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Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast.

We've talked a lot about crypto on the podcast.

You can check out the blockchain and Bitcoin tag on our website for more episodes.

But this conversation, moderated by general partner Chris Dixon, summarizes the bigger picture

and overall trends in cryptocurrencies, featuring past guests Juan Bennett, founder and CEO at Protocol Labs,

and Olaf Carlson Wee, CEO of Polychain Capital.

It was recorded at our most recent A16Z summit event in November 2017.

Can you tell us how you first got into all this stuff?

So in June 2011, I found out about Bitcoin and just went down the veritable rabbit hole,

which is something people say in this space, where once you start thinking about it,

nothing else feels interesting anymore.

So that happened to me pretty aggressively.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Bitcoin.

I joined Coinbase as a first employee and worked there for three and a half years.

After that, I started PolyChane. So Polychain is an investment fund that invests exclusively in cryptocurrency

protocols. We do not invest in the equity of private or public companies at all. It's this area of

kind of new protocols and ICOs and all those kind of words you've

been hearing. That's what we invest in. Well, I studied distributed systems at Stanford,

...