Brett Harrison - FTX US Former President & HFT Veteran Speaks Out The Lunar Society

I flew out to Chicago to interview Brett Harrison, who is the former President of FTX US President and founder of Architect.
In his first longform interview since the fall of FTX, he speak in great detail about his entire tenure there and about SBF’s dysfunctional leadership. He talks about how the inner circle of Gary Wang, Nishad Singh, and SBF mismanaged the company, controlled the codebase, got distracted by media, and even threatened him for his letter of resignation.
In what was my favorite part of the interview, we also discuss his insights about the financial system from his decades of experience in the world's largest HFT firms.
And we talk about Brett's new startup, Architect, as well as the general state of crypto post-FTX.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
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Timestamps
(0:00:00) - Passive investing & HFT hacks
(0:08:30) - Is Finance Zero-Sum?
(0:18:38) - Interstellar Markets & Periodic Auctions
(0:23:10) - Hiring & Programming at Jane Street
(0:32:09) - Quant Culture
(0:42:10) - FTX - Meeting Sam, Joining FTX US
(0:58:20) - FTX - Accomplishments, Beginnings of Trouble
(1:08:11) - FTX - SBF's Dysfunctional Leadership
(1:26:53) - FTX - Alameda
(1:33:50) - FTX - Leaving FTX, SBF"s Threats
(1:45:45) - FTX - Collapse
(1:53:10) - FTX - Lessons
(2:04:34) - FTX - Regulators, & FTX Mafia
(2:15:42) - Architect.xyz
(2:30:10) - Institutional Interest & Uses of Crypto
Transcript
This transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Brett Harrison, who is now the founder of Architect, which provides traders with infrastructure for accessing digital markets. Before that he was the president of FTX US, and before that he was the head of ETF technology at Citadel. And he has a large amount of experience in leadership positions in finance and tech. So this is going to be a very interesting conversation. Thanks for coming on the Lunar Society, Brett.
Brett Harrison
Yeah. Thanks for coming out to Chicago.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure. Is the growth of ETFs a good thing for the health of markets? There's one view that as there's more passive investing, you're kind of diluting the power of smart money. And in fact, what these active investors are doing with their fees is subsidizing the price discovery that makes markets efficient. And with passive investing, you're sort of free writing off of that. You were head of ETF technology at Citadel, so you're the perfect person to ask this. Is it bad that there's so much passive investing?
Brett Harrison
I think on that it's good. I think that most investors in the market shouldn't be trying to pick individual stock names. And the best thing people can do is invest in sort of diversified instruments. And it is far less expensive to invest in indices now than it ever was in history because of the advent of ETFs.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. So maybe it's good for individual investors to put their money in passive investments. But what about the health of the market as a whole? Is it hampered by how much money goes into passive investments?
Brett Harrison
It's hard to be able to tell what it would look like if there was less money in passive investment. Now, I do think one of the potential downsides is ending up creating extra correlated activity between i