People who know me know that I'm a rabid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks. My quirky habit is that every Kansas game is on my calendar, and, more often than not, I will plan and schedule flights around them so that I can engage and watch. I have already brainwashed my family to be Jayhawks fans.
To be candid, I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to work at AOL when I did. I think I had rose-colored glasses about the opportunity to reinvent AOL.
The thing I think is often misunderstood about Ripple is people say, 'Oh, Ripple is a centralized platform.' To me, this is a legacy perspective. Ripple's technology, IRP, is open source; XRP Ledger is open source.
What's happening in crypto - and certainly what's happening at Ripple - we have an opportunity to fundamentally change the way global commerce is managed from a payments point of view.
As I was looking around, to me, what was happening in the blockchain and crypto world was a movement.
In 2017, people have realized there isn't going to be one crypto to rule them all. You're seeing vertical solutions where XRP is focused on payment problems, Ethereum is focused on smart contracts, and increasingly, bitcoin is a store of value. Those aren't competitive. In fact, I want bitcoin and Ethereum to be successful.
If the cryptocurrency market overall or a digital asset is solving a problem, it's going to drive some value.
Some of the uses being implemented for blockchain could actually work better with a database.
When you look around Silicon Valley at new companies, there are very few ideas that are going to make a dent in the universe.
In the bubble that was dot-com 1.0 emerged Google, Amazon, and some of the most valuable companies on the planet. They were successful because they focused on their customer; they focused on revolutionary products.
We are all products of our experiences, good and bad. Sometimes you learn as much from the negative experiences as you do from the positive.
What xRapid allows you to do is to have real-time liquidity.
There is a lot of volatility in the digital asset market broadly, and certainly that is true in the bitcoin market. It's been true for XRP, and I think that's because these markets are very nascent.
'Be in' is all about passion. Life is short. There are so many interesting things we can do in our life, and I feel like if someone is just kind of showing up, it's not worth it for them or for us.
PayPal exists because banks are not interoperable: I can't efficiently pay you $10 unless I'm giving you a $10 bill. So we're all on PayPal and Venmo, I need interoperability on the same ledger.
I think what Ripple is doing is not just, 'Hey, how do we enable banks' - it's a broader effort in how can you enable an Internet of Things and connected devices that are economic actors to pass a couple pennies.
XRP is a digital asset that exists on the XRP ledger, one of the open-source products created by Ripple. XRP is a pivotal component of the Internet of Value, since it solves a key point of friction: the pre-funding of nostro/vostro accounts necessary to facilitate cross border payments.
Some of the bitcoin community come from that kind of anarchistic, libertarian view. But, one reason why I think Ripple has been very successful is because we work with the system.
Whether you talk about Africa or underbanked communities, these are all examples where Ripple can change the way society works.
Ripple is focused on enabling a global network of financial institutions to use our software to create what we call the Internet of Value.
