The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 49 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dixon: a16z owns less than 5% of most Web3 networks
“Generally what we own, contrary to Jack Dorsey and others saying that we own web three, we generally own sub five percent of most of these networks.”
Grefenstette: 80% of founders pitching a16z use cheap open-source Chinese LLMs
“I think Andreessen came out recently and said, 80% of the founders that come to them are using open source Chinese LLMs, because it might be 70, 80% as effective, efficient, but it's a 10th the cost.”
Dixon: Majority of top studio spinouts are building Web3 games
“Those game developers, I would say the majority of them are now doing NFT web three gaming.”
Sternlicht: Do not blindly trust top VC firms like a16z or Sequoia
“The key to investing is actually doing your own work. Then you triangulate other people's opinions and stuff, but do your own work. And I, the biggest mistakes like you often find when you find Andreas and Horowitz and Sequoia are, they're all in this deal. I …”
Dixon: Blockchain is about to enter an exponential growth flywheel phase
“I think we're about to hit that, I believe, in the blockchain world.”
Biology Mirrors the State of Computer Science in the Late 1960s
“Biology is kind of where computer science was like late sixties, early seventies, which is we're about to see like this whole new set of technologies that will dramatically change the costs and the automation and the price curves for a lot of these things.”
a16z's Post-Investment Platform Team Dwarfs Its Closest Competitor
“Nobody's certainly done it at the scale that we're doing it at, so a big change in the industry over the last 10 years has been that there are more firms that are adding to their post-investment teams, which for a long time was really never part of the makeup …”
a16z Rejects Consensus Voting to Avoid Reversion to the Mean
“We are decidedly not a consensus organization, so When we started, and Mark and Ben have been very true to this over time, is we said, look, we worry that if you go around the table and you ask people to vote, you end up with reversion to the mean type thinkin…”
Mega-Rounds Transfer Asset Appreciation From Public to Private Markets
“I think really most of this is really just a wealth transfer of appreciation from the public markets into the private markets, and many of these people have lower costs of capital, right?”
Sequoia's 2008 'Rest in Peace' Doomsday Presentation Was Incorrect
“If you were around here in the valley at the end of oh eight, Sequoia, who's a very well-regarded and has been a very successful firm, Put out this presentation called Rest in Peace, and it had a skull and crossbones and a tombstone on the front of it, and the…”
Product Visionaries Should Be CEOs to Control Resource Allocation
“And so we said, look, because these are product companies, we love the idea that the person who is the product visionary also is the CEO and therefore controls resource allocation and strategy and all this other stuff.”
Companies Staying Private Longer Actively Hurts the United States
“I think it's a bad trend for our country. Selfishly, it's very good for people who are investors in or who have access to private capital because I think more and more of that appreciation will accrue there, but it's not a good thing for our country.”
Dixon: Emerging Tech Startups Need at Least a Four-Year Runway
“I think any area where you're kind of an emerging technology area, you need to run things at that kind of four-year horizon, ideally, pretty minimum, because you're just dependent on the moods and sentiment of the broader world and exogenous factors that you c…”
Andreessen Horowitz built a media company monetized via venture capital
“One of the things they got right, they essentially built a media company that monetizes with venture capital, and they realized that that top of funnel investment flow is really valuable.”
Dixon: a16z recently invested in social networks offering creators 98% payouts
“We've invested in a bunch just recently where instead of the creators getting zero percent, they get 98%.”
Mega-funds cannot maintain senior partner involvement across every portfolio company
“You get as many people and as much money as they have, there's no way the senior people are involved with every company, and we are, and that will remain.”
Rosenthal: Andreessen Horowitz made $11 billion on its Coinbase investment
“Well, it turns out they invested in Coinbase and made eleven billion dollars on it.”
Dixon: a16z delegates token voting power to maintain protocol decentralization
“We also do this thing we call delegating. We want to make sure that the networks are sufficiently decentralized. And so in some cases, because we were the early venture capital investors, we own a bunch of the tokens. We want to make sure we aren't sort of doe…”
Dixon: a16z exercises crypto governance through token voting, not boards
“In the crypto world, we do governance, but we don't do it through boards. We do it through the token. So we own a bunch of tokens, and they have votes.”
As Capital Democratizes, VCs Must Differentiate Beyond Money
“It's likely to be the case that entrepreneurs will now have more choices of which VCs to work with because there will be capital in lots of different places, and therefore something other than capital will have to be what differentiates one VC from another.”
Founder Velocity and Execution Pace Best Predict Startup Success
“The best predictor of future success is do you actually meet the milestones and deliver on the things that you said you were going to do, and obviously there are some people who are very successful who struggle at the outset, but having that relationship over …”
Half of Andreessen Horowitz's Venture Investments Result in Total Capital Loss
“Probably half of what we do is euphemistically what we call impaired capital, which basically means you lost all your money, right?”
a16z's first Norway and YC's first Vietnam deals were Antler startups
“So I think for example, Andreas and Horowitz first investments in Norway was an antler company. White Combinator's first investment in Vietnam was an antler company.”
Dixon: Only one or two other firms would have backed Oculus then
“I led our investment in Oculus, which was a large check and a hardware company and one or two other firms on earth at the time. Would have both the financial resources and the will to do that kind of investing.”
Dixon: a16z invested in all 15 Coinbase funding rounds pre-IPO
“So Coinbase, as an example, I was on the board and we invested in but they did 15 rounds of financing before they went public and we invested in every single one of them.”
Dixon: Most a16z crypto portfolio companies are domiciled in the US
“Most of our companies are domiciled in the United States. We always recommend that.”
Dixon: Backing well-rounded founders leads to mediocre returns
“One of our core frameworks is invest in strengths, not lack of weaknesses. So what that means is look for people with some kind of superpower, but that doesn't mean they have to be well-rounded. The truth is a lot of great people and a lot of great companies h…”
Dixon: a16z expects founder perseverance, not guaranteed success
“We don't expect them to win or be successful, but we expect them to try really hard. A pet peeve would be entrepreneurs who just don't keep that covenant. Hey, I'm going to quit my startup and go take this cushy job. When we invest, that's kind of the only thi…”
Dixon: a16z Crypto just raised a $4.5 billion fund
“We just raised a four and a half billion dollar new fund.”
Dixon: a16z Crypto operates as an 80-person team with 50 operating specialists
“From an operational point of view, we're a completely independent team. We have 80 people on the crypto team. 13 are on the investment team. Then there's some set of back office and support, and then 50 or so on our operating teams.”
Drogen: Dixon and Wilson build winning crypto tech rather than predict it
“There are a couple of people out there like Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz, Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures that they're making these things. But anybody else, I don't think any of us knows which one is going to win long term.”
Kayden: Founders favor individual VC partners like Jeff Jordan over firm brands
“And I think founders will tell you that while they do pick firms, they really pick the individual partner. So if you're a marketplace consumer facing company, your number one draft pick is Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horwitz, and you get a lot of ancillary servi…”
Rosenthal: Andreessen Horowitz reshaped venture capital through high-velocity seed investing
“And Andreessen was the firm that really got this. It started deploying tons of capital, doing lots of seed investments, high valuations, high capital velocity deployment, and really has reshaped the whole industry around it.”
Dixon: Roughly 10% of top computer science talent is building blockchain apps
“And if you just sort of head count the very smart people that come to us that are in Silicon Valley, that are coming out of top computer science programs, et cetera, Something on the order of 10% of them I would say are building blockchain applications.”
a16z Missed Square After Anchoring to Early Funding Valuations
“Square is a company that we saw as early as the very, very first round, and for a variety of reasons just didn't make the decision to invest, and as often happens with these companies that are successful, every round always feels expensive after that”
Engineer Hobbyist Activities Evolve Into Mainstream Industries
“Often there's a reasonable correlation between stuff that starts as a engineer hobbyist activity that can evolve into a mainstream area, and that's part of how we think about it.”
'Software is Eating the World' Remains a16z's Core Investment Thesis
“So Mark Andreessen wrote this editorial many years ago called Software is Eating the World, and that's basically been our investment thesis for the last 10 years, and I think it will be our investment thesis at least for the next 10 unless the world changes, a…”
Founders Should Pitch 'Conquer-The-World' Ambition Over Downside Risk Mitigation
“The reality is, we achieve diversification through our portfolio. I don't need an individual entrepreneur to achieve diversification for us. It's great to know that there's somebody out there who might buy it, but, like, none of us is playing for that outcome,…”
a16z Initially Passed on Airbnb Before Investing at a Higher Valuation
“We did that at Airbnb. You know, we saw the very first round, and we just had lots of questions in our mind that didn't allow us to get there. We ultimately did the next round, but obviously, as you'd imagine, there's a substantial delta between the first roun…”
a16z Evaluates Founders Above Products Because Early Products Unavoidably Change
“At the early stage, it's really much more heavily geared towards entrepreneur. The reason for that, I think, is that we know that the product's gonna change, right?”
VCs Should Let Compelling Founders Drag Them Into New Technology Trends
“It's our job to be in front of all the interesting people who think they know what it is, and then for us to meet with them and hopefully be smart enough to allow them to drag us into places that we might not have gone because they've got some really killer id…”
Median Time From Founding to IPO Has Doubled to 12 Years
“For the last 15 years, it's basically been 10 to 12 years, so we've almost doubled the time to stay private”
Silicon Valley Absorbs 75 Percent of Andreessen Horowitz's Investment Activity
“Geographic expansion is not a big focus for the firm right now, so we're still a very heavy US-centric firm. Probably 75% of what we do is around the Silicon Valley area.”
Dixon: a16z Has Invested in Roughly 15 Top Game Studios
“We've probably made 15 investments in what I would call world-class game developers.”
Dixon: a16z backed Dapper Labs across six rounds before Top Shot
“Dapper Labs is a company that makes this popular product called Top Shot. But before Top Shot, they did, I think it was six rounds of financing and invested in all of them.”
Andreessen Horowitz operates an in-house consulting agency for portfolio companies
“Andreessen Horowitz takes this to the extreme by having really a big quasi-consulting operation under its own roof. That is there to go off and help entrepreneurs streamline things like, how do you find office space? Well, we've got someone to help with that. …”
Kayden: Accolade Has Backed Accel Since 2000 and Andreessen Since Fund II
“We've backed some terrific firms that we've stayed with, Excel since 2000, Andreessen since fund two.”
Andreessen Horowitz Manages Approximately 150 Active Portfolio Companies
“On the active companies, about a 150 today, and We've either got a board seat or we've got some substantive investment. We have some seed investments that are smaller where we don't take board seats, but about a 150 active is what we're managing today.”