Investing in the Future: A Conversation with Chris Dixon

I’m a long-time reader of Chris’s blog (a must-read) and was fortunate to get his advice on Product Hunt in the early stages.  He recently joined us to answer questions from the community.  Here are a few highlights, collected from the Product Hunt team.

Chris Dixon is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he’s on the Board of companies like Airware (drones), Coinbase (bitcoin), Shapeways(3D printing), Soylent (the future of food), and BuzzFeed (reporting/cat GIFs)?—?among others?—?and led the firm’s investments in Oculus, the leading virtual reality company that was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.

Earlier in his career Chris was the co-founder and CEO of two successful startups, SiteAdvisor, which sold to McAfee in 2006, and Hunch which he sold to eBay in 2011 for around $80 million. Along with making bets in more of the speculative technology companies at a16z, these days he’s known for being all around thought leader in the tech community, and writing articles like What’s Next in Computing (one of the most popular articles on Medium).

Chris recently joined the Product Hunt community for a LIVE Chat where he shared his thoughts on emerging startup trends, bot-blockers, the singularity, self-driving cars, and much more. Read on for his thought-provoking insights.

How do you identify emerging trends, and how do you pick ventures in nascent markets??—?Costas Andriopoulos

I try to spend a lot of time reading and meeting with smart people and listening to what they are excited about. Usually when really smart people are excited about a new technology something interesting going to happen in that area in the next few years.

Where do you get early-stage contrarian inspiration??—?Max

I’m a huge Reddit user. Not the main page, but topic specific subreddits like /r/Oculus, /r/Nootropics, /r/Futurology, etc. Also, obviously I read tech press, Hacker News, Twitter, and Product Hunt ??. I particularly like discussions of product and tech as opposed to discussions of valuations, finance, etc.

Are you worried at all about the singularity??—?Niv Dror

I think people watch too much dystopian science fiction ??. I think AI will be mostly a positive force. Like all technologies it will get misused, but I think the Skynet concerns are more Hollywood fantasy than real life. Meanwhile we have real, genuinely scary things to worry about like climate change.

How did you start out as an angel investor??—?Erik Torenberg

I made my first angel investment one week after selling SiteAdvisor. :) I love startups and wanted to get involved with more of them. I was hugely influenced by Ron Conway, who was an investor in SiteAdvisor and is just an incredibly great person and huge help to entrepreneurs.

What are your favorite questions to ask founders??—?Ben Tossell

We like to spend a significant amount of time hearing about founders’ backgrounds and what led them to start their company. We are big believers in founder-market fit. I find another great way to spend time with founders is to walk through the idea maze.

A16Z invests a lot of time in media: twitter, blogs, podcasts. Has this provided increased volume of quality deal flow??—?Charles Jo

What we try to do is just open up the discussions we are already having internally and make them public. That’s one reason I really like podcasting- the format kind of forces you to be natural and have a normal conversation.

Do you think we will soon see the emergence of bot-blockers? Similar to ad-blockers??—?Eon

The whole bot trend is interesting. I think there are multiple threads, including: (1) text vs voice interface (e.g. to communicate with businesses), (2) lower friction user acquisition for developers who are frustrated with app store rich-get-richer dynamics, and (3) advances in NLP making automated discussions much better (we were investors in Wit.AI, which is the NLP engine behind Facebook’s new bot platform). In general when tech X gets big, there are anti-X techs. So if bots are a big deal there probably will be bot blockers. :)

(for more on bots, check out the recent a16z Podcast: Bots and Beyond)

What’s your biggest frustration with Silicon Valley in general and what would you do to solve it??—?Charles Kunene

As you might expect, I’m generally very positive on Silicon Valley. I think this place/time will be looked back on as a very special golden era in the history of technology. I do favor the trend towards bigger, ambitious startups that solve hard problems. I think for a while people in the startup community assumed that only big companies can take on very hard technical challenges like self-driving cars, virtual reality, AI, etc. I think that’s starting to change and I’m very excited about it.

What are your favorite books on philosophy??—?Frédéric Renken

I studied philosophy in college and graduate school. I got interested via programming and AI. I was mainly interested in analytic philosophy?—?specifically language, logic, and philosophy of mind. My favorite philosophers back then: Quine, Dennett, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Goodman, Russell, Frege.

What 3 things should every new founder constantly be thinking??—?Emily Hodgins

(1) Recruiting the best people

(2) Making customers happy

(3) Making sure the company is financially healthy

Do you see intelligent machines and technology giving rise to an entirely new set of jobs??—?Abhinav Nakirekanti

Here’s a relevant graph I really like. The problem with new tech is it’s really easy to imagine the jobs it will destroy but really hard to imagine the jobs it will create. That asymmetry makes people pessimistic even though all the historical evidence shows that tech raises the standard of living and creates new jobs.

What’s your take on the blockchain and its future??—?Guerric de Ternay

I’m more excited about public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum than I am about private blockchains. I have this theory that for every technology, there is a strong and a weak form. For example, when Wikipedia first came out, a lot of people said “That’s cool, but it’s too crazy to have anyone edit a public wiki; let’s take the wiki idea and make it private and sell it to companies.” Wikipedia was the pure form of the tech. Enterprise wikis were the diluted form of the tech. In the end the pure form wins, although it takes longer because the tech is new and strange and is hard to make sense of.

What are your thoughts on investing in self driving cars??—?Amarnath Revanna

There are >1 billion cars out there, so there are a lot of opportunities for both big companies and startups. The key will be figuring how to collect mountains of training data to make the smartest systems.

What are your comments on the Facebook announcements about the Oculus Rift? Has it reached the “thick edge of the wedge”??—?Marija Zarkova

Timely question. I now have a Vive and CV Rift and have spent a lot of time with each, especially over the last week. I just spent the entire weekend using the Rift. I think people are going to be amazed when they see it. My hope is that this year, millions of people get to finally try it and see what the enthusiasts are so excited about. It will take a few years, though, for prices to come down and for VR to really go mainstream.

Check out the full conversation with a16z General Partner Chris Dixon on Product Hunt.