Conversation

1) On Hubris

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2) "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies... And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains."

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3) Each year, the world stands witness to a giant company, felled by its own arrogance. And each year the world averts its eyes as many more enterprises dream too small and believe too little.

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4) I guess I want to focus on one of

's larger failings, historically: user signup flow. The core of our issues can be summarized by the following fact: Until recently, signing up required a user to manually enter their address 2-3 times. Once, really, is enough.

6:26 PM · Nov 4, 2021Twitter Web App

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5) This probably slowed down our user growth a lot: entering an address takes a while, and no one wants to bother doing that multiple times! (Our internal numbers, FWIW, back this up.) So why did we end up there?

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6) It's not, to be clear, that no one had ever mentioned to us that our registration flow could stand to be tighter. We were quite aware of this, and agreed! But for about a year, we made very little progress on addressing it.

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7) We knew that our signup UX could be streamlined, and that doing so would be valuable. People would bring it up frequently as a reason that we couldn't compete for retail. And my response, generally, was: 1) Yeah it sucks right now 2) Don't worry, I'm 98% sure we can fix it

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8) While we were paying a price for not fixing it, I wasn't super worried strategically. We have built a number of complex, sophisticated, constrained systems to function at industrial scale. I had no doubt that we could consolidate pages in our registration flow.

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9) In fact, it was _so_ much easier than the trickiest things we've built, that from a medium term strategic perspective I didn't bother thinking about it. There are a number of difficult tasks ahead of us if we want to get FTX to where it could be; this wasn't one of them.

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10) If worst came to worst, at the last minute we could divert all dev and designer time for a few weeks and get it in decent shape. Instead, I focused on the things that would take everything we had to execute on well, and were also strategically crucial.

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11) We were working on complex licensing; matching engine overhauls; risk engine maintenance; product design; and NFT partnerships. Those were hard challenges that would require months of careful planning and attention, and which we wouldn't get right unless we focused on them.

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12) The last few weeks we've finally started overhauling our signup experience. And, as predicted, we've made very quick progress on it, and I expect we will continue to do so.

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13) I'm glad we started planning for LedgerX/FTX US Derivatives; the NFT platform; and the matching engine first, and the UX overhaul second, rather than the other way around. We were confident that we could do a good job at registration--so confident we took it for granted.

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14) And this made strategic sense: trusting in our abilities, and understanding that the progress we've made on the hardest parts of the product wasn't a reflection of some weird risk-engine-specific aptitude, but something more general.

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15) But at the same time: for months, we stunted the growth of FTX's userbase by not doing something relatively easy and extremely valuable. We paid a real price for this, and will continue to do so until we further refine things.

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16) Our confidence that we _could_ execute well stopped us from bothering to actually do it. Our confidence started to veer into hubris, and we risked failing to become what we could be by just not bothering to follow through.

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17) And I say 'our', but I take the lion's share of blame here; my job, ultimately, is to make sure we do the important things, and this was important and didn't get done. I was dismissive of it, and so it was dismissed.

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18) And, of course, while I remain confident we will quickly pick up the low hanging UX fruit, there's a looooong tail of things that can help make a user's experience beautiful, and we have our work cut out on it.

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19) One of the curses of achieving quick, early success is that you can be lulled into complacency, forgetting that the ability to do well is only worth anything if you keep pushing forward. One of the blessings, though, is understanding how much potential lies ahead.

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20) Anyway, my main takeaways are: a) Aim high, but don't forget to do everything you can to actually reach your lofty goals. b) Watchmen: episode 3 ("She Was Killed by Space Junk") is beautifully scripted and executed.

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