Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Peter Smith - Blockchain.com Co-Founder & CEO | What 13 Years in Crypto Taught Me About People

Transcript

Peter Smith - Blockchain.com Co-Founder & CEO | What 13 Years in Crypto Taught Me About People · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  Probably the half the time I've worked in crypto, I thought the most probable outcome was to
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  you have to be open to living the life less lived when you're young,
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  that doesn't get easier as you get older, there's a lot more trade-offs and sacrifices.
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  Before crypto became headlines, it was infrastructure. Peter Smith helped build that infrastructure.
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  As CEO and co-founder of blockchain.com, Peter was at the forefront of making crypto currency
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  accessible to millions around the world. Everybody's more worried about losing 100 grand than they are
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  about making 100 grand. But the same is also true of life experience. The faster you get the
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  experience of take ownership, the longer you have to deploy those skills over the course of
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  your career. In crypto, once every four years, you're the really a hero. Then the next year,
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  you're a moron. That gives you a huge sense of awareness about how many external is crafting
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  your reality. Where others saw chaos, he saw opportunity. This conversation isn't just about
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  digital assets, it's about conviction, long-term thinking and leading through uncertainty.
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  You come into crypto with a mindset that you want to get rich fast. You will be destroyed.
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  The most predictable path to success is sustained, focused effort over a long period of time.
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  Success and happiness don't come from mastering the universe. They come from mastering yourself.
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  Life is going to be far stranger, far more beautiful, far more fun than you expect.
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  So you have been at the helm of blockchain.com since 2011. So I would consider you a true crypto
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  pioneer. You've navigated all these different market cycles. What was the moment when you
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  realized that blockchain would fundamentally change global finance? It would be amazing if I had
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  realized that in like 2012 or 2013. But for me, working in crypto started out a lot,
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  a lot more casually. In the sense that I didn't know that it was going to become something that
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  would change global finance. I really thought it would probably die. Really, probably for the half
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  the time I've worked in crypto, I thought that the most probable outcome was death. It's so
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  funny. I think that not just for the company I worked on, but for the entire industry.
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  It is such an improbable, implausible idea. We're going to invent a whole new financial system.
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  We're going to do it on chain. We're going to try to do it across the whole world at once.
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  What do you think the probabilities of success are? First of all, you sound crazy.
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  You sound crazy. It has to be like sub 1%. For many years when I worked in crypto,
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  I thought it was most likely going nowhere. Then, of course, the question was,
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  why did you work on something you thought was going nowhere? It really broke down into three things
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  for me. There were three sectors you could work in that would really change the world. You could
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  work in machine learning, which now everyone calls III. You could work in autonomous vehicles
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  or autonomous manufacturing, or you could work in digital finance, Bitcoin, and crypto.
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  I thought that the machine learning game would go totally to large companies that could pay the
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  compute and have the data sets, particularly the data sets. I thought that to work in autonomous
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  stuff, you needed to be more of an electoral engineer or a LiDAR engineer or something like that.
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  So I was like, well, I'm only left with the third one, which looks completely unlikely and
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  implausible. Sweet. But you still jumped into it. What was your first exposure to crypto?
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  My first exposure to crypto was on an email listserv. It started very small time for me.
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  The thing is also true. It's something that I tell people today when they're thinking about
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  exploring an idea or getting involved in industry really early, is that there's no better time to
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  do it than when you're really young. I was really young when I started working in Bitcoin,
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  and really young when I started working on a startup. I think the best way that you can approach
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  your career is spend one to three years working for someone or some org that really knows what they're
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  doing, and I skipped this part. But a couple of years working for an org that really knows what
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  they're doing, and then immediately eject and go work on all of the completely implausible,
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  crazy shit possible because it's never going to get easier in your life to do that.
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  Take the risk when you're young. You have to be open to exploring, open to living the life
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  less lived when you're young because it doesn't get easier as you get older. And of course,
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  it's not impossible when you get older, but it's just a lot harder. There's a lot more trade-offs
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  in sacrifices. When you're young, and you're like, okay, I'm going to go work at this startup,
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  and the beginning days of blockchain.com were like six of us living in a two bedroom apartment.
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  I'm going to sleep on the floor, work all day, and drink really cheap beers on the weekend.
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  That's not a big sacrifice when you're young because if you go work at a bank, which I could have
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  done, I guess, it's like, okay, I would make more money, have a slightly nicer apartment,
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  work really hard, and like, drink beers on the weekend. It's just not that much of a different life,
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  and so however weird or crazy or implausible the idea that you're working on is,
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  there's nothing that you'll learn more from and be happier that you did it than taking that leap
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  when you're really young. It's interesting because when you are young, I try and understand
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  why people don't take more risk when they're young, but also at the same time some take an
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  exceptional amount of risk. Because when you're very young, it's either you don't have fear,
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  you have like too much fear. It's like you're like on both ends of this, you either default to like
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  one of the two sides of this ridiculous spectrum. You have so much fear that you're going to screw
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  it up because you have no experience that you kind of just follow, probably comes from your parents
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  and what you learned and probably your childhood and what you were exposed to. Like for me,
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  I had a ton of fear about screwing up and it took a lot of like deep programming to jump into
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  entrepreneurship because my parents worked for government and universities very safe. But on the
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  other end, if you don't have that fear implanted in you and you can just reconcile what you just
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  said is true, which I think it is, then you have no reason to be fearful because you've never failed
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  before. Well, I think it's a lot about loss of version. So there's a lot of like psychological
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  research that says, you know, everybody's more worried about losing 100 grand than they are about
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  making 100 grand. Like it's a lot easier to deal with the risk of not making 100 grand.
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  That is to deal with the risk of possibly losing 100 grand that you already have. And when you're
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  really young, you know, you have this perspective where it's really easy to lose respect.
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  And that's what drives your decision. Yeah, the humans are, you know, we're tribe animals,
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  right? And so when you think about like your parents right ever, it's like, you know, the reality
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  is when you're a 24 year old kid, even if you did get a job at Goldman or whatever other high
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  prestige thing is going on right now. And now I guess it's startups, which is like a little concerning.
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  But you know, it gets this high prestige job at Goldman. So you have this respect, right?
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  And in your mind, this is like an incredible achievement. And in some ways it is. I don't want to,
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  you know, denigrate that. But all you really did was like become one of the like 10,000 new people
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  that Goldman hired this year. Like it's not that big of a deal. Like it's not like either
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  rest of your life. They'll be like, ah, there goes Joe. Like he was hired at Goldman straight out
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  of Stanford. It's a great analyst. But when you are Joe and you have that offer to go to Goldman
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  or you have that offer to go like sleep on the floor and eat ramen and like hack with three other
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  weird nerds, it feels like a huge loss. So the reputation. So the reputation, right? And
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  and maybe even the money, right? Because the money side of those two things is very different,
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  even though when I said like, look, you're going to be doing the same shit anyway, just different
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  price points, it feels like it's going to be a big loss because you've never had any money.
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  Right? And one of the most interesting things that people sort of lose sight of is that yes,
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  like because of compounding interest, money that you make and save earlier in your life is much
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  more important than later. But the same is also true of life experience. Right? So the faster you
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  get the experience of being someone who has to take ownership, hiring, managing, leading,
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  the longer you have to deploy those skills over the course of your career. And when you're a young
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  person, there's no place that you're going to get that experience faster than being a founder of
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  a startup or of a new company or working in a really small one. Right? And so I would argue that
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  even more than whatever money you might save from the age of 22 to 28 is the compounding effect of
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  that experience that you get by doing risky off-the-wall things in that sort of 22 to 28-year-old
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  gap. And then of course, like in your early 30s, like you should be focused on achieving financial
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  freedom and doing that by saving money and letting it compound and all that shit that you read about
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  from Warren Buffett. But when you're really young, I think you want to be racking up this life
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  experience and these skills in a way that lets you deploy them across the rest of your life in a
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  really compounded fashion. I like that idea a lot. How did you get over this loss of version?
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  I didn't have a lot of it because I grew up without a whole lot of expectations. My grandmother
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  has no idea what Goldman Sachs is. She has no idea what investment banking is. She tells people,
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  and this means a lot to me, that she's really proud of me because I'm her most successful angel
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  investment ever. She doesn't even say angel investment. She just says investment because she
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  loves me some money to go to school. And she still tells people very proudly that she has a
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  grandson who's a millionaire. And so I say all that because one, it's cute and it means a lot to me.
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  But I say it also because I was very blessed that I didn't have the sort of expectations of
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  if I didn't go to work at Goldman or a hedge fund, I was a failure. And so I think that gave me
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  a lot of freedom to explore and to do weird things. But even my dad was concerned that I would never
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  have a real job until two or three years ago. That's funny. So it does come back to all these ideas
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  that are sort of implanted in our head over kids. And you have to be careful. For example,
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  what are you knowing that lack of expectations allowed you to build something great?
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  How does that translate into how you parent your own kids or how will it translate into
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  parenting your own kids in the future when they're older? Have you thought it? Because every
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  parent wants to have expectations. Yeah. You want them to do something great. But it's ironic that
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  the lack of that actually allowed you to pursue something that was riskier that worked out.
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  I think I'm going to do my best not to have expectations about my kids.
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  And to try to help them think about what will make them happy. What are they going to find
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  meaningful in life? What truly brings them joy? One of the things I've learned from my own
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  personal life is that achieving these sort of milestones that people put in their heads
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  brings very, very little happiness. I've never had a moment where I achieved a milestone
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  that classically people look at someone like me and are like, wow, that must have been an amazing
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  moment. I can almost guarantee you that all of those moments that someone who doesn't know me
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  would write down were not amazing moments for me personally. And everybody's wired differently,
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  for me a lot of my focus after achieving a lot of those milestones and not finding happiness in
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  them has been figuring out how to get back to enjoying the process rather than being focused on
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  finding enjoyment in the outcome. And this is like some really great wisdom that a mentor
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  friend of mine, Justin Khan has really helped me inspire me to focus on is you know,
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  you have so little control of the outcomes in life. There's so many things that are just
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  frankly so far beyond you that if you're not enjoying the process of what you're doing every day,
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  you're really setting yourself up for for failure. And this isn't me saying like you shouldn't
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  have big goals, you shouldn't tempt big things, but it's about like does attempting big things,
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  does the process of attempting big things bring you joy? Or are you just doing this thing because
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  you think that the outcome is going to bring you joy. And I can tell you from my life and from
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  watching many other entrepreneurs and rich people and whatever, the achievement of those outcomes
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  is very rarely bringing people a whole lot of joy. But I do know a lot of people that have done
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  really big things, really great things. And they found joy in the process and in the journey of
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  those things, whether they had huge monetary outcomes or not. And they found real fulfillment
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  in joy in life. And so I spend a lot of my time thinking about how do I enjoy the process of
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  this rather than how do I think that I'll find enjoyment in the outcome? That's very wise. I
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  think that a lot of people optimize for outcomes until they realize that well, they train themselves
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  almost hate every day on the journey to the outcome. It's almost like the days are just something
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  to be lived and to be survived on the pursuit of some big outcome. But then when it comes it's not
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  as meaningful as you think it is. And I think that there's in the startup world in particular,
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  which is the world I'm from, there's a particular like almost fetishment around struggle and pain.
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  I agree. It's like if you know if the founder is not killing themselves and on the edge of
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  mental failure, will you ever build anything? The best founders I know, the ones that make it a
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  really long time and I'm trying to become one of those founders and although arguably I've made it
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  a while, but if I want to make it another 10, 15 years, I know that like I have to build with joy
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  and build out of a sense of purpose rather than sort of like build out of a sense of obligation
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  or build out of a sense of trying to achieve a certain outcome. And I would, but I remind people
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  is that the best athletes in the world, they weren't suffering, right? Like when you think about
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  the highest performance people in the world, they weren't doing it, you know, they weren't suffering
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  through every moment of it. Sure, there's parts of training that suck. There's parts of my job
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  that are very difficult. There are bad days at the office and I don't want to glass over that.
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  But for the most part, I really find joy in what I do. And like, you know, we were talking before
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  the mics went on about vacations and stuff. Like most of the time at the end of vacation,
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  I'm bored and I want to go back to work. Did it take you a while to learn how to enjoy every single day,
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  enjoy the process? And I asked this because also you are probably in one of the, in terms of
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  startup land, you're probably in one of the more volatile types of markets you can build in.
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  There is nothing more volatile than crypto. Yeah, I know. So it's like take all the stress and then
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  tack on these macro factors that are going to stress you everything to be going great. And then
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  all of a sudden, the mark, I mean, markets in fact, everything. But I don't think with the same
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  volatility as crypto. If I'm selling, if I'm selling socks on Shopify, I don't think the macro
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  economic conditions in 24 hours are going to impact my sales maybe long term, but not to the same
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  degree. So you do with a whole other level of macro for sure. So first of all, I would say that
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  I haven't learned to be in that mindset every day. Like learning to be in that mindset
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  is something that is a big focus of mine last few years. And it's something that I think about
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  probably daily. And I don't achieve it every day, which I think is also part of the journey.
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  I'll say that working in crypto, I think is really an interesting opportunity for your evolution
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  and growth as a human being. Because for most entrepreneurs, I think the journey is like
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  toiling and obscurity. People start to hear about your comp in a success scenario. People
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  start to see, you know, hear about your company. And then it's like really takes off. And then
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  you're sort of up into the right. And at some point, there's some character correction where people
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  find out that you're a real human being. And then it's just sort of like stabilizes, right? In
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  crypto, we have an interesting thing where about once every four years, you're the really a hero.
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  You're like, good genius. You're right. You know, and people are like, oh my god, like,
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  and then, you know, then the next year, you're a moron because the market blew off, right?
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  That there's a euphoric year. And then there's a terrible year that follows. And this is all rough
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  outline. But then you're like, a moron. I feel like, why are you still doing this? And then there's
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  like a year where no one cares about you again. And then there's a year where people are like, oh,
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  this might be coming back. Like maybe he's not a moron. And maybe, you know, maybe I should check
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  in. And you can also look, you can almost look at my email traffic for this. You know, like,
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  there's people that I hear from two out of four years, 100 percent. Yeah. Particularly in the
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  beloved banking sector. But that gives you a huge sense of awareness about how much your
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  external reality or the external is crafting your reality of how you feel about it.
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  Well, like, at the end of the day, like, I know that this is going to go up and down. I know it's
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  super volatile. But how do I handle that year where everyone's like, wow, why are you still doing this?
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  Do you know how you handle it? Like, are you, are you self-aware enough to know like what allows
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  you to navigate these cycles? I mean, I guess the obvious question is, why do you want to keep doing
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  this? So many years, like, that's like such an obvious question because you're a smart entrepreneur.
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  There's a lot of other things that you could build where you would not have to deal with this.
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  Well, one, like I said, I think it's a great teacher. So it teaches you a lot of
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  learning. Well, until I feel like I've learned all the lessons. I haven't gotten there yet.
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  I'm still learning. I mean, I do, I think I do think that like, I would love to navigate one,
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  you know, staying in that mindset of full cycle, staying in that mindset, you know, navigating with
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  grades. That hasn't happened yet. So, you know, I still got, still got more to do. I think it's
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  also a great teacher in the rest of your life. Like, you know who your friends are when you're a
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  crypto CEO. Like, you know, because the market washes people out every couple of years. You know
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  who the people on your team are that you can really count. Like, there is a powerful cleansing
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  effect to the market volatility that is both very difficult to endure and, you know, a huge
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  blessing if you can view it that way. If I look at people and again, I am not as into crypto and
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  blockchain as you obviously, but a lot of people have crashed out, burned out, are no longer building
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  the companies that they started, especially when you got into the game. He's sort of touched on
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  this, but sort of last sort of last question around this, what do you think allowed you to persevere
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  through all that up and down and market cycles and stress and anxiety? I think about that a lot.
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  And I am as far as I'm aware of the second longest serving crypto CEO. So, I'm not wrong. So,
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  there's not many people. Brian Armstrong has a little bit of time on me. But, you know, like,
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  of the original cohort were it. And I want to say, and Brian is an incredible entrepreneur and
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  arguably a better entrepreneur than I am for sure a better entrepreneur than I am for what it's worth.
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  But I have retained all my hair. So, in almost every category, he is number one. But in that one
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  vein category, I've still got my hair. You have amazing hair. So, no trips to Turkey yet. No trips to
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  Turkey ever made. But what I'll say about learning to go off through that up and down is that
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  we've survived because we stayed very focused on our customers. We're not like a grand vision.
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  We're sort of closer to an Amazon where we try to understand what people are going to need,
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  what companies are going to need, what institutions are going to need, what crypto projects are going
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  to need to be part of the crypto financial system. And we build those products and we refine those
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  products. And we are very knowledgeable about the fact that we serve our customers. And if anything,
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  you know, most of my time these days is talking to customers. I probably talk to at least one or two
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  institutional customers today. And I talk to retail customers every single day as well. And I think
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  that grounding has really helped us. I think we've also been very fortunate at times. For any startup
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  to survive a long time, you need fortune. Fortune favors the bold, but you do need the fortune.
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  You do need some luck. And then I think I've been surrounded by a great team. I'm very blessed that
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  our team has been very stable. We have a lot of people that have incredibly long tenure.
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  And we've always been able to attract great people. The third factor that I think has mattered a
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  lot has been that we have never been based in California. I think California is very difficult for
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  people. And by California, I mean San Francisco to retain focus long-term. It's kind of like the
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  the memes you see online about everybody pivoting from like crypto to AI, AI to something you know.
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  Robotic stuff. Robotic stuff. I think defense is the thing now, right?
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  I don't know. I can't keep track. I can't keep track either. But you know, we were
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  in London saying like the team and like the people that you work with, they're trying to jump to
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  the next latest, the greatest thing. No, I think that entrepreneurs and I think it's very difficult
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  temptation for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley too. And in the US in particular,
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  whereas being in London, you know, we weren't as sort of enmeshed in that whole like echo chamber.
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  And a big example I'll give you is that a lot of the early crypto companies were wiped out by the
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  whole distributed ledgers, not tokens movement. And this is long enough to go now. It's super easy
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  to talk about like that happened after the first big crypto up and then you know, bear market.
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  Everybody was like Bitcoin retarded. You know, we are going to instead focus on distributed
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  ledgers for banks in our name was blocking. So the amount of investor pressure that we had
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  to like go to POCs with credit suites or with UBS or with you know, whoever and become like a
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  enterprise reseller of distributed ledger technology was immense, immense.
• 23:38
  I'm sure it's like it's interesting. You were sort of insulated in London.
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  But also I'm assuming that the investors that you brought in, they were also not.
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  They were not just bombarded with all these new like technological movements, however you
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  want to call them. So they probably weren't pushing you to move quicker than you wanted to.
• 23:59
  Well, we really don't have any London investors.
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  Well, where are your investors from? Because investors also put the point is investors put so much
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  pressure on the CEO that if you are an SF and you get the wrong investor, they're going to push
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  you to make decisions that you don't want to make, including exit, sell, work on the next thing.
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  I want my money out whatever it is. So where were the investors from? Because maybe that didn't
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  happen to you at all. But I'm just curious about how you're able to sort of incubate your idea
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  and not sort of speed run entrepreneurship because of investor pressure.
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  Until we started raising our growth rounds in mid 2021, the vast majority of our cap table was
• 24:40
  based in Silicon Valley. Did you have some of this pressure then? Oh, for sure.
• 24:46
  We definitely did. We had a lot of the pressure and we did one very tiny proof of concepts
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  with an investment bank, opened an office in New York to support it. It was very clear that it was
• 25:00
  a very silly idea to me. And it came back to me. I remember going for a very long walk in
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  Washington Square Park and just asking myself, I mean, Peter, this was the days of R3.
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  If you remember that, the R3 consortia, Blake Masters, Dang digital asset, holding company,
• 25:19
  whatever it was called. I remember asking myself, is this the way you want to spend your time?
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  Is this how you want to spend your life? If you're successful and you get bonds
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  clearing on a blockchain for foreign investment banks and you make $100 million, selling the company
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  to IBM, will you be happy? And the answer is that was no. I got into this for human economic
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  freedom to create a free financial market that anybody anywhere in the world could interact
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  with each other that you could interact peer to peer that we could make money as easy as WhatsApp.
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  I didn't get into crypto to help banks clear bonds between each other. Now, I think eventually
• 26:09
  banks will clear bonds between each other on the blockchain, but they won't do it on a private
• 26:13
  ledger. They'll do it on a public ledger. And so I was completely uninterested in the private ledger,
• 26:20
  you know, blockchains for banks vertical. And yeah, we shut it down and continued course.
• 26:26
  Now, what's interesting about that to wind the whole story out is that every company that pivoted
• 26:31
  into that space that I'm aware of is no longer here today. Why do you think that is? Focus.
• 26:39
  So this is bringing you back to the point of balancing investor expectations with entrepreneurial
• 26:45
  vision. So I think that investor expectations, they kill the entrepreneurial vision because they
• 26:50
  tell them to focus on all these other things because now they have stake in the company. So for
• 26:54
  entrepreneurs that do raise what's the advice on how to manage investors when they're pushing
• 27:01
  you in one direction, you have their money, you get stressed out because you have their money
• 27:06
  because you're a human. And you know, you're going in the wrong direction, but they're not hearing
• 27:11
  it. It's a hard thing to generalize about because it's always so specific. But the things that I
• 27:16
  generally tell people are number one, you know, raising money is really not to be celebrated
• 27:26
  because you know, you basically just signed an IOU. And of course, their institutions are
• 27:32
  sophisticated. They know what they're doing out of yada. But expectation wise, you just signed
• 27:36
  an IOU right for something in the future that, you know, frankly, like when you're 26, when I raised
• 27:41
  my first venture around, I was like 26, yeah, 26, 27, 26, 27-ish, like I didn't even totally
• 27:49
  understand. But nobody does. But nobody does. Nobody does. Right. So first thing it tell people
• 27:53
  is like, whatever age you are, you're signing an IOU on a future expectation. Second thing is,
• 27:59
  you know, really like why do you raise money? Well, because it's, you know, your best source of
• 28:02
  financing. The best source of financing in the world is making money. My biggest regret at the
• 28:10
  company is that I didn't push harder on monetization earlier. You know, I think that it's all well
• 28:18
  and fine to grow your product. And we've always had great growth and been blessed with that.
• 28:22
  Until you're growing your revenue, you don't really know how useful your product is.
• 28:30
  Right. And even revenue can be confusing. Because for example, if I sell you something that cost
• 28:37
  me a dollar and I sell it to you for 90 cents, my revenue is going to grow very fast.
• 28:42
  Example of this right now is chat GBT. You know, they're losing money on every query.
• 28:48
  Right. So like, they don't really know if their product is that valuable. And I think it is
• 28:54
  really valuable. I know, but they're playing this game where they're onboarding as many users as
• 28:58
  possible at a loss. And that's how they keep increasing their valuation when they keep raising.
• 29:02
  And I understand that strategy really well. But the danger in that strategy is that you never
• 29:06
  truly know how valuable your product is or if you're building the right thing. Because you don't
• 29:11
  know if it's generating enough economic value that customers are willing to pay you more than
• 29:15
  a cost you to build it. Right. Which that's a definition of building great product is like,
• 29:20
  will you pay me a dollar 50 for something that costs me a dollar or a dollar 40, whatever
• 29:26
  you're margin is, right? So I would monetize a lot earlier. I tell every entrepreneur like,
• 29:30
  it's never too early to monetize. And the second thing is I do think it really helps to have
• 29:36
  investors where you are. So physically, physically. So when we first started raising,
• 29:42
  you know, there weren't as many great VC firms outside of Silicon Valley. Today, that's not really
• 29:48
  the case. There's great VC firms in London. You know, there's great VC firms in York, you know,
• 29:54
  some of the best in New York now, actually, Silicon Valley. I think it's a lot easier to manage
• 30:00
  your cap table when you can meet with these people in person and when you don't have to travel to
• 30:05
  each other. So I would usually if you have all the choices in the world, which you never do,
• 30:10
  I would give preference to people that you can you can spend time with on a regular basis.
• 30:16
  The third thing I'd say about managing investors is that it really helps to raise capital.
• 30:25
  And if I raised, you know, another early stage round, I would try to raise capital from the founders
• 30:32
  of firms or from people who work at VC firms that used to be founders. I don't think it matters
• 30:40
  if someone's never been the founder of a tech company. But like if you were the one that started
• 30:45
  an investment firm, your lived experience and your mindset is different from someone who,
• 30:53
  you know, was an amazing product manager at Metta and then joined, you know, A16 or whatever.
• 31:00
  A16 is a great firm. But like, I know what you're saying. Different mindset, right? If you were
• 31:05
  an entrepreneur and you joined founders fund, you are a different mindset than if you are, you know,
• 31:13
  an ex, whatever analyst, a joint of firm. They get the journey that you're on because they've
• 31:17
  been on to themselves. It's not just that they also have the experience of betting on something
• 31:22
  when no one else believed in it and succeeding. Right? Like even at the end of the day, if you
• 31:29
  raised capital from, you know, it's a pick someone that founded a firm. If you raised capital from,
• 31:38
  you know, Mark and Jason. That's because they marketed Ben Horowitz pick one.
• 31:42
  Right. Like they know what it meant to bet on something big and succeed multiple times.
• 31:48
  Yeah. When they were entrepreneurs before. Yeah. They were entrepreneurs before. They built A16.
• 31:53
  Like that is a different story and it's a different kind of person than someone who's never
• 32:00
  had that experience. I've never heard it makes so much sense. And I know a lot of people that
• 32:06
  have raised money, but I've never heard somebody bring that idea. I think it's a really smart idea.
• 32:11
  Yeah. Look, there's also the reality of life that like you won't always have a choice about who
• 32:14
  you raised or whatever. But I do think, well, so the main thought that I keep, I always hear and
• 32:19
  I agree with is that you find somebody who at least understands what you're building. Like yeah,
• 32:23
  like at the bare minimum smart money, not done money. I actually, I don't agree with that one.
• 32:29
  No, you would take you would take somebody made a ton of money in real estate. You would want them
• 32:34
  on your cap table for a blockchain company. That one's a hard one. It kind of depends on the stage
• 32:39
  of the company at the later stage, maybe. But I don't think that like look every investor at a
• 32:46
  seed or a series A stage or B because the look further you go, the bigger you get, the more like
• 32:52
  the less relevant this advice becomes is going to say that they understand your idea. And because
• 32:58
  they're successful, probably type a person, they're going to be pretty convincing that they
• 33:03
  understand your idea and that they get your vision, right? It's more to me about the style of
• 33:09
  person you are of the like lived experiences that you've had in the sense that when everything looks
• 33:15
  silly about what you're doing and you need to like the only way is to double down to go to
• 33:19
  the other side. You need someone in your corner that has been exactly there. That was like, oh, you
• 33:27
  know what? This is hard and this is expected. And so that's what I mean by the like taking money from
• 33:36
  people who have been founders and CEOs themselves is that no one else really understands
• 33:44
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• 36:21
  You built blockchain over a trillion dollars in transactions. And these are old, I'm sure old
• 36:26
  numbers. So probably much more than that, regardless, like a phenomenal company. I want to understand
• 36:33
  what your vision was when you started it. But also we can tie it back into the raising money
• 36:38
  component. What was the vision when you started it? And then what was the sort of the idea or the
• 36:44
  thought that made you think, okay, the vision is great to this point, but I want to go poor fuel on
• 36:48
  the fire, go raise money and really blow this thing up with some growth capital. So a little bit,
• 36:55
  I don't want to spend too much time on the whole origin story because I know people know it to a
• 37:00
  degree, but a little bit on the origin story about what you want it to build. Kind of comes back
• 37:04
  to what I said at the beginning, it's like, what do people need to actually use Bitcoin?
• 37:10
  Like what products and services do they need? And of course later that became also, you know,
• 37:15
  like, you know, a thousand other cryptocurrencies. And then later it became, you know, other crypto
• 37:19
  companies, one of our biggest segments is other crypto tokens, projects, protocols, companies,
• 37:27
  probably it's our probably fastest growing signals. That was your idea going into it. No,
• 37:30
  no, that was much later. And then, and so it's like, that's what's always guided us is like,
• 37:37
  what do people need to be in the crypto space more than anything else? In terms of why we raise
• 37:42
  capital, you know, in the very beginning of crypto, there wasn't a lot of revenue. And so you could
• 37:48
  either be a very tiny crypto company like, you know, three of you, or you raise capital to be
• 37:53
  able to like, you know, invest in CapEx and what have you. And so it's a pretty simple choice.
• 37:58
  I think also I was probably less, I was probably less thoughtful about why we would raise capital.
• 38:08
  And it's like, that was just the thing you did, right? Like you, you go out and you raise and
• 38:14
  you raise the most capital you can at the highest value, but it's impossible because that was the
• 38:17
  game. And I don't mean game in a bad way. I just mean like, it's the game. This is the what we do,
• 38:23
  right? I think it was in later years that I became more thoughtful about why I was doing it.
• 38:29
  And I think that's kind of usually a natural evolution.
• 38:34
  You mentioned before the crypto was initially a mission, not a business.
• 38:40
  So how do you maintain that sort of ethos as you build a massive company that is a business?
• 38:46
  Yeah, and I'm reminded every day it's a business. You know, now I think of it as a business that
• 38:51
  supports a mission, right? Which is the best missions they need resources, right? And at the end of
• 38:57
  the day, like if I was trying to run a 501C charity to like bring human economic empowerment to the
• 39:02
  world, I don't think we would have gotten anywhere near where we've gotten. Like one of the coolest
• 39:06
  things we've done is put a US dollar trekking account and tens of millions of people's pockets
• 39:11
  all over the world no matter where they live. Like we've helped preside over the biggest expansion
• 39:17
  to like tier one financial services for everybody in the world in human history. Like that is
• 39:26
  something that I get huge joy out of and look other companies have been a huge part of that.
• 39:30
  We didn't do it alone, but we were a big part of an industry that said, okay, look people in Nigeria
• 39:39
  and we haven't gotten them quite to the same access as Americans, but we've gotten them
• 39:44
  huge leap forward in terms of access to high quality financial services, right?
• 39:50
  Hey, people in Buenos Aires, Argentina, you can choose now, right? You don't have to just be in
• 39:57
  that system. That's massive for people, for human economic freedom, for economic growth.
• 40:04
  And so today, I think of the company as a business that supports a mission.
• 40:11
  Well, you're true. You're actually banking people that were on bank. That was kind of the original
• 40:16
  goal to a degree, right? Now, the interesting, and I'm curious about how you view this, because the
• 40:22
  interesting idea around sort of like self-custody and banking people is that they no longer rely on
• 40:29
  financial institutions. And then you're in an industry where there's lots of fraud and then
• 40:35
  security breaches and people not understanding what it actually means to control their own money.
• 40:42
  So this macro idea, do you think crypto, do you think crypto and blockchain in general,
• 40:53
  we can talk about crypto is more applicable to like the average consumer? Do you think we've
• 40:59
  gone a good job of achieving the mission that crypto was set up to achieve or is it causing more
• 41:04
  stress and anxiety and loss than good? The answer to that question really also depends on
• 41:12
  the customer themselves. And what I mean by that is that, you know, if you come into crypto,
• 41:19
  you come in with a mindset that you want to get rich fast, you will be destroyed.
• 41:26
  I don't think that that's about crypto. I think that's about almost anything in my
• 41:30
  life where people try to get rich quick. Like at the end of the day, for every story out there
• 41:36
  about someone making a bunch of money in any industry really quickly, there are a hundred other
• 41:41
  people that try to do that and got completely wrecked. In life, as with anything, the most
• 41:48
  predictable path to success is like sustained, focused effort to do high quality things over a
• 41:57
  long period of time. And so, and this is the thing I come back to all the time. I have
• 42:03
  everybody's always asked me, what coin should I buy? What's going to be really well? Of course,
• 42:06
  look. You know, like, how do I trade crypto? And I almost universally disappoint people because
• 42:12
  they look, I have have, you know, I've seen, I've seen people trade crypto. I've seen the best
• 42:17
  funds trade crypto. I've seen myself trade crypto. And let me tell you the number one alpha strategy
• 42:22
  I can give you. It's to take a look at your checking account, decide a amount of money that's
• 42:29
  not stressful. Take that money and then divide it into six or 12 equal amounts and go out and buy
• 42:38
  the top two cryptos, top three cryptos, maybe just Bitcoin, you know, once a month for six or 12
• 42:45
  months, and then forget about the fact that it's there, maybe for three, four, five, six, seven,
• 42:51
  eight, nine years, if you log in and the balance is like frightening to you because of how big it is,
• 42:58
  just start selling until you're no longer stressed about it. If you find yourself waking up in the
• 43:02
  morning wondering what your crypto portfolio is worth, there's a cell button for a reason.
• 43:08
  Now, people are usually disappointed with that answer.
• 43:12
  Because it is not, here's how you can make, you know, 25 X on your money in the next 60 days.
• 43:18
  But for people that are willing to be a long-term investor in the crypto ecosystem,
• 43:24
  and even better yet a long-term participant in the crypto ecosystem, which is sort of the next level
• 43:28
  we could talk about, I've never seen anyone that didn't make amounts of money that meaningfully
• 43:37
  improve their life for the better. I've never seen anyone participate in the crypto ecosystem
• 43:43
  that didn't meaningfully change themselves in their life for the better if they were willing to
• 43:48
  follow the slow and steady plan. I would love to understand how people become a participant,
• 43:52
  but I was actually speaking about people just take control of their own finances to a degree.
• 43:57
  That's also something that I think people do not fully understand. So when they put money,
• 44:02
  and I think that actually the need to make money is probably what prompts people,
• 44:09
  pushes people to make these stupid decisions, and they don't realize that
• 44:13
  putting money into a meme coin, if it goes to zero, it's gone. There's no way to get it back.
• 44:19
  And also, if you're not a smart custodian of your money, you don't understand the technology,
• 44:25
  and there's a hack, there's no insurance on that money. So I think that all these ideas of
• 44:30
  not gambling, not looking for quick returns, also understanding that when you have money in a wallet
• 44:38
  or whatever device uses a store of crypto, that's yours. Not only should you invest for the long
• 44:45
  term, you should use platforms that have been here for the long term. Yes. Obviously, full disclosure,
• 44:50
  I'm self-interested because I have one of the longest running ones, but we've never broken a trade
• 44:55
  or not honored a withdrawal. Coinbase has never broken a trade or not honored a withdrawal.
• 45:00
  Use one of us. Yeah. Or not. But if you don't use one of us,
• 45:07
  and it's some new intern and they blow up on you, you're like, well, that's when people get stressed
• 45:11
  out because the largest hack, I think of all time just happened, what a week ago.
• 45:16
  It did. So when somebody who is not technically savvy, and they're kind of just like
• 45:25
  an average consumer and they say $1.5 billion or a hack, well, that shakes faith in the whole
• 45:32
  ecosystem. And we have an amazing part of our product that I really believe in, which is
• 45:38
  we have one side of our product, which is like a trading and brokerage account where we have
• 45:42
  custody of your crypto. And we treat that as like a really as a synchrist hanging duty.
• 45:48
  It makes it easy to trade, easy to onboard, so on and so forth. You can link your bank account,
• 45:52
  your cards, like all that kind of normal stuff you'd expire and like you expect in like a
• 45:57
  fintech trading experience. And then in the same wallet, we also have an on-chain defi wallet
• 46:04
  where you control the key. We have no access to your funds. But of course backing up that key
• 46:09
  as you've already alluded to can be tricky for people. So we build a cloud backup, which makes
• 46:14
  backing up your key incredibly easy. Like if you will take the time to back up your key in the
• 46:19
  cloud backup, you will not lose access to that crypto. With one button, you can move all the
• 46:26
  crypto from our custody to your custody, right? You no longer have to trust us. And there's been
• 46:33
  moments in the crypto market that looked extremely high risk. And you know, like this one big hack,
• 46:40
  but you know, there was the whole post FTX, BlockFi, Gemini, like all companies were falling left
• 46:46
  and right. A huge companies, enormous companies. We sent our customers an email and we said,
• 46:50
  you know, this is how long we've been in the space. This is our board, this is our governance.
• 46:57
  We want to earn your trust every day. But if for any reason, you do not want to trust us,
• 47:05
  click this button. And a lot of people clicked the button. Really? Yeah. But what was interesting was
• 47:13
  there's one of the biggest days for withdrawals of all time, the next 72 hours.
• 47:19
  The week after that was one of the biggest weeks ever at the time for inflowback.
• 47:24
  Because if you can honor all the withdrawals and people trust you. And not only was that, people
• 47:27
  I think told their friends. Yeah. So we had synopsis, inflow. So we believe in user choice. And we believe
• 47:34
  that, you know, we should make it easy for people to be their own bake, which also make it easy for
• 47:38
  people to onboard, to buy, to trade, to have their classic FinTech experience. But at the end of
• 47:43
  the day, this comes back to what I've been saying a lot. We believe in serving our customers.
• 47:46
  When somebody who is again, not like fully entrenched in crypto, they see FTX was fraught. But
• 47:54
  bite bit was not a IT security breach. So what do you say to that person who sees these stories
• 48:01
  and it's like, well, if it's a security breach, a $1.5 billion security breach, how can I trust
• 48:06
  anyone when somebody can lose $1.5 billion? What I would say is you don't need to. It's the beautiful
• 48:13
  thing about crypto. You know, like go use an exchange, use us, whatever, buy the crypto and then move
• 48:20
  it into your own custody. What do you mean by being? You can't even, you can't trust banks either. Like,
• 48:25
  you know, but with that, what was it to start up? Mercury. Was it Mercury? No, it's not for you.
• 48:30
  It wasn't Mercury. It was Silicon Valley bank. Yeah. But I mean, even more than that signature,
• 48:35
  SUV, first republic, you know, Silvergate. Those are all top 20 US banks going bankrupt in the
• 48:42
  space of two weeks. Right. And now the federal government stepped in and made them whole. But I was
• 48:48
  a customer of two of those banks. There was a very long weekend. Why didn't know if they're going
• 48:53
  to do it? Right. And I rested pretty easy that weekend actually because, you know, I had some
• 48:59
  other monies than my own custody. What do you mean? What do you mean by being a, like a market
• 49:06
  participant or crypto participant? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to participate in crypto. And that's
• 49:11
  what's kind of one of the beautiful things about it is you don't need anybody's permission.
• 49:16
  So you could do the very obvious thing. You could go to our website blockchain.com slash careers.
• 49:20
  We have many jobs open. You could apply for a job there. You could become a participant building
• 49:25
  in the crypto ecosystem. And I think that's a great way to be part of crypto. You can contribute
• 49:31
  to open source projects and not just developers. There's also people that contribute community.
• 49:36
  So typing how to documentation. You can join the discussion. You can be someone who talks about
• 49:43
  crypto. You can become a crypto evangelist. You can go to community meetups. It's a system in which
• 49:49
  you don't need anybody's permission to get involved. And you can even go out and start your own
• 49:53
  company and put yourself through many years of massive up and down markets and eventually end
• 49:58
  up on a podcast talking about it. It almost feels like crypto feels a lot like open source because it
• 50:05
  is not all of it. What's not open source? No, I mean a company that involves community. It's
• 50:12
  great. But I mean, the companies a lot of them are centralized. They're not. They're still private
• 50:16
  companies. Sure. But even in open source, you have private companies building on top of the open
• 50:20
  source. Correct. Yes. But I feel. Yes. So you're you're right. I just feel like like the culture
• 50:27
  is very much like a kind of open source. People want to contribute. That's one of the most
• 50:31
  fun things. I know. And you don't see that in regular tech. And it's the biggest open source sector
• 50:36
  in the world. Yeah. Like if you look at all the other open source projects on GitHub and then
• 50:40
  you look at the crypto ones, you know, it's massive. For people that don't understand the difference
• 50:46
  between traditional crypto and say, DeFi. How do they how do they understand if they want to
• 50:52
  invest and they want to put money somewhere and they want to not look at it for the next 10 years?
• 50:56
  Okay, check. You've done all the right things. You have the right mindset going into it. Where does
• 51:01
  DeFi fit into this from an asset class? Obviously, there's like utility as a technology, but from an
• 51:06
  asset class, is it something people should consider at all? For sure. I mean, the number one application
• 51:12
  DeFi or decentralized finance is what I have already talked about, which is being your own bank.
• 51:19
  Right. Now, of course, decentralized finance today goes further than that. You can be a lender on
• 51:25
  a decentralized lending market. You can be a borrower on a decentralized lending market. You know,
• 51:30
  you can be a yield generation, a staker, a minor. And then, you know, frankly, 20 other things that
• 51:37
  are maybe even more complicated than I can get into. But the biggest use case of decentralized
• 51:42
  finance today and has always been cussing your own funds, being your own bank. When you think about
• 51:49
  sort of like the evolving regulatory landscape, if you're building in this space, I mean,
• 51:58
  I think regulatory frameworks have been super unclear. That's sort of been the biggest pain point
• 52:04
  that I see people speaking about online. Obviously, you build in spite of that. But do you think
• 52:11
  that we're finally getting some clarity from the government? Do you think this is going to be
• 52:16
  something that we see in this administration? You truly feel that? Because this has been going on
• 52:21
  for how you started this in 2011, 2012, whatever, 20. Has there been any regulatory clarity since 2012?
• 52:29
  We have Mika in Europe, which is pretty clear. To be frank, it's not great in some areas,
• 52:36
  but I think it'll improve over time. But we do have clarity. Asia, like Singapore, Hong Kong,
• 52:42
  Tokyo, you got clarity from all those regulators long ago.
• 52:45
  US centric and ignorant of the rest of the world. The US has been a laggard,
• 52:50
  thanks to the Biden administration. But I do think that while we don't have that clarity today,
• 52:56
  what we do have is an incredibly strong commitment from the current administration to provide
• 52:59
  that clarity as quickly as possible. So I expect that we achieve clarity in the United States
• 53:05
  within the next 12 to 18 months. If you think about unclear or either unclear or overly restrictive
• 53:15
  regulation, how does that impact where you want to take the company? Does it impact you at all? Or
• 53:20
  do you just build in spite of what's happening in terms of regulatory? You do your best to future
• 53:24
  proof. You follow all the current applicable regulations and they're plenty.
• 53:30
  And you know, you try to try to work collaboratively with governments to make sure that the
• 53:36
  eventual regulation leads to the creation of a healthy market that grows. Have they called on you
• 53:41
  to sit down with them? Yeah. I've had hundreds of meetings with regulators in the last couple of
• 53:46
  years. Yeah. Is it moving in the right direction? It is. It wasn't. It was pretty tough there for
• 53:52
  about four years, but even like even since Trump, like do you have you sat down with anybody since?
• 53:57
  Yeah. I sat down with Trump. Yeah. And is it moving? It's moving. Yeah. It's moving right away.
• 54:02
  You know, I had really wonderful conversations with President Trump with his team.
• 54:08
  And I do think we're going in a really positive direction. No, that's really good to hear
• 54:13
  because again, like I'm just speaking to the layman who is. And I do think there's an expectation gap.
• 54:17
  There was kind of an expectation gap means that I think people thought Trump would be elected
• 54:23
  and like day two, we'd have the frame. Oh, yeah, because I was watching. I was I think in his
• 54:28
  for one of his first addresses, people were losing their ship because he didn't mention Bitcoin.
• 54:33
  That was like one of the first speeches he gave or like or when he was just elected, I'm pretty
• 54:37
  sure like the night he was elected, he didn't mention Bitcoin. Crypto people are are impatient and
• 54:41
  insufferable at times. I often say that you have to forgive us for our excitement and our passion.
• 54:47
  That's fine, though. That's no problem with excitement and passion, but that excitement and
• 54:51
  passion. I think the fastest we were ever going to see it is 12 months. So you know, when we when
• 54:57
  Trump was elected, it was like, yeah, I'm going to bring you as an industry clarity. We were like
• 55:01
  sick next two months. What does industry clarity mean for you? Like best possible outcome? What would
• 55:05
  you want them to say? Perfect world. I mean, a perfect world, we get a national crypto charter.
• 55:13
  So we would, you know, I think it's really hard to fit crypto into any of the existing frameworks
• 55:18
  or regimes. I think that, you know, right now, a lot of the regulatory is done at the state level.
• 55:23
  So I think federal preemption makes a lot of sense. You know, I think that the best thing for
• 55:28
  consumers, for companies, for innovation is a national crypto charter and a national crypto framework.
• 55:35
  And I mean, you've you compared crypto to like the internet in 1997 before and sort of the adoption
• 55:42
  curve of crypto. If we get a national crypto charter, do you think that that drastically
• 55:48
  accelerates adoption in the US at least? And globally and globally. So countries will follow the US.
• 55:55
  When you look at different crypto market cycles, what are some patterns that you observe for people
• 56:01
  that are just trying to understand? And this is never investment advice. When you're trying to
• 56:05
  understand crypto markets, you mentioned like sort of like a four year cycle that you regularly
• 56:12
  impacts how people, you know, engage with the business, reach out to you. Which strangely aligns
• 56:17
  to the presidential election cycle. That's ironic. And as well to the, you know, overall business,
• 56:22
  the quality cycle. Yeah. Yeah, I have a completely reliable magic indicator that tells me exactly
• 56:31
  when the top is here. For the record, I do not. I know you don't. I know you don't. But what are some
• 56:39
  patterns? Like any market, right? Like when things don't, when things stop making sense,
• 56:44
  when everyone agrees that crypto is like in a super cycle to the stratosphere and it feels you
• 56:49
  for it and things are happening that don't make sense, then I think that's probably the top.
• 56:54
  Like I think we've seen the top in AI. You feel that? Yeah. Like I think when you had people talking
• 56:59
  about spending half a trillion dollars, building an eye infrastructure on stage together,
• 57:05
  when no one on that stage has half a trillion dollars, that was probably the top. You see what
• 57:12
  happened with deep seek and the fact that they built it out of fraction of the price.
• 57:17
  It's the fact that they say they built it supposedly. I think the truth is probably somewhere
• 57:21
  in between. I agree. It's like you look at the chart of like exports of compute to Singapore and
• 57:26
  it's like, boom, you're straight to the right. You're like, I don't know if there's that much in
• 57:31
  Singapore. No, that's funny. No, but I mean, I don't think you're wrong. So I mean, you do have to
• 57:37
  sort of understand when you're at that. My advice and my advice is very uneducated advice is just
• 57:43
  probably similar to what your advice would be if everyone's talking about it. It's probably not
• 57:48
  the time to buy. And I don't, you know, when I say it, it's a tough advice, but any asset.
• 57:52
  When I say we sit at top for AI, I don't really, I should be more specific. I think we've seen
• 57:56
  the top for foundational models. Top for foundational models. And, you know, like, in no
• 58:03
  comeback and they'll be very sexy again, but I think we're going to see a blow off in foundational
• 58:07
  models. So like the foundational models, like, you know, when chat GPT builds a new model.
• 58:16
  Well, the chat GPT, the way that I see, like, chat GPT and, and, and, and through
• 58:20
  topic, they're almost like building like the foundation of model OS that everyone else can build
• 58:25
  upon. And deep seek was kind of like the, the new competitor and foundational models, right?
• 58:31
  But you have to, everybody has to remember that everything is faster now. So there was like a
• 58:35
  period of time where operating systems were really valuable, like Microsoft. Like they're very,
• 58:40
  the most valuable tech company and probably 80, 90% of that market cap was to do with Windows.
• 58:44
  Now I think, you know, Windows is probably like sub 10% of their market cap. Now they've been
• 58:51
  very well. They have a great business. So they've managed to build other things, their market cap,
• 58:55
  you know, they're only bigger than ever bigger Microsoft, right? But like to some extent,
• 59:01
  you know, no one really cares about OS. Well, this is so to draw parallel. This is what you see with
• 59:06
  Ethereum being an OS that people build on. But now you have all these other sort of OS.
• 59:14
  And I actually think that's one of the biggest ways that crypto is going to change over the next
• 59:17
  few years is that there's always been a shortage of capacity on our protocols. So every time
• 59:24
  crypto has a huge cycle, whatever change is being used the most, the fees go over 50 bucks.
• 59:29
  And some time in the next few months to cycle in, why? Because frankly, like consumers get
• 59:33
  pretty tired of like using a product where they can't get their transaction through. They have to
• 59:37
  pay a lot for it. And it fails half the time. Now we have enough high bandwidth protocols that I
• 59:45
  don't know if that's going to happen again. Which means two things. One, like we could keep growing
• 59:50
  consumer use cases is amazing. But two, it means that every protocol is probably worth less now
• 59:57
  than it was in the past. Because not a scarce resource. What was the protocol that Trump
• 1:00:04
  launches meme point on? Was it Salana? That was failing. And no, Salana didn't fail actually.
• 1:00:11
  Phantom, the app that people were using. So it wasn't the actual, okay. Because I was going to say,
• 1:00:17
  I thought I don't know all this. Everybody was reporting that Salana was failing. It was just
• 1:00:22
  phantom. You could go on and use another wallet. And you would have been totally fine.
• 1:00:27
  Which is interesting, right? Now the choke point is that the application layer not at the protocol
• 1:00:31
  layer. That is interesting. So I don't, I mean Ethereum has been around for a long time. Obviously,
• 1:00:37
  Salana is a new protocol. What are some other protocols that like don't have scalability issues?
• 1:00:43
  Almost any new protocol has far higher scalability than anything we did in the past.
• 1:00:48
  And Bitcoin was actually, you know, very pretty smart about this. It was a pretty controversial
• 1:00:54
  idea at the time. There was a whole industry so war over it. Bitcoin hasn't tried to upgrade.
• 1:01:00
  They haven't tried to be faster or more bandwidth, more consistent speed. They said,
• 1:01:04
  not like, we're going to be digital gold. We're going to make our value that we don't change.
• 1:01:10
  Which kind of left field. And so they're not competing in that segment at all.
• 1:01:16
  But, you know, Ethereum, Salana, phantom, near like we can keep going. There's a hundred of them
• 1:01:21
  are competing in that high capacity, high throughput, you know, very quick time to settlement
• 1:01:27
  space. But Ethereum is not keeping up compared to the other ones. Is it?
• 1:01:33
  If it depends who you ask, if you ask the Ethereum people, it's going great.
• 1:01:36
  Interesting. I don't know. I'm genuinely, I'm genuinely curious.
• 1:01:39
  Yeah, I am, I'm, and I've said this because I see it publicly like a Microsoft,
• 1:01:44
  as like kind of like the OG OS platform. And then I see all these other platforms sort of
• 1:01:49
  vying for market share, ultimately superior products. But the most used one today is Salana.
• 1:01:56
  Yeah. I think that the trouble for Ethereum is that they decided to go down this scaling pathway
• 1:02:03
  of like having a bunch of layer 2s, kind of side change. The trouble for them with that is that
• 1:02:08
  it means that when I log into my Ethereum wallet today, I have, you know, USDT, a stablecoin,
• 1:02:14
  on nine different networks. So I might have a thousand dollars of USDT in my wallet,
• 1:02:20
  but it's spread across nine networks. So if I need to paste for a two hundred dollar thing,
• 1:02:25
  I might not have it. I'd have to like move it around and it's just a really tough consumer
• 1:02:29
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  your podcast. Is there any path where Ethereum can potentially optimize to the point where they can
• 1:04:26
  now be more efficient or better user experience than Solana? Or is that something that because of
• 1:04:32
  the technology or the idea that sort of first birthed Ethereum is going to be very hard for them to
• 1:04:39
  modernize to the point where they can come up with something that will just create. It's a community
• 1:04:43
  problem. One of the biggest challenges for Ethereum is that because they decided to do these
• 1:04:48
  originally, the plan was charting, which would enable huge scale on the eth main chain and layer
• 1:04:54
  twos. And they haven't really gotten people to work on charting. Why not incentives? So if I'm a
• 1:05:00
  really clever Ethereum builder, I can go start a layer to maybe make a few hundred mill.
• 1:05:07
  So it sucks serving degree to 200 grand to 300 grand a year working on charting at the
• 1:05:13
  Ethereum foundation. What do you think happens? And then those people are big ecosystem participants
• 1:05:21
  and they're pushing it's all just, you know, incentives that totally makes sense.
• 1:05:27
  You mentioned something before. I don't know if this is what you were talking about when you said
• 1:05:29
  you have a relatively controversial opinion about something. Is it that incentives?
• 1:05:35
  Yeah. I think the incentives in Ethereum are misaligned now. And it's very hard
• 1:05:44
  solving technology problems is not that bad. Solving incentive misalignment to human problem.
• 1:05:50
  Particularly when no one's boss. I want to talk a little bit more about just some ideas that
• 1:05:56
  you've learned over your journey. People that are a little bit less technical and less focused on
• 1:06:01
  crypto, but more just interested in like the size and the scale of the business that you built.
• 1:06:05
  But before we go back to that, what are some other things that I don't know enough to ask you
• 1:06:10
  about about crypto that you think is useful for the audience to know? Somebody who's been in this
• 1:06:15
  space for so long spoke about custody about different platforms, regulatory. I've talked a lot
• 1:06:24
  about quality, like being dedicated to high quality things for long periods of time in life.
• 1:06:32
  But in crypto, it's even more important because it keeps you out of trouble. So for example,
• 1:06:39
  I don't really trust any crypto company until they've been through at least one down and one up.
• 1:06:45
  And that doesn't mean that just because you've done it down and up, you're scot free,
• 1:06:49
  there's no more stress. It's easy. But it tells me a lot about how the company is going to manage it,
• 1:06:56
  their culture, the way they think about risk, the way they think about greed,
• 1:07:01
  the way they think about taking care of their customers. So I don't really ever have an opinion
• 1:07:06
  about a company until it's gone through one up, one down, or about a protocol until it's
• 1:07:11
  gone through one up, one down. I'll give you two examples from the last cycle. I got to ask a lot
• 1:07:16
  what my opinion of FTX was. And I had said for a long time, I had no opinion because I haven't
• 1:07:23
  seen them go through it down. And then towards the end, I got very worried about them and said that
• 1:07:28
  I didn't trust them. But even very early on, I was like, I don't won't know until I see them go
• 1:07:35
  through the other side. You know, like you can be the greatest offense in the world. But if your
• 1:07:41
  defense is terrible, you're gonna have problems. So a flip side of that that's a little bit more
• 1:07:49
  of a positive story is Salana. Salana, huge game in your last cycle, a lot of heat, a lot of action,
• 1:07:55
  never gotten involved. Because they were doing, you know, there's like a lot of things going on
• 1:08:01
  there where we're like inside games, short-term games. You saw them playing short-term games.
• 1:08:07
  I did. Yeah, that's that's a signal of a problem. Yeah, it is. Post FTX blowout because they
• 1:08:15
  were very closely affiliated with FTX. I loved the way the founders stood up, owned it, said never
• 1:08:24
  again, doubled down on their core value proposition, doubled down on quality. And even though it was the
• 1:08:31
  most depressed crypto in the industry at that time, it went down the furthest. I was like, does
• 1:08:37
  coming back. These guys are going to do something great. They could have gone in two directions.
• 1:08:42
  They saw what happened to FTX. They're closely affiliated. They're at an all-time low.
• 1:08:47
  And they chose to sort of take the high road. They chose stop playing these short-term games. Not
• 1:08:51
  just to take a high road, but to take a much higher road than they'd been taking. Right. Like,
• 1:08:56
  well, they're probably scarred shitless, too. I don't know. Things got hard. And they decided,
• 1:09:01
  you know what? The way out of this is to do things better. Not to look for a short-term exit,
• 1:09:08
  or a short-term way of rebounding. No, we're going to go back to them as we're going to be
• 1:09:12
  slowly. We're going to go up. That's a life less than them. Huge amount of respect for that. And like,
• 1:09:16
  I've, you know, tracked closely and used and been involved in the salon ecosystem ever since.
• 1:09:21
  And I'm assuming this is sort of the litmus test that you put new projects through before you
• 1:09:24
  associate with them at all. Yeah. What is the what is the signal that you do want outside of going
• 1:09:31
  through a down cycle or, you know, when the market's shitting the bed and you see their behaviors
• 1:09:37
  through those worst times? Is there any sort of other due diligence? I know significant amount
• 1:09:43
  of due diligence, but any other sort of signals you look for that you're like, this is a project
• 1:09:48
  that I actually like to work with without naming projects because then I get in trouble. And this
• 1:09:53
  applies to everything. This applies to, you know, I invested in a food and beverage thing recently.
• 1:10:03
  So this applies to food and beverage and it applies to crypto protocols. And I love it when
• 1:10:08
  an entrepreneur and a team knows who their customers are. You've mentioned this. Yeah. Because many
• 1:10:13
  times they have more than one set of customers, right? I love it when they talk to me about what
• 1:10:19
  they're going to do for their customers rather than like how much money we're all going to make.
• 1:10:25
  Because I've learned that like the most reliable way to do well in an investment is to
• 1:10:32
  drive value for those people, right? So when when someone comes down to me and like if a carwash
• 1:10:38
  operator came to me and was like, dude, like I figured out a way to make getting your car washed
• 1:10:44
  painless in Miami, I'd be like, dope, tell me more. You know, and if I sat down with someone who
• 1:10:51
  was like, I figured out a way to make a million bucks a week on a car wash idea, I'd be like,
• 1:10:54
  man, I won't talk about that. No, but the thing is the million is a lagging indicator,
• 1:11:00
  the figuring out your customer, that avatar, like so specifically in how they live and breathe
• 1:11:05
  and everything they do in a day and how you're going to solve that, that's the leading indicator for
• 1:11:08
  success. Correct. That is that is universal. That is across any kind of business. So I'm always
• 1:11:14
  thinking about that and trying to anchor myself to that. I'm not always succeed, you know, but like
• 1:11:22
  yeah, I'll tell you one funny story about crypto and then we should talk about other stuff, but
• 1:11:28
  yeah, it's something called me the day and they're really mad because they bought into like one of
• 1:11:32
  these fake Kanye coins. The fake Kanye coins, the real Trump coins all of it. They're like,
• 1:11:37
  I'm like, what's my name? I'm peep peep done with crypto like my mind's coin and it like goes up
• 1:11:43
  and then it like I can't sell it and then it like goes down and I lost my money. I'm like, okay,
• 1:11:47
  hold on. Like you knowingly, willingly, we're trying to buy a coin before the creator of the coin,
• 1:11:58
  who is also maybe having a lot of mental health issues and maybe you don't want to be supporting
• 1:12:04
  some of the things that individual is saying, brilliant artists, but like, you know, it's definitely
• 1:12:10
  lost his way. You know, lost his way. You really want to make money with that guy? You want to be
• 1:12:14
  business partners with him right now? Then maybe not. You and then you would, like you buy something
• 1:12:19
  before it's even verified and then like what, what, this is crypto's fault. This is you problem.
• 1:12:26
  It's a default. Yeah. Did you see that tweet that he put out about somebody offering him
• 1:12:32
  like tons of money to to show like a fraud project? No, I don't I don't follow a lot of that
• 1:12:37
  stuff to be honest. You was saying that celebrities are like paid money. Oh, I know that.
• 1:12:44
  Saying that yeah, yeah, celebrities that will be paid just to like tweet it. They have nothing to
• 1:12:49
  do with it other than making the fur paid tweet. Yeah, that's scary because those celebrities have
• 1:12:53
  trust. I mean, I think that now celebrities are whizing up to maybe not exploit their audience
• 1:12:59
  in their fan base for a quick buck. Hopefully you've said that most founders should go to therapy.
• 1:13:05
  Why is that? I think that there's a lot of focus around founders getting executive coaches.
• 1:13:14
  I think very similar to investors, the best executive coaches would actually be former founders
• 1:13:21
  and formerly successful founders. Therefore, they have no desire in being your executive coach.
• 1:13:26
  They might want to be your mentor. Like I've talked about Justin. He's had a big impact on my life.
• 1:13:33
  But like, you know, someone who hasn't done it is hard. It's very hard for them to give you great
• 1:13:39
  advice. You know, it's like a lot of bad coach. Yeah, it's just hard. I agree with it because if
• 1:13:45
  somebody had a hundred million dollar, five hundred million dollar exit, are they really selling their
• 1:13:52
  time to be an executive coach? I mean, even if you even if you made 20 million bucks,
• 1:13:57
  like it's not worth it at that point, right? So I think they just want to give back and those are
• 1:14:02
  the best people because they care the list. They don't care if you keep calling them. They don't
• 1:14:06
  care how many hours they bill you. And for the most part, I would say that any founder that tries
• 1:14:10
  hard to find a mentor that's doing cool shit, you will find what. Yeah. Like, you know, you will
• 1:14:17
  because you're going to find somebody who hadn't made it. Who's bored? Who? Who? Not even somebody
• 1:14:22
  who's bored. Like I'm into people and I still have at least one job. So, you know,
• 1:14:27
  like if you're a founder and you can't find and you need a mentor because you've kind of gotten
• 1:14:33
  somewhere, you don't need a mentor before you've gotten anywhere. When you start to get somewhere,
• 1:14:36
  you need a mentor and you can't get one. That's a not a good indicator on your ability to
• 1:14:42
  continue this pathway to say the least. I agree with that. But why therapy? Oh, good. So,
• 1:14:49
  that person can tell you how to handle a lot of situations at work. Yeah. Because they've been
• 1:14:53
  there. They've done that. They've made a lot of mistakes and you can maybe make fewer of them.
• 1:14:59
  You don't really become a founder of a tech startup or a crypto startup without
• 1:15:06
  probably having some underlying mental issue. Because it's kind of a crazy value proposition.
• 1:15:15
  And if you do like a blacksholes model or a Monte Carlo on like your expected value of every year
• 1:15:22
  you work in this from a liquidity perspective, liquidity expected, it's not even a good idea.
• 1:15:29
  Like financially doing a startup is even, I mean, it's just not a good idea. The Monte Carlo is
• 1:15:36
  terrible. So you have to do it because you love it because you want to do it for some other reason.
• 1:15:41
  And you know, I've yet to meet any entrepreneur who started out in this game incredibly well-balanced.
• 1:15:48
  And I've met even fewer that do it for a long time and are incredibly well-balanced and healthy.
• 1:15:53
  I think most entrepreneurs like, you know, have crippling levels of insecurity or anxiety.
• 1:16:00
  Right. I think we all come into this with a lot to prove and that chip on our shoulder comes
• 1:16:06
  from somewhere. And what I'm completely confident in is in this kind of calls back to our earlier
• 1:16:11
  conversation is that no amount of success in the startup game will help you find peace with that.
• 1:16:19
  But that's what everyone's looking for. And you will be your best as an entrepreneur and as a CEO
• 1:16:24
  and as a leader in my view, when you begin to understand where that chip on your shoulder comes from
• 1:16:31
  and when you begin to make peace with it. And it's not that you will ever not have it.
• 1:16:35
  You know, like, years of therapy later, you know, I think if you go talk to my team,
• 1:16:41
  they'll tell you I'm one of the most driven people you've ever met. Like, I'm still in there on the field.
• 1:16:46
  I'm still in there building. I'm still in there in the jam room. I don't need to be anymore.
• 1:16:51
  Why? Because I love it. But like, where does all that come from? You know, and so like
• 1:16:57
  making peace with that will make you a better leader. It'll make you a better manager.
• 1:17:02
  It will also enable you to enjoy the process and the journey.
• 1:17:07
  Very good advice. Because I do believe that most entrepreneurs are some form of neurodivergent.
• 1:17:13
  Yeah, I have not met one yet that isn't. I mean, neurodivergent, yes, mostly, like we all have
• 1:17:18
  some kind of neurodivergence for the most part. But that's separate from like
• 1:17:23
  having these like complexes, right? And these like, it's like, you know,
• 1:17:28
  the classic way of saying is like, oh, man, he has a big chip on his shoulder.
• 1:17:31
  Yeah. But where does that chip come from? And I think understanding that chip allows you to
• 1:17:35
  understand how it's driving you. And then you can begin to learn how to use it as like fuel
• 1:17:43
  rather than use it using you. Have you thought about where your chip comes from?
• 1:17:49
  Of course. I'm saying you used to give out where that chip's come from.
• 1:17:54
  You know, and I'll say something really cheesy, but I think it's one of the things that I've
• 1:17:58
  I've really learned a lot from meditating on and thinking about is like, you know, success and
• 1:18:04
  happiness in life don't come from, and I'm paraphrasing, they don't come from mastering the
• 1:18:11
  universe. They come from mastering yourself. And I think that one of the real things that's
• 1:18:17
  most dangerous about being in the startup game as a founder is that you're so busy and you have
• 1:18:23
  so much stimulus that it's very easy to ignore your own voice who you are and figuring out how
• 1:18:32
  to do it the way that feels most authentic to you. Because the way that I lead my company is
• 1:18:37
  going to be very different from the way that another person leads their company.
• 1:18:41
  I've I've also felt sometimes that and I don't it's not I don't think it's definitely not healthy.
• 1:18:48
  But like your lack of self love or your lack of ability to look and see how you want to operate.
• 1:18:55
  I know in the past and sometimes I still do I lean on that as a superpower because I'm like,
• 1:18:59
  I can just ignore my emotions. I can just head down blinders on and get the shit done and I
• 1:19:04
  can work harder than anyone else. And I can still work smart and I can still work on the things
• 1:19:08
  that matter and move the needle. But my lack of self love and care at times has progressed my
• 1:19:15
  business, which is not healthy. And I think that there has to be a limit on that. I do believe
• 1:19:21
  that seasons exist for a reason. Yeah, there it's awareness. It's like, you know,
• 1:19:26
  it's like this is coming back to the journey. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like,
• 1:19:31
  so I want to really love because it's funny. It's like, do you want to be a mule or a lion?
• 1:19:35
  You know, like a mule is like meant to plot all day from 20, you know, 20 hours a day a mule plot.
• 1:19:40
  You know, a lion gets up like every three or four days and like runs real fast and kills something.
• 1:19:45
  You know, I think mules are great too. But you know, it's a different life. And you can't run at a
• 1:19:52
  full sprint forever. No one can. It's the funny thing that we all learn. So it's like, you know,
• 1:19:58
  if you want to be always in motion, then you've got to slow down or you can do sprints and then
• 1:20:04
  you can rest, which, you know, nobody's capable of sprinting in all the time. No, something will
• 1:20:09
  blow up. Usually it's your own health. Yeah, your own physical or mental health. Your body has a
• 1:20:15
  real good way of stopping you. It does. It's a real good way. You mentioned that like, you know,
• 1:20:22
  success is in the journey. But just to go a level deeper, how is your own definition of success
• 1:20:29
  sort of changed in the past 10, 15 years? I think having one is the biggest difference.
• 1:20:37
  Um, I think that I personally never had a real notion of what's assessment.
• 1:20:48
  I wasn't someone that necessary like wanted to do a startup, one to be venture backed,
• 1:20:52
  wanted to, you know, bubble bubble block kind of happen more organically for me. And even once I was
• 1:20:57
  already fully on the train, I never thought about what is success look like. It's success, you know,
• 1:21:04
  getting to profitability is success, getting to 100 million in revenue, 500 million in revenue
• 1:21:12
  is it, is it going public? Is it, is it being one of the 20 most valuable companies on the stock
• 1:21:19
  market? Is it being the first company that issues its equity on a token? I never, I never had a
• 1:21:28
  notion of what success was. You know, is it, is it generating, you know, a lot of shareholder value,
• 1:21:35
  like what is success for me? I didn't, I sort of like had a notion of what success was,
• 1:21:41
  but it was just sort of like whatever classic success indicators look like. You know,
• 1:21:47
  is success for you owning the biggest private jet? Maybe, you know, maybe, that's a perfectly
• 1:21:52
  fine thing. Or maybe it's escaping with your family. That's not, it's not for me, but like
• 1:21:57
  retiring and yeah, it's like I have a friend where like, you know, his next big goal is like he
• 1:22:04
  wants certain 737? I don't know, I don't even know, but like, that's fine. As long as you know
• 1:22:12
  what that is and that's authentic to you, right? I think for a long time, I had no sense of what
• 1:22:16
  that was. What is it now? I think success for me is finding joy in the process and the journey
• 1:22:26
  more days than not and really getting to experience my love of building. Like success for me on a
• 1:22:35
  day to day basis is like how much of my time do I spend building and generating value for people
• 1:22:41
  and clients versus like whatever other stuff is going on? It's a very healthy definition of success.
• 1:22:48
  Yeah, and you know, I got some financial goals as well. I financial goals every year.
• 1:22:52
  Of course. Those have brought me like financial security, but they were brought me like happiness.
• 1:22:58
  I think that the first version of success again is the leading indicator of the financial success.
• 1:23:05
  If you enjoy most days, I think you just naturally progress closer to mastery and the mastery
• 1:23:12
  equates to financial freedom. And I do tell and I probably should probably be remiss to not say that's
• 1:23:19
  like financial security, you know, when you're if you haven't achieved financial security by the
• 1:23:27
  time you're in your early 30s, that should be your number one goal. And I kind of define that as like,
• 1:23:32
  you know, do you have three years of cash on hand? If you have three years of cash on hand and you
• 1:23:37
  don't have to worry about how much a restaurant costs, like nothing after that really changes your
• 1:23:44
  life that much. True. Right. And so if you're not there, like that's a great goal to get to.
• 1:23:51
  Right. But after that, I think other things have always been more meaningful to me.
• 1:23:56
  What was the what was the most difficult darkest moment in building blockchain.com?
• 1:24:05
  Do you want to talk about publicly at least?
• 1:24:07
  And how did you get through it?
• 1:24:12
  Yeah, it was very it was early. It was years ago. And we think I've been through many hard chapters.
• 1:24:21
  But there was a moment in time in our early era where I had a major health issue. And I needed
• 1:24:31
  surgery. There was a significant chance of mortality with the operation.
• 1:24:41
  And, you know, reconciling myself to the fact that like, that may be it when we hadn't really
• 1:24:52
  gotten that far. It was really difficult for me. And then afterwards, the fact that we frankly
• 1:24:58
  didn't make a lot of progress because at the time we were family sized, not corporation sized.
• 1:25:06
  Yeah, I think without me being able to drive the energy forward, we slowed down a lot.
• 1:25:13
  And also, I think people were very naturally worried about me, which slowed them down a lot.
• 1:25:18
  And so I put a lot of guilt on myself about that. You know, that even like I hadn't done anything
• 1:25:26
  to the health problem was, you know, it was, whatever it is when you're born with it.
• 1:25:33
  Genetic. Yeah, it was genetic and came to awareness later in life.
• 1:25:39
  And I'm very healthy now. And it's a wonderful story of modern medicine.
• 1:25:45
  But I really did struggle to move on from the fact that I felt like I had let everyone down.
• 1:25:51
  Even though you were the one who is almost dying. Uncontrollable health issue.
• 1:25:58
  Right. That is the neurodivergence or some complex showing.
• 1:26:05
  Yeah. Because that is not the way anybody should think about health issues.
• 1:26:10
  Yeah, when I still felt that way quite some time later, that's when I decided I needed a therapist.
• 1:26:16
  So, and that was, you know, it took a long time to find the right therapy and the right systems,
• 1:26:22
  the right way of thinking about it. So it's not like it was like a, you know, a light switch that
• 1:26:25
  you flip on in your, and you have a healthier way of looking at the world. But that was a very hard
• 1:26:31
  moment for me because that's a regret-based thing, right? Like I don't know, like where would the
• 1:26:36
  business be today if that hadn't happened? But this is what I mean by the fact that like there's
• 1:26:41
  so little control you have over this. Another example that I'll give of what became a very hard
• 1:26:46
  moment for us was the market crash, you know, which sort of started with Russian invading Ukraine.
• 1:26:55
  We had a huge financing that was going to close. It was going to be one of those sort of pre-IPO
• 1:27:00
  financing where like old investors sell, new investors buy, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:27:05
  Was this the, because when I was reading, it said there was at one point you were valued at 14 billion.
• 1:27:10
  Was that that was that one? Yeah. And it ended up, you know, a lot of investors dropped out of that
• 1:27:15
  round. You know, because, and all the people who were assigned in the long form and everything,
• 1:27:20
  they're just like, well, like Russian invaded, like, you know, Suez. You can't control that.
• 1:27:24
  But you can't see it right in. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know when, you know, like you can
• 1:27:30
  spend your whole life building something be a week from the IPO and like nuclear war starts,
• 1:27:37
  which I really hope we don't have any good war. But if a nuclear war started like, dude,
• 1:27:41
  like fuck your IPO, like, you know, that was it. Yeah. You know, and so it's just like the theme
• 1:27:51
  that you're reminded of again and again in life is that is that you don't have as much control
• 1:27:56
  as you think you do. And I think, you know, to come back to one of your earlier questions that
• 1:28:00
  chip in my shoulder was that I wanted to have agency, right? I wanted to be empowered. I wanted
• 1:28:10
  to feel like I had the freedom to make the decisions. But you have to have, you do have to have
• 1:28:16
  agency. You have to have extreme ownership that internal locus of control or you're never going
• 1:28:20
  to do anything. Like you do have to have that. You do. But there's a duality. There's a duality
• 1:28:26
  that I took me years to understand, which is that that drive to have that is a huge part of
• 1:28:34
  what enabled me to have whatever success I've had. At the same time, the constant struggle for it
• 1:28:44
  and the demand for it was like probably the single greatest driver of my unhappiness or my
• 1:28:50
  inability to enjoy, you know, the blessings and joy that I can experience in life, right? It's
• 1:28:57
  like being worried about what happens next because I can't totally control what happens next.
• 1:29:02
  You know, even in a life that I have where I have far more control of my average of my everyday
• 1:29:07
  life than most people or my career or whatever you want to call it, I have no control over many,
• 1:29:15
  many things that are going to impact that and worrying about that all the time and trying to like
• 1:29:21
  bring order to that supposed chaos, you know, will generate incredible stress in your life.
• 1:29:27
  How much of yourself worth is wrapped up into your company? Probably in all time low.
• 1:29:31
  That's good. But still extremely high. That's good though. That's healthy. Yeah.
• 1:29:38
  Context matters. It's still very high, but it's at an all time low on the trend.
• 1:29:42
  What would be the biggest misconception about your story, blockchain.com success that you sort of
• 1:29:49
  want to correct set the record straight? That all that much of it had to do with anyone person.
• 1:29:56
  Success has many, many, many fathers and mothers and grandparents and whatever. It takes a whole
• 1:30:03
  community to build something, right? And and somebody ends up being the face and the CEO of it and
• 1:30:09
  what have you. And I think I've had a big partner. But the right team had to come together.
• 1:30:17
  The customers had to choose us. You know, the universe had to smile at us, you know, with the right
• 1:30:23
  fortune and and and luck at times. And frankly, like, you know, there's probably a hundred or
• 1:30:32
  other like we're probably like if you ran a hundred simulations, there's probably like three where
• 1:30:36
  it all worked, right? And so when you realize that, you realize like, hmm, you may have had a big
• 1:30:42
  partner, but it didn't come down to exclusively you. And so for, you know, one thing is like I've
• 1:30:47
  done way less, you know, press or conventional press, you know, since realizing that and I've
• 1:30:53
  and because I want to celebrate the team, I want to celebrate the company. But like in the context
• 1:30:58
  of this podcast, like you can't sit down and interview, you know, 400 people. And so somebody does
• 1:31:04
  have to let's read minutes tried, let's read men has tried. But 400 people from one company could
• 1:31:09
  get very boring. And so, you know, I try to be the best representative for the team and the collective
• 1:31:17
  and our customers and all the people that made us what we are today as possible. But any one person
• 1:31:24
  has less to do with it all than I think. I hate the idea of self made. It doesn't in my mind
• 1:31:29
  exist. It just never exists. And just the shift of focus from like, this is what I built to this
• 1:31:38
  is what we've built. I mean, I gravitate towards the latter and those types of entrepreneurs all the
• 1:31:43
  time. I cannot stand the self made bullshit. There used to be this podcast called um, how I built it.
• 1:31:49
  Well, there's still a series of guys. And it used to be one of my biggest goals to go on a podcast.
• 1:31:54
  You should do it. I won't do it. You should do it. It's a good show. I don't like to title.
• 1:31:59
  How I built this. I think it's a wrong attitude. How we built this?
• 1:32:03
  A wrong mindset. Yeah. It's like no one person builds anything.
• 1:32:09
  And I get that that's not the point of the podcast or whatever. But I think it's like,
• 1:32:14
  I want to steer away from perpetuating a lot of these myths that place everything,
• 1:32:20
  all the pressure, all the expectations, blah, blah, all the glory onto one person. Because it's
• 1:32:27
  not how the world works. I agree. Well, technically, there is a lot of pressure on you. But I would say
• 1:32:33
  I would say that I would say that a good founder understands that they can this, they can sort of
• 1:32:39
  they can take on all the pressure and the stress. But then all the wins are not their own.
• 1:32:45
  All the wins are the teams. I think that's a healthy way to look at it. Because if you're saying
• 1:32:49
  that all the negative is everyone else's fault, then you're just deflecting. I get some,
• 1:32:53
  it's oversimplifying. It's oversimplifying. I think, yeah. I think the whole team owns the wins
• 1:33:00
  and the whole team owns the problems. You also don't want to be putting that kind of like as a leader,
• 1:33:07
  entrepreneur, whatever you are. I don't think you want to put yourself in the position where like
• 1:33:11
  all failure is yours. All success is a team. Which is like one is a management maximum, right?
• 1:33:17
  Like we, you know, like everything, everything we're doing wrong is ultimately my responsibility
• 1:33:21
  to CEO everything that we do that's right is like the team's win. Like that's sort of a shitty
• 1:33:26
  deal. You as a human being. It is a shitty deal. But so perfect scenario. I think the team wants to
• 1:33:33
  share the wins and the losses. But that particular idea I think is better than I'm responsible for
• 1:33:40
  all the wins and everyone else's. For sure. That was like completely not acceptable. 100%.
• 1:33:45
  I think if you have a team that doesn't want to share the wins and the losses, you need new team.
• 1:33:49
  How do you find people like that? Because I mean like even speaking about the community that you
• 1:33:54
  attract and sort of like the open source culture component, you probably attract people that are
• 1:33:59
  like crypto blockchain. Honestly, it's one of the best parts about building a company that reaches
• 1:34:03
  scale is you can hire really good people. And people ask me a lot of times they're like,
• 1:34:07
  oh, would you ever retire and do it again? I'm like, woof. I don't know. Like zero to one is very hard.
• 1:34:13
  Like, you know, we can hire amazing people now. Nice. And if you come back to like where do I find
• 1:34:20
  joy? I find joy in building. It's a lot more fun to build with these people. Of course it is.
• 1:34:24
  You know, it's not fun to build on your own. It's like good. I don't know. So, but how do we find
• 1:34:29
  them? I mean, it's like anything else in life. Very carefully. What would be the highest? I mean,
• 1:34:33
  you mentioned your health, which is a pretty damn high personal price. But outside of your health,
• 1:34:38
  what would be the highest personal price that you've paid for commitment to your vision,
• 1:34:43
  to your business? I left, I probably left a lot of money on the table.
• 1:34:49
  You know, like I think the best way to make money in crypto probably was to run a fund.
• 1:34:54
  Right. And I kind of, I've known that for a long time. And I, you know, at any point in time,
• 1:35:00
  good of like retired from here and started a fund. But I don't think it would have been as fun.
• 1:35:06
  Or as rewarding or as satisfying. And so maybe, maybe that, but I don't know, like,
• 1:35:12
  I think that ties back to your, your, your North Star. And again, you have, you have a beautiful
• 1:35:19
  North Star, which I think is actually allowed you to be successful. I think that a fund,
• 1:35:23
  yes, it can provide, it's not just a pure extraction of value. You do provide a ton of value,
• 1:35:28
  but in a very different way. Yeah, so that could be one answer. I think probably a
• 1:35:33
  harder truth is that it took me a long time to learn how to balance having a personal life
• 1:35:43
  with being the CEO of this company. You know, maybe the biggest thing or biggest regret I have
• 1:35:52
  is not learning how to have a healthy personal life while being the CEO of Blockchain.com.
• 1:35:59
  And that, of course, that has come in the form of friendships, you know, where I like
• 1:36:04
  ignored friendships for a very long time, which is not a way to have a healthy,
• 1:36:08
  meaningful life, also in romantic relationships. You know, as an entrepreneur,
• 1:36:14
  you are under incredible stress when you're playing at that level of the game.
• 1:36:18
  I have so much admiration for you able to play at even higher levels of the game,
• 1:36:21
  the balanced relationships. And to do that while maintaining a healthy relationship,
• 1:36:26
  you know, is something that definitely did not know how to do for a very long time. And
• 1:36:35
  you know, arguably still don't know how to do. Right. And so I think that that,
• 1:36:39
  that is always where those sacrifices will be the biggest. Right. Is that you live a very unique,
• 1:36:45
  very high-pressure life. And that is really hard to make your personal life work with.
• 1:36:51
  It was that I think that there's seasons for everything. I think that this is a journey,
• 1:36:55
  to learning journey to it. Like you do have seasons where things won't be balanced.
• 1:37:00
  But I think the whole point for all entrepreneurs is to use that season to get the thing from
• 1:37:05
  zero to one. And then understand when it's time to not abandon hard work, but to move into a
• 1:37:11
  season that is slightly more balanced. Yeah. And I think this is one reason, you know, to
• 1:37:15
  circle it all the way back to the beginning, that I'm really happy that I started early.
• 1:37:19
  Yeah. Because I'm 10, 11 years in now. And you know, I'm still 35.
• 1:37:26
  So like there's a lot of time left on the clock. Yeah. And I think that's a good thing.
• 1:37:34
  If you look 20 years into the future, what impact do you want your work to have?
• 1:37:39
  I think there's the like industry as a whole in our customers and there's sort of like legacy
• 1:37:44
  with the company. On the first one, I think that I want to leave behind the impact of like having
• 1:37:49
  fundamentally helps drive human economic freedom in the world. And I think to some extent,
• 1:38:00
  we've begun to do that. And I'm really excited about like talking about giving people the right
• 1:38:05
  to opt out of their financial system, giving people the choice to interact with people anywhere
• 1:38:09
  in the world economically. That is super powerful and super meaningful to me.
• 1:38:16
  So that's the legacy from sort of like a 100, you know, 100 of you I don't want to leave.
• 1:38:22
  When I think about the company, the legacy that I want to leave is a company that is really,
• 1:38:27
  really well run. And without me still cares deeply about its customers.
• 1:38:33
  And deeply about each other. Right. I don't need to leave behind
• 1:38:44
  the world's most valuable company. Now, I think Amazon has been a very interesting example.
• 1:38:51
  And they're not the world's most valuable company. But of a company that,
• 1:38:55
  you know, you've never heard Jeff talk about wanting to leave behind a trillion dollar company.
• 1:39:02
  Or wanting to be number one. You, whenever he's spoken about this or in his letters,
• 1:39:08
  he talks about the legacy he wants to leave behind is a company that cares deeply about its customers.
• 1:39:14
  And a company that cares about its team. And the byproduct of that is this phenomenal company,
• 1:39:22
  arguably the world's greatest company to be built in the last 20 years because
• 1:39:28
  they have no natural edge. They don't pump oil out of the ground. You know,
• 1:39:32
  they have no monoline revenue product. Like Amazon never discovered a magic money tree.
• 1:39:39
  Facebook, Google, Apple, at some point they all discovered some magical money tree
• 1:39:44
  and then built an amazing company around it. Amazon, you know, Microsoft's same story,
• 1:39:49
  Amazon never had a magical money tree and was always doubted because of it. Right.
• 1:39:56
  And that whole time that guy was out there saying like, no, our secret sauce is that we're
• 1:40:04
  going to build a company that cares about its customers and keeps building out across the whole
• 1:40:09
  internet. We're going to build everything people need to use the internet. And like their first
• 1:40:16
  use case is like selling books, which is kind of funny. It is. It's wild. Right. That's the kind
• 1:40:21
  of thing where I'm like, wow, if I could leave behind like something that even on a smaller scale
• 1:40:27
  looks like that, that would make me really happy. Have you thought about how do we actually achieve
• 1:40:33
  that and exit out and find the right? Is this something that's in your mind right now? No, no.
• 1:40:38
  I think a lot about how do I encourage the culture of that? But in terms of like, have I started
• 1:40:43
  thinking about, you know, filing for unemployment or finding a new job and I'm a long way out.
• 1:40:50
  Not quite yet. I still got a lot left in the gas thing. Amazing. What would be one thing that you
• 1:40:56
  understand now about either crypto or leadership or entrepreneurship that you wish you knew in the
• 1:41:03
  beginning? And I know there's 10 million of them. The most practical advice that I can give anyone
• 1:41:10
  is to write things down. That's good advice. Oh my god. Like playbooks, you know, playbook for
• 1:41:20
  everything. Anything that you do more than once, write a playbook. You know, come into work in the
• 1:41:25
  morning, write down three things that you want to get done today. So simple. Hire someone,
• 1:41:31
  write down your thesis for why you hired them. You absolutely cannot keep track of all this and
• 1:41:36
  no one else can either. So like write, write down, document, write, document.
• 1:41:44
  And it's so easy now with the LLMs. It is very easy now at LLMs.
• 1:41:47
  It takes a quarter of the time. Yeah. Do it. If you could tell out of all the different lessons
• 1:41:52
  that you've learned, first of all, where can people connect with you? Where do you want to send people?
• 1:41:55
  A social website. I mean, blockchain.com is. Yeah. So my Twitter is one more Peter, all words,
• 1:42:03
  which I find entertaining. And then my email is just Peter at blockchain.com. And I read all of them.
• 1:42:09
  You read everything? You then box zero every day? Do you get all the way through there routinely?
• 1:42:14
  If you could tell you 20 year old self, one thing, what would that thing be?
• 1:42:21
  I would tell my 20 year old self that life is going to be far stranger, far more beautiful,
• 1:42:29
  and far more fun than you expect.