a16z partner's decade-long advice for Web3 founders: In the new cycle, just focus on three things

Chainfeeds Guide:

From the shock of reading the Bitcoin whitepaper, to the product-market fit of stablecoins, to the intersection of crypto and AI, and advice for founders.

Source:

Author:

Portal Labs

Opinion:

Portal Labs: Arianna’s entry point into crypto was the shock she felt when she first read the Bitcoin whitepaper over a decade ago. But what truly kept her in the space was not that moment of excitement, but the ups and downs she personally experienced over the following ten-plus years. She witnessed the birth of Bitcoin, the boom of DeFi, the frenzy of NFTs, and also the bubbles and subsequent cooling-off periods. Through such long-term observation, she gradually formed a clear understanding: the crypto industry has never grown linearly, but rather advances in dramatic waves, with emotions and capital ebbing and flowing in turn. Because of this, she shifted her focus from “predicting the next trend” to “identifying who is building against the wind.” Her investment approach is more like following: following what the best founders are doing. When the strongest founders flock to stablecoins, capital should follow; when top teams are continuously investing in Crypto × AI or DePIN, new value opportunities often emerge there as well. It’s not about making grand assertions first and then looking for projects to validate them, but about calibrating one’s worldview and capital allocation based on where frontline builders are heading. For Chinese Web3 founders and high-net-worth investors, this methodology is more actionable than “cycle prediction.” For founders, the cooling-off period is not an excuse, but a filter: if you can keep pushing your product and stack forward in years without applause, it means both your direction and your team are right; for allocators, what truly needs to be assessed is not the popularity of a theme, but whether the team can maintain speed, discipline, and mission density during tough years. This sequence of “identifying people — observing long-term execution — then discussing valuation” is more effective at weathering bull and bear markets than any short-term narrative. Narrowing the lens to stablecoins, Arianna’s judgment is simple: the reason they have become the current focus is not because of a new speculative story, but because both ends are truly using them — consumers use them for cross-border transfers and to hedge local currency volatility; enterprises use them for settlement, allocation, and as a bridge for accounts receivable and payable. More crucially, over the past year and a half, the two fundamental infrastructure “valves” of speed and cost have finally been opened, allowing stablecoins to transform from an imagined payment network into a real settlement layer. This directly hits home for Chinese Web3 founders and high-net-worth individuals. For teams going global, the real bottleneck is often not the product, but the flow of funds: how to send money to annotation teams in Southeast Asia, node maintainers in Africa, and channel partners in Latin America in a stable, low-cost, and traceable way; how to enable overseas clients to make payments without complex corporate procedures; how to manage cyclical receivables in a USD environment and control exchange rate risk in a local currency environment. The value of stablecoins lies not in the “coin,” but in the “rail.” When you standardize fund inflows and outflows, identity verification, reconciliation receipts, and tax traces onto an auditable track, the complexity of cross-border business drops significantly. Arianna’s intuition is: in the short term, there will be a hundred flowers blooming, but in the long run, it will converge to a few stablecoins with “scale, credibility, and an ecological niche”; further down the line, the front-end experience will become abstracted, users will barely perceive the specific token, and the back-end will automatically complete clearing and settlement through “rail interoperability.” This also means teams should focus more on making their business processes thoroughly “stablecoin-native,” rather than blindly issuing new coins. Arianna emphasizes that super cycles are often not driven by a single technology, but by several curves resonating and overlapping within the same time window. Today’s clearest combination is the decentralized incentives of crypto, the centralized computing power and data hunger of AI, and an added layer of DePIN’s real-world resource orchestration. Translating this into “actionable” language for Chinese founders: we have rare, long-term accumulation in hardware supply chains, manufacturing and deployment, and engineering organization of edge nodes. If we can use stablecoins to connect the chain of “contribution — measurement — payment,” incentivize the on-chain migration of real-world data and resources, and package these resources into AI-consumable standardized products (datasets, annotations, bandwidth, storage, inference time slices), there is an opportunity to build a “supply-side platform.” This is not a PPT-style tokenomics, but serious operations science: metric definition, anti-cheating, settlement frequency, dispute resolution, and reputation systems all need to be engineered. Another important thread is “authenticity.” The existence of deepfake content is not frightening; what is frightening is an unverifiable environment. Verifiable timestamps, generation paths, device signatures, and traceable operators will all become the “new utilities” of the future content and goods internet. For Chinese teams working on brand globalization, second-hand trading, and luxury goods circulation, this is an immediate incremental opportunity. Do the hard but right thing: make “verifiable authenticity” the default, not a paid add-on. Looking at AI Agents, using wallets as permission systems, setting limits on budgets, logs, and counterparties, and building practical vertical agents — rather than illusory “universal agents” — is the right path for application implementation.