Binance

“When I joined the Ben Reeves said, look, we have no company. We have no office. Everyone works remotely. We just pay everybody in Bitcoin. And so that's something I learned from that company. And I still look, that's still very heavily used in Binance today.”

“Probably less than that, but it's in the neighborhood.”

“The data shows that there was about 20,000 people who bought in the ICO.”

“We launched a new token, BNB. It's still there today. And then we said, look, we're going to sell we're going to sell 60% of it for fifteen million dollars.”

“At the time China was one of the largest user base they had like 30 something percent user base from China, but we still have like 70% from the rest of the world.”

“So BNB ICO at like about 10 cents. It dropped to like zero point zero dropped to six cents.”

“That came in early about six, seven, seven, eight months in, Forbes put me on the cover.”

“I think it's really daily active users. It's not trading volume. It's not revenue.”

“Five months after we started and we're kind of, we were number one exchange already.”

“I actually want multiple exchanges to be successful in the industry because then we won't be the ones that get targeted all the time.”

“The deal was finalized and the transfer was done in July, 20, 21. And this is like a full year and a half before they had issues.”

“It took, like, the negotiations, like, was basically daily calls with, like, 12, 20 lawyers on call for, like, more than a year.”

“Stepping down was really, really hard. I actually cried out of it. And the only other time I really cried was like, you know, when my father passed away a few years ago.”

“Without a pardon, Binance, Binance is severely limited to do stuff in the US.”

“If U.S. Wants to become the capital of crypto in the world, you cannot have not, you cannot not have the largest player. You cannot not, you cannot have U.S. People not be able to access the largest liquidity pool. In crypto.”

“I'm actually very grateful that I don't have to run Binance anymore and I have more time.”

“They went within five years to add a peak valuation of somewhere like four hundred billion or so with 2000 employees. Right? So that's zero to four hundred billion in five years.”

“CZ, the founder and CEO at one point had like 55 direct reports. And his direct reports had about the similar ones. So for a large portion of the history of the company, there was just one level between the individual employees and the CEO, right?”

“The leadership team, for example, met every day. And because the leadership team was spread across the world, we met at like 11 p.m. When I was in Singapore every day. That includes the weekends, holidays, like the leadership team was there 11 p.m. Every singl…”

“And then it suddenly became regulated where you had to almost have a full KYC flow like a bank. And that just meant that the conversion rate dropped from let's say a hundred percent to like two percent.”

“We said, I want, we had like a team of 20 people working on KYC. And we said for the next three months, we want 500.”

“Because I mean, our bonus structure went from, like, zero percent to, like, 500%, right?”

“CZ is good friends with Ray Dalio. So we had Ray Dalio come to our executive ops site, and he walked us through how he and his company does strengths assessment.”

“Just don't take on projects that are going to be six months, a year because you just generally don't have control over the macro. Things just move way, way more faster, and that's probably cemented my kind of now product philosophy of just doing small things v…”

“For some reason FTX has left up all of their videos on YouTube from three years ago called quantitative trading seven and a half thousand cell wall of Bitcoin on Binance. It's a 17 and a half minute YouTube video of SBF trading arbitrage across markets.”

“SPF was trying to get Binance and competitors like that banned while SPF would be one of the sole people to get the license.”

“The SEC's approach to regulating crypto has been a mess, and that's pushed stuff offshore. So that's pushed people who wanted to trade to go to things like Binance and FTX because they couldn't do it in the US.”

“I think eight out of the 10 teams on the grid have a giant crypto sponsor, FTX being one of them, Binance being another, which is also fascinating, but that's a whole other story for another day.”

“I think generally, I think both FTX and Binance have been really good at execution and You know, they've taken a different risk posture, I would say, internationally as well, which, you know, we'll, we'll see, have to see what happens with that. But Coinbase i…”

“Still FTX became the number two player in the world you know because of their innovation, because of what they brought to the table.”

“So as an example of a bet that we have on right now, we've created baskets based entirely on accessibility. So we have a basket of Coinbase coins, a basket of Binance coins, a basket of Korean and Japanese retail coins, where it's the assets that are easiest f…”

“Even some of the most prominent and well-run ones like Binance was hacked to the tune of forty million dollars a few weeks back.”

“The only place people are making real money is in the retail exchanges, and most of them offshore where they're taking all kinds of regulatory. They have more regulatory Movement. You know, not as tight on the KYC stuff, and so Binance, and Bitfinex, and I mea…”

“Binance is, you know, arguably, you know, largest, largest exchange in the world right now. And they launched their own token, pay all of their people in BNB and maybe some other cryptocurrencies. It's unclear where their headquarters are. It's unclear where t…”