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Patrick. Hello and
welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and
this is invest like the best this show is an open-ended exploration of markets ideas methods stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money you can learn more and stay up-to-date and investor Field Guide.com Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, all opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management this
Cast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, May maintain positions in the Securities discussed in this podcast. My guest this week is Brian Armstrong the co-founder and CEO of coinbase. The topic of our conversation is the future of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. It's been a while since I checked in on the world of crypto and while prices are still below the 2017 highs there's been a ton of additional work and infrastructure laid.
We discuss the major events of the past decade and what might happen in crypto in the 2020s. Perhaps most interesting. We cover the potential benefits of a modernized financial system, which coinbase hopes to help usher in as I'm trying to do more in my conversation with CEOs. We also discuss the lessons. He's learned building his business, please enjoy my conversation with Brian Armstrong Brian. Thanks so much for doing this for me today. I thought a neat place to begin since I used to spend a lot of time talking to people in the world of cryptocurrency would
Be sort of as an update many people were intimately familiar with what was going on in crypto and sort of 2017 and 2018 probably less intimately familiar with what has happened most substantially sense. So it'd be really neat to begin with your take on the most important developments over the last couple of years.
Well, there's lots to catch up on actually, I wrote a blog post at the beginning of 2020 that sort of talk about what happened in 2019. And then what I think will happen in 2020 a number of things happen defy started to actually work.
Get a lot of traction I should say we saw Central Bank digital currencies, which is kind of a fancy name for certain type of stable coin that started to get a lot of interest. So we saw China started to digitize the Yuan and the u.s. Started to get interested in digitizing the dollar after Libra kind of created a big Hornet's Nest stirred up a hornet's nest over there in DC. So there was a number of things like that that started happening and then I would say there's probably five or six really good teams that are working on what I call next.
Ation blockchain, they're trying to improve the scalability developer tools things like that in the Next Generation blockchain things like outran polkadot Kosmos to I don't want to shout anything in particular better than another one. I'm just sort of watching the whole Space broadly, but there's been a bunch of those as well, which is really exciting and I'm hoping that that kind of is like when the internet moved from dial-up to broadband or something we can get another couple orders of magnitude of transaction, but through the blockade, I think that'll actually unlock a lot of new use case.
I love thinking about things through the lens of the long-term vision of your business. I think those that know coinbase will understand its most basic use case, but I thought it would be a neat early conversation around sort of the mission and vision of coinbase in the various important aspects of that. Could you highlight the long-term Vision that you hope to help breathe into existence.
So I think most people they think about cryptocurrency as something that people trade kind of speculatively right now or they've heard of Bitcoin, but they don't know about any of the other to me that's actually missing the long-term potential.
For coinbase, our mission is to create an open Financial system for the world. We have this Vision about using that open Financial system to bring economic freedom to people all over the world and it's kind of this pretty big ambitious goal, which is we kind of want to create an entirely new economy. We're calling it The crypto economy which is native to the Internet. It's much more fair. It's much more Global. It's much more efficient in terms of Loki's. Yeah, you could imagine it as kind of what if the internet which is This Global decentralized thing had a native currency.
See that was also Global decentralized. Well, then you could have this new Freer economy happening. Basically what this means in practice is people start off in by all right. I want to buy a little bit coin or something to get started and learn more about this. And then okay, I'm going to learn about some of these other cryptocurrencies, but that's basically utilizing just the trade action like by himself and that's only one small part of an economy is trading the other things that people do is they earn money they spend money whether that's a merchants or paying their friends. They send money remittance.
Hoarder, they also invest money. They cryptocurrency they do something called staking there's even other things like crypto economic actions like boating and governance. So you're starting to see more and more of those features come up in coinbase. For instance. We launched a coinbase debit card in the UK last year and it got a lot of traction and we launched something called coinbase Tavern where you can actually earn bits of cryptocurrency for going and doing various tasks and learning about things and we have a merchant payment solution called coinbase Commerce, which is
Accepting allowing Merchants to accept crypto currency payments. We also launched staking like a whole bunch of things. And this is a metric we kind of track internally is what percentage of our customers are not just trading but they're doing some kind of non trading activity with cryptocurrency. That number has just been steadily increasing which is one of the few graphs that coinbase that actually steadily increases our most things are very volatile. They look kind of price of Bitcoin or something like that for years. People were asking me this when coinbase is getting started. All right. Well what are people actually doing with crypto other than trade?
And we can actually see the real data now and it's not one thing. That's the main thing. It's a bunch of little things. They're earning at they're spending it with Merchants. They're doing remittance. They're using gaps. They're using prediction markets. They're using things like Reddit that just came out with these Community coins. They're launching startups, but really is like a truly new economy that's happening and my hope is that that's going to grow to be a significant portion of the global economy at some point. We're really excited about that Trend.
We're gonna be so excited about this world early on.
Was this notion that the internet to that point had been about information delivery and protocols and this was about value delivery and protocols and you use two concepts that I'd like to dig it on a bit more one is this concept of an open Financial system and then the second is economic freedom on the open side that implies that right now it's closed. I'd love to hear the contrast. What is it about what you hope to usher in that is superior. And what does that allow for relative to the will call it an incumbent or closed Financial system?
It's really important to contract the
Personal financial system in this new open Financial system, what's the difference and then we can talk about economic freedom to if you want in the traditional Financial system. Look, I don't want to say every part of his bad obviously some parts that work pretty well, especially in countries like the United States. We have functioning credit system and generally even though there's some inflation some of that is good to stimulate the economy, but we sort of dollars lost in this value. I think the main challenges that I see with traditional Financial system are there's some things like one.
In its payments kind of only work more seamlessly when you're in one country like the United States a lot of times people were trying to send money abroad whatever they counter these issues. You can actually get on a plane and fly to Australia faster than it takes you to send money there for instance or if you were to send money there. You might lose sometimes 3% or 5% A lot of people who are doing these kind of Western Union type transactions, they end up paying like over ten percent in fees. Just a guest money to someone vodka part of it is just kind of global nature.
The other issue with it is there's Consumer Financial privacy issues. We're seeing all these issues Equifax being hacked and a lot of people's data is leaked out there. There's things that are just annoying how many times you see some random charge on your credit card or your credit card gets declined when you try to use it online or you get some kind of unexpected overdraft fee to the a lot of these little things that people just get frustrated about with the financial system. But I think probably the biggest one for me is that this is kind of underappreciated. I think the
A financial system is actually a huge barrier to Innovation what I mean by that is that there's a lot of people out there who don't realize this because I've never tried to start a company or something like that. But a lot of entrepreneurs have had this experience I have in my past were started this Tutoring company in college and getting customers. I thought was going to be the hard part or maybe making a product somebody like, but actually one of the hardest part was just being able to collect payments for my customers and get payments out to all the contractors tutors, and I remember the banks were
Give me all these kind of questions. Are you an aggregator of funds and you have this policy and that I almost felt like I was being treated like a criminal actually. It was really difficult to get these kind of systems set up. That was just a US company. I mean now of coinbase and companies like Airbnb and Uber it's incredibly difficult to get payments working on a global scale in all these countries both collecting money in and getting money paid out. You get all these kind of weird things that people do because the Global Financial system is not well connected people on
Has on Turk on Amazon, they'll often get paid an Amazon store credit because they have no way to get payments out these people in Bangladesh or wherever they are. Then you'll get these kind of weird Shadow economies of people trading Amazon credits in these regions or try to buy food and stuff like that. It kind of just gives you this blend into the Goldfish system you realize it's almost like if every country had its own private internet or something like that and if I wanted to read a web page in Brazil or send an email to Spain, I'd have to pay some kind of
Order taxed or something to get my email into Spain. When you think about it from that point of view. It kind of doesn't make sense that every country in the world needs to have its own currency and its own Financial system to create so much friction when the economy is becoming more and more Global that's kind of the traditional Financial system in the open Financial system. This is also very new some of it. I think will come in the future. Everything is kind of fast cheap and Global so sending payments is kind of more like sending an email it just it arrives in a few seconds it pretty cheap.
Keep it works everywhere in the world. It's kind of level the playing field as well. If you're someone in Venezuela and you can't really get access to a stable currency or bank account. Well, if you're in a country where a lot of countries like women are not allowed to have bank accounts. There's kind of an in financial inclusion aspect of this anybody who has a smartphone can get access to cryptocurrency has like a More Level Playing Field like that. My hope is that the open Financial system will unlock a ton of innovation. It'll be a lot of prove equality of opportunity to also just make things a lot more.
Shift lower fees for transaction fees and exchange rates and prevent people from getting unexpected prizes. That's kind of my contrast to that if we can talk about economic freedom to if you want.
Yeah, before we go there would love to even just break that down one more level to two Dimensions. So the first would be that the money itself and then the second would be sort of the movement of the money you sort of talked a bit about both when I think about the movement of money. I'm curious how you think crypto improves on say what stripe will look like in 10 years continuing to innovate behind an API.
Why they're trying to tackle that problem maybe for your tutoring business example or something to accept funds more easily, but you're accepting USD. I guess my question is how could crypto improve both the movement of money or value around the world, but then also in what ways might the money itself be superior to something like the US
dollar and a lot of really great companies like stripe and square and others who are building on top of the existing infrastructure underneath they can actually take something like the credit card system or ACA.
Or wires or equivalent in Europe and other countries and they're kind of trying to do all that hard work the stitch together a lot of these kind of archaic systems and put like a nice wrapper on top of it. I think that's really great. But there's only so much they can do because they're all built on the same underlying system. So you'll notice drive from square and Braintree and all these companies. Every single one is the prices are almost exactly the same as two point nine percent or whatever and the number of days before you get your payouts as a merchant is almost saying they can compete on the margin stripe has shown that by making
those developer tools easier. You can actually have a huge Advantage but there's all built on the same underlying system and cryptocurrency is kind of coming along and saying hey look what if we had a new underlying system that was dramatically more efficient that could be either in terms of global news of real-time settlement the fees. And by the way, I don't mean to paint this as a perfectly Rosy picture and cryptocurrency. There's a lot of work that needs to be done. Sometimes the fees in certain block chains are very high. Sometimes the settlement times are too high. It's kind of like the early days of the internet where their dial-up modems and stuff.
Still a little bit rough around the edges the potential is there in your si. It's getting better and better every couple of years. I think once that happens that you'll get these kind of magical experiences from the consumer point of view that are closer to the best analogy. I've seen is probably something like WeChat payments in China now China again, it's only kind of works within one country. But you've been to China you've seen how people use WeChat payment. It is kind of a glimpse into the Future Okay. Well what if that worked but not just in China on a global scale and without all the financial privacy issues.
China has that starts to get into a glimpse of what it might look like. You're on some kind of an e-commerce site. You just pull out your phone you scan a QR and it says you want to pay this much to this Merchant and send them your shipping address you hit accept and boom the checkouts done. You never needed to register a crazy account. You never needed type of credit card into your browser or something like that. There are things like that around the movement of money and then the underlying currency itself, which is kind of the second part of your question. I think there's some real interesting stuff there just around creating sound money right now.
The u.s. Dollar is generally considered to be the reserve currency of the world. I don't think that's going to change immediately. Although China is definitely pushing to try to get the Yuan to be a strong Contender. If not, take that top spot in the next five or ten years. I think there's a decent chance. They actually might do that because they're being very aggressive around the world in terms of all kinds of Investments and Technologies and things but in the crypto economy, the dollar is not the reserve currency Bitcoin is the reserve currency that people go to in that sense. It's actually a little more trustworthy because
So if you read about modern monetary Theory and quantitative easing and inflation and government debt and all these kind of things in the last 10 years or so. There's been a couple kind of worrying things with the US dollar in terms of our debt ratios. And especially with this covid stuff and all the recent economic activity. There has been a lot of stimulus bills passed and quantitative easing and stuff like that. The short-term effect of that has been filled inflationary because I think there's just such limited supply of manufacturing took ahead and people's wealth has income has
Have gone down but they're going to keep stimulating and printing that much money. The long-term effect could be that there's actually more and more inflation. I think people are even if they don't fully understand how those mechanisms work underneath. There's a lot of people out there who are starting to kind of get this uneasy feeling what is going on with the treasury and the Federal Reserve and does this really make sense to seems too good to be true. You just going to print all this money and it's somehow it's all going to be. Okay. I think they're kind of looking for an alternative system that they can trust and
Cryptocurrency there's nobody who has their fingers on the dials who can kind of manipulate it for their own benefit. There's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoins. Nobody can really go in and change that and that's so far stood the test of time 10 years or so, the u.s. Dollar is increasingly. They're not feeling like they have that same level of trust. I think both of those ways look at it or true.
I would love to talk about why economic freedom is an important variable in all of this. I think obviously one positive appeal of your dimension fostering innovation.
Things like that one appeal of a different Financial system or replacement or a secondary one would be higher economic freedom. So talk about your thinking and research there and how those freedoms relate to the rise of a crypto economy.
Economic freedom is a concept that I am really personally passionate about years and years ago. I ended up reading something about it. Probably on Wikipedia or the Wall Street Journal publishes something on it. Heritage Foundation is a few different organizations out there that try to kind of rank the countries of the world.
By economic freedom and economic freedom is this measure it's a composite metric that economists and various people look at that. It's kind of thing. How easy is it to start a business in this country how much corruption bribery is there those free trade exist can people work on things. They want or join the companies they want it's this composite metric and the really kind of surprising thing about it. Is that people might think oh, well that might correlate with high GDP growth and stuff like that and it does correlate with that but it also correlates with all these other things in society.
People wouldn't probably immediately get countries with the highest economic freedom tend to have the best treatment of the environment. They have the best income share of the poorest 10% of people in society. They have less war they have higher self-reported happiness of citizens. They have better literacy rates lower infant mortality rates always positive Downstream effects. And by the way, some of the countries you might imagine that are the highest economic freedom countries like New Zealand or Ireland or if that's where you I might want to live in that country someday and the place
that's the lowest economic freedom are Korea or Zimbabwe things like that where you might be fascinated about the kind of struggles. They have I love seeing these by the way, there are these visual indication people show like if you look at Cuba 50 years ago in Cuba today, which is a low economic freedom country. It actually looks relatively same the same like Skyline and Singapore transform in the time frame from a swamp land until to Metropolis. So North Korea South Korea is kind of maybe the most visually distinct one which is a kind of an a/b test that history put in.
Lab work like same geography same natural resources everything. It's just the laws of the economic freedom, we're different and they had these dramatically different outcomes if some space at night all that kind of stuff Peter Thiel says that every company is founded on a secret. I guess the secret of coin based has one is that I had this hunch when I read the Bitcoin white paper a long time ago. I said, I think economic freedom is really cool. And maybe it's Downstream effects in society not just correlation. But causation is there I bet with the rise of smartphones and this new cryptocurrency.
Currency Bitcoin and all the things that will come from that I bet we could add economic freedom in two countries all over the world by basically creating some of the basic Financial infrastructure that some of these don't have where their property right enforcement if I have some money can I actually keep it or will it be taken away from me somehow and played it away free trade and global trade and just enabling Commerce and transactions to happen in a maybe even credit markets. People are now getting loans with D5 which a lot of these Emerging Markets. You can't get loans to do anything. And so
Suppose our economy. That's kind of why I love economic freedom and I actually think cryptocurrency plus the smartphone is kind of the secret that we can use to inject economic freedom in two countries all over the world and hopefully change the economic remove the world.
It begs the question how that might happen alongside Regulators or regulations in different countries. Both developed countries, like the us but also say a Zimbabwe that the role of the incumbent governments and institutions and regulations and regulators.
Is is really important. How do you see that relationship unfolding especially if crypto gets much bigger than it is today. It's going to have to be
addressed eight years ago coinbase roughly started and we decided from the early days. We were going to go out practically work with regulators and try to be an educational resource to them at a lot of the crypto companies that time we're kind of trying to fly under the radar and hope that The Regulators did notice them and I kind of realized hey not all regulation. I agree with of course, but that's the Practical matter. That's the world we live in and if we're going to
The company for long term we need to work with Regulators not try to avoid them. That's exactly what we did in the US and then in the EU and now in 35 or 40 countries, we've successfully been able to interact with regulators and teach them about. Okay. Here's the AML program that we have in place and get their feedback on it. Have them tell us where we can improve it the u.s. We started off being still are regulated as a money transmitter New York, then put out something called a bit license. There's a federal fincen we work with the u.s. We end up working.
With cftc and SEC on a whole bunch of matters as well and then same kind of equivalent in Europe and all the places that we operate. I would generally say it's like this in kind of developed countries that have existing regulatory Frameworks and generally want to have growth in their economy and they believe in technology and things like that. We are finding that we are already a regulated financial service business today in all of these countries around the world and generally I would say maybe even coinbase was first starting. We got a lot of skepticism and things like that, but
Now they're like hey Bitcoin is great very much grade. The conversations were having with them are about the latest thing or some stable coin or some security token where they still need to get educated and learn more about it. But we that's all the developed countries of the world. Now, there's going to be just like the internet generally the internet is open and it works in most places in the Free World, but China has the great firewall of China and North Korea decided they want to build their own internet during the Arab Spring some countries tried to turn off the internet. So I think there is definitely going to be a
portion of the world that also does that same approach cryptocurrency and it wouldn't surprise me if China tries to discourage the use of some Global decentralized cryptocurrencies and push their own thing instead or if North Korea or some countries try to block cryptocurrency entirely. So I think it's just as kind of what side of History do you want to be on and I would say every year more and more kind of folks have gotten comfortable with cryptocurrency. Whereas now it today in the US. I mean even Ben Bernanke and people like that have come out and said,
We think this has promised and this is an interesting technology, and the internet was so good to you the United States in terms of creating all these very valuable companies like Google and Amazon and everything that I think the US it will be a regulated huge business that is legal and hopefully most places in the Free World
with clean base as an early leader in this space. I thought it would be neat to talk about its progression from the early days both to talk a bit about how you think about product and just building a business almost unrelated to cryptocurrency, but
Also just to use it as markers for how this has evolved like how people use this stuff and interact with this stuff. I would love to begin right at the start which is how did you get the first batch of users to join the original coinbase product?
So the origin story is pretty interesting. I was a software engineer at Airbnb. I was kind of working on some code for them to try to help them move payments around the world and I ended up reading the Bitcoin white paper just one I was at home one time with my parents over the holidays. This was I think around December of
In pain and I remember reading that white paper and thinking wow, this is a really big deal something about it just caught my attention. And anyway, I started thinking more about it over the next year or so and started working on a little bit of a prototype and eventually applied to Y combinator which is the startup incubator and went through that program. I have to say they kind of took a bet on me, which I'm always grateful for because at that time I was sort of telling some of my friends and stuff about. Hey, I think this Bitcoin thing is pretty cool and I kind of want to try to make a prototype or a product most of you. I thought you were like,
I don't really get it. It sounds like kind of a scam. What is this thing? You're kind of getting into I probably would have been very hesitant to kind of quit my job and really go try to do this full time. It wasn't for that initial check 450k or so that y combinator wrote me. I'm very grateful to them for that kind of went through that program right after that. I met Fred or some who ended up being my co-founder can't say enough good things about him. I mean without Fred I don't think there would have been a quiet day with this great match of our skill sets and talents and he and I just
Kind of ended up working 12-hour days 6 7 days a week for a couple of years to try to Hero the thing into existence and start to build a team and a lot of the early people came from those days and the very first version of the product was simple. It was just I knew that there was this protocol out there Bitcoin and it was kind of like a protocol on the internet like TCP IP or SMTP which powered email and I figured everybody at that time was running Bitcoin nodes kind of on their own computer. I figured this might involve kind of like email. Nobody wants to run their own email server. They just
Gmail or some kind of hosted service. So what if we did that for Bitcoin what if we make like a hosted Bitcoin wallet? So if you lost your phone or lost your computer, it's not like you lost all your money. It's all the security updates and the backups are in the cloud and we'll just build this great service. So that was the initial idea. And what was funny was I just launched it this prototype. We put it up on sites like Reddit and Hacker News and we just got our first couple hundred people to come in and look at it. And I remember at that time. You couldn't buy Bitcoin or any crypto currency on coinbase. It was just really
Was the dick when boss and I remember a lot of people would come sign up but they wouldn't really stick around and use the product. And so I emailed five of them today. We call this user studies. We do it all the time in product development, but I was doing it very informally back then I just emailed five people who'd find out that hey, can you get on the phone with me? I'm building this thing. I'd love to talk to you and I kind of asked them was like hey, I saw you signed up, but you didn't come back. Can you give me some feedback on the product and they were like, it seems pretty cool, but I don't really have any Bitcoin maybe if I get some out and come back and use it and I kind of
Remember ask one of on the phone. I was like well if we made it simple by button if you abused that he was like probably Fred and I went about sort of getting all the pieces in place to get that to work whether it's getting a bank partner to work with us, which was a huge ordeal and getting an easy way for people to connect the payment method and getting some kind of simple exchange integration working and we made it a just a very simple by experience the minute we launched that feature. It kind of started to take off organically and we had product Market fit at that point and
Was the very beginnings of coinbase.
What did it feel like at the peak of the December Madness in 2017?
So for people who don't know I mean cryptocurrency has gone through a number of Bubbles and correction each time. It ends up at a higher Plateau. So I think it's kind of directionally an upward Channel but each of those kind of bubble moment has been kind of crazy at coinbase. So the last one big one was in 2017 and around December things got crazy there for a while not only because we were
Are seeing record traffic come into the site and we have became the number one app in the app store. I remember we had never seen numbers like this where we have 50,000 people sign up in one day or something on the app. And I remember all of us it was this was probably I don't know 75 of us were in some kind of cramped office at that size or maybe a hundred fifty. I don't remember exactly how many people know we're all just kind of staring around hoping the website will stay up and we had 50,000 people sign up. We've only ever had five thousand people signed up before in a day and then the next day life.
Thousand people signed up in one day. I was like, how is that possible? I was Googling 50,000 people fit into the Giants stadium in San Francisco or something. That's what 50,000 people look like a lot of people and then we just had 10 Giants Stadium sign up in one day. There was a lot of sleepless nights. There's a lot of sleep deprivation. We were just desperately trying to keep the website up and running. There was a lot of capital kind of allocation challenges that Catholics challenges people are trading so much cryptocurrency that we needed to kind of via the ACH system.
Um, we were collecting this money out of people's accounts and there was two to three working days of capital that we needed to front. We were basically using huge amount of resources just to try to keep the buy and sell flows on I remember a lot of sort of scammy behavior started to emerge as well all these people who kind of rush into cryptocurrency like oh this is some get-rich-quick scheme and we saw people who were launching these tokens that were completely scammy and kind of fraudulent remember customers would find our office and sort of waiting for us there outside when we come
The office and so I started sneaking in the back door of number. One of the people who works in the building that I was living in they like came and knocked on my door and they were like sir. I know the company you work for and I just want to know should I buy crypto and I was like super awkward people are coming to my house in some ways. It was good in hindsight because it got another order of magnitude of people in the world kind of knowledgeable about cryptocurrency and a lot of people ended up getting a little bit of it for the first time in some ways. It was actually very negative because it brought in the wrong type of mentality.
E of people who like to come get rich quick thing and all the scanning Behavior, I think sort of created a little bit of a reputational stain for a little while. But most of that has passed at this point and it reminds me of kind of like the.com boom bust cycle. This is just how technology I think evolved and gets introduced into the world people get irrational exuberance about it. And then they have despair the about it the whole things over it'll never work reality. It's Never As Good As It Seems and it's never as bad as it seems the real adoption was just kind of slowly.
Moving throughout all of that regardless of what the price was doing. So that's why I always try to tell the team and other people don't get caught up in the heist. If you want to try something with this one percent of your assets into it and just don't touch it for 10 years. Don't put any money. You can't afford to lose. This is the new thing and just think long-term. That's what I always try to tell people
you mentioned team there and I'm so interested with relatively young companies like coinbase that have nonetheless added a ton of people to their firm over the last decade. How you think about
About recruiting identifying Talent successfully convincing them to join coinbase and then incentivizing them in the right way for them to be most productive this seems like probably the highest leverage thing that you as a CEO can do in a hyper growth stage. I'd love to hear the lessons you've learned on
people. There's so many things we could talk about on people and hiring and I agree with you, by the way, I think basically everything in a company comes back to people because you think well, okay. We need to be profitable how to become profitable. You got to have a good product people want. Well, okay. How do you have a
Product people want what you got to hire great people to build that and build a great team and get them to be aligned towards the same thing. And so it kind of all comes back to people there's a few things that I think we did. Well some that we probably didn't do well but in terms of taking the positive lessons, so at some point we wrote down the values of company and we got really clear about that. They said the first 150 or 200 people Fred and I were able to meet with each of them in person and we were the final decision maker on all these hires and that created Discord nucleus.
Score culture that had some of these common elements, but after that we realized the scale the company and today conversation about 1100 people we weren't going to be able to meet all of them in person. And so we need to see formalize and write down. What are the hiring criteria? What are the values that we're looking for? What are the things we want to all have in common here? We wrote those down and we talked about clear communication positive energy continuous learning efficient execution and learn more about those on our website if you want, but and we also introduced this thing. We called a cab our razor program we've
This idea from Google which is you don't want to let hiring managers make unilateral hiring decisions there needs to be another person who can veto the higher and their job is to raise the bar with every hire Fred and I repeated that over and over again, especially in the early days and point-based. But even now today where we tell everybody you're not a hell. Yes on this candidate, you're a no so if you're ever unsure you round down to know your job is to raise the bar with every higher the bar razor was kind of there to be the stickler or the
Jerk and the room a little bit to have some backbone and kind of say hey. Are you a hell? Yes on this person or do you just trying to fill these open headcount that you have because your team has so many priorities you need to go do and you don't have enough head count. That's the risk a little bit. This is human nature. If you're hiring manager, you might want to fill that seat because gosh you have so many things you're supposed to get done or you just want to build your Empire whatever the kind of failure modes are so I'd say the bar razor don't let hiring managers make you lateral hiring decisions really write down the values.
There's a lot more stuff that we're doing now in terms of where we Source candidates. I think different people they join companies for different reasons. Some people want it to be too growth and learning saying for others. It's really important mission that they care about for others its compensation. They want to build wealth. I think of it as those are different levers that you can pull for different people and for each person is different they're going to be motivated by different things. So you got to be good at all of them. Hopefully you hit the right lever for all those people, but you also need a tailor to that person's preferences.
Just having like a really important mission for the world, which I talked about the open Financial system and economic freedom. I'd say that's one of the things that has gotten us a lot of great talent because the best people they want to work on really ambitious stuff that's going to change the world and that's me coming out and saying hey, I actually think we can build a whole new economy for the world that more free and accelerate the pace of innovation and overthrow the dictator in the world or whatever and people are like, okay, that's crazy. But that's awesome. And I want to come see if I can help with that.
I love
Concept of a bar razor in addition to wanting to work on hard problems people want to work with great people and that becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's really really interesting. What are the mistakes mentioned? Maybe some things you didn't do as well. What were some of the blunders or errors are just mistakes that you made on the people side that have helped you learn and change how you do things.
Well, one of them is we probably should have written down those hiring values sooner. If I were to do it again. I probably would have written it down at five employees that have a hundred fifty because I think Fred and I were just killing
Ourselves being the bar razor effectively or the values interviewer. I kind of got so burned out on interviewing at a certain point. I think I had done five thousand interviews or something and for years it got crazy. Maybe not quite that many but thousands at least I've probably done that sooner the other things that I probably would say. I mean there was a lot of hiring lessons, but one of them is that I ended up kind of valuing hiring for humility. I would say a little bit later and coinbase history. And the reason was that there were some people that we hired that were just they were brilliant.
We're Geniuses. They were bar better at what they did than I could ever be but they struggled to kind of work well with other people and some people in Silicon Valley foie gras was the brilliant jerk or whatever. I don't want to call it acting like these kind of mean term, but I do want to look for humility and that's kind of the willingness for somebody to say. Hey, I'm curious. I want to learn from other people. I'm not so committed to being right about this thing. I've ended up valuing that more over the years. I would say
I'd like to hear a bit about your learning on the product side as well as the people side.
Undoubtedly coin basis had product Market fit in crypto investing or trading which is just an incredibly powerful base Instinct of people in finance seems to be one of those things that no matter what it is. We're trading we're going to want to trade. I'm curious how you think about steering the product roadmap knowing that people love to do that. But also with this bigger vision in mind with more primitive functions, like lending and spending and paying that you mentioned at the beginning how you balance that in thinking about what makes for a successful
product.
One thing I'll just say is kind of a product Focus EU. I do love working on product sometimes so much so that the team's probably didn't wish I was so into product but I would say so a lot of times products start off simple coin basis just fine till crypto and then over time we start to add more and more of the functionality. So there definitely is sort of an art to you don't want to destroy the new user experience. We call it the knux and ux where we have to remember that. We're building a product for people who are brand new. They've just heard about Bitcoin for the first time in some news.
Nicole they read or whatever and they're like, what is this? I'll come in and try to buy some Bitcoins for those people. If you put something in front of them and you want to stake your forked asset of this etherium smart contract, whatever you've just completely lost them or if you just say the word private key or something, you've completely lost them. They don't understand cryptography nor do they want we have to build a simple user experience that just going to pin hold them. But we also have these power users who they want to do the advanced stuff and they want to do he WAP orders.
Ten million dollars and kind of all these kind of interesting things. First of all, I should say coinbase is a multi-product company. So we have products for institutional customers. We have a retail we have it for merchants all kinds of things. So that's part of the solution. But the other thing I like to think about is sort of this it's kind of like a Swiss army knife analogy. We're on a Swiss army knife. You can take out just one blade and it's a simple tool but if you really want to expand out all of with the thumbnail catch you can expand out dozens of different tools and get those
When you need them, and so I kind of like to think about that those things that are like secondary or tertiary action. How do we kind of hide those behind a thumbnail catch? So they're there for people who need them, but they don't derail the experience to the new user. That's just one concept but there's many things like that that we tried to think
about. Let's go back now to the currencies themselves coinbase supports and allows you to trade not just Bitcoin, but early on it was a few others now, I think I don't know what the number is today, but it's expanded over the years. How do you think
Out that through the lens of the mission and vision. What do the non Bitcoin cryptocurrencies bring to the table that Bitcoin does not
today corn base has about 30 or so assets that people can trade will continue to add more as well. And the way that I thought about this overtime was first really everything we did was focused on bitcoin. That's what got us off the ground and we saw at a certain point that a lot of our customers were coming to us and saying hey we want to trade some of these other assets. I
It would go away for a while because I was like, I love the Simplicity of the focus of just being a Bitcoin but it became clear to certain point that we could probably fail as a company if we did not start to provide customers what they wanted. They were just going to go elsewhere a certain point. We just kind of made this decision were like, all right, we're going to add a couple more currencies where we got to over time was we said, you know, what our customer base is so distributed in different they each have their own favorite cryptocurrency or something that they're passionate about and our job is not to play judge and jury and try to tell them what they should use.
Goal should be let's just provide everything as long as it's not a scam or something out right like that or violating some law that we fall under let them make their own decision about what they want to trade and we're kind of be agnostic. It's a little bit like New York Stock Exchange or something. They have listing standards for who's going to be on there, but it's not like they're telling you to by bowing over Google or something like that. They're kind of just providing infrastructure. And by the way, I think over time you're going to see just like on Amazon Amazon lists all the products you might want to buy but
Of them have two stars from have five stars. So we want to provide things like that over time to help consumers and institutions make more educated choices about what their trading we don't want to have somebody feel like they got duped or something. It's the same thing with like the Google Play store or the App Store. So some kind of ratings I think is the solution as opposed to us playing judge and jury. But anyway, so I think the second part of your question was about kind of why are there so many different cryptocurrencies or maybe what are the use cases out there
most specifically what I'm interested in is
Working backwards from this vision of a differentiated more open Financial system that precipitates more economic freedom. What about Bitcoin isn't good enough, or maybe it's the big chunky of core asset, but there's other things needed we could talk about second layer Solutions as well here that allow that dream to come true. What's the missing functionality?
Okay. So here's kind of my feature list. I think of things that we need to get out there that will help cryptocurrency reach the next order of magnitude of people. So one of them,
M is scalability transactions per second day on most block changes too low for a mass-market application. It's allowed things like defy to take off because borrowing and lending you don't need to do super high transaction throughput but if you wanted to put like Reddit wherever you upload is on chain or a game or something like that you need much higher throughput the scalability is one and we can talk about later two solutions, which I think are really promising for some of these next-generation block chains that are working on higher throughput second one is probably around usability.
So today when you send a crypto currency transaction, you're sending it to this random address, which is like a random string of characters and what you want to be sending it to as a human readable address not a machine-readable address. And by the way, the internet went through this same transition to it went from having IP addresses to domain names like through the DNS system. So you need something to translate those human names into the computer names and the third one. I would say is around security or privacy. So today in cryptocurrency.
See, it's pseudo Anonymous on most of the change. You can't tell exactly the somebody is but it is a public ledger so you can trace it through and there's privacy coins that are coming out now probably coins are a little bit controversial, but I think eventually people want more financial privacy. And again the internet did the same thing it moved from HTTP, which was plain text to http over time. So the internet is kind of a Perfect Analogy went from dial-up to broadband. It went from IP addresses. It's made names and it went from HTTP to https and cryptocurrency means
It's the same kind of equivalent I think how is that going to translate into the different crypto currencies that are out there today? Nobody knows for sure and I certainly don't Bitcoin has really sort of established itself as the reserve currency in the crypto economy. So I think that'll be the gold standard the gold equivalent for quite a long time and we may get layer 2 Solutions working on top of Bitcoin, which allow the high throughput as well for that might end up in one of these newer blockchains, like any of the ones that I mentioned earlier and then of course privacy tokens are a piece of the
Little some of these decentralized identity solution, which would it give you that human readable names instead of the machine readable names. Those are all things where there's a lot of research papers being written. We're reading them Point base. We're doing meetings. Try to figure out. All right. Do we want to put our weight behind one of these standards to set our help the industry move forward. So those are the things I think we really need to get working.
What area of innovation in crypto outside of coinbase. Are you most excited about
well, there's a lot of really cool stuff happening in defy. I mean, we're participating a little bit in defy through
His wallet and things like that, but I think we haven't dipped our toe into it in a big way.
Can you define d Phi for people out there
Stanford decentralized Finance? It's basically a collection of new protocols and tokens that are allowing people to different Financial activity like borrowing and lending or doing decentralized exchanges. But these are happening in a totally distributed decentralized way instead of there being like a centralized place where you'd go hey, I want to get a loan and they'd match you with a lender or
Or I can exchange where you go. And you say I want to put a buy order and they'll match with a seller in a centralized way. These are offering be a smart contract and with new protocols. So they're totally decentralized which means they inherently work on a global basis and it can't really be shut down and there's a lot of Regulation that's well-intentioned around lending licenses and things like that, but in decentralized protocol like that, you want to work on a global basis. Well kind of impossible to go get a lending license in 190 countries around the world not to mention individual states and like all these
In the United States and everything decentralized Protocols are basically creating a little bit of that truly open Financial system. That is global and they get there by being decentralized.
Is there a country or region that you visited as part of this coinbase journey that was especially interesting through the lens of crypto.
There have been a few over the years. Yeah. One thing that was kind of formative in my path was I ended up living in when it's ours for a year not while is billing coinbase, but prior when I was younger and I think seeing a country that had gone.
Through hyperinflation actually did really influenced my thinking a lot of people have only grown up in the United States and have never really seen Financial crises us has its own now I suppose but a lot of people who they grew up outside the US they somehow just yet cryptocurrency quicker. I've noticed that's not the only way to get there. But that's one of the ways people get there and I've done other trips in my life to where for instance. I took a trip into Ecuador at one point that I was did this Amazon rainforest trip, and that guy was in The Villages where people they
Dirt floors, but they all had cell phones. In fact, they were like pretty modern Android smartphones and I realized okay. Well, the smartphone is the cost of come down people are going to have these everywhere even the poorest people they all use the internet. They know how to use it. I gave some of them cryptocurrency and stuff like that just to see could they even understand it and things like that and they're very resourceful. They understand how to use thing. There's actually a charity that I set up called give crypto dot-org which is sending small amounts of crypto into regions of the world that are going through financial crisis. We've
It's a bunch of payments to people in Venezuela and stuff like that where 90% of the people who receive these payments they're able to go complete a transaction buying food or medicine whatever they need with cryptocurrency or going to a local exchanger that to me was pretty excited. We didn't even know if it would work would they even want cryptocurrency would the internet work well enough in Venezuela, but 90% of them were able to benefit from it and the transaction fees for us to get money like that into Venezuela was a lot less than transferring fiat currency
back to the idea.
Company building again over the Journey of building coinbase to this point what has changed most in your mind what opinions of yours have changed most about effective company building
this might take me some time to write up a really good post on this but just off the cuff. I mean certainly hiring great people with one of the best things that we started with kind of all comes back to that and then you have to have a company that's going to be economically viable and coinbase has been very lucky to have a good business model.
DeLand be operating cash flow positive and stuff like that. There's a real risk that I think companies get too big too fast and they have to kind of rely a lot on Venture financing and they basically the founders end up losing control and bad things can happen there. This is a topic maybe I could talk more about public at some point, but I think actually having founder controlled companies is kind of important just in terms of staying true to the vision of it and it can all go wrong as well. We've seen some public examples of that to like founders.
A crazy people. I think there's some data I've seen that founder LED companies in the public markets actually outperform and that kind of thing and you need to kind of pair these crazy founders with great operators. That's a really tricky to get right. There's probably a lot more I could say but on that I think about it more
sure during that same Journey. The founder thing is interesting like the psychology of it is very interesting to me were there points where you lost confidence either in yourself or in the business or in the vision?
And if so, how did you fight through those things
starting a company is definitely an emotional roller coaster and I have a lot of respect for Founders even when they fail because it is such a tough thing. A lot of people. I think they see someone like Elon Musk or something in there. Like now this guy's crazy. What's he doing? They don't like him or whatever. I kind of have some respect for what he's attempting to do is freaking difficult and whether he succeeds or not, I feel like we should be rooting for him because it's probably better for Humanity in that sense. But yeah, I mean there were some very
Dark Days building coinbase where especially when we were smaller somebody stole this amount of money and my two best Engineers quits and we just got this lawsuit from someone and one of the things nobody told me about starting a company is that a lot of people will just end up hating you for no reason which sounds like kind of a weird thing, but I like to think I'm just like a pretty normal nice guy talk to people whatever in your normal course of your life. Most people will never experience the idea of having a
And people mad at you at the same time much less ten thousand or Millions that's been very uncomfortable. And I think it's just kind of human nature thing. Social media probably doesn't help with this but people if they meet you in person or something is there always nice to me. They've kind of become more comfortable with what I'm all about and everything but if they just knew me from the Internet or something, there's people who have become very negative or whatever over time. So it's a common experience by the way. I don't think it's anything specific to coinbase like probably obvious statement, but I mean there's
People who I know that are just they decided to run a charity where they're just giving all their money away and there's people who hate them too, which is mind-boggling to me. So I think that's just something social media has may be exacerbated a little bit. But yeah, you got to power through all that stuff and if you want to change the world, you can't let that stop you basically people are going to hate you kind of no matter what you do so you might as well just do the thing that you actually are passionate about and keep going.
Do you think that that has
and you at all or changed your personality in a permanent way almost out of necessity. It seems like it must have to to some degree to be able to keep enduring your growth is going to be correlated with the amount of haters.
Yeah, totally. I mean this is actually an essential skill set of Founders is you need to make sure you don't burn out take vacations like exercise Health all that stuff and then you got to make sure that you cultivate this mental toughness or resiliency because building a company is basically just moving from one setback to the next.
Enthusiasm sometimes people ask me how I got that part of it might be just how I'm wired or something. I'm a pretty even-keeled person, but I think a lot of it can be learned through it just it's like building a muscle before starting point. I had never managed anybody and so if you had thrown me into doing what I'm doing now or companies 1100 people Stakes are really high and all this. I mean, I would have crumbled under it but it didn't happen overnight. It took eight years and I learned how to manage one person and then 10 and a lot of really great executive coaches along the way my board.
Was really supportive. I tried to surround myself with people who had either we're building companies or had built companies and I just tried to go hat in hand to them and kind of with total humility and be like, here's what I was thinking about doing but I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Can you tell me what to do and I would just get everybody's opinion and then just what I thought was best you're sort of drinking from the fire hose trying to grow a company like that. One of the best things I did was I surrounded myself with a really great executive team.
Yeah and deferred a lot to them on things that I just didn't really know that much about I have nothing to teach my CFO my CEO my head of engineering or anything go on down the list. They're all much better at what they do than what I do. So a lot of them they've run bigger organizations than me. They're older than me the more experienced though. You have to kind of have this. It's really finding this balance between okay. I'm going to defer to these people because that's why I hire them but I also kind of nowhere. I want this company to go if I feel like there's something a little off about that. I do need to make sure
All with its aligned towards this common strategy and vision that I've articulated balance
in addition to people being so important. It seems like the other hand of this would be more and more effective decision-making on your part. How have you gotten better at that skill set over the years. Do you think you've gotten better as a decision maker? And if so kind of along with Dimensions
this is making definitely really important I would say up until about a hundred and fifty people are so the company all of our decision-making was pretty
Ad hoc, and it was pregnant. I would just get in a room and we decide 9 out of 10 times. We would agree the one of the ten times that we didn't agree would kind of say. All right, how much you care about this 125 and we would kind of go on three spume and show the number of fingers and he was a for and I was a three. Okay, great. You get this one. Let's do it your way. I was like rv1 decision-making which got us a long ways the company grew. I remember we went through a big grossberger. We have 450 or 500 people. We realized that all decision-making was just breaking down a certain path.
And people were coming to us and they're like we were kind of a bottleneck. Nobody knows what the decision is. It's being delayed for weeks and we would end up revisiting decisions a lot. People would come in a month later. Hey, I want to revisit this or someone would come in at the last minute. Hey, you didn't ask so and so what their opinion was the decisions known void we started to run into all these decision making problems. I credit some of the executives that joined at that time. Especially Emily who is now our CEO and she introduced a couple really good Frameworks. One of them is around
And this decision making framework called Rapids, there's a couple of them out there, but it's basically this idea of just choosing who is going to be up front who's the decision maker who's going to provide input those people? They can't beat though. This their input is important who's going to actually go do the work. Once the decisions made you kind of label all the participants and you go and you do it in writing it captures everybody's input in writing and then you go in and you have the meeting to discuss and you make everybody do the pre-read. Nobody can say, well my opinion wasn't heard you.
Your opinion the document and you watched everybody read it and then you discuss and then the decision maker and they believe in this idea of having a single decision makers in most cases because then it unblocks a lot of things the few exceptions to that the bar razor we talked about but in certain committees we have to use and things like that, but generally I try to just have single decision makers. So we then memorialize it in writing in the document after the decision maker deliberate in the decision maker doesn't need to be me delegate push down as many of these things as you can only the real
Lee One Way doors that would be very expensive to go back or are the kinds of things that should be at my level and push a lot of that decision-making down into the organ formalize the process.
What aspects of the job do you most enjoy now?
Yeah. So the founder CEO job changes a lot over time in the early days. I was actually writing the code to build the first version of the product and getting our first couple of users and doing fundraising and stuff and I'd say over time what I've realized the things that I actually like and I think I'm good at a few things. So one is
Hiring top talent so I still think that's probably one of my top priorities is getting really tough Talent into or especially senior people and board members second one is around product. So I love product we have an amazing Chief product officer and probably team but I do like to go in there are probably about five or six areas of product that I really care about that changes every few quarters, and I want to go into those meetings and try to influence the direction and make sure it's in line with the overall product strategy that I've set out with our chief product officer the last one
Is just about setting a clear strategy and culture for the company. So articulating those things in writing repeating them often like at our All Hands meeting and when kind of education has come up trying to be a guide post or something like that about hey, this is the kind of company we want to be long term. So this is the kind of the reasoning behind how we got to that strategy or that cultural principal. So those are the three things they asked that I try to focus on now
you've mentioned a few times so much you love product love.
Big one step deeper there and just understand what specifically is it. Is it trying to remove frictions trying to identify the jobs to be done. The Aesthetics of it what really gets you excited in those meetings.
I definitely am very excited about usability and I just generally think that All Tech products are still too difficult to use you make things easier to use you just open up not only like a few more people but like an order of magnitude kind of like a pyramid. We're at the top you have leads computer scientists and the next layer down or really tech savvy people you keep going down the pyramid.
And you can build something that can get billions of users. I focus a lot of usability
on usability are there questions that you ask of the team that you find yield interesting answers are there ways to poke and prod to get something more usable without having the idea yourself.
Yeah. I mean one thing that I like to do in product meeting is I'm not a big fan of slide deck when I go to product meetings and product reviews and people just showing me slide deck. I get really nervous. What is the customer going to see just show me the thing the customer is going to see whether that
Clickable prototype or the actual implemented feature. I don't like them to coach the witness too much and they're like, okay next you're supposed to click this. If you're not going to be sitting there over the customer shoulder when they're using the product show me a brand new user trying this out. We do a lot of user studies user research or in the early days, especially I would try to simulate being the voice of user. Although I'm not the perfect user. We have lots of types of customers now, but yeah, I like going to product reviews where you get Hands-On with let's see the demo. Let's see the actual thing. Don't show me quad. Yeah. There's probably other stuff but that's
When it comes to mind
back on crypto and the kind of broad Vision that we started with. What do you think? The largest or largest impediments are to this Vision coming to fruition? Is it regulation? Is it something else? What are you thinking about as barriers that need to be knocked down?
I think it's going to be a little bit of a repeat of what I said earlier, which is I think there's challenges just in terms of scalability usability and privacy and security on these lock change if we go from dial-up to broadband and all those kind of things that'll
Huge unlock there's definitely some regulatory component to it right now. There's a lot of startups that are trying to be created. We've actually invested in a bunch of them through coinbase centers. We've invested in probably 60 or 70 crypto startups, by the way, people aren't familiar when I say quickly start up. It's kind of like a new type of stars like a.com startup or something but a crypto startup is start that raises money often using crypto currency. They also attract their initial user base with cryptocurrency by building a community having some kind of collective ownership.
Shh principles, there's a lot of really talented teams trying to build companies this way now, but a lot of the regulatory environment is still unclear for them about is this a security what kind of Securities regulations might you trip up if you do these and so there's all these kind of different exemptions and stuff that people are trying to jump through hoops to try to make work. So we're trying to think about how we acquire bass can help that we're working on a product will probably call it coinbase launch or something like that, but it's a way for anybody who wants to do a crypto start up to
And say all right. I want to issue a token. Maybe I want to raise money. Maybe I just want to use it to build my community and just handhold people through that process and help them with the custody of it helped them create the smart contract help them with the governance issues vesting of these things if you need to distribute those employees or I think that kind of like stripe Atlas meets Angel list or something. I don't know what exactly the analogy would be but that could be a huge unlock for the crypto economy as well to get a thousand new startups built like that.
Whether in crypto or elsewhere, what do you not understand? Well today that you wish you did.
I mean I'm interested in all kinds of Technology. Generally. I'm a technological Progressive. I would say I actually Technologies course change the world and we should invest more in it. Yeah. I'm trying to understand more about how academic and scientific research works and why it seems so inefficient. There's a startup that I've been helping out called research Hub.com. It's trying to kind of like Get hub for science is trying to accelerate the patient.
The Innovation, I'm also just really interested in genetic engineering and different kind of Bio therapies and things like neural link and I think the human body is something that's going to be something that people can edit program over time. So I'm very interested in those kind of topics well, but I need to go back and brush up on my biology chemistry and everything to really try to understand it. I was always better computer than that stuff. I learned it as well as I wish I had so that's something I wish I knew more
about the key about advice for young people out there whether they're going to be Founders or just go work at another company.
Was there any special advice whether from a board member or a mentor or something you read in a book? That was a really helpful Guiding Light in the early days that you would offer up for the younger people out there.
First of all, I say I don't think everybody has to be a Founder. If you want to have an impact on the world probably in terms of expected value. Actually. It might even be make more sense to join a start-up that's already found really good fit and it's kind of Off to the Races or even these big companies that are
Billions of users if you're editing a feature in a product that has a billion users you're having a big impact on the world most startups that you go and try and create from scratch. They fail I've tried lots of startups and coinbase was probably one of 10 or something. That's the one that worked. Well most startups fail and I feel like I kind of got lucky to there's a big component of what to it but for people who do want to start companies if that's something you want to do. I think there's one quote that I really like stuck with me where the greatest risk is not taking one.
Lot of people in life. They have ideas. They like 99% of people talk about ideas all the time say like wouldn't it be cool if this and this work or like if that happened or someone built this but they don't actually go do anything about it. It's sort of like an intellectually you can get so caught up in. Okay. What if I did that in this and okay? Well stop trying to see ten steps ahead. You can only see some a few steps ahead. Just go do anything. It doesn't even matter what you do as long as you do something because that's my other favorite quote action produces information.
There's a certain point you got to stop pontificating about this stuff and just try something anything. You're going to be embarrassed by the V1 that you go out there. And you create that's part of the product development process is dramatically scaling back kind of the ambition and the feature set and everything to rapidly iterate and prototype these things but go do anything the first thing you try is almost guaranteed not to work. So don't give up. Let's go try the next thing and the next thing and the next thing that's the only way that new products and companies ever get created the world. You got to put a lot of shots on goal.
To get one to eventually work
action creates information is an amazing quote that I had never heard before. I will not forget that one. This has been awesome. I mean, I have not explored this base in a while. I love getting caught up. I love hearing all the lessons. You've learned not just about crypto but about building a business. My closing question for everybody is the same and it's to ask what the kindest thing that anyone has ever
done for you.
Well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is what I said earlier, which is I was just a kid who was tinkering around with something kind of technology and I thought maybe I was crazy because nobody else seemed to think it was very cool. But I applied to Y combinator and they wrote me that initial check and I was like, okay, maybe I'm not crazy. It sounds so silly in hindsight, but I was afraid of telling my parents and telling him. Hey, by the way, I quit my job to go do this crazy thing if I could tell them well the somebody actually believe in me because they wrote me this check they gave me a little
We're confident to go do it. So I think sometimes just taking a bet on somebody and seeing the potential in them, and I've tried to do that a few times with other people can be like a really important gift for them. So that was probably one of the kind of things someone's ever done for me
that answer has become probably the most common some early bet ahead of results or something like this. It's made me kind of reflect on maybe I need to do a lot more of that make bets on on people much earlier on it's definitely a great source of kindness. Well Brian, this has been awesome. I really appreciate
Your time, it's great to meet you. Again. Thanks for all that. You've taught us.
Yeah, thanks for the questions. They were great. And I'm going to try doing more podcasts like this. This is a really great one to kick off with thank you so much.
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