# a16z's Chris Dixon on Who Will Win the Next Generation of Venture

The Two Ways to Make Great Venture Investments and Find the Best Entrepreneurs & Why AI Will Strengthen the Position of the Incumbents Moving Forward

20VC · Mar 27, 2024 · 55 min · 12,563 words
Speakers: Chris Dixon, Harry Stebbings
Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-a2d6ac57/

## Cold open

**Chris Dixon** [0:00]:

I think there's sort of broadly two methods at work in venture. I would call one heat seeking and one truffle hunting. I haven't seen a technology movement where a bunch of very smart people were excited about it in my career that hasn't eventually worked. The the big five companies have 955% plus of the traffic and the money. And AI is exciting as it is, will will very likely accelerate that consolidation because it rewards companies with large stores of data and capital.

**Harry Stebbings** [0:26]:

This is 20 VC

## Intro

**Harry Stebbings** [0:27]:

with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I've wanted to make this episode happen for a long time. Today, we welcome one of the leading venture investors of the last decade, Chris Dixon. Chris is a number one Midas List investor. In 2022, Chris raised $4,500,000,000 for Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund, and he was an early investor in incredible companies like Coinbase, Oculus, Stripe, and Dappa Labs to name a few.

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## Conversation

**Harry Stebbings** [3:14]:

Chris, I've been waiting many, many years for this one. I've heard so many great things from especially the team at Founder Collective, but thank you so much for joining me today.

**Chris Dixon** [3:22]:

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be

**Harry Stebbings** [3:23]:

Not at all, but I wanna start with a little bit of context. And this is a weird show for many reasons, but I wanna go back to when you were a child. If your parents would've described you or your teachers would've described you, how would they have described the very young Chris?

**Chris Dixon** [3:37]:

I think I'm kind of a little bit of a stereotype of tech people. You know, it's sort of a cliche, but I was super into computers, so that was a clear part of my personality, you know, programming computers. And then, you know, slightly entrepreneurial, like I had various jobs and tried to start businesses, failed businesses. I think curious, slightly mischievous maybe, I don't know, or something. But yeah, I don't know. I was, I think, pretty normal in a lot ways. I had a nice childhood. I grew up in kind of a smallish town in Ohio, and generally got a good experience. And so, I I don't think of anything out of extraordinary.

**Harry Stebbings** [4:11]:

I heard from a little birdie that you studied philosophy at university and then have continued to study philosophy. Thanks, Alex Rampel. How did studying philosophy impact how you think, both just as a person, as an and as an investor?

**Chris Dixon** [4:24]:

So I got into it from computers. A little bit like the current AI stuff, in the sense of there's sort of overlap between for those who read these kinds of books, there's like Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter, and there's sort of this overlap between, I guess, these are, like, maybe still called cognitive science and philosophy of mind and computer and AI and computer science. So that kind of got me into it. So it's on the more kind of analytic, they call it scientific side of philosophy. I, you know, just, like a lot of people at that age, had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought arrogantly that I knew how to program and didn't have any use for computer science. In retrospect, you know, I think I could have taken some interesting theory classes and stuff. And then I stayed just kind of through inertia. I got invited to stay for a PhD program. But I I was in New York, and in New York, you just sort of have to work, you know, unless you have the money. And so I was always doing freelance computer programming, and then in New York, around the late nineties, 2000, if you were doing computer programming, you were ended up at an Internet startup. And so I sort of discovered that world and since then fell in love with that. The idea that you could start a company or, you know, someday invest in companies and work on interesting technology, work with interesting people, build products. You know, I like the kind of real world aspect of it. Academia, you're very kind of cloistered.

**Harry Stebbings** [5:36]:

When did you realize investing was your calling? Because you obviously were at Founder Collective for three years and and worked with the team there. When was that this is what I was born to do?

**Chris Dixon** [5:44]:

I always thought it was you know, I'd read about it and thought it was interesting. I worked briefly at Bessemer Venture Partners as a junior person in 2003 for about a year. I didn't see a path, honestly. It was a much smaller industry, and I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I needed to be an entrepreneur, I thought, to be a credible investor. So I left and started a company. They funded me along with General Catalyst. Then we ended up selling the company pretty early in 2006, and I I literally I think it was the day after we sold the company, was on the phone with Ron Conway, I was like, I wanna start angel investing. And I think probably four days later, I was out in the Bay Area, and he was introducing me to people, you know, like, just want to do that. I was working at McAfee, but I also you know, it's just it's more of a corporate job at that point, so I had time to do this stuff. You mentioned the Founder Collective guys, Dave Frankel and Eric Paley. Like, we had known each other from school, and we so we had all been entrepreneurs, and we had all gone out to raise money. And at the time, 2,000 you know, mid two thousands, if you tried to raise money, essentially, the product that venture capital's offer was a $10,000,000 series a. It was sort of the smallest check. They would occasionally do smaller checks, but they weren't really built for that, especially on the East Coast. They wanted financial statements. They wanted like, it just wasn't a seed funding environment. So we actually had a plan in like 2004 to start a consumer Internet seed fund. Companies needed less money and that the consumer Internet was very much frowned upon by a lot of at least the East Coast especially, a little less on the West Coast. That would there would be an opportunity there. And then I sold my company. Eric sold his company. David had been investing personally. I think Eric had gotten some job offers or something, we said, hey, why don't we dust off that business plan and do it? So that was Founder Collective, so we co founded it back then. I think we started in 2008. I think we closed in early two thousand and nine, so we were raising during the financial crisis, which was I think if you go back, we were one of very few funds then in the financial crisis. So that was that was that story. But, yeah, I just always look. I always thought it was interesting, like, this world, there's all these interesting characters, and it's just like another way to be involved with startups. Like, I love startups. So I was like, okay. The sort of direct way to be involved with a startup is to start a company, and then and the next best thing is to be part of it and as an investor.

**Harry Stebbings** [7:40]:

So I have two questions on the back of this. One is, I have this theory that financially secure or, in other words, rich investors make better investors because they're not scared of downside, and they don't bring paranoia and nerves to the entrepreneur like someone who really needs the money and needs it to work does. Do you agree that richer investors often make better investors?

**Chris Dixon** [8:03]:

I would put a spin on that. I would say that, like, speaking of venture capital, a lot of issues are so called principal agent problems. Meaning the individual is not aligned with the financial interests of the LPs. Because like you're a junior person, you're afraid, and you're, you you have three shots on a lot of firms, you get three shots on goal, and you better have a hit. And if you don't, you're not promoted, you're fired essentially. And maybe this also applies to angel investing. But if you're in a business where one in 10, if not one in 100, 50 work really well and by the way, in almost all cases that I've seen, the startups at work go through a trough of despair.

**Harry Stebbings** [8:38]:

Yeah.

**Chris Dixon** [8:38]:

They go through a tough time. So if you're in a business where it's like a very low hit rate, relatively speaking, the hits hopefully are so big they pay for everything, and you have these downturns. Right? The optimal strategy is to be really calm and not panicky. And there are lots of reasons people get panicky. One is maybe if like, look, people should not invest more than some X percent of their savings in this asset class. It's a very risky asset class. What you're saying is true, it also occurs with professionals at firms if they have incentives that aren't aligned fully with the with the fund.

**Harry Stebbings** [9:07]:

Chris, I I I love doing this show because I just get to ask the smartest people in the world questions that I have naturally, and I just remove the schedule. You said that about the trough of sorrow. I'm totally with you, Which leads to my no reserves model. I don't think that you can accurately pick your winners early. If you acknowledge the Trough of Sorrow, how do you think about effective reserves deployment?

**Chris Dixon** [9:27]:

This is funny you bring it up because like with Founder Collective, this is always a question in like early seed funds. So you're talking about follow on investing specifically, like how do you do follow on investing? Yeah. You know, I I would say, honestly, I started off, like, back when we started Founder Collective, one of our tenants was to not do reserves and follow ons. The argument was that we would be fully aligned with the entrepreneurs. Right? We do the first investment and we wanna see the next valuation be higher, and so we're fully aligned. And then the other argument was your argument, I think essentially, that markets are efficient and it will drag down our returns because we're gonna be averaging up our cost basis and the real alpha comes from being early in seed investing. I just think that there's more being involved with a company, the ability to see an entrepreneur over a multi year process and how they handle things. If you're good at it, the winners can just be so big that you wanna do pro rata. So it's a hard question. I do think I I probably lean more toward the reserves and the pro rata kind of thing at this point.

**Harry Stebbings** [10:22]:

Can I ask you on the on the flip side of that? You mentioned kind of going back to the early days of Collective there and their preference for no reserves. You know, Doug Leone said before on the show that we have moved from a high margin boutique business to a low margin commoditized industry. I'm just intrigued given your perspective now over fourteen years, having seen the Founder Collective start to the size of Andreessen today, which is immense and incredible. Do you agree with that transition?

**Chris Dixon** [10:49]:

So I'd say let me just maybe step back. So my theory, and then this first thing to think about with venture is is barbelled. This happens sort of death of the middle. Like, this happens in a lot of industries. So the most famous would be retail where, you know, the Internet comes along and you used to have JCPenney and Sears and sort of these mid sized retailers that existed for because you, you know, you did logistics and shopping and that's just the way people bought things was they go to their nearby town and buy something. The internet comes along and you have this barbelling effect. Right? So you have the very big winners like Amazon, who are very good at hyper efficiency and logistics. And then on the other side, you have boutiques. And and the the financial winner there, for example, was LVMH, which is a roll up of boutique brands. Right? And it's not a coincidence that the two most successful retailers of the last twenty years, one was on the one side of the barbell, Amazon, and the other was on the the other side, LVMH. I I think a similar thing has been happening in venture for the last ten years as as it matures. And so there's the a16z kind of Sequoia strategy of being a a big fund. You have a different product you offer quote unquote product you offer entrepreneurs, which is, you know, operating services, help, full stage support. And then on the flip side, there's the kind of boutique model where it's early stage, probably sub $50,000,000 funds, managers with some deep expertise in some area. And I would say another dimension to this is strategy. I think there's sort of broadly two methods at work in venture. I would call one heat seeking and one truffle hunting. Right? So heat seeking is the team out of Google that's doing foundation models, and everybody in Silicon Valley thinks of it as the hot deal, and the game is to win it. That can work. You know, if you get the Google, heat seeking can work. But it's a different game than truffle hunting, which is, you know, kind of the classic one I think of as like Union Square Ventures in 2005, where they were the first ones to really see the Web2 movement and develop that thesis. And, you know, there's a bunch of cases in the history of venture where you sort of like you have a thesis that someone else doesn't have. So I guess I think if you are cognizant to the barbell and you like a lot of the low margin things, I think, are people that don't really understand their strategy. They think they're a seed fund, but they've raised $500,000,000 and they're actually competing with scaled funds that are better prepared to service the entrepreneur. Or I meet a lot of people who I think they think they're truffle hunters, but they're actually heat seekers, seekers. And you need to know what you're doing. And I think both can work all these different strategies can work, but you gotta know what it is and lean into it. I

**Harry Stebbings** [13:06]:

love this so much for the different analogies already. Which would you say that Andreessen is? Heat seeking or truffle hunting?

**Chris Dixon** [13:12]:

The firm? I think we try to do both. I think we try to do both. And that's the way I think about it. And I think about it explicitly, like, this this is a heat seeking investment. This is a truffle hunting investment. For truffle hunting, often it's deep in a vertical before other people kind of figure it out. It can be within a vertical. Maybe it's, you know, crypto when it's not cool. Maybe it's some subsegment of AI that's out of fashion or overlooked. Maybe it's a geography. There's a lot of different ways to do these things. But I think you need to know what you're doing, if you do each strategy, it's a very different thing. Truffle hunting, you gotta go deep, you gotta be an expert, you gotta meet everybody, you you need to appeal to them. It's like when they when the entrepreneur meets with you, when you're in that, you know, if you're Fred Wilson doing consumer Internet in 2005, you know, you heard the reason that Twitter picked him, you know, when it was a competitive deal to series a was that he was using the product, he was deep in the space. So it's a different strategy, whereas heat seeking is much more of the sales motion. Like, you're trying to win the deal that everyone wants to win, it becomes, can you be the most helpful? Like, founder referencing, I think one of the things about this business that keeps people honest is that ultimately winning investments at large VC firms comes down to what the founders say about you. And that's a very good thing. It forces people to behave. There's no way to game that. What a founder will say, it's a special call, think, at least in my experience as a founder. If another founder calls you and they're about to choose a VC and devote the next ten years of their life, people give pretty candid references. Right?

**Harry Stebbings** [14:30]:

Do you worry that we've over rotated on founder NPS? You know, we saw a lot of lack of governance in the last few years where there maybe should have been some. I agree in terms of the importance of the founder reference, but it leads to, in some cases, just pure negligence because people don't wanna have anything bad said about them.

**Chris Dixon** [14:45]:

I think there's a difference between being the founder's friend and being their partner. And so being their partner means you're a good fiduciary, you're supportive, you help the company, you give them honest feedback. It's not always friendly feedback. What I think a bad partnership is you say yes to everything, and then the moment they need money, you say no, or you let them behave, not for practice good governance. A good partnership is you're honest with them, you support them, but you're also like, there are times when the best thing for the company is, for example, for a CEO change or something. That has to be a good partner would recommend that if that's actually the best thing for the company governance or whatever it might be. So I think that distinction is important. Obviously, we become friends with people that we work with, but ultimately, it's important to keep in mind the kind of professional roles that people have. The fact, look, when you're involved with a startup, there's often many employees, many other investors. It's an important responsibility to be a good custodian of those people's careers. And so you have to balance all these things. Right?

**Harry Stebbings** [15:41]:

I've spoken to, you know, many of the team at Founders Fund on the show, and they always say that the best founders don't need their VCs. They don't need help. How do you feel about the best founders actually don't need their VC?

**Chris Dixon** [15:52]:

I think there's a distinction between do you need advice and do you need sort of network, I guess. Like, I just don't believe especially if the the sort of founders that we tilt towards, which are technical product founders, it's just impossible that they know the right customer prospect at all Fortune 500 companies. The best founders, do they know how to build the product and the technology? For sure. And like, for example, I I'll speak for myself and not the firm, but I rarely get involved in in those parts of the companies. And in fact, I probably judiciously try to not comment on that because I think sometimes board members and investors opinions on like, this button should be purple or something. Like, they'll say these things and then suddenly it'll become like an organizational priority. But there's just no reason that, for example, a founder doesn't have as much experience with fundraising. They don't know all the investors. They don't know all the potential partners. They don't know all the potential customers. They don't have the same talent network. Like, it's just inconsistent with their if they're if they're in truly a deep product or technologist sort of founder, they just couldn't be spending have been spending their time like that. If they're saying that, if the Founders Fund folks are saying that in terms of product and technology, I tend to agree. Like, it's something is wrong if Chris Dixon is giving you your tech ideas or product ideas. But if I'm introducing you to a great executive, like, I think that's working well. Chris, why do you think the best founders in the world pick here? This is a business I think that primarily goes down to founder referencing. I'm not on those calls, but when you're competing over an investment, that is the determining factor. What those folks say about you is very important. I would also say specific to blockchain crypto, there's a lot of sensitivity around the fact that, you know, we've now been through maybe four cycles that this is a bull market, and every time that there's a downturn, kind of a lot of investors leave. That becomes a big issue. Then it's very important to founders that you are high conviction. And that comes out again in founder referencing. By way, that's not just my group at the firm. That's throughout the firm. I think there's a kind of a misunderstanding around this that I see some articles that misunderstand it. We don't pivot like we've never pivoted. We've done AI for ten since I've been at the firm since 2013. We've done blockchain crypto consistently. We've done bio. We've done SaaS. We've done video games. Over time, we've created verticals. Like, as we think something's working, we've spun out verticals like crypto, games, bio. We've stayed very high conviction in those areas. Sometimes we're too early. That can mean there's a challenging era. But that's kind of just how we practice it. And I think that's important to founders. Like, when they're know, they wanna know that they're investors. This is you mentioned Ron Conway, you know, he's a good friend. He always says, you make your money in the in the bull market and your reputation in the bear market.

**Harry Stebbings** [18:17]:

Well, it's funny because Ron actually told me that you are a master of conviction and quote, you have remained undeterred in the face of the most adverse conditions. That's a very nice thing to hear. My question to you is, when the world and the market tells you you are wrong, how do you retain that undeterred conviction?

**Chris Dixon** [18:37]:

I think there's different ways to do this job, and different ways can work. And I think a lot of people in the industry today, they'll say things like, I don't try to predict the future. I just try to predict the present. There's a lot of focus these days on metrics, on ARR, and all these other kinds of things. That can work, and it has worked for people. I have a different view, which is I do try to predict the future, and I do and I spend a lot of time thinking about that. I think, as I recall, Thiel, I think in Zero to One, he has this part about it, about sort of a deterministic or indeterministic future. Like, I fall into the deterministic camp. I'm not saying everyone should do this. The way I approach it is I I have a view of the future, and I wanna get to that that future. And I spend a lot of time reading about the history of technology, trying to understand it. A lot of that is to try to understand how the future might play out, is to look and and study the patterns, and to study the the kind of the underlying forces. You know, when you have an incredibly complex system with economics and technology and people and all of these things, it's very hard to kind of draw lines through charts. I don't think that's a very good way to view in the future. I think a better way is to really understand the dynamics and the historical forces and things like that. So that's my approach, and I've just spent so much time on it that I believe in it. And that's why, like, I think we'll talk about my book. Like, if you read that book, that is a book of somebody who is, I believe, you know, you can agree or disagree with it. It's somebody who has spent a lot of time thinking about the Internet, and it has a lot of frameworks for how these things play out, and I believe in those frameworks. You know, I like their setbacks. Like, in in crypto, the stuff that happened two years ago with FTX and a bunch of scandals, I think, set back the space a couple, you know, maybe a couple years. This is the kind of thing that your frameworks can't help you with. Right? There's just things in the world that happen, these exogenous events. There's ways you can mitigate that kind of risk through, for example, companies having longer runways and things. But that anyway, that's just my approach and I and I believe in it and the book which I I wrote, part of writing the book was a test of conviction. I think if you can write something out in 230 pages in detail, an argument, that helps you kind of vet that argument and kind of pressure test it.

**Harry Stebbings** [20:29]:

We're gonna get to the book. I just wanna ask on this. Alex Rampell told me that you are the master of strong opinions loosely held. And so on this, there's a point when you do let them go. Can you talk to me about when you have enough data to realize you need to change your mind?

**Chris Dixon** [20:45]:

Look, think of venture as, you know, sort of this fox and hedgehog. The fox knows many things, the hedgehog one thing. Like, venture is the fox business, I think. Like, it's like you're you're constantly tuning your neural network. What are all the different things that go into this decision making? And it's very complex and there's many things. And that's one reason it's sort of a it takes a long time, I think, to really get good at it. And it's very important to have mentorship and other things because it's very hard to kind of get these neural networks trained. I just want to be clear, I'm constantly like, there's lots of little things and specific, know, this sector's not gonna work, this one is, that kind of thing. But on the big thing, look, I mean, I guess I've if anything, I've been emboldened on the big thing. I mean, just every single thing, I mean, Marc Andreessen and I talk about this a lot. Like, I think his phrase is there's no bad ideas or there's only too early. First of all, I started my Internet career when the Internet was kind of a joke. People today cannot picture this. You start your career in a highly contrarian area, you know, that that shapes you. I then doubled down in the financial crisis and then did a whole bunch of things like blockchain and VR and other things over ten years ago. So I've just been used to this and I've just blocked out the noise, and I just kind of try to look at the fundamentals. I'm very careful about the information I consume and and really focusing on primary sources. For example, on the crypto blockchain stuff, like most mainstream news coverage is just factually incorrect, and I could go through with a red pen and show you all the mistakes. And that, you know, if you just read that, then I assume that's probably the case for other areas. It's a Murray Gell Mann thing, you know, the it's not just the area I know, it's others. I talk to entrepreneurs all day. I look at metrics. I read technical and product papers and, you know, read a lot of books and history. And when you do that, it's a different set of inputs. I haven't seen a technology movement, a software movement, where a bunch of very smart people were excited about it in my career that hasn't eventually worked. I started an AI company in 2008, and I if you told me and I sold it to eBay in 2011, a machine learning company called Hunch, I was obviously too early, but eventually it worked. The interesting question to me is not whether something like crypto blockchain will work. I don't think it's a question. The timing is a question, as it was with AI and other things. You could do a lot of work to try to understand the timing too. Speaking of the

**Harry Stebbings** [22:45]:

timing and and moving more to crypto specifically, you said to me before that big tech is stifling the Internet, that blockchain networks can break the stranglehold. Again, moving to very much today into the crypto space, why is big tech for us strangling the Internet? Just so we have an element of causation.

**Chris Dixon** [23:02]:

You know, in in my book, my in Read Write Own, I go through in the first couple of chapters. I sort of think of the book as split between on the first half diagnosing what happened. So how did the Internet go from an open and democratic controlled system in the nineties to the Internet that's essentially controlled by five companies today? The the big five companies have 955% plus of the traffic and the money. AI is exciting as it is will will very likely accelerate that consolidation because it rewards companies with large stores of data and capital. And so, you know, why did that happen? I go through in detail. My argument is, you know, we started off with the Internet is a network of networks. So like, there's the base layer of the Internet protocol that connects hardware, and then we build networks on top. And in the nineties, the dominant networks were email and the web, which are what I call protocol networks. People call them protocols. They are networks that are that are more like, you know, they're standards among a community, and the and the network effects, which is don't accrue to a company, they accrue to the community. And then in the two thousands, there were a lot of great things that happened, including kind of the democratization of the Internet that went from a couple 100,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 people. People got lots of great services. But in that process, we adopted internet services that had a different architecture, that were controlled by companies and not by communities. And that sort of seemed fine in the in the 2000s and even the early 2010s when those companies acted in very open ways and supported, allowed for creators and software developers and entrepreneurs to build businesses on top of them. But they've since changed the way they're doing that. That's why, look at consumer internet investing today. There's there's very few successful consumer internet companies the last ten years. That's because you have this sort of chokehold with these five companies. My argument then is that what blockchains let you do is create a new wave of internet services, which have the societal benefits of those early protocol networks, but a lot of what I'd say is called the competitive advantages, through the advanced functionality, the ability to do a lot of financial things that make them competitive with these corporate networks.

**Harry Stebbings** [24:56]:

What does that look like in reality, Chris? So just to take it down to a more human level, what does that actually look like in reality for these networks?

**Chris Dixon** [25:04]:

So for example, I'll just give you an example. We have a so it's a blockchain based social network called Forecaster. It's we're investors in. And Forecaster, you can download it and use it. It's got a couple 100,000 active users today. It will feel a lot like Twitter or something. You know, it's the user experience, everything else. The difference is that on Twitter, when I have c dixon and I have an audience, that's controlled by Twitter. And they can change the algorithm. They can change the economics. They can change the rules. They could remove me from the platform. On Forecaster, I control my name, and I control my audience. Much more the way, like, with an email list. Like, you think about you, you know, you have your email list on Substack, you own that list. If Substack messes with you, you can switch to another provider. That's how Forecaster works. So there's many Forecasters the protocol, and there's many different clients. And so it provides the kind of advanced functionality of social network that you want and all the features, but it pushes control to the users. And so they kept choice. They can choose different software providers. Right? That's just one example. You know, we have dozens in our portfolio of new services where the functionality is very advanced and modern, but it has different economic and control properties because using blockchain shifts power to the edges of the network, the users, the creators, the software developers.

**Harry Stebbings** [26:14]:

Chris, you're a student of history, and you mentioned the power of incumbents there. I've never been more worried about the size of incumbents. As we mentioned, the size of their data is enormous. The free cash flows of their businesses is enormous. Have incumbents ever been this dangerously large? And is it not too big to usurp some with a far caster where or a hive mapper or you name any of your innovations given the free cash flow machines that these businesses have? So

**Chris Dixon** [26:43]:

I have a chapter for those interested in the book. It's called community created software where I kind of walk through this. But if you look at the history of the technology industry, the competition has moved to different layers of the stack. So, you know, prior to Microsoft, the business of computing was to sell hardware. Companies like IBM would sell mainframe computers. They'd bundle it with software and services, but the business was hardware. The contrarian innovative idea of Bill Gates was that software would be the next layer of value. Right? And that was the idea behind Microsoft, and it turned out to be correct. And so, you know, they had very high cash flows, very high margins, and essentially began to commoditize the hardware layer. You didn't care if you got Compact or Dell as long as you had Windows and Office. Right? And then what happened was open source software came along, particularly like Linux. You know, fast forward today, by far the dominant operating system in the world. And it turned out that sort of a ragtag group of people could create a better operating system than this giant high cash flow company. The rise of open source software, I I I think is a very under appreciated thing. Every Android phone is running open source software. A lot of your Apple computers running it, and certainly every back end system runs all open source stacks. All the new devices do. This was a movement that was crazy left wing political movement in the eighties and then dismissed in the nineties. Go go read was it '98? Was the DOJ case against Microsoft? Go read the documents. Like, Linux doesn't occur. It's all about Sun and Java. And yet, that was when Linux was growing. And so I I think that there's and, you know, there's a famous essay from the nineties, Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. And he talks about these sort of different ways to make software. Like, one is the cathedral is Microsoft. It's this, you know, cathedral. The the product managers are the priests. You know, they speak in secret incantations. And then the Bazaar is this cacophonous marketplace of brilliant people and crazy people and all the sort of things you get with the Internet and humanity. But in the end, you know, his prediction, and he was right, is that the bizarre would win because you would have as Bill Joy famously said, the co founder of Sun, no matter how many smart people you have working for you, most of the smart people work for somebody else. How many people at these big cash flow companies actually work on cutting edge new products? Right? Mean, Google has 300,000 employees or something. The vast majority are doing customer service, product management. They're maintaining old products. They're doing bureaucratic, you know, PowerPoints, arguing over politics. I don't know what they do. But like, I bet you there's a thousand people that are really doing cutting edge new products for as big as these companies are. And, you know, there's that many people working on Ethereum that are very, very smart, and they have people from all over the world. Blockchains are to centralize services as open source software was to centralize operating systems. Right? That's what we're doing here. We're trying to open the services layer of the Internet. Historically, this pendulum has swung back and forth between the cathedral and the bazaar, and I think there's a lot of pent up energy to support the bazaar. And you I'm I can't predict the future. You may be right. Maybe it's too late. Maybe it's over. I think that there's a lot of strong forces that will ultimately support a more kind of community built Internet services layer than we have today.

**Harry Stebbings** [29:38]:

Can I ask, what do you think is the biggest challenge to the next generation community built services layer that we both wanna see? What are the biggest barriers that the community led next generation has to break to enable or

**Chris Dixon** [29:50]:

to be what it could be? I think there's two things. In the book, I talk about what I call the computer in the casino. And so this this idea is that around blockchains, there are two communities that have developed. The casino is a set of folks who are more interested in kind of the trading and gambling aspects of meme coins. And to me, this is where FTX and Luna and a bunch of these catastrophes kind of came out of that community. And the computer is people who, like me, view blockchains as a computing movement. I was just at Heath Denver. Ethereum has these series of community organized conferences. You go there, and it's it's awesome. It's like early Linux days. Thousands of, like, nerds talking about computing and stuff. Like, I love it. And that world is kind of ignored, think, by I think most people that think about the blockchain world don't realize that exists, how big it is and how lively it is. That's the world I'm part of. That's what we invest in. I think of it as there's the blockchain as a computer movement. And then we're on the one side, we have people that are, I think, co opting that movement for this kind of casino activities. And on the other side, we have mainstream world, the policymakers, media, the establishment, all of these forces that are against us. You know, the big banks hate crypto. The big tech companies hate crypto. Media seems to hate crypto. Certain elements of the government seem to hate crypto. So we've got that on one side, and then we've got these kind of co opters on the other side. So that and I think what's going on is that the reason those people don't like it is they see the casino side, and they don't understand that there's two sides to it. And that in an ideal world, what we would do is come up with policy prescriptions, and this is what we've been calling for for years long before FTX. We've had stuff on our website. We've been, you know, advocating for It's policy that encourages the innovative use cases and discourages the harmful use cases. Right? In an ideal world, you'd that's what you'd have, is you'd have something that sort of reins in the speculation, the casino stuff, but allows somebody when they're building like a new social network using blockchains to have a path to be compliant. Instead, what we have today is actually the opposite, which is we actually have a regulatory system which so just to give you an example, you can creating a meme coin, you know, meme coin meme coin is just an utterly stupid token. Has no purpose by design. You can create a meme coin. You can own 10% of it. You can dump it and get rich. And as long as you don't manipulate the markets and things like this, basically, that's legal. If you then take that meme coin and try to build something useful, like a game or a financial service, that's when you get tripped up with regulators today. So we have a system now that literally encourages the casino behavior and discourages the productive use cases. So you asked me what the biggest challenge is. That that's the biggest challenge. We have this harmful community on one side. It'd be it'd be as if we had an AI policy that allowed you to create dangerous bioweapons, but didn't let you create customer service chatbots. Like, it's just opposite land of what we should be doing.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:25]:

I asked from pure inquisition, why does everyone throw the accusation then against Andreessen crypto for pump and dump?

**Chris Dixon** [32:33]:

It's it's just factually incorrect. I don't know where they get their their alleged facts. So first of all, all of our funds are 10 venture funds. Throughout the lifetime of the crypto funds, we today hold 94% of our investments. And not only that, the length of the lockup in some ways is limited by the market. So we've been advocates. In other words, if we go too far, the entrepreneurs won't work with us. We've been advocating for a long time for regulatory guardrails that make longer lockups. I don't understand where this comes from. You don't have to believe that we're good people or something, but just look at all the charts, look at the history of venture capital, like selling your winners is the worst possible strategy, and the things that aren't winners don't move the needle on funds. Like, it's just not how venture capital works. There's a j curve, and that holding things for a long time is always, if it's a growing market that's growing in value, which crypto has, is always a good strategy. So I I yeah. I don't know. That's just misinformation.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:25]:

Can I ask you? You mentioned that they kind of casino like culture, and you mentioned the word speculation. Is speculation bad always? Can it not be an inroad for interest? Yeah.

**Chris Dixon** [33:34]:

Look, I don't think speculation's always bad. So the housing market. To me, the point of a blockchain is to enable digital ownership. Like, an NFT is a digital object, and it can represent a name on a social network. It can represent a game an object in a video game. It can represent a piece of art. It can represent whatever the creator wants to represent. Similar to the offline world, like, think we'd all agree that homeownership has a positive societal value. It's psychologically, personally rewarding to own a home and have a family, and I think we think societally, like, people that own homes are more likely to improve their homes and more likely to contribute to their community. So homeownership's a good thing. We also have speculation around real estate. People flip houses, REITs, and all this other kind of stuff. I don't think the speculation is bad, but I think that the point is homeownership. And in fact, speculation pays a purpose. Right? You have price discovery, liquidity. And I think generally, society, we allow spec I mean, stock markets are similar, right? Like the purpose of a stock market is to productively allocate capital to companies that are building products. The byproduct is you have hedge funds and other folks like that. They do provide liquidity and they play service. Right? My issue with the casino community in around blockchains is the is the focus. The focus should be on building useful services that enable digital ownership. As a byproduct, there should be markets around that, and those markets should be regulated and there should be it should be tamped down. The issue is you ask most people, you read the media, etcetera, like all of the focus is on the casino, and that skews incorrectly the perception of the technology. If you could make one change to the regulatory environment today, what would it be? Look, I just think the main thing is that as an entrepreneur, and this this ends up affecting our business because as an entrepreneur, you don't want gray area. If you're a top computer scientist and you're choosing what sector to go into, And one sector, there's gray area, there's some percent chance that no matter what you do, you get a subpoena or something. A lot of people just won't do that. And on the flip side, with the gray area, if you're a bad actor and, you know, your other career choices are stealing money or something, like creating a meme coin seems like a good idea. Right? This took me a while to appreciate. I had to work in the space. Like, I didn't understand how kind of policy worked and how policy interacted with entrepreneurship. But I will say that my chief learning there is that gray areas discourage good entrepreneurs and encourage bad actors. Actors. And so my main thing is, we talk about this a lot, like clarity. Now, obviously, we want not just clear, like clarity, bright line rules. Here's what you do. Here's what you don't do. And of course, a pathway. It could be a lot it could be an onerous pathway, but a pathway to building these products. And so there's very specific proposals out there that we've been advocates of that do that and tamp down the speculation and allow for entrepreneurs to build products and have long lockups and disclosures and security audits and like all these things that should be happening that in a sensible policy environment would be happening just aren't happening today. Like you have these hacks and it's because there's no requirements around security audits. Like there should be requirements around that. We can try to force it, but if we go too far with entrepreneurs they won't work with, like we can't we're not the referee.

**Harry Stebbings** [36:30]:

Can I ask a blunt one? How would a Trump administration impact the regulatory environment for crypto?

**Chris Dixon** [36:35]:

I mean, it's look, it's complicated. There's, you know, there are obviously three branches of government, all matter. In fact, a lot of it's playing out in courts right now. I think ultimately this will get resolved, I hope, through congressional legislation, so that matters a lot. The executive branch matters too in who they pick. Look, a lot of it just comes down to who they pick as the head of agencies, and you could imagine Trump, I don't know, but like Republicans tend to skew more pro business. But ultimately, it really comes down to the specific people they choose to run these agencies. Chris,

**Harry Stebbings** [37:01]:

why did

**Chris Dixon** [37:02]:

you decide to

**Harry Stebbings** [37:02]:

write the

**Chris Dixon** [37:03]:

book

**Harry Stebbings** [37:03]:

now? You've been in the space ten years plus. Why now?

**Chris Dixon** [37:07]:

Well, one is I needed time to write it and and to, you know, after last downturn, had more time. So it was a good opportunity. But really, it was that I feel like the technology is very misunderstood. And I wanted to have like a one stop shop for somebody who wanted to understand it to be able to and to hear the other side of the story, because I think they hear the negative side a lot. And I wanted to provide the other side of the story and the full kind of treatment of it.

**Harry Stebbings** [37:32]:

I often think, like, who's the customer for the book? Is this a net new entrant to crypto? Is this an existing crypto enthusiast? For you writing it, who was that customer in your mind? Yeah.

**Chris Dixon** [37:42]:

I think of it as concentric circles. There's the crypto community, which I think embraced it honestly in in a very nice way as sort of the best explainer. And then there's the next ring of the circle is all the people they know. So you're joining Coinbase and your family is like, isn't that the thing with Dogecoin? You're like, no, family member. It's actually more than that. Here's a book to read. And I'm very excited to say that I've heard a lot of feedback that that's happening now. So it's becoming that book that people kind of give to, let's call it crypto adjacent people, which is a lot of. There's 50,000 that work in the industry. I don't know what the exact number is. One thing about books, this is one thing I debated is if you actually look at the book sales figures of all books, it's sort of surprising how small like, when you're used to the Internet, it's just small number. Like, there's kind of, I don't know, a million people that still read non fiction books in the country or something. Mean, the best selling non fiction book last year was 400,000 books or something, that was like a self help book. It's just a smaller set of people. So you're, you know, when you write a book, it's a smaller set of people, but I'm hoping, you know, they're an important set of people that read books. I also think about this, which is like I had books that really influenced my life. It would be cool if ten years from now I meet somebody who's an entrepreneur who's done some really interesting stuff and the book was part of that. So I think of it as like a blog post can reach millions of people, a tweet can reach millions of people, books reach a smaller group, but they can be canon events. They can really affect people's lives. I think of it both as like a way to explain it to the people that are adjacent, but also potentially a way to kind of influence entrepreneurs. Particularly, like, when they talk about the computer in the casino, I'm trying to influence those entrepreneurs to go towards the computer and like explain the whole thing to them and explain why this is the right path to take. I'm hoping to nudge the industry in that direction. Chris, do you think

**Harry Stebbings** [39:16]:

brand is more important

**Chris Dixon** [39:18]:

than ever in venture? To be honest, I don't think about venture as a category. Think that the internet changed the way that information flowed for sure, and I think probably unbundled a lot of brand and venture. When I started off, there were just these kind of like it was just these black boxes. It was like Sequoia and Kleiner and Benchmark and Excel, and you'd hear rumors about who the people are. You'd hear literally rumors about how term sheets work because there was no blogging about it. There weren't really books on it. And so it was just sort of like this mysterious thing that you didn't really understand. But the firms carried a lot of weight. The firm name was the thing. It was a big deal. And you saw it, you read about the history and the companies they'd funded. I think that's how fundraising worked too, right, with LPs. And this is a lot of what's happened with the unbundling I was talking about before, where you have the barbell and the rise of seed funds, right, is if you're someone like you, the calculus has changed versus twenty years ago, where then you had to join a big firm to raise money, and now you don't because you're you have your own brand. And so I think the sort of unbundling of the branding, where you can just build your brand with your podcast and with the other things you do, and then, of course, over time with your investing and everything, is very different.

**Harry Stebbings** [40:27]:

The thing that I worry about, honestly, Chris, is the weight of capital is different. Know, $5,000,000 to me is very different to $5,000,000 to you and Andreessen. And so you can do a five on 25 with ease. Whereas for me, that's a big bet in a early company with absolutely no traction and very little to go on. When the weight of capital is different, it makes it very hard for boutiques to survive, I think. If you think to, like,

**Chris Dixon** [40:53]:

Founder Collective I'll speak for my own for for my own vertical here, my own area, which is we very we do very little seed investing. And the reason is we take conflicts very seriously, meaning we invest in one company per category. If we go too early, that's sort of our bet in the category. Most of our stuff is like a true series a and not seed that I do for that reason, and I think that and I try to work very hard to collaborate with seed funds, and they go earlier. So that that's just speaking for myself. Do you agree with

**Harry Stebbings** [41:18]:

if the cash is on the table, you should take it? Because, like, you know, if you have a two on 10 versus a five on 25, it's a lot more money, it's a much better price. It's hard to argue and tell a founder that no, the two on 10 is better.

**Chris Dixon** [41:30]:

Honestly, think, and then maybe this sounds like I'm talking in my book, but I would say this even if I were a founder. Like, I think there's many factors. Like, this is a 10 this is a ten plus year relationship with investors. It's a long term thing. Look, obviously, the dilution and everything matters. And so you shouldn't be crazy. But, you know, I think, one, it's an important factor. But the way I think about it is you're building a company. You're thinking about how do I kind of assemble an excellent team of excellence both in my company and around my company. And some of those decisions are like in like who you take as investors, basically irreversible. I do think you should know who you're dealing with.

**Harry Stebbings** [42:02]:

Final one before we do a quick fire, which is as part of that partnership often it comes to the board seat. What are your biggest lessons on what it takes to be a great board member, and how has your style of board membership changed over time as an investor?

**Chris Dixon** [42:14]:

A lot of it is good governance. And unfortunately, I think it's relatively easy to be in the top quartile of that if you care about it, if you're supportive in both up cycles and down cycles. To your point earlier, there's just a lot of stuff that goes on when the market drops. I'm not just talking about crypto here, I'm talking about regular venture when the downturn happens. You have somebody who's early in their career at venture, they made three investments, they've told their partners this is their hot company and now it's struggling, they're worried, this happens a lot, or maybe the fund isn't doing well and they need to recover money. I just had a situation where, you know, the investors came in at a high valuation and they have a high preference stack and so like they would financially be better off if the company sold themselves right now versus the early stage investors because of the way preferences work. You have different incentives. So, you know, you have people who micromanage and try to, you know, board members who don't really have the expertise trying to give granular product advice. So I think a lot I don't mean to sound negative, but I do think a lot of it is just not being bad. It helps a lot. Caring, being there for downturns, it's complicated when you're an investor, right, because you were kind of wearing two hats. You were wearing the board member hat and you're wearing the investor hat, and so being able to sort of separate those. If you bring some detail, like some expertise, like operating expertise or financial expertise, that's a bonus. But I think that alone is just an important thing when it's scrubbed.

**Harry Stebbings** [43:31]:

Final final one before a quick fight. Do you enjoy the size and scale of Andreessen today? It's very different to the fund that you joined eleven years ago. Do you prefer it today than you did when it was much smaller and more boutique y and I'm sure less process driven and

**Chris Dixon** [43:45]:

I will say, first of all, we, you know, we're very verticalized now. We're a big firm, but, you know, I run a vertical and pretty independent. And that's important because I think we actually avoid a lot of the bureaucracy and other things. You know, we had a period where that was a transition period where we weren't like that always, but I think we're in a very good spot there. But at some point, I I think my interest kind of shifted from just investing in startups to sort of having impact. I remember when I joined the firm, I was considering joining in 2012. I joined it beginning in 2013, thinking a lot about the fact that it was starting to really bug me that, you know, I'd put some money into an investment and they would either do well or not, and I would think to myself, did I actually have any impact? Or if I didn't do it with somebody else, I'd just put that money in as an oversubscribe around, like, someone else would have invested. Yeah. Maybe I gave some advice on this and that. This is what I wanna do. And so what really appealed to me why I joined is when I talked to Marc and Ben, I was like, look, I just went through the the three the era of mobile social cloud. These are the three big computing trends. I think there will be the next ten years, we'll have another wave of multiple computing trends. And I want to aggressively invest in those areas. I think there were a handful of organizations in the world who at that time would have supported a plan like that. Andreessen Horowitz, Marc and Ben were one of them. Right? That's what we've been doing. Mean, that was the just to go back, that was my motivation and that's still very much my motivation today. I think about it in terms of impact. Obviously, we manage the fund and there's all the kind of financial aspects of it, but that's a lot of my motivation is not just riding along, but actually having some influence.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:10]:

Speaking of influence, I guess my question is how do you assess your own relationship to money and has that changed over time?

**Chris Dixon** [45:16]:

I think the healthiest relationship is to think of money mostly as capital. It's mostly as a way to invest in people and ideas that you believe in. Marc Andreessen and I have been for a long time, both first individually and for the last seven years together, investing in funds, supporting new managers, starting venture funds. We do other kind of things like we I don't know if you've seen this California forever. This was something we did. It's a new city in Northern California. At the time, didn't fit into the venture fund model, we did that. You know, it was a personal thing we did later on it. That changed and the firm did invest. I'm very interested in sort of Internet freedom, blockchains, open source software, being able to support some of those causes. Like, I think that's the healthiest relationship with money. I've seen a lot of as you do this kind of job over time, you see a lot of unhealthy relationships with money. And you see people that kind of make money and end their career or get on the hedonistic treadmill or something and like, I don't know. So those are there's lots of unhealthy relationships, I'll say that. I think that's a healthy way to think about it. It's just a resource to kind of do things that help people you like or causes you like.

**Harry Stebbings** [46:15]:

Chris, we're gonna do a quick fire round because otherwise I could talk to you all day. One, what have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months?

**Chris Dixon** [46:22]:

Probably a lot of things. You know, one that might be interesting is, you know, COVID, I like a lot of like everyone, I guess, we went remote, and I really wanted to believe this was the new world and all these kinds of, you know, tweet threads that you read about how the world's changed, and I and I wanted to believe that, you know, just that you could have now a globally distributed workforce, people could live wherever they want. I've come to think it's especially in our business, just doesn't work. And that, you know, we've now returning our like, least on our investment team, you know, back in one place in New York. In some ways, think what works in remote teams is that you're, you know, you're kind of piggybacking off past relationships, and it's very hard to build new relationships. It's hard to sort of share knowledge. What are you most concerned about in the world today, Chris? Well, the issue I spend the most time on that I'm concerned about is are these issues we're discussing. I think, sort of, I would call broadly Internet freedom, little tech versus big tech. I think that the outside world perceives would say that someone like me and you work in the tech industry. I see myself as working on the behalf of sort of little tech of startups. I think that having a dynamic Internet economy and software economy is good for the world. I think it's good for innovation. I think it's good for a whole bunch of reasons. I think we're at serious risk of losing that. To me, the two issues are there's a real effort to ban open source AI, and there's a real effort to ban blockchains. And I care a lot about those two issues and spend a lot of time thinking about that and working on that.

**Harry Stebbings** [47:36]:

I've got to ask, should OpenAI be open sourced?

**Chris Dixon** [47:38]:

Look, I I think everyone should choose their own strategy. That's fine. I just think that open source should be frontier open source model should be legal. And I if you look at the Biden executive order, it looks like you're gonna have to register and there'll be export controls. So I just think every project should have a choice, and they can do whatever they want. But Mistral and all the other, like, LAMA with Facebook, they they should all be allowed to to open their code, open their weights. I think there's just a lot of crazy panic right now about this. The obvious thing that's gonna happen if they do put regulations around this is just further entrench the power of the big five companies.

**Harry Stebbings** [48:08]:

What's the biggest lesson from working with Marc and Ben for over a decade?

**Chris Dixon** [48:12]:

You know, we used to for the first five or so years I was at the firm, we'd sit in this room and there were relatively small number of us at the firm and just sit around and talk about mostly investing. Entrepreneurs would come in and then we'd talk about it. It'd be hard to enumerate all of the things I've learned and hopefully I've taught them some things, but mostly I've probably learned from them. I mean, have a couple of frameworks like there's a, you know, Ben, this is in our when you join the firm, it's in our onboarding. It's first class business in a first class way, it's just sort of everything we do, no matter how seemingly small it is, needs to be conducted in sort of a high integrity way. And think if you talk to people who interact with our firm, regardless of who at the firm, often will hear that. Everything is done in a very high integrity way, and we really care about it. We care very much about who we hire and the culture we create. We like to say invest in strength, not lack of weakness. That applies both to portfolio company investing but also hiring. We try to find people that have some very special ability. Often that comes bundled with issues, but the issues are things that we can try to work through as opposed to looking for people that are kind of perfect and well rounded, but maybe not exceptional. We're in the exception business. Venture capital is the exception business. It's the exception business with investing. It's the exception business with hiring. Like, you can't lose sight of that, and you have to always remind yourself of it.

**Harry Stebbings** [49:25]:

What's your biggest miss and how did that impact your mindset?

**Chris Dixon** [49:28]:

Well, I had a lot of misses. I've had a lot I mean, everyone that I think I I think it's an important moment in your investing career to have like high conviction pass and then have it become a big thing. And I everyone I know has had that happen. And then you're like, oh, wow. I've got to go readjust my mental model. I mean, I had a lot. I started investing in I guess it was two thousand six, seven when I sold my first company. Well, I remember one thing that was funny. My company was a security company I sold to McAfee. And so one might think that I'm knowledgeable about internet security. And I remember like four years into it noticing that my best investments were non security and my worst investments were security. And I sort of thought about why that is and I came to the conclusion it's because in the security ones, I was over weighting the idea because I had a whole bunch of ideas. I thought things should be built, and someone came in that had one that matched one of those ideas, and I was like, okay, here here's some money. Whereas in the non security areas, was much more agnostic about the ideas and just sort of met the people and was like, wow, that person is really smart. So my conclusion was, yeah, I needed to significantly increase the kind of weighting I put on people. And I actually eventually developed kind of a methodology that I think about now, which is there's a very interesting balancing act you do in venture, which is you do need to become an expert on something. Like, obviously, I spent a lot of time on crypto and blockchains, I know a lot about it. But you also have to be willing to throw out your expertise and just say like, wow, that person knows more than me, that person's smarter than me. And so there's this kind of balancing act between prepared mind and humility that took me a long time to kind of get right, I think. And so, yeah, that was through a series of misses, a whole bunch of stuff early on. Punultimate one, what's the most memorable first Founder meeting you've had? I mean, remember the first time I met Brian Armstrong, the first time I met Patrick Haul, and I was in personal investor at Stripe, like, and it's probably selective memory or something because I don't know. That's a good question. I had I just feel like I had a lot of interesting memorable meetings. Sort of I walk in and and, you know, you in this business, you do a lot of meetings and, you know, and obviously a lot of them you don't invest. So it's always striking when you have kind of lightning strikes and you're you're kind of awed by something. I'm a huge VR fan and I, you know, I led our investment in Oculus years ago, 2013, and I remember like that demo. A lot of interesting I love really love demos. That was, to me, just like one of the times I felt like I was stepping into the future. Final one for you, Chris.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:41]:

Where do you wanna be in ten years? What does Chris Dixon in 2024 look like?

**Chris Dixon** [51:45]:

I mean, I'm I'm very focused on this mission of the space I work in. So I very much see myself focusing on that until the mission is done. And by that, I mean, it's sort of past all these, you know, kind of growing pains.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:55]:

You don't have too much cash for this space, do you? People often say, oh, 4,500,000,000 is too big a fund for the space.

**Chris Dixon** [52:01]:

Like, I mean, we announced it, we had two there were two funds. There was a venture fund and a seed fund. And, you know, part of our charter is we can invest in over the counter assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum. The market cap of all the crypto assets today is something like 2,500,000,000,000. If you just do the math, having a fund of that size is a very small percentage of the market.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:18]:

Chris, listen. I've wanted to do this for a long time. I so appreciate you putting up with my flexible questions. You've been fantastic. So thank you so much. Thank you, Harry. Yeah. I really appreciate it. So I wanna say huge thank you to Chris for being so fantastic in that episode. If you wanna see the full episode in video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. But before we leave you today,

## Sponsor read

**Harry Stebbings** [52:39]:

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