The Future of Money - EP 19 Zach Abrams

**Zach Abrams** (0:00)
What is the thing, as you started the company, what's the thing that you didn't do before, that you now do, and you realize you like the most?

**Ashlee Vance** (0:07)
Oh, God, now you're interviewing me. I mean, I never had to run a business, and I guess part of that's miserable and is a ton of work, but part of it's really fun. The biggest thing about this whole thing, I think, is I'm competitive, and I played competitive sports growing up, and I've never really, I've been entrepreneurial about my career, and then I would write books outside of work and work on movies, but this was like, oh, I'm in a game, and now I want to win.

**Zach Abrams** (0:40)
So it feels different from writing a book, and book doesn't feel as entrepreneurial, it feels more creative or something?

**Ashlee Vance** (0:47)
It does feel sort of entrepreneurial. I always thought of each book or documentary, it actually made me have more respect and I think a better understanding of the people I was covering, because they are like little startups in and of themselves, but you know they're going to be kind of finite, but there's always ups and downs, and there's things collapsing, and things you have to fix, and it's this journey. And so in that sense, but not in the like, there's money coming in, and there's money going out, and like, you know, and I have to make this work. And I think when you write a book, you're like, I have to make this work, but I feel pretty confident in my skills, and I feel like there's so much in my control, whereas on this, it's like, I think I can do my absolute best stuff, and I still don't know fully if it's gonna pan out, you know?

**Zach Abrams** (1:39)
Yeah, no, I've been there. Yeah. Maybe I'm still there.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:44)
All right. Well, I'll do, so I don't do a crazy long intro or anything, but we can jump in if you're ready.

**Zach Abrams** (1:50)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:04)
Zach Abrams, thank you for coming to the Pods, dude.

**Zach Abrams** (2:08)
Excited to be here, thank you for having me.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:11)
I'm going to try to introduce you, and if I miss anything, help me out. But you're the CEO of Bridge, Stripe acquired Bridge, well, last year it began, and I think it closed this year for $1 billion, and the company was only a couple years old. You're a long-time executive in the FinTech space, you've done startups, you've worked for Square, other big companies, and then, yeah, created this rocket ship, and we're going to, I don't want to freak my listeners out because I'm not, I don't do a lot, and I know crypto is not really the full right phrase here, but I don't do a lot of FinTech stuff, and you guys are doing stable coins. I pretty much had to learn actually what a stable coin is doing research for this episode, but I thought this is a good opportunity because I think we try to make this accessible to a pretty wide audience. So I don't want people to get freaked out if they're not in FinTech, because I think we're about to learn about the future of money, what this stuff is, where it's all heading, and I know we had a brief chat a couple of months ago, and that was already pretty illuminating for me.

**Zach Abrams** (3:22)
Yeah, definitely, and it's a lot simpler than rockets and artificial wounds and all the other things that you normally talk about.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:31)
We'll see. Just before we kick off, really briefly, I want to thank E1 Ventures for helping make this possible and give us some support. Very short little read there, and with that, we're off and running. Where to begin? Well, let's do a little explainer, history lesson type thing on what a stable coin is.

**Zach Abrams** (3:56)
Yeah, a stable coin is a tokenized form of a dollar. So you take a dollar, like a US dollar, for instance, and you put it into a bank account, and then you create a digital representation of that dollar that other people can have, and that's the extent of it.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:13)
And unlike crypto, which often feels psychotic and full of risk and insanity, I mean, these are backed by T-bills, essentially, right?

**Zach Abrams** (4:24)
Yeah, exactly. They're pegged to the US dollar and backed by US dollars or short-term treasuries, so not even long-term treasuries. They're, technically speaking, safer than even a bank deposit because your bank deposits are backed by loans and so on.