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: Interest rates and macro factors are irrelevant to early-stage VC
“People talk about interest rates. I don't think it's relevant to early stage venture capital, because again, it's like any exit would be 10 years away. And fundamentally to get there, it's just so much more Driven by the quality of the team and the ideas than …”
Dixon: Google and Facebook will become low-growth legacy giants like IBM
“I think they're very likely going to become like IBM and HP and just chugging along and not really doing much new innovative stuff. They'll still be around and they'll still have their services, but I think that their relevance and growth are limited.”
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.”
Dixon: Web3 payouts will pass Web2 payouts in next couple years
“I believe we'll see in the next couple of years, web three payouts past web two payouts.”
Dixon: Decentralized blockchain communities will build tomorrow's social networks
“A lot of the thesis we have with crypto blockchain is that a similar thing will happen with internet services in the same way that almost all software today is made by a group, a community of people who get together and build something. We think the same thing…”
Dixon: Bitcoin is too eccentric to scale to billions of users
“I think Bitcoin's important, but I think a little too eccentric for the billions of people kind of scale.”
Dixon: No top App Store apps were created in the last decade
“Go look at the top apps in the app store. And none of those services were created in the last 10 years.”
Dixon: Centralized platforms inevitably shift from attracting creators to extracting value
“These networks have a set of shifting incentives where when they start off, They're solicitous to software developers, creators. They have to be their startup. But over time, as they gain power and the network effects kick in, they start to extract.”
Dixon: Blockchains combine protocol network rights with corporate network capabilities
“So blockchain is the best of both worlds. So you get the societal benefits of protocol networks where users and software developers and creators have rights and agency and economic benefits, but you also can do a lot of the advanced things that led corporate n…”
Dixon: Had RSS won, $150B would have flowed to internet users
“Social networks made last year, one hundred and fifty billion dollars. Had RSS won, and you had an architecture with no gatekeeper, I think it's credible to think that hundred and fifty billion dollars would instead flow to the edges of the network.”
Dixon: US crypto policy perversely protects useless tokens over useful products
“So there's this really reverse thing I think happening now where people are afraid to build useful products, but it's perfectly legal to build useless products.”
Dixon: Banning Open-Source AI Would Leave Five Companies In Control
“If it's banned, which I think some places seem to be moving towards, that will end up in a very different world. It'll end up in the world where you have five companies that control the technology and just a very different economic structure.”
Dixon: AI is sustaining for incumbents, while blockchains are disruptive
“I think AI, for example, is sustaining. I think blockchains are disruptive. Blockchains are very, very hard to respond to.”
Dixon: Web3 combines Web1 open protocols with Web2 functionality
“The goal of web three is to get the best of both worlds, to get the democratized open protocols of web one and the advanced functionality that we've come to love, mobile apps, fast user experience, everything else from web two and combine those.”
Dixon: Focusing on institutional crypto adoption puts the cart before horse
“I think of it as we need to build great products used by billions of people. And then I just assume the institutions will follow. The institutions are going to go where the growth and the money is, frankly. That's what comes first. So I feel like people are pu…”
Dixon: Web3 services will not have dominant network effects locking users in
“In the case of Web three, the network is owned by the community yet. I think you'll have big services. We'll hopefully invest in some of them, but they won't have the dominant network effects that lock you in and users will have a choice. Users can exit.”
Dixon: US stablecoin regulation perversely incentivizes offshore evasion
“USDC gets all the attention from the regulators and the other ones are ignored. And it creates this perverse incentive where it actually, I think, incentivizes people to be offshore, more aggressive, because they don't get the scrutiny, and the people that wan…”
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.”
Dixon: a16z Crypto never joins party rounds and only leads investments
“When we invest, we don't do quote unquote party rounds. We don't put a little bit of money here and dabble. We either invest and lead and back up the truck and put all our resources behind it and roll up our sleeves or we don't invest.”
Dixon: Tech workers lack mission drive in SaaS compared to Web3
“This is in no way to diminish other categories, but I just don't think people feel mission-driven with respect to SaaS software, as an example, or databases. I think those are important categories, just so you know, and our firm invests in them. They provide r…”
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.”
Dixon: Blockchains are computers capable of making immutable, programmatic commitments
“I call blockchains computers that can make commitments. And so what that means is you write some software on the Ethereum computer and you can write some software that says, I'm going to build a social network. And on this social network, I'm going to commit t…”
Dixon predicts mainstream consumer blockchain adoption within one to five years
“I would say the short answer is somewhere between one and five years.”
Dixon: Liquidity is a bug, not a feature in venture capital
“I believe that in my business, at least liquidity is a bug and not a feature. And what I mean by that is the ability to sell something is a very, very dangerous thing and can mess with you. And I bet you that if most venture capitalists could sell their stock …”
Dixon: Internet Platforms Scale via "Come for Tool, Stay for Network"
“That's an old internet strategy that I call come for the tool, stay for the network.”
Dixon: Global NFT sales reached $8.6 billion in 2023
“There were 8.6 billion in NFT sales last year.”
Dixon: Policymakers fighting stablecoins hurt US dollar adoption
“It's frustrating that some policymakers are trying to fight against stable coins when it seems pretty clear that, that popularizing the dollar should be in our interest.”
Dixon: NFT Projects Evolve Bottom-Up Like Cities, Not Corporate Theme Parks
“The way I think about these NFT projects is the goal is to evolve them more like cities in a bottom up way. So you create these assets in these communities, and then people build applications around them, and it comes bottom up.”
Dixon: Multi-vertical Silicon Valley VCs made basically no crypto investments in two years
“There's basically no Silicon Valley investment in the last two years from multi vertical VCs.”
Dixon: Chasing consensus hype cycles in venture capital yields average outcomes
“If you just run around like kid soccer, average thesis will lead to average outcomes.”
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…”
Dixon: Five to ten companies essentially control the internet
“You have five, maybe 10 companies that essentially control the internet. You still have open protocols like the web and email, but they've been diminished in their influence and power.”
Dixon: Non-crypto VCs see over 50% of founders pitching Web3
“When I talk to friends who aren't even into crypto and web three technology investors, they'll tell me something on the order of 50% or more of the entrepreneurs that come to them are doing web three.”
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%.”
Dixon: Web3 token ownership eliminates heavy customer acquisition spending
“In blockchain web three, there's been very, very few cases of people spending significant money on customer acquisition. One of the exciting things of web three is that the users, because they have tokens, because they have ownership, they become evangelists f…”
Dixon: Twitter shutting down its developer ecosystem was a mistake
“Twitter decided to shut that down because they decided to pursue an advertising business model, which I think was a mistake, but that's what they did.”
Dixon: I would leave Twitter if I could take my followers with me
“If I had that same ability on Twitter, I'd switch off of Twitter. I'd switch C. Dixon on Twitter to something else because I don't like how they run that service. They have spam and a bunch of other things, and I'd like to switch and take my followers with me,…”
Dixon: Compound and on-chain DeFi protocols performed well through market volatility
“And Compound, by the way, contrary to a lot of the news you'll read today, Compound and all of the other on-chain DeFi protocols have performed quite well in this volatile market.”
Dixon: Gaming Metaverse Economies Will Provide Livelihoods for Many People
“I think that trend will only increase and there'll be more and more people who earn a living digitally. And I think creating spaceships and EVE online and selling goods and creating worlds and doing all sorts of other creative activities, for example, in a gam…”
Dixon: Technical Infrastructure for Cross-Game Item Interoperability Exists Today
“I think the programming is there today. NFTs are pretty simple programming standard that's relatively easy to bring from one game to another.”
Dixon: Hollywood understands Web3 and NFTs while Silicon Valley dismisses them
“People at Google and Facebook, in my experience, just don't get this stuff. Web two entrepreneurs just scratching their heads and they say it's all scams and fraud. They just don't get it. People in Hollywood get it. It's not weird to them. They've been sellin…”
Dixon: 2022 crypto crash resembles 2008 macro shock, not crypto winters
“To me, this feels more like 2008 than the crypto downturns of 2014 and 18. The macro thing with inflation, interest rates, the next few months will tell maybe the inflation was transitory or maybe it will lead to problems in real estate and credit markets. And…”
Dixon: Tech scaling laws are economically driven, not physical inevitabilities
“If you look at just generally at the history of technology, people mistakenly think of these things as laws of physics, like Moore's law. People talk about as if magically There's this inevitable march towards being able to pack more transistors on chips. I th…”
Dixon: Tech and media are the United States' two main exports
“We basically have two exports in the U S right now. We have tech and media. Just look at the numbers. Those are the two killer products that we have.”
Dixon: Startups should ride macro trends rather than creating them
“I'd say a very important lesson, and I think one I kind of learned the hard way on my second startup is don't try to create the trends as a startup, try to ride the trends.”
Dixon: Angel investing is 98% about founders and 2% about the idea
“What I've come to believe in retrospect is that early stage angel investing is, you'll often hear that it's 80% about the people or something and 20% about the idea or something like that. I think it's like 98% I've now learned about the people and like two pe…”
Dixon: Payment blockchains will do for payments what WhatsApp did for messaging
“I would sort of say that they'll do for payments. What I think of as WhatsApp did for messaging.”
Dixon: Crypto is in 2004–2005 phase, years from an iPhone moment
“I think with respect to crypto blockchains, we are pre iPhone moment. Like we haven't had the breakthrough platform yet. I think we're somewhere, if you map it to mobile phones, let's say, I think we're probably 2004, 2005. I hope at least that we're like a ye…”