Activity tagged "Andreessen Horowitz"

Posted:

Kickstarter's bizarre blockchain announcement in December 2021 makes so much more sense now that we know Andreessen Horowitz secretly promised them $100 million to pivot to a blockchain-based product built on the also-a16z-backed Celo blockchain.

At the time, I wondered why COO Sean Leow was so insistent on the move despite being apparently very confused about the whole concept.

Kickstarter's COO, Sean Leow, did an interview with The Beat to discuss the announcement. He seemed to be a little bit confused on the whole concept throughout, and seemed to believe that "open source" is some sort of competing idea to blockchains. At one point he stated, "We believe that that data can be structured in a way through a blockchain where it ... can move in a much more efficient and effective way between services ... in a way that open source doesn't allow". Later in the interview he spoke about governance, saying, "our understanding is that [governance] is done more effectively with blockchain then with open-source."
– February 2022 Web3 is Going Just Great entry

I suspect Tom McKay  , then writing at Gizmodo, didn't know how right he was:

How this will actually work, [begin highlight] beyond Kickstarter being able to yell “blockchain” like a spell to summon investors [end highlight] or maybe getting a cut of every project that runs on the resulting protocol, is unclear. A white paper explaining how the
"The untold story of Kickstarter's crypto Hail Mary—and the secret $100 million a16z-led investment to save its fading brand".
Leo Schwartz and Jessica Mathews in Fortune.