Chamath: CZ, welcome to the All-In podcast.

CZ: Well, thanks for having me here.

Chamath: It's really, really great to see you. I want to go all the way back to the beginning because I think a lot of people don't really know your background the way that they probably should. The part of the background that I really care about is there's parts of your early journey in Canada, which is very similar to mine. You worked at McDonald's. I worked at Burger King.

CZ: Okay.

Chamath: But before that, your parents were able to immigrate from China right around Tiananmen Square, right?

CZ: My father went to Canada to study in 1984. That's five years before Tiananmen Square.

Chamath: How did that come about? So your father stayed in Canada once he went there or no?

CZ: Uh he he could visit us every twice a year basically but he would most of the time he was in Canada and he was a teacher in China. He was a professor in China and then he went to do a exchange program in University of Toronto first. And then a couple years later he moved to UBC University of British Columbia in Vancouver. And then he was there. We were applying back back then it's actually very difficult to get a passport. It takes like three or four years to get a passport. We started applying in 1985 fiveish. It took like two three years to get a passport and then after you get a passport... meaning a Chinese passport. A Chinese passport. Yeah. So and then it takes like another few years to get a visa. Like that's just how long the process takes back then. And then yeah, so we got it shortly after in 1989.

Chamath: When you look back, it almost seems fortuitous. Isn't there a version where post-Tiananmen they kind of just shut everything down and say, "Okay, let's just reset and then maybe they wouldn't have approved the visa or..."

CZ: No, actually after that the visa got easier. The passports got harder. So they no longer issue new passport... the reissue of new passports got harder. But we were lucky. So we got the passports maybe a year before that and then we're waiting for the visa and then afterwards the visa got easier. So in some ways that actually kind of helped us to get the visa.

Chamath: Did that event shape your perspective in any way shape or form or not really? Were you too young or no? You were what 12?

CZ: I was 12. So I think consciously no. It didn't change me that much but I subconsciously I think you know there were discussions about democracy. I was actually living on a university campus back then, the China Science and Technology University, one of the top four universities in China. So there were a lot of discussions among the university students which were older, probably seven to nine years older than me. So there were some discussions but I was 12 so I wasn't really clued into it but I think subconsciously it may have some kind of a subconscious impact.

Chamath: And what was it like when you moved to Vancouver?

CZ: I moved to Vancouver. Yeah. It's just different. It's very different. It's just a completely new country. I studied English for like couple years in school but you know I was not fluent at all. But yeah, Vancouver is great. Canada is nice green, nice greenery, open space. Everything's pretty, the living standard is high. Everything's pretty good. Everything is very clean. The fruits are bigger. It's just a really nice environment.

Chamath: Did both your parents work when the family was reunited? What do they do?

CZ: So my father was like assistant professor in the university. He gets like a thousand Canadian dollars per month of like a stipend. We get some like really low-cost housing with the faculty housing from UBC. So we lived on campus. I think on the third day of our arrival in Canada, my mom went to a factory, sewing factory to work like sewing clothes. She was a math and history teacher in China, but she doesn't speak that much English. So she couldn't get the same level of jobs and she basically can only work at a minimum wage factory. She did that for like seven to 10 years.

Chamath: My mom was a nurse in Sri Lanka and when we immigrated when we got refugee status, my father was unemployed and my mom became a housekeeper and that's what she did. And then I think when I was like 14 is when I got my first job.

CZ: Yeah. I got my first job at McDonald's at I think it's 14 or 15. I think it was 15.

Chamath: We're the same age so it probably would have been 14. Do you remember what the minimum wage was in British Columbia back then?

CZ: I do. The minimum wage was $6, but McDonald's pay $4.50. That's below minimum wage because the McDonald's somehow had like a special exemption because they a lot of young kids work there. So, I think it was on my 14th birthday that I applied for the job and then a week later I was flipping burgers there. It was the first income I had.

Chamath: You're not like this precocious technical wonder kid who's coding 24/7 and learning computer science or were you?

CZ: Uh no I wouldn't describe me as that. I think I'm a technical guy. I started computer science. I was interested in programming even in high school. But I wasn't a programming wizard. I wasn't like one of those really genius coders. I think I'm a decent coder. I wrote some decent code in my career and then when I was like 28, 30-ish I moved away from coding. I was doing more business development, sales and etc.

Chamath: So you're a normal immigrant kid learning to adapt in Canada. Did you have a lot of friends?

CZ: Yeah, I had a lot of friends. In our school most of the Asians hang out with Asians but I was actually one of the exceptions that I had like Caucasian friends. I had all kind of different friends. My teenager years in Canada was great. It was like some of the best years, I think those years are really shaped to me to be a happy person.

Chamath: How did it feel when you weren't able to get into my alma mater University of Waterloo and so had to settle for McGill? How did that make you feel? Does it make you feel stupid?

CZ: So actually my sister went to Waterloo so I was deciding between Waterloo and McGill and maybe UT. I knew I wasn't going to go to UBC. I wanted a different city. And actually UBC gave me an offer but I just knew I don't want to go there. At the time my friend's mother who I really respect, she said well you might want to become a doctor because doctors have a good living, a good lifestyle. I took her advice. I study biology and Waterloo is not much of a biology school. So, I went to McGill. But then one semester later I said, "No, no more biology. I'm going to move to computer science."

Chamath: Was it a typical kind of college experience for you? Did you have great jobs in the summertime or were you just like an average normal university kid? How'd you pay for school by the way?

CZ: I worked every summer. I worked every summer and I also worked part-time during the school year. I didn't take any student debt. The first year I actually still took about $6,000 Canadian dollars from my dad. The second year I was still a bit short. My sister gave me $3,000. And then from that point on I never took money at all. I was self-sustainable. No student debt. Very lucky.

Chamath: So you graduate from McGill in computer science.

CZ: Yeah. In computer... actually I didn't graduate from McGill. I went there for four years and on my third year I got an internship job and then extended, extended, extended and I didn't go back to McGill. So I didn't graduate from McGill and later on I found out I still need a bachelor's degree to apply for work visas in Japan. So I went to an online education program called the American College of Computer Science and got a degree there.

Chamath: Okay. So which internship did you get where you started to work there?

CZ: I got an internship at to in Tokyo. I always from first year college I always worked on a programming job. I worked at a company called Original Sim writing some simulation software and then third year I got into a company in Japan in Tokyo called Fusion Systems Japan and then they were writing order execution systems for brokers of the Tokyo stock.

Chamath: Sorry that's a Japanese company with an office in Montreal or an office in Canada or no?

CZ: No no I I went to Tokyo. It's actually an American bunch of American guys' company that's in Tokyo. I mean I was a college student and living in Tokyo is like you know it's fun. It's a dream.

Chamath: And what kind of software did you write?

CZ: Mostly order execution software. So the same software like that moves orders and buy... what drives Binance today. Pretty much. So it's the same style. Actually all the software I was involved with have no decision-making.

Chamath: Were you attracted to the subject matter or you just did it because it was your job?

CZ: I first did it was because it was my job. I was so young I didn't know what all the different industries are. But very soon the company's main product is the order execution system, so I was involved in that and then that became the thing over my career and I like it because it requires quite a lot of technical expertise. Everything is about efficiency, making it go as fast as possible, process as low latency as possible. I'm an efficiency kind of driven guy.

Chamath: In high frequency trading organization, they go to such a degree to basically optimize for efficiency and low latency all the way down to their own physical fiber infrastructure. How does that manifest in the software? How do you actually optimize for those boundary conditions in code?

CZ: Well, there's quite a few levels, right? The first level you do is basically you write a software to be efficient and fast. You want to remove all the database lookups. So you want to do everything in memory and then you want to reduce any sort of additional computation. You want to simplify the risk checks. And then the more advanced versions you move on to like the FPGA which is a network chip card that's on the network card. So that you don't have to go all the way up to memory and come all the way back down to the processor. Back then that round trip is about 100 microseconds and by avoiding that you reduce down to 20 microseconds.

Chamath: Why when so much money is on the line for high frequency trading, why did they never try their own custom silicon (ASIC)?

CZ: I think the algorithms change too often. So when you want to design your own chip, it is very efficient, but when you want to change it, it takes a long time. I think FPGA already offers kind of the best of both worlds.

Chamath: The company you worked at in Japan was it successful?

CZ: It's successful. That company got sold to a NASDAQ listed company just before 2000 for like $52 million. At that time I was too young. I was like 20 something. I was just a coder. You're a salary man.

Chamath: So then walk us through what happens afterwards.

CZ: So that company got sold. There was a lot of culture clashes. That's my first experience about how mergers may not work. The same partners went to do a different company, but they rented a very fancy office. That company only lasted a year. It means that previous success doesn't guarantee future success. In early 2001 I was looking for new jobs and then Bloomberg was hiring. This is right before 911. I kind of got an offer before 911.

Chamath: So after 911 you went to New York?

CZ: I went to New York in November of 2001. I worked at Bloomberg for four years. I joined as a senior developer. I was put into a team called Tradebook Futures. Still no inkling of that entrepreneurial bug. I was just a young guy trying to get a job, experience different parts of the world. I got promoted three times in two years and then I was leading a team of 60 initially and then grew to about 80 people. That's when I became sort of a manager. I no longer wrote code. The worst transition.

Chamath: And then you quit and moved to China.

CZ: Yes. Beginning of 2005. The same friends I made in Japan, they were talking about starting a new fintech company in Asia. They said Shanghai is most likely the most happening place for the future of fintech. So the six of us went there to do a new IT startup in Shanghai. Our idea was let's bring the Wall Street trading technology into China so we can service the brokers and exchanges in China.

Chamath: Did you know to even ask the question like okay guys what's our equity split?

CZ: It wasn't one-sixth. The top guy had like 40% and the rest five of us split equally so I had about 11%. I didn't know any of the ins and outs about shareholder rights. I had no idea what common stock is versus preferred. Once we landed in China, I found out we are registered as a wholly foreigner owned enterprise (WFOE). The Chinese brokers and financial institutions are not allowed to work with a WFOE.

Chamath: So you pivoted?

CZ: Yeah, the company pivoted towards doing any IT system for any company. Work for hire. We can be fixing printers or we can be writing SAP implementations. We did that for a few years and we actually made a living. We had a number of automotive clients, Shanghai General Motors, Shanghai Volkswagen. Three or four years in we started having offices in Hong Kong and then we were dealing with Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank. I left in 2013 after 8 years.

Chamath: In the eight years you worked at that company, you got married and had kids. By 2013 you're 36, a salary guy, junior partner, kids in private school. So then what happens?

CZ: I came across Bitcoin. One of my friends tells me, "Look, CZ, you got to look at this thing called Bitcoin." I look into it. It took me about roughly six months to fully understand it. I read the white paper and I read it again and read it again.

Chamath: I wrote this thing in 2012 about Bitcoin and I said everybody should put 1% of their net worth into Bitcoin as "schmuck insurance". The thing that captivated me was it was the only white paper that I read end to end where I thought this is one of the most elegantly written pieces of non-technical prose. You could literally give it to somebody non-technical and they would understand it.

CZ: Yeah, and it's only nine pages. It's much harder to write it very short and elegantly. The friend that showed it to you was Ron Cao. He was a managing director of Lightspeed Ventures in China. We have a poker house game. Ron says, "CZ, you should look at this thing called Bitcoin." I had lunch with Bobby Lee the next day and Bobby said put 10% of your net worth into Bitcoin. He said there's a small chance you will go to zero then you lose 10%. There's a much higher chance you will go 10x and you'll double your net worth.

Chamath: Did you feel late?

CZ: By end of 2013 I started like I'm convinced now. But then Bitcoin went from $70 in mid 2013 to like $1,000 by end of 2013. I was like, I'm too late. Doesn't matter when you get into Bitcoin, you always feel late.

Chamath: Were you still working at that company while you were doing all of this moonlighting?

CZ: Yes. I flew to Las Vegas for a Bitcoin conference. Met Vitalik, Charlie Lee, everyone. The media was like Bitcoin is only used by drug lords. But when you go to the conference it was like a bunch of geeks and they're very nice people. I told my partners we should do a Bitcoin payment system. For me, the internet I was too young to do too much with it, and there was this Bitcoin thing and I wasn't going to miss it. So I told my partners I'm going to quit. I sold my apartment in Shanghai and buy Bitcoin.

Chamath: How much did you sell it for?

CZ: Roughly $900,000. Every trench I get, I just buy. The first trench at $800 and then Bitcoin is dropping $600, $400. Kind of averaged to about $600. I was looking for a job in the Bitcoin industry. I joined Blockchain.info as VP of Engineering. Then I joined OKCoin as CTO. That didn't last long either because there were culture differences.

Chamath: So how do we get from there to Binance?

CZ: In 2015, I with a couple of my old colleagues said we're going to do a Bitcoin exchange in Tokyo. But investors said you won't be successful because you don't speak Japanese. They said why don't you sell the technology to other exchanges. So we pivoted to an exchange systems provider. In March 2017 the Chinese government shut down most of our clients. By end of May we said why don't we do our own crypto-to-crypto only trading. In June 2017 I said we're going to do an ICO.

Chamath: How much did you raise?

CZ: Raised $15 million. We launched the token BNB. September 4th, Chinese government issued a memo saying crypto exchanges are no longer allowed. I said let's move to Tokyo. We had like 30 people then. Everybody just packed up and moved.

Chamath: When you first launched Binance, was it an instant hit?

CZ: The product was growing pretty well. Placing an order on Binance is so much faster than on competing platform. By that New Year's Eve 2017 we were number one exchange already. There were some really surreal moments. I asked team what's our revenue? She said like a couple hundred Bitcoins. I was like, that's crazy. This number can't be correct.

Chamath: Early 2018 Forbes put you on the cover. What is money when you're in your 40s and you make it?

CZ: Money is not everything. I'm not like a young 20-year-old that just you know Lambos, big parties. I have a very comfortable life. My house is an old house that I bought third or fourth hand. The living room water leaks every month or so. But I'm function driven. If it functions, I'm okay. I don't care about the fanciness.

Chamath: When did things at Binance start to get complicated for you?

CZ: They started asking for information in 2021. Late 2022 it was getting more hostile. In early 2023 it was more clear that we either reach a deal of some kind or they're going to indict us. It was very stressful. Daily calls with like 12-20 lawyers on call for more than a year.

Chamath: You eventually agreed to the final terms.

CZ: Yeah, I validated a single charge of a banking secrecy violation, which is a registration failure. No one went to jail for this in history. The government want to add two additional charges, they call enhancements. The court outright rejected those because they couldn't provide any evidence.

Chamath: What was it like in prison?

CZ: It's a really bad experience overall. They organize prisons by race. This actually does avoid a lot of conflicts. I was sent to a low security prison where all the drug laws are. The first thing I did when I got out was a good shower and a good meal. I haven't seen a whole fruit for like months.

Chamath: You couldn't run Binance per se. Did that make you sad?

CZ: Stepping down was really really hard. I actually cried. But after a while I was like I'm actually quite happy not to run Binance. I have a lot more free time. I do Giggle Academy, this free education platform. I will for a very long time resist issue a token on the Giggle Academy. I want it to be a real free education platform instead of a token platform.

Chamath: What's your vision for AI agents and crypto?

CZ: Soon each of us going to have like hundreds or thousands of agents working for us in the background and they will be transacting. They're not going to use banks. Banks won't onboard and AML KYC an agent. Agents will transact at a transaction volume and at a rate that'll make the traditional network's head spin.

Chamath: Finally, what do you want to say to people who look up to you?

CZ: I'm a normal dude. I don't think I'm super smart. There's a lot of luck as well. You usually cannot change the situation, so what you can only do is change yourself. If you just push yourself a little bit every day for like 30 years and you get lucky, you will be successful. Money is only one tangent. Once you have enough, more doesn't make you happy. Health, family, and positive impact are extremely important.