Pinned Tweet
this is why i wish the tech/sci fi film canon were wider. im tired of references to Her and Bladerunner and The Social Network etc. in 2026 you should be watching:
-Demonlover
-Until the End of the World
-Videodrome
-World on a Wire
-Solaris
-The 10th Victim
-Megalopolis
-Stalker
-Run, Lola, Run
-Seconds
-and so many more…
57
221
2,288
171,078
Spent dinner last night with my bf discussing the hierarchy of man.
He then used his PE slide-making abilities and sent me this today.
481
1,811
26,535
2,304,492
Web3 Media - Why it’s inevitable, What’s here today, and Where we’re heading ... a thread🧵
49
357
1,472
Some news — I’ve joined the @a16z crypto team as a deal analyst! I couldn’t be more excited to be working with @alive_ @AriannaSimpson @cdixon @katie_haun and the entire team of trailblazers ✨
112
33
1,211
Why web3 gaming will finally unlock the true potential of user-generated content - a thread 🧵
32
271
1,105
im usually not a birthday celebratoooor but…my parents sent me maybe the best card ever?? 😭😭
52
27
1,007
very strong agree here.
have to admit I was a bit skeptical before walking into (or more accurately, my skepticism brewed as I stood in line for, and then walked into) the pop-up yesterday. how much brand equity can you really get out of free coffee, a hat, and a free copy of a book?
turns out quite a bit. the lady working at the cash register told me this was their “most successful pop-up ever,” that she’d spoken to engineers from both OpenAI and Gemini who’d come by to visit, and I saw two teenage boys saunter in, then leave crestfallen that the popup had run out of copies of “Machines of Loving Grace” for the day. she told them to come back tomorrow.
am still trying to reconcile the feeling of being there (a little cattle-like tbh) vs the feeling of posting about being there (more ruminative, WANTING to generate meaning and discourse about the experience). takeaway for me is that successful tech pop-ups should give totems and clues about how to retroactively contribute to the discourse (in Anthropic’s case, a cap and a book).
Smart move by Anthropic to carve out a brand identity as “the thinking man’s AI lab”
Positioning as a defender of human intellect is a unique differentiator and taps into the anti-slop zeitgeist
Unclear impact on sales, but it’s great for recruiting smart principled people, which is upstream of all else
14
25
799
152,026
went down a rabbit hole trying to find the source of McKinsey’s “Gen Z accounts for 40% of consumer spending claim.”
they cite an Inc article which cites another report from Barkley (3rd pic) which uses data from a survey released in 2013 (when 10% of gen Z wasnt even born..)
23
103
728
The maintenance and advancement of open-source software is crucial for the crypto community. To increase our support of public goods in web3, @a16z crypto is committing $300,000 for open-source developers in the next round of @Gitcoin Grants (GR15). a16zcrypto.com/supporting-pu…
31
95
707
i get tons of DMs from reporters who want to chat about things we3/crypto related…& when i look at their feeds it’s just cynicism & derision. if i sense that you’ve predetermined the narrative & lack curiosity, why would i speak to you from a forced defensive crouch?
23
21
687
imagine trying to cancel an airline ticket in 2025, your locally-trained, on-device AI is battling it out w/ the hyper-intelligent United Airlines chatbot optimized to *never* end the conversation, instead of all-powerful AGI we just have extremely banal customer support warfare
13
67
639
79,870
Decentralized Speed🔥
Over the past decade zero-knowledge proofs, the cryptography underpinning privacy and scabilty solutions in web3, have grown faster and more computationally-efficient to generate.
a16z.com/2022/04/15/zero-kno…
24
123
617
Something @cdixon and I have been discussing: how NFTs can completely reshape mobile gaming.
75
91
589
thought this was the most interesting moment in the Thiel / Douthat conversation (instead of like, the antichrist stuff).
"2024 is the year where Elon stopped believing in Mars, not as a silly science tech project, but as a political project."
21
50
519
93,138
was on a flight next to someone who watched competitive bowling for 4+ hrs(??)...a baffling sport, players index on a strike ~99% of the time, perfection is the rule not the exception. few “great” plays, just consistency with infrequent flaws. is there any other game like this?
56
11
487
Some personal news -- today was my final day with @a16zcrypto. I have immense gratitude to the entire team for their brilliance, wisdom, and for everything I've learned with them.
31
3
457
116,491
Life news! I'm thrilled to announce that I've joined the @latticexyz team to lead their comms & writing strategy. Lattice is building MUD, an operating system for developing autonomous worlds and large-scale applications on Ethereum.
41
16
460
64,859
Blockchains have incentivized zero-knowledge proof research, creating modern proving systems w/ smaller memory footprints and faster proving & verification times — making it possible to verify certain small machine learning algorithms on-chain. a16zcrypto.com/content/artic…
11
123
417
140,854
My first piece for @a16z's Future! I wrote about making crypto more accessible for newcomers, and my desire to see more applications in web3 that revolve around gaming and collaboration.
Where are the opportunities for more people to engage in crypto in a capacity that isn’t (just) flipping NFTs, using DeFi, or working for a DAO? On Future, @VirtualElena explores emerging ways to make crypto more accessible by lowering barriers to entry. future.a16z.com/minimum-viab…
24
37
411
DAOs should have on-staff archivists who go thru discord history, snapshot votes, forums etc & help tell the story of the project as it unfolds. u visit most landing pages today & all you see is roadmap roadmap roadmap—there shld be a timeline w hyperlinks/graphs 2 chart progress
29
47
396
A core value unique to web3 is composability: the ability to take assets or data generated by one protocol & use them with another. In web3 games, composability unlocks something powerful – for the first time, players get to guide the mechanics & values of the game itself.
22
76
378
My first post on @viamirror! A look back on my time as a stock analyst, Wall Street as a game, the false promises of fintech, the REAL opportunity of crypto, and why I'm so excited about the future :)
virtualelena.mirror.xyz/LhhX…
21
42
368
the cleverest move pulled by anons is saying gm at random times throughout the day, effectively DDoSing my attempts to geolocate them based on timezone
36
8
312
moved into a new place a few weeks ago & i think about my mom’s reaction to my lobby every day
13
4
291
in crypto i feel like everyone either was born/lived abroad early in life *or* spent their entire childhood in the american midwest. no in between
39
3
289
There’s a wave of crypto companies (@NousResearch @SuccinctLabs @StoryProtocol @merit_systems @daylightenergy @vana some others) that actually bother to understand real-world biz models (GPU datacenters, AI, energy, IP, etc.).
Engaging with the real world — not to recreate it onchain but to exercise rigorous thought and understand where decentralization actually improves the state of things — is how crypto goes mainstream. Better UX won’t save us, memecoins will attract only fickle capital.
Very excited for a swell of real innovation happening from the teams that are solving real problems and thinking 5-30 years ahead.
Nothing is more aggressively ambitious than @NousResearch announcing Psyche + end-to-end open source models (data, methods, gradients, not just final weights) on the week the world went crazy about DeepSeek
Imagine if quant funds are competing on Nous to make the best e2e model
21
25
280
50,579
EthCC should be in Rome, Milan, or at a giant villa in the Tuscan countryside.
All crypto events should be in Italy actually.
57
4
281
29,858
NEW SUBSTACK PIECE
I've been thinking about how eCommerce is still a relatively small % of overall retail sales (14% in Q3 of '20). But we talk about physical retail as if it's already gone.
Intelligence has outpaced life.
virtualelena.substack.com/p/…
18
33
246
where the smartest people send their eth to on the weekends is where everyone else will get their eth from ten years from now
13
15
238
all the hotel employees know me as the girl who comes down to breakfast early at 7:30am, drinks two waters and a coffee, journals, then goes out for a 2 hour walk.
europemaxxing, you should try it.
14
3
232
50,703
I’ll be focusing mostly on
-crypto x community
-gaming
-NFTs
-new funding models for culture & curation
-DAOs
-ways to make crypto more accessible to the next 1bn users :)
If this is you, reach out via DM or eburger@a16z.com!
19
3
239
absolutely wild story in the WSJ about how south korea's next president ran with the help of an AI-powered deepfake avatar to appeal to younger voters (also lmao @ the opening of the article...truly savage campaigning)
wsj.com/articles/these-campa…
6
32
197
AI and ZK are the emergent political systems of the internet, and natural checks and balances on each other. one expands the frontier of possibility, the other restrains power and champions individual sovereignty. you can't have one without the other.
17
34
210
41,915
prob the most important takeaway from majoring in history was to dig until you hit the primary source (even those are biased, but @ least you can start from 1st principles). secondary vs primary is the difference between swimming in a shallow estuary of bullshit vs ocean of truth
9
3
203
I reviewed @HermanNarula’s book, Virtual Society, where he explores the historical & philosophical origins of the metaverse & envisions an interoperable future. When the metaverse emerges, digitally-native value will develop & permeate into the real world
a16zcrypto.com/virtual-socie…
10
71
180
really feel like we could teach 4th/5th graders about zero knowledge proof schemes at the same they learn about factoring polynomials? why doesn’t this happen?
24
10
181
love a quiet saturday night in curled up on my lounge chair across from my stacked bookshelf which exists entirely for ornamental purposes bc my chrome tabs are currently buckling under the weight of all the whitepapers im reading on my laptop
13
1
181
cryptography people: mev is an economic incentives problems
economic incentives people: mev is an ordering problem
ordering people: mev is a latency problem
latency people: mev is a cryptography problem
15
16
176
46,825
just asked my brother how flight ticketing databases/systems worked in the 60s/70s…he cagily replies “mainframes and nodes”, i asked him to elaborate and after a long silence he goes “elena, this isn’t an appropriate conversation”
!?!!?
19
2
173
american milk: touts treatment of the cows
british milk: touts treatment of the farmers
9
13
166
54,928
the more i think about it, the more I feel like crypto is still in the 1970s/80s (analogous to protocol wars, packet vs circuit switching, “browsers” tied to hardware) than the 1990s. but i also feel like 1970/80–>2020s will take like 3-5 years.
12
11
172
27,112
pov: when youve still got a few hours of meetings before you can clock out of the metaverse for the week
8
2
165
pretty ironic that the enabling protocol for flexible/malleable identity was built by someone who believes that identity should be a fixed condition
2
9
160
i love seeing tweets like this & am so excited to see what the future looks like when artists have pressure valves released. the most under-discussed opportunity cost in the world r the thoughts, ideas, & creative breakthroughs that get stifled when you have to worry about money
I've just sold my first NFT, ever. This actually clears about 40% of my debt. I can finally breathe after 5 years of suffocating. Holy fuck.
9
13
162
in actual pain rn bc i have an amazing tweet in my drafts but it’d piss off bitcoiners, eth people, smokers, market makers and both political parties so i can’t say it
34
148
gm.
right now is the best possible time to be working in crypto. ideas are flowing, innovation is happening at every layer of the stack, the builders are brilliant. thrilled to be on this journey with the a16z crypto team. if ur a founder, DMs are open or email eburger@a16z.com
Today we are announcing a16z crypto Fund 4. We’ve raised $4.5B to invest in promising web3 founders and startups, bringing our total crypto funds raised to more than $7.6B. 💪
a16zcrypto.com/crypto-fund-f…
8
4
151
God the NYT is seriously delegitimizing themselves by positioning all of their stances as “anything the Trump admin does is bad.” They’ve been forced into a defensive crouch, and have to say things like “seed oils are good actually” otherwise they lose their base. Sad to see.
11
6
145
11,495
gm! A number of people in finance have reached out asking how to transition to working in the crypto industry. I've decided to start hosting weekly office hours to help answer that question! Link to sign up (along w instructions & an optional reading list) calendly.com/eburger-4/tradf…
5
16
144
suddenly feel pressure to have kids, not in a “maternal instinct” kind of way, but in a “submit to Darwinian impulses, ensure my progeny is competitive in the rapidly accelerating dark forest of internet money & secure triumph in the Hobbesian arena” kind of way
9
1
135
ARE WE AGENTIC?
An exploration of AI consciousness, agency, & autonomy, and how TEEs allow us to delegate true agency to AIs for the first time.
First post in awhile and excited to be blogging again :)
10
18
140
39,497
There’s no mechanism in web2 that allows artists to capture the upside they create for a platform. Web3 is changing this – largely by eliminating the idea of platforms altogether & reorganizing the internet around atomic units of media that invite communities to cross-compose.
8
20
134
increasingly feel like defi supplanting tradfi will be a tiny market compared to defi being the arbiter and conductor for the limitless array of value & experiences rendered possible in digital space
7
10
136
Web 2 vs web3 gaming is the difference between exploring a map built by a central gaming studio vs building the map in real time with billions of other players. And it’s all made possible by the fact that you, the player, can own your assets for the first time in history.
17
11
130
there are hours where nothing happens and then the three minutes immediately before a zoom call where literally everything happens
5
1
128
stopped saying “I don’t remember” in favor of “this violates my data retention policy”
2
6
132
16,465
dad blissfully unaware he’s wading into the hottest, most divisive argument on CT. what do i tell him?
17
1
128
on quitting smoking:
there was a whole universe of needs i wasn’t letting myself feel (hunger/tiredness/anxiety/distraction) because i confused those needs with craving nicotine. the moment i started letting myself need the other things, i completely stopped needing cigarettes.
8
2
130
1/ On Crypto and Overcoming Limits:
Crypto is technology for when the center cannot hold. I look at prediction markets, decentralized AI training, stablecoins, and more - and explore what present-day limits in traditional systems can be surpassed.
Link to full piece below
7
10
130
57,134
tbh it is kind of awesome that McKinsey is going to be the reason all our surfaces are holographic and acne stickers have smiley faces on them, v strong pivot from scandals in Saudi Arabia and South Africa
1
2
121
have been thinking about how crypto vc is way harder than stock investing. has less to do w feedback loops (which are whip-fast in both markets) &more to do w the fact that equities give you a quarterly ability to interrogate thesis while crypto heuristics/inputs shift constantly
19
6
128
ughh debating between winding down / going to bed early and firing off a 20+ tweet thread about the history of the spanish silver dollar in the 16th century and modern-day parallels with composable digital stablecoins
14
2
124
tbh an interesting question for any crypto project to ask itself is what would happen to it if twitter went away tomorrow
30
5
122
25,055
The point of Web 3 is that users own the in-game items (as NFTs), the in-game currency (as ERC-20 tokens), and eventually, the game itself (via governance tokens that entitle users to in-game revenue).
4
9
118
Roblox’s CEO has gone on the record to say that he could pay developers more if Apple and Google lowered their take rates, which stand at an average of ~30%.
In other words, it’s take rates, all the way down.
The online game platform Roblox has “great partnerships” with companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, its CEO said — but added that lower app store commissions would allow the company to pay its developers more. #AxiosOnHBO
4
9
110
My boyfriend has started using LLMs to generate nice weekend schedule grids for us and it makes the type A zone of my brain so happy
5
2
121
14,815
Toward a working definition of paperclip-punk.
I wrote about that visual style you're seeing everywhere. paperclip-punk: what it is, who's doing it, how it outruns AI panic, how Vercel is probably responsible, and why Cloudflare is doing it best.
Link below:
16
10
122
39,861
it’s hard to express how grateful & lucky i feel every day to be working on the frontier with the coolest team in crypto/web3 💖🚀
fun fact: the 1st scene of the dot com boom script depicts the 1995 netscape IPO…little did i know id one day work at the firm run by its founders!
I’m so happy to welcome @VirtualElena to the a16z crypto team! (She actually joined us in Sept but it’s never too late to celebrate). A history major with a TradFi background, Elena’s creative thinking is evident in her innovative product insights & her expressive writing style.
4
3
113
selling juuls to people waiting outside the cityMD for covid tests the way vendors sell water bottles to people queued for rides at fairgrounds
1
112
