Right, welcome Arjun. So I want to start with something. Um, you became COO of Kraken in November and you gave an interview to Semaphore and you mentioned in it something that surprised me. Um, when you were asked kind of what led to the transition to you becoming the co-CEO with Jesse Powell, the co-founder deciding that they wanted you to leave the business, you said, quote, um, Jesse said that he wanted you to run it in the quantitative way that you've always run your organizations, the very transparent and micromanaging way that you run your organizations. Micromanaging, if you check on Indeed.com or Glassdoor, is typically not considered a positive attribute, but in this sense he seemed to think it was. Um, and then you know, with the way that I think about it at least, Ray Dalio has written about transparency in his books and radical transparency, and that was the first thing I thought of. So can you dive a little deeper about what that means, micromanaging, and what that actually looks like within Kraken?
So I think generally it's considered negative. Um, because when I was working at Yahoo, like Marissa Mayer was considered a micromanager, and so we would line up basically like in a school bus line trying to get to the office and get like a UI/UX approved. And so I would say like that's the epitome of sort of a nightmare. Um, the when we say micromanage, it's mostly just playing the field in the game. So if you are managing any asset or product, what you typically see is folks get further and further away from what the product looks like, what the customers do. Um, and I think when you can't play the game on the field and you can't understand the context or empathize with what's happening with the people that are serving the customers or the clients, then you lose sight of how to lead the company. So a lot of it was just understanding like at a quantitative level what's happening, at a quality of what's happening, and then how can you enable the teams.
Okay, so it's about you being closer to your employees. Like you're putting yourself on the product level, not necessarily you're going... and I mean Dalio in his book says you have to be willing to shoot the people you love. It's not that kind of radical transparency.
I don't think I'd shoot the people I love. Um, but I think it's more each team, each context, each product is different. And so taking a step back, you know, I was an entrepreneur for a lot of failed companies, and so you kind of learn along the way what works, what doesn't. And then as we moved forward and we were successful, especially in games, which is one of the companies that I ran for mobile and social gaming, it's kind of a war zone. And you got to build products for your customers that I like to say are whimsical. Um, you kind of have to have those moments that people get excited about. And so you fast forward all of the infrastructure you build in order to make that happen for, you know, financial services that are technically boring. Um, but you want someone who holds an app in their hand or comes to a website to use the product that feels good, they feel enabled, and they feel like they can win in some cases. And so like, I would like to see our customers smile while they have their app in the hand, no matter what they have.
I'm going to pull out another quote because you are online as a tech CEO. You tweeted out, I think in January or February, so this would have been for timeline for folks, this was about two weeks before Jamie Dimon had his like hot mic moment and he was recorded with a leaked audio using expletives telling people to return to work. Um, you tweeted out, 'Yes, we're 100% working from our office at home.' Why have you taken that stance? The logic between at least working in office is it's higher productivity, but you've taken a different stance on that. Is there different numbers? Like why have you taken that particular stance?
I just don't think there's a perfect model. If you are on the factory floor, of course you can't work from home. Um, so in our portfolio at Tribe Capital, we have a set of companies that do production in biofarma and production for robots. Um, and there it's just a production company, and so you got to be there on the floor and you just have to be there. And so understand from brainstorming to instrumentation to production, that makes sense. Um, but as a capital allocator, you're always interviewing people, you're always meeting people here on the go. The job is more naturally remote. Um, and then when you think about building software, depending on what you're building, you're going to be spending time either with your team brainstorming. So I'd actually say that if you segment what people do at any given stage, zero to one you're brainstorming, you're with people. Once you get a product out to scale, you're starting to add more functionalities, that becomes much more remote and repetitive. And as you're scaling other parts of your product, as we do at Kraken, we're 100% fully remote. Most people are working from home for our product or engineering and design team. But the first new products that we build, all those teams are, you know, we're in a garage, we're in an apartment building, it doesn't matter. We're just trying to get things out as quickly as possible. So it just depends on what the context. And then the last piece is, yeah, if you have customers, you are sitting with them, you do have an office. So we do have offices in Dublin, London, we have offices here in DC. So it just depends on the context of the business. I think having a post-World War II construct for everything doesn't make sense when we've built over the last 40 years every single type of workflow asynchronous product that just makes us faster.
Got it. So different stages of product, different needs equals maybe work from home, maybe from the office. Um, I mean, you're here, so you're like with people, so it makes sense that you're going to be within an environment. But if you're on the go, you're reporting, you're like talking to sources, you may or may not be in person, and the office construct might not make the most sense.
Yeah, I definitely work more not in office anymore. So relatively recently, Kraken announced a $1.5 billion acquisition of NinjaTrader. Uh, this was a big deal because, a, this was one of the biggest, well, this was the biggest actually acquisition by a crypto company in terms that was completed, will be completed, we'll see, um, ever. And then the second part is that for you guys, at least, NinjaTrader wasn't just a crypto company, it was derivatives of all kind.
Would that deal have been done in the Biden Administration?
It's hard for me to... well, I wasn't there, so I can't speak to like what I wouldn't have done while I was there. I think there's two ways to look at it. One is the overall regulatory environment worldwide, not just in the United States, has generally become more favorable. Um, so I do think that M&A became a part of that DNA. But before Trump was elected and I was coming on board, um, officially but even unofficially as I was spending more time there, the first thing I was thinking about was M&A into traditional finance and how to bridge the gap between centralized finance of crypto, DeFi, and traditional finance, and how to bridge the gap for a customer. I think the biggest issue probably on both sides, even on the regulatory side, is use the word crypto, use the word stablecoin. It's like using IMAP, SMTP, POP3 from the past and no one knows what it means. Um, and so I think, you know, having a human element of why a stablecoin yield is really important for individuals in emerging markets is a priority. Why we can bring down the cost of remittances spread from 7% to 1% to 25 basis points should be a part of the conversation, and that's what crypto enables. And so when we were thinking about what are the steps we want to take at Kraken moving forward, is that we have our exchange layer, our liquidity layer, our technology layer. What else can it enable? And so one of my goals at Kraken over the next 10 years is how do we just get more free products out there for the underbanked, how do we get more free products out there for the average consumer that enable crypto, where the monetization layer is into part of the overall value proposition, right? But it's also outside of crypto as well that you're looking at. It's not outside of crypto, it enables us to be able to build those products even if it's in traditional finance, right?
