Coinbase Founder: The Crazy Journey Of Building A $100 Billion Company: Brian Armstrong
Guests: Brian
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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Everybody I talked to actually thought it was a bad idea. Any reasonable person would have quit. I was filled with self-doubt. And then Coinbase was valued at a billion dollars.
Brian Armstrong, CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange.
I saw technology as a way to try to have a big impact on the world. If the thing that got you started in the first place was fear—fear of never being important or fear of never feeling fulfilled—you're just going to give up.
Cryptocurrency is the biggest transformation of money since the invention of paper. Coinbase was being deemed the most trustworthy brand in crypto.
It tipped at a certain point from "this growth is really good" to "things are getting a little crazy here." If you more than double a company in a year, you're really going to start to see a lot of stuff break.
Coinbase is just telling employees in an email that it plans to lay off 18% of its workforce.
We had never done a layoff before. I remember I went up in front of the company and my voice cracked. It was awful.
I actually think Coinbase is in deep trouble here, and let me tell you why.
The pressure, the scrutiny, and the headlines—how are you dealing with your emotions?
This is getting very personal. It’s a real superpower to care less what other people think.
Without further ado, I’m Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody’s listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Brian, when I read through people's stories, there are sometimes really obvious causal factors that led them to become the people they are today. But with you, I'm more compelled by the less obvious factors. If we go back to your early years when you were a young man on the West Coast of the United States, what are the less obvious reasons as to why you've ended up where you are today and achieved what you have achieved in your life?
Great question. One of the less obvious reasons, probably, is that I was an introvert. I just wasn't really very good with people. I didn't really have that many friends. As a young person, I was quite shy. I really found a love of computers and I liked just being by myself and playing with computers, learning about how they worked, programming.
In our technological age, some of the people who got excited about computers early on and just found a love of building things have now become CEOs of companies, which is kind of a strange thing. For a long time, I didn't think I could be a CEO because I envisioned CEOs of companies as being like these military generals who barked orders at people. They were these strong, charismatic leaders, and I always felt like, "Well, that's not me. I'm kind of like an engineer, I'm kind of a nerd."
What I've learned over time, now reading enough books and things historically, is that introverts can actually make really good CEOs. Of course, there are lots of different types of CEOs. There's not just one mold. There are people who love marketing, people who love operations, people who love sales, and then there are engineer CEOs. So, that's one reason that I think is maybe a little less known why I'm here.
Another reason is that I just became very passionate about this idea of trying to have an impact on the world. I think it again may have come from that introversion as a kid. I felt like I had good ideas, but it was hard for me to get them out there and for people to listen to them. I didn't feel confident speaking in some public setting or whatever. I have lots of practice doing it now, so I'm a well-trained introvert, but I saw technology as a way to try to have a big impact on the world. It could get my ideas out there in a scalable way, even if I felt like maybe I couldn't.
In hindsight then, going back to those early years as well, what was your luck or privilege? What were the factors that were out of your control that happened to be the case that also aided this trajectory?
I mean, there was a lot of things that went right. I was in a home with loving parents that were very supportive of education and my passions and interests. My mother worked at IBM, so we had an early computer in our home. She was kind of an early programmer there. We had early access to the internet, things like that.
I also graduated and studied computer science and economics, and I had enough—this was a very important thing—I was not afraid to go try starting companies because I knew that if I failed, I could actually go back and still get a job. People always think of entrepreneurs as such risk-takers. Honestly, it's not that risky.
If you're a young person and you get a little bit of money to go start a company, like in Silicon Valley, people will write you angel checks for these things. You can pay yourself a salary, go try it for a couple of years, and if it doesn't work, you go back to a company and it's often viewed as a badge of honor that you've tried a startup. You have this entrepreneurial DNA, and you're somehow more valuable inside a company now if it doesn't work and you go back.
In many places in the world, that's not the case. Failure of a company is considered a mark of shame, not a badge of honor. I think many people don't have the luxury of being able to raise these seed rounds and things like that. Crypto is trying to help that, by the way, but in Silicon Valley, you can get angel checks for things.
I tried starting many different things over the years as side projects. With Coinbase specifically, I didn't really even quit my job to try it full-time until I had gotten an angel investment. So, I was able to pay myself something. It wasn't a lot, but I was able to pay myself something and de-risk it.
If I had asked you then at say, 10 years old, what you wanted to be when you grew up, what would you have told me?
At 10 years old, I mean, I really had no idea. I think the first glimmer of it that I had was in high school. I had started building some websites. I remember as a senior in high school, I went on this retreat and I remember having this thought: the thing that has excited me most in my life so far was I had built this kind of simple website or app, and it felt like this really incredible feeling.
I went to sleep, and I woke up in the morning and I checked the stats, and like 200 people or something had visited the website while I was sleeping. I was like, "Wow, that was so cool. I don't know who these people are; they're all over the world." It felt like a superpower. If I could build something that could be working and helping people while I was sleeping, if not 200 people, why not 2,000, 2 million, whatever.
So, I do remember having sort of a... it stuck in my memory that of all the things I've tried in my life—sports, reading, science, school—that was the thing that really got me excited in a way that nothing else had at that point. So, I was probably in the very early stages of discovering my passion at that point.
Just listening to you speak there, my brain was telling me that because I'm trying to make this link between why being an introvert led you to technology and then also having this desire to have impact. It sounds like there technology allowed you to be an introvert and have impact because it was the bridge between you and the outside world. When that website goes live, you don't have to see these people or persuade them, but you can have your impact by a piece of technology that's enabling something in their lives.
Exactly.
You go off and study Economics in university?
Yeah, so I had been taking some programming classes on the side in high school.
Why?
I couldn't help it. In my free time, I would just play with computers until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I was dead tired at school every day because I was wide awake at night playing with computers, learning about Linux and all these things. School was a little bit boring in some ways.
So, I basically decided if I'm this interested in computers—my parents were supportive of this, of course—there were community college classes and I went to try to take some of those classes to learn programming. I got some books from the library about how to program Java and things like that. I couldn't understand any of it, but I was trying to work my way through it.
So then when it came time to go to college, I was basically like, "Okay, computer science, that seems like the closest thing to what I'm interested in." I was also interested in business, and they didn't offer a business degree, so I studied economics instead. That was the closest thing to a business degree they offered. That was literally my thinking. Now, of course, I had no idea later I'd start a crypto company which was literally the intersection of computer science and economics. But at the time, I just thought I want to write software and I want to learn how to start a business.
At some point during college, you start your first, I guess, real company, which is a tutoring business. Was that... did you have grand plans of turning that into a mega business or did you stumble into that?
More like stumbled into it. As a college student, my roommates and I were always trying to think about how to make extra money. I went around and I was looking at these on-campus jobs. You could work at the library, there was a coffee shop, and they paid like $10 or $15 an hour or something like that.
One of the upperclassmen, I remember he told me, "I'm tutoring this high school kid and they're paying me $60 an hour." I was like, "Wow, $60 an hour? It was like three or four times what you could make at these other on-campus jobs." So, I decided to try doing it myself. I got in touch with some people and I started tutoring high school kids in math and science and things like that, and it paid really well.
So, my roommate and I at the time, we were starting to brainstorm, like, "Why don't we start a little tutoring company and help high school kids and their parents match with tutors at the university?" So we got that going, we got maybe 10 or 20 of our fellow students kind of connected in, and then we said, "Alright, let's make a website for this to connect even more people, maybe try to expand it to other schools."
Eventually, over a period of a couple of years, this idea just kept evolving and we started to think about it as—we didn't really know this at the time—but we were kind of making an online marketplace, like Airbnb but for tutoring. I got to practice building web applications, there was payroll and incorporation and sales and marketing and taxes. I could never really get it to grow enormous, to become like a really big business, but that was the seed of it that later became a little bit more of a company.
Why then? Why couldn't you make it become a big business? What was the lesson in hindsight, what was the barrier?
We learned this the hard way about creating a marketplace, which was that in this particular industry in tutoring, a lot of times you would introduce a student and a tutor and our business was trying to take a 10% fee by matching these people. We were basically trying to do all the payments through our website, like billing with a 10% fee.
What would happen often is they would meet the tutor, they'd do the initial first payment, but then afterwards they'd start paying them under the table. So, I realized at a certain point we were basically just getting in the way. They wanted us to match them, but they didn't want us to be the whole billing apparatus. It was much more of a local repeat business, in-person business.
For years and years, I struggled with that. There was a counter-intuitive moment which allowed me to pivot away from that. I eventually realized this thing isn't working; I need to go get a "real job." As I was going to start my next real job—this was at Airbnb, where I became an early employee—I was about to shut down the tutoring site.
I was feeling a lot of pain about that because I was like, "Well, I don't know, there are still like 5,000 to 10,000 people every month who are looking at this thing and using it." It felt like such a pain to shut it down. So I was like, "What if I were to just put everything on autopilot? We're not going to be involved in any of the payments, there's no customer support, this is literally just going to be a directory like a tutoring directory. You can contact these tutors, you can pay them however you want, and I'm just going to try to make it like a free thing, maybe I'll put up some ads."
So, I basically had like a week before I was starting my new job. I got rid of all the payments, I messaged all the people using it, was like, "You can pay people directly now," and I was going to put up some ads. I did one more thing at the last hour, which was I said, "If you want to have like a featured profile as a tutor, with like a little featured badge and come up first in search results, then you can just pay $10 a month."
That was it. I basically stopped looking at the website and I went to go focus on my new job. Every year thereafter, the site doubled after I made that change. So, basically, the lesson was: stop trying to extract value and start trying to create more value. At that point, I think that was the only tutoring directory online that had free profiles and you could just contact the tutors. So, it actually started to grow. Later, somebody ended up acquiring it for maybe like $2 million dollars or something.
Wow.
To me, that was like a seven or eight-year "base hit" outcome where for years, I was struggling to get anything to work.
But the truth is, they paid $2 million for it, but the lessons you learned—many of those translate into the business that you went on to build in Coinbase. Is there anything else? Because I look at my first startup that I made out of dropping out of university, and there's so many lessons. One of them is what you've said, which is I was so romantic about my hypothesis about what this business should be that I got in the way of what customers wanted to do. But is there anything else that you learned from that seven-year first messy startup that are key philosophies for you today in Coinbase?
I think one of the big realizations I had in starting that tutoring company—which again, you can always look back and see how the pieces connect, but at the time you're just wandering in the desert, you're lost. I felt like I was a failure, I felt like I had no idea what I even wanted to do, I didn't even know if I wanted to be an entrepreneur. It basically wasn't working.
But looking back with hindsight, one thing I realized was how broken the global financial system was. Because it was incredibly difficult to collect money from all these students and pay these tutors, not only in the U.S. but in various places around the world. I remember going through this incredibly onerous process to set up credit card processing and payments that I was sending out.
I remember the bank called me one day and they were like, "Are you an aggregator of funds?" I was like, "I don't even know what that is." They were basically treating me almost like I was a criminal. "What are your licenses to do all this stuff?" I was like, "This is crazy." One of the hardest things about that business was just to get the payments—collecting payments and distributing payments to the tutors as a marketplace. So, that gave me sort of a real insight later when I saw the Bitcoin white paper years later. I was like, "That system is broken, and this could be an opportunity to fix it."
What about Airbnb? So you went and worked in the product team at Airbnb?
Yeah, I was a technical product manager, which basically meant I wrote some code and I tried to be a product manager. I think I was the 40th employee at Airbnb. I basically moved back to Silicon Valley from—I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for a year or so, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
I'm going to have to talk about that. What did that give you, that experience of travel and going to Argentina and living there for how many years?
A little less than a year, yeah. It gave me a few things. One was that I got to see what a hyperinflation economy looked like. A lot of people who've only grown up in a developed country, they've never experienced hyperinflation and they've never felt firsthand what that can really do for a population and people.
It really deeply affects the culture of places like Argentina. There's just this deep distrust of the government and there's a pessimism about the future. In countries that I think are the most forward-thinking, there's a sense of optimism about the future: "Hey, we can build a better future." In places like Argentina—my impression was that people felt like the best days are behind us and "Live every day like it's your last because it could all disappear tomorrow," meaning your wealth and everything, which has happened many times in their history.
Also, just little things like you'd go to the restaurant the next week and the prices are higher and they put a sticker on top of the menu because the prices keep changing so frequently. It really harms the poorest people in society because they're the ones holding their wealth in cash as opposed to wealthy people who can hold real estate, things that adjust for inflation. Now they can hold Bitcoin.
So, anyway, it gave me a front-row seat into that. It probably gave me a little bit of a sense of confidence too, because I had never studied abroad or really lived in a foreign country by myself where I didn't really speak the language very well. So, there were things like that where I was just trying to learn how to become more independent and grow up.
You were running the tutoring business at this point?
I was doing a lot of things. I was running the tutoring business, I was doing some contract software development just kind of while traveling, I was trying to build some real estate investments in the U.S. I was basically trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. There was a whole process I went through to try to figure that out if you're curious.
The digital nomad piece, which is becoming much more common these days because we've had this pandemic and we've built systems which allow us to work more remotely, but just generally people were choosing that lifestyle. When I did that, when I was 21 in the gap between my startup failing and then me pivoting into a new business, I found it quite lonely.
I remember being actually on a plane flying from one country to another—Brazil to Thailand or something—and seeing this, I think it was Techstars or something, this San Francisco incubator or New York-based incubator where they were building companies. I was living the dream in many people's eyes in these hot countries with my laptop, but something inside me was missing: community, a sense of shared mission, whatever it is. I wondered if you can relate to that in any way.
Totally. I found it actually quite lonely as well. In some ways, that was the point, which was to step outside my comfort zone, feel like I had to make new friends in a new city. But yeah, I mean, there was a good five or six months there in Buenos Aires where I felt like I didn't really know that many people. I was feeling kind of homesick. Eventually, I tried to meet some local people like expats, various hostels. By the time I left, I felt like I had a budding friend group and I liked it more, but it was lonely there for a while.
You said you used that time to figure out what you wanted to do with your life, as if there's some kind of system there.
I don't know if there's a perfect system, but I read this book by Seth Godin called *The Dip*. I went back to read it many years later, and it's actually a relatively simple book. But at that moment in that time, that's what I needed to hear. It's a very simple idea, which is: what's the thing that you would still want to be doing 10 years from now, even if you hadn't seen a lot of success?
Because most things in life, you start off as a beginner, you have a fast pace of learning, it's kind of fun, but then after you're a beginner, there is this "dip" in the middle where you're not an expert, you're not one of the best people in the world at it, you're probably not making money from it, but you're not a beginner anymore. There's this long slog to go through the middle, you know, putting in your 10,000 hours. Lots of various people have talked about this.
I was doing a variety of things at that time. I was running that tutoring company, doing some real estate investing, learning martial arts, and various things, traveling in Argentina. I basically sat down one day and I was like, "Okay, what is the thing that 10 years from now I'm still going to want to do this and be passionate about it, even if I'm not successful at it because I just love doing it?"
The only thing I could really write on my list was tech entrepreneurship. Part of the point of that book is if you're not willing to go through the dip, then quit now because it's... so I was like, "Do I really want to be doing great real estate investments 10 years from now?" I was like, "I don't actually love real estate investing." So maybe I should just stop doing that. Maybe I should stop doing this and maybe I should...
So it became this very clarifying moment. "Okay, if I want to be a tech entrepreneur," because I had been doing that in some way, shape, or form for 5 or 10 years, and I was pretty sure I'd want to be doing it 10 years from now. I was like, "Why do I live in Buenos Aires? I should go to the center of tech entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley." That's happening all over the world now—Silicon Valley is kind of decentralized—but at that time especially. So I kind of stopped doing everything else, moved to Silicon Valley, and went all-in on that. Then I think within maybe seven years of making that decision, Coinbase was valued at a billion dollars.
Crazy.
So it did really help clarify my ambitions and I just put it all into one thing.
That is atypical. There’s going to be entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires listening to this that are booking flights to San Francisco.
It could be anything. If you really want to be an actor, you should probably go to Hollywood or something. Or if you really want to be in finance, maybe go to London or New York. I don't want to say there's one geography for everything, but there is a clarifying thing that happens if you just say, "This is what is the most important thing to me, and I'm just going to try to make luck—my own luck—around that."
So true. It’s something that I don't think especially young people think about when they're deciding, making career choices. They don't... where to live is sometimes not as prioritized as much as, like, "Which university has the best partying?" or "Who's offering me a job right now?" as opposed to that long-term horizon of "How do I surround myself with the most talent and opportunity and funding in the case of business, and inspiration and enablers for this long-term vision I have?" I spent some time in San Francisco myself, about three years, and when I come back to the UK and when I go to other cities in the UK, I see how much of a disadvantage we have in philosophy, in ambition, in funding, in talent. It's no surprise that most of the great unicorns are emerging out of one city in the world. That then leads you to Airbnb somehow, through I think you take a job first then eventually you take a job at Airbnb?
Yes, exactly. I joined a Y Combinator startup that was really cool, but it didn't really work out. There was a brief interlude there, but basically I decided my tutoring company's not really working. I need to—and that's when I pivoted to that thing which had a base hit—but what I decided was, "Alright, I want to go to Silicon Valley, I kind of want to apply to Y Combinator (it's a startup incubator), but I wasn't able to get in."
So I was like, "Alright, let me go work at a Y Combinator company to sort of learn." By the way, I also just needed to recharge a little bit because the tutoring company—I'd been living abroad, the tutoring company wasn't working, I was barely paying myself anything. So I was kind of broke. I was also just exhausted from the tutoring company just not working after so many years of trying to get it to work.
So I was like, "Great, let me take a job at a high-growth company that seems to be well-run and actually make some money for a little bit here, save some money." And that's how I got to Airbnb. It just had a really magnetic culture. Even at 40 people, they were clearly onto something. It had found product-market fit, it was growing quickly. I learned a lot there. They had a really unique culture. They were hiring differently; they were really trying to raise the bar with every hire. You know, if it's not a "Hell yes," it's a "No." The way that they just did product reviews was really interesting. They had an important design component to it.
If you think about now why Airbnb won in their market from what you got to see inside their walls, what would you say? You've talked about their hiring philosophy, which is very clear. But what else would you say?
The main thing, and I think this is true of not just Airbnb but a lot of startups, was determination. They went through a period—everybody always looks back to these startups and they think, "Oh, it was a unicorn, they just found the thing and it worked." Airbnb is actually somewhat typical in this regard, which was there was I think at least a three-year period where they were just wandering in the desert.
Any reasonable person would have stopped working on this idea. It was a crazy idea. It was like couch surfing; you're going to let strangers stay on my couch? That's not a business, it's ripe for lawsuits. They were in tons of credit card debt because they had been trying to self-fund it. They had launched several times and nobody was using it. They should have quit. Any reasonable person would have quit.
But they didn't, they kept going. Because getting marketplaces off the ground is very hard—you have this chicken-and-egg problem, supply and demand. So, I actually think that's a common element in a lot of successful companies. There was a period where a normal person just would have quit, and they went from setback to setback to setback with enthusiasm, somehow powering through it. So, I learned that too.
I hear a lot of entrepreneurs who have your same enthusiasm to be an entrepreneur, the enthusiasm you've expressed there when you leave Argentina and you come back. You just want to be an entrepreneur. You don't necessarily know what or what industry or what problem you want to solve. What always makes me feel a little bit concerned is when an entrepreneur is so keen to be an entrepreneur that they'll just try and think of an idea. You took a time to go and get inspired, I guess, and to let the inspiration come to you. What's your view on that? There will be people listening to this now that want to be an entrepreneur but they don't have an idea.
Okay, I mean I was probably guilty of that too where there was definitely a period of my life where I was like, "I just want to be an entrepreneur." You know, honestly, it was probably partly ego-driven, it was partly my own introvert way of saying like, "I just want to be able to have an impact. I wanted to feel like I had done something valuable because I didn't feel valuable as a human myself." You can get into all the psychology of it, right?
It's a kind of a crazy thing actually to go say like, "I have to be an entrepreneur" because if you just want to make money or something, from an expected value outcome, it's probably better just to go to some early-stage company, invest some equity, or join Goldman Sachs or something, right? So to be truly... want to be an entrepreneur, I guess you have to be... well, sometimes it's ego-driven.
But I think your chances of success go up dramatically if you're doing something because you're actually super passionate about it. For me, reading the Bitcoin white paper was kind of a lucky moment because it tapped into something that I was really passionate about, which was basically freedom—economic freedom and just how do we empower people all over the world to have access to sound money and a decentralized open system where anybody can get access to the global financial system.
That really just resonated with me. I think that really helped Coinbase be successful because there were many times in our history as a company where—like 2015, 2016—the whole industry was down for three years, everybody was pivoting to do blockchain, not Bitcoin, if you remember that. A lot of the competitors in the space pivoted to make software for banks and stuff. Everybody looks back at that and like, "Wow, Brian, you never lost faith."
For me, it was simpler than that. I was just like, "Well, I don't really want to make software for banks. So if that's what this is all about now, I'd pretty much just shut it down and give the money back to investors." I was just too stubborn. I got into this because I feel like this is the way to create more freedom in the world, so that's what I'm going to keep doing, whether it works or not.
So, I think there is a really important element there. You have to be super into it for some reason that's bigger than just ego or trying to make money because every company is just filled with setback after setback after setback. You think you can power through it, but believe me, when you're like three years in and your co-founder quit and you got sued and you're broke and the first three times you launched the product nobody wants to use it and everything sucks and you're feeling like a failure, you're just going to give up because you're not actually doing it for some bigger purpose. You're doing it because you wanted to feel important or something. So it actually is important to pick the thing that you're passionate about.
"You're doing it because you want to feel important or something." We were talking about how part of the introvert's dilemma is you can feel personal significance by creating something that has significance in the world. Zooming right to the end of the story, has that impact you've had on the world made you feel more personally significant?
Yeah, totally. Okay, so I think this is a really important topic because it's stressful to run a company, right? So a lot of founders, if they do get to some level of success, they will often burn out. It shows up in weird ways, by the way. Some people gain a ton of weight, some people lose a lot of weight, people deal with stress in all kinds of ways. I've met founders that get addicted to prescription drugs or all kinds of unhealthy things you can imagine.
You have to find a way to shift from—if the thing that got you started in the first place was fear, fear of never being important or fear of never feeling fulfilled—you have to at some point transition it once that hole is filled in your heart. You have to transition to being motivated out of joy or love or something more positive, not like running away from fear and anger. Like you're really angry at your father, or like the person who co-founded with you who decided they didn't want to and you're pissed at them so you're trying to show them up or whatever. Those aren't relevant to me, but I've heard other examples.
Anyway, long way of saying you have to transition away from fear and anger as your motivator to joy and love and just find the thing you actually love doing in life. For me, that was figuring out what is the kind of CEO role that I really want to have. What's the thing that brings me joy? For me, it's like I love building things with technology, I love learning new things.
There are some parts of the CEO job, the typical CEO job, which lower my energy, they don't give me as much energy. Frankly, I'm not the best people manager in the world. I used to have 12 direct reports at the company and I was so stressed. Now, I have like four, and it's actually much easier for me to run the company with that.
So, there were a lot of ideas that I had in my head. I was like, "Well, the CEO has to do that. Obviously, the CEO has to do that." I sort of let go of some of those things over time and I said, "You know what? I'm going to actually focus on the things that I'm better at because they bring me joy, and I'm going to delegate a lot of this stuff which I thought I had to do." That's actually made the company run a lot better and it's kept me engaged in the job. I've been doing it 10 years and I hope I can do it another 10, and it's still fun because I've been able to delegate.
Why do you have to make that transition away from fear and maybe insecurity being the motivator towards it being about joy and love? What's the cost if you don't?
I think if you don't, then once you hit some kind of level of success—however people count that—then you're not going to feel motivated anymore. So you're just... you're going to be done. You're going to go do whatever else you're going to do next, like become an investor or sit on the board or whatever, which is nothing wrong with that either. But I just... part of me does wish that more founders were able to continue being founders and build the next thing and the next thing.
I'm guessing that you're finding a lot of fulfillment out of running this podcast and you've found some new level of joy in doing that. So this is like your next founding moment. But yeah, I think if you don't do it, then you're just going to burn out. A lot of people I think who had some level of success as a founder, they look back on it and they're like, "Well, man, I finally got that thing to some level of success and I sold the company or whatever, but I never want to do that again because it damn near killed me and I was so stressed all the time."
I've tried to make it... I need to get it to a place where it's fun to run the company so that I can keep building companies for many, many decades, hopefully. At least that's my goal.
You're describing me when you say that. So I built the company for seven years, but it felt like I was doing it involuntarily. It wasn't voluntary meaningful struggle. It was "I can't let this thing go down," "I'm not enjoying it anymore," "I can't stop." And then at the point where I realized I could stop, I did immediately.
In hindsight, the way around that would be to do a bunch of things involving how the company's structured and who owns it and who has control and all those things, but really trying to build a sustainable—as you describe it—a sustainable life for me as a founder and for my team members. Often in Silicon Valley when you're in high-growth companies, sustainability in terms of culture is the last thing. How have you done that then? How have you tried to make it more sustainable? You've talked about yourself, but how do you create a sustainable company, one that's built for 50 years or 100?
Well, okay, so there are a lot of different elements to that. One of them is just the burnout factor with people. Let's talk about that first and then I'll come to repeatable innovation. So from a burnout point of view, I mean, a few things that I do, for instance. Because obviously, there are days where you have to go hard and sprint and then... but for instance, every quarter I take a week off, right? I just have that pre-scheduled for the year because if you just wait, there's never a good time to do it.
We actually tried an experiment this year where we're having—we call them recharge weeks. Everybody in the company is taking a week off every quarter and they're doing it at the same time because sometimes if you're off, you're the only one who's taking a week off and then people are pinging you the whole time and you'd... whatever. I don't know if we'll keep doing it or not; it's an experiment. But by taking a week off every quarter, it allows me to kind of make sure that I recharge, I have time to go learn new things, and it often... I'm thinking about the business in some way, shape, or form, but it's... yeah, that's helped make it sustainable.
Other things I've done, I've had a lot of executive coaches, different executive coaches. I have one now. It's funny; there are different kinds of executive coaches. Some of them are very tactical with their advice, like they're former CEOs. Others are basically therapists. And like, you know, both are good and important versions to have. When I first heard that, I was like, "Oh, I don't want the therapist, I want the tactical CEO coach," but I've found the therapist part is almost even more valuable.
Let's see what else. I have this morning routine. I've noticed that my days go... I'm a lot more stressed if I just wake up, I look at my phone, I haven't really had any breakfast or exercised or anything and like, you know, I'm like low blood sugar, everything's pissing me off, I'm irritable. That's just a bad way to wake up. So now when I wake up, I basically don't look at my phone, I try to do the morning routine: exercise, eat some breakfast, meditate, whatever. And then, "Okay, now I'll start my day." All these kinds of things help.
I think this is important for the whole company to some degree because a lot of new employees, especially new grads or younger folks, they actually don't know about burnout. They'll actually... you can have an unlimited vacation policy and tell people at the all-hands meetings, "Don't wait until it's too late, take time off," but they won't do it.
Sometimes I've seen especially high-achieving people, they push themselves too hard and they'll actually quit. And I'm like, "Why are you quitting?" and they're like, "I'm burned out." And I was like, "Well, why didn't you take any vacation in the last two years?" and they're like, "I don't know," and they didn't feel like they had permission because everything was so important. So we're almost like trying to force people to take a little bit of time off here and there. But we still have a pretty intense work environment at Coinbase. I'm trying to amp it up, like, we should be going hard but then take periods of rest and renewal. And take rest and renewal very seriously; it's actually an important skill to learn.
Okay, so that's kind of how to go hard for the long term but don't burn out. Then I think companies also need to have repeatable innovation. What that means to me is you can't just have one product that finally works and then you scale it and the S-curve tapers off and then what do you do? I think companies need to continually have a next act and ideally like a portfolio of products or different revenue lines so that while something is going down, another thing is going up.
We do this thing at Coinbase called 70-20-10 resource allocation. Seventy percent of our resources go to the core business today that's making most of the money and is at scale. Twenty percent of our resources go towards these adjacent bets that are like an extension of the core. And ten percent go to these venture bets, which are basically kind of crazy ideas that have a higher chance of failure, but it's... so even in up markets, down markets, we're putting 10% of our resources towards crazy, potentially big things that could work. Some of them do, some of them don't.
That's allowed us to build this portfolio of products. I think that's important for the long-term sustainability of companies because it always maintains this startup culture, this founder mindset of "It's always day one," "Never let us become complacent," "Try to disrupt ourselves before somebody else does," and "Just keep building the next thing and the next thing." That's what keeps a company exciting. That's how you extend the founding moment, like Zuckerberg is trying to do now with the Metaverse instead of just being a social media company. If a company doesn't have those continually stretched and try to build the next thing, I think it just becomes a little more complacent and good people eventually leave and stuff like that.
Every company wants that. At least they say they do. But then they set up incentive structures and policies that actually act as a deterrent for innovation; they disincentivize people to innovate. So a question I get asked a lot when I'm on the stage is, "You've run an innovative company in an industry like social media which is changing all the time and the tricks and tips and algorithms are adjusting. How do you get your teams to—and how do you align incentives and how do you really make that philosophy and culture real where people are actually incentivized to take risks and to do those 10% bets that might end up being the next AWS or the next Kindle in the case of Amazon?"
You're right. It's a natural tendency of most orgs is to not allow that and so you have to actively fight against it as a founder or CEO. If you have somebody within the org who is kind of entrepreneurial and they try something new and it doesn't work, you have to make sure that that's not like a black mark on their career advancement.
There's a difference between they had good execution towards the wrong idea or they had the right idea but bad execution. In that Amazon example, they tried to launch their own phone at Amazon, the Fire Phone, and it was this big failure. But my understanding internally was they basically pushed... it was the wrong idea, but they had good execution. So they didn't fire that team because the Amazon phone failed. They said, "Okay, the execution was good, you shipped a phone in a pretty small amount of time, it was towards the wrong idea, what's next?" And I think my understanding is that team actually became the Kindle team, which then was a very successful product.
So it's a tolerance for failure, recognizing good execution even if it's towards the wrong idea. I think some of this has to come from the founder; I don't know if there's any other way. The problem is, if you look at public companies that are founder-led, they actually outperform the rest of the S&P 500. One theory for why that is is that the scarcest thing inside big companies is actually risk tolerance.
Founders can kind of provide that. Now, you can go too far with this; we know of founders who have too much risk tolerance and have kind of blown the place up.
WeWork.
Exactly. And then we also know of companies that had not enough risk tolerance; they had a professional CEO come in. Steve Ballmer or someone would be a classic example. I'm sure he's a smart guy, but something happened there where they didn't have the risk tolerance.
So I kind of view my job as a founder-CEO at this point is to ensure we have enough risk tolerance to try new ideas. And then I also want to pair myself with great operators like Emily Choi, our COO and President, and we have a really amazing executive team. So it's the combination of great operator but also great founder energy, which I think is a nice combination that creates good outcomes. If you're too heavy on one or the other, sometimes it doesn't work as well.
You read this white paper, Satoshi's famous Bitcoin white paper. Pivotal moment for you, sparks interest and intrigue while you're at Airbnb. You do something which a lot of people ask me about as well, which is when you're in a job and you have a spark of inspiration, how do you do both? You've got to pay the bills on one end, but then you want to pursue this idea. How did you do both? Because you stayed at Airbnb while you started developing what became Coinbase.
Yeah, basically I did it on nights and weekends.
People don't like that answer. It sounds toxic.
It required a lot of energy. First of all, you need to make sure that if you are currently employed, don't build it on company hours and don't build it on the company laptop. There's a lot of IP litigation that has ended badly for some people because the company actually owns it typically, at least in the US. If you build it on employee... on company time, on the company hardware, the company probably owns the IP.
So you need to make sure you're doing it on your own computer, not during hours. Anyway, I would often work till like 7:00 PM or something like that, I'd come home, eat dinner or something like that, and then I would work from like 8:00 PM to midnight. I would do that maybe three or four days a week on weekdays, and then on the weekend I'd work maybe like Sunday afternoon for seven or eight hours.
So I was probably doing like 20 hours a week or something like that on what would eventually become Coinbase in my personal time, and it was hard. It sucked. I was tired after a full day of work at 7:00 PM. But this is where some of that determination comes in. My co-workers are like going out drinking or whatever, and nothing wrong with that, I did plenty of that, but in my time at that moment in that time I was in my late 20s, I was like, "I really want to try to build something important in the world, and I'm going to have to take my own determination and turn that into this fuel to go try to build this thing."
So I probably did that for like a year, a year and a half, to try to build the prototype of what would become Coinbase. Then I applied to Y Combinator. They eventually accepted me and wrote me the initial seed check. That's what gave me the confidence to quit my job and go full-time on it.
How did you maintain friendships and those kind of meaningful personal relationships in that time when you're working full-time during the day and then coming home and writing code? Where's the time for friends and girlfriends and boyfriends?
I was pretty intense about it. I would say I sacrificed friendships for it. I mean, it's not like I wasn't never responding to people, but people would ping me like, "Hey, can you come out and this thing?" and I was like... actually, I remember this funny memory. One time this guy who I really like from work, he was like, "Come out to this thing, we're going to this club or something." I think I literally wrote back to him, "I'm changing the world one line of code at a time, can't hang out." He's like, "Rock on, I love it."
I'm going to try that with my mom.
So, you know, I was joking and whatever, but I think I've seen this happen to various people. They get to a certain point in their life and they're like, "God damn it, I'm... can I swear on this program?"
Of course you can.
Okay, so anyway, there comes a time I've seen this happen to various people in their life where something triggers it. Sometimes it's like an age thing—they're turning a certain age where they always thought they would have more done by then. Or a certain maybe someone in their family passes away and they're like, "Oh my God, like time is finite, it's precious." And something happens where they're like, "I'm not going to fuck around anymore. I'm going to get this done no matter the cost," and they just start really buckling down. They find this source of energy.
So, find whatever that is for you, the listener out there, and then go hard at it. Finish your book, launch your thing, whatever it is—the app, the startup. Just start doing stuff. Even if you don't even know what to do, just do anything because action will produce information. Actually, you just reminded me, there was a precursor to Coinbase which was this app that I built with my friend where we were trying to figure out how Bitcoin worked. We built that, and the minute we shipped it I was like, "It's built wrong." And I knew the architecture was wrong and then I knew what to do next. So often times you don't even know what to do, just do anything and it'll help you get to the right thing.
Action actually leads to information.
Yeah, action produces information. I stole that from Paul Graham, I think, who started Y Combinator. It’s so true.
And I will steal that from you. At that time, what were you trying to build? You'd read that white paper, you'd launched that first step. Then after that first step you launched, what were you trying to build? What was the vision?
This was 2010 timeframe.
And you were how old?
I was like 29, yeah, something like that. So what I was trying to do—I had read the Bitcoin white paper and I was like, "Okay, this is a decentralized protocol for money." And my thought in my head at that time was: well, there's been other decentralized protocols like email is a decentralized protocol, Git is a tool that developers used for version control. For email, people didn't really run their own email servers; they'd use a hosted email service like Gmail. Or for Git, they'd use a hosted service like GitHub.
So my thought was, "Okay, here's a new decentralized protocol; people are going to need like a GitHub or a Gmail type thing that does all the security and the backups for you and it works on mobile and the web." I was like, "Someone's going to build a company doing that." That would be a kind of a hard company to run because you're going to be storing all this Bitcoin, people are going to want to hack it, and that's not like a weekend project; that's like a really serious responsibility.
I had that idea in the back of my head and somehow I couldn't get it out of my head. So I just sort of started tinkering. I wasn't even saying I was going to build a company yet; I was more like, "I don't know, let me just try building a prototype of this to see what... if..." again, action produces information. So that was the original idea. It was like a hosted Bitcoin wallet instead of like running your own one on your own computer with a node and everything, which was complicated at the time.
And when you told people this idea, what was their reaction? Because you would have had to tell a lot of people that you were building this thing with this thing called Bitcoin on a other thing which they wouldn't have understood either.
Yeah, so people didn't get it at all. I talked to some of my smartest friends about it and they were like, "I don't really get this Bitcoin thing, it sounds like a scam, honestly." So that was not reassuring. And then I went to a couple of Bitcoin meetups, people who were really into Bitcoin, and I was like, "Yeah, I'm building like a hosted Bitcoin wallet, like Gmail for email." One of these people was like, "That's a terrible idea because all the people who've tried to do that, they get hacked and they lose all the customer funds and so you should never do that."
So I didn't get a lot of positive feedback. Everybody I talked to actually thought the idea was a bad idea. Even when I had gone through Y Combinator and I was trying to raise money, for every 10 meetings I did with investors, I got nine "Nos" and one kind of like "small Yes." So that's always tough. Fundraising is always tough, but if you go to these people who you believe are like really smart people and 90% of them are telling you "No," that's like the best-case scenario in my experience. The worst-case scenario is 100% of them tell you "No." But either way, it's like 90% of the people telling you "No," you have to be really kind of willing to not get discouraged by that.
You had a co-founder for a couple of weeks during that Y Combinator process, right? In applying for Y Combinator you wanted to have a co-founder, you met someone quickly and then it didn't last more than like four weeks or something.
Yeah, exactly. I was looking for a co-founder at that time desperately. Ben Reeves had created this really good app called blockchain.info at the time (now it's blockchain.com). So I reached out to him, we didn't really know each other that well, we ended up applying to Y Combinator and sort of did this like shotgun wedding thing. But it didn't work out and it was like we were about to start the program and we basically decided to part ways. In an alternate universe, blockchain.com and Coinbase would have been the same company, which is funny. But it all obviously worked out well for both of us.
Did you have self-doubt at that point?
For sure. Oh man, I was filled with self-doubt. Yeah. I thought that first of all, maybe I was crazy because all my friends who I talked to about this idea thought it was a bad idea. The thing that gave me a glimmer of hope was that Y Combinator decided to give me this $150k seed check, and I really respected Y Combinator. So that gave me a big shot of confidence.
But before that, it was very touch and go. I was like, "Well, my co-founder thing didn't work out, I don't know, I'm just going to try my best here, but this has like a pretty high chance of failure."
What did your parents think?
Okay, so my parents are people who worked at big companies like their whole life, and I don't know if they ever really got the whole entrepreneurship thing that I was so into. When I called to tell them that I was quitting Airbnb to go start this company, they were kind of like, "Okay, well, we support you, we love you, are you going to have any health insurance?" That's what my mom asked, I think. And so I think there was... they were kind of afraid that I was just doing something really stupid and reckless is my guess. But they ultimately trusted me and supported it, probably with a lot of doubts.
On that point of co-founders, I read that you eventually sort of interviewed 50-odd co-founders to try and find the right one for what would become Coinbase. What were you looking for? And what was in hindsight, what advice would you give me? Because that's another question I get asked a lot: "How do you find a co-founder?"
So yeah, I was looking for a co-founder at that time desperately. I'd go on these like co-founder dates, you know, you meet somebody, see how it goes, they'd pitch you their startup idea, I'd tell them about mine, and maybe go on a second date or third date. None of these seemed to like really click. I guess I was looking for someone to get really excited about my idea, but also somebody who I felt was really complementary to me in terms of pushing me to think bigger and stuff like that I hadn't thought of before. I wanted to leave feeling energized and that I'd learned something and that they were a good complement.
And so I got kind of disillusioned because a number of these went on and on and on and I couldn't find anybody who I really liked to join this thing. So eventually I just got fed up and I was like, "Alright, you know what? I'm just going to do this thing on my own and get it off the ground." And lo and behold, once I started to show some signs of progress—like getting through Y Combinator, raising a seed check, getting the prototype... I put the prototype out there on like Reddit—the right person reached out to me.
So anyway, I tell people that story because I think it's an important lesson which is basically: if you don't have the right co-founder, just keep making progress and signs of success may cause the right person to find you. But it needs to be public signs of success. It's almost like putting out the "Bat Signal." If you have like half of an idea, you can't just like be talking to your friends about it. You got to put it out on a blog post or like a prototype or get something out there in the world on Twitter or whatever because then the other person might be out there and they won't know to find you and reach out unless you put out the Bat Signal.
That's also really good dating advice. If you don't have a co-founder, just keep making progress and putting it out there.
I guess it's true, like in terms of people fitness and health and self-development. Figure out yourself, yeah.
Exactly. And you become a magnet as opposed to having to be a peacock. That’s much more valuable.
When I think about your first tutoring company, there was that pivotal moment where you removed the payment and just kind of got out the way, and that was pivotal to the company exploding. When you think about those early years, what was the significant step that unlocked the growth in your view?
Yeah, so there was a significant moment like that with Coinbase too. Because oftentimes, by the way, the first version of a product you put out, it doesn't work. In fact, that's the only thing I've ever seen happen in startups. I've never seen a startup where the very first version of their product actually worked. Sometimes in hindsight people like to tell that story, but I think in reality it's very rare.
So for us—or for really it was just me initially and then it was Fred Ehrsam and I co-founding it—the first version was this hosted Bitcoin wallet. And so we had... I had posted it on Reddit, some people would sign up, but nobody would stick around and use the product. So in Y Combinator they teach you this great thing which is: don't spend your time going to conferences and trying to raise money. If you don't have product-market fit yet, talk to your customers and then improve the product based on their feedback. Talk to your customers, improve the product. There's really only two things you should be doing in the early stage: talking to your customers and improving the product. Sounds like simple advice, but people spend so much time doing other things that's actually not real work.
So, taking this advice, I emailed 10 of the people or so who had signed up for the product and never come back. I said, "Hey, I created this app, I'd love to get on the phone with you and just talk to you about it for a minute." So I remember I got on the phone with some of these people and one of them was like, "You know, what do you think about the app?" He's like, "Well, I kind of like it but I don't have any Bitcoin, so I just didn't come back."
And I remember thinking, "Well, if there had been an easy way to get Bitcoin into your wallet, like a buy button or something, would you have stuck around and used the product?" He's like, "Yeah, probably." And so I was like, "Okay, let me go try to make a simple buy button so when people sign up they can actually get some Bitcoin into their wallet." And it turned out that was a very hard thing to do—you had to get these bank partnerships, I had to figure out money transmission licenses, and I won't bore you with all the details. There was a lot of making things work somehow behind the scenes.
But the minute that we launched—at that time, I think Fred Ehrsam had just joined—and we launched that buy button, it started to grow every day organically with no marketing or anything. That was the minute I felt like we finally had product-market fit.
Over the next let's say five—so that's 2012 roughly? 2012. Over the next five years up until the point where Fred departs, that growth is pretty crazy, right, for Coinbase?
Yeah, I mean it started growing organically and we had a very good problem at that point, which was that we were basically every time someone clicked the buy button, we had to use our own capital to acquire the Bitcoin right at that price so we didn't have some exposure to it going up or down. And then we would initiate a debit to their bank account and two or three business days later we'd get the funds. So we had basically a working capital issue; we were using our own corporate funds to buy the crypto and then getting the payment from the customer.
And so the numbers started to go up and up and up and I think we had raised like $600k at that time and we were using like $550k to service the day-to-day buying on the site. And so we realized quite quickly like, "Okay, we need to go out and raise money." And that was a good story to raise money—"Hey, this thing is growing so fast that we're going to be turning away business if we don't raise some money." That's a good story to go raise money as opposed to, "Ah, the numbers are kind of flat, we haven't really got it working yet." So I think it was very important that we found product-market fit. Only when we couldn't scale then we went out to raise capital.
What mistakes did you make as a company in those first five years that in hindsight you go, "Damn, that's a key learning"?
Yeah, so I think if I were to go back and do it again, there's a few things I might have done that would have helped it be even more efficient. One is that we actually never wrote down the mission of the company or the values of the company early on. We were doing it all organically. We were basically just hiring, interviewing every single person who would join, and we managed to create this really interesting culture but it was a little bit... it wasn't very deliberate. It just happened kind of accidentally because we were just choosing the people that we wanted to work with and we really surprised us and were really bright.
In those high-growth moments, things keep breaking and processes actually need to adopt when you go as you'll know from when you go from a couple of people to then 50 to then 100 to then... so I was just thinking if there's any advice you have for me as someone that's grown a business, but not in such a high-growth way and not in such an interesting uncharted industry. Eventually your co-founder Fred departs. What was that like emotionally? Because I can't imagine the thought of my co-founder departing in year five. It would almost make me feel honestly it would have made me feel like they were part of the reason I was doing this. You know, that bond and that "we're in this together." So how did that feel emotionally?
I mean, it was awful. I cried. So yeah, I think here's the whole story. I think really Fred Ehrsam was an amazing co-founder and we were building all this great stuff together. He's really a natural leader, right? And so I was the CEO of the company, but there was times where I think he felt like he was being held back. He really kind of wanted to run his own thing at a certain point. We were almost like running it jointly at various places and at various times.
And so I tried my best to like keep him engaged and I was like, "Alright, why don't you go do all the external facing stuff? What's the thing that would really excite you?" He did a lot of the fundraising, he was really representing the company in the way... the titles didn't matter. But ultimately I think he did really want to run his own thing and so he was very clear with me. We talked about it basically over the period of like a year or so with an exec coach and all this.
And one of the things that I think I'm most proud of is that he and I are still like really good friends, probably best friends, to this day. Whereas a lot of co-founders, when someone does leave, there's like a blow-up and it's... I think we both realized at a certain point it was like, actually the more important thing to preserve here is the friendship. And so he was great about it. He was like, "I want to make sure the company's in a good place, it doesn't need to happen... there's nothing soon here happening, but I do eventually want to transition."
So over a period of a year, we talked about it and then when he finally told me he was ready, I cried. It did feel like, you know, I was losing kind of half the company, the founding moment of it. And I remember so then we had to go in front of the company and deliver the news. Oh man. So we talked to the board and everything like that first, but I remember the day we had to go tell the company. And, you know, I wasn't normally I wasn't getting nervous talking to the company—like, first the company is two people, and then it's five, then it's 10, then it's 50, then it's 100, 200. So you sort of get to build up your tolerance and like, "Okay, I could go talk to the company of 150 people or something."
But this time I had to go up there and tell them the co-founder was leaving and I remember I went up in front of the company and my voice cracked like I was a 14-year-old, 13-year-old, whatever. And then my leg was like shaking. You know sometimes you get like enough adrenaline if you're nervous that just like your... anyway. I was like, "Oh my God, this is so embarrassing." Like I had to like walk behind the podium so nobody could see my leg shaking and my voice is cracking and I'm like, "God, I'm fucking... I'm messing this up," you know, because I'm supposed to be projecting confidence and "No, it's not a big deal, we're going to get through this," and I'm just like coming across like this pre-pubescent kid.
So everybody, of course, is like kind of shocked and people were like, "I could tell you were really scared, Brian." I was like, "Shit, okay, I didn't really announce that very well." And of course, like, you know, 48 hours went by, everybody freaked out, and then it was like 48 hours later it was like, "Alright, let's get back to work." And of course, it wasn't as bad as I thought.
But yeah, that was a really scary moment. And then basically I had to transition from running the company with like, "Alright, Fred and I let's get in a room and decide it," to "Okay, let's actually build an executive team around me to have a more like professionally run company, if you will." So it ended up being like sort of a second founding moment of the company. And I've realized this later—actually, companies have many founding moments and you can just keep building.
What situation was the company in now again in hindsight at that stage? Because I heard in 2017 things were a little bit messy and you'd brought in this exec team to kind of help you, you know, solve some of those problems. But when Fred left, what was the state of the company?
So he left it as the market was swinging up, and that was conscious on his part. He wanted to make sure it didn't harm the company as he left. And so yeah, the challenge after that was like, "Okay, go build an exec team." And a lot of founders have gone through this—it's quite hard. If a company is growing, you know, 50% a year or something, you can often times promote people from within who are kind of learning on the job and just take on more and more responsibility.
We in these crypto so volatile to go through like 500% growth in one year and then negative 100% the next year. And it's like... so I felt like I was in over my head, all these junior people who had joined early on, we were all in over our head. We basically went out to seek more experienced executives to come in. And that was in itself its own crazy process with lots of learnings because whenever you bring in a bunch of high-powered executives, you know, sometimes you get people who butt heads.
It's hard when... taking in a new team, they have to build trust. And oftentimes the team is often somewhat kind of dysfunctional until like they go through enough together. So we had some good blow-ups there. There was some executives like left or were fired and I had to like basically learn how to work with more seasoned executives and people who had run massive things before.
You know, I guess one lesson I learned from that—and this is kind of personal to me, there's different people find different things that work for them—but you know, I realized I wanted to work with people who were not just really brilliant but like also really humble. Because I'm not really like a combative person by nature. Some companies have this culture where they love to hash things out and debate it and like "that's like a really good conversation" and you kind like get into it and you're like cut... you know, but I'm more of a like, "I want to think about what you said and come back" and more collaborative. So I'm not really... I'm a little bit conflict-averse.
So anyway, I started hiring more for like people who were bright but humble, collaborative. I mean, the risk of that, by the way, is you can get into a little bit of a "yes person" culture where every... everyone's afraid to disagree or something. That's also not good. But it took me a couple of iterations to kind of find my style there. And now it's working great, like the exec team is super competent and high-trust and collaborative. And I think it's like a... it gives us a lot of benefits as a company because there's like basically no BS politics stuff. It's just like we're just getting work done, have each other's back. And we have to constantly tend that and nurture it like with these exec offsites and stuff. But yeah, there were some learning pains there.
When crypto went through that first—well, not the first, but that real that sort of 2017 bull run where everything was going up, how were you feeling as the CEO of Coinbase? Coinbase is exploding. I remember that's when I first downloaded Coinbase and became a Coinbase customer. How were you feeling as CEO in terms of optimism for how long that moment was going to last? Did you have a suspicion that in 2018, I believe it was, that the market would come crashing down?
Yeah, I didn't know when it would happen, but there was definitely... it tipped at a certain point from "this growth is really good" to "okay, things are getting a little crazy here." Like there was... I remember I'd go to some event and it's like everybody was coming in launching some ICO and people would come over and like want to take selfies with me and then like post the stuff on Twitter in a like almost implying I was like endorsing the project.
And then I remember like weird stuff happened. Like I was living in this apartment building in San Francisco and this guy who like worked in the building came to me one day and he's like, "This package arrived for you, sir. And sir, I just have this question, like, which crypto should I buy?" And I was like, "I don't... this is getting really weird. Like I don't give any investment advice or whatever."
Yeah, so basically it started attracting in like people who were just trying to get rich quick or scams and all this stuff. And so yeah, we started... I started walking around with like a security guard. We had like some over-exuberant customers. It was weird.
Tell me about that because I was thinking we've had some Fintech CEOs here that have built disruptor banks out in Europe—Monzo, Starling Bank, etc., Klarna. Security is not something that most CEOs have to think about. But when you're dealing with money, as Tom told me from Monzo, you get a lot of unhappy people because you sometimes you have to freeze funds and things like that.
Yeah, well, okay, so I mean, at a certain size of company, it's almost inevitable for every CEO. It's not just... it's not just money. But I do think that we probably started a little earlier because it was crypto, it was money. And yeah, I mean, it's also just a law of numbers. Like if you're running an enterprise SaaS business, you might have thousands of customers or maybe 100,000 or something. But if you're running a very popular consumer app and you get into the millions, or you know, Coinbase has like maybe like 100 million-ish verified users now, if you just think about it statistically, I mean, you know, like one in 100 people in society has some form of schizophrenia, right? Maybe one out of 10 of those, like one out of 1,000 people in society has a form of mental illness that just like... you know, could be potentially dangerous or they can become obsessed with things irrationally or whatever.
And so if you have 100 million customers, like there's going to be enough people. It's part of it's just like a law of large numbers. But, you know, I don't want to overstate it; it's not like a huge burden on my life. I feel safe and I'm able to keep functioning and stuff like that. Yeah.
Another thing most CEOs don't have to contend with is building a business in such a volatile market. So when in 2018 the crypto market comes crashing down, talk to me about what leadership lessons you learned through that, what I can only imagine was a pretty awful period.
Yeah, so 2018 everything was coming down off that high of 2017. And, you know, I had been through a couple cycles like this, but each one was getting bigger and bigger. And it was tough. I mean, in the following I think year or so after that crash, I think we might have had like 25% of the company leave or something, right? Yeah, so there was a lot of attrition. There were people who had joined and they thought, "Hey, this is a rocket ship, it's only going one way."
And then when it was down, and lots of negative news headlines come along... the news always focuses on things that are too short-term. When it's going up, they're like, "This is your genius and your future, everything's the future," and then when it's down, they're like, "This is never going to work, it's failed." Neither one is true, right? You have to zoom out to kind of look at reality.
But one thing I realized was that I felt this overwhelming pressure as CEO. It's like, "Oh shoot, like every every week I've got to get in front of the company and like put on a good face and like create some sense of optimism," right? The reality was I was kind of feeling shitty about it too, and so it was a little inauthentic for me to go up there and try to just be super positive or something.
And so one leadership lesson I learned during that moment is that great leaders are often vulnerable. And so it... it's actually a much more powerful leadership style, I think, to just go up there and say how you actually feel. Which you might be able to... you might go up there and say something like, "I feel like shit today. You know, like this thing is down, like this person quit, whatever it is."
Now it helps if you can then use that to as a moment to like bring the team together. And it's not like you have to solve all the problems as CEO. It's like "We." You use a lot of "We" language. It's like, "I don't know how you're feeling, I feel like this." That's going to take a little bit of the tension out of the room because they're all probably feeling it too and they're like, "Okay, great, this guy's like not a robot, he like kind of gets it too."
§02Transcript — part 2
And it's like, "Okay, so what can we do about it? Like, we all need to figure out how to solve X. X is a pretty big problem right now. We all need to figure out how to solve Y. So what what are we going to do? Like this week, I'm going to host this meeting with so-and-so and this group and like we're going to come... I want you all to bring your best ideas about how we're going to solve X. We're going to pick one and we're going to go double down on it."
Right? So now it's like you're turning this authenticity, this candor in and you're making everybody a part of the solution. It's not like, "Hey, everybody look to Brian, like he's got all the answers," you know, this like Messiah complex or whatever. Like, no, it's like the strength is comes from the team. It's not just like me trying to carry the whole weight of the world on my shoulders or something. So that that was a good leadership lesson for me.
How do you deal with—because you've been through, you know, these crypto winters and your company got so big that it went public, and then when you become a public company you're almost seen as the poster child of the space in many respects. At least that's always been my view of Coinbase. There's been many, many exchanges, but the number one one, the one that's the famous one, the poster child is Coinbase. The pressure and the scrutiny and the headlines and the and the fake news and all of it that you must be have thrown at you. And then all the internal problems of just running a business anyway. How are you dealing with your emotions?
Yeah, okay. Wow. Deep question. So, let's see. I think one of the most important things—I totally didn't realize this before starting a company, but it turns out one of the most important skill sets to kind of develop as a CEO of a startup is that you have to be willing to ignore a lot of noise, both positive and negative, right? Because if people on the way up are telling you how brilliant you are and you kind of get caught up in like going to the speaker circuit and like... then you're going to fall even harder when they turn on you. And eventually everybody either gets built up or taken down and it's just driving headlines, right? So you kind of can't believe it on the way up because then you won't believe it on the way down either.
I totally didn't realize that by starting a company... I thought most people would generally be rooting for you and, you know... but there's people out there rooting for you to fail, which is a weird thing. They're kind of dealing with their own maybe stuff about success or I don't know what it is. But you have to learn how to just tune all that out.
So I mean, like, frankly, I just don't don't read like a lot of news anymore. I kind of think of it like sugar: it's addictive, and can you consume it in small quantities responsibly and like eat a couple bites of dessert or something? Like, yes. But you have to be really careful because basically the kind of anger, fear, outrage, whatever, you know, is an addictive thing.
By the way, it's not just mainstream media; like social media has some challenges with this too. I think it's actually a little hypocritical—mainstream media is always criticizing social media for misinformation and it's like pot calling the kettle black or whatever. It's like the same thing happening there. So I literally try not to read a lot of this stuff.
So then once you've developed your own sort of psychology about it, now you have to insulate the team from it, because they'll go after your team. And so you need to kind of continually be preaching this to the team about like, "Be an independent thinker," right? "Go develop your own source of truth by going to the root of it. Don't be listening to mainstream media or social media whatever when things are up or down. You have to curate this... use that stuff in moderation like like sugar or something. It's not actually... they're they're trying to sell their own product." And one of my friends has this great saying: "Only a half-truth can go viral." Like if it's that triggering or whatever that's like "Ah!" and it goes all around the world, it's probably half-truth at best. So you have to remember that whenever you see anything out there.
What are the things that still penetrate all of that resilience though? Because there's things in even me that I I understand all of that. As I was saying to you before we started recording, I became a Dragon on *Dragon's Den*, so I got much more scrutiny than I've ever got from headlines. I'd read about my family that I don't have, my girlfriend, I'd done this, that. You'd think I was running Guantanamo Bay the way that they described my former business. All these things.
And although I knew I was resilient and although I knew everything you've said and I put these processes in place where I don't see notifications—someone tweets me I probably won't even see it, it doesn't come up. Never read the replies. I don't have them on. But what pierces you still? What still moves your mood?
So there's definitely something every year at least that like it's the next level that that it's going to test you, right? And um... oh man, what was... most recently, um, there was like... I don't even know if this was real or if this was like some short sellers like putting fake information out there, but there was some like petition that some employees put together or something and like...
I saw your response to it.
Yeah, I got irritated by it and I like wrote some stuff on Twitter about it. But that that bugged me for a bit because I was like, "Okay, like you're going to attack the executives, like it's not even their fault, like you... whatever, blame me." So trying to think what... there's always something new. It's like, you know, a lot of people probably would be okay with "Oh there's some somebody saying something stupid on Twitter or whatever."
But they really respect X, you know, maybe it's like the *New York Times* or something. Whatever, right? And they're like, "Well, that's that's like a..." And so then you get your first like negative article like that has false information in it in the *New York Times*. And then you're like, "Well, that just shattered my reality of like even that could happen." And like, "So, man, there's like what else is like not accurate in the *New York Times*? Or pick any other, you know, *Fox News*, whatever, right?"
One of the ones that really got to me was I always felt like, "Okay, we have these kind of people who are upset with us outside of the company. But the company is one team. We're all friends." And then when I started to see like sometimes there were people in the company kind of turning on each other, I was like, "Man, that that one really bugged me," right?
So think about if you think about companies that have gotten to really big scale, it makes all your problems look small by comparison, okay? Like look at Mark Zuckerberg, right? I mean the amount of negative news coming out on that guy on a daily basis. I think the Russian government like just put him on some like list of like sanctioned people, like there's people with tons of death threats, you know, like... there's always another level it can get to, right? That's just like... anyway.
What I've realized about a lot of people who I think are building important things in the world is that they've developed this like high disagreeableness muscle where they've recognized like they're not going to make everybody happy and they've made peace with it, right? So they realize at a certain point like whether I do the thing that I think everyone's going to like or the thing that's more authentic to me, someone's going to be pissed no matter what. So at the end of the day I'm just going to do the thing that I think is the right thing. And they've leaned more into authenticity instead of trying to say what they think people want to hear. And that does require you to have some amount of thick skin and some kind of high disagreeableness, and then they can actually do even more interesting stuff because they're being themselves instead of trying to be liked.
"You're doing it because you want to feel important or something." We talked about how part of the introvert's dilemma is you can feel personal significance by creating something that has significance in the world. My success and my building my personal brand and getting millions of followers online, it scratched that itch in an unhealthy way that we described earlier. It kind of made me feel... it gave me external validation which felt like it was filling me up. It was probably sugar or something.
And then the problem is if you are that type of person, when you do reach that height, you get more public scrutiny. It matters more to you because validation was your driving force this whole time. So is there an element of that with you because because you were an introvert that wanted to have significance, be significant because of that early upbringing, that it might be psychologically more difficult to deal with because significance and fitting in I guess was so paramount to your initial motivation?
Totally. Yeah, I mean it can be very it can be very addictive also just to be liked and and the adulation and everything. So the minute something starts to happen that you realize people aren't going to like you for, your temptation is to try to preserve it. Now you have something to lose. You're like, "Oh I'm going to lose these followers or I'm going to..." whatever. It doesn't even matter, but it always feels serious at the time.
So I definitely had to grow through that. I don't know, I think I'm still growing through that to... I would like to get to a place where you don't want to you don't want to become like isolated to the place where you're not listening to anybody because that's also really bad. So you do need people who can keep you grounded, like your family, your friends, whatever. And people who are around you who will tell you when you're being an idiot or you're just wrong. So you don't ever want to get to a place where "I listen to nobody," right?
But a lot of people... you want to be around people who have your best interest at heart and then listen to them. Or people who've already done what you're trying to do; like listen, that's good advice. But a lot of the people who are just trying to take shots at you to build their own whatever in life, you need to build the ability to ignore them and it's a real superpower to care less what other people think. At least people who don't have your best interest at heart.
Having worked in social media over the last 10 years, I at maybe in my seventh or eighth year noticed a really interesting thing that happened. Organizations, as Edelman say in their trust reports, were once black boxes, which is the reputation of the organization, the image was written on the outside of the black box of the organization by the marketing department or PR. We moved into this world where they're now glass boxes—the world can see inside. All of your employees have smartphones and they can take pictures and write reviews and so organizations now had to adapt.
One of the things that I've seen, just as an observation, is CEOs being out there in the public eye, overly out there in the public eye. I'm thinking Elon and the antithesis of that might be Zuckerberg who basically hid for 10 years and the media shaped him as a soulless data-stealing robot. And then you've got Elon because he's smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast, you can say whatever you like about him, I think I know him. I have my own reference point. And my point here is about transparency and even doing things like this.
For me—I don't know how you feel about this—but for me the if I was running a big organization, I'd be doing a lot to make sure that the public had their own reference point of who I am. How does that all sit with you? Because that seems to be the only defense against the media writing your narrative.
Yeah, so I've thought about this a lot and I'm not sure I have the perfect answer. So I think there's a spectrum. So on one side of the spectrum like you said you can actually... I think Zuckerberg is somewhere in the middle to me but the to be truly isolated I think like Larry Page, for instance. He was very reclusive, almost never gave interviews, right? Elon is kind of out there doing a lot more interviews and he's just literally says whatever he thinks, I think, you know, right on Twitter.
Did you see Zuckerberg's 2017 Facebook post? 2017 he did a post saying that he's basically hidden away for that whole period of time and his New Year's resolution was to come out of his bunker.
So he did a period of hiding out and yeah. So I mean I think a lot of CEOs struggle with this because you know, I think a lot of people realize like it sucks to be famous. So, you know, when I was a kid I would you'd hear people say that or something and I'd be like, "Yeah, whatever, easy for you to say." But there's a lot of downsides, right? I mean people and the media or publicity can be like this this cruel beast, right? If you feed it, it just wants more and more and more.
So I think there are advantages to having a public profile—like it helps you recruit people, if someone attacks the company you have your own direct audience to like get the the message out, the truth. So there's definitely like benefits. And then there's drawbacks because now you know maybe your kids need security or whatever or just, you know, someone's going to come up to you in a restaurant when you're trying to have a thing with your family or whatever. So there's real downsides to it.
I think for me I'm trying to find this reasonable middle ground where like I turn down 95% of media. I I really want to talk to people like that are doing what I call new media, right, like like this, like podcasts or or YouTube or really just have conversations with people that I think are interesting and I like, um, that get messages out in sort of unique ways. And I I do I like having some amount of following if I ever need to set the record on something. But I don't want to become famous actually. I'd rather if I could avoid that, I would prefer it. I think it's sort of a an acceptable negative of building something interesting in the world, but it's not it's not actually a positive.
Interesting. And one of the things you talked about was that—who knows whether it was real or not—there was a I want to give context to the listeners who don't who don't follow you and might not have seen that. There was a something written up that said internally an employee was petitioning to have someone else removed internally. Whether it's true or not, we don't know. It was taken down. You responded to that on Twitter. You also said to me that you were in a bit of a bad mood when you responded to that on Twitter. How do you feel in hindsight about all of that? And did you did you learn anything about company culture or changes that needed to be made or give me your your reflections on that?
Yeah, so you never know if you're doing the right thing, right? One argument would be that that was just unnecessary. I could have ignored it and there were people who had never even saw it and there were and they read my tweets and they're like, "Whoa, what's going on?" And now I gave even more attention to it, right? On the flip side, there was a bunch of people who reached out to me that was very positive—was like, "I'm glad you're just saying it like it is, like it shows who what you really care about, and you're basically communicating to the rest of employees like if you're unhappy about something like there's a right forum to do that internally, it's not this is harming the company and so you're..." Anyway, a lot of people liked it, some people didn't like it at all.
So did I do the right thing? I have no idea. I'm just like making this up as I go and I kind of I kind of like try things and I see how they go. One thing I will say is that something that's polarizing is not necessarily that doesn't make it the wrong thing to do. It the what makes it to me the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do is whether it was authentically true. So, I don't know how I would do it again next time. I guess I maybe I would do it with a cool head and see if it still felt authentic and then go from there.
Polarizing. Another thing that when people talk about company culture, people give people that I've been around point to Coinbase as an example of is you coming out and saying that Coinbase wouldn't tolerate politics and other divisive topics being discussed on company channels in the workplace. This is a big conversation—I've had conversations this week with my companies where they've talked about Coinbase and the example you've set because of things that have happened over the last couple of weeks in politics around in America. Tell me why you made that decision because I once upon a time when we had Brexit in this company allowed my office to get overrun with anti-Brexit flags and I actually regret that because a week later an employee pulled me aside and said "I'm actually pro-Brexit" and the whole week I've felt like the office wasn't a safe place for me to to... so you you set out a stance which I've not I saw you doing it first. I'm not sure if any other companies have done it but publicly you were the first to say "no politics at work."
Yeah, I mean I think other companies are doing variations of that, um, so it's not entirely original but yeah, I did put it out in a way that was public and got a lot of attention. So look, I don't I don't know what to say about it. I think it's it started from a very good place, which is people want to have a safe space at work, they want to have a place where they can just be themselves authentically, like these all these things actually start from a very good place.
What's unfortunate is that it can get to a place where the office is actually just very divided and people are upset with each other all day instead of working towards the common mission that we all kind of signed up for. They're actually just upset with each other and arguing over things which we don't really have very much impact over like bigger broader societal issues outside of our mission. This not just Coinbase, this this is happening broadly across a lot of tech and all companies really, it's not just even a tech thing. It is it is more pronounced certain places in the world. It's it's not a broad thing geographically, it's it's very pronounced in some cities. Especially in the US, but I guess probably somewhat here as well.
Not as much.
Yeah, okay. I remember our Ireland office, like there were some people who messaged me during all that and they're like, "What is you just said like we're going to work on work, do work at work? Like what's what's so controversial?" They they didn't it didn't make any sense. So it was it was largely a thing that happened I think in the Bay Area in the US and a couple other cities like maybe Brooklyn and Portland, places like that.
But um, look, I I don't... in some ways I'd rather Coinbase was like known for our product innovation and stuff. This is a weird one because like we've actually been pretty become kind of well-known for this stance and others have emulated it. But the thing that really made me finally get the courage to do it—because I I hate I didn't really want to make a public stance about this or whatever, I just wanted everybody to get back to work—but the reason I did it was that I felt like I had been a bad leader basically. I had let this kind of misunderstanding accumulate inside the organization where people thought that it was okay to like come to work and just debate endlessly these things or like at the Q&A that we would host every week or two, there would be a lot of questions that were not about our product or the regulators or the the future of the company, it would be about like these broader societal issues.
And these kind of these brush fires kept erupting in in Slack channels and things. And so oh and and and I think I reached a place where I was like, "I don't think I really want to be the CEO of this company if like this is what the CEO job entails is kind of like getting put on the spot with like these crazy difficult societal questions every week. I kind of want to just build cool stuff with technology and work on our mission." And so I actually contemplated briefly I was like, "Am I the one who's like just not suited for this job and maybe this is how companies are run now?"
And a bunch of I talked to a bunch of friends of mine and people and they were like, "No, like if that's how you feel, there's probably a bunch of other people at the company who also feel that way and like you started this company, you don't need to go, they need to go." And so it was if I realized it was like either I'm going to resign or they're going to need to resign. And so at that point I was like, "Alright, they need to resign."
So we made we made an exit package available, like I clarified the stance of the company, 5% of the employees opted into that package and left, and then after that it felt like the company was much more aligned and we were all able to move towards the mission. So it was cool to see some companies emulate it afterwards and there's probably a less dramatic way to do it, you know, if you kind of set it that way from the beginning, but um, yeah, that's where we are.
One of the things that I really wanted to ask you about because from reading your blog post you have a very clear strategy and perspective on this and I also see this in hindsight as being the single most important thing that I ever had the responsibility of doing and getting right, which is hiring people. I I fucked up for the first three years. I hired inexperienced people that were cheap and that I felt I could manage because I was 21 or 20. So I hired a bunch of "you like you want a job, you want a job, you want a job, you can be director, director of this." My biggest mistake. I only learned when I hired someone good and I saw the net impact they had and the fact that good people then hire good people. What advice would you give to people that are hiring now and how important do you consider hiring to be?
Super important. I mean, actually in Coinbase's values, the number one value is top talent in every seat because it really everything in the company comes back to people. Like if you want to have a big impact, you need to have generate a bunch of revenue and profit, if you want good revenue and profit you have to make good products, if you make good products you have to have good people to build them. So it actually everything comes back to to people.
So yeah, I mean it's interesting to hear that you learned that lesson the hard way. I've hiring is super hard. Sometimes the only way to learn a lesson is to actually go make the mistake and and do it. But the mistake that a lot of startups make I think is that they hire too fast. They treat the absence of any negatives as a reason to hire, whereas it should be not just the absence of negatives but a "Hell yes," meaning like, "I learned something from this person, they're way better than me at something at least, um, I left the interview with more energy than when I went in."
You can de-risk a lot of early hiring also by just having people come in and like try working together for a week or two. Interviews are actually a really kind of a low-signal thing; you have to get really some people are great interviewers, like maybe 5% of people can really assess someone in interview. Most people aren't that good at it naturally and so you can basically use references or what we did in early days of Coinbase, we actually just had people try working with us for like a week or two. A lot of people can't do that because they have an existing job, but some people can. And you'll you'll know within a week or two like this person basically delivered a bunch of stuff, they got a bunch of stuff done that was useful and helped move the ball forward or they didn't. Like it needed me to it needed me or someone else to come in and edit their work or curate it and like it's not to oversimplify it but basically like if the person can get a lot of stuff done that advances the mission then you want them on the team and if they can't, you shouldn't have them on the team.
And that's basically what makes great companies is like you have a bunch of people aligned toward a big impactful mission who can actually get a lot of stuff done every week. And um, you know, you share some values in common and then everything else they can be quirky and weird and different and like from every background and walk of life and like everything else can be different but if you have those pieces right—they get a lot of stuff done towards the mission and they're aligned—then you got a good company.
You said about growing too fast. I saw you post recently that you'd grown the company too fast over the last couple of years and that you were having to cut back about 18% of the workforce. Emotionally in those moments, you know, the statement was you were very transparent, you were very honest, you didn't have to publish that to the entire world but you did. Emotionally what are those moments like? Does it get any easier for you to to to cut back the workforce when you you signaled in the the memo that you take responsibility for that as well? Like you weren't skirting blame or anything.
So there's always something challenging every year that like really pushes you out outside of your comfort zone and that's part of what I like about running a company is like you're constantly learning. So for this year that was one of the things was like we had never done a layoff before, I had never done one. And um, yeah, it did kind of suck to look back and say, "Ah, I actually made the mistake." You know, we were everything in crypto was so up and up and up last year that it it felt irresponsible not to keep hiring more people because we had like lines out our door, you know virtually, of like customers trying to sign up, like institutional clients and new products and competitors and all these different markets and we were like, "We're just being irrational and irrational not to keep building the company with all this revenue we're generating."
So but I think we found the breaking point. And basically if you kind of more than double a company in a year, you're really going to start to see a lot of stuff break. The culture erodes, um, decision-making is unclear, communication channels break down. And so we definitely like exceeded that threshold last year in 2021 and in early this year we were on a pace to kind of keep growing too quickly.
So you know, it really it really kind of is a bad feeling to look at a problem and say, "Oops, I made a mistake." But the only worst thing than that is to like bury your head in the sand and pretend that you didn't make a mistake because you don't want to admit it or whatever. And so um facing reality while it was deeply unpleasant and it was really unpleasant for the people that were part ways with the company, um, it was the right thing to do that now we have the ability to kind of learn how to operate really efficiently at this new size, 5,000 people, still a lot, we can get a ton done with that. And we got the cost structure to a place where we know that we can not only have enough cash but like really thrive in this in this recession we're all going through at this point and whether that lasts one year or three years or four years, whatever. We're now we've set the company up to ensure that it has a better chance of accomplishing the mission long-term. So in a way although it was a super hard decision and it was tough for a lot of people involved, it made me feel good that we did the right thing.
This is an interesting question that I just had when I was just just thinking then um because of the, you know, from my perspective I would call that stress. Sometimes stress is great, but there's a lot of volatility in the markets and those tough decisions. If if you view happiness as like a concoction of as like a recipe and there's lots of ingredients that go in go into making us happy, um, what ingredients in your happiness recipe do you think you need more of? Like today personally for you.
Oh wow. I mean... so I think this is getting very personal. I think, you know, people are they're basically happy with like health, wealth, relationships, things like that. If you don't have your health, it's hard to really be happy, you can't really do anything. You don't need to be wealthy, but you need to have some level of security where you're like, "I'm not worried about like being hungry tomorrow or something," right? And then relationships account for a lot of happiness, I think. Um, family, like romantically, personal friendships. So, um, I mean, it's kind of I'm like almost 40 and I think I'm thinking at some point I'm going to have kids. So that's probably like that's probably an area. But otherwise I think, yeah, I feel quite happy about relationships in my life, personally, professionally, romantically, all that stuff. So yeah, I didn't think you were going to go there, but yeah.
No, there you go. I feel the same way. I've had I've not had enough balance in my life, so my big next chapter is um invest allocating enough time to my girlfriend and being I said it on stage today, being a dad and those things, and prioritizing that, knowing the importance of it even though I can't track it. It's not revenue, so...
Yeah.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. They don't know who they're writing it for. Okay. Um, their question was: what is the belief that you hold that most people disagree with you on? Hmm. Give you some time.
Well, I mean one kind of um contrarian view that I have that I think most people would disagree with is um... I think a lot of regulation is well-intentioned and it actually causes more harm than good.
Very on point for your business.
Yeah, it's true. I mean, well and and even beyond my business, um, you know if you want to become if you want to become like hair stylist in the US, you have to get a license from the state, you have to spend like $20k getting a thousand hours of training. It's literally illegal for some person just go cut another person's hair without a license. And it prevents a lot of young people or marginalized groups in society from getting that basic economic level up that could change their lives.
And I think you know the people who pass these laws are well-intentioned. They're like, "Oh we don't want anyone getting a skin infection at the at the hair stylist" or whatever, right? "We don't want anyone losing their bank funds." And but when you actually go pass these massive rule sets, they they turn into regulatory capture where big incumbents write the rules to make it harder for new startups to enter. And the small businesses can't handle the overhead of all that filing and licensing and legal fees.
And so it actually slows down progress and prevents the the people who need that leg up the most in society from entering those fields. I think people want things to be safe, so they lean into regulation but they don't realize the massive negative side effects of it.
Brian, thank you. Thank you for your candor and your transparency today. It's really really appreciated. I know people don't see a lot of you and they don't get this perspective on who you are. But for me, it's really reinforced my belief that you are the exact right person in the exact right seat in the exact right industry to have the resilience and the logic to lead that whole decentralized space towards the Promised Land. So thank you so much.
Thanks, Steven. Appreciate it.
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