Chris Dixon on the "second-order effects" behind a16z's early bets on Oculus, drones, and crypto: "I joined the firm in 2013. I talked to Marc and Ben, and I said, 'Hey, I wanna do this crazy stuff,' and they were like, 'Great.'" "That led to a couple of themes at the time, and they're all kind of what I would call kinda second-order effects. You had smartphones obviously start in 2007, and by 2013 had gotten mainstream, and there were all these kind of first-order effects like building apps on top." "But a second-order effect was that you had the components of smartphones. You had sensors and chips getting better and better, and maybe people could repurpose those in different ways." "We invested in Oculus as an example, and that was really kind of a reconfigured smartphone. Skydio, that was one of our investments from back then that was, at the beginning, kind of a reconfigured smartphone." "Crypto, I think at the time was kind of a downstream effect to me of sort of the open-source software movement morphing into services and also kind of a result of social media where you could have these communities form without mainstream acceptance and coalesce around these blockchains." @cdixon