The Pomp Podcast - #682 Building A Multi-Billion Dollar Business w/ Peter Smith

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Peter Smith is a co-founder and CEO at Blockchain. In this conversation, we discussed Blockchain, the business, building a multi-billion dollar business, hiring the best talent, treasury management, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the private investing that they do. I really enjoyed this conversation with Peter and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is OKCoin. If you haven't started building your crypto portfolio on OKCoin, there's no better time. They're one of the

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Starting point is 00:03:51 athleticgreens.com slash Pomp. Go check them out. All right, let's get this episode with Peter. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Peter, how are you? Let's just start first with, you were one of the earliest people in Bitcoin and blockchain industry. Talk to us a little bit about how you discovered Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:04:30 and what really caught your attention to join the industry. Yeah. So I found out about it on a mailing list. Completely thought it was like crazy and not going to work i'd done a big project in graduate school to look at like all the attempts to create digital money all failures and i was like okay here's another failure you know a couple years later i checked back in on it there's all these people around the world working on it i thought a crazy number of people i think it was like a couple thousand people on bitcoin doc at the time and i decided to uh you know buy my first coins which i did in a otc trade which back then meant posting a message on Bitcoin talk and then sending a random stranger PayPal, which is

Starting point is 00:05:10 coincidentally how you lose your PayPal account. But for me, what was powerful about Bitcoin at the time is still what's powerful about cryptocurrency, which is the idea of building a borderless financial system that really is meant for the internet and for the internet economy and is sort of beyond the reach of any one government or person. So it's still regulated, just like the internet's still regulated on some level, but it's really cross-national and brings the whole world together into one financial market and one financial system on a level playing field. And that felt like one of the biggest ideas that we would be part of in my lifetime. And I wanted to be part of that and started building crypto products. And

Starting point is 00:05:53 that was many years ago and still building crypto products every day. So one of the aspects of this is people have no clue how big this thing is, right? You started blockchain.com in 2011, if I understand correctly. And the numbers that I've seen publicly are that about one third of transactions that occur in Bitcoin take place on blockchain.com. You've created about 76 million crypto wallets, and you've got about 35 million verified users in more than 200 countries. One, how accurate are those numbers? And then two, where is all of that growth coming from? Like, why are people coming to you all to go ahead and join? Yeah. So the numbers are completely accurate. You can verify some of those on the Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:06:38 blockchain and they would be insanely expensive to fake. And so they're definitely real. I think the most interesting thing about that transaction count is that when we raised our Series A seven years ago, we were about 14% of all transactions. So it's roughly doubled in that time period. And I actually expected it to go down in that time period. At the time I predicted it would go down. The other really interesting headline stat about the business is that the consumer product, so not institutional volume or exchange volume, but just the consumer product has now transacted over a trillion in volume, which is crazy when you think about it. A trillion in volume for a consumer payment product, consumer financial product is astronomical.

Starting point is 00:07:25 Why do people choose us? I think it's about trust. It's about the brand and the name. We have an incredible funnel for people wanting to show up to this space. People show up and they find our site. But we're also trusted. And when you have as many users as we do, people usually recommend a wallet to their friends. Crypto is a very social phenomenon. And it's like a law of large numbers. If you started out with blockchain, you're probably going to recommend someone else to blockchain and so on and so forth um the other interesting thing about our business is mostly outside the us so about 80 of our business is outside the united states so we're really large in europe latin america eastern europe a few other key geographies growing super rapidly in africa

Starting point is 00:08:12 right now um but we're very different from like a coinbase for example which is is very us dominant we're really there for the rest of the world. It's been a phenomenal ride. When you think of the institutional side of the business versus the retail side of the business, it's very obvious that you're getting tons and tons of activity and user acquisition. How much of it's institutional versus retail? And then what's driving those two different cohorts? So our business is about 50% retail today by revenue and about 50% institutional by revenue. What's driving the institutions is two things. One, there's been the rise of crypto institutions. What I mean by a crypto institution is a firm that is native to crypto.

Starting point is 00:08:51 So not a client, but Polychain would be a crypto native institution. There's also driving the market is institutions from TradFi coming into crypto. So our last financing was led by Bailey Gifford, which is one of the world's largest asset managers. You have the Bailey Giffords of the world coming into crypto now. And so the two things are driving it. one, the natural capital velocity cycle in crypto, which is creating these multi-billion dollar crypto institutions. And on the other side, huge asset managers that are coming into the institutional side of crypto. On the consumer side of crypto, a lot of it is driven by retail

Starting point is 00:09:28 investing and then retail financial services. And it just really depends on which country you're talking about. So in Africa, they're using crypto to invest, but they're also using it very transactionally. Same is true for Latin America. In the US, where we're seeing a lot of really strong growth right now, it's really about investing. It's not about transacting. And you're hoping to see that shift over time. Talk to me about building the organization itself. Obviously, you guys have seen immense growth from a user perspective. You recently moved your headquarters to Miami, is my understanding, which is awesome. Appreciate that. But where are you finding talent? How do people actually get a job

Starting point is 00:10:03 at blockchain.com? And what are the types of roles that you're seeing people kind of transition from the legacy world into this new world? So our US headquarters is in Miami now, and we're really excited about that. I'm also moving to Miami, shall we beer sometime? But weather's great. But, you know, our global headquarters

Starting point is 00:10:21 is still in London, which is where I'm sitting today. And the team is expanding really rapidly. So on one hand, it's a really small team. We're only about 250 people. We've always had the idea that, you know, you want to hire really high impact hires and as few of them as possible.

Starting point is 00:10:37 rather than trying to build a really huge team. But that said, in the last year, we've hired 100 people. We'll probably hire 100 people over the next year. What we're looking for in people is, talent in whatever their domain is. We're about half engineers, but at the same time, we wanna look for people with an intellectual curiosity to learn new things because crypto is always changing.

Starting point is 00:11:01 And then on top of that, we want people who are really passionate about crypto. In the early years of hiring team members, sometimes we'd hire someone who's just like a brilliant engineer or a brilliant DevOps person. That's great. But if they don't really believe in crypto and the mission of crypto, it's really hard for them to be effective over time because it's hard to work in crypto. There's a lot of volatility.

Starting point is 00:11:26 There's a lot of traffic surge. It's a very high security, high stakes environment. If you don't believe in the underlying market, it's really hard to make it work long term in the industry. Talk to us about regulation. Obviously, we've seen an immense conversation there. Everyone from Jerome Powell to Janet Yellen, Gary Gensler, et cetera, all being asked, are they going to ban it? What do they think? How do we think that the rule should evolve? We see politicians constantly battling back and forth. We should put more regulation in place. We should put less regulation in place. Then we have the market participants also with their

Starting point is 00:11:56 opinions. How do you see the regulatory environment today and how is that going to evolve over time? Look, it's complex. And I think it depends on what part of the world you're talking about. So, you know, in the EU, the process has been very administrative, pretty predictable. You know, our primary regulator is the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. Engaging with them is very different from engaging with U.S. regulators. I'm much more optimistic about, you know, the regulatory regime in Europe, in the UK, you know, in Singapore. The U.S. has become a political issue. So it's now become an issue where you have political parties staking out territory and it's become a voting issue.

Starting point is 00:12:33 like increasingly people are going to vote for politicians based on their stance in crypto and when an industry becomes a political issue it's hard to predict uh and so i think it's going to be a very volatile couple of years in terms of crypto regulation in the united states um i think it's kind of on the industry to do a better job of educating lawmakers But more importantly, educating voters about why crypto and why innovation matters to the United States, because ultimately that's who we have to go to. Like the U.S. is a democracy. It is ruled by the voters at the end of the day. And we need to make our case to the American people about why our industry matters, why it counts and why it's more important than just the headlines they read about, you know, Shiva or Doge or whatever else. When you start to think about the various products you've already built, are there things where you're like, hey, this is a market opportunity.

Starting point is 00:13:29 We've definitely got to go build something there or some sort of a feature or service that you really guys are focused on over the next 12 to 18 months? Yeah. So the fun thing about blockchain is that at this point, we're kind of like a crypto holding company and we build all this stuff all the time. Right. So like, you know, people are like, why are you still working? I'm like, well, because I'm having the time of my life. I have this incredible platform and we have talent, we have liquidity, we have capital and we have infrastructure and we can just go out and build like all kinds of new shit all the time. Right. So a lot of our biggest businesses today are businesses that we've built in the last three years. And we've built so many things of blockchain over the years that have not worked out. And we could talk about all those failures, too. But what we're seeing in the market today is the need to make it easier to use multiple chains at the same time.

Starting point is 00:14:17 If I own Bitcoin, but I have Bitcoin sitting on four different chains or layer twos or whatever, like, how do I manage that? How do I get the Bitcoins to the right place? How do I do that in a seamless way? Like, how do I support multiple chains in a way that isn't completely, you know, mind numbing to the user? And that is a big product problem. That's kind of on the consumer side, right? On the institutional side, I think it really comes down to stability, infrastructure, and tooling, and really building that out in a robust way that institutions can be happy

Starting point is 00:14:52 with. And I think that, you know, even though we started building that business three years ago, we've probably got years to go before we're in the place that we really want to be in terms of being the best partner to institutions. I've got two of my brothers here with me. What questions do you guys have for Peter? Hey, Peter, thanks for doing this. Uh, I, I guess my question would be around, like, you've obviously built a, an extremely

Starting point is 00:15:16 impressive business, you know, in Europe and the U S and et cetera. Uh, but like, what keeps you up at night? Right. Like, what are you worried about a long-term? I worry about regulation a lot. Yeah. I think for us, like we're big, right. We throw off an insane amount of revenue every year profits, you know, we can hire lobbyists,

Starting point is 00:15:36 lawyers, fund, you know, political paths, facts, whatever we have to do. Right. If they come up with a license, we can apply for it and we can comply with it. If they tell us to KYC every crypto user, we have the infrastructure to do it. We wouldn't have been able to do all that when we first started this business seven, eight years ago, right? And I worry a lot about building the future and building a huge market and ecosystem because today we're tiny, right? Like we've achieved a lot in the last eight years, but the whole ecosystem is tiny today. how are we going to do that if you can't start a business and you can't innovate

Starting point is 00:16:13 right and you look coinbase blockchain.com the other big players we should be regulated to some extent and we are regulated you know we have a blockchain.com we have like 60 regulators that we're dealing with but if you're a little startup like you should be able to build you should be able to innovate you should be able to do that without needing like a 30 million dollar a year legal and compliance budget um and so i worry about that a lot because without those new companies without those new protocols without those new tokens and projects and experiments what is our industry you know how do we grow it over the next five to ten years yeah and i guess on the back of that like over the last five or ten years since you started blockchain.com how has your investment

Starting point is 00:16:54 in legal compliance lobbyist in washington like how has that trended over time and how has that grown? It's grown a lot. I'm not sure I even want to run the number about the growth rate of that budget. It's certainly not gotten cheaper at any point. I think the second thing I worry about a lot though is risk management. There's a lot of companies in our space that have gotten to pretty big size without going through a downside yet, like without going through a down cycle, which means that their risk management is largely untested. And because we're so active in the market as an investor, as a credit provider, as a liquidity provider, we see a lot. And I can tell you that risk management and risk systems are not where they should be for some of the firms in our

Starting point is 00:17:44 space. And that keeps me up at night because there's no one to bail anyone out on crypto, right that's the beautiful thing about it but the you know natural market economics of blow-ups are not fun for the other people in the market and i do worry about risk controls in a lot of firms in space gotcha john what questions you got yeah peter thank you for doing that it's very nice to meet you so i am curious you are the co-founder and ceo of blockchain.com can you talk about how the hell you build a company like this and then where you guys are going from here? Uh, well, I did it with a lot of people, a lot of help. Um, it's not, you know, building a company like this is not a solo sport. It's a big team sport. And I've had to grow a lot

Starting point is 00:18:28 as a person. Um, you know, I was very young when I started this journey and I'm still super young. I'm only 32. It required a lot of personal growth, a lot of rethinking the way I did things. A lot of me, I mean, like I had to admit that I didn't know how to do things a lot, to get better at them. But I think the number one thing that I tell entrepreneurs when I invest in them and they're asking for whatever advice, just make steady progress. Inch forward day by day. Preserve as much optionality as you can. Find the things that you love doing in the business that make it fun for you so you don't lose the joy and the passion. And then hire really great people that you love working with. Like you should want to love working with your team

Starting point is 00:19:16 because it's your team. If you're the CEO and founder of a business and you don't love the team you're working with, the only person you can blame is yourself because you have the power to change that. Right. So love the team you're working with. And if you can do that and you can just keep going forward and don't get discouraged and don't pivot, you can get somewhere and you know get lucky definitely peter talk to us about uh the market itself we're sitting around you know fifty four thousand dollars or so bitcoin price fifty five thousand dollars how do you see the rest of this year playing out in terms of uh of bitcoin i honestly think we're gonna see your hat happen like that's it only 100k only 100k um no i think that q4 is

Starting point is 00:19:58 gonna be strong like we're settled in for a crazy q4 you know i'm really excited about what's going on in Ethereum. I think that if you asked me two years ago, if I thought ETH was going to went out as kind of the dominant smart contract platform, or if one of the ETH 2.0s would happen, I would have told you I didn't really know. I think that we've seen scaling is going to happen on ETH. Because of that, you know, I'm really bullish on ETH right now and super excited about all the innovation that's happening there on layer two and on ETH 2.0. And that's really cool because you're going to be able to build apps. Like there's going to be crypto app stores. like we will be able to put an app store in our wallet where any developer could launch

Starting point is 00:20:38 a financial services app built on top defy into our app store like how cool will that be and i think we're like a year away from that being a reality how do you think about personal allocation or like portfolio construction right you're in the space obviously you've got like outsized exposure to the equity of a infrastructure type business do you think about uh uh bitcoin and eth as like the main components do you think about the long tail like just walk through like the framework you use in terms of uh allocating to the space uh yeah someone asked me once like how much of my net worth i had in crypto and i said it was like at least over a hundred percent but yeah you know i'm like the crazy person that like sold all my equities right before covid

Starting point is 00:21:22 and bought more ethereum not my private stock my like public equities portfolio so maybe i'm not the right person to talk to about like safe and responsible portfolio. No, we want, what's the crazy portfolio allocation. Yeah. By the way, you are talking to three guys that are basically the same thing. So, uh, you have, uh, you have a company here. Yeah. So in the crypto space, I think about constructing my portfolio in a way that minimizes regret. You know, I have a solid position in Bitcoin. I have a solid position in whatever I think is going to be the market leader market standard three four years from now which for a long time was bitcoin and for me now personally as ethereum and then i have you know about 25 of my portfolio in what you could call

Starting point is 00:22:07 venture crypto investments whether those are companies or those are you know new protocols or venture funds you know i'm a gp and an lp and our venture fund here at blockchain.com which has has done really well i'm a lp and a couple other early stage crypto funds um and then i've done you know some investing in early stage protocols outside of that as well and i think about that being like 25 of my portfolio with 75 of my crypto portfolio away from blockchain.com stock being you know large cap points got it and then when you start to think about uh allocating capital internally so blockchain.com huge business uh and somebody comes to you with an idea how do you think about almost trying to disrupt yourself or allocate to R&D? Are there certain

Starting point is 00:22:56 decisions or trade-offs or frameworks that you're using there? Yes. And we run a number that is measured in billions. And so it's a lot. I spent a lot of time studying CIOs and studying how Jeff Bezos allocated capital. Because in some ways, Amazon is like a holding company for the internet, infrastructure, capital, people, and they just kept building adjacent businesses, right? And I think what I learned from that study was, one, you need to have a framework that makes it quantitative and not qualitative. It needs to be about the opportunity. So it needs to be about the opportunity in the market size in front of you. And so when we are looking at an opportunity internally to build a new business or do R&D, we're going to look at how big is the opportunity?

Starting point is 00:23:45 how much capital does it take us to get to the first step the first step being like where we can get customer feedback so time people capital financial capital to get to the first market test where we know if this is going to work or not and then once it's working we can put capital you know once customers have it they're using it there's some product feedback then we can attack it with capital and people because we can size it correctly. But it's really about like sizing these bets. And then, you know, inside of our business, we're actually, you know, putting principal capital work, you know, lending, you know, our whole prime brokerage, liquidity provision, venture investments. I'm really looking at return on capital and return on equity.

Starting point is 00:24:34 And so what's driving those decisions is both immediate return on capital and return on equity. and then what I think the best way to allocate capital is to achieve long-term return on capital and return on equity. How do you think about cutting an investment? So let's say you allocate capital somewhere. You've got this grand vision of what's going to happen. Do you evaluate at any point like, all right, if we don't hit these metrics by a certain date, or if we hit these obstacles, we're going to go ahead and pull the plug on this project or this R&D effort? It's one of the things we're best at actually is what I call killing the bad trade. And it's advice that i give people all the time when you make an investment or you know a trade and you

Starting point is 00:25:13 had a thesis and it's not working if you can't explain why it's not working and what's going to change no matter what it costs you you need to cut it you need to end it and you need to separate yourself from the emotional pain of that one way of doing that is like celebrating mistakes so like a blockchain we celebrate mistakes each year we have like mistake day where everyone while I share my biggest mistake of the year and invite other people to share their biggest mistake of the year and share what they learned.

Starting point is 00:25:43 And we celebrate those mistakes and we celebrate those learnings because the only way to be aggressive and try out new ideas and iterate and take a moonshot is to know when to like shut the rocket down. And you have to be super disciplined and cold and almost unemotional about it.

Starting point is 00:25:59 When you start to understand this kind of capital allocation strategy, do you do it also not only with the products internally Um, but also when you're evaluating like these early stage protocols or early stage investments that you're making, whether it's off the balance sheet, personally, whatever, um, is there some sort of way that you evaluate like follow on investment decisions, uh, by the same criteria? Absolutely. It's like, tell me, you know, I'm always asking me like, tell me your roadmap, tell me how you're going to execute against it. How do we know if we're on track or we're not on

Starting point is 00:26:29 track? You know? So if you tell me, Hey, Peter, like we're going to build a protocol for, you know uh tipping on twitch and you launch a protocol for tipping on twitch and it doesn't go anywhere then like we either need to understand why it didn't go anywhere and what how we're going to fix it and be very confident in that which is like underwriting a new investment or we need to like write it off or sell it but like you have to be in like a quantitative like evidence-based framework john it's really interesting when you start to think about uh kind of the allocation of capital across this and then also at the same time building a business right like you're building a business plus you're also thinking from an investment standpoint a lot of the same activity

Starting point is 00:27:09 yeah it is uh it it makes you kind of like double down on on the investment in the industry in general but it's growing at such a fast pace um it's it's exactly what you kind of want to be doing yeah as a business in crypto how you allocate your capital really matters to the long-term success of the business absolutely and also what you do with uh your balance sheet if you hold it in cryptocurrencies if you hold it in fiat um and there's so many different ways that people utilize it we were talking to the guy the other day about how he took a single percentage of his fiat balance sheet that was hundreds of millions of dollars and actually put it into bitcoin or into stable coins yeah peter like what has been your guy's strategy and how has that

Starting point is 00:27:48 evolved over time when it comes to your balance sheet if it has changed i guess yeah because our balance because our like movements are large we don't usually like talk about specifically what we do. But one kind of cool thing that I can tell you is that we keep all of our retained earnings in crypto or crypto investments. So, you know, every dollar that we make from the crypto industry and the crypto ecosystem, providing services to clients, we're going to put back into the crypto industry. When you think about, uh, whatever the allocation is for the strategy, do you have periodic reviews of it? Or do you simply say, Hey, like, this is what we're going to do for like the year. Like, how do you think about that? Every, every week, sometimes more

Starting point is 00:28:27 than once a week so you so it's uh and the reason i'm asking is uh in some crazy way like i think there was a fidelity study done a while ago the best investors were the people who forgot their password or uh died right it was just like they just didn't touch it and just over a long period of time it compounded uh there's other people who are really good at kind of tactically moving around allocations and stuff like that and so with the balance sheet uh whether it's your personal balance sheet or with a company's balance sheet uh you can take you know kind of a couple of different strategy. So you guys really are evaluating on a pretty periodic basis. Is that because the market changes so rapidly or is there some other reason why you're doing it so often?

Starting point is 00:29:03 Well, a couple of things. When we're investing in the venture side, we're long-term holders. We're going to sit on that for, in some cases, many years now. But we also run a business that has working capital, the prime brokerage, right? We're like a merchant bank for crypto. And we need to efficiently allocate capital between business lines. So the lending desk may need a lot more capital this week, next week, maybe it doesn't, right? And it's not, it doesn't, you know, change dramatically week over week, but we still need to like step back, look at our business each week and say, okay, where are the returns on capital? What does each business unit need? And how do we allocate the capital between them efficiently?

Starting point is 00:29:39 Yeah. It's fascinating when you start to kind of put frameworks around this and understand, hey, here's how we're going to allocate. Here's how we're going to evaluate whether it's working are not willing to cut things and then reallocate. So pretty cool. What's your pitch? Before we let you go, what's your pitch in terms of folks who are looking at blockchain.com, all the various products and services? Why should they come and use that stuff with you guys? At the end of the day, I think the best reason to use us is that we really, really care about our customers. We're like here to build whatever you need to be part of the crypto financial system and to do what you want in the crypto financial system. So more than probably any other business in the space,

Starting point is 00:30:18 we're willing to build bespoke solutions. We're willing to start with you when you're really small and grow with you when you're really big. Like we've had customers start with a thousand dollars of Bitcoin and, you know, become ultra high net worth institutional customers over the last five, six years. Like we're here for you. We, at the end of the day, are a really customer client driven business. Um, you know, to the extent that I'm still talking to customers every day. It, uh, it's absolutely fascinating to see just how much you care and, and, uh, and kind of how involved you still are, uh, which is a kudos to you. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find a blockchain.com, uh, products? Well, you can go to blockchain.com.

Starting point is 00:30:58 It's a little known URL. Um, but, uh, you know, look, I'm on the internet. I'm one more Peter, all words, uh, on Twitter. So you can find me there. Um, try to not find any of the scammers that are pretending to be me all the time. Uh, and then, you know, look, if you ever have an issue or an idea that I can be helpful with, you can send me an email. It's just Peter at blockchain.com. Now the, uh, last question I'm going to ask you is what, if you had to guess right now, do you think blockchain.com, the actual URL, if you posted it for sale today, what do you think it would go for? I don't know, 20, 30 million. Oh, I think that's low. I mean, there's somebody out there who created a fake coin.

Starting point is 00:31:39 That's got a bunch of coins. They trade you and then be 50, a hundred million. I think voice.com voice.com went for 30 mil. I could probably sell blockchain.com to like one of the new layer to like one of the new ETH 2.0 guys for like a couple hundred million. Right. Easy, easy. Like if you've got $10 billion of monopoly money, what's a hundred mil between friends. and then it's like but then you know what do you do with like 300 million of you know random youth 2.0 coin you sell as much of it as you can as fast as possible and hope you

Starting point is 00:32:12 get 50 million now right isn't that what they do i don't know i think so i think so that is what you do awesome man listen thank you so much for coming on i'm excited you're moving to miami we'll definitely have to hang out when uh when you get here anyone who wants to learn more about blockchain go to blockchain.com follow peter on twitter and uh and we appreciate you doing this man thanks gentlemen all right we'll talk soon buddy

The Pomp Podcast - #682 Building A Multi-Billion Dollar Business w/ Peter Smith

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