Rebuilding the Internet for Privacy | Barrett Lyon on DoxxNet

We're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin-operated intelligence at scale.

The internet has really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design. There's, like, not a lot of new stuff. All of it's built on top. Erasing that is kind of what I'm trying to go for.

What you're saying is you've actually built this transient way for folks to connect and chat without there being any record.

The really big problem is on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Telegram, all of those applications disguise themselves as you sending something to somebody else, but you're really sending something to a server. But the question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those?

It's coming at such an important inflection point for, like, the future of our country tech, and to just have this conversation that seems to be manipulated to some end.

It feels very manipulated, and to me, the future of our tech is needing to build this infrastructure now. If we're crippling it-

The internet was designed to connect people directly. Today, much of what we do online passes through someone else's server, along with an enormous amount of data about us. In this episode, A sixteen Z's Joel de la Garza sits down with internet infrastructure pioneer Barrett Lyon to talk about DOXNET, his attempt to rethink that architecture from the ground up. Barrett explains why VPNs aren't enough, how DOXNET enables encrypted peer-to-peer communication without a central server sitting in the middle, and why the company owns its infrastructure all the way down to the hardware. They also discuss what happens when decades of online tracking meet cheap AI, why Barrett thinks internet protocol development has stagnated, and what it would take to bring back some of the openness and experimentation of the early internet.

Well, today we're joined by Barrett Lyon, perhaps the most-- one of the most interesting people in tech.

[chuckles]

I have a lot of stories to share, and I am always kind of blown away every time we catch up because you tell me a new story that just puts everything I've ever done in pale in comparison.

[chuckles]

And I think the most interesting one I heard recently, and I had never heard it before, and this was during a period, I believe, where we were investors in your previous company, was you are a pilot, you have a pilot's license, and you decided to optimize your life by flying places, and you had an unfortunate experience, I believe, flying back from one of our meetings.

Yeah. Well, I mean, one day I was driving to work in the Bay Area, and I realized it was almost forty-five minutes, which used to be fifteen, and my family lives up in the Tahoe region, so I'm like, "Well, I think the plane can fly there in about the same time." [chuckles] Maybe I could just commute that way. That was before work from home was, like, codified by COVID. So I had, like, a need to physically be present. So yeah, I started flying and-

So your daily driver was a daily flyer.

Right.

Yeah. [chuckles]

Yeah. So I put thirteen hundred hours on, on a Cirrus. And yeah, one day after a meeting here, I left and got in the plane, took off from San Carlos, and somewhere over Oakland Airport, the