Episode Details

Michael Blau left a16z Crypto to build Drip, a marketplace where AI agents pay writers per article. No subscriptions. Just micropayments, settled on-chain, every time an agent reads.

The thesis: everyone's about to give their ChatGPT or Claude a wallet, and when they do, those agents will need somewhere to buy premium analysis. Drip lets Substack and newsletter writers sell their work to agents on a pay-per-read basis, starting with finance and tech. Writers set their own price. A trading agent might buy 100 articles for pennies each before it ever places a trade.

Matt Medved sits down with Blau to get under the hood of agentic commerce and what it means for the media model.

In this conversation:

– How Drip works and why it's additive to subscriptions, not a replacement

– Why micropayments need stablecoins (credit cards can't process a one-cent transaction)

– The x402 standard and why it feels like the early NFT/ERC-721 days

– Investor brain vs. founder brain, and lessons from Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon

– The three ways to play the agent economy: be the wallet, sell to agents, or own discovery

– Blau's personal AI stack: Codex, "brain folders," and switching off Claude overnight

Subscribe to Now Media: https://nowmedia.co/

Drip: https://dripstack.xyz

Michael Blau: https://x.com/blauyourmind

Matt Medved: https://x.com/mattmedved

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