Good morning from Abu Dhabi, where Fortune is holding its flagship Global Forum event for CEOs, and where I sat down with Richard Teng, who just stepped into the hardest chief executive job of anyone in crypto—or possibly any other sector for that matter. Teng has the top job at Binance, which until last week was held by the company’s charismatic founder, Changpeng Zhao—known to crypto folks as CZ.
It’s never an easy job to replace a founding CEO since founders exert such a huge influence on a company’s culture. I can think of examples where this worked, including Apple, where Tim Cook didn’t try to replicate Steve Jobs’ brilliance at product and design, but instead crafted a less dazzling strategy that played to his own strengths as an operations and supply-chain guy.
Teng is looking to do something similar. He is not going to try and be CZ, who built a cult following among crypto geeks with a swashbuckling style and deft product innovation. Instead, Teng is going to tap into his background as a regulator and remake Binance to compete in what he sees as a new era for crypto that will be defined by compliance and institutional money.
This is a sound strategy, and Teng will be aided by the fact CZ telegraphed a month ago that the new CEO is his chosen successor and has the support of other top Binance executives. All of this would normally mean that the incoming CEO has a decent chance to keep the company’s hold on its longtime place as the top dog of crypto. But for one thing: the nature of CZ’s departure.
In the ordinary course of things, a founding CEO doesn’t exit the company under a cloud of criminal charges as CZ did. Those circumstances not only mean that Binance must be careful with its cash to pay an eye-popping $4.3 billion fine, but it also deprives Teng of strategic guidance since CZ is barred from having anything to do with the company for three years. Meanwhile, other shoes are set to drop in the form of the SEC’s ongoing lawsuit against Binance.
This doesn’t mean Teng can’t pull this off. By his account, Binance is carrying no debt and remains profitable—and it doesn’t hurt, of course, that crypto markets are finally on an upswing. But it will be an uphill slog to say the least. You can read more in Fortune’s full account of Teng’s first on-the-record interview as CEO.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
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