＂$900K Turned Into $121M＂- The Bitcoin Bet That Turned CZ Into A Crypto Legend
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, Ronster chats with Bitcoin's first true billionaire, Satoshi Nakamoto. They talk about how he went from being a geeky kid in a rural village in China to building one of the fastest growing crypto-exchange companies in the world, and how he built a company that went from zero to $1B in a short period of time.
Transcript
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your story fascinating story you know before everybody learned about you with binance at the
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time i think you guys went from zero to billion the fastest out of any other company that we had
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and then reports came out you on twitter you have a massive following when it comes down to bitcoin
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the comments you've made the stories of you selling your house for 900 000 all of that
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but for some of the audience that maybe doesn't know before you became the business tycoon that
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you are today. How does the story begin? Well, we trace back, right? I was born in a fairly rural
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village in China. I grew up there, moved to a city when I was 10, and then moved to Canada when I was
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12. And then I did high school there. I did high school in Vancouver, and then I started college
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in Montreal, in McGill. Didn't graduate there. I did four years, and then my intern boss gave me
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a job, and I delayed and delayed, and I never went back to McGill.
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And then I worked in Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, and then where else?
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So I started as an IT guy and then turned into an entrepreneur.
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um and so i was always in the sort of thin financial tech fintech field um so um and then
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i started a company i was a junior partner of a it company i started a company with six other
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older guys um in shanghai in 2005 did that for eight years and then i came across bitcoin in 2013
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um and i was like this is the this is the this is the future technology so at that time it was
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actually pretty interesting because um i think there's three big technologies in my life there's
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internet that's blockchain and at the time i didn't know what was next right at the time i
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thought the next one was going to be like 10 15 years later now we know it's ai so i think this
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is the three big technologies in my life um when the internet was happening i was too young to
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really do anything meaningful with it um in the blockchain uh when blockchain is happening we
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know we got lucky we founded a platform that's uh that's impactful that's useful and then so yeah
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that's kind of how i came to be yeah well if i was in high school with you say you're 14 15 years
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old who were you in high school we're in a class together who's cz i was a normal kid i was a bit
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geeky uh i played a lot of sports um and um i was like you know asian kid in canada um that played
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volleyball um that um just no more kid nothing i wasn't super smart i wasn't super um i wasn't
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the best in any academics i was pretty decent in math and science um a bit weaker on the literature
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like no english uh french i was very bad in french um uh yeah so but i was a normal kid yeah
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did did people like did you know you're gonna do something special like was there something
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where like one day i'm were you a driven kid or no no it was it was not it was no it was like
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there was no indications i was anything special um i was just a normal kid yeah and i there was
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never any indications oh this guy's gonna build a billion dollar company even were you a dreamer
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Would you dream about one day, you know, I'm going to do this, make my family proud?
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No, I didn't have any of the, I wanted to be successful.
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I wanted to do well, but I never dreamed of being a billionaire or like, you know, run a largest crypto exchange.
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Like, that's just never, like, you know, I just wanted to like, no, have a, I want to be financially successful.
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But I wasn't dreaming like, no, I want to be the worst, I don't know, whatever ranking.
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So I don't know if you read the book, Accidental Millionaire.
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It was a book written about Apple, about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
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It was, I think it's a former employee that wrote, it's a little bit of a disgruntled guy that was saying bad things about him.
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If you go to Accidental Millionaire and you put Apple, just go to images, you'll see which one it is.
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Then they wrote a book called The Accidental Billionaire.
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For somebody in the space, Lee Butcher was actually a very good book I read.
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Then the book came out called An Accidental Billionaire.
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And that was written, I think, about Mark Zuckerberg, who, you know, he became a billionaire.
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Because I know the story when you sold your property,
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when you sold the property and you bought all Bitcoin,
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I started learning about Bitcoin in 2013, right?
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and then I was like okay this is this is the future technology this is bigger than the internet
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and when the internet was happening I was too young so I was at 36 37 ish I wasn't gonna let
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this opportunity pass by so I said look I just gotta get involved in this in this in this new
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technology field I don't know what I'm gonna do first I don't know what I'm gonna do yet but I'm
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gonna buy bitcoins first so I sold my house sold my apartment and bought bitcoin
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And when you bought it at the time, what was the average price of Bitcoin?
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So I bought it at $800,000, $600,000, $400,000.
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So if we do $900,000 divided by $600,000 times $81,000,
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Selling a $900,000 apartment turned into $121 million.
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The average person listening to this thinks that's crazy.
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But what made you say, this is what I'm going to be doing?
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Well, number one, I saw the clear future of the technology.
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I don't know what it's going to be like exactly, but I know it's going to grow.
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or back then there was much less materials about it um there was white paper that i read there was
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a forum called bitcoin talk.org that i spent a lot of time on and then uh going to conferences
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meeting meeting the people the community made a huge difference and also doing the first
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transaction with bitcoin when when you when you install your own bitcoin wallet and you realize
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wait a second this this is a network i can send money to anyone a full control there's no bank
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involved there's no no other fees involved uh it's instantaneous um so once you realize that
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it's like this is a technology for the future uh not only did i just sell the apartment um i actually
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quit my job to look for a new job in this industry right so most people will say like no
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those two combined are pretty high risk but i think as i know as i as i um detail in the book
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risk is a risk is not based on the action it's based on your individual circumstance for me
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At the time when you sold your apartment and you quit your job, how much did you have in liquid cash?
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Not very much because I put most of my cash into the company that was working before, and the rest of the cash was in the apartment.
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The reason why I say this is it's not like you made the decision because you had a couple million dollars in a bank from a previous exit.
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But you trusted your ability on the way to work
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So I didn't need the 900,000 to maintain my lifestyle.
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I can work for income that will maintain my life.
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was it like a three o'clock in the morning aha moment?
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Did you have a moment like that or was it gradual?
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And so from there, is it, you know, inviting friends over,
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guys, we're going to go do this, we're going to go do that,
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or no, it was more, I got to go find a company to work for?
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At the time, first, I spoke to a bunch of guys.
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I talked to a couple of friends in Taiwan who used to work for TSMC,
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Basically, all the NVIDIA chips, all the AI chips,
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And then I said, okay, well, instead of trying to do a startup, let me try to work for a company first. And I bumped into a few guys at Blockchain Info, and then I joined them for a few months.
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Very small company. I joined as a third person there.
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And who were they players? The other two guys, were they players in the Bitcoin space?
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Well, the founder is a 20-year-old kid who wrote a website that attracted 20 million users.
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So a 36, 37-year-old goes, works for a 20-year-old to build a website with 20 million users.
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Did you go in as an equity position player or no, just a regular person?
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I have an earn out to earn the equity, but I didn't stay that long.
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I didn't stay more than a year, so I didn't have a year.
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He's the founder of the company, but he sold his shares later on for at least a few million.
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And during that eight months, was it an accelerated learning curve of finding out everything with Bitcoin?
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So this guy, Ben Reeves, his only marketing was based on one thread on BitcoinTalk.org, which is a bulletin, like a virtual bulletin form.
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Yeah. And then also blockchain info at the time didn't have a company. They don't use bank accounts. They don't have an office. They pay everybody in Bitcoin. They pay all the, you know, when we grew into like 18 people, we just, the company just paid every month, send some Bitcoin to all the employees. It's up to them to how they handle that Bitcoin, those Bitcoins. They didn't have an office. They didn't even have the company back then. So it's just like 18 people working together and they're still growing.
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So I learned a lot of different stuff about blockchain, about crypto during that time.
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So did your idea of not having a headquarters kind of come from the experience here that you don't need it?
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That definitely contributed to like when early on in Binance, I said, look, we don't need a headquarter.
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So then from there, eight months later, what do you do next?
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I actually joined a Bitcoin exchange in China, OKCoin at the time.
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And then I learned a bit about how exchanges operate.
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Exchanges are actually much closer to what I know best.
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I've been dealing with trading systems quite a lot.
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They're probably about, I would imagine like about 10 times smaller than Binance.
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And it was two years later, in 2017, I launched Binance.
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So at this point, when you're leaving and you're working at these different companies,
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what is, are you sitting there saying, I'm eventually going to start something?
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So in 2015, I said, look, I'm going to do my own startup, right?
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So I, and I actually wanted to do a Bitcoin exchange, basically very similar to what Binance is.
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But then the team I assembled, we only had tech guys and we don't have a marketing team.
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And I wanted to do a Bitcoin exchange in Japan, and none of us spoke Japanese.
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So I tried to raise money from VC investors, and they said, like, no, there's no way you can do this Bitcoin exchange thing.
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But you can provide the technology for Bitcoin exchanges.
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So we pivoted to a technology company providing exchange systems to other exchanges.
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And then it was 2017, we said, well, there might be a chance that we can pivot to running a Bitcoin exchange ourselves.
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So 2015, we tried to do a Bitcoin exchange, but we were not quite ready.
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Pre-17, are you a known player in the crypto world, in the Bitcoin world?
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Like if somebody came up, like right now we talk about Ben Reeves.
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If somebody said, hey, CZ in 2017 pre-Binance, what would they say about CZ?
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They would probably say CZ is a technology guy, been involved in the crypto industry relatively early, and been in a senior position in a wallet company, senior position in an exchange company, and then built his own business as a technology exchange systems technology company.
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Are you at a point that if you start something, people want to work with you?
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what were some of the big early meetings you guys had?
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and he's there with, you know, five, six, seven guys.
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but it's old video where you can tell it's not a...
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Where you said, guys, here's what we're building.
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We said, look, let's build this thing called a crypto exchange, right?
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And put the guys into a room and says, this is what we're going to build.
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And I told him, look, I've been for the last, I don't know, 17 years in my career,
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If I don't do this, I'm going to keep thinking about this for the rest of my life, right?
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So if I don't do this today, I might try again two years, five years, 10 years later.
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So it's something that we'll have to do sooner or later.
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And now might just be the right time to give it a shot.
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whether you're going to be able to pull this off.
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Everyone's like, no, no, the exchange space is too crowded.
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So if somebody would have put $1,000, it's worth $4,300.
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And even more, depending on the B&B price at different times.
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But at the time, it was just crazy because we had a white paper
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for about half of the total supply of the coins.
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He did a couple of different companies, I think.
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and um so he when i when i when i asked him he just told me he just told me that no uh cz i'll
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give you this much money this is before he read the paper he this is before he read anything he
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just said oh cz you're gonna do a project i'm gonna support you i think he sent me i want to
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say like 100 eth uh uh and the time was i don't know i forgot the price but you know he gave me
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