>dough
https://twitter.com/BrettHarrison88/status/1614373878158999554
1) Many have asked questions about my time at FTX US and why I left when I did. As I indicated earlier this week, I’m happy to begin sharing my experiences and perspective publicly.
2) I worked at FTX US for seventeen months. When my resignation was made public, those unfamiliar with my plans were surprised, and some questioned whether I’d been fired. It seemed as though I’d left a dream job abruptly after a very short tenure.
3) The truth was that FTX US hadn’t felt to me like the dream job it appeared to the industry and media for some time, and my departure was not abrupt.
4) My relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried and his deputies had reached a point of total deterioration, after months of disputes over management practices at FTX.
5) And, as a group of my friends, mentors, and investors knew then, I’d felt such a strong conviction to found my own company that it wasn’t worth keeping a “dream job,” no matter the prestige or upside, no matter the risk it posed to my reputation in departing so early.
6) Sam asked me to join FTX US casually over text in late March 2021. He was my former colleague at Jane Street and I had fond memories of his presence there.
7) We’d barely stayed in touch over the years, but I’d occasionally read news about FTX’s growth. I was happy to hear from him and interested to learn more about how things were going at FTX.
8) I’d known Sam to be a conscientious junior trader at Jane Street who’d done well in the programming-for-traders course I taught there, in which he’d been my student. In manager meetings about Sam’s performance the senior traders on his desk indicated he had promise.
9) Beyond that, he seemed like a sensitive and intellectually curious person who cared about animals, and that endeared him to me.
10) My negotiations to join FTX US moved quickly, a welcome contrast to the 4-6 months they’d taken for every move I’d made in traditional finance. I’d built software for Jane Street’s crypto desk in 2017 but hadn’t worked on crypto since. I was excited to dive back in.
11) My first few months at FTX US were wonderful. I worked largely independently of Sam to grow a US-based team and foster a professional environment prepared for regulated businesses.
12) I made plans with the LedgerX team, built out legal, compliance, and operations departments with first-in-class lateral hires, and began setting up and building a US-regulated retail stock brokerage.
13) FTX US’s spot exchange was growing in market share. The team was dedicated and productive. Customer feedback was positive. I was excited about the future.
14) But from the start, I noticed that while Sam was rarely engaged on the US business, decisions impacting the US would come, without warning, from the Bahamas.
15) Six months into my time at the company, pronounced cracks began to form in my own relationship with Sam. Around then I began advocating strongly for establishing separation and independence for the executive, legal, and developer teams of FTX US, and Sam disagreed.
16) I saw in that early conflict his total insecurity and intransigence when his decisions were questioned, his spitefulness, and the volatility of his temperament. I realized he wasn’t who I remembered.
17) I wasn’t sure what accounted for the dramatic change I saw in Sam.
18) Like many of us, I have family and friends who live with addiction and mental health problems, and I’ve seen how these problems often manifest without much warning in early adulthood. I thought that might be a contributing factor, and initially felt sympathetic.
19) But I didn’t know Sam well enough personally or have any real time to reflect on the question. I was in a business relationship with him, and he was making a number of decisions about running a business that I disagreed with.
20) There was tremendous pressure not to disagree with Sam, but I did so anyway. At that time, and for all of my time at FTX US, his influence over the media, FTX’s partners, the venture capital industry, and the traditional finance industry was pervasive and unyielding.
21) Standing up to an insecure, prideful manager is hard under any circumstance. But it’s nearly impossible when every day, every major voice of culture and commerce deafens you with a narrative that implies if you disagree with your manager you clearly must be wrong.
22) I wasn’t the only one at FTX US who disagreed with Sam and members of his inner circle. FTX US was staffed with experienced professionals from US finance firms, law firms, and regulated exchanges.
23) Our collective experience and professional acumen were frequently treated as though they were irrelevant and valueless. It was extremely frustrating for all of us.
24) Over the ensuing months, I further argued for enacting a sensible hiring policy, for staffing FTX US with a C-suite of experienced officers, for transparent communication between Sam and FTX US leadership,
25) for Gary Wang’s and Nishad Singh’s software development responsibilities to be formally identified and shared across a larger group, for the delegation of managerial responsibility and controls beyond Sam and Bahamas-based executives, and other important matters.
26) Sam was uncomfortable with conflict. He responded at times with dysregulated hostility, at times with gaslighting and manipulation, but ultimately chose to isolate me from communication on key decision-making.
27) It felt terrible. I sought out information about decisions that had been made behind my back, desperate but trying hard not to show it.
28) In early April 2022, my eleventh month, I made one last try. I made a written formal complaint about what I saw to be the largest organizational problems inhibiting FTX’s future success. I wrote that I would resign if the problems weren’t addressed.
29) In response, I was threatened on Sam’s behalf that I would be fired and that Sam would destroy my professional reputation. I was instructed to formally retract what I’d written and to deliver an apology to Sam that had been drafted for me.
30) That event solidified my decision to leave. I knew an abrupt departure would be harmful to the company and my FTX US reports, and I wanted to best position the company for future success after I left.
31) So I gradually wound down, finished building and releasing the US stock brokerage, and saw FTX US employees through their mid-year reviews.
32) And with that, I shifted my focus to the future and to my own company.
33) The information that is now in the public record – from indictments, complaints, guilty pleas, or otherwise – show facts that even now, after months, are difficult for me to assimilate into reality.
34) I raised concerns at the company believing that the management and organizational issues I saw were typical of growing start-ups, and that my role, as an experienced financial services executive, was to correct them and unlock the next stage of the company’s growth.
35) I never could have guessed that underlying these kinds of issues — which I’d seen at other more mature firms in my career and believed not to be fatal to business success — was multi-billion-dollar fraud.
36) It’s clear from what has been made public that the scheme was held closely by Sam and his inner circle at FTX. com and Alameda, which I was not a part of, nor were other executives at FTX US.
37) I understand now why they carefully concealed their criminal activity from us. We have extensive professional networks, our own lines of communication with US regulators, and our own authority to speak to US media.
38) If any one of us had suspected let alone learned the truth, we would have reported them immediately.
39) Over my seventeen months at FTX US, my colleagues and I dedicated everything to serving the needs of our customers and growing real businesses we believed offered consumers a way to more equitably access financial services that are central to their lives.
40) Ancient forms of greed and dishonesty destroy trust and corrupt progress. The scale of this particular instance of this lesson is difficult to comprehend, but far from exceptional in the twelve years of my professional experience in finance. It’s a strange dissonance.
41) After I left FTX US and up until November, nearly every conversation I had with a venture capitalist about my new company eventually came around to the same kind of question: “Is FTX investing? Is Sam okay with you doing this? Do you mind if we confirm with him?”
42) After that, many conversations eventually came around to the same kind of apology: “We know you weren’t involved in what Sam and others did, but we can’t take on the PR risk of associating ourselves with FTX, no matter how capable you are or compelling your idea is.”
43) The last few months have provided me with a valuable character study of the industry. Some treated me like an entirely different person overnight, some immediately offered sympathy and support. It will be a difficult experience to forget.
44) It will also be difficult to forget the frenzied and baseless accusations leveled against me on social media.
45) For example, that my resignation could only mean I had knowledge of a criminal scheme, even though there’s no evidence of that, and available information shows the scheme was run by a small number of people in another country and began years before I joined FTX US.
46) Or that I’m seeking a plea deal even though I haven’t been accused of wrongdoing and am not a target in any investigation. Or that while at FTX US I colluded with Citadel to manipulate tokenized stock prices (yes, people are actually saying this).
47) I’m grateful from the bottom of my heart to those who showed me unwavering trust and support through the turbulence of the last two months.
48) They helped me cut through the noise and remain focused on the future, even as they themselves had been harmed by the tragedy of FTX’s collapse. I credit them, along with my family, with getting me through the most devastating and destabilizing event of my professional life
49) I’m extremely honored to have them as partners. The path ahead of me is clear now, and I’m excited to move forward together with them.