GP @a16z crypto // Google Brain, GoogleX, @Stanford CS

Joined April 2008
165 Photos and videos
Ali Yahya retweeted
.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense. SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world. Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere. SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity. Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help. The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist. Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives. Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation. Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears. Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction. We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.
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The choice is not between socialism and capitalism. It’s between socialism and freedom.
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Ali Yahya retweeted
If the socialists had their way, Elon would have had his paypal profits taken and redistributed for the greater good. The world would never have seen Tesla, nor SpaceX. And the world wouldn't know it, because they were uncreated, and thus unseen. Imagine the companies that don't exist, because Washington destroyed them before they were born.
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NYC rainbow on SpaceX’s day
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My new behavior on any X article is to hit Grok summarize. 90% of the time — that’s it, done. Most of them are slop. So new communication protocol we’ve landed on: simple idea => grok expand to 1K words => grok re-compress => simple idea
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Ali Yahya retweeted
Beyond excited to be investing in and partnering with @YuvalRooz, @wesarn_real & @ShaulKfir and the entire @digitalasset team. In my brief time working with them, the three adjectives that best describe this team are: tenacious, pragmatic & visionary. These qualities are what’s required to help shepherd the largest, most sophisticated financial institutions onto blockchain infrastructure. Let’s do this!
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Ali Yahya retweeted
I am very excited to be working with Yuval for real and not just through a book :-).
Almost 12 years ago, I left @DRWTrading with @wesarn_real to start @digitalasset. @ShaulKfir joined us shortly after. The name felt right. The idea was simple but audacious: build a global settlement system that is asset agnostic. One that doesn’t eliminate banks, exchanges, and intermediaries, but tears down the barriers keeping people from accessing assets and settling at a fraction of today’s cost. A new financial world, built for the end consumer. We knew institutional adoption was the path. We just didn’t know how long it would take. We failed. We made bad decisions. There are things we would have done differently. But we never let go of our North Star, even when people around us were convinced we had no idea what we were doing. That focus, conviction, and most of all, patience, led us to launching @CantonNetwork. And the results speak for themselves. Today is a new chapter in that story. I’m proud to announce that @a16zcrypto is leading our latest round, joined by some of the giants of the global financial system, including @ABNAMRO, ADIA, @apolloglobal, @BNPParibasCIB, @Broadridge, @citsecurities, @CMEVentures, @cbventures, Green Wolf Asset Management, @Hanwha_Official, @HSBC, @icapitalnetwork, @LCVentures, @OptiverGlobal, @polychain, @R136Ventures, @SPGlobal, @sbigroup, @smash_capital, @SoFi, @Tradeweb, and @WilliamBlair, and others we’ll be naming shortly. Twelve years ago, I could not have imagined building alongside partners of this caliber. $CC today processes the highest fees of any institutional blockchain network. And we’re just getting started. What’s coming later this year is just as exciting. None of this happens without the builders, the ones who show up to weekly tokenomics meetings, dial into operations subcommittees, spend nights and weekends building apps on Canton, and show up on @X to cheer this ecosystem forward. You are not just supporters. You are partners. I’m honored to be on this journey with you. On a personal note: @a16z hits differently for me. Ben’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things was one I kept coming back to during the hard stretches. Having his firm lead this round is meaningful in a way that’s hard to put into words. So I’ll let him do it: “The hard thing isn’t setting a big, audacious goal. The hard thing is spending sleepless nights trying to achieve it. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare. Motivating yourself by watching YouTube shorts or Instagram reels isn’t the hard thing. The hard thing is working every day and being consistent even if you feel like shit. The hard thing isn’t boasting you could achieve anything. The hard thing is working like hell to achieve something. The hard thing isn’t believing in yourself. The hard thing is getting things done when nobody believes in you, even when you doubt yourself. The hard thing isn’t telling yourself that you must achieve the impossible. The hard thing is toiling hard every day for years despite knowing that success is too uncertain.” theblock.co/post/404386/a16z…
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Ali Yahya retweeted
Almost 12 years ago, I left @DRWTrading with @wesarn_real to start @digitalasset. @ShaulKfir joined us shortly after. The name felt right. The idea was simple but audacious: build a global settlement system that is asset agnostic. One that doesn’t eliminate banks, exchanges, and intermediaries, but tears down the barriers keeping people from accessing assets and settling at a fraction of today’s cost. A new financial world, built for the end consumer. We knew institutional adoption was the path. We just didn’t know how long it would take. We failed. We made bad decisions. There are things we would have done differently. But we never let go of our North Star, even when people around us were convinced we had no idea what we were doing. That focus, conviction, and most of all, patience, led us to launching @CantonNetwork. And the results speak for themselves. Today is a new chapter in that story. I’m proud to announce that @a16zcrypto is leading our latest round, joined by some of the giants of the global financial system, including @ABNAMRO, ADIA, @apolloglobal, @BNPParibasCIB, @Broadridge, @citsecurities, @CMEVentures, @cbventures, Green Wolf Asset Management, @Hanwha_Official, @HSBC, @icapitalnetwork, @LCVentures, @OptiverGlobal, @polychain, @R136Ventures, @SPGlobal, @sbigroup, @smash_capital, @SoFi, @Tradeweb, and @WilliamBlair, and others we’ll be naming shortly. Twelve years ago, I could not have imagined building alongside partners of this caliber. $CC today processes the highest fees of any institutional blockchain network. And we’re just getting started. What’s coming later this year is just as exciting. None of this happens without the builders, the ones who show up to weekly tokenomics meetings, dial into operations subcommittees, spend nights and weekends building apps on Canton, and show up on @X to cheer this ecosystem forward. You are not just supporters. You are partners. I’m honored to be on this journey with you. On a personal note: @a16z hits differently for me. Ben’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things was one I kept coming back to during the hard stretches. Having his firm lead this round is meaningful in a way that’s hard to put into words. So I’ll let him do it: “The hard thing isn’t setting a big, audacious goal. The hard thing is spending sleepless nights trying to achieve it. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare. Motivating yourself by watching YouTube shorts or Instagram reels isn’t the hard thing. The hard thing is working every day and being consistent even if you feel like shit. The hard thing isn’t boasting you could achieve anything. The hard thing is working like hell to achieve something. The hard thing isn’t believing in yourself. The hard thing is getting things done when nobody believes in you, even when you doubt yourself. The hard thing isn’t telling yourself that you must achieve the impossible. The hard thing is toiling hard every day for years despite knowing that success is too uncertain.” theblock.co/post/404386/a16z…
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goated setup to get Codex to read/write your Obsidian vault on your phone: 1. Get a cloud machine. I use GCP. 2. Add it to Codex: Connections => SSH 3. Clone your obsidian vault to the machine 4. Ask Codex to setup headless Obsidian sync That's it. You can now use Codex Mobile to do anything on your vault, and the changes will be reflected immediately on your phone's Obsidian.
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Ali Yahya retweeted

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Welcome to the team, Robbie. It's great to have you onboard 🚀
Excited to announce that I'm joining @a16zcrypto as an Investment Partner My thesis on crypto has always been the same: if you believe the arc of technological adoption bends toward efficiency, market forces will inevitably reveal that blockchains are the most efficient technology for global coordination This is already evident across stablecoins, perps, prediction markets and tokenized assets. The only bottleneck to blockchains eating the rest of global markets – and creating net new markets – is time The delta between sentiment and fundamentals has never been wider in crypto, and therefore I've never been more bullish Couldn't be more fired up to work alongside @cdixon, @alive_, @guywuolletjr, @eddylazzarin and the entire @a16zcrypto team, backing the most ambitious founders pulling this future forward!
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Starting a company is to live in a contradiction: 1. You have to maintain the irrational belief that you will prevail, even in the dark moments when everyone tells you that you will fail. 2. But at the same time, you have to confront the facts of your reality, however brutal they may be. This is the psychological duality that you are forced to inhabit. But it's not actually a contradiction. The odds may seem against you. But odds are averages over things in the past. As a founder, you are—by definition—building something new. It is your job to build conviction on a plan that turns the odds around. And often, the mere existence of your "irrational belief" is enough to do that. You may be the first person to be irrational enough to give your plan a real shot. There are times when faith in a fact can help create that fact. A great founder has the judgement to know when that's true.
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Ali Yahya retweeted
Another on target deep thought from @alive_. Planning to read this one out loud to my kids tonight before bedtime
Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI: Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible. 1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun. 2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love. Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI. Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.
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Ali Yahya retweeted

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RT @sreeramkannan: Post AGI Parenting: The Barbell Strategy What should we teach kids in this singularity age when every skill seems repla…
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Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI: Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible. 1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun. 2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love. Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI. Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.
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I posted this paid partnership last night on IG and this morning it’s at 1M views and 100K likes: Life with Claude
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I feel seen
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i still think about this specialization is for insects
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