A little over a month into the COVID-19 lockdowns, in April 2020, Marc Andreessen posted “It’s Time to Build”. The essay called on America to build housing, factories, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure.
Eleven days after the essay, Andreessen Horowitz announced a $515 million crypto fund. In June 2021, they announced another $2.2 billion crypto fund. Two years after the post, in May 2022, they announced a crypto fund dwarfing the previous two: $4.5 billion. They called it “the golden era of web3”. The next crypto fund would not come for another four years.
Crypto was by far the largest of Andreessen Horowitz’s sectoral bets during the two years following the essay. Marc Andreessen had called for America to build. Andreessen Horowitz’s contribution included a $4 billion valuation for a monkey JPEG company.
Actually, journalist Joe Weisenthal saw this coming almost immediately with a Twitter post two days after the essay went up:
Wonder how many Silicon Valley people are inspired by that Marc Andreesen post on how Now Is The Time To Build to get working, even harder, on their next-gen decentralized stablecoin protocol.