Kevin Weil: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay, final question. This is going to go in a completely different direction. A lot of people asked about this. So famously, you led this project at Facebook called Libra, which is now called Novi. A lot of people always wondered, "What happened there? That was a really cool idea." I know some people have a sense there's regulation challenges, things like that. I don't know if you've talked about this much. So I guess, could you just give people a brief summary of just what is Libra? This project you working on, and just what happened, and how you feel about it? Yeah. I mean, David Marcus led it, and I happily work for him and with him. I think he's a visionary and also a mentor and a friend. Honestly, Libra is probably the biggest disappointment of my career. When I think about the problems we were solving, which are very real problems. If you look at, for example, the remittance space, people sending money to family members in other countries, it is maybe... I mean it's incredibly regressive, right? People that don't have the money to spend are having to pay 20% to send money home to their family. So outrageous fees, it takes multiple days, you have to go then pick up cash from... It's all bad. And here we are with 3 billion people using WhatsApp all over the world, talking to each other every day, especially friends and family, and exactly the kind of people who'd send money to each other. Why can't you send money as immediately, as cheaply, as simply as you send a text message? It is one of those things when you sit back and think about it, that should just exist. And that was what we set out to try and do. Now, I don't think we played all of our cards perfectly. If I could go back and do things, there are a bunch of things I would do differently. We tried to get it all at once. We tried to launch a new blockchain. It was a basket of currencies originally. It was integration into WhatsApp and Messenger, and I think the whole world kind of went like, "Oh my God, that's a lot of change at once." And it happened also to be at the time that Facebook was at the absolute nadir of its reputation. And so that didn't help. It was also not the Messenger that people wanted for this kind of change. We knew all that going in, but we went for it. I think there are a bunch of ways that we could do that that would've introduced the change a little bit more gently, maybe still gotten to that same outcome, but fewer new things at once and introduced the new things one at a time. Who knows? Those were decisions we made together. So we all own them. Certainly, I own them. But it fundamentally disappoints me that this doesn't exist in the world today because the world would be a better place if we'd been able to ship that product. I would be able to send you 50 cents in WhatsApp for free. It would settle instantly. Everybody would have a balance in their WhatsApp account. We'd be transact... I mean, it should exist. I don't know. To be honest, the current administration is super friendly to crypto. Facebook's reputation, Meta's reputation is in a very different place. Maybe they should go build it now. I was looking at the history of it, and apparently, they sold the tech to some private equity company for 200 million bucks.…

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