Who will be safe in the age of AI?
Chris Lyons has an answer worth listening to. He is arguably the most culturally savvy guy at the most culturally influential VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz. He put together many of the splashiest tech deals today — because he’s the one forming the relationships between disruptive founders and attention-getting celebrities. Serena Williams calls him a friend. Kevin Durant’s business partner credits him with helping introduce the NBA superstar to Silicon Valley. Multiplatinum music artist will.i.am says that Lyons can find “Dr. Dre before he is Dr. Dre” — which is to say, he can spot the next icon while they’re still nobody.
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So according to Lyons, who is safe in the age of AI? To look forward, he says, we should first look backward — to Renaissance Italy. “I’ve done a lot of studying of the Medici Era,” he says. “Think about a world with poets, designers, and architects all coming and working together.” Today, he says, we should think of our time as a digital renaissance — as once-siloed disciplines come crashing together and industries start to overlap. “A blockchain expert sits down with a fashion house. An AI creative sits down with a musician. Now, instead of Michelangelo, we are uploading to Sora [OpenAI’s text-to-video model]. Who knows how to put those pieces together?”
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Does this depress you? Disorient you? It shouldn’t, according to Lyons. “It takes a community to know how to put those pieces together,” he says. That’s because, to him, the future doesn’t just belong to creators or thinkers or doers. It belongs to combiners — to people who embrace many disciplines, who pursue many skills, and who gather together many kinds of people. These people push beyond what they “should” be learning, or whom they “should” be collaborating with. In an age of AI, the combiners literally double down on humanity. They add more people — because to Lyons, the most unexpected people can produce the most unexpectedly transformative ideas, so long as someone (like him, and maybe you?) can bring them together.
He has a term for this — “shared genius.” And if you want to build a great business, he says, you need to learn to share. Lyons is happy to share how it’s done.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Harvard Business School
Chris Lyons has a title, though it doesn’t fully explain him. It is this: President of Web3 Media at a16z crypto, a vertical at Andreessen Horowitz.
Here’s a better description. Lyons started his career in music, working as a sound engineer for musician and producer Jermaine Dupri. As he watched musicians lay tracks, turning their abstract ideas into songs that could be heard by millions, he started to think deeper about the process of creation. “Everything in the world starts from an idea and concept,” he says. “The journey and the fun part is architecting that into real life.” This begs a few questions: Where is creation happening at a larger scale? Where would it be really fun to create?
His answer was technology. “Technology is like modern-day alchemy,” he says. To medieval scientists, alchemy was the process of turning one metal into another. They believed that, for example, lead could be made into gold. They never pulled it off, but modern technology can do something even better, Lyons says: “It’s digital gold.” Ideas turn into money. And it can be applied equally to any field, whether it’s music, fashion, food, or more.
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He wanted to test this alchemy himself, so he created an app that makes digital restaurant menus. It didn’t catch, but it inspired him to learn to code and move to Silicon Valley at the age of 24, in 2012. He joined an accelerator for tech entrepreneurs of color called NewMe, which is where he met Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz.
Horowitz eventually hired Lyons as his chief of staff, which gave Lyons entry into a tech gold mine. Andreessen Horowitz built its name investing in the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, and Stripe, and now has $44 billion in committed capital across multiple funds. It has become an influential shaper of tech culture. When its partners speak, the tech world listens.
Lyons approached this work with a philosophy: “Go where you’re the 1%, where you think differently than anyone else,” he says. “It’s important to go outside of the box, where people haven’t gone, and bridge into it.” Given his roots in music, he saw an opportunity to combine venture capital with the world’s largest cultural figures. Celebrities were eager to “go from a world of endorsements to equity,” he says, and founders were eager to connect with a new kind of investor network with strong cultural influence.
In other words, it was a form of Lyons’ shared genius concept. Founders and culture-makers hadn’t always worked together. But don’t they have a lot to teach each other?
From there, Lyons’ dual roles were formed: He became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and now focuses on companies at the intersection of culture and technology. But he also created its Cultural Leadership Fund, a joint investment fund with major athletes, artists, and other cultural movers — Kevin Hart, Shonda Rhimes, Will Smith, and major names from sports, music, and entertainment have all invested. (“What makes him so special is his ability to bridge the gap for those outside the traditional tech space,” Serena Williams says of Lyons.) It’s the first fund in Silicon Valley with 100% Black LPs (limited partners, or investors), with all management fees going back to a select number of nonprofits and charities that help individuals of diverse backgrounds break into tech.
Through it all, Lyons has refined his approach to creating shared genius. It starts by seeing everything and everyone as one piece of a larger puzzle — and then thinking about how those pieces can come together.
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To Lyons, here’s a perfect example of shared genius in action: A few months ago, he arranged a dinner for the founders of Udio, which a16z has invested in. Udio is an AI music generator app; you give it a prompt, and it will create a song, complete with lyrics and singing. The product was publicly launched in April 2024, and Udio, like any new tech startup, needed to figure out its product-market fit. Who exactly needs its service, and what will they do with it?
In part to answer this question, Lyons brought Udio’s founders together with will.i.am (who has also invested in Udio) and producer and rapper Timbaland. The three started goofing around with the app, starting with new music (as the app is intended) and then veering unexpectedly into full-blown comedy sketches, until the night felt like a combination of a karaoke session and Saturday Night Live. “It was hilarious,” says Lyons. “By leveraging the culture, you’re one step into an unknown mindset. The founders had never thought this was how their product would be used.”
In other words: When you meet with people who think like you, you might come away with one new idea or direction. But when you meet with people completely unlike you, or with entirely different skill sets, they bring a universe of new ideas and considerations. The key is knowing which ideas will pair best.
And for that, he often likes to think of the “idea maze” — a term coined by Balaji S. Srinivasan, a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. It’s a metaphor for navigating the challenges of startups. “A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death,” Srinivasan writes.
“A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the ‘movies/music/filesharing/P2P’ maze or the ‘photosharing’ maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.”
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To escape the maze, Lyons says, you must take in a range of information from different sources — and then develop your own unique vision of what’s right. “It’s important to get feedback and alternative perspectives, but ultimately only you know how to navigate your internal journey,” he says.
Lyons follows this advice for himself. For example, when he’s excited about a founder’s product, he likes to share it with a tight-knit group of close friends and fraternity brothers from outside of tech. “If they don’t like it, then I know
I’m too much in the weeds,” he says.
Lyons frames the world around “and’s” versus “or’s”: “I want to incorporate as many ‘and’s’ as I can,” says Lyons. In order to build what he hopes, or close the loop on a deal, or create an opportunity for someone in his network, successfully leveraging those “and’s” is key. That could mean making introductions, asking questions, listening, sparking collaboration, and knowing the people who can help make each happen. “The goal is to let founders and entrepreneurs be great at what they do, and then create an ecosystem to support them across multiple different facets,” says Lyons. “Creative communities can unlock ideas and opportunities. No one thought Sam Altman and Cardi B could hypothetically be standing next to each other at the Met Gala. That’s where the potential lies.”
He encourages entrepreneurs to think about their own version of “and.” Where can combinations be created — both with people and ideas? It could be in the media and ideas you ingest, for example, where combining ideas and sources can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. (On any given day, Lyons says, he’s reading everything from Deepak Chopra to Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act to James Nestor’s Breath.) It can be in pairing people for an interesting dinner, or exploring collaborations that push both sides’ comfort zones.
And most importantly, he says, embracing “and” means not locking yourself into any one idea, concept, or even technology. His closest collaborators have come to expect this now. “You have to have fearlessness to go back into a room and say, ‘I know I was talking to you about NFTs last year, but I’m talking to you about AI now,'” says Rich Kleiman, who cofounded the venture firm 35V with Kevin Durant, and has invested alongside Lyons on multiple projects. “The idea of him bringing that world into other worlds gracefully is part of his skill.”
It’s a skill, yes, but it’s really about a firm belief in a simple formula — for business, for people, for ideas, and for success. The formula is this: many > one.
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