Why a Leading Venture Capitalist Is Betting on a Decentralized Internethris Dixon, arguably the most prominent venture capitalist focusing on blockchain, is friggin’ tall. Before sitting down with him inside the spa-like Silicon Valley offices of Andreessen Horowitz in August, I had talked to him a handful of times over the years, but always on the phone, so I didn’t exactly know about his height.
As far as either of us can remember, Dixon and I initially talked in the mid-2000s, when he was running his first company, SiteAdvisor—a web security startup that got bought by McAfee in 2006. Next, Dixon cofounded Hunch, a wisdom-of-the-crowds recommendation site that eBay scooped up in 2011 for $80 million. Dixon joined VC superpower Andreessen Horowitz in 2013, around the time he made his first blockchain investment, in Ripple. He’s since led the firm into crypto investments that
include Coinbase, OpenBazaar, and Mediachain. In June, Andreessen Horowitz unveiled a $300 million crypto fund, and brought in blockchain guru and former federal prosecutor Katie Haun to run it.After Dixon and the firm’s communications chief, Margit Wennmachers, greet me warmly in a hallway at Andreessen Horowitz, in Menlo Park, we make our way into a blah conference room. Dixon sits and stretches out his long frame, wearing a gray polo shirt, gray jeans, red-and-white striped socks and sneakers. The following is an edited version of our conversation, beginning right after Wennmachers reminds me that Dixon doesn’t like to talk about his private life.
You just don’t like to talk about personal things?
There are a lot of crazy people. We have people coming to our house thinking that we keep bitcoin there.
OK, well, this is a little personal: I’m intrigued that you were a philosophy major.
It was AI-meets-computer science that first got me introduced to philosophy, and reading Godel, Escher, Bach, which was really influential for me. I wrote my high school thesis on whether machines will someday think, and then I studied philosophy at Columbia: philosophy of language, philosophy of mind. Then I got interested in history and how innovation works, and this has been a constant interest of mine.
Does any of that factor into what you do now?
If you go back and you look at a lot of great innovations, they were driven by small groups of slightly crazy people who were motivated by what I would call the interestingness of the problem. It wasn’t practicality, right?
That sounds right.
For example, if you look at a lot of the early technology that bitcoin is based on…these people were not trying to go and disrupt the Federal Reserve or create computers to take on Facebook and Google. They were interested in these very obscure specialized problems.
I wrote this blog post that kind of got popular. I wrote “what the smartest people will do on the weekends is what everyone else will do in work in 10 years.” It’s more than a coincidence that so many important technologies began in garages and dorm rooms. It has to do with the fact that there’s very few contexts in life in which people are able to focus on things that have a 10-plus year horizon.
There’s academia and maybe government funded things, but the vast majority of people are private sector people—that’s where a lot of talented people are, right? It’s their weekends and night times. They’re motivated by interestingness. It tends to be predictive of things that will matter 10-plus years from now, but have no practical importance today.
Satoshi’s paper describing bitcoin doesn’t talk at all about disrupting the world.
I have it on my wall. The white paper actually fits on a poster. It’s actually that short. It’s a very modest kind of opening. So, there are two interpretations of the paper. One is it’s a submarine strategy of, “Oh, this is a little modest thing.” The other interpretation is it’s a deliberately understated technical discussion that had a secret intent.
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Breakermag[/ur] It is an awesome and big interview. Everything points to a REALLY BIg bull market. Do not go away if you have lost some money in the short time.
