I do remember the whole thing as being very argumentative, hot blooded... a permanent state of friction between Jon and Chris, Chris and me, me and Jon.
The average small-business owner uses 18 apps to run their business every day, and if those applications don't allow data to flow seamlessly and they don't integrate, it's going to become a point of friction. It's going to prevent the small business from being successful.
XRP is a digital asset that exists on the XRP ledger, one of the open-source products created by Ripple. XRP is a pivotal component of the Internet of Value, since it solves a key point of friction: the pre-funding of nostro/vostro accounts necessary to facilitate cross border payments.
There are a lot of really fabulous things that get done with digital assets and blockchain technologies to reduce friction, to reduce costs, and enable things that weren't possible before.
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
With a contained environment, there is the promise of friction. And that is where the drama comes from.
As humans our hangups seem to shape our interaction with the world around us. They are often the source of our intolerance and friction with people who think differently than us, and even the reason we build walls between us and the people close to us.
2009 was one of the busiest, most insane, stressful periods in my entire career. I was raising a bunch of money, buying a bunch of Twitter. I saw my friend fired as CEO of Twitter. Uber was growing like a weed. As these companies get bigger and bigger, there's more and more friction. Being public was the last thing I wanted to do at the time.
In mobile, people really love having single-use case experiences. They want low friction to getting to the application's use case.
Like most MPs, I campaigned and voted to remain in the EU. I was concerned that extricating ourselves from a relationship built up over 40 years would be complex and challenging and that the economic cost of increasing friction in our trade with the EU would be high.
