YouSaid · the spoken record

Fred Wilson

lines on the record
88
first
2018-09-24
most recent
2018-09-24
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “But it's not at the surface, right? It's like under the water. And you're not getting rewarded very much as an investor for being super bullish. Last year was great. Like everybody wanted to own crypto, but I think that was kind of like a wave and it's certainly come and gone. I don't think you're getting worded a lot for that. And you are getting rewarded a lot more for the more operational execution oriented stuff like Enterprise SaaS and things like that. But I think what's super interesting is the stuff that's going to start bubbling up and that's where my head's at.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I mean, it may be a good example. Like a lot of interesting core infrastructure came out of Netscape, right? Why did Netscape have to build it? Because didn't exist. But if you go all the way back to where we started, I think we are maybe in the most interesting time I've ever seen in my 30 year career, but”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Definitely. That's what I see. And that's why largely we're not investing in a lot of dApps. I mean, we are playing around with NFTs and games for all the reasons you raised. I just think that's the first place that we might see it. And by the way, if you go back and look at the history of infrastructure, sometimes it's the apps that demand the infrastructure. And then the infrastructure gets there because the apps demand it. So games, in a way, games might make it such that we get the crypto network we need, right?”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So that we need that. And then it happens over. So whenever that happens, and then hopefully we have the five to ten year kind of immediate explosion of apps the way we did with the internet and mobile, and then a long tail of kind of further innovation.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “What's the quote, power corrupts, absolute power absolutely corrupts, or whatever it is, but like you just said when Facebook realizes that they've got the keys to the castle, you're going to start to extract rents. It's what happens. So that's why decentralization is so important. And so I think we got to have a crypto network or two or three or four, 10, who knows, that is truly decentralized, truly secure, and can process transactions at the speeds at least of like an ATM network or something, you know? We don't have that yet.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “To me, it means trust, and that goes along with nobody control it. You trust the network. I trust that if I have this NFT, I really have it. And no one can take it away. No single person can take it away. No bad system engineering can take it away.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That's what I'm waiting for. And, you know, it doesn't have to be totally decentralized. There's this whole narrative around where on the decentralized curve is enough. I just think decentralized means that nobody controls the network. And that's kind of to me fundamental.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think it's to me, think of the crypto network as a computer And the computer has different design criteria. It's very different than traditional computers and network, right? But in the consensus mechanism, et cetera, it makes this abstraction that's a computer on top. And you need trust, you need developer experience, you need scalability. And yeah, it's like we're internet pre-broadband. We're mobile phone pre-iPhone. Exactly.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think that we've got to fix, it's the broadband issue, we've got to figure out how to get crypto networks that are truly secure and decentralized that Handle much higher transaction processing speeds than what we have today.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Involved in, for example. People think that Numurai is a hedge fund powered by a crowd sourced network of data scientists, and it is, but I actually think if you really try to understand what Richard's doing, I think he's playing around with staking. It's like staking is a really powerful idea. I mean, it's existed forever. I mean, if you read Taleb's new book, it's really all about skin in the game. It's about staking. But I think that we're going to see a lot of really innovative things being done with staking because I think crypto tokens make staking super easy to do. And there are, like, I think Richard's idea is that if I can get data scientists to stake their models, to put skin in the game against their models, I'm going to get much better models than if they just throw them up against the wall. So I just think we're going to see a lot of innovation around staking, around governance.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “After the big idea. But this idea that you can, I mean, to me, it still blows my mind that you just look at any of these interesting solidity contracts. And it's code running on the internet. No one can, you know, once the developers have shipped it out and taken off all of the controlling kind of code, it is just literally a code that exists out. It's autonomous code. And it's got to sort of, it's its own little organization, right? And these things will get more and more sophisticated. And this is something that can never existed before, right? Like Numerai is one that you guys are involved in, for example.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, like Dow's is a good example. Like autonomous organizations, right? This concept, which is now, it kind of fell a little bit into disrepute because of this thing called the DAO, which was kind of mismanaged.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “That's why I don't love when entrepreneurs, founders come to us and they're like, we're going to take mortgage-backed securities and put them on the blockchain or we're going to take, a lot of people are interested in taking things that exist in the physical world or the existing financial world and putting them on a distributed ledger. And I mean, I think that that's some incremental value to doing that. But what I'm much more excited about is people creating brand new things de novo from scratch on these crypto networks that never existed off the crypto networks couldn't have existed off the crypto networks and always will live on the crypto networks. Like to me, that just seems like a 10x or 100x better idea.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's not to make, I don't think it's to make a limited edition piece of your art, like that there's going to be 10 of these. I think it's something that's more like the way Bitcoin has happened where it gets mined over time, released by something again.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The move That you have this thing. It's funny every form of media. You go back and you look at the early movies and they were plays, and they were trying to film the play. And then later on, they're like, oh, we can do a close-up. We can do an establishing shot. We can do this. We can do that. And they just develop a new grammar. And then there's sort of the movie native movies or something, right? I think it's a very common pattern.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I don't have a crystal ball view of how this is all going to go down, but I definitely think that the move is not one of the things I learned really like almost like painfully was that when we first started investing in the internet in 94, 95, 96, what we were doing was dumb. We were just basically investing in things that had existed in the offline world that were getting moved onto the internet. Like, okay, so let's invest in a online newspaper. Let's invest in an online store. Let's invest, you know, like, but that's actually not the move. The move is you got to find the native thing that needs to happen now that you have this thing.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “But the point I'm trying to make is I don't think necessarily for the artist the move is super tight scarcity. I think the move might be pretty loose scarcity, but still some scarcity. And the only thing that's cool that's happened with Bitcoin is the value has risen over time. And I know that's come down recently, but it's mostly risen over time as we've started to mine more and more of it, right? So we've never seen, well, you have seen.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, the cool thing is it doesn't have to be that there's only one of them. It could be there's a million of them, or in the case of Bitcoin, 21 million. We still haven't mined all the Bitcoin, and we're nine years into it now, right? So imagine if you made a song. I just came up with, I think, a pretty cool idea. Imagine if you made a song and there was 21 million listens to it and you had to mine the listens, right? But it was gonna take maybe five or ten years to mine all those listens. You know, actually, you get 21 million listens pretty quickly on the most popular songs. But imagine if there was some mechanism of releasing a piece of art or a piece of music that felt more like mining Bitcoin than it did.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “But I think the other thing with NFTs that excites me is I feel like this should be a wonderful time in history for creative people with four billion smartphones and the ability to just sit down and write something and create a piece of music. And from a business model perspective, it hasn't been. And to one of the things that's really exciting to me about NFTs is if you let's take music as an example, right? So mostly selling the song itself has become a not great business model. And so a lot of musicians have moved to, they go to where the scarcity is, right? And the scarcity is offline. And so it's shows and merchandising. And so one of the really exciting things to me about NFTs is the idea that you can reintroduce digital scarcity and have whatever exclusive album art, exclusive, whatever. Maybe this is, to me, it seems like a very promising new business model, not just for games, but for writers, for musicians, for”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Like imagine if you could take him out of the game and you could put them in your wallet or think about just like your bank account, right? And then another game comes along and you could literally take them to another game and this person who I was talking to who was a skeptic, like a fucking skeptic, like you wouldn't believe, he's like, holy shit, my 12-year-old would just be all over that. Like that's like, you have just given my 12-year-old his like nirvana. I said, but that's what we're doing here. Like, that is, that's where we're going.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Crypto goods. I think the innovation here is that these digital assets can be scarce, can be one of a kind. The reality is we've never had the ability to make a digital good non-replicable, right? And that's, I think, what has held back a lot of the business models around digital goods is just like if you had an MP3, you could give it to a million people. If you had an MPEG, you could give it to a million people. I was explaining this to somebody last week who's trying to like figure out crypto and I said you know think about all of the digital goods that you earn in a video game right and you spend you know you're obsessed about this video game for like six months and you collect all these incredible video but they're stuck in the game”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “A lot of times in the history of tech, like mobile 2011 or 12, it felt like mobile was definitely growing, but I don't think, at least for me until like maybe 2012, I didn't realize that it had actually replaced desktop. There was a moment at which it was sort of like, wait a second, this isn't just like a big thing. This is the thing. Right. You know what I mean? And you realize now in retrospect that we thought we were in kind of this growth period, but we were actually in this hockey stick. Right. Right. And I think that sort of, I believe, one of my theories is we're in this like, so take esports as an example. I think we're in this hockey stick right now with esports, like video games, it's just going to be obvious that it's going to seem, I mean, I think it's always great that people play physical sports on anti, but, you know, it'll be like horseback riding, vinyl records, like, you know, a whole bunch of other kind of...”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So I think though that we're in this transition period where we're still kind of like anchored on this sort of thing of like, well, it's not real. But it's going to be obvious 10 to 20 years from now, especially as the newer generation kind of grows up and just, of course, an emote is worth more than offline equivalent or whatever. And these words are going to, and the language is going to change with it and just the whole kind of way of thinking about it. And there's not going to be this weird thing like, oh, it's digital. It's not as right. You see what I'm saying, though? And I think esports is a great, like another thing I think about is a lot of like I remember”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And there were a lot of predecess I've never sold any of those either, by the way. I never sell a domain, you know? I feel like In a way, this is like religion, right? It's like, you know, I would never ever sell a domain. I might swap a domain. Like if you said, you know, hey, I've got ABCD and I said, well, I got, you know, we might swap one, but we never sell it for dollars.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “No, no. And there were a lot of predecessors. And whenever you have a modifier on the thing, you know that people think it's subordinate. But eventually it'll flip and it'll be like Amazon is commerce and Walmart is, oh yeah, it's like meat space or offline commerce or IRL commerce or whatever they're going to call it. So I think we're in this transition period. And it's funny too because Fortnite made $300 million last month on dance moves, right? Emotes, right? And so digital goods have become a massive industry, for example, in video games and as your digital resources, domain names. I've been a longtime collector of domain names. I'm like, look, it's a little piece of the internet. Like, of course it's going to be valuable. And I've always wanted them. And I hold on to them. And that's a multi-hundred. I've never sold any of those either, by the way. I never sell a domain. Why would you? I mean, it's the inter, you own a piece of the internet. It's like owning real estate around Central Park or something.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Right. I think that's very, by the way, I think that's a wonderful thing. I think that's very scary to a lot of the people whose jobs it is to regulate and protect the capital markets because they're looking at that and they're saying there's all these people who own a lot of this thing and they're out there promoting the shit out of it, right? The truth of the matter is though most of these people are not pumping and dumping. The truth of the matter is most of these people are true believers, right? who have held all the way through once my money gets into the crypto ecosystem it's going to stay in the crypto ecosystem it might you know move like i'm definitely going to be playing around in all of these networks and and you know using them and staking and doing all this incredibly cool shit that you can do but that wealth that i took out of fiat and put into crypto back in 11 12 13 14 is not going back that way”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, and the thing you'll have is instead of the fighting, right, you'll have this beautiful alignment between the core protocol, all of the third-party developers, all of the users. And by the way, the other thing you didn't mention when you mentioned the Bitcoin users, not only do those users own Bitcoin and participate in it, they also probably, by the way, disproportionately have Twitter followers, Reddit Karma, hacker news, cred, whatever that's called, Google Juice, right? And they're out there talking about it and marketing it. And so you have this army of users, miners, developers, core protocol developers, all fully aligned. And by the way, and control and probably very powerful relatively speaking on the most important marketing medium of the internet. And it's just a very powerful combination.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Had existed in 2005 instead of 2009, I think it's very possible that Twitter could have adopted a token-based business model, left the protocol open, Twitter could have been the protocol, and the third-party clients could have been the clients on top of the protocol, and it could have worked beautifully and Part of me just wishes that we could have done that. And then we could have seen how powerful this new business model is. We're going to see it. Eventually, we're going to see it. Someone's going to do it. And we're going to be like, holy fucking shit.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, look, I mean, you know, I did live through that period, and I was on the board of the company during that time. And I very much wanted to see an open platform. I mean, if you read the blog posts that I wrote when we invested in Twitter, it's still on usv.com. I wrote about the API and the open ecosystem and all the stuff that was getting built on top of Twitter. That's what I wanted Twitter to be. But we had an advertising attention-based business model. And the truth of the matter was there were other people who were out there running around buying up third-party Twitter clients. And inside Twitter, we saw that and we're like, we can't have that, right? Like we can't let somebody go get half of our user base by acquiring all these third-party clients and then taking them onto a new network. And then we've just lost half of our users, right? Particularly when we have a attention-based business model, right? If Bitcoin and token”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “They could have worked together in concert, and it could have been a much bigger and more impactful platform. But the logic of the business model, the ad-based business model, said we need to control the experience, we need to control where the ads appear, we need to et cetera, et cetera. Again, not placing blame on anybody. It's the logic of that model, right?”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And then what happens is these networks have these kind of internal battles, right? And those are the most vicious. Like that's the funny thing about tech. And I think that people outside of tech don't, so traditionally in economics, people think of substitutes as the competitors, right? So the hamburger and the hamburger and the hot dog are the competitors. Whereas in tech, actually, the hot dog and the hot dog bun are the ones that have the most vicious fights. Microsoft Netscape, you know, Facebook Zinga, like Twitter and the Twitter apps or whatever, right? Because with Twitter, it just feels kind of tragic to me that you had this giant developer ecosystem that was trying to make the protocol proliferate.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It forces them at that point when things start to slow. Like Google, like Google search. If you look at mobile, it's hard now. You get all sponsored links on mobile. They just keep adding more sponsored links. You have Yelp going up in front of Congress and doing, you know, like when it's the growth period, hey, great. We'll have one little ad at the top and like, you know,”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “The value. And beyond that, right? To me, one of the great tragedies in the history of the technology industry is that what happens, and there's this sort of life cycle of every network, right? And I use the network in a very broad sense. I think Windows is a network, right? So it's a network between developers and users, right? And there's a life cycle, right? And they start off, and at the beginning there's sort of this network. The platform wants to attract everybody, and they play very well. And so they provide tools for this third-party software developers. Facebook early on says, hey, media companies, come work with us. They're solicitous. And then over time, you hit the kind of growth peak and everyone into party and everyone's having a good time. And if you're growing 100% year over year, you don't worry too much about stuff. And then eventually the top of the S curve comes, right? And then it becomes, that's when things get ugly. And that's when, and it's not, and I don't blame any of the management of these companies or the boards. I think it's just the logic of the business model. The logic of the business model is sort of...”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And you don't have to be an investor to be a user. But if you want to be, you can be both. And it's just as easy to be, like, it's just as easy to be both, right? And that, I think, it's just not right, particularly for a lot of these businesses where the user is the product. Facebook users made Facebook. Twitter's users made Twitter. YouTube users made YouTube, right? It's just not right that the people who make the product have no participation in the value creation.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yeah, taking money, right? And like the money people are like Bitcoin maximalists and they're really focused on hard money and the tech people are Ethereum maximalists and they're focused on DApp platforms and smart contracts and all that. I don't buy that at all. That to me is not I'm not arguing that that's what the world is today. I think that as Eric Thornberger wrote it and I thought it was very insightful about where we are in crypto right now. But I reject that idea and I think what's powerful about crypto is that they're the same thing. That using and investing are the same thing and you don't have to be a user to be an investor”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Very strange and wrong. The other thing is, you know, if you were an early user of Facebook, you might have said to yourself, oh my God, this thing's going to be huge, right? It was so let's say that was 2003 or 2004, 2005, whenever that was, when did Facebook go public 11, 12? So it was like seven years before you could eventually become a shareholder on Facebook. But if you're an early user of Bitcoin, you had Bitcoin day one, right? So what's great about crypto is that I think it allows the early adopters to not only be users, but also participate financially if they want to, if they want to hold on to their Bitcoin and go along for the ride, they can do that. And that's why I think this token business model is so exciting is that in a way, it kind of takes the world of investing and the world of”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I don't, I mean, and I am pretty sure that almost all the people that participate in those things were technical people that were into crypto. I mean, the vast majority were. And those are people like, and I just said anecdotally around Silicon Valley, these were like programmers who were very sophisticated who understood exactly what the technology was, who were not maybe not accredited investors, and who felt like now they finally found a market where they understood the product, right? I mean, they were customers of the product. They were literally protocols built for developers, and they would use it. And they could participate in this. And the idea that non-technical wealthy person is able to invest in that, but this programmer who really deeply understands the protocol is not just seems strange, right? Very.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I mean, the fact that today you have to be literally a millionaire to invest in startups, right, to be an accreditor, if you actually participate in an ICO, it's very complex, right? You need to download a wallet. You have to put in a long hexadecimal address”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “That making it possible for everybody to invest in these high growth opportunities is good. And I think it's good for founders that the capital markets for what they're doing are going to continue to grow.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Certainly in 2017 and even now there's a lot of that money sloshing around. But I think what we're really seeing, and I'm an optimist here and I'm hopeful about this, is that we're seeing a new capital market being built. We're seeing a new way of raising capital that's global from the ground up, that's not subject to these, I think, antiquated laws around who can invest in startups and who can't invest in startups. And just unleashing the startup capital markets to be global and anyone can play is great. It's a huge innovation, right? And I understand there's people out there saying there's going to be scams and people are going to invest and lose all their money. And I get all that. And I realize that that's not all good. But in general, I think...”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “The traditional angel seed early stage VC, then growth VC market, I think the explosion of capital is probably more in the later stage with the soft banks and Sequoia going out and raising however many billions they raised and so on and so forth. And I think that, if anything, there may have been a slight contraction in seed and angel and early stage money in the past few years. But I think that what's interesting about crypto, so first of all, there's a lot of people who went and used tokens or just a crypto business plan or a business model to go tap into like a lot of new money that was showing up in the world of crypto. And I think that that may”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “The first thing I would say is what you said there's more capital available for founders today than there's ever been. And I think that's a good thing. A lot of people in the venture business or the people who give us the money think there's too much money and Maybe yes, but the reality is what's good for founders is good for the venture business. I just kind of believe that is like a fundamental truth. So there's a lot of money out there.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “But they're also not winner-take-all markets, right? So it's probably still a power law distribution in the outcomes, but maybe it's not as severe. Maybe the winner is not 10 times bigger than number two, who's then 10 times bigger than number three, which you can see in consumer, but maybe an enterprise, it's the winners three times bigger than the next biggest one who's then three times bigger than the next biggest one. And if it's a business that can support, you know, Billions of dollars of market value that could be two or three companies that could be pretty big winners. For the founders and for the VCs who back them.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Yeah, I mean, the great thing about SAS, right, is the business, once you have those customers and they like your software, they stick with you. So it's like an annuity, right? It's a very high margin annuity. It's a challenge to get those customers and you have to get, there's a lot of detailed kind of sales and marketing execution to go reach efficiently. I mean, that's kind of the trick in a lot of those companies. How do you efficiently reach the massage parlor, the whatever, the small business payroll person whose payroll.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “You're talking about right now, I think, is where a lot of the action is in startups and venture capital right now. If I look at where a lot of the dollars are being invested, where a lot of the value creation is happening, where a lot of the bigger companies are getting built, it is sort of in that enterprise SaaS area. I think consumer has gotten harder because of some of the things we've been talking about before, but I don't think that enterprise SaaS has gotten harder. And so in a way, I think we've thought for the past four or five years, it's more of a grinded out execution operational, not super sexy style of startup and style of investing that has been winning the day. And the things that were kind of happening in the latter part of the last decade where you had like a Facebook come out of nowhere or a Twitter come out of nowhere, YouTube come out of nowhere where VCs were making 100 times their money.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Just, you know, whatever your new payroll system, your new payroll SaaS app, just suddenly you don't need as many people in your payroll department, right? And it's a much subtler thing. And it's not a one-to-one transition and it's not a literal thing of like kind of like Elon Musk AI comes in and replaces your payroll department. It's just like more and more just kind of incremental software comes in and just makes everyone more efficient, which takes jobs. I think also will create many jobs. There'll just be, it's just always harder to envision the jobs that are created than it is to envision the jobs that are destroyed.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “World where we think everything is SaaS delivered. And so you see these really interesting things happening where like vertical SaaS is an interesting trend where you see this whatever massage parlors need their own billing and reservation system or something. And it turns out that's a big market and those people previously wouldn't really have software. I kind of think of it almost like. People have this view that AI is going to come take the jobs, but they have this kind of anthropomorphic idea that it's going to”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I think also on the app side, I mean, SaaS app, I mean, I think we live in this world where we think everything is SaaS-based. And the data I see, and something, it's like sub 10% of corporate applications today are still unbelievably low, right? I mean, it's still people are still using, you know, I don't know, you go to the whatever, you go to the United desk and they've got like a DOS interface, you go here and they've got Windows. the government hack was like COBOL you know like and so and a lot of it's more modern but it's still like it's Windows it's whatever it's not so you know we live in this kind of”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “That's a story, by the way. That's a story that's been playing out for a better part of 10 years. What I'm saying is I think there's still some legs to that. Like you were saying, what are the big drivers? It's AI, it's AR and VR, it's crypto. And then we were talking about a few other things that I think are still playing out. And one of the things that's still playing out is cloud. I think there's still some legs there.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “So you're building on top, and that's you're able to take what was CapEx and move it to OpEx and focus on what you want to focus on. Focus on music playing. That's a story, by the way. That's a story that's been...”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source