Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it?

Chris Dixon Plus, why a16z has spent $3 billion on web3 startups

Regular listeners to Decoder know I’m pretty skeptical of crypto. But I want to come by that skepticism honestly, so I talk to people who are actually investing in and building crypto startups and technology. There is a lot of money, attention, and energy — both literal and metaphorical — in crypto, and I think it’s important to ask the questions and really listen to the answers. We’ve done a few of these episodes now, but this episode is a conversation I’ve wanted to have from the very beginning.

Chris Dixon leads crypto investing at the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z. He’s responsible for leading funding rounds for Coinbase, which went public about a year ago, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, and Yuga Labs, which is behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club , among others. He is also a prolific user of Twitter , where he posts lengthy threads about crypto and web3. He is at once one of the biggest investors in the space and its biggest booster.

Chris is a smart guy who has been around the industry a long time and has seen a lot of tech hype come and go. This episode gets way into the weeds and, while we do talk over each other here and there, I think excited but respectful disagreement is in too short supply these days, so we wanted to keep all of that in the episode.

In any case, I think it’s a good one, and no matter what side of the crypto debate you’re on, you’ll find something here that you hadn’t thought about before.

OK, Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Chris Dixon is a general partner at the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, where he leads a16z crypto. Welcome to Decoder .

Thanks for having me.

I always ask what I have come to call the Decoder questions about structure and decision-making, but I really want to talk about Web3 with you, so let’s do those questions as a little bit of a lightning round.

Sure.

How is Andreessen Horowitz structured?

Great question. It has actually changed a lot over the recent years. When I joined the firm in 2013, it was just a traditional venture firm with a group of investors that we call general partners. Something different with our firm is that we have operating teams, which are teams whose job is to support our portfolio companies. That was a new idea from founders Ben [Horowitz] and Marc [Andreessen]; they had been entrepreneurs in the past and had wished that their VCs would do more than just provide money and advice. They wanted them to supplement their network, introduce them to people, help them recruit, and a whole bunch of different things.

They built the firm with that in mind. Over the last few years, we realized that Web3 is just so different from other areas. For example, we have a biology and healthcare fund, we have a FinTech practice, we have an enterprise software practice — there are different expertises required, different people involved, and different networks of companies. Over the last few years we really split it out, so I am part of the firm, but really run an autonomous unit.

Our crypto Web3 team is now at about 60 people. We are pretty significant, and that has grown a lot over the last few years. Out of those 60 people, about 15 are on the investment team; I am one of four general partners who lead investments and we have about 10 junior people under us who support. The other 45 are in our operating team, and their jobs are to help our companies with everything from recruiting talent to business development to research and computer science.

We have a team that helps if we are working on cutting edge problems, and we have a marketing communications team. Security is a big issue in the space, so we also have a five-person security team who does things like audit their smart contracts. Sonal Chokshi — who built out the firm’s podcasts — just came over to our team and we are going to really ramp that up. The way we think about the comm side is not for us, but to evangelize the space and explain what are sometimes difficult concepts. We really want to […]

source Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it?