More About Chris
Chris Dixon is a General Partner and has been at Andreessen Horowitz since 2012. He founded and leads a16z crypto, which invests in web3 technologies through four dedicated funds with more than $7 billion under management.
Chris is the author of Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (Random House, January 2024).
Previously, Chris was the cofounder and CEO of two startups, SiteAdvisor and Hunch. SiteAdvisor was an internet security company that warned web users of security threats. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. Hunch was a recommendation technology company that was acquired by eBay in 2011.
Chris has been a prolific seed investor, cofounding Founder Collective, a seed venture fund, and making a number of personal angel investments in various technology companies.
Chris started programming as a kid, and was a professional programmer after college at the high-speed options trading firm, Arbitrade. He has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard.
Chris writes about his theories and experiences as an entrepreneur and investor on Mirror, and before that on Medium and at cdixon.org. He is also a frequent guest on the “web3 with a16z” podcast.
Latest Content
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While tech platforms have helped us discover and connect with more artists than ever — including more independent artists — a few mainstream artists continue to dominate platforms. It’s a structural problem in the entertainment industry, and also involves the way many tech platforms operate today: Creators need power, power comes from control, and control comes from ownership.
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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong speaks with a16z crypto founder Chris Dixon about FTX, crypto in politics, company building, and more.
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Using blockchains and tokens purely for gambling — casino culture — distracts from the true potential of this computing movement.
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Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz discuss the new bestselling book Read Write Own with author Chris Dixon on the web3 with a16z crypto podcast.
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Learn key blockchain and internet terms and definitions with our comprehensive glossary for beginners adapted from the book Read Write Own.
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It’s easy to dismiss crypto because of its associations with casino-style gambling but it would be a mistake to ignore blockchains' potential.
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Chris Dixon is the founder and managing partner of a16z crypto and author of the new book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. Robert Hackett is an editor at a16z crypto who worked closely with him on the book as an editing and thought partner. They discuss the writing process, the book's themes, and what could follow the internet's read-write-own era.
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The internet is probably the most important invention of the twentieth century. It transformed the world much as earlier technological revolutions. The killer app of the internet is networks. Freedom and sense of ownership led/ lead to a golden period of creativity and innovation, leading to countless applications that have transformed our world and the way we live, work, and play.
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An interview with Chris Dixon about his new book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet on the web3 with a16z crypto podcast.
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We’re leading a Seed investment in Proof of Play, an on-chain game studio and tech company that’s committed to building a future with composability, interoperability, and permanence at the core of gameplay.
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Kevin Rose's (CEO of PROOF) path to building in crypto, growing and involving a passionate community, and navigating downturns.
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I believe blockchains and the software movement around them — typically called crypto or web3 — provide the only plausible path to sustaining the original vision of the internet as an open platform that incentivizes creativity and entrepreneurship.
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Over the last year it has become clear that blockchains and the software movement around them -- usually called crypto or web3 -- can only succeed with a clear regulatory regime that provides an open pathway for startups...
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No matter how well a founder has mapped out their idea maze, the road to product-market fit is unpredictable and difficult. The founders who do achieve product-market fit are rewarded with a set of new challenges: incumb...
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One of the reasons I’m so optimistic about the future of crypto and web3 is that it has attracted many of the world’s smartest people to start building and problem-solving in this space. It takes a truly special intellect to stand out among the technologists in this field, and we’re fortunate to have one of...
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This week, we have a special episode for you, from our newest podcast, "web3 with a16z". This episode features Chris Dixon – founding general partner of a16z crypto and former entrepreneur himself – and Kevin Rose – the co-founder of Proof Collective, as well as co-founder of Digg, former investor at GV, and longtime entrepreneur and podcaster. In this wide-ranging hallway-style conversation from web3 with a16z, these two veterans of both web2 and web3 movements go long on tech trends both in web3 and beyond, including NFTs and art; AI; the evolving roles of modding, copying, and copyrights on the internet; tech’s expansion from Silicon Valley to LA and New York; and more. Their discussion is not just a journey through time (long cycles of computing, web2 to web3) and place (LA, SF, NYC), but into "the age of wonders". Are we at the end of (computing) history, or the beginning? For more on the latest in web3 trends, be sure to subscribe to our podcast “web3 with a16z” (which is hosted by Sonal Choksi, the longtime former showrunner of this show) wherever you listen to your pods.
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In this crossover episode from new show "web3 with a16z", a16z general partners Chris Dixon and Ali Yahya and a16z crypto head of research Tim Roughgarden, with host Sonal Choksi, set context and discuss the connections between blockchain, crypto, and web3, as well as how lessons from earlier eras of the web do and don't apply to the current moment.
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We at a16z started investing in bitcoin in 2013, several years before we had a dedicated crypto fund. We have always been big believers in Bitcoin, its unique history and its foundational role in crypto.
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We’re excited to announce the creation of a16z crypto research, a new kind of multidisciplinary lab that will work closely with our portfolio and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
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In today's web, the most popular authentication methods rely on centralized identity providers that act as trusted intermediaries. Social login and single sign-on (SSO) are significant improvements over prior methods, bu...
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The next frontier in computing, which will take shape this decade, is building apps on programmable blockchains. Programmable blockchains are interesting for the same reason that innovation on smartphones spiked after op...
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The early web and the early age of web3 both have similar limitations: people’s interactions were “read-only” in nature, leading founders to create skeuomorphic copies of older technologies. But after a new technology ga...
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We believe that the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto. We are radically optimistic about crypto’s potential to restore trust and enable new kinds of governance where communities collectively make...
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When crypto first emerged, the traditional finance world mostly ignored it. We expected these institutions would eventually want to participate in the crypto economy, and that there would be a need for a company that wou...
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This is a special episode of the a16z podcast — it's an audio history, told through the voices of the a16z crypto team, about what crypto is, how it really works, and why it matters. This "innovation overview" is meant as a resource, and it features hallway-style conversations with the a16z team as well as outside experts. In brief segments, we’ll take you from the ground up — from the basics, to the most current developments, and beyond that to a look at what we might see in the future.
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Today we are excited to announce that we are promoting Ali Yahya to General Partner, focusing with me and Katie on crypto.
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In today’s episode of the a16z Podcast, we’re talking about the Creator Economy, and how NFTs (but not just NFTs!) are making it possible for artists, musicians, videogamers, game developers, and writers to create entirely new markets to make money from their work and engage with their fans.
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The NFT Canon is a go-to resource for artists and creators, developers, corporations and institutions, communities, and other organizations seeking to understand or do more with non-fungible tokens.
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Today Dapper Labs is announcing a $305 million financing round, with strong participation from our crypto and growth funds. We first invested in Dapper over three years ago when they were working on CryptoKitties. Crypto...
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In his classic 2008 essay “1000 True Fans,” Kevin Kelly predicted that the internet would transform the economics of creative activities:
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Ethereum has proven itself to be an extremely popular computing platform, with both developer and user demand growing dramatically. Since May of 2020, the capacity used per block (a strong proxy for demand) has stabilize...
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AS THE INTERNET has evolved over its 35-year lifespan, control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by non-profit communities to proprietary services operated by la...
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New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things...
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Today’s episode is a conversation about four big trends in the tech world. Any one of these trends would be notable on its own, but we cover all four in this hallway-style chat, as a16z General Partner Chris Dixon talks with Sep Kamvar (professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and now cofounder of cryptocurrency platform Celo); and Elad Gil (investor and the cofounder of health technology company Color Genomics, and formerly at Twitter and Google).
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In this episode, we continue our community series with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building. Today’s topic: How do you create a platform that people not only use, but tell their friends about? One that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user? In this discussion, which was recorded at our Crypto Startup School in April 2020, a16z General Partner Chris Dixon talked about building communities — specifically, communities of open-source developers — with GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner. They discussed how to engage early users, how to turn them into your biggest advocates, how to create superfans, and more. Today, GitHub is the leading community for open-source developers and others. They also discuss in-person communities vs. distributed communities, a topic that is very top of mind today.
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People who’ve been in crypto for a long time view the space as evolving in cycles, alternating between periods of high activity and “crypto winters.” There have been three cycles so far. The first peaked in 2011, the sec...
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Investments made in internet technologies over the last several decades have given rise to products and services used everyday by billions of people, including messaging, video conferencing, ecommerce and everything in b...
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Blockchains are computers that can make commitments. Traditional computers are ultimately controlled by people, either directly in the case of personal computers or indirectly through organizations. Blockchains invert th...
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Chris Dixon, a16z General Partner, is interviewed by Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of Buzzfeed. They discuss all things internet, including how innovation comes about, the ways disparate trends collide, and more.
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There are broadly two adoption paths for new computing technologies: inside-out and outside-in. Inside-out technologies are pioneered by established institutions and later proliferate outward to the mainstream. Apple (fo...
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How can we evolve the web for a better future? Has the web become a mature platform -- or are we still in the early days of knowing what it can do and what role it might have in our lives? Just as “social/local/mobile” o...
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Historically, new models of computing have tended to emerge every 10–15 years: mainframes in the 60s, PCs in the late 70s, the internet in the early 90s, and smartphones in the 2000s. Today, a number of exciting new comp...
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News and trends covered this week include: * Amazon's move into care delivery, initially for employees, what it means for incumbents and startups, the future of healthcare -- with @julesyoo @jorgecondebio * Oculus Connect 6, Facebook's annual developer event, where announcements about devices and content signal the future of VR (and AR) --with @cdixon * Google quantum supremacy claim, as shared in a paper with/via NASA: what does it mean for cryptography and other applications, where are we in quantum computing? -- with @vijaypande
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The biggest shift in gaming happened with the combination of cloud, social, and mobile. As with all great tech shifts, though, it's really the underlying business models that really create new startup opportunities. With blockchain technology and cryptoeconomic business models, what becomes possible in gaming?
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One of the most popular applications on the internet is social media, for better... and for worse. So if we were to imagine how crypto and blockchains could transform social networking in the future, how might that look?...