Latest / The Stable Pulse / The Race to Put Dollars on the Blockchain

Transcript

The Race to Put Dollars on the Blockchain · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Intro: Passage of the stablecoin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act.
• 0:04
  Intro: Because analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things.
• 0:13
  Bam Azizi: Hello everyone.
• 0:14
  Bam Azizi: We are with another episode of CEO Beat uh today.
• 0:18
  Bam Azizi: Our guest is Chad or Charles Cascarella.
• 0:21
  Bam Azizi: Welcome to our show, Chad.
• 0:23
  Charles Cascarilla: Hey, great to be here, man.
• 0:24
  Charles Cascarilla: Thanks for having me on.
• 0:26
  Bam Azizi: I know you don't take a lot of uh podcast calls.
• 0:29
  Bam Azizi: Uh uh, I'm very grateful for you two spending time today with us.
• 0:33
  Bam Azizi: Um, we have a lot of founders in the audience that um would love to hear more about your stories.
• 0:39
  Bam Azizi: I'm super, super excited for this show.
• 0:41
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, I can't wait to have the conversation.
• 0:43
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh it's gonna be fun.
• 0:45
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, 100%.
• 0:46
  Bam Azizi: Uh before we start and asking all the serious questions about the Paxos and a stable coin, why don't you tell us a little bit more about your journey, where you were born, like uh how was the childhood and how did you get into like the founder mode and entrepreneurship?
• 1:02
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh yeah, well, I was born in Lansing, Michigan, um and uh still Michigan State fan.
• 1:08
  Charles Cascarilla: And I grew up in Cleveland, um uh where I spent, you know, kind of really my whole life.
• 1:14
  Charles Cascarilla: Um and so in the Midwest, um, and uh, you know, it was kind of like during the Rust Belt era.
• 1:20
  Charles Cascarilla: So you definitely lived in somewhat depressed times.
• 1:24
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and uh in some ways, it like I think maybe that helped you constantly think about well, what ways could you try and go out and make money?
• 1:32
  Charles Cascarilla: Like what kind of businesses could you start?
• 1:34
  Charles Cascarilla: What could you do?
• 1:35
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, you know, these weren't like boom towns, uh, you know, it was quite the opposite.
• 1:39
  Charles Cascarilla: So, you know, uh, what side hospitals could you try to put together and be able to make some money and you know think really creatively?
• 1:46
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and you know, uh Cleveland is a fantastic town.
• 1:50
  Charles Cascarilla: I mean, it's uh you like kind of learn about loyalty and hard work and um uh you know, really kind of appreciating your friends and family.
• 1:59
  Charles Cascarilla: And so, you know, being from Cleveland is like indelible, um, but at the same time, uh, you know, sometimes, you know, it has awesome an impetus to be able to move to new and bigger and better things as well.
• 2:12
  Bam Azizi: And you have a you have an interesting background.
• 2:15
  Bam Azizi: Um, to to what extent you want to share by know there is some immigrant in your blood.
• 2:20
  Charles Cascarilla: Well, you know, I guess we're all immigrants in some ways.
• 2:22
  Charles Cascarilla: It's like uh maybe sometimes it's easy to forget when it's far enough away.
• 2:26
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh but yeah, I'm half Lebanese, half Italian.
• 2:29
  Charles Cascarilla: And so that's combo.
• 2:31
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, I mean the best food combo, that's for sure.
• 2:34
  Charles Cascarilla: There's nothing better.
• 2:36
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh the you know, at least in my mind.
• 2:39
  Charles Cascarilla: Um and uh so we always had good food growing up, uh though nobody knew what hummus and babaganoush was in Cleveland in the in the early 80s, I can tell you that right now.
• 2:49
  Charles Cascarilla: It's not quite the fad today.
• 2:51
  Charles Cascarilla: It was like uh definitely um, you know, very uh unknown and uh exotic at the least.
• 2:59
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, makes sense.
• 3:00
  Bam Azizi: And then what was the first time you felt like you can do it yourself?
• 3:05
  Bam Azizi: You can make your own money, you don't need to be an employee.
• 3:07
  Bam Azizi: Well well, like tell us about your entrepreneurship journey.
• 3:10
  Charles Cascarilla: How did it I don't know, it's probably some lemonade stand or mowing lawns and shoveling snow.
• 3:15
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, you know, you're always trying to think of like some crafty ways doing yard work for other people, um, you know, painting houses.
• 3:22
  Charles Cascarilla: I remember breaking concrete.
• 3:24
  Charles Cascarilla: I can't even think of all the different jobs I had over time.
• 3:26
  Charles Cascarilla: And so, you know, you but you go back all the way.
• 3:29
  Charles Cascarilla: I remember buying like my first stock when I was in, oh, I don't know, it must have been fourth grade or something like that, fifth grade, and my grandmother explained to me uh the stock market and uh LTV steel just came out of bankruptcy.
• 3:43
  Charles Cascarilla: And I thought, oh yeah, we should buy LTV Steel.
• 3:45
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, it's from Cleveland.
• 3:46
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh yeah, it wasn't a good investment.
• 3:49
  Charles Cascarilla: I think went bankrupt again.
• 3:50
  Charles Cascarilla: But, you know, it was like um uh, you know, and it uh continues on uh the same cycle.
• 3:56
  Charles Cascarilla: But um it you know really kind of forced me to think about what are different ways you could invest money, you know, you're earning money, what do you do with it?
• 4:05
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, you know, I remember getting like $200 in total for like my first communion money or something in second grade and thinking, well, where can I put this money?
• 4:12
  Charles Cascarilla: Like what could what could I do to generate like a good return?
• 4:15
  Charles Cascarilla: Um and you know, so that maybe that was always inherent some way.
• 4:19
  Charles Cascarilla: And I think, you know, the Cleveland side of my family is the Lebanese side, and I think you know they're always entrepreneurial, and you know, everyone in my family they've you know, doing all kinds of businesses that they ran themselves.
• 4:29
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh so it's kind of a little bit in the blood, too.
• 4:32
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, when you have that type of um exposure, you know, I don't think it feels so foreign to say, oh yes, I want to go do something entrepreneurial, because you just kind of expect that you will.
• 4:44
  Charles Cascarilla: Um and because that's what everybody else is doing that you're seeing around you.
• 4:49
  Bam Azizi: That's that's right.
• 4:50
  Bam Azizi: And then um you, your first job, like serious job as a Goldman?
• 4:55
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, I mean, um I I guess uh I was at Bank of America and I did high-yield investment banking, and then I uh moved to Goldman in New York, and I was there and uh investment banking was okay.
• 5:08
  Charles Cascarilla: I didn't really love investment banking um because I mean it seems transactional, it is transactional.
• 5:15
  Charles Cascarilla: Um it's obviously very sophisticated and hard work, and so it is a good um groundwork to understand businesses and cap tables and what's going on.
• 5:23
  Charles Cascarilla: But you know, high-yield banking is very much about the transaction of enabling someone to issue debt.
• 5:30
  Charles Cascarilla: Um moving to Goldman, I went to the sell side uh covering financial institutions.
• 5:34
  Charles Cascarilla: So it was a research uh and writing reports and following companies, and it was like American Express and MBA and Capital One and a whole variety of other Fannie and Freddie.
• 5:44
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh it was all the specialty finance companies, which are kind of like um uh the non-bank uh lenders.
• 5:51
  Charles Cascarilla: And it was a not exactly what I planned to be doing.
• 5:54
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, I was actually supposed to go cover the technology companies at Goldman.
• 5:57
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, and this was in 99 and 2000, so that's exactly where you wanted to be.
• 6:00
  Charles Cascarilla: The last thing anyone wanted was like a mortgage insurer, a bond guarantor.
• 6:03
  Charles Cascarilla: You're like, what the heck?
• 6:04
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, this is uh this is not interesting.
• 6:06
  Charles Cascarilla: These aren't changing the world.
• 6:07
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh actually, it turns out they did uh because they all blew up in 2008, but you know, it's a different part of the story.
• 6:13
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh so, anyways, I was at Goldman writing research, and that was kind of interesting, but I always really wanted to be on the buy side where you're allocating capital, um, analyzing businesses and putting money behind your decisions and like really thinking about how you know different products and different management teams could really change the competitive position for their companies and for in the industry and even society.
• 6:36
  Charles Cascarilla: And so being on the sell side was good, but it was really more about um laying groundwork.
• 6:42
  Charles Cascarilla: And I uh, you know, I kind of was there for a couple of years.
• 6:45
  Charles Cascarilla: That's the normal tour duty unless you want to continue to extend it out.
• 6:49
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh I then left uh went to the buy side.
• 6:53
  Bam Azizi: Nice.
• 6:53
  Bam Azizi: And and uh Goldman, you've seen the first bubble, right?
• 6:56
  Bam Azizi: 2001.
• 6:58
  Charles Cascarilla: Yes, definitely.
• 6:59
  Charles Cascarilla: This was I mean, I think that's part of the reason I got I think it's part of the reason I got hired.
• 7:04
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh was you know, I remember the Asian financial crisis well, it was uh when I was in college and we were like spent a lot of time studying it.
• 7:10
  Charles Cascarilla: So you saw like uh that crash, then you 97, yeah, yeah, 97, 98, you know, the all the you know kind of different tiger um uh Asian tigers, they were called, uh kind of their growth model started to unravel.
• 7:24
  Charles Cascarilla: And then um, you know, obviously that actually in some ways created uh the easy money we put into place, created this really enormous bubble uh uh that came out of the internet.
• 7:36
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh I think that maybe that's part of the reason I got hired at Goldman.
• 7:39
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh everyone was hiring as many people as they could find.
• 7:42
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh so like they're like, we'll even hire you.
• 7:44
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh so I ended up with Goldman.
• 7:46
  Charles Cascarilla: And um, you know, that was definitely during the the this bubble.
• 7:50
  Charles Cascarilla: But it was so strange because I wanted to cover technology stocks, I ended up covering financial services companies.
• 7:56
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh financial services companies, they were trading, they just kept going down every day because everyone is selling everything to just buy more, you know, Nokia or uh Niku or whatever it was.
• 8:08
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, there's like so many of these darlings, pets.com.
• 8:11
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, I mean, half of these things are gone now.
• 8:13
  Charles Cascarilla: But, anyways, uh the net next networking company, uh Juniper.
• 8:17
  Charles Cascarilla: And um, so everyone's selling everything, buying those.
• 8:19
  Charles Cascarilla: These are trading at like five times earnings, like you know, one times book value.
• 8:23
  Charles Cascarilla: And when the bubble happened, strangely, all those stocks started going up.
• 8:28
  Charles Cascarilla: So it was the greatest time in the world to basically be long, like very cheap value and very cheap growth and short, you know, kind of bubble stuff.
• 8:36
  Charles Cascarilla: And so even though technology stocks were going down, and clearly the bubble hurt everybody uh as it was popping, uh, the financial uh stocks and industrials and a bunch of other sectors actually really went up a lot.
• 8:49
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh, you know, you could really have if you were running a hedge fund, and people made enormous amounts of money because this was like the perfect setup.
• 8:56
  Charles Cascarilla: And um, you know, this the easy money policy that Green Stand put into place coming out of the bubble, you know, you kind of always hurt the one you love the most.
• 9:06
  Charles Cascarilla: And like, you know, he loved the stock market, and you know, actually he just kept blowing bubbles because he kept trying to bail it out.
• 9:11
  Charles Cascarilla: And so he started cutting interest rates and the financial stocks went up and they just kept going up for like the next five, six years until you know we hit like kind of um you know terminal.
• 9:22
  Charles Cascarilla: The music sure has stopped, yeah.
• 9:24
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah.
• 9:25
  Charles Cascarilla: The music is stopping something, right?
• 9:27
  Charles Cascarilla: Um yeah, you can only blow bubbles so big, you know, and they're always based on something that's true because you know, people are smart and you know they get uh captured by a narrative and a trend that had to be based in reality.
• 9:41
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 9:42
  Bam Azizi: And then past 2001, another bubble burst or another financial crisis, which is 2008, which was the root cause of uh Satoshi starting Bitcoin.
• 9:53
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 9:54
  Bam Azizi: And by then you were like this experienced guy, you already knew the tech, you already knew the financial institutions, financial products.
• 10:00
  Bam Azizi: Uh like how did you know that Bitcoin is the next big thing?
• 10:04
  Bam Azizi: How did you get too early uh on the Bitcoin bandwagon?
• 10:09
  Charles Cascarilla: I wish I could tell you that it was because I'm like some Prussian like technologist.
• 10:13
  Charles Cascarilla: I'm not a technologist and I'm not Prussian.
• 10:15
  Charles Cascarilla: You're not Satoshi, right?
• 10:17
  Charles Cascarilla: I would be such an amazing uh catfishing if I was Satoshi.
• 10:25
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh since I've only learned how to code by using Claude.
• 10:28
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, you know, so I'm missing some of the requisite skill sets to be Satoshi.
• 10:34
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh even to be one part of Satoshi, even.
• 10:37
  Charles Cascarilla: So um uh, you know, look, when we started, I started my asset manager with a partner in 2004, late 2004, early 2005.
• 10:45
  Charles Cascarilla: And it was really about how the financial industry and financial technology was going to uh evolve.
• 10:52
  Charles Cascarilla: And some of that was uh credit uh underwritten through the internet.
• 10:58
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh that was different ways of provisioning loans, securitizations really came into full force, um, and definitely how trading technologies were going to change with tech uh with you know the use of more electronic measures.
• 11:14
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, you know, when I started in 99 and 2000, I almost went and worked at Spear Leads and Kellogg, which was a market maker on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
• 11:22
  Charles Cascarilla: Now, I basically said, look, I don't think this thing's gonna last.
• 11:24
  Charles Cascarilla: This doesn't seem like the greatest place to go build your career.
• 11:27
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, but it was still trading on the floor, you know what I mean?
• 11:30
  Charles Cascarilla: And it was still trading on the floor for quite some time.
• 11:32
  Charles Cascarilla: And then, you know, decimalization happened, and then you know, electronic trading happened, and that was a huge shift.
• 11:37
  Charles Cascarilla: And so we really invested in those themes.
• 11:40
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, then we modeled every mortgage in the country down to the zip code.
• 11:43
  Charles Cascarilla: We were short subprime going into the financial crisis.
• 11:45
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, we could see what was happening, and we realized it was the funding mechanism that was the best place to express the imbalances that were building up through the whole economy.
• 11:53
  Charles Cascarilla: It just happened to be that subprime was like the most imbalanced place, but you know, we had a debt bubble.
• 11:59
  Charles Cascarilla: And it wasn't just a subprime debt bubble.
• 12:01
  Charles Cascarilla: And today we still have that exact same debt bubble.
• 12:04
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh it's just unlike in the early 2000s, we print money anytime it looks like it's gonna pop.
• 12:09
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, there we didn't print any money, and we kind of let a bunch of financial institutions fail.
• 12:15
  Charles Cascarilla: And it created like some, you know, obviously accelerator effects.
• 12:18
  Charles Cascarilla: But we and that's by the way, what led Satoshi to create the white paper, which was let's print our way out of the mess.
• 12:26
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, we're still living with the legacy of that printing today and all the I think uh chaos it's creating in financial markets and throughout society.
• 12:34
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and uh when he wrote that white paper, you know, we just came across it by happenstance.
• 12:40
  Charles Cascarilla: It was very early days, like April 2010.
• 12:43
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh, you know, I didn't know that it was going to be successful, but um, I could see Bitcoin as a store of value.
• 12:49
  Charles Cascarilla: I could also see Bitcoin, and there was no other thing then, uh, aside from Bitcoin.
• 12:54
  Charles Cascarilla: So you're like, well, I could see it as a store of value, I can also see this as a technology that you could use to issue assets on.
• 13:01
  Charles Cascarilla: And we definitely tried to issue assets on the Bitcoin blockchain all the way back in like Paxos' early days, and it was still IPA, you know, colored coins and uh whole other types of technologies came out.
• 13:12
  Charles Cascarilla: We were trying to use the opportunity part of the Bitcoin blockchain to put code into, but it just wasn't built for that.
• 13:20
  Charles Cascarilla: And so uh it meant that you know we were partly right, partly wrong about what was so interesting about Bitcoin, but lots of other blockchains obviously soon came to exist and they started to solve the idea of um having a blockchain for information, not just a blockchain for Bitcoin.
• 13:39
  Charles Cascarilla: That's great.
• 13:40
  Bam Azizi: So Bitcoin is like that it has this curse and blessing, right?
• 13:44
  Bam Azizi: You cannot really change it much, which is good in some ways, but also bad in other ways, that you cannot create new type of assets, you cannot run a stablecoin on it, you cannot bring real world assets that it doesn't have barely has smart contract capabilities, which is great because you don't want like your digital gold to be manipulated too much.
• 14:03
  Bam Azizi: Uh at the same time, there are many other use cases that can be built outside of Bitcoin.
• 14:08
  Bam Azizi: So you went from Bitcoin like April 2010, and uh then you started Paxos at what time?
• 14:17
  Charles Cascarilla: Um so we started Paxos in 2012, basically we incubated within our asset manager um so that we could then uh go and apply for licenses.
• 14:28
  Charles Cascarilla: So we didn't really um you know have like a true launch until basically we got approved in May of 2015, but we were incubating the business.
• 14:38
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and the most important license we were working on was a New York Trust.
• 14:42
  Charles Cascarilla: And we started working on this New York Trust in 2012.
• 14:45
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, this predates the Bit license, it didn't exist.
• 14:48
  Charles Cascarilla: We were the first trust company ultimately got approved in May of 2015 in the whole country to operate in Bitcoin and blockchain.
• 14:55
  Charles Cascarilla: We really pioneered this way of getting regulatory approval uh to hold assets and issue assets.
• 15:02
  Bam Azizi: Wow.
• 15:02
  Bam Azizi: And then you went from like zero to two billion market cap um or even more after that.
• 15:10
  Bam Azizi: Like tell tell us the challenges that you had in that journey that and like when you started.
• 15:16
  Charles Cascarilla: Well, you know, there's two challenges.
• 15:18
  Charles Cascarilla: I think when you start um in an industry that is so early and so nascent, as well as a business that's so early.
• 15:24
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, it's uh it's not so much that you're just disrupting within an industry, you're kind of trying to really be part of the disruption that's gonna happen in the broader financial system.
• 15:35
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and that's not gonna be linear.
• 15:38
  Charles Cascarilla: And crypto is anything but linear, uh, you know, because it's so prone to these booms and busts driven by price cycles.
• 15:46
  Charles Cascarilla: And for us, the whole idea of starting Paxos, and by the way, we invested in a whole variety of um early uh crypto firms um all the way back in you know 2012 and earlier.
• 15:58
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, so we were doing that as part of our asset management business.
• 16:02
  Charles Cascarilla: The idea for Paxos was that someone should build neutral, regulated institutional infrastructure so that you could replatform the financial system in a way that was trustworthy and reliable and accessible for all the different institutions.
• 16:20
  Charles Cascarilla: And that just wasn't gonna kind of happen otherwise.
• 16:23
  Charles Cascarilla: Now, there's a lot of things that were right about that, and there's a lot of things that were wrong about that.
• 16:27
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, but when you live through an industry with these ups and downs and the crypto prices, we're subject to them too, even as trying to be neutral institutional infrastructure, whether we're trying to issue assets or provide uh wallet infrastructure, uh, you're tied to that cycle.
• 16:42
  Charles Cascarilla: And there's been a lot of examples where you kind of thought you're gonna get institutional adoption happen, and it kind of ended, whether it was FTX blowing up or some uh kind of big bull market came to an end.
• 16:55
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh so many of those happened.
• 16:57
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh kind of I've essentially lived through every single bull market and bear market in Bitcoin, uh, believe it or not.
• 17:03
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, you know, and so uh since three cents, basically.
• 17:07
  Charles Cascarilla: So I've seen them all, and uh every single one feels terrible.
• 17:11
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh I can tell you that.
• 17:12
  Charles Cascarilla: And the bull markets feel great.
• 17:14
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and but it makes it difficult because you're building a business not on price cycles, you have to build it on fundamental operating cycles.
• 17:23
  Bam Azizi: Right.
• 17:23
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 17:24
  Bam Azizi: And then what was the from your perspective, what was the peak of Paxus?
• 17:29
  Bam Azizi: Is it right now you're at the peak, or did you did you see like better days at Paxas?
• 17:36
  Charles Cascarilla: Well, I mean, it depends on what peak means.
• 17:38
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, if you said uh institutional adoption of infrastructure, today is absolutely the peak.
• 17:45
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh I mean, this is like the moment we've been waiting for.
• 17:48
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, like uh my way of really synthesizing the environment we're in is it might be a crypto winter, but it's institutional summer.
• 17:57
  Charles Cascarilla: That's right.
• 17:58
  Charles Cascarilla: And that is like something we've waited for the entire life of Paxos.
• 18:04
  Charles Cascarilla: Now, on the other hand, if you said like what was our revenue peak?
• 18:07
  Charles Cascarilla: Well, we had a product called uh BUSD, it was the white label stable coin, and we issued it for Binance.
• 18:13
  Charles Cascarilla: It was a great partnership, and it was up to $25 billion almost a market cap.
• 18:17
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, so, anyways, that was like uh definitely at the revenue peak.
• 18:20
  Charles Cascarilla: And so we've had to rebuild the revenues because that product uh was shut down by the regulators.
• 18:25
  Bam Azizi: So what what year was BUSD?
• 18:29
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh what year was it launched or what year was it shut down?
• 18:31
  Charles Cascarilla: No, what year was launch?
• 18:33
  Charles Cascarilla: I think it was launched in 2020, uh basically, yeah.
• 18:38
  Bam Azizi: Where was Circle and Tether USDC, USDT back then?
• 18:43
  Charles Cascarilla: Um well, they were both larger, but not that much larger.
• 18:46
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, I had to like go back and look at what the well, I'm sorry, I'm thinking of 2023.
• 18:51
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh in 2020, I mean, look, they were um yeah, they were definitely like uh bigger uh market caps, but um the whole space was quite small.
• 19:00
  Charles Cascarilla: I mean, you know, you're only in like hundreds of millions or low-digit billions of uh market cap.
• 19:06
  Charles Cascarilla: It really started to explode in uh uh the pandemic, uh, because that's when stable coins really took off.
• 19:13
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh interest rates went to towards zero, uh, crypto prices started going up, you had an enormous bull run, and you had to get into stable coins in order to get into Bitcoin and other crypto.
• 19:24
  Charles Cascarilla: And it's just created a complete adoption curve that no one was really expecting.
• 19:27
  Charles Cascarilla: I mean, there's all kinds of origin stories around Tether and Circle.
• 19:30
  Charles Cascarilla: And by the way, we launched the first regulated stable coin in 20 uh 2018, 2019, uh, and it was our own called Pax Dollar.
• 19:40
  Charles Cascarilla: And we quickly realized we don't have the distribution, we're not a distribution um organized institution.
• 19:46
  Charles Cascarilla: We need to go work with institutions that have distribution.
• 19:48
  Charles Cascarilla: And in some ways, that was what Circle did.
• 19:50
  Charles Cascarilla: They worked with Coinbase.
• 19:51
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 19:52
  Bam Azizi: And so I remember like early 2020s, like after the the bull market in crash 2022 and FTX happened, everything was going down, but when you were looking at chores, stablecoin was going up and up and up.
• 20:06
  Bam Azizi: Even like for stablecoin, you were like two to three years earlier than anybody else.
• 20:10
  Bam Azizi: Uh so why you thought the stablecoin is the next big thing and you invested in BUST and launched it with Binance.
• 20:17
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, really, it's the legacy of how we thought the uh financial system would get replatformed.
• 20:24
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, so when we got approved for our trust in May of 2015, we started working on tokenization of RWAs.
• 20:32
  Charles Cascarilla: That's what we were focused on first and foremost.
• 20:36
  Charles Cascarilla: And that um involved us looking at well, could you do syndicated loans?
• 20:41
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh there were some other companies in this cohort, R3, digital assets, um, they're they're still around today, great companies.
• 20:46
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and uh we were looking at um should you do fixed income?
• 20:52
  Charles Cascarilla: Could you do equities?
• 20:53
  Charles Cascarilla: Is it private shares?
• 20:55
  Charles Cascarilla: And you spent a lot of time working on this.
• 20:57
  Charles Cascarilla: And we actually were going to create our own blockchain called bank chain.
• 21:01
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, believe it or not.
• 21:03
  Charles Cascarilla: And the whole concept of bank chain was that you needed to have a private permission ledger.
• 21:08
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, you know, we got that wrong.
• 21:10
  Charles Cascarilla: Like I definitely think it's all about uh public ledgers, um, ultimately, public and open, not private and closed.
• 21:16
  Charles Cascarilla: And um uh so we were working on bank chain for quite some time.
• 21:19
  Charles Cascarilla: We ultimately decided not to do that, but uh we were continuing to work through um securities tokenization for a long period of time.
• 21:27
  Charles Cascarilla: And we applied for started working on applying for a clearing agency with the SEC back in 2016, 2017.
• 21:35
  Charles Cascarilla: And we ultimately got a no action letter in 2019, and we were really moving real live tokenized US equities around.
• 21:42
  Charles Cascarilla: And when we realized is if you want to tokenize, whether it's syndicated loans or private shares or equities, you can't have it syndicated and or a security put onto a blockchain without having the cash leg on a blockchain.
• 21:57
  Charles Cascarilla: So Now that look, I didn't realize that we're going to have these unbelievable crypto bull markets that was going to pull cash on chain.
• 22:05
  Charles Cascarilla: My view was you need to get cash on chain so that you could then have the cash leg to put securities and RWAs on chain.
• 22:12
  Charles Cascarilla: So we were not approaching it from a crypto lens of you need to have it for the crypto markets.
• 22:18
  Charles Cascarilla: Um in hindsight, that's almost feels obvious.
• 22:21
  Charles Cascarilla: Basically, you have on-chain assets, you gotta you need an on-chain um uh cash leg.
• 22:27
  Charles Cascarilla: We were approaching it the opposite, which is let's get an on-chain cash leg so that you can then get off-chain assets on-chain.
• 22:35
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, weird.
• 22:35
  Charles Cascarilla: You know what I mean?
• 22:36
  Charles Cascarilla: Like we didn't get everything right, and like certainly understanding that evolution of the product market uh was surprising for us.
• 22:44
  Charles Cascarilla: Now, I I don't know if we're the village idiots, I don't think anybody else expected that either.
• 22:48
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, but you know, if you got it right, it would have certainly helped uh our uh maturation as a company.
• 22:56
  Bam Azizi: Makes makes sense.
• 22:57
  Bam Azizi: And you went from the UST to a consortium called USDG.
• 23:03
  Bam Azizi: Um so that was your double down doubling down bet on a stable coin.
• 23:10
  Charles Cascarilla: Well, um we actually launched the PayPal dollar first, and this is something we're really proud of.
• 23:16
  Charles Cascarilla: Yes, yes.
• 23:17
  Charles Cascarilla: So we pioneered this concept of white label stable coins.
• 23:21
  Charles Cascarilla: We had our own, we said we don't have distribution.
• 23:23
  Charles Cascarilla: So the first white label we created was for Holby.
• 23:25
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh most people don't remember this.
• 23:27
  Charles Cascarilla: There's a Holby dollar.
• 23:28
  Charles Cascarilla: Then we created the Binance dollar, BUSD.
• 23:31
  Charles Cascarilla: That one obviously had tremendous success.
• 23:33
  Charles Cascarilla: Um and um then uh we launched um, but in any case, um when we launched uh BUSD, uh you know, you know, we were really proud of it.
• 23:47
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh obviously that ended.
• 23:48
  Charles Cascarilla: PYUSD, also very proud of it.
• 23:51
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and then we launched something called the global dollar, which is what you're referencing.
• 23:56
  Charles Cascarilla: And this is a consortium dollar.
• 23:57
  Charles Cascarilla: So we issue the PayPal dollar today, we issue USDG today.
• 24:00
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, there's 171 firms that are part of the global dollar network we issue on behalf of the global dollar network, just like we issue PayPal dollar.
• 24:10
  Bam Azizi: Is it Kraken Robinhood?
• 24:12
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh Kraken, Robinhood, um, OKX, um there's a whole host of other uh firms uh that uh in the US and Europe uh that I've either joined or joining, even MasterCard is uh joined it.
• 24:24
  Charles Cascarilla: This is an open consortium.
• 24:26
  Charles Cascarilla: Anyone can join.
• 24:27
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh we issue on behalf of it, just like we would any other white label.
• 24:32
  Charles Cascarilla: The really the the driving focus there was many of the firms that wanted to were considering launching their own brands.
• 24:40
  Charles Cascarilla: Yes.
• 24:41
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh said, you know what, maybe this makes more sense to join together.
• 24:44
  Charles Cascarilla: And I really do think this is the right way to approach the stablecoin market today.
• 24:49
  Charles Cascarilla: We've seen uh kind of a um you know uh uh I think flattery is being copied.
• 24:57
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh OUSD is copied the uh the method that we came about with, which is to create an open consortium for uh both the rewards and and maybe in some sense the governance.
• 25:07
  Charles Cascarilla: And um I think that's the way you're gonna get to a place of uh real societal scale, just like how Visa and MasterCard did it.
• 25:16
  Charles Cascarilla: And so I think that that's what the Global Dollar Network has pioneered.
• 25:18
  Charles Cascarilla: Um it's the fastest growing uh dollar at this point.
• 25:21
  Charles Cascarilla: I think it's up 5x year over year and doubled so far this year.
• 25:25
  Charles Cascarilla: And um Robinhood launched with it on its chain and it's like had some great success there.
• 25:30
  Charles Cascarilla: So um I think a consortium model makes a ton of sense.
• 25:33
  Charles Cascarilla: I also think a single issuer model can make sense too.
• 25:36
  Charles Cascarilla: It just um you have to really dedicate an enormous amount of time and effort to kind of push through the fact that um a lot of firms don't want to use someone else's uh dollar because that's giving them a benefit versus you.
• 25:51
  Charles Cascarilla: Um and by the way, that's part of the problem with USDC today and and uh USDC as well.
• 25:57
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah.
• 25:58
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 25:58
  Bam Azizi: So before getting more into the stablecoin, I have one interesting question for you.
• 26:04
  Bam Azizi: So you powered uh most interesting products uh related to stablecoin on the planet, like BUSD, PYUSD, USDG.
• 26:13
  Bam Azizi: But you were like you decided to be the plumbing the infrastructure behind the scene.
• 26:17
  Bam Azizi: So probably if you go ask people in the street what is Paxos, they don't know, but they might use they might have used BUST or PYUST or USDG.
• 26:26
  Bam Azizi: Does that bother you?
• 26:28
  Bam Azizi: No, not at all.
• 26:29
  Bam Azizi: I mean it was not a bug, it was a feature, maybe.
• 26:32
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, look, I know it's just right.
• 26:34
  Charles Cascarilla: We don't eat psychological food, we eat success.
• 26:37
  Charles Cascarilla: And like you don't you you can succeed in many different ways.
• 26:40
  Charles Cascarilla: And um having looked at the financial system for a long period of time, some of the most successful companies are the ones you'd never heard of, or some of the most important ones are the ones you never heard of because they're in the background.
• 26:51
  Charles Cascarilla: There's going to be a lot of competition for customers, uh, the end customers.
• 26:55
  Charles Cascarilla: And if you are the actually the infrastructure layer underneath, you can create scale, but you do it in a wholesale basis.
• 27:04
  Charles Cascarilla: And I really spent my career in kind of the institutional markets, anyways.
• 27:08
  Charles Cascarilla: So going out and doing retail marketing wasn't something that was native to me or to what we'd maybe even be good at.
• 27:15
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, I do think that um, you know, when you look at the crypto markets, obviously it's been enormously about retail.
• 27:23
  Charles Cascarilla: And ironically, because the government was cracking down so hard, all the other institutions that have the end customer, you know, basically every American's got a financial relationship somewhere, um, but they couldn't go to traditional institutions to get access to these assets.
• 27:41
  Charles Cascarilla: So the government act created an unbelievable hook for all of these disruptors to come in and be able to gain market share because they were able to launch crypto trading um for a whole variety of reasons, but most traditional financial institutions weren't.
• 27:56
  Charles Cascarilla: Again, it was like you're the more heavily regulated you are, the less chance you're gonna have to be able to use this.
• 28:01
  Charles Cascarilla: And so it created an opening for all these new firms to come in.
• 28:04
  Charles Cascarilla: And uh I certainly wouldn't have expected that that's how this would have all played out, either in 2015 or 2016.
• 28:10
  Charles Cascarilla: Another thing that we just didn't expect, and you know, I think you know, you're maybe finally seeing that shift to the institutional summer that I was describing, but I would have thought it was gonna happen half a decade ago.
• 28:22
  Charles Cascarilla: And it almost did.
• 28:24
  Charles Cascarilla: It came close.
• 28:25
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, it was just FTX really, you know, really shifted everything.
• 28:30
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 28:31
  Bam Azizi: Um so what do you think?
• 28:34
  Bam Azizi: So there's two two things happened on the stablecoin.
• 28:38
  Bam Azizi: One is Circle went public, and and Circle and Coinbase, they have a very close connection.
• 28:45
  Bam Azizi: At some point, I think Circle was like almost as valuable as Coinbase.
• 28:49
  Bam Azizi: Well what's your take on that?
• 28:51
  Bam Azizi: And then we get to I want to chat a little bit about Tether and USDT too.
• 28:56
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, they got to like a hair's breadth of each other.
• 28:58
  Charles Cascarilla: It's interesting.
• 28:59
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, I don't know, it's always hard to tell uh when right when you go public, the market um the the the float, uh for people who don't know, like you know, when you go public, most of the stock is still locked up.
• 29:10
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh so it doesn't take very much buying or selling uh to have very large fluctuations in the stock price.
• 29:17
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, this is like fairly common, like what right after you go public.
• 29:22
  Charles Cascarilla: And so if you're a hot uh IPO, your stock's gonna go up a lot and then it might go down a lot.
• 29:27
  Charles Cascarilla: And if it's not a hot IPO, uh sometimes you could go down and you could maybe go down a lot, and then you go up.
• 29:34
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, and you know, everything in between.
• 29:36
  Charles Cascarilla: And so there was a moment in time where obviously Circle got very close to Coinbase's market cap, and that's somewhat counterintuitive because basically half or more of the revenues go to Coinbase, um, right?
• 29:47
  Charles Cascarilla: And Coinbase has got a lot of other businesses that are also generating revenue.
• 29:51
  Charles Cascarilla: So you're like, how could they be worth the same?
• 29:53
  Charles Cascarilla: And um, I don't know.
• 29:54
  Charles Cascarilla: I think there's probably some dislocations in the market and maybe some sense that you could get a pure play exposure to stable coins and maybe to a new payment network that they might be able to monetize away from whatever Coinbase agreement they have.
• 30:08
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, I'm kind of answering this more as like the stock analyst than I am like uh the industry competitor here.
• 30:14
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, you know, it's always hard to disaggregate those two things, but um, that's how I would try to answer like how it that evolved.
• 30:22
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, but it was pretty puzzling to a lot of people, but you know, that happens all the time.
• 30:25
  Bam Azizi: I mean, it's just like kind of par for the course when you especially when you go public, but anytime people vote of confidence off Street on stablecoin because like Circle was the only public stablecoin company, that's why it went from like 5 billion to 80 billion post-IPO.
• 30:45
  Bam Azizi: Um, was it?
• 30:46
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, that was definitely an important component of it, I think.
• 30:48
  Charles Cascarilla: And I think you know, um, you know, there was a a lot of interest in stable coins at the moment that they went.
• 30:55
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and you know, so they're the only expression of it, and you're getting everybody like, and there's not that much float.
• 31:02
  Charles Cascarilla: You put those three things together, and you can really create a quite a perfect storm.
• 31:07
  Bam Azizi: Tether, the owner of UCT, became one of the largest buyers of US Treasury.
• 31:12
  Bam Azizi: And as a result of that, they started building kind of this frenemy relationship, even though it was offshore kind of unknown entity, but it was an important success factor for US government uh during hard time.
• 31:27
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, I mean, look, I think um Tether is a big holder of U US Treasury for sure.
• 31:33
  Charles Cascarilla: Um I don't think of that as per se um uh unique demand.
• 31:42
  Charles Cascarilla: Um I think it's new demand for sure, because these stable coins exist and people are now able to hold dollars that they couldn't before.
• 31:49
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, but it's not unique demand, meaning that I think that if um Tether wasn't serving those customers, other people would be able to serve those customers.
• 31:58
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, there's probably some advantage to having an offshore issuer, uh, just like there is in uh having a euro dollar market, uh, which are like wholesale markets in Europe uh that trade in London or the Asian dollar market that really trades in Singapore.
• 32:13
  Charles Cascarilla: And so you have like these offshore markets where dollars move around um outside the United States.
• 32:18
  Charles Cascarilla: And so, you know, in some sense, like what they're doing could be looked at analogously to that.
• 32:24
  Charles Cascarilla: But I do think that there's a lot of competition in the stablecoin space.
• 32:28
  Charles Cascarilla: I mean, forget about like us issuing for the global dollar network, which has lots of international institutions or PayPal or Circle or whatever it is, there's you know, another half dozen other ones that would happily take their place.
• 32:41
  Charles Cascarilla: And um, you know, I think that that would happen really quickly, um, you know, if people had the ability to do it.
• 32:50
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, so I don't so I don't think it's unique demand.
• 32:53
  Charles Cascarilla: I do think it's not new though.
• 32:55
  Charles Cascarilla: Makes sense.
• 32:57
  Bam Azizi: And um recently uh stablecoin the volume on the stablecoin surpassed 35 trillion, which is more than MasterCard and Visa combined, which is around like 25 trillion.
• 33:12
  Bam Azizi: But a lot of that is trading um in asset circulations versus like payment.
• 33:18
  Bam Azizi: Uh maybe a fraction of it is payment, but it's growing very, very fast.
• 33:22
  Bam Azizi: Um so what's your take on stablecoin use case on the payment side uh versus just trading?
• 33:31
  Bam Azizi: Because a lot of traction was on the trading side.
• 33:34
  Bam Azizi: Um do you think payment would be a major contributor to the next wave of growth of stablecoin?
• 33:41
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 33:42
  Charles Cascarilla: What was that number again?
• 33:43
  Bam Azizi: You you were just saying it was 35 trillion.
• 33:45
  Bam Azizi: Um it's more than it's more than Visa and MasterCard combined, but visa, mastercard, everything.
• 33:50
  Bam Azizi: In the last year, basically, right?
• 33:52
  Bam Azizi: Last year, yeah.
• 33:53
  Charles Cascarilla: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:53
  Charles Cascarilla: So it's interesting.
• 33:54
  Charles Cascarilla: Now that's retail.
• 33:56
  Charles Cascarilla: And I think when you look at crypto movements, some of it's retail, but some of it's like kind of trading institutional wholesale, right?
• 34:02
  Charles Cascarilla: Most institutions, actually.
• 34:04
  Charles Cascarilla: So FedWire, by the way, this is not include like uh kind of everything.
• 34:08
  Charles Cascarilla: Fed wire is 1.6 quadrillion a year.
• 34:11
  Charles Cascarilla: Yes.
• 34:12
  Charles Cascarilla: All right.
• 34:13
  Charles Cascarilla: So, you know, in some sense, it's like, you know, that's really big that uh we're at 35 uh trillion dollars.
• 34:20
  Charles Cascarilla: But if you looked at it as a percentage of wholesale markets, you know, it's it's still like a couple percent, you know what I mean?
• 34:27
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh which by the way makes sense because here's another way of thinking about it.
• 34:31
  Charles Cascarilla: There's two to three trillion dollars of crypto market cap, depending on like what day we're talking about.
• 34:37
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and uh there's nine hundred trillion dollars of other assets, right?
• 34:42
  Charles Cascarilla: And so uh that's basically you know three percent.
• 34:46
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh so there's three percent of the world's crypto assets, and in order to have movement of crypto assets, you need dollars and they're on chain, so it's like tied to that, and then you basically have uh the rest of the other assets.
• 34:58
  Charles Cascarilla: So you could look at it as asset markets, you could also look at it as payments.
• 35:01
  Charles Cascarilla: Payments should have a lot more velocity than assets because um, you know, they're being used like every single day.
• 35:07
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, so I mean, I think you know, we can maybe get a little carried away.
• 35:12
  Charles Cascarilla: Like if you have stable coins and you went down to your grocery store and tried to use them, good luck.
• 35:16
  Charles Cascarilla: You're not, right?
• 35:18
  Charles Cascarilla: You're basically you might use a stable coin that's loaded onto your credit card, but nobody's accepting a stable coin for most goods and services throughout most of the US economy or even most of the developed world.
• 35:29
  Bam Azizi: Um do you think are you seeing that changes?
• 35:33
  Bam Azizi: Like people would go and buy coffee with the stable coin.
• 35:36
  Charles Cascarilla: Well, I don't know if I quite go that far yet.
• 35:39
  Charles Cascarilla: I would I mean, you know, or you know, it's probably more agentic commerce that I think will change it faster than like, you know, getting someone to buy a coffee with it because uh that works well.
• 35:48
  Charles Cascarilla: I mean, it works totally fine.
• 35:49
  Charles Cascarilla: You don't disrupt a scaled solution, you disrupt the part of uh the market the scaled solution could never serve.
• 35:58
  Charles Cascarilla: That's where disruption starts, and then you build up enough scale to then be able to solve bigger and bigger problems.
• 36:05
  Charles Cascarilla: If you try to go right at like supermarket spending on credit cards, you are gonna fail and it's gonna be ugly.
• 36:11
  Charles Cascarilla: Um if you basically say, I'm gonna give a wallet to people outside the US who have never had access to dollars, you're gonna succeed, and that's what's happening.
• 36:22
  Charles Cascarilla: And oh yeah, now you can do cross-border payments faster and maybe in a way that you could never do before, that's gonna uh succeed.
• 36:29
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, so you have to be strategic and smart about how to insert yourself in the problem cycle uh for whatever you're trying to fix.
• 36:38
  Charles Cascarilla: I mean, you know, you can just bang your head against the wall, and it doesn't matter if you're right, the market has to be at a point where it can accept it and where it's worth the switching costs.
• 36:48
  Charles Cascarilla: Switching costs are zero when you don't have something.
• 36:51
  Charles Cascarilla: You know what I mean?
• 36:51
  Charles Cascarilla: But you need it.
• 36:53
  Bam Azizi: Makes total sense.
• 36:54
  Bam Azizi: Um yeah, I think um uh from my perspective, there are so much uh broken things or outside of US that stablecoin can fix that we don't need to replace things that are actually working great in favor of consumers in the US yet.
• 37:10
  Bam Azizi: But at some point, maybe a stablecoin sandwich becomes a thing that you're like using the same card, same payment method, but the actual settlement happens on blockchain just because it's faster, cheaper, better.
• 37:21
  Charles Cascarilla: Um well, I definitely think uh you know, you see examples of a stable coin sandwich and for like kind of the um you know, kind of the basic listener.
• 37:30
  Charles Cascarilla: It's like if you have Brazilian real, you're in Brazil and you want to send something to China today, it takes five days uh to send money.
• 37:37
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh instead you could take the real, turn it into a dollar stable coin, send it to like Hong Kong or something or uh somewhere in China and turn it into a Remnimbi uh or the Hong Kong dollar in basically you know no time.
• 37:51
  Charles Cascarilla: And that's a huge improvement uh because otherwise you have to turn, by the way, there's still no way to go from Brazilian Real to Rem Nimbi.
• 37:58
  Charles Cascarilla: You'd have to go through dollars anyways, but instead you have to go through dollars through the banking system, and that takes five days, and you lose all that time and the interest on the money.
• 38:07
  Charles Cascarilla: And so, I mean, I think stablecoin sandwiches are real because I think 80% of all FX trading has a dollar on one side, like dollars to euros or dollars to yen or whatever it is.
• 38:21
  Charles Cascarilla: And so everything is trades against dollars, and putting stable coins in there is definitely to make things more efficient.
• 38:26
  Charles Cascarilla: So I there's lots of like great uses for stable coins, and I think we're gonna look back and say, well, it's 3% today or 1% or I don't know, whatever way numerator divided by whatever denominator.
• 38:38
  Charles Cascarilla: You're gonna look back and say, it's growing 10x from what we thought.
• 38:43
  Charles Cascarilla: And um while you're not using stable coins at down at your local coffee shop, I can tell you like the usage of stable coins for payments is growing dramatically.
• 38:53
  Charles Cascarilla: It's just still a relatively small number compared to the other uses of stable coins.
• 38:58
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 38:59
  Bam Azizi: My last question for you is agentic commerce.
• 39:02
  Bam Azizi: Uh you alluded to that one as well.
• 39:04
  Bam Azizi: So do you think at some point agentic commerce would be bigger than the entire e-commerce that we have, human-to-human interaction or transactions?
• 39:13
  Charles Cascarilla: I don't know if I'm going to uh be able to leave us with any deep thoughts here, but I will offer them.
• 39:19
  Charles Cascarilla: I absolutely think it's gonna be bigger.
• 39:20
  Charles Cascarilla: I think that's a no-brainer that you're gonna end up with a lot of agents, and they're already see-I forget what it is on web traffic now, uh, but majority of web traffic is basically uh AI driven.
• 39:32
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, I don't know why that wouldn't be the same in payments and agenda commerce.
• 39:37
  Charles Cascarilla: It will be.
• 39:38
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, maybe it's a little, it's happened with a little bit of a lag.
• 39:41
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, but you can already do it now.
• 39:42
  Charles Cascarilla: You could have an agent, you go to OpenClaw, you can download a MetaMask wallet, you can put $30 in there and say, go generate a return for me in DeFi of 10%.
• 39:51
  Charles Cascarilla: Come up with a strategy.
• 39:53
  Charles Cascarilla: And like it may or may not execute that strategy well, but it'll come up with a strategy for you.
• 39:57
  Charles Cascarilla: And so you can just, you know, it's not hard to imagine.
• 39:59
  Charles Cascarilla: Well, come up uh with a stock portfolio.
• 40:02
  Charles Cascarilla: I'm, you know, uh 70 years old, I'm gonna retire in three years, and you know, my life expectancy is 15 years.
• 40:10
  Charles Cascarilla: Come up with a portfolio of stuff I should earn and uh hold and do it for me.
• 40:15
  Charles Cascarilla: And it executes, and you know, you keep asking it to rebalance it and it handles it, and you'll end up getting way more velocity across all of assets and and um and payments.
• 40:26
  Charles Cascarilla: And I mean, I almost can't imagine that's not what the world's gonna look like.
• 40:29
  Charles Cascarilla: Now, I don't know exactly when, uh, but probably sooner than we think.
• 40:34
  Charles Cascarilla: On the other hand, Agentex Payments is like really at zero right now.
• 40:38
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, and everyone wants to talk about it because, of course, cool, that's the future.
• 40:43
  Charles Cascarilla: But you know what I mean?
• 40:44
  Charles Cascarilla: Like I remember talking about the future of uh stable coins in you know, 2019 or 2018 or the future of the blockchain.
• 40:51
  Charles Cascarilla: I mean, sometimes these things take longer than you think, and then sometimes they take shorter.
• 40:54
  Charles Cascarilla: Um, you know, it's it can be very unusual.
• 40:57
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 40:58
  Bam Azizi: Um, Chad, I really appreciate your open and honest conversation about uh even like your competition.
• 41:06
  Bam Azizi: Uh so I'm sure like founders would would love to uh hear your opinion about um deep opinion on the industry.
• 41:14
  Bam Azizi: But if you want to leave us with one advice for younger version of yourself, um when you started your first company, what would that be for our audience?
• 41:24
  Charles Cascarilla: Um you know, I think there's a couple things about starting your own business.
• 41:28
  Charles Cascarilla: One is you really need to be obsessed with the problem that you're trying to fix.
• 41:33
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, you know, just don't go like start a company because it's fashionable.
• 41:36
  Charles Cascarilla: You gotta be obsessed about it.
• 41:38
  Charles Cascarilla: And if you're obsessed about it, then you're gonna work at it really hard and you're gonna have to keep working.
• 41:43
  Charles Cascarilla: And so like you have to also want to win uh because it's the world's competitive.
• 41:49
  Charles Cascarilla: Like you're gonna have to be out there, you gotta work hard, and you gotta be obsessed.
• 41:52
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, you have to really care about your customers because you're solving somebody else's problem.
• 41:59
  Charles Cascarilla: And so you got to understand how do they think, how do they feel, how do you have empathy for them.
• 42:04
  Charles Cascarilla: And that's the uh framework and the groundwork for starting a business.
• 42:08
  Charles Cascarilla: There's so many things else that go into around hiring people and managing people and raising capital and how do you scale?
• 42:14
  Charles Cascarilla: But the bottom line is if you're gonna go start a business, what are you obsessed about?
• 42:18
  Charles Cascarilla: How much you want to work on it, like pour your heart into this thing, uh, like there's nothing else there.
• 42:23
  Charles Cascarilla: And really, how do you make sure that you care about the customer?
• 42:26
  Charles Cascarilla: And you but that that's a good starting point.
• 42:29
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, that's that's uh that's true.
• 42:31
  Charles Cascarilla: And also, there is no better time than today to build, like because it's so much easier to build 20 years ago, even than 10 or 15 years ago because you know the thing is you you have AI, so of course that's helpful, but it's more than just AI, you have all the software and the internet, and so that means you can get to a different type of scale.
• 42:52
  Charles Cascarilla: And it used to be the hardest problem was how do you manage people in order to scale?
• 42:58
  Charles Cascarilla: Now you can get to much bigger scale before you have to worry about that problem.
• 43:01
  Charles Cascarilla: And managing people is the hardest thing in the world, and it's actually a completely different skill set from like how do you obsess, how do you build something, how do you like really care about like customer problems?
• 43:10
  Charles Cascarilla: It's not the same thing as managing people, and so that's why like professional manager mode is a lot different from like professional, professional, like kind of builder mode or like founder mode.
• 43:19
  Charles Cascarilla: And like they usually the tween don't cross, and you know, you kind of have to move on from the founder at some point because you can't keep running the company like you're running out of ramen or something.
• 43:28
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, you have to like run it, and but now you can defer that day a lot longer than you ever could before, and that is a pretty cool thing.
• 43:36
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 43:37
  Bam Azizi: Um, my last question, I promise.
• 43:40
  Bam Azizi: What's your favorite restaurant and favorite food?
• 43:43
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh-huh.
• 43:44
  Charles Cascarilla: My favorite food, it's oh, it's Lebanese food, of course.
• 43:48
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh hopefully my uh Italian grandmother's not rolling over in a grave, though her lasagna is like still the best uh lasagna I've ever had.
• 43:56
  Charles Cascarilla: Um and uh I don't know what my what my favorite restaurant is.
• 44:00
  Charles Cascarilla: It's hard to say.
• 44:00
  Charles Cascarilla: I think it's probably a Grammarcy Tavern in New York.
• 44:02
  Charles Cascarilla: You know, it's good, but it's not too good.
• 44:04
  Charles Cascarilla: I feel like you get to like some of these places and they're too fancy and like you don't even know you're eating food anymore.
• 44:10
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, you leave hungry half the time.
• 44:13
  Charles Cascarilla: And you know, at the same time, you kind of want fresh ingredients that are really good and like uh from the farm.
• 44:17
  Charles Cascarilla: Uh, you know, but I take grandma's cooking all day long over any restaurant.
• 44:22
  Bam Azizi: That's great.
• 44:23
  Bam Azizi: Chad, I really, really appreciate your time.
• 44:25
  Bam Azizi: Uh it was a fascinating conversation.
• 44:27
  Bam Azizi: Thank you, my friend.
• 44:28
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, great to be with you.
• 44:29
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 44:29
  Bam Azizi: Where where people can find you?
• 44:31
  Bam Azizi: Uh on LinkedIn, on Twitter.
• 44:34
  Charles Cascarilla: You can ping me on LinkedIn, and uh that's uh probably the easiest way for the general public to get me.
• 44:40
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, sounds good.
• 44:41
  Bam Azizi: And you can find me at uh Bam as EasyMesh or you can go to meshpay.com.
• 44:45
  Bam Azizi: Thank you everyone for listening.
• 44:47
  Bam Azizi: Uh, this was another episode.
• 44:48
  Bam Azizi: Please uh don't forget to subscribe and like and share.
• 44:52
  Bam Azizi: Thank you.