RAOUL PAL: Bill, great to get you on Real
Vision.
I've been looking forward to this conversation.
You and I caught up on the phone and I think
we've got lots of things to talk about.
Because you've got-- and have had your finger
in many, many pies.
I'd love people to get a bit of background
about yourself because you've got a hugely
interesting and different background.
BILL TAI: Yeah, well, my parents are from
Taiwan.
I grew up in the Midwest, mostly.
I ended up becoming a hardware hacker at a
teenager age following a schematic from Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had built a little
phone hacking device called a Blue Box.
That got me into electronics.
I ended up studying electrical engineering
and a little bit of computer design, became
a semiconductor chip designer and I came out
to Silicon Valley in the mid-80s, when it
was still orchards.
I joined a startup started by the CEO of Fairchild
Semiconductor.
That startup was called LSI Logic and the
other big name startups at the time were Intel
and AMD and National Semiconductor.
LSI Logic was a successful company.
I ended up leaving there to have a very brief
stint to help the government of Taiwan put
together a spreadsheet that got built out
for a factory that became Taiwan Semiconductor,
which is now a 200 billion market cap company.
I then went to Alex. Brown & Sons, which many
people don't know that name, but it was a
tiny boutique investment bank, and it had
taken Microsoft public on the right of Goldman
Sachs and they were building out other tech
areas.
I started their semiconductor practice, and
in the '80s, took public companies like Atmel,
Zilog, Adaptec, XR, Cirrus Logic, Dallas Semiconductor.
Then I went into venture capital about 30
years ago.
I've funded maybe 150 companies over the years
and had 20 to go public.
We're using Zoom right now.
Really, I was the first person to commit to
Zoom, and it's become a crazy $54 billion
market cap company today.
RAOUL PAL: You do that in a private capacity?
It's not of funds.
BILL TAI: I write my own checks.
Yes, I did do stints with some of the bigger
firms.
I was a partner at IVP in the '80s, or sorry,
in the '90s.
IVP, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia were the
backers of the startup I joined at LSI Logic,
and I later joined IVP in the updraft during
the internet era and in year 2000, I stepped
off the train for a while and became a sponsored
athlete in kiteboarding and then I came back
into the business 2003 or so to start the
Charles River Ventures Office and I'm still
a partner emeritus there, but the last 10
years, I've been basically writing my own
checks.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 3 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley RAOUL PAL:
When you're looking, surveying the landscape,
what gets you excited now?
We've gone through the VC way, but what on
the horizon, or the things that you're investing
in, that really starts getting you excited
about the future?
BILL TAI: I am still incredibly excited about
the wave that I would generally call data
science.
Let me build up to why.
Technology, to me, is a series of waves that
build upon each other.
I got started in that first wave of basically
figuring out how to take these big vacuum
tubes that got hot and took up a lot of space
and burned out a lot to turn them into little
dots on a piece of silicon.
We had this wave of basically taking complex
electronics and turning them into Lego blocks.
That was a very big wave that produced companies
like TSMC, and Intel and AMD, etc.
Once those Lego blocks were available to everybody,
you could build things out of them so there
was a second wave of building hardware devices,
whether they were computers or routers or
switches or hubs and things that were the
infrastructure that we all use today for moving
electrons around.
That wave, the second, wave led to the third
wave, which was put all that together and
then you have internet.
You had basically the digitization of the
communication system, another wonderful wave
to invest in.
Then on top of that-- RAOUL PAL: Your first
idea of the internet when you first saw it
was the digitalization of communication?
BILL TAI: Basically, yes.
Yeah.
Because you had circuit switch networks that
were point to point calls.
Then once you could chop up the conversations,
you could then multiplex them and put many
on a line and then you could expand greatly
the capacity and you could change the characteristics
of what was expressed on the screens.
That led to the fourth wave, which was the
user interface that went on top of that.
If you think about what is Facebook, Google,
LinkedIn, anything that you touch on a web
page, all it really is is a user interface
that controls the ones and zeros that are
expressed on the screen into something that's
usable to you.
That was very high value.
Then the next wave, which we are still in
and will be a long wave, just like the other
ways were 30-year waves is the data science
wave where you're trying to figure out what
is being done to optimize that engagement.
If you think about the winners in the user
interface era, the ones I named before.
They were the ones that understood how to
figure out what was happening behind the front
cover, that user interface, and optimize to
win.
That wave is really massive and just beginning.
You see it expressed in everything from blockchain,
to physical things like Uber now.
If you think about what is Uber, what's Walmart,
in the face of like a retail industry that
was Sears and JC Penney for many decades,
Walmart is a data science cloud where everything
is represented by some bits and expressed
at the point of sale terminals, so they know
what's inside and what's moving around.
It's given them like an asset light, low working
capital business, everyone and the old guys
are out of business.
Uber is a data science cloud with cars on
the end of it.
Airbnb is a data science cloud with rooms
on the end of it.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 4 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley We're basically
moving today into a world of virtualization
of physical assets and efficiency created
on top of that cloud, which is what we're
doing here.
Think of the efficiency right here through
Zoom.
You and I have been virtualized, we're not
3D but our presence has been totally virtualized
in a marketplace of nodes, where you can communicate
with anyone anywhere anytime, and have that
unit of productivity surface to the top which
is why something like Zoom today in the face
of no airline travel is worth more than the
top seven airlines combined.
RAOUL PAL: Yeah, the whole move towards video
is one of the things that obviously, I'm in
the middle of with Real Vision, but that whole
thing, what everybody and every business is
now becoming a media company because of the
impact of video.
The Zoom revolution is part of that whole
thing, but video has basically taking over
all forms of communication there.
BILL TAI: It really has.
I think while the capacity was still building
in the very early days of internet, it was
tough to just get a voice call across that.
There would be a lot of dropouts, a lot of
congestion and as the speeds increased, and
the ability to multiplex increased, many more
bits could be put through and you could move
from pages to audio to video pretty cleanly.
I think what that's done is for the media
business in general, like technology has disrupted
all these other prior businesses, media, it's
in an interesting place today because in my
book, the type of media business that we have
grown up with for 30, 40, 50 years is an anomaly.
If you think about content in general, from
the time of the caveman, and let's use music
as the main thing, songs were always free.
You'd go to the campfire and you'd sing them
and you could maybe write down some notes
and sell a little sheet music, but it wasn't
really a business.
It wasn't until vinyl was invented and people
could press that on something that had capital
intensive characteristics to make that he
who control capital control content.
All of a sudden, you shifted to a world where
the people that were capitalized control the
content and could also control distribution.
Once you had production and distribution,
you could charge for it.
We had one or two generations where people
were willing to pay $17 for a $3 piece of
vinyl and $14 for a 90 cent or nine cents
CD, ultimately.
We're now going back to what humanity was
for 400,000 or 500,000 years, where content
is free because production and distribution
have been digitized, and it's in everyone's
hands now.
The business models are rapidly changing.
You're seeing that just like it's empowering
you to be a big player in this field or companies
like Netflix disrupting the old industry.
It's remaking industries.
RAOUL PAL: How does that work with a subscription
model?
There is a free element.
Obviously, we have a free element as many
media companies do, but how does that work
with subscription because that's basically
saying you're going to have to pay for the
curation or some of the work involved?
BILL TAI: Yeah, it is, and you do a great
job with that.
It was always about drawing audience to get
people to come to a destination in whatever
business model existed and in the '70s, when
in the US, it was CBS, NBC and PBS, there
were limited choices but now, and we've already
gone through that, the choices, the June 1st
, 2020 - www.realvision.com 5 The Interview:
The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism, Technology,
and Silicon Valley number of choices completely
exploded so you really have to curate well
and draw audience and build that flywheel
of reputation and the ability to draw good
content, just like any social circle.
RAOUL PAL: Yeah.
Where else, outside of the video side, where
else are you seeing the developments of this
data, and the application of it that you that
you're talking about, this big wave?
BILL TAI: Well, it's the entire stack, where
we're probably 30%, 40% of the way through
making available the infrastructure to anyone,
and there's a lot of people that still have
to learn how to use it, but at the very granular
layer, you needed a different architecture
to handle the data and there was an explosive
wave in a techie nerdy area called Hadoop.
Back, if you think about the way data and
computation was handled in the '70s and '80s,
you might buy a big machine from IBM and load
a big instance of Oracle on it, and then get
a bunch of disk drives and then store stuff
in your company in some back room.
When the internet started to explode, the
type of data changed a lot, because it wasn't
just the things that you'd run on your machine,
you started to have things like tweets and
JPEGs and user data of when somebody's on
or what they clicked on on a page, it was
a very different type of data that was not
easy to store on Oracle, on an IBM machine,
in disk drives.
Google and Yahoo changed the game by consolidating
that into data centers so instead of having
a single big hunk in machines, you had many,
many, many little CPUs on cards where a symphony
conductor could conduct and distribute the
computing.
That changed everything about how data is--
how you compute, how you store, how you process,
how you read and what information you can
get out of it, because there's a lot more
ambient data.
Google created something called GFS, Google
File System.
Yahoo created Hadoop.
Hadoop became open sourced in the '90s and
became the basis for how the modern companies,
the ones I mentioned, Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, they all use to do the user analysis
and the A-B testing and the reading of ambient
information to know how to steer their businesses
and the ones that we're good at it, won.
The ones that never tried were like the JC
Penneys and Sears.
That wave produced companies like-- Splunk
is not specifically Hadoop, but Splunk Treasure
Data was a company that I co-founded, where
we made Hadoop available as a service on the
cloud.
Amazon has Redshift.
That allowed any engineer sitting in a room
anywhere to take all kinds of data stored
somewhere through his internet connection
on the browser, and then check what's happening.
What do you do with it?
How do you optimize engagement, so it spread
the power of giant data centers, data analysis
everywhere.
That foundational layer is now available to
any tech company, and the ones that really
get it win, the ones that don't use it lose.
Then now you can build all kinds of businesses
on top of it.
Whether it's the virtualization of things
we talked about, cars, rooms, people.
There's all kinds of things now that you can
apply data science to, the reading of, the
understanding of the movement, where it's
headed to optimize so what I described with
Walmart where you have a real time cloud,
if there's somebody that buys something in
Boston, and they're out of inventory, and
there's extra inventory in California, they
move it so the whole system becomes efficient.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 6 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley In the next
decade, I think you're going to see that applied
to supply chains.
You're going to see a complete remaking because
we're in this competitive world now and a
remaking possibly of where we source our goods
from a political national perspective, where
everything is going to need to be identified,
where it came from, where it is, where it
is on the way.
Whenever you get something delivered, you'd
love to be able to click on that little thing
to see where it is.
That type of tracking is going to be pervasive
in everything we do, whether it's goods, people
services, and we're just really at the start.
RAOUL PAL: That may be even forced by regulatory
changes as well as either it's deglobalized
world or regionalized, however we end up in
this world because we're changing right now,
we don't know where we're going to end up,
but it sounds like people are going to be
forced to prove providence, I guess.
BILL TAI: Yes, I think so.
Then this brings-- RAOUL PAL: Same with food
as well.
BILL TAI: Yes, definitely.
Yeah, there's this movement of course.
The sustainability wave is finally also real.
Talk about another wave that is increasingly
important, who knows whether we're all going
to make the earth implode by our activities,
but it's on more people's minds today than
it ever was before.
The safety and quality of your food and your
water, everything about the brands you interact
with, it matters now.
I think this next generation of millennials
that, I don't know where they going to get
their money, maybe they'll just get it from
their parents-- RAOUL PAL: Or basic income
maybe.
BILL TAI: Yes.
Their purchase decisions are not just price
performance.
They don't buy things just because they're
cheaper and a little bit better, they buy
things because it means something to them.
The brands represent something.
If you don't represent something good or if
you really represent something bad, it matters.
I think the sheen of doing well by doing good
matters for your survival going forward.
I think that's also quite a big wave.
I think back to the provenance point, this
whole area of blockchain and cryptocurrency,
it's controversial in some ways, because it
hasn't become pervasive yet.
I think, to me, the blockchain looks like
TCP IP for assets.
What does that mean?
TCP IP is this little acronym you see everywhere,
Transmission Control Protocol slash Internet
Protocol, and it was and is the fabric around
which digital assets, meaning like emails
or packets that are sent through the internet
are tracked, traced.
When I send it into the-- I type an email
and hit send to Raoul, the TCP IP stream carries
it, transmits it, knows that it got there,
and it's just a bunch of bits.
I think now in the blockchain world, bits
represent physical assets or digital assets
of value like a Bitcoin and that fabric underlying
that is this blockchain.
Some are specific to certain kinds of things
like the Bitcoin blockchain is only the Bitcoin
blockchain, but there are other blockchains
that can be used for other things, those can
track those assets.
Whether it's a securitization of a real estate
project, a building, or it's the trading of
a token for another token, or insurance, execution
of insurance policies or whatever the contracts
may be, those can now become over time, very
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 7 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley fast, automatic
and guaranteed in a way that the verification
was very difficult to do before, very expensive
to do.
I think those businesses will be remade over
time as well.
RAOUL PAL: As this whole space develops, so
we've got these huge developments going on
in cloud, I guess, that seems to be happening.
Then we got the distributed computing power,
edge computing and that's just all allowing
more and more processing ability, and then
within that, suddenly, that's allowed, it
looks like this ability to create the internet
of, well, assets or money or value, or whatever
it is, how big a thing is this?
Where is a Silicon Valley because I'm really
interested, as you know, in this whole blockchain,
crypto, digital assets world because it's
the crossover of my world and your world.
It's macro meet Silicon Valley and it's fascinating.
How is that movement in the West Coast?
Do people see it?
Is it a really big thing because Andreessen
Horowitz seemed to be really putting the whole
business behind this now.
Tell me a bit about this movement that's going
on.
BILL TAI: It is.
What's interesting is that I'm going to answer
that on a couple of dimensions.
One is that Silicon Valley is definitely an
insular place.
It has its own way of thinking about things
that some people call it a bubble, whether
it's a financial or a thought bubble, or just
whatever it is, it's a little different.
There was a certain type of person that came
out to Silicon Valley in the '80s, '90s and
they came from all over the world.
If people were interested in electronics and
physical things like this was geek heaven
in the '80s and early '90s, and then it started
to become a little bit more commercial and
transactional with the internet.
Silicon Valley has its own way of looking
at things and because it became the center
of the universe for that development for a
while, and actually, it still is, it was an
interesting thing when the internet hit.
I was convinced at the beginning of that,
that the internet would democratize everybody
and that the software engineer in Bangladesh
would be equal to the one in San Jose, because
they could get information equally.
That was true, but what ended up happening
was as the internet spread, that person in
Bangladesh would wake up and say, I should
be in Silicon Valley, and they would get on
a plane and move.
That network reached out, touched everybody
and then sucked all the assets into Silicon
Valley, because everybody wanted to be commercially
productive.
Then it imploded.
Then some people went back home.
Silicon Valley goes through those waves, but
there's a high concentration of the more aggressive
people that are willing to try new things
here.
That's become its own ecosystem.
That said, I think what's happened in the
last eight or 10 years in particular is that
we had-- you know that movie, there's one
of the original Star Trek movies where Spock
goes back, he goes into the nuclear reactor
to take out the thing, and then they have
to bring it back to life because he dies,
so there's the Genesis project.
Then there's this like green shoot that shoots
out on the ground, and it goes everywhere.
Technology is like that now.
You had this idea of concentration in Silicon
Valley and over the last eight or 10 years,
the opportunity to fund and build and create
companies worldwide has expanded like crazy.
I think it's a couple of dimensions.
One is that in the earlier days of Silicon
Valley, it was all about miniaturization of
hardware devices and engineers selling to
engineers things that would make their machines
faster and cheaper and better.
The applications layer wasn't the main thing.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 8 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley Now, we've
moved to this world where technology is affecting
everything and it's allowing people like a
Mark Zuckerberg to start a company in a dorm
room at Harvard.
That one moved to Silicon Valley, but now,
there's people that don't move anymore.
Whether it's immigration restrictions, cost
of living, what have you.
I've been very successful in funding companies
like Canva out in Perth, Australia, it started,
it's there in Sydney now, but that company
is now worth half a billion dollars and it's
been profitable for three years, they're about
18 months behind Zoom in P&L and margin structure,
and same P&L and margin structure, but size
is about 18 months behind, or SafetyCulture's
another company who just raised a billion
in Australia.
Treasure Data which SoftBank acquired, I started
that one out of Tokyo.
There's so many opportunities now that are
springing up.
The fabled Silicon Valley unicorn isn't just
in Silicon Valley anymore, and there're unicorns
everywhere.
I think that that's just started.
RAOUL PAL: What is your-- because you got
involved in the whole Bitcoin business early
on, talk us through your journey of that because
that's-- BILL TAI: Oh, what a crazy thing
that I never thought would become what it
became.
In the '90s, I was on a board of a company
that went public called 8x8.
One of our board members was the chief scientist
of RealNetworks.
He introduced me to a good friend of his who
was the chief technologist, CTO of RealNetworks,
because he thought we'd be snowboard buddies,
and we did.
We kitesurf together, we snowboard together.
Around that time, I think around year 2000,
'99 or 2000, I can't remember the exact year.
His name's Philip Rosedale.
Philip told me, Bill, I'm going to build that
science fiction novel Snow Crash in real life.
First, I hadn't read that book yet.
I said, what's Snow Crash.
If you don't know what it is, it's a science
fiction novel by Neal Stevenson, that describes
a digital world.
This was written in the '80s, where the protagonist
drops down his computer, opens the screen,
drops in.
He's got a virtual character representing
him that goes around, and they have a ninja
sword, the characters had ninja swords, and
every once in a while, you get in a fight.
If you lose, and you get your head cut off,
you get timed out, and you're not in the world
anymore.
Towards the end of the book, the physical
and virtual memory, and the character gets
killed and the guy in real life dies.
It's like first life and second life merge.
Philip built Second Life, and it became this
thing, this amazing world where people would
create a digital representation of themselves
and wander around in an unstructured environment.
When it was first launched, people didn't
really know what to do because it wasn't a
structured game.
You just show up.
I was sitting in front of the Paragon bar
in San Francisco with him around 2000, 2001
when it launched, and I said Philip, we should
start an economy.
I said, if you think about, what is Las Vegas,
there was nothing there.
Nothing's made there.
It's just like a bunch of sand.
I said, if you put 10 people in a circle,
and you put one poker chip into the system,
and said, pass it to the right a million times
a year, everybody would have a million dollars
a year of income.
As it's moving around, you could peel stuff
off and build a casino, build a resort and
you have an economy.
We launched- - or Philip, I should say, launched
the Linden Dollar.
That became-- and I took the character, my
name is June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com
9 The Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture
Capitalism, Technology, and Silicon Valley
Alan Greenspan Gollum in Second Life.
We had this money supply, we had universal
basic income.
All the netizens of Second Life would get
a little stipend every month and then-- RAOUL
PAL: That creates money that therefore people
got distributed money and that they would
spend it and create a velocity of money, and
they've created an economy.
BILL TAI: That's what happened, it was like
Las Vegas.
It was crazy because people would set up banks,
there were Ponzi schemes, people would collect
other people's money and offer interest with
nothing really to invest in and get more money
and pay interest.
Everything that happened in the Wild West
days of banking in the US happened in Second
Life.
It was just nuts.
It was a fantastic experience.
Then when the Bitcoin whitepaper came out,
somebody sent it to me.
I don't remember the date, but it sat in my
in basket for a while because I didn't really
know what it was.
Then at some point in 2010, I read it and
I went to bitcoin.org and I downloaded some
software and I started running a miner.
RAOUL PAL: Why?
I understand you've understood the digital
money.
That was the big one, that the digital life
and the real life can blend, and people are
living two lives.
Okay, I get that.
That's very revolutionary and people still
haven't caught up with that yet, that our
kids are living now.
Why in that white paper do you go, okay, this
makes sense, I'm going to start mining?
Most people go, oh, that's interesting-- BILL
TAI: The phrase that caught my attention was
peer-to-peer currency.
It was more of a peer-to-peer than it was
a currency at the time.
Around 1999, 2000-- so back in the mid-90s,
I started an ISP.
I set up some routers in Taiwan at one of
the first commercially-owned ISPs that became
a bunch of data centers.
Goldman, Morgan and Salomon ended up taking
it public.
I, with the team, acquired AT&T Hong Kong,
and it became a company called iAsiaWorks
led by then CEO of AT&T Hong Kong and it became
a public company.
Here I had this data center business with
all these lines, and I could see clearly in
my head the world was moving, had moved, from
mainframes to minis to PCs to blade servers
distributed around the world and it was a
peer to peer fabric, effectively, of computational
devices.
I was experimenting at a time with peer-to-peer
computing and I also set up this little entity
to experiment, we've called ifrog.com and
I had some coders that built a peer-to-peer
content distribution network.
The idea was like Akamai, to take video streams
and instead of having to pay expensive bandwidth
across submarine cables across the ocean,
you could have a go-over once and sit in the
peer nodes and each one would spread it so
that would be at lower cost.
I was just into that type of technology at
the time and the Second Life architecture
in the beginning also was going to use blade
servers in a way where if you joined Second
Life, your computer would be attached to a
blade server in a pod and your computational
device, your PC would generate a little piece
of real estate in Second Life.
The idea was to have many, many, many people
on contributing their compute power to build
the world, so that the company itself didn't
have to.
I think just because I was interested in those
techniques and working on them and building
some things and experimenting, when I saw
a peer-to-peer currency, I read it.
I just thought, wow, this is fascinating.
This is cool.
It totally made sense to me that you could
have a world of June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com
10 The Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture
Capitalism, Technology, and Silicon Valley
people out there all contributing to a common
goal that was a computationally based thing,
whatever it was, and this just happened to
be a currency.
I lit up this miner and then it was computationally
intensive on an old PC I had that was running
some other stuff and it would crash every
once in a while.
In Thanksgiving weekend of 2010-- and I do
all my building on holidays so if you follow
me on Instagram, you'll see like, robots on
fourth of like Memorial Day weekend, I built
the robot and last Fourth of July, I built
like a little LED red, white and blue flashing
thing and I do things on holidays.
In Thanksgiving of 2010, so 10 years ago,
almost 10 years ago, I decided to switch from
mining to possibly buying and I tweeted something
that's still out there that was something
like anyone else using peer-to-peer currency
bitcoin.org, because I wanted to find other
people.
Then I ended up meeting this kid, whose father
was a kite surfer.
This kid named Nico Poonan [?] was mining
in Finland, and his apartment was full of
machines basically mining and I got to know
him and bought some Bitcoin from him.
Over the years, he and some other people in
the open source community got together and
pooled their assets and learned how to go
from laptops to programming graphics cards,
to programming FPGAs, field programmable gate
arrays, and then they wanted to do a semiconductor
chip, like a hardcore ASIC that ran the Bitcoin
protocol.
Having been a chip designer, my background,
when he first approached me as young kid who's
no education in that space.
It was like, there's no way you can do this,
but he and his open source buddies found some
code, some programs design silicon, and they
came up with a design and I looked at it,
I was like, this could work.
I ended up writing a check with some friends.
The investor of Google Maps, some employee
to Facebook, the head of infrastructure at
Facebook, we funded a silicon chip that became
the main computational device at Bitfury.
That's how I got involved with what was for
a while, the world's largest Bitcoin mining
operation.
RAOUL PAL: What did you see in those days?
What did you think was going to happen with
this Bitcoin thing?
I'd love to see where you think it's going
now because Bitcoin's where our worlds collide
as well, because there seems to be an accelerant
around us.
What did you see then, and how has your evolution
of thought process change?
BILL TAI: Well, when I read the white paper,
and then I started to understand the Byzantine
Generals Problem if you've ever-- RAOUL PAL:
Why don't you explain that to some people,
we've had it once on before, but I think it's
very useful if you explain it for some people.
BILL TAI: Yeah, so at a very high level, okay--
I look at Bitcoin as primarily a store of
value.
It's useful in some levels of transactions,
but there are improvements that need to be
made to a bunch of things to make it high
volume.
If it's going to be a store of value like
gold, then scarcity is quite important.
How do you know that there's a limited quantity
and how do you identify all the little pieces
of Bitcoin that make up the universe of Bitcoin?
There's a set of algorithms that were really
based on history where if you had like a war,
a bunch of Byzantine generals that were being
attacked, or in some battle, and you have
this June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com
11 The Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture
Capitalism, Technology, and Silicon Valley
communications, not even a grid, because you
have people like running around by foot with
little scrolls messaging, how do you know
how to communicate with all of them in a distributed
fashion and make sure that they're in sync
and that the instructions that are going to
each general are authentic, and that you should
really follow them?
An interesting problem when you're leading
a troop, and you're going to go into battle
against all these other people and you don't
know, am I being tricked?
Is this real?
Is it not real?
There's an algorithm that was developed that
outlines the way the communication happens
between those things to make sure that it's
fault tolerant, and that with enough nodes,
you can tell that something's authentic.
The algorithm that was designed that is imputed
in having a bunch of nodes that run the Bitcoin
program, run them all together in a way that
you can verify transactions so that if you
and I have-- if you wanted to send me part
of a coin, and you sent it to me, how do I
know like that Byzantine messenger, that that
was real, it happened.
It's indelible, it wasn't fake, and that everyone
can know that without having to like have
watched it?
That set of algorithms is coded into the software
that has all these different nodes that you
hear about is the hashing program and the
verification of transactions that occur in
the Bitcoin blockchain and that the blockchain
to simplify that, it's a chain of blocks of
information.
Every 10 minutes or so, it's not exactly 10
minutes, but it's roughly every 10 minutes,
all the little movements of coins around the
world that are queued up, there's a wrapper
put around that and that's a block, and then
that's stuck on the chain.
Over a period of time, anyone can look at
that chain and see, Raoul said, Bill, this
tiny amount of Bitcoin at this time on this
date, and now that unit sits with him and
I can then move at any time so that all of
those transactions in the world all the time
are being recorded and stored in multiple
locations and no one can replace it, and it's
indelible.
There's a tracking system.
It's back to this data science thing.
RAOUL PAL: What is so revolutionary about
it outside of Bitcoin?
Bitcoin as a store of value, what is all of
the excitement about Ethereum, the whole blockchain,
digital assets?
What world do you see looking forwards now
that this has given birth and has become unproven?
BILL TAI: My framework is going to be based
on things that I saw happen before.
To me, it's a little bit like, I would look
at Bitcoin as DOS or Basic, meaning an older
programming language that is or actually not
even that, there's something called Assembly
language, which is, when you have like a microprocessor
in your computer, it's not looking at a bunch
of words, you're programming that in a series
of ones and zeros.
It's very granular, and very precise, and
you can see everything that's going wrong
if it goes wrong, and if it glitches, it's
going to glitch and just stop.
Bitcoin is at that layer where the programming
of Bitcoin is so granular that you can see
everything.
There's not a lot of people that like to do
it because it's tedious.
There was a need after Bitcoin got started
to make the concept of blockchain more applicable
to broader sets of things, you needed to make
it easier to use.
Rather than programming this laptop that I'm
using Zoom on in a bunch of ones and zeros,
a lot of applications on a Mac or an iPhone
are built with higher level languages.
In the case of applications on iPhone, there's
something called XCode.
You basically download it, you can drag and
drop modules and user interfaces and bump,
bump, bump, bump, bump.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 12 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley Software development,
to some degree today is no longer development.
It's permission plagiarism.
You basically go out to GitHub and you go
to GitLab and you find different blocks, and
you paste them together and you hit run.
Then you change the variables and you just
tweak it.
That level of programming, it's faster, it's
easier.
You get to results sooner, but it's not secure.
What you see in the development of Bitcoin,
Bitcoin's never been hacked because it's this
very granular, clunky, low level thing and
you can see everything going on.
Ethereum's is abstracted language that took,
or it's built on an abstracted language solidified.
It was designed in a way that attracted every
kid that could design an iPhone app.
There was this flood of developers because
it was easy to use, but it had these little
things underneath because it was based on
other things where if you put these two little
gears together, maybe they don't quite match,
the early days of Ethereum were filled with,
oh, the wallet hung, it was hackable, this
was hackable, that was hackable.
There were all these gaps, because people
would attack it at lower layers.
I think Bitcoin, in that context, to me is
such a rock solid thing, it's like the gold
standard.
I think Ethereum and some of the other languages
and tokens around different block chains may
be simpler to use, and therefore draw developers
that want to apply blockchain principles to
managing things, whether it's a fleet of cars,
or tracking assets or different things, tracking
transactions, and I did fund some things in
that space, too.
I'm one of the early backers of CryptoKitties,
for example.
RAOUL PAL: What did you see in that?
Was that just you seeing Second Life all over
again, basically?
BILL TAI: It was one of the very, very first--
well, first of all, the team.
I always back people in teams first, and then
they have to be in a space that I think is
a bit-- Philosophy for Venture Capital 101,
you're not going to make money if you're in
a dead market.
You want to be in a big market going through
transition that's starting to accelerate or
leading up to that.
You're not going to make money if you have
a shitty team so you want A players.
Then you're not going to make money if you
overpay or you get the capital structure wrong.
It's very simple.
I had a conversation with Don Valentine.
Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital,
was a backer of that first startup that I
joined.
When I went into venture capital in the early
'90s, I used to follow him around and we got
stuck in an airport one day after a board
meeting at Microchip because there was a flight
delay or something, I had dinner with him,
and I was like, Don, you're so good at this.
By the way, if you want to see a venture capitalist
that is just amazing, think about only 10
investments he ever made or a subset, Oracle,
Apple, Cisco, Electronic Arts, LSI Logic,
Network Appliance, just in that, there's like
1000 billion.
Then his firm went on to fund Google and really
everything else.
Zoom, they came in late to Zoom.
Sequoia Capital, they just have that DNA of
a great thinker that understood markets, understood
issues, and he was one of my early mentors
that I followed around, and so I said, Don,
what do I do to be good at this business?
He said, it's very simple.
You only have to get three things right, markets,
management, capital.
He said, if you think about those three things,
if you have a great team and infinite capital
and you're in a shitty market, you'll lose
money every time so just make sure you're
in a good market and then get the right people
and if they're not working, change it out
until it works.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 13 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley That was the
early Sequoia culture, they're not so much
like that now, but they were very hard on
management at the time because they saw the
management as a commodity.
Anyway, I think we're in this world now where
I think Bitcoin is this reference standard,
Ethereum and CryptoKitties-- CryptoKitties
ran on Ethereum, and they broke out as the
highest volume application.
RAOUL PAL: Anybody else would have looked
at this and said, why the hell do we care
about digital currencies on a blockchain?
That's what the world's narrative was, but
you saw something entirely different.
BILL TAI: Well, it was, yeah.
I tend to be drawn like I was to the peer-to-peer
thing.
When I feel like there's a new and useful
technology that gets a foothold around the
use case, I'm just generally interested and
then whether or not I find it's a different
case, but in this particular case, it represented
to me the first high volume transaction machine.
Because to me, I didn't care if it was a cat.
It was interesting that it was a cat or set
of cats, but you could put anything in there.
It was representative to me of what am I going
to learn about driving super high volume transactions
on a blockchain here?
RAOUL PAL: Is this tokenization essentially,
you're seeing within the kitties?
BILL TAI: Yeah, it is.
Yes, that's it.
RAOUL PAL: You're seeing, okay, they tokenize
these kittens, but therefore, I could tokenize
anything.
BILL TAI: That's right.
RAOUL PAL: Therefore, tokens become securities,
securities have value and now, we've got this
whole digital platform to exchange all of
these things anyway.
BILL TAI: That's it.
Basically, to me, it represented one of the
first steps towards digital value exchange
in a universal way of anything, and like Second
Life, it was its own economy.
It was its own little closed world with its
own currency, and back to your question about
where does Bitcoin fit in the world's currency
system and other value exchange?
I have another weird ethereal thought on this
whole-- and ethereal doesn't mean Ethereum,
but I think if you think about the history
of currencies, generally speaking, and let's
take this recent history that we're just in.
The US dollar, as we know it, has not been
around that long.
If you think about-- yeah, so 1944, Bretton
Woods, reference to a piece of gold to give
it trust so how do you impute trust?
In that time, it was like there's physical
gold.
Now, it's blockchain if you understand blockchain.
Then it ran out of gas in 1971 or 1972.
Then they had it abstracted from the dollar
and it became this floating thing, a reserve
currency with its special advantages, but
that's only been in place for 28, 29 years.
Is it breaking now?
Don't know, it might be.
'44 to '72, I don't know-- it wasn't that
long.
It's like 20- or 30-year periods, and we're
having these hit the wall moments within a
few decades at a time.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 14 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley That doesn't
give me a lot of confidence that this currency
is going to be around 100 years from now.
I don't know when it totally breaks, but it's
going to break at some point.
Now, let's go back beyond this couple of generation
period to societal structure now, people exchange
money.
Let's go back to the revolutionary period,
when a bunch of people got off boats from
continental Europe and stepped on sandy beaches
or wooded beaches in America, they set up
colonies.
Let's draw a line here.
This is Connecticut.
This is New York, this is Virginia.
Every single one of them created their own
currency.
Every single one.
If you think about currencies and value of
exchange, anytime you have a societal group,
whatever that grouping is, religious, political,
cultish.
You're going to have little exchanges of things.
We're in a world that increasingly is able
to have a gazillion micro communities exchanging
value however they want.
The world that we knew after World War II
was temporary, because you go back before,
let's say, humans have been around for 400,000
or 500,000 years in the form we are now, longer
than that if we were lucky.
If you think about what was society like when
you were a caveman?
How did you do value exchange?
In the morning, you might wake up and say,
hey, I'm going to go fish with Raoul and three
friends.
Then in the afternoon, I might pick five other
people and in the middle of the day or later
in the evening, I might do something else
with another set.
I didn't work for a company.
You had a flexible fabric of need that you
serviced with free molecules that could disperse,
reform, apply themselves whenever you needed
productivity of a certain kind and a certain
thing, so work was fluid.
It wasn't until the physical Industrial Revolution,
just like we talked about music, that societal
structure and work changed.
It's only like 1% of human history, we've
been locked in these big companies.
After industrialization and capital intensity,
we had this notion of giant companies that
promised their employees that they would have
pensions forever.
I know you're big on this pension thing.
That's all fake.
It was like, come work for me.
I'll take care of you for the rest of your
life.
That's not true.
RAOUL PAL: Bullshit.
That was a lie.
BILL TAI: It was never sustainable.
We know a certain limited history of our parents
and grandparents that worked for these big
companies in the aftermath of World War II,
but before that, they never existed for hundreds
of thousands of years.
Why should this structure be what it will
be in the future?
I think we're going back to-- or the future
is going back to what we were for all of human
history.
Think about every young person you know.
They work on five jobs.
None of them work for a big company.
Think about every big company you know.
They're mostly in trouble.
The industrial ones.
The ones that move bits around, freeform,
they're not in trouble but the General Electrics,
the old industrial things, no young kid's
going to go work there are hardly any.
We are now, we had this like societal line
of this continuous society, capital intensive
big companies and nations.
Nope, that didn't really work.
What will that do?
That's going to dissolve national borders
in a way and if national border's-- RAOUL
PAL: [?] doing that, already.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 15 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley BILL TAI: It
is.
This premise of what is currency in a world
that looks like caveman days with computers?
It's a totally different thing.
You get micro economies and all kinds of assets
and I think humans like to have a reference
standard.
I think back to your original question, I
think Bitcoin is one of those things that's
very secure and if you think about the human
behavioral economics around gold and the need
to hold gold, and you may know the answer
to this better than me, but I think all the
gold in the world's worth 8 trillion?
RAOUL PAL: 10 trillion and silver.
BILL TAI: Okay, so if Bitcoin becomes worth
a 10th of that over a decade, or less or more,
whatever it is, or even 20 or 30% of it in
two or three decades or 50 years, whenever
this dollar regime starts to have big stress,
what's it worth then, is that 100,000 or is
it 200 or 500 a coin, but it's somewhere in
that neighborhood.
I think it's one of those things that you
buy a little, you hang on.
RAOUL PAL: Yeah.
See, I'm really interested in this because
I've been looking at the fragmentation of
society and the change of the tribalism brought
by the internet because we exist in two societies
now.
We live in a sovereign state, you live in
the United States, I live in the Cayman Islands.
We have our citizenships, you're originally
Taiwanese by heritage, I was originally British,
parents from different countries but now,
I live online.
I'm now part of the macro community.
This is a whole community of people, of which
most of the people I've never met before,
but I talk all day on Twitter to, or via video,
or whatever.
We can have mediums of exchange.
We have our own terminologies.
We have, in jokes, own society as it is, but
I may be part of another society as well.
Maybe I'm part of whatever, my other interests
may be, music, a different society, different
groups.
As you said, what becomes really interesting
is once you start thinking of this new tokenization,
CryptoKitties being I thought was really fascinating.
Once you understand that everything can be
tokenized, that has value, and particularly
digital assets as well and we have this multi-tribal
world, we've now just built a brand new securities
market with millions of new instruments, we
can trade.
I'm looking at the pretty shitty fucking world
that we've got now with rigged central bank
buying and narrowing base of ownership of
equities and all of this mess that we're all
finding ourselves in, well, we're about to
be given an entirely new playing field.
Everyone still thinks of tokens from the first
wave of tokens in 2017, that was just the
start of we're going.
BILL TAI: I agree.
The first set of web pages suck, too.
A lot of porno and a lot scammy sites, but
they evolved into something cool.
RAOUL PAL: Yeah.
I very much think that if we were to go forward
20 years, if you're in the financial industry,
you're actually trading value between tokens.
I've always said the point being, let's say
you take a great firm like Exxon, huge, big
monolithic entity.
Right now, I can buy their bonds or their
equity.
They employ, I don't know, 500,000 people
or something crazy and maybe you want the
upstream and I want the green energy component,
that person wants the buildings and that we
can do all of that.
We don't have corporate entities any longer,
which is your point, about corporate entities
don't exist, they became a legal thing to
turn a company into a human, a corporation.
For legal entities, that all goes.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 16 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley BILL TAI: Very
similar to the media business.
If you think about production and distribution,
if you could control the production and distribution,
you could control the media, the content,
the currency, and I think digitization, you
eroded it all of that and put it in the hands
of everyone else.
Because you could, you literally could get
on a computer and create your own token right
now.
You could easily do that, you could have a
Real Vision currency if you wanted and it's
a question do you or do you not have a little
nation?
A little cult, a little following and you
could have people trading it, just like Second
Life?
It's in every asset, whether it's a community
or as you described, the buildings or what
have you.
I also funded something called Fluidity, they
just merged into consensus, which had released
a peer-to-peer exchange, AirSwap.
AirSwap's like instant exchange of tokens.
They did a an experiment with the securitization
or the tokenization of a Goldman Sachs led
real estate project financing.
Instead of getting a stack of papers around
a LP stack of papers representing a chunk
of a building, they securitized, or they tokenized
Real Estate funding of a project and like
you were referring to, it doesn't have to
be a big thing.
You could do one thing at a time.
It's whatever has a following.
Whatever you have a belief in.
RAOUL PAL: Sportstars, we're seeing that and
that's a no brainer.
BILL TAI: You're going to have to see, take
a look at CryptoKitties again, because one
of the great learnings at CryptoKitties was
that for their purposes in their spiky high
volume transaction periods, the Ethereum blockchain
wasn't designed to handle that kind of traffic,
so they created their own blockchain called
Flow.
They are now working with major sports leagues
to create-- because you had unique cats, trading
cards.
RAOUL PAL: The same thing.
Not only that, but it can be the future income
stream of Sportscars, doesn't even have to
be the cards.
BILL TAI: Yes, because it's their identity.
They're taking little movie clips, or little
clips from games like special moments, you
could own the authentic one.
There are micro economies around different
things.
There's all kinds of new assets.
You talked about all the old assets, there's
a new generation of different assets that
have value that people may not understand
today, but they will just like in Instagram--
Instagram and YouTube have created micro economies
for influencers that you've never predicted.
RAOUL PAL: That is all going to get digitized,
all of the revenue flows and everything else
and we already see that too.
It's a fascinating world, so I'm going to
go out of that world now into the other side
of it, or no for two things from you, your
thought processes, as we wrap up a bit.
Going back into the big world is talking about
Libra, because you're closer to that world
than I am.
I thought it was super interesting.
Then what you think the central banks are
up to with digital currencies.
BILL TAI: Wow, big thing.
RAOUL PAL: How does that all fit into this
framework?
Because a lot of people are looking at it
and say, well, the central bank set up digital
currencies, that makes Bitcoin worthless.
My view is this is creating on ramps and off
ramps and digital economy that we've been
talking about, you and I, that it's exploding
and June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 17
The Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture
Capitalism, Technology, and Silicon Valley
there's no way of stopping this digital economy.
Libra was something amazing because it gives
a global currency, but anyway, if you can
give any thoughts on this, it will be amazing.
BILL TAI: Yeah.
Back to this concept of a bunch of people
getting on and off a boat, stepping on the
land in North America, every little community,
or big community can have its own currency,
whether it's a military protected nation state,
or a virtual community like Facebook.
If you have members of a community, however
you got them, you have the ability to introduce
something that becomes the digital representation
of value of exchange.
It's obvious, when you think about what's
happened in China with WeChat, and QQ and
the other kinds of digital value transfer
that occur there, I'm surprised it took Facebook
so long to try to step into it.
I'm really pleased that they decided to do
it on blockchain because in my mind, that's
the best way to do it.
Because you can't hack it.
You can't fake it.
If you're running servers in WeChat, you can
probably print your own and just make yourself
a billionaire if you want.
RAOUL PAL: The Libra thing is a bunch of stable
coins and loads of currencies all put together
in one basket or something like that.
BILL TAI: Yes, it is.
There's a reference they're trying there.
I think Facebook is in an interesting position
because they're so big and have such broad
reach, they are the subject of regulatory
controversy.
I think it's hard for them as a company to
try to go in the face of governments because
the governments will attack them hard.
I think the decisions they made are trying
to thread that needle of how do we build something
that is useful as a reference standard, a
global reference standard amongst our community
that's both on Facebook and WhatsApp and on
Instagram and which is billions of people?
How do we also make it usable to merchants
around the world?
Which that the announcement recently was Shopify,
if you caught that, Shopify has been on a
tear as a stock and Facebook announced the
ability for anyone to set up a store on Instagram,
or there are other sites and have it powered
by Shopify.
Now, they have a currency system to transact.
It's this whole world of how do you get community
and commerce and the payment method.
RAOUL PAL: Once you have your own currency,
you basically create ultra-loyalty within
your community because they now have something
of value.
If they leave the community, it now has no
value or less.
Potentially less value in the outside world.
BILL TAI: Yes, it's a transaction mechanism.
It makes it stickier for people to stay on,
you can tax it with commissions.
It's another monetization method.
I think the cost of delivering that is going
to be lower than other methods at scale because
of the size of their audience and because
of the blockchain element, and I think it's
an amazing thing that might happen.
RAOUL PAL: Also, I've been very interested
because the US dollar is part of the basket
that they propose.
Basically, the denominator, there's no denominator,
so therefore, they could denominate by global
money supply or something that's less volatile.
If I'm trying to buy something from you, and
you're a Facebook merchant, and I'm an individual,
and I'm in Ethiopia, and you're in Taiwan,
well, we'll have this currency, June 1st , 2020
- www.realvision.com 18 The Interview: The
Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism, Technology,
and Silicon Valley it doesn't move a lot.
I'm likely to store it now, as well, because
I'm in Ethiopia, and I'm more worried about
my currency.
I might use that currency as my bet.
It's an extraordinary thing.
BILL TAI: It really is.
I'm going to abstract this conversation before
we get to central banks again but think about
what is a store of value in general if you
take two commodities that have become important
to our lives, oil, and electronics.
You hear the term petrodollar for forever.
RAOUL PAL: Electrodollar?
BILL TAI: Yes, because the petrodollar has
been an ephemeral period based on this industrial
move.
The third Industrial Revolution fueled machines
with oil, so oil had value because it was
the grease that ran the system.
The reference standard for the US dollar became
that, it broke away from gold because you
could store productivity.
What is currency?
Currency is stored productivity in a way.
As a nation, you could store your future by
buying a lot of oil or having the means to
buy a lot of oil in something that could be
swapped, a petrodollar, for barrels of oil.
The US dollar in a way was an ICO tokenization
of oil.
Today, if I said, Raoul, you're sitting there,
you're having fun every day, I have this switch,
and it can only go one direction.
Either I cut off your oil, or I cut off your
electricity.
What do you want me to cut off?
You're going to choose oil.
All of our future productivity, most of our
productivity already today is not based on
oil.
It's based on electrons.
We're already, we've already moved into the
world where everything about our lives-- RAOUL
PAL: I've never thought about it that way
but you're dead right, and oil, it's just
one of the means of generating the electrons,
but there are many.
BILL TAI: There are.
You probably have solar because you're in
the Cayman.
I think we're now in the process of transitioning,
and it's already happened where our lives
are more dependent, every unit of our productivity
happens through a computer or smartphone or
some device, where, yeah, we care about oil,
but we really care about the electricity.
RAOUL PAL: Bitcoin mining is essentially the
conversion of electricity into a Bitcoin.
BILL TAI: It is.
All of these things, whether it's a Libra
thing, or whatever they are, they're basically
the tokenization of forms of electricity that
you can use.
It is the Electrodollar, I don't know, maybe
it's called Libra, maybe it's called something
else.
Maybe because electricity is so fluid.
RAOUL PAL: We just invented something today,
the Electrodollar.
This conversation created something new.
BILL TAI: Yeah.
It's a lot more fluid.
I think back to this idea of oil and heavy
machinery created physical assets that nations
had to protect and create armies to protect
your productivity, it's now dissolving into
ones and zeros on screens.
How do you store that value?
How do you transact in that value?
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 19 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley RAOUL PAL:
You're even seeing warfare goes to cyber,
the battle over the electrons.
BILL TAI: Yes.
Nation states are a little different now,
like, is Facebook a nation state?
Hard to know, but it can influence an election
of a physical state.
We're totally entering this new era where--
and so back to this last question about digital
currency, you got these governments and banks
trying to catch up.
The wave has been unleashed and now they,
I think, are looking at it where I think even
just 24 months ago, they were trying to crush
it.
They were like, stop it.
We're going to regulate it out of existence,
and then they realized we can't, and the public
might get upset and we're voted into office.
Well, maybe we got to play ball a little bit
here.
Now, it's how do we make a digital currency?
We need to have a digital currency.
Let's make one.
It's a little bit of a backwards look and
I guess there's an assumption there that they'll
be able to hang on to their community, or
their nation state, which maybe they can from
a physical sense, but is that going to stop
me from moving my assets to other digital
things?
No.
RAOUL PAL: No, but they can track your money.
It makes it harder for the transfer if they
don't want it to happen.
That's one thing.
The other thing is they're desperate to get
away from the dollar standard.
The reason they're trying to get together
with digital currencies is not that necessarily,
the digitization aspect means anything to
them, but it does because we're in a digitized
world, and it gets them out of the SWIFT system
for stuff.
BILL TAI: Yes, a very expensive [?]. RAOUL
PAL: They have all sorts of problems and then
China can create a regional currency basket
very easily and its currencies and then weight
it, it just becomes a much easier way to globally
transact business.
BILL TAI: Totally agree.
Lower friction, lower cost, easier to scale.
Lots of ways for water to seek its own level.
It makes it much more fluid.
RAOUL PAL: Without having to go through the
US that's omnipotence in their dollar standard.
Right now, 79.5% of every single transaction
on earth is in US dollars.
The US is only 25% of the global GDP.
It's so screwed up.
That has to change, and that's what Mark Carney
from the Bank of England talked about, and
the ECB have talked about is like, we need
to move away from this because it just doesn't
function anymore.
BILL TAI: It's not fair.
It's only what, the US must be 6%, 7% of the
world population.
Maybe.
Yeah, and 79% of the transactions in US dollars.
Amazing.
RAOUL PAL: Incredible.
Bill, fantastic conversation.
Thoroughly enjoyed it, gave me tons to think
about.
We've invented the electro currency.
It's trademarked.
BILL TAI: It started here.
Yes.
June 1st , 2020 - www.realvision.com 20 The
Interview: The Electrodollar: Venture Capitalism,
Technology, and Silicon Valley RAOUL PAL:
It started right here.
It looks super fascinating and love it so
much.
Thank you so much for coming on and I look
forward to talk to you again at some point
soon.
BILL TAI: Yeah, look forward to it, Raoul.
Wonderful to be here.
Thank you so much.
RAOUL PAL: Thank you.
BILL TAI: Okay.
Take care.
JUSTINE: If you're ready to go beyond the
interview, make sure you visit realvision.com
where you can try real vision plus for 30
days for just $1.
We'll see you next time right here on real
vision.
