Is decentralization overhyped? And the future of voice tech.

Today I'm at AngelList HQ in San Francisco for a bit of a reunion with two friends and investors: Parker Thompson and Erik Torenberg. Parker Thompson is a partner at AngelList and early stage investor. Prior to joining the family here (Product Hunt is an AngelList company), he was a partner at 500 Startups where he invested in Erik's first company, among many others. Before that, Parker spent six years at Pivotal Labs. As you'll hear, he's also behind the popular Twitter account @StartupLJackson. Erik Torenberg is co-founder and partner at Village Global, a network-driven venture firm. He is also co-founder and chairman of crypto company TokenDaily and On Deck, a community of top talent looking to start or join their next company. Erik was actually the first full-time teammate to join me at Product Hunt and prior to that, he co-founded rapt.fm, an app for participating in live online rap battles. In this episode we talk about: * How investors choose which companies to bet on, including how investors think about investing in companies with distributed teams. We also run through the lessons learned from the early stage investing Parker, Erik and I have done and discuss the strategies founders should use when pricing their initial fundraising rounds. * The emergence of crypto and whether it will pose a threat to Facebook as well as the challenges Facebook faces in trying to regulate what can and can't be said on their platform. We also talk about when decentralization makes sense and why some of the benefits of centralization might be overlooked in the rush to decentralize. * How new business opportunities emerge through platform shifts, including whether voice as a platform is finally seeing its often-forecasted and much-anticipated shift to the mainstream. Erik and Parker also run through some of their requests for products. Of course, we also talk about some of their favorite products, including a social network for books, an app to help freestyle rappers, and a device that lets you cook food to perfection by vacuum-sealing it and submerging it in hot water. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support.