CZ's Untold Story: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Binance's Founder

Quick Overview

CZ's early life involved immigrating from China to Canada around 1989 after a lengthy passport and visa process, where his parents struggled financially, leading him to work jobs like flipping burgers at McDonald's starting at age 15, before pivoting through early programming roles, licensing exchange software in Japan, and eventually co-founding Binance in 2017 after pivoting away from a planned exchange venture in Tokyo due to regulatory shifts in China.

Key Points: CZ immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, in 1989 at age 12 after his parents, both professors in China, secured exchange and transfer programs, noting that visa processes became easier immediately after they left. His mother, a math and history teacher in China, worked minimum wage sewing clothes for 7-10 years upon arrival because she could not secure comparable employment due to limited English. CZ financed his education at McGill (where he switched from biology to computer science) through summer and part-time work, graduating without student debt, unlike his co-host who accumulated $30,000 in debt. He worked as a coder in Tokyo for Fusion Systems, writing order execution software, which was similar to the software that drives Binance today, focusing on low-latency efficiency. After working four years as a senior developer and manager at Bloomberg in New York following 9/11, he moved to Shanghai in 2005 to start a fintech company with partners, which pivoted to general IT work for hire after discovering Chinese brokers could not work with their foreign-owned enterprise. In 2013, after six months of learning about Bitcoin, CZ sold his Shanghai apartment for roughly $900,000, bought Bitcoin in trenches averaging around $600, and joined Blockchain.info as VP of Engineering for six to seven months. He left OKCoin in early 2015 due to cultural disagreements, and in 2017, after his software licensing business for exchanges collapsed due to Chinese government shutdowns, he pivoted the 20-person team to create an exchange via an ICO, leading to Binance.