3. The Ethereum Story With Matthew Leising [FourWeekMBA Podcast]

What this episode covers

In this episode, we interview Matthew Leising, formerly reporter of Bloomberg news between 2004-2021.Now the co-founder of DeCential Media (https://decential.io/), and author of a great book:Out of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist that Almost Destroyed It All(https://i0.wp.com/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51mSHCTPuIL._SX336_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg?w=1154&ssl=1)Matt made his book available as a special edition, as an NFT collection at outoftheether.net. (https://outoftheether.net/)We cover the story (https://fourweekmba.com/business-storytelling/) of Ethereum of the early years, up to the DAO hack which would define the Ethereum governance for years to come, and it would be one of the most important events that defined the Ethereum ecosystem.Gennaro:Thanks Matt for joining this conversation, it’s a pleasure to have you here.Thank you for putting together such a book that is Out of The Ether. Which is the story (https://fourweekmba.com/business-storytelling/) of the DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization hack, but it’s way more than that. It’s the story of Ethereum in the early days, in the early years, it’s an incredible story. So the effort that went into the book for the people that will be reading it, it’s incredible. So thanks for taking the time. But so, let’s start from there. What prompted you to cover Ethereum? Matt Leising:Yeah, of course. So I’ve been a reporter my whole life, a lot of that was spent at Bloomberg News and I was covering Wall Street and finance went through the financial (https://fourweekmba.com/financial-accounting/) crisis and all of that as a reporter. And my beat was market structure, which is like, how do markets work? What’s the kind of regulation that people are facing? Legislation is there, does this market need to be updated? So I was covering that for the derivatives market and the bond market for Bloomberg for many years.So once I finally understood what blockchain technology was, I realized it could really change the things that I was writing about. And this was around the same time that Wall Street was starting to wake up to that Bitcoin wasn’t just a cryptocurrency, it had this blockchain technology that for the first time allowed you to engage in trustless transactions with anyone around the world, which was transformative.So that was in 2015, I started covering blockchain as part of my beat, like I said, Wall Street was getting involved, so it was a really good time to write about it because there was a lot of interest, and to be honest not a lot of people knew much about it. So it was fun to just learn and write as I went along. So, it started just with blockchain in general, and then Ethereum had just been released in 2015, I didn’t start paying attention to it until early 2016 because there was this project that everyone was getting excited about called the DAO, it’s the Decentralized Autonomous Organization.And I’ve written it, that’s a terrible name come up by coders that is meant to scare children in the night. But basically what this was, was, in traditional finance you have venture capital firms that have money and they want to find startups to invest in, to help them grow their business (https://fourweekmba.com/business-strategy/) and get off the ground, and then also have an investment stake in these companies that they can then sell for lots of

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