This is a good start. But in my opinion, the questions we need to wrestle with are more structural.
For instance, when EA (as a collection of institutions and individuals) was considering taking donations from a single donor to the extent SBF offered, what due diligence did we attempt to go through of the business practices of Alameda and FTX? Was this failure a case of blind trust, a coordination failure (surely Sequoia Capital did their due diligence…), or a known, calculated risk?
I see a lot of attempts to clarify that fraud is bad. But if we actually believe that, what attempts have there been to actually check whether fraud was occurring until this week? If we were genuinely caught off-guard, what did we previously believe about the actual business of FTX?
It seems like at the very least our baseline expectation should have featured a much higher degree of skepticism than seems to have been brought to the whole endeavor of entrusting a decent chunk of the financing and reputation of the entire EA movement to an offshore crypto business.
It is good that you and the rest of prominent EA leaders are adopting this stance now, at least preferable to doubling down or even focusing exclusively on our ignorance with a “wait and see” attitude.
But Rob, respectfully, we also have questions.
Given the scope of its audience and the apparently extensive preparation and effort you advertise that it takes, your 80k interview with SBF both presented him in a very favorable light and, at least in retrospect, was a huge missed opportunity for us as a community to ask questions that could have raised red flags.
For that interview, were there any topics that were considered off-limits? Given the hesitance you express, at least in this post, about crypto in general, did you consider asking any difficult questions about FTX’s business? At the time, were you aware of the continued Alameda-FTX connection and “open secret” that they were self-trading?
What thinking influenced the overwhelmingly positive “let’s all learn from SBF’s example” framing that you brought to the interview? What about SBF’s business career in crypto, seemed admirable to you beyond his philanthropy and (now known to be illusory) success? Did anyone on staff who is even more skeptical than you of crypto/FTX have a look over the questions ahead of time with a critical eye?
I don’t generally believe that you failed to disclose any conflicts of interest—it was pretty clear to me at least that SBF was funding a large number of EA causes, and that’s why you were inviting him on. But I think there’s a lot of information we now clearly wish we could have gotten from that interview, but didn’t.