How CZ built Binance and became the richest person in crypto | Crypto Stories Ep. 16

So when I was younger, somebody said, hey cz, let's say if you walk to the bottom of a valley, what do you do? And the answer is pretty simple. Just keep walking. As long as you keep walking, then you eventually get out of the valley. When I was born, there was no running water, there's no electricity. I was born in a little village, so when I was a kid, I was pumping water out of.

And then I moved to Canada when I was 12. And then I spent six years in Vancouver, four years in Montreal. After university, I went to Tokyo to work. I worked in Tokyo for four years and then went to New York for four years to work for Bloomberg. And then in 2005, I returned to Shanghai to do a startup together with five other founders. In 2013, I decided to leave that company. After eight years, I decided to jump full into crypt. So mid 2017 I decided to do Binance. And we got very lucky. It grew very quickly. So for me it's like a 20 year journey.

I started learning about Bitcoin in 2013 and I read the white paper. I went to a few different conferences. The one that was really, really standing out was the December conference in Las Vegas. It was a very small conference, maybe about 200 people total. But everyone in the crypto space today were there. Like Charlie Lee was, Matt Rosic was there, Vitalik was there. The group of people was really, really nice. I remember one guy teaching me about Ripple and Ripple was pretty complicated to use and in the process he transferred some repo to me. When I was done, I was like, okay, now I understand how to use it. Let me transfer these coins back to you. He said, well, no, you can keep it, you can use it to teach the next guy. I looked at it, I was like, coins were at the time worth about $500. So it's not a huge amount of money, but it's also not a small amount of money. So I thought that community was really, really nice. So at that time I had a really high confidence in cryptocurrency succeeding.

So.

So I understood the technology, I understood the financial aspect of it. And you already had a really nice community behind it. And also for me personally, the situation was I sold my house. Not only did I sell my house, I also quit my job, I sold my house, bought bitcoin. Bitcoin was $600 USD. Roughly within about three months, Bitcoin dropped to about $200. So I lost two thirds of the house and it stayed at 200 for two years. So two years later, it finally went up, but my lifestyle was still okay. For me, the risk was totally tolerable. I know 100% that if even crypto fails, I can get a job in a bank. It's not a big issue. I was looking for jobs in the cryptocurrency space. I bumped into blockchain.info very quickly and landed a job there in two weeks. When Binance started, I was kind of already leaving the coding stage. Whereas even in the early years of Binance, like a year and a half ago, I still wrote some scripts to do some random stuff for myself. With coding, you got to have a chunk of time that you got to sit down and stare at the computer screen uninterrupted. In the last year and a half or so, I haven't really, really had a lot of chance to do coding at all, which is something I really want to go back to and try. But unfortunately right now my time is really, really segmented. So, like, there's a lot of interrupts. I tell other people that now I have a memory of goldfish. Like I can't remember anything like longer than seven seconds. So everything's like in seconds. But it is what it is. I'm always a very calm person. So in Binance, I've never shouted, I've never yelled at anybody. I've never sort of became really sort of agitated. When you run an exchange globally, there's a lot of stressful situations with different regulations, with security hack, all of the situations, they were very, very high stress situations. I'm usually very, very calm. I also have a low heart rate, so my resting heart rate is like 50 something. I'm also usually very optimistic as well. I've tried many different startups. A lot of them have failed. But even in those situations, even at the times where we have to dissolve a company, I was incurring debt. I know I had to pay back and I did eventually. But at the time I remained relatively calm. I'm not materialistic because it's kind of hard to carry. I like to keep mobile. I like to be able to sort of live in different city every month and if I want to. And with the shared economy, it's so much easier now. I recently passed my birthday. I didn't celebrate either. So I had normal dinner with people I had dinner with all the time. I don't feel the need to own a lot of stuff, to have a really complicated life. Just keep everything simple. Whenever I feel like a lot of stress, I don't know why I just keep remembering that story. That helps a lot. My role in here is just to do the best I can, so I just keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep marching forward. So it makes life a lot easier, actually.