Challenges and Lessons | Bill Barhydt

So I already talked, I'm not gonna spend too much time on the tech. It's obviously really interesting to me. I think you'd find it interesting as well, but just in the interest of time, I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. But it's the first time, I think, and remember, we didn't actually set out to create a Bitcoin or blockchain company. I happen to know the tech because I've been working on digital currency since my Netscape days. But we were trying to solve a different problem, which was how to create that Haiti model in 200 countries. Turns out that this was the only way that we could figure out how to do it. And the side effect is it seems to have made the Bitcoin tech useful for the first time. Everybody's talked about the promise of using Bitcoin to send low-value money transfers and replace Western Union. But until you dig into the problem and understand global liquidity at this level, it's really not that useful. And it turns out that we had the insights because of all the work we had done in traditional banking to put all these pieces together using that technology. And in this model, what's amazing is that there's no point anywhere where anybody is not holding their own funds. And that's why this becomes legal everywhere, right? There's no country in the world where it's illegal to exchange a $10 bill for 2 fives. That's effectively what's going on here, uh, and, and that is a, a big, big breakthrough, right? But unless you have the insights as to how the current system works, how liquidity works with banks, you would never understand how to do this. And in the meantime, we've gotten a lot of people pretty excited about this. We've raised about $20 million in venture capital. And we're even getting big banks to take notice now, which I didn't think would happen. American Express, Fidelity, and some others, including Boost, have invested. And so, you know, We're off to the races. So, you know, I feel like just kind of coming full circle that this is the first job in my life that I'm actually qualified for. But at the same time, if I hadn't learned to appreciate the value of solving big problems, if I actually never figured out how derivatives work, which when I was at NASA interested me for zero, if I hadn't basically spent all those time in developing markets, fighting with government agencies at Boom and fighting with the Commerce Department at Netscape, there's no way that I would be able to do what Abra is doing today. So, you know, while I was too ignorant and arrogant to probably be grateful at the time, today I'm extremely grateful that I had all those opportunities. And I also am really grateful that we're in a unique time where the technology has caught up with the vision from 10 years ago, because without this blockchain tech, Abra would not be possible. I'd still be fighting the how do I do this via traditional bank wars. When I was running Sonari, which is a gaming company, a few years ago, a friend of mine, Nick Szabo, who came up with the original concept of smart contracts, he and I were talking about this, saying, you know, Abra would be really cool if Abra didn't have to store all the money for the consumers. And but we just couldn't figure out how to get the smart contracts to work without a central trust authority, which has basically killed every kind of crypto payments company for the last 20 years. And honestly, it just never occurred to us that the way to solve the problem was to use every computer in the world to process the transactions, because if you know anything about computer science, The blockchain is basically the most inefficient transaction processing system ever created. And that's fine because it wasn't created to be efficient. It was created to solve the double-spend problem that none of us could figure out in the crypto world. And so if all you care about is solving that problem, which is what we cared about, the blockchain is beautiful. So again, this is where the tech finally caught up with the vision. So again, Tim said I should give some of my perspective on what I've learned over the years. So, you know, hopefully this doesn't conflict too much with all the cool stuff that you guys are learning here. But I think for me, probably— there's probably 3 things, but I'll share 5 with you. So, I think today I have a huge appreciation for the difference between management and leadership that I probably didn't care about 10 years ago. or probably should have cared about 10 years ago that I think today has made me a better person to be around and a more patient person to be around. And if you don't understand the difference between the two, you know, start working on it because it's going to make you not only a better entrepreneur but probably a better person to be around when you learn how to navigate the 2 worlds. It's okay to hold people's feet to the fire as a manager, but if you don't know how to steer the ship in the right direction to begin with, you're not going to be holding your people's feet to the right fire in the first place. All right. And so, probably my favorite quote from my time at Netscape— anybody here know who— ever heard of Jim Barksdale? Yes. Jim was the CIO of FedEx, ran a company called McCaw Cellular, which today is AT&T Wireless, and was the CEO of Netscape. Jim was from— is from Mississippi, and he's really an old Mississippi gentleman type. And one of his favorite sayings was— and everybody from Netscape knew the saying, right? If you see a snake, kill it. Obviously, if you— if there's a big problem that's causing the company to potentially fail or move in the wrong direction, deal with it. Stop what you're doing and deal with it immediately. But once you've dealt with it, move on, right? If you've done something that theoretically saves the company, you don't need to second-guess. Just move on. But also recognize that a lot of opportunities look like snakes at first. Right? And so, you know, sometimes it's okay to basically take a few seconds to understand what's a snake that's gonna kill the company and what's an opportunity that's knocking at your door. All right? From one perspective, those 3-letter acronyms all look like snakes to me. When I'm trying to solve the problem in Haiti. But it was the fact that we were willing to stop and rethink about the problem that caused us to think about things in a totally new way. And I think the thing that's probably served me the best from a business perspective has been my willingness to get on a plane. I take it to an extreme. I think I flew half a million miles last year, so I'm not recommending that you do that, but we're also building a global company quickly. so I had no choice. But if you're not out in the field and you're trying to build a company that's selling to consumers and companies, you're doing something wrong. You're not going to figure it out sitting in a chair and staring at a screen. You need to do that, but it's never going to be a panacea, which is another variation on the last point, which is— Nothing happens until you sell something. It's all great in theory, but until a consumer is using it, until a business is using it, until people are telling you what they like about it and what they don't like about it, nothing really has happened. And the last point is always know— my opinion is if you don't know why you're doing something, you should probably stop. Figure out why you're doing it, and then keep doing it if appropriate. But I think there's too many people today that are entrepreneurs or work at startups, they don't know why the company is doing what it's doing. It's okay to ask the CEO. If the CEO is a passionate founder, they're going to be willing to talk about why. If they're not, there's a problem anyway. Right. But I think why has to come first. And if you can't, in simple terms, make people understand the why, then you really have to question your own motivations for what you're doing.