Chris Dixon
130 statements across 47 episodes · 67 bullish · 18 bearish · 5 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Chris Dixon · said 70 times in 51 episodes since 2018 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Chris Dixon's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Ben Horowitz (10), Erik Torenberg (7), Sonal Chokshi (6), Katie Haun (3), Andrew Chen (3), Terry Angelos (2), Michael Copeland (2), Martin Casado (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 11 mentions in 9 episodes 1 per episode
- Garry Tan: New Rules for Founders
- The New Rule for Picking AI Winners | The a16z Show
- The State of AI: Models, Moats, and the Consumer Renaissance
- The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS | Benedict Evans on a16z
- Why Claude Feels Different (And What That Means for AI) | The a16z Show
- Ben Horowitz and David Solomon: The Sweetest Macro Spot in 40 Years
- The Biggest Bottlenecks For AI: Energy & Cooling
- The AI Opportunity that goes beyond Models
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 21 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- How Andreessen Horowitz Disrupted VC & What’s Coming Next
- Founders, Media, & Memes: a16z’s Strategy for the Future | a16z LP Summit 2025
- Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | Kevin Rose and Anish Acharya
- Crypto Experts Explain Stablecoins & the Future Financial System w/ Ali Yahya & Arianna Simpson
- The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1
- Jack Altman & Martin Casado on the Future of Venture Capital
- Tech vs. Media: Balaji Srinivasan on the Battle Shaping Our Future
- Marc & Ben on the Collapse of Traditional Media - Podcasts, Politics & the New Media Playbook
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 27 mentions in 25 episodes 1 per episode
- a16z Podcast | On Productivity, Immigration, Trump, and Media
- Product Zeitgeist Fit and the Next Big Thing
- What's Next for Esports Startups
- 10+1 Lessons from Serial Entrepreneur Justin Kan
- a16z Podcast | Incenting Innovation Inside, Loonshots to Moonshots
- a16z Podcast | Capitalizing on an Autonomous Vehicle Future
- a16z Podcast | All About Stablecoins
- a16z Podcast | Cryptonetworks and Cities -- Analogies
- 17 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
Everything said about Chris Dixon, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Dixon: Startup success is 90% recruiting top product and engineering talent
“What startups really are is a dynamic process that probably, you know, 90% of it is frankly recruiting a great product and engineering team, and What we find is only, just empirically, is it only great Product engineering people are able to recruit those peopl…”
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Dixon: University of Waterloo produces highly sophisticated engineering graduates
“See, like, Waterloo's a great example of that, where they, I think they have a, it's like they have a crazy number, like six or plus internships over their four years of undergrad. The whole sort of, it's deeply integrated, sort of, working in industry and wor…”
Jul 26, 2018 bullish
Jul 26, 2018
Jul 26, 2018 bullish
Dixon: The internet has reached peak centralization and will decentralize
“I think that that we're, I believe we're at sort of peak centralization, and we're going to see more and more interesting things happening, and there's sort of this kind of, you know, it's like a lot of things in life, like politics and, you know, fashion tren…”
Dec 21, 2018 bullish
Dixon: Smartphone users will hit 5 billion as hardware drops to $3
“You can get a 15 dollar Android phone now. That will come down. You'll be able to get a three dollar phone. It'll probably be like Benedict Evans, who works with us, comes up, he does all these studies on this. It'll be, there'll be something, there's like thr…”
Dec 21, 2018 bullish
Dixon: a16z sees as many top founders in crypto as in AI
“I think that the you know, it's to me, if you sort of compare at our firm, so at the, you know, if you compare crypto to, you know, I don't know, SaaS, or like all the other kind of, you know, or machine learning, AI startups I'd say it's at least as many, lik…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Dixon: VR movies will function like walk-around immersive theatre
“Yeah, it's going to be like, you know, those, like performance art plays they have in New York where you're like, you could, you get to walk around the play as they're doing it or something like that's how movies are going to be used.”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Dixon: Samsung's smartwatch strategy merely shrinks phones without solving use cases
“Yeah, it's interesting, because I think, like, a lot of the views, like, if you look at the Samsung Watch, it's basically that their idea is just, let's just take the phone, and shrink it, and remove some features, and put it on your wrist, right?”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Dixon: Ambitious startup missions create talent monopolies by uniting expert talent
“You sort of go out, you plant a flag, you say, I'm building virtual reality, and then all of these people, interesting people who have been thinking about the problem for years, never had a home, all kind of came together, right? And you sort of ended up with …”
Jan 2, 2019
Dixon: New web formats provoke cultural panic unlike traditional print novelties
“Because those have existed in newspapers for, you know, decades, it's considered ok, but then, you know, you have slidey things, and lists, and everything else, and because it's new, it's like, oh god, the web is destroying western culture.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Chris Dixon: Large incumbents largely ignore the venture capital world
“The way big companies operate, they kind of ignore our VC world. Like we think we're, you know, we get all this, we think we know we're important in the center of the world. And in fact, most people don't really care. And the big companies really don't care. A…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Chris Dixon: Tech platforms and telecom carriers are entering total war
“It's now kind of just total war where everyone is fighting everyone, you know, Google and Facebook are building internet access and Verizon is getting into content and they're getting into TV and they're just, you know, so there's no, You know, in some ways, a…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Chris Dixon: Early mobile ad tech failed because paid apps dominated monetization
“The mobile ad, the prior mobile ad wave was predicated on the notion that ads would become a dominant monetization model on mobile, which they actually haven't really. It's been more paid. And so that was sort of in some ways a false start, I think.”
Jan 2, 2019
Chris Dixon: Ad tech startups must sell quickly during M&A consolidation waves
“My advice was always, when that happens, you gotta, like, It's like musical chairs. And if you don't get a seat, you know, you're probably screwed because now these guys are all part of, you now have your direct competitor is now part of Google and part of Fac…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Distributed computing will dominate software engineering for decades
“Over the next few decades, distributed computing will be a particularly important topic because we're now with things like AWS awash in Computing resources you know, compute is becoming, approaching zero, storage, networking, but most of this is on, you know, …”
Jan 2, 2019
Dixon: Industry excels at iterative depth, while academia excels at fundamental rethinkings
“And I think that the theory we have is that that's because you kind of, you know, industry is very good at a kind of a depth search, right? Like, you know, continuing to iterate on something. But when you need to go back and fundamentally rethink how you do so…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Bitcoin's greatest value is enabling new payment types
“I personally am much more excited about the latter kind for Bitcoin. In other words, I'm more excited about new ways that you can use Bitcoin and pay for things that you couldn't before. So for example, micro payments, machine to machine payments, versus save …”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Open protocols protect developers from being booted off by corporate platforms
“The great thing about open protocols is that they invite developers and entrepreneurs and investors To build on top of them in a way that they know they can do so safely and not sort of get booted off later the way that corporate controlled platforms tend to d…”
Jan 2, 2019
Krohn: Keybase servers store no user decryption keys
“If anyone ever breaks into the server, all they really get is a bunch of encryption, and Unlike with other systems, the key you need to decrypt the data is just not on the server. The only person who has a key is like, is the phone in your pocket or the deskto…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Dixon: Only great product engineers can recruit top engineering teams
“What startups really are is a dynamic process that probably, you know, 90% of it is frankly recruiting a great product and engineering team, and What we find is only, just empirically, is that only great product engineering people are able to recruit those peo…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Soylent powder is the most calorie-efficient food for backpackers
“One really, one of the most popular use cases for soylent is people that hiking and doing other kinds of things like this, because it turns out right, the powder, carrying the powder in a backpack, it's the most efficient way to carry it's the lightest weight …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: A $300 standalone 4K VR headset is four years away
“We're seeing, I think it's accelerate, it's accelerating to the sort of Holy Grail headset, which is whatever, let's call it a 300 dollar standalone device with positional tracking and hand tracking and four K per eye or something like, let's call that the Hol…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Dixon: Social interaction is the killer app for all internet connected devices
“And probably people would want to do with it what they've done with every other competing platform, which is interact with other people, right? Like that seems to be the killer app of all internet connected devices, right?”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Crypto business models will shift capital back to open protocols
“Now open is developing its own kind of business model around this, which I think is going to shift a lot more energy, I hope, And money and funding and a whole bunch of other things back to the forces of open have a new set of new arsenal.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: No one, including Vitalik Buterin, can cut developers off Ethereum
“As a developer, you can now invest in this. You can build things on top of Ethereum with the knowledge that no one can, you know, Vitalik, who's the kind of the, you know, the leader of Ethereum, can't pull the rug out from under you, even if you wanted to.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Crypto solves network bootstrapping by trading financial value for utility
“And so one thing that cryptocurrency does potentially is it's like a universal solution to the bootstrap problem. We call it chicken egg problem, which is you incentivize the early users when there's not enough network value, you give them financial value. And…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Dixon: Carlota Perez's innovation framework doesn't apply to software
“This is also why the traditional models of innovation, like the Carlotta Perez model don't really work in software worlds because in software it's bound only by the ability of people to kind of come up with new, interesting ideas.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Dixon: Tech giants plan 2-5 years out, open-source developers 10 years longer
“When you're a company, no matter how visionary you are, I mean, I think Zuckerberg and Larry Page, they're extremely visionary and they're extremely long-term thinking, but ultimately they do try to manage probably to a two to five year horizon or something, r…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Dixon: Smart weekend projects predict tech trends 10 years in advance
“The history of this is very clear, and that the side of the nights and weekends for the last 30 years, that's been the best predictor of the future. That's where I bet, that's how I make my investments, that's where I spend my time. I have this blog post, what…”
Jan 2, 2019
Dixon: Protocol network tokens require a distinct valuation model from digital commodities
“My personal nomenclature, like I think of in the first bucket, the commodity bucket, there's Bitcoin, there's Monero, Zcash, maybe Dash. And then there's this other thing, which is kind of the networks, call them fat protocols, call them tokens. There's this w…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Dixon: Community-driven startups enjoy lower customer acquisition costs
“What that means from a business point of view is that you tend to have a lot more, you know, lower acquisition costs for customers, they come to you naturally, you show up in SEO. The news media likes to write about you because these communities are kind of ou…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: $10 positional tracking ASICs will unlock standalone VR headsets
“So once you get positional tracking ASICs that are, you know, that hopefully follow the typical semiconductor price curve, and they drop down, and eventually they're 10 bucks or something, you can put it in a Go, you get positional tracking, and that unlocks l…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: We are entering a Cambrian explosion of 10+ computers per person
“This is part of a broader wave, which is, if you just go back and look at the history of computing, we had the mainframes, we had sort of a one computer for every 10,000 people, or a 100,000 people, then you had PCs, sort of one for every 10 people, and then y…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Drone autonomy will enable third-party software app development
“So longer term, in my view, that, you know, sort of autonomy, knowing the drone will avoid obstacles, be able to do kind of high-level functionality like identify people and objects, will eventually allow software developers to build applications in the same w…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Silicon Valley's edge is late-stage executive talent, not engineers
“And one of the advantages of Silicon Valley, I think people talk about how there's more engineers and there's more Investors, but those are frankly everywhere. But the big difference is VP marketing, VP sales, VP engineering, and then all the product managers …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019
Dixon: Studying history is the only way to predict the future
“My bias has always been Towards history, for example, like the only way you're ever going to possibly get a lens on how to predict the future is to read a lot of history and understand how these things work because they're such complex systems that you're not …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Dixon: The decentralized web was an underdog to corporate networks in 1993
“And then there was sort of this really kind of unlikely alternative, which was this, at the time, pretty crappy experience in Mosaic and, you know, homebrew websites and Yahoo, and you talk about this, you know, in the book, but like, and I think, I don't know…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: The current tech era is defined by modernizing outdated corporate software
“Like the software, the work feels like 10 years ago. So I, one interpretation I think is what's happening right now is we're just upgrading all that stuff, and that's how, that's quote unquote SaaS and all these other kinds of things going on, and it's, there'…”
May 8, 2019 positive
Dixon: Core blockchain innovation is autonomous software with game-theoretic guarantees
“This is the sort of idea to me, the key idea of a blockchain is that the code continues to run as designed and it has sort of game theoretic guarantees that it will. Right? And that gives code this autonomous, at least autonomous, not in the sense of like AI a…”
May 8, 2019 neutral
Dixon: Web2 prioritized DAUs because its main business model was advertising
“Well, the reason everyone was so focused on DAUs for web two was because the main business model was advertising. And that was driven, so it was a proxy for what the business model was, right? But ultimately, if you have a business model that is not dependent …”
May 8, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Third wave of blockchain computing will arrive in 12 to 24 months
“And now I think what we're seeing over the next 12 months or so, maybe 12 to 24 months, is the kind of the wave three happening, right, which is taking the ideas of Ethereum upgrading the developer experience like you just discussed very importantly, upgrading…”
Jun 24, 2019 bullish
Aug 29, 2019 bearish
Dixon: AI automation will exacerbate digital platform economic inequality
“You know, I think it's very likely on the current path, these issues will get probably exacerbated. New technologies like artificial intelligence are likely to automate a lot of jobs, and I think these issues and the issues in the prior slide, you'll, I think …”
Aug 29, 2019 negative
Dixon: Centralized perimeter data security models are failing
“This model that we've had for the last 20 years of sort of putting, the way I describe it as putting the gold in the village, and then building a big wall around the village, and hoping nobody leaves the door open, is basically the security model of the modern…”
Aug 29, 2019 negative
Dixon: Venture model denies upside to early network contributors
“The model for these business models for these companies is essentially baked around, you know, advertising and transaction fees, and they're, you know, sort of traditional companies that are funded by people like us, like venture capitalists and entrepreneurs,…”
Dec 9, 2019
Voluntary adoption by elite technical talent predicts startup success
“The most talented, hardest working, most in demand people, the product managers, and engineers, and data scientists, they're intrigued by it. They're working on it. They're excited by it. They're using it. They're trying to make it a thing. Because if they are…”
Dec 19, 2019
Dixon: Major technologies take decades to produce second-order effects
“There's always sort of a first order and second order effect of any major new technology, ok? So, what I mean by that is like, the car comes along, and the first order effect is you can drive from point A to point B faster, right? The second order effect took …”
Dec 19, 2019 neutral
Dixon: Tech has only truly disrupted media, transportation, and retail
“The, it's kind of surprising, 25 years into the internet that, The only industries that have been really quote disrupted have been, I think media, maybe transportation and maybe starting to happen is retail, right? And then the rest, I mean, if you look at the…”
Dec 19, 2019 bullish
Dec 19, 2019
Dec 19, 2019 bearish
Dixon: Cable TV bundle economics will collapse in the near future
“And the economics too, like the, you know, like the cable bundle is going to break at some point, I think soon, right? But at some point, like the economics will, like fundamentally, like it will no longer work to have the cable bundle. I think that's, Relativ…”
Dec 19, 2019 bullish
Dec 19, 2019 bullish
Dec 19, 2019 bullish
May 18, 2021 positive
Dixon: NFT metadata storage on decentralized networks is a coordination challenge
“So the metadata can be stored. I think ideally it was stored on a decentralized storage platform which are essentially blockchains that are optimized for that use case. And that could be Filecoin or Arweave or a bunch of others. Those blockchains exist. They'r…”
May 18, 2021 bullish
Dixon: NFTs enable creators to build viable businesses selling to super-fans
“For the creators, what NFTs, NFTs let them do is, is have business models that are much more like the offline models, but they can actually sell things directly to their fans. And a relatively small set of kind of super enthusiastic fans can provide a great bu…”
May 18, 2021 bullish
Dixon: Web3 re-architects the internet to prioritize users over platforms
“And, I think another way to think about it is we're sort of re-architecting, hopefully, If this all works to re architecting the web to be a user and object kind of first, and then the applications created around it, as opposed to what the web has been so far,…”
May 18, 2021 bullish
Dixon predicts services will let users utilize NFTs across virtual worlds
“And I think increasingly what we'll see is we'll see more and more services that let you do cool things with them. So maybe you take your crypto punk into a game or you take, you know, a piece of art into the central land, or you do.”
May 24, 2021 bullish
Dixon: Community is the dividing line between successful and failed NFTs
“I think when we look back in this period and we say what sort of NFTs work and what didn't the key dividing line would be community, right? This is why crypto punks is so strong. This is why NBA top shot is so strong. And I think on contrast, you know, there's…”
Feb 28, 2024 negative
Feb 20, 2025 negative
Feb 20, 2025
Dixon: Disruption requires misalignment with an incumbent's business model
“Disruptive doesn't just mean new. It means misaligned with the incumbent business model. And so that means that even if the incumbent, that, that's sort of the interesting part of his book, right, is that even when the income, the smart incumbent sees it comin…”
Feb 20, 2025 negative
Feb 20, 2025 positive
Dixon: AI, crypto, and new hardware will mutually reinforce each other
“And so I think of that with AI, crypto, and maybe, you know, new devices, the other kind of probably robotics and self-driving cars and VR and things. I think of those as kind of the three interesting things going on. And I think they all kind of complement ea…”
Feb 20, 2025 bearish
Feb 20, 2025
Dixon: Major tech waves arrive in mutually reinforcing clusters
“Technology waves tend to come in pairs or triples, like the last, kind of, 15 years ago it was cloud, mobile social cloud, and I think they tend to, ah, I'm always sort of giving this speech to entrepreneurs, they tend to reinforce each other.”
Feb 20, 2025 neutral
Feb 20, 2025 bullish
Dixon: Crypto is a new network architecture, not just meme coins
“Crypto is a new, this is what my book's about, is it's a new way to architect internet services, a new way to build networks that has a bunch of different properties, which I argue are beneficial for a bunch of reasons and can do a set of things you couldn't d…”
Feb 20, 2025 bearish
Dixon: AI will consolidate internet traffic into 3 to 5 major systems
“That's probably where we're headed is a world where you have sort of Five big systems, let's call it, you know, three to five big AI systems, you go to their websites, they give you an answer, and you don't, and so what happens to the billion other websites if…”
Apr 29, 2025 positive
May 31, 2025 positive
May 31, 2025
May 31, 2025
Jul 25, 2025
Sep 10, 2025 positive
Dixon: Modern software network effects are externalized to the web ecosystem
“Maybe a lot of the network effect has been externalized to the internet, right? And so the idea being, you know, your cursor, and then suddenly all of the, you know, it becomes popular or, you know, mid journey, let's say, right? And then you get all of these,…”
Sep 10, 2025 bullish
Sep 10, 2025
Dixon: Investments in Oculus, Coinbase, and Soylent came from hobbyist forums
“3D printing, like this led to my investment in Oculus and Coinbase really were both from that you know, from that thesis sort of VR, seeing the developers and the kind of, you know, Kickstarter community enthusiasm around, you know, when Palmer, Palmer Luckey …”
Sep 10, 2025
Dixon: Exponential forces inevitably overwhelm tactical product decisions in technology
“Whether you're an investor or entrepreneur, the most important thing to start with is to look for these forces, to look for these exponential forces. And one of the lessons I learned in my career was You know, you can do all sorts of tactical product things, e…”
Sep 10, 2025
Dixon: Major online communities are driven by only 20,000 core people
“If you look at, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, like a lot of these kind of interesting kind of movements, like community sites, like they're often like 20,000 people, like they aren't that many, they aren't the millions that you might think.”
Aug 11, 2026
Acharya: Truly interesting startup ideas lack a defined intellectual edge
“I think a good measure of how interesting the thing is, is can you find the edge? And for the most interesting things, you typically can't. Even if you find the edge of the conversation, you can't find the intellectual edge, which I think is a very good sign.”