Chris Dixon, general partner at investment giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), says that the crypto industry may be approaching its “iPhone” phase of adoption.
In a new interview with Laura Shin on the Unchained Podcast, Dixon references the evolution of the smartphone in the mid-2000s when the iPhone finally delivered a product that would eventually lead to mass adoption.
[adinserter block="1"]After the iPhone caught on, Dixon says the smartphone industry reached a “sweet spot” where a barrage of highly popular apps were all developed for mobile users within a short period of time, like Uber, Instagram and Snapchat.
According to the investor, crypto hasn’t yet had the same moment, but it’s likely coming into view.
“I was there for the early iPhone application wave and what happened is, you had like a 13-year period of people trying to create smartphones. The iPhone came out in 2007, and smartphone innovation in Silicon Valley probably began 15 years before the iPhone like General Magic, there were a bunch of people trying to create smartphones in the 2000s.
And then the iPhone came out, and it finally nailed the infrastructure, nailed the phone. And then there was like a year of flashlight apps, and then about a year later you started to see entrepreneurs entering and I was actually an active investor at that point.
If you look at the data, it was between 2009 and 2011 when almost all the top apps were started, meaning Uber, Snap, Instagram – they were all kind of in that range.
And so at some point, you hit this kind of sweet spot in computing evolution and I don’t think we’re there yet, we haven’t had our ‘iPhone moment’ yet in crypto, but I do think that a lot of signs point to it being in the near future.”
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