Vlad Tenev

Yeah.

Yeah and from my perspective, you could imagine

Fresh in my mind was the full platform outage of March of the past year.

And I was kind of like, what's the big deal here?

At least we didn't shut down the platform.

To some degree, I was like, wow, the engineering held up and we were able to serve all the buy and hold customers.

But no, you know, once this collusion narrative took off, it was like wildfire.

I see.

And I gave some very bad press interviews.

Yeah.

And my instinct was, look at all this noise on social media.

We have to get out there right away.

We have to communicate with the customers.

We have to tell people we're not colluding.

And so the first messages were like highly scrubbed, generic messages.

legalese messages like we did not do this at the direction of any other market participant or market center or we didn't want to say citadel or hedge funds or anything so there was these generic things and then of course the reaction was of course they're colluding yeah look at this shit they sound just like what someone colluding and doing some stuff would say hostage videos exactly yeah they're telling us they're not colluding so obviously they're colluding and

And then I did these interviews with the press, with Andrew Ross Sorkin, where I just kind of had my talking points and I was reading them.

And, you know.

Were you scared?

I mean, I wasn't scared.