. @cdixon Dixon is a core leader at a16z Crypto, a representative investor in Silicon Valley, known for extremely early-stage and high-risk judgment. Coinbase and Stripe are both "infrastructure-level companies" he backed before the industry was fully formed.

I’ve summarized his 100 articles, removing outdated and incorrect parts, leaving only the essence 👇
1. How to determine if a technology/project is "really"
Dixon has a very clear set of criteria that run through all his articles:
"What are smart people doing on weekends that everyone will be doing on weekdays ten years from now?"
Business people vote with their dollars, mainly aiming for near-term financial returns. Engineers vote with their time, mainly trying to invent interesting new things. Hobbies are what the smartest people spend their time on when they aren’t constrained by short-term financial goals.
This is a specific signal detection method: don’t look at how much funding a project has raised, look at what top engineers are tinkering with in their spare time.
In 2013, he listed a few items using this framework:
Bitcoin, NoSQL, IoT, 3D printing
Bitcoin and NoSQL have been validated; IoT and 3D printing partially validated.
What are smart people doing on weekends now?
Vibe coding yes (and fighting against Claude’s ban 😅)
😎 If you also have entrepreneurial ideas, check GitHub to see what frameworks people are contributing code to in their spare time, and look at weekend posts discussing Agent tools. These signals are likely to be 1-2 years ahead of funding reports.
2. Strong technology changes the world to fit itself (iPhone), weak technology adapts to the existing world (BlackBerry)
Strong technology vs. weak technology, e.g., Tesla pure electric vs. hybrid
iPhone (touchscreen + full OS) vs. BlackBerry (physical keyboard + limited features)
The conclusion is that strong technology (which ultimately wins) starts out as a toy, while weak technology (which seems more mature but loses) appears more practical.
Strong technology may seem like a toy at first, weak technology looks more useful; most people give up on strong tech during the "disillusionment valley" and switch to weak tech, which is usually a mistake.
He quotes Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
I interpret