This conversation from Davos with Elisabeth Carpenter, COO of Circle, discusses the USDC stable coin, the democratization of information and currency and how to get more people access to the internet.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 We're talking about sustainability and the corporation is a unit in our society that plays a certain role.
00:07 You're the COO of a corporation that's very forward-thinking.
00:11 I feel like we could learn a little bit about you.
00:14 What are the priorities as a leader of a financial service company?
00:19 Are you stodgy, boring? Do you just help tech bros?
00:23 Do you know what a marginalized person looks like?
00:26 Tell me a little bit about, you're an important leader that has something to say.
00:31 What kind of leadership are you doing right now?
00:33 Just 10 seconds.
00:41 For those who don't know what Circle does, we created USDC five years ago.
00:46 It is the world's most trusted digital dollar.
00:48 The concept is very simple.
00:51 Money should move at the speed of the internet with the ease, cost, speed, efficiency, etc.
00:56 We have an email, text, security, etc.
01:00 That's what we've enabled. It's a digital dollar that flies around the world with the greatest of ease.
01:04 When you build something like that, yes, we do know what marginalized people look like.
01:10 To answer your question about the part about it boring, we actually like being boring
01:15 because the dollar is only ever worth a dollar.
01:18 No one will trust it if it's worth a little more some day or a little less another.
01:22 That's particularly important for people in marginalized communities
01:27 because I don't know how many people in the audience know,
01:29 but roughly 1.7 billion people in the world are unbanked or underbanked,
01:36 of which, believe it or not, even in America, we have about 6 million that are unbanked or underbanked.
01:41 The current financial system is just inherently exclusive.
01:46 If you even think about something like an immigrant in America sending money home,
01:50 they have to show up at a kiosk, there's probably half an hour of paperwork of some sort.
01:55 They're maybe sending $200 to their home country.
02:00 They're going to have to spend at least $11 in fees.
02:03 It doesn't necessarily get sent instantly.
02:05 The person on the other end sometimes has to pay to get it.
02:07 All of those are friction points, and friction is basically an equity killer.
02:13 Everything we do is based around enabling money to move at the speed of the Internet,
02:19 sound, secure, trustworthy, that will absolutely help those of us in the room here who are privileged,
02:27 but it absolutely has a massive impact and potential for helping the underserved,
02:34 which it's already doing, which I can get to in a minute, but I'll pause there.
02:37 I'm going to go off script here.
02:39 Oh, boy.
02:40 I have a question that occurred to me that is a very creative question, and feel free to pass.
02:47 Are you familiar with the movie The Wizard of Oz?
02:49 Yes.
02:50 In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wears these ruby slippers.
02:53 They apparently, in Frank L. Baum's book, were silver.
02:57 Oh.
02:57 And the yellow brick road was the gold standard, and Oz is Emerald City, it's the greenback,
03:05 and the scarecrow's the farmer, the tin man's the factory worker,
03:10 and it was a political allegory about the gold standard, the silver standard.
03:15 I did not know that.
03:16 My mind is, that's amazing.
03:17 Now, where I'm going with that, I originally was going to ask you,
03:19 you're an amazing leader, and you're building a company that's a very special company,
03:25 but it occurs to me, if a movie were to be made about the global economy right now,
03:31 and kind of talked about where you think it should go so people aren't left out,
03:38 and, you know, have you heard of the internets?
03:41 I have, yeah.
03:42 Like, there's some new technologies that would never have been in Frank L. Baum's movie.
03:46 Yep.
03:46 I'm just curious, what are some elements of a movie that could, like, tell a story about this moment
03:52 and where we need to go, and AI is also going to play a role.
03:55 You have these people in Silicon Valley saying, I don't know, universal something, something.
04:00 Yep.
04:01 So, I'm sorry if I've gone off script, but feel free to pass.
04:04 You know, no, it's a really interesting question.
04:06 I think there's a couple ways of answering that, actually.
04:09 There's a lot in there, and we won't do it justice,
04:11 but I think on the one hand, all the colors you referenced,
04:16 The Wizard of Oz made today would be multicolored.
04:19 Yep.
04:20 Because, you know, the future, these are Web 3, the Internet of Value,
04:26 something like a digital currency like USDC, EURC, which is our Euro digital currency,
04:34 you know, these are equalizers.
04:36 Yep.
04:36 And so, they don't care what your skin color is, what your gender is,
04:41 doesn't matter, it will serve you just like the Internet did that for content.
04:47 And, you know, the role out of broadband across the world was certainly choppy,
04:49 but I don't think anyone can deny the fact that content has essentially been,
04:53 access to content and information has been democratized for all skin colors,
04:58 all socioeconomic groups, all demographics.
05:01 And if you have access to the Internet, which is an ongoing challenge
05:06 because the entire world is not connected with the Internet yet,
05:10 I think it's like 80% now is a stat I heard this morning,
05:13 but of that fewer are women, for example, so there's still a challenge there and roadblocks.
05:18 However, if you are connected to the Internet,
05:22 you can basically get access to economic freedom today,
05:29 and certainly over time as this kind of technology becomes more mainstream.
05:33 So, I don't know what color the road would be or the city,
05:36 but I would say that you could definitely explode the whole set with lots of colors
05:41 to represent just how inclusive what we're doing will be.
05:44 And I think where I was going with that is the times are changing.
05:48 Yeah.
05:48 And you guys are playing an important role in that.
05:50 Yeah.
05:51 And you're running a very thoughtful company that I think people can learn from,
05:56 and I applaud your leadership.
05:57 Just as a final question, if you could look into that nice camera over there
06:02 and say something that you know that other C-suites should know to run effective companies
06:08 that are inclusive, that are able to be effective at this time, what advice do you have?
06:15 I would say two things.
06:16 First, I'd repeat the stat I said earlier because it can't be repeated enough
06:19 because it's very much unknown, which is that 1.7 billion people in the world are unbanked or underbanked.
06:28 They're literally keeping their money under a mattress.
06:31 We need to change that.
06:33 And then the other is the other point I made, and I don't know if this stat is totally accurate,
06:37 but I did hear it from a very good source this morning in an event I was at,
06:40 which is that only 80% of the world is connected to the Internet,
06:44 and significantly fewer of those are women.
06:47 So if you think about inclusion for any industry on any level,
06:53 access to the Internet is obviously table stakes.
06:56 Yeah.
06:57 So I think leaders have to understand that, you know, we all talk about technology and access to the Internet
07:05 as if everyone has the access we all have, which is absolutely not the case.
07:08 So whatever we can do to help that.
07:10 And then once people do have access to the Internet, it is absolutely our responsibility
07:15 to enable them to be empowered by it and not excluded by it.
07:18 [ Silence ]