My conversation with Jesse Walden, founder and managing partner of Variant.
Jesse has spent most of his career pulling on one idea: technology is most interesting when it gives people more agency.
That idea first showed up for him in the early internet, through piracy, BitTorrent, and the independent music scene. It later led him to crypto, where ownership, permissionless networks, and composability promised a more open internet.
He first tried to put that thesis into practice with Mediachain (which USV invested in back in the day) and later built Variant around a version of the same idea: that ownership could give users more control, access, and agency online.
Not all of that played out the way he expected. Ownership proved incredibly powerful in some parts of crypto, but much harder to generalize across the rest of the internet.
Today, Jesse thinks AI agents may supply some of what was missing - making it far easier to move between systems, compose different tools, and give users more control over how they interact with the internet.
- 0:00 Preview
- 01:15 Variant's new thesis
- 02:20 Automation ≠ Autonomy
- 06:50 How piracy shaped Jesse's worldview
- 09:00 How the internet went from open to closed
- 15:45 How BTC inspired Jesse’s startup MediaChain
- 21:00 Why breaking the rules drives innovation
- 24:00 The Variant founding story
- 29:30 Why crypto's ownership thesis didn’t fully play out
- 34:00 Could AI agents deliver on crypto’s original promise?
- 37:00 Will AI become another walled garden?
- 39:00 “You can just do things”
- 46:15 Will AI give us more agency or take it away?