How Crypto Is Rebuilding Finance From First Principles

Guy Wuollet (0:00)

The entire world has been put on a computer and on the internet, everything is computer other than the financial system, which is insane. Stablecoins and blockchains are a digital transformation for finance and for Wall Street, the same way that the cloud services was a digital transformation for most businesses. A significant portion of the Western economy is focused on information technology or financial markets. I think blockchain is literal convergence of those two ideas, blockchains and crypto needs to get to, where if you're using financial services or a network on the internet, like you just happen to be using a blockchain, because that is a good way to coordinate those products and services. The success for crypto as an industry or a movement is that we stop saying crypto.

Robert Hackett (0:40)

In looking at the crypto landscape today, where are you focusing your energy and attention?

Guy Wuollet (0:45)

Yeah, I think the obvious opportunity today.

Robert Hackett (0:52)

So, here with Guy Wuollet, General Partner at a16z crypto. Welcome on to the show.

Guy Wuollet (0:57)

Thank you. Great to be here.

Robert Hackett (0:59)

Today, we're just here to get to know you a little bit better. You recently have been elevated to the position of General Partner, one of four GPs that we have on the a16z crypto team. Before that, you were an investment partner, but you've been in the crypto world for a while now. I actually was digging up some Guy Wuollet lore and learned that you were not even originally at a16z on the crypto team. You were on a different team, an intern on the go-to-market team for the enterprise team. And somehow from there, you managed to make your way into all this crypto stuff that we do.

So give me a little bit of the background here. So how did you land on the enterprise team? And how did you then make your way from the buttoned up world of enterprise software to the pretty wonky wild world of crypto? Which is getting more professionalized and suited up, as you say, but.

Guy Wuollet (1:53)

Yeah, so I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. My sport or passion in high school was rowing, and that's part of how I ended up at Stanford, where I went to college. There, I very quickly fell down kind of the computer science and then the crypto rabbit hole. I had programmed a little bit as a kid, but it was never kind of my primary interest. I went to a very classic East Coast prep school, and we did not have programming or computer science classes. When I was at Stanford, I became very interested in crypto. And around that same time, I was looking for a summer internship my sophomore year.

After my freshman year, I had worked in the economics department, researching the impact of political power on nuclear energy cleanup costs.

Robert Hackett (2:36)

Didn't know about this.

Guy Wuollet (2:36)

It was like a super niche topic. And it was very fun reading and then digitizing the Department of Energy budgets that were physically on paper.

Robert Hackett (2:45)

I didn't know about this backstory. And then, I mean, we can get to this later, but you've also led our investment in Daylight, which is a decentralized physical infrastructure project that focuses on decentralized energy. So I am beginning to see some weaving of threads throughout your career here.

Guy Wuollet (3:01)

Yeah, I think I've always kind of been fascinated by networks, be it the internet or the energy grid or the financial system. I think that's kind of a through line of a lot of the intellectual interests I've had and certainly part of what inspired me to get interested in crypto.

My sophomore year of college, they had the student-athlete career fair, and I ended up talking to, I think it was Ben Gardner and Ronnie Harris, who are both on, at the time, it was called the market development team, and they were hiring interns, and Ben and Ronnie both played football at Stanford. So I chatted with them for a little while and kind of made a connection, ended up getting an introduction to some other people on that team through a family friend as well. I ended up on the enterprise go-to-market team as an intern, which I did for two summers in the year in between.

Robert Hackett (3:50)

This was in 2018?

Guy Wuollet (3:52)

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was very interested in crypto, and I would say kind of interested in the internet and networking and crypto as potentially the future of that. And so during my time as an intern on that team initially, I tried to do more crypto-related things, and I was fortunate to get to spend some time with Jesse Walden, who's now at Variant, but at the time was one of the investing partners on the crypto team. And then a little bit with Eddie, who I think joined at the beginning of 2019, maybe the summer of 2019