Milk Road's FTX "Deep Dive"

Shaan tells a story about how his company, Milk Road, inadvertently highlighted issues with FTX before its collapse.

"We used to do something called deep dives, which was basically an ad product. If you pay us a ton of money, we would do a report on you. The catch was we're going to do the report we actually want to do - you don't get to say what we say in the report.

With FTX, it seemed like a no-brainer. They were the richest player and there were a bunch of good things to say. They paid us a bunch of money, and we went to write the report.

We were thinking about the devil's advocate perspective - what doesn't smell right about this? We noted that their chief strategy officer was only 24 years old, which seemed unusual for a $20 billion company. We also wrote that it wasn't clear what the relationship was between Alameda Research and FTX, and whether there was a firewall between them.

FTX asked us to take that part out. We refused, so they told us to hold off on publishing. They had paid us half the amount already. We'd check in every few months, asking if they were ready for us to release it, but they'd always say no.

Then, sure enough, that unclear connection between Alameda and FTX turned out to be a very, very big problem actually. It was like we had spotted stage 4 cancer without realizing it."