Alex Heath

So I spent time in financial markets, like at Goldman and at Citadel.

At Goldman, the thing that struck me is sort of the large institutions, I was there in 2016.

There were two big events in 2016, Brexit, and then the US election, so the first Trump election.

All the kind of big guys, what they were focused on is essentially

know i want to get exposure to brexit or hedge against it and then i want to get exposure to trump or hedge against that and then we would create these financial bundles and all of that and there were three issues like one it was a pro we gave them the wrong products like the traditional financial markets don't get you the exact sort of yes no is trump going to win exposure that they were looking for so one of the big things we sold is the the s p if they wanted to go long trump

So people write about Trump and then they lost money.

So it's horrible.

The second thing is there wasn't an open fair market for people to price this question.

It was just like the bank deciding and it would charge crazy fees.

It was exorbitant.

And the third that like irked me the most is like a lot of people have views on this.

And also a lot of people are impacted by Brexit.

It's like this notion that like you are only impacted by Brexit if you're big enough to get a seat at the Goldman Sachs table like was a bit weird to me.

It was like kind of like, you know,

But this is where the idea was like, you have a financial market to price companies, commodities.

What if you built one to price simple questions about the future?

And if you did something like this, the beauty of this is areas of expertise.

Everyone is an expert on something.

Areas of knowledge and expertise and passion lie in a much broader set than just Wall Street.

There's a lot more people out there, outside of Wall Street, that have views and have knowledge about politics.