Amy Oldenburg: Morgan Stanley Insider on Why Bitcoin's Stuck, How Much to Own, and What's Next

**Amy Oldenburg** (0:00)
We're going to a million dollars Bitcoin price. That's great. I don't see why we couldn't. And I hate to say it's going to potentially take a crisis where we break things and Bitcoin is the one thing that stays intact.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:12)
The launch of MSBT was the best first day ETF debut in Morgan Stanley's history.

**Amy Oldenburg** (0:18)
We're still early stage here. I really do believe that there's a long journey here as we talk about things like if it's Bitcoin credit or other more advanced products. There's more to come here.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:35)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show. Joining me this week is Amy Oldenburg. She is the head of Digital Asset Strategy for Morgan Stanley. The big banks are coming into Bitcoin. Amy, thanks for joining me.

**Amy Oldenburg** (0:45)
Nice to see you, thanks for having me today.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:48)
I'd love to hear a little bit about your Bitcoin journey and maybe your history at Morgan Stanley, because you've been there for two decades. So talk to me about that.

**Amy Oldenburg** (0:55)
Yeah, it's went by very quickly, but I've been at Morgan Stanley for 26 years. Although actually that wasn't my plan. I grew up in Ohio. So I grew up in a small town in the Midwest. And the interesting thing is, I think you were asking as we were prepping for the show, like how did I get here? Like how do you end up in this crazy journey around digital assets and Bitcoin? And I'm a deep Gen Xer and totally relate. It's funny to watch all this crazy content on Instagram or any of these other platforms that have like what it was like to grow up in the 80s and 90s as a kid. And you think about technology and how it impacted your life from like very early ages. Like my mind was blown sitting with my cousins as like, you know, being seven, eight years old and in their basement playing Atari, or like when Nintendo came out and like Super Mario Brothers playing with my cousins. It was just crazy. Like we watched every period of my life, there was like some technological impact that was just totally transformational. My father, we got a Tandy computer for Christmas one year and we're playing games on, you know, first PC gaming. And just wild. And it just continued to evolve. Like every, if when I was in high school, you know, we're still learning typing a little bit, we had a computer lab. But in college too, when we started to just focus more on every part of technology creeping into our lives, we had a professor that got a beta test with BlackBerry. So my marketing class, we beta test BlackBerry's back when I was in college. And we couldn't figure out what to use them for because they had no apps.
It was just the hardware. And we're like, OK, this is kind of like the pagers we grew up in in high school.
So we can send alphanumeric messages, but none of our friends have these things. And what would you do with them anyway?

**Natalie Brunell** (3:07)
Oh, I remember those, the QWERTY keyboards. And everyone had one, and then suddenly no one did anymore.

**Amy Oldenburg** (3:12)
Well, no one did. Exactly. And the interesting thing is, when I went to school, I was an accounting major. And as an accounting major, you couldn't study abroad. And I was dying to get out of Ohio. So as far as you could take me away from Ohio, send me international. I was totally up for it. And I couldn't go. But there was this exchange program in college. I could go to San Francisco. So they had, because I went to school in New York City here. And so in 1999, I went to an exchange program in San Francisco, landed on the ground in San Francisco during the tech bubble, had no idea how insane it was. I was at the time in San Francisco in the Valley and was working for an internet startup the second day I was there, building websites for Fortune 500 companies. And it was insane. And by the way, like two months later, I dropped accounting and that was no longer my major because it was so clear that just this technology transformation that was happening was so significant. And we used to go when I worked for that company, we would go to conferences and Google was just starting out and they would try to recruit people at the conferences using like little pieces of paper, like go to our Craigslist and apply for a job at Google. And we're like, Google, what's this? Like, it doesn't even make sense. Why would you ever? What would you use this for?