Chris Dixon - Entrepreneur, Investor, Cryptocurrency and Web3 Evangelist | Read Write Own

In 1990s, when you send an email, there's no kind of email company in the middle. There's no worldwide web company. It's very different than today where you have, you know, you send a Facebook message and there's Mark Zuckerberg in the middle and they can do all sorts of things. You have to go through these gatekeepers and these gatekeepers have immense power. That power shows up in a number of ways that I mentioned, sort of, it's a control of what information is shown to their algorithms. Another very stark thing is what is the economics of these networks. All of the money is kind of getting sucked into these five companies. Instead of going to the people who I think deserve the money. Even for the people who are actually creating the content, creating the products. When these big companies control their internet services, is that over time they just kind of extract more and more money out of the service or to build value should get that value. And in the 90s web, they would get that value. If you build a website and you, you know, going back to the Uber example, if somebody paid you $100, you've got $100. There's no one taking money in the middle. There's always been two ways to build everything. There's a company-owned way and a community-owned way. And we've seen that in software, with the case of Linux versus Windows. We've seen that with internet services like the web versus Twitter. I think that we can see it again. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot does a ton for entrepreneurs and business owners. That is why I'm so proud to partner with them for over three years now. If you need anything to build your business, help desk software, payment software, email marketing tools, CMS and blogging tools, SEO tools, deal management tracking, pipeline tracking, you don't need more tools to get more out of your business. You just need HubSpot. Their all-in-one customer platform is a dream come true for every member of your team. With best-in-class campaigns and workflows to generate more leads from marketing, category leading pipeline management to help with sales, help them close more deals, powerful AI chatbots, and a knowledge base to help your service team scale. And it is built to deliver results to drive revenue faster and to help you grow your business. So dump the disconnected tools and the chaos that comes with them. Discover what HubSpots all in one platform can do to streamline your business. Visit HubSpot.com to grow better today. Chris, thank you for coming on. I have your new book here and we're going to talk about it. We're going to go into it. So read right on. I thought to kick this off, it'd be interesting. I always like, I don't always go into titles, but this title is a little bit interesting because it's read right on, but then it's building the next era of the internet. So please explain what the first era of the internet was. Sure. So in the little bit of context, I've spent 20 years now working on the internet as a entrepreneur and then investor. So it's been sort of deeply involved and seeing it evolve. The internet officially began as a government project in 1969, but really the modern internet began in the 1990s. And I sort of the read right on, refers to how I've used sort of the three years of the modern internet. And so the read right, read in the right, by the way, are common terms people use for those first two. So this is not my idea, but the own, is sort of my addition to it. So the read era was sort of roughly 1990 to 2005. And that was an era that was marked by a few things. One was the dominant systems that we use to interact with the internet were what are known as open protocols. So there's the World Wide Web and email or sort of the dominant thing that you would do in the 1990s. You go to a website, you send an email. And those open protocols had this very interesting characteristic, which they're not owned by anybody. They're community owned standards. There's no, when you send an email, there's no kind of email company in the middle. There's no World Wide Web company. There's, you know, it's very different than today, where you have, you know, you send a Facebook message and there's Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook company in the middle and they can do all sorts of things. So the 90s, the first kind of key thing was that sort of the dominant systems that people used were community-owned open systems, which had all sorts of implications I talk about in the book. The second thing about the 90s was that the interact, the internet was mostly kind of a one-way medium in that people, you would go to websites and consume information. And there wasn't this sort of interactivity and sort of the democratic, you know, publishing, social media that we have today. So I describe it as the 90s internet democratized the consumption of information as opposed to the publishing information. So that, you know, for those who are around, you had the internet bubble. You had companies like Google and Amazon started and you had a crash in the 2000s. And in that, out of that crash, a new kind of movement developed. I was part of this. I was an entrepreneur at that movement. People called it Web 2. People also called it the Read Write Movement. And they called it Read Write because the idea was, instead of just reading kind of consuming information, you could also now publish. Anyone could publish information. And so the idea was to democratize publishing. And this began as blogging and kind of these, you know, more technical kind of nerdy behaviors, but then went mainstream with things like Twitter and Facebook, right? Which we, of course, all know and are very familiar with social media today. But at the time, that was sort of a new idea, which is let's make the internet sort of truly interactive. And now anyone can not only consume information, but also publish information. And that was, I think, generally a good thing. You know, we now have five billion people that have internet access. It's generally very inexpensive to access the internet. You can get a $10 Android phone. And you can often get free internet service around the world. More people have internet access than running water. I mean, this is just, you know, there was a lot of successful things that happened. As a result of that, I think one of the, the, in my mind, one of the very negative things was that instead of the systems that we ended up using that became dominant, instead of being these open systems that were open owned by communities, like the World Wide Web and email, they were proprietary systems owned by companies, so Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google, and so forth. And this, you know, I think for some period of time, maybe the late 2000s, early 2010s, this seemed okay. I think that has now led to a number of significant issues. So the internet has become extremely consolidated. But there are about five companies that control 95% of the money and the traffic on the internet. People, you know, these companies have full control of their algorithms of who has access to their networks, sort of de-platforming, things like this. But I think more important and more subtle is just they control through their algorithms, you know, the popularity of different people. And this can be everything from political actors to really my focus is more on the business side and the startup side. And so we've seen this have a serious, so I think negative effect on startup activity, where, you know, a startup will build an audience on a social. You have to kind of go through these networks now, Google, Facebook, etc. to build a non-heater or a startup, they're gatekeepers. And you have to go through these gatekeepers and these gatekeepers have immense power. That power shows up in a number of ways that I mentioned, sort of it's the control of what information is shown to their algorithms. Another very stark thing is what are the economics of these networks? And so there's something called a take rate in on the internet business, which a take rate is the percentage of money flowing through a system that the network operator takes. So a friend of mine was recently taking an Uber and the Uber cost, the driver asked him how much he paid. And he said something, it was like $75 or something. And then my friend asked the driver how much he got and it was like $18, right? So what was the, you know, what goes, where does the rest of the money go? Some of its taxes and things. But the bulk of it goes to the intermediary, to the gatekeeper, the tollkeeper. And this is true, like, look, Uber's actually, I think Uber has a 40% take rate or something like that. They think it's gone up over time, but some of the social networks like Facebook is 100%. Twitter's 100%, meaning they make, you know, Facebook will make 100 billion plus in revenue this year, off of the work done by users, right? You don't go to Facebook to see Facebook's content. You go to see the user content, yet they make that money and they keep them. And that's true of TikTok, Twitter, you know, Apple takes 30%, so if you create a game or some kind of app with the App Store, just for simply the right to exist in the App Store, you pay 30% of your revenue, same with Android. And so, you know, generally, like, you know, and this is led to, so one is this is just all of the money is kind of getting sucked into these five companies. Instead of going to the people who I think deserve the money, including the people who are actually creating the content, creating the products, you know, look, I'm in the startup business. I was an entrepreneur now, I invest in startups. This, you know, I think that the startups who build value should get that value. And in the 90s web, they would get that value. If you build a website and you, you know, going back to the Uber example, if somebody paid you $100, you got $100. There was no one taking money in the middle. That's how the 90s internet work. That's how the first year of the internet worked. Today, it's very, very different. They have, you know, Apple can kick you off the app store. You know, the game maker Fortnite is in a big high profile lawsuit with Apple over this. Yeah. There's a number of Spotify's, you know, very upset about it. There's a whole series of kind of lawsuits and other complaints about the behavior of these big incumbents. I think from a user experience point of view, it's been very negative. So if you just, you know, if you do Google search now, you'll see more and more of the page taken over by sponsored links, by Google properties. This is a, this is, I have a whole chapter on the book on this. But what happens with these, with these, when these big companies control these internet services, is that over time, they just kind of extract more and more money out of the service. And that's what you're saying there. You're going to, you're sort of seeing a steady takeover of all these services with more and more kind of ways for them to make money and extract. And then Apple instead of the booth over time. And so I think it's heard the quality of the internet, yeah, the startups, the users, etc. Sorry, we're using them. No, no, no, I was just going to say there's different, there's different people trying to solve this problem. So I know Frank McCourt Jr. is, I had him on the, on the show. And he's trying to fix it from the perspective. He put like 500 million dollars into something called project liberty, which is really transferring the ownership of data that Facebook now controls and all these other companies control back to the user. So there's that perspective. There's also the perspective like I love that you mentioned. It's almost like a 30% tax to even build a business or an app that will, it's literally a 30%. It's like, it's like that like without even building a business, now you have a 30% cost of goods that you have to deal with, which is ridiculous. It's very difficult. But in your, in your perfect future of the internet, and well, I just want to have like a sort of like a synopsis or a very high level thesis to start, someone will say, well, yeah, you have to pay 30%. But how also are you going to market your app or how else are you going to find a user base of millions or tens of millions of hundreds and millions of people? Or well, I like the experience on Facebook. I feel like it's not hurting me that much, even though if you go down the rabbit hole with Cambridge Analytica, and I believe that people understood what data was being harvested from them, they would also push back a little bit more. So I think there's a lot of education that probably has to coexist with a better future internet as well, which is really why you're writing this book. But in your perfect world, what would the next era, the best possible next era of the internet be? What does it look like? Yeah, and so to your question, I think there's broadly two ways to kind of reign in incumbents. There's regulation and there's competition. And I think there's potentially a role for both. I'm more focused on competition, on creating new services that can replace these services. I think that it's a, I think that the kind of the thing you're imagining where people say, well, I like these services, I think the mistake there is that they think that the only way you can have great internet services is if a company controls it. And we have lots of evidence over the last 30 years. The World Wide Web is a great example. You go to a website, you know, like there've been literally tens of millions of businesses built on the World Wide Web. I mean, people think of the World Wide Web as the internet. It's a service that runs on top that's community-owned. And it's been wildly successful. And it had the great user experiences. The, you know, and there's no, there's no company behind that. There's no, you know, email is the same way. There's no company behind. There's no one can decide those rules that can take the money. And so like, look, I would like in it to like the 90s, so for those who are old enough to remember in the 90s, Microsoft was seen as, you know, we had dissimilar debates about Windows and Microsoft. People were like, well, I like having an operating system that works. And I like, you know, isn't that the only way you can do it? It turns out that now today fast forward, 99% of the operating systems that run in the world are not Windows. Their Linux, Android is Linux. So you think you're using Android. You're really using something called Linux. Apple's iOS is a lot of open-source, but all of the backend servers in the world that your phones connect to are open-source Linux. Linux is, I don't know, the exact stats, but it's definitely over 95% probably close to 99% of operating systems in the world. And that's a operating system that nobody owns. It's a community-created operating system. And that's how we broke the stranglehold of Windows. So I would just say there's a long history in the 80 years of computing of sort of two ways. There's always been two ways to build everything. There's a company-owned way and a community-owned way. And we've seen that in software, with the case of Linux versus Windows, we've seen that with internet services, like the web versus Twitter. And I think that we can see it again. And so there doesn't need to be the trade-off. You can have great user experiences. You can have modern internet services. And you can do all these, you know, the addictive behaviors. If you like those, you can have those. Like it's not a trade-off. There is no reason. It's sort of a, it's just because of the way that things develop, these companies happen to control it, but it doesn't have to be that way. And I think, like, I think one approach is to say that it's over and the internet's consolidated, and that's it. And another approach is to say, it's the only way that my random end is regulation. And then the approach I take is that I think that the internet's still young. It's, you know, 30 years into a technology that I think, you know, it's not hyperbolic to say. It's as important as something like the printing press. And, you know, or any other kind of massive technology. And if you look back at history, none of those 30 years in had a kind of a originally locked-in structure. There's still plenty of time to rethink it and reinvent it. And so, so that's what my book's about. That's what I work on, which is using building a new wave of internet services. They're, you know, built-on blockchains that I argue in my book can kind of combine the best of both worlds. The open access and low-take rates of early internet services with the advanced functionality and user experience that we have come to love with modern internet services services. I love it. I want to understand. We'll go more into sort of like your playbook for revolutionizing and building that next version of the internet. And maybe some lessons learned from what you've done in blockchain. And also some of the investments that you've deployed capital into and lessons learned from successes and failures. But I want to understand the sort of your path a little bit more because your path is very emblematic of the path that somebody should have actually taken to learning more about not just Web 1 or the original Web, I guess Web 2 and then eventually Web 3. So I want to understand where you came from, how you got involved, because you were an entrepreneur. You turned to a capital allocator, but then obviously you niched down into Web 3, into Web 3 crypto blockchain. So maybe just walk through your evolution. And I also learned that you majored in philosophy if I'm not mistaken, which is I want to understand how that plays into all of this as well, because that's not the normal liberal arts underground grad that would put you where you are right now. Yeah, so I mean just briefly in my background, I, you know, my family, my parents' English professors, I grew up in a small town in Ohio. And when I went to college, I, you know, I just sort of had grown up in an academic family and I, I had been interested in computers, like programming computers, but then got kind of got interested in kind of the intersection of computers and philosophy, which is sort of like artificial intelligence and things like this, philosophy of language, philosophy, like logic. And so I was doing that. And yeah, I was actually in a PhD program at one point. I would say partly, I just liked it, but also I didn't have a career plan, I would say. And then I, you know, for me, it was a real epiphany to discover the world of startups. So this was like around the year 2000 or so. And this was, you know, the internet kind of boom was happening and I was in New York City and I had friends who were doing internet startups. And for me, it was a real eye-opening revelation to realize, and this is kind of more obvious today, but at the time it was like a little less obvious, I guess, which was that you could have a career, you know, as an entrepreneur or an internet entrepreneur. And do what I thought was cool stuff, like build products, you know, strategy, hiring, products, you know, marketing, fundraising, I don't know, just seemed exciting. And, you know, you could build stuff and kind of take risks and be out there and ideally have build products that are used by millions and maybe even hundreds and millions of people, right? That just having that impact seemed exciting to me. So I started a security company in 2004, which was, this is, I don't know, it's just kind of ancient history now, but it was when fishing and spyware were kind of at a peak and it was an anti-spyware fishing product. We were acquired by McAfee, the large security company in 2006. And then I started another company that was kind of an early AI artificial intelligence company called Hunch, which fast-forward in 2011 was acquired by eBay. We powered a lot of the, or kind of recommendations of you go to eBay and you're looking at a product that it says you might like these other products. This was, this was our technology. And then along the way, you know, it's in my business there's kind of two roles. There's sort of player coach. You're either an entrepreneur or you're an investor. And there's, at some point, you know, I'd done two, I'd started two companies and that's a very intense experience and didn't, didn't think I could do that again. And so I transitioned to the coach role. I had done some, since I'd sold my first company in 2006, I'd started Angel investing. So that's, you know, personally investing and startup to internet startups. And then in 2013, joined Entries and Horowitz, which is a, you know, the time was a startup relatively new venture firm to look in Valley. You know, now much more established. And so, I'm joined them. And, you know, I really wanted to sort of be on the frontier of computing. And my broad view, if you kind of go back and look, you know, the history of computing. So the first computers were built around World War II. And then every 10 to 15 years, you had a major computing cycle. So you had mainframe computers and many computers and PCs and internet and mobile phones. And so, you know, I started doing venture capital 2013. So that was, you know, the iPhone 2007, we've seen this explosion of mobile stuff that happened. Also cloud computing, social networking, like there'd been all this interesting stuff. I wanted to kind of explore what would be next. And so I did a bunch of, I had sort of three areas. And I've been writing about this and talking about this for years. ARVR, like kind of new devices, experiences, virtuality. AI did a bunch of AI investing and then blockchain crypto. So I, so I let our investment in Oculus, for example. And VR, which was acquired by Facebook. And I led our investment in Coinbase, which I was on the board of for a long time. That was back in 2013. I did a bunch of other like a AI power drone startup and a bunch of other kind of things. They were all kind of at the front, too. Sort of, the idea was we hadn't quite hit the next wave yet. But I wanted to be kind of at the edge of it. And then about five years ago, decided that the blockchain stuff was really what was exciting to me. And so about about, yeah, about five years ago, went full-time into that. And so I now lead our crypto fund, the blockchain fund. I'm curious when you're looking at, when you're looking at investing in crypto blockchain, what are the similarities, what are the differences between traditional angel investing into any other category, pick a category that's maybe, maybe not as like bleeding edge. I mean, ARVR is probably, there's a lot, there's a lot of bleeding edge tech and there's probably a lot of uncertainty as well. But yeah, speak to that. I'm curious because I don't know, I know a lot of investors. I don't know a lot of investors that are just so niche down and hyperfocus on blockchain and crypto. So there has to be some differences in similarities. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think you hit on one thing, which is when you're doing things kind of at the, the quote frontier, you will call soon as called Frontier Tech, there's a different approach generally because you're doing something that hasn't, you know, that hasn't, that isn't as predictable. So just generally when I do any of these kind of cutting edge sort of Frontier, like when I did VR stuff or blockchain stuff or AI before, you know, back before chat GPT, you would have these, you're sort of dependent on these external factors, like when will the technology, so generally these technologies kind of go through two phases. They have kind of an incubation phase where you have lots of early adopters. In like the case of blockchain, they're probably like 30 million kind of hardcore users right now, which is, sounds like maybe a lot, but it's actually tiny on the scale, the internet. And then you have a moment where kind of like chat GPT or the iPhone, where you have sort of a breakout product, and suddenly the space transitions from, from kind of this, you know, early adopter phase to going more mainstream. And so when you're in that early adopter stage, you just have to sort of behave differently. And so for example, you have to, you know, when you, if you're building a typical like accounting SaaS company, you might raise venture capital and land for like a two-year kind of budget, and assume that if you hit certain metrics, you can raise more money. It's a very predictable financing market. If you do certain things, you can raise more money, and it's much more established kind of what the metrics need to be and the patterns. When you're in these emerging areas, it's, you know, you'll have these massive waves of like excitement and then kind of bull and bear markets. And if you hit a bear market and you don't have the cash, you know, you won't make it, right? And so you just have to like operate, so like Coinbase, for example, they would be, they were very good at about this. They would just raise a lot of money and save it, and then kind of endure through like tough times. You have to have a thicker skin, and you have to be willing to kind of power through. I've seen just so many cases in my career in technology, where, you know, people that stuck with something ended up doing very well. Like so many of the entrepreneurs that you see today that are successful, you know, like sort of the outside view is like, there's some kind of overnight success. When in fact, they were just trudging through many different ups and downs. And so you just, so the entrepreneur needs to be ready for that. The investor needs to be ready for that. The, you know, the company needs to be structured. You know, you end up in capital for that. You need to have the team for that. So it's just a different way of thinking about the world. They're sort of free kind of, you know, pre growth, you know, kind of incubation phase and then mainstream breakout phase. I mean, that's the hard part. The good news, that's the bad news. The good news is when you do that and you're willing to do that, you tend to be one of the very few who are willing to do that. And that's how, you know, that's how you have outsized outcomes, right? That's how you have as an investor, outsized outcomes, that's how an entrepreneur you do. If you just kind of follow the consensus, you know, if you're the, you know, if you're the 10,000th company building a wrapper on chat GPT, like, I don't know if that's, you know, going to be like, that's just the consensus strategy, right? And so, you got to be right. You can't just be non-consensus and, you know, contrarian and wrong, but, but, you know, so, but that's to me the interesting part of technology. That's where I've always gravitated towards is kind of like, that's why I want to be at the frontier in doing that stuff. I assume that once this kind of like block chains go mainstream, I'll probably move on to something else. And so, you know, there's just different, it's a different approach. There's a lot of value in doing the other thing too. I mean, we need people to kind of do, you know, do kind of later stage technology as well. And I think they're, they all have values. I'm not making a value judgment. I'm just sort of saying that this is where I'd like to operate. Hey, yeah, this is just a very different way of operating. And it's a skill I've developed and, and, well, you don't know well. You've done, you've had massive success. I'm also just curious. I mean, you've worked with like Marc Andreessen Ben Horowitz, which, I mean, you're a legendary investor. They're legendary investors. I can ask you the lessons that you've learned. But I want to ask you the lessons that you've learned from them as well. Yeah, I've learned a lot from them. So the first, you know, five years I was at the firm, we would just do it was like very, it was a much smaller word out of the firm as much bigger now. It's like 500 people back then. It was pretty small and there were, I don't know, a seven of five or seven of us that would just sit around a table, like something entrepreneur would come in and then they would, you know, describe their business and then we'd sort of sit around a table and discuss it and make investments. And so it's hard to summarize all the very, I mean, I learned so much about just from them and just from entrepreneurs, all the different aspects of building a business. So like, for example, I'm not an enterprise software person, but I've sat in, I don't know, hundreds of enterprise, they have not thousands of enterprise software discussions and just learning all the details of organization building and sales development, just all the things you do there. Yeah, I think we have a lot of kind of broad investment, kind of lessons, I guess, on one of Mark and Ben's favorite phrases is invest in strengths, but not like weaknesses. And so what does that mean? It means almost every interesting startup will have issues, you know, when you're investing, you know, when you're doing what we do, which is investing in early stage, obviously once you're in video or something, maybe all your issues are done, but then you're worth two trillion dollars. But when you're doing kind of early stage investing, almost by definition, you're going to have things that are messed up. And if you look for the biggest danger you can make in venture capital is looking for some startup that's sort of good on all metrics. What you really want is a startup that's great in a few things and probably really messed up in a bunch of other areas. And specifically, you know, what do you grade at? Like, well, we really buy as heavily towards, and this is another kind of Mark and Ben thing, but is technical product focused entrepreneurs. So what we look for are people that have a deep insight. We like to say an earned secret. I think that's originally a Peter Tiel phrase. The idea is that kind of most, you know, almost by definition, a startup is a contrary idea, right? Because if you had an idea that was like, I want to build, you know, an iPhone with a longer battery life, right? That's a good idea. But Apple knows that's a good idea, and they probably have a thousand people working, right? So almost by definition, in a way, a startup is a good idea that appears to be a bad idea, because it appeared to be a good idea. All of these incredibly wealthy companies would be investing, right? So you have some kind of contrary in insight. And that's usually, that's what Peter Tiel calls a secret. But it's also an earned secret, because you don't just come to these things, like walking down the street, right? You often come to them through, you know, years of, of I've been working in the apparel industry, and I, you know, there's this thing I've discovered that's this crazy thing that needs to be fixed. And I have a way to fix, right? Or I was in a PhD program, and I developed a breakthrough way to do large language models. And now I'm going to go do that, you know? So it could be a technical secret. It can be a business secret. And so you want it. So when you, I think when you do venture investing, you want people that have those earned secrets. Now those people that have those earned secrets, they're often, they're not often people that know how to at first run a company, right? And they may have hired badly. They may have made some bad decisions. They may have bad press. They may have, you know, I don't know, financial issues, like, right? And so if you kind of look at the mistake you can make as a venture investor is going and saying, like, I want somebody who's got all buttoned up and everything's working fine. What you really want is someone who's got this sort of deep secret who's obsessed with a problem who has deep knowledge of the domain. And very likely the rest of it is sort of a fixer upper, right? And so that as a result, we structured the firm. This was a, this was kind of a novel thing. And really is kind of still somewhat novel in the venture industry, which is, we'll find those great entrepreneurs. And then we'll layer in services that help them fix those other issues, right? So as an example, it's very unlikely that you're sort of like a brilliant inventor and also spend all your time out of conferences, meeting and connecting with 4500 leaders. So we have a group of, you know, dozens of people whose job it is to connect you with people of Fortune 500 companies because we sort of assume that these technologists, founders that we invested in won't already have that network. So we try to supplement their network. And so we just do a, you know, we help them with legal and policy. We help them with recruiting. We help them with comms. We help them with financial stuff. And so, so that's kind of the core thing now. Now, when I described this very general, there's a lot of details. And this is, I think, adventure as like in some ways is like people talk about a fox and a hedgehog, you know, the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many things. I think of the venture capital and startups as a fox thing. There's like a million little things to know. And it's very hard to summarize all of it. And so, and each domain will be different, you know, blockchain is different than consumer internet is different than enterprise software is different than Vintech. And each one has patterns and people and lessons. But that sort of broad framework, I would say, is something that, you know, I learned over the last 10 years and much of that from Ben and Mark and other folks I worked with. Success story is part of the HubSpot podcast network. In the network, there are other incredible podcasts like the Offs Authority hosted by Natalie Gingrich. Every week on the Offs Authority, Natalie discovers actionable strategies to move your business forward and transformational stories of powerhouse business owners who value operations. You can't ignore backend pieces that have to work together and flow smoothly in order to build a brand, grow a movement, or disrupt an industry. If the operation side of your business is a mess, putting out fires will always take priority, leaving no room for creative innovation, visibility, or networking with powerhouse peers or even wannabe powerhouse peers. You've got to get your house in order. And to do that, you have to listen to the Offs Authority wherever you get your podcast. I love it. And it's just a good sort of primers to how you think and operate at the level that you're playing at. One last question, just about investing, then we're going to go back to Web3 Crypto Blockchain. You've had a lot of wins, but maybe walk me through one of your biggest failures and what was learned from that from an investing perspective. Yeah, I mean, so I've had many investments that have not worked out. And generally in our business, if you do early stage, at least TAF will probably not work out. It depends how you define it. Sometimes you recover some money or something with an acquisition, but generally we're in the kind of they call it kind of the Babers Effect in venture capital, which is like you, you know, everything is driven by a few grand slams and, you know, and then often the people that have the most grand slams also have the most strikeouts. And so I've had many things that have not worked out. And it's sort of, you know, it's the famous Tolstoy quote, all happy families of the same, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Like success, there's sort of successes. Like you have customers that love you and pay you money and all these other things. Failure can be, I mean, look, it's often people related. I would say most of the time it's, you know, a founding team breaks up. They don't, you know, they don't have the ability to build the product. Look, I think that the kind of basic assumption you should use in any creative project, but particularly startups, is that there will be this kind of trough of despair if you're familiar with like the Gardener hype cycle. Like you have sort of the period where you're having beers with your buddy and everything's exciting. And then you're like, oh, oh shit, I mean, you're into it. And like it's a lot harder than I thought. Like it happens almost all the time. And then like the question is, how do you get out of that? And sometimes people just can't get out of it. They can't come up with the right product or they give up emotionally or, you know, they, and so so often that's where you die when you do, you know, early stage companies is just in that. You just don't either, it's either an intellectual issue sort of a, that you just can't come up with the right product that the market wants. Maybe your hypothesis was wrong in the first place. Maybe the market just doesn't want this product. Maybe you can't figure out the right configuration of the product. Or maybe, and this is at least half the time probably, there's just some kind of emotional thing. Like the founders just can't take it or, you know, or, yeah, and keep the team together. Or so. And so that's generally, you know, again, I do early stage mostly. I mean, later stage was all sorts of other, you know, sort of each stage is sort of a set of failure modes. But, but that's sort of the main thing is just like, but yeah, it always has like a different kind of way of unraveling. This is very hard to do. It's a very, you know, and look, I did on the other side of it. As, you know, very sympathetic to it. It's a very, you know, you, you, you, you bet your whole career, often these people are, you know, have other options and have decided to bet their whole career on something. You have the biggest, most stressful thing for me was having employees, you know, that depend on me, having investors that depend on you. Investors a little less worried because like that's our business and we have a portfolio. But, you know, like with VCs, but with employees, obviously that's their, their career. And, you know, and then you're sort of under this pressure to, to, you know, to do something is very hard to do, which is just, you know, among the thousands of tech startups to break out and, and build something special to people's laws. So, yeah, so I've had a whole bunch and it's a, it's a, it's never easy. No, I, so I appreciate it. Um, and, you know, this is, this is useful information people that are raising money. I mean, the, the listeners, the people that are listening to this, they're a mixture of people that, um, are people that are starting their first business, their earlier stage entrepreneurs. Some of them are building in crypto, some of them are not. So I always like, you know, just getting a little bit of perspective as to the reality of entrepreneurship because whether or not you're building in crypto, we've three blockchain or, or any other category, everything you just mentioned is so hyper relevant. Um, and I think that said people up there. If I could add one thing, it's like, you know, the, the, the type of capital that we are, or the venture capital is only applicable to certain subs, very small subset of startups. Yeah. Why? So I know you're listener, bass is broader. And I, by the way, I don't recommend venture capital for a lot of things. Um, you know, our, like I mentioned, it's a grand slam business. Um, and, and so you need to, the entrepreneur needs to sign up for that as well, right? But like, you, you're getting on a certain treadmill, a certain path. Um, and that, that's what this capital is designed for. There's lots of other kinds of capital in the world that are designed for different types of businesses. So if you want to build like a, you know, a company that maybe is a smaller business, but with higher margins and more profitability, you know, there's debt. There's, there's angel, the sort of non-tech regular angel investors. And, um, you know, there's, uh, many others bootstrapping. There's many other sources of capital. Um, and, and I think that is important because it really changes the kind of the pressure that you'll feel both on your, by yourself and from others and the expectations around you. Um, so I'm describing, you know, I think our business gets a lot of attention and like, when we're successful, we build big companies and that's probably why we get attention, but it's a, but it's, but it's a, you know, it's, we actually look at the numbers. Like venture capital is like, uh, it's sub one percent of, if not far less than that, I think it's like, we know one percent of capital fundraising in the, in the country. I didn't realize it was so small to tiny. It's a tiny asset class compared to dead and other things. Um, so, and, and it's really first specific purpose. Um, let's talk about, let's talk about why you wrote this book because you've been in the space for a while now. You've worked with some of the biggest, uh, companies in the space. You've seen positives, negatives, success stories, you've seen fraud, criminal activity, you've seen all of it. Um, so what is this book hoping to accomplish? Because I feel like the layman coming in, I'm still not super layman. I'm technical enough to be dangerous, but not, not as technical as you or people that you work with, obviously. Um, so I feel like this industry is not new. crypto blockchain, web three is not new. And I feel like there's been multiple stabs at trying to help people wrap their head around it and understand it. What are we not getting right that you're trying to solve for with read right on? Yeah. I, I, so a couple things I'd say, one, yes, it's been around for 15 years. If you count sort of the, you know, beginnings of Bitcoin, although I would argue that, you know, it was a pretty different industry at that point and up until recently. Um, and really look, it, it, but blockchains are a technology and there's many different kind of movements around it. So there's the Bitcoin people who are kind of, you know, sort of libertarians who want to create an alternative form of money. Um, and that has been around for 15 years. The art of the movement I'm part of has been around for maybe six or seven years, um, which is sort of this tech movement I would describe it as, um, and I felt that, and it's a different movement and, um, and a newer movement. And I felt that that movement had not been properly explained to the world. And that's why I wrote the book. And so the book is meant for a general, I understand the difference. Yeah. And the movement's either. So yeah. So I know it's very simply like the, the, the Bitcoin movement is concerned with big government inflation. They want to create sort of digital gold, right? And that was a lot of the, and that's how a lot of people think of kind of crypto. I am much more concerned with the consolidation of the internet and creating new services that fight that. So sort of think of it as like we, you know, the tech movement is trying, trying to counter big tech, the political kind of Bitcoin movement is trying to counter, I don't know, big government, right? That's, yeah. And they're like, like anything kind of technology that's all sorts of sub movements and other things. But I, I felt this sort of this side of it that I'm part of had not been properly explained. And look at, and I had after things like FTX and all of these scams and scandals, it, you know, I had spent time trying to explain this and I felt like was making some progress. And then all that stuff happened. And it really sellied the, you know, the image of the space. I, you know, I go to talk to people a lot, you know, folks like you, but then I go to like DC and other places and talk to policymakers. And generally I hear over and over like what one is the people say, what book should I read? They said that to me for like a number of years and I didn't have a great answer. And two, they would say, hey, I've never heard this view of it. I've always heard like this sort of anti-government view of blockchain. I've never heard this, this kind of tech angle. I hear that a lot. And so I felt that no one had really kind of fully, you know, made that case in a way that, you know, was accessible. So I tried very hard in this book. I did many, hopefully this came through, but I did many rewrites to, you know, to not use jargon to explain things with examples to make it success. I mean, like it's, it's, it's not, you know, it's not for everybody, but I think that there are lots of people who are not tech people. I hope they can read it and understand it. And I tried very hard to make it that way. Well, I think because like, I now I understand, now I understand the difference in between what the existing sort of story was with crypto blockchain and how you're tackling and solving, you said a few times, you're not looking to tackle and solve it from a regulatory perspective. That's difficult and it's slow and it's a drawn out process. So you're looking to tackle it from a, we want to create innovation. We want to create better options, right? So when you think about the opportunity in creating innovation, obviously you work for venture capital firm, you can, you can invest in companies, you can help them grow. How do you, how do you, what's the best way to put this? How do you give companies or alternative options the best chance of succeeding as an investor compared to sort of the incumbents in the market? Actually, if you don't mind, I feel like I've been a little bit abstract. Can I give you one example of a hundred percent? So your audience knows that I'm not just being abstract. So just to put a fine point on it, like we're investors in a project called Farcaster. And Farcaster is a, this is a real product that exists. You can download, you know, you can go download it. And it's a open protocol, sort of like the worldwide web and email or social networking. And it's got hundreds of thousands of users. You can, the way it works is like email, there's like like the web, you don't download the web, you download a browser to the web like Chrome or Safari. And so if you want to try this, you download Workcast as an example. It's one of the browsers kind of for this network. And to use it, it'll, it'll feel like Twitter or some other kind of social network. The big difference is there's no gatekeeper. And so there's nobody that, that kind of runs this network. It's just owned by the community. And so anyone can add a new, can build a new client software to it. People can add, there's a whole series of developers adding applications on top. They don't pay 30%. They don't pay anything because there's nobody to pay because it's just a community on protocol. And so the economics are dramatically better for the users. Developers can openly build on top. People already, like we have all these startups pitching us who are building Farcaster apps on top of it. And so it's sort of developing in this kind of community way. So just just one example. These are real products. And to your question about, you know, the space has been around for a while. Like none of these products existed until last couple of years. And this had to do with a whole bunch of performance issues with blockchains and just the technology developing. But only in the last two years could you build like mainstream consumer products built on blockchains. So we have games, social networks, marketplaces, like out of anything that you can imagine that you use today on the internet, you can now build a blockchain-based version that removes the toll keepers, improves the economics for the users, removes the gate keepers, you don't have a CEO in charge, the communities in charge. So just to be clear, like these are real products that exist. And I wanted to, you know, kind of provide the intellectual foundation for them and explain it to the world. And that's why I wrote the book. And I expect that if we're successful, these products will become more and more common and people will use them right now. They're still relatively small user bases. I was just going to say the financial incentives for people to move onto these platforms. I can assume because they're open-source, like you can now, and the community, I guess, decides how it wants this particular product to evolve and grow. But if you don't have centralized CEO, you know, company running this, then creators, for example, that really drive adoption of a certain platform, like a social platform, right? They would now be getting paid out to some degree. Like I think there's like, so there's different ways, I mean, so, already. That's why, like, why do creators move to, like, why do so many journalists try to move the sub-stack, right? Because sub-stack is built on email. And email is an open protocol. And therefore, the take rate is like, sub-stack has a fee, but it's a very, it's like a 10% fee, and they have that, and the reason it's slow is not because they are nicer, it's because it's built on an email, and therefore you can switch. The same with Forecaster. If the client, if the software provider tried to charge your money, you could just switch to a different browser, and so to speak, because you control your name in a way that you don't, like, you have full control of your name and your followers, the same way you do with email, and unlike Twitter, and Facebook. I can't leave Twitter. I built an audience there. If I don't like something that that the owner does, I can't leave, right? Without losing my audience. With email and the web, you can leave. With blockchain-based systems, you can leave, and that changes the power dynamic. So yeah, so to your point, the social networks last year, the top five social networks generate 150 billion with a B in revenue, you can sort of think, I think if it is sort of money flowing through the network, like, think of it as like a traffic grid, and there's this toll keeper in the middle that took the $150 billion. If you didn't have that toll keeper, I think it's very reasonable to think the bulk of that would flow to the outside of the network to creators. So I think there's an extremely compelling economic proposal, which is, by the way, one of the reasons I think this movement is inevitable because I don't think that they're going to be able to hold on to that 150 billion forever when people realize that there's alternatives that are just as good and that have dramatically better economics. I think the dam will break. I quite sure of it. It's just a matter of time. And also, you think about, like, who's paying the $150 billion? It's advertisers and advertisers will just go wherever the audience is. They don't have they'll go where creators are. The creators have the real power and the creators are getting screwed right now. Yeah. What is what is composability at the content you speak about? What does that mean? So that's that's a so you can kind of look at this. We just talked about creators and how they're kind of getting the the short end of the stick here. The other the set of folks who are getting who are losing out on this current system are startups and software developers. And this is, you know, maybe less relatable to your audience, but is the world I inhabit? And specifically with software developers, a very, very powerful force. And I mentioned Linux earlier. And one of the reasons that open source software has been successful is a feature of software called composability, which is if you go to get GitHub is a, this is the most popular website for using open source software. The reason that open source is successful is it is people kind of treat software open source makes software like Lego bricks. In the sense of some one person can build like a AI library or graphics library or some other thing. And then once one person builds that, someone else can come along and take that Lego brick and reuse it and build something else. And so you can think of the open source software world as this huge collection of Lego bricks that people are constantly building new bricks and adding onto it. And that process had it turns out over the last 20 years that process of sort of the whole world collectively building Lego bricks of software has been a vastly more successful process than you know, having a company internally try to try to compete with that. And so one of the things with blockchains, as I mentioned before, the forecaster, the social network is you have the same effect going on now, but with social networks. So like, I was recently at a conference on my book tour and I was signing books and I always asked people when I'm signing books, what they do. And more and more, I meet these like the other day, I met a kid, he's a college student. And I said, what are you, you know, what are you working on? He's like, I'm building features for forecaster for the network. And I was like, so why are you doing that? He's like, well, I always wanted to build a social network. But until blockchains, I had to go build the whole social network. Right. I had to go and like build a TikTok competitor and market it and get millions of users. And so that just seemed impossible. But now I can just build a piece of a social network. Right. And that was very exciting. And we're seeing more and more of that. Right. And so you're going to see this thing where like kind of this, this army of kind of ants ends up, you know, kind of coming together and building this, this big thing and competes with these, you know, these big companies like Facebook. And that, that, that, that's composability, sort of the software is Lego bricks. And that has been a very, very powerful force in the last 20 to 30 years with, with software. And I believe we can bring that same force to internet services. So this is, so maybe just help explain and, and, and help people understand who are listening to this, who again are like adjacent to the industry and they've seen people build projects. And then they've seen, for example, like, very scammy fundraising and ICOs and all the negativity that comes with the industry that I think everything kind of gets like bulked together and grouped together if you don't understand, right. You get ICOs and NFTs and Bitcoin and blockchain and crypto. And it's very confused. So when you talk about building apps, obviously it's massively different than what was happening. And I don't know what five years ago, or, or whatever that time frame was. So maybe like walk me through the evolution and just paint the, the, the, the picture like the back then what was happening versus what is actually happening right now. So people understand there's a, like a massive difference in who's actually building the value that people are actually creating. Yeah. And the, in the book I talk about what I, the distinction between two communities, I call them the computer and the casino. And so the idea is that there's really kind of two cultures attracted to blockchains. And there's casino is people that are interested in speculation and gambling and scams. And then there's the people like me and, and, you know, who want to build a new wave of internet services. And there are, you know, I would say certainly tens of thousands in my side of the camp. And then there's, you know, at least that many, maybe more on the other side. And it's your point. Unfortunately, if you're not in, in the industry, it all looks kind of grouped together. But I think of it as very much two distinct movements. I believe that that the role of smart regulation would be to tamp down a lot of the speculative behavior. Certainly the scams. I, you know, I'd, I've been frustrated with that. I don't think that's happened. And we've been calling for that for a long time, long before FTX and everything else. And we're one of the only these seasons looking at value that we're not interested in FTX or any of these scams. So we, you know, like I think this is, to me, this is a role of referees of policy makers of regulation is to, you need to put guardrails around these things and, and, you know, and, and have protections. And I don't think that that's been done yet in a, in a, in a smart way. So that's a big reason that we go to D.C. and kind of implication policy is to try to do that. And I think, and, and a lot of, like, so for example, one of the things we're big proponents of is lockups. So lockups, and you create a token, the investors like us, and the founders are cannot sell those tokens for a number of years. I think an ideal, you know, length would be like four years, which is kind of what you see in a lot of the, you know, the non blockchain industry. And that forces people to be long-term. And it, and that, that alone would remove a whole lot of issues, I believe, a lot of this sort of get rich quick stuff. And that's only one of many things that, you know, disclosures or a bunch of other kinds of things that, that should be there. So, so that's part of it. I think, um, yeah, and, and, like, I think it's, um, um, yeah, and unfortunately these, you know, I think part of it too is like people on my side, it's just having gone out and kind of made the case. This is why I wrote my book. This is why I'm, yeah, I'm going to focus on podcast. Um, you know, people had heard a lot from, from some of the bad actors. It's, it's a juicier news story. They talk about, you know, price is going up and down and people making fortunes and losing fortunes. It's less interesting to talk about kind of the stuff, you know, some of the stuff I'm talking about is longer term, it's slower moving. It's true. It's creating true value. It's creating true, true innovation and value and disruption as opposed to as a, as opposed to speculation. And I'm, I'm actually curious if you think speculation plays that not scam. Remove, remove scam and remove fraudulent actors. And that's, that has no place in any industry. But is there, is there some benefit to speculation? Or is that entirely toxic? I, like, I think I would take the view that I think we've generally taken in the US, which is speculation has a role. So like, for example, the stock market, the housing market, right, it has a role, but it needs to be coupled with real utility. So to give you an example, like, why, why do we decide to value home ownership? We value it because primarily because it's one can, you know, buy home, there's an emotional attachment, you can raise a family, it aligns your incentive, you have an incentive to improve, there's a lot of evidence, people that own homes, you know, contribute more to their home, to improving their home and also their community, right, to home ownership. I think we think it's a good side of value. And then we allow for speculation, right? People lip homes, people speculate. But it's, but it's not the main focus. Like the main focus is home, like the reason we have, you know, the main focus of housing policy of our social values is home ownership as a, as a, as a good for citizens, right? Not the, but the financial, the speculation part does play a role. I mean, the reason you can get a price on Zillow so easily, right, is there's very liquid markets. And same with stock markets, right? Like the hedge funds and all these kinds of things are legal and people speculate. But the primary purpose of the stock market is not speculation. It's to provide capital to, you know, to companies that are building products, right? And then the speculation just provides liquidity and price discovery and things like that. So I think that's how it, things should evolve in a healthy market. Is it like fundamentally, this is about building new internet services? And yes, there are, there, you know, tokens are important because they're the mechanism by which you enable community ownership. You can allow people to, you know, have, by owning a token in this new network, you can, you as a user can get paid, for example, for your contributions to the network through tokens. And that's valuable. And that person might now to then at some point sell those tokens and they need a market for that. And there's a role for, you know, markets and that. It's just, it's, it's, to me, it's a question of, of focus and priorities. There's been all, all of the focus and priorities have been on the speculative side and far too little on the utilities. The utility needs to come first. It needs to be the priority. And, and then to some extent, you'll have these financial markets, but they'll, they'll have guardrails around them and they'll be secondary, not primary. Well, I was going to say, I think that the, the speculative market grew so much quicker than the utility market or the, the casinos versus the computers or the builders or whatever you said. Because I love that, I love that analogy because it's so true. But it's because utility for the, for the layman for the average person was difficult. It didn't, it didn't seem like me using a decentralized app or an app that runs on blockchain was that much better than me just using something that was run and built by a company. But what you're investing in and what you're creating and what, and Dries and Horowitz is creating and what your portfolio companies are creating are companies that again, to your point, the, you, it does, the user experience is, is all that matters. The user experience is on par or better than what is already in the market. And I think that's when you have more adoption of utility. And there's, it's been hurting. It's been hurting for years. And I think that hopefully we're at the point where we're there. I would also say, you know, there's, I think there's a little bit of revisionism happening in other areas of tech. So for example, you know, AI, the first neural network paper was 1943. If you go look on, if you go look it up, there was literally an AI financial stock market bubble in the 1980s around these things called expert systems. You know, I look, I started an AI company in 2008 and I thought that was the right time I was saying first to really sift, you know, which is a mistake. But the, but it's been around a very, very long time to the point where even when I was doing my company, you didn't say the word AI because it was kind of a bad word because you know, you'd say machine learning or something because AI had been so overhyped. Smartphones, you know, there was a, there's a good documentary on iTunes about general magic. It was a company trying to build an iPhone and something like an iPhone in 1994 or something. And there were attempts in the 80s. You know, the internet had a 20 year period before the browser. And so I would also say like now people pay attention more to tech. And so it's been the spotlight more. But my experience is just as how these things, I mean, like everything's different and history doesn't repeat Iran's. But also like just new, you know, trying to build a set of internet services to replace the tech incumbents. Like it doesn't happen overnight. Like this takes time. And, you know, and you got to kind of dive into the details to my opinion to understand, you know, what's going right and what's going wrong. And anyways, that's what I'm trying to kind of explain and share with people. When you, and then just one more thought on like the underlying technology. So there's so many different protocols and so many and they're really just operating systems that you can build on. What is evolved to the point where now we can scale something so that it can accommodate millions of people. I don't want it. I don't want you to say like this is a protocol that is killing it right now. But I would just want commentary on why we couldn't do this 10 years ago. Why we can do this now. There's transaction costs involved. There's some friction that used to be there not so much anymore. Just speak to that for somebody who is like a little bit more involved in this industry. Well, the mode like so that yeah, so just very high level, you know, there was Bitcoin. And then in 2015, there was Ethereum, which is a program of blockchain, which means you can write software for it and build applications for it, which was sort of the beginning of the modern era. And but the big problem with Ethereum was that it would it would cost like a dollar like to do a transaction. Like think about a social network. You click a button and it costs a dollar. Like no one's going to use that. Today, and this is only as of honestly like two months ago, some upgrades to the system. It's finally extremely inexpensive. And so for example, Coinbase is on a good job. They're building they have a they have a blockchain called base. You can download the Coinbase wallet and and use it. You know, it's it's easy to use. And that's that's a kind of thing built on Ethereum as an example. And so that that I'd say that ecosystem has finally gotten to the point of sort of, you know, you can really build. Because there's interesting competitors. People who probably heard of Solana, that's a that's, you know, I think incredible. Alternative, the few others. And like any kind of computing market, I expect you'll see multiple, you know, you have Android and iPhone, you're such a sort of one thing. So there's sort of, you know, there's multiple things like that. But I think it's for the first time really in the last few months. I would say you can you finally have these these things at a point where the the infrastructure is not the gaining factor. Yeah. I mean, you look at when you look at, you know, you speak to people that are asking you like, what book should I read? You know, how do I go on this rabbit hole? You have your book. But I'm also curious about some of the major misconceptions that you still see about crypto like while you're on the podcast, maybe quash some things that you hear repeatedly that are just massively incorrect that are still commonly held beliefs. Yeah, I think the energy you used to think. I mean, that so that's, you know, people say it waste times of energy. That's specific to a certain type type method of what's, you know, certain types of blockchains, literally proof of work blockchains. You know, Bitcoin is a proof of work blockchain. It's true of Bitcoin. You can argue that the Bitcoiners would argue that they there's, you know, a lot of clean tech and other things used. But, but that system, you know, does consume a lot of energy. The Ethereum and all that have blockchains that were involved and all the services I'm discussing don't they use what's called proof of stake, which is has energy consumption that's comparable to, you know, when to kind of data centers like traditional software. I have a chart in my book kind of going through that. So that is simply not the energy usage is simply not a valid criticism of Ethereum, Solana, and all the kind of services I'm talking about anymore. That that it used to be Ethereum switched over about two years ago. So I think that's that's a giant misconception. I think the, you know, the, just the general conception that I discussed before of sort of thinking it's all about kind of gambling and and speculation. I think that does exist for sure. And, but, but there's just other side to it. So I think that's sort of probably the other big thing. I think another, well, another big one is that it's that blockchains are good for illicit finance and hiding things. It's quite the opposite, which is it's actually pretty much an unsolved problem in blockchains as to how to in a in a scalable way create privacy. Because by default, all blockchains, everything is public. And so and 99% of the usage today, if not higher, is, you know, is done in that way is public. So if you do something out of Ethereum, you can just go see everything somebody else has done. And so it's actually a really bad way to do to do legal finance. And all this data, you know, chain analysis of firm that's sort of law enforcement. And they say that I think it's sub 0.2% of blockchain transactions are illicit. And that's actually less than is, is, you know, a percentage lower percentage than in the non crypto world. So that's another common misconception. So I would say those three like energy use elicit finance. And then the third is just sort of, you know, that there's it's all about speculation. And if you're going to pinpoint one particular challenge that you're still working on to to basically this has to be addressed for widespread web 3 adoption, what would that challenge be that's still sort of inhibiting where you want this to go? I think it's I think at this point, it's mostly regulatory policy. I think it's having clear what we need our guard rails to eliminate the bad actors. But then having clear path for good entrepreneurs. And specifically, here's what I see in my daily life, which is, you know, you're not you're a technologist who's got a, you know, a brilliant technologist who can do many different things in their life, including starting an AI company or joining Google or whatever it might be. Are you going to join an industry where there's some uncertainty about the legal status? And there's some chance that you'll get sued by some regulatory agency. The answer's no, like it's it deters good actors. Uncertainly deters good actors. On the flip side, if you're a scammer hacker and you, you know, your other choices in life stealing credit cards, you may say, hey, I'll take that rails, right? And so what we've, this is the biggest issue with the policy side. And I see this on daily basis is that we've created an incentive system that attracts bad actors to blockchains and and deters good actors. Now this is not like I said, there's still tens of thousands of good actors kind of working on these areas, but but it's it's a big issue. And it's created this kind of negative cycle where you have the bad policy leads to bad sort of attracting the wrong people, which then creates bad behavior, which I think is a statement more. And then I'll see. And so I think we're in that kind of cycle. And that's what we need to break. And that's what I, you know, think about and work on a lot. And I think we're making progress. You know, there's a there's a, I think there's, you know, the kind of growing awareness that on the policy maker side that something needs to be done. There's also it's like right now. And if you follow it, there's this thing of like, there's a thing called meme coins, which are this kind of like doge coin that are more and more popular. Why are they more popular? Because they're they're they're one of the few areas and blockchains that's that we have regulatory clarity. They're fully legal. It's fully legal for you to create a coin that is, you know, absolutely silly and like, you know, has has no value at all, but it's super speculative, but it's legal. But that's legal. And actually you get into legal gray areas when you start adding utility. That's like, which is like, that's as backwards. Yeah. So exactly. So we've created this incentive system for people to create more and more silly stuff. And and if you create utility is when you get into gray area. And so that has been, and again, I'm not, I'm not anti speculation or anti like a, like a people sports gambling of legal slot machines or legal, a lot of those illegal. I'm not here to moralize. I'm just saying that you create the incentives for this and you create, you make utility, you know, gray area and you make gambling legally clear. And what do you, you know, what do you expect? What do you expect? What do you expect? What do you expect is going to happen? Yeah. Yeah. Um, this book is very new. I think it's it, when is this coming out? Or is it already out? We can try to keep this podcast evergreen. What's the date when it actually came out? Uh, it was January 30th. January 30th. Okay. Oh, so it's it's out now. Okay. Perfect. Um, candidly, we, we, we're going to break the fourth while we push this podcast back to your times. I appreciate you. And I'm glad we finally got it done. No, I'm very, very glad we finally got it done. So you can get this book. Um, wherever you get books, obviously now whenever this drops, it'll drop very, very soon, uh, Amazon or wherever, um, or you get your books. If you were going to, so the reason why I asked is because it's been a couple months since this book came out, is there anything that's come into your life recently that you wish you could have included in this book when you were writing it, but you didn't have a chance to. That's a good question. I tried. I, I, I, I, I used to blog for years and so, and I had blog posts, I wrote that that I felt like, uh, didn't age well. Some age well and some didn't. And so I had that knowledge going into it. And so I tried to keep it at a little bit of abstract enough that it would age pretty well. I mean, this stuff is hard like AI because it's moving so quickly. Um, I would say right now it's pretty good. Like I, there wasn't a lot I would, I'm sure in a couple of years, there'll be examples I used or predictions I made that were off, but, but, um, so far, it's been pretty good. And it's been, I've been done with it, you know, you have to finish a book a few months before you publish it. So I've been done with it probably for almost a year now. And it's not a year, but nine months or something. So, um, it's pretty good so far, but I'm sure at some point I want to revise something. No, of course. And, uh, and, and lastly, I mean, like, if you, if you've gone down this path already and you've gone through, if you've gone through the process of writing, I mean, now you know what it takes. And now, like the next time won't be as hard, but I always laugh because it's not, it's not easy to put this together by any means. Like, it's so it was a, I had no idea what I was getting into. Like if I heard this a lot, I would have done it. It was, it was, I, you know, the first draft took me like four months. I was like, oh, this is great. And then I, I realized it was crap and I had to spend another eight months rewriting it. So it was like a year of a lot of works. If people want to, if you want to connect with you, um, where, where should they go? Like, you're really active on Twitter, right? I think Twitter. And then when the one I mentioned, uh, Forecaster, so Forecaster. Okay. Perfect. If you were going to, if you were going to, you know, sort of look back over your career, um, and you've seen, you know, all the seasons that you've gone through in your career, what would be a lesson that you would tell your younger self? Yeah. I think, you know, I mean, look, I, I think the technology industry is a fantastic industry to work in. I, you know, I, I haven't, it's, it matters so much what wave you ride. Um, this may sound obvious, but like, I, I, I mean, I just, like, you asked me why I have mistakes. I made so many kind of mistakes, investment mistakes, entrepreneurial mistakes, but I made one, did one thing right, which is like, you know, I got on, I joined the internet industry in the year 2000. And, um, and I, by the way, a lot of people, you know, in the 2005, I've gotten very negative about it. Um, and so I kind of, you know, luckily I was a friend of the bunch of optimists. Um, I would say, you know, surround yourself with smart, optimistic people and, you know, and the optimistic about these trends, you know, today, I think it's, to me, that very clearly, it's blockchain and AI, I would be involved with one of those two. Um, and I think they both have strengths and weaknesses from a career point of view. Um, the, um, maybe, maybe VAR and self-driving cars and other new devices, a lot of cool stuff happening. Um, you know, surround yourself with smart, great high integrity, optimistic people. Um, they say, you know, you become the five people you spend the most time with. It's really true. You know, you chat, you, you challenge yourself. I've seen people that join startups and the sort of may not go well, but maybe if they join the right people, like, it's like this sort of PayPal mafia kind of thing where they all go off and do interesting stuff. Yeah. It's so often the case, um, it doesn't matter so much. Um, you know, um, so yeah, I mean, like, I don't know. They just sound like kind of obvious platitudes, but well, I don't think there is, I think, I think they're obvious platitudes, but I don't think people understand the, the wisdom behind the words that you're saying, because I know that people that have started a company, started their next company, myself included, like, you already have the people you're going to be working with for the next one. And that goes from that, that, that speaking to from an operational perspective and sort of finding the periods you want to work with. But also when you start to have some success and you make some money from an investor perspective, I know groups of people that only do deals with their friends. Like, they don't have to go, if they want to go invest in a deal, like, they don't really need to go find LPs. They just invest with the friends that they've invested in because they've all done deals together and they all know what, you know, this person is not going to screw up the due diligence on this deal and they trust like I'm part of an exited founder group and everybody just pushes, puts deals forward. And, I mean, you start to trust the people, you start to deals with again and again and again and again. And it just, it removes a ton of risk and ambiguity, especially like not at the level that you're doing that where you see thousands and thousands of deals. But if you just want to do a couple deals, then you, you have your circle. So it's incredibly important. I mean, it's, and it's, you know, and I would say one other thing I would add to this is I wrote a blog post a years ago about this called climbing the wrong hill and it was about, I think there's on the negative side or just sort of the flip side of advice, I guess is the traps people find themselves, especially early in their career, which is getting on kind of a, you know, you go to some fancy school, you get a fancy job and getting on these kind of treadmills. I called it climbing the wrong hill because you sort of, you feel like you're making progress, right? You're going upwards. But then, you know, maybe 10 years later, you're going to look back and be like, I was climbing up the wrong hill, right? And I hadn't, I needed to spend more time looking for other hills. And that also suggests some exploration, some kind of experimentation in early in your career and like really sort of is this the right hill? And are you getting kind of hooked on near term kind of dopamine hits of like I got a promotion? I've, you know, I'm in whatever Google or Goldman Sachs or something. As, you know, it's like, look, if you go and, for example, join a startup from Google, it's, it's, it's, it can be a jarring experience. You go to a party and like people like, what? I never heard of that. Whereas you go, yeah, you're Google and it's like, oh, you're, you're used to like the status that is associated with these things. And so a lot of times the kind of the right hill, it will feel a meat in the near term like a setback, right? I think again and that's a pattern I've seen with people that feel fulfilled in their career is that they took their moments when they took what seemed to be steps back. And, and you know, we call it risk. But risk kind of, I think glosses over the, the emotional side of it, which is like, wow, I just, I just gave up this fancy job and took a step back of what it feels like at some point. And then things are going badly, you're into it and you're like, what the hell did I do? But did you power through it? So, um, anyway, so that would be another, another kind of career lesson I'd add. I love it. Chris, uh, thank you so much. Thanks for, thanks for writing this book. Thanks for educating. Thanks for, for investing in an incredible ethical, smart entrepreneur is trying to disrupt. Um, it's, it's, it's, you're doing good work. That's all I can say. So thank you.