a16z crypto

By Fred Wilson for his blog

I guess this is the week I am going to compliment our competitors in the VC business.

That meme started yesterday in my post on Benchmark and will continue today.

Yesterday afternoon my friend Chris Dixon announced a new VC fund called “a16z crypto” which he will lead with a team of great investors, many of which are also friends, including his new partner Katie Haun who I serve on the Coinbase board with. She is a very special person as Ben Horowitz described in this post.

Go read the blog post which Chris wrote to announce the fund. It is among the best articulations of the crypto opportunity that I have read.

Here are some of the concepts he explains which had me nodding my head:

Trust is a new software primitive from which other components can be constructed.

and

The new primitive of trust also means that 3rd-party developers, entrepreneurs, and creators can build on top of crypto-powered platforms without worrying about whether the rules of the game will change later on. In an era in which the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of large tech incumbents, it’s more important than ever to create the right economic conditions for developers, creators, and entrepreneurs. Trust also enables new kinds of governance where communities collectively make important decisions about how networks evolve, what behaviors are permitted, and how economic benefits are distributed.

and

We believe that just as the last three megatrends — mobile, social, and cloud — intersected and reinforced each other, so will the next three megatrends — next-gen computing devices, AI, and crypto.

and

crypto is purely a software movement and doesn’t depend on a hardware buildout, in contrast to, say, the internet, which required laying cables and building cell towers. Second, the space is developing extremely rapidly, partly because the code, data, and knowledge is largely open source, and partly because of the increasing inflow of talent.

and

Cryptogoods can unlock new experiences and business models for games and other forms of media.

I really like the term “cryptogoods” and plan to start using it as my default word for NFTs and related efforts.

Many of our crypto investments have been with Chris and his partners and I hope that will continue. They are fantastic to work with.