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SBF
@SBF_FTX
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@SBF_FTX
7) Second, The Right Arrow. TRA was the first employee to tell me they thought that we should take FTX and run with it, and make it the best we could. It hadn't launched yet, and everyone else was still uncertain and thought maybe we should just try to get _anything_ for it.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
8) Third, The Two Silhouettes. It takes an army to build an exchange; most companies have 100-1,000 developers. We had two. Sometimes, 2 > 1000. And that says a lot about the 2. (And, I mean, about the 1,000.) And it was more than that.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
9) I didn't write up a complete spec for exactly how FTX would work. I was like, "hey wanna make a futures exchange?" And they were like "yeah sure". And then a few weeks later: "Hey Sam, here's an alpha version. How should positional margin requirements scale with size?"
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
10) Any good team of devs can implement a perfectly specified protocol. But taking "futures exchange" and inferring "we should have a risk engine, it should liquidate at some point, bigger positions have larger impact but it might not be linear, maybe constant*sqrt(size)"...
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
11) Fourth, The Late-Night Dancers. T L-N D were smart and knowledgeable and quick, which is great! And valuable. But they were more. They understood something: that businesses can succeed and fail based on whether they do whatever they have to do.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
12) Crypto is 24/7, and sometimes things happen at 2am. Life can be brutal that way. You can either hope the night is never important, or you can sleep next to your phone, ready to sprint to the office on a moment's notice. Not everyone needs to! But someone does.
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@SBF_FTX
13) Fifth, The Relay Circle. You hear about the products and the tech and the posts. You even hear about back-end dev work. You don't hear about back-end corporate work.
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@SBF_FTX
14) It's easy to abstract it away. "Oh yeah, then you use your company [which apparently you have and it's the right one in the right place]" "Our KYC process [build and managed by people]" "Then you wire the money [from the bank account you got]..."
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
15) TRC is possibly the most crucial piece of the puuzzle. It's also brutal. For a while, TRC spent 6 hours per day in a physical bank branch, watching tellers manually type 20-digit memos and watching for typos.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
16) TRC also has to deal with customers when they're wrong. And with lawyers, when they're wrong. (If you think lawyers are never wrong -- what happens when two lawyers disagree with each other?) And with service providers when they break. And employees, when they feel broken
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@SBF_FTX
19) To everyone who got us where we are today: thanks <3. To everyone who will help us get to where we're going next: welcome aboard. And to the haters: fuck you. But seriously, yesterday is over. Tomorrow's what matters. And *everyone* who wants to join is invited.
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