Katie Haun, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, believes that all money will be digital in ten years. According to her, she expects money to make the transformation that music and books have in recent years. Haun sees efforts like the one made by Libra, as the pathway to that coming to fruition in the next decade.
Haun’s reference to Libra had to do with its ambition of creating a global digital currency. The effort has stalled having run into regulatory and political resistance, but those behind it believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
The Future of Money
Haun sees the future of money as very similar to how other things that were once only manual have turned out. She pointed at services like Venmo and PayPal as the digital versions of banks and said that more similar services would come up in the next decade to feed the demand for people to transfer value. She went on to make the possible future of money more relatable by pointing out what books used to look like (physical books) and what they are now (E-books) and also what music used to look like in the form of cassette tapes and now (Live Streaming).
Haun sees the biggest winners in light of the changes that she expects to take place within the next decade will be consumers. Consumers will live in a world where the middlemen have been eliminated and services can reach them directly. Companies that will have the foresight and the knowhow to build services that enable the new order of things, such as customer interfaces will also win big.
Haun revealed that her company Andreesen Horowitz was investing in big companies that are involved in the crypto space such as Coinbase and Anchorage. The company sees the two companies as solid and pivotal for the finance revolution that will take place soon. Despite the promise that the crypto space shows, there is still a lot of reluctance by Venture Capital firms to hop into the action. She attributed the reluctance, to the difficulty of keeping with the changes and the volatility. She however noted that a good number of traditional venture capital funds are beginning to take notice of crypto.
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