Brian Armstrong, Coinbase

Summary

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Podcast Summary: David Senra — Brian Armstrong, Coinbase

Podcast: David Senra Presents (Host: Scicomm Media)
Episode: Brian Armstrong, Coinbase
Date: March 1, 2026
Theme: Conversations with the greatest living founders

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Overview

This episode features a deep-dive interview between David Senra and Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. They explore Armstrong's entrepreneurial journey, Coinbase’s battles with U.S. regulators, the company's mission-driven approach, Armstrong’s philosophies on building for the long-term, hiring, product expansion, and the future impacts of AI and longevity research. The discussion is candid and rich with behind-the-scenes details, including Armstrong's reflections on leadership, culture, and the unique challenges of inventing an industry from scratch.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Political Advocacy & Regulatory Battles

• [00:02–09:57]
  Armstrong describes how building political power and engaging with regulators is now integral to running Coinbase. He details the ongoing legislative battle to define crypto assets as commodities or securities, noting the negative impact ambiguity has had:

"That lack of clarity was really weaponized by Gary Gensler ... and Elizabeth Warren ... who tried to, in my view, unlawfully kill the industry in the United States."
— Brian Armstrong [00:36]

• Armstrong explains the extrajudicial pressure regulators applied on banks and recounts Coinbase's decision to sue the SEC, a rare move for a public company:

"Very few [companies sue their regulator]. ... There are moments where you have to stand up and sue the regulator or the government to actually get the right outcome."
— Brian Armstrong [05:52]

• The lawsuit was expensive (up to $100 million) and damaging to Coinbase's stock, but ultimately vindicated by judicial opinion:

"We won that case ... didn’t pay a single dollar in fines. ... The judges actually published opinions saying that the SEC behaved in an arbitrary and capricious manner."
— Brian Armstrong [09:17]

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2. Mission, Philosophy, and Long-Term Thinking

• [11:11–15:18 & 22:52–25:32]
  Armstrong shares how striving for long-term impact shaped his entrepreneurial mindset after a series of small projects and "base hits." He advocates for founders to pick ambitious missions:

"You could spend the next two decades of your life working on this thing you're just talking about now ... you might as well work on the thing that'll actually have a major impact."
— Brian Armstrong [12:16]

• Armstrong's shyness and tendencies on the autism spectrum, while sometimes challenging for social interaction, enable him to focus intently and resist social pressures:

"There is a part of me ... I don't care that much about being disliked for it, and I know that it'll piss people off. But I don't let that stop me from doing what I think is the right thing."
— Brian Armstrong [14:07]

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3. Company Culture and the “Mission First” Policy

• [15:04–21:09]
  The episode examines the notorious “apolitical” blog post Armstrong published at Coinbase, set against the heated backdrop of social activism in 2020. Armstrong contextualizes the decision:

"We already have an important mission, which is increasing economic freedom. ... We're not going to be a company that just tries to jump into whatever the current hot social issue is ... inside the workplace we're not going to be political."
— Brian Armstrong [17:25]

• He recalls how offering severance to misaligned employees led to only 5% resigning, not the feared 50%:

"There are moments like that where you have to stand up and say, we're going in this direction. And if you're not on board with it, it's OK, you can leave, but we're going this way. That, that's leadership."
— Brian Armstrong [22:14]

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4. Iterative Learning, Intuition, and Decision-Making

• [23:12–25:32, 24:30–24:52]
  Armstrong credits his combination of intuition, pattern recognition, and relentless problem-solving to finding successful directions:

"A lot of your job as CEO is ... once in a while you just need to follow your nose. ... Intuition. It's pattern matching."
— Brian Armstrong [24:30]

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5. Early Coinbase, Product-Market Fit, and “Not Dying”

• [36:25–51:20]
  Armstrong shares gritty anecdotes from Coinbase’s scrappy beginnings: recruiting, near-death experiences (like angry customers showing up at the office due to support delays), struggles with banking partners, and the crucial realization that users wanted to buy Bitcoin directly in-app.

Memorable moments:

• App launch without a buy/sell feature
• Paying $30,000 for a legal opinion just to open a bank account
• Surviving on minimal funding, rushing to raise $25M to keep the business afloat

"Then it was like instead of pushing a boulder uphill every day, it was like the boulder was rolling down the hill and you're just chasing it as fast as you could."
— Brian Armstrong [47:12]

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6. Influences, Hiring, and Culture

• [51:41–62:14, 59:23–62:14]
  Armstrong emphasizes hiring for “spikes” and agency over pedigrees, sharing examples like hiring former lumberjack Olaf Carlson, now a crypto billionaire. He’s inspired by founders like Bezos, the PayPal mafia, the Wright brothers, and adopted “mission-driven” lessons from both Airbnb and great historical figures.

"We were looking at people's past work ... if they showed up in the interview and it was like, wow, I learned something ... and they can point to things ... which are like real outliers of success ... those were some of our best hires."
— Brian Armstrong [59:54]

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7. Expanding Coinbase’s Product & Vision

• [64:45–66:35]
  Coinbase started as a Bitcoin wallet and exchange but has expanded into diverse financial services (stock trading, loans, stablecoins). Armstrong likens this to the "appliance vs. kit computer" insight: making crypto services widely accessible.

"What crypto is going to do is just going to update the financial system so people have better financial services. ... Ultimately, many people are going to use it without even knowing they're using crypto."
— Brian Armstrong [65:14]

• Armstrong admits he didn’t have a fully formed Bezos-esque “Everything Store” vision from the start, but pursued the largest possible market as Coinbase grew.

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8. Leadership, Scaling, and Organizational Structure

• [68:03–74:20]
  Armstrong pairs product leadership with COO Emily Choi’s operational excellence and pushes for decentralized, fast decision-making, encouraging internal “venture” pitches (only one “yes” required for a team to pursue big bets).

"If you get any one of us to say yes and fund it out of your budget, you're greenlit ... There's actually been examples where I voted no on something and [it] turned out to be a massive success."
— Brian Armstrong [74:20]

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9. Marketing, Communications, and Content

• [75:18–80:11]
  Armstrong describes Coinbase’s creative, Internet-native marketing (“QR codes in the Super Bowl”), the use of content as marketing, and his evolving approach to shareholder letters (inspired by Buffett and Bezos):

"Every company is a media company now. ... You should be publishing your own content direct to your own blog. ... I really don't like this idea of putting information out ... through a traditional journalist who's going to bring their own bias."
— Brian Armstrong [82:04]

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10. Building an Industry & Resilience

• [87:12–91:45]
  Senra draws parallels between early crypto and early automobiles. Armstrong underscores that founding Coinbase meant simultaneously building a company and an industry, requiring the willingness to be misunderstood and persistent in adversity.

"Peter Thiel says you have to be contrarian but right to be an entrepreneur. So you have to be comfortable looking stupid for a long time ... then you slowly start to have these breakthroughs."
— Brian Armstrong [87:49]

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11. Beyond Coinbase: Longevity and Entrepreneurship

• [91:52–95:37]
  Armstrong discusses New Limit, his longevity biotech startup, and his belief in supporting fundamental civilizational progress. He outlines the company’s focus on epigenetic reprogramming and his role as founder/investor.

"It's been going about three or four years now. We've demonstrated successfully programming human cells ... The first drug candidate's going to go into clinical trials probably next year."
— Brian Armstrong [94:18]

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12. Founders’ Stress & Wellbeing

• [96:55–98:55]
  Armstrong offers candid advice on routines and boundaries to maintain mental health and avoid founder burnout:

"Dealing with stress as a founder is actually a very important topic ... Eventually you'll burn out, and you need to make it sustainable to have the impact you want to have over a period of many decades."
— Brian Armstrong [97:01]

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13. AI Inside Coinbase

• [101:02–104:35]
  Armstrong elaborates on how AI is profoundly changing workflows at Coinbase—coding, compliance, support, finance, and management. Notably, AI agents are now given stablecoin wallets to autonomously execute payments, reflecting a vision of AI as “digital employees.”

"These AI agents are increasingly needing to do payments to get work done. And we're giving them all stablecoin wallets."
— Brian Armstrong [102:04]

He sees AI as a tool for research, drafting, and even “intuition” input on team decisions.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "I want to accelerate civilizational progress in the world. That's kind of my personal mission."
  — Brian Armstrong [91:55]

• "If you just have one error, like ... you're insolvent. ... We were sleep deprived ... but we were ... just chasing ... as fast as you could."
  — Brian Armstrong [48:56]

• "Everyone should have a New York Times hit piece written about them once in their life. Once you get through it, you’re free."
  — Brian Armstrong [85:02]

• "That's the nature of innovation: you have to be willing to be misunderstood. And the key part is you have to also be right."
  — Brian Armstrong [89:54]

• "There was a period of four or five years where I felt like I couldn't take a week off without the place blowing up."
  — Brian Armstrong [51:23]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:02] — Armstrong on political engagement and legislation for crypto
• [05:52] — The rare decision to sue the SEC
• [11:11] — Developing a long-term orientation for tech entrepreneurship
• [15:04] — The "mission first" blog post and apolitical workplace policy
• [22:52] — Standing up to internal company unrest
• [47:12] — Achieving product-market fit and breakout growth
• [65:14] — Crypto’s path to mass adoption parallels the PC revolution
• [68:03] — The founding team, leadership, and operational partnerships
• [74:20] — Internal innovation: “next bets” and decentralized greenlighting
• [80:11] — Shareholder letters, founder communication, and direct-to-audience media
• [87:12] — Lessons from history: building an industry and company simultaneously
• [91:52] — New Limit and the quest for longevity
• [97:01] — Brian's strategies to avoid founder burnout
• [101:02] — How AI is transforming Coinbase’s internal operations

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Conclusion

This episode offers an unvarnished look at Brian Armstrong’s thought processes, from the gritty details of Coinbase’s regulatory battles to the philosophical frameworks that guide his leadership. It’s a must-listen for entrepreneurs interested in mission-driven companies, product vision expansion, navigating regulatory minefields, and the intersection of AI, biotech, and the future of finance. Armstrong’s candor, long-term focus, and willingness to buck both external and internal consensus stand out as central threads throughout the conversation.

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Transcript

[David Senra]

How much of your job is building political power as an advocate for, like, the crypto industry?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I mean, I don't have to go, but I think it's worth it for the business. I don't mind going. I like doing. In some ways, I like doing it. There's some pretty interesting people there. So I go about once a quarter, maybe once or twice a quarter recently, because we're right at the crux of this key moment for market structure. Legislation. But I'd say over the last few years, yeah, about once a quarter.

[David Senra]

What's the key moment for the market structure?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, the crypto industry has been working for a long time on getting in the Senate. A whole bunch of people have been trying to get this piece of legislation passed. In the House, it was called the Clarity Act. In the Senate, they're drafting their own version of it. But it's. It's essentially clarifying this question about which of these crypto assets are commodities versus securities. And, you know, someone might say, well, why does it matter? It matters because in the United States, we have two different regulate federal regulators, the CFTC and the sec. The CFTC regulates commodities, the SEC regulates securities. And so it turns out in the past this ambiguity about where crypto assets sit between the two federal regulators, that lack of clarity was really weaponized and by Gary Gensler, the former SEC chair and Elizabeth Warren and people like that who tried to, in my view, unlawfully kill the industry in the United States. So in other countries where we operate, like in the UK or in Singapore, they only have one federal regulator for financial services. So they actually don't care whether these are commodities or securities. It's a totally different parochial issue in the United States that's kind of like this turf war between two federal agencies in the past. So anyway, we just decided we need to get legislation passed by Congress to clarify once and for all which of them go in which bucket so that a future Gary Gensler couldn't come in and try to kill the industry.

[David Senra]

So what was the lawfare they were trying to do?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, okay, so long story, but, you know, essentially this was around, like the 2020, 2021 timeframe Coinbase. We decided we wanted to become a public company. We had been operating for about nine years at that point. And we went in and went through the normal process with the sec. You have to describe your entire company, how it works. You know, how do we decide which assets to list? Which do we not list? At that time, we wanted there to be a path to have crypto securities Be traded. Simple way to think of it is a security is like a way to raise money for a company that you want to start. A commodity is something that's decentralized, kind of like oil or gold or copper or something like that. Right. So bitcoin is decentralized. Nobody controls it. Everyone pretty much agrees bitcoin is a commodity. But there were people issuing tokens which were raising money for different projects they were doing that were in various stage, stages of decentralization. So was it a commodity? Was it a security? And then Gary Gensler, the SEC chair at that time, my understanding is that, you know, he and Elizabeth Warren essentially decided they wanted to use this to curtail the crypto industry. And if you want to know why. Well, okay, so Elizabeth Warren is, you know, in my view, she's a socialist. She believes the government should be running all financial services. And she had essentially found a way to bypass Congress and have a lot of influence over financial institutions like big banks. And she did.

[David Senra]

How would she get that influence?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, she would appoint regulators that could essentially go in and pressure the banks to do things that Congress had not necessarily authorized. So under the Constitution, only Congress is allowed to make laws, but the regulator is given some discretion about how they implement those laws. So you can imagine, let's say you're a bank and you have, you know, your bank regulator, and they come in, this is. They can choose to, you know, lose your paperwork and not approve something for 90 days or two years or five years, or they can, you can have a good relationship with them and they can approve things. So let's say they come in and they start to ask you, hey, are you guys serving crypto companies? And you say, well, yes. And they say, well, you know, that's not illegal per se, but we're going to have a lot of questions about that in the next exam that we do of your bank. We, we have deep concerns about the risk that this might introduce. You know, suddenly everyone inside the bank's getting the message real, real loud and clear, like, ooh, maybe they don't like us doing this. Now, is it illegal? No. But the banks, regulators, if they say jump, you sometimes won't say how high. Right. And this was the kind of extrajudicial pressure that Elizabeth Warren was able to. To create on banks. She did it, by the way, in a bunch of other industries, too. Like, she got them to stop giving loans to, like, oil and gas and, you know, firearms industry and some things that she like her own political agenda, basically. So she got kind of her hooks into these banks, had a lot of influence over them. Suddenly crypto comes along, which is a new system operating outside of that. And she didn't like it too much. And so she asked. My understanding, this is kind of what other people in the Congress told me, is that she asked Gary Gensler to go hard on crypto and like, try to really curtail it in the United States. And that's what he did. He created a bunch of lawfare, essentially. Like, we'd go in to meet with him. We did maybe 30 times. We met with the SEC after becoming a public company where they allowed us to become a public company. And, you know, we'd say, hey, we're here. We'll tell you anything you'd like to know. Just tell us what are the rules we're here to, like, we're trying to build this industry in America. You, you tell us the rules, we follow the rules. That's how it's supposed to work. And they would say, we're not going to give you any, any advice. Go talk to your lawyer. And then the next day, like an enforcement action would arrive and we'd say, can you show us in the law what you think we've done that's wrong? No, we're not going to do that. You need to comply, basically delist all these assets or we're going to sue you. And so at a certain point, we just said, okay, let's go to the courts and find out who initiated the legal action.

[David Senra]

Them or you?

[Brian Armstrong]

It was actually both. They created an enforcement action and initiated a lawsuit against us. We actually sued them proactively because they had violated another part of the law called the Administrative Procedures act, where they're, they're required actually by law to engage with the industry, to promulgate rules. And they had failed to do that.

[David Senra]

Wait, how many companies sue their regulator?

[Brian Armstrong]

Very few. So this, this actually gets into like one of the big themes of, you know, I don't know, like, me as a CEO, like, I want to try to always do the right thing. And I have a very long term perspective. Like I'm trying to create an important outcome here in the world, which is around increasing economic freedom in the world. So, you know, in the short term, I knew this was going to hurt our company. A lot of public market investors, they just know this company is suing its regulator. Well, I'll just wait and see. I'm not going to buy that stock. You know, actually a lot of people I talked to at that time, they were like, do not sue the sec, like this is a bad idea. But I, but I did. I actually talked to a couple other financial services CEOs who had sued the SEC and won. And so I knew it was possible. You know, it's a little bit like, you remember when SpaceX was trying to get that contract with the government, NASA. Yeah. And they, they didn't think it was fair how it was awarded and they sued and they won. Like Palantir had to do something similar. So you don't, you don't want to do these things haphazardly or, you know, but you, you do. There are moments where you have to stand up and, and sue the regulator or the government and they'll. To actually get the right outcome.

[David Senra]

Okay, so when you're deliberating on whether to do this or not.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

What's the timeframe? Is this A couple days, a few weeks? Like, how fast do you have to make this decision?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, I would say that was, that was probably over a period of like three or four months. We could tell the temperature was rising where they were like, you're about to get sued. And we, you know, we were like, well, what have we done that's wrong? You haven't published any rules that we can actually adhere to. And we knew the temperature was rising and then we sued them and they sued us and. Yeah, we made a, made a call. Yeah.

[David Senra]

The reason I asked is because it's a great story in one of the biographies of Elon, when you just mentioned this.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And in that case, it's even crazier because you're almost like suing your customer because Elon wanted money from NASA.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And they wind up. There was all kinds of, you know, essentially corruption where it's just like, I can't remember the amount. It was 250 million or whatever the case was. And they gave it to this other guy's company, even though. And essentially to save this guy who used to be either a former astronaut or in, like, working for NASA. And he's like, well, his company will go out of business if we don't give him the money. And Elon's like, this is insane. That can't be the way we're making decisions.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And so they tell the story where he's sitting there and they're like, what are we going to do, Elon? He, like, closes his eyes and he's thinking for a little bit. He's like, we have to sit, though. And they wind up, you know, winning

[Brian Armstrong]

founder mode, I guess, you know.

[David Senra]

Well, you Just said like, mission driven. Like, this is what's very fascinating about you, where it's just like, well, I have a mission that I'm on. And so if you're looking at your decisions through that lens, it kind of simplifies, like what you're doing.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. And I have a long term perspective on it too. Like if it's going to be short term pain for a few years while we're going through this, but it allows the industry to actually be built in the United States and help create more economic freedom, which is the mission of the company, then I'm fine with that. You know, I feel like personally I'm well off. Like I, I'm, I'm in this at this, I don't have to work a day of my life. I'm doing this because I actually want to achieve the outcome at this point. And so it wouldn't have helped me achieve the outcome if we'd let this regulator unlawfully kill the whole industry in the United States. That would have just been a setback from my point of view.

[David Senra]

This happened after you were public.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

So you accumulated resources. Your company has a lot more resources. If this would have occurred before, would you have had the money to fight it?

[Brian Armstrong]

Probably not. In fact, a lot of startups did die as a result of that. Lawfare. I mean, he didn't just sue us, he sued a whole bunch of crypto companies and a lot of them unfolded. So in many ways he actually did a lot for the economic development of places like the UAE and the Bahamas and places like that because a lot of the industry moved offshore. But it was incredibly damaging to America. I think the total amount we spent on legal and all that was maybe in the 50 to 100 million range as a result of that law firm.

[David Senra]

That one thing.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, but the damage to the stock was probably, I don't know, 10, 20 billion, maybe more. You know, it was a, it was a massive downward pressure on the stock for a period of a couple years. Oh, and I should mention we, we won that case. It was so. We didn't, we didn't pay a single dollar, a single dollar in fines. We didn't have to change a single thing about the company. The judge, or actually the sec withdrew it in the, under this new administration. And several judges actually published opinions saying that the SEC behaved in an arbitrary and capricious manner. So I have a nice little thing in my office commemorating that. Winning. Winning our case, suing the sec.

[David Senra]

That's incredible.

[Podcast Host]

One of the things I love most about the conversations I have with Brian Armstrong is how focused he is on making the best possible product he can for his customers. Obsess over customers is a maxim that is repeated by Jeff Bezos. And you definitely see that with Brian. It also is the same trait that I see in my friend Kareem, who is the co founder and CTO of Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast and Kareem is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance today. Kareem is obsessed with crafting a high quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers. Ramp has one of the most talented technical teams in finance and they use rapid, relentless iteration to make their product better every day. In the last year, Ramp has shipped over 300 new features. Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers and and automate as much of your business's finances as possible. Many of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on Ramp. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money today. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers. Get started today by going to ramp.com

[David Senra]

where did you get this long term perspective from?

[Brian Armstrong]

I think it was from trying a bunch of short term things and then realizing that I started some companies like in college and I realized that everything's difficult, right? And it doesn't even. You're running like a sandwich shop or something. Like it's, it's difficult. Like you have to find people who, you know, employees don't show up on time and the food and the vendors and the margin compression because there's like a million other sandwich shops like. And so if you're going to do something, you might as well. It's going to take you like a decade or two or three to really start to have an impact. You might as well pick something that you care about. That's like the really big thing. You know, it always bothers me a little bit when I talk to entrepreneurs and they tell me the thing they're working on. And I'm like, okay, what do you really want to do? My big thing is I really want to do this. In their mind, it's like a little too ambitious. It's a little too difficult. They need more capital. Part of me is thinking like, man, you should just go for that now because it's gonna. You could spend the next two decades of your life Working on this thing you're just talking about now and you might as well work on the thing that'll actually have a major impact if it's actually. If it works.

[David Senra]

So are you optimizing for impact?

[Brian Armstrong]

I think so, yeah. I mean I think early on in my like I was, I. I was kind of shy and introverted as a kid and I was like a little on the autism spectrum and stuff. So I think I was just trying.

[David Senra]

You keep saying that. We've talked enough.

[Brian Armstrong]

You're.

[David Senra]

You're not autistic to me.

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, I, I mask it. Well, there's like a whole masking thing.

[David Senra]

Let's talk about this.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

How do you mask your autism? Are you just saying you're autistic because

[Brian Armstrong]

it's like cuz trendy and cool now? No, it's actually like, you know, that's a good way to get adventure check is like to be on the spectrum. I mean we're not raising money, but

[David Senra]

I. Introverted for sure. But I'm introverted too.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

I hate when people in the comments think I'm autistic because I read all the time like I'm not autistic, man.

[Brian Armstrong]

I think I'm somewhere on the spectrum. You know, I've taken some online tests and things like that and they're. I. There are things like where you know, I have difficulty like reading people's faces and emotions sometimes and you know, I kind of can get overstimulated by like loud sounds and lights and you know, so there's kind of classic signs like that. But it's not debilitating at all. And I actually find it to be like it is a, it's a strength in a sense that like I can just endlessly f. Focus on interesting work almost like for 12 hours a day. I just find it to be, I wouldn't say like effortless. It depends, depends on what kind of work I'm doing. Like if I'm. If I have to just do a bunch of like 12 hours of people management hard conversations, like that's pretty taxing. But if I'm just like writing code or reading things on my computer or just like digesting cool content on the Internet, I can just do that endlessly. So there is like any. I wouldn't say you have to be autistic to have that, but there's certain things like that I just find it endlessly fascinating.

[David Senra]

Well, you definitely have the ability to sit with like a non consensus opinion for a long period of time.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yes, that. So that's the other thing, which I don't know if this is an autism spectrum thing, but yeah, I, I think more. Some people are like a little more concerned with social cohesion or what other people think. And so there is a part of me that's just like, if I see something that's just wrong and not in line with what I want to accomplish long term around, you know, civilizational progress and these things, it's. I don't, I don't care being disliked. I don't really care that much about being disliked for it, and I know that it'll piss people off. So there are a handful of things like this that I've done in, in Coinbase, which I think people consistently remark to me, like, wow, that was really unique. And to me it didn't seem that unique. But like this mission first blog post I put out where we said the company's going to be apolitical during, you know, 2021, all that madness or suing your. Your regulator. Right? These are things which most people probably wouldn't do because they're, they're afraid of being disliked. And I, it's not that I like being disliked. It actually causes me a fair amount of stress too. But I don't let that stop me from doing what I think is the right thing.

[David Senra]

So I recently reread that blog post. Can you remember the context of what you were thinking when you were writing it? Because you look back now and a lot of people are like, of course. Like, you would just focus on the mission of the company. What is the point of having a company if you don't have a mission?

[Brian Armstrong]

Right?

[David Senra]

You read it today, it's fairly innocuous, right? But back then, I remember the response. People were going crazy.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, it's really funny if you go look at it now, it's like, what's the big deal? I mean, it's kind of a boring blog post in some ways, right? But yeah, at that time, I feel like there was this mass hysteria or something that had like, taken over the country. I mean, the George Floyd thing had happened, people were Covid had happened. So people were isolated. They weren't getting in person as much with folks and feeling a sense of, hey, we're all on the same team, we trust each other. And, you know, increasingly at these town halls that we would host as a company, usually people would ask questions about, like, our products and our competitors and regulators and. And then we increasingly would be getting these questions about social issues happening in the world. In this case, like police brutality with George Floyd, but all kinds of things like, you know, Middle east or whatever, gun control, you know, and we. It became almost like, almost like I realized there was this element within this in the company that really wanted to get in front of the company with a microphone and like, see if they could make the executive team squirm somehow. And, you know, we had this culture of this open mic thing. But I realized that later we actually don't really do that. We just have people pre submit questions. And if we think we take hard questions, but if they're like just way off topic or someone's pet issue, we just don't. We don't entertain that. It's. We don't allow one person to kind of derail 3,000 other people. So it was in that context that the company was going through this. And somebody at a town hall asked the question, like, are we going to support Black Lives Matter at Coinbase? I basically said, I don't know if I know enough about it, but I'll look into it. Like, move on to the next question. And they kind of held the mic and they said, like, that's not good enough. I need to know if we at this company are going to stand for this or not. And I said, I don't know. I'm not. I haven't looked into it. Right. And this erupted in slack, and basically 300 employees did a walkout in protest. If you remember, at this time, like, every company in America was posting pro BLM statements. So I never had a walkout of employees at the company before. I didn't even know what that meant. They all just kind of closed their laptop in a remote. In a remote environment, I guess.

[David Senra]

Wait, so wait, are these, Are these. This is not in person.

[Brian Armstrong]

This was all remote during COVID Okay,

[David Senra]

so the walkout is close. My laptop.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. But we were like, from my bedroom

[David Senra]

to my living room now.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, yeah. And I was like, okay, this is weird. I mean, as a CEO, I'd never had. I felt like I had the confidence of the company or whatever. And now people are saying they don't. They refuse to work at this company based on my comment. And I, I found this very confusing, actually. Maybe a little of that autism spectrum. I was like, I'm confused. Like, this company has nothing to do with police brutality or anything. You know, what is going on here? And we kind of got in the room as an executive team and I asked them kind of a few questions like, hey, people are very sensitive in this moment. I need to feel reassured about where their Leaders stand. And I was like, what does BLM even stand for? We went and looked into that later. I found out by the way that they support defunding the police and all these other things. It was not a very simple answer. And so I didn't really know what to do. So after about 48 hours or so, we put out a statement and we said, okay, I guess we support equality for all people and all these things. And people, people came back to work. But I felt something was deeply wrong. I felt like I had compromised something about myself and I didn't understand what was happening. And so I started to go talk to a bunch of employees in the company and read a bunch of these books, like Jonathan Haidt's book and Others, which is the Jonathan Haidt book, Something of the American Mind, the Coddling of the American Mind. I think he was talking. He basically talks about how in these college campuses, there's like, these training activists in these college campuses. And, um, it's now spilling into the workforce. And they. They feel that their job is not to, like, join a company and advance its mission. They felt like their job was to join a company and hold it, hold truth to power and, like, hold it to account for these broader societal issues and actually reform the company as an activist. I essentially started drafting this blog post and I said, I don't. We're not going to do that here. You know, like, we're not going to be a company that just tries to jump into whatever the current hot social issue is and make a bunch of feelgood statements without actually doing anything. We already have an important mission, which is increasing economic freedom. And it takes decades of work to try to make an impact on something that big. So let's stick to the thing that we think is important in the world and outside of work. People can do whatever they want. You can go protest, you can be left or right or whatever, but just inside the workplace. We're not going to be political. We're just going to. Unless it has to do with our mission, crypto and economic freedom, then we'll be very political and, you know, engaging for litigation and things like that. So I knew it was going to piss some people off. And I actually. Some people, when they read the draft post before I sent it, they said, like, do not post this. They, like, begged me not to post it.

[David Senra]

People inside your company, you sent it

[Brian Armstrong]

to, like, other founders inside the company. Okay, yeah.

[David Senra]

Did you send it to anybody outside Coinbase?

[Brian Armstrong]

I might have sent to the board or something like that. I'm not sure if I sent it to anybody out. Think I might have told a few of my friends what I was up to, but they didn't read the post.

[David Senra]

Okay.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. And. Yeah. And so I decided to do it anyway and I, I knew people were going to upset and so we put out this, we said, anybody who's not okay with this new direction, you know, I basically, I had failed to create alignment in the company about where we were going. And I was kind of walking on eggshells around whenever people would ask me this. So it, people were confused about where, where we stood. And there was maybe like, it felt like 50% of the company was, was against this. But I think in reality it was like one, it's a very vocal 1% minority and there was other people who were sympathetic to that cause. Anyway, we put out the post and I said, anybody who's not aligned with this new direction, we'll give you a good severance package. You can fill out this form and accept it by Friday or something. And 5% of the company took the exit package. We, we were having bets beforehand. We, we didn't know. We thought maybe 50 of the company would resign or something. It, like, it felt like that was

[David Senra]

what would have happened at that time if 50% resigned.

[Brian Armstrong]

We would have built it all back. You know, and this, this is actually a very important point because I think that there's a big difference between like a founder and a, and a presider of a company. Right. Like, I, I know that I could build it back because I started it when it was just me on a laptop. Right. And I, and I was there when it was 10 people and 100 people and a thousand people. And if we need to go from 2,000 to 1,000, I, that's not a big deal to me. You know, I could go back to being on my laptop again if I had to. Right. And there's actually, there's this great Lee Kuan Yew speech that he gave. He's the founder of Singapore, you know, and I guess he, he was dealing with a, a strike that was happening, I think from the air traffic controllers or the airline or something like that. But there's this great speech. If you, if you Google Lee Kuan Yew iron. Iron in veins. You know which one I'm talking about. And he, he basically, he says like in this speech it kind of gives me chills every time where he's, he's like, you know, I sat across the table from them and they were threatening to like shut down the airline and everything. And he said, get back to work. And you know, or. And like, I will not allow you to bring this country down. And if you don't do it, I'm prepared to rebuild it all from scratch again. And he said, anyone who rules Singapore, you know, has to look, look at me and know that I have iron in my veins. Like, I will rebuild it all from scratch. Right. And so I was watching like videos like that, and I was like, this is what, this is what I need to do as a leader. Like, it was very, it was very inspiring. So there are moments like that that you have to stand up and say, we're going in this direction. And if you don't, if you're not on board with it, it's okay, you can leave, but we're going this way. That, that's leadership.

[David Senra]

There's two interesting things that popped out in what you just said. I want to go to the long term again. You have this long term orientation you mentioned multiple times in the blog post. You're like, we're trying to change, literally changed the world. And that's going to take multiple decades. I want to go to that one second. But I like how you said I was confused. Like, what is going on here? So you're not your first instinct when you're confused? You start reading books, you start talking to people.

[Brian Armstrong]

What do you do to try to,

[David Senra]

to like, to essentially alleviate the confusion? Because you're like, oh, I don't know what's going on. I'm going to read Jonathan Haidt's part, for example.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, all the above. I mean, I read books and books are amazing. I think sometimes it can take reading, like, you know, as, you know, it's like read for eight hours to get that one part. Oh, that's the key insight, you know, so actually calling people, I think it's faster if you have access to them. Especially earlier in my career I didn't have access, but now I, I feel like I can get access to more people. And it's often just a shortcut. Like if you know the right person to call who's been thinking about that or working that for 10 years, they can explain to you in 30 seconds what you need. Oh, my gosh. Like, that's the connection, of course. Like, so, yeah, that's exactly what I do. And I just am following my instinct. A lot of the time, Like, a lot of, A lot of your job as CEO is, you know, your day can just get infinitely scheduled and you're just like trying to hire the right people and go talk to investors and build, you know, go to product reviews and stu. But once in a while you just need to follow your nose. If you're like, something's bothering me, you know, it's like I've been. You're kind of always ingesting information and once in a while you're just like, something feels really off over here. Like this team doesn't. This team is rudderless, like going in no direction or I don't trust what's going on with over here. Like you know, in this policy thing. And you can just go digging, you know, and occasionally you find things and you can add a lot of value.

[David Senra]

When you say follow your nose, is this intuition?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, it's, it's intuition. It's pattern matching. I mean a lot of times you're just absorbing information like in documents people are writing up and slack channels and reports and like a lot of information is just being ingested. And once in a while you start to, you're like, that's the third time I've heard something weird about that. Like, I need to go dig into it.

[David Senra]

I was actually surprised. One of my favorite conversations I've had so far for the show was with Toby Luque. Yeah, me and you talked about him at lunch. And like I always say he's like your favorite founder's favorite founder. Like the amount of people that really admire the way he thinks and the, the way he's building his company. And you would think like this German engineer, you know, is going to be all data driven and like he just talked about like visualization and like affirmations. Affirmations, yeah, exactly. All intuition. It was actually surprising. It's one of the most fascinating things about this conversation. So explain the difference you thought about when you were starting the companies before Coinbase because you had this long term orientation almost from the beginning of Coinbase, but you lacked that in the other businesses that you were starting before that.

[Brian Armstrong]

It was really just by trying enough projects that either didn't work at all or were base hits that I realized everything was difficult. And I think so my mentality in college and coming out of college, I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was trying different ideas. My view was, okay, if I can get something to be paying me, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars a year passively, that would be incredible because I could somehow free up all my time and then I don't know what I'd be able to do. I'd be able to be like passive income, you know, wealthy and I could then go build something else or I don't know. I didn't, I didn't really have a plan after that.

[David Senra]

What year was this?

[Brian Armstrong]

Oh, I mean this was like graduated in 2005.

[David Senra]

Were you reading Tim Ferriss?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yes. Tim Ferriss had a big thing on this. Yes. There was the four hour work week, like that whole thing. I was kind of thinking about it even before that. But the four hour work was definitely that. Like the first company I really started in college was this tutoring company because I had been tutoring high school kids while I was in college to make extra money and like working at the, working at the library. You got paid. I forget it was like seven or eight dollars an hour. But if you were tutoring high school kids, you could make like $60 an hour. I was like, this is crazy. So I was tutoring kids for a while and then, and then I realized I could match my other college students with other high school kids. And I. So I built, I built like this simple web app which was like a tutor finding tutor matching service called University Tutor. And I was basically building this in college with like another friend of mine, a roommate. I didn't think about it from first principles. It wasn't like, I wasn't particularly passionate about tutoring or education. I was just trying to make some passive income essentially and scale it. Right. And so it would have never occurred to me at that moment to like, I didn't have the wherewithal to zoom out and say, you know what, we need to become an interplanetary species. I should make rockets. Or you know, or like, I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I've never, you know, I'm just trying to make like go from $60 an hour to like have 10 of my friends be hired by their, you know, get, get jobs too. So, you know, I went through that process. The tutoring company is its own little story. And then, you know, I tried a couple of other ideas like that after college too. Like I had a couple of like, I got like these rental houses in Houston and I was like refurbishing them and I was trying to do, build like a little real estate investment thing. I was doing a bunch of stuff and at some point I actually, I remember I read this book by Seth Godin called the Dip. I don't know if you've ever seen that book.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I read it a long time ago.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, it's, it's actually like pretty simple book. I don't know if it would do anything for me today. But at the time when I read it, it was pretty powerful idea. And he, he basically was just saying, you know, there's a big dip between being a beginner and, and, and like the top of your field where you make, you know, the top 1%. And like most people quit in the middle because it's not fun after you're a beginner and there's just like 10,000 hours and all these kind of things. And I remember thinking, do I really want to be doing real estate in like 10, 20 years? I was like, no, do I, do I, do I care enough about education? Or, you know, I was like, I don't think that either. So I, I was, I literally had like a piece of paper I was writing, what are the things I am passionate enough about where I would do it for the next 20 years, even if, even if I saw a little or no success. And the only thing I could write, I could think of was like tech entrepreneurship. That was like the only thing I could really think of. And so that was a very clarifying decision where I decided, all right, I need to move to Silicon Valley because that's where tech entrepreneurship happens. I need to shut down all the other stuff I'm doing because those are just little short term games. I sold off all these little rental properties. And you know, within a few years of that decision moving to Silicon Valley, Coinbase had been founded. And I think within seven years of that decision, Coinbase had a billion dollar valuation. It was like a huge direction and change in my life. It was just like, I know what's the big thing is long term and I'm going to just go all in on it. And all the decisions led to that.

[David Senra]

At the time you started Coinbase, did you think, if it succeeds, this is something I'm going to dedicate a few decades of my life to doing?

[Brian Armstrong]

Even at that point, I remember I did think that, yeah, because I tried a couple of these other ideas that were kind of, they were, they were difficult and I wasn't actually passionate about it. And so a lot of entrepreneurship, you're just like moving from one setback to the next with enthusiasm or whatever. There's that Winston Churchill quote. So I was like, okay, if I'm, I realized how hard it was to do those businesses. So I was like, the next thing I try, I need to make sure it's something that I'm like, I'm really into for, for lifetime. Right. And I had been reading a lot of books like, like Milton Friedman about economics and, like, Ayn Rand stuff. And I was like, okay. I was. I was getting kind of into these, like, free market, like, libertarian ideas. And I was also living in Argentina for a year. That was a whole piece of the story where I got to see, like, a hyperinflation country.

[David Senra]

Why'd you go to Argentina?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well.

[David Senra]

Women.

[Brian Armstrong]

No. Okay. No. Sadly, no. But it was. I needed some adventure. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And so I just. I had never traveled alone, and so I basically just went abroad and, like, tried to put myself outside my comfort zone. I had never been in the military. I'd never traveled. I'd never, like, traveled abroad by myself. I was kind of just reading a bunch of books and, like, I need to go travel the world and, like, see. Find my. Find what I'm trying to do with my life. And Buenos Aires. Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah.

[David Senra]

Argentina is a beautiful country.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, it's. Well, it's. I learned from an economics point of view, like, not like that.

[David Senra]

I meant the physical beauty.

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, so it ties together because, you know, my understanding is actually around the year 1900 or so, like. Like more than 100 years ago, I think, 1908. It was, like, one of the top 10 economies in the whole world.

[David Senra]

It was called the Paris of South America.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. It was like the first Latin American country that had a train station. You can see it in these historic buildings. They had, like, massive wealth, right, from beef and copper and all these things. And then over a period of, like, a hundred years of bad economic policy, of essentially, like, socialist policies of the government, like, stealing wealth from the people while claiming to help them. It's now, like, the hundredth richest economy in the world, from, like, top ten to hundredth. And so I was down there kind of reading, you know, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and seeing how hyperinflation had, like, decimated this entire country. And everyone was pessimistic about the future. And these once grand government buildings were just in these, like, states of decay, you know, with, like, cracks and ivy and graffiti on it and stuff. And, you know, this was like, around that moment where I was like, okay, the next thing I do, it needs to be something I'm passionate about for the long term. And within a year or two of that, I read the bitcoin white paper that captivated my attention. And then I think this is around.

[David Senra]

So. Bitcoin white paper published end of 2008.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. And I think you read it December 2010.

[David Senra]

Okay.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. I Just come back from Argentina. So I was in the Bay Area deciding I wanted to be in tech entrepreneurship. I read the Bitcoin white paper, December 2010. I had gotten a job at Airbnb, actually, and I was seeing how money movement had. Was happening with them, all these different countries. And that's when I started working on the prototype for Coinbase nights and weekends.

[David Senra]

So wait, how did they move money to all these different countries back then?

[Brian Armstrong]

Legacy payment Rails. So in the US And Europe, it was a little simpler. You could use bank transfers, and so they were accepting payments in, and then they had to pay out to the host. In many of the countries where they operated, like, in Latin America, there would be some local cash pickup service that you could like, kind of like a Western union, but it was different ones in different countries, and they typically had very high fees, like 7 to 12%. I remember we were trying to send payouts into, I think it was Ecuador or one of these countries. And we were reading that, like, there's like a little oligopoly of like, two or two companies that do this and that, you know, in the region. And we were. We were like, how much money shows up on the other side? Like, what are your fees? And then we were reading through their documentation. We're like, we have no idea how. It's basically like a borderline corrupt thing. And we basically just decided to send a hundred dollars and we found somebody there. Look like how much money showed up on the other side, just to give us some rough sense so we could tell the customer how much their payout was going to be. I mean, it gave me such a visceral sense of how broken the global financial system is. It's like each country is its own little proprietary set of oligopolies. And imagine if the Internet worked like this, right? It's like, I want to load a web page for. From, you know, another country, and they're like, you pay a high exchange fee and it comes in like a different language, you know, and you have to wait seven days or whatever. I realized, and due to a couple of these experiences, like the Argentina experience with hyperinflation, the Airbnb experience, and reading some of these books that, like, the world would benefit from a global financial system that was, you know, fast, cheap, permissionless, decentralized. So there was no small group of people who could. Who could be corrupt or put their fingers on the dials to manipulate it. And so that was what I was thinking about as I read the Bitcoin white paper for the first time.

[David Senra]

Okay, so you're building your personal philosophy about economics and what's important there. You know, that you want to dedicate yourself to tech entrepreneurship as far as what your career is because you're going to be passionate about that. You want to do something for a long term. And then you're also seeing this real life problem of trying to send money into all these disparate, you know, economies and countries.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yes.

[David Senra]

And then you start working on Coinbase nights and weekends.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Okay, great, great summary by the way. Yeah, so I kind of do that for a living. Yeah. So this is where a little bit of that hustle and drive came in. Because, you know, I was working long hours at Airbnb. They were like rocket ship company. I was learning a lot, really amazing team and. But I really wanted to build something new for my next company. I still wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I'd work till like 7pm at Airbnb, come home, eat a little dinner and then from like 8:30 to midnight or something, like five days a week I would work on my startup. And you know, you always have to be very careful. You have to do it on your own separate laptop. Don't do it on company time or company property. Make sure it's separate. But you know, I use my own laptop and sometimes on Sundays I'd work as well and Right. I'd sort of take one day off but I was just grinding and I was like, okay, well I didn't know where to start. So you kind of just have to start with anything. Right. So first I went and talked to a friend of mine I went to college with. We built this little Android app for Bitcoin, a bitcoin wallet. I realized once we shipped out we had done it the wrong way. I tried to, I tried to recruit him to like leave Google and be co found with me. He wasn't ready to do that. So I started working on another prototype that was more of a cloud based bitcoin wallet, which eventually became Coinbase. And I had to reimplement like a whole bitcoin node in Ruby just to try to get it to hook up to my database, you know, and all these things. So I was just doing this like nights and weekends while occasionally trying to find a co founder, you know, and going on these co founder dates.

[David Senra]

Why did you think you needed a co founder?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, the main reason was that I had read a lot of Paul Graham essays from Y Combinator and you know, I was, I was, I really wanted to get accepted into Y Combinator. It was like the top incubator. It still is in Silicon Valley. And Paul had these great essays and one of them had talked about how, you know, if you look at Hewlett and Packard and you know, Larry and Sergey and you know, there are exceptions, but more often than not, like great founders running building a company is just so difficult. It helps to have people with some complimentary skill sets. So just to improve my chances of like getting to Y Combinator, if nothing else and the company eventually succeeding, I was trying to find the right person.

[David Senra]

Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like there's always, even if you have co founders, it's like one, it's actually one founder. Like you can start out with two or three or four. And I know YC is like, you need a co founder and like that's like something that's repeated. But if you read the history of entrepreneurship, it's like, yo, well, you start out with three or four or five, there's always one. Like there's one person that's going that's actually driving the company.

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, you know, long. Like it's like Wozniak and Jobs. Right. Like Jobs was clearly the one that had more impact over a long period of time. But there probably wouldn't have been an Apple without Woz in the early days. Yeah, you know, you never know. Exactly. And you know, like I will say in our, in my case, like, I tried to find a co founder for about like a year and a half and failed. And so I eventually got the app live and got into Y Combinator and there's a whole story there.

[David Senra]

Did you get into Y Combinator as a solo founder?

[Brian Armstrong]

So this is the, this is another interesting story, but I actually applied with this guy who, Ben Reeve, who had created blockchain.info which is now blockchain.com and we sort. He had never heard of Y Combinator, but I convinced him to fly from the uk. We met, had a coffee and then we went into the interview, which by the way is a bad idea. You should really co found with people you've known for a long time. So anyway, we got accepted somehow under that premise. I don't think we mentioned probably that we didn't know each other that long or it didn't come up in the interview or something. We didn't hide anything. But anyway, it became clear within like three months that it was not going to work. And so with the help of yc, I kind of went, you know, I had a hard conversation with him about that and I went through the program solo. Anyway, long story short, we went through Y Combinator, raised the seed round at the end of it and I was lucky enough to have Fred Ursum reach out to me and he became the first person who I really started working with on it unofficially. And then it just started going really well. Very complimentary skill sets and I asked him to co found and so he became the co founder of Coinbase. And I actually don't think Coinbase would have succeeded without Fred. If you look at the subsequent three, four or five years, there was a lot of like near death experiences and he was just an absolute killer. And so it was that pairing that allowed us to really get to product market fit and like off the launch pad, into orbit if you will.

[Podcast Host]

Brad Jacobs has started eight separate billion dollar companies. He said, I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life and they all have one thing in common. They think differently than most people. All of them to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails. What Brad noticed is that great business leaders are pattern spotters. But you can't spot patterns if you can't see all of your data. Most businesses only use 20% of their data. Why? Because 80% of customer intelligence is invisible. It's hidden in emails, transcripts and conversations. That's where HubSpot comes in. With HubSpot, all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. This is important because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit HubSpot.com today. That is HubSpot.com There were some funny

[David Senra]

stories from the early days of Coinbase. I've heard like Fred identified that you guys were losing money on every single bitcoin transaction.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yes, that is true.

[David Senra]

How did that happen?

[Brian Armstrong]

I mean the simple version of it is that I was a computer science major and I studied economics and computer science. Fred studied the same thing, but he had gone into work in finance. After college he went to go work at Goldman Sachs as an FX trader and I was working as a software engineer, Entrepreneur, failing entrepreneur. So I had more of like that engineering brain, he had more like that finance trader brain. And so when he came in and started to analyze all of the flow of funds on every trade, he was able to map that out. And due to like certain time risks and things, things he, he actually was correct that he'd map that out and it was just A set of conditions which I was not as familiar with. So that was a great example of just him adding value in the first probably three weeks we worked together.

[David Senra]

But that wasn't like, it wasn't like a near death experience.

[Brian Armstrong]

No, that one wasn't near death. It was just getting the right business model and fee structure.

[David Senra]

An example of a near death experience.

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, okay, so an example of a near death experience was. I think we had, we had raised maybe the Series A or something like that. Yeah. And we had found product market fit. So there was a lot of people using the site every day. And, you know, we, we were having this huge backlog of customer support inquiries, like, where it would be like every night from like 9pm to midnight. We would just try to answer support queries because we hadn't, we didn't have a customer support team. And. Well, we were slowly trying to build it, I should say. Anyway, so we had like a thousand, two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand backlog of these customer support tickets. And people were getting very angry about all of this because you couldn't respond.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I was one of those people.

[Brian Armstrong]

Okay, you were early. Early on Coinbase. Okay, well, apologies for the lack of customer support response to the point where

[David Senra]

I was looking up like, I had a bunch of bitcoin on there. I was like, there was an issue and I was like, what is the address? Like, I'm going to have to fly to San Francisco because these people won't

[Brian Armstrong]

respond to my email. Well, this is exactly what happened is people started showing up at the office, like, and we didn't really even have the address published, but there was a photo of the office and you could see in the background a couple of these buildings. And some people found that and they started showing up at the office at all these odd hours. And I remember back there, they had to be weirdos.

[David Senra]

Like, the people that were into crypto back then were not your normal people.

[Brian Armstrong]

I don't know. I mean, it was. Once in a while Fred would actually go answer the door holding like a golf, A golf club. And, you know, like, usually it was somebody who was like, man, why didn't my crypto hit my wall? And then we were like, sometimes we'd write people like a physical check and like, okay, you need to leave the office. Anyway. That was the first time I'd really experienced having tens of thousands of people angry at you at the same time.

[David Senra]

Because back then it was the only place where you could buy bitcoin with a credit card. Right.

[Brian Armstrong]

Like, you could use yeah, Or a bank transfer.

[David Senra]

Or a bank transfer.

[Brian Armstrong]

Right. Once we managed to get that bank partnership set up and an easy way to buy, sell in the U.S. i mean, we were, we had instant product market fit and it was just like trying to keep up with the demand.

[David Senra]

Were you the first crypto company to

[Brian Armstrong]

do that in the U.S. yes. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

[David Senra]

How did you get the bank partnership?

[Brian Armstrong]

So that's its own whole story. I mean, by the way, there was other near death experiences around cyber events and things like that we can talk about if you want, on the, on the bank side. Yeah. So, okay, there's another interesting story where we. Okay, believe it or not, the first version of the Coinbase app, actually you couldn't buy or sell Bitcoin. I thought we were making a wallet for payments on the Internet and so you could store bitcoin, you could make bitcoin payments. And this prototype went out and I remember like a couple hundred people signed up on, off of Reddit or something like that. But the app was not retaining users. Right. And what they teach you in Y Combinator is like, go talk to customers, give feedback and then build the product and talk to customers and build the product and just do that on repeat and don't get distracted by any other bullshit like going to conferences or whatever. So I remember I emailed, like three of these people had signed up and I was like, hey, I built this app. Can I get on the phone with you? And in the first few conversations I was like, I noticed you didn't come back to the app. And the guy was like, yeah, I mean, the app was pretty cool, but like, I just don't have any Bitcoin. And I remember something kind of clicked in my head and I was like, well, if there was, if I, if there was like a buy button in the app, would you have bought it here? And it sounds like ridiculous in hindsight, but at the time this was like market research, right? And he's like, yeah, probably. And so I was like, okay, we got to make a simple way for people to just buy it here. It's not like you go to a separate exchange and then put it in your wallet for actually daily utility or something. And so then I was like, okay, we've got to make it possible to get bank transfers hooked up, kind of like PayPal or debit cards. And I remember calling like these different banks and saying, hey, I want to get integrated into the, the bank network in the ach. It's called ACH in the US and these banks were either. Like, what the heck are you talking about? Like, I've never heard of this thing. It sounds like a scam. Or some of them who had heard about bitcoin. I remember, like hung up on me. You know, they were like, they're like, we do not work with bitcoin companies. Like, bam. So like slamming the phone down, right? And so I went to the, the partners at Y Combinator. Actually one of them was like Sam Altman. At the time he was running, he was running Y Combinator and like Gary Tan was there, he was helping me and these Paul Bukai and these various folks. And I remember they said, well, why don't you go talk to Silicon Valley Bank? Like, we help. We. Silicon Valley bank opens bank accounts for lots of Y Combinator companies. We have a good relationship there. So they kind of warmly introduced me to the right person. And they were kind of like, ah, these guys are, you know, these guys are probably crazy, but we like to help Y Combinator, so let's, let's see what we can do. And they ran it through their compliance team and their compliance team came back and said, we think you might be what's called a money transmitter, which means you need to have a license in the United States. And I remember getting on the phone with them and they were like, well, we can't open this account for you unless you can prove to us that you're not a money transmitter. Or you have to get a money transmission license. And the money transmission license I researched was like, it was like it was going to cost 5 or 10 million dollars and take about 3 or 4 years. And I'd only raised about 600k right now. So I was like, that's not good. But they also said, well, if you have some legal argument that you're not a money transmitter, maybe we would allow you to get started. And I remember going to a couple law firms and one of them agreed. He's like, there are some arguments that you could make that you're not a money transmitter. It's a little bit of a gray area. And he was like, I'll write you a legal opinion saying, subject to the following terms, that you may not be a money transmitter, but it's going to cost $30,000 for this like five page piece of paper. And I thought, at the time, I thought this was crazy. You know, we'd raised like 6, $600,000. I was like, $30,000 for a piece of paper, you know. But I was talking with my advisors at Y Combinator and they were like, well, if this allows you to get the bank account open and you can start to test your, your product idea, like do it, you know. So I paid this guy the 30 grand, we got the account open. I, I wrote all the code myself to do like ACH integrations and you have to FTP these files to the bank. And it's like this kind of antiquated system. And it launched and it had product market fit and it just was. Then it was like instead of pushing a boulder uphill every day, it was like the boulder was rolling down the hill and you're just chasing it as fast as you could.

[David Senra]

So you could buy Bitcoin through ACH through a bank transfer.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

Could you use credit cards back then or no?

[Brian Armstrong]

No, I think debit card came a year or two after that. Yeah.

[David Senra]

Okay. So even that with just the bank transfer.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Flooded with customers. Yeah. And started to get some very anxious calls from the bank at certain points too because as they, they were like, you guys have raised $600,000 and they're like every day there's like $550,000, you know, because we, we debit these customer accounts to get the money, but we had to pre buy the Bitcoin. And so we had this cash flow issue where like we were basically using our entire balance every day just to service the current demand. And they, and the. I remember the guy from the bank called me kind of frantic. He's like, if you just have one error, like your whole, you're insolvent. And by the way, they might be on the hook for it too. We might be like negative a million dollars and just be insolvent and then the bank's on the hook for it. And I remember the guy told me on the phone, he's like, you need to go raise money right now and get more money in your account or we're not going to be able to continue to serve you on this ACH network transfers. You were in this tiny little sandbox, but now you're suddenly growing like a weed. And I remember we took this graph of the daily buys. It was just up and we didn't even have a pitch deck or anything. And we just went out in, in like a week, raised the next round and got like $25 million deposited in the account.

[David Senra]

With a graph.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, because we ordinarily you. I wouldn't recommend that, but we were sleep deprived and it, it was. That's all we had time to do. So we just went and we, yeah, we showed them a few pieces of data. And we're like, this is enough. And Right. Graph of demand. And the bank's going to close our account in, like, two weeks if we don't get that 25 million. Was.

[David Senra]

And rivet.

[Brian Armstrong]

The series A was from Union Square Ventures and Ribbit. Okay. Yeah. And then A6 and Z was the B series. Yeah.

[David Senra]

So who was doing the graph then? Was it Union Square and Ribbit?

[Brian Armstrong]

That was. That was. Yeah. Okay. Union Square Ventures. And was it Mickey? Yeah. You know him? Okay.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I spent some time with him. I like him a lot.

[Brian Armstrong]

That's great. Yep.

[David Senra]

That sounds like something he would do.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Well, he was a bitcoin believer for a long time before. Why?

[David Senra]

Because he came. He spent the first 36 or 37 years of his life living in South America.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yep. Venezuela. Yeah, exactly. The people who had seen hyperinflation countries kind of got it right away. The people who had only spent time in the United States were like, why would anyone use a new. A new kind of money?

[David Senra]

So from your perspective as a founder, you thought your product at that point was a wallet and an exchange to buy bitcoin?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And how long did you. Did you think that was going to be, like, the totality of the business? Were you already thinking about product extension back then or.

[Brian Armstrong]

No. First I knew there was a lot of ways to die along the way, so I was just trying to get the simple thing working. I mean, we had hackers trying to break into our systems. We had, like, engineers quitting because it was, like, just overwhelming and there was too much stuff. We had. They were getting paged in the middle of the night, like, three times every night, trying to keep the website up there. You know, these banks might just turn us off. And we got. So there was all kinds of just. I was just trying to survive, like, the next few months. Often, you know, in the back of my mind, I knew that if we could get this thing to scale just on the first product, there's all kinds of things that this could disrupt. I mean, that. That's what I got excited about when I first read the bitcoin white paper was like, this could be a new kind of financial system for the world that's global and fair and decentralized, more free market oriented. Anybody with a. With a cell phone could have access to good financial services, participate in a global economy. Like, the government couldn't erode all their wealth via inflation, like what happened in Argentina. So I. I knew that there was high potential for this eventually, but, like, there wasn't too Much time to think about that. We were just. There was a lot of sleep deprivation and long hours and just trying to survive to the next three months.

[David Senra]

And how long did this. That period last? This is a couple of years.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I mean, I'd say like. Like four. Like four or five years in I. I got to. We were at a place where I felt like I could take. And I could take a week off and not the place wouldn't blow up or something.

[David Senra]

Who's influencing your thinking in terms of the kind of company that you want to build and the way you want to build it?

[Brian Armstrong]

Back then there was a book called PayPal wars, which talked about the early days of PayPal. And it's actually pretty remarkable. You go back and look at what Peter Thiel and Elon Max Levchin, all these guys were doing. David Sachs, they actually had many similar ideas to Bitcoin. They were trying to create a decentralized form of money that could be permissionless, global, on the Internet. Because of the history of the company and how it got acquired by ebay and a lot of the people left, it ended up being more just checkout alternative with credit cards and stuff. But actually having worked at Airbnb, that actually gave me a good picture into what was possible as well. Because in college, I went to school at Rice University in Houston. Amazing school. I loved it, but it didn't really have a startup environment. It wasn't Stanford or something. And so I had never really seen a successful startup from the inside. I had tried doing my own startup, which didn't go super well. And inside Airbnb, it was. It was like some magic was happening, like they'd caught lightning in a bottle and thing was growing like wildfire. They were. The way that they hired people and had this really high bar for excellence and design, the way they did decision making. Like, a lot of things I got to see working there. And then I kind of said, okay. Before, in my mind, I had it kind of put on a pedestal. I was like, wow, these are like some crazy geniuses that are doing all this kind of stuff. And there's something amazing about working with, getting in the room just so you can see how people work. And it doesn't mean that they're not geniuses. I think those guys are brilliant. It means, like, I got to see it and it demystified it, and it made it feel possible that I could try to do something a little bit similar. Right. And so there's a couple companies like that. I mean, now nowadays, I would say you know, certainly like the level of ambition like that Elon has. And these things are very inspiring. I've tried to take bits and like parts from Google, Amazon. I've sort of been a student of lots of these companies and tried to take the best.

[David Senra]

Anything from history.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I mean I really like the Wright brothers. They're cool. Have you ever done an episode on episode 228, you remember that? Wow. Okay.

[David Senra]

The book by David McCullough.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I think that's the one I read too.

[David Senra]

Incredible.

[Brian Armstrong]

Incredible. Yeah. I love these kind of just like big problems like that, that humanity, you know, that it's kind of crazy, but it's possible and someone's going to do it maybe in the next 100 years. And there's a few, there's a few things like that, like longevity, we can talk about that. Like in the biotech space, you know, fusion energy. The Wright brothers is strong.

[David Senra]

AI The Wright brothers is crazy because that was like a centuries old problem. Yeah. Like humans have been trying to figure out how to fly for centuries before these two brothers in Dayton, Ohio, if I remember correctly, that essentially solve a century old, a centuries old problem with the modest profits of a bicycle shop. And what was fascinating about them is like most of the, I mean they had a ton of competitors that had more credentials, more financial backing. And I think in David McCullough's book, if I remember correctly, like they solved human powered flight with like $1,500.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, it was some really tiny amount of money and there was people funded with like 200x as much money. But yeah, I mean I get very passionate about like going after what are the big ideas like that that people could go after. And I think it's actually worth everybody writing some of those down periodically and then see which one grabs you and you think you have something unique to contribute and just like go for it. Those are the big exciting ideas.

[David Senra]

So going back to where we were in the story, you're like, okay, I just need to not die. Yeah, I have something working and is if I just don't die, I can figure out other products or you know, a way to grow the business in the future. Were you thinking of any other specific way about I want to build a company this way?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, there was a few things I was thinking about. I mean one was articulating a mission that could be bigger, writing down the values of the company, which we can talk about. Actually we didn't do this maybe till we were a couple hundred people because this all happened organically in the beginning, it was just who we were hiring, and the. The culture sort of formed organically. But after we got a little bigger, we started to think about, all right, let's formalize it. I wasn't going to be able to be in every single interview indefinitely. Right. So, okay, the values, the mission.

[David Senra]

When did you arrive at the mission?

[Brian Armstrong]

I don't remember the exact year, but it was at least a few. A few years in, we started to really think about it. And, you know, for me, it was not just like getting people to use crypto or something. It was like, what's. Well, why, why, why do we want that? And it was because it was enabling everybody to own their own wealth in a way that couldn't be taken from them. Go try to attempt more ambitious things in life. It was kind of like a foundation. Basic property rights is what they'd call it in economics. Right. And if you had sound money, basic property rights, low friction, to try new things in the world that might benefit people and actually be able to keep the upside of it, you'd have more people trying attempting this. That very much appealed to me. We sort of take this for granted in the United States that, you know, usually, like, the money is just not going to get taken out of your bank account or something like that. But in many places of the world, that's not true. Right. There's people like, where the government will actually do seizures. Cyprus actually did this recently in the past where they, like, took a bunch of money out of everyone's bank accounts to, like, cover debt. There's refugees that have to flee borders in various times in history where all their wealth gets confiscated. There is so much bureaucracy and corruption in places like Argentina. To even start a company, it's like. It's a huge black market and there's just. Yeah. So. And by the way, people can't. They can't get access to loans or anything like that. Like, you know, one. One of the major ways people build wealth in the United States is you buy a home, you get a mortgage. Only wealthy people can really buy real estate in Argentina because you can't get a mortgage and you have to pay cash. So there's all kinds of ways that this is just pernicious and it's. It decelerates progress, essentially. So I was trying to think of a pithy way to articulate that. And I wrote down this increased economic freedom in the world mission, and it's a little wonky. Sometimes people don't know what exactly it means, and they have to go and Read about it. But it does encompass what we're trying to do. And I think crypto is the best technology to increase economic freedom.

[David Senra]

How are you recruiting talent back then and were you sitting in on every single interview?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, so, I mean, the very early days, it was just like me cold, like going to meetups and try and trying to get anybody interested and come and interview. It was like cold messaging people off LinkedIn. It was reaching out to people who I had worked with in various contexts.

[David Senra]

Why did it have to be outbound at that point?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, first of all, crypto was like a very niche thing. Like we were not a hot company at Y Combinator. We went to the demo day that they do where we raised like the six, raised the 600k seed round and. But there was lots of companies that raised like multimillion dollar rounds and beyond. Like we were kind of middle of the pack somewhere, maybe a little below in terms of how hot the company was. So the only people we managed to actually convince to invest or to join the company were people who had already gotten excited about crypto for some reason. And then they met us and they're like, okay, this is semi legit at least. Like they've gone through Y Combinator, they have this product that's working. They've had some early investors like Union Square Ventures. And so we got some of these. Like the first five or 10 people who joined were like crypto zealots who just thought we might be a good company to bet on as the company got bigger, you know, we hired recruiting teams and the whole, the whole thing. We were competing with big tech in San Francisco, which was, you know, during the zero interest rate phenomenon, it was like fiercely competitive. We eventually brought, opened other offices, hired some remote workers. Hiring is its own whole topic.

[David Senra]

Yeah, well, I'm curious, like, have you found any other? I talked to my friend Kareem, founder of Ramp, about this. Daniel Eric, founder of Spotify. They both think about it in the same exact way where they hire for spikes. Yeah, One of the benefits of being a founder led company is, you know, big companies try to manage to the middle. They don't want the high highs or the low lows. And Daniel and Green are both like, no, I want the best. The person that is the best in the world at this one tiny little thing. And that's all I want them to do. And I'll deal with their usually, you know, excessive or extreme personality traits on the other side of that.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean that's like we were looking at people's past work and not necessarily like their resume or you know, if they just, if they showed up in the interview and it was like, wow, I learned something. I left the interview with more energy than I went in. They're like a very efficient communicator and then they can point to things that they've done which are like real outliers of success or like, oh, that's awesome, or maybe we've seen their work previously. These are people who we would hire. I mean there's many examples of this. Like, you know, you talked about some of their personality quirks and like biology. Srinivasan is like this genius guy who was our CTO for a while and he, he like did so many amazing things and he's like very eccentric. Actually the very first hire at Coinbase was this guy, Olaf Carlson. We, outside of Fred and I as the co founders and we were trying to hire this customer, someone to come in to run customer support. Because of the backlog I mentioned and I remember it came down, there was two finalists. One of them was this guy who had run a team at Google AdSense. And on paper he was like, this guy worked at Google, he's like, he'd run a big team of like 20 or 30 people. I was like very credentialed. But you just, in the interview it was just like, it was kind of low energy and like not exciting for some reason, even though on paper he was like super qualified. And Olaf came in and his prior job was he was a lumberjack. Literally. He had just graduated college, he wrote his thesis in college on bitcoin and then he did this kind of like walkabout sort of spirit quest thing where he went for like a summer and he was a lumberjack. So he came in and he looked like super disheveled. And you know, he, he like threw on some like ill fitting suit he'd bought like on the way to the interview or something because he only owned like lumberjack clothing. But the guy was just like super bright, super passionate, super young, super hungry and we're like, screw it. Like, let's just give this guy a shot. Like it's, it's, it's going to be, it was just exciting to like talk to him about crypto and he crushed it. So he, by, he, he went on and founded like a, he's like a billionaire, he's created like a crypto venture fund. So like these were the kinds of bets that we wanted to make. They were people who were entrepreneurial We've had a lot of good success with that. I know Toby talked about that recently on, on the podcast too. And they were people that were just like, high agency smart, get shit done. And they. Even if they were totally unqualified on paper. And those were some of our best hires.

[David Senra]

So I was reading a ton of the bitcoin subreddit back then, like around this time, and am I wrong? Weren't you getting like a lot of shit? Because, you know, everybody's like, this is decentralized. And you're like, well, no, I'm like, actually trying to build like a real business here. Like, yeah. Did you have an issue getting talented people to work for you? Like, because you were kind of. This is. You might be autistic. You might be right. Because now you're interested in this like, weird bitcoin thing way before other people. And then not only that, you're like bucking the trend in this weird subculture too.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I mean, so people did often ask that. They're like, well, isn't the whole point of bitcoin to be decentralized? And I was like, yeah, it uses a decentralized protocol. We just want to make it easy for people to access it. So you can choose to use our company, but there you could use any company, like, as opposed to, let's say Visa. Like, the only way to access the Visa network is through one company, Visa, you know, but like email is a better analogy. Email is a decentralized protocol, but you can use Gmail or Outlook or whatever. So at least there's like choice. But even going beyond that, because for years we heard that as a criticism. So we said, all right, let's make a self custodial wallet too. Like, if you want to custody your own crypto and not have to trust us at all, we're going to put out a wallet for that. And so we have a successful product now too, on our self custodial wallet. I think both are important. The centralized product gives people a lot of ease of use. Like if you forget your password, your money's not gone, that kind of stuff. And it also allowed a lot of big institutions. Like, most of the money in the world is at like something like 80 or 90% of it's all tied up in financial institutions. It's not retail people. And so when we went and met with institutions and we're like, self custodial wallets, they're like, that sounds super scary. We're not going to do that. So they wanted these kind of enterprise grade Custody solutions and we've been very successful building those kind of things for like banks.

[David Senra]

That decision was based on the response of the market or is that a decision you made before and then brought that decision to the market?

[Brian Armstrong]

The one around institution specifically was based on conversations with them. Yeah. And the retail customer though I would say that was made prior to customer. That was like my intuition. So we've got to make this simple, simple and easy to use and trusted and the average person is not going to know how to run like a self custodial wallet on their laptop. The tech has gotten better and better where like account recovery and these things are now possible. But at the time it was very scary. Like if you lost, many people had this happen, sadly, like if they lost their password or something trying to custody their own Bitcoin, it was gone. There's many, many, many solid stories about that.

[David Senra]

Yeah, it's funny because there's an like a parallel here. When Steve Jobs had that observation, he's like, well the first things we're making at Apple, they're for hobbyists. But he's like, if the amount of people that want to put together their own computer as opposed to the ones that want to go to the store, if you just treat it. He called it the appliance. He's wanting to make a personal computer as an appliance. It's like that market is a thousand times bigger. It wind up being millions of times bigger actually. But his idea was the easier I make it, the bigger the market gets.

[Brian Armstrong]

I think that's right and it's fine. A lot of these products start off with hobbyists who love the tech for the tech's sake and they want to take it apart. But ultimately what crypto is going to do is just going to update the financial system so people have better financial services. Many people are going to use it without even knowing they're using crypto. They're just going to say, I don't know, I just want to send money to my family abroad or whatever. And Instead of paying 11% at Western Union, I just want it to arrive instantly for free or whatever. And they're going to use stablecoins for that. Right. Or if they want to get a loan and it's just using defi, it's cheaper, lower rate and they can get approved in 30 seconds. It's like that's easier than calling a bank and filling out all these forms. Right. So Coinbase's app actually has evolved. I mean fast forwarding to modern day like we are now you can trade any type of asset, not just crypto assets. You can trade stocks and commodities and prediction markets and then you can get a loan. You have a Coinbase card you can spend. We're just trying to build better financial services now. And actually that's where you start to get into multi trillion dollar market.

[David Senra]

Yeah. You call it what the Everything applies.

[Brian Armstrong]

The Everything Exchange.

[David Senra]

Everything Exchange.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

Yeah.

[Brian Armstrong]

And a super app maybe that's. Yeah, you can combine the two.

[David Senra]

Okay. This is not like a plan from the beginning. Like Bezos had the Everything store that was the code name of Amazon in D.E. shaw, like in the hedge fund that spun out. So he kind of had that master plan at the beginning, even though he started with books. But that was not the case with Coinbase. Correct.

[Brian Armstrong]

I felt like more and more of the economy was going to run on bitcoin because it was just faster, cheaper, more global. I didn't, I couldn't have foreseen all of the things that happened. I didn't foresee stablecoins, I didn't foresee prediction markets. Like, I, I just knew that we had a foothold with something everybody really like. Bitcoin turned out to be the best performing asset class of the last decade. And so a lot of people wanted to buy it and hold it. We were the easiest way to do that. That was a, a wedge into the market to start to then update all kinds of financial services. And that's how you thought. I didn't have a complete picture of that from day one. I think that would be intellectually dishonest for me to say that. I knew exactly how that was going to play out. But I had a. I knew that the potential of it went way beyond just like buying bitcoin or something. I was like, this could power the global economy because it's just better than like having certain countries printing their own money or like super high fees in each country. Like we need a. We need a native financial layer to the Internet that's truly global and decentralized and like a bigger and bigger share of GDP could run on that over time. I knew it was massive. I just didn't know exactly how it'd play out. Hey, real quick.

[Podcast Host]

I've started a newsletter for this podcast that you might find interesting. The newsletter shares five of my favorite quotes from each episode along with behind the scenes photos with the guest. The first of these newsletters goes out next week. I'll share my five favorite quotes from the Daniel Ek episode along with some of the photos with Daniel and I to Sign up, just go to davidsonra.com newsletter. That's davidsunner.com newsletter.

[David Senra]

So how do you think about running the company now? How is it organized?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, there's lots of ways you can answer that question. So I have a really amazing president and coo, Emily Choi. She really is an amazing operator. Allows me to focus on a lot of the. Managing the product groups. Like, I would say, I'm pretty product focused CEO, she's operationally focused, and it's an amazing combo of skill sets. I actually think a lot of enterprise value can get generated when you pair like a technical founder with a great operator. Right. Because if you have just an operator, they can make the company very, very efficient. You know, this sort of stereotypically, everyone's different. Right. But if you imagine like a. Like only an operational leader, the company will run very efficiently, but they won't. They'll miss their next wave of innovation or something. Right. And if you have only a founder, sometimes they blow the place up because they like every. They're always trying to do some crazy new thing. Right. And so I think there's a really healthy balance of those two things. And there are other companies where traditionally, like Zuckerberg and Cheryl or Samberg or, you know, whatever kind of classic thing you want to look at. I'd say even at Google, there probably Eric Schmidt and Larry kind of played that role. Right. And with Sergey. So there's examples like that in history, I think, anyway, it's generated a lot of value for Coinbase to have Emily and I both there.

[David Senra]

And you get the most energy when you're working on product.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. And I, And I don't mind going and doing some policy, you know, try to get legislation passed.

[David Senra]

You don't mind it?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I, There was times where I felt like, man, it's like draining to, like, go to go to D.C. and I have to go meet with all these politicians. I actually don't mind it now, in a weird way, it's. There's so many interesting people in dc. There's like big, big personalities. Okay, hold on.

[David Senra]

We got, we got it. We got to go into that, because you said that earlier, and I was like, I got to ask him about this.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

That is shocking to me.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

That you find them interesting.

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, here's one thing I learned about my, My motivation is that I can get excited about anything that helps advance the mission of the company forward. Right. Like, there's times where if you look at what I'm actually doing, it's like, really not Fun, like, grind stuff. It's just like. Like, review 300 resumes or something. Or there was a moment where we, like, we didn't have the right finance leader. And I was like, going to all these meetings with accountants and stuff, and I was like, I took a class in college on accounting, but I'm like, not an accountant by any stretch of the imagination. And, you know, I was like, if this is what is necessary at this moment to get the financial statements to a state where we can close this round or whatever, it's generating value in the company. So I try to derive my sense of motivation from that. And a lot of times the thing I'm doing is like, actually, like the gnarliest problem in the company. It's like, oh, these two teams are super pissed at each other and both the leaders are threatening to quit and, you know, or I have to go shut down this whole thing and, like, we're going to lay people off or whatever. Like, usually it's the. The worst thing you're trying to cycle. You don't want to wake up and do. But I find a sense of. It's not. I'm not a masochist about it. Like, a lot of times it's draining, but I derive a sense of fulfillment from it. Of like, okay, this is moving the ball forward. At least I did something useful today.

[David Senra]

I like that idea of like, you're essentially searching for bottlenecks in the company.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Like, that's a great. Actually, Elon frames what is the limiting factor at any given time and go dive deep on that. That is a very great principle. I'd say the last thing is just we try to push down decision making in the org. Right. It's hard. It's hard to do, but that's like, make clear dris of each of these different things and just try to amp up the pace of execution. Right. Of just. It's hard to do as the company gets bigger because you have more stakeholders and all this. But it's like, okay, single decision maker. Push it down and just give people short timeframes. Like, knock out a decision, unblock this. Go, go, go. And I try to be a little bit of like, the pace car for that and provide risk tolerance to the organization when needed. Like, let's say somebody comes and says, hey, I think we should try this thing. And it's a kind of a crazy idea, but if it worked, it'd be amazing. Like, it'd be like a 20x outcome, but it has like a 20% chance of success. Which you should take that bet all day long. But most companies are risk averse. They won't, they won't do something that has a 20% chance of success. And I'm like, go for it. If it fails, it's on me, you know, and I try to just give people like air cover for those things. So that's, that's a little bit of like the decision making, how we do that.

[David Senra]

What other elements of the company you think are like a reflection of your personality as the founder?

[Brian Armstrong]

I mean just the fact that we have like, you know, four or five product groups, like, that's probably a little bit of the reflection of my. I always want to build new things almost to a fault. And I actually, we have a lot of good systems in place to be rigorous about. Okay, let's. Resource allocation is very important. You don't want to get too spread too thin. But I, I keep having like ambition to go build new things in new categories.

[David Senra]

In the age of AI, that actually might be like more valuable.

[Brian Armstrong]

How so what, what do you think? If you have lower cost to try it?

[David Senra]

Yeah. If you have all these ideas and usually you'd be constrained, you know, by time or resources or actual physical people to go and implement all these ideas coming out of your head.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And now you have, you know, on tap, on demand, intelligent, like co workers.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, that's true. The cost to get a V1 running is now much, much lower.

[David Senra]

Yeah.

[Brian Armstrong]

And we are seeing that internally now to take some, see something through to through is still, you know, intense amounts of work. But yeah, we think a lot about resource allocation where you can have like a two or three person team try these ideas internally and then only if it starts to work and hits key milestones like then do you do the Series A, you know, internally. So we try to treat it a little bit like venture capital. And the hard part is this the

[David Senra]

language you use inside the company?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

Really?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Like one of the key things we did actually was that twice a year any employees can come pitch and say, hey, I think we should be doing this and I have the team to go do it. And in most companies you have to get your boss to say yes, your boss's boss, your boss's boss, all the way up to the CEO. So you have to get like five yeses in a row, which is basically a committee. And if one person says no, it won't happen, which means the company's risk averse. What we've tried to set up internally is we call these next bets, but you can come in and pitch. So each of the product group leaders has their own budget. I'm there. CFO's there. Emily, maybe one or two really talented young engineers. And if you get any one of us to say yes and fund it out of your budget, you're greenlit. So it's kind of like coming in and pitching at 10 venture capitalists.

[David Senra]

So you almost inverted it.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. So you only need to get one yes if someone wants to fund it out of their budget, which is. Yeah. And there's actually been examples where I voted no on something and turned out to be a massive success. And an example of that is like usdc, which is the stablecoin. I actually embarrassed to admit I voted no on that idea. Luckily, somebody else funded it out of their budget and it's. I think in 2025, we did like 800 million revenue off it or something. So it tells you sometimes good ideas can come from anywhere. It's like actually reading about Steve Jobs and Wozniak. That Wozniak, whatever. He went to his employer, hp, and told him, hey, I think we should make a personal computer. They said no, and then he left to found Apple.

[David Senra]

So many such cases.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I always have a little.

[David Senra]

Sam Walton tried to give away the idea for Walmart. They said no.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. So I always have a little bit of that fear in the back of my mind of like, there's brilliant young engineers inside Coinbase. I want to make sure they can come pitch and some. Somebody, even if not me, funds it.

[David Senra]

How much time do you spend on Coinbase marketing? Are you interested in it at all? You guys are doing very unique things around marketing.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, thanks for noticing that. I mean, I wish I could take more credit for that. I actually think it's. It's the team entirely. You know, they. They come and show me the things that they're doing and I. I definitely. The only thing I'm doing is I'm trying to give them error cover to try crazy stuff. And basically whenever they show me something like, that's awesome, like, run with it, you know, and. Whereas I think most organ. Some organizations would be like, a little too cautious or hesitant. But, yeah, what they're doing with, like, putting QR codes in the super bowl or they just did this karaoke thing at the super bowl, or, I don't know, they. They're trying more ambitious ideas, which. Which I like. It's also a lot of marketing now is. It's actually more like content on the Internet than like your. Your typical brand ad. Running on tv and you know, just like a very simple thing actually was. I remember we were putting our earnings calls. You know, as a public company, you put out your earnings, they're usually kind of dry and boring. Like these analysts tune in, listen to these calls. You're on, like a conference call. It was using this, like, really ancient technology and this ancient vendor that we were using. And I remember I was always so bored on these earnings calls. I was like, man, how do we spice these things up? Just do something more interesting. And I remember some of, some of the people on the finance team were like, Brian, just like, stay on script. It's supposed to be boring. Like, just report the numbers. Like that's all we're doing here. And I was like, no, this is a marketing moment. We're supposed to be selling some stock. Let's go out and tell the story of the company. And so anyway, just in this recent earnings, we put together a pitch deck. Kind of like we were going and pitching when we were a private company. And I was like, I want to just like run through the deck and like make a video of me. And then we put it on the website and one of the guys on our marketing team paired it. Have you seen those videos, like Vertical video where I saw this, like, the guy's running through the game collecting coins.

[David Senra]

So they realized on short form that you can have somebody speaking, but then if you put something, somebody like playing a video game or whatever the case is, or going through a maze, their attention goes through the roof.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. And so that's like, we have these like, young Internet native marketing people. They're not like, you know, people who made ads for Coca Cola or something. They're just like, they're. They're just like people who live their whole life on the Internet and meet like meme. Meme culture and all this kind of stuff. Right? And I mean, somebody could reasonably say, well, Brian, are you trying to turn the company into a Meme stock or something? And I'm like, no, not really. I think we're building something very serious and important as like an institution that's going to stand the test of time. But we do need to get the word out in the way that people actually consume content today. And frankly, I think our shareholder letter is brilliant. I get a lot of good feedback on it from like the biggest funds at Fidelity and all these kind of folks. So I'm glad we're putting out a shareholder letter. But 99% of people aren't going to read our shareholder letter. They're going to see some clip on social media about the company, and that's kind of how they're ingesting their information. So how do we speak in an Internet native way? And that is marketing.

[David Senra]

Everything is marketing.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Content. I mean, everything.

[David Senra]

I like that you had this. I'm going to do. I have to do the calls anyways? Like, why don't you actually make them interesting? You said, you know, you have to get attention. People have to pay attention to, like, what we're doing or they're not going to like it. Kind of serves the mission, too. There's a great maxim from David Ogilvy about this, says you can't save souls in an empty church.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

You want to save their soul? You got to get their attention first. You got to get them in the door first.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Well said.

[David Senra]

How do you compose your shareholder letters? Because I'm going through this right now. I just reread Warren Buffett shareholder letters since the last one is out. But that was the best marketing that he ever did. And the amount every year, each year took them about seven months of him. And I think her name's Carol Loomis, going back and forth. And you read them and they're technically about a public company, but they're fascinating. He's essentially. He thought of it as like, he's just teaching how do you compose your shareholders.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. So that's a great point. Actually. Bezos did that too. Right. He's got some bangers. Buffett.

[David Senra]

Bezos is. See, Buffett's different because it's like 70 years or whatever. Bezos, I think, did it for 21 years. He distilled it on the maximums. His last shareholder letter was like, differentiation is survival.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

But I think those are probably the best technology company shareholder letters I've ever seen, I've ever read.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. I mean, I think that those guys are putting in a level of craft into those like. And, you know, partly was a product of their time. I think the way people consume this has changed. As we talked about, our shareholder letters are good. I think they're like, really just reporting the numbers primarily right now. So they're kind of written for analysts, whereas I think the Bezos and the Buffett one might have been written for more like teaching people about business.

[David Senra]

I think Bezos was teaching his very interesting philosophy.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And searching essentially using that. It's like almost like a tuning fork to like, I'm putting this out and the right shareholders for me and this weird strategy to have will respond to this information. Yeah, I wonder if you could do the same, though.

[Brian Armstrong]

It's a great point. I hadn't thought about it. I mean, we could put more of, like, I don't know, my philosophy in it. I. I think what I want to try is actually going through, for me, the medium of just talking through a deck and like, getting me talking about it can be a little bit easier. There is something powerful about forcing yourself to sit down and really distill it to, like, in writing, which can be clarifying. So think about that.

[David Senra]

You said, do you prefer being prompted? Like, when you said, it's better if I said, like, we put a deck. But let me just film. Just film me going through the deck.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, Like, I don't want to just like, read. I'm not reading the deck, but I want to tell you it'll help me clarify my thinking. Like, okay, here's the mission of the company. What are we building? We're just building better financial services with crypto. How do we measure our progress on that? Here's our key metrics. You know, it's growing trading volume, market share, and it's. And it's like the transaction volume and the assets on the platform. We have a whole theory about how we're growing that as the most trusted brand. And then, okay, you can also just go through a bunch of objections people commonly would bring up. Right? And like, okay, let's have a slide and address that and that and that. And then you can take submitted questions too, and you can kind of riff on those. I think that that's a good format for us to play with. But you're bringing. I hadn't really thought about the Buffett and the Bezos analogy on the shareholders. Those guys went deep. That was very atypical.

[David Senra]

Yeah. I would argue that the Buffett shareholders is the most successful example of content marketing in history. If you think about, like, what it did for his reputation, the fact that then he got access to proprietary deal flow as a result of that. So if you don't feel people are reading the shareholder letters, how do you think they're consuming information about public companies then?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, I think there are a number of analysts that are reading the show letters. I don't want to say there's none, but I think most people like retail investors, even people who aren't specifically tracking public company stocks, like, in that level of detail, they're consuming podcasts. They're probably listening to your podcast. They're reading social media like X. They're reading blog posts, substack. I think Some of them still read traditional media, but that's dwindling, especially amongst people under, say 65 or something. Every company is a media company now. You should be publishing your own content direct to your own blog. Social media. Some companies have their own podcast. I don't. You never should be going like through. I really don't like this idea of putting information out of the company through a traditional journalist who's going to bring their own bias and filter to it.

[David Senra]

So, you know, how many founders have been telling me that recently? Why do you arrive at that conclusion?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, part of it was just having, I mean, we talked about the mission first blog post, you know, one of the like formative experiences, I would say, as a CEO, was that like after that happened, I think several traditional media organizations wrote just very negative and false stories about us. And it just made me really appreciate like how they're not doing journalism, like in the traditional sense of the word that I think of it, which is to go report the facts and investigate things which need uncovering in the world, which is a very important thing. They're actually more like political propaganda machines. And if it doesn't fit their narrative, then they're, they'll put out stories which are fake, misleading. I shouldn't have been surprised. There's like a long history of this going back to like, you know, yellow journalism and Joseph Pulitzer. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[David Senra]

Because people give me shit because I don't read the news at all. Yeah. Like, I just read old books and then talk to founders now. Like, that's essentially my entire media diet. And then like talking to LLMs.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And they're like, you're not informed. I was like, have you read William Randolph Hearst biography? Did you read Joseph, like who invented yellow journalism? Just read anything that's happening now derived from those two, especially in America. Those are the two most influential and powerful, you know, people media. And they literally changed the way that newspapers and the written text came out to make it intentionally more salacious.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

And more exaggerated.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. What did he, Hearst say? Like, you provide the photos, I'll provide the war or something like. Yeah. And so anyway, I think most people have become aware of this now. Like the trust in traditional media is kind of at all time lows. So, you know, luckily things have moved on. I, I, you know, anyway, I think it's Social media has its own challenges too about misinformation and whatnot. But at least like you can just go direct and put out whatever you want to say and people like it or don't it's fine. And then, you know, I think it's good to talk to new media as well. And anyway, that. That was a formative experience, and I actually think it was very liberating in a way. I actually. I think everybody, at some point in their life should get the New York Times to write a hit piece on them because you stop fearing it and you start realizing, okay, I'm just going to do whatever I think is the right thing to do now, because there's not like some terrible thing that could happen to me anymore. Like, it doesn't matter. Like once. Once they try to. Once they try to do it and it doesn't do anything, you realize, oh, okay, I'm not trying to optimize for optics here or doing something that looks like. That looks good. Why don't I actually just do the thing that I think is good, regardless of how people perceive it? And that's very liberating. I hope more people experience that.

[David Senra]

When did you go through that?

[Brian Armstrong]

It happened in many small ways as Coinbase was growing. Like, we'd see articles come out that was like, what? That's not. That's not right. What are they talking about? And they wouldn't post a correction. It was just. Sometimes you get these calls from journalists. They were like, I'm posting this in four hours. Like, will you comment? And we're like, what? This is totally false information. What are you talking about? So it was just this kind of annoying tax that was always happening on the company. But what really I think radicalized me on it was post that mission first blog post. Like several organizations, but the New York Times in particular, I remember they basically put a team of people, I was later told by insiders, they're like, go dig up dirt on this company and write negative articles about them. They had the headline written before they even had found anything. And they wrote articles kind of implying that we were racist and we were underpaying certain minorities and things. False. It was false information. And you know, that. That just like this basically was like, pissed me off. And I was like, okay, I don't really want to. They're not engaging in good faith. Like, these are. They're so biased, they don't even realize it. And they have some political agenda. It's not really. It's not really journalism. It's like a political propaganda company or something. So that was frustrating. And yeah, it shifted my point of view to go direct.

[David Senra]

You had a unique experience because you're building a company, but you're also starting at the Very beginning of an industry. I think like the. I was thinking about you earlier today. I was like, the analogy is kind of, that sticks in my mind. It's like the early American automobile founders. It's like I have to learn how to build a car company, but we're building an industry simultaneously where like if you start a software company today, like you're not building the software industry. The software has been around. What was that experience like?

[Brian Armstrong]

It's a really good point. I mean, Henry Ford, you probably know about it, right? It's like when the cars came out and then there people were like freaked out about your cars are going to scare the horses. You know, and like some. Wasn't there some law that. I remember Mark Andreessen told me about this where like when automobiles first came out in cities, you. There's somebody passed a law, you had to like run in front of the car with a flag.

[David Senra]

Yes.

[Brian Armstrong]

So so as not to like scare the horses. So yeah, inherently, if you are. Crypto is, is a brand new industry. It's updating all financial services. And it's like that Gandhi quote, you know, like, first they ignore you and they laugh at you and they fight

[David Senra]

you and then they Davos and wave their finger.

[Brian Armstrong]

Then you win. So we're, we're at stage three. They're, they're. Now there's a little bit of fighting happening, but actually, honestly, most of the big banks and financial institutions are embracing crypto. And like five, five of the, you know, GC banks in the world, the largest banks, are working with us now in crypto integrations. If you look at their LinkedIn posts, they're all hiring crypto people, product managers and engineers. So it's working, it's up and we want to work with all of them. This is like a little blip on the policy radar. That's just a little negotiation happening. Peter Thiel says you have to be contrarian but right to be an entrepreneur. So you have to be comfortable looking stupid. For like a long time when I was calling those banks and saying, hey, we want it, we're a crypto company, want to do this. And they would hang up on me or, you know, I'd go pitch the 30th venture investor and get a no or the, you know, the thousandth employee we tried to hire or whatever, like you were willing to be misunderstood for a long time and then you slowly start to have these breakthroughs. And a lot of the best, you know, if you look at like Uber, you know, they were fighting for a Decade to just be like, yeah, it's actually better and safer than a cab. And the entrenched interests were fighting them. Right. Or Airbnb with the hotels, you know, self driving cars. Like everything that's truly innovative and breakthrough is going to upset an entrenched incumbent, eventually intersect with the government and just piss off some, some segment of the population who kind of are like, how dare you question the status quo? You and the Wright brothers. I mean when they came out with the airplane, nobody believed them for like, for years. I mean you, you know, you read the biography. They went to the United States government and were like, we have this, we've created flight. You know, they thought it'd be celebrated. And they were like, they had to go to Europe. Yeah, they went to Europe.

[David Senra]

They were doing these demonstrations on like this guy's field in Ohio and almost there'd be like three people watching them.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. And didn't. Wasn't there was that famous quote from the War Department. They said, we see new. No military application for the airplane and 40 years later it won't. World War II, if I remember correctly.

[David Senra]

I haven't read the book in probably six years. I, I should reread it again, do another episode on it. But I think it was like the French government was their first.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

The first person to, to actually buy it for the military.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. So it, that's the nature of innovation is like you have to be willing to be misunderstood. And then the key part is you have to also be right, which is you can't just be throwing out crazy ideas which are wrong and for them.

[David Senra]

So they're. They're creating an industry and a company. Yeah, but. But they actually didn't create the most successful company.

[Brian Armstrong]

That's true.

[David Senra]

In that industry where you did.

[Brian Armstrong]

It's true. Well, I think Orville and Wilbur were more like.

[David Senra]

Well, Wilbur died prematurely, I think from like I forgot consumption or maybe tuberculosis. I forgot what it was. They died like 45. Orville lived for a lot longer. But there was basically they created the industry and one of the first few companies, but then they were overtaken in a way that you have not been.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. So not to torture this analogy too much, but I think of Wilver and Orville as kind of like inventors. The equivalent in this case would be like Satoshi Nakamoto or someone like that. Brilliant. Whoever they are. There's an interesting documentary coming out on this soon. Whoever those people are, they're probably innovators, scientists. I don't consider myself really a scientist. I'm more of like an engineer and entrepreneur. So I recognized early what was happening with the invention of bitcoin, but I didn't invent bitcoin myself. I did not discover flight like the Wright brothers. So I always had a lot of respect for people that are like, you know, Edison and these people. Right. Like, because they're actually on the frontier making scientific breakthroughs. Who knows, maybe this would happen at some point. But I don't think I'm going to be the person to make a scientific breakthrough. What I am going to do is have an instinct or a nose that, like, something interesting is happening here and it's created an opportunity and I can go commercialize it with a really successful company.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I mean, Edison was obsessed with commercialization, though. He said that he didn't want to invent anything that didn't sell. And that sale is proof of utility. There's a great line on that. So you have your mission of Coinbase, but you said your natural inclination is to work on multiple things, Right? You started another company.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

You want to talk about this?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, sure. So, I mean broadly, I want to accelerate civilizational progress in the world. That's kind of my personal mission. So I think economic freedom is foundational to that. With crypto, when Coinbase went public and I got some liquidity from that, I was also just thinking, okay, what are the other big problems in the world in hard tech? Not just software that might require more capital that I could try to help with. And I started thinking, so the big ones in my mind were like, AI and crypto are probably the two biggest right now. Then of course, there's fusion, energy, brain, machine interfaces, space. And I felt like, hey, there's good teams working on all of these. And I'm not sure what unique I have to add. The other biggest one I thought of was longevity. Like, how do we start to reprogram our own biology to enhance what it means to be human at some point? So I started hosting these dinners. I didn't see teams working on that that I thought were credible. In fact, the longevity space has had a lot of snake oil type stuff. It's like, pretty, you know, attracted some unsavory characters.

[David Senra]

A little bit like crypto for centuries.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, for centuries, for sure. I reached out to a couple friends of mine who had done. They were biotech CEOs or PhDs and started to host some dinners. And this is a good way just to learn too, is like, try to see if you can convene some of the top people in the room and just go around the table and ask them what's the most interesting thing on the horizon that's underfunded or under invested in. We hosted a couple of these dinners. I was lucky enough to do this with a friend of mine, Blake Byers, who eventually we co founded this company with. And one of the topics they told us about was epigenetic reprogramming, which is the ability to reprogram cells and you can restore function they had when they were younger. There were some early breakthroughs that had happened in different labs. One example of this was Shinya Yamanaka, who won the Nobel Prize for reprogramming skin cells into stem cells. I think he got that in 2005, if I'm not mistaken. And so I started to feel a little bit about epigenetic reprogramming like I did about Bitcoin when I first read about the Bitcoin white paper. And I was like, how deep does this rabbit hole go? And if you can actually reprogram cells, it turns out our cells are much more plastic than people realized what could be possible with that. And so through a series of these dinners, we met the other co founder, Jacob Kimmel and Greg Johnson, and created this company. It's called New Limit and it's a longevity company searching for novel therapies that can reprogram your cells to restore function they had when they were younger. So it's been going about three or four years now. We've demonstrated successfully programming human cells for the first time to restore function. It's a discovery platform that's testing tens of thousands, eventually millions of hypotheses in high throughput screens across lots of different cell types. It's using AI to prioritize those screens. And the first drug candidate's going to go into clinical trials probably next year. So it's gone faster than I thought. Actually. I committed 100 million of my own money to it to hope to help it get off the ground. And it subsequently raised more money from others as well. And I thought it was going to be like a pure research thing for maybe five, six years or who knows? It turned out the scientific progress happened a bit faster than we thought. And we're ready to go to clinical trials now with the first drug candidate. Hopefully there'll be three, four, five drug candidates over the next five years.

[David Senra]

Do you think you'll continue to start more companies?

[Brian Armstrong]

I do, yeah. I mean, both within Coinbase. Like there's lots of these product groups and I think it's fun like that's. The most fun thing in the world is building companies that try to have a positive impact in the world, try to be useful. And I'm getting slowly better at it, you know, over the, over the decades, hopefully, and learning a lot of painful lessons along the way. And so yeah, I don't want to get distracted and have too many things. Each one of these is really difficult. But I do think over the coming decades, hopefully I'll start more companies.

[David Senra]

Do you think Coinbase is the last company you'll be CEO of?

[Brian Armstrong]

Oof, that's a tough question.

[David Senra]

Let me tell you why you think about it. Let me tell you why I asked because I was shocked when I was talking to Toby. He's like. He said something. I think it was on the episode that if AI, like the advancements in AI weren't happening right now, he thinks he wouldn't be the CEO of Shopify anymore.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I was surprised to hear him say that too. I heard him say that. I don't feel the same way he does about that, I think. I mean, AI is changing everything about how we work and lots of things in financial services.

[David Senra]

We haven't talked about that. We need to talk about this.

[Brian Armstrong]

Sure, yeah.

[David Senra]

After. Let's go there next.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Senra]

So let me forget.

[Brian Armstrong]

I want to continue to be Coinbase CEO for a long time. Do you like being CEO? Yeah, I find it, I always clarify, I find it very fulfilling, which means that it's sometimes very stressful. Sometimes it's super fun. Sometimes I just get my ass kicked, like, and I'm, you know, I'm like, oh man, that was a. Ralph's a rough day. Right? You're just going and doing like the hardest things that get escalated to you because nobody else in the company, you know, so. But that's what creates fulfillment, right? It's a little bit like playing a video game or something. Like it needs to be a really hard level. It's a little outside your comfort zone for you to feel like, whoa, okay, I beat like I was right at the limit of my ability.

[David Senra]

When you're having these like very stressful times in your life based on work, what do you do to like decompress or to like take time away?

[Brian Armstrong]

I think it's a very important topic because a lot of founders, like the found the other founders that were in my YC batch that I went through, I saw many of them like burn out within three, three, four years. They would either. It manifested in lots of different ways. Some of them would gain a bunch of weight Someone would lose a bunch of weight. One of them had hair falling out. I was like bald before starting. But they were like, literally clumps of hair were falling out because of the stress. Some of them got addicted to prescription drugs. So dealing with stress as a founder is actually a very important topic because you need to. Eventually you can burn the candle at both ends for a period of years, but eventually you'll burn out and you need to make it sustainable to have the impact you want to have over a period of many decades, hopefully. And so, yeah, the kinds of things that I baked in as a routine and there were, I'd say every couple years I felt like I hit a patch of burnout, right. And I had to change something up. So I either have to like delegate more, stop doing some piece of what I was doing, having fewer direct reports, and then have a routine around like sleep, exercise and nutrition basically, and some form of like, you can call it meditation or prayer, whatever you want it. But in the evening you can go to the sauna, right. Or in the morning you can just sit there and meditate for one minute or whatever it is. And I have a pretty strict routine when I'm in work mode around like sleep, exercise, what I eat, and then just like wind down time in the evening. And then, you know, on the weekends I mix it up and I'm like, not so strict about things, but I even just wear the same thing every day. Right. So I'm pretty rigorous about that. And I mean, I basically am just in this routine of get enough sleep, wake up, lift heavy things and do zone two cardio. Yeah. And like meditate for a few minutes and then get after it.

[David Senra]

What's your wind down time at night though?

[Brian Armstrong]

It's basically like, you know, lovemaking. No, it's. Don't look at screens would be the main, the main thing. Right. Like you're, if you're, if you're, if you're looking at work stuff on your laptop or your phone and like even something you just glance at for a second, it can like piss you off. And then if I try to just go right to sleep after working, I have like stressful dreams about work and I just don't get well, well rested. So there does have to be, I think, a period of time too.

[David Senra]

How long is this wind down time?

[Brian Armstrong]

Oh, like an hour before bed. Yeah.

[David Senra]

Okay.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. And you can read, watch stuff, sauna, whatever. Yeah.

[David Senra]

Before we go to how AI is changing the way you're working inside Coinbase.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

Question. I was thinking about Was what's the distribution of time between Coinbase and your other company?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, Coinbase is my full time job.

[David Senra]

So it's like 99%.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. I mean if you looked at how

[David Senra]

you're spending time between the two companies.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah. Well, when New Limit was just getting started, I was spending more time with them, like 5, 10% of my time. But. And you know, I jump in whenever needed. But I'm primarily an investor and a board member there and I'm helping with some of the operational pieces and helping them raise money and things like that. But yeah, Jacob Kimmel is the president operating that company day to day and he's crushing it. He's an incredibly talented CEO and business person. I talked to, sorry, I should say scientist and business person.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I talked to Palmer Luckey about this because that's something I asked him. It's like we have three companies. He's like, no, I really have like one. He's like 99% of my time is on Andoril. And then he said something fascinating. He just like wakes up every day and tries to think of like the highest leverage thing he can do for that company.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

Even if it's stuff he doesn't want to do, which is very interesting.

[Brian Armstrong]

That's exactly right. It's like it's so easy to get caught up in just doing short term things, but you have to start your day usually with the thing that sucks that you. It's the most important thing and usually it sucks. Yeah.

[David Senra]

So how or is AI changing the way that you're working in Coinbase?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, lots of ways. So some of it is similar to other companies and some is different. The parts that's similar is like more and more code is being written by these agents. More than 50% now customer support inquiries I think is about 60% answered by agents.

[David Senra]

Now are you building your own tools or you're using other people's tools?

[Brian Armstrong]

Both. We're using vendors. We have a lot of custom models internally as well. We're testing different use cases, for instance, around like compliance automation. We're building a lot of stuff in house design. Totally. You can really quickly, rapidly prototype stuff and get it out there. We're even using it in, within our finance function and like you know, to do FPA and build models and things like that. So it's widely, even, even like decision making in the company. The key was getting a lot of our data ingested, like all the Google Docs and the Slack Messages and the GitHub commits and the Salesforce and Now like you can ask it really great questions like what, what should I be more aware of as CEO? And it's like, did you know this team is not aligned on the strategy? I was like, actually I didn't know that, you know.

[David Senra]

So this is something you build yourself.

[Brian Armstrong]

There's a team internally working on this and there's a couple vendors. So there's one called LibreChat that's open source, you can connect all your internal data to. There's other vendors out there like Glean and Slackbot and different. We're testing three of them or so. Right now Gemini is doing a bunch of stuff with Google so we're testing all of them to see which ones employees gravitate towards. Basically that's I would say current best practice amongst a lot of tech companies. Not super unique to crypto. The thing that's more unique to crypto is that these AI agents are increasingly needing to do payments to get work done. And we're giving them all stablecoin wallets. So you can imagine in the traditional financial world you and I can go get a credit card or something where we have to be identified as a human. But if you're an agent trying to get work done, you either have to bug your human every time to like will you approve this purchase? Or if you want to increasingly these agents, you can tell them just go do this like overnight or the next two, you know, the next hours, week, whatever and get work done. Like they might need to spin up AWS resources or get through a paywall on the Internet to read some research paper or buy a domain name or whatever, spin up a marketing program. If you really want to treat them almost like their own digital employees, they need to have a corporate card kind of thing. And traditional corporate cards can't be issued to non human entities. And so we're giving them stablecoin wallets. They're doing a lot of machine to machine payments. This is all very new in the last few months, but it's been getting a lot of traction. So that's pretty exciting. We built a couple of tools that allow any agent to get a stablecoin wallet inside of it.

[David Senra]

How are you using them personally?

[Brian Armstrong]

AI agents?

[David Senra]

Yeah, agents. Any kind of tools?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, I've been using Claude and Codex a little bit just to learn the current development tools. I've been speeding that up locally on my laptop just to make sure I understand the current best tools that developers are using. TOBII actually writes a lot of code still in production.

[David Senra]

It just came. Did you See the tree today?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, yeah, I dabble, but I do not write that much code in production. I have to admire him for that. As a CEO, the main thing I use it for is research essentially of just like, okay, help me understand this and this, how this works and then draft this for me. And internally, with these data report repositories now connected in, I can use it for decision making. And we actually like, we use a decision making framework and there's a row now for the AI agent to write right in their input. And it's like kind of nice to compare it to the other people on the team. Those are the primary ways that I use it today.

[David Senra]

I'm still a little confused. Tell me about the base app.

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, I watched the presentation, so I've

[David Senra]

talked to you about it.

[Brian Armstrong]

I'm still confused. Yeah, okay. Well the simple way to think of it is the base app is the self custodial version of coinbase. We launched a new version of it recently which frankly it was kind of polarizing. Like we put it out and it was trying to do something kind of novel on the social front. And I don't think it quite worked. We got like a bunch of feedback from the community about that.

[David Senra]

Was this the tap thing?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, you could double tap to buy any post.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I understand that. But then each post almost had its own market cap. But then what happens?

[Brian Armstrong]

Well, it was interesting. So there was also every post had its own coin and also every creator had its own coin. It was optional for the creator. But what happened is if you bought a post, some of the economics would flow back to the creator. We thought maybe each post would have this up and down, it would have residual zero value. It turned out like many of the posts had a couple thousand dollars of value or something at the terminal end of it and people were thinking of it as a way to, I guess reward and thank the creator, but they also owned some of the creator coin. Long way of saying I think something is going to work in this space around. They call it social fi or like, you know, these kind of social media tokens. I don't think that the tokenomics has not quite been figured out yet where it needs, for, for the people, you know, investing in them, it needs to have some sort of like durability to like the, you know, they have to believe, okay, David Senra is going to continue to make great content into the future and he's relatively undiscovered now, but he's going to be much bigger. And it's kind of like you know, a company or something and they would want to own your creator token and there'd be some value and maybe like a revenue stream would accrue to them over time, depending on your ad revenue. Or you'd have to come up with something like that that I think it's a little bit more durable in the current incarnation. It wasn't quite there in my view. So we tried it as an experiment. Didn't quite work. The app has since pivoted to really just be more focused on trading and being a self custodial version of the Coinbase app. So we're starting with that for now. But I do think something in the social token space will eventually work.

[David Senra]

What else has been on your mind outside of Coinbase and is it new limit?

[Brian Armstrong]

Yeah, new limit, yeah. Well, you know, there's another project that I invested in, helped get off the ground called Research Hub, which is trying to accelerate scientific research. They're trying to find novel ways for people to raise like the funding problems in science are like a whole thing and replication is an issue. You can talk about that if you want. I think, you know, I'm making, through my family office, I'm making various investments in like companies that I think are doing innovative stuff on the frontier. I think sometimes about what are the other big ideas that could really unlock progress. Right. One other idea I'm interested in is actually like special economic zones in the US or elsewhere where there's such a morass of red tape, both federally and state and local to try to innovate sometimes that it's hard to get off the ground. Right. Like the, that money transmitter license thing is an example that I mentioned where you need to like, you need like five or ten million dollars just to get the licenses. And I. Sometimes entrepreneurs can find a creative way around these things in the early days. But for instance, like look at like, I don't know, nuclear energy, right. It's, it's basically impossible to get like a new nuclear power plant. I shouldn't say impossible. Very difficult right now. And if you had these special economic zones, like actually China has been very successful at this. They have like Shenzhen is a special economic zone, essentially. Right. Or like, like Hong Kong or in the uae they have these and there's been examples of these around the world that have been unlocked a ton of value. My ideal world, you'd have like 10 plots of land, like take federal land in the US and designate them as special zones. So you could have one that's hey, this, is this in this sandbox you can iterate on nuclear reactor design in this one little area. You know, we're okay, maybe something bad will happen, but it's contained in this, in this area. We need to be on our front foot and like innovate there or have another one for, for biotech, like accelerated trials, or another one for crypto or another one for drones. They're just like drones flying all over within this zone, you know, outside of traditional FAA rules and like allow people to really innovate and build startups. And if they get a product working through that rapid innovation in a, in a regulatory sandbox, they can then go apply for the, the license federally and then serve the rest of the US market. But the problem is it's like, it's such a high barrier to entry to even try to get started in some of these markets with these new technologies. Anyway, I think special economic zones could be cool. I might work on that at some point.

[David Senra]

I love the idea of just lowering the barrier of entry to innovation, entrepreneurship. Brian, this is awesome, man. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

[Brian Armstrong]

Thank you. I appreciate it.

[Podcast Host]

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.