Chris Dixon on How to Build Networks, Movements, and AI-Native Products

1. 0:00 – 0:33

   Introduction

   1. CDChris Dixon0:00

      Whether you're an investor or entrepreneur, the most important thing to start with is to look for these forces, to look for these exponential forces. You can do all sorts of tactical product things, everything else, but these forces are gonna overwhelm you, for better or worse.

   2. AAAnish Acharya0:12

      How intentional do you think you have to be as a founder about building... Like, you're building a tool, do you have to be sort of thinking about the network a priori, or can the network sort of emerge? 'Cause in AI so far, we've seen a lot of tools and not a lot of networks. What's your instinct? Welcome to the a16z Consumer Pod. I'm super excited and

2. 0:33 – 2:08

   The Power of Networks & Network Effects

   1. AAAnish Acharya0:33

      honored to have my partner, Chris Dixon, here today. You know, Chris, you're probably best known for your work in Web3 and network economies recently, but what folks may not know is that you led a lot of the most important consumer investments at Andreessen Horowitz, and prior, you also founded two consumer companies. I thought a fun place to start would be networks. That feels like the first place you really cut your teeth. So maybe talk about your investments in Stack Overflow, Pinterest, Instagram, and how you generally think about consumer networks.

   2. CDChris Dixon0:59

      So many of the most important internet services are networks, right? Going back to the early internet, um, email and the World Wide Web, which are still, of course, around and really important, um, are networks, right? And they're networks in the sense that, um, the service gets more valuable as more people use the network, right? If you were the only one on email, it wouldn't be particularly valuable. Um, during the, you know, the kind of the rise of the internet in the nineties and two thousands, that's when you had things like YouTube and Facebook and, uh, later on Instagram and, and a whole bunch of other really important networks. You know, if you're an entrepreneur or an investor during that period, they, you know, they tend to be very valuable companies. They're very hard to build, and we can talk about that later. There's different kind of tactics and strategies for doing that. Um, and so yeah. So when I... You know, I, my background, I started two companies. The first was a consumer security company, and the second was a consumer AI company, um, and then was a personal investor. I co-founded a seed fund called Founder Collective, which was an investor in things like Uber and Venmo and Stack Overflow, as you mentioned, and just, you know, sort of were involved in a bunch of these networks as, as the internet involved. Um, I think to, to really talk about networks, though, it's important to kind of step back and the way I think about, to me, a foundational question

3. 2:08 – 5:35

   Composability and Open Source Growth

   1. CDChris Dixon2:08

      in tech is, is why do... You know, why in tech do you have these, these companies come out of nowhere and end up being, you know, very impactful, having hundreds of millions or billions of users, being very valuable, um, in a way that you typically don't see that in other industries, right? Like, what's, what's fundamentally different about tech? And I think the answer is that in tech you have some very strong kind of exponential super linear forces. Um, so the most famous example of that is Moore's law. Right? So Moore's law is the idea that you can, that sort of every, you know, roughly two years or eighteen months, the, the-

   2. AAAnish Acharya2:45

      Mm-hmm

   3. CDChris Dixon2:45

      ... uh, performance of semiconductors doubles. Um, it's a rough approximation, but it's basically been true. You've seen this compounding improvement in, in processor performance. I think there's also kind of a broader Moore's law, which is, you know, storage, networking, like all the kind of computing resources just gotten much better, which is why you have things like mobile phones, right? So if you go back and look pre-iPhone, you know, mobile phones were pretty junky and limited in capability and didn't have, you know, touch screens and, and had poor performance. Um, and what, you know, Steve Jobs and Apple's great insight was, was that... Actually, by the way, the first iPhone also I, you know, I, I was, I think I was one of the people that bought it on the first day. It also was quite limited, but, you know, part of their brilliance was they saw this curve, right?

   4. AAAnish Acharya3:26

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CDChris Dixon3:26

      They saw this exponential curve, and they rode that curve, and that, um... So, so that Moore's law is a very important exponential curve. But the s- the other kind of, I'd say there's two other really important exponential curves in software. One is what I call composability. Composability is really I think what's accounted for the rise of open source software.

   6. AAAnish Acharya3:43

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CDChris Dixon3:44

      Um, you know, why did Linux go from a hobby project in the nineties to the dominant operating system on, in the world today? Um, the answer, a lot of it is composability. Composability means the software is open source, anyone can contribute to it, and you can very importantly sort of harness the collective intelligence of the internet as opposed to locking up, you know, only relying on your employees, right? Anyone in the world can, can, uh, you know, the famous phrase all, all bugs are shallow with enough eyeballs. And, you know, and, and really importantly, with open source, you can, they become, software becomes like Lego bricks, where anyone can take a piece and reuse it. And so you get this kind of compounding exponential kind of improvement growth. And then the third really important, uh, exponential force in tech is network effects, as we were talking about, which is, which is why networks are so important, right? So they start off often, um, quite limited. You know, Facebook was just at Harvard, and it was essentially a, you know, a, a real-time, you know, kind of yearbook or whatever for students at one school. And of course, you know, and then kind of hopped pr- by lily pads to other schools and high schools and, you know, eventually to kind of global domination that we have today. Um, and so they saw, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and the team saw the, this power of network effects and, uh, and kind of rode those network effects. Um, and so that's, you know, that's kind of why... I mean, Clay Christensen calls this disruptive technologies. It's a, it's this kind of puzzle in a way of why in tech, you know, you have these very strong incumbents who seem to miss, um, you know, and I think you could s- tell the story today about maybe Intel and Nvidia or something, like Intel-

   8. AAAnish Acharya5:18

      Or even ChatGPT and Google. You know, I was just reading an engagement-

   9. CDChris Dixon5:21

      That's a, that's a great example, yes, is that, you know, neural networks ten years ago were kind of toys, right? Um-

   10. AAAnish Acharya5:26

       Yeah, yes

   11. CDChris Dixon5:27

       ... and I mean, they were cool, and I think, you know, so, so a bunch of people saw the potential of them. Um-

   12. AAAnish Acharya5:32

       Mm-hmm

   13. CDChris Dixon5:32

       ... but the reality is they just didn't work that well, right? I mean, I

4. 5:35 – 6:50

   The Rise of Consumer Tools & Networks

   1. CDChris Dixon5:35

      remember there was a chatbot, uh, kind of VC thing in like, I wanna say like two thousand sixteen or something. I don't know if you remember that.

   2. AAAnish Acharya5:41

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CDChris Dixon5:41

      Maybe you were, you were not somewhere then.

   4. AAAnish Acharya5:43

      Of course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the chatbot, chatbots had a moment back then.

   5. CDChris Dixon5:45

      Yeah, they had a moment, but you know, the reality is it just, they weren't that good, right?

   6. AAAnish Acharya5:48

      Yeah.

   7. CDChris Dixon5:49

      Um, they just couldn't do the job. Um, but of course, they got much, much better, and the genius of OpenAI and other pioneers in the space was to make that bet, right?

   8. AAAnish Acharya5:58

      That's right.

   9. CDChris Dixon5:59

      Um, and then, like Google today is in kind of an awkward position, right? Because they have this huge incumbent business that depends on, you know, the sponsored links, and they're trying to layer in AI and do things like that. But it, you know, in some ways it, it, it didn't come out of nowhere, but it, it grew, it grew I think faster than even some of the optimists predicted. Improved faster. And so, so, so the kind of the, the big takeaway here is, I think whether you're an investor or entrepreneurThe most, the most important thing to start with is to look for these forces, to look for these exponential forces. And one of the lessons I learned in my career was, you know, you can do all sorts of tactical product things, everything else, but these forces are gonna overwhelm you for, for better, for, for better or worse. And that the first thing to understand is that kind of landscape of these forces and how they're moving, and how you can hopefully be on the right side of them.

5. 6:50 – 10:08

   Advice for Founders

   1. AAAnish Acharya6:50

      Chris, how, how intentional do you think you have to be as a founder about building... Like, you're building a tool, do you have to be sort of thinking about the network a priori, or can the network sort of emerge? 'Cause in AI so far, we've seen a lot of tools and not a lot of networks. So how, and then of course, in hindsight, everybody was designing a network from day zero. W-what's your instinct?

   2. CDChris Dixon7:10

      That's a great question. So like, like I wrote a blog post years ago called Come for the Tools, Stay for the Network, and the idea was, I was observing a, what I observed as sort of a tactical pattern among entrepreneurs. I, I cited Instagram as an example, so people won't, young people won't remember this. But Instagram actually kind of initially, um, you know, that it, its network, Instagram's network was not a big part of the product. Um, it had a button where you could share on Instagram, but why would you do that? 'Cause no one was on it. And so what you would do is, I think two things. One is they had these cool filters, which at the time you had to pay for in other services, and they gave them away for free. Um, so kind of just, you know, effects or lenses or whatever you wanna call them. And then, um, and then secondly, they piggybacked off other networks. So you would share to Twitter, um, and then I think like a year or two later, Twitter blocked them, and there was a whole kinda thing. You see that today maybe with Substack. Um, you know, Substack starts off, right, piggybacking on the email network on Twitter. My under-- My, my sense is they're now getting traction with their own network. You go to the Substack app, right? Um.

   3. AAAnish Acharya8:07

      That's right.

   4. CDChris Dixon8:07

      And, and so I think it's kind of a similar tactic. I think you could see some of this kind of come for the tool, stay for the network in pot... This is, I'll, I'll defer to you on this 'cause I'm not as up to date, but like modern productivity tools.

   5. AAAnish Acharya8:19

      Yeah.

   6. CDChris Dixon8:19

      Maybe like Figma and Notion, things like this, where they're useful single player, right?

   7. AAAnish Acharya8:25

      Yeah.

   8. CDChris Dixon8:25

      You can just go to Notion, and it's a really nice way to edit a document or Figma-

   9. AAAnish Acharya8:29

      Yeah

   10. CDChris Dixon8:29

       ... to, you know, kinda do design. But also, you, you know, you, there are social features that I, I think become essential. Um, there's always, these things are all degrees, right? Like Google Docs, I love Google Docs. I use it, I use the social features. The reality is, is, is it really a network? Like, I could probably switch and then just share links with somebody else. But the social features layer on. Other, some products, like Instagram, it becomes essential, right? Like it's just, you simply can't leave Instagram if you have a following and you wanna keep that following. Um, so it, it kind of varies by use case. But I think the point... By the way, I think you see some of this now in like Stripe doing the Link product, you know, which is a payment app. I think Shop-Shopify and the Shop product, right? I think those are really nice user experiences. You know, I don't have to type in my credit card again. Now there's kind of a network, right? Shopify originally was just kind of a tool for, um-

   11. AAAnish Acharya9:15

       That's right. Sellers online

   12. CDChris Dixon9:16

       ... for a merchant to get online.

   13. AAAnish Acharya9:18

       That's right.

   14. CDChris Dixon9:18

       Um, so I think it's a really powerful tactic, right? Because, 'cause network effects cut both ways. 'Cause network effects are great when you have them, but they're really hard at the beginning. No one wants to be on a dating site with like two people, right?

   15. AAAnish Acharya9:27

       [laughs]

   16. CDChris Dixon9:27

       I mean, or something, right? And so, like, how do you make these things useful from day one? But then the problem with single player, right, is it's just hard to defend them, right? You see, I think you're seeing this in AI now today. You tell-- you know much better, but you're seeing a lot of like really cool tools 'cause it's an amazing technology. But then it's like, okay, you can change your face app or whatever, um, but then how does it sort of move beyond faddishness, right? How does it move to something that, that really engages people over a long period of time? And often the answer in consumer products is networks. And so then, you know, then you have to layer in a network. The challenge is, of course, you don't wanna just layer it in for the sake of it. It needs to actually be useful. Um, so yeah, I'd love to hear from you or what are you seeing in that area?

   17. AAAnish Acharya10:04

       Yeah, yeah, no, well, it, it's actually interesting 'cause it feels like the big networks have become,

6. 10:08 – 14:58

   Brand, Pricing, and Defensibility in Tech

   1. AAAnish Acharya10:09

      um, hypersensitized to this idea of new networks emerging that were bootstrapped on their networks. So I think Twitter of ten years ago would have, you know, been a lot more asleep at the wheel to the threat of a Substack, and they were pretty aware of this potentially happening. And of course, Facebook has deplatformed a ton of companies that they thought were going to do this, and Insta and others. So one, I think the networks are more sensitive. And then on the tool side, actually, because the tools have been specializing in their own directions, and part of it is sort of product features, but part of it, even for some of the multimodal tools, is, um, aesthetics. You know, Midjourney just has a different aesthetic than Ideogram, so they can both coexist, and they're not directly competing. So even though the tools are seemingly substitutes, like so far we haven't seen that trade-off and they're all working, maybe that's just where we are in the product cycle. But I do think it's sort of a topic for a lot of AI founders, which is like there's not an obvious network to build around a lot of these tools, and how much of that should be sort of pre-designed versus let's just keep pushing the edge and the network will emerge.

   2. CDChris Dixon11:09

      And also the, the, it will show up in two ways, right? Like, one would be in the usage. Like you, you might see some of these tools not get used as much, but the other is in pricing, right? Like-

   3. AAAnish Acharya11:19

      Yeah

   4. CDChris Dixon11:20

      ... even if you carve out a niche, how much more are people willing to pay for that niche versus those competitors, right? So-

   5. AAAnish Acharya11:26

      Yes

   6. CDChris Dixon11:26

      ... um, but-

   7. AAAnish Acharya11:27

      Yeah. And actually prices have been going up interestingly. You know, like Google's top SKU is two hundred and fifty a month. Groq's is three hundred a month. I don't think we've ever seen a time where consumers were paying those kinds of prices. I mean, one of our, our sort of extreme views here is that like the future of consumer disposable income will be like food, rent, software. You know, then software is gonna subsume a lot of the other areas of, of discretionary spend today. Um, so-

   8. CDChris Dixon11:51

      Yeah. It's also possible... I've always suspected in tech, we, in Silicon Valley, kind of we underestimate the power of just kind of brands and consumer inertia.

   9. AAAnish Acharya12:00

      Yeah.

   10. CDChris Dixon12:00

       And I think you're sort of seeing that today with ChatGPT of just like-

   11. AAAnish Acharya12:03

       Totally

   12. CDChris Dixon12:03

       ... such a household name, like overnight almost. Um, that even though it doesn't have in this sort of technical sense, maybe network effects, um-

   13. AAAnish Acharya12:11

       That's right

   14. CDChris Dixon12:11

       ... I mean, it has memory and things, but I mean, it's not, that's more stickiness network effects. But like, you know, just the brand, the brand effects are so powerful, right? And you become kind of known, and the Cursor is known as the best, you know, best vibe coding platform or whatever

   15. AAAnish Acharya12:25

       That's right. Yeah. I was just gonna ask you about that, Chris. So you know, of course, network effect is a gold standard for defensibility. Um, you know, you've maybe talked a little bit about how brand is underappreciated. You just mentioned it. Do you think being a high NPS DAU product, is that enough of a moat, um, or do you think that, like, we really have to push for sort of these, building around these compounding forces?

   16. CDChris Dixon12:46

       Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, one, one argument would be the internet. I, I think there's a decent argument... I mean, I was actually having this argument at one of our, our partner off-sites. Not argument, but discussion. Um, is that maybe, you know, maybe a lot of the, the network effect has been externalized to the Internet, right? Um, and so the idea being, you know, you're a cursor, and then suddenly all of the, you know, it becomes popular.

   17. AAAnish Acharya13:10

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CDChris Dixon13:10

       Um, or, you know, Midjourney, let's say, right? And then you get all of these, you know, Midjourney influencers, YouTube videos, websites, how-to guides. And so you still in some sense have a network effect, but it's just not a network effect that's in the product itself. It's sort of externalized to the Internet, right? And maybe that's a difference now. Like when I-- The era I'm discussing was the era when the internet was being built. In some ways, the internet is built now. I mean, I'm sure it'll hopefully improve and change, but it's built, right? I mean, it's built-

   19. AAAnish Acharya13:39

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CDChris Dixon13:39

       And it's, you know, five billion users and, um... And so, you know, maybe the rules are different now, and maybe now, um, that effect of getting sort of all of those different, you know, the, the adjacent networks around you gives you in a sense a network effect. You show up top in search, ChatGPT recommends you.

   21. AAAnish Acharya13:58

       Interesting.

   22. CDChris Dixon13:58

       You know, the algorithms feature you. Like, you know, and there's of course, there's a soft sense of like a brand, people have heard of you, but it's also this whole giant kind of system, right? With all of these different interconnecting networks, um, might strongly favor those products. And that, and then it becomes sort of a timing thing, right? You get in early. You, you, you, um... The timing seems quite important, like getting in, you know, be-being the, the first to kind of own the, own the meme-

   23. AAAnish Acharya14:25

       Mm-hmm.

   24. CDChris Dixon14:25

       Um, in the category and, and get that effect going, and then maintaining it through product velocity and high quality and everything else, which is non-trivial. It's very hard to do, I think, particularly in AI, you tell me. But, um-

   25. AAAnish Acharya14:38

       Yeah.

   26. CDChris Dixon14:38

       To always stay on the cutting edge, um, it's expensive.

   27. AAAnish Acharya14:41

       Yeah.

   28. CDChris Dixon14:41

       A lot of capital. That's another thing, by the way, the capital effects in AI, right? You, you do well, you raise the most money.

   29. AAAnish Acharya14:49

       Mm-hmm.

   30. CDChris Dixon14:49

       Um, I, you know, I assume the people raising a billion have already, you know, proven a bunch of things, and at some point the capital becomes a moat, right?
7. 14:58 – 19:57

   Movements, Niche Communities, and Investing

   1. AAAnish Acharya14:58

      'cause there's this barbelling that's happening even in software where the bigs are getting bigger, but we're also seeing sort of, you know, the, like, single person, hundred million run rate company is coming, or maybe it's already here. Um, but certainly the bigs are getting bigger and capital's a part of that.

   2. CDChris Dixon15:12

      And maybe, maybe the market's just so big that you can... That the, the answer is both, all of the above. [laughs] It may just be that, as you said, it becomes like food and rent, and it just, software is moving beyond kind of the quote-unquote "software budget."

   3. AAAnish Acharya15:25

      It really hasn't been zero-sum so far. It's been shocking, like prices-

   4. CDChris Dixon15:28

      Yeah.

   5. AAAnish Acharya15:28

      Are going up, and everything feels like it's working. So, you know, maybe we'll look back and say that was a sign, but, um, but so far so good. You know, Chris, I, I thought actually since you mentioned vibe coding, it would be fun to talk about movements. You know, it feels like you've been early to a bunch of movements, you know, products like, um, Coinbase, of course, and MakerBot. You know, those felt like niche communities on the internet when you started paying attention to them. You know, how, how do you think about investing in movements, and how do you think about building around them when there's sort of questions around, is this a toy? Is this something sort of structural? Is it durable, ephemeral? Um, maybe talk a bit about that.

   6. CDChris Dixon16:02

      Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit to the point where we're talking about the, about the networks becoming externalized. I used to spend a lot of time, I don't know, ten to fifteen years ago, just like on subreddits in, in kind of niche communities, partly 'cause I'm interested [chuckles] in that stuff and partly because I think they're very powerful, right? If you have... You know, if you look at Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, like a lot of these kind of interesting kind of movements, like community sites, like they're, they're often like twenty thousand people. Like they aren't that many. They, they aren't the millions that you might think. There's millions maybe doing a little bit here and there. But I just think a lot of, you know, and if you look at open source software and crypto projects, like, um, just a lot of things that, that, that, that have been kind of, uh, you know, popular movements that grew were really led by a relatively small... I mean, I'm saying on the internet scale, relatively small sort of hardcore enthusiasts who are really smart, often technical. Um, and so, you know, and it's sort of this, you know, famous old quote, I think Williams Gibson, that the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Like I've a- I've always believed that, and I think if you just go back historically, that's, that's the case that like, you know, we're talking about neural networks, like that's been going on for, since nineteen forty-three or something, and there's been-

   7. AAAnish Acharya17:10

      Mm-hmm. [laughs]

   8. CDChris Dixon17:10

      You know, communities of people, including like the people, a lot of the people that lead the labs today, who, you know, fifteen years ago were seen as kind of niche, more niche or something. You know, they weren't... Neural networks weren't the dominant, uh, you know, approach. Um, and so, you know, with that thesis, sort of you wanna sort of find the n-next thing, the, the next big thing, like one way to do it is to look around and, and see where these kind of, you know, I would describe it as sort of hyper-enthusiastic, sometimes cultish, you know, they have their own language, their own norms, um, uh, you know, kind of a sense of insider outsiders. Um, and so I got into that kind of a while ago, and that's how I got into originally like into Bitcoin. You know, is I just followed those people, and I found it was one of those things where it sounded kinda silly at first, and then as you learn more about it, it seemed a lot more interesting. Like that's always an interesting feature, right? There's some things you learn more about and they aren't, they aren't that interesting. [laughs] Some things-

   9. AAAnish Acharya18:03

      [laughs]

   10. CDChris Dixon18:03

       You know, they are kinda silly. You know, the moon, the, the conspiracy theories that the earth is flat or something.

   11. AAAnish Acharya18:10

       [laughs]

   12. CDChris Dixon18:10

       Like, I went one day, hour looking at that stuff, and it's like this stuff is just crazy or something, or I don't know, the flat landing conspiracies or whatever. Um, whereas, you know, you dig into this stuff and you don't have to agree with everything, but there's smart people and it's very interesting. Um, so you know, for like for me, it was like three-D printing, like this led to my-Investment in Oculus and Coinbase really were both from that, um, you know, from that thesis, sort of VR, seeing the developers and the kind of, you know, Kickstarter community enthusiasm around, you know, when Palmer, Palmer Luckey was first creating that. Um, the-- It also, you know, I got into kind of nootropics, and that led to an investment in, in things like Soylent and, um, got into-- Back then it was like, this is like when I joined the firm in two thousand and thirteen, like drones. We did a few investments around that.

   13. AAAnish Acharya18:55

       Mm-hmm.

   14. CDChris Dixon18:55

       Um, and you know, just sort of looking at these interesting kind of hobby com-- And the hobby communities, I mean, there's a bunch of reasons why is I think it's an interesting way to, to look at it is, one is those are the people that create these things. I mean, if you have twenty thousand hard, you know, interesting technologists, they're, they often build things, right? And so they're gonna build some interesting products. It's also like a great kind of marketing engine, right? They're, they're out there. They often have sort of outsized influence on the internet. They have followings.

   15. AAAnish Acharya19:19

       [laughs]

   16. CDChris Dixon19:19

       Um, you know, they, they're, they help kinda get the energy and, uh, energy going and, and, uh, and build things and kinda market them. Um, uh, it's not-- look, it's not foolproof, and you have-- it's hard, you know, 'cause a lot of these things just end up kind of being niche or don't have, um... I think it's going back to the exponential forces. Like-

   17. AAAnish Acharya19:37

       Yeah

   18. CDChris Dixon19:37

       ... you take nootropics, like that's still a thing that's around, but I don't think it's, you know, it hasn't created a big tech company as far as I know. Um, but then I think it's partly 'cause it's just got linear forces, not exponential forces behind it, right? There's only, there's not sort of some engine exponentially driving it to have-

   19. AAAnish Acharya19:53

       Yeah

   20. CDChris Dixon19:53

       ... better and better products.

   21. AAAnish Acharya19:54

       Maybe actually though, you-- if you look at a company like Function Health,

8. 19:57 – 21:02

   The Impact of Timing of Networks

   1. AAAnish Acharya19:57

      you know, Function Health is sort of the catalyst for this huge movement, consumer movement around health and quantified self and, you know, nootropics was a bit of the predecessor to that. So in a sense, there is this sort of slow exponential maybe and then very rapid uptake. And I think timing is, is a really interesting question here, 'cause with these movements, you don't know if they're gonna play out over, you know, a hundred years or a hundred days sometimes.

   2. CDChris Dixon20:19

      Yeah, and you're right. Like it may-- it could just be that-- Like, three D printing's a good example where, um, you know, it's still around. I don't-- it didn't kinda get as big as people had hoped. Um, um, you know, I had an investment in MakerBot back in, back then, which got, was a kind of a leader and got acquired and, um, you know, it's still a hobbyist thing. It's interesting. I think the limiting thing is it's in the physical world. There isn't kind of a Moore's law driving it. That said, I expect that over, you know, fifty years or something, it will become a more important thing. And you're right, you're right, it could just be a timing thing.

   3. AAAnish Acharya20:50

      Yeah. Yeah. You know, the, the vibe coding thing to come back to that, that feels like this sort of irreversible consumer phenomenon, you know, where everybody is maybe not quite programming, but, you know, creating software in a way that they weren't ten years ago.

9. 21:02 – 24:06

   What are the Second Order Implications?

   1. AAAnish Acharya21:02

      H-how do you think of that as a sort of decentralizing force? You know, you've talked about the economics of software versus the means of production. The means of production are sort of getting decentralized through these new tools like Replit and, you know, and, and others, Cursor. Is that, like, sufficient to lead to a renaissance in the open web, or what do you think are the second-order implications of everybody programming?

   2. CDChris Dixon21:24

      Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the thing with the internet and the consolidation, I mean, the internet has become increasingly consolidated. If you just look at, um... And you know, I, I wrote a book about kinda blockchains, and this was a kind of core theme in the beginning of the book, was talking about sort of what happened with the internet getting consolidated. Um, it's just if you look at metrics like the amount of money revenue generated, the, um, the traffic, right? I mean, it's, it's more and more, it's like ninety-five percent plus of that, both of those metrics are, you know, now in five to ten companies' hands. Um, you can make an argument either way. Like with AI, you know, look, with AI, I mean, we're already seeing this in the data. Um, a lot of AI obviates the need to click through and go to a website, right? Um, and so, and I think we just saw, I think we just saw a report out that like a bunch of like travel sites and others were kind of seeing some alarming drops in SEO, um, which I think is kind of inevitable if, you know... Like, I mean, it's, it's a mixed thing. Like on the one hand, as I'm a, I'm a user of ChatGPT, and it's amazing to just get an answer, right?

   3. AAAnish Acharya22:26

      Yeah.

   4. CDChris Dixon22:26

      Not have to go and like searching again after you, uh, you know, [chuckles] and, and go through all these websites. And look, and it's sort of this, uh, vicious cycle thing where like the websites lose traffic, and they get more desperate, and then they put up pop-up ads and other things, and so it-

   5. AAAnish Acharya22:40

      Yeah

   6. CDChris Dixon22:40

      ... becomes even a worse experience. I mean, this has been going on for like ten years. There's this kind of, kind of negative flywheel I think that's been going on. Um, so look, on the one hand, it's great for consumers. You get an an- I mean, vibe coding in a lot, you know, vi-we were investors in Stack Overflow, which, you know, got acquired, but I think their traffic has dropped a lot because of vibe coding. And you know, it's this thing where vibe coding, I think probably some of the training data came from Stack Overflow and GitHub and places-

   7. AAAnish Acharya23:03

      Mm-hmm

   8. CDChris Dixon23:03

      ... but then it becomes better. And like, you know, like I, I use, I've used Cursor to do some fun projects. It's an unbelievable tool. I think it's clearly good for the world. Um, you know, that the, uh, it, it is, you know, bad for those websites. It's a great question. I think, you know, I, I, I hope what we're seeing is a renaissance of paid-- it seems like we're seeing a paid software of-

   9. AAAnish Acharya23:26

      Yeah

   10. CDChris Dixon23:26

       ... of sort of businesses that, you know, they don't need to dominate the internet, um, and, and be Facebook, but they can get to hundreds of millions in revenue. I mean, I think we're seeing this, right?

   11. AAAnish Acharya23:35

       Yeah.

   12. CDChris Dixon23:35

       Um, and so I think from an entrepreneur's perspective, it's a very, very exciting time. I think we can see a lot of, um, great products. I think it's a great time for consumers. Your, you know, your, um, may-maybe that will change over time. Maybe they'll need to layer in ads, and the incentives will shift, um, and do-

   13. AAAnish Acharya23:52

       Yeah

   14. CDChris Dixon23:52

       ... you know, kind of things that are more adversarial towards consumers. I think right now I like the AI things, uh, products in that they feel very aligned with users. Um, like they're really just genuinely trying to create great products and, and charge for them. Um-

   15. AAAnish Acharya24:05

       Exactly.

   16. CDChris Dixon24:05

       So.

10. 24:06 – 30:55

    The Emergence of 'Narrow Startups' and Platform Shifts

    1. AAAnish Acharya24:06

       Yeah. Yeah, we, we sort of call it this like emergence of narrow startups where they charge high prices and deliver, you know, exceptional value and, and maybe a controversial statement right now is that there are no marketing problems, only product problems because the technology allows you to be so ambitious on behalf of your customer. And then the costs actually ironically lead to better business models because consumer founders need to think about monetizing early.Otherwise, you're just gonna go out of business. Um, so there's, it, it does feel like there's a renaissance in paid software that's happening that makes it a more fun time to build than five years ago.

    2. CDChris Dixon24:39

       Do you think that over time, um, that that will shift potentially? 'Cause people will realize that maybe the kinda low-hanging fruit is picked, the higher-paying consumers, and to get the rest, you need to layer in different business models, ad-based business models, and so forth, or...

    3. AAAnish Acharya24:55

       I don't know. I mean, it feels like there's so many more consumer needs that are addressable, and they're addressable in a s-such a significant way by the technology that you can actually specialize and go very, very deep. Like there, you know, there's AI therapy generally, then there's AI therapy for people that have ADHD, and then there's people who have ADHD that are in a certain life stage that perhaps wanna interact in a certain way. You can just go extraordinarily deep. So I, I don't know if it leads to consolidation over time or, or, you know, or if you can continue to specialize and, you know, for a small number of people be their primary. That actually might lead to a, a good topic around the idea maze. You know, Chris, you've talked a bunch about platform shifts. You've invested around platform shifts. You predicted them. You know, one of the interesting things about this platform shift is that the properties of the platform are sort of emergent. They're not explicitly defined by Apple as iOS was. They're things that founders, you know, and even the people training the models are discovering. Does that sort of change your mental model around platform shift? And, and maybe how similar or dissimilar is that to Web3?

    4. CDChris Dixon25:54

       Yeah, I mean, so the idea maze concept, this originally came from our friend, uh, Balaji Srinivasan, um, and I wrote about it a while ago. The idea-- The way I think about the idea is that, is that there was this old debate of like, are... with startups, are the ideas more important or the execution, right? And sort of, I think with the idea maze, the way I think about it is it says they're both important in the sense that it matters which maze you enter. I'm entering the AI maze for, you know, health-healthcare, or I'm entering the AI maze for image generation or whatever. Like, clearly the idea, I mean, you go in with an initial product idea, and clearly that matters. But it also matters that, you know, it's a maze, meaning it's dynamic. The world will shift, like you can't predict it. So, you know, the canonical example in my mind is Netflix, right? Netflix started off, you know, mailing CDs, right? So the hypothesis is that movies will become, you know, the internet has changed the way people consume movies. People will subscribe to them, but today we need to send them by mail. And then over time, they pivoted to digital distribution, and then they pivoted to... And then they started getting pushback from the content providers, and they pivoted to original content, right? So they really did two almost complete company pivots, but their core maze was right, right?

    5. AAAnish Acharya27:05

       Mm-hmm.

    6. CDChris Dixon27:05

       Their core maze was like the internet will lead to subscription movies in some broad sense-

    7. AAAnish Acharya27:11

       Mm-hmm.

    8. CDChris Dixon27:11

       -was correct, but then they were extremely agile with respect to the implementation of that, right? And so I think to me that's, you know, that, that's the idea maze concept is you're sort of, you're, you're entering a maze. As an investor and as a founder, you need to think, "Am I a person who wants to be in this maze for ten years? Am I willing-

    9. AAAnish Acharya27:27

       Mm-hmm.

    10. CDChris Dixon27:27

        -to be, you know, agile and, and, and oft- and often, you know, persevere through difficult periods?" Um, it's often emotionally challenging, I think, but not just intellectually challenging. Um, and so, so that's kind of the, the life of a startup. Now, when you think about AI, look, we have a very clear mega trend of these, you know, of AI being ex- you know, it's intelligence. It's, it's a very broad, um, and important, uh, technology. Obviously, every- I think everyone knows that. And then secondly, you have these scaling laws, which seem to be, you know, which seem to be quite powerful, right? It's the, the models are getting much better. And then I think an important distinction there would be there's specific scaling things like LLM pre-training or something, which I think people may have debates about, you know, at what point do you have diminishing returns? Maybe we're hitting that, I don't know.

    11. AAAnish Acharya28:18

        Mm-hmm.

    12. CDChris Dixon28:19

        Defer to the experts. Um, but then there's that sort of a process, but then there's the meta process, and the meta process is AI overall, right? There's people working on whatever, uh, reinforcement learning, and I'm sure-

    13. AAAnish Acharya28:29

        Oh, yeah.

    14. CDChris Dixon28:30

        -a hundred different techniques.

    15. AAAnish Acharya28:31

        Mm-hmm.

    16. CDChris Dixon28:31

        Now AI, the sort of meta process, which means like it's at this point really an economic phenomenon, um, which is there's all of these smart people there. There's business models behind it. There's funding, right? There's not just one process. There's many processes being explored. Kind of reminding me of Moore's law, like from the outside Moore's law, I think, like naively, I'm not a semiconductor person, is like, wow, these semiconductors magically get better every two years. If you read books about it, I've read a few books about it, from their perspective, they run, you know, some fabrication technique, hits a wall, they freak out, and then some brilliant person from another lab comes up with a new fabrication technique.

    17. AAAnish Acharya29:06

        Mm-hmm.

    18. CDChris Dixon29:07

        Right? And so it was always each process would run, you know, and have diminishing returns asymptote at some point, you know. But the meta process, the sort of the gi- the bigger industry flywheel-

    19. AAAnish Acharya29:18

        Mm-hmm.

    20. CDChris Dixon29:19

        -uh, did not, you know, led to this smooth growth. I think, uh, my sense is AI's in that kind of, you know, semiconductor-like place where you have this meta process that's very likely to continue scaling exponentially for a very long time, and that creates a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs. It's also a challenge, right? I mean, the opportunity obviously is you can build things with the, the capabilities will grow. There'll be all these new opportunities and so forth. The challenge is, you know, are the incumbent models gonna be sort of God models that subsume your use cases, and how do you kind of play that, right? [chuckles] Um, and so, you know, I think what you're seeing, right, is that you see people say, "Well, I'm gonna go so deep on a domain, um, that that will be my edge. You know, I know everything about this specific domain, and I, and I know that, you know, no matter, no matter what the, you know, incumbent models do, I'll always be able to have an edge in my product, or I'll have such a good brand recognition, or strong user base, or reference selling or whatever it might be," right?

    21. AAAnish Acharya30:12

        Mm-hmm.

    22. CDChris Dixon30:13

        Um, so I think that's the both kind of threat. And I mean, if you go back in the hist- like with the semiconductor analogy I mentioned, like, you know, the canonical case study in, um, in, in Clay Christensen's, uh, Innovator's Dilemma book is, uh, you know, the hard, the PC industry, the hard drive makers, you know. And it was this very like kind of-Fruit fly Darwinian struggle where you just had like thousands of companies and very short life cycles for a lot of the companies. Um, but you know, but then a lot of very successful companies. So, you know, it's, it's gonna be, it may be a very kind of brutal process, um, for, for entrepreneurs in the sense of just like a lot of competition, a lot of other smart people, you know, very dynamic i-ideamas, but also massive opportunity.

11. 30:55 – 34:20

    Native vs. Skeuomorphic Technologies

    1. AAAnish Acharya30:55

       H-how do you think, Chris, about native versus skeuomorphic technologies in that context? You know, everything is changing, especially when you're building for consumer. Does the consumer change their preferences when they get, you know, this magical new technology is invented? Or in a sense, does the emergence of the native technologies also dependent on sort of consumer preferences changing and being informed by these external forces about things like AI?

    2. CDChris Dixon31:17

       Yeah, great question. So just maybe I'll define the term versus skeuomorphic native. What skeuomorphic, um, is a term Steve Jobs used to use with respect to design to talk about how he likes some design, like the original book, bookshelf app, book app on the iPhone-

    3. AAAnish Acharya31:32

       Mm-hmm

    4. CDChris Dixon31:33

       ... had like grainy, grainy stuff in the background.

    5. AAAnish Acharya31:35

       [laughs]

    6. CDChris Dixon31:35

       Design that kind of took or the trash can on the, on the, you know, on the desktop, computer desktop-

    7. AAAnish Acharya31:41

       Mm-hmm

    8. CDChris Dixon31:41

       ... sort of, you know, right, it, it hearkens back to a, to a different, uh, form factor. Is a common pattern in technology and media is when you have a new, uh, a new platform or media form, um, develop, is that people start off kind of imitating prior media forms. So early films, you know, were shot sort of like plays with a camera and a better distribution model, and then people kind of invented a native grammar of film. Um, and, you know, close-ups and establishing shots and all, all those kinds of things. Um, early internet, a lot of the '90s internet looked like, you know, you take like a cat- a catalog, you know, a, a, a commerce catalog and put it online or a brochure-

    9. AAAnish Acharya32:20

       Right

    10. CDChris Dixon32:20

        ... and put it online. And it took ten to fifteen years before you had things like YouTube and, you know, modern social networking and things that really just couldn't have existed prior to the internet, you know, user generated, anyone can upload a video and things. So I think some of it is, um, some of it's the technology, like YouTube you couldn't have had until you had really wide broadband penetration, right? So some of it's the underlying technology takes a while to kinda get there. Um, YouTube also, you know, when it started off, it was just like f-funny viral videos. A lot of it was copyright violations. It took a while to develop kind of native YouTubers, right? Content creators.

    11. AAAnish Acharya32:52

        Mm-hmm.

    12. CDChris Dixon32:53

        So that's often just like a generational thing, I think. I think it literally is a new generation sometimes, right? People that just, that, that don't look at the technology as a threat, but as an opportunity. Um, and, um, and so that, you know, that was a big part of it. Um, and then part of it's the entrepreneurs just have to figure out the, it's the ideamas thing, right? They just have to figure it out, like, what do people want? Like, a lot of people, there was a lot of debates in around YouTube's time as to people want just take football and, you know, take NFL and stream it to the web. There were a lot of companies doing that.

    13. AAAnish Acharya33:21

        Mm-hmm.

    14. CDChris Dixon33:21

        Tastes aren't gonna change. Why would people wanna watch, you know, f-four people joke around or something, right?

    15. AAAnish Acharya33:27

        [laughs]

    16. CDChris Dixon33:27

        Maybe there were analogs, like is that like talk radio or is it this? But it just, they, they really just didn't understand. So, you know, I, I don't think human nature cha-- I mean, obviously there's a new generation with different ideas. I mean, I don't think fundamentally humans changed, you know, in, in a, in a deeper sense. But, but, you know, it was understanding the capabilities of technology, the cultural shifts around it, the network effect around it. And so with, you know, I, I personally think with AI, a really interesting question, and I'm sure you've thought much more deeply about it than I have. It does... I mean, most likely we're in a skeuomorphic phase right now.

    17. AAAnish Acharya33:59

        That's right.

    18. CDChris Dixon34:00

        Um, and, and what is the native phase gonna look like? Like, what is-- I think it's going to be... And usually that, for me at least personally, I like the native phase better 'cause it's kinda crazier-

    19. AAAnish Acharya34:08

        Yeah

    20. CDChris Dixon34:08

        ... and more interesting. Um, and, you know, so what would a, you know, if you look at image generation, they're kind of just basically taking what illustrators do and-

    21. AAAnish Acharya34:18

        Yeah

    22. CDChris Dixon34:18

        ... um, but one, one thing I would mention

12. 34:20 – 36:54

    New Art Media and Prompt Engineering

    1. CDChris Dixon34:20

       is, um, like, a, a cool thing with, with photography, I think, is that, you know, when it first came along, it seemed like a threat to representative painting, and you saw kind of art move to more abstract art to kind of-

    2. AAAnish Acharya34:34

       Mm-hmm

    3. CDChris Dixon34:34

       ... get away from that. And I think, you know, you go back and read stuff at the time, and there was a lot of kind of hand-wringing around that, like, is this gonna, you know, kind of cheapen this art form? Um, but, but an interesting thing happened, right, which is a new art form emerged, which was film, right? So you took, you took-

    4. AAAnish Acharya34:49

       Right

    5. CDChris Dixon34:49

       ... it wasn't just you, you copying... So in some sense, like, pho-photographs were the skeuomorphic kind of quote unquote "app" of cameras.

    6. AAAnish Acharya34:57

       That's right.

    7. CDChris Dixon34:57

       But film was a native one, right? You had a new art form. Um, and I wonder about that with AI. Like, right now you have the kind of image generation, which is kind of, you know, taking what a human might do and automating it and movie generation and the other kind of videos we see online. Um, but is there a new medium, for example, that hasn't emerged yet? Is it, you know, maybe it's, uh, virtual worlds or something. There's probably a bunch of hypotheses-

    8. AAAnish Acharya35:18

       That's right

    9. CDChris Dixon35:18

       ... as to what it could be, but my experience has been, is often surprising, and it's hard to predict. Um, but that's where a lot of the cool, creative, interesting stuff comes in. It may, it may take another generation or, you know, five to ten years for like a new set of AI-native kinda kids to grow up.

    10. AAAnish Acharya35:34

        That's right. Yeah, it's actually really interesting 'cause we're in a sense, we're in the command line era of AI, and there's some things that, you know, you can articulate well with words. But if I describe to you like what kind of music do you like, it's hard to say... You know, we don't have the language for it, most people, to say, "Well, I like a certain sound with a certain sort of aesthetic, and it's moody, but not too moody, and it's 110 beats per minute." Like, most people lack the language to articulate the art that they love.

    11. CDChris Dixon35:58

        Mm-hmm.

    12. AAAnish Acharya35:59

        So even the idea of prompt to media feels skeuomorphic, and there's gotta be like a more native way to explore it. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I'd be surprised if it's prompts in the long term.

    13. CDChris Dixon36:10

        I mean, prompt, like, I guess people are now calling it context engineering, not prompt engineering, which I think is a nice-

    14. AAAnish Acharya36:15

        Yeah

    15. CDChris Dixon36:15

        ... or some people are, right? Which is-

    16. AAAnish Acharya36:16

        Yeah

    17. CDChris Dixon36:16

        ... I think is a nice rephrasing, 'cause that is kind of what you're doing, right? Is you're taking the fact that all of this stuff I do in the real world that ChatGPT isn't able to see, right? And I'm trying to summarize all that knowledge that's, that's hidden to it, the context, and put it in there, right? Um-And that does feel like something that should be automated, right? [chuckles]

    18. AAAnish Acharya36:35

        Yeah. Yeah.

    19. CDChris Dixon36:36

        If you have the intelligent machines. And I think that's what people... I assume that's what they're doing with these potentially new ambient devices people are creating.

    20. AAAnish Acharya36:43

        Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I mean, even in the media case, you know, like my Spotify library is probably much more useful for generating music that I like versus my articulation of it.

    21. CDChris Dixon36:52

        That's right.

    22. AAAnish Acharya36:53

        You'd mentioned

13. 36:54 – 42:53

    Open-Source AI & The Future of Technology

    1. AAAnish Acharya36:54

       in another pod that, you know, if you had one, one sort of issue to get passionate about in the world of AI was open source and open-source AI. Do, do you wanna speak to that for a moment?

    2. CDChris Dixon37:02

       Well, we were talking earlier about the democratization of the web or how kind of consolidated the internet is or technology is. I, I, you know, I think I would argue, and I think a lot of people would argue, that open-source software has been an incredibly important force for democratizing technology, right? I mean, the reason that you can get a, a Android phone for ten dollars and, and get on the internet so cheaply, right, is your-- is that basically all the software is free. I mean, imagine if there was no open source and, you know, operating system providers used to charge a hundred dollars, and you'd be paying that on client and maybe on the back end, and there's a whole other set of stack of software that you'd be paying for and, instead you're not. Most, most internet users are, you know, the vast majority of the kind of bits being hit are, are open source. Um, it also is what makes, you know, startups exist, right? We can fund startups, and they can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and, you know, or even less sometimes and be up and running-

    3. AAAnish Acharya37:57

       Mm-hmm

    4. CDChris Dixon37:57

       ...with, you know, really competitive, great software, and that's because of open source, right? So, so we, you know, I think about a lot, and, and I think, you know, on a policy side as a firm, we've been a big advocates for, you know, making sure open source is around and competitive. Um, and you know, first that means not banning it, which there are bills out there, particularly at the state level, that wanna put in, you know, not explicit bans, but de facto bans. So, like, for example, California had a bill that would've, would've created unlimited downstream liability for software developers, which would've effectively killed open source. So that's step number one. And then I think step number two is, you know, are the incentives there to create open source? I think... I watched a, a interview, I think it was a dorkish interview with Satya from Microsoft recently. It was a really good interview. Um, he argued that open source will always exist because enterprise customers always demand at least one kind of open-source alternative. Like, they'll just, they'll, they'll end up funding it.

    5. AAAnish Acharya38:52

       Interesting. Okay.

    6. CDChris Dixon38:52

       Um, and that's why you always see kind of this proprietary open source, um, you know, combo. But then you have, you know, Facebook is doing with Llama. I don't know if they'll continue to do that. There are some startups doing it. You know, China has been very into open source. Maybe that's a kind of a s- national strategy. Maybe that changes at some. Maybe you do it at first to kind of create attention and kind of marketing, and then you change it. Um, you know, I wish there were more, uh, you know... It's just the thing with AI that's different than operating systems, like with operating systems and databases, you just need a, a bunch of coders sitting around. With AI, you need massive capital expenditure to, to train the models. Um, so I just don't know long... I think it's an unknown question long term. Are there good steady state funding models for open source? I think a, I think a possible outcome, which I think is pr-pretty good outcome, is open source is just always a little bit behind, like the way OpenAI is now releasing older models.

    7. AAAnish Acharya39:47

       Yeah. Yeah.

    8. CDChris Dixon39:48

       And I think that's probably a fine outcome, like for startups to exist, for consum-- you know. We want consumers to get inexpensive healthcare advice. You know, the, the next best model in five years-

    9. AAAnish Acharya40:00

       Yeah

    10. CDChris Dixon40:00

        ...will probably be good enough. For most startups, it will probably be good enough.

    11. AAAnish Acharya40:04

        Yeah.

    12. CDChris Dixon40:04

        And then for the, you know, super high-end stuff, you, people pay for it. And, and maybe that's a good outcome, a good kind of equilibrium state, and maybe that's where we're headed. I, I hope so. Um, I think it would be re-- I think it would just be a bad outcome if you had four companies that had, you know, just vastly better closed-source technology and could effectively, you know, kind of charge rent to consumers and startups.

    13. AAAnish Acharya40:26

        Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's interesting. I think a lot about the early ethos of Android, which felt like it matched Google's sort of open web mindset. And then when it became clear that iOS was beating their pants off by being a closed ecosystem, Android became very closed and started to mimic the sort of closed iOS strategies. So we'll see what happens with Meta and Llama if they sort of replicate that, but that, that's a worrying dynamic. I think that the more optimistic case is that we haven't yet seen the same sort of app platform feedback loop and the lock-in that you get from the foundation models. So, you know, th-there is sort of a case for them to continue to release the next best model and for the models to be somewhat substitutes for each other, um, so far.

    14. CDChris Dixon41:09

        Yeah, the Android case is a good kind of, I think, cautionary tale, right? Because I, I think maybe in some technical sense, some of the code is open source, but it de facto isn't, right, all the services, everything else-

    15. AAAnish Acharya41:18

        That's right. That's right

    16. CDChris Dixon41:18

        ...like unique information. Um, and it was one where, yeah, where they kind of made lots of overtures that way. Um, so that would be, yeah, that would be the worry. But it does seem... I think it feels a lot better than it did three years ago or something with the China, the China open source stuff, the, um-

    17. AAAnish Acharya41:33

        Yeah

    18. CDChris Dixon41:33

        ...policy stuff is better. We're seeing, you know, the fact that, that OpenAI is doing older models, like it, it seems like we're in a better spot for open source. I think some of it's also the scaremongering that like a chatbot's gonna murder everyone or something is sort-

    19. AAAnish Acharya41:45

        [laughs]

    20. CDChris Dixon41:46

        ...is like, it's like-

    21. AAAnish Acharya41:47

        I mean, that's-

    22. CDChris Dixon41:47

        ...like literally zero people have died from ChatGPT so far as far as, you know. It's just the whole, you know. So I think that maybe people are chilling out on and, um-

    23. AAAnish Acharya41:55

        Yeah

    24. CDChris Dixon41:56

        ...so it feels like we're in a much better spot. I'm cautiously optimistic on open source.

    25. AAAnish Acharya42:00

        Yeah, two years ago, the conversation was a lot about, you know, if OpenAI is the only game in town, over time, they take all the economics of the complements, and it doesn't feel like that's happened, which is, you know, to your point in the amazing book about ballooning, it feels like that's why there's a lot of interest in acquiring IDs because they understand that, like, if the foundation models start to become more interchangeable, they're gonna have to move upstream and own, you know, user-facing economics. Amazing. Well, Chris, thank you so much. It's great to hear you talk about sort of consumer and AI and, and all the implications. Um, and we're, we're super thankful to have you at the firm.

    26. CDChris Dixon42:34

        Well, thank you. Thank you. This was fun. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 42:54