How to start a revolution, w/Bitcoin pioneer Wences Casares (Xapo)

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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. twenty six. We drive a bus from Buenos Aires. Around the world, a week a year.

Have a lot of fun, just the guys get together and drink mate and make many many miles. That's When says Casaris. Serial startup founder from Argentina. And he's taking us with him on a yearly journey with a group of lifelong friends.

I want you to imagine. Yeah. This beloved bus. It looks like the product of a school bus that got freaky with an R V and then spent its retirement in the apocalyptic world. of Mad Max.

In the run up. To one of their epic trips. Wensus got word that the bus had broken down. The repairs weren't difficult. But paying for them was

Especially as Wences was living in California at the time. While the bust Was in Argentina. We had to send some money for fixing some things in the past. And Argentina has shut down Western Union, Paypal, everything.

You could send money to the central bank, but it was cumbersome, expensive. It looked like their next trip would be stalled. Until the Argentinian financial system was sorted out. But that could be months. Even years.

Then A friend made a suggestion. Have you looked into Bitcoin? Bitcoin. This was two thousand eleven.

Just two years after the cyber currency had launched. And Wences. was caught. Off guard. And I'm supposed to be a tech guy, I'm supposed to be a finance guy, and I had not heard about these things, so what is that?

And he says, Well it's a new currency that you can send money anywhere. Without third parties. I was super skeptical and cynical. But that bus. Wasn't fixing itself.

And neither was the Argentinian financial system any time soon. So once this is decided to give Bitcoin a go. It was the start. Of a mysterious journey.

I found on Craigslist an older man who was willing to sell me$2,000 worth of Bitcoin told me to meet at a cafe a lo alto Uh guy looked like Gandalf. And I gave him two thousand dollars in cash. Wenses didn't exactly trust.

What Gondalf did next. He made me download some app and read some QR code and he sent me supposedly$2,000 worth of Bitcoin. I walk back to the office convinced I got scammed. And then I send my friend two hundred hours my share of what I had to send. By the end of the day my friend said hey Wince I got the bitcoin I sold them for pesos.

We're good. I'm like what? What? What did just happen? Wenses' view of Bitcoin was flipped.

And I went in a rabbit hole like lasted six months where I was first super cynical. But in six months I said, you know, I wanna dedicate the rest of my career to help this succeed because I think a world in which Bitcoin succeeds For billions of people. It's more important than one in which the internet succeeds.

And totally needed it. Wenses hadn't considered Bitcoin. And he didn't even know he needed it. Until someone told him he did. And then Wences went all in.

That's because Wensis is the kind of person who will climb aboard a rickety bus and venture across entire continents. But most people aren't that adventurous, especially when it comes to their money. The path ahead for Wences would involve systematically persuading person aferson to join him on the Bitcoin journey. because any time you're launching something that others will find far fetched, You're going to have to prove

Your magical mystery tour bus. is roadworthy. I believe. The more revolutionary your product is, the more reassuring you have to be when you invite your customers on board.

There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Ten years later I'm like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it. This His master's of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman.

Co founder of LinkedIn. Partner Greylock. And your host. And I believe. The more revolutionary your product is, the more reassuring you'll need to be when you invite your consumers on board.

Every founder believes their product is revolutionary in some way. Maybe you have a new way to keep potato chips fresh, for example. That's new. But it's not scary. Everyone.

Understands the benefit. Of fresh chips. Spoiler alert. It's the crunch. Selling people on your idea will be relatively easy.

But if your product or service is so radical that people have trouble grasping what it is. Or believing. That it won't harm them. They may be hesitant. To even try it.

Think of Airbnb replacing hotel rooms. Uber and Lyft replacing taxis. Self driving cars. AI phone calls that can fool you into believing they're human. All radical ideas.

That overturn expectations. In cases like these You're effectively trying to lead a revolution. And if you want to rally the masses. You'll need to speak a language.

They understand. You'll need to reassure them that this idea Isn't it? As different. Or is dangerous.

As they might think. I wanted to talk to Wences Casaris about this because I call him The Bitcoin Patient Zero of Silicon Valley. He single handedly infected dozens of investors, including me.

With Bitcoin fever. With his latest company. Zappo That's spelled XAPO. Wens has set out to make using bitcoin as easy possible for consumers and institutions.

And he did this by taking extraordinary lengths. To reassure them. Before we get to Wentz's story, I want to assure you that we'll give a bit of a Bitcoin primer later in the episode. This demystification is part Wentz's mission.

But first, we're going to hear Wentz's firsthand experience of being excluded from traditional financial systems and the devastating effect. It can have. So Growing up in Patagonia where my parents where and still are to this day ship branchers.

I saw my family's lose all of their savings three times. I think that an average family should be very unlucky to happen one of those things happen Once in their life. I'm

Hopefully never. Um The first time it was because of Argentina's biggest devaluation to date. wiped out their savings. The second time Almost ten years later it was because of uh hyperinflation.

And wiped out their savings. again, once they had recovered, then Yeah, some years later. the government confiscated bank deposits. So he wiped them out again. It's not just the extreme physical hardship.

caused by these repeated calamities that have stuck with Wensus. What I remember is My parents fighting about money and the world around us. collapsing as we know it, right? It's just a a feeling of Everybody on their own, like going back to animal spirits and I know of

Being Vulnerable. Uh exposed. In a scary way. The collapse of something as fundamental as the banking system is something that most of us will hopefully.

Never experience. But for hundreds of millions of people worldwide, it's a real threat. didn't just hurt Wensis in the short term. Wences saw how it crippled the whole economy.

Starting. Wensis had dropped out of college to launch the country's first internet service provider. Called Internet Argentina SA. He convinced his sisters to drop out too, but

For a year and a half he tried to raise capital in and around Argentina. But the meetings. Thirty three of them. All went the same way. He'd launch.

into his carefully crafted presentation. And they would stop the presentation and basically ask me. A version of Who's Your Father? trying to see if they knew my father. They wouldn't because he was in Patagonia. Which

school did you go to? Actually meaning which private school did you go to and And that was usually the end of the meeting. In Argentina at that time. Getting money was all about family connections. No doubt this was entered repeated financial crises.

So when Wences visited Silicon Valley for a conference in nineteen ninety four, it was like a different world. I couldn't believe what I saw. that these kids from the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin or India or China Would be giving three million dollars? Without people thinking that they were gonna steal it.

I like, oh my God. I I really was in awe and s and and I said I have to come here more often and get inspired. Wensis returned to Argentina and launched a new financial services venture called Patagon. But he wasn't just launching his own startup, he wanted to revolutionize how startups were launched in Argentina. However, he found once again that Argentina's venture capital deck was stacked against him.

It was rejection. After rejection. Until the moment. Everything changed. We were in this tiny little office, I was a loner from a friend and trying to get this thing started, haven't raised any money, we were we we were behind without payroll. It was not a good time and

The bell rings and I open Um Linda Rotenberg. Linda Rotenberg. The co-founder of Endeavour, which helps entrepreneurs worldwide to thrive.

She arrived at Wentz's door, Certain she could help. Wen's this? Wasn't so sure. Well, when you ask Wencis what he thought of

Someone like me walking into his office saying hey, you have a great idea and I want to help you. He thought that myself and my co founder Peter were running a cult. And I remember thinking that this is Too strange. He thought it was a religious cult because why would anyone want to actually help someone who didn't have the right last name?

She tells me that. She started a nonprofit in New York to help entrepreneurs in emerging markets and And that she like to see if they can help me. Linda's nonprofit was still an idea when she met Wensis. And Linda was looking to start a revolution of her own.

She wanted to bring entrepreneurs together with local investors to show ideas could come from anywhere. Wenses was exactly the kind of unlikely entrepreneur she was looking for. Wens is Kasaris. Was a kid who'd grown up on a sheep farm in Patagonia. He creates the first internet service provider. It gets taken over, he gets thrown out of the company with nothing. He's twenty four years old, and he decides all right, I'm gonna dust up my pants and I'm gonna go start the first e trade of Latin America.

Okay, well He had been turned down by thirty four local investors. Everyone says you don't have the right last name. Never mind, you know, any capital. Who are you? And this e trade, we don't even have really a functioning stock market in Argentina. And then it said do you Provide money. And said no, we don't provide money but we help you in other ways.

We just met him and said this this guy's on to something. And I said, you know, whatever, we we have nothing to lose, come on in and She changed my life. We ended up helping Wences raise capital from uh Fred Wilson, then of Flatiron Partners and Chase Capital. We ended up helping him find a COO. I don't think I could have ever raised money.

without having that experience before. I was thinking out the business incorrectly, I was pitching it incorrect. There were a number of things that were Very, very valuable. And a year later, Banco Santander buys the company for th three quarters of a billion dollars. And suddenly everyone

Throughout the entire southern cone starts saying, Hey, wait a minute, if Wencis can do it, I can too. You can hear Linda's full story on our episode entitled. The next Silicon Valley is Wensis realized he needed to change the way he pitched his business to investors. In Argentina at that time.

It was revolutionary for the child of sheep ranchers to launch a successful startup. To say nothing of the radical ideas in his startup itself. To succeed, Wen's has needed to speak the language of local finance. He needed to reassure Argentine investors that his operation was actually quite conventional in order to start that revolution. And he did.

When is a startup patagone? was sold to the Spanish bank Santander for seven hundred and fifty million dollars in two thousand. Wensis went on to found a string of successful startups, including video game developer Wanaco Games. Lemon Bank in Brazil. Mobile payment provider Bling Nation.

And mobile wallet. Lemon. And now there's Apo. Spelled with an X. Zapo is a Bitcoin wallet.

Whose user interface is a lot like a regular bank's. They have an app. That makes it easy to transfer Bitcoin Onto a debit card. So

No more cafe meetups with guys who look like Gondolf. Zappo gives the people the revolutionary benefits of using Bitcoin without making it seem Scary. But getting to this point was no easy feat. You'll remember that Wentz's first encountered Bitcoin when he sent money to repair that bus in two thousand eleven.

Let's listen again as he describes the effect. it had on him. Like what? What? What did just happen?

And I went in a rabbit hole like lasted six months where I was first super cynical. And then at one point I hired a group of hackers with whom I had worked a long time ago. That's right. As part of his serious stress test.

Wenz has actually paid hackers to let loose on Bitcoin and try to break the system. But before we come to that story, This seems like a good time to pause and explain just for a moment how Bitcoin works. And why it makes some people Wary.

Bitcoin is digital currency, of course, but that's only the beginning. Its transactions are encrypted. And decentralized. So no one person

Or bank. or government. has control. Every time Bitcoin changes hands, it's recorded on a public ledger. A digital record.

Stretching. Back, back, back. with fairy creation. Like a very long Very detailed.

Guessbook. But instead of people's names The guest book is filled with unique addresses. Each of which records a transaction. This ledger, known as the blockchain.

Updates constantly. And in real time. And that information updates simultaneously. to the millions of computers tracking it. So if someone tries to mess with a ledger, it won't work.

Because a ledger. Lives everywhere. It's Bitcoin's decentralization that makes it so secure. But that's also what can make people nervous. We're trained to think of safety.

Of a single bank with a single key. Public ledger with millions of copies feels like the exact opposite. Another thing that some people find scary, another's liberating. Is the control you have over access to your Bitcoin and how easy it is to lose.

Bitcoins are stored in wallets. A unique address on the blockchain that only you can access. But if you lose that private адрес. then access to the bitcoins held there is lost forever. I recently produced a video that gives an entertaining overview of Bitcoin.

In the form. of a Hamilton style. Rap battle. You can see it. at masters of scale dot com slash

Bitcoin rap. Wensus knew that if he was going to build a business around this bitcoin revolution. He'd need to reassure consumers that it was as safe as conventional currency. And first He had to convince himself.

So we hired that group of hackers to see if they could break the system. After three months. He asked for a progress report. I say so where are we? And say we're gonna need more time.

Okay. How much Mm. Three months. Yeah. Okay.

And we'll need more money. Okay, how much? Another two hundred and fifty thousand. Wow. Made me dive. And we'd like you to pay us in Bitcoin. We're done. We don't need a lot of very much.

So the hackers, once it's hired to try to break Bitcoin. Ask to be paid. in Bitcoin. And like that. When this was sold.

And that's when I said, You know what, I wanna dedicate the rest of my career, my reputation and my capital to help this system succeed because I really believe that If Bitcoin succeeds for billions of people, that will be more meaningful than the internet succeeding. Having a universal store of value or measure of of value in a universal settlement system that can't be censored or manipulated, it's really a game changer for

Billions of people around the world. Even though Wences was converted, he could see how the gospel of Bitcoin was might be a hard sell for some. I think that having grown in Argentina

Help me understand Bitcoin. A lot better when I first saw it. Because if you live in the US the w dollar has worked really well, right? For you, has worked for your parents, has worked for your grandparents. It's very easy to get a credit card and a checking account, it's very easy to make a payment with a credit card. or with PayPal or with Benmore, et cetera. So you don't really see a problem there.

And in general. Americans have these very Positive view about the assume that the government will always be there and the government will always do the right thing. Right.

So you have to have grown in a up in a different country to say look, the government may not be there, may not always do the right thing and And that currency may not always be there, may not always Do the right thing. But when says didn't see Bitcoin as a mere alternative to unstable currencies and compromise financial institutions.

He saw it as a revolution for economies like Argentina. He also knew that for Bitcoin to truly succeed, it would need buy in from people used to stability. Wensus couldn't hire teams of hackers to reassure each and every person that Bitcoin was unbreakable. And he couldn't dress up as Gondolf and give personal demonstrations in coffee shops. After the break.

We'll hear how Wences found at Zapo. he would use to help make bitcoin. More relatable. When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position.

The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

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I hope to see you there. Before the break. We had heard how Wensis had been gripped by the possibilities of Bitcoin. Now He wanted to help lay the foundations for its wider acceptance.

So Wences founded Zappo. with Federico Morone to make using Bitcoin more convenient. And more importantly. Trustworthy. We wanna take care of the

Problem of Keeping the private key secure. receiving bitcoin for them, making very easy for them to receive Bitcoin, send Bitcoin and keeping them Secure. without them having to understand anything about the technology.

And at the time when we looked around there wasn't a service that already did that or that we could trust and we built that. Within a year of setting it up. Wensus and Federico knew they would have to make a bold bet. If they were going to reassure people. That bitcoin was safe.

The market was heating up. And that Increased risk. A lot of people brought their bitcoin to us.

And the Bitcoin price was going up rapidly. meaning we felt constantly like we were trying to catch up from behind and we said, How do we make sure that So Wensus and Federico made their big bold bet. They backed Sapo with a measure so conservative it seems almost crazy to those of us in Silicon Valley.

He literally built underground vaults. That were protected by armed guards. and elaborate security systems. Within these vaults, Zapo set up secure computer servers that were isolated from the internet. It was on these servers that Zappo kept its customers' digital wallets.

Effectively. Sapo had created the Fort Knox. of bitcoin. Wim. quickly build the infrastructure, say, Okay, what if the price is

Much, much Bigger than what it is right now and what if we have ten times more coins and we were very glad we did that. At the time some people thought we were crazy for building that infrastructure. of having these deep underground vaults in multiple continents that can only be accessed physically, that have arm guards that have man traps, that have very large tunnels, that uh everything is being filmed, that has biometric access. It looks like science fiction and people thought it was an exaggeration.

But it gave us comfort that we were not gonna have to be catch up from behind if the price went up the next and if we had Ten times more coins, we knew that The security was there. We were very glad we did that.

Wensus' big bold bet here is very unusual. Because the normal startup pattern, the one that I suggest and encourage entrepreneurs to do, is the minimal tests to see. What works. What would reassure people? What's the smallest, cheapest, easiest thing that you can measure and then iterate upon?

Yeah. In fact. The typical and especially software approach. To say we're going to go build the fort nox. is an extremely expensive

Extremely big option. But that shows you just how far you need to go in order to try to reassure people that this is in fact. Actually safe. In fact, This

Bold. Bet. This big move. Seems very risky. But maybe in fact.

There's more risk. in not taking that big bold bet. I think that it would have been more bold not to do it, because in any other service I would recommend that you do the way you suggest it, that you just Iterate, gradually, make it better.

But when you are responsible for other people's money It's just hard to sleep at night if you don't know if tomorrow your service will be good enough. if all of a sudden the price or the number of coins becomes too attractive to hackers and you were not prepared. So here I don't think we really had a choice if we did wanted to do it right. So because you're responsible for money, the only way forward was To really get way ahead of the game.

Like any revolutionary, Wens had to act quickly to make his vision a reality. But he also needed to show people that his Bitcoin vision was as safe as the familiar world. Of checking accounts. Bank statements and debit cards that many consumers were so familiar with. This paradoxically meant

Investing enormous time and money in conventional security measures. the kind that would convince consumers to join his revolution. Another founder who made an industry defining bet on the long game. is Anne Wajisky. of the DNA testing and analysis company twenty three and me.

Twenty three and me was a first of its kind company. Government regulators. Didn't know how to classify it. And Anne had to decide whether to evade them. Or engage them.

I had one very wise regulator who Asked me, she's like, Well what do you want to do? Do you want to sell this company in two years? And if you want to do that. This is your strategy, but if you really want

To change health care. You just sit down. and you work with the FDA and you do the hard work. And it's gonna take you Years.

And you gotta be ready. At the end of those years you will have really changed society. But you gotta know that you're committed to doing that. and ultimately succeeded in reassuring the FDA of the safety and reliability

of the revolutionary new DNA service. And Wensus showed a similar unrelenting commitment to Zappo. This prepared the company for the huge growth in Bitcoin that Wentz has predicted. It also made sure Sapo had the reassuring measures that would attract anyone still on the fence.

To the Bitcoin revolution. Wentz is his big bet on Zappo. Paid off. when an event shook the world of bitcoin in two thousand and fourteen. It started with a Japanese Bitcoin exchange.

Mount Gox. MT Gox, which was the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time. When bankrupt. and put a huge pressure on the rest of the ecosystem for Security at a premium basically. And we had a wall of coins coming our way as a result. That event

put us at a completely different level. I want to stress here that Wenses is in no way gleeful about how this event helped Zappo. Quite the opposite. I think that was bad for Bitcoin as a whole. As an industry we were all set back.

a few years because of empty cocks going under but it made people care more about security and we had Very well known security and we brought a lot of coins to us. Unpleasant. as the Malcox episode was.

It was a vindication of Winston's strategy. Today. Sapo's grown to one of the most trusted ports of refuge in the often tumultuoin waters. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has grown from seeing at most ten thousand confirmed transactions per day in two thousand eleven.

to around four hundred thousand. If we wanna get to a billion owners of Bitcoin, which I believe we do We also have to make it Very, very, very easy.

With any product, your first tranche of users will likely be very similar. They'll be the kind of people who are already primed for what you have to offer. I love what Wences has to say about growing Bitcoin or any product to its Second billion users.

He says the first billion users of any digital tool have a lot in common with each other. And he likens it. to the early days of the internet. You Can think of Silicon Valley as being super central.

to getting the first billion people online. And Those first billion people We were the first billion people to get online all over the world. They look a lot like people from Palo Alto. Even if they're not in Palo Alto. even if they're in Bangalore, even if they are in Istanbul, even if they are in Paris

I think it felt somewhat natural t for Silicon Valley to bring them online because there were people like them. They spoke the same language even if they didn't speak the same language, right? Just as with the internet. With Bitcoin, you have the super early adopters. The hardcore technologists Who revel in the new.

Then it gets popularized amongst a wider group. That shares a similar outlook. But reaching the second billion? That's something else altogether. That changed in the second billion.

people who some of them look a little bit like that, but most of them begin to look very different. And right now we're in a completely extraterrestrial territory. The people who are coming online now from the two billion onwards have nothing to do with the people. Around Silicon Valley. Meaning that they for the most part Just have a very different

view of the world that we have. Wensus knows that attracting the first billion Bitcoin users will require a lot of reassurance. But reaching the second and subsequent billions will take a radically different approach. These are the people who constantly face the challenge of having their life savings wiped out. Just as Wenses and his family did in Argentina.

So how to reach that second billion? Or as Wenses refers to it here, the That's second public. there is some advantages to finding people who really understand that second public, who understand it firsthand. Not by watching YouTube or reading a paper or doing tourism, right? And in some ways there's no no other way to understand the public than being there.

One powerful way to be there. is to hire people who live there. And who intrinsically understand How to reach and reassure. Your new expansive audience.

They will be able to show others exactly how your radical new product Technology or service. Will bring true value. To their lives. This is what Wences is doing with Zappo.

The company is fully remote. With two hundred and seventy five people. Across sixty two countries. The main advantage is that if You and I

We're gonna play soccer. Football match. to the death. You're given ten million dollars and you can hire Any players you want.

and I am given 10 million dollars and our teams are gonna play and whoever loses Nice. And then there's a little catch. Which is I can only hire

In Buenos Aires. And you can hire all over the world. You will kill me. No matter what

Right. And this is no different when it comes to a startup. So I think that's the biggest advantage. Fencing you will find better people, period. Those people will be More motivated. And more uh loyal

That is a h a huge advantage. Once you've got your dream soccer team. It's time to start scoring goals. A good example of this is when the entire Zappo team of the Went to Kenya.

And use the local payment service. M Pesa. And Passa. is in Bitcoin. But it's an interesting case of how Bitcoin could be used by people who lack access to traditional banking.

No, I think that If you are in in payment. And in Bitcoin. You cannot ignore what's going on in Kenya with Empeza, but also what's going on in in China with WeChat and Alipay.

and see it first hand and use it and spend some time using it like the locals do to to understand. We were in Nairobi We have everybody using Empeza in downtown Nairobi and we we told everybody that they could only use Empeza for the whole week we were there. It was interesting that we did this exercise where we asked Are people why they

thought that people were using M Pesa and then We had them. Wait that the places where people recharge and top up their M Pesa account. Asking

why they used it. And the difference you think you know and that's why you're there to learn The things that will surprise you. And and there were a lot of interesting Surprises. One surprise.

The early adopters of MPESA were not the privileged educated users we see in developed countries. Quite the opposite. The people with less than money used it first and and only now, as of the last year, people who have a bank account and a credit card began using Empeza.

But before it wasn't the case. So for example in fancy hotels you couldn't pay within Pesa. Or if you're at a fancy restaurant and you ask to pay with Empeza, people laugh. The reasons for using MPESA were also surprising. For example, the answer from a woman who said like when she receives their salary, if she has it in cash, her husband may spend it and may mispend it. Right? And it was very

very hard for him to do that if she kept it in her Mesa account. Never thought about that, but it makes a lot of sense. And it's more valuable than I thought. Um a young man Explaining look when I pay with Empeza nobody can see my wallet. Nobody can see how much I have in it. Nobody can see what I get as change. I just pay and I'm done.

And yes, he was referring to the act of reaching for your wallet, getting all the cash out, paying getting the change and and all of what that exposes. And again, I never thought about that. And it's very valid, right? Yep. So there are all of these things that you need to be there to understand. and why they're valuable and how valuable they are. It's uncovering and promoting these unimagined upsides of Bitcoin that helps drive Wensis. What is really important is that

If Bitcoin works It may do for value For money. what the internet did for information.

Bitcoin is very risky and it may fail we don't know it may take 10 20 30 years to get fully established like the internet took that long And in that process he may fail, he may not succeed like the internet did. But if Bitcoin succeeds, you can imagine a world In which

The national currencies do not disappear. Right. When you're Granddaughter asks you. You know, what's the price of

The New Zealand dollar. You're Answer will be Seventeen hundred Satoshis. A Satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin currency. And the Turkish lira, five thousand Satoshis.

In August two thousand nineteen. Zapo sold a portion of its custodial business to Coinbase for fifty five million dollars. Wensen and his team had laid the groundwork for bringing on board the big institutional investors. Now they want to focus on the kinds of customers for whom Bitcoin could have a transformational effect. Having

a global non political standard of value and having a global non political standard of settlement would free Money in a way that it has never done before. It would be the biggest step in the democratization of money we've ever seen. It's really a truly Sovereign.

standard of value, non political standard of value is sovereign, it's uncensorable, it's undevaluable. If that becomes the backbone of value in the world We're looking at a much better world for most. Of us for billions of people. Like any revolution that seeks to make the world a better place,

Wentzis's vision is not about change for the sake of change. It's about overcoming the inequities that for many of us go unseen, but for too many others. are an ever present cage. However lofty the revolution you're aiming for. If you can reassure your customers that the upsides make it worth them putting their trust in you.

Then you've already won. the critical. First half of the battle. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening.

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