Ali Yahya, Andreessen Horowitz: 'Many Fair Weather VCs Have Pivoted'

I've been watching these so-called "crypto winter" narratives for years now, and honestly, I'm tired of the cliché that it's "building time." Everyone repeats this mantra like it's some profound insight, when really it's just a way to cope with falling prices and vanishing profits.

What's more interesting to me is how the big players like Andreessen Horowitz are actually doubling down while others flee. Ali Yahya, looking like he could bench press the entire crypto market, claims they've raised over $7 billion for crypto and aren't going anywhere. Must be nice to have those deep pockets while smaller investors get wiped out.

Sitting in my home office, watching this Zoom interview, I couldn't help but notice how Yahya's muscles seemed ready to burst through his t-shirt. The man looks like he's preparing for the apocalypse rather than a market downturn. But there's something telling about his approach to both powerlifting and investing.

"In powerlifting, you're maxing out, stressing your body to its limit," he says. It's a convenient metaphor for what's happening to most projects in this space - they're being stressed to their breaking point. The difference is Yahya seems to enjoy the pain.

The way he talks about "filtering out nonbelievers" sounds almost cultish. "The winter filters out the nonbelievers, right?" he says, as if this is some kind of religious purification rather than a market correction that's burned countless retail investors.

I find it particularly rich when VCs who've amassed fortunes talk about how great market downturns are. Easy to be philosophical about "seeking out uncomfortable experiences" when you're sitting on billions in dry powder. For the average founder struggling to make payroll, this Stoic posturing rings hollow.

When Yahya says, "We're not pivoting out, we're open for business," what he's really saying is they're now able to negotiate much better deals with desperate founders. Talk about opportunistic! He admits as much: "There's little competition and we're able to make the investments we want to make." Translation: We can buy low because founders have few options.

What about Marc Andreessen's manifesto that conspicuously omitted crypto? Yahya brushes this off, but I wonder if there's more internal tension there than he lets on. The pivot to AI is real, even if a16z still has their 85-person crypto team.

His vision for mainstream adoption feels simultaneously ambitious and narrow. Social networks like Farcaster? Crypto games? Music platforms? We've heard these promises for years now. The infrastructure just isn't there yet, and most users still don't care about decentralization unless it makes their lives tangibly better.

When pressed on regulation, Yahya gives the standard VC line about "educating" Washington, as if the problem is simply that regulators don't understand the technology rather than having legitimate concerns about investor protection.

In the end, what strikes me most is how these market cycles reveal who has staying power. Yahya's right about one thing - this period does test conviction. I just wish that conviction wasn't so often confused with blind faith.