Crypto’s Business Model is Familiar. What Isn’t is Who Benefits

Many entrepreneurs and investors think that crypto projects can’t capture value because they are based on open source code. The thinking goes that if you develop open source code, someone will come along and copy it, luring away your users and any potential for revenue. That doesn’t seem…Read More

Narrative Economics

Originally published as a Twitter thread, here is my high level reading/summary of @RobertJShiller’s book: "Narrative Economics"…Read More

My first professional decade(ish)

I spent the first half of the decade doing overlapping music things:2010 - concert promoter2012-  live streaming, SaaS tool2013 - artist managerThe second half doing tech things —specifically, "crypto" (née "blockchain") things2015 - entrepreneur2017 - investing / product / r&d2018 - VCThe through-line is interestingness, at least to me.…Read More

Incomplete Contracts (and Scaling Crypto)

One way to think about various kinds of crypto projects is through the lens of contract theory. An axiom of this area of legal scholarship states: “all but the simplest contracts are incomplete”. That is, contractual arrangements cannot anticipate every possible outcome or set of actions, given complex and dynamic…Read More

Past, Present, Future: From Co-ops to Cryptonetworks

Today, some of the most valuable corporations in the world today are “network operators”. Thanks to network effects, these platforms become more valuable to existing users as each new user joins. Network effects are innocuous at first, but can cause concern at scale if platforms enter an “extractive” phase in…Read More

Maker

This post was co-authored with Katie Haun. It pertains to an a16zcrypto investment. The original announcement is here, on our official blog.Cryptocurrencies are borderless, trustless, and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. As such we believe they’ll increasingly be used for a host of financial services in…Read More