78. Defendant Yishan Wong, in response to an article authored by Plaintiff on the website Quora, wrote the following comments (among others) indicating his knowledge of payments-related laws and regulations on June 15, 2011:
“Yeah, I am constantly amazed at how people haven’t yet learned that the paymentsindustry is really hard to get into. It was okay for first-wave companies like PayPal to besurprised by it, but anyone who does their due diligence before starting a paymentsstartup should know everyone – literally everyone, including regulators and thegovernment – is going to be working against you. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen and go start a photosharing startup.”
“Payment startups face a far more adversarial environment, including utter and totalhostility. It was okay for PayPal to whine about this (though they didn’t), because itwasn't known. But now it’s known. If you run a payments startup, you are fightingagainst thugs, actual criminals – both real ones and government ones. It is not normalbusiness. It is like trying to start a business in an actual warzone. Complaining aboutthis is just whining. There is no actual solution than to win. Anything else is, in fact, justwhining.”
Presumably with the hope of “winning,” Defendant Wong proceeded to invest his own personalfunds in Unlicensed MSB Defendant Balanced (part of a $3.4 million seed financing round)