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12:53 PM · Oct 16, 2020Twitter Web App

2) not (investment) advice

3) Two years ago, Alameda Research nearly ended. The full story is messy and sordid and contentious, but the short version is that in a month we went from invicible to struggling. While things were good, all the employees gave things the benefit of the doubt.

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4) When things were bad, *everything* looked bad. Faith turned to skepticism, and it grew like wildfire. I had thought I was a good manager. It turns out that it's a lot easier to manage when things are going well than when they're going poorly.

5) Which, I think really hammered into me that running a successful business is about a lot more than just the core product. There's marketing, customer service, regulation, budget, morale, hiring, managing... -------------

6) I first met Arthur and Ben a few years ago in Hong Kong. Arthur was always polite, but we never talked much. Ben was more open around me -- and an all around great guy. He was the guy you'd hope was assigned next to you at a dinner party. And he's genuinely altruistic.

7) BitMEX, too has been upstanding and respectful towards us. It's easy, in this industry, to see each other as competitors. They were always gracious and fair. We'd bullshit together at conferences and meet up now and then to reminisce.

8) And, of course, they built a great business, at least for a while. BitMEX was truly the king of crypto. It found the product market fit at the right time. And it went for it. And the team knows their shit.

9) It was clear, by the end, that things had been brewing for a while. And it seems like they probably made decisions I wouldn't have made. It's not clear if they saw the writing on the wall, but it was probably there.

10) ------ I only met Star once -- I flew to his office to talk about futures. It was an odd talk, not least of which because his scattered attempts at English still eclipsed my total lack of Chinese. But he built an empire in crypto.

11) OKEx went a few years without much international recognition. But those who knew, knew. It was, for a while, where it all happened. If it was 2018 and crypto moved, you didn't check BitMEX, or Coinbase, or the CME. You checked OKEx's quarterly futures.

12) EOS rose on a wave of OKEx flow, and BTC crashed on a string of OKEx liquidations. At one point its markets generated more than half of all information in crypto. They always had their issues--risk, and margin GUIs--but they cleaned much of it up.

13) There was also always something lurking. They did what they had to do, given their position. And they made the most of it. But it was always there, always a risk. They're not alone in that. You either die a hero, or... ------------

14) Many people learned this before I did, but: running something is hard. It's hard because not only is there the central hard task: You have to stay on top of *everything*. It's _thousands_ of hours on phone calls, running over plans again and again and again.

15) Where should I live? What shouldn't we do? What can I say? Who owns what, and where? What do we do if that happens? What's the most likely response to this? What, really, is the exposure there?

16) Sometimes they're boring, and sometimes they seem like they won't matter. They take _forever_ to do. And you can't just outsource them -- they're decisions that can only really be made with the full context of the project. Often people skip infrastructure day.

17) But in the end, everything rests on it. A company is nothing without its structure, its foundation, its plan. So much of the value comes from that. People often call it 'luck' without realizing that it was planned. And when I feel 'unlucky', I try to take a step back.

18) What caused me to be in a position where that was possible? Could I have acted different to not be in that position? --- There are competitors in the space. But I firmly belive that we have more to gain from each other than we do to lose.

19) Because collaboration isn't a 0-sum game, it's a positive sum game when done right, and that overwhelms the competitive tension. And I have no bones to pick here.