Welcome to episode of the podcast was talks about the
Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the
global watching Revolution. I'm Sebastian could do.
And I'm here with my co-host mayor Roy.
Today, we're speaking with Ali. Yeah, he is a general partner at
a 16z course. They are a Massive fund which
Bears? No, I don't think that you do.
The proper introduction, everybody knows it.
Who a czr and the type of the Investments they've made.
But we're going to be chatting with Ali today about a bunch of
stuff, including a 16 sees thesis.
Also taking a step back and looking at fundamentals of
crypto networks. And some of the broader banking
in political crises that have been happening around the world
in the last few weeks and months but first.
Yeah. Thanks for joining us and may be
starting off by giving us a little background and how you
became part of the team at ACC. Yeah, sure thing.
Thank you, 7 mirror. It's great to be good to be
here. So yeah, maybe I'll give you a
little bit of a little bit of my history.
I was I was originally born and Mexico City was born and raised
in Mexico and throughout my childhood that I was fascinated
by technology, I was very into engineering and to the things
that humans have built I was always in awe of things like you
know, fast cars or planes or like tall buildings all over.
Superlatives like the kind of the great things that humans
could build and I was particularly fascinated by
computers and by Robotics and Prospect of AI and you can have
a whole that whole world and very much wanted to pursue a
career in engineering. And so I kind of saw it looked
like toward the us as a place to study as a place to to kind of
make a career. And in the end I ended up going
to Stanford to study computer science focused on systems in
particular. I really like to like, right.
Code. And that was like that track.
That would that would expose you the most to large, like
programming, programming projects and programming
experience. So focused a lot on distributed
systems Operating Systems computer, networking computer
security, those were all of the fields that were most
interesting to me. And this was, by the way, I like
my undergrad started in 2006. This is before crypto was a
thing at the very tail. End of my undergrad degree.
In 2010 I was doing research with David Meza areas at the at
the computer security Lab at Stanford and that's when we all
became aware of the of the Bitcoin white paper.
I still have a few emails like in the lab of us being like out
like isn't this. So cool thing we should just
like play with it and we all we all like downloaded it played
with it, we minded but I think most of us that specially
certainly I did I missed the implications of how important
that was going to be so even though I was playing with it and
minded I didn't track anything. I did attract any of the private
keys. That I was that I was mining
with it so that was that ended up being later on like three
years after the, after that until 2013, when I started to
become more clear, what the applications really were?
That was my first very visceral lesson in the space.
And I kind of that kind of likes was be, became a seared in my
memory as a, as an experience early on.
And I feel like many people who bit in the space in a while,
have similar stories but I was fascinated by it.
So I kind of was Was following it closely.
Since then at the time there was no, there were no word, really
many ways of working on it full-time.
And I was also, as I said, I was also interested in Ai and so I
actually, I joined Google first. I joined Google X and I joined
this robotics project called replicant which had been started
by an open, which is this abomination of a bunch of
different robotics projects and the mission was to build an
operating system for fleets of robots.
And that was that Nice because it kind of married my interests
in distributed systems and then also machine learning and
Robotics. So the very fun project to work
on for two years that that that that ultimately it was a project
that was that exit actually became the everyday.
Robot project, just now a real real thing at me it's like it's
alive is now public, you know how X is super secretive about
about everything but but it's now a project that people can
talk about it which is nice. But after that I moved over to
Google brain. Where where I did a little bit
more of the same Act, was distributed systems for machine
learning generally and I was working closely with the
robotics team at Google brain. It was a core contributor
tensorflow, to make tensorflow, more capable to work in that
kind of environment. And then finally, in 2017, like
all throughout this time, by the way, it was still kind of
fascinated that crypto Google of course will never touch crypto
with a thousand foot pole. So I could only really Follow it
and play with it in my own time. All right, in my roommate at the
time was was one Bennett or the founder of protocol Labs.
So we were, we were close or like teasing.
You may be my best friend and we were kind of contemporary since
school is we we go way back. We were living together at the
time and talking about all of this stuff.
So I was fascinated by the space.
I won't point they got connected to Chris to Chris Dixon, York
firm. And we kind of hit it off and he
and he essentially Said like hey you should you to join.
We should start a crypto of crypto farmed because back then
the firm was simplest investing. We Chris was investing in
crypto. He's been investing in crypto
since 2013 or so but it was all entirely within the context of
the meaning of the main farm. So the thinking was we should
build a dedicated team for crypto and really double down
and that was his pitch to me and to me that's all I can operators
like that. I love the space is super
interesting. I was frustrated that Google is
such a big company. It's very hard, actually, get
things done. So I dropped, I kind of do.
I joined the firm in 2017? It was christened me at first,
and then, we started to build out the team.
We've recruited a few other people, and then since then, we
both out the entire think they're equipped.
So vertical here at the firm, and we're now, we're now up to
80 people or so across a bunch of different functions.
And the idea is to not only make great wrestlers, but to also
support every portfolio company in every way we can.
And I'm happy to talk a little bit more about the way that we
tend to work with Founders, but that's the story.
It's been five years now and it's been quite a ride and and
it's been awesome and really great.
That's a, that's fascinating story.
I didn't realize that your roots at the crypto went so far back.
And that's like many of us you have been burned early, right?
Yeah. But by not realizing the
implications of what you were getting involved in.
What you mentioned that you you think that Google will never
catch crypto with a ten-foot pole or perhaps even longer
pole? Why do you think that is?
And why do you think Google hasn't embraced?
Do because there's such, like, a forward-thinking company on so
many other, you were two goals and industries, but crypto seems
to be something that they are incredibly hesitant to Tasha.
Although, although recently, there were some announcements
that they were implementing like, if their Cloud offerings,
like some MPC services, and things like that, this seemed to
indicate that they are you open to providing infrastructure
services to crypto companies? But at least I got the payment
side or on any of the higher level.
Ex of the stack there, there's they're quite absent.
Yeah, well, I could go into an hour long rant about Google,
that would consume the entire podcast, but I think that maybe
the core reason that that Google will will likely never do
anything. Significant in the space is it's
just a classic innovators dilemma.
It's just the fact that crypto is such a disruptive technology,
the fact that crypto works by being fully open by being open
source and by the centralizing power as much as possible.
Well, the fact that that is at the core of wood crypto is about
is entirely at odds. With the entire business model
that Google The Google leverages to survive.
And so in order for Google to actually truly move into the
space and actually do something meaningful, it would it would
have to disrupt itself. It would have to disrupt the
core business models that drive it today and because as a
company is no longer really found or lead, you don't have
very and Sergey there as involved as they used to be.
And because of the fact that it's atrophied, and all these
ways and that is become, I mean, they could, I think it's fair to
say that we come up, more complacent company than it used
to be. It's just very unlikely that for
them, to for them to do anything that disrupting everything that
they do now, it seems to be in to be much more incremental and
seems to be in service of the core business model that has
that has powered them this far. So, yeah, I think I have not
holding my breath for Google to do something meaningful.
Well, they do have all of these like little little experiments
because Google does still have this kind of Freedom.
Where you, as an engineer, you can use your quote-unquote, 20%
time and play around with things.
And there are a couple of teams that are maybe experimenting but
it's hard to imagine that we will actually invest heavily in
and make it up core part of what they do, for a portal of the
above reasons. It may be that Google is like
the is like the IBM or the HP of Our Generation.
Oh, no, for sure. I agree with that completely.
I'm glad that this was point and so if this size it, yeah good.
The innovators dilemma is probably the biggest culprit
here and that's the case for many, many companies not just
Google. You know, we could say the same
thing about Microsoft or or Facebook or although you know
there have been some I think other types of Miss interesting
experiments there that You might leverage purple at some point,
but in a very different form than what we know, and they'll
sort of thriving for as people have been in space for long as
we have. So, just maybe zooming in a
little bit on a 16 SE and, and the, the, the, the crypto team
you may said it's 80 people. What does that, what does that
look like? And you know what are the, you
know, what are the key roles there?
I'm curious because I'm also starting a Fund.
And, you know, there's a lot of things that I think I have to
learn from other funds and even though he's ECG is a massive
organization and like, you know, is nowhere near the size that
I'll ever use bar to get to the understanding sort of what the
course, core support structures. There are and and support
functions. Yeah.
Give us a bit of an overview of what the team looks like.
Yeah, of course. So the whole the vision from the
very start was to was to build a vertical within the firm that
mirrored. The original, a 16z form factor
but was very tailored for crypto specifically it.
So originally mayonnaise is easiest firm.
The whole vision from the start was that, it's a, it's
essentially, a platform The Firm that not only makes Investments,
but but is truly a partner end-to-end across Many different
functions to help the companies in our portfolio succeed.
What that means for crypto is that because crypto has certain
big differences from traditional traditional companies.
There are things in ways that we can help that that are
fundamentally different. They require building out the
team differently. This was an example of that.
One of the observations that we made was that because most of
the work in crypto. A test to be open source because
it the work that's done tests to be out.
In the open, it's actually possible for collaboration to
happen between organizational boundaries.
And that means that as a as a venture firm, we actually can
get involved in some of the core technical challenges.
That some of our portfolio companies are facing which is
something that would be much more difficult to do in any
other sector of technology that you can.
You imagine, for example, in the world of Biotech in order or in
the world of, like, I don't know, deep like Enterprise
software in order to get access The code base or to the
intellectual property that the company is working on you.
You really have to become a full-time employee, as it would
be difficult in those worlds, to contribute technically to
contribute to the core science and technology.
That each of our portfolio companies are working on.
Whereas in crypto, this much more is much more collaborative
environment. The fact that it's all open
source actually changes the game and makes it makes it possible
for us to build the research team, which Is led by Tim
roughgarden. He's a former professor at
Stanford was actually my purposely we get took all of his
classes and these were these were some of the most
interesting and hardest classes that I ever took it.
He's a Pioneer in the world of algorithmic Game Theory and he's
also extremely deep in the space.
So he in a sense he's a bit of a bit of a unicorn are very few
people who have the kind of knowledge and breadth of the
traditional literature the academic literature around
distributed. Systems and Game Theory and
mechanism design. But who also deeply understand
the crypto and blockchains and bring those two together to do
what he's been on the podcast search and this distance great
own accord. We have course.
And he was he was actually the person who who did the formal
analysis of our VIP 1559 and and actually got the community or
helped get the community more comfortable with incorporating.
Yet be won by 1592 aetherium. So he's the head of research and
under him we have a team of World-class researchers across
cryptography, distributed systems, economics Game Theory
mechanism design, and we're still going to be open to, to
continue to expand that team. And the idea there is a is that
they can really help our portfolio companies at the very
least, understand what's been done before.
And then also, we can help them, think through some of the
open-ended problems that are actually research problems in
that team, works very closely with our engineering.
Just headed by a lazarum. You may also know as any labs
are in, is our CTO and head of head of research and under him,
we have a team of, of, I get extremely senior, very sort of,
they like better and like, like a smart contract Engineers.
A security Engineers people who build build things and they work
closely with our research team, and our portfolio to, to
actually produce a production grade code.
And and so Much of the work that they do tests to be open source
again. If the idea here is that we want
to contribute, we want to help our portfolio solve open-ended
problems, but we also want to help community at large.
So, all of the work that we do is fully public and we publish
all the research papers and all of the research content both in
our website. And then also on in a reviewed
conferences, on the research side and then we publish all of
the code that our engineering team.
Produces in our GitHub repo, right?
So it's all it's all. So those two teams work closely
with our portfolio and there's a third important team which is
very different from from a good traditional Venture side, kind
of the main firm and that is the Regulatory and policy team
because as you guys know that's that's obviously, look at a huge
open, open. Kind of question in the space.
There are no bright lines is to what is regulatory compliant,
and what isn't? And as a result we have to take
we have to be very smart about about how we navigate.
Negate, the regular regulatory landscape.
And so, we have a team that includes that includes people
from people who have been extremely senior, just about
every regulatory agency, including, for example, Bill
Kahneman, who, who was the person who actually established
the framework for decentralisation at the SEC who
established for example, that that ethereal should not be
considered a security in part because or largely because It
feels like the fourth prong of the how we just the fact that
it's that there's no managerial and entrepreneurial efforts of
others because it's fully decentralized is allowable frame
working from him and so he he works closely with us and and
and watch with a portfolio company step to think through
some of the regulatory constraints it.
So then it's important to have both of those three teams.
The research engineering and Regulatory policy teams in the
same room often with the portfolio company to be able to
explore at the same time. All of the possibilities on the
research and Engineering side, but then also the constraints,
like, how do you design a protocol?
That also is also compliant and doesn't doesn't run afoul of by
Securities laws or a male, like a comprehensive regulatory
constraints. So, those are the three
important teams that are fairly unique to crypto and other.
No other vertical. At the firm has has those those
teams just yet and then beyond that we have like the more
traditional the traditional team That the help of Performing
companies and the ways that you'd expect.
So for example, we have a big recruiting team to help our
portfolio. Companies recruit at at every
level recruit both individual contributors people like
software Engineers product Managers generally product or ux
people, as well as Executives. So higher, like, if you want to
hire like a general counsel, for example, which is again, super
important given the regulatory piece to the recruiting team is
an important function with. We also have The kind of the biz
Dev Market Dev team which helps with Partnerships and that team
is connected to just about every team, every every entity, every
individual important, individual, and the space, and
also outside of the space. So we want to connect our
portfolio companies to potential Partners to exchanges.
Maybe also Partners from the traditional world, like, we want
to connect them to this to a company like, like stride for
resale companies, like that, that team is basically the
connector of everything and beyond that we have the
marketing team, which, which helps base helps us basically
produce all the content we do, but it also works closely with
the portfolio companies to to shape the narrative to pick
maybe sickly help them tell the story of their company and we
hope especially around born in moments like announcements or or
for example, if there happens to be some kind of Crisis, we can
really be helpful at managing the ER and that the cons around
around moments of Crisis. That's a very important theme.
And then finally, we have the network operations team which is
the team that allows us to participate actively in all of
the networks that we were involved with.
And so that involves staking our tokens for example, for layer 1
block chains and involves voting or tokens for protocols that
have on chain governance it involves delegating or tokens to
other players in the space. So as to increase of the
centralization of these networks.
So for example, we have this this delegate program that in
that involves many University watching groups that are very
eager to learn a lot about space and would like to participate
and some of the governance conversations that happen for
for protocols. Like you to swap and compound
and protocols like that, like that.
So we very actively have a whole process for for bedding, the
various different delegates. That we can potentially do get
tokens to as a way of including more voices in the conversation
and making the space more more decentralized.
So that was a bit of a rat. That's that's maybe the full
rundown of the, the various different ways that we work with
the portfolio. And that's how the team is
structured. So only for those of us who
don't know, a lot about the Venture Capital business you
started off as partner in the the in the crypto arm of a sixth
easy and then you became General partner I think a couple of
years back. That's right.
What does a partner do and what is a general partner do in this
in this organization structure? General partners are responsible
for ultimately making investment decisions and in the whole
investment team works together at at finding the best.
Founders being connected to everyone in the space thinking
through what our thesis for this place is it's always an active
conversation and we have many meetings internally to discuss
what we believe to be true. And what we think might be
interesting to invest in. So it's a fairly flat
organization and that Dee has a very active role in making any
one particular investment. And then the, the one
distinction is that ultimately, a general partner, is the one
who makes the final, the final decision of whether or not to
invest. And also is the primary point of
contact with, with the portfolio company thereafter, do the whole
team again? I got it should basically, went
through the whole team that ultimately, the portfolio
company will work with and the general partner ends up being
more of a router or like a psycho, you need help.
The majority will let me let me connect you to create the go.
You start to dim or there's an engineering problem to talk to
edit. So it's really a team effort.
Like we all we all work very closely together and we're
different from many other Venture firms in that we really
do work as a team and is not as if every investor has its own
his or her own mandate. And it is is like a little bits
like survival of the fittest that which tends to be the case
in other places where there's just less teamwork and each
person is more of a solo actor. Here we do have a ballistic
General thesis for the space. We all believe it will be ball.
Kind of crafted it together. We debated constantly and we
work closely together to make sure that all of our companies
are supported Let's let's maybe talk about the thesis a little
bit or, you know, to the extent to whatever extent we want it.
We could we could probably talk about the thesis for a long
time. So what is the, what is a 60s?
These pieces when it comes to crypto, Yeah, well the the heart
of it starts with the, with the Insight, which I think by now
is, is now better understood that a blockchain is a computer.
It's a the best way to think of it as a is a computer and it's
not it's not some sort of database or Ledger or whatever
you not. There are many.
Many other terms of people like to use to describe blockchains
another right model to think about.
This is a new paradigm for computation.
It is a computer that has special Properties.
If you if you look back at the history of computing, every
every Paradigm along the way as introduced something that's
qualitatively different and that's what that's what kind of
demarcates the different, the different phases of competition.
And that's also what allows for the kinds of applications that
we can build to expand and to enter kind of bleed into more
aspects of Our Lives. As we started with things like
minicomputers and mainframes and then we moved on to personal
computers and then we had cloud and mobile.
Men, the whole kind of Internet chapter.
And now we contend how we have. We have blocked it and if you
look at previous waves of computation, new kind of
computing. Paradigm.
Is that, for example, take mobile Tend to actually be worse
than previous paradigms, in many ways, maybe in most ways.
Like, for example, a mobile phone is a slower computer, then
a personal computer and it doesn't have a keyboard and it
has limited battery life and it has a small screen right in and
it's it's kind of maybe clunky to use it first.
But it has one key feature that personal computers don't have.
And that that it fits in your pocket and that it has a GPS and
that it has like this all of these and mobile features that
that actually unlock new kinds of applications.
Did you couldn't possibly built? It on a personal computer which
include things like uber, for example, right?
Or include all of the, you know, the things that we love about
about like the mobile Revolution, the kinds of things
that people have built over the past couple of decades.
So our contention is that blockchains yes.
Like there are criticisms of them that are true.
Like, for example that they are very slow conduction is a
computer. It's a very slow computer.
It's an expensive computer run but There are features that
block his have the traditional computers don't have.
And in particular block, chains are a kind of computer that
allow developers to write programs that have a life of
their own. In a sense, these are programs
that can make strong commitments about their own behavior in the
future. These are programs that run
without interference from anyone from including the people, who
originally wrote them, including the people who run the actual
physical. Machines that execute the logic
of those programs and including the people who interact with
those programs. As they run these programs can
run free of interference from all of those.
All of those players. And that's a very powerful thing
in particular, is powerful, because it can create a kind of
trust that a normal program that runs in a computer that someone
else controls cannot engender. One way of putting.
This is our credit to Chris is that blockchains invert the
Relationship between software and Hardware.
We're traditionally Hardware has power over software because
whomever controls the hardware can turn the the software off or
can change it into whatever they want.
Whereas in crypto on a blockchain is the reverse.
The software actually has power over the hardware.
The hardware is actually just provided as a commodity by
various different. Participants who have an
economic incentive to participate.
But, we do not have any kind of control or what the software
does. Does.
And that's a very powerful shift that has never that has never
happened in history of computer, computer science, having a
network, and the software have power over the hardware.
That's what's unique. That's what's different about
blockchains. And as I mentioned before, the
powerful thing about this is that it can create applications
that have a different level of trust.
The first application of that was Bitcoin, where the fact that
you can trust that Bitcoin will only have will only ever have 21
million Bitcoins and that As we processed in a way.
That's that is, well, defined in that is valid, and that no one
can really subvert the logic of how Bitcoin works.
And that's the first example, what is the very simple example
and we contend there's so many different different things that
you can do. Like, now that you have this
primitive, you have this kind of program that can make
commitments. What can you build with that?
Some of the applications that you could build might be
Financial in nature of Finance lends itself.
Well to this space because of the fact that it requires trust
so you can build maybe more Enid Financial Primitives like that,
that maybe the whole like defy world, you can build exchanges.
That are decentralized that have assembled property of trust,
ready? Or you can build a landing
platform. You can build stable coins.
You can build some of the interesting divide Primitives of
people have experimented with, but you can also build these.
I have nothing to do with finance and I think one of my
favorite examples, which is fairly topical these days is the
whole, the whole world of of social media.
Because you can conceivably build something like a
decentralized social network that is truly decentralized.
And doesn't have a monopolistic 44, billion-dollar Tech Giant in
the middle that can control who you get the follow.
That can control who gets to follow you.
That controls what you see, and has like, the one given
algorithm one given duration, mechanism that controls would
you feed contains. And instead, you can build
something that is decentralized. As were you as a user control
your own identity, you as a user control, you get to follow and
get to follow you. You maybe even control the
algorithm that's used to curate content and you have control
over your feet and it could be a whole Marketplace for different
kinds of recommendation, algorithms, that is competitive,
and people and people participate in it.
And then you can do that with crypto in the same way that you
can build Bitcoin and it has the same property that you can trust
that the network will maintain and will commit to certain
rules, that, that will be up out throughout time that cannot be
changed by some kind of central operator.
So, that's basically the heart of the pieces, and there's that
there are many applications that but that's where it where it
starts. Yeah, that's interesting.
Way to you know I think if you still if you ask a lot of people
today what is a blockchain? I think like 90% of people will
say it's a decentralized database or it's like a
decentralized ledger or yeah. This.
This idea of a decentralized letters Ledger still permeates
and and I think there is a shift You know, in there it is in the
industry. That is that is leaning more
towards this idea that it is a computer and, you know, like it
sort of started that way with etherium as the world computer.
And then it went to decentralize Ledger's like in the whole like
mid 2000s with or 2010s with like Enterprise trying to build
whatever their private probably attend that whole thing.
Yeah, old and blockchain not Bitcoin.
Exactly. Yeah.
It's so I think a lot of that narrative came from that and now
Oh, it's it from from what I'm seeing, like, teams that were
looking at. And the narratives that we see,
at least, like, I'm pretty, I'm fairly well connected like, in
the inner chain, ecosystem, those, those narratives are
starting to come back again and I think it's quite positive
because it really does. I think a line, well, like I
said with the with the evolution of computing and, you know, it
might very well be that if you go back to the example of
mobile. Mobile enabled, new types of
applications that are are well-suited like for people who
are not who are not stationary, right?
It's like their applications that are well suited for for
Mobility through their mobile. Right?
We're here, you know, the types of applications I think we will
discover is types of applications and sort of like
self-serving the what I'm about to say.
But the types of applications that that require Typically that
will require trust in a person or an entity and what will
realize you know, as as crypto and decentralized applications
become more mainstream is that, that that this will be the
defining factor. And yeah.
So let me you've started off in my Stead these blockchains at
distributed computers and the key property is that programs
running on these computers are able to credibly commit
Something about their future Behavior to participants and
because then able to credibly commit about simcha behaviors in
action and end up getting applied to finance because those
sorts of commitments are important in finance.
Yes. From this Viewpoint as it the
you see particular verticals in the crypto area but you can
subscribe to that are you know, especially Code or especially
bullish about. So, what I mean is you can scan
across crypto, you have the crypto gaming area, then you
have the Storage storage area, on a Computing Services area.
Then you have defiled, you have these exchanges, you have this
data sharing area data dolls, Etc, right, are there any
particular areas that you are especially when the shop out and
believe that in twenty twenty years?
That those one or two areas are going to be a massive success
has the power law successes. Yes, absolutely.
So I think we want to be other ways in which trust really plays
an important role in the world of software is, is this notion
of platform risk, which is directly in the web to world has
been a huge source of risk for any startup that is potentially
building on top of some other companies, apis.
And I think you mean you really are, we're all kind of seen
this. There would have been many Art
ups, for example, that built on top of Twitter, apis, a long
time ago. Remember, like Tweety and
there's a whole kind of set of companies that we're doing
interesting things, and composing different, kinds of
web to apis, but that ultimately because those apis are
controlled by a centralized company.
The company, the central company can change the rules and can
decide to move against the startup.
That is starting to get big. And instead charge more or
instead, like change. Something about how the apis
work, such that the central company, captures more value,
and then maybe the startup ends up dying in.
This happen has happened time and time again, where there's
certainly kind of like the Tweety Twitter, or example.
There's Zynga Facebook. And it's also, by the way, they
it's back to to kind of the world, the world of operating
systems where we You have operating systems like,
Microsoft Windows. Also, subverting, the
functionality of some of the applications that are built on
top. So platform, wrist has been at
the game and technology is and software for a very long time.
And I think it gives you some insight as to how crypto can be
used for things that are no longer Financial in nature.
So when you can build a program that has a kind of API that is
committed to that that the program committee.
To not change it. Then you neutralize platform
risk and it has a result allows startup companies to build on
top of that program in a way that, that it is no longer
possible in the world of web to these days.
If there's a company that comes pitch outs, for example, you
could they come to pitch our main main father consumer phone
with an idea to build a product that depends entirely on the
apis of Instagram for the apis of Google or whatever?
That's a non-starter because it is now very well known that,
that, that that won't work. You cannot build a massive
company on top of the apis of a company like that because at
some point sooner, or later, right, whoever runs that
centralized company will change the roles and they will want to
capture more of the value which is doesn't work.
So now, I think this is, this is, by the way that enables
composability in the world of cricket, in fact that you can
neutralize platform risk, the fact that you can actually build
on top of the theory. Mmm, And not worry that if you
remove change the rules on you and we'll try to take a bigger
cut of the, of the money that you're prod product makes that's
huge. And in fact, that that continues
even above that, right? The fact that you can build a
product or a start up on top of the unit swap where you can
build a startup on top of some of the, some of the applications
that are already running on top of the theory on because those
applications also make commitments.
Then you can actually you can actually trust So, I give you
one example of a vertical or above sort of an area that's
super interesting, which is that of social media like
decentralized social media. The fact that you can build a
decentralized social network that has rules and has apis that
that can be trusted in perpetuity is very interesting.
Because now, now you can have a social network where the social
graph is I kind of like a public good, right?
That exists on chain that is owned, collectively by all of
the users. You own your node in the graph
and other users on their own notes.
And then all sorts of startups can build on top of that, same
social graph, you can imagine a start of building, one
particular client, that gives you one of you into the social
graph and that may be the size to curate content in one
particular way. But someone else can build a
client to that's different. That has a different interface
that maybe maybe Like highlights different kinds of content.
Maybe one of them is kind of like Instagram and another one
is more like medium. I don't know, but it's the same
social graph. And this is what enables the
composability and none of those startups that are building on
top of the social graph, have to worry that the rules will be
changed from underneath them and that and that as a result, there
they'll go out of business. So that's one very interesting
vertical where where there's notion of platform risk plays a
role where crypto I think in crypto in the trust feature.
Is that crypto provides really make a difference but there are
many others. I think another one, as you
mentioned gaming, is another interesting area where you can
look at the history of gaming, you can look at examples like
Fortnight, right? The fact that people pay a lot
of money for for in-game items that are purely cosmetic.
Right the fact that these in-game items don't actually
change Gameplay at all, they only change the way you look in
the game or that the kinds of little emotes that your Can make
and it's a is like a multibillion-dollar Runway
business that's fascinating because the company at the
center of it has full control over that economy.
Imagine if you could actually build a crypto economy into a
game, such that the Indian items that you buy are actually yours,
right? Such that you can actually take
them out of the game and maybe even take them into another
game. If it's a standard, for example,
that multiple games begin to support Then maybe maybe your
character does, it actually isn't just specific to one game.
You can actually take it from one game and into another game
and this becomes a much larger economy that spans multiple
different kind of digital universes.
And this is what people like to call the metal version of
become, a word has been co-opted and it's a very overloaded, but
but it's an interesting idea and it's born bottom-up.
And again, the trustee does really matter here, right?
Because it's important that you do, you trust that you actually
own the things that you own. That's what allows us ecosystem
to emerge. So that's another interesting
area, maybe a third one and then I'll stop.
I'll stop ranting is is the area of media generally and maybe
I'll lead with an example. So we were, we were investors in
a company called sound XYZ, which is a decentralized music
streaming platform, which I think is a super interesting
application of of crypto. If you look at the music
industry, historically, The record labels have an inordinate
amount of power. And the reason for that is that
they control the catalog instead of some sort of company like
Spotify. For example, cannot really
negotiate against the record labels because any one of these
record, labels controls so much of the historical catalog that.
If they pull out Spotify becomes almost unusable because now it's
missing. I kept third of the music and
the total value proposition of being able to provide you with
every song on you You might want to listen to is no longer hold
up. So the record labels have
enormous, leverage, they take a huge cut in a Spotify has to
take a cut and so therefore there's only a sliver that's
left that that it actually goes to the artist.
So the artist is royally screwed and if you actually look at the
numbers, there are something like 8 million artists on
Spotify and only like 14 thousand of them.
So 14,000 out of eight million make more than 50 k per year.
Which is hardly a living, which is a say basically no one makes
any money on Spotify. The only people who make money
are like, be the very head of a distribution.
The kind of a Taylor Swift's early, some sort of a daisies of
the world and then everybody else makes 50k or or less likely
much less in order to actually make any kind of money on
Spotify. You have to have millions if not
tens of millions or hundreds of millions of tramps.
It's insane. How much, how much traction you
have to have as an artist. To make any money on Spotify.
So sound sound is a little different.
So you guys remember SoundCloud from before SoundCloud was As
Nice Guy, music service, you as an artist can upload music.
And it had this cool feature which was that you can as a
user, you can comment on the track as it plays on the
website. Such that other users can then
see your comments, right? So as as the music plays and it
rolls over the time at which you left your comment, they can see
what it was, which like was like a cute idea.
This kind of social Dynamic around a piece of music.
So sound too bad idea. And if their initial their
initial product idea is that you can actually make that comment
an entity. Meaning that say as an artist
you upload a piece of music and there's 100 and of teas for that
piece of music. Whoever buys those entities, if
you have one of those entities, you now have the right to add a
comment to the track and if you sell you an empty, then the
comment is a few years and then whoever pulls the empty.
Now the new The new folder of the end of T.
Can now add a comment as well. So this creates a bit of a
little seven, guys can look a little market right for these
energies. The beauty of it, is that 100%
of the money that is recouped from the sale of these entities
goes to the artist or maybe like 95% of vitamin A small
percentage of it goes to sound the protocol, so that's great.
But the more important piece of this is that as an artist, you
now have a direct relationship with your super fans.
These are the people who are willing to buy an entity to add
a comment to your track. These are the people who truly
believe in your music. I would truly truly like your
music and it's not only a relationship.
It's an economic relationship, you know, they're quick the
wallets and that's a community you can.
Now start doing interesting things, you can, for example, I
don't know do like backstage passes for the people who hold
any one of these entities or you can have like a Discord group
that is token gated and only people have any of tea. he's of
this kind can can access it or any other kinds of benefits
where you as an artist now have like a more direct relationship
with your with your fans and it's connected to this idea
there's this great blog post by David Kelly called 1,000 true
fans which which argues that all you need as an artist or as a
Creator to make a living online is 1,000 true fans and his logic
is if you define a true fan as someone who pays you, ten
dollars a month, You do the maths right 1,000?
True fans, each paying you $10 a month.
That's a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year.
All you need is a thousand two events.
Clearly on Spotify, that doesn't work, but you need them.
You need millions of fans to actually make any kind of
living. But if you had a more direct
economic relationship with your fans, you can actually make a
living and so sound. This is basically exploring how
you can use crypto to do that right.
As an artist, you can, you can build a community of two fans
and have an economic relationship with them.
They pay you at Least ten dollars.
That's that's more than you could make on Spotify.
All right. So far, by the way, they played
out like five million dollars, it's not as a content creator
getting to 1,000 true fans. Even for just five bucks a month
is not easy. Ask it's not, it's not easy to
get there but making it you're right.
You're right for that to happen in your things.
Like, patreon have definitely shown how this model works,
right? Like I think patreon has a
similar type of model and and one that is very different from
say like a Spotify model. You know, I think like those
there there were probably you know just as many musicians 50
years ago that were making zero dollars.
They just weren't streaming but I mean of course like that.
But the the platform allowing this, you know, does a lot does
like allow opportunities for people to achieve those goals.
You know, there was that something you were missing
earlier about you know the the platform risk and recently in
the last year or so you I used to have this idea that like
blockchains are immutable rules that are embedded in the Block
Chain and the smart contracts are immutable and like that's
it. And, you know, you could you can
sort of like, deploy there and be assured that like your, your
code will be run in perpetuity forever.
And then, and then there was the whole Juno whale thing.
And I don't know if you followed this, this particular part of
Cosmos drama. But essentially a governance
boat on Juno which is a smart contract chain in the cosmos
ecosystem that The runs cause the walls and smart contracts, a
governance boat decided that funds that were held
essentially, by an individual who had received airdrops for
for reasons that I'm not going to get into here, were were to
be clawed back, essentially, and because because, you know, the
rules of the airdrop had not specified certain Provisions
about people holding other people's funds or whatever it
is. So there's a whole blog post
about it and and if that's not enough the people who were meant
to take those funds as sort of transfer them into a treasury so
that they could be effectively managed or whatever made a
mistake when transferring the funds and lost like tens of
millions of dollars or maybe even hundreds.
I mean it was a massive catastrophe but it just showed
me that I just that I realized that you know what like
blockchains do have this immutability Aspect is sort of
like this. This like, this is this platform
risk Assurance, when they arrive at a such a state that
governance is solid enough that the governance and incentives
are aligned, such that validators are not going to
screw, you know, the user base or you account holders.
And I think there's a delicate balance between validators users
and application developers that really mirrors.
Is kind of governance that that we know and soda from from,
from, from our, everyday lives, and democracy and sort of like
human governance. But when it comes down to it,
like, blockchains are our mechanism for, for executing
human decisions, and the power, balances that exist in the real
world can also exist in blockchains, you know, how do
you reason about that when when thinking about You know, this
whole idea of platform risk and eliminating platform risk.
Yeah, it's a really good. It's a really good point.
I think that the way to think about this is that a blockchain
gives you an enormous design space on top of which, you can
build, all sorts of different things, including different
kinds of governance systems, which I think is an exciting.
Some really exciting thing because now it is possible for a
thousand different companies who are building different,
ecosystems to Run a thousand different experiments about how
to run a governance system for their Community which actually
gives us insight about governance.
Generally and it gives us inside the maybe can translate to be on
crypto and it's in a way that was impossible before where like
I think before crypto if you wanted to test a new kind of
sort of political governance system you had to spin up at a
whole civilization Institute, your new experimental governance
system, wait 10,000 years and check to see if everyone has
died or if it has somehow Baird. Well or not.
Whereas now it seems like you can run much more isolated
experience experiments with with a network that maybe does one
simple thing and has a community that governs.
It you can come up with a new governance system that hopefully
does better than other governance systems and some will
do well in others in others won't did.
I think over time we will figure out what the best practices are.
Maybe we conclude that one token.
One boat is not the right model because it leads to a kind of
total credit outcome. Maybe we can.
Glued that the governance system has to be restricted in some way
so that you can't call back tokens.
Maybe that's not something that's within the purview of the
governing system. Maybe we concluded.
We need different kinds of stakeholders.
Like like maybe you have token holders is that as one camera
and the governance chamber and then there is also like actual
applications or drivers of volume or drivers of activity in
the network that also have some say and have some ability to
participate in the Governance process is a very big design
space and I don't think we found all of the answers and I think
that some of the, some of the initial experiments are
interesting. I think, for example maker is
pioneering what pioneered? I think.
One of the one of the initial models for governance with the
mkr token and the way that that govern is works for level
system, which is very complex. But but it was interesting that
we learned a lot from it. Then also compound was also
initially at one of the One of the Pioneers until can base
Governor governance with their governance module to get that.
As I forget actually technical the code file governance, a file
or something. And I think, since then we've
seen, we've seen many other experiments and it's exciting to
see. I think what when you think
people may try in it and along the way there will be failures
like the one that you described. But I just think that that's
part of the learning process In my cup.
No Journey. One of the things that I found
very hard is making sense of it could provoke an valuations by
that. I mean is, you know, pick pick
any random coin and you often have this sense that okay, if
this coin is trading at 100 million, that's awesome.
And if it's trading at 10 billion, I'm not going to buy
that coin, right? You often have this kind of kind
of gut gut instinct. Where what?
You invest in depends on the market cap of the think.
When you're looking at yet, there is no good way to Quantify
or think about it logically. So I'm actually curious how a
16z as a as as professionals that make these decisions day in
day out. How do you How do you think
about valuation and what makes sense?
And what doesn't Yes, it's a great question.
Well, and I think this, this often is, is a conversation that
we tend to have on a case-by-case basis.
It's a very much depends on the kind of network.
The kind of protocol, the kind of product that we are looking
at their different models, for different kinds of things,
especially when it comes to different layers of the stack.
So it's for example, we can, we can work through this tag,
something that exists at the at the user interface, like client
level. An application that's may be
communicating with protocols that run on chain but that it in
and of itself isn't on chain and that maybe has a more
traditional business model by something like a wallet where
wallets business model is to potentially just take decrease
on all transactions or something like this that's
straightforward. We don't have to spend too much
time on that. We use traditional methods of
reasoning evaluation in decades. If we move one level down that
there may be applications that run on.
And there are protocols, that provide that for example, like,
one on top of the theorem and this could include some of the
some of the D5 protocols like you in a swap or, or compound
or, or like applications. Like I mentioned like sound that
XYZ as like a non chain. Component is a protocol that
runs on etherium oftentimes in those cases there's this is by
the way, I think apparently like a misconception about space
people take good. People think that all
cryptocurrencies are just like fully - in most cases there is
still some notion or something that resembles Revenue side
where there's like a fee that's being taken by the protocol on
chain. The see a crewman accrues to
some Unchained Treasury and the token has some claim on the
treasury or Pez a potential claim down the line based on
governance, potentially. And in the same way that that
may be the shareholders of the company have a claim to the
assets on the balance sheet. And to Future cash flows,
talking holders. Similarly, have that kind of
claim over a protocols treasury course, is fully decentralized,
right? So there is no, there's no
company how when we're talking about the protocol.
There's no company that controls the treasury and it's just a
broad ecosystem, which is by the way, it's why the token is not a
security fact that it's a fully decentralized ecosystem, where
there aren't any asymmetry of information.
It's just all one chain and it's all open source.
And so, for those, for those networks, are those protocols,
it's also reasonable to think of it.
In terms of the traditional methods of allowing a company,
like, what is the current, the current Revenue, the current
cash flow and do, what is our thesis for?
What that, what? That might look like in a in the
long-term future? And we believe that this
protocol will somehow become like a fundamental piece of the
crypto world, and if crypto is going to it, Going to ultimately
reach billions of people, then you can make some argument for
why it will be much bigger than it is today, but the methods are
still fairly fairly traditional in those cases.
And then there's the question of how you would value a layer one
block chain. So, something like, like
etherium. For example, the good news, is
that even a blockchain like a theorem, which is a later one
block chain and the token serves many different kinds of
purposes. Also has a notion of Revenue and
that comes in the form of eith getting burned with every
transaction. Thanks to VIP 159 that that is a
form of Revenue because it it is taking it out of circulation and
that's mathematically equivalent to essentially doing a
distribution of that amount of money to all eat holders so you
can use that at least to reason about the value of f.
But there are many other drivers of Value for the ID token.
For the sort of the fact that if is used for staking, makes it a
kind of productive asset such that you can actually earn money
by holding it and owning it in the way that validators in the
Network's do. And that provide that, that
drives some value to the Token because because it's a
productive asset, think of it as capital.
It also is the courtesy with which everything gets paid for
in the network, you need Eve's to pay for From, in the network
which means that people have to buy it to be able to use it.
Here, I am to be able to participate, which is another
driver, which gives the token. The kind of monetary premium
people begin to think of it, as kind of money.
That is also may be a good store of value.
And as a result, we took a probably just hold some amount
of weeks longer term, which, which drives which provides
value to the Token. So that there are a number of
different in there are, there are more.
Maybe we can keep talking about the drivers of value for a token
likies but we tend to think of all those things and try to at
the very least, get some quantitative sense for for how
all of these interplay, but it's very hard.
It's very hard to make it a very quantitative analysis for what a
layer 1 Block Chain, should be worth and people had tried.
I'm sure you guys have heard of them of the, basically, the
application of the equation of exchange to to layer 1 block
chains, which is that equation, a equals to P Q, which is used
to Value for x foreign exchange currencies.
Like, one currency with respect to another.
You can think of it here, IAM as a kind of like a like a
sovereign nation state that has its own currency in a material,
and it has one export. And that's the central as
computation, then you can apply the equation of exchange to try
to Value V in that way. And there's a term there, which
is the velocity of money. Like, the more it gets
transacted, then the less valuable it is because it's not
being held. So that's the intuition.
But if you actually use that model to try to, Predict the
price of view, you're going to be completely completely out.
So we we take all of those factors as input and then we
think about what the future might look like if we believe
that there's a whole thesis that we have about, how there will
likely be a handful of winning smart contract, architectures.
The won't be 1000 and there won't be one will probably be a
handful in the same way that there's a handful of winning
processor architectures and the winning ones will likely be if I
get if we're right about grip doing crypto, will we?
Millions of users and will become this major phenomenon in
a whole world. It's akin to web to will be
built on top of web, 30, then we strongly believe that each one
of these winning smart contract, architectures will be worth
many, many trillions of dollars. So that's kind of how we think
about it and we just try to imagine what the future looks
like. And then back back, back track
from there to try to like then make an argument about what the
what the token should be worth today and then make investment
decisions. In that way.
So one curiosity is so it makes a lot of sense, right?
But if you have Walnut Valley because a traditional business,
okay? Present value of future,
discount, present value of future cash flows, easy.
When it's a protocol. Well, if it's a protocol like
you this job, you can still still view it.
That way any, you need token, maybe maybe we will that way.
And can you can have some kind of rational Model for it, but it
comes into each area. You can have a rational
evaluation for it, but then the some kind of Premium that needs
to be added because the market is attaching some kind of
monetary premium. And if you ignore it, it's going
to be hard to justify the values at which each is practically
trading in the market. And then to get the Bitcoin,
man. You really can't see any Court
Revenue stream at all and then it is entirely some kind of
monetary premium which really hard to approximate do I get
that right? And then so my question would
be, do you think other in ones L1 tokens with also have
monetary premium in the future or is the market kind of Already
won by Bitcoin in in any sir, it's a good signal question.
We think that the touching on this and other pieces for for
why there will likely be a handful of winning
architectures. Did the thinking is that no one
watching can fully cover the trade-off space?
There are there are many different things that you can be
optimizing for. You guys, may be familiar with
the scalability. Trilemma.
There are number of different optimizations that you can try
to make and it's very hard for a single architecture.
To just be the god blockchain that basically takes the whole
thing. And this is similar, by the way,
to, to just traditional Computing where you have CPU
architectures, that are intended for general-purpose computation,
like x64 and arm and things like that.
Which by the way themselves have big differences between them.
But you also have different kinds of architectures that are
optimized for completely different things like gpus.
That are optimized for parallel compute and optimized for
gaming, and now, they could turn out to actually work quite well
for machine learning and AI, is there?
Similarly, we believed that there will be a handful of
different kinds of architectures for smart contract, platforms.
That collectively, cover the entire Trail space.
But no one in architecture Will Will just win win everything.
And I think that that's maybe the reason for why they won't be
one. We also have to argue have to
make the argument for why there won't be a thousand of them.
And and the reason there is that there are very strong Network
effects as if you do have to block chains that are fairly
similar and are differentiated with respect to one another.
I think that the equilibrium state is for is for one of them
to ultimately win and that's that's because of the
self-reinforcing feedback loops involved.
The fact that there are network effects at every level, there
are no visible security level because as a validator, you To
validate on the blockchain, that's more secure and the
voucher that will give you the biggest reward, which is the bug
chain that has, highest token value, and so.
So with that, that results in a self-reinforcing feedback loop
that causes one way back when causes one box into when there's
also Network effects at the application Level where because
of composability you want to build your application on the
blockchain that has all of the other applications because you
can use those other applications as building blocks, this is the
whole notion of, like, Lego building blocks in crypto.
The fact that there is no platform Allows you to leverage
other smart contracts that are also running on the same Block
Chain as inputs to your own application and you don't have
to necessarily reinvent the wheel, which is another reason.
You you're more likely to build on top of each theorem and you
are on top of a random new Block Chain that has nothing on it and
at the same applies at the Integrations level they give for
watching is already integrated into all of the exchanges in all
of the wallets and all of the interfaces and clients a new
Block Chain has a hard time I'm displacing all of that, I'm
competing against, I guess, all of that.
So the network effects of think reduce the possibility that
there may be many different block chains that are all
identical to one another. So that I think precludes the
possibility that there will be a thousand blockchains.
This was a result. Like I think my strong belief is
is will probably end up with something like five.
I don't know. Like some handful of different
kinds of architectures, all of which will likely be.
Very big is that. So small number that support,
all of the decentralised competition in the world and I
think as a result, it's likely that token for each.
One of them will will have all of the same factors that drive
value grief, right? Including the stake, including
the fact that there is a monetary premium because people
use it to pay for things in those ecosystems, but take all
this with a grain of salt, you know, Phil.
See it says it is very hard to predict future.
This is just, this is just one way to look at it.
In your experience, investing in, in some of these protocols
I'm sure like a 16z comes across the case, where then is the
split of Revenue. May not be may not be clear at
the time of admission. What I meant when I might mean
is like maybe I can only take a practical example like the Yuna
swap case. So where you have Unis, more
open apps will build the protocol and for a long while
did not actually want to launch a token and then out of the
competitive Dynamics, with sushi swap, they were forced to almost
their hand. Was almost forced to go into the
direction of launching a token. And when I personally, look at
you Eunice walk like a rational evaluation of the uni token is
made for me hard by the fact that how does the revenue gets
split between these two. These two entities, there are
many of these protocols in which that is like fashion.
Evaluation is hot made hard by the fact that there is a
foundation and there's a there's a community Treasury and the
Dynamics of that may not pick to you.
Up time now for me as an external as an external the
market participants. The only thing that is available
is the but for a 16z in such cases, you you, you would have
the option to invest it either. Republic token or the regular of
the founding team. Do you have any kind of General
guidelines for when to prefer one?
Over the other or how to think about the state of space.
Well, we primarily invest very early stage and and at that
stage, it's often too hard to know whether the value will
ultimately be captured by some token of the team decides to
build or whether it will be captured by a company.
A traditional company that company builds the the team
Builds on top of, on top of some protocol that maybe it's just
open source as so as a result, the structure that we've landed
on is one where everyone involved.
That includes the team and it also includes investors like us
should get both things. They should get both an equity
stake in the company. In the case that the tuck that
depth, the team decides that that's that's the path that they
will take. Maybe they decide not to even
launch a token. Maybe they took us about the
wrong thing. May just want to build a
traditional business and it's too hard to know that a priori.
So in the case that that happens, you want everyone to
have Equity or and then also, I think if it in the end, It is
actually a token and token is what captures the most value.
You also want everyone to have the token and the reason this is
important is just for alignment reasons, it is what everyone to
be on the same boat. No matter what happens.
If the company succeeds, everybody succeeds no.
And and then did this also by the way, maximize flexibility.
It doesn't constrain the founder 22 absolutely necessarily launch
token because the investors expect that or to just build a
revenue earning business again because you can investors expect
that as investors, we are on board, we're on your team, no
matter what and everyone's aligned.
And we found it, that that is actually the best structure.
And we don't try to predict a priori, you know, where the
value is going to be captured because that can impose
constraints on the founding team that you don't want to impose
that early. Yeah, that's that's really
interesting. And, you know, I think for us as
we think about how we want to construct a portfolio is also
this altar alliance with what we look for when investing and and
certainly, you know, they're there has become I think a sort
of standard that most teams raising in crypto will you know
will raise on on a silly future Equity agreement and and then
and then a token warrant or something like that.
So it is quite commonplace. To have that sort of agreement
with teams that are raising. Yeah, maybe just before we wrap
up here. One final thing, I wanted to
touch on taking a step back and looking at the events of the
last couple of weeks is, you know, how has the firm you
change? Or say, how does the firm advise
companies and teams in your portfolio to protect themselves
against, you know, up? Federal Banking crisis or the
shutdown of, you know, perhaps like the bag that they're
working with or or more broadly, you know, economic crisis that
that might, you know, have them have their treasury be wiped out
or, to some extent you even regulatory risks.
Like, how do you approach these sort of, you know, risks that
are inherently tied to the system in which crypto Operates
in order for teams to be better prepared against these types of
events. Yeah, it's it's a really good
question and it's a hard one. I don't think that there's a
truly great answer and by the way I think that everything has
been going on with a banking crisis is is actually just a
reflection of the failures of centralized Finance.
So in a way like it kind of highlights the way the reasons
that you actually actually decrypt out and being able to
have the transparency such that you can tell, you could, you
know, whether an organization or a protocol is solvent or not.
Um, is some of the essential is a part of the central, ethos of
the space, but given that we are still embedded in the
traditional Financial system and our company still need bank
accounts in order to advise really just comes down to
diversification. You you want to not be entirely
concentrated with anyone back. You want to maybe split up the
company's assets across three bags or so maybe maybe you can
hold some amount of capital on chain in the front of you, as
you see As well it's another it's another way of diversifying
but that's really ultimately the only answer like borrowing like
most companies in the space at the moment cannot get bank
accounts with the big G sub organizations, like the banks
that are so big that they're too big to fail.
They fail because those Banks don't want to bank crypto
companies. And so then as a result, the
only other option is to is to maybe get three bank accounts
with other more Regional banks that are more friendly towards
Do as a way of of minimizing the risk that any one of them might
fail. Yeah, I think that's sound
advice and certainly, it's what I would have encountered so far
in the last last two weeks, as the dust has settled and people
are starting to reason about how they want to reduce that risk.
And certainly for us, you know, we were, we were about to start
working with one of the banks that was shut down.
And, and now are thinking, okay, well mean, we probably need to
engage with several Banks exactly as we set up our our
structure so that it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, this has been really fascinating really do this
conversation. And yeah, all the insights, you
provided here and so would like to leave our listeners with one
final thing, where can people find you?
Or you know, some of the things that you mentioned the the work
they succeed, Zeus doing the research, Etc.
Yeah, absolutely. So we are a 16z crypto.com.
Probably, as you can see, crypto specific content and that's
where we all are in this where you can find us, and then
personally, I'm on Twitter at alive underscore eat.
Great, thanks. Lyle you.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thank you so much, guys. This was so fun.
Really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on this
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