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slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

As more and more of what we do for fun and work happens online, establishing identity becomes

ever more critical. Whether it's for dating or sending money, you want to trust that not only

are you interacting with the person you think you are, but that your messages or money

are in fact reaching the right person and only them. Sounds simple, but with an internet and

computers in between, a lot can go wrong, whether by accident or malicious design. A16Z's

Chris Dixon and Max Crone, co-founder of the encryption startup Keybase, examine the problem

in this segment of the pod. What makes cryptography so hard to use, what approach

Crone and the Keybase team are taking, and why crypto key parties are not what you might think.

Chris Dixon starts us off.

So you and Chris co-founded Keybase, and prior to that, you guys were the co-founders of OKCupid and Spark Notes.

Can you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you started Keybase?

We started a little bit over a year ago just because we were convinced that in the future, people would really see a

need for mapping what they considered notions of identity that computers could understand.

Chris and I got together, and we thought we had a pretty good background between the two of us

for tackling this problem.

It's a problem that on the one hand has

some cryptographic and security components to it, as you can imagine. But on the other hand,

it also has a lot of social networking and social engineering aspects to it as well. And obviously,

...