Internet History Podcast 214. Chris Dixon of a16z
13 snips
Dec 22, 2025 
Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a former entrepreneur, takes us on a fascinating journey through his tech career. He shares insights from founding SiteAdvisor, including lessons learned from its sale to McAfee. The discussion spans his early days in programming, the struggles of starting Hunch, and the evolution of angel investing with Founder Collective. Dixon also dives into his role in creating a16z's crypto fund, his bets on transformative technologies like Oculus and Coinbase, and the unique tech landscape of New York compared to Silicon Valley.
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Building SiteAdvisor And The Exit
- Chris Dixon built SiteAdvisor to warn users about phishing and spyware by classifying websites with automated tests.
- He sold it to McAfee in 2006 because channel access and scaling inside big security partnerships were necessary to reach users.
Hunch: Good Idea, Too-Early Timing
- After McAfee, Dixon started Hunch to apply machine learning to recommendations but the timing was early for neural nets.
- He says compute and model maturity lagged the idea, so the product never reached large scale then.
Starting Founder Collective During The App Boom
- Dixon co-founded Founder Collective to fund early consumer startups when small checks and cloud hosting lowered startup costs.
- He ran it part-time while starting companies and cites timing (App Store era) as a major factor in its success.
