Srinivasan was asked, on a live panel, what negotiating with governments is like when you are shopping for a jurisdiction. He says dealing with a small state is a lot like enterprise sales. His pitch is that big online networks have capital and connections but no territory, while small states have territory and legitimacy and little capital, so each has what the other lacks.
I think I'm more curious. What does like horse trading look like when you're shopping for a new jurisdiction? Like who's coming after you? What are the levers you can pull? Good question.
What do they offer? What do the offers look like?
…to like enterprise to small governments to large governments, small governments are actually a lot like enterprises. See, the thing is, this is one of the secrets, right? Most countries are small countries. Okay, most people have not actually made this graph. Take the 193 UN members, let's use as an operational definition of what a country is. There's exceptions and so on, but let's use that. And you make a histogram of their populations, and you'll find that half of them have less than 10 million people, and like 20% have less than 1 million people, right? Only a small fraction of countries by number are the 100 million plus countries like Russia, China, India, America. Most sovereigns are small. Like Cayman Islands, you know the population of Cayman Islands? Who knows? 60,000? Yeah, 70,000. Yeah, exactly. What's BVI? It's like 30K. That's smaller than Palo Alto. So the number one asset that they have is a flag. And so the complementarity between…
And you saw all of those when you were evaluating computers. That's
right. So, and that just means you just have to put a lot of miles and you actually have to see it on the ground. So,
who are the folks who were you think it's good and is good? And who are the folks you thought it was bad and they were good?