Sam Bankman-Fried: belief

Transcript context

…Going back to the story here a little bit. I've got a list in front of me that I pulled out from PitchBook of the original investors in FTX. This is a nutso list. I mean, Blackrock, IVP, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Race Capital, Binance. There are 30 firms and it's like the who's who. So your fundraise, once you decide, oh, we're starting a company called FTX and it's an exchange for crypto derivative products. This seems to go very well, very quickly, as opposed to Alameda, which seemed like kind of a grind to get off the ground. Why is that? I think there are a lot of things that went into it. I think, eventually, a story that convinced them was that FTX would be exciting and convinced a lot of people. It just passed diligence. The more diligence you did on it, the more it seems like, oh, that kind of checks out or like, look, the existing exchanges have serious issues, and people looking to like, yeah, okay. We've talked to a lot of people who use them who agree. I think we have compelling reasons to be able to do better. I think that there's maybe a more general thing going on here. It's not that they messed up a few specific things, but were great otherwise. They’re indicative of execution ability. I think some [...] just made a lot of money and peaced out. They're like, yeah, we're not going to, why would you try hard now? I think the other things were that it's a much more legible company. When you talk about recurring revenue. There sort of doesn't exist a clearer example of that than we have volume each day and we charge a transaction fee on it. It's incredibly clean. People like, is this revenue real? Yeah, it's all public. Versus the story of, hey, this arbitrage opportunity exists, we're going to keep doing it, and it may or may not be there tomorrow. If it's not, we'll find others.…

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