A16z's Wuollet Sees Wall Street Excel Shifting to Blockchains

a16z合伙人Wuollet预计华尔街Excel将转向区块链 只有当加密技术成为取代传统金融电子表格的隐形互联网基础设施时，其主流应用才会取得成功。 Guy Wuollet阐述了加密行业从意识形态层面的密码朋克反叛转向务实的金融与互联网基础设施层的过程，并将这一演变与企业云计算及开源软件的兴起进行了对比。他探讨了现代高吞吐量区块链如何使稳定币得以实现点对点数字现金的最初承诺，同时永续合约等新型机制也桥接了散户需求与代币化的现实世界资产。对话还详述了a16z crypto的长期投资承销理念，将纯粹的财务利益最大化者与专注工艺、享受日常构建磨砺的创始人进行了对比。最终，Wuollet展望了一个10到20年的时间跨度，届时随着去中心化网络成为全球商业无形的底层管道，“加密”等术语将彻底消失。 a16z crypto新晋升的总合伙人Guy Wuollet认为，区块链代表了信息技术与华尔街的融合，并预测当加密技术成为隐形的后端基础设施时，才算最终取得成功。 (0:00) 稳定币已转变为加密领域核心的务用引擎，每季度结算数万亿美元，践行了点对点电子现金的最初愿景。 (20:00) 与长达十余年保持私有状态的传统科技初创公司不同，加密协议出于架构上的必然需求，往往很早就引入流动性代币，以激励验证者并保障共识安全。 (24:14) 区块链充当了华尔街通用的、中立的谢林点（Schelling point）——用单一的同步账本取代分散的本地Excel电子表格，从而消除交易对手和平台风险。 (45:00)

According to a16z crypto General Partner Guy Wuollet, blockchains represent the overdue digital convergence of information technology and traditional finance, operating as a cloud-style architectural transformation that will succeed once crypto fades into invisible internet infrastructure. Wall Street's Cloud Migration and Universal Ledgers (0:00) Wuollet observes that while most economic sectors have fully transitioned to the internet, traditional finance remains an exception tethered to legacy local spreadsheets and fragmented databases. Major financial institutions frequently exhibit an intellectual category error by appointing a 'Head of Digital Assets,' which implicitly treats the remainder of the bank as non-digital and mistakes crypto for merely a niche asset class rather than an overarching technological upgrade akin to enterprise cloud computing. In Wuollet's framing, blockchains function as a neutral Schelling point—a universally synchronized spreadsheet that market participants can simultaneously read and write to without relying on a centralized intermediary. While traditional financial firms rarely ask for decentralization on ideological grounds, they demand its practical consequences: programmatic governance, elimination of platform lock-in, and significant reductions in counterparty and settlement friction. Pragmatic Scaling and the Rise of Stablecoins (20:00) Early blockchain environments were constrained by low throughput, high latency, and steep transaction costs, forcing the ecosystem to emphasize digital gold or alternative speculative asset narratives. Wuollet compares this early cypherpunk era to political revolutions: while anti-authoritarian activation energy was necessary to challenge incumbents, enduring systems must eventually transition into pragmatic utility. Just as the open-source software movement succeeded by prioritizing distribution and efficiency through Linux, crypto's mainstream adoption relies on operational performance. With Layer 2 networks and high-throughput chains lowering transaction fees, developer attention has pivoted toward utilitarian financial tools. Fiat-backed stablecoins such as USDC and Tether now process trillions of dollars in quarterly volume, fulfilling the original vision of peer-to-peer electronic cash by exporting the US dollar to global populations facing inflation or banking frictions. Concurrently, perpetual futures contracts have emerged as an efficient, delta-one mechanism providing capital-efficient exposure to diverse markets and tokenized real-world assets without legacy brokerage constraints. Physical Network Choke Points Threatening Decentralization (5:00) While examining blockchain stacks from an enterprise perspective, Wuollet identified a fundamental architectural vulnerability: developer effort heavily concentrated on Layer 1 protocols and bridge applications, leaving the physical networking layer centralized. Applications can only be as decentralized as their underlying infrastructure, which remains tethered to physical choke points such as undersea cables, heavily regulated Tier 1 internet service providers, and state-level controls like China's Great Firewall. To address this fragility, Wuollet explored applying token incentives to fundamental routing protocols like IP and BGP to create decentralized internet service providers. This coordination thesis extends to physical bottlenecks in artificial intelligence, where Wuollet highlights energy and specialized semiconductor chips as primary constraints. In his view, open blockchains offer a neutral, liquid venue for financing and distributing compute and energy capacity outside centralized technology monopolies. Early Token Liquidity and Founder Psychology (24:14) Unlike traditional software companies that remain private for a decade or more, decentralized protocols frequently issue publicly tradable tokens early in their lifecycles to incentivize node validators and secure consensus. However, Wuollet notes that daily mark-to-market pricing introduces intense managerial friction, as immature protocols often trade at valuations far ahead of real-world traction, creating risks that opportunistic founders cash out prematurely. Because building foundational institutions requires multi-decade commitments, Wuollet stresses that venture underwriting must distinguish between expected-value maximizers and missionary craftsmen. Drawing an analogy to tennis champion Novak Djokovic, he argues that the most resilient founders derive intrinsic joy from the process itself—'hitting the tennis ball'—rather than viewing enterprise value strictly through personal purchasing power. He also advocates for formalized insider disclosure frameworks to ensure management alignment over 10- to 20-year roadmaps. Wuollet projects that modernizing financial services onto blockchain infrastructure will require a 10-to-20-year horizon, noting that total internet adoption may ultimately prove to be a century-long transition. The unresolved challenge lies in whether decentralized coordination can overcome physical network chokepoints and align founder incentives while the industry sheds its specialized jargon to operate as routine financial plumbing.

## Background 本期内容由 Andreessen Horowitz（a16z）于 2026 年 10 月 6 日在播客及网页平台发布。节目中，a16z crypto 普通合伙人 Guy Wuollet 与主持人 Robert Hackett 展开深入对谈，核心围绕稳定币的崛起、新兴金融市场、创始人的底层驱动力以及加密行业的下一演进阶段展开探讨。 ## TL;DR 节目回顾了 Guy Wuollet 从企业市场拓展实习生逆袭成长为 a16z crypto 普通合伙人的独特轨迹，并深入剖析了他对物理网络去中心化与密码朋克精神的早期探索。Guy 指出，现代社会中唯有金融体系尚未完成真正的数字化跃迁，而稳定币与区块链正是推动华尔街基础设施重构的“数字化转型”引擎。此外，他详细拆解了早期代币流动性对创始人动机带来的考验、DePIN 与 AI 算力及能源交易市场的结合潜力，并断言加密技术走向终极成功的标志正是大家不再刻意提及“加密”二字。最后，对话还趣谈了他的业余抽象油画创作以及对男装量产版型偏误的犀利见解。 ## Atmosphere & style 整场对话在严密硬核的技术哲思与轻松机敏的笑谈之间自如切换，散发着硅谷顶级风投特有的理性与思辨魅力。Guy Wuollet 表达坦率且极富洞察力，既能从“第一性原理”高屋建瓴地解构金融与算力网络，又能以平易近人的自嘲化解严肃命题。随着话题从底层架构演进过渡到个人生活中的“手艺人”心态、抽象绘画疗愈以及对男士紧身裤的幽默吐槽，节目的情绪曲线由宏大深邃逐渐回归生动鲜活，给听众带来既具认知密度又充满人情味的收听体验。 ## Bulletin - `20:00` 稳定币每季度结算规模已达数万亿美元，正凭借极高效率逐步实现中本聪白皮书中“点对点电子现金”的初始设想，跳脱出纯粹的价值储藏（数字黄金）叙事。 - `45:00` 传统金融的底层仍高度依赖分散割裂的本地 Excel 表格和机构间清算，区块链去中心化账本将扮演“全民共享且互信的 Excel 表”，推动华尔街经历类似云计算般的数字化转型。 - `26:45` 针对加密领域产品上线即发币的早期流动性风险，a16z 倾向于投资具备纯粹使命感与手艺人心态的创始人，以抵御代币过早高估值带来的套现诱惑与耗竭。 - `00:00` 加密技术的终局是“隐形化”：当行业真正成熟时，人们将不再特意提及“加密”或“区块链”，而是像日常使用互联网一样自然地消费其承载的金融与网络服务。 ## Key takeaways - `00:00` 加密行业成熟的终极标志是不再提及“加密”二字，就像现代人使用智能手机或互联网服务时不会刻意强调网络协议一样，区块链将彻底沉淀为底层的无感金融基建。 - `05:00` 现实互联网在物理通信层高度中心化且受制于海底光缆与少数一级 ISP 垄断，这促使行业探索为底层 IP 和 BGP 协议引入代币激励机制以构建去中心化 ISP。 - `15:00` 技术革命早期往往需要激进的意识形态作为活化能，但走向大众市场必须在纯粹去中心化与实用性之间做出妥协，类似开源运动最终由 Linux 赢得主流市场的路径。 - `20:00` 现代高性能链与 L2 带来的高吞吐量、极低手续费和超低延迟，使加密生态的应用重心从投机资产转向以效率为核心的实际用例，为稳定币的大爆发提供了底层土壤。 - `22:30` 公众对新技术的道德恐慌与污名化属于历史常态（如早期的自行车或网络交友），经过时间淘洗与实用性验证后，加密技术同样将演变为社会习以为常的基础设施。 - `24:10` 传统初创企业延迟上市与加密项目的早期发币形成鲜明对比；去中心化网络因需要代币进行节点激励，被迫将产品落地与公开交易捆绑，带来了每日盯市的团队管理挑战。 - `26:45` 面对早期流动性与估值严重透支业务进展的挑战，投资机构需要寻找具备手艺人心态与强烈使命感的创始人，以防团队过早套现离场。 - `30:00` 纯粹追求预期价值（EV）最大化和理性算计的个体往往难以承受 10 到 20 年的创业长跑，最顶级的创始人往往将创造价值视为凝聚团队的号召手段，发自内心热爱建造的过程本身。 - `30:00` 识别创始人真实动机的关键工具是深入且客观的背调（References），投资人自身的主观滤镜与先入为主反而容易掩盖创业者在日常言行中流露的真实倾向。 - `32:51` 顶级创始人普遍具备让优秀人才由衷渴望与其并肩作战的“磁吸力”，并像喜欢击打网球的德约科维奇一样，享受工作细节与手艺磨砺本身带来的回报。 - `35:50` AI 时代智能的普及受制于电力能源与芯片算力等物理瓶颈，区块链与 DePIN 机制为非“科技七巨头”的外部力量提供了去中心化资本承销与资源协调的市场机制。 - `40:00` 各大银行设立“数字资产负责人”折射出传统金融仍未计算机化的现实；区块链与稳定币将作为数字化转型引擎，彻底解决华尔街依赖割裂 Excel 账本对账的低效问题。 - `42:37` 永续合约凭借直观的杠杆收益结构和出色的资金效率，不仅降低了散户理解衍生品的门槛，也为全球投资者提供了便捷获取现实世界稀缺资产敞口的通道。 - `45:00` 华尔街或许不会主动拥抱去中心化这一意识形态，但迫切需要去中心化所带来的抗审查性、透明治理、对手方风险削减以及平台风险消除等实际效用。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 从企业软件实习生到 a16z crypto 普通合伙人 主持人 Robert Hackett 介绍了本期嘉宾 Guy Wuollet——a16z crypto 团队最新晋升的四位普通合伙人（General Partner, GP）之一。Guy 此前是投资合伙人（Investment Partner），但他进入加密领域的路径相当曲折。他最初甚至不是投资团队成员，而只是企业市场拓展团队（Enterprise Go-to-Market / Market Development）的一名实习生。从保守规整的企业软件世界跨越到狂野多变的加密世界，这一转变引出了他在科技和网络架构领域的长期探索。 谈及加密行业的宏观愿景时，Guy 指出，现代社会的方方面面几乎都已被计算机与互联网所重构，唯独金融体系依然落后。稳定币和区块链代表了金融与华尔街的数字化转型，其影响无异于云计算对传统商业模式的重塑。西方经济的很大一部分高度集中于信息技术和金融市场，而区块链正是这两大领域的真正交汇点。关于加密行业的未来形态，Guy Wuollet 总结道：“The success for crypto as an industry or a movement is that we stop saying crypto.”（加密作为一项产业或运动，其成功的标志就是我们不再天天把‘加密’挂在嘴边，而是像使用普通互联网服务一样自然地使用底层区块链协议）。 Guy 分享了自己在费城郊区长大的经历。高中时他的主要爱好是赛艇运动，这也是他后来进入斯坦福大学（Stanford University）的重要契机。在斯坦福求学期间，他迅速迷上了计算机科学与区块链技术。他提到自己读的是一所非常典型的美东预科高中（East Coast prep school），学校当时根本没有开设编程或计算机科学课程，尽管小时候稍微写过一点代码，但从未作为主业。大一升大二的暑假，他在经济学系从事研究，课题极其小众——分析政治权力对核能清理成本的影响。那份工作需要他查阅美国能源部（Department of Energy）写在实体纸质档案上的预算报告并逐一数字化，这段经历悄然培养了他对能源网络和复杂系统的好奇心。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: Guy Wuollet 的早期成长与职业路径演进 accDescr: 展示 Guy 从斯坦福赛艇队、核能研究，到 a16z 企业实习及进入 a16z crypto 的路径 subgraph Edu["斯坦福大学阶段"] A["高中文体特长<br/>(赛艇运动)"] --> B["斯坦福经济系研究<br/>(核能清理成本/数字化档案)"] B --> C["对网络系统产生浓厚兴趣<br/>(互联网/能源电网/金融)"] end subgraph A16Z_Early["进入 a16z 体系"] D["结识斯坦福校友运动员<br/>(Ben Gardner & Ronnie Harris)"] --> E["企业 GTM 团队实习<br/>(2018-2019 两期暑期实习)"] end subgraph Crypto_Shift["转向加密领域"] E --> F["师从 Jesse Walden<br/>梳理企业视角加密技术栈"] F --> G["转向底层去中心化网络协议研究"] end C --> D ``` ### `05:00` 底层网络的脆弱性与去中心化 ISP 的探索 大二那年，Guy 结识了当时在 a16z 市场拓展团队工作的 Ben Gardner 和 Ronnie Harris。两人此前都在斯坦福打美式橄榄球，凭借校友和运动员的共同渊源，加上家庭朋友的引荐，Guy 在 2018 年夏天正式进入 a16z 企业 GTM 团队担任实习生，并连续做了两个暑假。在此期间，他始终在寻找机会接触加密技术，并有幸与当时还在 a16z crypto 担任投资合伙人的 Jesse Walden（后来创立了 Variant Fund）进行了深入交流。 到了 2019 年夏天，Guy 在企业团队的核心项目是站在传统大型企业首席信息官（CIO）的视角绘制一张全面的加密技术栈架构图。他观察到，当时行业绝大部分创业者和资金都扎堆在基础设施的执行与互操作层（如 L1 公链、跨链桥、跨链通信协议），却几乎没有人关注更底层的物理网络层（Networking layer）。然而，基于基础设施构建的去中心化应用，其去中心化程度必然受制于最底层的物理通信承载能力。 Guy 强调，现实中的互联网远非公众想象中那种无处不在、弥散漂浮的“去中心化云朵”，而是高度中心化且受物理现实约束的实体架构。全球绝大多数国家的网络都被极少数一级互联网服务提供商（Tier 1 ISP）所垄断，受到政府的严格监管，并高度依赖海底光缆（undersea cables）和少数核心交换节点等物理咽喉。此外，由于部分国家为了信息审查而建立防火墙（如中国的防火长城），互联网在地理层面正日益碎片化。受以太坊基于原生代币激励构建去中心化协议的启发，Guy 开始深入构想：能否为 IP 协议和 BGP（边界网关协议）也引入原生经济激励机制，从而打造一个去中心化的互联网服务提供商（Decentralized ISP）？ - **物理网络的中心化风险**：全球互联网高度依赖少数几家 Tier 1 ISP 及海底光缆物理节点，极易受到地缘政治与监管的单点钳制。 - **协议层激励机制的缺失**：传统 IP 和 BGP 协议没有原生结算机制，Guy 试图借鉴以太坊的经济模型将其重构为去中心化激励网络。 ### `07:15` 从加密创业学校到加入 a16z crypto 投资团队 带着对去中心化网络的设想，Guy 参与了 a16z 举办的首届加密创业学校（Crypto Startup School，即后来延续多年的 Crypto Startup Accelerator 的雏形）。随后，他以研究员的身份加入了 Protocol Labs（Filecoin 的开发团队）。当时 Filecoin 的核心开发已逐步成熟，其高水平工程团队正在寻找下一个核心研究方向。在研究主管 Evan Miyazono 的带领下，Protocol Labs 内部并行着多个前沿课题，例如与麻省理工学院（MIT）合作、由 Joel Gustafson 领导的 Underlay 项目，以及由 Alan Ransil 和 Michael Hammersley 主导的去中心化能源项目（Decentralized Energy Project）。 Guy 在 Protocol Labs 的专项研究正是构建激励型网络传输层。在此期间，各种人际网络与机缘巧合互相交织：a16z crypto 的合伙人 Ali Yahya 大学时期就与 Protocol Labs 创始人 Juan Benet 是同窗好友兼室友，两人曾共同创立过公司；而在斯坦福大学，Guy 还担任了著名密码学与区块链教授 Dan Boneh 的助教（Guy 在对话中盛赞：“Dan is the GOAT.”）。在结束 Protocol Labs 的研究后，Guy 返回斯坦福攻读学制为一年的本硕连读项目（co-term / 第五年课程），原本计划利用这一年验证自己的研究项目是否具备独立孵化为创业公司的可行性。就在此时，Ali Yahya 主动打来电话，询问他是否愿意以非传统风投背景的身份加入 a16z 担任投资人。Guy 仅思索片刻便接受了邀请，正式转型为一名专职的加密风险投资人。 - **多重视角交织的独特背景**：Guy 兼具创业加速营学员、知名学者科研助教、大型去中心化网络（Protocol Labs）底层协议研究员以及一线风险投资人的多重经验。 - **关键人脉节点**：斯坦福教授兼 a16z 研究顾问 Dan Boneh、Protocol Labs 创始人 Juan Benet 与 a16z crypto 合伙人 Ali Yahya 的长期合作关系，促成了 Guy 最终加盟 a16z crypto。 ### `10:00` 加入 a16z 的破格路径与加密朋克精神的萌芽 Guy Wuollet 谈到了他加入 Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) 时非常规的背景。a16z 历来的传统是让极具经验的成功创业者或资深操盘手担任普通合伙人（General Partner），而协助 GP 的投资合伙人（Investment Partners）通常也是二十多岁尾或三十岁出头、曾在高增长创业公司担任产品或企业战略拓展（Corp Dev）角色的资深人才。然而，Guy 当时只是一名斯坦福在校生。他自嘲道：“我就是那种喜欢礼貌地打扰别人并试图学到更多的实习生（I was kind of the intern that was interested in politely bothering people and trying to learn more）。” 在面试团队时，他在整个基金内部建立了一系列深厚的连接：他曾与 Stacey 一起实习，与 Dan 密切共事（当 Ali 向 Dan 询问对 Guy 的推荐意见时，Dan 的评价极高：“Guy 很能干”），并在 Protocol Labs 与 Juan 也有过交集。当 Chris Dixon 后来宣布提拔 Guy 为普通合伙人时，曾打趣说团队总是在各个地方“不断撞见他”。Guy 最终在 2020 年底正式加入了团队。 谈及为何走向加密领域，Guy 坦言自己从小就有抵触权威的脾气：“我认为自己在一定程度上是个有点脾气坏的孩子，我不是个喜欢权威的人（I think I was a bit of a, let's say, curmudgeonly child. I was not a huge fan of authority）。” 这种天性使他对比特币最本源的理念产生了强烈共鸣——将其视为对抗政府通胀的对冲手段以及对民族国家权力的制衡工具。 这种兴趣在 2017 年底转变为具体的行动。作为家族中主修计算机科学的“技术担当”，Guy 平常总被亲戚拉去修 Wi-Fi 或设置节日科技礼物。然而在那年年底，他的祖母无意中问了他一句：“新闻上总在报比特币，我该不该买点比特币？”为了能解答这个问题，Guy 找出了中本聪的比特币白皮书。他反复研读了一周时间，由此真正被加密技术迷住： - **原生激励机制**：区块链不仅是开源软件，而且内置了经济激励机制，能够让网络本身形成商业闭环。 - **密码朋克意识形态**：通过密码学来推动社会变革、重塑社会运作规则。Guy 长久以来都自认为是一名纯正的“密码朋克（cypherpunk）”。 --- ### `15:00` 意识形态与务实主义的博弈：技术革命如何走向大众市场 回顾加密朋克与加密行业近年的演进，Guy 引用了一句关于自由意志主义者的俏皮话来作类比： > “关于自由意志主义者，有一句我喜欢的俏皮话：好消息是他们是对的，坏消息是他们输了。我认为过去几年加密领域对密码朋克来说也是这样（There's a quip I like about libertarians which is you know there's a good thing a bad thing about libertarians and the good thing is they're right and the bad thing is that they lose and I think the history of crypto over the last few years is kind of that for cypherpunks）。” 纯去中心化系统确实具有极高的抗脆弱性和鲁棒性，但从实际市场采纳度与主流商业成功来看，那些愿意在意识形态上做适度妥协、追求务实路线的项目往往获得了更广泛的普及。这与开源软件的发展史极为相似：尽管当今的企业开源拥护者与早期的激进自由软件斗士在理念上大相径庭，但开源运动毫无疑问已经取得了彻底胜利——Linux 如今已经运行在全世界超过 90% 以上的计算机设备上。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 技术革命演进生命周期 accDescr: 展示从早期的意识形态驱动爆发，到务实落地、走向大众市场的产品演进过程。 subgraph Phase1["爆发阶段（激进意识形态）"] A["核心驱动能量：密码朋克/颠覆现状"] B["早期受众：基于意识形态与抗审查做选择"] end subgraph Phase2["过渡阶段（务实权衡）"] C["革命不能永远造反，必须建立治理与秩序"] D["适度妥协纯粹去中心化以换取可用性"] end subgraph Phase3["成熟阶段（大众市场采纳）"] E["主流受众：基于效率、互操作性与低平台风险做选择"] F["基础设施极大改善：低延迟、高吞吐、极低费用"] end A --> B B --> C C --> D D --> E E --> F ``` Guy 指出，任何政治革命或技术革命在爆发之初都需要极强的“活化能”（activation energy）来推翻既得利益者；但革命不可能永远造反下去，最终必须建立治理架构，提供可供大众消费的日常服务： - **主体间性价值（Intersubjective Value）**：像比特币这样的资产是成功的，它的价值很大程度上建立在互为主观的共识之上（“我认为它有价值，因为其他人也认为它有价值”）。 - **效率与降低平台风险**：许多新兴应用不再单纯诉诸去中心化意识形态，而是以更高的效率、更低的中介风险与可组合性来吸引普通企业和大众用户。 对于市场上长期存在的“区块链还是比特币（Blockchain not Bitcoin）”的争论，Guy 解析了 a16z crypto 命名的多重维度。Crypto 不仅仅是纯粹中立的技术工具（密码学），也是一种新型资产类别（加密货币），更是一种构建下一代互联网服务的模式（加密网络）。过去 5 到 10 年难以实现的设想，正在随着区块链底层基础设施的飞跃——吞吐量显著提升、延迟大幅降低、Gas 费用大幅削减——而迎来走向成熟的窗口期。 ### `20:00` 基础设施迭代与稳定币的“正名” 底层基础设施的跨越式升级，从根本上重塑了加密技术的应用场景。早期类似比特币乃至初始阶段的以太坊，网络速度慢且交互成本极高；而如今以太坊 L2、Solana 以及各类超高速新链的涌现，带来了极高的吞吐量、超低的手续费与极低的延迟，这种吞吐量甚至超越了当下的实际需求。这种基础设施维度的蜕变，使得加密生态的应用重心从最初的“数字货币”或纯粹的“投机资产类别”，转向了以效率为核心的实际用例。与此同时，社会认知与政府立法监管的演进同样功不可没。几年前，稳定币在技术、监管及用户采纳层面都还被视为高风险品类；而如今，稳定币已成长为加密领域中最安全、在效率提升上最立竿见影的赛道，每季度的交易规模已达数万亿美元且仍在持续增长。 在探讨这一转变时，团队经常思考的核心命题是“为什么是现在”（Why now）。某种意义上，任何创业构想在未来的某个时间节点都可能是好主意，但为何过去未能成功的概念会在当下大放异彩，而不是推迟五年或提前五年？稳定币在很大程度上完成了从早期的 Hashcash 甚至 PayPal 就开始探索的“数字现金”夙愿。比特币最初的构想本身就是“点对点电子现金”，而非后来被广泛认同的“数字黄金”。如今，以 USDC 或 Tether 为代表的稳定币，在支付场景中显然比其前辈们更具吸引力，真正承载了点对点电子现金的实际使命。 - **基础设施对比**：早期的以太坊与比特币速度慢、费用昂贵；现代高性能链与 L2 具备高吞吐量、低延迟和极低手续费。 - **交易规模体量**：稳定币目前每个季度结算数万亿美元的交易量，成为效率最高的加密基础设施。 - **定位回归**：稳定币重新兑现了中本聪白皮书中“点对点电子现金”的初始设想，跳脱出纯粹的价值储藏（数字黄金）叙事。 --- ### `22:30` 技术演进中的社会认知反转与道德恐慌 技术与意识形态、文化演进往往是步调一致的，这与互联网自身的发展轨迹如出一辙。诸如社交媒体或网络交友（Online dating）这类如今习以为常的产物，在 20 世纪 90 年代和 2000 年代初的公众认知中曾面临巨大的社会偏见。过去，人们甚至会因为承认伴侣是通过网络认识的而感到尴尬；而现在情况彻底反转，在网上结识伴侣已经成为社会常态。 这种对新技术的初始抗拒在人类历史上屡见不鲜。网站“悲观主义者档案”（Pessimists Archive）记录了大量公众对新兴技术的道德恐慌与情绪反弹。例如，自行车刚发明时曾引发严重的社会道德恐慌，人们担心它让居民在城镇之间自由流动，从而彻底瓦解社区和国家的传统社会结构；但站在今天的视角，自行车不过是一件平淡无奇的日常交通工具。加密技术同样遵循这种规律，那些起初伴随着强烈意识形态碰撞或剧烈情绪反应的事物，在经历时间的淘洗后，终将被全社会视为习以为常的基础工具。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 技术采纳与社会认知演进 accDescr: 展示新技术从道德恐慌演进到日常基础设施的三个阶段 subgraph Phase1["初现阶段"] A["新技术出现"] --> B["道德恐慌与社会偏见<br/>（如自行车破坏社区/网络交友被污名化）"] end subgraph Phase2["过渡阶段"] B --> C["基础设施成熟与实用性验证"] end subgraph Phase3["常态化阶段"] C --> D["日常化工具<br/>（成为社会习以为常的基础设施）"] end ``` --- ### `24:10` 早期流动性与去中心化网络的时机悖论 传统风险投资领域中，企业保持私有化（非上市）的时间越来越长，投资锁定期常常跨越十年以上。而在加密领域，代币往往很早就具备了流动性。关于这一现象，必须将两个维度的“时机”清晰拆分：其一是特定商业想法或产品技术落地的时机，其二是该项目何时引入公开可交易的资产。在 Google 之前有许多搜索引擎，在 Facebook 之前也有许多社交网络，那些公司何时上市与当时是否是创立该类产品的合适时机是完全脱钩的两件事。 然而在加密世界中，这两者往往被迫捆绑。若要构建一个带有激励机制的去中心化网络，项目方往往必须引入公开交易的代币资产来激励验证节点，导致产品上线的同时代币也进入了交易市场。公司在传统领域延迟上市，主要归因于上市合规与信息披露的高昂成本，以及私市股权资本的充裕供给，这并非加密技术造成的后果。但对于加密创业者而言，在产品上线即发币的模式下，每天都要面对盯市（mark-to-market）估值的波动，这给团队的日常管理带来了极大的挑战。 正如 Guy Wuollet 所指出的那样：“I think these things get combined in crypto because to build a decentralized network with incentives, oftentimes you need to have a publicly tradable asset associated with your project.” --- ### `26:45` 创始人动机与抵御过早资本化的长期主义 面对代币资产早期流动性可能带来的极高估值泡沫，这究竟是优势还是劣势，取决于创始人的心智与动机。成熟优秀的团队会将其视为市场结构所赋予的绝佳融资窗口，利用更充沛的资本储备加速开发。但这也凸显了加密行业对更完善的信息披露机制的迫切需求——类似于传统公开市场的 CEO 在减持股票前必须依法依规进行申报披露一样，加密项目也需要类似的透明度规范。 在投资策略上，a16z 依然秉持 5 年、10 年乃至 20 年的极长投资视野，并未因代币早期的流动性而改变风险投资的本质。更重要的是，过早的市场定价往往远超实际业务进展，这要求投资机构更加青睐那些具备强烈使命感和意识形态驱动的创始人。如果缺乏长期的热情与执念，创业者很容易在项目估值严重透支未来的阶段，选择套现离场去购买游艇或海景房。 关于创始人动机与投机诱惑的博弈，Guy Wuollet 总结道：“So I would almost say that investing in founders who are somewhat ideological is a defense against the idea that if your startup is priced ahead of progress, you would sell a large portion of your startup and buy a boat or beachfront property or something.” - **投资周期定位**：风险投资的核心始终是长期陪伴顶尖团队，无论是传统股权还是加密资产，其孵化周期通常都需要 5 到 20 年。 - **披露制度诉求**：加密市场亟需建立类似公众公司的管理层减持预披露制度，以平衡早期流动性带来的道德风险。 - **意识形态作为护城河**：强烈的使命感和长期主义信念，能够有效防止创始团队在代币过早获得流动性和高估值时丧失进取心。 ### `30:00` 创业者的动机心理学与识别“本真追求” Guy Wuollet 深入剖析了顶级创业者独特的偏好架构。在他看来，经济学中假设的“追求效用最大化、理性算计”的人，根本不可能拥有创立伟大企业所需的偏好。想要在长达 10 到 20 年的漫长跨度里赚取巨额财富本身是一种极度反直觉的选择。那些构建出非凡成就的人，往往将建立高价值企业视为一种号召与凝聚他人的路径，借此吸引伙伴共同投身于宏大且有意义的旅程。这类创始人渴望打造极具价值的商业实体，但其个人往往对金钱本身的实际消费力毫无兴趣。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 创业者底层驱动力对比模型 accDescr: 对比纯EV理性追求者与热爱构建过程者的核心差异与企业终局 subgraph EV["纯 EV / 结果驱动型创始人"] A1["终极目标: 追求纯财务回报与资金购买力"] A2["心理状态: '在目标达成之前我绝不快乐'"] A3["终局走向: 达成阶段目标即退出或陷入耗竭"] end subgraph Craft["过程 / 使命驱动型创始人"] B1["终极目标: 热爱构建企业本身与手艺品质"] B2["心理状态: '享受过程，好工作的报酬是更多工作'"] B3["终局走向: 具备长期磁吸效应，穿越 10-20 年周期"] end A1 --> A2 --> A3 B1 --> B2 --> B3 ``` 针对 Robert Hackett 提出的风投行业核心难题——“普通人极难准确识破创始人的真实动机”，Guy 提出了截然不同的观点。他认为人们在日常表达中其实是非常坦诚的，很难长期伪装真实信念与偏好。评判出错往往是因为投资人自身带着主观滤镜和倾向性去过度解读。Guy 援引了一项经典的心理学实验：让亲密好友与完全陌生的旁观者分别预测目标对象的性格测试结果，结果仅凭观察公寓布置的纯陌生人，在预测性格准确率上反而显著优于朝夕相处的好友。这证明评估最大的障碍并非缺乏信息，而是人们强加的想象与先入为主的偏见。 - 纯粹基于预期价值（EV）最大化、精于算计的个体，往往难以承受 10 至 20 年周期的创业煎熬。 - 背调（References）是破除投资人主观偏见、还原创始人真实行为模式的最有效工具。 - 正如 Guy Wuollet 所说：“I think if your only goal is to make a giant amount of money in a pure EV maximizing rational way, then maybe you're not the perfect fit to build a startup over the course of 10 or 20 years.” --- ### `32:51` 顶级创始人的特质：“击球”手艺人与磁吸效应 在探讨优秀创始人的共通特征时，Guy 指出首要特质在于“磁吸力（Magnetism）”。这种磁场并非指善于在社交酒会上八面玲珑的传统魅力，而是一种能让顶尖人才由衷渴望与其并肩作战的天然吸引力。另一个普遍特征则是将构建过程本身视作奖赏。他直言，对优秀工作的真正奖赏往往只是“更多的工作”。如果一个人纯粹为了终局结果而咬牙坚持，一旦目标达成或遭遇阻碍便极易抽身离去。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 体育巨星心态类比 accDescr: 对比阿加西与德约科维奇的心态来阐释创始人做事的根本驱动力 subgraph Agassi["安德烈·阿加西 (Andre Agassi)"] direction TB A["自传坦白极其痛恨网球"] --> B["完全被训练和目标压迫驱动"] end subgraph Djokovic["诺瓦克·德约科维奇 (Novak Djokovic)"] direction TB C["打球初衷极其纯粹"] --> D["'我真的只是喜欢击打网球的感觉'"] end Agassi -.->|"对比"| Djokovic ``` Guy 用网球巨星的经典案例作了生动对照：安德烈·阿加西在自传中曾坦承自己其实极其憎恨网球，纯靠非凡的自律与痛苦咬牙支撑；而诺瓦克·德约科维奇谈及为何打球时，答案却纯粹得多——他只是发自内心地喜欢击打网球的那种纯粹感觉。主流商业文化往往宣扬“狼性竞争（Killer instinct）”和极致功利，但 Guy 认为最顶级的成功者往往是怀着手艺人（Craftsmanship）的心态深耕细节。那些真正决定胜负的边缘洞见，往往极其隐晦，只有当一个人对业务本身抱有极度浓厚且纯粹的个人兴趣时，才可能发掘并沉淀出独特的认知壁垒。 - 优秀创始人普遍具备极高的磁场，能不依赖外在说辞自发聚拢最顶尖的团队。 - 真正能穿越周期的人享受建造本身的技艺磨砺，而非仅仅执着于商业终局。 - 正如 Guy Wuollet 所评价：“And I think the founders that tend to succeed really just like hitting the tennis ball.” --- ### `35:50` 区块链的落地前沿：金融基建、DePIN 与算力/能源市场 在探讨加密技术的落地场景时，Guy 明确表示，区块链在当下最明显且具备最强产品市场契合度（PMF）的领域依然是更优越的金融服务。公链构成了互联网级别的新一代结算网络与资本协调机制。目前行业中最具活力的应用，绝大多数都可以视为围绕稳定币（Stablecoins）或永续合约（Perps）爆发所产生的二阶效应。西方经济体中相当巨大的比重聚焦在信息技术与金融市场的交汇处，而区块链正是这两者的终极融合点。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: a16z crypto 关注的赛道全景图 accDescr: 涵盖金融服务层、衍生品与预测市场、以及物理基础设施网络的三层投资全景 subgraph CoreFin["核心金融与市场层"] F1["支付与结算 (Payments)"] F2["信贷与借贷 (Lending & Credit)"] F3["新交易所基建 (Prime Brokerages / 聚合器 / 交易终端)"] end subgraph Derivatives["衍生品与预测网络"] D1["永续合约 (Perps)"] D2["传统衍生品 (期权 Options / 期货 Futures / 远期 Forwards)"] D3["预测市场 (Prediction Markets)"] end subgraph DePIN["物理基础设施网络 (DePIN) & AI"] P1["算力网络与算力交易市场 (Compute Networks)"] P2["分布式能源网络与储能分配 (Energy Markets)"] P3["非 Mag 7 机构的资本承销与资源协调"] end CoreFin --- Derivatives Derivatives --- DePIN ``` 除了支付、主经纪商业务（Prime Brokerages）、预测市场及全品类金融衍生品，Guy 特别强调了加密与人工智能的交汇点，以及分布式物理基础设施网络（DePIN）的爆发潜力。在人工智能时代，“充沛的智能”本质上受制于两大物理瓶颈：电力能源与芯片算力。虽然制造更高效的芯片和储能设备属于纯技术攻关，但如何高效调度资本、承销物理资产以及创建流动性交易市场，本质上属于市场机制设计问题。区块链为非“科技七巨头（Magnificent Seven）”的全球外部力量提供了一个去信任、无门槛参与算力与能源市场的绝佳载体。 - 稳定币突破了西方成熟金融体系的准入壁垒，演变为全球资本流动的新渠道。 - a16z 持续关注主经纪商（Prime Brokerage）、交易终端、聚合器等交易所之上的配套基础设施。 - 尽管 NFT 与创作者经济在前一周期遭遇了时间节点上的波折，但数字所有权的核心逻辑仍具长期生命力。 - 面对 AI 算力与能源的军备竞赛，DePIN 机制能够打破大科技垄断，提供高效的去中心化承销与协调手段。 - 正如 Guy Wuollet 所断言：“I think blockchains are a wonderful general purpose technology for building networks on the Internet. I think in the short term, the applications that have the strongest product market fit are mostly financial.” ### `40:00` 美元的超强产品契合度与华尔街的“非数字化”悖论 Guy Wuollet 谈到，人们对美元有着巨大的需求，美元本身就是一个极其卓越的产品。在遭遇高通胀、严苛外汇管制或对本国央行缺乏信任的国家和地区，美元展现出了惊人的产品市场契合度（PMF）。而稳定币在商业上的加速普及，本质上很大程度源自其带来的超高效率。 在审视传统金融体系时，Guy Wuollet 指出了一个颇为荒诞的命名现象：在各大银行和顶尖金融科技公司中，负责区块链业务的高管往往被冠以“数字资产负责人”（Head of Digital Assets）的头衔。语言往往能折射出底层的真实认知，这种称谓背后隐含的逻辑令人深思——如果需要专门设立一个部门去管“数字资产”，就意味着整个银行的其他部门处理的都是“非数字资产”。Guy Wuollet 感叹道：“整个世界都已经被搬上了计算机和互联网。除了金融系统之外，万事万物皆已计算机化，这简直太不可思议了。”（“The entire world has been put on a computer and on the Internet. Everything is computer other than the financial system, which is insane.”）虽然散户通过 Robinhood 或盈透证券（Interactive Brokers）在手机上操作买卖，看似体验现代化，但底层设施并没有完成真正的数字化跃升。正如云计算彻底改造了企业 IT 架构一样，区块链和稳定币将成为整个金融界和华尔街的“数字化转型”引擎。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 传统金融与区块链数字化转型对比 accDescr: 对比传统银行分散割裂的电子表格与基于区块链的共享账本架构 subgraph TradFi["传统金融体系"] direction TB A["分散的本地账本 / Excel"] --> B["机构间对账清算与人工干预"] B --> C["高摩擦、对手方与平台风险"] end subgraph BlockchainFin["区块链金融网络"] direction TB D["去中心化共享账本"] --> E["自动化智能合约结算与跨机构协同"] E --> F["抗审查、低对手方风险与透明共识"] end TradFi -.->|"数字化转型升级 (类比云计算)"| BlockchainFin ``` - **认知偏差与“类型错误”**：许多投行机构区分“加密货币”（特指 BTC、ETH、Solana 等代币资产类别）与“区块链”（底层技术），甚至沿用 2018 年“只要区块链，不要比特币”的说辞。Guy Wuollet 评价这在计算机语言中犹如一个“类型错误”（Type Error）——就像财富管理机构可以向客户提供黄金投资，但不能因为提供黄金而无视互联网底层基础设施的存在。 - **机构接纳的转折点**：区块链性能瓶颈的突破、监管清晰度的提升以及全社会认知的深化，正促使机构级金融服务迎来拐点；这一浪潮率先从支付和现金领域（即稳定币）爆发，接下来必然延伸至传统证券资产和更广泛的资本市场链上化。 --- ### `42:37` 永续合约（Perps）的爆发逻辑与链上衍生品魅力 在探讨链上交易时，主持人 Robert Hackett 问及永续合约（Perpetual Futures，简称 Perps）广受欢迎的原因。Guy Wuollet 认为，永续合约是一种极其直观的衍生品结构，特别是对散户投资者而言格外友好。传统期货需要考虑交割日与展期操作，而永续合约结构简单：标的资产价格波动 X%，在杠杆作用下合约价格就相应波动 X% 乘以杠杆倍数。这种机制不仅在资金效率上表现优异，而且比复杂的期权或传统合约更容易被人理解。 此外，永续合约为全球投资者打破了壁垒，提供了获取稀缺资产敞口和杠杆的便捷通道。很多现实世界资产（RWA）难以直接购买或无法轻易加杠杆，永续合约交易所便成为了最佳载体。去中心化永续合约还具备独特的 Delta-1 敞口结构，投资者直接与其他对手方进行博弈，而非单纯面对中央券商的暗箱操作。Guy Wuollet 强调：“任何时候只要出现如此惊人的产品市场契合度，探究‘为什么’固然重要，但认识到‘事实已经发生’同样关键。我认为无论是今天的稳定币还是永续合约，都已经无可争议地证明了这一点。”（“Anytime there's that sort of level of incredible product market fit, I think it's as important understanding why and just understanding that it is. And I think it very clearly is for both stable coins and perps today.”） --- ### `45:00` “全民共识的 Excel 表”与终极隐形化 谈到资产代币化与数字化的本质优势时，Guy Wuollet 归结为“各维度的纯粹效率”——就像互联网在各方面都超越传统平信、Excel 全方位超越纸质账本一样。目前华尔街许多业务的实际载体并非真正的互联网络，而是各自割裂运行的本地 Excel 电子表格。设想如果出现一张“所有人都能访问、所有人都能达成一致的共享 Excel 表格”，金融业务将迎来质的飞跃。 然而，构建一个“全民共享且互信”的账本极其困难：由哪家机构来掌控这个共享表格？谁拥有权限修改运行规则？谁来审批读写权限？任何单一中心化机构给出的方案都无法取得全行业的绝对信任，而区块链通过去中心化技术完美充当了这一“谢林点”（Schelling Point），使全行业得以同步协同升级。Guy Wuollet 观察到：“尽管华尔街的大多数人不会主动声称自己需要‘去中心化’，但我认为他们迫切需要去中心化所带来的实际效果——抗审查性、治理机制、对手方风险的降低以及平台风险的消除。”（“I think much of Wall Street would not say they want decentralization. I think they want... the effects that decentralization brings in censorship resistance, in governance, in the reduction of counterparty risk, in the reduction of platform risk.”） - **行业终局：不再提及“加密”二字**：Guy Wuollet 预测，加密行业最终成熟的标志就是大家不再挂着“加密”（Crypto）、“区块链”或“数字资产”这些名词，而是直接统称为金融服务。正如现代人佩戴 Apple Watch、兜里揣着智能手机时，出门买饭绝不会刻意宣布“我现在要连上互联网”一样，网络已在无感中渗透。 - **数十年的漫长变革**：向稳定币和链上资本市场的迁移在未来几年内将加速体现，但整个数字化转型的彻底完成将是一个长达 10 到 20 年甚至更久的历程。从人类采纳互联网的宏观视角来看，这或许是一场百年尺度的演进，而区块链正是承载金融网络的核心基础设施。 --- ### `48:47` 业余生活：满屋悬挂的“六年级学生画作” 在严谨的金融管道、技术架构与底层机制探讨之外，Robert Hackett 将话题转向了私人生活与闲暇兴趣，并提及 Guy Wuollet 此前说过的有趣观点——让一个陌生人走进你的家，往往比朋友甚至你自己更能看透你的本质。Robert Hackett 追问：“如果有人走进盖伊·乌莱特（Guy Wuollet）的家，他们会看到什么？” Guy Wuollet 笑着揭晓了一个反差极大的秘密：他的家可能会让所有人大吃一惊。踏入他的公寓，直观感觉就像是“一位教小学六年级美术的老师在得意地展示全班学生的作品”。墙上随处挂满了各种略带生涩、看似信手涂鸦的画作。这些其实并非来自儿童，而是出自他自己之手。他透露自己在去年迷上了油画，画画成为了他工作之余最重要的业余爱好与创意表达方式，这与他每天深耕的高精尖加密金融投资形成了趣味鲜明的对比。 ### `50:00` 抽象绘画：逃离量化与市场评价的个人疗愈 在节目的尾声，主持人 Robert Hackett 问及 Guy Wuollet 平时的个人爱好，尤其是他在画画时究竟是画静物还是风景。Guy Wuollet 坦言自己的创作全部是抽象画，而且是“故意画得很烂”。他解释道，自己在生活中所做的大多数事情都极度量化且讲求客观，无论是成为一名出色的风险投资人，还是从事金融相关的工作，都需要经历长期、严谨、客观的数据与理性推导。 然而艺术创作的逻辑与金融市场截然相反。Guy Wuollet 强调：“And I love the fact that if you paint something, like it only really matters if you are happy with it.” 在他看来，市场的价值取决于外部环境与群体的客观定价，但绘画只要创作者自己感到愉悦和满足就足够了。画画对他而言，既是一个释放内心童真、富有玩心且充满乐趣的情绪出口，又是一种无需理会外部理性市场评判的纯粹个人体验。 - **投资与艺术的对比**：风投和金融工作高度依赖理性、客观逻辑与量化指标；而艺术创作则完全主观，只需取悦创作者自己。 - **创作风格**：偏爱纯粹的抽象风格，刻意不追求传统意义上的“画得好”，以此作为解压和释放内心情绪的途径。 --- ### `50:50` 男装尺码之争：紧身裤与过长T恤的时尚误区 在被问及“你愿意誓死捍卫的最微不足道的小执念（the smallest hill you will die on）是什么”时，Guy Wuollet 出人意料地将矛头指向了男士着装，直言大多数男性的裤子都太紧了。他特别调侃了一种代际现象，指出很多中年男性极其热衷于穿紧绷绷的 Lululemon ABC 裤子，这让他觉得十分滑稽。他坦言自己也是在几年前才恍然大悟，发现自己大半辈子以来竟然一直买错了鞋子尺码和裤子尺寸，并推测社会上有相当大一部分群体同样从未买到过合身、合尺寸的衣服。针对“大多数男裤都不合身”的困境，他建议男性应该认真寻找真正贴合体型的裤子，而不是盲目跟风。 Guy Wuollet 进一步追溯了这种风潮的源头，认为从 2000 年代初期开始，时尚界兴起了紧身牛仔裤（skinny jeans）的潮流。这种剪裁或许非常适合骨瘦如柴的模特，但绝大多数普通人根本没有那种身材，整体视觉风格也完全不搭调，偏偏这种审美却席卷了大众市场。与此同时，市面上的男士 T 恤普遍做得过长，往往比合适长度多出了 3 到 4 英寸；正常的 T 恤理应刚好垂在腰带下方一点，但成衣却往往长得离谱。Guy Wuollet 指出，只要仔细观察服装广告的模特拍摄就会发现，摄影师往往会将 T 恤塞进裤腰或者拉扯出一个角度，以掩盖成衣过长的事实。 “Like this sort of very specific high fashion aesthetic, which is like interesting and cool and like definitely works for some portion of people have led to like maybe most men's clothing that's mass produced and you buy off the rack, like not fitting particularly well.” Guy Wuollet 总结道，这种脱胎于高级时装秀场、仅适合极少数特定人群的小众审美，彻底扭曲了大众成衣工业，导致绝大多数货架上的量产男装变得极不合身。在一番犀利吐槽后，主持人打趣他居然对服装穿搭有如此强烈的个人见解，Guy Wuollet 则笑着自嘲称自己真不该在播客里公开发表这番言论，因为接下来大家肯定会紧盯着他的裤子找茬，免不了在 Twitter 上遭到网友的无情调侃。两人在轻松欢快的氛围中结束了本次对话。 - **中年男士的“神裤”偏见**：中年男性对紧绷款 Lululemon ABC 长裤的追捧，体现了大众审美与真实合身度之间的脱节。 - **T 恤版型通病**：市面上的大众量产 T 恤普遍偏长 3 至 4 英寸，广告模特通常需要靠扎衣角或特殊角度摆拍来营造合身假象。 - **秀场审美的负面溢出效应**：专为极瘦体型设计的高级时装审美被直接套用至大众流水线成衣，导致普通消费者极难在货架上买到合体的日常衣物。 ## Notable quotes > `00:00` The success for crypto as an industry or a movement is that we stop saying crypto. — Guy Wuollet > `40:00` The entire world has been put on a computer and on the Internet. Everything is computer other than the financial system, which is insane. — Guy Wuollet > `26:45` So I would almost say that investing in founders who are somewhat ideological is a defense against the idea that if your startup is priced ahead of progress, you would sell a large portion of your startup and buy a boat or beachfront property or something. — Guy Wuollet > `30:00` I think if your only goal is to make a giant amount of money in a pure EV maximizing rational way, then maybe you're not the perfect fit to build a startup over the course of 10 or 20 years. — Guy Wuollet > `45:00` I think much of Wall Street would not say they want decentralization. I think they want... the effects that decentralization brings in censorship resistance, in governance, in the reduction of counterparty risk, in the reduction of platform risk. — Guy Wuollet > `35:50` I think blockchains are a wonderful general purpose technology for building networks on the Internet. I think in the short term, the applications that have the strongest product market fit are mostly financial. — Guy Wuollet ## Mentioned Guy Wuollet, Robert Hackett, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Stanford University, United States Department of Energy, Ben Gardner, Ronnie Harris, Jesse Walden, Variant Fund, Protocol Labs, Filecoin, Evan Miyazono, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Joel Gustafson, Alan Ransil, Michael Hammersley, Juan Benet, Ali Yahya, Dan Boneh, Chris Dixon, Satoshi Nakamoto, Linux, Hashcash, PayPal, USDC, Tether, Google, Facebook, Andre Agassi, Novak Djokovic, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, Apple Watch, Lululemon ABC Pants, Twitter ## Video description a16z crypto GP Guy Wuollet joins Robert Hackett to discuss stablecoins, new markets, founder motivation, and the next phase of crypto. [Source](https://mgln.ai/e/1344/afp-848985-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/bf52be5a-9faf-45fb-9bc3-bb4270ec53d9/episodes/6bac005c-82be-4a75-8724-4a3f9e722f73/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=bf52be5a-9faf-45fb-9bc3-bb4270ec53d9&awEpisodeId=6bac005c-82be-4a75-8724-4a3f9e722f73&feed=XPOpH7r4)

[0:00] Guy Wuollet: The success for crypto as an industry or a movement is that we stop saying crypto. [40:00] Guy Wuollet: The entire world has been put on a computer and on the Internet. Everything is computer other than the financial system, which is insane. [26:45] Guy Wuollet: So I would almost say that investing in founders who are somewhat ideological is a defense against the idea that if your startup is priced ahead of progress, you would sell a large portion of your startup and buy a boat or beachfront property or something. [30:00] Guy Wuollet: I think if your only goal is to make a giant amount of money in a pure EV maximizing rational way, then maybe you're not the perfect fit to build a startup over the course of 10 or 20 years. [45:00] Guy Wuollet: I think much of Wall Street would not say they want decentralization. I think they want... the effects that decentralization brings in censorship resistance, in governance, in the reduction of counterparty risk, in the reduction of platform risk. [35:50] Guy Wuollet: I think blockchains are a wonderful general purpose technology for building networks on the Internet. I think in the short term, the applications that have the strongest product market fit are mostly financial.

[0:00] Guy Wuollet: The success for crypto as an industry or a movement is that we stop saying crypto. [5:00] Guy Wuollet: something built on top of a piece of infrastructure can only be as decentralized as the infrastructure that underlies it. [45:00] Guy Wuollet: I think that's, maybe a way you could frame why digital assets are interesting to Wall Street is that a lot of Wall Street runs on Excel as opposed to on the Internet.

[0:00] The entire world has been put on a computer and on the internet. Everything is computer other than the financial system, which is insane. Stablecoins and blockchains are a digital transformation for finance and for Wall Street, the same way that the cloud services was a digital transformation for most businesses. A significant portion of the Western economy is focused on information technology or financial markets. I think blockchain is literal convergence of those two ideas, blockchains and crypto needs to get to, a network on the internet, like you just happen to be using a blockchain because that is a good way to coordinate those products and services. The success for crypto as an industry or a movement is that we stop saying crypto. In looking at the crypto landscape today? Where are you focusing your energy and attention? Yeah, I think the obvious opportunity today. So, Here with Guy Ouellette, General Partner at A16Z Crypto. Welcome onto the show. Thank you. Great to be here. And today, we're just here to get to know you a little bit better. You recently have been elevated to the position of General Partner, one of four GPs that we have on the A16Z Crypto team. Before that, you were an investment partner. But you've been in the crypto world for a while now. I actually was digging up some Guy Ouellette lore and learned that you were not even originally at You were on a different team, an intern on the go-to-market team for the enterprise team. And somehow from there, you managed to make your way into all this crypto stuff that we do. Yes. So give me a little bit of the background here. So how did you land on the enterprise team? And how did you then make your way from the buttoned up world of enterprise software to the pretty wonky, wild world of crypto, which is getting more professionalized and suited up, as you say? Yeah, so I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. My sport or passion in high school was rowing, and that's part of how I ended up at Stanford, where I went to college. There, I very quickly fell down kind of the computer science and then the crypto rabbit hole. I had programmed a little bit as a kid, but it was never kind of my primary interest. I went to a very classic East Coast prep school, and we did not have programming or computer science classes. When I was at Stanford, I was looking for a summer internship my sophomore year. After my freshman year, I had worked in the economics department researching the impact of political power on nuclear energy cleanup costs. Didn't know about this. It was like a super niche topic, and it was very fun reading and then digitizing Department of Energy budgets that were physically on paper. I didn't know about this backstory. project that focuses on decentralized energy. So I am beginning to see some weaving of threads throughout your career here. Yeah, I think I've always kind of been fascinated by networks, be it the internet or the energy grid or the financial system. I think that's kind of a through line of a lot of the intellectual interests I've had and certainly part of what inspired me to get interested in crypto. My sophomore year of college, they had the I think it was Ben Gardner and Ronnie Harris, who were both on, at the time it was called the market development team, and they were hiring interns. And Ben and Ronnie both played football at Stanford. So I chatted with them for a little while and kind of made a connection, ended up getting an introduction to some other people on that team through a family friend as well. And I ended up on the enterprise go-to-market team as an intern, which I did for two summers in the year in between. This was in 2018? Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was very interested in crypto and I would say kind of interested in the Internet and networking and crypto as, you know, potentially the future of that. And so during my time as an intern on that team initially, I tried to do more crypto related things. And I was fortunate to get to spend some time with Jesse Walden, who's now at Variant, but at the time was one of the investing partners on the crypto team. at the beginning of 2019, maybe the summer of 2019. And my big project the second summer I was working on the enterprise Mark Dev team was trying to build a stack diagram from the perspective of a chief information officer at a traditional company to understand the crypto landscape. And at the time, there were lots of people building at the infrastructure layer, let's call it L1s, bridges, interoperability protocols on top of blockchains. very few people were building uh like a business or an incentivized decentralized network at the networking layer and [5:00] Part of the inspiration was, well, if the point of blockchains is to offer, you know, decentralized applications, something built on top of a piece of infrastructure can only be as decentralized as the infrastructure that underlies it. And if you think about the Internet itself, in pretty much every country globally, it's actually relatively centralized into a couple of tier one ISPs. I usually, you know, heavily regulated by the government. There's so many really interesting bottlenecks and choke points with the Internet. ones that connect up all the wires, the undersea cables. People think of the Internet as just being this diffuse cloud that's ever-present, omnipresent everywhere. Yes. But it's... It's it's tethered to reality through a few locations. Totally. And usually we refer to the Internet as a singular thing, which is also not. As true today as it used to be, we have, you know, some some fragmentation of, you know, the Internet amongst different countries, especially where, you know, some foreign governments want to more strongly control the information in their society. Example being China and Great Firewall. That's at one end of the spectrum. But there are other countries that also maintain levels of control over their Internet. So I became very interested in can we build a. a networking or an internet protocol that had native incentives the same way, you know, Ethereum was a decentralized protocol that had native incentives. Could we build something, you know, similar for IP and BGP? And that turned into trying to build a research project around a decentralized internet service provider. And I was part of the original version of, at the time it was called Crypto Startup School, and it turned into Crypto Startup Accelerator, the program we've run a few times as a team. I was one of the participants as part of that. back in, I think that was in the very beginning of 2020, maybe the end of 2019. So Guy, you've got a really interesting panoramic view, having gone at this from a number of different angles, all the way, you know, coming up as an entrepreneur through our Startup Accelerator program, being an intern on one of the other teams, and then being an investment partner here and now leading deals in various crypto startups. That's a unique kind of worldview that you've managed to... capture for yourself. Yeah, I think I was very fortunate to have a lot of happy accidents with the people I got to work with. Stacey D'Amico on the enterprise market development team. I was an intern in college. I was a TA for Dan Binet, who teaches a lot of the cryptography and blockchain classes at Stanford. And is a research advisor here? Yes, Dan is the goat. That's the correct way of saying that. And then I never started a company. when I was part of the accelerator program we ran. And kind of coming out of that program, one of the things that I've I was interested in and focused on I worked then with protocol labs as a researcher on their on their team The focus of protocol labs is building file coin, which many people may know as decentralized file sharing protocol one of the ideas was we have this excellent, you know large-scale engineering team when we, you know, finally uh perfect file coin like what's the next project for for the company and so the kind of ideas in that research group uh one of them was called the underlay which was a partnership with uh mit and i think joel gustafson was was leading that there's a project called the decentralized energy project which uh alan ransel and michael hammersley led didn't ali uh wasn't he involved with protocol labs as well yeah did you overlap with him well this is kind of a series of happy Ali, Yaya, who's one of the GPs on our team, went to college with Juan Bennett, who's the founder of Protocol Labs. And they actually started a company before Juan started Protocol Labs. So Ali and Juan, you know, started a company together, had lived together, were very good friends. And so I worked at Protocol Labs on this kind of research team. My project was on trying to build, you know, this incentivized networking layer. And I worked very closely with Evan Miyazono, who's the head of research. more focused on Filecoin at the time. And so when I kind of finished my time with Protocol Labs, I was doing a co-term, basically a fifth year. And I was like, you know, I'm very interested in building some crypto project or kind of working in that space, but not totally sure how to materialize that. I should just do the co-term and figure out whether this research project I've worked on, you know, first in the context of this accelerator and also with Protocol Labs can become on our team called me and said, you know, we're interested in hiring new investors from, you know, backgrounds that are not typical of venture capitalists. Like, are you interested in interviewing for this? And I thought about it very briefly. And then I was like, yes, absolutely. That would be fantastic. Fantastic. [10:00] Wait, Stanford? Eventually a goal. Stanford student who had interned at A16Z. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the context is useful because like the original idea of the general partners and the investors at Andreessen Horowitz was that all of the general partners were very successful entrepreneurs or, you know, very experienced operators. Everybody who was in an operator position had to have been a former founder. Yeah, I was kind of the intern that was interested in politely bothering people and trying to learn more. The pattern of the investors across the different teams, the investment partners who work with the general partners, was usually someone in their, let's call it late 20s. early 30s who'd worked at a high-growth startup, usually in a product or corporate development role. So it was kind of a different... a different background. Anyway, I ended up, you know, interviewing with everyone on the team and kind of found all of these touch points that in hindsight maybe seem very obvious, but were, you know, certainly not intentional, that I had worked with Stacey as an intern, that I'd worked closely with Dan. And he, if I recall correctly, Ali asked Dan for a reference on me and Dan's comment was like, guy is competent. That's high praise coming from Dan. Evan and worked with Juan a little bit of Protocol Labs, who Elite knew very well. And so we ended up having all of these kind of touch points. And I was fortunate to join our team at the end of 2020. When Chris was announcing your promotion to General Partner, he mentioned that the team just kept running into you. I think that's a very good way to put it. Yes, I would put it as like I was fortunate to keep running into them. So there's one part of your story that still remains a gap to me, which is you mentioned origin of that isn't clear to me. And I know from working with you, uh, earlier on that you do have a sort of cypherpunk ethos and spirit, but it's never been clear to me where that came from and why you gravitated toward crypto. I would say certainly just, you know, in part by inclination, I think I was a bit of a, let's say, curmudgeonly child. I was not a huge fan of authority. And so, you know, the idea that there is a kind of new way to evolve the internet services that maybe didn't work as well for for everyone as as they could was was appealing to me the idea kind of the original ethos of bitcoin as a hedge against government inflation kind of a check on a nation state power was definitely interesting to me uh intellectually i also remember at one point uh I think it was my grandmother at the end of 2017. And I was the... the tech person and the family studying computer science. So usually the questions would be something like, the Wi-Fi is broken, can you fix it? Or someone got a new tech gift for the holiday, can we help set it up? And one of her questions really offhanded was, should I be buying Bitcoin? I keep seeing this on the news. And I understood a little bit about it. I'd talked to some of my my friends from school, but I didn't have a deep understanding, so I read the white paper. I kind of sat down, looked through it, and I ended up coming back to it every day for about a week and just kind of rereading it and trying to understand it better, and that was definitely... the initial inspiration there. And so I kind of came to crypto through, you know, one, the context of Bitcoin and being very interested in that, and two, through the context of, you know, just being kind of fascinated by the internet and thinking of blockchains as this, you know, generalization or this next era of how to build internet services that are not just open source, but also have native incentives and can be themselves businesses, as opposed to, you know, pure open software lot of my initial interests. Some of that was purely technical and intellectual, and some of that was certainly ideologically inspired by this idea that you can use cryptography for social change or to change how society works. I think the best way to put that is being a cypherpunk, which I I definitely identified that way for a long time. I think there's maybe an interesting evolution of that, which we can maybe talk about in a few minutes, too. Personal or personal? industry-wide I think I think both there's a quip I like about libertarians which is you know there's a good thing a bad thing about libertarians and the good thing is they're right and the bad thing is that they lose and I think The history of crypto over the last few years is kind of that for cypherpunks, like cypherpunks are correct and that the purely decentralized systems have been significantly more robust. [15:00] the kind of social or ideological goals, but in terms of what has gotten the most market adoption and what projects have been the most successful on kind of a financial or mainstream basis, I would say that the projects that are a little bit more pragmatic and have been willing to, you know, compromise in some of the ideological goals in order to, you know, achieve kind of a mainstream adoption. And I think you see this in a lot of technological revolutions, like this is, open source advocates have a different maybe soft process or inspiration than the original open source advocates. But I think, you know, you see open source being significantly more popular today. And I would argue open source is clearly one. Definitely. Linux is running on like over 90 plus percent of computers. Yeah. in existence. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think crypto is going through this process too. An analogy we've talked about a couple of times is that, you know, it's not a mistake that, you know, Oftentimes we refer to blockchains as a technological revolution, right? If you compare them to literal, you know, political or social revolutions, I think you need like a strong activation energy to convince people to try to make a change and, you know, overthrow the incumbent. But at some point, the revolution can't continue to revolt forever. There has to be kind of a solution or a structure, be it, you know, in the course of a political to govern at some point. I think for a technological revolution, you have to provide a solution or a service that everyone can consume or is more mass market than the initial core inciting energy. And I think we're going through that process a little bit in crypto where there are some products that are really very clearly targeted towards a cypherpunk customer who's making a technology choice on the basis of ideology. There are also a lot of projects that are targeting You know, a consumer or a business that's making a choice on the basis of efficiency or platform risk or composability. You know, all of those projects are are valuable and viable and should exist. But I think crypto started with, you know, building products and services for people that were a little more ideological. And that certainly succeeded in the case of Bitcoin, which I think is valuable intersubjectively. Like Bitcoin is valuable because other people also think it's valuable. you know, more efficient than an existing solution or valuable because they, you know, reduce counterparty or platform risk. And, you know, I think there's kind of a place for both of these and both are very important. This dichotomy, this schism between sort of the cypherpunk ideological bent in crypto and the pragmatic, more perhaps professional kind of interest, in crypto has existed for a long time. You know, Years ago, we used to call it blockchain, not Bitcoin. That was like the rallying cry of the banks that were interested in using this technology for their own ends and purposes, but not getting into the. crazy world of tokens and coins and such. What would you say is the balance today between those two forces, those like yin and yang forces in crypto? And, Having been interested in this, you know, from reading the Bitcoin white paper to trying to build your own decentralized ISP. to now, you know, as a GP at A16Z Crypto, how have you seen that also shift within the industry? Have you seen these two balancing forces, these two weights on the scales? What's like the percentage between them? Well, it's interesting. We call the fund A16Z Crypto. I think the way you describe something is often very indicative of more than the literal description. So crypto is crypto network. Crypto is literally a technology that has no opinion on how it's used in the form of cryptography. It is an asset class in the form of cryptocurrency, trying to build digital money that's secured by cryptography as opposed to through trust, for example, from a nation state or a company. And it also is a way of building internet services in crypto networks that are building new digitally native networks on the internet that are maybe not explicitly financial would suggest. And I think there's a time period for everything in life. And I think there's a time period for different businesses or for different technologies demanded by the market. And I think a lot of the things that are being built today were very hard to build, you know, five or 10 years ago because the infrastructure wasn't there. I mean, the significant improvement in blockchain throughput, reduction in latency, reduction in cost and transaction fees, I think and overlooked or taken for granted, where we went from [20:00] something like Bitcoin or even Ethereum, which was very slow and very expensive to today. Ethereum L2s, Solana, new chains like Xero, incredibly fast, very, very high throughput, maybe more throughput than we know what to do with today. Very, very low fees, very low latency. And so I think kind of that change in infrastructure allowed use cases that were more about efficiency than about kind of digital money or an asset class. And, you know, I think a big component of this is also just social adoption and regulation or legislation from the government as well. Certainly, if you looked back a few years ago, stable coins would have been a much higher risk category, both on the basis of technical risk, on the basis of regulatory risk, on the basis of adoption. Stable coins today, with the passage of genius, are maybe the safest and most obviously useful from an efficiency standpoint category in crypto. Trillions of dollars of volume every quarter and growing. Yeah. A lot of this is just market maturity and timing. Something that we talk about on the team often is that every idea is a good idea at some point and that we kind of take for granted that every entrepreneur will be correct in the fullness of time But a very important question is why now Why will an idea that maybe previously has not succeeded, why will that succeed in this instance? And why not five years in the future or five years in the past? The idea of stable coins, I would say, is really in many ways a fulfillment of the original idea of digital cash going back to to, you know, hash cash or even PayPal. Kind of the original point of Bitcoin was a peer-to-peer electronic cash, not a form of digital gold. That was kind of not the initial use case or idea. And I think today, you know, stable coins in the form of something like USDC or even something like Tether probably fulfill the idea of a peer-to-peer electronic cash in a way that is clearly more appealing for payments use cases than kind of these other predecessors. I so you know, I think the ideology or the culture evolves And in step with the technology and you know, I certainly think this is true with the internet itself If you go back and you look at kind of the public perception around things we take for granted today like social media or Online dating it was not viewed in the in the 90s in the 2000s the way it is that is viewed today Yeah it actually online dating has flipped where it actually more common for you to have met your partner online than the reverse But when I was growing up, there was like a whole social stigma around it. You might be embarrassed that you met somebody online and now it's the norm. Yes. And so I think you have very similar dynamics in all forms of technology and certainly in crypto. There's a fun website called Pessimists Archive where you can go and look at initial sort of emotional or moral responses to technologies, even going back to like when the bicycle was invented, there was a moral panic because it would allow people to move from town to town. And that would fundamentally disrupt the social structure of a community or of a country. And now I think, you know, we'd look at a bicycle as, you know, being incredibly banal. And so I think kind of in the fullness of time, of these things that start out having some strong ideological or emotional reaction end up becoming something that we take for granted as just a tool for use in society at large. I want to talk more about the timing question that you raised. So it is the case that in venture capital companies are staying private much longer decade plus timelines And so positions are locked up in a liquid for a much longer period of time But in crypto it a little bit different because tokens can become more liquid earlier. And so I'd like to understand how you think about timing the bets that you're placing and how that window of, you know, when gains might be realized affects how you're, you're placing your investments, what you deem investable or a potential fund returner. Your question was on companies staying private much longer in crypto or projects building decentralized networks. Oftentimes you have a liquid token much sooner than if you were to build a centralized version of the product that centralized company would go public. I think there are maybe two things here. The timing question is both, is it a good time for this specific idea or product or technology and like will the the team and project or company behind this idea have a publicly tradable asset associated with it sooner or later i think these are these are different questions we had many social networks many search engines before google many social networks before before facebook uh i think when those companies went public or you know [25:00] A publicly tradable asset is kind of totally divorced from whether that was the right time to start a social network or the right time to start a search engine. I think these things get combined in crypto because to build a decentralized network with incentives, oftentimes you you need to have a publicly tradable asset associated with your your project. And so when you want to launch your product, in many cases, the correct product decision is to have a publicly tradable asset. as to whether we should have a publicly tradable asset associated with our project and whether we should launch our product now or whether it's like a good time for this product. I think that is an opportunity and a challenge. Certainly, there are people that would want the market structure of when companies go public in the U.S. to be pulled much, much earlier. sooner. I think that's, you know, a bit separate from if I'm building a layer one blockchain, I have to have a native token to incentivize my validators. So when I launch my layer one blockchain, when I launch my product, I also have, you know, publicly tradable asset. I think there are pros and cons to having a publicly tradable asset. Like it's maybe harder to manage a startup if every day you can kind of see the mark to market value of that startup. Yeah, you're less of the market? Yeah, I think a lot of these things manifest in crypto, but are not specifically a result of crypto. I don't think companies are staying private longer because of crypto. I think companies are staying private longer because of the legal requirements and disclosure requirements to go public and because of the availability of capital in private markets. And I think those two things are not, you know, directly related to crypto. I think people look at those as opportunities and see, you know, can we take advantage of that opportunity or that market structure and build, crypto to address it. But lots of decentralized networks need to have or would benefit from having a publicly tradable asset. So I think in many cases, as a crypto founder, your hand is forced or encouraged, whereas there's probably not a huge benefit to going public at like series B if you're a traditional high growth startup today. Part of what I'm asking too is how the idiosyncrasies of crypto and the timing related elements, the potential for like earlier liquidity than other domains, how that might affect the type of project that you invest in. Imagine tokens were illiquid just as long as equity in a traditional startup. I might surmise that. a person would invest in projects that, perhaps are more ideologically bent because you have this longer time frame this longer window with which to see the revolution unfold and you know a huge transformation of of the world people um underestimate how how much change happens in 10 years, whereas they overestimate how much happens in like one year. So I wonder. how the varying time horizons might affect the actual... ideas that you find investable themselves. Yeah, we have a long time horizon for our investments. And I think in many cases, it takes a long time to build something really valuable. We think of investing in blockchain and crypto projects no differently than investing in other categories from kind of a venture capital perspective. We want to work with the best teams and people over a very long time horizon, be that 5, 10, 20 years. One idiosyncrasy of tradable asset, sometimes there's a very high valuation for that publicly tradable asset. And there's some question as to whether that's good or bad. I think the good version of that would be founders and teams that view that as an opportunity. This is a fantastic fundraising quirk of the market structure where now I have a lot more capital available sometimes. And so I think really what is probably needed is better transparency and disclosures. Same way in public markets, if you are running a project, you have to disclose, like, you know, I'm the CEO of this public company. If I would like to sell shares in my company, I have to disclose this. That would seem to be a valuable thing for crypto projects as well. So I would almost say that investing in founders who are somewhat ideological is a defense against the idea that investors, If your startup is priced ahead of progress, you would sell a large portion of your startup and buy a boat or beachfront property or something. It's more the idea that I think the most successful founders tend to be people who are either deeply passionate about building something on a long time frame or are doing it. [30:00] because it's their true calling. It's a very weird set of preferences as a founder to want to make a giant amount of money in a long time frame. I think the utility-maximizing, rational person that economics would model does not have those preferences. And so I think the people that tend to build fantastically successful things, ironically, uh, building something very valuable as, uh, like the pathway to convince and encourage other people to, you know, participate in their journey of, of building something big and meaningful. And that's also, I think kind of a unique person or psychology. So that wants to build an incredibly valuable product or business, uh, but themselves is not really interested in the spending power of the money. So yeah, that's, that's certainly something we, we think about, but I think you can someone is interested in the thing for itself and loves the process of building a company, or is just super competitive and wants to have the highest return possible. I think if your only goal is to make a giant amount of money in a pure EV maximizing rational way, then maybe you're not the perfect fit to build a startup over the course of 10 or 20 years. If your goal is to use the fact and like a market-driven economy to help build something fantastic and kind of attract talent and, you know, partners and customers, then I think like that is a much better fit. You said that it's pretty straightforward to tell apart these people, but I don't think it is. I think that's like the nature of venture capital is making these decisions and trying to, you know, parse who is who and their motivations and whether they've got what it takes. How do you tell these lead to success. Yeah, as a general comment, I think people are usually actually very honest. It's like quite hard to portray preferences or opinions or something other than the ones you really believe. Every person as an individual filters, you know, someone else or their comments through, you know, your own personal perspective. And I think like the tricky part is being totally neutral in regards to the comments or the outcome. So I think people the wrong impression if you allow yourself to kind of be biased and like a reaction to what someone else says. So I actually do think it's pretty straightforward to figure out what people want if you are like completely and totally open to accepting the answer at face value. A simple and uninteresting answer to your question is you should do a lot of references. If I'm recalling correctly, there's an interesting study asking people, people to complete a personality test about their friends and asking total strangers to view the subject's house or apartment and then fill out a personality quiz like your good friend will actually be worse at predicting the correct results of your personality quiz than a total stranger just looking at your apartment or your house and predicting the results of your personality quiz which to me says like there's actually a ton of information and very simple straightforward things or like imagination about who someone else is or who you want them to be tend to get in the way of making kind of a correct assessment, much more so than there's like, you know, a lack of information available to make the judgment or choice. What commonalities have you found among the founders that you esteem? Very magnetic people. And that manifests in a lot of different ways, not always in the classic, like I'm great working a room at a party sort of charisma. But just the sort of people that tend to attract talent are the sort of people that others really want to work with. I think that's almost a universally shared trait. Then I would say people that really like the process of building something and do it for its own sake. I think the reward for good work is more work. something for the goal or outcome at the end of the work you're putting in, you will probably do something else when you have finished. And so I think it's also, again, it's not that hard to tell when someone has decided, I will be unhappy until I achieve my goal. That's very different from, it would be awesome if I achieved my goal, but I'm just going to be really happy in the process of trying to achieve it. And I think people who really enjoy the process of building have a better outcome than someone who is really focused on achieving the outcome. There's a good parallel, I think, in sports where you could look at Andre Agassi's book or biography, [35:00] Or he was... You know, Matt made some version of the comment that he hated playing tennis and worked so, so hard. And then there's, you know, Djokovic's comment on like what inspired you to play tennis. And he'll say some version of why I really just like hitting the tennis ball. And I think the founders that tend to succeed really just like hitting the tennis ball. The sort of the the prevailing culture will tell you that. Yeah. People tend to succeed if they're highly competitive and super focused. And like there's a quote from succession, you have to be a killer. I think a lot of very successful people just really like doing whatever they're doing and are doing it for like a sake of craftsmanship or the quality of doing the thing itself as opposed to for the competition or the result. where oftentimes the thing that makes you succeed is totally unobvious and you would sort of only be deeply knowledgeable about it or focused on it if it was personally very interesting and compelling to you. It's always very easy in hindsight to say, well, like, you know, I had this perfect plan and, you know, I worked very hard and I got very lucky. I think maybe people tend to be bad at describing why they succeeded as opposed to having a proper introspection about, Yeah, I think the... Obvious opportunity today building on a blockchain is building better financial services. I think blockchains are a wonderful general purpose technology for building networks on the Internet. I think in the short term, the applications that have the strongest product market fit are mostly financial. I would say a lot of what is working is a second order effect of interest in either stable coins or interest in perps. You know, that's a lot of our interest and focus as well. using stable coins, not just for people in the Western world who have good access to financial services. I think blockchains are a new distribution rail and coordination mechanism for capital markets and for investing. A lot of the opportunity over the next couple of years is to build new markets. I would say a significant portion of the Western economy is focused on, let's call it information technology or financial markets. I think blockchain is the literal those two ideas, you know, to be more specific, you know, Uh, we're very interested in payments and, uh, lending and credit and building new exchanges and building, uh, you know, layers on top of exchanges, things like prime brokerages or trading terminals or aggregators. We're interested in, in prediction markets and perps. We're interested in, in derivatives broadly, other structures like options, futures, forwards, I think are all very interesting. We're also interested in, in kind of the intersection between crypto and AI. people that have significant wealth but would not qualify for a private wealth account at a big bank. There are, I think, probably a lot of interesting consumer products to be built in crypto moving forward as well. I mean, we had a whole wave of interest in digital collectibles through NFTs, interest in building more equitable and efficient creator economies. I think a lot of those are very good ideas and will work. The timing, I think, was a bit unfortunate, and we remain very interested in those ideas generally. I'm personally quite interested in physical infrastructure markets and networks. Often these are called deep end projects or decentralized physical infrastructure networks. Specifically there, I think energy networks and markets and compute networks and compute markets are quite compelling. Obviously, the kind of tailwind there having abundant intelligence, I think being, you know, very literally energy and chips. Some part of that is definitely a pure technology question, like how do we build better forms of energy generation and storage? How do we build, you know, more efficient chips? But I think some of it is a markets question as well. How do we efficiently allocate capital and finance or underwrite these assets? And I think blockchains have a big role to play in that, especially beyond participate in compute and energy markets as someone other than mag 7 kind of the best place to do that will will be on a blockchain. And that's been an area of interest and focus for us. Why are stable coins and perps or perpetual futures gaining so much traction right now? What is it about those products that people are so interested in? With stablecoins, I think people [40:00] are interested in dollars, like the US dollar is a fantastic product. It has incredible product market fit, especially amongst people that live in a country with high inflation or with strong capital controls or with a central bank that they don't like. I think the commercial adoption of stable coins is often based largely around efficiency. I guess as a broader comment or topic, the existing financial system. You know, we have a digital or a modern financial system in the US, but I find it very interesting that the person focused on blockchains at every big bank or at a lot of the fintech companies, the title is head of digital assets. And again, I think, The words we use to describe something are often very indicative of some underlying truth. And the implication of that is that if you have a head of digital assets, then the rest of the bank is focused on assets that are not digital. So the entire world has been put on a computer and on the Internet. Everything is computer other than the financial system, which is insane. is probably through Robinhood or, you know, interactive brokers, you know, an app on your phone. But I really think there's a version of blockchains and how you would describe them that is kind of taking the same transformation, literally a digital transformation that cloud services made on IT and bringing kind of that same digital transformation to finance. I think like stable coins and blockchains are a digital transformation for finance and for Wall Street, that the cloud services was a digital transformation for most businesses. And I think it's very interesting if you talk to someone who, for example, works at a GCM focused on blockchains, when they say crypto, they mean crypto as an asset class. They mean Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana as crypto tokens. When they say blockchain, they mean blockchain as a technology. And so the quip from 2018 of blockchain, not Bitcoin, is like very literally true for them, right? But that's kind like it's a non sequitur, like you should offer gold to your wealth management clients if you're an asset manager, because that's an interesting asset. But to not take the internet for granted, because you're offering gold as an investable asset to your clients, it's like, you have a type error in computer science speak. And I think that is finally happening. People are finally getting it. And a lot of the bottlenecks there, I think, were just the performance of blockchains And the lack of kind of regulatory clarity and lack of sort of social adoption or understanding around the technology. So it feels like we're kind of finally at a tipping point for institutional adoption of blockchain financial services. And the first version of that, I think, has come through through payments and through cash in the form of stable coins. assets, traditional securities, and that those would operate on blockchains and that you would, you know, have a real movement for capital markets on chain, the same way you've seen a real movement for dollars on chain in the form of stable coins. You were asking a bit about perps. Why do people like trading perps? Perps are, I think, an incredibly intuitive derivative product, especially for retail investors. They're also unique in that they provide high leverage, The underlying asset moves X percent. The perpetual future will also move X percent times the leverage you've taken out. And so I think, you know, that as a product structure, like the perpetual future is is very interesting and I would argue significantly more intuitive or understandable for a large swath of of investors. I also think perps have brought the ability to access investments, especially in the last year globally, that that are otherwise pretty hard to to trade. want leverage and perpetual futures have provided that to to investors and both an intuitive and often in a more capital efficient sense. But seeing real world assets trade on perpetual futures exchanges, I think a lot of that interest is that it's maybe hard to invest in the underlying asset or invest in the underlying asset with leverage. And, you know, the first time this has really been available is through a perpetual future. And just the same way, you know, a decentralized exchange is interesting compared to a centralized exchange. I think kind of a decentralized derivative contract that has kind of this delta one exposure where you're trading directly against another counterparty as opposed to [45:00] against a brokerage is particularly interesting. So, you know, we can kind of come up with a bunch of reasons why people are adopting perps and why they're interesting. But the truth is, like, it just is, like, it is true. You know, anytime there's that sort of level of incredible product market fit, I think it's as important understanding why and just understanding that it is. And I think it very clearly is for both stable coins and perps today. What is the advantage of digitizing an asset or tokenizing an asset? One, I would say efficiency in every sense. Like the internet was better than physical mail in every sense. Like Excel is better than a physical paper ledger. I think that's, Maybe a way you could frame why digital assets are interesting to Wall Street is that a lot of Wall Street runs on Excel as opposed to on the Internet. And what if all of a sudden you had an Excel sheet that everyone could access and everyone agreed on? And that sounds interesting and relatively straightforward to build. But this idea that everyone can access and everyone can agree on is actually incredibly hard. upgrade. So I think blockchains provide a shilling point for much of the financial industry to upgrade in lockstep. And they also answer a lot of questions that, again, seem sort of obvious, but are under the hood very complicated of like, who owns this shared spreadsheet that we're running a lot of finance on? Who gets to make changes to how the spreadsheet works or gate access to particular parts of the spreadsheet? Who gets to write or read from the spreadsheet? answers to those questions as an individual institution, but it would be very hard to get everyone else to agree on them. And so I think blockchains provide a lot of good answers to that through decentralization. And even though I think much of Wall Street would not say they want decentralization. I think they want... The effects that decentralization brings in censorship resistance, in governance, in the reduction of counterparty risk, in the reduction of platform risk. These are all things that I think those customers understand very well. I, But probably they would use entirely different words to describe the same ideas. And so kind of the hope is that at some point we don't have crypto and blockchains and digital assets. At some point, like we just have financial services that happen to run on a blockchain because that's a good way to operate them. And I think kind of the fullness of time, the success for a fund like us and the success for crypto as an industry or a movement is that we stop saying crypto. words. But when you go and try to buy food, you don't say, well, now I'm going to use the internet. You don't go online, right? Like you have an Apple watch, you have a phone in your pocket, like you are currently online. I think that is the place that blockchains and crypto needs to get to where if you're using financial services or a network on the internet, like you just happen to be using a blockchain because that is a good way to coordinate those products and services. transformation take to unfold? I think it will probably take many years. I think in the next couple of years, we'll see a broad shift in... kind of cash dollars to stable coins, I think we'll see a broad shift in capital markets moving on chain. My guess is that this will be, you know, a 10, 20 year transformation or perhaps longer. You know, if we use the Internet as an analogy, like. I think we're still in the early stages of the Internet really being properly and fully adopted. Maybe when we zoom out, this is like a hundred year process of of adopting the Internet and blockchains are a core component and part of the Internet. Tackling financial services as a network and tackling lots of these network based businesses and marketplaces. So when you're not thinking about. financial and tech infrastructure, plumbing and upgrades. What are you thinking about? What do you do for fun? What do you do outside of your job? I think you said earlier that if... You know, you gave a stranger access to your home or apartment that they might be able to know you better than a friend knows you or you even know yourself. Sure. What would what would people glean? about Guy Ouellette. If they were to see your home. I think the thing that would probably surprise people the most, and I suspect will surprise you, my experience. apartment looks like I teach like sixth grade art and I'm very proud of my students because there are like these sort of haphazard paintings all over the walls of your own I picked up oil painting last year and that's kind of been one of the one of the I guess hobbies or create [50:00] that I really enjoyed. What do you do still lifes or landscapes? It's all very abstract and intentionally not good. A lot of the things I do in life are like highly quantitative and objective. It takes a while, but the process of being a good venture capital investor or, you know, working in a financial role is very quantitative and very objective. And I love the fact that if you paint something, like it only really matters if you are happy with it. And I think that's kind of the process of art, which is very much not how markets work, right? Like the market has an context. So, you know, but both the idea that it's a fun kind of playful outlet for for my inner child and the fact that it's just supposed to be interesting and pleasing individually as opposed to something that's like a, you know, a very rational market is compelling to me. All right. I'm going to give you one final question that we can leave off on, which is what is the smallest hill that you will die on? I think most men's pants are too tight. And you can tell this generationally. I find it hilarious that there's a certain sort of middle-aged man that wears skin-tight Lululemon ABC pants. A couple of years ago, I think I figured out I'd been buying shoes that were the wrong size and pants that were the wrong size literally my entire life. And I suspect there's a large group of people that just do not buy the right size or fit thing for themselves. I think that's probably a small hill to die on. Most men's pants do not fit very well. And you should find pants that fit. How do you do that? Go to a tailor or just go up a size? I think probably starting in the early 2000s, there's this era of skinny jeans and pants that affectation if you are like rail thin and most people do not have the body type or the like general aesthetic consistency for that to make sense but these became incredibly popular like all t-shirts are way too long uh they're like in many cases three four inches too long like they should sort of uh end slightly below your belt line uh instead they're like way too long clothing being modeled, oftentimes the shirt will be sort of tucked in or it will be at an angle where it's pulled to the right level because the shirts are all way too long. So yeah, I think just generally... Like this sort of very specific high fashion aesthetic, which is like interesting and cool and like definitely works for some portion of people have led to like maybe. Uh, most men's clothing that's mass produced and you buy off the rack, like not fitting particularly well. All right. I didn't realize you had such strong opinions about sartorial choices. I really should not have said this publicly because now my pants are not going to fit. I'm going to get roasted on Twitter. Yep, totally. Cool. All right, Kai. Well, thanks so much for your time. Thank you.