If you believe the spin, the reason that Andreessen Horowitz — or a16z — is betting billions of dollars on the chimerical, crypto-powered idea of “Web3” is because the current version of the internet, “Web2”, gives too much money and power to Big Tech, and not enough to users. You might wonder whether one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital funds might themselves be trying to grab as much money and power as they can but no, really, it’s you they care about.
“My hope is through Web3, we can return to . . . a much more decentralised distribution of power and control,” Chris Dixon, head of the firm’s $7.6bn crypto fund, told the FT’s Tech Tonic podcast. “Facebook, Instagram . . . They figured out a way to have other people create their content and take basically all of the money,” he said.
This is bemusing. Isn’t a16z at the very heart of Big Tech, having massively profited from Web2? Is co-founder Marc Andreessen not still on the board of Meta — the company that owns both Facebook and Instagram — and doesn’t he still own millions of dollars’ worth of shares in it? And anyway, isn’t the whole point of venture capital to generate returns? Why does this company — and the tech sector more broadly — feel the need to insist that their raison d’être is saving the world, when in reality they are simply out to make as much money as they can? Shouldn’t it be OK to say that?