Rebuilding the Internet for Privacy | Barrett Lyon on DoxxNet

a16z’s Joel de la Garza sits down with DoxxNet founder Barrett Lyon to discuss what it would take to rebuild the internet around privacy, direct communication, and less dependence on centralized intermediaries. Barrett explains why he thinks traditional VPNs only solve part of the problem and how DoxxNet is building a parallel mesh network where users can communicate peer-to-peer, transfer large files, make calls, and message without routing those interactions through a central application server. He also explains why the company owns its infrastructure and runs its AI systems locally rather than relying on third-party inference providers. doxxnet_assembly They also get into the growing amount of tracking embedded across the internet, what happens when that data can be analyzed by increasingly capable AI, and why Barrett believes the underlying protocols of the internet are due for another wave of experimentation. Along the way, he shares lessons from decades of building internet infrastructure, from fighting early DDoS attacks to mapping the internet and building global networks.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Joel de la Garza?

  We're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin-operated intelligence at scale.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  The internet has really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design. There's like not a lot of new stuff. All of it's built on top. Erasing that is kind of what I'm trying to go for.

• 0:16Joel de la Garza?

  What you're saying is you've actually built this transient way for folks to connect and chat without there being any record.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  The really big problem is on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Telegram. All of those applications disguise themselves as you sending something to somebody else. But you're really sending something to a server. The question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those?

• 0:37Joel de la Garza?

  It's coming at such an important inflection point for like the future of our country tech. And to just have this conversation that seems to be manipulated to some extent.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  It feels very manipulated. And to me, the future of our tech is needing to build this infrastructure now. If we're crippling it.

• 0:51Erik Torenberg?

  The internet was designed to connect people directly. Today, much of what we do online passes through someone else's server, along with an enormous amount of data about us. In this episode, A16Z's Joel de la Garza sits down with internet infrastructure pioneer Barrett Lyon to talk about DoxxNet, his attempt to rethink that architecture from the ground up. Barrett explains why VPNs aren't enough, how DoxxNet enables encrypted peer-to-peer communication without a central server sitting in the middle, and why the company owns its infrastructure all the way down to the hardware. They also discuss what happens when decades of online tracking meet cheap AI, why Barrett thinks internet protocol development has stagnated, and what it would take to bring back some of the openness and experimentation of the early internet.

• 1:38Joel de la Garza?

  Well, today we're joined by Barrett Lyon, perhaps the most, one of the most interesting people in tech. I have a lot of stories to share and I am always kind of blown away every time we catch up because you tell me a new story that just puts everything I've ever done in ail and comparison. And I think the most interesting one I heard recently, and I had never heard it before. And this was during a period, I believe, where we were investors in your previous company, was you are a pilot, you have a pilot's license, and you decided to optimize your life by flying places. And you had an unfortunate experience, I believe, flying back from one of our meetings.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, one day I was driving to work in the Bay Area and I realized it was almost 45 minutes, which used to be 15. And my family lives up in the Tahoe region. So I'm like, well, I think the plane can fly there in about the same time. Maybe I could just commute that way. And that was before work from home was like codified by COVID. So I had like a need to physically be present. So yeah, I started flying and.

• 2:38Joel de la Garza?

  So your daily driver was a daily flyer?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. So I put 1,300 hours on a Cirrus. And yeah, one day after a meeting here, I left and got in the plane, took off from San Carlos and somewhere over Oakland Airport, engine started acting up. And I thought maybe it was like some sort of water in the fuel or something. But I climbed up, cleared Bravo and felt like it was okay. And then right after that thought, lost pretty much all power.

• 3:11Joel de la Garza?

  And what went through your head immediately after that?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually I messaged my friends and said, hey, guys, I have an emergency. Love you. I don't know, I just declared emergency and just tried to think, okay, where do I crash and not hurt people? I found a field and then it turns out I was up pretty high. And there was a giant airport right next to us, not Oakland, but it was Buchanan Field. I forget the name of the town. And it's a giant old military airport.

• 3:38Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, Alameda?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  No, it was the other one, on the other side of the mountain range there. Buchanan Field is the name of it, I believe. But anyway, landed there. But before that, I kind of went to this field and I was like, all right, well, I've got a parachute, ballistics parachute. Do I pull it? And I was thinking, all right, well, when I read all these crash reports, the reason the pilot dies is because they didn't use the parachute.

• 3:59Joel de la Garza?

  Absolutely.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I'm like, well, the airport's right there and I'm still in the air flying.

• 4:02Joel de la Garza?

  And isn't that a funny quirk of that plane? That it's technically the safest plane ever made, but yet it's involved in the most crashes because people never use a safety feature?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and I mean, it does work, but it destroys the plane too. So shoots a rock out of the back of the tail and rips all this stuff out and ruins the plane. So, and then it's not a guarantee that you're going to land nicely on the ground. And in fact, the seats, I think, are made with a crumple impact thing. So when you do hit the ground, it absorbs some compression.

• 4:30Joel de la Garza?

  And this is all playing out over how long a period of time?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know, probably like minutes or less, maybe less. And then anyway, I just made the call to land and landed, rolled right onto the transient parking spot. I was calm, I was kind of frustrated and a little confused like when I got out of the plane. And then, you know, those big fire truck things, the huge ones? That look like some kid made them, but they're big. The guy gets out of that, shakes my hand, and then that's when the fear hit me. Cause I'm like, that's the guy scraping my brains off. I'm like, well, no, this is the guy that puts the fire out. Like, that was close. Then I'm like, now what do I do? I have to get home somehow. Rent a car or drive home. That was kind of the end of it for me. I was like, the risk is too high.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And I kept the plane for a while and ended up ferrying it out to Las Vegas and selling it, but.

• 5:20Joel de la Garza?

  Did you ever find out what the issue, where the cause was?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like three really weird things at the same time. One was a piece of metal on the air intake control valve, or kind of a lever broke off and sucked into the air intake manifold. And then it went down to the oil pan and it was crushed into cylinder three and six, I think.

• 5:39Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  And then that caused an electrical problem with something with the spark, which was controlled by a brand new electronic ignition system. That stopped working. And so then I lost half ignition. And then at the same time, my Magneto on the other side, which is the backup, also stopped working.

• 6:00Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So it was like three, it was like a cascading, strange failure. And then it was also weird too, because on the ground, the Magneto was kind of working a little bit. So it would start, but then when you went to higher RPMs, it just went bye-bye. So anyway, yeah, so that's what it was. It took a while to figure it out, but yeah, that was an interesting travel. Happens.

• 6:24Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, now you understand why the pope kisses the ground when he gets off the plane, right?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, if there's ever another plane in my life, it will have less moving parts.

• 6:33Joel de la Garza?

  Hopefully a backup, backup pilots and redundancy.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you fly a lot, you kind of, you're increasing your, I guess, your risk level a little bit.

• 6:42Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah. And that sort of probably triggered a lot of things. I know we're here to talk about your new venture, which sort of is something very, I'd say very different for you. It seems more like a more close to home, more important. And so maybe we can talk a bit about Docs.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:57Joel de la Garza?

  And why you decided to build. Well, first of all, what is it? What caused you to do it? And kind of maybe you're thinking around why this is important, why now?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so DoxxNet, first of all, maybe I should explain the name. As a kid, my hacker name was Dox. And then I started a business in high school with my high school friend called DoxxNet. It was before cloud and we were renting server, basically giving user accounts for money. Totally legit business and in high school, we're making pretty good money.

• 7:24Joel de la Garza?

  Were these shell accounts?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, shell accounts. So we were selling shell accounts for $5 a month, but we had 1,000 users. And we had all these features and people liked it. And there was actually a little community around it for a while. Got out of high school and shut it all down and started my career. But I kept the domain. And also I'm very fascinated about protocol design and the fact that the internet has really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design. There's like not a lot of new stuff, all of it's built on top. So there's that. And then just noticing the shift of censorship and people's privacy being eroded and all of this kind of thing, kind of, and then the uprising of VPN made it really interesting to make a kind of an alternative network

• 8:07Speaker 01

  that kind of is designed from the ground up to protect people from advertisers, trackers, malware, and foreign adversaries trying to learn about what you're doing.

• 8:20Joel de la Garza?

  Well, I mean, the original promise of the internet was this incredible marketplace of ideas, unrestricted, no censorship, right? I think a lot of original, or a lot of the original people around the founding of what became the internet were free speech maximalists. And it was sort of a very specific crowd. And I think over the last couple of years, that to your point is, has shifted pretty incredibly, right?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's in the hands of a few. So, you know, for example, China is a good example, is China Netcom, China Telecom. And those, or is it China Netcom? Yeah, anyway, either way, it's a pretty good chokehold of the entire population using that network as an opportunity to force people into different decision-making processes. And the internet originally, like you said, is kind of designed with this like more open kind of concept. So bringing that back, one of the things I was kind of interested in doing, trying to figure out new ways of doing things that might kind of leverage before the internet. Way back in the day, wireless networking was what? Aloha net or something like that? It was like wireless through packet modems and things. But now we have really high powerful wifi on the edge,

• 9:27Speaker 01

  incredible opportunities to create better mesh protocols and better P2P. And kind of really, one of the biggest stains of the entire internet is carrier-grade net. It's just destroying applications' ability to do really cool stuff. And erasing that is kind of what I'm trying to go for.

• 9:45Joel de la Garza?

  Gotcha. And also I think one of the interesting things is we always talk about sort of foreign governments restricting internet access, right? We harp on China and Russia. But I was in a state recently that has a know your customer rule. And they were requiring or blocking access to certain websites. Whatever they define as being inappropriate. It could be a health website, it could be whatever. And so we're actually seeing the creep of kind of this censorship even within the United States.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's creeping into the US. And it's being done in a way that's kind of odd because a lot of times they're asking the network to solve an identity problem. And the network doesn't do identity.

• 10:24Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, it has a hammer and it's going to hammer the nail.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  An IP address is not your driver's license. And asking people to do network restrictions based off of age and things like that, it makes a lot of sense, but in a different place in the stack.

• 10:39Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  You know, if they want to restrict things for certain reasons, then that should be done in a much different way and not asking the network to do it. So yeah, I think that we're starting to see that in the United States. We're seeing it definitely elsewhere. And it's also not just with like age restrictions, but an interesting problem popped up the other day where Google or Cisco umbrella broke for like a major carrier. Cause they classified that carrier as France. They're not even in France really, as far as their corporate structure goes. But France had a rule requiring them to block like 100 plus piracy sites. And they said, no, we're going to go scorched earth, we're just going to block France.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Well, then there's the blast radius of that, which is, okay, well, then if your geo provider accidentally identifies somebody's the wrong location, then you're also now part of that policy.

• 11:34Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And it's terrible.

• 11:36Joel de la Garza?

  Those classifications are always the worst. I mean, we were looking at, we were looking at an investment opportunity in a company that makes chatbots that are focused on more like partnership type stuff or companionship type stuff. And half of the classifications engines classified it as adult content. And you're just sort of like, okay, well, this is like a legitimate, like, you know, e-partner, e-spouse site. Like, it's not doing the untoward stuff.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've run into that a little bit, too.

• 12:03Joel de la Garza?

  Docs.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Because it's got two X's in it, and then also.

• 12:07Joel de la Garza?

  You're hitting a signature, yeah?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it actually worked out in our favor, because we got flagged, I think, with Claude. And then we applied with, you know, the proper means to go through their registration process, and they opened up everything for us, which was quite nice.

• 12:24Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, nice. That's great.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:25Joel de la Garza?

  And so maybe, I mean, I think so, you know, this creeping sort of, the creeping information totalitarianism has given birth to a whole bunch of products, of which we know we're all super familiar with, right? And VPNs is probably the most, most, most common. And so maybe it'd be great to hear a little bit about sort of why the existing tools, I don't know, why are you building docs? How is it different? Maybe we could double-click a bit on, on sort of your thoughts around it.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 12:53Joel de la Garza?

  Interesting part.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So, a lot of the VPNs, I would say, are just entry and exit points. So they're operating, they lease a server from a landlord and set up a, their software on it, and then you connect to it encrypted, and then your requests and things that you do on the internet come out that node.

• 13:14Joel de la Garza?

  And that's to solve the, your IP address is your identity problem?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it kind of, kind of is a way around that, I guess. But it's also kind of, people feel like there's more security to that, and I could argue against that. But, you know, it's very basic. It's not, if you think about it, that, those networks are real-time adjustable, you could apply APIs to everything, and all of a sudden, you could say, all right, well, here's an API that your agent can use that can build an entire network. And you're just using the VPN protocols as a way to get into that area. And then inside, we can create, either, you can call it a walled garden, or a parallel internet, or wherever you want to call it, but we built an entire mesh network, 196 different domains that don't exist on the internet.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  You can register domains, you can lease IP addresses, you can lease mesh addresses or public addresses, create policy, all within like milliseconds.

• 14:10Joel de la Garza?

  Gotcha.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So it's a whole different ecosystem in there. And then on top of that, we've been able to use that system, since we can kind of control it, to create P2P applications that actually work. So like phone calling, video call, chat, all of those things that sit best of class on top of the app, run across the mesh network, and it's all encrypted.

• 14:35Joel de la Garza?

  Gotcha.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  No phone numbers, no email addresses, no names, no, no nothing.

• 14:42Joel de la Garza?

  So it's funny, it's funny, and that's, that's, that's phenomenal, because I think, you know, we're, we're, we're both pretty well steeped in the security space. And, you know, I think I come from sort of a, I've had it drilled into my head, that if you want to have a private conversation, don't do it anywhere with anything with a battery or an electrical signal, right?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:02Joel de la Garza?

  And so, and so what you're saying is, you've actually built this sort of like transient way for folks to connect and chat without there being any record.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you create your account, you just have to prove you're human by doing a little puzzle. Once you do that, you get a token, it's yours. You can change it, you can delete your account, make a new one. But once you're in there, you can create a certificate and share it with a friend. You don't really know you're doing it, it just says, invite friend, and it looks kind of like normal. But it's actually doing a cryptographic exchange with each other, and then you have extra privileges.

• 15:39Joel de la Garza?

  I think the key lesson of PKI was actually, if you tell people it's PKI, it's not going to work. So, yeah, you have to kind of abstract that layer away, right?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, well, it's not even PKI, it's private key, it's not public. So, anyway, you, you and your friend just decided, okay, we trust each other. Now, that unlocks the ability for the phones over the mesh network to talk to each other directly. And then all of a sudden, you have all these really cool file transfer stuff, which has no file size limit. The really big problem is on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Telegram, and by the way, Telegram's creepy. All of those applications disguise themselves as you sending something to somebody else. But you're really sending something to a server, and then the server is then having the other person pull that. So if you upload a file, you're uploading it.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And also, the upload infrastructure isn't always as distributed, or doesn't, might even be a little bit slow. You might be in one part of the US and you're uploading it to another, so the upload's a little slow. So when we use our applications, it extracts all of that, it's gone. So it's really no middleman, no server in the middle, and your phone becomes a server to your friend. And it's fast. It works great. You can send 20 gigabyte file to each other.

• 16:57Joel de la Garza?

  20 gigabytes, private network, point-to-point.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:00Joel de la Garza?

  No latency, wow.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  With like three layers, four layers of encryption.

• 17:03Joel de la Garza?

  Gotcha.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's post-quantum, and, I mean, these are really nice tools to have.

• 17:09Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  So, I don't know, when you start stacking up all of these things, it's, DoxxNet is kind of like this giant toolkit for freedom of speech, I guess.

• 17:18Joel de la Garza?

  Freedom from surveillance.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we should talk about that, too.

• 17:22Joel de la Garza?

  Which is what's interesting. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, Telegram is creepy. I, I, I would say, I think I find all, it just seems like a lot of the VPN, I don't want to say all, because it's an absolutist term, but it seems like a lot of the VPNs are very creepy, right? And, and without bashing on anyone specific, I think for me, the most illustrative story was in the, in the news, there was, there was actually an issue where a bunch of organized criminals were arrested across the world. Australia, I believe, had arrested some, the US had arrested some. And it turned out that the FBI had built a secure messaging app, and then marketed it exclusively to organized criminal groups. And so, these guys are like, don't trust Signal, because that's the NSA.

• 18:07Joel de la Garza?

  Let's, let's use, let's use this app, because this is safe and only five people use it. And it turned out that they all got indicted, because, and they're, I think most of them are in prison now. And so like, in the US, right, we've seen this activity. And then if you look on any app store, and you look for VPN, you probably find 50 VPNs that are all hosted abroad.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Well, if it's free, there's nothing free.

• 18:33Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And if you're not paying for it, you are the product. You're being eaten alive. You know, the United States has pretty cool laws, we can use them to protect people. And so DoxxNet's US-based, but we also have a Swiss company that handles all of European operations, so there's separation between the operations between the two regions, we're doing other regions like that, too. So it's, you know, corporate governance actually matters in these, these types of situations. But like, you know, I just don't feel comfortable with my data going to a company that doesn't talk about who owns it, why they exist, other than privacy. You know, we made a very, very conscious decision that we're very open about what

• 19:19Speaker 01

  we're doing, who's involved, why, why the decisions have been made those ways, and it's also kind of to drive community, too. But, yeah, there are creepy VPNs out there.

• 19:31Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, and, and, you know, and it's not just, I mean, it's funny, because we like to talk about nation-states, we like to talk about intelligence agencies, right? Like CIA, NSA, these are all super cool. But in reality, like, the risks are a lot more low-level than that, right? Like, and, you know, for some of these, there were instances at the beginning of sort of the crypto, the initial cryptocurrency waves, where people's accounts were getting drained, and they were using some of these services that were in other countries. And it turns out that, like, you know, in some of these countries, you have the meshing together of the intelligence state apparatus and organized crime, right? And so, and so you, you see where these things start to bleed into each other.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and then people look at the policies for the VPNs, oh, no logs, no this. And, but the question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those?

• 20:24Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Are they owned by big brand VPN, or are they leased? And if they're leased, who are they leased from? And what are those people doing with the data? And what are their policies? But there's, there's that whole underbelly, and, and learning about that has been difficult, because I personally was not up to be, you know, building infrastructure all over the world as rapidly as I could, but I ended up realizing that that was, you know, if it's not your equipment, you can't set policy. It's just, you can't. And then, then the next layer of policy is the, the carriers and interconnect beyond, beyond your cage, or whatever it is. So it's been an incredible amount of work to work around.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  You know, the bare metal is a service, kind of creepy underbelly.

• 21:14Joel de la Garza?

  And this is like one big difference with, I think, a lot of folks, right? Is that you own the full stack from like software to wire.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, software to wire and even all the AI components that run routing and things like that are all on our on our metal.

• 21:31Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and I think that was, that was one of the funny things, I think, when we originally started talking about this was

• 21:37Joel de la Garza?

  you were, you were incredibly distrusting of large inference and AI providers.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:43Joel de la Garza?

  And, and you've built your own AI stack.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:46Joel de la Garza?

  That's, and so, so, I mean, GPUs are in shortage. It's data, the power is hard to get. Everybody's anti data center now, like, how did you pull that off in probably six months?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Very efficiently. Well, I mean, we built, so far, it's like 26 sites around the world with a dozen routing and.

• 22:05Joel de la Garza?

  And how many employees in the company?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  A total, I think, the people involved is 12.

• 22:10Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, wow.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:11Joel de la Garza?

  Okay.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  And we have no network administrator, no sysadmin. It's all done by AI. So, and it's actually working quite well. I'm, I kind of, I'm kind of on top of it. The nice thing, though, if you think about our footprint of like,

• 22:29Speaker 01

  who's involved, you know, we don't have a thousand employees with access to this network.

• 22:33Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Me, you know, the, the, the blast radius of just the corporate structure is very minimal.

• 22:41Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, no, that's, that's impressive. And I think, you know, the, I think the, the, you know, the thing we very rarely talk about, because it's kind of uncomfortable, is just how great an extent insider threat is.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:52Joel de la Garza?

  And how it's like the most crippling catastrophic cyber attacks are always sort of the insider threat angle. And now you're saying with agents, like, you're kind of elite, you're eliminating at least a good portion of that risk.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's running in its own, you know, secure environment that's not exporting data to like, one of the big AI companies. So all the contacts and inference and stuff stays inside. And we have it secured and we monitor all our equipment with cameras and no one goes in and touches anything.

• 23:24Joel de la Garza?

  Do you have agents that watch the camera footage?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, well, I mean, technically, we don't, but the camera companies that made the agents do. Yeah, we get alarms if something moves and something like, you know, something goes around. But, you know, we even thought about putting lasers in a couple of the spots, but.

• 23:40Joel de la Garza?

  Trying to make it Mission Impossible style?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  I'm like, why not? It'd be kind of fun.

• 23:43Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah. You gotta have the one data center that you take people to.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:47Joel de la Garza?

  To impress them, right? That's the, like the switch data centers in Las Vegas, you know, they got the, the jeeps with the 50 cal machine guns on them. You gotta.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I do, I love lasers and I did this big, anyway, long story short, we did look into it and even got the, the light actuated switches. So if the beams did break, it would actually set off the alarms and things. But just the problem was the data center doesn't turn off the lights. So you don't get to see this really cool display.

• 24:18Joel de la Garza?

  Gotcha.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And there's no dust in there and there's no particles.

• 24:21Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  So.

• 24:22Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, you can't bring in some talcum powder, because that'll.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  No, it's like, oh, let's, let's smoke up the data center for the laser show.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  That's the other thing that started me crazy is people like, don't understand data centers at all.

• 24:34Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 24:35Joel de la Garza?

  I mean, I think you're seeing that in the popular press, right?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, they drink water. Yeah. It's like, come on, no. It's, the data, the data center's been around for a very, very long time. And, yeah, they need water when they break and you have to replenish some of the water and there's some evaporation. But it's not like they're running off of water. Well, that's the crazy part.

• 24:54Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, and it's, it's just sort of like, I think, I think in, in order of like, most impressive machines humans have built, like, one is probably commercial airliners, right? And two has got to be data centers. Like, they're so incredibly sophisticated, they're closed systems, like.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the data centers themselves are kind of just boring buildings.

• 25:11Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  And the, the other thing is like the sounds, I've never heard sound outside of a data center before.

• 25:17Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Maybe a chiller or something, but I see videos where people are watching videos and it's like, look at the hell, and it's audio from inside being dubbed and people aren't smart enough to know that.

• 25:28Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  That it's, it's fake.

• 25:29Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's all contained with inside these things.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  People are being manipulated with this data center thing.

• 25:34Joel de la Garza?

  Isn't it amazing, right? And I think like, it's gonna be, I think, over as the years progress, it's gonna come out that this was all just some sort of like, very interested group of, of organizations or interests.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  I completely.

• 25:47Joel de la Garza?

  Are manipulating public opinion to some end.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's very interesting to be in the know and then watch this and then go, oh, my goodness, these people are missing the mark.

• 25:56Joel de la Garza?

  Have you seen, I mean, because you, you've been to 20 something data centers in the last couple of months. Have you seen actual protesters outside?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:02Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, but, yeah, I know, I haven't like.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  No, you see nothing. It's just, most of them, especially like the big data center park in Virginia, you know, you just see bunny rabbits in the field. It's just a big building and a bunch of parking lot and then.

• 26:16Joel de la Garza?

  Totally.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 26:17Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah. Meanwhile, that's like one of the richest counties in the, in the country because of all the data centers, right?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Right, because it brings jobs, the people that work in them aren't getting paid pennies. And, and it also brings high tech talent.

• 26:31Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  And then also, infrastructure and infrastructure powers everything you do.

• 26:35Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  So if you have a data center, your, your internet's faster, things like that work better.

• 26:41Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and then.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Depending on which one it is, but.

• 26:43Joel de la Garza?

  And then the argument about data centers drinking water goes back to some quote that was like fabricated entirely, like, it's, it's, yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think there was this switch data center built near Reno.

• 26:54Joel de la Garza?

  Uh huh.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And they built this big, like, lake out there. And then people think that it lives off the lake.

• 27:00Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  And the reality is, you know, if, say you have a chiller failure and you have to drain all that closest amount, you need to refill it.

• 27:08Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Joel de la Garza?

  Drain it to the lake.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so anyway, yeah, it's, so it's interesting to see people like, I know, I work in these buildings and and then you see the conspiracy theorists and it's like, oh no, we're, we're way off here, I'm sorry.

• 27:22Joel de la Garza?

  This feels just like the, like the people that think the moon landing was faked or like, it just feels like classic sort of, but, but I do think like this is, it's coming at such an important inflection point for like the future of our country, tech.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:36Joel de la Garza?

  Society in general. And to just have this conversation that seems to be manipulated to some end.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  It feels very manipulated. And to me, the future of our tech is needing to build this infrastructure now.

• 27:47Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  And if we, if we're crippling it, then we're making bad decisions.

• 27:51Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  And we're making bad decisions on Instagram posts.

• 27:54Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, yeah, or TikTok, right?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  TikTok.

• 27:56Joel de la Garza?

  Which who knows where that content is being.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Or like some crazy anti data center music video.

• 28:01Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  It's like, that's, that's public opinion is being framed by that.

• 28:06Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and this is the second half. I mean, I guess the, I know, we, we had talked about sort of intelligence agencies and the big, bad, scary government, right? But like, and now we're talking more about clearly an operation that's probably being done by some sort of commercial interest to manipulate public opinion.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:21Joel de la Garza?

  Right, which goes to kind of the second half of why you built docs, which is like, you know, advertising.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:27Joel de la Garza?

  Which is, which is sort of like the, like, people like to think the NSA is incredibly sophisticated, but, you know, advertisers are probably far ahead of what they're doing. And I think you're seeing now where intelligence agencies are actually using data brokers and using the techniques of ad agencies.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like all your apps have these trackers in them. WhatsApp has DIT dot WhatsApp dot net. Apple even has Apple telemetry. They call it telemetry or metadata, whatever they want to call it, but it's, some level of it is a tracker. And you can block them. It doesn't break the app, doesn't break, most websites don't have any problem with that telemetry data breaking, because the rest of the site was still loaded. But, you know, somebody asked me, very controversial wealthy individual said, well, so what? Someone won't, won't know that I purchased underwear off of Target dot com. And then I'm like, well, it's not really that one, it's all of them.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  When you combine all of the tracking that's being done on every different app that you're using or every different website, and it accumulates, and then it's being stored by who knows who, where, and being sold. And then when you aggregate all those data points together, you could know if you're a coffee drinker, what time you wake up in the morning, what your income is, where you shop, how often you purchase things.

• 29:46Joel de la Garza?

  And if you're preparing for the birth of a child or perhaps for a divorce or.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:50Joel de la Garza?

  Some other big life event, right?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  They probably know these events sooner than your spouse would.

• 29:55Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  So turning that off doesn't bother me at all.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  I love all that stuff being turned off. I hate that kind of stuff. So that's a big piece of the app is, or the, the network, it's not just part of the app, it's part of the network, is to kind of deconstruct all of that and get rid of it. And just kind of like the, get back to the old internet that has the ability to connect to things and has the ability to, you know, create. And, and then also, you know, not be spied on by, you know, advertisers and governments and everybody else.

• 30:30Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and it seems like we're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin operated intelligence at scale, right? You can deploy millions, you've got the prevent, you got the proverbial millions of monkeys with millions or infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters. And, and so we're sort of looking at this world in which there's more telemetry, there's more data, everything you do is being tracked. And you can combine that with intelligence, right? To, to actually arrive at some pretty scary conclusion.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can take all of that and just dump it into an LLM and say, tell me about this person. You get an answer.

• 31:07Joel de la Garza?

  Probably do really effective targeting against things like data centers as well, right?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:11Joel de la Garza?

  Like, you start to see these mass movements orchestrated across multiple platforms and you start to think like, huh, that's, that's pretty clever.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, but people should be targeting those, maybe not the data centers, but the tracking is pretty bad, ad tracking. It's, you know, that, that kind of stuff really can go away and your life would be better.

• 31:30Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  So, yeah, that's, at the core, it's like trying to recreate that vibe the internet used to have and then, and then see where we could take it, you know, with, with bigger resources and, and things like that, you could start creating more protocols and things like, that don't exist yet.

• 31:48Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the internet succeeded because it was free. And so, thank you for trying to make it free again.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Trying, but you have to pay me.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Just kidding.

• 32:00Joel de la Garza?

  Awesome. So I don't know if you know this, but our paths crossed a long time ago. I was looking back through some of my archives and I did a lot of work sort of in the early 2000s on DDoS bots. So stockle drought, TFN, TFN 2K. And then obviously a large, large denial of service distributed account attacks. And you were at the forefront of building a lot of the solutions to prevent that, like at Prolexic.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:31Joel de la Garza?

  Like, how did that get going?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Well, actually, it kind of goes back to Doc's net. In high school, people were attacking my servers. And so we had to figure out better ways to protect them and techniques and tricks and and all the different things you need to do to survive a DDoS attack. And I started writing kind of my list of what you would do to survive. And then somehow I presented that at SANS and then it got in Google. And then people started calling me. And then we started dealing with real cybercrime, extortion, people trying to take, you know, one company sells watches, the other sells watches, the other one is attacking the other watch company during Christmas sale season.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Or, you know, Super Bowl is about to start and all the gambling sites go dark.

• 33:23Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Things like that. And it got pretty serious. And so I built a whole company to protect businesses from these attacks. And the way I looked at it is like, you need big scale. You need to have the biggest, most expensive stuff and not everyone could afford that. So we'll turn that into kind of a leased service as a, you know, it's one of the first cloud services to exist. And I was pretty, very successful, still exists today. Akamai Prolexic.

• 33:51Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  They even kept the name. It's just rare. And then we did DefenseNet later on, which became F5 Silverline. And then, so in between all of that, I really like big scale stuff and bandwidth. And so the other one we did was called BitGravity. And that was one of the first, or the first video centric CDNs. So big file, big object delivery. And we had some really great customers there early on. People got it. And then we had a lot of tech around it to save people money. You know, people didn't realize it hit play and you're downloading a progressive file. And before all of this kind of media management stuff existed, you're just wasting bandwidth just to scroll into the middle of a video.

• 34:34Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  It costs people money. So anyway, we created all kinds of cool stuff around video. And so as far as like building a new network for consumers, well, actually, and it's a little bit for bots too.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  There's actually a lot of agentic networking components to it. It's right up my alley because I love building big infrastructure. I love building scaled stuff. But now it's kind of like twisting it instead of doing this for corporations, we're doing it for people. I haven't really seen a lot of that being done, at least well. So it's going to be fun to see kind of how people adapt to it. But I think one of the more interesting things about that is we might even see some DDoS on our network.

• 35:20Joel de la Garza?

  I'm sure you're ready for that.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Well, inbound from the internet, but what happens if somebody gets onto my network and starts using it inside and I have to deal with those, those silly people.

• 35:31Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  But, you know, the truth is, even if you have privacy, there's still laws and you need to at least follow them as much as you can. So.

• 35:42Joel de la Garza?

  Well, I think one other interesting thing, so you know, it's, it's sort of the, and this is the kind of spending, spending years talking with you. One other interesting thing is that you created an artwork that actually hung in the, at the, at the MoMA.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:57Joel de la Garza?

  And it's part of the permanent collection.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  That's, there's two pieces. Yeah. College project, I studied philosophy. Oddly enough, I studied.

• 36:07Joel de la Garza?

  As one does, yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I studied then the art aesthetics and anyway, some other stuff. A lot of it was like theoretical AI.

• 36:15Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  And I'm like, wow, actually a philosophy degree makes a lot of sense now.

• 36:19Joel de la Garza?

  Totally.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  This is helpful. But yeah, I started mapping networks because I was doing, I was a penetration tester in hacking, ethical hacking into other companies. And I found that casing the joint was the easiest way to start. So you make a network diagram and where all the stuff is and how it all works and what do you think is where? And then I started automating that. And then I got mouthy at lunch one day and bet some guys that I could probably use the same technique to map the entire internet. And that started a $50 bet that I was pretty sure I was going to lose. And then I got hit by a car on a bicycle.

• 36:58Joel de la Garza?

  Whoa, okay.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And couldn't walk. And all of a sudden, my life got really slow and I sat down and started doing the code for that. And that became the Opti project. And that ended up in not just MoMA, but like Boston Museum of Science, all over the world in different traveling exhibits. And then I did, you know, animations of that too. And it's, it's pretty neat because it's, that project has gotten a lot of attention, not just because it looks cool, but it, there's kind of really interesting history in, in the video as things are happening. You could see companies crash and burn and all kinds of stuff. And I was lucky enough to be able to talk to Event Surf about it and, you know, have opportunity to ask my questions to him and it's pretty cool.

• 37:44Joel de la Garza?

  That is awesome. And you've, you've now done, you've probably accomplished two of the harder things to do in this world, which is one, starting a successful tech company and two, being a successful artist.

• 37:56Joel de la Garza?

  Being an artist, a successful artist is probably much more difficult than starting a tech company.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was actually kind of strange, you know, after I, I went to the opening in MoMA and it was, you know, this giant party.

• 38:08Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  And, you know, I was one of the artists and, you know, they had a new exhibit and I had the piece in there and it was just kind of like, oh man, this is kind of cool. There's a DJ, there's drinking. And then, and then the curators, they took me to some really interesting parts of MoMA's other properties that they own. And it was really cool experience, but the next day I kind of had this imposter syndrome.

• 38:31Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Where I just felt super depressed. I'm like, wow, am I ever going to experience what an artist feels like ever again? Because this was kind of like accidental, you know?

• 38:39Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  But yeah, I got to do it again, but, but it was, yeah, very strange, surreal moment in life.

• 38:47Joel de la Garza?

  Probably the only person in tech that can say that.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting. I have a lot of artist friends that are probably much better artists than me. And they, they're all like, what?

• 39:00Joel de la Garza?

  How did you get in the moment?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And part of the permanent collection too.

• 39:05Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, I know, I know. Yeah, you're one of a few hundred or thousand.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I forget about that sometimes. I also forget about the book too.

• 39:15Joel de la Garza?

  That is true. Yeah, we have not talked about the book. I don't know, do you want to cover that or?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 39:19Joel de la Garza?

  We'll throw this on the list of great stories.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  I keep forgetting about that it exists.

• 39:25Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  And recently, so I, I have an AI powered webcam that watches boats in Miami.

• 39:32Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  And it has, and it's 24 hours a day. It's been up for almost a year now and it's got a little chat community of people on there. And one of them figured out who I was. And then the other day they're like, I just finished reading the book about you. I'm like, what?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  What, what do you mean? I'm like, oh shoot, that's right. They've figured it out.

• 39:51Joel de la Garza?

  So what is the book about you and what is it about?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Oh, it's been so long. So it's about, I think the start, the beginnings of Prolexic and tracking down these cyber criminals in Russia. And specifically these guys, there's like a couple of them, extremely aggressive, extorting and damaging a lot of our clients.

• 40:10Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  And so we just kind of had enough of it and said, this has got to end. I mean, we had Christmases destroyed because we were just dealing with customers and network outages.

• 40:19Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and these are like real criminals. These are not, these are not just hackers. These are people that are doing human trafficking, they're trafficking narcotics and they have a side hustle in.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  There's some stuff going on, yeah.

• 40:29Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, it's like real criminals, right?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then they went to prison for, I think, eight years, hard labor or something like that. And I don't know what happened to them afterwards, but yeah, that, that was really, we went out to Russia and got turned around. We were there in Moscow for a while and then there was like some really interesting signals of like, you need to leave now.

• 40:51Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  So we left. But yeah, that whole book is about that whole saga of what happened through that period of time. It's really weird because it, you know, when you live it, it seems kind of normal, but then you look back and go, oh geez, that was kind of crazy.

• 41:06Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 41:09Joel de la Garza?

  I tell you, every time we talk, I hear new, new stories.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Let's not talk about Burning Man.

• 41:15Joel de la Garza?

  That could be a whole episode itself.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:18Joel de la Garza?

  Actually, when was your first Burning Man is next week?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's this coming weekend.

• 41:23Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, coming weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you going this year?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:27Joel de la Garza?

  Awesome.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I think it's year 14.

• 41:29Joel de la Garza?

  Year 14.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Somewhere around there. I, I can't remember. We lost a couple to COVID. Don't remember which ones I skipped, but.

• 41:38Joel de la Garza?

  And you have a famous car.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Well, my partner has the famous car. Yeah. So Pablo created the Mayan Warrior and I created the Mayan Warrior camp. And so we were partners in that whole crazy thing for a while. And boy, that, that car went from like, you know, fun project to like a whole global phenomenon. Like it, you know, people paid money to go see it. It's crazy. But no, it was a lot of, it was, you know, what I was thinking about this morning is like, when you're passionate about something, it kind of, it kind of creates that aura around you and then other people pick up on it. And we were very passionate about that project. And I think it kind of inspired a lot of folks to do really interesting

• 42:23Speaker 01

  other projects that are similar to it. And this is the first year we're not taking it to the, to the playa.

• 42:28Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Not going. It's, we're done.

• 42:32Joel de la Garza?

  Will you be doing your laser show though?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 42:34Joel de la Garza?

  Wow. All right.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  No, well, there'll be something, but it's not mine. It's Pablo's got a beautiful art piece. There's two art pieces that he's bringing this year that'll be pretty cool.

• 42:43Joel de la Garza?

  Awesome.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  But no more traveling superpower soundstage. It's, that's gone.

• 42:50Joel de la Garza?

  How's the vibe out there now that you can get Starlink internet access?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  It's actually, I mean, you can argue against it and you could argue for it. I find that if you're running, well, for me, like when you're organizing a camp or dealing with, you know, oh, we ran out of water on the art car. It helps because you can communicate.

• 43:09Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, totally.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Because we always bring high powered Motorola radios.

• 43:13Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  And.

• 43:14Joel de la Garza?

  People are using shortwave too, right? Like it's sort of.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you have the radios and then that's kind of fun. And, you know, it reminds you of being a kid and stuff. But, but it's also like, you know, it's still a communications device. So out there, I don't know, it takes the edge off when, when it comes to like finding things or organizing things. People don't get stuck at the gate very long anymore. But if you're sitting there watching movies, that's probably the wrong use, wrong use for it.

• 43:38Joel de la Garza?

  You know, go to Burning Man to Netflix and chill.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  No, no. If you're, if you're using it for anything other than like local communications, then maybe it's like the wrong, wrong use. But, but it, but it has changed it a bit. Yeah.

• 43:51Joel de la Garza?

  Awesome. Well, as you said, right? Like you pursue your passion and that takes you down all sorts of amazing rabbit holes. And you are clearly someone that is always pursuing his passion. So thank you so much for stopping by. I am a, I am an incredibly happy Doc's Net user and, and, and thank you for building it. It's good to get that old internet vibe back.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's just getting started and thanks for trusting me to help build it.

• 44:20Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 44:45Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.