Speaker

Chris Dixon

Chris Dixon

American venture capitalist and author. General partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he founded and leads a16z crypto, the firm’s dedicated blockchain investment fund. Author of Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (2023).

Dixon came to venture capital through the internet’s first boom: he built and sold two companies before joining a16z, and was an active blogger during the RSS era he now writes about historically. His intellectual formation is unusual for a VC — he studied analytic philosophy at graduate-school level before leaving the programme, and returns to philosophy as a recreational practice.

Core positions

Dixon’s central argument is that the internet’s consolidation into five to ten dominant platforms was not inevitable but structural — the product of how venture-backed corporate networks could subsidise their way to network-effect lock-in in ways that open protocol networks (email, RSS, the early web) could not. Blockchains, in his account, are the first architecture capable of combining the societal benefits of open protocols (low take rates, community governance, no intermediary) with the competitive capabilities of corporate networks (subsidies, coordination, treasury management through smart contracts).

He frames the history of the internet in three acts — read (the static web), write (user-generated content and social networks), own (blockchain-enabled digital ownership) — and sees digital ownership as the internet’s missing primitive. He defends stablecoins as the category’s first mass-market product, NFTs as the correct property-right architecture for digital assets, and open-source AI as a structural necessity for preserving national sovereignty and informational pluralism in an era when foundation models may otherwise concentrate unprecedented soft power in a handful of firms.

In the wiki