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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