 Hi, everyone. I'm Julien. I'm an investor at Feliz Capital. Pleased to be here with my friend and former colleague, David Marcus. Good morning. So David, like many of us here, you grew up in Europe. You started a company in Europe. A few years later, somehow you became CEO of PayPal. And ultimately, you became VP of payments at Facebook. So how did that happen? So the origin story is that I always did startups, even when I was in Europe. The first one was a telco and ISP in Switzerland of all places. The second one was actually a mobile payments company using premium SMS. I spent a lot of time here in Helsinki and Finland with a lot of gaming and telco clients doing premium SMS top ups for gaming and all kinds of different things. And then the iPhone became a thing in 2007. And I decided, OK. This whole world is going to change, and it's time for me to move to Silicon Valley. And so moved to Silicon Valley with a very short, tight leash from my investors at the time to try to make it work, and built Zong, which was a mobile payments company, into actually a pretty successful company in mobile payments with powering games, notably on Facebook and the likes, and got acquired by PayPal in 2011. Shortly after that, the then CEO left to be the CEO of Yahoo, and I'm like, OK, this is great. I'm going to go back to building startups. And they asked me to take over, which really wasn't expected at all. And I'm like, OK, you don't turn down the opportunity to go lead one of the biggest payments companies in the world, so I did that for a while. But then I was really, really missing building products. And at that time, Mark Zuckerberg came to me and asked me to come and join him to go build messaging products at Facebook. And I thought it would be a good thing to just change, move away from payments for a little bit, and go do that. And so built the Messenger app. And it was a great, great ride, building it from 100 million users to 1.5 billion users. And then a few years later, I got kind of bored by that too, and felt like it was time to go do something else. And so I pitched a Libra DM idea, which was the general purpose, open protocol for money on the internet. And Mark said, yeah, that sounds like a really good idea. And we went and built that. And we can talk about that later. And running a startup in Europe and running PayPal in the US and working as an exec at Facebook are very different jobs. So how did you scale? How are you able to be successful at both jobs? It's a good question. It's definitely a very different world between startups and large corporate stuff. I'm really happy that I'm back at startups, to be frank. It was an amazing experience. I don't regret anything. But the nimble approach of building really fast, pivoting, not having overhead, not having complicated corporate and governance structures is really where I feel at home. And so for 10 years, I kind of exiled myself a little bit into corporate structures. But I learned a lot, worked with amazing people. And I think that, at the end of the day, was kind of the guiding principle of working with immensely talented people on really hard problems at a scale that was nuts. Like, you know, the Facebook experience, you were there, we were there together. When you serve billions of people and you get to build products at an intoxicating speed at the time where you have an idea and then two weeks later, you push it out, then 100 million people use it for the first time. It's like, you know, really intoxicating. And this was a really fun ride at the time. But I feel like startups are a lot more fun, scarier. But, you know, if you take that angst of the entrepreneur and turn it into energy and resilience, then you can make magic happen. And that's where I feel right at home. And at Facebook, no, Meta, one of the things that you've famously worked on is Libra, also known as Diem. What was the ambition there? And what are the learnings of Libra slash Diem? So the ambition was really to fix something that is an absolute crazy anomaly in the world, which is when you think about the way that money moves or rather doesn't move on the internet natively, we're in 2023 and we're still relying on infrastructure for payments that was built in the late 1960s and 70s, namely the correspondent banking system in Swift. And that's crazy to me that, you know, we are sending rockets and beaming satellite, you know, beaming internet from satellites in space. And that, you know, for money, you're still, you can't do it at Friday after 5 p.m. across countries. It's like nuts. And so the aim was really to try to build a new protocol for money on the internet, which is what we did. We built the Libra protocol and blockchain and we built the Libra currency. But then what we didn't really fully internalize at the time is how aggressively opposed to this would be the governments. And the general idea of a private company and not a popular one at the time, issuing a unit of account for retail payments at the scale of billions of people was kind of a very scary thing for a lot of governments. And as such, you know, they really, really got in the way of us launching and it never happened. So that's why in December of 21, I left and then went on to build LightSpark. Got it. So just to illustrate the passion that you have for payments, I wanted to show, and I hope it's possible to show it, an exchange you and I had on Facebook, literally on Facebook more than 10 years ago. So is it possible to show the deck? So it was 10 years ago, I was in London, and I got excited because I had just paid my money on PayPal. And I was very happy. And I wanted to thank David, who at that time was the CEO of PayPal for the experience I had of paying the nanny cashless immediately. So I posted that on Facebook. And now you can show the second slide. And look what happened. This is a true story of 10 years ago. So he was so obsessed that he had to make that comment. So where is that passion or that twisted hobby for payments and being fast and in a reliable way? Where is it coming from? I mean, you've got to agree that 15 seconds is pretty crappy if you're doing a payment on the same platform. I wasn't happy back then. It's like shitty. That was enough. So look, I think the reason I'm obsessed with this, singularly obsessed with this, is actually that when you think about it, people care about many things and need many things. The first thing is you need to be healthy. Otherwise, nothing matters. Second thing is your loved ones need to be safe. Otherwise, nothing matters. And the third thing is you have to have money to put food on the table and provide for the people you care. And if the systems that we depend on to move money are not as good as they can be, then so many people are left behind. And so much of the world's GDP is actually constrained by the archaic rails that we depend on. And I feel like anger and frustration adds to the state of things. It shouldn't be that way. It's like it's crazy that we live in a world where, in payments right now, it's as if you're on Gmail and you can't send an email to anyone else if the other person is not on Gmail, right? It's like you have no interoperability. Moving money cross-border is excessively difficult and costly. It doesn't move in real time. You have delays. No one has access to the underlying transport layer of money except banks themselves. So there's no developer effort around that to build amazing things that happen on other computing platform and others out there. And so there's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of opportunity to go build a lot of many companies that can actually change the game. And so on that, two years ago, you left Facebook. You started LightSpark. What's the story there? What's the vision? Who's the team behind it? And how is it going? Yeah, so a lot of my co-founders and people at LightSpark are people who were part of the Libra journey and who shared this sense of unfinished business for building an open, interoperable protocol for money on the internet. And so we learned a lesson which is don't build a unit of account from a centralized place even though you're trying as much as you can to decentralize the governance. It's just not going to be enough because a lot of people are going to not want this thing to exist. Lots of entrenched interests, lots of incumbents that have a lot to lose. And so the question is then when you look at that, what is the platform that you can build on? What is the thing that looks the most like the internet in terms of money movement and value? And the answer is unequivocally, Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the most decentralized form of neutral money in the world. No one controls it. The soft power around the governance of Bitcoin is arguably the most decentralized ever. And the trust that is conferred to the underlying network and asset as such is really the highest you can have. And so then the question is actually, how do you make Bitcoin move fast and cheap? The answer is the lightning network. And then how do you build that in a form where, and I like email analogies a lot for this, like, you know, when you send an email, you don't think about SMTP and TCPIP. How can you make Bitcoin enlightening that so you can send dollars and receive euros, any currencies on the edges of the network, have a human readable address that, you know, basically goes across all of the different payment systems and enable people to just send money as they send a text message or email on top of this new infrastructure. And so that's what we're building at Lightspark, but this time around, we're building it on an open standard, rather than trying to invent one, which at the time was for necessity, mainly not for ideology. And so how was it going back, basically, to the basement with a small team, raise money from great VCs and fully disclaimer, we are saying that capital, I have to disclaim it. We invested in Lightspark, but how was it for you going back to that stage after PayPal, Facebook, becoming a big company It's amazing, it's amazing. It feels right at home. I mean, the amount of cycles that you spend when you're working at a large company on things that actually are non-continuent, don't matter in the actual buildup of the product or the success of the product, just because of the sheer scale and number of people you have to go convince or stop from stopping you is just insane. And so just getting rid of all of that overhead is just amazing. And you can focus on actually building an amazing product with remarkably talented people. I like to talk about the engine room of a large ship or a small ship that's agile. And so having the ability to go in that engine room, get your hands dirty with a group of people that is remarkable and super focused on the same mission with no bullshit is just amazing. And how is it going? Do you have any numbers to share? How is the traction like? How do people react? How do partners and developers react when you come up with that pitch? So I mean, we started the company a year and a half ago, almost a year and a half ago. We shipped the first version of our product in April of this year. Last month, we announced UMA, which is a universal money address which is this email address looking like standard for money transfers on top of Lightning and Bitcoin. It's basically, if you want to check it out, it's UMA.me, but it's basically a dollar sign, your username at the wallet, exchange, or bank that you want to use for transfers. You can define the currency you want to get paid. It's got compliance, FX, addressing all built-in. And the vision for this, we just got started 30 days ago on this one, but the vision for this is that many exchanges banks and wallets are going to on board, and we will have about 48 countries live by the end of December this month, and hopefully about 100 and so countries by the end of Q1 and then continue from there. And the vision here is that you're going to be able to claim one address, define your currency, give that address to anyone you want, receive a payment cost-effectively even for $0.10 or for a large amount if you want, but that's going to enable you to flow 24-7 at a fraction of the cost of the current system in an interoperable way across apps and banks. And we're very excited about that because we think that that's how users want to use the product and the network. They don't want to spend their Bitcoin. They want to use their Bitcoin for people who hold them as future appreciation value or as a hedge to the money printing machines that government has been using, but not spend it. And so the idea is just to use the Bitcoin like a TCP-IP packet to transport value natively on the network and let people use their own currencies on the edges of the network. It's very ambitious, but I also think it's one of the very few blockchain applications that I could explain to my mom. She would understand it. Hopefully she would use it. And what is the... I'm counting on it. What is the message, we'd say the value proposition for developers out there. There are many developers, independent developers, developers working for big financial institutions, fintech, banks. What's the message you have for them with LightSpark and with UMI in particular? Well, I mean, the way I would think about this, if you're a developer and you're building anything that touches a value transfer or money, is try to rewind the clock to pre-internet or pre-app store era and think about the companies that built huge businesses on top of these new platforms that enabled brand new things that changed the game. And think about what you can build in a world where money moves natively on the internet like anything else. Think about streaming money application. Think about loyalty and rewards for games where people can actually accrue small sense by completing a task or by inviting other people to do other things. Think about larger money transfer applications for B2B applications. Think about all kinds of different things that you can do programmatically if you can assign an address that can receive no matter how small of an amount of a subatomic unit of any currency at any given point in time 24-7 and build apps around that. And by the way, we're not a consumer-facing company. We're here to support developers and startups and larger enterprises building applications that need to move value around the world in real time. And so, you know, just use our stack. We just changed our pricing because we heard from developers that actually we had a monthly minimum fee and we heard from developers, actually, you know, we want to focus on building our apps and not, you know, pay until we find product market fit. We just changed our pricing to be more developer-friendly so you can go experiment, build things, figure out what works what doesn't work without paying anything. And when it works, we'll eventually charge you something, but, you know, not at first. So go experiment and go build things. It's going to be a really, really inspiring future when you can do all these things that move value around. By the way, another idea, if you're building AI agents for specific applications, you can actually think about AI agents with an address that can send and receive fractions of currencies in real-time to other agents to complete tasks for you. When you think about that future where we're not in an app world, we're in an AI agent world, and money needs to move natively, it's not going to be stopped Friday at 5 p.m. by the banking current capacity and capability, right? It has to be real-time. It has to move money natively on the Internet. So those are applications that we think are going to be really amazing when they come to life. And as you know very well from the Facebook experience, regulation in that space is important. Is regulation for LightSpark a headwind or a tailwind? And how do you navigate with that ecosystem? So I think when we announced Libra in June of 2019, three and a half weeks later, I was testifying in front of Congress, which if you haven't done it, I highly recommend it. It's an interesting experience. But so I think we've learned a lot of lessons from this. And the lesson that we learned is that actually, sovereign governments like governments want to actually control their own currency issuance and their domestic payment systems. And we think where we play a role is actually in the interoperability layer between all of the existing fiat currencies and existing real-time payment systems that are now being deployed everywhere are already prevalent in a number of regions. And so as such, what we're doing is just making that money flow between these systems more efficient. So this is not threatening, I think. And then from a regulatory standpoint, the way that it works is that we're building software and capabilities at the center of the network. And our clients, for the most part, are regulated entities that are licensed and can actually meet their compliance or exceed their compliance obligations. And so we don't see it as a problem and then we use Bitcoin that has regulatory clarity. We're going to have a Bitcoin spot TTF launch soon. There's a lot of institutional money into Bitcoin already and they're comfortable actually backing it. So the acceptance of Bitcoin now is not, it's not a genie that you can put back in a bottle. And so we feel really good about our position. Would you call LightSpark a crypto company or a payments company or both or something else? I think, you know, we're a money grid company. And it so happens that the money grid of the future, one that is cheap, available 24-7, interoperable, super fast, is just going to be built on Bitcoin and Lightning. So you started a business in Europe, you started a business in the US, in California. How is it different and how has it changed since your early days as an entrepreneur in Switzerland? I mean, look, look at this place. It's like really, really amazing to see so many people from all over Europe and all over the world, frankly, and the energy and drive and passion to go build and disrupt existing things. It's really great to see so much energy in Europe. So that makes me really happy. I mean, we were just joking in the car coming here about, you know, the first time we met, like, you know, many, many moons ago at Loweb conference in Paris. And the world has changed a lot since then and especially, you know, European energy around building new things. So that makes me really happy. I think, you know, building in Europe is really, really harder to be frank because you have smaller markets, different languages, different cultures, and so to get to critical scale when you're building something, it's harder. But I think that the European entrepreneurs that are then moving to the US are, you know, it's just like suddenly you have superpowers because it's so much harder to do it here. And when you do, then you have a much more, you know, a much bigger competitive moat because, you know, getting into multiple markets in Europe with critical scale is really, really hard. So I still think this is a challenge. I still think access to capital is more difficult here in Europe than in the US. But I'm thrilled to see so many entrepreneurs and so much energy towards building new things here and I hope it continues. You think it's still necessary to go to the US? No, I don't think it's necessary at all. I think it depends what you're building and, you know, what is the ambition for the company in terms of what you want to reach. Any advice for the people here while looking at your journey as an inspiration? Well, I think that the key when you're building anything is really resilience. At the end of the day, that's what defines good entrepreneurs from entrepreneurs who fail. It's like, you know, you have to have super high conviction in what you're building, a ton of passion for fixing something that's broken. I found mine. I know that I'm going to do this or die trying. There will be an open protocol for money on the internet while, you know, I'm still around hopefully and I will do whatever I can to make it happen. This is my life's pursuit. I know it. Find yours and then just don't throw the towel. It's going to get really hard and the last ten competitors that you will have will throw the towel before you do and so you have to be the last person standing. And I think, you know, you're not going to get it right. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to learn along the way. You're going to fail multiple times but then you're just going to dust yourself up and continue fighting for what you believe in and I think that's the key, the resilience, the persistence in achieving the goal, the mission that you have your life's passion in or with. So we have just a few minutes left. We're going to play a game, a quick-fire round. So you need to answer fast. So Snow or Sun? Both. It's like asking me to choose, you know, one of my kids. I can't. Crypto or AI? Definitely crypto. What is the best advice you've ever received and who was it from and when? The best advice I've ever received. That shows you how entrepreneurs don't take advice well. The fact that I have to think about this. What is the best advice? I mean, I was, so this is a conversation that I had when I was like actually I was walking around the direction of Libra and I actually showed up at, I haven't told the story before, but I showed up at Mark Zuckerberg's house that was late in Palo Alto and we were discussing the various ways of doing that and then he left me on his porch in the front of his house and he looked at me and he's like, be ambitious. And we were certainly very ambitious with that project. As if you needed that. But so yeah, that was, you know, Mark has continued to be a really great source of inspiration for me and I think, you know, working with him for seven and a half years was really a highlight of my career. Amen. What is the book you most enjoyed last year? The book I most enjoyed last year, I think it was The Last Days of Night, which is kind of a novel type of book recounting the story of Edison versus Tesla in Westinghouse in the fight for a standard, electricity standard of AC versus DC. Back in the day, it's like a really fascinating book. Sounds familiar. Yeah. The last one, we have 30 seconds. What is your top prediction for 2024? And I know you did some predictions last year which were actually very right. So what is the big one this year? I don't know. I want to be optimistic, but I still think it's going to be a pretty challenging year. And I just think that we're just going to have to brace ourselves for more complicated things. I think the social fabric of this world is kind of, you know, almost at the breaking point right now. And so I'm kind of, you know, worried about that. And I think it's going to take all of us and all of us to actually look to the future, to what we can build to make it better and focus on that to actually get through it. I think it's going to be a pretty challenging year still, sadly. Great. Well, thank you so much, David, for sharing your story and your insights and telling us everything about Lights Park. Thank you for spending your time with us. It was great. Thank you. Let's do it again. Thanks. Thank you.