Chris Dixon: From Quant Trading to Building a16z Crypto

**Chris Dixon** (0:00)
And at the time I joined, there were only a couple of investing partners, and there was only one fund. Now we have sort of this complex of funds. And I was a reasonably prominent sort of angel investor, a blogger. They were probably looking at people that had been doing it for some period of time. I mean, I don't know exactly why. But I think in the end, we just sort of hit it off.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
Chris Dixon grew up in Ohio, got a computer in the 1980s, and taught himself C and assembly language by making video games. After college, he wrote Monte Carlo Simulations at an options market making firm in New York, then left to co-found SiteAdvisor, an Internet security company sold to McAfee in 2006 Two years later, he started an AI company called Hunch, built on neural networks that didn't yet have the GPU power to work well. It sold to eBay in 2011 In 2013, he joined Andreessen Horowitz where he led a $75 million round for Oculus, made the firm's early investment in Coinbase, and eventually built a16z's dedicated crypto practice, now in its fourth fund. In this conversation, Dixon traces the full arc from quant finance to seed investing to Washington policy work on stablecoin legislation and explains the framework behind his most unconventional bets. This episode previously aired on the Internet History Podcast. Brian McCullough speaks with Chris Dixon, General Partner at a16z.

**Brian McCullough** (1:36)
Chris Dixon, thanks for coming on to talk to us today.

**Chris Dixon** (1:39)
Thanks for having me, Brian.

**Brian McCullough** (1:40)
Yeah, you and I have spoken many, many times, and I feel like we have gotten some of your beginning before, but let me go back to the very, very beginning and ask you about becoming a programmer. What were your first encounters with computers, and how did you know in terms of programming and computers that this is what I want to do?

**Chris Dixon** (2:04)
Yeah, I think this is a fairly common thing in tech, but I just as a kid got a computer just as back in the 1980s, and just wanted to make video games and enjoyed programming, and it was kind of a cultish, I don't know, niche activity back then, and just really enjoyed it. I think we'd say today got to a flow state and just designing stuff, and figuring it all out. And, yeah, and it just really, and I was doing C programming and assembly language programming and making graphics stuff and video games, and was really into it. And then I was in college in the early 90s, and at the time, I kind of felt like computing had gotten too corporate, and like it was sort of, before the Internet had really taken off. And for those who remember, the computer industry kind of moved from like a hobbyist phase to more of like Microsoft's Office, Excel. I don't know, I just sort of, so I actually studied philosophy in school, and got into like kind of cognitive, like a little bit of the intersection, maybe a little bit of what we call today AI. I did a little bit of AI, but more, it was sort of free AI, but more philosophy of mind, cognitive science, logic, and just, I don't know, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I thought it was fun, and didn't have a very sharp career idea.
But then, I was in New York, and in New York, if you had a program, and you're in New York, and it's expensive, I ended up doing various programming jobs, which eventually led me into, for two years, post-school finance at a hedge fund doing programming, just to pay my student loans and things. But then the Internet really started taking off, and I discovered that, and got into that. And fast forward, you know, I was in New York and then in Boston for a while, and ended up in the early 2000s starting an Internet security company.

**Brian McCullough** (4:07)
All right. You've jumped way ahead for me. So, I don't know.

**Chris Dixon** (4:15)
I'm happy to go into more detail.

**Brian McCullough** (4:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay. I researched you for this, and I learned things that I didn't know about you. And so, let me come back to the, you were essentially, when you're saying after school, you were a programmer, you were like a quant. You were programming for quantitative finance and like trading systems and stuff like that?

**Chris Dixon** (4:38)
Yeah, it was a company called Arbitrade, and it did options market making. I had no particular like interest. I mean, I wasn't like looking to work in finance, I guess, but I was just sort of in New York, like I mentioned programming and if you're a New York program, and I was just trying to honestly just pay bills and pay down debt, and it was the best paying thing you could do, or at least that I found. Yeah, so it was a company that like today we'd call like quant trading, you know, high-speed trading. I wrote programs, I wasn't like quant per se, but I wrote programs that were kind of finance oriented. So for those who know this stuff, like Monte Carlo simulations, like these sort of big simulations you run, and I would do basically kind of high-performance algorithms for those, so try to make them really optimized, so they would execute quickly. So we had a, I think we were about 20 people in our office. The company was bigger, it was like a couple hundred, but in the R&D group it was about 20, and I was kind of the lead of, I eventually became the lead of sort of one part of that group, which was sort of the finance group. So I kind of knew, I would say just generally about myself, as I kind of like know a little bit about a bunch of things, as opposed to a lot about one thing. So I knew kind of enough finance to get by and enough, and I was actually a pretty good programmer, decent programmer.