Chris Dixon – The Future of Blockchain at a16z

**Ted Seides** (0:01)
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Hello, I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can keep up to date by visiting capitalallocatorspodcast.com.
My guest on today's show is Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreesen Horowitz, where he focuses on the A16Z crypto funds. Before joining Andreesen in 2013, Chris co-founded, built and sold two technology companies and was a prolific seed investor, founding member of Founder Collective and personal investor. At various spots along the way, Chris was an investor in BuzzFeed, Uber, Venmo, Hotel Tonight, Coinbase and Oculus, among many others.
Our conversation covers Chris' early interest in computers and business, and lessons from starting companies and angel investing. We then turn to his activities since joining Andreesen Horowitz, discussing new computing platforms, a brief history of centralized and decentralized computing, development of blockchain technologies, potential killer apps, token basics, and investor perception.
Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Dixon.
Chris, thanks so much for doing this.

**Chris Dixon** (3:45)
Thanks for having me.

**Ted Seides** (3:46)
Why don't we start just back at the beginning for you and your initial interest in technology way back when?

**Chris Dixon** (3:52)
I was interested in computers when I was a kid in the 80s. So I had a few top people in the business in the industry, probably a pretty familiar path, which is I got an Apple II and I started programming games and just got really interested just generally in programming, I professionally programmed at college, sort of helped pay my way through college. And then I worked for a couple of years after college as a programmer at a high speed options trading firm doing programming of financial models, I guess, which is a really cool job. It's a great way to pay off student loans. But that was sort of late 90s. And I started reading about venture capital and startups and got interested in that and made the switch over to that world.

**Ted Seides** (4:34)
So my understanding is, as an undergrad, you were a philosophy major, which isn't necessarily what you think happens with programming. So how did that come about?

**Chris Dixon** (4:42)
It's not as crazy as it sounds. So I had read this great book called Gerd-Alesher Bach. That was Hofstadter. And there's a sort of a series of Daniel Dennett. There's kind of a series of writers who I think kind of really had their golden age, maybe when I was a teenager, who would write about the intersection of how the mind works, how computers work, and maybe like sort of philosophical questions around logic and language. And so I got really interested in that. I was frankly a little arrogant. I thought I knew computers already, so I didn't need to do computer science. In retrospect, of course, I was extremely arrogant and I didn't really know that. I knew how to like program in a hacker sense, but not anything. I wish I'd taken more proper computer science.