Ever since AI supplanted crypto as the shiny new toy in Silicon Valley, there’s been no shortage of jokes about workers jumping ship. New data from prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (commonly referred to as a16z) shows that the truth is more complicated.
“People forget that the collapse of FTX and the launch of ChatGPT were less than a month apart”, said Daren Matsuoka, a partner on the crypto investment team at a16z, in an interview with Fortune. “There was a period of time in the crypto industry where it was looking very negative for crypto and very promising for AI.”
In its report, a16z found that workers coming into the crypto industry are tending to join from a traditional finance and consulting background, or from emerging fintech companies, another sign that the line is blurring between traditional finance and crypto.
“We started doing this report four years ago, when crypto was in its teenage years,” Matsuoka added. “But now the world takes crypto seriously… the industry just got a lot more mature.”
“It’s a common trope in the industry for people to say users don’t really care about privacy”, said Eddy Lazzarin, a16z crypto’s chief technology officer, in an interview with Fortune. “I personally don’t think that that’s true. I think that people either do or will care.”
