Jesse Walden
Founder & Managing Partner, Variant. On 2 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderoperatorauthor@jessewldn ↗LinkedIn ↗jessewalden.com ↗
Jesse Walden is the founder and managing partner of Variant, an early-stage crypto venture capital firm. He previously co-founded Mediachain Labs, which was acquired by Spotify, and served as an investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
2shows
5appearances
37statements
5resolved
5supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
14said about them ↓ Everything Jesse Walden said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Walden: A large portion of proof-of-work mining energy comes from renewables
“I'm not, you know, defending this practice, but I'm just noting that a lot of these emissions are either sort of latent or a large part of the energy mix of proof of work mining is from renewables.”
Walden: Crypto tokens allow users to earn ownership without full-time employment
“And so I think this is a really profound idea where it's going to change the way that people come to work and that they won't have to go and become a full-time employee to earn some ownership value for the value that they contribute to the platform or service …”
Walden: General base-layer protocols must ossify to foster developer trust
“The more general the service of a crypto network, the more it should be ossified. So again, coming back to this, IP is ossified, Bitcoin has ossified, maybe a general computation substrate is better ossified because it lends itself to the trust that the develo…”
Walden: Algorithmic stablecoins lack collateral and rely solely on market belief
“What's critical here is, like, there's no collateral backing this. There's nothing behind it. It's just people's belief that it will stabilize itself based on this adjusting supply and demand.”
Walden: Smart contracts are wildly more efficient than music industry royalty systems
“Contrast that with royalties in the music industry, which is like a completely opaque system with many layers of middleman that are each taking a cut, right? It's a wildly more efficient architecture. That's uniquely made possible by blockchains and smart cont…”
Walden: Open NFT media libraries let developers build the next Spotify
“One way to think about what's happening with NFTs is we're building this universal open media library on top of which any developer can build the next Spotify or build the next Instagram or build the next Facebook. And when there's a lot more competition, ther…”
Walden: Reproducing a digital file increases its NFT's social and financial value
“So I would say that the number of times a file has been reproduced on the internet is directly correlated to the value of that file's NFT. Meaning the more times a piece of media gets shared online, the more social value it has.”
Walden: People will crowdfund big ideas by purchasing tokenized blog posts
“So you can see this idea going a lot further where new big ideas enter the world as blog posts and people crowdfund those big ideas that they want to see happen in the world and become part owners in the blog post that becomes the sort of canonical representat…”
Walden: NFT 'patronage plus' models may grow creator markets beyond Web2
“And I think that plus is really key because it's a very strong incentive to become a patron in the first place. So patronage plus may end up growing the market way bigger than patronage that we saw in web two.”
Walden: NFTs act as canonical identifiers linking arbitrary metadata to digital assets
“NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are an embodiment of the same idea, where you have a canonical identifier for a thing. It could be an image, a song, you know, a you know, anything, literally anything. And hooked to it is metadata, and the metadata is arbitrary, and…”
Walden: Blockchain streaming networks are fundamentally better for creators
“This is, I think, fundamentally better for creators than the way things work today, where it's like this very clunky manual process where you have to coordinate all of these relationships in, in contracts, and there's tons of middlemen and lawyer fees, and lik…”
Walden: Blockchain projects should not compete directly with Spotify
“I wouldn't encourage, you know, blockchain projects that want to go and compete with Spotify directly, but there's this new territory that's opened up to figure out new sort of modes of creative expression that benefit from these properties, and hopefully we'l…”
Walden: Releasing half-baked, compelling ideas works best in open source
“One of the amazing properties of open source is that someone can put an idea out there and then galvanize developers to finish the idea, and that's in fact one of the features of open source that you know, you get, and it gets to this idea that Dennis talked a…”
Walden: Not every crypto project needs its own native token
“Not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol.”
Jesse Walden: Not every crypto project needs its own token
“And not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol but there's not an incentive or there's at least no mechanism by which the community can for…”
Walden: NFTs make digital files ownable media assets on the internet
“NFTs are a way to make digital files ownable. Instead of a financial asset, you can now own a digital media asset on the internet. And that's why the file metaphor is apt. You can now own a JPEG, own an MP three. And what you're essentially doing when you crea…”
Walden: NFTs programmatically route secondary resale royalties to original creators
“The secondary resale of an asset can be programmatically constructed such that any time the NFT changes hands, a portion of the resale value goes back to the original creator.”
Walden: NFTs establish permanent cryptographic provenance for internet media
“Whereas today, think about an image you see on Instagram. You could screenshot that, you know, crop it, and then paste it on another platform. So like, repaste it on Facebook. And as soon as you do that, you break its entire history, its entire provenance. You…”
Walden: Internet distribution platforms will soon socially credit NFT owners
“And I think very soon we'll see that these owners are credited socially on platforms where that work is distributed.”
Walden: Roughly 10% of Americans owned cryptocurrency as of April 2021
“So we now live in a world where roughly 10% of Americans own cryptocurrencies.”
Walden: Crypto market frenzies drive lasting infrastructure and mental models
“Markets drive, you know, they're volatile and they drive these speculative frenzies, but they also drive infrastructure and mental models that stick”
Walden: Crypto-enabled collector DAOs will increasingly pool resources to purchase NFTs
“And I think we're going to see a lot more of that.”
Walden: Public blockchain data makes financial and transactional forensics much easier
“In one sense, you could argue that blockchains actually make the job of forensics a lot easier because all the information is publicly accessible and available to anyone.”
The other half of the tape: Jesse Walden's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 14 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Zooko Wilcox 10Devon Zuegel 2Ali Yahya 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 14
2019 10 mentions in 1 episode
2018 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jesse's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Variant | 4 | 21 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Variant | 1 | 16 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Capital Allocators → |