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4) I really enjoyed this thread by , the founder of DoorDash: twitter.com/evancharles/st Instead of talking about grand visions and large ambition, I want to start in the opposite place: standing in line at a bank.
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On 5/29/13 (my birthday!), I filed to incorporate Palo Alto Delivery Inc., later renamed DoorDash Inc. It's mostly not my story to tell. But I'll share a bit today about how it started. My goal is to give aspiring entrepreneurs a window into one founding story.
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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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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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11) About ourselves, and markets, and banks, and companies, and how you get there from here.
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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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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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