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5) twitter.com/evancharles/st Very early in Alameda’s life, Bitcoins on Japanese exchanges were trading 10% higher than BTC on US exchanges. So you could make 10% with the following trade: bank1 → Coinbase → BTC → Bitflyer → JPY → bank2 → USD → bank1 → Coinbase

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Evan Moore

@evancharles

Dec 10, 2020

We probably took "do things that don't scale" too far. It was absurd. But there was a major upside to doing so many orders ourselves: we understand the details:

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6) The core of the trade, of course, was: buy on Coinbase, sell on Bitflyer. But you wouldn’t make money if that’s how you thought about it. Because as it turned out, most of the difficulty was in the banking. The intersection of banks and crypto has always been a sore spot.

7) Back then, Alameda had a Bank of America account. And each weekday at 10am two team members would walk to the local branch. They’d be there for hours: waiting in line, reading out confirmation codes, talking to the manager, requesting higher limits, signing forms…

8) Wire transfers closed at 1pm. If the wires weren’t out by then, we didn’t make money that day. And sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes 3 hours sitting in a bank wasn’t enough; so we started showing up at 9am. 8 people-hours spent sitting in a bank, every day.

9) In some sense, this obviously didn’t scale. (If only there were some way to transfer wealth online and permissionlessly!) But if we’d never done it, we’d never understand how wire transfers worked.

10) And in some senses it did scale. You can do the math: 10% arb; once every weekday; multiply by capital base…. Unfortunately that trade only lasted a few weeks before the bubble burst. But it taught us a lot.

11) About ourselves, and markets, and banks, and companies, and how you get there from here.

Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth)

12) twitter.com/evancharles/st Ask pretty much any startup, and they’ll tell you the same thing: you have to go all-in. You can’t half ass it.

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Evan Moore

@evancharles

Dec 10, 2020

A few months in, we explicitly decided to reset our lives, move in together, and devote 24/7 to building DoorDash. After YC, we made the same commitment again. A business like this doesn't get built without sacrifice. I can only imagine what it's been like to do this for 6 years.

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You have to go all in, but all in can look very different. Everyone thinks its has to be eating ramen and 3 guys in an SF bachelor apt. But I think it can be going all in on anything, values, execution, etc. The going on-all in just means a willingness to try and be wrong.