So I found this article about Byrne's speech

"He thinks the only way cryptocurrencies could truly compete with Bitcoin was if they offered a superior technical feature. However, Bitcoin developers could just implement that feature into Bitcoin via a fork. Nevertheless, he did acknowledge the core Bitcoin code contains a lot of “slop,” which he speculated could cause potential logistical problems for Bitcoin in the future."

So Byrne doesn't favor altcoins that much, but he can see that they might be needed in the future.

Bottomline: If this guy quoted XC in his speech and was interested in the concept to the extent of opening a "communication channel" with the team, then I wouldn't start selling my XC, were I you

PS: The article does not feature the whole speech, word to word.