From Go-go to So Slow, a Look at Crypto’s Roller-coaster Year
9:57PM Sep 21, 2023
Speakers:
Connie Loizos
Darrell Etherington
Keywords:
crypto
fund
coinbase
companies
founders
lps
raised
cycles
talking
call
cases
starting
team
happened
market
year
connie
involved
early stage
proofs
base board member GP at Andreessen Horowitz. Huge, amazing resume. Now at her own fund Han ventures. She raised a $1.5 billion fund last year for this. That scene has changed quite a bit FTX imploded. There's all kinds of turmoil in crypto. And we're going to hear from her what to expect next. And she's going to be joined by Connie Loizos. So welcome
everyone, Katie, I'm so glad that you're here. I know that you could be in New York at a big crypto event and we really appreciate you joining us today.
Thank you for having me, Connie.
So it has been about two years just shy of two years since the last time the two of us sat down together, and much has changed. So at the time you were a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz Bitcoin was trading at $65,000 and Sam Venkman. Fried was riding high at FTX. Today you are running your own fund bitcoin is not at $65,000 apiece and so much has happened. I mean, FTX is gone. We've had Celsius three arrows, capital, et cetera, et cetera. How did you write out the turmoil? Well, we're
still writing out the turmoil. Actually, Connie, and I think some of the things that you mentioned that happened in the space so that the space back considerably so let's back up and talk about what happened. I think the gentleman who introduced us said that it was one year ago, we raised our fund and it was actually not one year ago, I thought, wow, that was a fast year then but actually, it's been almost two years not quite, will be two years old. Actually come next year, q1. So writing out the turmoil. I think one of the things is zooming out what happened? You mentioned FTX. You mentioned a number of other debacles that have happened in the space. And I think there was also a macro correction going on, obviously crypto prices were down and starting to go down actually, because I believe the last peak was November 2021. As you mentioned, FTX had raised a large round and not and it was not only FTX. That raised a large valuation, it was a lot of other companies and projects in this space. So writing out the turmoil, we are still writing out the turmoil, as I said, a couple of those things set the industry back in my estimation years,
I guess, what are the red flags that you saw that others seemingly missed?
Well, I don't really want to look backward. I mean, looking forward, what I can tell you about is what we look for in our founders, because that's how we're approaching this space. So one of the things we look for first, right off the bat is first of all, we look for no conflicts. I mean, it's hard sometimes in crypto, but in traditional venture, I think this was very much something that folks looked for and being on the board of Coinbase I'm now on my third board term with Coinbase. So I was always kind of team Coinbase. And so really was never going to invest in FTX for that reason alone, so we didn't even get past go. But another point is one of the things we look for in our founders is who do we want to spend really the next 10 years in business with and obviously we by us being crypt in crypto, we biased toward highly technical founders. But we also bias toward founders who do have a certain degree and humility in certain things. They might be obsessive about a few different areas. Maybe it's product. Maybe it's recruiting engineering, but they have the humility to know that they don't know everything. I've yet to meet a subject matter domain expert and absolutely everything. But I have met plenty of founders who think they are domain experts in everything. So we look for founders who have that humility, who we want to enter into really a 10 year partnership with and those are some of the things that we look for we also look for frankly, we know that regulations and laws are important. The gentleman who introduced us mentioned I was a federal prosecutor for a decade. And so that's something that's still very important to me and to also to our team, because it's not just me, we have 12 people and a number of us used to work in the government.
Sure, and congratulations on UNbuilding your team, you know, I didn't want to ask so in preparation for this interview. I was watching a clip of you onstage last year in the Bahamas with Sam Venkman fried being interviewed by Michael Lewis, the writer. And you know, speaking of Coinbase Sam spent like uninterrupted seven minutes talking about everything that was wrong with all these other crypto exchanges. They were broken. People were no longer innovating. And you just sort of sat there quietly smiling and I'm just wondering now, what you were thinking as that was happening? Well,
actually, I remember and I don't know if it came out on the video because it was a large audience. I had just set up my firm. And one of the reasons I was there was it was a very important industry conference at the time I was building a team. I was recruiting people there were a lot of different founders who were there. And I remember actually getting booed because of what you said. I was very much team coin base and the audience by and large was, you know, a lot of sex, a lot of sex supporters, right. The only other time I think I've met him two or three times the only other time I shared a stage with him was behind closed doors, so I won't say too much about it. But I can tell you also, I was talking about governance and there were some awkward moments where he was saying other things, things were not registering.
Well, I did kind of wonder, you know, wearing your former federal prosecutors hat, his trial kicks off in two weeks. What are you going to be looking for? What should we maybe be looking for?
Well, what do you mean in terms of what should we be looking for? I think just one a lot of the cases I think a lot of the cases out there and the indictment already. So but of course we've all been surprised by more and more bombshells I think as a stepping back into my shoes as a prosecutor, one of the things that you do do is you will continue to gather evidence right up in witnesses right up until the moment I guess one thing that we might be looking for, and of course, the government will have already had to produce this is their witness list. So who is going to take the stand against him? Yeah, that's one thing I'd look for. I did tell everyone at the time and I maintain this position that I do think he will get a very lengthy jail sentence.
It's looking that way. I'm, we're, we'll all be watching with bated breath. earlier. I'm sorry. So Right. Early last year, so between I was at like March of 2022 ish.
When we when we raised our fund. Yeah, actually, April, okay. Okay, March, April. It was a big deal though. You
raised a $1.5 billion fund who actually rose three years two funds. One was a $500 million early stage fund, then you raise this $1 billion acceleration fund. So much was made of that number. It's one of the biggest debut funds ever. It's the biggest fund that a woman has ever raised. You know, it's kind of funny. I guess, because you and I had sat down publicly shortly before that. People were reaching out to me to ask if I can introduce them to you, which I never happened before. So I guess I'm just wondering how much interest Did you really have because I'm guessing it was above what you raised? Well, I
think there were two real misperceptions with our fund that still persist. One misperception about our fund, as you mentioned, is that it's one big fund and it's not it's two funds, and I'll address that in a second. But I think another misperception is Oh, wow, you raised at the height of the market, great timing peak. Actually, I that was not the case. We definitely raised at a much easier time to be sure than we would now and we're not going to be out fundraising for a very long time can tell you that. But at the time that we were raising our fund and talking with institutional LPS in the first quarter of 2022, a lot was happening already. It was not a walk in the park. Number one, crypto market cap had dropped 40% People forget that. So there was already tremendous sharp decline in crypto prices. 40% again, from its peak, and I think it was November 2021. So that's the first thing the global macro picture was really shifting under our feet in real time that was already going on inflation rate hikes. And then of course, also, before we closed our fund, Russia invaded Ukraine, and I could go on and on with other things that were starting to happen in the crypto space. Of course, things continued to happen in the crypto space and in the global macro picture. But we were not closing our fund at a time when LPS weren't worried about volatility they were and I think one of the things I'm very grateful for is that we have LPs, who are who know that this is going to be volatile we we address that and we talked extensively to them about the volatility in crypto on my team. Several of us have been in the space for a decade or more already. And so we knew from our experience with prior cycles, that there would be volatility, and we have LPS that have that long term view. The other big misperception about our fund is we're one huge, enormous $1.5 billion fund and we're not we have two funds. We have a early stage fund $500 million. We do seed a and b and then we have an acceleration fund which backs all kinds of later stage projects in crypto. And there are handles and tokens and a handful of later stage you know kind of pre IPO you can call it companies in this space. And so we have those two funds. No to answer your question, Connie. We did not take every dollar available to us quite. That's that's definitely not the case. I can tell you that today. The size was purposeful. If those two funds, I call it kind of the Goldilocks size one we want it to be big enough to compete with some of the other top crypto funds. And we also wanted to work with the best founders who often are looking for funds that can support them through multiple cycles of their journey seed A, B, etc. So those two funds strategies turn out to be quite a bit different and it's not one one hedge fund and the pacing is very different. And the strategy is also very different. And the companies that we end up backing are very different.
Right? Right. Sure. And I want to get into your strategies. I did want to ask one question. It's out there. You had raised you've got some sovereign wealth funds behind you. This is true of a lot of people in the industry. One of them is public investment fund, which is also backed Founders Fund, Tiger global, many, many other funds. There is sort of this angst with US companies partnering more closely with Saudi Arabia from PE to VC to the PGA. I'm just wondering if that was at all a difficult decision. If you can just sort of talk about that for a second.
I think just a correction. It's not actually the Pitt font. It is their bad novel. Yes. And then also another entity, they're a university entity. And I think we're very proud of our LPs, as you said, it's a diverse set. It's a very global set of sovereign wealth funds of foundations of hospital systems, of an Ivy League endowments, I mean, so it's a very diverse and global set, and we feel very lucky to have all of them. I think one of the things we do is we definitely follow what the US government is also doing and making our decisions about that. About who to take.
Okay, that's interesting. Right, right. Right. Well, this is a good point is you're saying, How much do you have of the fun left to invest 18 months later?
Yeah. So I don't want to slap a number on it. And I'm not sure that these funds are public. I have to be so careful now that what I say is an investment advice and a sort of investment advisor with the SEC so I want to be very careful about exact percentages, but I can give you a ballpark. Okay. I think of our answers very ballpark. But if our later stage fund, we have not yet deployed about half of it. Okay, maybe even a little more than half and of our earlier stage fund. It's considerably less than that. But we are making new investments. One of the things that happened is we were waiting for the markets to correct we're still very busy. I think there's a perception out there that Oh, crypto, it's crickets chirping. We find ourselves very busy. But one of the things we did do is we saw this market correction. And we very purposely waited to make some deployments and I can get into that with our strategy. So I know this is going to sound a little odd, but we feel like surely it's a really good time to be investing in the space during this down market.
Sure. I'm sure prices are a lot better than they've ever been that that's a lot of leverage. You know, I wanted to ask, if you were to go out today, just sort of as to sort of gauge the market, if you would, if you think you could raise as much as you did. When you did if you would want to raise as much as you did. You know, I saw that blockchain capital just announced half a billion dollars in funds. I'm just wondering what you think the market
yeah can support. I mean, I don't want to speculate on it. Because we are nowhere as I said, our approximate percentages have deployed. So we're nowhere near thinking about fundraising right now. I think what I could tell you, and we've seen in crypto with our experience in crypto and frankly all of tech is going through a similar cycle right now. We've just seen it before. In crypto in a shorter time frame. Things changed so dramatically from one year to the next. I mean, you've seen crypto market caps swing wildly and I don't want to say what conditions would be in a year in two years. What I can tell you is that we were very deliberate and thoughtful about who we partnered with we also took LPS who we thought had strategic value, including for the projects that were backing, we are backing us projects. We're also backing projects globally. And so that was very much in mind. We have brands that are strategic. You mentioned sovereign wealth funds you meant we talked about foundations endowments on but we also have huge corporate global brands that everyone in this room would have heard of who we think are very strategic visionary that's I don't think I can some of them have shared okay. So it's it's find out double okay, I would have said when I was a prosecutor, but we we actually don't disclose our LPS per the terms of our LPA agreement, but you can go look at some of them have disclosed that they participated on our fund. And why was I saying that? What were we talking about? We were talking about? When did you ask me a question about fundraising?
I think I just asked if you would wait raise what you raised now.
So what I was going to say is one thing we were purposefully because we did at that time, as I said did not take every dollar so we did have our choice of LPs at the time. And I don't know what what, what things would hold in the future. But I can tell you that we made very clear we were we were interested in large partners who would make multi fund commitments if I have my way, we will never have to take another LP again. Because we love our existing set of LPs. And the other thing I would say is we don't intend to I know the sounds in 2023 Sitting here like an obvious thing, but we don't intend to ever increase our fund size no matter what the market is. And by the way, I'm sitting here publicly stating this on the record in a tape setting. Even if the market if it's a massive crypto Bull Run, we don't intend to increase our size. We think we picked our size and our strategy for
a reason. That's great. So let's talk a little bit about your strategy. You obviously know which companies to avoid. What is interesting to you right now?
Yeah, so again, this gets back to which fund we're talking about. Let me talk about our acceleration fund. And I think the kind of use cases or at least some of the companies that we're interested in will be more familiar to this audience because they are a little bit more mainstream. They tend toward more financial use cases, picks and shovels, custodians and the like. And for that acceleration fund that you can think of that son does the we call it the it's working fund, things are already working. These are not early stage. They're not very experimental. They're in many cases they're businesses. With clear revenue models already with metrics. And by the way, we've just done two deals we haven't announced yet. There are companies that are very known in crypto, they're iconic brands. They've grown even during this trough, and they have revenue and they have customers and they have metrics that will look very familiar to some of the folks in this room who invest or some of founders who are creating metrics. They're very traditional metrics that one can measuring growth that one can measure. And one of the things I'm very excited about is these are teams that we've known for years. Again, I've been in the space now for a decade. Some of my team has too many of them were early Coinbase employees okay. And so these are teams that were known to us. And I think what happened is smartly, some of these teams raised a lot of money during prior cycles. And so they have kind of war chests now. So they don't need to raise capital again. So they're not raising more primary capital, but because of the relationship and the work that they knew we would put in, and my team would put in on behalf of these companies. They wanted to partner with us. Now problem we raised at this time when I although I said it was a 40% correction, it still hadn't corrected as far as it has now. The valuations were pretty high and one of the things I have to do for my LPs and for our LPS is deliver venture style returns and I did not have the confidence to think okay at these valuations I can really deliver what are true venture style returns, which is my fiduciary obligation. What what to do, we couldn't get involved, however, with the markets correcting so much. And again, it's not just crypto, it's all of the technology markets and public markets. These companies also were no exception. As I said, we were in touch with the founding teams even when we weren't investors and I we developed what we call our harpoon strategy. We knew the price at which we would be able to get involved and feel confident that we could deliver venture style returns and that's exactly what we've done this year, which is why that number is hovering somewhere around the 50% deployment, right. We have gone out and we have acquired pretty meaningful stakes in some later stage companies that I feel like our iconic crypto
businesses. That's great. Let's make news. Tell us what they are.
I think I told you I think what I committed to do is that I would tell you first
Oh, that's better call me in two weeks.
But but we will. It's not up to me. It's up to the founders of those businesses when we can announce those deals, but I'm very excited about them and their teams that I've known for years. And Phil very excited about. So that's on the later stage funds on the early stage fund. You know, people often think, oh, that's crypto, that's a crypto business. It is a crypto business because how we think of crypto really is cryptography paired with economic incentives. So that's how we think of crypto when we think of a crypto business. And that leads to things like I know Connie, you've asked me before about zero knowledge proofs. Yes, zero knowledge proofs are something that I feel like we're seeing a lot of experimentation and a lot of development and there are some zero knowledge proof protocols that are going to launch in the next year that really have nothing to do with the financial case. In crypto. They're things like let me give you one kind of use case. And this is not a demonstrated use case yet, by the way, but this is one thing that you might use a zero knowledge proof for age verification online. This is something many enterprises and people need to do. And zero knowledge proofs are a way to do that in a more secure fashion. Sure. It's really zero knowledge proofs are kind of a breakthrough in cryptography. So that's one example. One of our portfolio companies. A Leo is an example of that. We're also seeing more of the infrastructure stuff out of the early stage fund and I'm very lucky that our deal team we have an early engineer from Coinbase, and Zora. We've won from Index Ventures. And then of course, we've got we've got another deal partner who came from Coinbase ventures. So these are people who have been on the lookout for these kinds of technologies for a long time and now they're starting to come online is developer tooling plays like things like third web, which is a portfolio company that we've announced this face right here in San Francisco. And they're building developer tools. It is in the early stage fund. It's a lot more infrastructure facing people say well, what are the use cases? Which I think is a very fair question, that few people in crypto answer and I'm happy to answer that. on the early side stage of things though, the use cases really the end users still have early stage crypto projects or developers, okay, so they're not as much consumer facing now that could change and we've seen that change quickly. What we saw in the last cycle of crypto was that enthusiasm, got a little bit ahead of technical progress. And so we're seeing some of the corrections there now and a lot of infrastructure is getting built. You hear things like sovereign rollouts, like our one of our portfolio companies in our early stage, that we lead the seed round for what's called Sovereign labs. They're building sovereign roll ups. So this is very infrastructure very developer facing, whereas again, the later stage fund, a little more consumer facing more financial institution architecture. So hopefully that addresses a little bit about the strategy.
Well, yeah, when you talk about later stage companies that you may be getting involved in I mean, I just always think of like the biggest brands that you know, we sort of emerged in the last couple of years and most of them are consumer facing. Some of them are NFT companies. I did want to ask you so one of your companies I saw announced with Zara Labs, which is an NFT marketplace. Does that compete with open sea?
Not really, I'm not really they're very different companies. As you know, we're very involved with open tea. I was very involved with open tea and I'm still very excited even though the volumes are so far down. I'm very excited about the concept of digitally scarce goods. And I think you have to really think about why that is. I think then the acronym NF Ts are non fungible tokens gets really associated especially in the media and especially by consumers fairly so fairly. So with a really nice thing that's very inaccessible to many to use. It's also inaccessible to many and to most to buy. People think of these high priced profile pictures, and of course, one of the early iterations of NF T's were were that right? They were or they they were the you needed specialized software to use or a special wallet whether it's Metamask, whether it's coin base, it wasn't a really easy consumer experience. But I think if you step back one of the things that's still interesting to me about digitally scarce goods, and I've always called them that I called them that even prior cycles, not nfts, but digitally scarce goods is that their new business model for the internet, and it's so early days, I think that it started with art and collectibles, and we've talked about that. But I think that what people don't realize is that brands are still doing these around things like gaming around things like fashion, so you've had Nike, you've had LVMH, you've had Starbucks, still experimenting right now, with digitally scarce goods. They're just not calling it NF T's. They're not calling it digitally scarce goods. Why do I even find that exciting at all? Or why do I think that it would grow in the future? I think that more and more of our lives are digital. I think that eyeballs on screens are up into the right. And I think that in that world, it will be important to enforce digital scarcity and as consumers to actually own goods. That today when we own a digital good, we don't own it. We don't possess the properties.
I'm not convinced that people need to, I guess own things. I mean, just based on people are lazy. You know, we the last time we talked, we were talking about maybe royal we were talking about you know new music, new music and FTS and you're explaining and I understand that it would be great if artists got better economics for their height work, but it's yet still complicated and you know, why would you not just go to Spotify and listen to the song that you want? And do you care about owning it not not realizing that
you can hear it but the reality is that people say they value privacy, but they really value convenience, right? You've seen that time and time again. And I completely agree with you, by the way, Connie right now, yeah, but the infrastructure is changing. And I think that we're making bets. Don't forget, we're not a crypto hedge fund, we're not trading enough tokens and then out of companies, what we're doing is we're making bets for seven to 10 years from now. And one of the things I've tried to be careful not to do is be dismissive of technologies that a lot of people frankly don't see the use of early on think well I wouldn't use that. I mean, look at Twitch. I remember hearing about Twitch, and I thought Why would anyone want to watch someone else play game? Right. But I thought that about a lot of things, and I've been wrong. And so I think we're not look we're not an NFT font. We're doing a lot more than just that. But certainly we are making select investments still that is an important, I think sector in the space and you mentioned Zora, one of the things that Sora is doing is trying to make it cheaper and easier for people for free to make things for creators. So I think Zora is really focused more on the Creator. And so we're very excited about it.
That's great. You know, so I'm sure you hear this all the time and I don't doubt you know, probably two years from now when we get on the market will be hopping but like when you look at AI I just feel like AI is something that people can you know, grok like the efficiencies or insight. Everybody is already benefiting from it with crypto and blockchain it's complicated and I think it's it just seems like we keep talking about it as a new industry, but it is, you know, 10 years in so I mean, what do you think is going to change that what you know, we're we're really see a tipping point.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, I don't know the answer to where we will see the tipping point where will the tipping point come? But I can tell you that one thing is people are not paying attention. They say, Oh, you know what's going on in crypto? They think, you know, questions that you asked me within the beginning around companies that have failed, but they are missing some of the news. I mean, again, having been through three cycles, we've heard that the space is dead, actually, in all three cycles, right? Right. Every single one. And as my team says, who are Game of Thrones fans, what's dead may never die. But in all seriousness, the thing that happened, even just this year alone, some of that it's been a year of low lights, make no mistake, but it's also been a year of some highlights. I mean, just this week alone, you saw PayPal, announcing a Stable coin on Venmo. That's a really big deal. Visa also announced earlier this year that they're going to be experimenting with Stable points. Also a big deal. I don't think you would have the world's largest asset managers from Blackrock to Fidelity and beyond filing crypto ETFs. If it were a flash in the pan, I think those of us who are following the space day to day, which is what we're doing. We see also technical progress, we see developer activity up again, those end users or customer use cases. Really we're still at the point in crypto of infrastructure phase, developer facing and so breakthroughs in cryptography, but also let's not forget the merge happened just about just under a year ago, on a theorem and the merge was really significant. But it wasn't really focused on by many people in mainstream media, I got some attention. But had that happened when prices were high, it would have gotten a whole lot more attention. I mean, the merge was the largest software upgrade ever. With almost no downtime actually, I think it was zero downtime, all while supporting, building billions and billions of dollars in volume. And that's pretty significant. If you think about it, and that was years in the making. And had that happened. When crypto prices were high. I guarantee every single person out there would have been talking about the merge, but because crypto has a bug in a feature of this real time price ticker feed attached to everything. It really some of the things go unnoticed. And you know, I've seen irrationality on the way up in every single cycle. And I've also seen a rationality also on the way down. Sure
That's how it always works. Right? Well, we're running out of time. But of course we haven't even talked about the biggest I guess obstacle to date, which is one of the biggest obstacles regulation. As an investor, you mentioned that you are I think you mentioned at some point earlier that you are investing in US companies, but are you less inclined going forward? I mean, are you hesitant to invest in American companies because regulation here has remained so uncertain? We're not
hesitant to invest in US companies, we invest in US companies, and we will continue to do so. What I would say is the same thing I've said for actually now several years, which is that the law and the regulations are decided in this country, by the courts and by Congress. They're not decided by independent agencies. So just because an agency says something doesn't really make it the law, right. And I think a lot of folks don't realize that. And so we've seen agencies and we've seen certain branch of government get really involved and by the way different administration's to this is bipartisan, get very, very involved. And I think what we're starting to see now is our system of checks and balances starting to work. So I've been saying for years, it's going to be going to court and courts are going to tell us what the rules are. And that's happening. In fact, in the last month, we've had a trio of losses. In one of one agency, the SEC is position by three different federal judges. In fact, in one case, Connie, it was a three judge panel of the DC Circuit a very ideologically diverse panel unanimous the DC Circuit is one step removed from the US Supreme Court. And they said that the agency had acted arbitrarily and capriciously, and sent them back the proposal to do their job over again. So I think that the court is starting to push back by the way Congress is starting to say wait a second. This is a really major area of the economy and could be national security. We're going to start getting involved too. You had bipartisan, two different committees, both in the House. And then you also had in the Senate legislation being introduced at the committee level. That's never happened. before. And that's never happened before. Nor has that I told you the world's largest asset managers entered before stablecoins. Now last year 2022 were $6.87 trillion of volume in DT for the IRS just issued guidance. Honestly Connie, I know this is a very contrarian take that we do as investors. But I will tell you that I have actually never felt that in prior cycles. Crypto was more inevitable than in this cycle. And this is before cycle I've been in in crypto. And the reason is, you've got the IRS passing guidance. Like I said, You've got legislation being proposed. It's not passed, but it's proposed. bipartisan, that's just in the US. We have not talked about internationally and globally. And of course, crypto being open source 24/7 distributed from the get go globally. I think it's really important to also look at what's happening globally and the picture is brighter on what's happening globally. You have a majority of G 20 countries now moving forward with crypto frameworks. Yeah. You have countries like the UK, like Japan, then Abu Dhabi, like the BRIC countries as they call them BRIC countries. Now starting to pass frameworks also, I think these aren't like small nations that folks haven't really done a lot of business. And these are very sophisticated economies. And I think that right now they're moving forward because they realize the inevitability of cryptography paired with economic incentives.
Do you think Gary Gensler the SEC chief knows what he's doing?
Well, I hope he does. But I will say that courts have started disagreeing with his position. I think he is, and I won't, I don't wanna make it personal to him. I think the SEC under his chair ship has really taken a very expansive view of their jurisdiction in a way that I think, by the way, make no mistake, it's not just crypto, it's on AI, it's on climate. It's another major policy questions that concern the US economy. And I think that's a bit concerning, because that's not how our system is set up. Our system is set up for that's saved for the courts. And I think that's why you've started to see some federal judges, not connected federal judges, right. You've got federal judge in New York, you've got a three judge panel in Washington DC starting to say, Wait a second. This is a step too far. But I think invariably, like most agencies, they'll probably get some wins and get some losses. I will say Unfortunately, despite companies like Coinbase, and others calling for more regulatory clarity for a number of years in the space, none came and we had all of the debacle that you talked about, and I think what's going on now is regulators need to prove that they're the tough cop on the beat. And they're going after whatever they can, even if they might not ultimately prevail. Sure.
Last question. Thank you for sticking around. So SPF trial kicks off in two weeks just wondering do you think it's going to sort of book in this chapter or do you think it could hurt the industry even further?
I think it will be nice to have some closure on this chapter. But I would say that in my I'm not making any predictions here at all, but I will say in my experience as a federal prosecutor trials can get continued. I'm not saying it would happen here or that I'm actually not following it. as closely as you might think I would be because we're really focused on the future. But it's possible it gets continued. It's I hope it doesn't, I hope it goes forward. And I do think that it would be nice for the industry to have a bit of resolution there and also see that a large financial fraudster is brought to justice. That's the former prosecutor and me talking
great, Katie, thank you so much. Thanks, I really appreciate it. I gotta stand