Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dixon: AI winners will be determined by data, not algorithms
“Is who kind of wins in AI, and I think that will probably come down to who has the best data, because the algorithms are, you know, all published and out there, and the frameworks are out there, and so it's not really, that's not really gonna be a differentiat…”
Insight
Dixon: 80% accurate ML models take a weekend; the rest takes decades
“You can sort of, like, you know, you can download TensorFlow, download some data sets, and over the weekend, probably come up with, you know, if you're a good programmer, come up with something that can do, like, 80% accuracy of whatever, let's say OCR or some…”
Insight
Dixon: Crypto networks are community-owned digital services, not corporate ones
“The way I think of crypto networks, as I call them, is, is they are digital services, and that's, I mean, in the broadest sense of any kind of digital service that are owned and operated by communities as opposed to being owned and operated by companies.”
Insight
Dixon: Centralized platforms predictably turn hostile to third-party developers over time
“What tends to happen with these big platforms is they start off being very open to, kind of, third parties to startups. Like, if you look at Facebook early on, they embraced Zynga, and they embraced media companies and things like this, and then as they got bi…”
Insight
Chris Dixon: The best VC strategy is following smart developers
“The thing that's worked for me as an investor is to not try to outsmart, ah, really smart developers. Just sort of let them show me where to go and follow them.”
Prediction Held up
Dixon: Musicians will make money selling digital virtual goods
“And so I think you're going to see musicians who now make money by selling digital virtual goods as an example, which is not a model today, and that's like a very interesting new model as an example.”
Opinion
Dixon: Betting against Ethereum means betting against top developer talent
“If you want to bet against Ethereum as an example, like you're effectively betting against, you know, I don't know, like a lot of really, really smart engineers, and I just, I think it's a, You know, I'll take the other side of the bed.”
Insight
Dixon: Tech advances in 10 to 15 year platform cycles
“If you just look at the history of technology, It tends to go in these sort of 10 to 15 year cycles, right? So you had the mainframe computers, you had PCs, you had the internet, you had smartphones. Like, we're due for another kind of wave, I think, in the ne…”
Insight
Dixon: Ten Google results act as a fault-tolerant UI for AI
“In some ways, you can think of Google results. They give you 10 results, right? They're sort of, you know, like in an ideal world, they give you one result, but they give you 10 results, because they let the human figure out the last 20%, right? So that's sort…”
Opinion
Chris Dixon remains bullish on VR over AR for full immersion
“I'm still very bullish on, I know it's sort of fashionable to be like AR, not VR. I think AR is very cool, but I think VR. I mean, I think VR, I don't know, I just think of it as like, you want to, do you want to go partially into the matrix or fully into the …”
Insight
Dixon: Blockchains without native tokens lack an essential operational funding model
“I think the idea of trying to build, like, a blockchain system without a cryptocurrency associated with it, you're losing this essential aspect, which is this funding model, essentially which funds both the operation of the network, but also the development, t…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dixon: Developer momentum will solve blockchain scaling challenges
“Ethereum has, they have a lot of really interesting stuff going on that they're doing to improve scaling, and there's Plasma, I think. There's Plasma, there's sharding, you know, proof of stake, Wasm like there's all this layer two stuff so it's like state cha…”
Assertion Contradicted
Dixon: High-end VR headset prices fell 80% over three years
“The price of a high-end VR headset has gone down, I think, like, 80% over the last three years”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2023
Dixon: Cost of Wi-Fi Linux computers will fall to $1
“You can get a five dollar, you know, Linux It's a computer now with Wi-Fi. It's Wi-Fi enabled. That's going to go to a dollar.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dixon: Non-tech giants will find speech recognition AI very tough
“I think for some applications, like speech, you know speech is going to be, I think, very tough for non, you know, I mean, like Google and Amazon with their, you know, with their, and Apple with their phones and the, you know, the Alexa's and things like that.…”
Insight
Chris Dixon: Mass VR adoption requires a $200 untethered 6DOF headset
“I think you need a 200 dollar, some sort of consumer price point device which has sort of a high-end feature, so like, and that means like six degrees of freedom, head tracking, I don't know if people follow this stuff, hand tracking you have to get rid of the…”
Assertion Partly supported
Dixon: Top mobile apps were all created between 2009 and 2011
“If you just go look at all the top apps, they were all created between 2009 and 11 basically.”
Assertion Supported
Dixon: U.S. ban on beyond line of sight drones holds back commercial applications
“A lot of it's regulation in the U.S. It's there's, like, beyond line of sight drones, for example, are not legal. Which is a big issue for a lot of applications.”
Disclosure
Chris Dixon meets weekly with three teams leaving Google or Facebook
“I have three of these meetings a week where it's team coming out of Google or Facebook or someplace like that”
Assertion Supported
Chris Dixon: Netscape was hauled before regulators over SSL encryption
“Netscape created SSL in the nineties, which is the, you know, the encryption protocol of the internet. They were like hauled in front of, you know, regulators and things, because The thought at the time was, who would want to encrypt it except for criminals?”
Insight
Chris Dixon: 99% of network effect startups fail before achieving scale
“99%, probably, of network effect businesses die before they kind of get to network effects, to real network effects.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dixon expected major crypto user applications within one to two years
“I hope and I expect over the next year or two we're going to see some really interesting applications.”
Disclosure
a16z expanded into direct token investments around late 2016
“We've since, about a year and a half ago, kind of crossed over to doing also direct investment in coins and tokens”
Insight
Chris Dixon: Startups facing bundlers need order-of-magnitude better technology
“The key is to, you just, you need, you just really need, like, an order of magnitude, kind of better technology and product, like, it just really raises the bar, right, because it's essentially an old problem in startups, which is you're competing against bund…”
Chris Dixon