Peter Smith - Blockchain.com Co-Founder & CEO | What 13 Years in Crypto Taught Me About People

Probably the half the time I've worked in crypto, I thought the most probable outcome was to you have to be open to living the life less lived when you're young, that doesn't get easier as you get older, there's a lot more trade-offs and sacrifices. Before crypto became headlines, it was infrastructure. Peter Smith helped build that infrastructure. As CEO and co-founder of blockchain.com, Peter was at the forefront of making crypto currency accessible to millions around the world. Everybody's more worried about losing 100 grand than they are about making 100 grand. But the same is also true of life experience. The faster you get the experience of take ownership, the longer you have to deploy those skills over the course of your career. In crypto, once every four years, you're the really a hero. Then the next year, you're a moron. That gives you a huge sense of awareness about how many external is crafting your reality. Where others saw chaos, he saw opportunity. This conversation isn't just about digital assets, it's about conviction, long-term thinking and leading through uncertainty. You come into crypto with a mindset that you want to get rich fast. You will be destroyed. The most predictable path to success is sustained, focused effort over a long period of time. Success and happiness don't come from mastering the universe. They come from mastering yourself. Life is going to be far stranger, far more beautiful, far more fun than you expect. So you have been at the helm of blockchain.com since 2011. So I would consider you a true crypto pioneer. You've navigated all these different market cycles. What was the moment when you realized that blockchain would fundamentally change global finance? It would be amazing if I had realized that in like 2012 or 2013. But for me, working in crypto started out a lot, a lot more casually. In the sense that I didn't know that it was going to become something that would change global finance. I really thought it would probably die. Really, probably for the half the time I've worked in crypto, I thought that the most probable outcome was death. It's so funny. I think that not just for the company I worked on, but for the entire industry. It is such an improbable, implausible idea. We're going to invent a whole new financial system. We're going to do it on chain. We're going to try to do it across the whole world at once. What do you think the probabilities of success are? First of all, you sound crazy. You sound crazy. It has to be like sub 1%. For many years when I worked in crypto, I thought it was most likely going nowhere. Then, of course, the question was, why did you work on something you thought was going nowhere? It really broke down into three things for me. There were three sectors you could work in that would really change the world. You could work in machine learning, which now everyone calls III. You could work in autonomous vehicles or autonomous manufacturing, or you could work in digital finance, Bitcoin, and crypto. I thought that the machine learning game would go totally to large companies that could pay the compute and have the data sets, particularly the data sets. I thought that to work in autonomous stuff, you needed to be more of an electoral engineer or a LiDAR engineer or something like that. So I was like, well, I'm only left with the third one, which looks completely unlikely and implausible. Sweet. But you still jumped into it. What was your first exposure to crypto? My first exposure to crypto was on an email listserv. It started very small time for me. The thing is also true. It's something that I tell people today when they're thinking about exploring an idea or getting involved in industry really early, is that there's no better time to do it than when you're really young. I was really young when I started working in Bitcoin, and really young when I started working on a startup. I think the best way that you can approach your career is spend one to three years working for someone or some org that really knows what they're doing, and I skipped this part. But a couple of years working for an org that really knows what they're doing, and then immediately eject and go work on all of the completely implausible, crazy shit possible because it's never going to get easier in your life to do that. Take the risk when you're young. You have to be open to exploring, open to living the life less lived when you're young because it doesn't get easier as you get older. And of course, it's not impossible when you get older, but it's just a lot harder. There's a lot more trade-offs in sacrifices. When you're young, and you're like, okay, I'm going to go work at this startup, and the beginning days of blockchain.com were like six of us living in a two bedroom apartment. I'm going to sleep on the floor, work all day, and drink really cheap beers on the weekend. That's not a big sacrifice when you're young because if you go work at a bank, which I could have done, I guess, it's like, okay, I would make more money, have a slightly nicer apartment, work really hard, and like, drink beers on the weekend. It's just not that much of a different life, and so however weird or crazy or implausible the idea that you're working on is, there's nothing that you'll learn more from and be happier that you did it than taking that leap when you're really young. It's interesting because when you are young, I try and understand why people don't take more risk when they're young, but also at the same time some take an exceptional amount of risk. Because when you're very young, it's either you don't have fear, you have like too much fear. It's like you're like on both ends of this, you either default to like one of the two sides of this ridiculous spectrum. You have so much fear that you're going to screw it up because you have no experience that you kind of just follow, probably comes from your parents and what you learned and probably your childhood and what you were exposed to. Like for me, I had a ton of fear about screwing up and it took a lot of like deep programming to jump into entrepreneurship because my parents worked for government and universities very safe. But on the other end, if you don't have that fear implanted in you and you can just reconcile what you just said is true, which I think it is, then you have no reason to be fearful because you've never failed before. Well, I think it's a lot about loss of version. So there's a lot of like psychological research that says, you know, everybody's more worried about losing 100 grand than they are about making 100 grand. Like it's a lot easier to deal with the risk of not making 100 grand. That is to deal with the risk of possibly losing 100 grand that you already have. And when you're really young, you know, you have this perspective where it's really easy to lose respect. And that's what drives your decision. Yeah, the humans are, you know, we're tribe animals, right? And so when you think about like your parents right ever, it's like, you know, the reality is when you're a 24 year old kid, even if you did get a job at Goldman or whatever other high prestige thing is going on right now. And now I guess it's startups, which is like a little concerning. But you know, it gets this high prestige job at Goldman. So you have this respect, right? And in your mind, this is like an incredible achievement. And in some ways it is. I don't want to, you know, denigrate that. But all you really did was like become one of the like 10,000 new people that Goldman hired this year. Like it's not that big of a deal. Like it's not like either rest of your life. They'll be like, ah, there goes Joe. Like he was hired at Goldman straight out of Stanford. It's a great analyst. But when you are Joe and you have that offer to go to Goldman or you have that offer to go like sleep on the floor and eat ramen and like hack with three other weird nerds, it feels like a huge loss. So the reputation. So the reputation, right? And and maybe even the money, right? Because the money side of those two things is very different, even though when I said like, look, you're going to be doing the same shit anyway, just different price points, it feels like it's going to be a big loss because you've never had any money. Right? And one of the most interesting things that people sort of lose sight of is that yes, like because of compounding interest, money that you make and save earlier in your life is much more important than later. But the same is also true of life experience. Right? So the faster you get the experience of being someone who has to take ownership, hiring, managing, leading, the longer you have to deploy those skills over the course of your career. And when you're a young person, there's no place that you're going to get that experience faster than being a founder of a startup or of a new company or working in a really small one. Right? And so I would argue that even more than whatever money you might save from the age of 22 to 28 is the compounding effect of that experience that you get by doing risky off-the-wall things in that sort of 22 to 28-year-old gap. And then of course, like in your early 30s, like you should be focused on achieving financial freedom and doing that by saving money and letting it compound and all that shit that you read about from Warren Buffett. But when you're really young, I think you want to be racking up this life experience and these skills in a way that lets you deploy them across the rest of your life in a really compounded fashion. I like that idea a lot. How did you get over this loss of version? I didn't have a lot of it because I grew up without a whole lot of expectations. My grandmother has no idea what Goldman Sachs is. She has no idea what investment banking is. She tells people, and this means a lot to me, that she's really proud of me because I'm her most successful angel investment ever. She doesn't even say angel investment. She just says investment because she loves me some money to go to school. And she still tells people very proudly that she has a grandson who's a millionaire. And so I say all that because one, it's cute and it means a lot to me. But I say it also because I was very blessed that I didn't have the sort of expectations of if I didn't go to work at Goldman or a hedge fund, I was a failure. And so I think that gave me a lot of freedom to explore and to do weird things. But even my dad was concerned that I would never have a real job until two or three years ago. That's funny. So it does come back to all these ideas that are sort of implanted in our head over kids. And you have to be careful. For example, what are you knowing that lack of expectations allowed you to build something great? How does that translate into how you parent your own kids or how will it translate into parenting your own kids in the future when they're older? Have you thought it? Because every parent wants to have expectations. Yeah. You want them to do something great. But it's ironic that the lack of that actually allowed you to pursue something that was riskier that worked out. I think I'm going to do my best not to have expectations about my kids. And to try to help them think about what will make them happy. What are they going to find meaningful in life? What truly brings them joy? One of the things I've learned from my own personal life is that achieving these sort of milestones that people put in their heads brings very, very little happiness. I've never had a moment where I achieved a milestone that classically people look at someone like me and are like, wow, that must have been an amazing moment. I can almost guarantee you that all of those moments that someone who doesn't know me would write down were not amazing moments for me personally. And everybody's wired differently, for me a lot of my focus after achieving a lot of those milestones and not finding happiness in them has been figuring out how to get back to enjoying the process rather than being focused on finding enjoyment in the outcome. And this is like some really great wisdom that a mentor friend of mine, Justin Khan has really helped me inspire me to focus on is you know, you have so little control of the outcomes in life. There's so many things that are just frankly so far beyond you that if you're not enjoying the process of what you're doing every day, you're really setting yourself up for for failure. And this isn't me saying like you shouldn't have big goals, you shouldn't tempt big things, but it's about like does attempting big things, does the process of attempting big things bring you joy? Or are you just doing this thing because you think that the outcome is going to bring you joy. And I can tell you from my life and from watching many other entrepreneurs and rich people and whatever, the achievement of those outcomes is very rarely bringing people a whole lot of joy. But I do know a lot of people that have done really big things, really great things. And they found joy in the process and in the journey of those things, whether they had huge monetary outcomes or not. And they found real fulfillment in joy in life. And so I spend a lot of my time thinking about how do I enjoy the process of this rather than how do I think that I'll find enjoyment in the outcome? That's very wise. I think that a lot of people optimize for outcomes until they realize that well, they train themselves almost hate every day on the journey to the outcome. It's almost like the days are just something to be lived and to be survived on the pursuit of some big outcome. But then when it comes it's not as meaningful as you think it is. And I think that there's in the startup world in particular, which is the world I'm from, there's a particular like almost fetishment around struggle and pain. I agree. It's like if you know if the founder is not killing themselves and on the edge of mental failure, will you ever build anything? The best founders I know, the ones that make it a really long time and I'm trying to become one of those founders and although arguably I've made it a while, but if I want to make it another 10, 15 years, I know that like I have to build with joy and build out of a sense of purpose rather than sort of like build out of a sense of obligation or build out of a sense of trying to achieve a certain outcome. And I would, but I remind people is that the best athletes in the world, they weren't suffering, right? Like when you think about the highest performance people in the world, they weren't doing it, you know, they weren't suffering through every moment of it. Sure, there's parts of training that suck. There's parts of my job that are very difficult. There are bad days at the office and I don't want to glass over that. But for the most part, I really find joy in what I do. And like, you know, we were talking before the mics went on about vacations and stuff. Like most of the time at the end of vacation, 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, enjoy the process? And I asked this because also you are probably in one of the, in terms of startup land, you're probably in one of the more volatile types of markets you can build in. There is nothing more volatile than crypto. Yeah, I know. So it's like take all the stress and then tack on these macro factors that are going to stress you everything to be going great. And then all of a sudden, the mark, I mean, markets in fact, everything. But I don't think with the same volatility as crypto. If I'm selling, if I'm selling socks on Shopify, I don't think the macro economic conditions in 24 hours are going to impact my sales maybe long term, but not to the same degree. So you do with a whole other level of macro for sure. So first of all, I would say that I haven't learned to be in that mindset every day. Like learning to be in that mindset is something that is a big focus of mine last few years. And it's something that I think about probably daily. And I don't achieve it every day, which I think is also part of the journey. I'll say that working in crypto, I think is really an interesting opportunity for your evolution and growth as a human being. Because for most entrepreneurs, I think the journey is like toiling and obscurity. People start to hear about your comp in a success scenario. People start to see, you know, hear about your company. And then it's like really takes off. And then you're sort of up into the right. And at some point, there's some character correction where people find out that you're a real human being. And then it's just sort of like stabilizes, right? In crypto, we have an interesting thing where about once every four years, you're the really a hero. You're like, good genius. You're right. You know, and people are like, oh my god, like, and then, you know, then the next year, you're a moron because the market blew off, right? That there's a euphoric year. And then there's a terrible year that follows. And this is all rough outline. But then you're like, a moron. I feel like, why are you still doing this? And then there's like a year where no one cares about you again. And then there's a year where people are like, oh, this might be coming back. Like maybe he's not a moron. And maybe, you know, maybe I should check in. And you can also look, you can almost look at my email traffic for this. You know, like, there's people that I hear from two out of four years, 100 percent. Yeah. Particularly in the beloved banking sector. But that gives you a huge sense of awareness about how much your external reality or the external is crafting your reality of how you feel about it. Well, like, at the end of the day, like, I know that this is going to go up and down. I know it's super volatile. But how do I handle that year where everyone's like, wow, why are you still doing this? Do you know how you handle it? Like, are you, are you self-aware enough to know like what allows you to navigate these cycles? I mean, I guess the obvious question is, why do you want to keep doing this? So many years, like, that's like such an obvious question because you're a smart entrepreneur. There's a lot of other things that you could build where you would not have to deal with this. Well, one, like I said, I think it's a great teacher. So it teaches you a lot of learning. Well, until I feel like I've learned all the lessons. I haven't gotten there yet. I'm still learning. I mean, I do, I think I do think that like, I would love to navigate one, you know, staying in that mindset of full cycle, staying in that mindset, you know, navigating with grades. That hasn't happened yet. So, you know, I still got, still got more to do. I think it's also a great teacher in the rest of your life. Like, you know who your friends are when you're a crypto CEO. Like, you know, because the market washes people out every couple of years. You know who the people on your team are that you can really count. Like, there is a powerful cleansing effect to the market volatility that is both very difficult to endure and, you know, a huge blessing if you can view it that way. If I look at people and again, I am not as into crypto and blockchain as you obviously, but a lot of people have crashed out, burned out, are no longer building the companies that they started, especially when you got into the game. He's sort of touched on this, but sort of last sort of last question around this, what do you think allowed you to persevere through all that up and down and market cycles and stress and anxiety? I think about that a lot. And I am as far as I'm aware of the second longest serving crypto CEO. So, I'm not wrong. So, there's not many people. Brian Armstrong has a little bit of time on me. But, you know, like, of the original cohort were it. And I want to say, and Brian is an incredible entrepreneur and arguably a better entrepreneur than I am for sure a better entrepreneur than I am for what it's worth. But I have retained all my hair. So, in almost every category, he is number one. But in that one vein category, I've still got my hair. You have amazing hair. So, no trips to Turkey yet. No trips to Turkey ever made. But what I'll say about learning to go off through that up and down is that we've survived because we stayed very focused on our customers. We're not like a grand vision. We're sort of closer to an Amazon where we try to understand what people are going to need, what companies are going to need, what institutions are going to need, what crypto projects are going to need to be part of the crypto financial system. And we build those products and we refine those products. And we are very knowledgeable about the fact that we serve our customers. And if anything, you know, most of my time these days is talking to customers. I probably talk to at least one or two institutional customers today. And I talk to retail customers every single day as well. And I think that grounding has really helped us. I think we've also been very fortunate at times. For any startup to survive a long time, you need fortune. Fortune favors the bold, but you do need the fortune. You do need some luck. And then I think I've been surrounded by a great team. I'm very blessed that our team has been very stable. We have a lot of people that have incredibly long tenure. And we've always been able to attract great people. The third factor that I think has mattered a lot has been that we have never been based in California. I think California is very difficult for people. And by California, I mean San Francisco to retain focus long-term. It's kind of like the the memes you see online about everybody pivoting from like crypto to AI, AI to something you know. Robotic stuff. Robotic stuff. I think defense is the thing now, right? I don't know. I can't keep track. I can't keep track either. But you know, we were in London saying like the team and like the people that you work with, they're trying to jump to the next latest, the greatest thing. No, I think that entrepreneurs and I think it's very difficult temptation for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley too. And in the US in particular, whereas being in London, you know, we weren't as sort of enmeshed in that whole like echo chamber. And a big example I'll give you is that a lot of the early crypto companies were wiped out by the whole distributed ledgers, not tokens movement. And this is long enough to go now. It's super easy to talk about like that happened after the first big crypto up and then you know, bear market. Everybody was like Bitcoin retarded. You know, we are going to instead focus on distributed ledgers for banks in our name was blocking. So the amount of investor pressure that we had to like go to POCs with credit suites or with UBS or with you know, whoever and become like a enterprise reseller of distributed ledger technology was immense, immense. I'm sure it's like it's interesting. You were sort of insulated in London. But also I'm assuming that the investors that you brought in, they were also not. They were not just bombarded with all these new like technological movements, however you want to call them. So they probably weren't pushing you to move quicker than you wanted to. Well, we really don't have any London investors. Well, where are your investors from? Because investors also put the point is investors put so much pressure on the CEO that if you are an SF and you get the wrong investor, they're going to push you to make decisions that you don't want to make, including exit, sell, work on the next thing. I want my money out whatever it is. So where were the investors from? Because maybe that didn't happen to you at all. But I'm just curious about how you're able to sort of incubate your idea and not sort of speed run entrepreneurship because of investor pressure. Until we started raising our growth rounds in mid 2021, the vast majority of our cap table was based in Silicon Valley. Did you have some of this pressure then? Oh, for sure. We definitely did. We had a lot of the pressure and we did one very tiny proof of concepts with an investment bank, opened an office in New York to support it. It was very clear that it was a very silly idea to me. And it came back to me. I remember going for a very long walk in Washington Square Park and just asking myself, I mean, Peter, this was the days of R3. If you remember that, the R3 consortia, Blake Masters, Dang digital asset, holding company, whatever it was called. I remember asking myself, is this the way you want to spend your time? Is this how you want to spend your life? If you're successful and you get bonds clearing on a blockchain for foreign investment banks and you make $100 million, selling the company to IBM, will you be happy? And the answer is that was no. I got into this for human economic freedom to create a free financial market that anybody anywhere in the world could interact with each other that you could interact peer to peer that we could make money as easy as WhatsApp. I didn't get into crypto to help banks clear bonds between each other. Now, I think eventually banks will clear bonds between each other on the blockchain, but they won't do it on a private ledger. They'll do it on a public ledger. And so I was completely uninterested in the private ledger, you know, blockchains for banks vertical. And yeah, we shut it down and continued course. Now, what's interesting about that to wind the whole story out is that every company that pivoted into that space that I'm aware of is no longer here today. Why do you think that is? Focus. So this is bringing you back to the point of balancing investor expectations with entrepreneurial vision. So I think that investor expectations, they kill the entrepreneurial vision because they tell them to focus on all these other things because now they have stake in the company. So for entrepreneurs that do raise what's the advice on how to manage investors when they're pushing you in one direction, you have their money, you get stressed out because you have their money because you're a human. And you know, you're going in the wrong direction, but they're not hearing it. It's a hard thing to generalize about because it's always so specific. But the things that I generally tell people are number one, you know, raising money is really not to be celebrated because you know, you basically just signed an IOU. And of course, their institutions are sophisticated. They know what they're doing out of yada. But expectation wise, you just signed an IOU right for something in the future that, you know, frankly, like when you're 26, when I raised my first venture around, I was like 26, yeah, 26, 27, 26, 27-ish, like I didn't even totally understand. But nobody does. But nobody does. Nobody does. Right. So first thing it tell people is like, whatever age you are, you're signing an IOU on a future expectation. Second thing is, you know, really like why do you raise money? Well, because it's, you know, your best source of financing. The best source of financing in the world is making money. My biggest regret at the company is that I didn't push harder on monetization earlier. You know, I think that it's all well and fine to grow your product. And we've always had great growth and been blessed with that. Until you're growing your revenue, you don't really know how useful your product is. Right. And even revenue can be confusing. Because for example, if I sell you something that cost me a dollar and I sell it to you for 90 cents, my revenue is going to grow very fast. Example of this right now is chat GBT. You know, they're losing money on every query. Right. So like, they don't really know if their product is that valuable. And I think it is really valuable. I know, but they're playing this game where they're onboarding as many users as possible at a loss. And that's how they keep increasing their valuation when they keep raising. And I understand that strategy really well. But the danger in that strategy is that you never truly know how valuable your product is or if you're building the right thing. Because you don't know if it's generating enough economic value that customers are willing to pay you more than a cost you to build it. Right. Which that's a definition of building great product is like, will you pay me a dollar 50 for something that costs me a dollar or a dollar 40, whatever you're margin is, right? So I would monetize a lot earlier. I tell every entrepreneur like, it's never too early to monetize. And the second thing is I do think it really helps to have investors where you are. So physically, physically. So when we first started raising, you know, there weren't as many great VC firms outside of Silicon Valley. Today, that's not really the case. There's great VC firms in London. You know, there's great VC firms in York, you know, some of the best in New York now, actually, Silicon Valley. I think it's a lot easier to manage your cap table when you can meet with these people in person and when you don't have to travel to each other. So I would usually if you have all the choices in the world, which you never do, I would give preference to people that you can you can spend time with on a regular basis. The third thing I'd say about managing investors is that it really helps to raise capital. And if I raised, you know, another early stage round, I would try to raise capital from the founders of firms or from people who work at VC firms that used to be founders. I don't think it matters if someone's never been the founder of a tech company. But like if you were the one that started an investment firm, your lived experience and your mindset is different from someone who, you know, was an amazing product manager at Metta and then joined, you know, A16 or whatever. A16 is a great firm. But like, I know what you're saying. Different mindset, right? If you were an entrepreneur and you joined founders fund, you are a different mindset than if you are, you know, an ex, whatever analyst, a joint of firm. They get the journey that you're on because they've been on to themselves. It's not just that they also have the experience of betting on something when no one else believed in it and succeeding. Right? Like even at the end of the day, if you raised capital from, you know, it's a pick someone that founded a firm. If you raised capital from, you know, Mark and Jason. That's because they marketed Ben Horowitz pick one. Right. Like they know what it meant to bet on something big and succeed multiple times. Yeah. When they were entrepreneurs before. Yeah. They were entrepreneurs before. They built A16. Like that is a different story and it's a different kind of person than someone who's never had that experience. I've never heard it makes so much sense. And I know a lot of people that have raised money, but I've never heard somebody bring that idea. I think it's a really smart idea. Yeah. Look, there's also the reality of life that like you won't always have a choice about who you raised or whatever. But I do think, well, so the main thought that I keep, I always hear and I agree with is that you find somebody who at least understands what you're building. Like yeah, like at the bare minimum smart money, not done money. I actually, I don't agree with that one. No, you would take you would take somebody made a ton of money in real estate. You would want them on your cap table for a blockchain company. That one's a hard one. It kind of depends on the stage of the company at the later stage, maybe. But I don't think that like look every investor at a seed or a series A stage or B because the look further you go, the bigger you get, the more like the less relevant this advice becomes is going to say that they understand your idea. And because they're successful, probably type a person, they're going to be pretty convincing that they understand your idea and that they get your vision, right? It's more to me about the style of person you are of the like lived experiences that you've had in the sense that when everything looks silly about what you're doing and you need to like the only way is to double down to go to the other side. You need someone in your corner that has been exactly there. That was like, oh, you know what? This is hard and this is expected. And so that's what I mean by the like taking money from people who have been founders and CEOs themselves is that no one else really understands what it is to be that until they've done it. Quick question. What's your go to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout? 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I want to understand what your vision was when you started it. But also we can tie it back into the raising money component. What was the vision when you started it? And then what was the sort of the idea or the thought that made you think, okay, the vision is great to this point, but I want to go poor fuel on the fire, go raise money and really blow this thing up with some growth capital. So a little bit, I don't want to spend too much time on the whole origin story because I know people know it to a degree, but a little bit on the origin story about what you want it to build. Kind of comes back to what I said at the beginning, it's like, what do people need to actually use Bitcoin? Like what products and services do they need? And of course later that became also, you know, like, you know, a thousand other cryptocurrencies. And then later it became, you know, other crypto companies, one of our biggest segments is other crypto tokens, projects, protocols, companies, probably it's our probably fastest growing signals. That was your idea going into it. No, no, that was much later. And then, and so it's like, that's what's always guided us is like, what do people need to be in the crypto space more than anything else? In terms of why we raise capital, you know, in the very beginning of crypto, there wasn't a lot of revenue. And so you could either be a very tiny crypto company like, you know, three of you, or you raise capital to be able to like, you know, invest in CapEx and what have you. And so it's a pretty simple choice. I think also I was probably less, I was probably less thoughtful about why we would raise capital. And it's like, that was just the thing you did, right? Like you, you go out and you raise and you raise the most capital you can at the highest value, but it's impossible because that was the 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, right? I think it was in later years that I became more thoughtful about why I was doing it. And I think that's kind of usually a natural evolution. You mentioned before the crypto was initially a mission, not a business. So how do you maintain that sort of ethos as you build a massive company that is a business? Yeah, and I'm reminded every day it's a business. You know, now I think of it as a business that supports a mission, right? Which is the best missions they need resources, right? And at the end of the day, like if I was trying to run a 501C charity to like bring human economic empowerment to the world, I don't think we would have gotten anywhere near where we've gotten. Like one of the coolest things we've done is put a US dollar trekking account and tens of millions of people's pockets all over the world no matter where they live. Like we've helped preside over the biggest expansion to like tier one financial services for everybody in the world in human history. Like that is something that I get huge joy out of and look other companies have been a huge part of that. We didn't do it alone, but we were a big part of an industry that said, okay, look people in Nigeria and we haven't gotten them quite to the same access as Americans, but we've gotten them huge leap forward in terms of access to high quality financial services, right? Hey, people in Buenos Aires, Argentina, you can choose now, right? You don't have to just be in that system. That's massive for people, for human economic freedom, for economic growth. And so today, I think of the company as a business that supports a mission. Well, you're true. You're actually banking people that were on bank. That was kind of the original goal to a degree, right? Now, the interesting, and I'm curious about how you view this, because the interesting idea around sort of like self-custody and banking people is that they no longer rely on financial institutions. And then you're in an industry where there's lots of fraud and then security breaches and people not understanding what it actually means to control their own money. So this macro idea, do you think crypto, do you think crypto and blockchain in general, we can talk about crypto is more applicable to like the average consumer? Do you think we've gone a good job of achieving the mission that crypto was set up to achieve or is it causing more stress and anxiety and loss than good? The answer to that question really also depends on the customer themselves. And what I mean by that is that, you know, if you come into crypto, you come in with a mindset that you want to get rich fast, you will be destroyed. I don't think that that's about crypto. I think that's about almost anything in my life where people try to get rich quick. Like at the end of the day, for every story out there about someone making a bunch of money in any industry really quickly, there are a hundred other people that try to do that and got completely wrecked. In life, as with anything, the most predictable path to success is like sustained, focused effort to do high quality things over a long period of time. And so, and this is the thing I come back to all the time. I have everybody's always asked me, what coin should I buy? What's going to be really well? Of course, look. You know, like, how do I trade crypto? And I almost universally disappoint people because they look, I have have, you know, I've seen, I've seen people trade crypto. I've seen the best funds trade crypto. I've seen myself trade crypto. And let me tell you the number one alpha strategy I can give you. It's to take a look at your checking account, decide a amount of money that's not stressful. Take that money and then divide it into six or 12 equal amounts and go out and buy the top two cryptos, top three cryptos, maybe just Bitcoin, you know, once a month for six or 12 months, and then forget about the fact that it's there, maybe for three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years, if you log in and the balance is like frightening to you because of how big it is, just start selling until you're no longer stressed about it. If you find yourself waking up in the morning wondering what your crypto portfolio is worth, there's a cell button for a reason. Now, people are usually disappointed with that answer. Because it is not, here's how you can make, you know, 25 X on your money in the next 60 days. But for people that are willing to be a long-term investor in the crypto ecosystem, and even better yet a long-term participant in the crypto ecosystem, which is sort of the next level we could talk about, I've never seen anyone that didn't make amounts of money that meaningfully improve their life for the better. I've never seen anyone participate in the crypto ecosystem that didn't meaningfully change themselves in their life for the better if they were willing to follow the slow and steady plan. I would love to understand how people become a participant, but I was actually speaking about people just take control of their own finances to a degree. That's also something that I think people do not fully understand. So when they put money, and I think that actually the need to make money is probably what prompts people, pushes people to make these stupid decisions, and they don't realize that putting money into a meme coin, if it goes to zero, it's gone. There's no way to get it back. And also, if you're not a smart custodian of your money, you don't understand the technology, and there's a hack, there's no insurance on that money. So I think that all these ideas of not gambling, not looking for quick returns, also understanding that when you have money in a wallet or whatever device uses a store of crypto, that's yours. Not only should you invest for the long term, you should use platforms that have been here for the long term. Yes. Obviously, full disclosure, I'm self-interested because I have one of the longest running ones, but we've never broken a trade or not honored a withdrawal. Coinbase has never broken a trade or not honored a withdrawal. Use one of us. Yeah. Or not. But if you don't use one of us, and it's some new intern and they blow up on you, you're like, well, that's when people get stressed out because the largest hack, I think of all time just happened, what a week ago. It did. So when somebody who is not technically savvy, and they're kind of just like an average consumer and they say $1.5 billion or a hack, well, that shakes faith in the whole ecosystem. And we have an amazing part of our product that I really believe in, which is we have one side of our product, which is like a trading and brokerage account where we have custody of your crypto. And we treat that as like a really as a synchrist hanging duty. It makes it easy to trade, easy to onboard, so on and so forth. You can link your bank account, your cards, like all that kind of normal stuff you'd expire and like you expect in like a fintech trading experience. And then in the same wallet, we also have an on-chain defi wallet where you control the key. We have no access to your funds. But of course backing up that key as you've already alluded to can be tricky for people. So we build a cloud backup, which makes backing up your key incredibly easy. Like if you will take the time to back up your key in the cloud backup, you will not lose access to that crypto. With one button, you can move all the crypto from our custody to your custody, right? You no longer have to trust us. And there's been moments in the crypto market that looked extremely high risk. And you know, like this one big hack, but you know, there was the whole post FTX, BlockFi, Gemini, like all companies were falling left and right. A huge companies, enormous companies. We sent our customers an email and we said, you know, this is how long we've been in the space. This is our board, this is our governance. We want to earn your trust every day. But if for any reason, you do not want to trust us, click this button. And a lot of people clicked the button. Really? Yeah. But what was interesting was there's one of the biggest days for withdrawals of all time, the next 72 hours. The week after that was one of the biggest weeks ever at the time for inflowback. Because if you can honor all the withdrawals and people trust you. And not only was that, people I think told their friends. Yeah. So we had synopsis, inflow. So we believe in user choice. And we believe that, you know, we should make it easy for people to be their own bake, which also make it easy for people to onboard, to buy, to trade, to have their classic FinTech experience. But at the end of the day, this comes back to what I've been saying a lot. We believe in serving our customers. When somebody who is again, not like fully entrenched in crypto, they see FTX was fraught. But bite bit was not a IT security breach. So what do you say to that person who sees these stories and it's like, well, if it's a security breach, a $1.5 billion security breach, how can I trust anyone when somebody can lose $1.5 billion? What I would say is you don't need to. It's the beautiful thing about crypto. You know, like go use an exchange, use us, whatever, buy the crypto and then move it into your own custody. What do you mean by being? You can't even, you can't trust banks either. Like, you know, but with that, what was it to start up? Mercury. Was it Mercury? No, it's not for you. It wasn't Mercury. It was Silicon Valley bank. Yeah. But I mean, even more than that signature, SUV, first republic, you know, Silvergate. Those are all top 20 US banks going bankrupt in the space of two weeks. Right. And now the federal government stepped in and made them whole. But I was a customer of two of those banks. There was a very long weekend. Why didn't know if they're going to do it? Right. And I rested pretty easy that weekend actually because, you know, I had some other monies than my own custody. What do you mean? What do you mean by being a, like a market participant or crypto participant? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to participate in crypto. And that's what's kind of one of the beautiful things about it is you don't need anybody's permission. So you could do the very obvious thing. You could go to our website blockchain.com slash careers. We have many jobs open. You could apply for a job there. You could become a participant building in the crypto ecosystem. And I think that's a great way to be part of crypto. You can contribute to open source projects and not just developers. There's also people that contribute community. So typing how to documentation. You can join the discussion. You can be someone who talks about crypto. You can become a crypto evangelist. You can go to community meetups. It's a system in which you don't need anybody's permission to get involved. And you can even go out and start your own company and put yourself through many years of massive up and down markets and eventually end up on a podcast talking about it. It almost feels like crypto feels a lot like open source because it is not all of it. What's not open source? No, I mean a company that involves community. It's great. But I mean, the companies a lot of them are centralized. They're not. They're still private companies. Sure. But even in open source, you have private companies building on top of the open source. Correct. Yes. But I feel. Yes. So you're you're right. I just feel like like the culture is very much like a kind of open source. People want to contribute. That's one of the most fun things. I know. And you don't see that in regular tech. And it's the biggest open source sector in the world. Yeah. Like if you look at all the other open source projects on GitHub and then you look at the crypto ones, you know, it's massive. For people that don't understand the difference between traditional crypto and say, DeFi. How do they how do they understand if they want to invest and they want to put money somewhere and they want to not look at it for the next 10 years? Okay, check. You've done all the right things. You have the right mindset going into it. Where does DeFi fit into this from an asset class? Obviously, there's like utility as a technology, but from an asset class, is it something people should consider at all? For sure. I mean, the number one application DeFi or decentralized finance is what I have already talked about, which is being your own bank. Right. Now, of course, decentralized finance today goes further than that. You can be a lender on a decentralized lending market. You can be a borrower on a decentralized lending market. You know, you can be a yield generation, a staker, a minor. And then, you know, frankly, 20 other things that are maybe even more complicated than I can get into. But the biggest use case of decentralized finance today and has always been cussing your own funds, being your own bank. When you think about sort of like the evolving regulatory landscape, if you're building in this space, I mean, I think regulatory frameworks have been super unclear. That's sort of been the biggest pain point that I see people speaking about online. Obviously, you build in spite of that. But do you think that we're finally getting some clarity from the government? Do you think this is going to be something that we see in this administration? You truly feel that? Because this has been going on for how you started this in 2011, 2012, whatever, 20. Has there been any regulatory clarity since 2012? We have Mika in Europe, which is pretty clear. To be frank, it's not great in some areas, but I think it'll improve over time. But we do have clarity. Asia, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, you got clarity from all those regulators long ago. US centric and ignorant of the rest of the world. The US has been a laggard, thanks to the Biden administration. But I do think that while we don't have that clarity today, what we do have is an incredibly strong commitment from the current administration to provide that clarity as quickly as possible. So I expect that we achieve clarity in the United States within the next 12 to 18 months. If you think about unclear or either unclear or overly restrictive regulation, how does that impact where you want to take the company? Does it impact you at all? Or do you just build in spite of what's happening in terms of regulatory? You do your best to future proof. You follow all the current applicable regulations and they're plenty. And you know, you try to try to work collaboratively with governments to make sure that the eventual regulation leads to the creation of a healthy market that grows. Have they called on you to sit down with them? Yeah. I've had hundreds of meetings with regulators in the last couple of years. Yeah. Is it moving in the right direction? It is. It wasn't. It was pretty tough there for about four years, but even like even since Trump, like do you have you sat down with anybody since? Yeah. I sat down with Trump. Yeah. And is it moving? It's moving. Yeah. It's moving right away. You know, I had really wonderful conversations with President Trump with his team. And I do think we're going in a really positive direction. No, that's really good to hear because again, like I'm just speaking to the layman who is. And I do think there's an expectation gap. There was kind of an expectation gap means that I think people thought Trump would be elected and like day two, we'd have the frame. Oh, yeah, because I was watching. I was I think in his for one of his first addresses, people were losing their ship because he didn't mention Bitcoin. That was like one of the first speeches he gave or like or when he was just elected, I'm pretty sure like the night he was elected, he didn't mention Bitcoin. Crypto people are are impatient and insufferable at times. I often say that you have to forgive us for our excitement and our passion. That's fine, though. That's no problem with excitement and passion, but that excitement and passion. I think the fastest we were ever going to see it is 12 months. So you know, when we when Trump was elected, it was like, yeah, I'm going to bring you as an industry clarity. We were like sick next two months. What does industry clarity mean for you? Like best possible outcome? What would you want them to say? Perfect world. I mean, a perfect world, we get a national crypto charter. So we would, you know, I think it's really hard to fit crypto into any of the existing frameworks or regimes. I think that, you know, right now, a lot of the regulatory is done at the state level. So I think federal preemption makes a lot of sense. You know, I think that the best thing for consumers, for companies, for innovation is a national crypto charter and a national crypto framework. And I mean, you've you compared crypto to like the internet in 1997 before and sort of the adoption curve of crypto. If we get a national crypto charter, do you think that that drastically accelerates adoption in the US at least? And globally and globally. So countries will follow the US. When you look at different crypto market cycles, what are some patterns that you observe for people that are just trying to understand? And this is never investment advice. When you're trying to understand crypto markets, you mentioned like sort of like a four year cycle that you regularly impacts how people, you know, engage with the business, reach out to you. Which strangely aligns to the presidential election cycle. That's ironic. And as well to the, you know, overall business, the quality cycle. Yeah. Yeah, I have a completely reliable magic indicator that tells me exactly 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 patterns? Like any market, right? Like when things don't, when things stop making sense, when everyone agrees that crypto is like in a super cycle to the stratosphere and it feels you for it and things are happening that don't make sense, then I think that's probably the top. Like I think we've seen the top in AI. You feel that? Yeah. Like I think when you had people talking about spending half a trillion dollars, building an eye infrastructure on stage together, when no one on that stage has half a trillion dollars, that was probably the top. You see what happened with deep seek and the fact that they built it out of fraction of the price. It's the fact that they say they built it supposedly. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. I agree. It's like you look at the chart of like exports of compute to Singapore and it's like, boom, you're straight to the right. You're like, I don't know if there's that much in Singapore. No, that's funny. No, but I mean, I don't think you're wrong. So I mean, you do have to sort of understand when you're at that. My advice and my advice is very uneducated advice is just probably similar to what your advice would be if everyone's talking about it. It's probably not the time to buy. And I don't, you know, when I say it, it's a tough advice, but any asset. When I say we sit at top for AI, I don't really, I should be more specific. I think we've seen the top for foundational models. Top for foundational models. And, you know, like, in no comeback and they'll be very sexy again, but I think we're going to see a blow off in foundational models. So like the foundational models, like, you know, when chat GPT builds a new model. Well, the chat GPT, the way that I see, like, chat GPT and, and, and, and through topic, they're almost like building like the foundation of model OS that everyone else can build upon. And deep seek was kind of like the, the new competitor and foundational models, right? But you have to, everybody has to remember that everything is faster now. So there was like a period of time where operating systems were really valuable, like Microsoft. Like they're very, the most valuable tech company and probably 80, 90% of that market cap was to do with Windows. Now I think, you know, Windows is probably like sub 10% of their market cap. Now they've been very well. They have a great business. So they've managed to build other things, their market cap, you know, they're only bigger than ever bigger Microsoft, right? But like to some extent, you know, no one really cares about OS. Well, this is so to draw parallel. This is what you see with Ethereum being an OS that people build on. But now you have all these other sort of OS. And I actually think that's one of the biggest ways that crypto is going to change over the next few years is that there's always been a shortage of capacity on our protocols. So every time crypto has a huge cycle, whatever change is being used the most, the fees go over 50 bucks. And some time in the next few months to cycle in, why? Because frankly, like consumers get pretty tired of like using a product where they can't get their transaction through. They have to pay a lot for it. And it fails half the time. Now we have enough high bandwidth protocols that I don't know if that's going to happen again. Which means two things. One, like we could keep growing consumer use cases is amazing. But two, it means that every protocol is probably worth less now than it was in the past. Because not a scarce resource. What was the protocol that Trump launches meme point on? Was it Salana? That was failing. And no, Salana didn't fail actually. Phantom, the app that people were using. So it wasn't the actual, okay. Because I was going to say, I thought I don't know all this. Everybody was reporting that Salana was failing. It was just phantom. You could go on and use another wallet. And you would have been totally fine. Which is interesting, right? Now the choke point is that the application layer not at the protocol layer. That is interesting. So I don't, I mean Ethereum has been around for a long time. Obviously, Salana is a new protocol. What are some other protocols that like don't have scalability issues? Almost any new protocol has far higher scalability than anything we did in the past. And Bitcoin was actually, you know, very pretty smart about this. It was a pretty controversial idea at the time. There was a whole industry so war over it. Bitcoin hasn't tried to upgrade. They haven't tried to be faster or more bandwidth, more consistent speed. They said, not like, we're going to be digital gold. We're going to make our value that we don't change. Which kind of left field. And so they're not competing in that segment at all. But, you know, Ethereum, Salana, phantom, near like we can keep going. There's a hundred of them are competing in that high capacity, high throughput, you know, very quick time to settlement space. But Ethereum is not keeping up compared to the other ones. Is it? If it depends who you ask, if you ask the Ethereum people, it's going great. Interesting. I don't know. I'm genuinely, I'm genuinely curious. Yeah, I am, I'm, and I've said this because I see it publicly like a Microsoft, as like kind of like the OG OS platform. And then I see all these other platforms sort of vying for market share, ultimately superior products. But the most used one today is Salana. Yeah. I think that the trouble for Ethereum is that they decided to go down this scaling pathway of like having a bunch of layer 2s, kind of side change. The trouble for them with that is that it means that when I log into my Ethereum wallet today, I have, you know, USDT, a stablecoin, on nine different networks. So I might have a thousand dollars of USDT in my wallet, but it's spread across nine networks. So if I need to paste for a two hundred dollar thing, I might not have it. I'd have to like move it around and it's just a really tough consumer experience. Indeed is a success story partner. Now if you're hiring, indeed is all you need. Let me give you an example. If I needed to hire a new editor for this show, I'd go to indeed and be super specific. Not just can you edit audio, I'd say I need someone who's edited a conversational podcast for at least three years gets our style and knows our software. Someone who's done this before. And here's the thing with indeed sponsor jobs. I'd get people who fit that description. I'm not digging through resumes when people who've edited one YouTube video, I'm getting actual podcast editors who know what they're doing. People who've worked on shows like ours and can prove it. That's what makes a difference. 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If you're in the B2B marketing space, you need to be listening to this. It's hosted by the team at Blent. They are a demand Gen Agency. They know what they're doing. They're also part of the HubSpot podcast network. What I love about it is they skip all the theory and they just tell you what's actually working today. So demand gen marketing content linked in ad attribution. They talk about real strategies that they are using that you can use today that are working. So if you're an entrepreneur, if you're building a business, if you're really selling anything to anyone, go search demand decoded wherever you get your podcast. Is there any path where Ethereum can potentially optimize to the point where they can now be more efficient or better user experience than Solana? Or is that something that because of the technology or the idea that sort of first birthed Ethereum is going to be very hard for them to modernize to the point where they can come up with something that will just create. It's a community problem. One of the biggest challenges for Ethereum is that because they decided to do these originally, the plan was charting, which would enable huge scale on the eth main chain and layer twos. And they haven't really gotten people to work on charting. Why not incentives? So if I'm a really clever Ethereum builder, I can go start a layer to maybe make a few hundred mill. So it sucks serving degree to 200 grand to 300 grand a year working on charting at the Ethereum foundation. What do you think happens? And then those people are big ecosystem participants and they're pushing it's all just, you know, incentives that totally makes sense. You mentioned something before. I don't know if this is what you were talking about when you said you have a relatively controversial opinion about something. Is it that incentives? Yeah. I think the incentives in Ethereum are misaligned now. And it's very hard solving technology problems is not that bad. Solving incentive misalignment to human problem. Particularly when no one's boss. I want to talk a little bit more about just some ideas that you've learned over your journey. People that are a little bit less technical and less focused on crypto, but more just interested in like the size and the scale of the business that you built. But before we go back to that, what are some other things that I don't know enough to ask you about about crypto that you think is useful for the audience to know? Somebody who's been in this space for so long spoke about custody about different platforms, regulatory. I've talked a lot about quality, like being dedicated to high quality things for long periods of time in life. But in crypto, it's even more important because it keeps you out of trouble. So for example, I don't really trust any crypto company until they've been through at least one down and one up. And that doesn't mean that just because you've done it down and up, you're scot free, there's no more stress. It's easy. But it tells me a lot about how the company is going to manage it, their culture, the way they think about risk, the way they think about greed, the way they think about taking care of their customers. So I don't really ever have an opinion about a company until it's gone through one up, one down, or about a protocol until it's gone through one up, one down. I'll give you two examples from the last cycle. I got to ask a lot what my opinion of FTX was. And I had said for a long time, I had no opinion because I haven't seen them go through it down. And then towards the end, I got very worried about them and said that I didn't trust them. But even very early on, I was like, I don't won't know until I see them go through the other side. You know, like you can be the greatest offense in the world. But if your defense is terrible, you're gonna have problems. So a flip side of that that's a little bit more of a positive story is Salana. Salana, huge game in your last cycle, a lot of heat, a lot of action, never gotten involved. Because they were doing, you know, there's like a lot of things going on there where we're like inside games, short-term games. You saw them playing short-term games. I did. Yeah, that's that's a signal of a problem. Yeah, it is. Post FTX blowout because they were very closely affiliated with FTX. I loved the way the founders stood up, owned it, said never again, doubled down on their core value proposition, doubled down on quality. And even though it was the most depressed crypto in the industry at that time, it went down the furthest. I was like, does coming back. These guys are going to do something great. They could have gone in two directions. They saw what happened to FTX. They're closely affiliated. They're at an all-time low. And they chose to sort of take the high road. They chose stop playing these short-term games. Not just to take a high road, but to take a much higher road than they'd been taking. Right. Like, well, they're probably scarred shitless, too. I don't know. Things got hard. And they decided, you know what? The way out of this is to do things better. Not to look for a short-term exit, or a short-term way of rebounding. No, we're going to go back to them as we're going to be slowly. We're going to go up. That's a life less than them. Huge amount of respect for that. And like, I've, you know, tracked closely and used and been involved in the salon ecosystem ever since. And I'm assuming this is sort of the litmus test that you put new projects through before you associate with them at all. Yeah. What is the what is the signal that you do want outside of going through a down cycle or, you know, when the market's shitting the bed and you see their behaviors through those worst times? Is there any sort of other due diligence? I know significant amount of due diligence, but any other sort of signals you look for that you're like, this is a project that I actually like to work with without naming projects because then I get in trouble. And this applies to everything. This applies to, you know, I invested in a food and beverage thing recently. So this applies to food and beverage and it applies to crypto protocols. And I love it when an entrepreneur and a team knows who their customers are. You've mentioned this. Yeah. Because many times they have more than one set of customers, right? I love it when they talk to me about what they're going to do for their customers rather than like how much money we're all going to make. Because I've learned that like the most reliable way to do well in an investment is to drive value for those people, right? So when when someone comes down to me and like if a carwash operator came to me and was like, dude, like I figured out a way to make getting your car washed painless in Miami, I'd be like, dope, tell me more. You know, and if I sat down with someone who was like, I figured out a way to make a million bucks a week on a car wash idea, I'd be like, man, I won't talk about that. No, but the thing is the million is a lagging indicator, the figuring out your customer, that avatar, like so specifically in how they live and breathe and everything they do in a day and how you're going to solve that, that's the leading indicator for success. Correct. That is that is universal. That is across any kind of business. So I'm always thinking about that and trying to anchor myself to that. I'm not always succeed, you know, but like yeah, I'll tell you one funny story about crypto and then we should talk about other stuff, but yeah, it's something called me the day and they're really mad because they bought into like one of these fake Kanye coins. The fake Kanye coins, the real Trump coins all of it. They're like, I'm like, what's my name? I'm peep peep done with crypto like my mind's coin and it like goes up and then it like I can't sell it and then it like goes down and I lost my money. I'm like, okay, hold on. Like you knowingly, willingly, we're trying to buy a coin before the creator of the coin, who is also maybe having a lot of mental health issues and maybe you don't want to be supporting some of the things that individual is saying, brilliant artists, but like, you know, it's definitely lost his way. You know, lost his way. You really want to make money with that guy? You want to be business partners with him right now? Then maybe not. You and then you would, like you buy something before it's even verified and then like what, what, this is crypto's fault. This is you problem. It's a default. Yeah. Did you see that tweet that he put out about somebody offering him like tons of money to to show like a fraud project? No, I don't I don't follow a lot of that stuff to be honest. You was saying that celebrities are like paid money. Oh, I know that. Saying that yeah, yeah, celebrities that will be paid just to like tweet it. They have nothing to do with it other than making the fur paid tweet. Yeah, that's scary because those celebrities have trust. I mean, I think that now celebrities are whizing up to maybe not exploit their audience in their fan base for a quick buck. Hopefully you've said that most founders should go to therapy. Why is that? I think that there's a lot of focus around founders getting executive coaches. I think very similar to investors, the best executive coaches would actually be former founders and formerly successful founders. Therefore, they have no desire in being your executive coach. They might want to be your mentor. Like I've talked about Justin. He's had a big impact on my life. But like, you know, someone who hasn't done it is hard. It's very hard for them to give you great advice. You know, it's like a lot of bad coach. Yeah, it's just hard. I agree with it because if somebody had a hundred million dollar, five hundred million dollar exit, are they really selling their time to be an executive coach? I mean, even if you even if you made 20 million bucks, like it's not worth it at that point, right? So I think they just want to give back and those are the best people because they care the list. They don't care if you keep calling them. They don't care how many hours they bill you. And for the most part, I would say that any founder that tries hard to find a mentor that's doing cool shit, you will find what. Yeah. Like, you know, you will because you're going to find somebody who hadn't made it. Who's bored? Who? Who? Not even somebody who's bored. Like I'm into people and I still have at least one job. So, you know, like if you're a founder and you can't find and you need a mentor because you've kind of gotten somewhere, you don't need a mentor before you've gotten anywhere. When you start to get somewhere, you need a mentor and you can't get one. That's a not a good indicator on your ability to continue this pathway to say the least. I agree with that. But why therapy? Oh, good. So, that person can tell you how to handle a lot of situations at work. Yeah. Because they've been there. They've done that. They've made a lot of mistakes and you can maybe make fewer of them. You don't really become a founder of a tech startup or a crypto startup without probably having some underlying mental issue. Because it's kind of a crazy value proposition. And if you do like a blacksholes model or a Monte Carlo on like your expected value of every year you work in this from a liquidity perspective, liquidity expected, it's not even a good idea. Like financially doing a startup is even, I mean, it's just not a good idea. The Monte Carlo is terrible. So you have to do it because you love it because you want to do it for some other reason. And you know, I've yet to meet any entrepreneur who started out in this game incredibly well-balanced. And I've met even fewer that do it for a long time and are incredibly well-balanced and healthy. I think most entrepreneurs like, you know, have crippling levels of insecurity or anxiety. Right. I think we all come into this with a lot to prove and that chip on our shoulder comes from somewhere. And what I'm completely confident in is in this kind of calls back to our earlier conversation is that no amount of success in the startup game will help you find peace with that. But that's what everyone's looking for. And you will be your best as an entrepreneur and as a CEO and as a leader in my view, when you begin to understand where that chip on your shoulder comes from and when you begin to make peace with it. And it's not that you will ever not have it. You know, like, years of therapy later, you know, I think if you go talk to my team, 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. I'm still in there building. I'm still in there in the jam room. I don't need to be anymore. Why? Because I love it. But like, where does all that come from? You know, and so like making peace with that will make you a better leader. It'll make you a better manager. It will also enable you to enjoy the process and the journey. Very good advice. Because I do believe that most entrepreneurs are some form of neurodivergent. Yeah, I have not met one yet that isn't. I mean, neurodivergent, yes, mostly, like we all have some kind of neurodivergence for the most part. But that's separate from like having these like complexes, right? And these like, it's like, you know, the classic way of saying is like, oh, man, he has a big chip on his shoulder. Yeah. But where does that chip come from? And I think understanding that chip allows you to understand how it's driving you. And then you can begin to learn how to use it as like fuel rather than use it using you. Have you thought about where your chip comes from? Of course. I'm saying you used to give out where that chip's come from. You know, and I'll say something really cheesy, but I think it's one of the things that I've I've really learned a lot from meditating on and thinking about is like, you know, success and happiness in life don't come from, and I'm paraphrasing, they don't come from mastering the universe. They come from mastering yourself. And I think that one of the real things that's most dangerous about being in the startup game as a founder is that you're so busy and you have so much stimulus that it's very easy to ignore your own voice who you are and figuring out how to do it the way that feels most authentic to you. Because the way that I lead my company is going to be very different from the way that another person leads their company. I've I've also felt sometimes that and I don't it's not I don't think it's definitely not healthy. But like your lack of self love or your lack of ability to look and see how you want to operate. I know in the past and sometimes I still do I lean on that as a superpower because I'm like, I can just ignore my emotions. I can just head down blinders on and get the shit done and I can work harder than anyone else. And I can still work smart and I can still work on the things that matter and move the needle. But my lack of self love and care at times has progressed my business, which is not healthy. And I think that there has to be a limit on that. I do believe that seasons exist for a reason. Yeah, there it's awareness. It's like, you know, it's like this is coming back to the journey. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like, so I want to really love because it's funny. It's like, do you want to be a mule or a lion? You know, like a mule is like meant to plot all day from 20, you know, 20 hours a day a mule plot. You know, a lion gets up like every three or four days and like runs real fast and kills something. You know, I think mules are great too. But you know, it's a different life. And you can't run at a full sprint forever. No one can. It's the funny thing that we all learn. So it's like, you know, if you want to be always in motion, then you've got to slow down or you can do sprints and then you can rest, which, you know, nobody's capable of sprinting in all the time. No, something will blow up. Usually it's your own health. Yeah, your own physical or mental health. Your body has a real good way of stopping you. It does. It's a real good way. You mentioned that like, you know, success is in the journey. But just to go a level deeper, how is your own definition of success sort of changed in the past 10, 15 years? I think having one is the biggest difference. Um, I think that I personally never had a real notion of what's assessment. I wasn't someone that necessary like wanted to do a startup, one to be venture backed, wanted to, you know, bubble bubble block kind of happen more organically for me. And even once I was already fully on the train, I never thought about what is success look like. It's success, you know, getting to profitability is success, getting to 100 million in revenue, 500 million in revenue is it, is it going public? Is it, is it being one of the 20 most valuable companies on the stock market? Is it being the first company that issues its equity on a token? I never, I never had a notion of what success was. You know, is it, is it generating, you know, a lot of shareholder value, like what is success for me? I didn't, I sort of like had a notion of what success was, but it was just sort of like whatever classic success indicators look like. You know, is success for you owning the biggest private jet? Maybe, you know, maybe, that's a perfectly fine thing. Or maybe it's escaping with your family. That's not, it's not for me, but like retiring and yeah, it's like I have a friend where like, you know, his next big goal is like he wants certain 737? I don't know, I don't even know, but like, that's fine. As long as you know what that is and that's authentic to you, right? I think for a long time, I had no sense of what that was. What is it now? I think success for me is finding joy in the process and the journey more days than not and really getting to experience my love of building. Like success for me on a day to day basis is like how much of my time do I spend building and generating value for people and clients versus like whatever other stuff is going on? It's a very healthy definition of success. Yeah, and you know, I got some financial goals as well. I financial goals every year. Of course. Those have brought me like financial security, but they were brought me like happiness. I think that the first version of success again is the leading indicator of the financial success. If you enjoy most days, I think you just naturally progress closer to mastery and the mastery equates to financial freedom. And I do tell and I probably should probably be remiss to not say that's like financial security, you know, when you're if you haven't achieved financial security by the time you're in your early 30s, that should be your number one goal. And I kind of define that as like, you know, do you have three years of cash on hand? If you have three years of cash on hand and you don't have to worry about how much a restaurant costs, like nothing after that really changes your life that much. True. Right. And so if you're not there, like that's a great goal to get to. Right. But after that, I think other things have always been more meaningful to me. What was the what was the most difficult darkest moment in building blockchain.com? Do you want to talk about publicly at least? And how did you get through it? Yeah, it was very it was early. It was years ago. And we think I've been through many hard chapters. But there was a moment in time in our early era where I had a major health issue. And I needed surgery. There was a significant chance of mortality with the operation. And, you know, reconciling myself to the fact that like, that may be it when we hadn't really gotten that far. It was really difficult for me. And then afterwards, the fact that we frankly didn't make a lot of progress because at the time we were family sized, not corporation sized. Yeah, I think without me being able to drive the energy forward, we slowed down a lot. And also, I think people were very naturally worried about me, which slowed them down a lot. And so I put a lot of guilt on myself about that. You know, that even like I hadn't done anything to the health problem was, you know, it was, whatever it is when you're born with it. Genetic. Yeah, it was genetic and came to awareness later in life. And I'm very healthy now. And it's a wonderful story of modern medicine. But I really did struggle to move on from the fact that I felt like I had let everyone down. Even though you were the one who is almost dying. Uncontrollable health issue. Right. That is the neurodivergence or some complex showing. Yeah. Because that is not the way anybody should think about health issues. Yeah, when I still felt that way quite some time later, that's when I decided I needed a therapist. So, and that was, you know, it took a long time to find the right therapy and the right systems, the right way of thinking about it. So it's not like it was like a, you know, a light switch that you flip on in your, and you have a healthier way of looking at the world. But that was a very hard moment for me because that's a regret-based thing, right? Like I don't know, like where would the business be today if that hadn't happened? But this is what I mean by the fact that like there's so little control you have over this. Another example that I'll give of what became a very hard moment for us was the market crash, you know, which sort of started with Russian invading Ukraine. We had a huge financing that was going to close. It was going to be one of those sort of pre-IPO financing where like old investors sell, new investors buy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Was this the, because when I was reading, it said there was at one point you were valued at 14 billion. Was that that was that one? Yeah. And it ended up, you know, a lot of investors dropped out of that round. You know, because, and all the people who were assigned in the long form and everything, they're just like, well, like Russian invaded, like, you know, Suez. You can't control that. But you can't see it right in. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know when, you know, like you can spend your whole life building something be a week from the IPO and like nuclear war starts, which I really hope we don't have any good war. But if a nuclear war started like, dude, like fuck your IPO, like, you know, that was it. Yeah. You know, and so it's just like the theme that you're reminded of again and again in life is that is that you don't have as much control as you think you do. And I think, you know, to come back to one of your earlier questions that chip in my shoulder was that I wanted to have agency, right? I wanted to be empowered. I wanted to feel like I had the freedom to make the decisions. But you have to have, you do have to have agency. You have to have extreme ownership that internal locus of control or you're never going to do anything. Like you do have to have that. You do. But there's a duality. There's a duality that I took me years to understand, which is that that drive to have that is a huge part of what enabled me to have whatever success I've had. At the same time, the constant struggle for it and the demand for it was like probably the single greatest driver of my unhappiness or my inability to enjoy, you know, the blessings and joy that I can experience in life, right? It's like being worried about what happens next because I can't totally control what happens next. You know, even in a life that I have where I have far more control of my average of my everyday life than most people or my career or whatever you want to call it, I have no control over many, many things that are going to impact that and worrying about that all the time and trying to like bring order to that supposed chaos, you know, will generate incredible stress in your life. How much of yourself worth is wrapped up into your company? Probably in all time low. That's good. But still extremely high. That's good though. That's healthy. Yeah. Context matters. It's still very high, but it's at an all time low on the trend. What would be the biggest misconception about your story, blockchain.com success that you sort of want to correct set the record straight? That all that much of it had to do with anyone person. Success has many, many, many fathers and mothers and grandparents and whatever. It takes a whole community to build something, right? And and somebody ends up being the face and the CEO of it and what have you. And I think I've had a big partner. But the right team had to come together. The customers had to choose us. You know, the universe had to smile at us, you know, with the right fortune and and and luck at times. And frankly, like, you know, there's probably a hundred or other like we're probably like if you ran a hundred simulations, there's probably like three where it all worked, right? And so when you realize that, you realize like, hmm, you may have had a big partner, but it didn't come down to exclusively you. And so for, you know, one thing is like I've done way less, you know, press or conventional press, you know, since realizing that and I've and because I want to celebrate the team, I want to celebrate the company. But like in the context of this podcast, like you can't sit down and interview, you know, 400 people. And so somebody does have to let's read minutes tried, let's read men has tried. But 400 people from one company could get very boring. And so, you know, I try to be the best representative for the team and the collective and our customers and all the people that made us what we are today as possible. But any one person has less to do with it all than I think. I hate the idea of self made. It doesn't in my mind exist. It just never exists. And just the shift of focus from like, this is what I built to this is what we've built. I mean, I gravitate towards the latter and those types of entrepreneurs all the time. I cannot stand the self made bullshit. There used to be this podcast called um, how I built it. Well, there's still a series of guys. And it used to be one of my biggest goals to go on a podcast. You should do it. I won't do it. You should do it. It's a good show. I don't like to title. How I built this. I think it's a wrong attitude. How we built this? A wrong mindset. Yeah. It's like no one person builds anything. And I get that that's not the point of the podcast or whatever. But I think it's like, I want to steer away from perpetuating a lot of these myths that place everything, all the pressure, all the expectations, blah, blah, all the glory onto one person. Because it's not how the world works. I agree. Well, technically, there is a lot of pressure on you. But I would say I would say that I would say that a good founder understands that they can this, they can sort of they can take on all the pressure and the stress. But then all the wins are not their own. All the wins are the teams. I think that's a healthy way to look at it. Because if you're saying that all the negative is everyone else's fault, then you're just deflecting. I get some, it's oversimplifying. It's oversimplifying. I think, yeah. I think the whole team owns the wins and the whole team owns the problems. You also don't want to be putting that kind of like as a leader, entrepreneur, whatever you are. I don't think you want to put yourself in the position where like all failure is yours. All success is a team. Which is like one is a management maximum, right? Like we, you know, like everything, everything we're doing wrong is ultimately my responsibility to CEO everything that we do that's right is like the team's win. Like that's sort of a shitty deal. You as a human being. It is a shitty deal. But so perfect scenario. I think the team wants to share the wins and the losses. But that particular idea I think is better than I'm responsible for all the wins and everyone else's. For sure. That was like completely not acceptable. 100%. I think if you have a team that doesn't want to share the wins and the losses, you need new team. How do you find people like that? Because I mean like even speaking about the community that you attract and sort of like the open source culture component, you probably attract people that are like crypto blockchain. Honestly, it's one of the best parts about building a company that reaches scale is you can hire really good people. And people ask me a lot of times they're like, oh, would you ever retire and do it again? I'm like, woof. I don't know. Like zero to one is very hard. Like, you know, we can hire amazing people now. Nice. And if you come back to like where do I find joy? I find joy in building. It's a lot more fun to build with these people. Of course it is. 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 them? I mean, it's like anything else in life. Very carefully. What would be the highest? I mean, you mentioned your health, which is a pretty damn high personal price. But outside of your health, what would be the highest personal price that you've paid for commitment to your vision, to your business? I left, I probably left a lot of money on the table. You know, like I think the best way to make money in crypto probably was to run a fund. Right. And I kind of, I've known that for a long time. And I, you know, at any point in time, good of like retired from here and started a fund. But I don't think it would have been as fun. Or as rewarding or as satisfying. And so maybe, maybe that, but I don't know, like, I think that ties back to your, your, your North Star. And again, you have, you have a beautiful North Star, which I think is actually allowed you to be successful. I think that a fund, yes, it can provide, it's not just a pure extraction of value. You do provide a ton of value, but in a very different way. Yeah, so that could be one answer. I think probably a harder truth is that it took me a long time to learn how to balance having a personal life with being the CEO of this company. You know, maybe the biggest thing or biggest regret I have is not learning how to have a healthy personal life while being the CEO of Blockchain.com. And that, of course, that has come in the form of friendships, you know, where I like ignored friendships for a very long time, which is not a way to have a healthy, meaningful life, also in romantic relationships. You know, as an entrepreneur, you are under incredible stress when you're playing at that level of the game. I have so much admiration for you able to play at even higher levels of the game, the balanced relationships. And to do that while maintaining a healthy relationship, you know, is something that definitely did not know how to do for a very long time. And you know, arguably still don't know how to do. Right. And so I think that that, that is always where those sacrifices will be the biggest. Right. Is that you live a very unique, very high-pressure life. And that is really hard to make your personal life work with. It was that I think that there's seasons for everything. I think that this is a journey, to learning journey to it. Like you do have seasons where things won't be balanced. But I think the whole point for all entrepreneurs is to use that season to get the thing from zero to one. And then understand when it's time to not abandon hard work, but to move into a season that is slightly more balanced. Yeah. And I think this is one reason, you know, to circle it all the way back to the beginning, that I'm really happy that I started early. Yeah. Because I'm 10, 11 years in now. And you know, I'm still 35. So like there's a lot of time left on the clock. Yeah. And I think that's a good thing. If you look 20 years into the future, what impact do you want your work to have? I think there's the like industry as a whole in our customers and there's sort of like legacy with the company. On the first one, I think that I want to leave behind the impact of like having fundamentally helps drive human economic freedom in the world. And I think to some extent, we've begun to do that. And I'm really excited about like talking about giving people the right to opt out of their financial system, giving people the choice to interact with people anywhere in the world economically. That is super powerful and super meaningful to me. So that's the legacy from sort of like a 100, you know, 100 of you I don't want to leave. When I think about the company, the legacy that I want to leave is a company that is really, really well run. And without me still cares deeply about its customers. And deeply about each other. Right. I don't need to leave behind the world's most valuable company. Now, I think Amazon has been a very interesting example. And they're not the world's most valuable company. But of a company that, you know, you've never heard Jeff talk about wanting to leave behind a trillion dollar company. Or wanting to be number one. You, whenever he's spoken about this or in his letters, he talks about the legacy he wants to leave behind is a company that cares deeply about its customers. And a company that cares about its team. And the byproduct of that is this phenomenal company, arguably the world's greatest company to be built in the last 20 years because they have no natural edge. They don't pump oil out of the ground. You know, they have no monoline revenue product. Like Amazon never discovered a magic money tree. Facebook, Google, Apple, at some point they all discovered some magical money tree and then built an amazing company around it. Amazon, you know, Microsoft's same story, Amazon never had a magical money tree and was always doubted because of it. Right. And that whole time that guy was out there saying like, no, our secret sauce is that we're going to build a company that cares about its customers and keeps building out across the whole internet. We're going to build everything people need to use the internet. And like their first use case is like selling books, which is kind of funny. It is. It's wild. Right. That's the kind of thing where I'm like, wow, if I could leave behind like something that even on a smaller scale looks like that, that would make me really happy. Have you thought about how do we actually achieve that and exit out and find the right? Is this something that's in your mind right now? No, no. I think a lot about how do I encourage the culture of that? But in terms of like, have I started thinking about, you know, filing for unemployment or finding a new job and I'm a long way out. Not quite yet. I still got a lot left in the gas thing. Amazing. What would be one thing that you understand now about either crypto or leadership or entrepreneurship that you wish you knew in the beginning? And I know there's 10 million of them. The most practical advice that I can give anyone is to write things down. That's good advice. Oh my god. Like playbooks, you know, playbook for everything. Anything that you do more than once, write a playbook. You know, come into work in the morning, write down three things that you want to get done today. So simple. Hire someone, write down your thesis for why you hired them. You absolutely cannot keep track of all this and no one else can either. So like write, write down, document, write, document. And it's so easy now with the LLMs. It is very easy now at LLMs. It takes a quarter of the time. Yeah. Do it. If you could tell out of all the different lessons that you've learned, first of all, where can people connect with you? Where do you want to send people? A social website. I mean, blockchain.com is. Yeah. So my Twitter is one more Peter, all words, which I find entertaining. And then my email is just Peter at blockchain.com. And I read all of them. You read everything? You then box zero every day? Do you get all the way through there routinely? If you could tell you 20 year old self, one thing, what would that thing be? I would tell my 20 year old self that life is going to be far stranger, far more beautiful, and far more fun than you expect.