The future

If America fails to win technologically, it will lose economically, militarily, geopolitically, and culturally. And the entire world will lose as well.

At a16z, we believe that the best thing that a society can do for a person is to give them a chance. Give them a shot at a great life regardless of their circumstance, background, ethnicity, religion, gender or any other attribute. Give them a shot, a chance to contribute, a chance to do something larger than themself and make the world a better... See more

Financial assets want to be free. They want to be open. They want to be interconnected. Crypto turns financial assets into file formats, makes it as easy to send a dollar or a stock as to send a PDF. Crypto makes it possible for everything to talk to everything. It makes it all 24/7, global, interconnected, and open.

That will win. Open always wins.... See more

This is the thing that Silicon Valley has always understood better than Wall Street. Silicon Valley was raised on exponentials, while Wall Street was raised on linearity. And over the last few years, crypto’s center of gravity has migrated from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. You can feel it.

Granted, crypto growth doesn’t look as smooth as... See more

10 years of chop. All along the way, Amazon was beset with doubters and non-believers. Is e-commerce a VC-subsidized charity? They’re selling underpriced cheap low-quality knick-knacks to bargain hunters, who cares? How are they ever going to make actual money, like Walmart or GE?

If you were arguing about Amazon’s P/E ratio, you were in the wrong... See more

But you might respond—well, stablecoin growth might be exponential, maybe DeFi volumes are exponential, but they don’t accrue to ETH or SOL. The value doesn’t get captured by the chains.

To which I answer: you still don’t believe in the exponential.

Because the exponential’s answer is always the same: it doesn’t matter. This stuff is going to be so... See more

A story he often tells is about when all the early e-commerce VCs (it was a small group back then) got together for coffee in the early 2000s. They debated: how big is the market for e-commerce going to be?

Is it going to be mostly electronics (maybe only techies will use PCs)? Could it ever work for women (perhaps they’re too tactile)? What about... See more

The generational wealth imbalance is not a problem that America will solve.

It is a pressure gradient the system will route around.

And the routing takes the following shape:

•AI becomes the new productivity engine

•Bitcoin becomes the new neutral store of value

•stablecoins become the transactional layer

•fiscal policy keeps real growth from collapsing

•... See more

Bitcoin is not popular with millennials and Gen Z because they are rebellious or ideological.

It is because:

It is the only major asset where the asset base is not already owned by the seventy-plus cohort.

Housing? Owned.

Equities? Owned.

Bonds? Owned.

Private equity? Owned.

Land? Owned.

Bitcoin is the only vessel where younger cohorts can accumulate a... See more