YouSaid · the spoken record

Brett Harrison

lines on the record: 174
first: 2023-03-13
most recent: 2023-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We were doing things to intentionally manipulate internal records in order to fool the employees and auditors and investors. So everything's out the window at that point. And then secondly, it sounded like in the week prior to the bankruptcy, there was this flurry of inter-company transfers. And given all that that's happened, it's impossible to say what state we are in now compared to where we were several months prior. So it's impossible to know.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Straight answer is I really don't know. If you had asked me about the solvency of FTX US at the time that I left, I would have said, why are you asking about this? Like, of course, everything's fine. Now it's very difficult to understand what is going on. I mean, first, the level of Was created by this inner circle of SAMs and now reported through the various complaints and the indictments from DOJ”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're trying to do damage control themselves. Either they were themselves investors in FTX or FTT. They had companies who, part of their runway was held on FTX, or they were expecting to get investment from FTX. So people were just trying to assess what was happening with their own companies. They were not writing checks into new companies anymore. So I had to hit pause on the whole thing. I mean, for their sake and for my sake. And yeah, it just What could one do in that situation except for just read the news all week? Because everything that came out was something brand new and unbelievable, more unfathomable than the thing before. And it was a mixture of like rumors on Twitter and articles coming out in major media publications and the announcement of the bankruptcy.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, I mean, first, the investors, you know, we all had to hit pause. I mean, first of all, architect became priority number 1000 on everyone's list. Secondly, a number of investors”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kept a bunch of money on the exchange. I was still in equity holder in FTX and FTX US. I was still very, very pro FTX in spite of my experience with Sam.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, busy talking to my own lawyers and investors for the company because we were actually closing up our investment round. Actually, the closing docks for my investment round went out that morning, the morning that FTX announced they were going to be bought by Binance. It was like the worst timing in crypto fundraising history. And so I was busy all morning and then I went online and checked Twitter and then saw Sam's tweet that said, you know, like what comes around goes around and we're going to get acquired by Binance. I don't know. I felt dizzy. I had no idea what was going on in the world at FTX. I just couldn't put the pieces together in my head. It just didn't make any sense to me.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sam and Caroline are great traders. Like, if anything, maybe they'll profit from all this volatility and tokens and they don't understand like there's no way anything's going to happen to Alameda. But also this connection between the price of FTT token and the ability for customers to withdraw their funds from the exchange, this did not compute for me at all. So I was like, if this will boil over in a couple days, like everything else. Next morning, I”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing I heard was the night before the announcement that Binance might be buying FTX I was just looking at Twitter and just saw all of this fear mongering. It was like, okay, well, CZ says he's selling FTT. And so FTT is going to go down. And people were saying, well, that means Alameda's toast. And then once Alameda goes under, oh, that's going to be a problem for FTX, pull your funds from FTX. And I was just sort of laughing at this because whatever, I'm used to people saying things on Twitter that seem nonsense. And first of all,”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I left at the end of my official resignation was the end of September. I had stopped working earlier than that. And so I kind of started to start working on fundraising for the company in October.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, if that happened, I don't know about it, but I think it was just Sam had such a kind of magical hold over the entire industry from investors to media to politicians that they looked to him for approval.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were existing FTX investors. And I think it really mattered to them. Sam thought of them. And if they didn't know the full story and if they were being told that Sam fired me, then I think they were concerned about potential conflict investing in me too.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I had this couple of ideas, and I had this particular idea for architect, and it was starting to really form kind of towards the end of my time at FTX. But I hadn't started anything. And so finally, I left FTX and then took a little bit of time off and then started to talk to investors about, you know, maybe raising some money for starting this company. And there were a few investors that basically said, you know, do you have Sam's blessing to do this? I think why do I need Sam's blessing? I've resigned. I don't work there anymore. And I said, like, we really would feel more comfortable if we could talk to Sam first and kind of like, you know, make sure things are okay and kind of figure out what he's doing, find out if he wants to invest to before we kind of talk to you further. And it was impossible to escape that the SAM kind of hype bubble, even having left the company.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, knowing that I was going to leave, I started thinking what I was going to do next and thought, well, if I think I can run a company better than Sam, I should put my money where my mouth is and start a company.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The employees were distraught, and what I had learned later from several investors and reporters who had talked to me was that when they talked to Sam about my leaving, Sam told them that my leaving was a combination of resignation and firing and that one of the reasons that I had to leave was because I refused to move my family to my Miami. So basically, I was constructively fired. That he had closed down this office that I had built and that if I wasn't going to move, that I couldn't have no road left at the company. And so that took a little bit to crawl out from. I had to tell people like, well, it's... Boss. It didn't happen at all. And yeah, and he was telling people that he fired me.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did the acute thing that happened was Sam, I actually offered to stay on longer. I said, I could stay on for a couple more months and help this transition to whomever you name as the successor president of FTX US. And he said, no, I want you gone more quickly. And so I should say he said that, but he was communicating through other people. He wasn't talking to me directly at that point. And so he said, I want you gone on on September 27th. So, okay, that's fine with me. On September 27th, not only did he announce to the company my resignation, he also announced that he was closing the Chicago and San Francisco offices and that everyone had to move to Miami. And basically if they didn't move to Miami by a certain date, they were not going to be at the company anymore.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I did know was that I'm still a professional. I'm still loyal to the company. I still believe the company itself had an incredible potential to continue its sort of road of profitability. And I really liked all my employees here on the U.S. side. And I wasn't going to abandon them. So I sort of thought like a three to six month time period is about standard to take the time to unwind responsibilities, to finish the stocks platform that I was working on, to get my team in a position where I knew they would be in good standing and they wouldn't be like retaliated against after I left and took the time to do that before officially resigning in kind of the end of the summer and early fall.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To come here to Chicago and pull me into a side room and say, you are probably going to be fired for this letter that you wrote And not only are you going to be fired, but Sam is going to destroy your professional reputation. Where do you think you're going to be able to work after FTX after all this happened? And he was threatening me. And then not only that, he had said, if you are going to have any hope of staying, and if you can forget about getting paid bonuses, you need to write Sam an apology letter and show it to me first because I'm going to edit it. And I'm going to tell you what to say. And I said absolutely not. This isn't like a mafia organization. This is like, this is extremely unprofessional. And I knew at that point there was absolutely no way I was staying. And it was a matter of when, not if.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, I think we have the best developer team in the world, and I think anyone who suggests otherwise is completely wrong. And if we add more people to the dev team, if we move them to the US and move them away from the Bahamas, we're going to be worse as an organization. He kind of ignored the point about separate leadership. I think he hated the idea of giving other people kind of titles that would reflect kind of greater responsibility within the company. And then so that conversation ended with us kind of not knowing what the future was going to be because I basically said like, look, I'm going to resign if you don't fix this. He said, we're not fixing anything. And then what happened next was he had deputized another person within a company.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took a little while before we got on the phone. He pointed through every point and refuted every one. Starting with communication, he said, I think phone calls are a waste of time. I think that if I promise people regular phone calls, they will use it to waste my time and it's not an efficient mode of communication.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't regular. I was on chat groups that he was in. And so occasionally he would respond to something I say on that group. But one-on-one conversations, I think there were fewer than 10 for my entire tenure.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Separate, you know, especially sea level management staff on the U.S. side. If Sam was going to be so busy doing what he was doing, at least he needed to delegate that responsibility to, like I said, of professional managers who could actually take care of the day-to-day operations within the company. And it felt like things were starting to unravel in the absence of that. And then the third was to grow the tech team and move a lot of the authority and management of that team away from Nishod and Gary so that we could actually spread the knowledge and be able to keep up with a lot of the tasks that we were assigning ourselves and trying to build all these new business lines. That pretty much summarizes it.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the top three things were one to communicate more with me in particular. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had like a one-on-one phone call with Sam, which probably seems insane given the position I was supposed to be in. I basically said we have to talk every week. It's impossible for me to get anything done if I don't have the authority, but I have the responsibility to be able to push this company forward and we're not talking at all. So that was number one. Number two was to establish”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I think that's up for a professional with credentials that I don't have, but I do think it was probably a combination of everything. The lack of sleep, the stress he probably was under, not just being in his role, but having kept the secret for so many years around whatever was happening with the holes in the exchange and the lying he was doing to his own employees, to investors, to auditors maybe that weighed on him. Maybe at something could do with his medications, maybe I just had to be just a plain deterioration in mental state or some kind of personality disorder or different kind of anxiety disorder. I really don't know. Maybe a mixture of everything.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I remember at all. You know, he would snap easily, he would not respond to messages for long periods of time. And people had different theories. I mean, people would attribute it to the unbelievable stress of being in the position that he was in, the complete lack of sleep, like his diet, lack of exercise. I mean, people had plenty of thoughts about what could be causing it all, but something definitely had deteriorated mentally and physically about him from who I remembered.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was more than that. When I knew Sam when he was 21, 22 years old, he was like a happy, like healthy looking kid who was very positive, very talkative, got along super well with his cohort of traders. The people in the desk really liked him. When I got to FTX, I think over the course of my time there, I saw someone who was very different than that person I remembered. I think he was angrier, seen more depressed, more anxious. You know, he couldn't get through a conversation without shaking his leg.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, nothing at all. Maybe that's a function of being here in Chicago and just not seeing. Group of people freaking out, but nothing seemed wrong at all. In fact, we started having conversations around paying out mid-year bonuses a couple weeks later after Terra announcement, and everything seemed very normal. Sam sent out an announcement to the whole company basically saying like, okay, we're going to be paying out bonus assume. People should expect they're going to be like a little bit lower because we have very similar revenue to last year, but we've also grown in size and also like the market is slowing and we need to be a little bit more conservative. So all the signs pointed to like things as normal.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The code base and the inner workings of all the exchange, and really wanting to keep that nexus of developer group in the Bahamas next to Gary and Nashad, those seem like red flags now.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time, people said, Look, Sam's really busy, he's flying to DC every week. He has all this stuff going on. Like he just hasn't gotten around to it. But don't worry, it's coming. In hindsight, it felt like there was some clear liquidity issue. You know, that was probably the most obvious thing. I think everything else is all just. That were red flags about the organization, not red flags about potential liquidity issues or fraud. Things like the complete inability to hire more people, especially on the developer side, not allowing me to establish separate C-level staff on the U.S. side that would have authority that was really separate from the ones in the Bahamas. Completely tightly controlled the dev team was around access to.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most obvious thing only in hindsight was that. Sam liked to do bonuses for the employees twice a year. And once the end of June, once the end of December. So there were like semester bonuses. And in the previous semesters, he had paid them early, like in May for the first semester in November or December early December for the second one. And he was extremely late in doing the mid-year 2021 bonuses. So much so that people within the company started to freak out because there was a lot of bad news in the press about other companies doing layoffs or folding. And it was two to three months late. And people were like expecting to get bonuses to pay rent and do whatever. And this was just, there's very little communication around this and people were very concerned.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like trading firms and investment banks, right? If you imagine there needs to be wall separation between buy side and sell side at different institutions. And the way they do that is they put them on different floors in the same building. And sure, like they can meet each other for lunch in the lobby, but they set up some actual physical separation. This is like super par for the course when it comes to financial firms that have these businesses that need to be walled off from each other. And so that didn't seem like particularly strange thing.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never visited the places where they lived in that Albany section of the Bahamas. So I think I didn't fully grasp the extent to which they were all living in this particular arrangement. I understood that as long as Sam was going to be the 90% owner or something of Alameda, he would want oversight there. And so having them close by made sense. But the actual HUT setup was such that it had like physical separation from minute to minute. So it wasn't like Alameda could overhear stuff happening on the exchange or people in the exchange could overhear stuff that was happening at Alameda. So to some extent, I felt like, well, at least they're going through the right motions of setting up like physical separate buildings. I mean, also, this is not uncommon within.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was this a completely separate company? Sam doesn't really do anything for them anymore because he is 100% focused on FTX. It's separately being run by Caroline and Sam Trabucco. They have the same access to the exchange, like data feeds and API as any other market maker on the exchange. And also, especially towards the time that I left, that Alameda wasn't even a significant percentage of the exchange volume anymore. They weren't in like the top 20 market makers on FTX.com or something like that.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But besides those early interactions, I barely interacted with Caroline, not in the same way that I had done with Sam, just based on the Trait and Desk he was on. And when I joined the company, the FTX US people communication-wise were walled off from Alameda. So we didn't really cross paths almost at all.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's hard to remember because it was like the early days, but I'm pretty sure she was also one of my boot camp students.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were deliberately falsifying information that went into ultimately the audited financials. So in order to actually have suspected anything, one would have to not only disagree with all of the kind of internal conventional wisdom around how the company was doing, but also have to basically distrust audited financials coming back to the company. Combined with having any concerns about income when it seemed like we were generating income faster than any startup in history. So I think it was very difficult for anyone within the company, especially in the US side, to have a clue what was going on.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had zero access to bank account stuff or financials on the ftx.com side. On the US, I had some. But remember now, knowing what we now know about even like recent, like the guilty pleas from Nashad and seeing the complaints from like the SEC CFDC.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, all that stuff came later. And secondly, a lot of that wasn't known to the employees within the company. Most of the venture deals, the value of the real estate, et cetera, was non-public within the company. There were $100 plus million dollar investments into various companies and other investment funds that were never discussed openly at least to the US people. So like it wasn't like there was sort of this clear internal accounting where people could look at it and say, hey, are you really spending all this money on all this stuff? No, I think Sam very deliberately kept all that stuff within like his innermost circle for a reason because he didn't want the criticism on what he was spending on.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dollars in income. And you think, okay, is $19 million a reasonable percentage of the total income to spend on a very significant marketing play? I don't know. It feels kind of reasonable. Like how much does Coca-Cola spend per year on marketing as a percentage of their income? It's probably somewhere between like 50 and 130%. I don't actually know what it is. It doesn't seem crazy.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for example, when I joined the company, the FTX had just inked that Miami Heat Deal. And I think it was something like $19 million a year. And I was like, oh, that sounds like a lot of money, right? But at the time, you could see the publicly reported volume on FTX. It was something around $15 to $20 billion in notional per day. The fee schedule was also public. So even at like the highest volume tiers, the take fee would be something like two basis points portrayed. So if you just did $20 billion traded per day times two basis points times 365, which because like crypto trades every single day, you can get a sense of how much money FTX was making a year. And at the time, I think the run rate for FTX was something like close to a billion.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To underwater, it would auction that position off to backstop liquidity providers, a number of them, who would then take on that position again without having to kind of rip through the book and cause dislocation. And so it was much more orderly. It was much more predictable. And that had to have come from the initial intuitions that Sam and his colleagues got from being traders on these exchanges and thinking how should this work if it were perfect. So I do think in the beginning they were really working on that product together. And then once the success came and Sam got drunk on the celebrity of being so out there and known and having all these newfound connections that things are to go, by the wayside.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This game of shifting assets around to different wallets to make sure you kept meeting your collateral requirements, which was just an operational nightmare. And so Sam told and worked with Gary and Nishad to build basically a cross-collateralization system where you have just one wallet with all of your assets, haircuted appropriately based on volatility and liquidity, but then summing up to a single collateral value that represents what you can put on in terms of margin for all your positions or having an auto liquidation system that doesn't just the second that you're slightly below your margin fraction send a giant market order into the book and dislocate the you know the order book by 10 it would automatically start liquidating small percentages of your portfolio at a time to try to minimize market impact and then if the position got”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the core of the product was built before my time and my understanding was in the transition from Alameda to FTX, where there was no publicity around Alameda, there wasn't any publicity around FTX. It was very much like heads down build mode for several months. And just think, think, think about the core product. Having been a trader on these different exchanges around the world that also offer derivatives and knowing all their problems, like for example If you had an Ether futures position and also an Ether spot position on this one exchange, you could get liquidated on your Ether futures position even if you had enough Ether spot as collateral because you needed to have that spot crypto within the Ether futures spot collateral wallet, which was different than the Ether spot wallet. And so it was”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Far inside in the Bahamas Nishad was really like the number two person there. I mean, he was making a lot of decisions. There were a couple others in the Bahamas who were taking kind of swaths of the company, whether it was like investments or marketing or legal, things like that. On the U.S. side, we had like a different crew trying to make decisions where we could for U.S. regulated matters. But again, it was always, we were always sort of below the decision making authority that was happening in the Bahamas, especially inside of the home where they were all living.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All day, whether those were worth investors or with media, podcasts, whatever. It was just consistently just doing that. And I saw very, very little time where he actually got up and talked to anyone else within the company about anything. So I think to me that was the primary impression I got of his leadership was actually that there was none, which made me feel a lot like I and others needed to step up and sort of take that role in the absence.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they did it. I would say aside from the intuition, Sam wasn't a details man. Like that was usually left up to the people below him to really take care of was like to drive a project to completion, to figure out all the details that had to be done. I think besides that as a leader, I thought he was fairly incompetent. I thought he was very conflict avoidant. He didn't like to get into direct confrontation with any of his employees where most of the reasons why people needed to talk to him were because there were significant issues, whether those were personnel or otherwise. And he just blew them off. I mean, that was a frequent occurrence in the company. I mean, if you went to Bahamas, and I went only a couple of times to actually visit the office, if he was in the office, he was there all day on calls.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the beginning, when I joined FTX, my initial impressions were that he Had pretty clear intuition and insight into the simple things to do that would work. In many ways, if you think about what STX did, it wasn't really super complicated. It was just be operationally good and give your trading customers as predictable of an experience as possible with regards to collateral management and auto-liquidation and matching engine behavior and latency.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On one hand, I think people were growing frustrated within the company because of the lack of direction. And some of the power of vacuums that resulted from Sam's continual absence. On the other hand, so many people within the company just hero worship Sam. Know when you hear all the really tragic stories now of all the employees who kept all of their funds and life savings on FTX, they really, really believed in Sam. And doesn't matter how little time he spent with the company, doesn't matter how he treated employees internally. It was like he was this sort of genius pioneer. And that image couldn't be shaken.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there was some amount of, well, I like to call reputation laundering going on here, where it was like, okay, so you get the famous celebrity to endorse Sam, which makes this politician think highly of Sam because they also like that celebrity. And then also. In a way that didn't necessarily need to match the underlying reality of who he was at the company.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the media was primed for the archetype that was Sam, this sort of young, upstart prodigy in the realm of fintech. We have a lot of these characters in the world of big tech. And I think that he had a particular role to play in the world of finance. And by making himself so accessible all the time, He gave people a drug that they were addicted to, which was like that constant access. I feel like any time of day or night, someone could text Sam and get him on the phone with them if they were in media. And they loved it. It was like getting access to a direct expert who was also this famous person who was also this billionaire, who was also this extremely well-connected person, who was also this very insightful person who knew a lot was going on in the industry and can give them insight and tips.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, sometimes some reporters would say to me, you know, do you can you get me in touch with Sam? And I would say, you know, why? I'm not really his keeper. You could contact him yourself. They're like, oh, because we want to come to Bahamas and do a special on him. And I would say like, okay, you're going to be like the sixth one this month.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source