Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
45 published records
01 / belief
“I think I tend to find some things more credible than other people do sometimes and tend to believe a little bit more.”
02 / uncertainty
“I didn't really know who they were. I don't know if the blockchain does it. I really didn't know what crypto was when I first jumped in.”
03 / belief
“I think that's something that we think is important that we continue to move in that direction over time.”
04 / belief
“I think that in the end, our sense of this is this isn't, you can choose to be compliant or you can choose to be functional, and you have to choose which company you're launching.”
05 / belief
“A lot of this is something that you have to figure out over time. But I think a lot of this is like, you put someone in an uncertain messy situation where there's no obvious right answer.”
06 / belief
“The scale of it, in theory, if one had infinite capital, one could have made 10% on a few $100 million a day, maybe. I think $20 million was the size of this trade.”
07 / belief
“Of course, at this point in time, I think the whole idea of a DEX, of a decentralized exchange didn't even exist yet.”
08 / belief
“Especially maybe coming into the US market as a late mover, I think, you guys have been incredibly savvy about building that trust by aligning yourselves with entities that are part of people's lives in really meaningful ways, and that they have long-standing emotional connections too.”
09 / belief
“I do think we're still trying to do that. But I agree that there's some extent to which you can get liquidity moats, customer moats, regulatory moats, and whatever.”
10 / belief
“Whereas, I think you guys have really managed to thread the needle by saying, we're going to innovate, we're going to push new products forward, but we're also here to push the regulatory side of things forward as well.”
11 / uncertainty
“If you asked me what is a Bitcoin, I would not have been able to give you an answer other than a thing that trades on some exchanges and decentralization. I don't know.”
12 / belief
“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.”
13 / belief
“I think that I was a little too skeptical of the US opportunities when we first started.”
14 / belief
“The answer is that there actually weren't a lot of other players in this value chain. That's one of the bigger differences between what we see in crypto and I think what we see in most financial ecosystems.”
15 / belief
“I think, eventually, a story that convinced them was that FTX would be exciting and convinced a lot of people.”
16 / belief
“At least long-term, we really want to try hard not to cut off avenues that we think are going to be valuable.”
17 / uncertainty
“Can you walk through that assumption? I don't know if you realize you made an assumption there.”
18 / belief
“I think we're basically still making this up as we go, and that it's probably going to be a while before people feel like, all right, we now understand all the implications that that ended up having for society.”
19 / commitment
“We will come back to some of this in our analysis section, but just to finish out the growth of the company and bring us to today, now, one of the ways that you're acquiring customers is by owning naming rights to arenas, patches on major league baseball umpires, and celebrity commercials.”
20 / belief
“I think that part of that is you look at the breadth and to some extent, frankly, randomness, of the type of things that we've tried to do.”
21 / belief
“Obviously not every company fits this, but mostly, I think has, over the past 10, 15 years been hiring for experience.”
22 / belief
“You guys have led the way in this space for a long time and I think made it a lot easier for folks like me and Packy to get to jump in and be a part of the movement in a little way.”
23 / belief
“I think thinking about did we ever succeed at getting retail users at penetrating that market is going to be one of the things that I think we're going to grade ourselves on, which I think I'm cautiously optimistic about, but we haven't proven that.”
24 / belief
“I more feel like it probably is. I think that's the right prior to have about it.”
25 / uncertainty
“Just bumming around the Bay Area and seeing what happened was one of them. Trying to find some startups, I don't know what was one of them.”
26 / belief
“I believe that. Welcome to season 9, episode 7 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.”
27 / belief
“I think one of the things you do really well, both internally, it sounds like, but also externally, is give people all the context they need so that they can actually hopefully make sense from the data, and then you can decide whether to agree with it internally or how to communicate with it externally.”
28 / uncertainty
“I think maybe another consequence of that or I don't know what flows from what exactly, but maybe a related statement is that I don't think of us as we've built the hard thing and now we’re coasting.”
29 / belief
“In the research, I found that they grew an astonishing 10x by volume in the year 2020.”
30 / belief
“Mario, I think we want to make sure that we say this and cover you as well that you may have interests in things discussed, and do your own research.”
31 / belief
“I think often people get flustered and end up doing nothing close to the best they can because they're just like, oh, geez, I don't even know what to do here.”
32 / belief
“Again, this isn't meant to be precise. Back then, daily trading volume was only a few billion dollars, I think.”
33 / belief
“I think that you're seeing a lot of parallel worlds being spun off because you can split into different social media, for better or for worse.”
34 / uncertainty
“One percent, I don't know that I'd ever done a trade good by 1% before in my life on anything.”
35 / belief
“I think a lot of FTX's success to date is because you guys have executed flawlessly, very rapidly, as Mario puts it, speedrunning the market in his piece when there's just a massively growing pie and huge amounts of opportunity opening up.”
36 / preference
“I'd love it if we take it to an S&P 500 graph for a moment. News cycles are faster because they're tweet cycles, not editorial cycles.”
37 / prediction
“I think that having a built-in example of like, we are quite confident that this is going to be a product with demand because we've wanted this product for a while.”
38 / evaluation
“There's eventually a lot of things that ended up becoming pretty relevant here. But I think the most legible thing and the most egregious thing at the time was this 83% of profits thing where it's just like, okay, that will change, that has to change.”
39 / evaluation
“In the end, most of our initial growth came from power users, the people who are spending hours a day in the ecosystem, and would try out every new exchange that came, and use the ones that they liked the most, that was the best fit.”
40 / commitment
“We started by not servicing Americans because it just had a really long regulatory regime.”
41 / prediction
“The biggest thing that we're anticipating is the launch of derivatives hopefully sometime in the next year that we think could really bring a lot that's been missing to the market.”
42 / prediction
“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.”
43 / evaluation
“It's a variable cost and it just decreases your revenue, whatever, but it's basically near zero. So we felt like we've been using these products, we understand it, it's a big business, but okay, fine, whatever.”
44 / prediction
“Make 2% on that. I think that's like $200,000. That's an estimate for how much money, maybe, you could make per day doing arbitrage.”
45 / prediction
“I can't tell you what that is now because the world might change, which is, honestly sometimes how we think about things, that the world does change and you have to adapt.”