Sam Bankman-Fried: prediction

Transcript context

…Sam, isn't it almost exactly around the same time as you guys announced your seed round that Arthur Hayes, CEO of Bitmex, which is I think the biggest player at that point is getting into real trouble with the CFTC. So if there's ever a sign that there is an opening here, it really seems to all be happening in mid to early July of 2019. Yeah. I think some of this was coming from the perspective of, oh, wow, coincidentally, a lot of good things happened for us. Who would have thought? I think some of it is also a lot of hypotheses about ways that product differentiation would happen in the exchange space started playing out. Look, this is a big problem that some people have. We think it is going to get worse over time. It started happening. An important backdrop for this, how high of a standard do we need to hold ourselves to? The answer is incredibly high because we're coming from behind. We don't have a user base. We don't have a brand name. We're coming from a perspective of everyone knows our competitors and no one knows us. Just being about as good is just not worth anything. It's just like, whatever, okay, you're about as good as the other people. That's not going to cause someone to change what they're using. Sam, what were the things you were really intentional about as you realized, okay, we're going to build a company, an enduring institution here, an operating company with FTX? Because it seems like the crew that you got together for Alameda, it was like, there's this crazy opportunity, we have to exploit it, go, go go. We'll probably exploit more opportunities in the future. But now suddenly, you're realizing you're building a company that's going to become a key piece of infrastructure in this next paradigm. What did you have to be super intentional about?…

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