Next Steps After FTX

I could tell you what the next step will be based on rote and based on the predictable pattern of how the regulators, the policymakers, et cetera, the media will deal with FTX and Sam Bankman Fried. That will be a predictable fact finding pattern. It will be forensics, it will be policymaking. And the sad thing unfortunately is all of that will be backward looking. The risk that rears its ugly head a year from today and hurts entrepreneurs, consumers and markets will not look the same as the last one. That's why it's called risk. If you could predict it, many of us wouldn't be on this lecture tonight. We would be going and betting and potentially even speculating. And so in my mind that would be a failure because the opportunity of leveraging novel technology for the movement of money at scale, the utility value opportunity here should not be held at bay because one company failed due to old classical garden variety fraud. And that's what I'm afraid of, is that the knee jerk instinctive policy reaction to Sam Bankman Fried and FTX will be to litigate how it happened, but to do nothing about enabling the responsible actors in any space, not just finance, not just crypto, not just blockchain, but in any space to innovate on the edges. We have in our society today a deep anti innovation streak and a deep anti technology streak. And neither of those are going to get us through the twin perils of COVID 19. In an anemic market environment and anemic macro environment, we need innovation to be at the core, but we need responsible innovation. And therefore, hopefully the message tonight is to the entrepreneurs listening in, there is a good durable way of building a business and there's a very, very bad way of building a business. And if you want to play the long game, I would opt for the latter approach. And ideally FTX and post FTX allows us to actually go build.