Thanks for posting this. If I may I’ll ask some more questions below about due diligence, as that’s not a subject of your four reply-sections.
I’m not expecting that you’d answer every single one of these questions (there’s a lot!), but my hope is that their variety might prompt reflections and recollections. I imagine It could be the case that you can’t answer any of the questions below—perhaps you feel its Beckstead’s story to tell and you don’t want to tell it for him, or Beckstead is currently in law suits and legal jeopardy so this can’t be discussed publicly. If so that’s understandable.
But it would be great to hear more about this meeting in November/December 2021 with Beckstead and Bankman-Fried. (All quotes from Wei Dai’s transcript, all bold text is highlighted by me.)
00:16:27 Will MacAskill
“But then by the end of 2021, so, you know things are opening up after the pandemic. And I go to North America to, you know, reconnect with a bunch of people. Sam at that point, by that point has put Nick Beckstead in charge of the his foundation.
And so I meet up with Nick and with Sam in order to kind of discuss the strategy for the foundation and at that point it looks like, ohh, he’s actually going to start scaling up his giving in a larger way earlier on and suggests that, you know, he’s planning to give something like 100 million over the course of the next year and then aiming to scale up to giving many billions over the years to come.
At that point I, you know, start talking with Nick about strategy for the foundation, the sheer amount of money that he’s planning to give just seems like, you know, getting that right seems enormously important from the perspective of the big problems in the world.
I’d worked with Nick for many years and felt like I was adding quite a lot of value in the conversations we were having. And so we discussed the idea of me, you know, becoming an advisor, like unpaid and part time to the foundation. We tried that out in about January of 2022 and then, you know, I had that role of advising the foundation or the Future Fund in particular over the course of 2022.”
At that point, what due diligence had Beckstead done, what did he tell you, what questions did you ask, and what were the key considerations/evidence? (You have discussed Bankman-Fried’s character extensively which is great, though unfortunately—as you highlight—its the least legible/transparent factor and has least predictive power!) Two key topics I’d love your recollections on are:
how you weighed up/assessed the crypto industry in general; and
the specifics of the business in terms of corporate governance and culture.
1. You imply several times that there’s something particularly problematic about crypto (see below). Did you think that at the time? What were the key concerns here, and how were they discussed? Were your concerns about the industry in general, its unregulated nature, or the particular business model of the FTX exchange (mass consumer facing meaning that unsophisticated retail investors could lose their money)?
“Sam was very keen for everything just to get called FTX Foundation. You know, I thought it was a bad move to be tying the foundation to both, just to a company, but especially to a crypto company. In the same way that I think that if Open Philanthropy were called the Facebook Foundation or Osana Foundation, that would be a bad move.”
“I also did some things to try and separate out the brands of effective altruism and FTX. This wasn’t because of worries about Sam as a person. You know, that’s not how I was thinking about things at the time, but more just for any company, let alone a crypto company. I wouldn’t want effective altruism as an idea to be too closely.”
“Yeah. I mean, I think initially I was apprehensive again, not because of any attitude to Sam, but just him being a crypto billionaire. You know, crypto has a very mixed reputation. Billionaires do not have a great reputation.”
2. You have mentioned the board problem several times (see below). This strongly implies that in late 2021/early 2022 you didn’t know that FTX didn’t have a board and had atrocious governance. Is that the case? What about the other four team members of the FTX Foundation? Did any of you ask about this? Was this a concern that was discussed in late 2021/early 2022?
“But what would have helped a lot more, in my view, was knowing how poorly-governed the company was — there wasn’t a functional board, or a risk department, or a CFO.”
“I’m definitely not claiming that like character plays no role, but I mean from what we’ve learned since the collapse just seemed like FTX had truly atrocious governance. I mean, I think I heard they didn’t even have a board.”
“There are some cases I think where it’s just like wow, this is a bad this you know a bad person. But I think at least in in many cases, whereas I think there’s some things like: Does this company have a board that are just they’re very legible and very predictable”
Registering that this line of questioning (and volume of questions) strikes me as a bit off-putting/ too intense.
If someone asked about what “What were the key concerns here, and how were they discussed?” [...] “what questions did you ask, and what were the key considerations/evidence?” about interactions I had years ago, I would feel like they’re holding me to an unrealistic standard of memory or documentation.
(Although I do acknowledge the mood that these were some really important interactions. Scrutiny is an appropriate reaction, but I still find this off-putting.)
I understand that that impression/reaction. As I mentioned, the intention behind offering a bunch of specific and varied questions is that they might prompt reflection from different angles, different thoughts and memories, angles on it that provide new insight or that MacAskill finds more comfortable sharing—not that each would be responded to in forensic detail.
“I’m not expecting that you’d answer every single one of these questions (there’s a lot!), but my hope is that their variety might prompt reflections and recollections. I imagine It could be the case that you can’t answer any of the questions below—perhaps you feel its Beckstead’s story to tell and you don’t want to tell it for him, or Beckstead is currently in law suits and legal jeopardy so this can’t be discussed publicly. If so that’s understandable.”
Thanks for posting this. If I may I’ll ask some more questions below about due diligence, as that’s not a subject of your four reply-sections.
I’m not expecting that you’d answer every single one of these questions (there’s a lot!), but my hope is that their variety might prompt reflections and recollections. I imagine It could be the case that you can’t answer any of the questions below—perhaps you feel its Beckstead’s story to tell and you don’t want to tell it for him, or Beckstead is currently in law suits and legal jeopardy so this can’t be discussed publicly. If so that’s understandable.
But it would be great to hear more about this meeting in November/December 2021 with Beckstead and Bankman-Fried. (All quotes from Wei Dai’s transcript, all bold text is highlighted by me.)
At that point, what due diligence had Beckstead done, what did he tell you, what questions did you ask, and what were the key considerations/evidence? (You have discussed Bankman-Fried’s character extensively which is great, though unfortunately—as you highlight—its the least legible/transparent factor and has least predictive power!) Two key topics I’d love your recollections on are:
how you weighed up/assessed the crypto industry in general; and
the specifics of the business in terms of corporate governance and culture.
1. You imply several times that there’s something particularly problematic about crypto (see below). Did you think that at the time? What were the key concerns here, and how were they discussed? Were your concerns about the industry in general, its unregulated nature, or the particular business model of the FTX exchange (mass consumer facing meaning that unsophisticated retail investors could lose their money)?
2. You have mentioned the board problem several times (see below). This strongly implies that in late 2021/early 2022 you didn’t know that FTX didn’t have a board and had atrocious governance. Is that the case? What about the other four team members of the FTX Foundation? Did any of you ask about this? Was this a concern that was discussed in late 2021/early 2022?
Registering that this line of questioning (and volume of questions) strikes me as a bit off-putting/ too intense.
If someone asked about what “What were the key concerns here, and how were they discussed?” [...] “what questions did you ask, and what were the key considerations/evidence?” about interactions I had years ago, I would feel like they’re holding me to an unrealistic standard of memory or documentation.
(Although I do acknowledge the mood that these were some really important interactions. Scrutiny is an appropriate reaction, but I still find this off-putting.)
These seem pretty reasonable questions to me.
Fair enough. Interesting to see people’s different intuitions on this.
I understand that that impression/reaction. As I mentioned, the intention behind offering a bunch of specific and varied questions is that they might prompt reflection from different angles, different thoughts and memories, angles on it that provide new insight or that MacAskill finds more comfortable sharing—not that each would be responded to in forensic detail.
Oh sorry, I missed this! I should have read that more closely before commenting.