Argentina Entrepreneurship, Endeavor, and Global Lessons with Wences Casares and Reid Hoffman
In this episode of Greymatter, Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock and Co-Founder of LinkedIn sits down with Wences Casares, CEO and founder of Xapo, a Greylock portfolio company in Patagonia to discuss a range of topics, including what Silicon Valley can learn from from Argentina.
Silicon Valley has the rare privilege and good fortune to be one of the most amazing entrepreneurial networks in the world. Despite a population of less than 4 million, Silicon Valley has created the majority of the world’s $100 billion companies, including mega-successes like Apple, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Netflix, and Salesforce.
Silicon Valley benefits immensely from the entrepreneurs, investors, and technologists who come from around the world to make it one of the central nodes in their network. Many of these lessons have been captured in Reid’s book Blitzscaling and podcast Masters of Scale.
But, just as every strength has a weakness, diverse entrepreneurial ecosystems like Argentina can teach Silicon Valley (and others) important lessons about global entrepreneurship. The quintessential teacher here is Wences.
Wences was Patient Zero for Bitcoin in Silicon Valley (you can watch his cameo in the Bitcoin rap battle), and his insight can be attributed to his experiences outside the region. Unlike people whose experience is limited to the bubble of Silicon Valley, he’s seen the challenges presented by unstable governments and currency, such as the difficulties of making cross-border payments. This knowledge made Wences realize much earlier than most the importance of a global, nation-independent, reliable, robust monetary ecosystem.
This is just one of the many insights that Wences and Reid covered during the conversation. They also discuss how Wences’ childhood and family (his mother was an entrepreneur who involved him in her business, and his father built his own computer for the family) helped prepare him for life as a tech entrepreneur. And, you’ll hear the story behind how needing to pay a $200 bus repair bill led to Wences becoming a Bitcoin user and investor.
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