Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

A few people in the comment section of my recent videos about the whole situation at FTX are acting

like these videos are designed to be funny or that they're comedy of some sort.

And that's just not true and it's a mischaracterization of my YouTube channel and everything

that I'm trying to do here.

Today I'm going to be talking about the venture capital firms that invested in FTX.

And so to a certain extent I have to rely on one of the documents from Sequoia,

one of the big tech VC firms' websites that they've since deleted.

This document explains the talk process around their investment, which they were clearly

very proud of only a few weeks ago.

Now look, there's stuff in there

like the bit where SBF pitched to the partners that his vision for FTX was of a super app.

You can buy a banana, you can do anything you want with your money, Sam allegedly said to them,

while dressed like an unruly toddler and playing video games.

But that's not a joke, it's just what happened.

It's in the document, and it was deemed relevant by the partners at Sequoia, as otherwise

they wouldn't have publicised it on their own website.

And we're not going to learn much about technology venture capital investing here if people

are just going to snicker about things like this in the comments section of my videos.

In California, particularly in Silicon Valley, online cryptocurrency trading and banana procurement

are the kind of problems that still need to be solved. And to many in the venture capital

space, Sam Bankmanfried looked like the man who would solve that problem. This banana

...