Libra failed by trying to change too much at once

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:18:04

   So famously, you led this project at Facebook called Libra, which is now called Novi. A lot of people always wondered, what happened there? That was a really cool idea. I know some people have a sense there's regulation challenges, things like that. I don't know if you've talked about this much. So I guess just can you just give people a brief summary of just like, what is Libra? This project you're working on and just what happened and how you feel about it? Yeah. I mean, David Marcus led it and I happily work for him and with him. I think he's a visionary and also a mentor and a friend.

2. 1:18:36

   You know, honestly, Libra is probably the biggest disappointment of my career. When I think about the problems we were solving, which are very real problems, if you look at, for example, the remittance space, people sending money to family members in other countries, it's incredibly regressive. People that don't have the money to spend are having to pay 20% to send money home to their family. so outrageous fees it takes multiple days you have to go then pick up cash from yeah it's just it's all bad and here we are with like three billion people using whatsapp all over the world talking to each other every day especially friends and family exactly the kind of people who'd send money to each other why can't you send money as immediately as cheaply as simply as you send a text message it just it's one of those things when you when you sit back and think

3. 1:19:34

   about it that should just exist and that was what we set out to try and do now i don't think we played all of our like cards perfectly if i could go back and do things there are a bunch of things i would do differently you know we we tried to kind of get it all at once we tried to launch a new blockchain it was a basket of currencies originally it was integration into whatsapp and messenger and i think the whole What kind of went like, oh my god, that's a lot of change at once. And, you know, it happened also to be at the time that Facebook was at the absolute like nadir of its reputation. And so that didn't help, right? It was it was also not the messenger that people wanted for this kind of change. We knew all that going in, but we we went for it. I think if we I think there are a bunch of ways that we could do that that would have introduced the change a little bit more gently, you know, maybe still gotten to that same outcome.

4. 1:20:31

   but fewer new things at once and introduce the new things one at a time. Who knows? Those were decisions we made together. So we all own them. Certainly I own them. But it fundamentally disappoints me that this doesn't exist in the world today because the world would be a better place if we'd been able to ship that product. I would be able to send you 50 cents in WhatsApp for free. It would settle instantly. Everybody would have a balance in their WhatsApp account.

5. 1:20:58

   we'd be transact i mean it was just it should exist i don't know to be honest like i mean the current administration is super friendly to crypto facebook's reputation meta's reputation is in a very different place maybe they should go build it now i was looking at the history of it and uh apparently they sold the tech to some private equity company for 200 million bucks yeah yeah yeah so and we had to buy back there are a couple of uh of current uh blockchains that are built on the tech because the tech was open sourced from the beginning uh aptos and uh mistin are two companies that are built off of this tech so you know at least the all of the work that we did did not die but and and lives on in these two companies and they're both doing really well but still uh you know we should be able to send each other money in whatsapp and and we can't today