What's Next for the Internet?

How can we evolve the web for a better future? Has the web become a mature platform -- or are we still in the early days of knowing what it can do and what role it might have in our lives? Just as “social/local/mobile” once did, what are the new trends -- like crypto and blockchain networks and commerce everywhere -- that might converge into new products and experiences? Chris Dixon (general partner at a16z and co-lead of the a16z crypto fund) discusses all things internet with Jonah Peretti (founder and CEO of BuzzFeed). Their conversation ranges from the early days of the web to the way innovation happens (what Chris calls “outside-in vs inside-out”) to the promise of a community-owned and operated internet, and more. Together they explore the possibilities that could co-evolve and converge are we enter into the next era of the web, and they share how we might not be quite as far removed from the “wild west days” of the internet as we imagined. SHOW NOTES The pioneering spirit of the early internet [5:10] Predictions about what we can expect from the internet as it continues to evolve [6:31] Outside-in vs. Inside-out technology adoption patterns [8:11] Why big innovations often happen outside of regular business hours [9:38] Why the Internet is a constantly evolving organism [11:33] Definition and examples of first order and second order effects of the Internet [12:37] Definition of Fourth and Fifth Estate [14:14] Discussion on Decentralized networks [15:37] The possible future of Internet governance [18:30] Blockchain as an extension of open source [20:11] A brief history of RSS and the innovations it lead to [22:05] Chris breaks down the next phase of technological convergence [27:50] The expansion of transactional media [37:30] *** The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L. L. C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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. For more details, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to the A16Z Podcast. I'm Amelia. Today's episode is all about the past, present, and future of the web, featuring a conversation between two people who have played key roles in shaping how the internet has developed to date. A16Z general partner, Chris Dixon, is interviewed by the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti. The conversation originally took place at our most recent annual innovation conference, the A16Z Summit, and it was also previously released on YouTube, if you'd like to check it out there as well.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Hello, good to see you all. So I am very excited to have a conversation with Chris today. I first met Chris back in the New York tech scene. Chris was, at the time, was running this company called Hunch, and it was a company that was really sparking a lot of thinking among all of the New York tech entrepreneurs. I feel like Chris was very much in the scene in New York, and Hunch was a company that opened people's eyes to new possibilities and a kind of shift in the web. Could you maybe give a little overview of what the internet was like back then, and then what Hunch was doing?

• 1:33Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, so, I mean, the way I think about the web, and I think the title of this talk is "Past and Future of the Web", so we'll try to cover all that, I guess. But I think of it as sort of, there's the Web 1 era, which was in the 90s, where really a lot of what was going on, it's similar to a lot of forms of new media, where you look at early films, and early films, they would just sort of film plays. And then eventually they figured out, okay, like you can have a close up, you can have an establishment shot, and they had a sort of new grammar. And now, of course, films look totally different than plays and much better. And so early web was kind of like people were taking their magazine or their brochure and putting it on the web. And that was sort of the... I mean, there were exceptions and things like eBay and other things. But for the most part, that was sort of the dominant thing, right? So it was exciting, I think, when you and I got started as entrepreneurs

• 2:18Chris Dixon?

  in like the early, mid 2000s was this idea that people were starting to realize that the web was fundamentally a two-way or a multi-way communication device. And what were all the new design possibilities that you could create? And so that was the big sort of the Twitter and Facebook and all of the kind of tagging and all these other new kind of concepts. Like every week, there was like this new kind of concept. Someone would come up with like tagging or, you know, if you remember like Delicious and Flickr and all these other cool things. And it was sort of this relatively small group of people. Because I think the conventional wisdom at that time was outside of Google, you know, the web was this great invention, but wasn't a great business for the most part.

• 3:01Chris Dixon?

  You know, people were still getting over the hangover of the dot com period. But it was a great, in my mind, it was a great period of experimentation, right? And then like Wikipedia is an example, which I still think of, I think is still kind of an underappreciated marvel. Wikipedia, by the way, for years and years was just, was trashed. I wrote a blog post about this, very interesting. I went back and found all of the negative thing. It was actually like banned in schools, like it was going to destroy young minds. It was so inaccurate. There was finally in 2007, there was a study done that said it was actually as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. It was like a nature study, and that was like a big revelation. Of course, fast forward to today, and like all the other things are bankrupt, and Wikipedia is sort of the dominant thing. And this idea that you could have, like users could come together, right? And collectively, like the interesting thing about Wikipedia is it's something like,

• 3:46Chris Dixon?

  there's like 100,000, per day, 100,000 sort of attacks on Wikipedia, people spamming it, changing it. But per day, there's also more than 100,000 people fixing it, right? It's this big kind of ocean of like errors and hacks and mistakes. And then this other kind of counterforce of like people doing good things and fixing stuff, right?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Right. It's like wrong, but for 15 minutes.

• 4:08Chris Dixon?

  That's right.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And then it's right for five years.

• 4:10Chris Dixon?

  That's right. And so, to me, that was sort of the really, kind of the big story of that decade of the 2000s. But then, you know, the next era, which you were deeply involved with, I remember you telling me like... I think it was like 2000, like it was pre-iPhone, I believe. You said someday people are gonna read their news on smartphones via social networks. And at the time, like, you know, we had our StarTAC phone or whatever it was. And it sounded like completely insane.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I had a sidekick for a little while.

• 4:40Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, a sidekick was cool.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Pretty cool.

• 4:42Chris Dixon?

  But then in my mind, that was the next wave, right? Which, which I think even at the time, we all knew the iPhone. Like, we probably, I had an iPhone, you probably had an iPhone. But the idea that it was going to be as big as it was, like, even like, even essentially, if you look back, like, even like Clay Christensen said, "The iPhone is not a disruptive technology." As he said, "It's just a high-end, rich-person smartphone." What he didn't realize is it actually was disrupting the PC and those things.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  He likes disruption from the bottom moving up. A fancier phone with bells and whistles isn't disruptive, but a cheap computer that you can take with you everywhere is disruptive.

• 5:23Chris Dixon?

  That's right, exactly. But then, yeah, but that was the era that you were, you know, kind of helped pioneer.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I would say, like, it's hard in retrospect because we take the internet for granted today, but if you, if you look at early internet, there, there was still this long period of everyone figuring out what you could do with the internet. To your point about film, figuring out the grammar film. And so I, I think initially it was like, "Oh, you can use the internet as a way of doing, you know, make a portal, which is kind of like a newspaper, and everyone sees the same thing, and there's no personalization, there's no two-way connection." And then I think people started to realize, all these things you could do with the internet you couldn't do in traditional media. So it's instantly global, so that was one thing. It's like, "Oh, you put something online and people read it all around the world." Then people started realizing, "Oh, it can be social."

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Like, you can share the content with a friend. If you read a newspaper, I mean, some of you maybe have like a grandparent who will like cut out a newspaper article and send it to you. So it's possible to share, but with the internet, it became really easy to share. It was possible to see the data of the users. So like, early We just did something super simple, which was you had a click meter on every headline. And we could just see which headlines were people clicking and which ones weren't clicking. If there was an important story and no one was clicking it, we'd rewrite the headline. And so having this two-way data connection was another piece. The instantaneousness of it was another one. Like, it used to be you get a newspaper with yesterday's news on your doorstep.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Or you'd read Time or Newsweek, which would have news from a week or longer in the past. And now you just instantly get a push notification. So I think we keep seeing new things you can do with the Internet. And it keeps surprising people. And so I guess one sort of question for you is, what are the surprises that the Internet still has in store for us? If it's over the course of 15 years, we've figured out it's global, and it's social, and it's personalized, and it's instant, and it has all of these characteristics that have really changed lots of industries, are we going to discover new things about the Internet in the next few years that are going to open up new businesses and markets?

• 7:41Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's, to me, that's the big question right now. It's sort of like, how will the Internet evolve? And I take that in a few parts. So like, the first thing I'll say is, so I think the kind of conventional view, I would call it, is if you read a book like Tim Wu's Masters, which is a very good book, but I would describe that as sort of the conventional view, which is the Internet is like every other form of media in the past, which is it starts off, and it's sort of the Wild West, and then eventually a few incumbents emerge, you know, ABC, CBS, radio, cable. And then it's sort of, okay, those incumbents control it, and it's sort of game over, and they're the gatekeepers, and that's it, right? And that's kind of the conventional view.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that book, by the way, I think the thing that felt most analogous to the Internet was radio, because radio was started by a bunch of hobbyists who would put up an antenna and broadcast in their local area. And it was a lot of hobbyists who were hacking radio and building things out. And then slowly, it ended up being consolidated into CBS as a national media conglomerate that had lots of control over radio. So it kind of went from... From hobbyists to

• 8:44Chris Dixon?

  I think of that as the way I describe that is there's there's technologies that have an outside in adoption pattern and inside out. And so outside in like open source would be the conical example, right? Where it's completely fringe stuff. I mean, it's Richard Stallman. Extreme libertarian, you know, statements in the eighties at MIT and now it's 95% of the operating systems in the world, right? And so completely on the fringes, whereas like the iPhone, that was inside out. It was Apple in, you know, Cupertino and a lot of

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Really early Apple was the hobbyist hobbyist.

• 9:13Chris Dixon?

  The PC was outside in, smartphone was inside out. Right? A lot of it has to do with, you know, you needed probably a billion dollars to build a, you know, proper iPhone and to market it and everything else and supply chain and a whole bunch of complex reasons why that had to be crypto, which we'll talk about. I think it's very much an outside in kind of movement. And sort of these hackers and hobbyists and smart people doing on the weekend.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  You like the outside in movements generally.

• 9:34Chris Dixon?

  I mean, I, I, yes, I do like them. I think that they, well, I think from a startup investor point of view, both as an entrepreneur and as an investor. Those are where the bigger opportunities are, right? Because it's much harder if it's an inside out and it's going to require, you know, a new game console, like it's just the reality of the economics of it. It costs $5 billion probably to build that, to market it, to do all the exclusives, like, you know, it's, it's, it's a very expensive proposition.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  You have enough funds under management to cover that, right?

• 9:59Chris Dixon?

  We're getting airfully, but, but the, but, but from an entrepreneurial perspective, it's these, it's these kind of disruptive things that I, you know, I like to say to start off looking like a toy. Better sort of hackers on the weekends, right? The, like, there's a deep reason why, like, like, I, I think there's a deep reason why so many of these technology movements were done sort of by hobbyists. And it's not just sort of a cultural thing, you know, that technologists like to wear flip flops and hang out or something like this. There's a deep reason, which is, which is you basically have the nine to five is governed by business people, right? Nine to five is governed by like what you do during nine to five work hours is governed by people that generally have a

• 10:43Chris Dixon?

  one to three year time horizon, right? They have to like unless they're the, you know, maybe Jeff Bezos is an exception or something, but like for the most part, like you want to keep your job as a manager of a company and you've got to manage to a one to three Your time horizon. So where where does the 10 year away stuff, the five and 10 year away stuff happen? Right. It happens where when when the smartest people get to vote themselves with their time. Right. And that's why it happens on the week. And that's why, like, I have always done, if you go back and read history, like, so much of the, you know, I was, there's a great book about Henry Ford I read recently, and you look at early cars. It's like, exactly like, you know, Soma 2015 or something. They were in Detroit, they were hacking. If you go read, like, I was reading the old, it was, uh, Horseless Age was like the hot, was a tech crunch of the era.

• 11:26Chris Dixon?

  It's now, now, actually, Car and Driver is the same magazine. If you go read the old ones, it was all like, oh, my God, this like cool new carbureator. And of course, what did they do? Like, today, we think Henry Ford, you know, he's wearing a suit. No, no, he was like, lying down, trying to race as fast as he could with his friends and whoever could do the fastest car. He's like, these pictures, like, covered in oil. Like, you know, he's going 70 miles an hour, the thing's like, like practically blowing up, you know, it's just basically like, it was like Wozniak and like, you know, and these other hackers. So, um, yeah, so I think, um, and so I think the big question, going back to the Tim moving, I think the big question with the web right now is, is it gonna be like that? Is it Comcast? Is it over? Is it sort of Google, Apple, and that's it? Uh, or is it different? I would argue it's different. The internet is a very different type of, uh, uh, medium than,

• 12:08Chris Dixon?

  let's say, radio or cable, in that it's software based. Um, the design of the internet is you have a very, very deliberately very simple, you know, core protocols, like internet protocol. Um, and then all of the smarts live on the edges. And the edges can upgrade themselves and are constantly, it's a constantly evolving organism. And it evolves according to incentives. And one of the very powerful things, and one of the reasons I'm so excited about, uh, the whole kind of crypto blockchain movement, is it's, it's, is it, the whole thing is around, how do you design incentives to get people to kind of upgrade and change the, change the, the code they're running on the internet? And so, to me, a huge question right now is just sort of, you know, is it gonna be like the last things, the last kind of radio, TV, et cetera, where it's sort of, this is it?

• 12:50Chris Dixon?

  And now startups just get to sort of pick up the scraps, or maybe there, or maybe, you know, there's, just, by the way, there's, I don't wanna, there's plenty of other, one interesting thing about tech is there's, there's so many different movements happening, right? So this is sort of the core internet. Meanwhile, there's all this interesting stuff happening in enterprise software, in fintech. So that's all going like full speed ahead. I'm talking more of just sort of the core internet architecture structure. I think another really interesting thing, if you look at past historical trends is there's always sort of a first order and second order effect of any major new technology. Okay, so what I mean by that is like the car comes along and the first order effect is you can drive from point A to point B faster. Right, the second order effect took 50 years to play out. It was suburbs, trucking companies, e-commerce, you know, what, you know, mechanized warfare.

• 13:34Chris Dixon?

  Like there's just thousands of like kind of secondary, second order implications of this new technology. Right, but it took a really long time to play out. And I think the thing that we're seeing right now is with social media and the internet. And we're in that kind of, I don't know, if it's a car, we're probably in 1915, not at, you know, 1950 or something. We're still very early on. We're seeing the effects on the media landscape. We're seeing the effects on the political world. I think things like cryptocurrency, for example, in many ways, it's a consequence of social media. If 20 years ago, someone invented Bitcoin, you'd have like a couple of New York Times articles quoting some Yale economists. This is stupid, it's over. Maybe there'd be like a zine or whatever, like, you know, like some weird hobbyist magazine you could read, but that'd be it.

• 14:19Chris Dixon?

  Right, whereas now you've got an army of, I don't know, 100, probably 100 million plus cryptocurrency enthusiasts who have, they have Twitter followers, they have blogs, they have GitHub accounts, they have Reddit karma. And they're out proselytizing and, you know, it's the fifth estate, like the fifth estate loves it, right? The fourth estate doesn't, the fifth estate loves it. And it turns out they have a lot of influence these days, right? And so that's like another example of something that, you know, is this sort of unexpected second order effect. And what will those other second order effects be? I guess is to me a big question.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  So this concept of fourth estate and fifth estate, basically the press and the public or active people on social media and public sentiment. One thing about the press that I feel like has happened in the last, you know, really Trump was maybe an inflection point, but it was a larger, a larger thing, which is there feels to be now a lot more fear in the press. About decentralized networks. And the fear seems to be, well, if there's not a gatekeeper, there's not someone checking the facts, or if there's not someone making sure the information has integrity, that you might end up with fascist movements, populist movements, separatist movements,

• 15:31Speaker 02

  people being driven by emotion and not facts, sort of post-truth, where politicians can just say whatever they want and just spread it on social media and bypass the press, go direct to consumer. And I think that that fear probably also has influenced press about crypto, because the promise of crypto is similar to the internet, in that it is democratizing and giving more people a voice and more decentralized. And so, what's legitimate about those concerns? What are the press missing? How should the press and the public be thinking about the value of decentralized systems?

• 16:15Chris Dixon?

  I think, by the way, not just crypto in the blockchain sense, but crypto in encryption sense. I wouldn't be surprised if we head into another era similar to the 90s, where there's real battle. We see with Apple and the FBI and things like this, just like encryption in general. It used to be, in the 90s, they were classified as munitions, like the RSA algorithm and things. And then this whole Clipper chip thing. Anyway, so encryption alone. Zuckerberg says they're going to go to private messaging and end encryption. So forget about blockchain, just like that alone is going to be a hot-button issue. The reality is you're going to have bad stuff. These are really tough issues.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Even within Facebook, there was a lot of disagreements about, should we have everything be encrypted to protect privacy? Or should we have content not be encrypted, so we can scan the content for child pornography or terrorist activity or abuse or other kinds of things?

• 17:03Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. I mean, you know... Like, what, you know, look, take the telephone was to have bad things happen using a telephone. Like, probably a lot of bad stuff has happened using a telephone, right? We decided, society, that we wanted to put pretty strict privacy controls over telephone use, right?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Like, in court transcripts, whenever you see "call me", you know something bad was gonna happen on that phone conversation.

• 17:24Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, because we decided, like...

• 17:26Speaker 02

  There's some knowing laughs in this audience.

• 17:29Chris Dixon?

  From a regulatory perspective, though, we decided to make that trade-off, right? We tried, like, we decided to make the trade-off that we wanted to preserve the, you know, people's feeling that this was a private feeling, that probably more of a feeling, but the feeling that it was a private medium. And decided to regulate it as such, and I think that's going to be a big question. And, look, there are gonna be trade-offs, like, The New York Times in the one week will have an article about how these, you know, Google, et cetera, are surveilling you, and the next week will have one about how they're allowing terrible stuff to happen. And so, where do you draw the line? It's really hard. I think, you know, I think that one of the great things about the internet in the first era was the fact that it was sort of community governed and controlled. And the second era, what was great is that we got amazing web services

• 18:14Chris Dixon?

  that were free for billions of people. And I, what my hope is, in the third era, we could find kind of a happy medium, where we'd recapture some of the kind of community-controlled aspects. So, instead of, so for some of these issues, you know, should political ads be allowed on a social network? Like, should this be decided by a single company? Or should it be decided by a community? The way that decisions around DNS, for example, the naming service for the internet, was always a community thing, it was run by a nonprofit, it was like a community, you know, standards, it was done in an open way. This is not, you know, it sounds very utopian, it was actually reality until recently, you know, how the internet was governed. And so, the question for me is, I believe that what we can do now is, we now have the technology where we can have kind of the best of both worlds.

• 18:58Chris Dixon?

  I mean, why is everyone so upset on Twitter, right? There's a bunch of reasons they're upset. But I think one of them is, you know, they helped create that platform. I mean, I was early on Twitter, you were early on Twitter, and then you feel like, you know, you helped create it, and then, and then suddenly all these new rules are getting imposed. Like, you kind of felt like you were, sort of felt like an owner in a lot of these cases, if you were early on these networks. And then you realize later on you're not.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  They're just setting up a platform for Kim Kardashian.

• 19:23Chris Dixon?

  Basically, and so, and it's not just users, by the way, it's people like you, like, I mean, companies like yours, like, media companies, right, you have a partnership, and then the rules change, and like, next week, the rules are different, and like, you know, should you have a seat at the table deciding that, right? To me, that's a, right, that doesn't mean it's, anything goes, it just means you have a community kind of governed process, and that's the core value of the whole kind of crypto blockchain world, everything is open source, everything is community governed, it's a very deeply held belief, and, you know, and it really comes from the open source movement, it's, I think of it as an extension of open source, and...

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Well, we were talking backstage about the difference between a city and Disneyland, and, you know, if you're in Disneyland, everything is controlled, there's not bad areas where there's crime, or there's things like that, but also, everything feels a little fake, and if you're in a vibrant city, there's lots of, you know, dynamic things, everyone's building and creating things, and making things, there's good parts, there's bad parts, and that can be a metaphor for, you know, what different kinds of visions of the internet, do we want the Walgreens and Disneyland internet, or do we want the more vibrant city internet, even with some of the downsides?

• 20:44Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, and I think until, so to me, like, one way to think of what a blockchain is, a simple way to think of it, it's the first time that we've had a concept of a community-owned and operated web service, one that's truly owned by a community, right? And so, I kind of think of it, if you think of analogy to the real world, like, you have an iPhone, that's kind of like your home, it's like your personal computer, you have, you can rent a computer at AWS, and it's kind of like your office, right, and then you have things like Facebook and Google, which are shared services that feel like public spaces, but are actually controlled by a company. And now, we have the ability to create things that are kind of more like parks, or like cities, they're community-controlled, public spaces, and you can, it's a very interesting kind of new thing that allows... And I think it

• 21:29Speaker 02

  And you know the rules aren't going to be changed

• 21:30Chris Dixon?

  That's right.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Because the rules are written into the

• 21:32Chris Dixon?

  That's right. The rules are written. That's actually the core feature of a blockchain. The way I would define a blockchain is it's a computer where there are game theoretic strong guarantees that the code will run as designed and the rules won't change essentially. Like, that's fundamentally what it is. And so, until now, you know, if you were using a public computer, if I was on Facebook, just by virtue of the fact that that computer is controlled by that company, they can change the code, they can change the rules, right? This is the first time you had that. Now, there's trade-offs, like, you lose performance and you, there's a whole bunch of like, kind of weaknesses with this architecture that I think will get fixed over the next few years, and we're investing in a lot of these things to try to improve it. It's still, you know, early and evolving, but that's a very powerful concept, and it

• 22:16Chris Dixon?

  means you can have a commons, and so you can have a social graph, for example. You know, like, actually, if you go back, for people that are interested in the history of this, like, RSS was a real contender for a while. So RSS is a protocol, it's like a, sort of a blogging protocol, that was a real contender for a while, to compete with the proprietary social networks. But the problem with RSS, in my view, I was involved in this and invested in a bunch of companies around it, is that it didn't have, you couldn't make a user experience the way you could with Facebook or Twitter or something like this, because you had to do all this kind of weird technical stuff, and set up your domain, and do all, and have

• 22:53Speaker 02

  So we, back, back in the days, we did a project that was an open source project called Reblog.

• 22:58Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  And Reblog would take, was a, it was a server-side RSS reader, where you'd get all, you could subscribe to all the sites you wanted, you'd get this information. And then you could press a button to repost anything you liked, and it would say, "Chris has reblogged this."

• 23:18Speaker 02

  And that was a long time ago. I don't remember the exact year we did it, but then David Karp saw that, and added Reblog to Tumblr, and then Tumblr, and then Twitter's community saw sort of Tumblr having this functionality, and then they added that to Twitter, where originally, when you would retweet something, you would just write RT and retweet it, and it wasn't built into the software. Eventually, Twitter then built it into the software, and then Facebook added the share button, kind of looking at Twitter.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  And so, it was really, to your point about RSS not being able to have a functionality, we saw this need to make, to make content social. You know, way before BuzzFeed and made it through using RSS, which is this open platform. And it was, it was, and like, maybe, maybe 15 to 25 people installed the reblog software. And there was like a little network where they would like reblog to, you know, and they had sites that maybe got, you know, a few thousand readers. And so we would sometimes have something get reblogged like three or four times. And, um, and so you sort of saw, oh, this is how it should work. But to make it really good and for a user, the Facebook and Twitter model was a lot, was a lot better.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  And we never tried to make it into a company, but had we tried to make it into an open source company, we would have been at a disadvantage compared to.

• 24:32Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, you just didn't have, there was no way to have a community, like, controlled place to store things, like to store social, like just simply the technology wasn't there yet. There was a Wired article, I have a blog post I wrote about it, that where they, in 2008 or something, they tried to create a open source social, uh, you know, kind of Facebook competitor. And they said, like, basically the problem is there's nowhere to store the social graph or something. Now, now what we have today is we have these public commons. We have these publicly shared data, but community controlled databases. So what can we do with it, right? And we're in a very exciting period, I think, where, like, I always think of it as like, the, the history of technology is every 10 to 15 years, there's a major new computing cycle. So mainframes, you know, PCs, internet, smartphones, and now today, what are we, you know, what is the cycle?

• 25:17Chris Dixon?

  I obviously have my, my beliefs. But, uh, what you have is you, with each of those periods, you have kind of a, uh, kind of gestation phase where people are sort of experimenting. So the early smartphones, you had Sidekick and BlackBerry and Trio. And it was sort of, you know, like, they had a scale of like, you know, BlackBerry was more successful, the rest were like on a scale of like a few million, you know, maybe 10 million users. And then eventually you kind of get to the point where you have like kind of a breakthrough device. And then you have this amazing golden period where entrepreneurs flock to this new platform and then very rapidly explore what I would call like the design space. Like what can you do with this, right? So like the smartphone comes along.

• 26:00Chris Dixon?

  And you know, if you ask people in 2007, what are you going to do with a smartphone? They probably would have taken a lot of the ideas of what happened with PCs, right? They wouldn't have thought like the killer thing will be calling a car or sending a vintage looking photograph to a network of people or like, like it wasn't like you may have been on your list of 100 things, but it probably wasn't the, you know, if you look at ephemeral messaging, I need this will be the killer app for this like, you know, I mean, clearly there were entrepreneurs who believe that, but there were, you know, 10,000 credible attempts to create mobile startups and of that probably, you know, 10 of massive significance kind of emerged. And so I think that we, I believe we're on the precipice now, not just crypto, I think AI and first reality, and there's a bunch of really exciting things happening, but

• 26:44Chris Dixon?

  where we're about to hit that point where you get kind of the iPhone moment and then you get all sorts of interesting experiments that get run and out of that, it'll be a lot of chaos, a lot of train wrecks, you know, so there's pain in this process as well.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  The other, the other thing that I think happens is trends converge that you didn't expect, you know, so I think just as an analogy, when Buzzfeed started, the iPhone didn't exist yet. And then when the iPhone first started getting used, people were only consuming really text content, maybe images on it and it wasn't great for video. And then there was this digital video trend. So, so there was this digital video trend and this mobile trend and this social trend. And so there are three sort of different trends.

• 27:27Chris Dixon?

  And by the way, I would add cloud to that too. Like if it wasn't for the work that Salesforce and AWS did, you couldn't have stored all that data so cheaply.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Right, right. So there's really, yeah, four different trends, you know, cloud, mobile, social, digital video. And then it turned out that those trends all converged into, into mobile, so, you know, being on a mobile device with this, on a social platform, watching digital video that's streamed from the cloud, you know, so all those things, all those things converge and ma- and then make something seem just like one simple thing, which is like I'm scrolling through a feed and watching, watching video. And so I think you'll see the same thing with crypto and, and you know. You know, where the other trends you mentioned, AI and VR and crypto,

• 28:17Speaker 02

  you know, it's hard to predict how those trends will converge and end up making something that is more than the sum of its parts.

• 28:24Chris Dixon?

  I actually think I would even go further and I would say not only, I think, are we about on the cusp of multiple major technology breakthroughs converging, so probably AI, but then I would call kind of new devices. So that's everything from talking speakers to cars to VR to blockchain and crypto. And I think those will be kind of like cloud, mobile, social and reinforce each other. I think in addition, though, what else is happening right now? We've got, what is it, like three to four billion people with smartphones? That's going to go to eight billion. In addition to that, the hours per day spent on these devices is going to continue to go up. So you're just going to have essentially like 2X the time spent, if not more. Number three, you now have major areas of the economy that were previously relatively untouched by technology,

• 29:06Chris Dixon?

  namely finance, education, healthcare. I think now entrepreneurs have now figured out ways to kind of bring modern technology into those industries. So I kind of think like if you combine like number of engaged users, level of engagement, plus unlocking what's basically 70% of GDP with these new kind of markets, plus, you know, what I think is kind of like multiple major new trends coming together. It's not quite there. The technology is still like all these things, like even the, you know, I mean, like Lex is awesome, but like, you know, autocorrect breaks half the time. Like it's still not quite there, but it's very, very close.

• 29:47Chris Dixon?

  And if you go and same with the crypto blockchains, like it's slow and Bitcoin has its issues and everything. It's not quite there. It's still the sidekick era, you know, it's not the iPhone era. But yeah, I think those three things will converge and you have these other kind of macro trends now. And you have these, and the economics too, like the, you know, like the cable bundle is going to break at some point, I think, soon, right? But at some point, like the economics will like fundamentally, like it will no longer work to have the cable bundle. I think that's. Relatively near future and then there will be this sort of massive, you know, wave of people and dollars shifting over to

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, to the, to the, my earlier comment about all the things the internet enables, TV hasn't gotten the benefit of those things and now, except for Netflix. And now all the digital, all the big media companies, traditional media companies are moving over and they're going to have the advantages of, of the internet. Like for example, you know, the idea that you would flip through the channels hoping something good is on was the way that traditional media has historically worked. And as opposed to what is the best content for me that has ever been produced in the universe, I'm going to, you know, watch that. And so now that's possible with Disney. It used to be that was possible with Netflix archive. Now it's possible, you know, so, so we're, we're seeing, we're seeing a lot of big industries

• 31:03Speaker 02

  that are slower to change, starting to adopt, adopt these things.

• 31:07Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I mean, if you think about the, I mean, the, it's kind of surprising 25 years into the internet that the only industries that have been really quote disrupted have been, I think, media, maybe transportation and, and maybe starting to happen is retail, right? And then the rest, I mean, if you look at the list of incumbents in every other industry, it hasn't changed that much, right? And even the media world, right? Like still the vast majority of people, like they sit there and they, you know, they watch whatever, reality TV and on a regular cable box and like it hasn't changed that much yet.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, it's slow, it's slow for these to change. There are also times when I feel like the converging trends end up creating some kind of a Frankenstein situation where, where the trends are in conflict with each other. The goal of being the future of media and recommending content to people and the goal of being a place for people to connect with their friends in a private, you know, way with close friends feels to be in conflict. So you end up having Facebook, it's almost like we're having a phone conversation and then you say something interesting and then it's like, oh, we're going to show that to a million people, you know? It's a little weird if you're talking with your friends and, you know, and sharing content with, with a small group that that could end up reaching tons of people. And there are trends that kind of smash into each other in a way that causes problems and.

• 32:21Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, we're, it feels like we're in a very interesting time now with all of, there's so much attention on these platforms and, you know, the decisions they're making and, and just the like, we, I don't feel like we've, I mean, maybe you have insight into it, but I, I don't feel like we fully understand how to, you know, the, the.

• 32:41Chris Dixon?

  The etiquette, the personal etiquette, you know, like, is it okay to,

• 32:47Chris Dixon?

  you know, talk a certain way on Twitter or go find somebody's old tweets or, you know, should the plat-- like, all these things are being figured out, right? Like, it's, it's, and it's very confusing. And I think, kind of, my view at least, causing a lot of upheaval, kind of, social upheaval or something.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, people don't know how to interact with each other. People don't know how to figure out what, what information they should pay attention to. And I definitely think there's, and then I feel like when you look at the press coverage of all this, there's just so many trade-offs that it's, you know, and reporters, I mean, I know this because we have BuzzFeed News covers this stuff. And reporters are not in a, you know, it's not really the job of a reporter, at least classically, to read everything and make a policy recommendation. They're just trying to say, oh, there's this, like, here's a leaked, you know, document, or here's some information people didn't know, or, oh, this company's

• 33:44Speaker 02

  struggling with deciding between these two different, you know, possibilities. But it doesn't feel like there's a, there's a clear sense right now of, of this is where society is headed, and this is how technology is part of progress. And, and is there, is there a way to get more of that back, where, where people see the benefits of technology? And, you know, both to the economy, but also to people's lives and to society?

• 34:12Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think, I mean, my view is partly this feeling of, I do, I, this is, again, going back to my main area of interest, the crypto stuff, but the, it's this feeling, I think, a lot of people have, that it's sort of this bait and switch, you know, that, that they help build up these networks, you know, whether it be a marketplace or a social network. And then the benefits go to other people, the governance goes to other people. And so I think having more, you know, new architectural designs that provide incentives and are more inclusive can, can help with that. Now that, getting that message out, like, it is very hard, because there's a lot of, like, negative, I think--

• 34:52Chris Dixon?

  Misunderstandings around, you know, going back to Bitcoin and crypto in general. And like, it's actually like a very kind of utopian, meritocratic technology. But that's not very hard to explain to people.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  You know, I think some of the, some of it from the fifth estate is you'll see people on social media being like, you know, triple your money right now and like trying to basically pump an altcoin or something like that. And how much has that driven progress in, you know, the fact that people are trying to make money is in its powerful incentive? How much has that driven progress in crypto and, you know, blockchain? And how much is that like holding it back? And is there a way in a, in a more decentralized thing, you know, system to, to shift the narrative towards things that will lead to the, to the overall benefit of the total community?

• 35:41Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I think it's definitely a good point. And like, there was this big run up in 2017 where a lot of people kind of, you know, sort of had this get rich quick kind of mentality. The, I do think what's really important about it is there's the negative side, as you highlighted. The positive side is it's a business model that doesn't depend on advertising and tracking users, right? And so Marc Andreessen talks about this, how the original, there's actually an error code. People are probably familiar with error code 404. There's a, you know, when you go to a webpage, it's not there. There's error code 402, which was never implemented. It said, "Payment required." And so the original idea with the original internet was to actually have like money as a native unit. Right now, of course, we have credit cards and things.

• 36:24Chris Dixon?

  It took a long time, by the way, and in fact, was very controversial. SSL, you needed SSL for credit cards, and that was actually almost regulated away because people thought, well, who would want encryption except for bad people? But it turned out you need it for banking and things. Anyway, so we've now grafted on kind of the legacy financial payment systems onto the internet, and it sort of works, right? But still, the vast majority of these big companies are funded through advertising. So I think one other utopian idea is that, is that, you know, I think one of the reasons people are disillusioned is they feel this sense of like, they're not part of it, they aren't included, and the business model they feel like is extractive. And, you know, and we see this with GDPR, and I think there'll be similar kinds of stuff happening in the US around sort of privacy.

• 37:10Chris Dixon?

  And so, you know, I think.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Well, there's this huge, I mean, in my sort of corner of the of the of the internet with digital media, there's a huge number of intermediaries who are skimming money in the ad tech space. And oftentimes, the main value they're providing to an advertiser is is surveilling and tracking users where if users had the choice to say, do I want to be tracked this way or not, they would almost always say no. And these are companies that don't actually make content or create create apps or build things that consumers value. So there's some hope that blockchain could help help with that.

• 37:53Chris Dixon?

  And I think right now, what I think a lot of what we're feeling is and why people are upset is they don't feel like the interests are aligned. And the question for me is, is there a way to realign that? Or is it just too late? And that's just the state of things? And maybe that's the pessimistic view. And it's just gonna be.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, one trend we have seen at Buzzfeed, if you had asked me a couple years ago, I would never have guessed the transformation that's happened in our business from advertising revenue being essentially the only kind of revenue to now having so many of our so much of our audience is looking to transact. And so 500 million in GMV where people are seeing, you know, products we might recommend or things that we're talking about. And and a multiple of that of other kinds of of transactions that we're indirectly influencing. But we're we're seeing that, you know, again, to this convergence of trends that used to be content shifted to mobile, but people weren't transacting on mobile. They were going back to their desktop to do their shopping where they could, you know,

• 38:51Speaker 02

  type in information and do things more easily. Now, it's better to shop on mobile. That's where more people want to shop. You can double click and buy stuff. Your credit card's integrated in. And so we're seeing a huge shift where media has become much more transactional, where people are looking to be inspired to do something, go on a trip, or buy a product, or try a new experience. And I think a lot of it is also just these online marketplaces are starting to dominate the entire economy. And there's infinite choice. If you're Gen X, Y, or Z, or anyone actually who's using the internet, you're used to being able to watch any show on the streaming services,

• 39:30Speaker 02

  watch, listen to any song on Spotify, you know, go to any travel destination with Airbnb or one of the OTAs. And so you're looking for some culture and content and vicarious experience and something that will inspire you to choose which option out of all of these options are worth doing. And now with your phone, you can just transact. And so I think that there is this larger shift towards just transactional media as opposed to impression-based, advertising-based.

• 40:01Chris Dixon?

  And also, if I'm wrong, but also the sort of the adjacent, like, so using Tasty to build a brand and then partnering with retailers to sell products related to that, right? So instead of like new models like that where you're inserting yourself into the kind of the purchasing experience.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's like 100 SKU line of Tasty products at Walmart. So when you see a video where people are cooking, they're like, oh, I can actually make that recipe and I can buy the pots and pans. You know, like connecting, I feel like one sort of shift is just connecting the internet to people's actual lives and the things that they're doing, you know, every single day. And I think that crypto and blockchain can help people do that in a way where there's more trust and more security and that they're more part of it and can build it with, as part of a community. All right, we're out of time.

• 40:56Chris Dixon?

  Yep.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  I only asked the first question, though, so I don't know if we have a couple more hours, but thank you, Chris.

• 41:06Chris Dixon?

  Thank you, John. Thank you, everyone.