Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested today in the Bahamas on the tails of what will go down as one of the most spectacular collapses of a US corporation in history.
There is a lot you can take away from this incident. How ripe the crypto space is for fraud. How dangerous the "fake it 'til you make it" mindset in tech has become. How we have a false belief that fraud is something only entrepreneurs of the past conducted in and now we're in the clear. But to me, there's one theme that looms quite a bit larger than the rest:
How nobody in their 20s is mature enough or individually brilliant enough to justify an absence of strong guardrails and guidance from trusted adults.
Sam Bankman-Fried is fully responsible for what he did. He's 30 years old. Anyone smart enough to even understand how cryptocurrency works is absolutely smart enough to foresee the glaring issues in taking FTX customer deposits and loaning them in mass to a separate crypto trading firm.
But just as much as we should blame SBF for getting himself into this situation, we need to turn a mirror on ourselves and ask how we as a society keep seemingly cultivating an environment where these situations can happen. Elizabeth Holmes. Adam Neumann. Sam Bankman-Fried. They're not isolated incidents.
We've developed a culture the last few decades in America of idolizing the 20-year-old innovator extraordinaire. The college dropout. The coding mastermind. The savvy App Store millionaire. We've placed them on a pedestal and told them, "You are the example for what it means to be successful in the tech age."
But evolution doesn't adapt as quickly as culture. The 20-year-old brain still isn't fully developed. The 20-year-old brain still has a lot of growing and failing and learning and maturing to do. The 20-year-old brain still needs guardrails and guidance. Yet we're consistently taking these incredibly vulnerable 20-year-olds and calling them heroes so often that they never feel it's necessary to seek out guardrails and guidance. They're empowered to think that they can drive all the way to Billionaire Row by the seat of their own brilliance when in reality they're often driving themselves to their own prison cell.
I don't care how good of a coder you are or how eloquently you can describe the blockchain to me. If you're in your 20s, you need help to stay on the tracks. Those people should take ownership of setting their own guardrails and finding their own mentors when possible, but I think those in positions to be mentors to these folks should take more ownership of that role too. It takes a village to raise a 20-year-old.
To Sam Bankman-Fried: I believe you when you say you didn't intend to commit the harm that you did, but you're at fault for the horrendous decision you made and for not having any checks around you to point you in the other direction. It's okay that you only have $100,000 in your bank account now because that's $100,000 more than you'll need in prison.
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