YouSaid · the spoken record

Guy Willette

lines on the record: 16
first: 2025-12-26
most recent: 2025-12-26
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

“My name is James Taco. I'm a partner on the Apps Investing team. My big idea for 2026 is the Greenfield strategy. We're going to see AI native startups selling to other AI native startups reach scale. One of the biggest issues for startups is”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The life sciences and pharma market, there's companies like Chemify and Yonita Labs that are focused on the chemistry industry. And then zooming out a bit, there's collaborations between government and industry that are really focused on this intersection of AI and science. There is the Genesis mission led by the Department of Energy that brings together academia, government, and the national labs as well as leading AI companies to pursue AI-driven science. I think just today, DeepMind announced a partnership with the UK government to collaborate on areas of scientific discovery. So I think, you know, there's startups that are working on lab automation. There's startups that are working on building an AI scientist. And that work is happening against the backdrop of a broader collaboration between both the public sector and the private sector in academia to realize.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buyer for a lot of the outputs of this research. And the increase in speed and capability, as well as any cost advantage that might accrue, all of these things are going to matter more for markets where there is a well-established buyer of research output. And so I think where you see autonomous labs and autonomous science being adopted first is probably more of a function of the market that it's operating in. I think Periodic Labs is a great example of a team taking a swing at autonomous science. I think when you look at the early stage startup landscape, there's companies like Medra that are focused on”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Loop, but progress across all these fields is, of course, uneven, and you kind of have to wait for the capabilities to get to the point where they're ready to be applied to this closed loop. And I think that's the destination. And in the near term, incrementally we'll make progress on lab automation, on the reasoning pieces of this, but ultimately the final destination, I think, would be around this idea of a self-driving lab or of autonomous science. Part of this is going to be driven by the market dynamic in which the research is conducted. So I think there are certain categories of science where there is just a much more mature demand side market for the outputs of research. And examples include, of course, life sciences and pharma, the chemicals industry, facets of the material science industry. I think these are areas where there is a ready and willing”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self driving science, right? Like a closed loop where you have AI that iterates on itself and then carries out an experiment and continues to iterate without human intervention. I think this is further out. This is what I would consider the destination for this idea of autonomous science. I think where we are right now is that there's a lot of work being done to form the foundations of autonomous science. And if you consider science as, broadly speaking, some combination of theory, of computation, and of experimentation, there's work being done in the AI ecosystem across areas like mathematical reasoning, physical reasoning, simulation and world models, and robot learning, and all of these things eventually as these capabilities improve can be applied to closing the”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many different kinds of labs and many different kinds of scientific processes, whether that's in the life sciences, in the chemicals industry, in the material science research sphere, and so on and so forth. One of the things that I think is important in the near term, though, is around interpretability. So if you think about AI systems as non-deterministic computers, one of the things that really matters for research is you want to really understand why the system is doing what it's doing, why it's planning on iterating on an experiment in a given way, why it's planning on doing this particular thing. And I think systems that are purpose-built for scientific research are probably going to focus a lot on that, on the interpretability, on recording what exactly is happening throughout each step of the process as it collaborates with a human scientist. I think this concept of fully”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My name is Oliver Shu. I'm a partner on the American Dynamism Team here at A16Z. And my big idea is that advances in AI reasoning capabilities and in robot learning will help accelerate scientific progress by moving us closer towards autonomous labs. Laboratory automation is something that's existed for a long time. Like that is not new. This idea of having robots that you can pre-program to assist in some of the motions involved in a lab. What is new and what is emerging right now is the combination of reasoning capabilities and experiment planning and the physical element of lab automation. So what that might look like in the near term is collaboration between a scientist and a system that involves both an AI application and a robot and having that be a much more collaborative process in the near term.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Native audience, or to a more traditional audience because you're going to have much greater back office efficiency in many cases. And a lot of these details are still being figured out, but I think there is great potential there. When we talk about synthetic dollars on chain, meaning a token, And really, this looks very similar in a crypto native sense to how traditional trading strategies have been turned into ETFs in existing markets, providing greater access and legibility to users. I think that will happen much more on chain. I think there's a real opportunity for builders to create, let's call it, a synthetic dollar factory to take these existing, these interesting trades or investing products and peg them to a dollar, offer them to existing investors and help collateralize stablecoins with those synthetic dollars.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a wide swath of traditional assets because it's much easier to create a synthetic representation on chain that can scale to very high notional volume than trying to tokenize existing assets, basically copying them on chain. And so to say it in briefer terms, I think the idea of creating synthetic representations of traditional assets on chain is more easily scalable than creating literal copies of those assets on chain today. So specifically when we think about the credit markets, lots of people are interested in tokenization today, but I don't know the tokenization brings as many benefits for credit assets as people would imagine. I'm much more interested in native on-chain loan origination because I think it can significantly reduce the back office costs that are traditionally associated with creating basically asset-backed securities or other forms of credit assets. I think taking a more crypto native approach is actually better regardless of whether you want to offer the product to a crypto native native native native native”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial services and assets, but when we think about an example like the Indian equities and derivatives market, in many cases, zero-day options trade higher notional volume than the underlying spot assets do. And so I think there are many places where users and retail investors are actually more interested in trading derivatives. And those derivatives could be made much more efficient and given much greater access by moving on chain. So I think the idea of purification is very interesting. And just to say what that means very literally, that means to make a perp or a perpetual future out of what is today an existing spot asset. So a perpetual future is a derivative that allows an end user, an investor to tune their leverage limits in a very intuitive and simple way. And there is a perp price that trades against a mark price. And when the two prices diverge, there are fees or a funding rate that are charged to the holder of the asset. And I think prolification is interesting.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, but that means a dollar representation backed by off chain traditional assets where the normal token itself is fully collateralized by Diat Dollars off-chain, but the staked representation of it then would be collateralized by higher risk and higher yield credit assets. And Athena popularized this idea initially a synthetic dollar that is backed by a cash and carry trade, a basis trade for perpetual futures, but we're starting to see this proliferate into other asset classes and into other structures, things like currency, cash and carry trades, synthetic dollars that are backed by physical infrastructure akin to solar panels or batteries or GPUs. I think emerging market equity is perhaps a more interesting asset to bring on chain than let's say US equities because they have a fundamental product value proposition as opposed to simply access. The thing that most excites me about putting U.S. equities on chain is allowing global access to traditional American”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More notional volume than the underlying spot. So I think there's already pretty good product market fit for derivatives on these underlying assets. We could see a lot of those moving on chain in the coming years. Stablecoins have gone mainstream today, but I would argue we need more than simple tokenization of fiat dollars or fiat currencies. And I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first would be I think we need a better way to facilitate credit on chain than minting stablecoins and then using those stablecoins for loans. I think in many cases stablecoins look like narrow banks and we need some way to do credit on chain. And so I think there's an interesting opportunity for curators that today operate on something like Morpho or private credit funds, someone like Apollo that has put Acred on chain, take more of an active role in helping to manage existing stablecoin collateral. An interesting form of this is there are lots of, call them synthetic dollars because they're not strictly speaking stablecoins.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Costs like loan servicing, which in many cases can take one to three percent of the outstanding credit facility itself every year. So it's incredibly expensive. But I also think doing on-chain origination will allow for much more composability between different DeFi projects. A very similar vein when we think about how to move traditional assets on chain, lots of people focus on tokenizing those assets, meaning creating an on-chain record or copy of the existing asset that exists off-chain. We've seen many more perpetual futures projects purpify or create a perp related to an off-chain price feed or an off-chain asset. So instead of tokenizing something like an equity and putting it on-chain, you could create a perpetual future for that equity. This, I think, is interesting in the US and in Europe and in robust capital markets, but I think it's particularly interesting for emerging market equities, things like the Indian equities market, for example, where existing derivatives like zero day options often trade.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maturing on chain for crypto, you see, I think, a very similar market structure to what's happening in the traditional financial world after the great financial crisis, in part because of Basel III. There's a lot more non-bank lending from entities like large private credit funds that have significant equity capital. So banks are doing much more lending to credit funds for making loans and depositors. This is very similar today in crypto to how I think stablecoins will effectively end up lending to curators or to asset managers who will end up making loans to end users. And one of the things I've spending a lot of time considering is how we move credit origination on-chain. So instead of originating a series of loans off chain, a credit card receivable, for example, then tokenizing that, potentially securitizing it, and moving that on-chain as a copy of an off-chain asset, how we originate credit natively on chain. And I think this is important specifically because it can drastically reduce back office.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My name is Guy Willette, and I'm a general partner on the crypto team here at A16C. This year, my big ideas are origination and purpose. In 2025, we've seen stablecoins go mainstream with increasing outstanding issuance and payment volume. And one of the things I've been thinking about is what the most important second order effects of outstanding stablecoin issuance will be. I think a lot of the existing stablecoins look effectively like narrow banks today, where they hold user deposits in fiat or perhaps in treasury bills. I think it's very unlikely in the long term that we scale on-chain finance exclusively through neuro banks. And so I've been thinking much more about how we can facilitate credit and capital formation on chain. There will be a sort of new role or entity that's very important, which is something akin to a private credit fund helping to facilitate loans on chain. If you look at the way things are”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start with the rail that's already visible, stablecoins going mainstream. Guy Willet argues that stablecoins are only the beginning. The next phase is on-chain credit origination and new synthetic products that are easier to scale than simply copying traditional assets onto a blockchain. Here's Guy.”
2025-12-26 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: New Infrastructure Primitives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source