Chris Dixon is an American entrepreneur, investor, and a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he also previously worked at eBay. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Hunch, a website that developed a collective intelligence recommender system that used decision trees to make decisions based on users’ interest.
Early life and education
Chris Dixon was born in 1972. Dixon began programming at 8, starting on a TRS-8 Model 1. Dixon earned a BA (in 1996) and an MA (in 1999), majoring in philosophy from Columbia University, and also earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2003.
Career
Dixon spent three years in the late 1990s, as a software programmer at Arbitrade, a hedge fund focused on high-frequency trading. Dixon then joined Bessemer Venture Partners, a venture capital firm. Dixon co-founded SiteAdvisor in 2005, a web-security startup that was acquired by software security giant company, McAfee in 2006.
Hunch
Dixon co-founded Hunch, a company that developed a collective intelligence recommender system that used decision trees to make decisions based on users’ interest in 2007, with Caterina Fake and another 11-person team of MIT graduates.
Hunch started a private preview period in December 2008 but went public in March 2009 as an invitation-only. Users had to request an invitation upon joining Hunch.com, which took days to receive. Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia joined Hunch in December 2009, as Board Member and advisor.
The website’s traffic had grown to 1.2 million unique visitors by February 2010. In January 2011, from topic-specific questions and decision tree system, they redesigned Hunch to tagging and product referral. In November 2011, eBay declared that they formally obtained Hunch for $80 million. To drive consumers to products they are more likely to obtain, eBay required to enhance the ability of their e-commerce platform by incorporating the recommendation of Hunch in terms of its engine technology suggestions.
Specifically, eBay needed the Hunch technology to develop the ability of their search engine to recommend non-obvious purchase proposals. In an interview, Hunch co-founder, Chris Dixon said that the Hunch technology may recommend to an enthusiastic coin-collector to acquire a microscope for use in examining coins, a proposal he said traditional machine learning algorithms could not achieve. Dixon, a co-founder of Hunch, remained as head of the operating business within eBay after the acquisition.
Founder Collective
Dixon also co-founded Founder Collective with Caterina Fake, David Frankel, Zach Klein, Eric Paley, Micah Rosenbloom, and Bill Trenchard in 2009. The company is a seed-stage venture capital fund and originally based in New York. The firm also has offices in San Francisco, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founder Collective concentrates on funding companies that are located in the East Coast United States.
The firm prefers to support businesses in these industries: advertising, e-commerce, healthcare, mobile and Internet of things. The firm has accomplished to collect a total amount of $185 million in a fund with its most contemporary round held in November 2016, raising a total amount of $75 million. Founder Collective became an investor in Betaworks, BuzzFeed, Hotel Tonight, Mkerbot, Milo, Uber, and Venmo.
Andreessen Horowitz
Dixon got selected as the seventh general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a private American venture capital firm, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009. One of the Andreessen Horowitz’s founders, Marc Andreessen said that he was impressed with Dixon’s track record both as an investor and entrepreneur.
Dixon decided to move to Andreessen Horowitz, because of its reputation among entrepreneurs, in addition to its model with services for entrepreneurs. Dixon concentrates mainly on consumer investments across seed, venture, and growth stages.
Dixon has supervised a variety of investments since joining the firm in January 2013, for the firm including Nootrobox and FiftyThree Soylent and sits on the boards of drone startup Airwave, digital Bitcoin wallet Coinbase, and 3D printing startup Shapeways. Dixon also supervised the firm’s investment and sits on the board of Oculus VR, which was acquired in March 2014 by Facebook.
Awards and recognitions
In 2010, Bloomberg Business named Dixon, the top angel investor in the technology industry. Dixon is highly successful personal angel investments in more than fifty startups including Behance, Bloomreach, Codecademy, Discourse, Dropbox, Flatiron Health, Foursquare, Hipmunk, Kickstarter, OMGPOP, Optimizely, Pinterest, Sift, Skype, Smart Things, Stack Overflow, Stripe, TrialPay, Warby Parker, and Zipline.
Dixon also won the 2012 Crunchie’s Angel of the Year award.