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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?"

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)"...

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.

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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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.

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]..."

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.

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

17) Which is why it's a relay. It's hard and grinding and thankless and crucial. And so from time to time we pass the baton to each other. Some people thrive on it. Some feel its weight heavily. Sometimes those people are one and the same.