BUILD PRODUCT

“And I think that ballet is very good at this because it teaches you that failing is completely normal. Like, you're only gonna get to do, like, the three pirouettes or whatever, the three turns if you try to do one and you fail a 100,000 times, and then you get to one, and then you get to two. And being okay with the concept of, like with ballet, you're trying, and the downside is actually pretty bad because if you fall, you hurt yourself, you might break your foot or something.”

“Over the years, as I've gotten older, I have found that my stomach has become more sensitive. I used to pride myself in having a stomach of steel, where I could put anything into it, and it would digest it. As I'm getting older, my gut just doesn't function like it once did, and I'm finding that my body just prefers Whey Protein Isolate much better than traditional concentrate.”

“And there was actually this very interesting paper by the Federal Reserve, talking about how cow sheet markets are better at forecasting macroeconomic trends than economists Bloomberg and even the Fed itself. Well, I believe that. All those PhDs at the Fed, they have got it wrong. They clearly have.”

“Some of the biggest pain points over the years are dual registered entities. So think of like a registered investment advisor that's also a commodity trading advisor. This is pretty much every hedge fund and asset manager. And they're regulated for the same thing, but it's not the same examination program, examination cycle, set of reports you're filing. So a lot of pain points to solve there.”

“The headline item is most major digital assets are now clearly in the commodity side of the regulatory categorization ledger, which is a level of certainty for market participants that lets you start to build new products, allocate capital with certainty in the United States. And you might say, well, that's been happening for years... But what we haven't seen in this space is a lot of the traditional financial services firms really dive in in a tangible way.”

“All we could do is we're gonna decide if we're gonna sue the government to be able to bring these markets. And that was a very hard decision. I love risk. I'm a risk taker. My cofounder is really not. He hates risks. And we ended up winning one month before the election. And we had one month, and I remember that conversation we had with everyone in the office. It was like, guys, it's gonna be the most intense month of our lives, and we have to just, like, literally give every single thing that we have to grow this market.”

“But on the other side, I think we've done a lot of mistakes with hiring that I would have gone back and being like, don't worry about execs and hiring execs. Hire the best like, empower the very good people that you have even if they are, like, out of college, and really focus on building a great culture with your core people. And I think we would maybe have saved, like, a year of product velocity if we had just, like, not hired the wrong people and focus exclusively on product versus everything else.”

“So I was a freshman in college, and I got an email saying the MIT Bitcoin Club, I think was the name, or Bitcoin Lab, had a $100 of Bitcoin of anyone that would just, like, sign up to Coinbase. There were three wallets, and it was just, like, Coinbase and just redeem your $100 in Bitcoin. That I think was, like, point three of a Bitcoin at the time. And I was, like, a freshman in college. I had no money. I was like, oh, yes. I'm gonna get this a $100 and see who he goes. And then I lost my password. So very good because I didn't sell.”

“Stylistically and from a tone perspective, there is an intentional transition from regulation by enforcement to regulation by regulation. And what I've seen that mean is they're putting out guidance, they're putting out proposed rules, they're putting out advanced notices of proposed rules, meaning they're giving a signal to the market that we might do a rulemaking on prediction limits, or prediction markets, for example.”

“The agency always is a funding issue. It's funded by Congress. It's not funded by fees. And their staffing is limited by that budget. They can't spend more than their budget. So every year, there's this debate. CFTC have enough money. Should it have more? Should it switch to a fee model so that it can hire more staffers?”

“Sounds like the problem here is regulatory. Seems like there's some legal issue in The US. So we're like, alright. We're gonna solve this legal issue. There's spreadsheet of 65 names of lawyers. You take 32, you take 33, and just call everyone. And in one day, we called the entire list, and not a single one of these lawyers said that this was doable. They were like, well, it is CFTC jurisdiction, but they were never gonna let you do it. Don't waste your time.”

“And he told us, like, don't listen to the experts. They're people just like you. Whatever they're experts on, you can become an expert on as well, and they're just people. Everyone that's done anything that's impressive is just a person just like you. It's not that different. And I think it really ties a lot of how I think about things. It's like, at the end of the day, you should just believe in yourself and take risk, especially if you're younger.”

“I am learning to enjoy training without a finish line in front of me, and trying to hold life with a little more gratitude and a little less seriousness. I say no to a lot of things outside of work and home so I can stay focused and be present and have the energy and bandwidth for the team and my family.”

“This episode touches on the tension between what I say matters and how I actually live, learning to lead through example. It is about closing the gap between the person I want to be and the man I actually am in the quiet moments. It’s a conversation about growth, patience, and perspective along the way.”

“This energy drink wouldn't be something that we focused distribution on our website and or Amazon. This would be mass scale retail. If you try to get into way too many doors, way too fast, and your velocity isn't there—meaning your sell-through, how fast and how many units you are moving—those retail partners will drop you, and that makes success in the future very challenging.”

“And then the last layer that we do, and we're the only ones that do this, even the stock market doesn't do it, is that for some classes of users, you're not even able to try to trade. So we block it from the start. So for example, politicians, if you try to trade on your markets, you're not even gonna go through, which no one does that. In the stock market, you trade, and then they try to figure out what's gonna happen.”

“Well, I'm we're unfortunately not fifty fifty yet. I hope to get there we hope to get there soon. I think it's around, like, almost 30% woman, though, which is a lot higher than if you look at bro like, other brokerages and all the similar platforms. It's a lot higher. And we've been talking to a lot of women, and I think that the big the thesis that we have right now of why the hypothesis of why that's happening is because we have so many more markets that women and other kind of not just women.”

“The CFTC announced an innovation task force on March 24th. And its stated purpose is to look at digital assets, AI, not surprising, and then prediction markets. It's going to be led by the Chairman's staffer, Michael Pasalacua, who joined Chairman Selig from private practice and has taken on a lot of the innovative agenda at the CFTC.”

“We are re-branding flight to be called pre. And there's a reason behind it. So we're bringing back our strength products in a meaningful way. We'll be launching them in June of 2026 and it's a collection. Three products: pre, pump and post. It’s a gritty look and feel, really fits the strength vibe that we're going for.”