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 99 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: Buying domains was probably the 1990s' best investment strategy
“Buying domains was probably the best, single best investment strategy in the nineties.”
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.”
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: Corporate career progression is a local-optimum trap for aspiring founders
“In people's careers, I think you get caught on kind of a local optimum. Imagine the career landscape is a hilly landscape, and there's the highest hills where you kind of want to get to. It's very easy to sort of be walking up a hill and feel like you're succe…”
Dixon: Over 90% of all software running worldwide is open source
“And today I think it really under appreciated under discussed aspect of the technology world is that the vast majority of software that runs in the world is open source software, which was a movement that was dismissed much like blockchains are today, 20 years…”
Dixon: Software composability acts as compounding interest in tech
“Because composability, this Lego brick feature of open source software is, to me, the compounding interest of software.”
Dixon: Ethereum generated $2B in application fees over the last year
“And so in the last 12 months, there's a ballpark of two billion dollars was paid by applications to run software on the Ethereum blockchain.”
Dixon: Prices and innovation operate on two largely decoupled charts
“My mental model is there's prices and then there's innovation. They're really two different charts that are somewhat unrelated. And the innovation chart in my mind is mainly driven by platform shifts and major new technologies.”
Dixon: Monthly stablecoin transaction volume reached roughly $600 billion
“Stable coins last month were something on the order of six hundred billion in transactions.”
Dixon: Tether on Tron functions like Venmo in parts of Asia
“I was just talking to someone who runs one of the larger stablecoin infrastructure companies, and he said that the average dollar value is under a hundred dollars. There's a lot of data, much of it is peer to peer, and there's a lot of anecdotes and data that …”
Dixon: DeFi Protocols Handled 2022 Market Turmoil Without Breaking
“And I think the other important thing to note is that during the volatility and downturns, when you had the failure of FTX and BlockFi and Celsius, all of these blockchain services worked perfectly. I should say the good ones, like Compound, Aave, Uniswap, Mak…”
Dixon: Blockchains Solve Institutional Coordination as Neutral Political Solutions
“In some ways, you can think of a blockchain as a political solution. It's a way to recruit great engineers, because they want to work on it, and there's a financial model to incentivize them, and it's neutral. So all these different 10 institutions that maybe …”
Dixon: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pay zero ad revenue to creators
“Twitter and Facebook have zero dollar revenue share. Instagram is zero dollars. So Instagram makes all their money on advertising. They pay zero out to the creators.”
Dixon: a16z Crypto just raised a $4.5 billion fund
“We just raised a four and a half billion dollar new fund.”
Dixon: OpenSea paid out around $5B to creators last year
“We're investors in OpenSea, which is an NFT platform. We put a report out recently where we calculated how much OpenSea had paid out to creative people. And it was something on the order of five billion dollars last year with a B”
Dixon: 99% of daily software interacted with is open source
“99% of the software that your listeners are interacting with on a daily basis is open source software.”
Dixon: Power in tech is almost always driven by network effects
“Power in tech is network effects, almost always. Occasionally you have scale effects, brand effects, but generally it's network effects.”
Dixon: Almost all major mobile apps were created between 2009 and 2011
“Almost all of the big mobile apps were created between 2009 and 11.”
Dixon: Blockchains are close to abstraction maturity but not there yet
“I think we're close to that in blockchains and crypto, but we're not quite there yet. So we're making a lot of investments in the infrastructure layer to get to that point.”
Dixon: Ethereum Layer 2 networks are ready for prime time
“We're seeing production ready scaled other networks, including what are called layer two networks on top of Ethereum that are really ready for prime time. And that dramatically lowers the transaction costs and therefore opens up a lot of new design possibiliti…”
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.”
Dixon: Web3 hiring values open source contributions over formal credentials
“In our world, a lot of people may not have formal educations. They may not have the same pedigree, brand name resumes. We've hired a lot of people who have not gone to college. What we want to see is they've demonstrated excellence. That excellence can be thro…”
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: 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: 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: 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: True tech community is grassroots peer affinity, matching early PC culture
“To me, a community is not when you look up to a leader like Steve Jobs. It's when you bump into somebody at a bar, and they're interested in that topic, and you actually feel an affinity. And that's how the PC felt back then, and that's how crypto feels today.”
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: People with tech skills dramatically overestimate startup risk
“Generally people who might be listening to this, who are interested in technology, if you have tech skills and you're in this world, they dramatically overestimate the risk of starting a company.”
Dixon: The majority of startups face founder tension and issues
“And I've now seen enough startups to tell you that in certainly the majority of cases, there's a founder issue. It's a very, very stressful experience starting a company and almost inevitably at some point there's tension between the founders and it can arise …”
Dixon: Persistence is one of the strongest predictors of startup success
“One of the best predictors of startup success. It'd be great if you knew it ahead of time. It's very hard to know ahead of time, but one of the highest correlates or something is persistence.”
Dixon: New major computing platforms emerge in cycles every 10 to 15 years
“If you look at the last, I guess, 70 years of computing, going back to, you know, World War II and the advent of modern computers, there's been these waves every 10 to 15 years of new computers. So mainframes, mini computers, PCs, the internet, mobile phones, …”
Dixon: Microsoft did not miss mobile phones and had good devices in the 2000s
“People say windows, Microsoft missed mobile phones. They didn't miss mobile phones at all. They had mobile phones in the late nineties. They had very good ones in the early 2000.”
Dixon: At least 95% of global software is open source
“95% of the software in the world, if not more, is open source software.”
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.”
Dixon: Media consumption should be treated like a diet with books as protein
“I have this idea unpublished blog posts. I call media keto. The idea is think of media consumption, kind of like you do with food. And I think of social networks, like reading Twitter and things as like sugar. Reading the news, I consider sugar. I don't read t…”
Dixon: Breakthrough ideas come from side hobbies, not structured productive work
“I think a lot of very important things come from those side interests and hobbies. And a lot of what we kind of consider productive work is important, but oftentimes can fall prey to short-termism, I guess. And kind of group think and other things.”
Dixon: Investors mistakenly impute logic onto noisy, random market moves
“Imputing logic onto things that are probably noisy and random. My impression of a lot of investing is everything from, if you could watch CNBC and they say the market moved today because of X, Y, and Z, and in fact, it was probably moved because whatever some …”
Dixon: Coinbase Maintained a Four-Year Cash Runway Early On
“Coinbase did this well early on. They always ran things at a four-year runway, and if you look at it, that was very, very smart.”
Dixon: Composability is the compound interest of software development
“I like to say composability is the software as compounding interest is the finance. It has that same amazing thing. When you do compounded interest, you're like, whoa, that really matters a lot. This is obviously well known to your listeners, but in software, …”
Dixon: Uniswap surpassed $1 trillion in trading volume
“Uniswap, which is what's called a decentralized exchange, just passed a trillion dollars in trading volume”
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: Surviving startup troughs requires grit and cross-disciplinary knowledge
“You get through that trough, you have to have two characteristics. You have to really just be all in. You have to have grit and you have to be willing to put up with that and be kind of miserable and all your friends say, what are you doing and why are you was…”
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.”
Dixon: Symantec was the world's largest subscription business around 2007
“I think at the time, Symantec was the biggest subscription business in the world. Like, it had a hundred and something million subscribers, which back then was The record.”
Dixon: Computing platforms compound exponentially via an app-platform feedback flywheel
“Computers specifically have this feedback loop. When they hit this golden period of product market fit, they have this flywheel where the applications Get rapidly better. And that in turn creates economics incentives for the platform to get better, which in tu…”