Chris Dixon

Martin Casado names four mindsets people bring to venture and private-market tech investing: a traditional finance mindset, productive investors, frontier investing, and speculative investors. A decade and hundreds of deals showed that investors in the same discussion were not communicating well.

The traditional finance mindset treats the market a business is entering, and its finances, as the correct proxy for the health of the whole company. Software-as-a-service metrics and the size of the market stand in for the business. Growth investors use it, and more early-stage Series A investors do too, which is a little discordant so early. Productive investors believe they are buying a producti

Chris Dixon says the internet is headed for a world in which the most numerous participants are agents, not people. The shift is still early, and he calls it somewhat inevitable. Muse and Instinct are utility proxy agents that act for people. Further categories of agents come next, and those agents become the main participants on the internet.

Agents will need their own ways to communicate, transact, and share knowledge, so a run of new products has to be built for them. They have already built their own version of a public forum inside a Hugging Face app. The agent ecology online is going to be spectacular, and people will plug into it in all kinds of ways.

Chris Dixon says founders should ask whether an idea is ambitious enough, not whether it is too ambitious. What is possible is spectacular, and a moderate idea probably will not be differentiated enough to matter.

Some incumbents, including technology companies in Silicon Valley, will be able to adapt, and Andreessen Horowitz wants to arm them with the new tools. He would tell any of them listening that the clock is ticking. He is full-time on the work and describes himself as drowning in how fast development is moving. A super-empowered 24-year-old with AI, in his view, will achieve amazing things in the next decade.

Marc Andreessen says AI-native startups already see what they can do with AI differently from a typical incumbent in almost any industry, and he calls the gap as wide as any he has seen in his career. The gap is still opening, because the capability races ahead week by week. Those founders will not stay inside one category. They will not think of themselves as only a software company, only a hardware company, or only an AI company. He already sees them choosing how many areas to touch and how to combine those areas.

He sets the change against Netscape in 1994. If he and Ben Horowitz had today's tools then, he says they would have built the whole internet, gotten crypto done then, had stream

Chris Dixon says a16z Frontier chooses to be too early because every good idea the firm has seen that involved technology has eventually worked, or he believes it will work if it has not worked yet. The qualifier is a good idea. Bad ideas exist. Almost everything that worked had a precursor that failed and was maybe 10 years too early. Timing is the hardest thing to predict, because the technology, the culture, the business environment, and the political environment all have to line up.

The fund accepts category risk. Some categories may not work. Oculus was bought, and 13 years later he still believes strongly in virtual reality, but it is not as mainstream as he wanted, because more hard

Chris Dixon says Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, described how people receive any new technology in three different ways, split by age.

Below 15, the technology is just how the world works. He tells of introducing his own child, at seven, to a computer that answers questions. The child treated it as obvious: what good is a computer that does not answer questions? From 15 to 35, the technology is new, exciting, and a place to build a career, so people want to learn it. Above 35, it looks unholy and evil, sure to overturn existing structures and destroy society. Refusing to answer the telephone fits that pattern, and an old man yelling at a cloud keeps showing u

Chris Dixon says humans just figured out how to turn sand into intelligence, a framing he credits to Marc Andreessen. The way to learn it is math and computer science, and maybe economics, though he is not sure economics belongs on the list.

He feels fortunate that a lot of his career, with Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, happened during the growth of the internet, something bequeathed by people before him. The AI work now is going to be the dominant narrative of the next 20, 30 years. Being in the mix, at the cutting edge, and using the tools is the obvious thing to do, and the work does not have to be solely technical.

A lot of other fields are going to be revolutionized. Classics is b

Chris Dixon says the internet business model is breaking, and he puts the start of the break maybe in the last decade while calling the break especially sharp now. He names the old arrangement the internet's covenant, a deal between the distribution side, Google and Facebook, and the content side, news sites, travel sites, and other publishers. A site would give Google a snippet, let Google index the page, and Google would send clicks back. A Google search now returns an answer, and social networks try to keep people on the platform instead of linking out.

Websites that make money on ads and conversions can no longer do that. Stack Overflow and some other websites saw traffic drop precipito

Marc Andreessen says open models are lapping closed models by six months to 12 months, depending on how you count, and open source is racing ahead.

The U.S. and China, the two great tech superpowers, both have active open source worlds alongside companies building proprietary systems. For the last three or four years, governments have threatened draconian regulation or a ban on open source. The EU still aspires to do it and does not quite have the leverage to threaten fines until the work stops. The current U.S. administration is 100% pro-open source and 100% wants American open source to happen and to win AI globally. The Chinese Communist Party is, at the moment, enthusiastic about open s

Marc Andreessen calls the pattern product manager brain: product managers design products for product managers. People build products for themselves, and product managers still tell a story about building for other people. The use cases stay in the same circle, such as booking a restaurant in San Francisco for dinner with friends who are also product managers, or booking a flight to a product management conference to spend time with more product manager friends.

The same narrowness shows up in an assistant pitched as happy, harmless, and honest, which becomes the most boring possible product and refuses a question it is not allowed to answer. Early companies held a blinkered view of human a

Chris Dixon says Andreessen Horowitz is expanding the crypto fund to Andreessen Horowitz Frontier for two reasons, and he leaves the second one uncertain: there was maybe a gap in coverage of stranger ideas. Crypto has worked really well in some areas, so it now sits inside the broader technology landscape. Other groups at the firm have so many interesting opportunities in core areas, and are doing an amazing job with them.

Stablecoins have become a normal part of the technology landscape. Companies like Stripe use them, almost every fintech company treats them as part of the toolbox, and Wall Street firms are moving heavily into crypto, including tokenized stocks and other assets. The cate

Garry Tan points founders to Chris Dixon's essay on the idea maze. Dixon was an angel investor in Tan's 2008 startup. Tan describes the maze as a tournament. A lot of people enter, often trying similar problems, and then they disperse. Some hit a wall and the company dies. Some get closer to the center. He calls that picture a true north for how he chooses which founders to back. The morning of this conversation he had also posted a video on why now and why you. He treats those two questions as part of the same map, not as a separate pep talk.