Crypto Life: A Day in the Life of a Partner at a16z Crypto

a16z crypto

2022-07-20 16:00

Read this article in 15 Minutes

What is your crypto life like?

Original title: "Info Diet: a16z Crypto's Elena Burger"

Original author: Elena Burger, a16z

Original compilation: Kxp, BlockBeats

Info Diet will invite different builders to record the articles they will read and browse in two days from their own perspective. Today we are honored to have Elena Burger, who lives in New York, is a trading partner of the a16z Crypto team, focusing on NFT, Web3 media and infrastructure.

Sunday, July 10

10 a.m.:This is an unusually lazy day for me. Typically, I wake up around 7 or 8am, grab a cup of coffee, go for a run in Central Park, and check Twitter and email when I get back. But today I happened to be visiting a family member's beach house with friends, so I lost some of my usual enthusiasm this morning.

I went to the kitchen and took a sip of coffee, and by the way opened the first issue on the table The New Yorker. It's also something I don't normally do: I may have read a lot of print media before, but now I prefer to read electronically. I was looking at a profile of gospel/blues singer Mavis Staples as people poured into the breakfast room.

12pm: On the Jitney bus back to Manhattan, My friend stuck one of his airpods in my ear and asked, "Have you seen Channel 5?" I said I hadn't.

Channel 5 is YouTuber Andrew Callaghan's street interview show, he always chooses controversial groups (girlfriend training camp, anti-vaccine rallies, etc.), and filming their daily activities. We watched an episode of the Utah Rap Festival (I suggest you turn the volume down a little below max before clicking the link) that featured a few raps by a gifted 15-year-old. I love this video, it's a bit like shows like Rescue or John Wilson's 100,000 How To's. I don't watch YouTube much, but like Mavis Staples material, if it's right in front of me, I'll still watch it.

Then I put on my airpods and listen to Lex Fridman's interview with Grimes a few weeks ago. After I listened to it, I realized that I really wanted to love her badly. I didn't know she knew so much about Crypto, and she had a very techno-utopian view of Web3. She mentioned using DAO to support all mothers and open source research, and also talked about Web3 or artificial intelligence will replace a lot of middleman functions. In my opinion, it is also very interesting that artists can explore more ways to use Crypto than many people in finance or traditional technology fields. After listening to her interview, I am now also curious about what Mavis Staples thinks about DAOs.

Also, in the podcast, Lex mentions that he lives with a well-known anarchist next door. This leads me to ask: if you are an anarchist, and you do own private property, what are the codes of anarchism that you uphold? Anyone who would like to discuss this topic with me is welcome to contact me anytime.

3:30 PM: When I get home, I open the The SITALWeek newsletter on my laptop, which I read every Sunday. This newsletter is written by Brad Slingerlend, who focuses on topics in traditional finance and technology: artificial intelligence, semiconductors, the streaming economy, inflation, and oil and natural energy. As someone who thinks about Crypto most of the time, this is a good "knowledge" time for me.

There is an article in this issue about the impact of robotic surgery on the skill level of medical trainees. There's also one on China's dominance of the lithium-ion battery market, and some links to articles about much-needed austerity for streaming services.

In my opinion, although this is not the "Crypto" newsletter, I am always in some The article finds ways in which Web3 can learn (especially in the streaming/online media space). We seem to have reached the limit of what the big streaming companies can effectively and accurately model in terms of user preference and user stickiness, and newer business models in Crypto could allow more artists to share a larger percentage of the value they create share, while also allowing the community to share intellectual property achievements.

4:30pm: I'm going for a walk, so give me brother call. He's an electrical engineer, and I've been trying to get him into the crypto scene for the past few months. I might have gone a little too far lately, because the first thing he said when he answered the phone was: "Elena, I'm not coming to the Stanford blockchain conference".

We started talking about recent advances in artificial intelligence and image generation and also discussed DALL -E, this is a platform that I find very interesting recently. My brother sent me an Astral Codex Ten article called "A Technical Guide to Robotically Designing Stained-Glass Windows," in which the author described the process by which he guided DALL-E step-by-step to render the image he envisioned.

When I use DALL-E, I sometimes give some specific hints, and sometimes Will deliberately give it some open-ended, conceptually vague information. For example, a few weeks ago, I had it generate a scene where Edison was selling bootleg DVDs on the street in the 90s. The first two images it generates look like they're from the 90s (saturated colors, Edison standing on the side of a pickup truck), but the remaining four look like they're from the 1890s - black and white and grainy, and the DVD The proportions are also very strange, and the shape is still oval, like a picture that can only be generated by a visual gramophone. This is a kind of creative leap that is difficult for people to make, and it really surprises me that DALL-E can realize this possibility consciously or unconsciously.

After I read this article, I realized that if I could use GPT-3 If so, then I can answer my previous question (what would Mavis Staples think of DAO?), and I can also access GPT-3 through OpenAI's playground page. So I wrote the sentence: A New Yorker-style paragraph about Mavis Staples talking about Crypto and DAOs.

The results are as follows:

Mavis Staples has been singing gospel and soul music since 1950, revered as a contemporary legend and loved as a performer. Last fall, she released her latest album, "If I Were Black," a collaboration with producer and musician Jeff Tweedy. Staples is also a venture capitalist, and in early December she attended the Web Summit in Lisbon on Crypto and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. "Although I am not a professional technician, I am trying to learn relevant knowledge," she said at the meeting.

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I would say that this result is quite astonishing. The only inaccuracy I noticed (besides the fictional plot about Mavis Staples popping up at the Crypto conference in Lisbon as a VC) is that Mavis' most recent album is We Get By, released in 2019. This is most likely due to the fact that the training data used by GPT-3 has not been fully updated, but I'm not entirely sure.

7:30 PM: I can't remember when Quit that site, but I'm reading about Minecraft servers right now. This article is from Rock Paper Shotgun in 2015 when Hypixel was first launched, and at the time Hypixel was the world's largest standalone server by concurrent users. It peaked at 216,000 players in 2021, and averaged 45,000-70,000 players per day. I'm curious to see how Minetrack quantifies CCU in Hypixel games, since the server directs players to play in small "parties" (so you don't have tens of thousands of gamers around you). But I may be wrong, after all, it is still a technical problem to expand the game to tens of thousands or even millions of CCUs - Water & This topic is discussed in detail in the article.

Monday, July 11

7am: I woke up and did a few laps in Central Park. I only listen to music when I run (I tried podcasts for a while, but my mind wandered when I jogged), and now my playlist is filled with 2000s artists like Meek Mill, SOPHIE, and Ryan Leslie.

10 AM: I'm reading my "non -crypto” article, but in fact news in many fields—chip shortages, inflation, entertainment events, etc., are all related to Crypto. I also like to watch Liberty's Highlights, a platform that covers news in many fields: semiconductors, chips, traditional media, etc. Today's issue actually cites yesterday's SITALWeek article on surgical automation, as well as some articles from The Wall Street Journal and Compound Capital Advisors CEO Charlie Bilello on energy efficiency of EV batteries and euro zone inflation.

8pm:I spend most of my day in Not much time is spent scrolling through the news (other than tweets) on the phone or answering emails/Slack messages. I do check a ton of funding rounds and emails from founders, but I only read those in-depth articles at night (or on weekends).

Tonight, I watched a Reddit AMA by the Ethereum Foundation Research Team from a week ago because I Would love to keep up to date with the latest opinion from the Ethereum Foundation (especially as we get closer to the merger). Then I found that the opinions of the core developers are often not necessarily unified, and there may be differences in the process of research and implementation.

The types of apps people are expecting in the future, at least according to Vitalik, Justin Drake and Danny Ryan , should be innovative applications around identity, reputation, and privacy.

(I also often browse the What's New in Eth2 website compiled by Ben Edgington of ConsenSys .Also, while we're on the topic, it's worth saying thanks to Tim Beiko for his very detailed notes on the EthereumAllCoreDevs call.)

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1 AM: After dinner, I went back to checking messages and scrolling through tweets on Twitter. Then, I opened another in-depth article on Minecraft. Before getting ready for bed, I read OpenAI's research paper on training a neural network to find and craft in-game items. Impressively, of the videos used to train the neural network, only a small portion is labeled with the corresponding mouse and keyboard actions, the rest are just a plethora of videos uploaded by players online. In other words, the neural network is able to learn extrapolatively from this small amount of labeled data and apply it to a larger amount of unlabeled data.

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The more I pay attention to what is happening in the field of artificial intelligence, the more I want to explore how artificial intelligence Combined with Crypto. I wonder if in the future there will be more community-owned utility protocols that support AI on-chain, can be checked and upgraded by anyone? 0xPARC did a proof of concept a few months ago showing an on-chain digital image classifier inside a zkSNARK. Likewise, Ali, a member of our team, did a Twitter thread a few years ago on how to spin up an ANN on-chain. I hope we will continue to see more of these types of applications in the future.