Chris Dixon, who leads the A16Z crypto fund, and has been an entrepreneur, VC, and friend of mine for over twenty years, has written a book called Read Write Own that is available for pre-order now and will start shipping at the end of the month. Chris gave me a copy right before the holidays and I read it over the last week.

I asked Chris why he wrote the book and he had two answers, one personal and one practical. The personal one is “I have focused my career on investing in blockchain networks. During the recent downturn, I felt a need to rearticulate to myself why I am doing that.”  The practical one is “I want to explain blockchain networks to young adults who are thinking about where to start their careers, to the mother of the software engineer at Coinbase who wants to understand what her child is working on, and to lawmakers and regulators in DC who need to understand why they are important.”

What Chris calls Blockchain Networks, I call Web3. The term Web3 is important to me because my investing career first took meaning during the initial phase of the web, which I think of as Web1. It took off during the second phase of my career which many call Web2. And I’ve spent the last decade of my career imagining what a better version could be, which I call Web3.

Chris takes the same journey but he calls these phases Read, Write, and Own. The initial phase of the web, when the web browser arrived, was mostly a reading experience. Then in the early 2000s, the web became two-way and we could Read and Write. What Blockchain Networks have unlocked is the ability to own things on the web. You can own your identity. You can own your social media posts. You can own your money. You can own your art. You can own your music. And so on and so forth.

Chris’s book has three parts. The first part is a history of the web and how we got to where we are right now. The second part is a detailed description of what makes Blockchain Networks work and why they are important and powerful. The third and final part is a series of descriptions of new kinds of applications that are being built on Blockchain Networks.

While I enjoyed all three parts of the book, I was energized by the final section. Chris imagines a future that is very different from where we are today. It is one I very much want to see emerge. I think you will too.

You can pre-order Read Write Own here.I encourage you to do that. I expect you will turn that last page and be excited, like I am, about what is coming now that we can own the Internet instead of it owning us.

2007 was a heady time for USV. Web2 was finally happening, four years after Brad and I spent 18 months telling the world it was coming to mostly deaf ears. We finally raised our first fund at the end of 2004 and three years later things were finally coming together and quickly. Though we made investments with a much bigger impact during that time, the one I loved the most as a user was Tumblr. Every morning I would wake up and scroll through my feed and find amazing thoughts, images, music, and more. Sadly Tumblr did not transition to the iPhone/mobile world and was displaced by things like Instagram and TikTok and SoundCloud, but for a while, Tumblr was the greatest thing on the Internet and I loved it.

That's when we first met Jared Hecht, who was employee number eight at Tumblr. During Jared's time at Tumblr, he, along with our good friend Steve Martocci, attended a Twilio (another USV investment that I have huge heart for) hackathon and made GroupMe overnight which became an instant sensation and then a company and then an exit to Skype/Microsoft.

Tumblr and Twilio and web2 and what you could do with all of this stuff was a time of infinite possibility. A lot has changed since then on the consumer web but the friends we made then have stuck and today Jared is telling the world something we have known for a few months and that is that he is joining USV as a Venture Partner.

I think we are at the beginning of another heady time, as web3 and AI present the opportunity to make a new internet that, like the early days of web2, has endless possibilities.

So Jared joins us with a decade and a half more experience than when we first met him, two successful startups that taught him so much, but also with the memories of the early days of web2 and the pattern recognition that comes from it. We will need that right now. Because it is opportunity time again on the consumer web.

My colleague Nikhil has a great post up on the USV blog about NFTs and why they are here to stay.

I particularly like this graph that shows how monthly unique minters has grown steadily throughout the crypto winter even as volumes have declined massively.

It is a classic hype cycle where the bubble bursts but the underlying thing just keeps growing. One day we wake up and the market that almost everyone has given up on is not just alive but stronger than ever.

I also very much like this from Nikhil:

The net result of these improvements is that the aperture of what NFTs can practically represent is opening quickly and interacting with NFTs is becoming ever cheaper and easier. We now have the tools to, in many cases, abstract the technology altogether and have users engage with digital experiences that are silently backed by NFTs. Art and collectibles are just a piece of the puzzle, and any digital artifact in our lives can – and possibly eventually will – be represented by an NFT.

USV has been investing in NFTs and NFT-related technologies, projects, and companies since 2017 and we never stopped, wavered, or flinched. Nikhil's post starts with something I wrote back in 2017 and believe even more strongly today:

We think digital collectibles are one of many amazing things that blockchains enable that literally could not be done before this technology emerged.

Most everyone thinks NFTs are images of silly apes, something to laugh at, but yet the reality is they are the atomic unit of digital ownership in the 21st century. Once again, the thing that we laughed at turns out to be the big thing.