Dwolla founder Ben Milne. (Photo: Twitter)

Dwolla*, the Des Moines-based payment platform that has a strong presence in NYC, announced today that it has received a $16.5 million Series C investment led by venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz, with contributions from NYC firms Thrive Capital* and Union Square Ventures. The fresh funding will allow Dwolla to double its staff of 40 to 80 and open a third office in San Francisco, according to The Next Web. Andreessen partner Scott Weiss will be joining Dwolla's board.

Dwolla is a payment network that allows users to transfer money back and forth for free for transactions under $10 and a flat rate fee of $0.25 for those over $10. The platform hooks directly up to your bank account and offers transfer fees lower than what banks or credit card companies typically charge, positioning it as a legitimate competitor to conglomerates like Visa and Mastercard (not to mention that rumored deal with Square).

But the company also appears to have PayPal in its sights. In October, Dwolla announced a new MassPay feature that competes with PayPal's "Mass Payment" function; MassPay allows users to send out payments to up to 2,000 people at once with just a few clicks. It's worth noting that Jeff Jordan, the former President of PayPal, is a partner at Andreessen.

This is one of the largest investmens Andreessen has made in a payment services startup, though it's made smaller bets on Stripe, a payment system for developers, and Balanced.

Mr. Weiss, who led the investment, explained on his blog why the firm chose to make such a big bet on Dwolla:

• Founder/market fit: Ben is one of the most determined and scrappy entrepreneurs we’ve met and has a deep knowledge of the entire payment network.

• Ridiculous market size: Dwolla’s FiSync is taking on ACH and FedWire, a combined $730+ trillion market with real-time transactions, new revenue streams and incentives for key players in the payment process.

• A snowball of traction: Its annual processing run rate has moved from the hundreds of millions to billions and its business development pipeline is chock full of opportunities.

Mr. Weiss signed off: "I am excited to be joining Dwolla’s board of directors and look forward to helping Ben build the next multi-billion dollar payment company!" Enjoy all that dough, boys.

*Disclosure

(Photo: Sound Ctrl)

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Foursquare, the New York-based check-in and recommendations app that was the breakout darling of SXSW 2009.

Former Square COO Keith Rabois recently engaged in a very public dustup with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley on Twitter, tweeting that only a "Hail Mary Bebo-style acquisition will bail you out." In January, data and research company PrivCo predicted that the startup will fail by the end of the year, eventually surrendering to an acquisition price of no more than $50 million (though the analysis didn't account for mobile traffic). In November of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors were "cooling" on Foursquare. "The company claims more than 25 million registered users, but only about 8 million of them use the app at least once a month," it wrote.

Now, Businessweek reports that Foursquare has raised $41 million in loans and convertible debt from Silver Lake Partners, a private equity fund, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and others. The influx of capital, Businessweek notes, will allow Foursquare time to grow as it tussles with low revenue (a source tells BW that the company only made $2 million last year) and works to launch a new ad program that will allow all of its merchants to serve mobile ads.

Foursquare's latest update to its iOS app brought search and recommendations to the forefront; sources also told Betabeat that the company has toyed with the idea of a recommendations app not equipped with check-ins, which speaks volumes about where the value of the app lies. A new mobile ad strategy, which would most likely serve ads to users based on their location, could help to greatly increase revenue at the company.

Taking on debt instead of raising a new round also helps Foursquare avoid a dreaded down round and what would undoubtedly be a fierce public debate about its valuation. The Series C in 2011 brought the company's total capital to $71 million at a valuation of $600 million, but the novelty of a check-in app seems to have worn off since then, and that coupled with thin yearly revenues could lead to a lower valuation.

One source told Betabeat that the company is “frustrated with lack of hype/momentum/growth," and that company culture has transitioned from “uplifting” to “oh shit."

Investors in this debt round are patient, allowing Mr. Crowley the time he needs to expand the business. But others, like Greylock's John Lilly, declined to participate--according to BW, he simply thinks Foursquare's $600 million valuation is too high.

(Photo: ITechBook.net)

The Wall Street Journal has unearthed more details about the Silicon Valley political advocacy group first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle.

Mark Zuckerberg--fresh off his fundraiser for Republican governor Chris Christie!--is working on launching the group, along with his close friend Joe Green, a former Harvard University roommate. Mr. Green was previously involved with NationBuilder.com and Causes.com and is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz. (As we noted last fall, founder Marc Andreessen himself contributed exclusively to a number of Republican campaigns, after previously supporting Clinton-Gore.)

But the tech and Republican connections don't stop there.

The bipartisan group includes Joe Lockhart, a former Facebook VP of global communications now at the Glover Park Group, as well as "Beltway insider consultants, including Republican strategists Jon Lerner and Rob Jesmer." The Journal says Mr. Jesmer, the former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee "is especially active on a day-to-day basis."

So world's most prominent Chris Christie supporter Mark Zuckerberg has hired hard-right extremists Jon Lerner & Rob Jesmer as his lobbyists?

— Anil Dash (@anildash) March 25, 2013

The technology leaders are pushing for federal legislation relevant to their hiring interests, such as immigration and education reform, as well as funding for scientific research. And the Journal says it will soon have money to burn:

The group, which so far doesn't have a name, is aiming to raise roughly $50 million and has already secured commitments in the tens of millions of dollars from Mr. Zuckerberg and more than a dozen other tech executives includingLinkedIn Corp. LNKD +0.13% founder Reid Hoffman, said these people.

The Chronicle called the group a Super PAC. But according to the Journal, Mr. Zuckerberg's political advocacy group plans to register as a 501(c)(4). The formal announcement isn't expected for another few weeks, but that designation would make the group a so-called "stealth PAC." Like the better-known super PACS, stealth PACs "are allowed to accept donations of unlimited size and apply that money to political campaigns." However, unlike super PACs, stealth PACs must show "influencing the outcomes of elections is not their primary purpose." This distinction allows them not to "disclose any information about their donors" and means they are regulated by the I.R.S., which is less aggressive with oversight than the Federal Election Commission.

With Sheryl Sandberg's widely-expected campaign, maybe this means we'll be sorting through the SEC's Facebook investigation, rather than the Bain Capital files come 2016.

While Facebook claims it's an effort to stop spam and promote apps that add value to the network, "Developers say the crackdown is an attempt to stifle applications that compete with Facebook-owned services," or pay for ads on Facebook, the Wall Street Journal reported last night.  

This past Friday, MessageMe joined the ranks of apps like Vine, Voxer, and Yandex's social discovery app Wonder, in getting blocked from Facebook's platform.

But it would be hard to make the case that MessageMe--a rich, incredibly easy-to-use app that lets users send doodles, locations, photos, Google images, videos, iTunes songs, and even Snapchat-like drawings on photos--doesn't add value considering Facebook reportedly tried to acquire the app.

Rather, cofounder Arjun Sethi told Betabeat, he was informed Friday that MessageMe was not compliant with platform policy guidelines related to duplicating Facebook's core services (i.e. Facebook Messenger) and that "they’d be shutting off access to our users to get to their friends list."

Mr. Sethi said his team "worked over the weekend and basically removed the feature. So if you looked at the app now it’s not there anymore." When we downloaded the app last night, the option to find friends on Facebook still showed up, which would have been a welcome option considering only seven early adopters from our contact list were already on the service, but MessageMe is that supremely rare app we actually wouldn't mind bugging our normal friends to join.

That explains why, in a blog post today revealing seed funding from True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Social+Capital Partnership raised last year, MessageMe also announced that it picked up more than 1 million users since launching (with the Facebook connection) on March 7th.

The company said it's sending more than 500 notifications per second worldwide and that in the U.S. alone, users have shared more than 10 million doodles and more than 4 million songs on iTunes.

Facebook's social graph may be in the midst of midlife crisis, but MessageMe's features are perfectly suited to the current state of discourse, which seems to be frozen in adolescence.

Mr. Sethi said his team's background is in social gaming and they plan on introducing in-app monetization when the time is right, rather than advertising or selling data to third-parties. (The "stickers" and "money" buttons next "video" and "doodle" are currently turned off.) The same cofounders previously collaborated on a company called Lolapps, which was acquired by a Korean company.

When it came time to build MessageMe, they took their inspiration from the more personal social network Path and its so-called "stickers," as well as the Chinese messaging app QQ and the older BBM-style messaging on Blackberries. "When you look at our product, you can see there’s a PIN system so we focus a lot of our attention on that as well, rather than like some sort of public broadcast of usernames," he explained.

(An earlier version of MessageMe's blog post noted typically "Asian" messaging behaviors becoming more mainstream.)

And like Path, MessageMe sets its sights smaller. "We’re not focused on the replication of your Facebook graph," he explained. "We’re focused on having you communicate with people that you want to communicate with the most and people that you feel you can be yourself with." The average customer, he said, will have a network of 20 to 25 people they spend their time chatting with, rather than hundreds of Facebook friends.

That may be more than just a defensive posture. As John Herrman recently wrote on Buzzfeed, app developers at SXSW were "actively planning for the graph-rot contingency" by "leveraging to build separate graphs of their own." Besides at this point, getting booted off of Facebook offers its own little media boost.

Mr. Sethi acknowledged that tensions between Facebook and developers were rising. "I do feel like some developers are feeling the pain depending on the type of applications they’re making. It’s just part of like a natural cycle of any platform or ecosystem, depending on what is core to them."

However, that hasn't been the case between MessageMe and Apple. "Our product is competitive with iMessage and they’re not revoking access for us. So I think it just depends on the way each company thinks about the platform and product."

In the meantime, DM us if you want our MessageMe pin? We really want to spend the morning sending doodles and most of the people on our contact list are venture capitalists. :(

Mark Zuckerberg is hardly the first billionaire turned off by the antics of Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam. As Betabeat learned while reporting a feature on the startup's $15 million investment round from Andreessen Horowitz, Mr. Moghadam's career in tech began only after he yapped his way out of an internship with Warren Buffet.

In the midst of the recession, Mr. Moghadam was given a year off--with reduced pay--from the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf. Only Berkshire Hathaway found his personal blog, Beneficent Allah, where he wrote a satirical billable memo referencing the “Ballstate Insurance Company." Allstate was a client of Dewey's, the offer was rescinded and long story short, Mr. Moghadam now gets to dine with Nas.

Not content with his good fortune, however, Mr. Moghadam has decided to use his company to launch a contest soliciting diss tracks--something of a habit with this guy--about Mr. Buffett. As Mr. Moghadam later explained, "Warren Buffett is a little bitch tho. I can't believe he bought a RAILROAD with CASH. it's like 'hey! warren! there's this thing.. it's like the NEW railroad! it's called the INTERNET!'fucking grandpa, setting the US economy back, hustling goldman sachs, true scumbag."

Here is an unedited version of the gChat conversation about the contest:

4:11 PM Mahbod: http://rapgenius.com/discussions/20432-Rap-genius-contest

4:12 PM dude we've got beef with warren buffett now!

  doo you think we can take that mufucka down??

4:14 PM me: are you still salty about the internship?

  why do you want to take him down?

4:15 PM Mahbod: you nailed it!

  also from a philosophical perspective I hate that fool

  furthermore my ex-gf's mom is friends with him

4:16 PM also he brags about eating at mcdonalds

  sooo many reasons! I loathe him

  I actually really LIKE mark zuckerberg

 me: what's wrong with mcdonald's?

 Mahbod: but warren buffett I legit hate

  it is unealthy/gross!

4:17 PM me: why are you always telling people to suck your dick? https://twitter.com/RapGenius/status/304518057798295552

 Mahbod: yeah I should stop that

  this one was a playful allusion to my zuck "faux pas"

4:18 PM me: did you take a vyvanse today?

 Mahbod: not.....yet...

  but now that you said that I just might

4:19 PM me: zuck got prickly about his photo being taken again: http://betabeat.com/2013/02/sergey-brin-google-glass-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-google-wearable-tech/

 Mahbod: I had sushi with kurupt last night so I feal really chipper

  oh nooo! LOL

  that dude needs to chillax!

Can't shut up, won't shut up, Rockafella Records . . .

(Photo: theybf.com)

Real Genius Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Rap Genius to help its Ivy League cofounders to annotate the Internet. But how much will they have to pay to rein in the braggadocious Mahbod Moghadam?

In a recent issue of Wakefield, a newsletter covering "tech and startup insight not captured elsewhere," Maboo was up to his old shenanigans, volunteering information about a “feud” with Mark Zuckerberg, who also happens to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Apparently, Mr. Moghadam was at Ben Horowitz’s home, “chilling” with Zuck and Nas as is the new mode of Silicon Valley socializing. (Mr. Horowitz happens to be close friends with Steve Stoute, Nas’ former manager.) Despite Zuck's heightened privacy concerns (it's complicated?) Rap Genius cofounder couldn't resist Instagramming his good fortune.

Apparently Zuck never leaves his house because he’s so afraid of people photographing him, and then our investor – his house is one of the only places where Zuck feels safe – so our investor invited Zuck and Nas over. They were chilling together, and I asked if I could take a photo. He was like “Let’s hold off, let’s hold off,” and I just couldn’t resist – I was drunk, and I went paparazzi and Instagrammed it, and I didn’t even think it would be a thing.

But then the press picked it up and apparently Zuck gets home and his whole PR crew is calling him every five seconds, and he told us to take it down. We wrote a letter of apology and I feel sorry. I regret taking it, I hope this has taught me some maturity, it certainly got me in a lot of trouble. But then on the other hand, fuck that fool – that’s Nas the Don.

Asked by Wakefield if there was anything else he wanted to discuss, Mr. Moghadam again volunteered:

Alright so I told you the New York Times is Carlos Slim’s ho, I told you Zuck can suck my dick, what else is there?

When Betabeat asked Mr. Moghadam about the tenor of those comments on gChat, he said, “i am so sorry, i love zuck, i think he should've made the photo w nas his fb profile pic. I talked to nas, nas loved him and loved the photo.” It was all “tongue in cheek,” he added, “but obvi this offends mark, he got me my last girlfriend, i feel terrible!”

Later, Mr. Moghadam requested that we note that he had taken a Vyvanse to prepare for a UC Berkeley Rap Genius colloquium after the Wakefield interview and was therefore “being negative on the come up." He also noted that he was “not surprised that the ‘guy’ (pun intended) who runs [Wakefield] went to harvard since havartis (as i call them) are little bitches. Also ‘harvard = illuminati, yale = KILLuminati (princeton = chilluminati).’”

Wonder what he calls Andreessen Horowitz?

Bloglords Never Worry In Emily Nussbaum's review of "Girls" for the New Yorker this week, she defined "concern trolling," as "the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry." Valley regulars don't seem too familiar with the term. So for a fine example, let us direct you to Sarah Lacy's comments about her former coworker Alexia Tsotsis on Jason Calacanis' This Week In Tech. Whatever happened to putting the blog first?

The Bachelor: Silicon Valley Congratulations to investor Peter Thiel, who made Out magazine's third annual list of "Most Eligible Bachelors." Local suitors, please let us know if you get an invite to his raging Upper East Side dinner parties.

Nap Time Bre Pettis is a busy guy. Between running MakerBot Industries and traveling around for meetings and conferences, he has to get his zzz's in where he can. "Parking lot nap," he wrote alongside an Instagram of his car with a bridge in the background. Perhaps MakerBot should invest in some sweet nap pods a la Google.

(Photo: Instagram)

Be Mine If you didn't get enough fill of Valentine's Day yesterday, perhaps this tool for determining your Twitter crush will come in handy. Twitamore analyzes who you follow, @-reply and favorite to figure out who your Twitter Valentine is. Our favorites? The ones who love themselves.

Belly up the bar Wired editor Ryan Tate has a bone to pick with the makers of the bourbon Maker’s Mark, who recently announced they’d be adding just a little more water to their product. Quartz took questions for the company’s COO via Twitter, and here’s what Mr. Tate demanded to know: “What will you do for a living after burning the American bourbon industry’s reputation to the ground and destroying your company?” Two words, Mr. Tate: Woodford Reserve.

Attention, please Consider this a cri de coeur from your friendly neighborhood scolds: Please, please, please stop making these Harlem Shake videos. Rumor has it that even Sheryl Sandberg is somewhere in this Facebook video. It’s nice to break up the workday with a little caper, but unfortunately, tech companies seem to have trouble rounding up employees with rhythm.

There’s only one exception to this blanket condemnation, and that’s the dude who appears front and center in Google’s version, thrashing about in what appear to be lederhosen. He looks like he’s on serious party drugs, and he is mesmerizing, and he is now a GIF:

For those who read and run? When Atlantic Media launched Quartz, it positioned the digital only business publication as the news source for the new global elite: the type of jet-setting professionals more likely to read a news story from a tablet while sipping complementary champagne at 30,000 feet than to hunker over a desktop PC. It stood to reason then that Quartz would be an early adopter of the smart-watch Pebble.

Quartz reporter Christopher Mims also brushed off concerns that nerdlinger arm candy might look pretty goofy once it actually hit the market.

Rappers will gold-plate their iWatches and Google Glasses, and some guy will wear a phablet on a chain around his neck. You'll see.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) February 14, 2013

We think we know just the fella.

(Photo: Business Insider)

Twitter attempted to have a conversation about race and the tech industry yesterday. The loudest voices?  White men on either side of the argument shouting each other down. What got obscured along the way was just how much pattern-matching plays into the lack of diversity in the tech industry and the people who cover it and how that holds all of us back.

They almost made Jamelle Bouie’s point for him.

In a feature for The Magazine, Mr. Bouie examined why the mastheads of tech blogs like The Next Web, The Verge, Engadget and Gizmodo were overwhelmingly white and male. Rather than “overt racism,” he found a prohibitive combination of dependence on unpaid internships--and the network effect of a wired boys club whose members sometimes seem to be talking solely for each other's benefit.

Technology has become just as pervasive as the Valley had always hoped, Mr. Bouie noted:

Gadgets are used by everyone. African Americans and Latinos, for example, are huge Internet users. They use Twitter and Facebook at higher rates than whites, they’re the most likely to use their cell phones for Internet usage, and the cell phones they buy are — for the most part — smartphones.

But so many of its gatekeepers are cut from the same cloth, limiting “aspects of their perspective.”

(For the purposes of his argument, Mr. Bouie focused on African-American and Latino writers: "In no way does this discount the real problems of access and representation for Asian Americans, but compared to African Americans and Latinos, they have much more representation in technology journalism." It's an important distinction. "Who Has It Worse," has to be the most divisive game ever marketed to minorities. But we all know there is a difference. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to themselves or doesn’t spend much time at tech events.)

I've never been discriminated against as a tech reporter because I’m Indian. At least I don't think I have. It's impossible to say, really, because there are a number of other factors that make me counter-to-type for a tech blogger. In addition to not being white, I’m not a dude and I didn't come from a family that had any interest in technology or media. It wasn't until I was 26 that a small J-school scholarship, student loans, and a semi-patient live-in boyfriend helped balance the cost of living in New York City with the limited income of a low-paying magazine internship.

The problem with identifying racism is that it seldom happens in isolation. Often it’s a confluence of factors that inspire people to see you as enough of an "other" to underestimate you, ignore you, deny you access, or simply not want to help.

Silicon Valley, however, does not respond well when its virtue is called into question. Unlike Wall Street, say, the tech industry cares what you think of it. It wants to be seen as a bootstrapped meritocracy--until the VC check arrives--open to all exceptional individuals and beholden to nothing but the disruptive tide of innovation ushered in by its gadgets, services and apps.

To imply otherwise is to call into question the hustle--the defensive posture of a “crush it” culture, which helps obscure both self-doubt and the fact that success can be capricious.

Mr. Bouie’s essay followed a similar line of reasoning to the one we've heard about the lack of black and Latino entrepreneurs and investors. ("I don't know a single black entrepreneur," Michael Arrington told CNN in 2011 before recanting his statement, claiming it caught him off guard.) Substitute "inability to find funding" for "unpaid internships," but the network effects and pattern-matching stays the same. Mark Zuckerberg becomes a billionaire and suddenly Ben Horowitz feels comfortable crowing that Andreessen Horowitz "likes to invest in college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no way to monetize."

Another recent discussion, this one about sexism faced by women working in gaming, devolved into making fun of male tech writers somehow. Trust me, male tech reporters do not need any more attention. There is already an entire phalanx of marketing and PR professionals--by and large capable women--who make them feel special. That whole dance is about as gendered as a Budweiser commercial.

Still, why is there so much attention being paid to the people covering tech when the industry itself faces very real race and gender gaps? As Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote about girl geeks vs. boys kings, “the unpaid and underpaid labor of women is essential to making that machine go, to making it so irresistible.” Besides a touch of solipsism, it’s likely because the media has such entrenched discrimination problems of its own. It’s not just tech bloggers who are mostly white men. In 2006, The Observer looked at the magazine world’s vanilla ceiling. No one could believably argue that much has changed.

It’s a pity that the conversation around Mr. Bouie’s article degenerated into piling on his most easily dismissed detractor, Jason Calacanis. In the same breath that he invoked the emergence of post-race society, Mr. Calacanis assigned a percentage of Korean-ness to his daughter's face. Imagine being that child and then let's all move on.

Perhaps a better way to encourage more diversity in tech reporting is to look at why diversity is important. As Mr. Bouie noted, the homogeneity of voices has lead tech writers to sleep on Pinterest’s popularity with women and dismiss concerns about how App.net might lead to white flight because of the Twitter competitor’s $50 fee.

What’s more, the proliferation of apps, gadgets and services--coupled with the metastasization of the often complacent tech press--has amplified the noise-to-signal ratio.

A report last month claimed that of the 430,000 odd apps that will debut in the iOS App Store this year, most will go unnoticed. Gatekeepers can influence which products get attention and adoption, which in turn can affect funding.

Venture capital firms sometimes talk about pattern matching, the act of identifying traits of successful entrepreneurs and companies in order to replicate their wins. Even an industry that prides itself on innovating, it seems, actively seeks to propagate the status quo.

That might also be the reason why, when we read about how black people use Twitter, it's so rarely from their own perspective.

Thus far none of the posts related to this week’s controversy have shown up on Techmeme, so no points on the leaderboard for trying to talk about race. And the biggest beneficiary to all the ink spilled might be Marco Arment, the bomb-throwing developer behind The Magazine. Here’s hoping that changes.

Wikipedia.

Marc Andreessen talks fast. And so when the Andreessen Horowitz co-founder sat down for a conversation with The New York Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin at Dealbook's Opportunities for Tomorrow conference, he covered a lot of ground, from the fiscal cliff to higher education, the future of English majors, newspapers and self-driving cars, and other topics our fingers weren't fast enough to keep up with.

On the fiscal cliff: "The last thing we want is for all the politicians to get together and figure out a grand solution," Mr. Andreessen said. "The last time we all agreed on anything, we got into the war on Iraq."

On government regulation: "If there's regulation or unions, the entire venture capitalist class in California totally avoids it," he said.

On education: "I think it bifurcates, it's bifurcating now, and technology is going to cause it to bifurcate further. Government or union run education, on one hand, is horrible and getting worse." But online schools offer great opportunities.

On English majors: "Anything that involves math, quantitative skills, computers—I think that's going to set people up really well. A degree in English, I'm sure it's fun to get the degree. But the average graduate from the average college is going to be working in a shoe store."

On scotch: "I have tons of opinions on the IPO," Mr. Andreessen said about Facebook's public offering, before noting that as a board member it was inappropriate to hold forth publicly. "There's Johnny Walker Blue in the green room. If you'd let me drink that before, I'd tell you everything I think."

On Hewlett-Packard, on whose board Mr. Andreessen also serves: That might take a whole bottle, he said.

Is it a tech bubble? Mr. Andreessen said that we're experiencing the opposite of a tech bubble, what he called a "tech depression," where investors are fearful of technology stocks. "The big dogs are trading at generational lows, Cisco and Dell and Microsoft and Oracle and on and on. The public market hates tech," he said, adding: "I think we're still dealing with broken trust from the 2000 crash." Also: "The level of cynicism among investors, and entrepreneurs, is very strong."

On Google: He said that the company was trading at "crazy lows," with investors valuing the company on the strength of its search business, essentially treating YouTube, Android and Chrome as worthless propositions.

On self-driving cars: "I can't wait."

On newspapers:the future of print: "Today," he said when asked when the New York Times should stop publishing a paper edition. "As soon as possible." Fast forward 20 years, he said, and online is going to be 100 percent of the news market. "It's not that you can't make money in print, it's not that there aren't people who want it. But is your organization able to be on offense and take the future?" Many news outlets, he said, are spending too much time playing defense. It's not all bad news. "The global market opportunity for media is growing exponentially," it may be 100 times larger in years to come. "The question is, how do you get to the online format?"

(Photo: Twitter)

Nintendo is releasing a Wii Mini on December 7th, just in time for the holidays. [The Verge]

Startup incubator Y Combinator has announced a VC program, allowing YC students access to guidance and an $80,000 investment from firms like Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. The program will replace the Start Fund. [Y Combinator]

First we worried that tech sites were turning into press release regurgitation factories; now it turns out some of those press releases aren't even true. Here's how PRWeb helps distribute fake and sketchy press releases. [Search Engine Land]

Tumblr has broken into the top 10 sites in the U.S. with a worldwide audience of 170 million people. [Tumblr]

Don't worry: the Pentagon says a human will always decide if a robot kills you. Feel better now? [Wired]

Kickstarter is being sued for patent infringement over a $3 million 3D printing project. [The Daily Dot]

Mr. Dixon

Earlier today, serial entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon made it official. The cofounder of SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee) and Hunch (acquired by eBay), who invests both personally and through Founder Collective, will be decamping our fair city for sunnier shores to join Andreessen Horowitz as the Sand Hill Road powerhouse's seventh general partner. We spoke with Mr. Dixon by phone shortly after the announcement was made to find out what it means for the many ventures he's involved in here (like eBay's massive new Flatiron R&D lab, which is slated to house 200 developers and data scientists).

Don't hold your breath for an East Coast outpost, as cofounder Marc Andreessen emphasized earlier, his is a "single office firm." In fact, based on the tenor of our questions, Amy Grady, a representative from Andreessen Horowitz who was also on the call, wanted to assure us Mr. Dixon's hire was about more than just geography. "We didn’t hire Chris just because of New York. It’s a huge bonus, he’s obviously really tapped in, but if we find an entrepreneur with a great idea in Idaho, we’ll invest!"

Silicon Prairie, start your pitch decks.

Is this a way for Andreessen Horowitz to keep a better eye on New York without opening up an office here?
Chris Dixon: I’m keeping my apartment in New York, I plan to be there a lot. I plan to make a lot of investments there. I think they saw it as a positive that I have been in New York and know a lot of people there. That said, I’m going to be based in California and I think it’s important with these things--VC firms need to work together as a team and, you know, that just often requires being around each other a lot. But yeah, I’m going to be very aggressively looking for investments in New York.

What about your role at Founder Collective and the fate of Founder Collective in general?
CD: There’s two people who run Founder Collective, Eric Paley and Dave Frankel. They’re the general partners. I’m not a general partner. What I’ll do is I’m going to continue to support any companies that I invested in through them. So if I can be helpful to those entrepreneurs I will be--the same for my personal angel investments. [In addition to Founder Collective, Mr. Dixon has personally invested in Skype, Gerson Lehrman Group, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Knewton, and many others.] But I’ll be doing all my future investing through Andreessen Horowitz.

Will you still be an advisor at eBay or Hunch?
CD: It hasn’t been finalized yet, but I will have some kind of an advisory role at eBay and my cofounder [Tom Pinckney] from Hunch is going to be taking over the New York office. He’s been my cofounder for two companies now [including SiteAdvisor] so they’re in good hands.

You mentioned Andreessen Horowitz’s so-called CAA model of offering help in various domains like recruiting and research. Will your expertise be in bringing in deals?
Amy Grady: Just to be clear, he’s the check writer, he’ll be doing investing.
CD: So the way it works is there are seven general partners and I’m one of them. Those are the people who go out and find new investments and then make the investment and join the board and do things they can do to help. Then there’s 55 other people who provide all sorts of support for the entrepreneur, once the investment’s made.

Was it a difficult decision to leave New York? In a lot of ways you’re representative of the scene from its infancy. You started in Wall Street, transitioned into startups, and then to investing. Were you worried it would be a loss for the community?
CD: To the extent that I can try to get Andreessen Horowitz to be more active in New York, I think that’s a net win for the New York City tech scene. You could look at this glass half full or half empty, but that’s how I see it. I care a lot about the New York tech community, it’s in a great place and it’s growing quickly and I want to keep supporting it.

I’m not sure if Marc Andreessen or Ben Horowitz or anyone there commented on how vocal you are on Twitter or in your blog posts in terms of critiquing trends that you see?
CD: They’ve encouraged me to continue to be vocal and blogging and tweeting and doing all that stuff--Tumblring, Foursquaring [laughs]. So, yeah I intend to do that. They’re totally supportive and they like it.
AG: Yup, we welcome it, no censorship allowed. We welcome feedback. We love a fresh perspective so he actually fits in quite well with the culture.

What are you most excited about in terms of moving out there? To be immersed in a place that has a different kind of expertise than New York’s consumer web?
I think it will be nice to have a different perspective, I think I’ll learn a lot. The people at this firm are really, really impressive and I’ll learn a lot from them. Over the last few years--seven years--that I’ve been angel investing, it’s always been sort of a hobby for me. So it’s just going to be fun to try it as a full time thing.

I imagine part of the appeal is having so many resources behind you? In your blog post, you mentioned founders choosing the investor and Andreessen Horowitz excels at that.
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always done the angel investing stuff totally by myself. It’s trying to do something on a larger stage with more resources, it’s pretty exciting.

What will you miss the most about not being here?
Well, I’ll be there, okay? [laughs] I’ll be there a lot! I love New York and I’ll be there a lot. And I want to make a lot investments there. I’m hoping I won’t miss anything because I'll be there a lot.