

Read Write Own: A New Era
Books' Unique Power
- Books offer unique depth and breadth, transmitting worldviews beyond a simple collection of blog posts.
- They create "canon events," deeply impacting readers and permeating culture.
Communicate Worldviews
- Share your worldview effectively through books, reaching a broader audience than blogs or podcasts.
- Books offer the depth and breadth to discuss complex ideas thoroughly.
Power of Catchy Phrases
- Distilling complex information into simple, memorable phrases helps ideas gain traction.
- Chris Dixon's "come for the tool, stay for the network" illustrates this principle.


























with @cdixon @rhhackett
Welcome to the web3 with a16z crypto podcast. I'm Robert Hackett, an editor here at a16z crypto, and I'm here with Chris Dixon, founding partner of a16z crypto and author of the new book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. I had the privilege of editing Chris throughout the book writing process, and I'm thrilled now to talk to you about what went on behind the scenes, the big themes of the book, the challenges, and also about the crypto industry at large as well as what we can expect from it in the future.
Learn more at https://readwriteown.com/.
Resources for references in this episode:
- Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse
- "'It's a canon event' TikTok trend, explained"
- Chris Dixon's blog at cdixon.org
- The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
- On Andrew Chen's writing habits
- On investing in Coinbase in 2013
- Guidance from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission in 2019: "Framework for 'Investment Contract' Analysis of Digital Assets"
- On blockchains as "a programmable computer that lives in the sky" via a16z crypto head of research Tim Roughgarden
- Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstader
- "How Aristotle Created the Computer" by Chris Dixon for The Atlantic
- "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" by Claude Shannon
- Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead
- An Investigation of the Laws of Thought by George Boole
- The End of Education by Neil Postman
- "Inside out vs. outside in: The adoption of new technologies" by Chris Dixon
- "The Inevitable Showdown Between Twitter and Twitter Apps" by Chris Dixon
- "Elon Musk says X is discouraging links in posts" by Sara Fischer
- "Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again" by Vitalik Buterin
- "What Will Happen in 2024" by Fred Wilson
- "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by McCullough and Pitts
- Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
- On "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" and Hegel's Dialectics
As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.