Tetragrammaton

Tetracketermat Growing up, I was kind of really shy introverted, so I started to really get drawn to computers.

We had a lot of early computers in the home. I studied computer science and economics in school.

I wanted to learn about how that worked and how technology could improve the economy and business. I also, I spent a year living abroad in Argentina. None of this made sense to me at the time, by the way. In hindsight, this made sense. When I was living in Argentina, I saw this economy that was going through hyperinflation. And it destroyed the lives of the average poor people in society that could only hold cash, right? So that was an important piece of the puzzle. Had you not seen that, your life would be different? I think so because if I had only spent time growing up in the United States, you know, we have, we have inflation issues once in a while here and there, but more or less, our financial system works, right? People are really frustrated with overdraft fees and there's all kinds

of delays and payments. So there's things we can improve. But in a hyperinflation country,

it's like an existential issue. It's like things get really dark, like in these places where

the government is essentially stealing wealth from people by just printing money, right?

So it's so extreme that it's hard for us to even imagine.

Yeah, exactly.

So that was a part of it.

And then I also had worked at Airbnb as an early employee, and they were moving money into

and out of about 180 countries around the world.

And I got to see how difficult and broken that was. Like we were

trying to send money into Cuba or Ecuador or these places people were renting their homes,

and we were trying to pay them out. And we had no idea how much money was going to show up on the

other side. It was like a cartel or almost like a black market where these like extraordinarily

high fees were being charged

and no one could even tell us how much the fees were and so i realized that through a couple experiences

like that how broken the global financial system is it's kind of this patchwork quilt of

different proprietary technologies there's usually a couple of monopolies in each like an oligopoly in

each country and so it's just incredibly inefficient.

Whereas if you compare it to the internet, right, you can send a text message and it just shows up

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