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

Mention Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, and you'll elicit a strong

opinion. In 2004, one hedge fund manager labeled Byrne the most hated man on Wall Street,

a label he wears proudly.

Byrne started Overstock.com in 1999, and the online retailer has been through a lot of change in the intervening years.

At the outset, Byrne didn't want Overstock to be a technology company trying to get retail right.

He wanted to be a retail company that was amplified by technology. Looking back,

Byrne says, he had the emphasis wrong. It should have been on technology. Burn has been focused

on the technology side of things ever since, pushing Overstock.com further into the cloud,

as well as becoming the first major online merchant to accept Bitcoin.

Byrne joins this segment of the A16Z podcast to discuss the state of online retail, value

investing in tech, and why Bitcoin and the crypto revolution is bigger than the internet.

Welcome, Patrick. Thank you, Michael. Good to be here.

We had a chance to talk a little bit earlier, and you were talking about the origins of

overstock, and how at the time you viewed this marketplace that you wanted to get

to as a sort of flea market, but that in those days, as you were building it, and even

though you were building it on the internet, you didn't view yourself as a technology company right well we that's absolutely correct in the

in 99 there was a lot of craziness going on and crazy thinking about the internet a lot of people

...