As an entrepreneur in finance for 10 years, I think the guy's perspective is actually pretty understandable. When you've been in finance for a while and have le

As an entrepreneur in finance for 10 years, I think the guy's perspective is actually pretty understandable. When you've been in finance for a while and have learned how many footguns and ways to go to jail there are to get major regulatory projects licensed and functional, you start to think of projects like "launch a bond offering and get it rated" or "launch an exchange" as so incredibly complex as to be impossible. There's a certain cynicism that comes up in the industry where people think something just can't be done because they know it's so complex to do right. Now I actually think that although this take is realistic, it is actually overly cynical and actually underestimates the possibility of disruption in finance. In actuality, not knowing the complexity allows a young entrepreneur to develop a simplistic plan and pitch it with conviction to VCs who also don't know any better. The mistake experienced people are making is that their experience tells them it is only reasonable to do a thing "correctly" or "scalably" when in fact the incorrect, illegal, unscalable way wins you valuable proof points. And with enough proof points and follow-on VC rounds the simplistic plan can mature enough to actually become functional. In the specific case of SBF and FTX, I do think the critic's seemingly superficial cynicism was actually both well-founded and ultimately correct. Launching an exchange functionally, legally and scalably was in fact too much for the inexperienced leadership of the business. They tried really hard to make a business model that worked and scaled fast. But in doing so, they ended up with effectively designing a circular reference (trading their own token) which made a lot of money for a while, but ended up crashing their business. I think they were well-intentioned, but it is true that more experienced leadership would not have tried the self-referential growth strategies FTX/Alameda engaged in. And in retrospect the critic's spidey sense was right; the pace of growth of FTX was bizarrely unsustainable and likely pointed to an underlying system that didn't make sense.