Chris Dixon

I really like history and I particularly like the era of the Victorian industrial age of like 1850 to 1920 or something. It’s an amazing period where you, I think of it as a period. We had like a hundred Elon Musks. So you had Westinghouse and Edison and Ford and the Wright brothers and Bell and just goes on and on. And you had that period where just the number of incredible inventions during that period. This was in that 50-year period. I mean, the airplane, the car, the photograph, the light bulb, for God’s sake, this amazing book called Empires of Light . It’s the battle between Westinghouse and Edison. It’s really fascinating. It was enterprise sales. They invent the light bulb. Westinghouse has AC, Edison has DC. And just went town to town, selling them and like “Use my system.” And there was this awesome moment at the end. The coup de grâce was Westinghouse built, because the key benefit of AC is it goes farther without losing power. He built this giant plant up at Niagara Falls and then turned the lights on in Buffalo. And it was like this magic act. They all like, like borrowed tons of money. And the other thing that’s cool about them is they were all engineers. It reminds me a lot — and they all started off in the telegraph business, which at the time was sort of the internet of that era. So that was cool. There’s another book. I’m sorry, I have crypto on my brain. I can’t help it. There’s a book I really like called [