Daren Matsuoka
@DarenMatsuoka
head of data and fund strategy @a16zcrypto
1.2K Following 10.8K Followers
It’s time to give the public a 50% ownership stake in Taylor Swift. This will ensure the money she makes from concerts is used to improve the lives of all of us.
As one thing (digital content) becomes cheap and plentiful, another thing (in-person experiences) becomes expensive and rare.
DAOs were a failure in the last era of crypto.
But it may have just been the wrong time for them. Two big things are different now: (1) regulatory clarity and (2) AI agents.
We spent the last 10 years rediscovering the hard way that direct democracy is a bad idea. Turns out, nobody wakes up in the morning eager to adjudicate risk parameters or protocol updates.
It didn't help that it was illegal to experiment with different DAO structures. The vicious hostility of Biden and Gensler toward the space killed all innovation.
But it's a new day.
It is once again legal to experiment. You could choose to play with forms of representative democracy, or multi-cameral systems, or hybrids of permissioned and permissionless participation.
Not to mention, AI agents can now step into many kinds of roles that humans will never want to perform. They may help DAOs live up to their name by making them truly Autonomous.
The design space for new DAOs is infinite, for they are just software. What new experiments are people running?
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Let's skip the self-driving cars phase and go straight to flying cars. It's clearly the more efficient method of transportation.
Traffic is a 2D problem.
WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR?
Every time a transportation technology lets us go further, faster, we use that technology to expand the radius of our lives. This is Marchetti's Constant.
@tsungxu is building flying cars, because the time is right technologically and regulatorily, and because they can eliminate the speed-freedom trade-off that limits every transportation technology.
This week's co-written essay explains why now is finally the time for flying cars, and what we can expect our world to look like when we get them.
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I used to think AI would struggle with complex data analysis because the hardest part was actually expressing the query.
I was wrong.
It turns out AI is totally capable of navigating schemas, inferring relationships, and translating intent into analysis.
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Before MCP: find the right table, understand the schema, write the query, know what to exclude.
After MCP: start with a question. The agent handles documentation search, schema exploration, and query generation behind the scenes.
Product, compliance, research, strategy. No SQL required.
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Decentralization is not important... until it is.
@LoganJastremski You should not build decentralization “for its own sake.”
You should build it for what it’s good for—building shared infrastructure that even parties who are mutually distrustful of one another can trust and build on top of.
The point is credible neutrality.
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Obvious crypto ideas that seem inevitable:
- Bitcoin as a better store of value than gold
- faster, cheaper, global payments
- payment rails for AI agents
- tokenized physical and digital collectibles
- proof of human
- 24/7 markets for everything
- censorship-resistant compute
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All we need is a one-time billionaire wealth tax to finally get this project across the finish line.
California high-speed rail cost now up to $231 billion. That means the average worker in the state will pay out over $12,000 to fund a single project that almost no one will ride.
CA rail will be studied for generations, a truly once-in-a-lifetime level of government failure.
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The positive impact AI can have on healthcare feels so obvious, and the world is going to be better because of it.
I want to fund infinite healthcare apps.
AI that delivers more care and less paperwork. Companies like @CounselHealth, @EvidenceOpen and @TennrOfficial are leading the way.
If you are building this future, I would love to chat.
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The "revenue is bad" story is usually just cope (with some interesting exceptions).
It's powerful and often smart to minimize fees and subsidize growth, but you need to test pricing and learn where you can consistently take revenue.
Crypto is learning.
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A sign that the crypto industry is maturing:
Onchain revenue is now much more distributed.
NFTs are still the best architecture for digital collectibles, and it’s not even close.
Provably scarce. Digitally native. Permanent. Interoperable. Permissionless. Platform agnostic.
Working with @eddylazzarin has been the highlight of my career.
It's obvious that Eddy is one of the sharpest thinkers in crypto. But he's also an exceptional investor, mentor, and leader at @a16zcrypto.
The future of crypto is bright.
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Crypto is here to stay. We raised $2.2 billion to support builders in the space.
It’s time to build new payment rails, upgrade our financial system, and create the internet that the world deserves.
The world needs more decentralization.
The compute resources AI is trained with, the infrastructure AI runs on, and the revenue that AI generates has consolidated into a handful of big companies.
The reality is that the only real growth in the American economy is coming from the “Magnificent 7” - who are all capitalizing on AI.
The remaining 493 companies in the S&P 500 are, in aggregate, growing at less than the rate of inflation.
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