727 Financea16z crypto fund managing partner Chris Dixon explains why the fund is being renamed a16z Frontier.
Author: Chris Dixon (Managing Partner at a16z Frontier)
Compiled by: TechFlow
TechFlow Introduction: Faced with the reality that blockchain's underlying infrastructure is gradually integrating into the mainstream financial system, Silicon Valley venture capital giant a16z has officially announced that a16z Crypto, which manages billions of dollars, will be renamed a16z Frontier. In this article, Managing Partner Chris Dixon elaborates in depth on the paradigm shift behind this move: in the post-AGI era, the focus of technology is shifting from "using new technology to do old things better" to "giving birth to unprecedented native use cases." From full-stack startups with deep software-hardware integration to machine-era networks in which machines collaborate autonomously with machines (M2M) and programmable cryptocurrencies serve as the economic settlement foundation, a16z is sounding the call to advance fully into the heartland of frontier technology.
Today we are announcing that we are expanding the investment scope of our new fund from crypto startups to the broader category of "Frontier Startups": companies that are building new technologies and opening up emerging markets that may take years to cultivate. To reflect this change, we are officially renaming a16z Crypto to a16z Frontier. This is a strategic expansion: we will continue to invest in crypto and related areas, and as always, advocate sensible and sound crypto regulation.
When we first began investing in crypto, it was a self-contained, independent world. However, as blockchain technology has been applied more widely, the boundaries of the industry have blurred, and the underlying infrastructure has gradually receded into the background. Today, Wall Street institutions and fintech companies frequently launch products built on blockchain. Does that mean they are crypto companies? Nowadays, the importance of such labels is diminishing. It clearly makes more sense to define companies by the substance of their business rather than by the technology they use.
This expansion of ours also aligns with the core philosophy that has guided many of our investments over the years: betting early on highly futuristic directions before future technologies reach the mainstream. When I joined a16z in 2013, I made this long-horizon perspective the focus of my investing. One core theme at the time was new types of computing devices. The rapid proliferation of smartphones drove cameras, sensors, and chips to become better and cheaper, which in turn gave rise to new types of endpoints such as drones, AR/VR headsets, and wearable devices. Based on this theme, we invested successively in Oculus and drone startups such as Skydio and Zipline.
Another theme was cryptocurrency, which I viewed as a new wave built on social media and the open-source movement. Social media enabled networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum to penetrate and expand from the outside in, allowing people to form communities on their own without first obtaining acceptance from mainstream society. Open-source culture provided a paradigm for software, enabling anyone to review, modify, and build on it. Blockchain technology went further, extending this paradigm from the purely software layer to services and network ecosystems. It was precisely this investment logic that guided our early investment in Coinbase and the establishment of our crypto-specific fund, and subsequently our investments in representative projects such as Solana and Uniswap.
Today, we are in the midst of another major technological transformation centered on artificial intelligence (AI). Although the buildout of AI models and computing infrastructure will continue, the technology itself is already mature enough to give rise to a new generation of products and services. No one can know exactly what the next generation of products will look like, but we are already seeing early signs. We are especially interested in the new products and new markets spawned by these technological advances, including innovative explorations that cannot be neatly placed into existing established categories.
Above all, what matters is the emergence of native use cases: creating entirely new experiences that people could not previously have. The early application of a new technology often focuses on doing old things better. So far, AI has mostly been used to empower existing activities (such as programming and other knowledge work), making them faster, better, and cheaper. But soon, native use cases will open up entirely new experiences that overturn conventional understanding and exceed expectations. In the early stages, many explorations often appear strange, insufficiently serious, or even like toys or hobbies that are a distraction from real work; but over time, some of them will eventually evolve into mainstream products. The key to discerning the difference lies in deeply understanding the underlying rate of evolution and the core factors that can turn seemingly marginal incremental growth into exponential growth curves.
We are very fortunate to live within one of the most profoundly influential growth curves in human history. Technological progress is accelerating itself at an astonishing pace, and we have already begun to capture early signals of the post-AGI world. On the one hand, software and, increasingly, hardware are becoming easier to create. Just as the proliferation of smartphones drove the previous computing cycle, we expect a large number of new intelligent devices to become the solid foundation supporting this cycle. Some of them will be autonomous machines capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting autonomously in the physical world; others will draw on frontier breakthroughs in biology and modern medicine; and still others will lie in between on cyber-physical systems.
All of these breakthroughs will give rise to entirely new models of company building. As entrepreneurs fully leverage entirely new capabilities and seek new types of competitive moats, we will see more full-stack startups combining software, hardware, and services. As humans gain more superpowers, and as AI agents increasingly possess autonomous decision-making and action capabilities, the concept of the "entrepreneur" itself may also be upended. As these capabilities permeate widely, they will reshape the organizational forms of various industries and even nurture unprecedented new industrial ecosystems.
AI will also build a new network form that deeply connects humans and intelligent agents, supporting continuous learning, efficient collaboration, value production, and economic transactions within the network. The large-scale internet networks we use daily are mainly designed for humans; networks built specifically for machines will look very different. Many projects will initially enter the market as single-player tools and then gradually evolve into multi-user, multi-agent collaborative networks. The potential contained in machine-era networks is enormous, and today's builders have only touched the tip of the iceberg.
In this historic transformation, blockchain will play a crucial role. Crypto technology gives the internet fast, low-cost, global, and programmable native monetary settlement rails. Stablecoins are rapidly becoming a common standard tool for fintech companies, established traditional financial institutions, and other market participants. In addition, thanks to the programmable nature of blockchain, both centralized and decentralized financial services can be built on it. Crypto technology can give new networks native economic functionality, enable seamless settlement between machines and machines (M2M), and open up entirely new paths for the early cold start of these emerging networks.
The above are only some frontier examples, by no means the boundary of innovation. In past technological waves, the greatest companies that defined their eras were often those that very few people could accurately predict in advance. As always, we look forward to entrepreneurs once again astonishing and impressing us by creating entirely new species that we cannot yet imagine today.
I will lead the fund together with a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, as well as General Partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet. Our post-investment operations team will, as always, provide comprehensive support to our existing and future portfolio companies in areas such as policy and regulation, market development, talent recruitment, marketing, and frontier technology research and development.
We firmly believe that several of the most important technological waves in human history still lie ahead. Today's ideas that seem bizarre or inconceivable will eventually evolve into indispensable, era-defining iconic products. If you are an entrepreneur building the next frontier of technology, please feel free to get in touch with us.