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Fred Ehrsam

Co-Founder & CEO, Nudge · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderinvestorexecutive@fehrsam ↗LinkedIn ↗fredehrsam.org ↗Wikipedia ↗

Fred Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase with Brian Armstrong in 2012, serving as its president until 2017, and subsequently co-founded the major crypto investment firm Paradigm in 2018. He currently leads Nudge, a neurotechnology startup building non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, while continuing to invest in frontier technology and crypto ecosystems.

17statements → 8claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 3.53/5average certainty → 2.29/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓

3 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 6 assertions · 2 opinions · 6 insights · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Fred argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Ehrsam: Bitcoin created the world's largest supercomputer network by 4 orders of magnitude
“And years later, we have a seventy billion dollar cryptocurrency, a whole ecosystem of companies, users and investors involved and the largest supercomputer network in the world by four orders of magnitude.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:24 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Ehrsam: DAO Smart Contract Bug Leaked $160M Worth of Ethereum
“The DAO which was a large decentralized application with a couple hundred million dollars in it was found to have a software bug and basically leaked you know, let's call it a hundred and sixty-ish million dollars worth of Ethereum”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:58 a16z Podcast | Ethereum, App Coins, and Beyond

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
75% certainty 4
50% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

227 words/min while actually speaking · 16.2 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Fred Ehrsam: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,157 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Fred Ehrsam said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Ehrsam: Bitcoin created the world's largest supercomputer network by 4 orders of magnitude
“And years later, we have a seventy billion dollar cryptocurrency, a whole ecosystem of companies, users and investors involved and the largest supercomputer network in the world by four orders of magnitude.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:24 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ehrsam: A working sharding upgrade would boost Ethereum's market value by 10-20%
“If you're to come out and submit an improvement, like sharding, for example, a working implementation, it could easily raise the value of the network 10 or 20%, which we're talking two and a half to five billion dollars.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:42 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Insight
Ehrsam: Crypto tokens resemble currencies rather than cash-flow equities
“Upon closer examination, tokens more closely resemble currencies where you look at some kind of monetary theory equation like MV equals PQ, and it turns out that the important things to look at are not the right to a future stream of cash flows. Rather, it's t…”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 29:48 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Insight
Ehrsam: Crypto enables direct monetization of internet building blocks
“You could pay for literal goods and services on the internet, but the building blocks of the internet themselves were not precisely programmed and parceled out into little units that you could pay for directly through the protocol. And that's sort of what we'r…”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:27 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
What-if
Ehrsam: Requiring economic staking on email accounts would eliminate spam overnight
“Spam email is killed overnight, probably.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:40 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Assertion Supported
Ehrsam: Ethereum throughput is 20,000x short of running Facebook
“And if you look at what Ethereum is capable of in terms of just throughput of the network, it can't handle more than about twenty-ish transactions a second right now, which means that you're about 20,000 X off being able to run Facebook on the chain.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:32 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Assertion Partly supported
Ehrsam: Only two top 50 websites were created by pre-internet companies
“One thing I think is really interesting to look at is the top 50 sites on the internet today. Guess how many of them were made by companies that existed before the internet was popularized? It's two. MSN.com and Microsoft.com, both by Microsoft. Every other si…”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:27 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Opinion
Ehrsam: Underlying valuation equations for digital commodities and network tokens are identical
“I would argue the equation actually that underlies both of them are the same though.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:35 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Assertion Contradicted
Ehrsam: DAO Smart Contract Bug Leaked $160M Worth of Ethereum
“The DAO which was a large decentralized application with a couple hundred million dollars in it was found to have a software bug and basically leaked you know, let's call it a hundred and sixty-ish million dollars worth of Ethereum”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:58 a16z Podcast | Ethereum, App Coins, and Beyond
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ehrsam: Tech value from 2002-2017 accrued to proprietary database networks
“If you look at all the value that's really accrued over the last 15 years, the vast majority of it has come from companies who have effectively built proprietary databases with strong network effects around them.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:37 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Assertion Supported
Ehrsam: Over 1,000 tokens exist, acting as mini central banks
“You can view each token as basically creating its own little central bank and its own little government. And there are already over a thousand tokens.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:59 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Insight
Ehrsam: Developer activity is crypto's key leading indicator
“Perhaps the leading indicator of the whole industry is developer activity and experimentation.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:33 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Insight
Ehrsam: Most ICO projects will fail like ordinary startups
“Just like startups, there's a small percentage that are legit and really worth funding. And there's a whole glut of projects that unfortunately are not and probably won't go anywhere.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:24 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Opinion
Ehrsam: Crypto infrastructure startups have higher success odds than consumer apps
“So as a result, it's probably a lot more valuable and relevant to build infrastructure components that lets people scale that and build apps in the future rather than trying to build Facebook right now. I would assign a higher likelihood of success to systems …”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:47 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Insight
Ehrsam: Tech paradigm shifts commodify previous value layers
“And the surest way to fail is to assume it's a zero sum game. It does not have to be a zero sum game. And this is true of all technological paradigm shifts where there's a commodification of all the value creation that happened in the last paradigm. So now val…”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 34:22 a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter
Insight
Ehrsam: Bitcoin's restrictive language prevented developer application building
“And when you ask that question, then you try to sort of do a root cause analysis of it where you ask, okay, well, why aren't there many, that many apps getting built? And I think the answer you arrive at is the scripting language in Bitcoin makes it really, re…”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:01 a16z Podcast | Ethereum, App Coins, and Beyond
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ehrsam: Decentralized-first projects will redefine standard corporate business models
“I think we now have these sort of like blockchain or decentralized first projects where, again, it will redefine how people look at the business model.”
Fred Ehrsam Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 37:25 a16z Podcast | Ethereum, App Coins, and Beyond

The other half of the tape: Fred Ehrsam's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 1Chris Dixon 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011222019episodesmentions
0122019episodes it came up in
000.51122019episodesmentions per episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Why Crypto Tokens Matter Jan 2, 2019 17m
a16z Podcast | Ethereum, App Coins, and Beyond Jan 2, 2019 14m
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