← The Bitcoin Treasuries Podcast with Tim Kotzman
The Bitcoin Treasuries Podcast with Tim Kotzman
The Sound Strategy Framework with Mathieu Agee of O21 Solutions
00:48:05
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Bitcoin Treasuries podcast. I'm Tim Kotsman. I'm here in the New York studio
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B
with Matt Agee, the founder of O21 Solutions. Matt, thanks for joining us today.
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C
Thanks, Tim. Pleasure to be here. So, yeah, I mean, I made it like here not in the achievement sense, but like, in the logistically. I made it here on a flight. So I mentioned to you earlier, I came in on miles on frequent flyer miles, and Houston is a big United Airlines hub, and so family and I frequently use miles to fly places. Flew here to today New York on miles, flew to Canada over the summer on miles. And a couple of weeks ago, in all the JP Morgan Chase uproar with strategy and all of that going on,
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B
down with the banks.
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C
Absolutely. So I definitely wanted to support them. And I came to realize, I always knew this, but my credit card is issued by JPMorgan Chase and, you know, put me in a conundrum because I like, I like the miles, but, you know, then you go card shopping and, you know, is it Wells Fargo? Well, they, you know, they opened up accounts for customers, you know, and there's other banks you could go to, but they, you know, maybe launder drug money or something like that. And then you've got other cards from, know, crypto companies now like Gemini and, and Coinbase for rewards. But like, then you're like with shitcoin casino. So, you know, it's just like the options out there, like, what do you do? Like, like, you know, all I want to do is, is like, get in my Jaguar, you know, take my family out to a nice dinner at. At Cracker Barrel, you know, pound some Bud Lights and then pay with my JP Morgan credit card. But the companies are making it very difficult to, like, want to do that now.
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B
Yeah.
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C
But anyway, long story short, I made it here on miles.
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B
So we need someone to come out with a bitcoin only credit card, so to speak. That would be helpful.
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C
I think it's probably in the works. If I'm not wrong, I think maybe Aqua's doing it. But yeah, definitely. I think that's something that. That's a need that's out there. Got it.
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A
Let's start with you.
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B
A little bit of your background and the mission of O21 Solutions as it pertains to corporate bitcoin adoption.
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C
Yeah, so we're focused on bitcoin corporate strategy. So corporate strategy adoption, bitcoin strategy development, implementation. And what makes us maybe a little bit unique is that we're focused on an industry vertical with energy. And that's in part because of my background, 20 years in the energy sector, but also the overall importance of the energy industry to the world and the synergies between energy, money, bitcoin and the sector. And I think there's a lot of benefits there, operational and monetary benefits for the industry. And I wanted to encourage, make the case for and facilitate adoption of Bitcoin. As you know, it's early, especially in corporate bitcoin adoption. These playbooks are not widely out there in house. Bitcoin expertise is probably zero. And so in the same way that they may seek outside help for technology adoption or whatever it may be, we're there to help provide that bitcoin expertise, education and playbooks.
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B
Got it.
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C
So beyond that, my vision of corporate adoption more broadly is probably more in line with what we saw five years ago with the initial foray from strategy Microstrategy back then, Tesla Block and others, with kind of using operating cash to acquire Bitcoin, using an operating business. And that's just kind of the way that we envision Bitcoin being a part of every business. Eventually every business will hold, Bitcoin will transact in Bitcoin, settle transactions on Bitcoin and with energy, maybe even mine Bitcoin. And so we think that eventually, if Bitcoin is the global reserve currency, if people are using it normally as money, then every company will need to use it and hold it. And because of its long term nature, its long term orientation, potential deflation with lowering prices. And we think it gives companies more Runway to think about what industries they want to do, like Runway to innovate, Runway to develop high quality products and services. And so we think ultimately like this is our ultimate vision, is that bitcoin can bring about this renaissance of creativity, innovation, efficiency and quality back into our lives. That today's suite of corporations now we can see some deterioration in the quality of things, the size of things, the ingredients of things and the price keeps going up and up. So back to my credit card example, it's like, you know, we want models that are long duration, treat the customer well and non exploitative. And bitcoin can help drive that type of transformation. Back to this kind of renaissance of creativity and high quality goods and services.
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B
You spent some time in leadership at both Exxon Mobil and Amazon. Can you talk about those experiences a little bit and what you learned and then later actually taught and implemented?
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C
Absolutely. So first thing to note about both of those companies, ExxonMobil and Amazon, I worked for Amazon Web Services, they both have very strong cultures. It's widely known that they have very strong cultures. ExxonMobil, I was there for 16 years, and oil and gas, obviously, but they're also like an engineering based company and they're a risk management company. A lot of people don't think of them that way, but they manage risks all day, every day to do what they do. And if you look at their core values and principles, it's really highly geared towards safety, security and operational excellence and cost efficiency. So those are kind of the foundational bedrock things that they do extremely well, better than anybody else. Which funnily enough, moving to Amazon and aws, people always ask me, was that a jarring experience going from a legacy oil and gas company to a tech company? And I always say no. It was actually surprisingly very seamless. And that's because fundamentally at the root they have very similar core values and principles. Like I mentioned, security, operational excellence, the different things about Amazon, they brought more of the customer focus, they brought bias for action. So the ability to actually quickly get things done, high velocity decision making, so they don't let things fester for a long time before raising things up for a decision. And so they kind of have the same bedrock, but then they have the quickness that allows them to kind of adapt to and change to conditions. So I learned a lot about culture, values, but I also had a number of different work assignments. So in the course of 20 years, I probably had 15 or 16 different jobs. That's just the nature of ExxonMobil specifically. They move you around a lot to develop you as a leader and there's a few key roles that I just wanted to touch on real quick and then I'll move on. Let me know if droning on and on. But early in my career I focused a lot on planning and budgeting. So financial planning and budgeting, which gave me lessons about capital allocation, how to kind of prioritize initiatives that your organization wants to execute, and then how to manage budgets. So working with executives to help their teams run day to day, managing their spending on workforce or software or hardware or whatever they may be buying and then stewarding throughout the year, tracking throughout the year. And then I had a chance to help re engineer the financial planning and budgeting process for ExxonMobil's digital organization, which was on the order of like a 2 and 2 or $2.5 billion budget at the time. So a very large kind of responsibility early on in my career. And through that it's, you know, you learn things like Lean, Six Sigma and all that stuff that we applied to solve that problem. Later on in my career, I worked for corporate strategic planning at ExxonMobil, which is an organization that sits just below the management committee and the board of directors. And they're focused on extremely long term planning and forecasting of, of macro energy and economic fields as well as they're responsible for providing, providing the, the corporate plan like expectations for the entire corporation. Like this is what you should expect from a technology perspective or an energy demand perspective or an economic perspective. And they also handled enterprise wide M and A. So got to learn a lot about that as well. So interesting thing about that experience was it was kind of at the height of ESG hysteria and a lot of litigation. New York AG suing the company, municipalities out in California suing the company. And there was a shareholder proposal back in 2017 that was lobbying ExxonMobil for additional climate disclosure risk. And so one of my proudest accomplishments to this day is working on behalf of ExxonMobil to respond to shareholders. The shareholder proposal passed. It was an active shareholder thing that passed. Responding directly to the shareholders on what does climate change mean, what does it mean for the company and what does it look like for the world? And so doing the research for that and all of the analysis and then responding ultimately in that year's outlook was a very big accomplishment for me. So I also helped ExxonMobil launch their trading business in 2019. And so again, you're applying all kinds of different leadership frameworks. And so by this time in my career I've had exposure to things like design thinking and agile, of course, scaled agile framework, lean startup, strategic learning or change management, leading change I think it's called. So a lot of different frameworks, a lot of different ways to think about how to take your aspirational vision and turn it into a practical execution from an organizational perspective so that everybody knows what's going on, that they're pointed in the same direction and that they're on task to an ultimate strategic goal.
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B
Can you walk us through the experiences that you had at those companies that ultimately led you to both Bitcoin and to establishing the sound strategy framework?
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C
Yeah, so led me to Bitcoin. I would say a lot of it's about long term orientation and general frugality and cost efficiency. So having to deal with that for your whole career, it's kind of a natural segue. There's a lot of similarities to me between oil and gas and Bitcoin commodities, long Term thinking, volatility. It was kind of just a natural extension for me. And know a number of the, the situations that I mentioned, I wasn't just trying to give you, you know, a resume. I, I brought them up because, you know, they, they taught me a lot about how corporations, very large enterprises, I mean two of the most successful companies in the history of the world thought about how to plan for the long term and be durable and last 100 or 200 years. And what led me to create the sound strategy framework based in Bitcoin is that I see a lot of the underlying principles. So Bitcoin is money and it's a long term savings technology, but it's also a lifestyle. It's a set of core values, beliefs, principles. And so I think what some people may miss, especially in the corporate adoption world, is that if you bolt Bitcoin onto your business because other people are doing it, but you don't understand it, you don't understand what it is or some of the underlying culture, then it may be a mismatch and it may not be successful or as successful as it otherwise would be. So I wanted to kind of amalgamate all of my learnings and create a set of tools and processes, very simple, very straightforward for companies who are getting into the bitcoin space to apply, not just for the bitcoin acquisition and mechanically, how do I buy it, how do I hold it, how do I ensure it, which is very important. But assuming I have an underlying business, a core business, what are my strategic objectives? How does that align with Bitcoin's core values? Can I adopt those core values and help them out compete my competitors? Because I'm not going to exploit them. I'm not going to have lower quality ingredients, I'm going to have high quality products and services. And so this is what I was talking about, at least to this competition. Imagine a customer in the future only on a bitcoin standard. It's hard to get people to spend their Bitcoin because it's such a good store value. The only way they're going to separate themselves with their Bitcoin is either because it's absolutely necessary, like you need a roof over your head, or it's because you're making something so compelling or so good that people are willing to separate themselves from their Bitcoin.
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B
That makes sense.
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C
So that's the vision and that's what these core values and processes are intended to try to instill in the business. And it doesn't matter if you hold Bitcoin or not. I think you can learn from the behaviors and from the principles and the core values of the culture.
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B
When you look at corporate bitcoin adoption today, are most companies getting it right? Are they missing the bigger picture? And is there like a vision that is the right vision in your opinion?
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C
Yeah, I think I'm not really one to judge right or wrong in terms of bitcoin adoption because it gets so early. And if my vision is actually that every company holds it and transacts in it and integrates it into their operations, then it's going to look a billion different ways. I think so far there's been a few models. I guess I'll broaden it beyond just the bitcoin treasury company, but bitcoin companies overall who maybe deal in the technology or their exchanges or whatnot. A really good example for me and full disclosure, I'm partnered with them, but I'm partnered with them because I admire them is river as a bitcoin only exchange. And a couple of reasons why I think they're hyper focused on what it is that they do. They're not trying to do a billion different things. They want to be a really good bitcoin only exchange. They're very transparent and we'll probably talk about that a little bit later, but they're very transparent in the way that they talk about features coming up or they do proof of reserves or they publish their private financials. And so this gets at some of the underlying behavior of like what makes a bitcoin company a bitcoin company. I would say like relentless focus and the transparency and then the kind of the customer value that people get from that. So that's somebody I point to that's doing really well. You could say the same thing about somebody like strike they came out with their bitcoin lending product, some pushback initially on that in the terms and conditions. And if you look at Jack on his openness every Monday to come on a Twitter show or a YouTube show and speak for hours at length on what they're doing and why and the underlying thesis for what's going on and the back and forth that he had directly with customers on X and other platforms on the lending product, that's a really good example as well. And then maybe some companies that you may be surprised at, I'll mention, but just for your average operating company that's trying to do things and maybe change the world, but they've also decided that bitcoin is a really good treasury asset to hold long term, is a company like Tesla or Block or even gme. And you can debate whether or not at the time anyone got it right, because some people have sold since they bought. Some people are kind of half hearted, half heartedly championing the cause for the bitcoin treasury strategy. But at the end of the day, GME has a huge cash reserve. Still, cash reserves are popular again, so they can be a viable tool for flexibility to adapt to a changing market. So we'll see. Those are good strategies. And Tesla, I looked at their numbers this week. It's been a material impact to their, to their quarterly earnings. I think their CAGR on their bitcoin position is over 20% per year, which, hey, like if, if the debasement rate is 10%, 8 to 10% per year, like, what else can you hold on your balance sheet? That's money, that's liquid, that's growing at 20% per year. And then lastly, of course, you know, the 800 pound gorilla is strategy. I would, I would also point to them as, as people who are extremely transparent with what they're doing. If you've ever attended their earnings call, they last a few hours and they're on camera and they're, they go into painstaking detail about what it is that they're doing. And they've, they've walked everybody through every step of their journey along the way since 2020. And Saylor gets on podcasts for hundreds, if not thousands of hours. And so that's just a level of openness and transparency that, you know, you don't really see anywhere else.
- [19:02]
B
Yeah, definitely. It's interesting thinking about the cash reserve development and thinking now when you have treasury companies that have whatever amount, 100 million, 200 million in cash, that maybe they haven't deployed yet, well, you could also think of that as their USD reserve until they do deploy it. And just so many different interesting strategies, no pun intended, to just think through the management of the operating business and the treasury strategy. And I guess it's becoming more and more apparent why there's so many podcasts talking about seemingly the same thing months after month, year, year after year. But there really is quite a bit to consider that's more nuanced than just buy bitcoin and hold it. Although that's also a good strategy.
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C
It is. And it's easy to say like in the moment, hey, why didn't you just YOLO 6 billion into Bitcoin? Because you had it and it compounds. But then you learn, well, you know, the credit rating agencies and credit investors like Certainty with dividend payments and you know, to get a better credit rating. Maybe that's something that's necessary and you learn that along the way. And in the meantime you also like again back to my corporate adoption vision. Like I don't want to be in a mud hut in the forest holding a lot of bitcoin because there's no companies that make anything anymore because bitcoin is the hurdle rate. And they say, well you know, we're just gonna, we're just gonna do that now and not make the thing that we were making before. Well then you don't have your house, you don't have a car, you don't, you know, that's taking it to the extreme but trying to make the point that there are people out there trying to do things in the world that people need, produce energy, bring that to market, produce the things that we need every day or just luxuries that we may enjoy. And bitcoin is a tool again to give people Runway, to build durable 100, 200 year long businesses and deliver the goods and services to people need in their, in their lives. So I think there's a lot of different ways to do it. I don't think that we've even scratched the surface of, of everything that's going to happen in the space. And you know, I, I think, I think it'll be interesting to see it play out and evolve over time.
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B
I keep thinking about the last two years because we're recording in December 2025. So beginning of last year 2024 you had the approval of the spot Bitcoin ETFs and you had BlackRock 13 trillion or something in AUM come out and several others. And then December of this year you have Vanguard 11 trillion in AUM finally kind of open for business, so to speak. Is it reasonable in your opinion that. I mean we saw PNC bank announce at 8am this Monday that they're the first U.S. bank to offer Bitcoin to their clients. Will be in essence January of 2026 through the mid, possibly the end of 2027 of just this parade of, of major banks and the trail of all the banks worldwide. Just really as Sailor says, like that's what's going to take us the next 10x and that is going to be like, along with nation states, hopefully like the major driver. Or do you think it's maybe more nuanced than that?
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C
I think I look at just the last two weeks you, you hit on a lot of them, but the last two weeks you've had two memos from the CFTC on collateral and what was the other one? I forgot, but two memos from the cftc. You've had Vanguard bend the knee. You've had bank of America say that they're going to start recommending Bitcoin 1 to 4% allocation. Their financial advisors would start recommending it. This letter from the OCC. Oh, yeah, it was spot Bitcoin exchanges in the U.S. right. So regulated spot Bitcoin exchanges. PNC bank you mentioned. So yeah, it looks like the floodgates are open and it looks like 2025 has been a year of preparation. Companies don't move quickly, especially not tradfi banks. And yeah, I mean, I think, I think it'll be interesting to see, like you mentioned price. It's hard not to be bullish on what's going on, like fundamentally with, you know, from first principles on the adoption of bitcoin in the, in the financial institutions and in corporations. So Yeah, I think 2026 and 2027 will be big years for adoption, regardless of the price.
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B
It was interesting to me, being from Pennsylvania, I have a relationship with PNC bank and it was surprising and several people said it's surprising that they were the first bank and it wasn't a bigger name bank that came out first. And so I'm just so curious what the reality is of, I mean, the news items. I almost saw like the PNC announcement and then I saw the OCC or some other announcement like after it and it's almost like they were like, hey, we're going to be the first one. And to your point that a lot of institutions do not move quickly. I mean, I would think
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C
you're only
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B
going to be able to have a couple of them announced and the rest are going to kind of feel like they're playing catch up. You would think?
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C
Yeah, I think if you're not at a minimum letting your customers buy, hold custody, you know, deposit and withdraw Bitcoin, you know, I think customers will begin to look for that service and go where that's offered. So I think it's in their best interest to offer those services.
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B
Yeah, maybe a little bit easier to set up an online bank account than to like, at least mentally be like, I'm going to move my brokerage account from Vanguard. Like that feels like even if it's all in your head, a heavier lift than just like going to a website and opening up a bank account, which a lot of banks allow you to do.
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C
Yeah. And I will put a plug in here Right. Just to make sure that I get this point across. It's also very easy to go on an exchange like river or your preferred exchange, and buy Bitcoin and take it into self custody. So I would just remind myself that bitcoin in self custody is the only way to truly achieve or enjoy all of its benefits and value propositions. Yeah, so yeah, there's always that too. Right. So a lot of people worry about the institutions coming, but while you can, while you can buy bitcoin and have it in self custody, I would recommend
- [25:45]
B
that, yeah, it's going to become more and more unique just because you'll hear so much about the institutional side, the corporate side of someone that actually has bitcoin in self custody or whatever arrangement and be like, what, tell me how that works. So yeah, it'd be like a stamp collection or baseball cards or something. Be like, how does that even work? How much is that worth?
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C
And I do think like as well, you know, companies, and this is something I'm focused on, is teaching them about custody. Companies can self custody, you know, it takes an investment. There's infrastructure, there's, there's process and there's, there's risk in doing that, but there's also extreme benefit. You know, in the history of corporate persecutions there, there may be advantageous reasons to hold at least a portion of, you know, your excess cash or treasury in a non confiscatable asset in self custody. So, you know, there's benefits to that definitely.
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B
So you already touched on this a little bit. But can you touch on why leadership and culture is so much more important than kind of the nuts and bolts of the custody setups and the playbooks, so to speak.
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C
Yeah. So if you think about corporate culture, like what is it? It's like the aggregate of everybody's experiences, beliefs, values and it's how you approach decision making. It's how you approach prioritizing and figuring out what is that you want to do. Like what industry do you want to be in, what, what products do you want to make, what services do you want to provide? And when, when things happen where you need to make a decision, you need to have a strong culture to, to fall back on and say, are we making a decision that is, you know, true to ourselves as a business in terms of what we want to provide society or our shareholders in terms of what we've promised them? And so if you don't define your corporate culture, so like in order to envision the world that you want, you need to be able to Describe and define the culture that you aspire to and have it front and center and then permeate throughout the organization. So if Bitcoin acquisition and holding it as a Treasury asset, or integrating into your business via mining or payments or whatever method you want is a decision that you make, is a service that you want to provide, then having a culture that backs that up would make that more successful likely. And it'll serve as a guide, a framework for sound decision making to have a successful business that ultimately wins in the marketplace, because that's the point, you want to beat your competitors.
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B
Makes sense. So this brings us to the sound strategy framework. Can you kind of lay out why you built it and what value it provides to companies?
- [28:45]
C
So the sound strategy framework is something that we've come up with that provides three different tools. Three so far, it's kind of V1 of it. So companies, when they're planning, they have different horizons, right? So part of my experience was really long term planning, like 25, 30 years out type planning. And that's where your principles come in, because those are your bedrock core values that you don't intend to change very often that will help you guide in your decision making. Then there's kind of more near term, kind of one to two or two to three year time frame where you have some strategic initiatives, like in whatever industry that you're in, you have a business and you want to go beat your competition or develop a new product offering, and you have a series of initiatives that you want to go spin off to execute. So there's that process of deciding what those things are and what enables those things, and then kind of assigns the ownership and tracks the execution of it. So that's the second part of the process. The last one is something that we call Bitcoin based budgeting, which is a tactical, like annual organizational budgeting process, which doesn't sound very interesting, but is crucial if you're a business that you have, you have to pay your vendors, you have to pay your people, you have to pay for your hardware or software expenses, and you have a budget and it's finite and it's not growing probably. So how do you make room? How do you make room for Bitcoin acquisition? So we've come up with, I think it's a clever way of prioritizing and thinking about Bitcoin as the hurdle rate for your organizational budgets. So the value that the framework overall then provides is one long term principles, near term cyclical process that allows you to transition your aspirations to practical execution. And then a tactical approach to fund those with capital allocation.
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B
And can you call out the specifics on each of those three frameworks, just briefly?
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C
Yeah. So the first part which I mentioned is the principles. It's called the sound strategy principles.
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B
Okay.
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C
It's 12. 12 principles. Amazon has like 16, others have five. You know, there's nothing magic about the number, it's just the 12 that I thought of. Okay. And you know, they can change over time, but that's the first part. The second part is called the orange horizon model, which, who doesn't like an orange horizon, be that a sunset or a sunrise. But the horizon word references this,
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B
you
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C
know, kind of three different horizons that companies need to think about as it relates to their corporate strategy. Really long term, medium term, and then tactical. And that's a cyclical four step process that's very efficient and time boxed to think about. What are your options? Like what are you good at, what are you not good at, what do you want to do and what are the things that you want to go chase and how do you prioritize those? So it's a cyclical way of getting to that answer and then assigning ownership and then tracking progress. And then the last one is Bitcoin based budgeting, which I talked about.
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B
Can you give us a quick Tour through the 12 sound strategy principles and why each one is really important?
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C
Yeah, so real quick, like lightning round. I'm just going to read through these because I don't have a perfect memory, but the first one is value for value. Okay, so I kind of talked about this earlier, but you want to emphasize exchanges that provide mutual benefit, building loyalty through genuine utility. Avoid exploitative models that erode trust over time and offer something so necessary and compelling that customers will choose you versus more bitcoin. So it's value for value. Excellence. Insist on superior quality and integrity, driving efficiency and competitive advantage. So just be excellent at what you do.
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B
Excellence. High quality stands by itself.
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C
Third is one chair. So we know what this means. It means be frugal. It means live within your means. Don't get too big too quickly. Enforce lean operations using Bitcoin's hurdle rate to allocate resources. Ruthlessly. Verify, don't trust. So we know this one, but this is about making decisions based on, you know, data driven. Well, data rely on verifiable data conducting due diligence to mitigate risks while embracing calculated boldness. So importantly though, it says take risks but be right. So you know you want to make data driven decisions, but you also want to listen to people through their anecdotes. Be bold in your, in your thoughts and in your ambitions. But like you want to be right about ultimately what you do. Accountability. So there's a strong ownership culture. We talked about that earlier in some of the good examples and foster ownership where leaders treat the company as their own art of the possible. So this is about thinking like creatively and long term. Like I mentioned renaissance like I mean like era long projects that don't pay off for eons. Like if you want to build big things it may take a long time and today's companies are very short term focused. So art of the possible is about that just do things. So this is about getting to decisions quickly, taking decisions rapidly and then quickly delivering value so it's not waiting forever in agony debating your colleagues on what's the right answer here and then coming to a grinding halt. You just need to do things, stay humble and stack sats. Of course this one's about delivering results. You can't just make big promises, you need to actually follow through on them. And that's what the stack stats is referencing. It's not actually like buying bitcoin in this case. It's like metaphorically stay humble and deliver results. Transparency we talked about earlier. Communicate openly, honestly with authenticity. You've talked about authenticity a lot before. Right? Fostering trust through clarity and reducing hidden risks in operations. Embrace volatility. It's not always smooth sailing. View uncertainty as opportunity, turning challenges into competitive advantages. Decentralized authority, which is predominantly just advocating for a flatter organization with more distributed decision making power. Back to the doing things quickly. Organizations today are extremely bloated. There's lots of layers of management and people have to make a lot of different trips to different meetings of different executives to get to a decision. Right. So you want to try to decentralize that. So empower teams to enhance adaptability and innovation and then learn continuously. So commit to education and ongoing learning. So that's all 12? Sorry for reading my notes, but yeah,
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B
no, the last one reminds me of a quote from maybe a decade or longer ago that in some cases you can make the case that the only or the biggest competitive advantage that an organization has is their ability to learn fast, faster than someone else, their ability to continuously learn and be in that flywheel. So yeah, that's what that really speaks to me when you mention that one in particular.
- [36:00]
C
Absolutely. I mean lifelong learning is kind of the point. I mean you could look at just examples of bitcoin, treasury, company space, like strategy, continuously Learning from their own activities. You know, from convertible notes to was. It was even a callable loan at one point to preferred shares to cash reserves. And just constantly learning. You know, things are always changing around you, even if you know you're doing everything right. There may be external factors like credit rating agencies. Yeah. Or.
- [36:28]
B
Yeah, just random example. But there's always something. There's always something to learn and address.
- [36:35]
C
You just reminded me like, you know, this MSCI thing, it's hard to keep talking about ExxonMobil, but it's kind of like I worked there for 16 years and I lived, I lived through a phase of, like I said, like litigation and debanking and all of that. And in the height of COVID I don't know if you recall, like oil prices were low because global transportation was at a standstill and nobody was doing anything. I was very aware oil prices went negative at one point and kind of right after that I just checked, it was April of 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Index delisted ExxonMobil in favor of Salesforce. Right.
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B
Yep.
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C
And it's like kicking somebody while they're down. Right.
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B
I mean, numbers are numbers.
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C
So I kind of want to write about this at some point, but like, there's a lot of parallels, I think, between strategy and what they're doing with the balance sheet that they're building and a company like ExxonMobil.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. I don't think the oil refinery analogy was an accident.
- [37:36]
C
No, absolutely not.
- [37:37]
B
Or several of the others. Yeah, indeed. Can you walk us through bitcoin based budgeting a bit and how it creates room for an accumulation strategy for either a business or a family office, depending on who is implementing the strategy.
- [37:52]
C
Yeah. So this gets at companies who say, or who would be prone to say, if you're coming to them, trying to, to pitch bitcoin accumulation is. Well, I just, I just don't have any money for bitcoin. Like, I've got a, I've got a core business. It's taking all my time and attention. It's taking all of my capital and my resources and I've got to pay my staff, I got to pay my vendors, I've got to, I've got to pay all these people and oh, by the way, I don't actually have the money to do that. That's all in receivables. And while I wait for my receivables, I got to take a loan against my receivables. And you're constantly basically living paycheck to paycheck or invoice to invoice. I think that describes probably 85/% of companies in the world who are in that spot. So how can they possibly stack bitcoin? Well, so this tries to get at. Well, your budget is typically derived especially for larger businesses through inertia. You kind of take what you did last year and roll it forward and you may cut a little bit or execs may come down and say, yeah, you got to cut 10% of your base budget so that we can make room for this new thing that we want to do. And lo and behold, like through my 20 years of experience, people always figure out how to get that 10%. They always figure it out. So the realization is if bitcoin is a priority, if it's growing at 30 plus percent per year and you think that that's a viable long term thing for you, then you can make it a priority in your strategic initiatives and fund it with a budget. Organizations do that all the time, right? So if you come up and your competitors like, oh, well, they're, they're doing the AI thing, you know, they're incorporating ChatGPT and Grok and anthropic and like, gee, we're going to be behind, we need to make room for that in our organizational budget this year. Well, it's no different than allocating budget to a bitcoin purchase. So the point is, people have maybe heard of zero based budgeting, which is this is kind of like borrowing from heavily, but it's with a bitcoin focus because that's the hurdle rate and you want to start from a clean sheet of paper, go through your budgets and try to validate everything. Right. And I understand that that may not be viable for a lot of people, that's a lot of work to do. But it's more of the principle and the concept of being able to prioritize something if it's important, you can make room for it. And this is an approach and a process and we lay that out as to how to go about doing that with a, with a framework and steps and, and an approach to get that done in a short period of time.
- [40:35]
B
Got it.
- [40:36]
A
Yeah.
- [40:36]
B
I mean that makes sense to just be thoughtful about every single line item and go through it, if not on a monthly or quarterly basis, on a yearly basis or as needed, and say, hey, what's going on here? Like how important is this and why? And have that conversation.
- [40:54]
C
I mean, it's kind of like what you saw this year with Doge and the government, right? And they would publish on X, like, hey, we're paying for a million licenses for this thing that nobody uses. Yeah, it's like, okay, companies do that all the time. And then what does the opportunity cost? Well, it's 50% per year. And individuals know this intuitively. Right. If you want to make room for something, you need to kind of not go to Starbucks or, you know, not go to the movies or whatever. Like, you figure out a way to make it work. Businesses aren't really any different. Got it. All right.
- [41:24]
B
And to wrap up, can you walk us through how putting Bitcoin at the center and the sound strategy at the center really helps companies to change the way that they think about saving, executing and serving their customers. Not just this year, but over like decades.
- [41:45]
C
So actually, I'll point to your conference, the UN conference in September, and Saylor's keynote there really resonated with me because he had this part of it where he said, you know, fix the money, fix the world. But you can only fix the world if you fix the. And he goes on to name a series of examples. And, you know, part of the reason I'm focused on corporate adoption. If you think about your interactions with companies on a day to day basis, it's like most of your day, it's most of your life. And they're like probably the single greatest invention in history. The most important facility or vehicle a company is to organize resources, capital, labor, raw materials to bring about value to the world in an efficient way. And what we see today is not we see deterioration and we see broken money. Right? And so for me, you want to fix the money, fix the world, you have to fix the culture. And in order to fix the culture, you need to try to name the one that you aspire to. And so that's what we've tried to do here. And again, that's kind of back to the long term vision of Bitcoin as this provider of a renaissance for durable business. And so we think that the sound strategy framework, through the principles, through the orange horizon model, the cyclical process and the budgeting process, and maybe later we'll get into things like performance evaluation and career development and other corporate processes that can benefit from these values. We think this is a good start at trying to name that culture so that businesses can accelerate their offering of these high quality products and services.
- [43:34]
B
Matt, where can people find you online?
- [43:37]
C
So my website is 021 Solutions. That's letter O, number 2, number 1021 Solutions.com and we are on xdecy21s is the handle. I'm also on LinkedIn so you can just search O21 Solutions there. I'm also in person in Houston if you want to come to a Bitcoin meetup. I regularly attend those so come see me there.
- [43:59]
B
Awesome. Matt, thanks for joining us today.
- [44:01]
C
Thank you.
- [44:03]
A
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