E153: Kast Founder: Why Crypto Banking Will Be Bigger Than You Think

0:00I think Cast is a trillion dollar plus company and I think it's gonna be 100 billion if we miss and 10 billion if we miss really bad Because the opportunity to build a global bank is so big. You have to be a little bit crazy to think this thing is just so enormous. So you need to have that ego. You said I'm someone who absorbs things. Who are you? Who am I? Ragolin Regs Pathy, also known as the Stablecoin guy. He founded CAST, a stablecoin powered banking platform. And leads JavCap as founder and CIO of its liquid crypto hedge fund. I had to eat the humble pie. Can you explain exactly what you mean by this?

0:32Well, after my last business, we thought it was worth nearly 100 million. and then it went to zero. I had to go through this process of going in and getting a corporate job. It's a big step down from thinking you're worth tens of millions of dollars. This is a hard thing as a founder that people don't talk about. It's just that eating humble pie. You just got to get humble and realize that it doesn't matter how much you think you're actually worth. You're worth what you're worth. Why do people call you the stablecoin guy? They just went very deep on stablecoins and just learned everything about stablecoins possible.

1:00I think I know more about stablecoins than probably top 50 in the world. Tell me something I might not know about stablecoins. roughly the world uses 70 % in USD for trading. Maybe US dollars are like 25 % or 30 % of the actual world's currencies, but 99 % of stablecoins. You said before people will think I'm crazy, but CAST is a trillion dollar company, a global bank for a billion people. Can you explain CAST vision?

1:30Hi everyone. This is the little bit that I know none of you like that can help us make a huge difference. for this show and we want to take it next. 71 % of the people who regularly watch When Shift Happens have not subscribed. And so all I'd ask you if you want to make a huge difference is the following. If you've seen this show before and you like it, help me, help my team. Hit the subscribe button and we'll continue to build this show for you. Thank you. I think you said something. I think you wrote something about the math of compounding as a founder. Oh, 100%. Do you want to tell us about that?

2:03Well, I think it's just basically the simple fact of we're not recording we are we are yeah oh really yeah we are oh i didn't know we started yet okay it's a living room conversation okay okay i mean my theory around compound maths is that firstly most people don't understand it and if you do understand it it's like the greatest weapon you can have because what most people don't understand is if your company is growing super fast and it's growing 15 and you can make it grow 20 or 25 month on month people just think okay that's like 15 versus 20 it's just 5 more but it's actually not true when you compound that over a year or two years it's dramatic um and um like it's multiples like the difference between 15 and like 35 for example it's like six to six x or more after 12 months and so it makes a huge difference if you understand that every little thing you do that can add 0.5 % here 0.5 % there it just keeps accumulating right and so in a business you've got maybe 10 different things you need to optimize for fundraising how operations are run how marketing is run who you're employing how quickly a product is delivered is it delivered in two weeks they deliver in six weeks so every little thing if you can squeeze 0.5 % here 0.5 % there it adds up to another five percent faster you compound that in 12 months it's the difference between you being the winning company and then someone else being the the second best company and so i i don't think a lot of founders pay attention to this and it makes me drive the business very very hard but i keep reminding everyone that compound maths is like super important and every single bit you squeeze makes a huge difference how do you make people understand this at scale because you have 170 employees now yeah yeah i mean like i write to the employees as much as i can directly to give examples of things that i've read or things that i i think about you know and so i think as a founder writing to and talking to people at all levels of the company directly is super important um so that they can understand directly from you without any translation in between um but yeah obviously different people don't get it and um but i think the more you you talk about things the more people come to understand them how much of your time you spend doing that because there's so many other things to do yeah i'm actually terrible at it yeah i'm terrible yeah i'm like i want people to understand what we're doing without me telling them yeah which is obviously terrible right yeah and wrong i i don't have any like uh exact discipline to it It's not like I say every Friday I'm going to write about it.

4:52Some weeks I'm writing more, some weeks I'm busy and I write less. But I am a person who absorbs ideas. And if I see an idea, I try to write about it and tell people about it. Not only in my own company, but also out in the world as well. You know, so when I see that I observe something, I write it on X or LinkedIn for everyone to share. Like that compound back to back. Actually on LinkedIn, I see you all the time. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, all the time. It's very good. Actually, LinkedIn is much better as an algorithm for people to see all the time and it stays there. So I see you much more on LinkedIn than on X.

5:28Yeah. The problem is that I'm a long-form writer. I'm not a short-form writer. And so LinkedIn was more suited to me and therefore I have a much bigger following on LinkedIn. But recently, X changed its format so I could write long-form and now I actually post on X a lot more than LinkedIn. So yeah, it balances out over time. you said i'm someone who absorbs things who are you who am i well um i'm sri lankan australian i i was born in sri lanka and i migrated to australia when i was five so i'm also an immigrant um my parents were relatively wealthy in sri lanka and and went to australia and we had nothing and so i've felt that journey um why because of the civil war in sri lanka started in the early 80s went for 26 years and a few years after the civil war obviously my dad wanted a better life even if that was the sacrifice of leaving behind wealth we had in sri lanka the start afresh and he never really made money again and we always lived kind of at a very basic level just to understand why do you have to or leave your wealth behind is it because it's wealth in businesses that can be exactly okay Yeah.

6:44Wealth and businesses and property. A lot of that property was caught up in the war. A lot of the businesses are not wealth that's transferable. And this in many ways, seeing my dad who was very successful and then had to live a very basic life as a shopkeeper. You know, it's a very typical immigrant upbringing for a lot of people who migrate to the West as immigrants. They start a shop. My dad had a shop for a couple of decades. I worked in the shop from when I was before 10 years old. so I grew up in that very typical immigrant household you know like in a shop and living week to week but in a very happy household you know and that informs my worldview about money and and how how life is in many ways fair to us because we escaped Sri Lanka and we went to a place like Australia one of the best countries in the world that allows me to have opportunities and I had some parts of the family who were in Sri Lanka and they were suffering a lot more.

7:42And even though we weren't rich in Australia, we were rich in opportunity. And a lot of people in Sri Lanka are not, including parts of my family, right? And so that informs my worldview. I subsequently, as an adult, have traveled to 100-plus countries because I love exploring. I love being in lots of places. I've lived in eight countries. And so this has given me a very wide worldview. of both emerging markets as well as developed markets. But, you know, at the core, I'm a person who I think is really an immigrant in many ways, you know, and lived that immigrant life. I'm also, I would say, an underdog.

8:23I think I've been discounted many times in my life. And, you know, I haven't come from a traditional background, you know, for success. and so i think that informs my world view of like i can appreciate people who come from nothing but want to make something big they want to go after bold ideas you know and um that's what i'm trying to do i guess with cast and that's what i try to do my whole life um and that's what we want to enable i guess with cast as well you had the first shot with the startups 2009 2010 yep you build a cloud software company in australia yeah a business you told me was valued about 100 million dollar but that then left you broke for more than eight years and five of these eight years were actually after the business closed down yeah can you tell me what happened yeah so myself and my business partner at the time simon uh we started a cloud software company it was fantastic company that grew very fast but it was in australia before venture capital was really around it started as a consulting company which then we made into a into a software cloud company and so we were self-funding it and of course cloud requires a lot of capital infrastructure investments and the only way you could get that infrastructure was through giving personal guarantees even though it was run as a business it was given through personal guarantees and at some point we took our eyes off the consulting business which was the cash cow for the for the cloud business and eventually both kind of went down right we weren't taking care of both of them and look in business these days in most places in the world business finishes you shut up shop and it's not great it's very hard to go from thinking a company's worth 100 million to zero but we i had the worst of all worlds where we had these personal guarantees it meant that I was on the hook or I had to declare bankruptcy.

10:22And like my dad was always like horrified of the fact that of declaring bankruptcy. And in Australia, bankruptcy laws are such that you're not never really off the hook. You know, you have to give back your passport and a whole bunch of things. And so I spent, so then I finished that in 2013 and I moved to Singapore and I was working in a place like Amazon and Facebook, but I was paying back those debts. So I was basically negative five years after I finished that business, you know, So that basically took out nearly, took out all the money I made in my 20s, took me to not zero, but negative. And it wiped out probably eight to 10 years of my life.

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12:14That is why we partnered with Zashi Wallet, the easiest self-custody wallet for private transactions. You can send, receive, and spend Zcash without middleman or surveillance using Zashi, the wallet that was built by the team that launched Zcash in 2016. What happens if you, I mean, maybe you don't know, but what happens if you declare personal bankruptcy? Because there's a lot of big founder stories, especially guys who take a lot of risks, sometimes do kind of shady things. They actually declared bankruptcy multiple times through their life but they're still rich as fuck like so what's the what happens concretely so it depends i think from country to country in america for example you can use bankruptcy as like a protection layer from which you can restructure your debts and it's much more generous to entrepreneurs when i was living in australia at the time they've actually refreshed it a little bit but basically means that like you have to either agree to pay back over seven years.

13:13It was very punitive at the time. Or you have to give up your passport and you can wipe your debts, right? But it's much more punitive in Australia. It's basically like pay it back or live a very knocked down life, you know? This is in America, you can kind of like walk away from your debts. And so I was living in Australia, so it was a very bad option. I think in America, people use it to restructure debts. And I think it's also because in America, people are getting sued all the time. They have to use this protection barrier, I guess. So if you give up your passport, you have to stay there forever.

13:45What's the deal? Yeah, now they've lightened the bankruptcy laws to allow, because it's not very conducive to startups, but at the time it didn't exist. I never actually declared bankruptcy, but I just chose to pay back the debts as much as possible and eventually, you know, cut deals and finish that whole thing. What did you learn from this kind of first crazy startup experience that make you much better founder today at Cast? well i think um the thing that i learned the most is how to manage cash flow as a business because you think that you've got infinite cash like even if you raise money but that scenario analysis of like what if something goes okay things are going well while we're making positive cash flow but it's only when you learn that hey what if like two-thirds of my business disappears years or more could i still make cash how long would i have to run so i think a lot of founders the first time around think oh i've got enough cash based upon the current burn but they don't think about what if disaster strikes how much cash would i have then you know so it made me a ultra paranoid founder this time around about everything not not in a bad way but just in a i think just enough in a good way to protect against bad things happening and even though we have lots of really good investors i never wanted to rely on the investors i want the business to be very substantially cash flow positive and a very very well run operation you mentioned before for the first startup we did this with our own money cast you have investors yeah what's your view on build you've done both on raising money versus trying to do the thing on your own well at the beginning i um was very willing i raised a small amount of money in the hundreds of thousands when i told my investors who were mostly my friends that like hey if this goes wrong i'll put i'll pay it back so i was backstopping it personally at the beginning forecast yeah well just because before we had institutional money you know then when you get institutional money um my first thing was that i need to make this business very lean as quickly as possible so i'm not burning through this institutional money right um so i think it's good to raise money for investors because they can add value um but at the end of the day they're investors and they want to return and so you know um obviously they can help you scale like you know some point cast may raise in the hundreds of millions or even billions because we want to go to some crazy scale which is very hard to do personally you know but i think a lot of people in startups they go and raise money and they think that raising money is the result 100 % and they celebrate it like hey we've made it but actually it's the beginning of the adventure and probably the beginning of a lot of troubles also problems exactly exactly and you will have much more control over your investor group if they realize that you don't need them in some ways i say that with all due to respect to my investors but if you don't need them if you You can be very cashflow positive.

16:49You can run a good operation. It's much better to have cash coming to you when you don't need it as opposed to having to need it. You have the leverage, right? Yeah. Well, recently I had the power law from tether in your seat and we're talking about, uh, I was saying, oh, you're trying to raise 20 billion at 500 billion valuation. What are you going to do with this money? And then he was like, oh yeah, you know, we're making 13 billion in profit every year. So it's not about the money is about sending a message. Yeah. Like you build the ultimate. I mean, maybe that's like another level, but you build the ultimate leverage where you can go faster with the money, but you actually don't need it.

17:22And you can be much more, I don't want to say relaxed, but less pressure and much better leverage when you negotiate for sure. Yeah. Look, I think the thing I've learned about fundraising is sometimes it's also signaling as well. And I think we're getting to that point where we might raise very substantial amounts of capital in the hundreds of millions, potentially, you know, over the next one to two years. But part of it is also like certain investors and certain signals can ordain winners in a market, especially a market that's very new. I think the concept of a crypto neobank is something that's getting a lot of meta now.

17:58But really, we were sort of at the origination story of that. And yeah, so I think what you can do is send a message saying, look, we're going to be the winner or there's going to be a handful of us. And everyone else who tries like this is the bar you have to climb now. you told me when we talked the other day i had to eat the humble pie which is a not strange expression yeah can you explain me exactly what you mean by this well after my last business like um you know we thought it was worth nearly 100 million because that's what you know we were trying to raise money at etc and then it went to zero negative as i told you and um so what did i have to do like i had to go through this process of like going and getting a corporate job for you know 150 160 000 a year base salary which is fine good salary but there's a big step down from thinking you're worth tens of millions of dollars you know and um i think this is a hard thing as a founder that people don't talk about is just that eating humble pie you just got to get humble and realize that it doesn't matter how much you think you're actually worth you're worth what you're worth right at that time you know and so i thought i was worth tens of millions and now i'm worth a hundred and mid hundred thousand dollars salary in a corporate job that's life you better you know you better just eat it and get back to get back to it and work your way through it you know and um there's no point like stewing on it of course naturally as a founder i can tell you every founder who's gone through this process is this probably struggled with it in some way shape or form i struggled with it for a while i don't think mentally i was quite there for for some time it was a struggle but you just have to push through and get ready to bat again in startup life how important is ego or lack of ego in the entrepreneurship world because you need to have a huge ego to start a company and think i'm going to be one of the ones going to be able to whatever one out of 10 companies that succeeds or probably even less or a couple of after a couple of years right yeah so you have this huge ego like i'm better than anyone else yeah but then you can't have the freaking ego because you're gonna get beaten down so much all the time yeah it's not about being beaten down i think the thing is is that look i if you ask me and i'm gonna go on record now and so people are gonna think i'm effing crazy but i think ours is a trillion plus company and i think it's going to be a hundred billion if we miss and and 10 billion if we miss really badly you know and so um because the opportunity to build a global bank is so big right and so when i look at um investors and people and friends like my job is to kind of not listen to them because their worldview as to how big something can get is only to a certain view and so if i absorb that then i will i will downsize the potential of costs you know and so my view you have to be a little bit crazy to think this thing is just so enormous and the potential is so big even if you're just tiny right now right and so you need to have that ego but then where the non-ego bit and so people are gonna like through their own um jealousy envy not understanding you know thinking that it's not possible thinking they're they're in a big company and and you know you're you're down here how could you think that you're going to be possibly bigger than them um are going to try to beat you down but that's not the bit about like lacking ego that matters to me because that's just like one ego versus another the thing that i think um where you need to lack ego is just doing anything you need to to make that company fine like i will go to the warehouse and take merch at the beginning i don't do it as much anymore but i'm happy to and carry that merch i was talking about this with another founder to an event and if that's what needs to be done that that's what needs to be done to build your company you know and um so you should have if i need to respond to a customer who's got a who spends fifty dollars on their card a month to sort out their customer service problem because they're screaming about it then i'll do it you know and i think that's what you that's what i think can create a great founder experiences if people know that you're willing to do the absolute dirt the most basic things but you still have this vision to build a trillion dollar company i saw you the other day retweet a tweet of someone very mean uh very angry yeah and saying ah this is a shit product this is shit service and he said hey guys like i'm gonna retweet that and answer to that and yeah almost no one would do that but i'm doing it right yeah yeah this person was was very unhappy with with the customer service issue and um i you know when we looked at it it was kind of like it wasn't totally our fault but it wasn't the thing like he complained about it i picked it up i retweeted it and i basically said look if you have an issue i don't care who you are you know you come and reach out to me and i'll try to respond now of course you know i'll get bombarded but i'll try and i sent it straight to the coo we took it straight down through the customer service layers because the thing is like i don't want to build a company that feels like your telco or your bank you know and that's the difference like you've got to build a company where you're like hey i'm going to hit the founder and one day maybe I can't scale myself, but maybe I'll try to build a team around me so that people always feel like they can go straight to the top and they'll take it all the way through the organization to get an answer.

23:33I don't want people to feel like they're – it's partly because I'm building this company for all the things I hated. I hate these call centers and these textbook answers and things going around in circles. And so we won't be perfect at that, but I mean, we'll really try, you know, and that's, that's going to be the challenge as we scale, but that's what we're really going to try to do. And Twitter is amazing at that. And if Elon can do it, which he does often, right? Yeah. Probably anyone can do it. We don't have an excuse. Exactly. Exactly. You said before, I think Cast is a trillion dollar company.

24:15Some people think I'm crazy. Are you born crazy? Or now that you're in your mid forties, you got there gradually by taking more and more risk and thinking bigger and bigger. Like, how do we get to, how does someone get to that? Because for entrepreneurs, I think it's, that's kind of always the problem. Maybe also it depends where you come from. I'm Swiss. I'm more like, so, but like try to do things profitable and grow slowly and all that stuff. Right. And I'm like 33 now, my third company. And I'm like, how do I get to think like that? Yeah. I think craziness scales over time, you know, you know, when you're like younger, you're like, Hey, if I build a$10 million company, that would be crazy.

24:55And then you're like, well, if I could build a hundred million dollar company, I'd be crazy until a few years ago. I was like, if I thought built a billion dollar company, it's crazy and cost is not a billion dollar company. It's close, but it's not there yet. And, um, but yeah, I think it's just at a certain point. And I think the thing is that like at a certain point as well, the craziness can scale more because, you know, the thing is that like after a certain amount of money, whether it's a billion or 10 billion 100 or trillion like the numbers kind of don't matter you might as well just go for maximum you know you might as well go for something that's going to change the world to the absolute maximum because um because now you're kind of clear of some you're clear of like 99.99 percent of businesses right so you're just fighting amongst a small segment of of businesses you said before i was in trouble for a couple of years after this first business.

25:44And then I decided to go and make some money. You worked for Zoom? I worked for Amazon first, Amazon Web Services, very early stage when they were quite early here in Asia. Because I was already in cloud and building data centers, so I knew everything about it. So I went there first. And then I went to Facebook to build their enterprise product and then Zoom very early and then Circle. But Zoom made a difference. Zoom made a big difference. I think in terms of money I made, because I was like in Amazon making a lot of money, but paying back a lot of it. Same thing in Facebook. And then I was like breaking even.

26:19And then I took a huge pay cut to go to Zoom, like 40%. But they had unlimited commission. And so I went there and just absolutely, like I was like, this is, it was almost like this is one of my last chances to just make it huge. And then this was pre-pandemic. And then when the pandemic came, I was like, I need to rinse this. to the absolute maximum. And so not only did everyone do well at Zoom, but my team was the number one team in one year, you know, me and Izya who now works at Cast. She sold the biggest deal in Zoom's history. So we went to the absolute maximum, you know, and did great things for Zoom.

27:01And I learned a lot from, I learned a lot from different companies, but I learned a lot from Zoom in particular, I think. I think Eric Yuan is like an amazing entrepreneur. And yeah, I learned a lot. A lot of, I think, costs, weirdly, even though it's more of a crypto fintech company, replicates a lot of what Zoom, components that Zoom has. Yeah. And I think part of that is that Eric is, you know, a Chinese immigrant, you know, when you look at me, he's very simple, very humble, but super ambitious. Zoom has great Western branding. But then has, you know, a lot of engineers, like 90 % of the company are like engineers in Asia, just working super hard to ship products super fast.

27:46And so they try to, they out-shipped everyone, you know? And so a lot of that is how, you know, we're building costs as well. Like we want to out-ship everyone, but have beautiful branding at the front as well. Why do people call you the stablecoin guy? I think I actually made it for myself. I would say maybe why do you call yourself the stablecoin guy? Well, I was just like very deep in stable coins and I was at Circle before running Asia. And so... You were the CEO of Circle Asia. Yeah. I mean, the Singapore entity. And so that's the main Asian entity. And yeah, I set them up here. And so I just went very deep on stable coins and like just learned everything about stable coins possible.

28:27Now, this is... Stable coins really became hot like in the last year, right? Yeah. So I spent many years before that really going very, very deep on stable coins. And to me, the thesis is very obvious, right? Of how deep, but like, I think I know more about stable coins and nearly, nearly anyone, but probably top, let's say top 50 in the world or maybe better, you know. Tell me something I might not know about stable coins. I don't think, I mean, there's many things I can tell you about stable coins, but 99 % are US dollars. um and that hasn't shifted uh pretty much since the beginning as much as people try um how much is u.s dollar not in stablecoin u.s dollar versus other currencies do you know in the world generally in the world well they i mean it's a little this is the other complex thing so they say like roughly the world uses 60 70 in usd for trading now there's lots of different currencies but it's the main trading currency um maybe u.s dollars are like 25 to 30 of the actual world's currencies but 99 of stable coins and i don't think that's ever going to shift by the way not for a long time um because there's a few reasons and i've batted this off because a lot of people are like foreign stable coins um there's a few reasons one is that um stable coins are money on the internet and the internet trades in dollars right and um so for that reason also it's like a liquidity game right so not none of the others have got enough liquidity or the trading payers in us dollars or the traders in us dollars all the selling of goods and services on the internet is in us dollars so it just has this huge dominance my thesis is that like us dollars are going to pretty much wipe out next to most currencies already have to some extent a lot of currencies are dollar linked or dollar basket linked or they're just like getting demolished and they'll just switch to us dollars soon and the stable coin phenomenon is one of the reasons or is the main reason why this is going to happen i think it was going to happen anyway and then i think there's a huge acceleration because of stable coins i think what most people don't understand is that dollars exist in like three different places so there's like dollars in the us which exists within the us then there's what they call euro dollars or asia dollars which are offshore dollars which are outside the us banking system per se and then there's like informal dollars dollars that float not in a bank through havala and other means right and this is why stable coins magic because it's the first time that all three systems have been unified in a single layer you can have dollars in the us offshore informal in a wallet in a mobile phone and you can send it to anyone anywhere, permissionlessly pretty much.

31:18And that is why the TAM of stablecoins is so huge and the businesses you can build on top of them is just enormous. Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible. Thank you, Trezor. My favorite cold wallet to store my crypto and make sure I sleep well at night. If you want to order a Trezor wallet and sleep well at night too, you can use my promo code WSH10 to get a 10 % discount. Big thank you to Bitwise Asset Management for backing today's conversation. Bitwise is a crypto specialist asset manager with more than$15 billion in client assets across 30 plus crypto solutions, including ETFs, index funds, alpha strategies, staking, and more.

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32:45your stablecoin maxi 100 have to be i'm the stablecoin guy are you a usd are you a usd maxi in terms of because there's this theory in crypto and if we look at asset prices over the last 10 20 30 years it makes sense right but it's very hard when you're in crypto and you understand all these things and you understand debasement, flat currency devaluation, asset price inflation, wage deflation, the dollar is worthless. But at the same time, the dollar is getting stronger and stronger versus other currencies. How do you think about that as a as an investor? Well, I mean, so at one point, dollars were linked 100 % to gold, right?

33:29And then obviously that got separated as a hard fix. And so now Now dollars are based on the fact the whole world wants to use them. And so as a result, it has value because if everyone wants, same way that gold has value because everyone wants it, right? At the end of the day, it's a piece of metal, it shines, pretty much useless. But if everyone wants it, it has value, right? And so I think the dollar will continue to get stronger for the next decade in terms of like it's going to eat up all the other currencies minus some very big ones like the Indian rupee, euros, Japanese yen. And, you know, there's going to be some very big ones, but pretty much the rest is going to get absorbed by dollars.

34:07But then my personal belief, and this is in my long run writing, in like 2040, give or take, the dollars will become abundant. But then there will be something that happens to the U.S. because the U.S. ultimately controls dollars. Around that time, from a macro point of view, other economies are going to get substantially bigger. India is going to be substantially bigger, China. And then all these other countries will become bigger, such that the US will become relatively smaller. And there'll just be this weird scenario where the world is relying mostly on dollars, but it's no longer the biggest economy in the world.

34:42And they will force migration to something else. And I think you'll see this new type of stablecoin appear, which would be, you know, the BRICS are trying to do the gold-backed one. but I think there is a world in which you could have a Bitcoin back to stablecoin, I guess. So at the moment, it's also like a numerical thing, right? Like it's very hard to price something in Bitcoin because it's hard to think about how many point bubble lies in Bitcoin. But, you know, if you just made Bitcoin, you know, basically a Bitcoin when it's a million dollars is a hundred million satoshis, right? Right? So if you divided Bitcoin in a million dollars into 1 million, then every piece would be 100 cents and a dollar, right?

35:31And so I think there's a world in which you're going to have a Bitcoin dollar per se or Bitcoin stablecoin eventually. But for the next 10 years, I would just stick to dollars. So you're the stablecoin guy. You run a circle, Asia Pacific Circle, obviously is the company behind the USDC stablecoin. But at some point you say, about 10 years after your previous company didn't work out. You say, now is the time to go and I need to build this thing called casts. I need to do that thing around stable coin. What did you see that made you take the leap and say, I'm going to try this thing again, go a hundred times bigger and harder.

36:17You know, I think we were talking about this, like conviction builds over time. right and so i did write a paper around how i think this was going to progress and how this was going to happen over the next decade but at the same time you know i was pretty burnt out after circle with all the travel etc and so i needed a little bit of break for a couple of months but then my view was that stable coins are going to go very big um but everyone was focused on the stable coin itself right and i was there at circle at a time when interest rates are 0.25 percent net interest margin was 10 bips i've if interest rates go back to that right then stable coins are suddenly not interesting from a profit making layer themselves right and so what i believe that people were missing was actually the biggest thing that the world needs is a global bank built on top of the stable coin layer right because at the moment um several coins are used by a few people and your experience is either an exchange or a wallet or things that are pretty clumsy, right?

37:18But what you actually need is you need a bank that people in like 150 plus countries can use. So for context, like Revolut and Wise, you can use in about 40 countries, 30 of them are Europe, right? So it's like Europe plus 10 other countries roughly. So there's really no global bank per se that's being built. And I think stable coins are the only opportunity upon which you can actually do that. And the exchanges and others, I feel, are distracted in terms of just printing money off trading to build something that initially is a pretty boring business in terms of revenue, but has a much wider use case.

37:57For example, a few hundred million people, maybe 200 million people trade crypto, but there's at least 2 billion people who need a bank for US dollars today and probably don't have one. right and so the market is much bigger and that's why i said okay like let me go and build this very hard thing by the way it's like um also to use stable coins it doesn't it like the thesis is like you can just use stable coins and everyone use stable coins but that's not here yet that's not here for another five or ten years so you have to not only build this bank for stable coins but you're going to make it interact with the real world through cards through what we call on and off ramp the ability to send money anywhere in the world you have to go and get all the licenses You have to build customer service.

38:39You have to build all the hard old school stuff that crypto people don't like doing. And I like doing hard stuff. And so that's why I chose to do it because I felt like the moat was the difficulty of doing it. Like most crypto people are short term thinking. They don't want to do the hard stuff. And I think that was where I found the sweet spot. Can you explain cast to your mom in two sentences? is it's a bank for anyone in the world nearly anyone in the world to use that has a simple cash account savings account and a card and my mom can use it and she's in Australia and her cousin is she's got cousins all over the world and in pretty much any country they could use the same bank and that's not something that happens today they would all be on a different bank you said before i took the leap and had this like understanding to build this thing this was 15 months ago yeah we're in our 16th month of cost how has your conviction level evolved in the last 15 months because you needed a lot of commission to start yeah but probably you've seen a bunch of things and you've seen the actual numbers now 15 16 months later yeah Yeah, I mean, look, we've been very lucky.

40:00I'm going to touch wood if I can, that we, since launching Cast, have grown every single month without fail. And during that time, there's been crypto bull markets where it's grown a lot. And then there's been some really bad markets when Bitcoin went from 110 down to 70. But even through that, we've grown every single month. And that tells me that there's just incredible demand for a global banking-style product, whether crypto goes up or down and so my conviction is now near infinite completely unrelated to to exchanges and the bitcoin price exactly you realize oh shit probably in uh probably in uh developing countries mostly or first i mean you can tell me but there's all these people who need an access to the dollar and a place to just store their wealth in dollars which in crypto you think you need to sell your wealth in Bitcoin, but actually the majority of the people, they don't have this, they have another problem.