“We want to dominate. Otherwise, what’s the point?” Nik Storonsky. Revolut. One of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve talked to. Tomorrow!

VC is “get rich slow.” We are living in a “get rich quick” market cycle, which also seems to be the greatest wealth creation period in human history. This does two things when you game theory out a career: 1) If you don’t think you’re a top-tier investor, it’s better to leave ASAP while startups are still GRQ. 2) If you think you are [smart enough to be a] top-tier investor, you likely also think you’re smart enough to GRQ via startups with fewer blockers/less bureaucracy. So — unless you think you are [smart enough to be a] a top-tier investor & you are not held back in your development such that you miss out on the economics in the greatest wealth creation period in human history while “paying your dues” — it makes perfect sense to join or start a startup.

.@orenzeev on why most VC partnerships add negative value and he invests alone: "Our business isn't symmetrical. A mistake of omission is much worse than a mistake of commission. If you do a deal you shouldn't have, you lose your money. If you miss a deal you should have done, you lose 100x, 200x the money you could have made. Your partners, even if they're smart, even if there's no politics, are never going to push you to do a deal you otherwise wouldn't. They push back on the ones you want to do. Even if they're right nine times out of ten, it's enough that one time they talk you out of the deal that was 100x. The whole thing wasn't worth it. A committee gravitates toward consensus. It's easier to be contrarian when there's no one you have to persuade."

Exactly. Most crypto builders have been ego-building, ie for themselves, to prove their can ship a complex product made for other people in the same industry. Most of crypto has only been about a tiny cottage industry, not caring about democratizing beyond its square.

The a16z name change isn’t a surprise. It’s an honest read of where crypto venture already is and where it needs to go. Look at the market today: $3T industry with BTC being 2/3 of that $300B in stablecoins $40B in RWAs 2-3 L1s worth over $100B 10-20 investable tokens in the 5B-20B range That market can’t produce outcomes big enough for a fund the size of a16z. It hasn’t for years. Crypto venture quietly became frontier venture over the last 1-2 years. If anything, I’m surprised it took this long. Today, 90% of conversations in crypto venture aren’t about building a better product for existing crypto users. That market isn’t big enough. Nobody wants to fund another prop AMM, another structured products protocol, or another onchain options order book. The real question now: how does this industry grow 10-100x ? The answer is always the same. Crypto has to meet and power other frontier markets. Prediction markets. AI. Fintech. Agentic payments. Crypto-enabled AI networks. This is a natural evolution, and I think this new fund will be FAR more beneficial to crypto’s growth than the old model. The marginal value of a16z funding the next perps protocol is zero. The intersections are where the bigger markets and bigger companies get built, and they’re the best people to do it. This will open up a lot of opportunities for "crypto"

There's lots of discussion about a16z dropping the word 'crypto'. It's actually a sign of crypto winning. It's outgrown being a standalone sector and now runs through global finance and frontier tech: payments, trading, tokenization, AiFi, and much more. We've spent more than a decade building this industry to make it useful everywhere, and we should welcome it escaping its own category. People used to say 'internet companies' - which is a prehistoric phrase now. Eventually, calling something a 'crypto company' should feel just as redundant. Many of us (including me) will keep the word. But the millions, and soon billions, using it every day won't care what we call it. They'll care what it lets them do.

no surprise, every crypto vc firm has done this privately if not publicly yet "crypto" so intertwined with every other frontier technology area now and the word so associated with historically unserious people that it no longer makes sense for any vc to define as such it's a limiting and inaccurate moniker just as many great vc firms outgrew "web" and "mobile" and "saas" and "fintech" brands / origins. the best investment firms are often born from emergent trends and expand from that wedge in practice, not much changes in terms of how anyone invests, if you were actually pivoting at this moment, you would have missed at least 18 months of the most investable opportunities at the intersection of blockchain, ai and markets