Chris Dixon is a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz who helped to kick off this year's TechCrunch Disrupt NY by being interviewed as the first speaker and first Fireside Chat participant at the three-day long event, taking place at the Manhattan Center from Monday, April 29 through Wednesday, May 1.
Dixon explained that though he began life as a programmer, he eventually received an MBA at Harvard so that he could actually learn the game of entrepreneurship and, inevitably, venture capitalism.
Dixon, who is based in Northern California's Silicon Valley, said he sees that area of the country, particularly the Bay Area, as being very invested in bringing out "a bunch of things in tech and applying it to the real world."
By this, Dixon meant products such as Square, which allows business owners out on the street with, for example, food carts or taxis, to take credit cards rather than just cash.
Though Dixon does feel there are plenty of investors interested in such products as Square and other new developments in New York, too, he said also that the big difference in San Francisco is that there are more "middle ground" employees on the West Coast. These are folks who can help to take a product to an international market or work with scaling Web services.
Dixon said this disparity between San Francisco and NYC stems from the simple reason that San Francisco has had a vibrant tech industry for "40+ years longer than NYC." In the Bay Area you can find folks who did some killer scaling for iconic companies such as Google.
In NYC, however, Dixon feels there are "hybrid" companies and services, thanks to longtime investments in media and entertainment. This seems to make Dixon an optimistic VC concerning what's going on in NYC.
Products that Dixon is particularly optimistic about include BitCoin and other payment mechanisms that may give PayPal a run for its money or perhaps make the established companies run more efficiently with a greater trust factor.
"The Internet is an anonymous network," Dixon said, explaining that BitCoin is a "fully anonymous payment system grafted onto an anonymous network."
Dixon said whereas the "first wave" of BitCoin saw VCs being reticent, now folks are getting into the idea. Dixon himself has invested a lot, he said, in BitCoin.
Dixon is also extremely passionate about 3D printing, saying that though there are still those who are skeptical about the industry, Dixon and his colleagues at Andersen Horowitz see it as "extremely significant," and he sees the firm making "multiple investments" in 3D printing.
The rationale behind Dixon's interest in 3D printing comes from his belief that it will fill the same gap in the manufacturing industry as that filled by the likes of Amazon for self-publishing authors. With 3D printing, now someone who wants to get into the field of making jewelry, for example, can do so much easier without having to sink as much startup capital into the making of the products themselves.
"Hardware in general is going through really interesting times," Dixon said, going on to explain that the "smarter hackers" three years ago used to work more with social networking. Now they are working with hardware along the lines of 3D printing like Shapeways and Makerbot, as well as hardware like Square.
Dixon feels this is true because of the "ubiquity of smartphones," which in his opinion has lowered the cost of components, as many new hardware products are basically just reassembled smartphones themselves. He said that soon we'll all be walking around with millions of supercomputers everywhere, essentially. This is particularly true too because so many products are needed to be applicable to smartphones themselves.
As far as much-anticipated products such as Google Glass, Dixon said he'll have to see it first before he makes any determinations about wearing it. He does feel that something along the lines of Google Glass could be great for professional fields, though — for example, architects and contractors looking at blueprints and needing to share these documents quickly.
Lastly, now that there's more money for VCs along with the fact that there is more information available for entrepreneurs through social media and sites such as Hacker News — in addition to there being fewer VC firms these days — Dixon feels there has been a real switch and entrepreneurs now have more power than the VCs, whereas this wasn't the case a few years ago.
Like what you're reading? Follow @ProfKlickberg
