

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