Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on Cryptocurrency and the Future of Decentralization

gary what's up what up brother good to see you good to see you come on in thanks for having me yeah dude this is going to be a fun conversation [Music] today we're in los angeles california and we'll be sitting down with brian armstrong founder and ceo of coinbase well brian thanks for hanging out man yeah thanks for having me where do you even start i mean obviously we're on the other side of an incredible ipo congratulations man thank you i don't know how to thank you enough i don't know just even being able to meet you and be a part of like what what you created yeah you know unbelievable you know it's mutual you helped me out a ton in the early days i don't know if people know that but you were kind of like my first ceo coach you made a big investment at the time in in coinbase for it was really obvious and it was just me kind of showing you a bunch of numbers on the screen and what do you think about this and this and you were giving me advice every week and i'd come back and i remember at a certain point you saw some some numbers from some growth experiment and you were like you should show that to investors i mean it makes me want to invest so make them want to invest in a kind of a light bulb went off in my head was like would gary invest you know so yeah totally anyway you took a big uh big bet on me as well and you were always just so optimistic about everybody's startups when they were super young and early that's that's my biggest memory of you actually from y combinator is like you were championing everybody when they had these beta barely functional products and you were like their first customer and you had their t-shirt and like a bit of motivation like an early customer who actually believes in the product can can go a long ways in the early days so thank you as well dude i appreciate that i mean that's my that's what gets me up in the morning is um believing before people believe and then helping people believe themselves but then what you do after that is you just go and make everyone else believe after that how crazy is that it can be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy actually like just having somebody else believe in you can make you believe in yourself and um yeah there's a lot to that like a lot of good ideas probably just die on the vine because you know people belittle them or they make fun of them or they assume it'll never work and so having someone actually believe in your ideas is non-trivial the interesting and hard thing though is to like believe something that is that can be true how did you know like that early about crypto and bitcoin yeah about crypto and i mean it sounds like there were things from uh places you worked at before that sort of started to inform that yeah that's true i mean you never really know for sure right i remember having moments of self-doubt where i was like maybe i'm crazy you know because nobody else seems to really get this if i explain it to them i i hear some people you know they make business ideas today where they're they're sort of doing like um almost like a consultant type analysis or a financial analysis and like this is the tam and here's the competitor set and so i believe for me it wasn't like that at all i was i basically just read the white paper and i was like that's cool the bitcoin white paper and i kind of could couldn't get out of my head and so it wasn't like i had some really sophisticated analysis of the market potential because there was no market for it it was basically just i i think this seems like a good idea it seems like it's interesting to me and so maybe it'll be interesting to other people and i was trying to think about all the ways that it could die you know would it be regulated out of existence would there be some kind of cyber security flaw and like the more i talked to people about it i couldn't find any obvious reason that that would happen so i didn't know for sure that it would work but i felt like it was a high enough chance that it was worth making a go of it and and you're right my prior work experience definitely did give me a little bit of an insight into that working on fraud prevention at airbnb i'd seen how difficult it was to move money around all these countries both collecting money from customers and then also paying it out to the people who were listing their homes on the site and it was like every single country of the world had their own little proprietary system with like a couple of entrenched you know oligopoly companies that were charging like you know opaque fees and it just felt like this thing is never going to get rid of all the bureaucracy and like actually be innovated unless there's a new a new system i was thinking about it in terms of the internet right like it wouldn't make sense for each country to have their own proprietary internet and you pay a fee when you want to load a web page from another country or something it's like let's all just run the world on one standard it felt so beautiful and elegant to me so those were some things which gave me a little bit of a hint that maybe it would work and i knew enough computer science and enough economics that not that i was an expert in any of it but i was like after i read the paper a few times i was like this might work i guess the crazy thing that i remember and i went into my email and dug up like the first mention of your name in my inbox and it was actually jason tan at sift science yeah and uh the line that really jumped out at me was that you were at airbnb uh debugging with jason at 2 a.m and yeah i you know i think that was the moment where i was like yc needs to fund brian it's like anyone who loves the craft so much that you know at 2am you know you're on like your brain is engaged in something that is you know useful towards a goal i mean that that really resonated with me as a founder because those are the times when i did my absolute best work you wake up and it's like whoa i wrote that all that code or i figured out this crazy thing right yeah i mean i've noticed that actually a lot of founders have weird sleep schedules it's not that they're all like night owls some of them are super early too and they but they it doesn't mean like if you have a normal sleep schedule you're not a good founder but i think anybody could probably be a founder but i have noticed that there's some people you know they're working during the day and there's like so many emails and meetings and you're distracted and so they need like a period of time whether it's super early or super late where there's nothing else scheduled you can kind of just dig in and yeah jason tan i remember at that time sift science was this great startup yc startup that was doing fraud prevention with machine learning and at airbnb i was trying to prevent some of the fraud that was happening and so i had looked at a couple of different solutions and what would it take to build our own i was like these guys seem like they have a good product and um it was like all right let's hook it up let's let's debug it and so i was kind of coding the whole thing and like talking with them and going through their api docs and it was just a convenient time to get work done like late at night because you know there were so many things happening during the day but yeah there there definitely were times in my life where i got so deep in the code and i just i wanted to get it working and it was fun there's other times where you're get deep in the code and like nothing is working and it's so incredibly frustrating and two hours later you're like oh it was like one character was different and it's like so you know so it's it was a labor of love and um i loved building stuff like that and so yeah i definitely got super into it yeah i mean i love that story just because a lot of people who are watching like they look at what you've created and they're like all desire is so mimetic especially in terms of creating companies and becoming a founder um but i feel like that that's like the common thread is being a builder being very focused on you know it's not the technology on its own it's not the problem on its own and it's probably not the sleep schedule but something about like all of that entering a flow state and then having this outcome yeah other people have written more eloquently about this than me but there is something about this desire or this ability to like look at the world and say okay this is how things are but they could be different and not to just dismiss the idea out of hand because it's so ridiculous so there's a weird it's almost like be able to suspend disbelief for a minute and be like okay maybe this could work that's one kind of characteristic and then i think that builder characteristic is super important too people who you know pg wrote a lot about this and everything right remarkably determined and resilient people that are just like you know setback after setback and they're just like i'm going to keep going um because startups are certainly are certainly like that so i think the builder piece is interesting too like the ability to code helps i don't think it's necessarily 100 required but the reason it helps is that you know when you're on a shoestring budget and you've only raised a tiny amount of money and you maybe only have one or two or three people you could in theory hire a firm to build your app right but almost you almost never get the first version of the product right and so if you're kind of overpaying so to speak like this some high-priced firm to build the app and then you get the first version wrong which everybody does and then you get the second version wrong which almost everybody does and you're on the third version you're like you're out of money and you're dead and so i guess it was almost like a way to save money if i just coded it myself and i remember for instance like you know i wasn't very good at design for instance but i kind of scraped together things as best i could i either using like twitter bootstrap or there were even like some some people some friends at yc who like i remember one of the people like created my logo for me or whatever it was as a favor so it was kind of beg borrow and steal and try to get something out and then if you get iterate iterated iterate you got product market fit then you can start to bring in enough people to get better and better stuff happening but in the early days there was just so few people who would even come join my thing that like had to make something happen with whatever i had one thing i remember about your version of coinbase in 2012 was it was the perfect idiomatic expression of uh bootstrap yeah i guess yeah it's like you know it looked like twitter actually so yeah it wasn't by any means the most beautiful site but it was functional and it had something about it that looked it wasn't sketchy it wasn't gonna it wasn't gonna win any awards but it wasn't like a huge detractor of the design either so but that seemed like a very important thing from the beginning making sort of a clean well-lit place to actually buy this stuff and interact with it it was interesting to see like a lot of people were had the idea of i want to do something with bitcoin but for you to pick like something so specific as a problem set you know that that wasn't and actually have built it and like started sending bitcoin around with it yeah well i mean that was my so like many people i downloaded the bitcoin client which was desktop software and had a command line interface right and i started syncing my node on my my macbook like that was the first version of it that i tried and i knew that just that wasn't going to scale to be a large number of people who would want to do that you know for one thing it took a while to sync to the blockchain right um it reminded me also kind of of like email servers or git servers because you know you could run your own email server but nobody wants to they want they want to run gmail or something in the cloud it works on your phone and you're if you lose your phone your email's not gone or whatever and same thing with git git is hard to use but github made it easier so those were sort of my analogies and i had this thought like someone's going to make the hosted wallet in the cloud thing for crypto i was sort of trying to talk myself out of that actually because i was like that's a really big responsibility that's going to be a big company that does that you're going to be storing people's money you're going to have to have regulation and so my early prototypes were like actually with a friend i made this um this bitcoin wallet that ran on an android phone and tried to just make it easier to use and we got a version of it out but i realized really like the day we launched it i realized it was built wrong because it required it was trying to run the full bitcoin node on the phone and so even if you were on wifi it still took like hours to sync and i was like all right someone's going to make the cloud version of this i couldn't help myself i just started tinkering and stuff and put it out there so that's an interesting idea thought pattern that seems to come up a lot like someone's going to do x and so i'd rather be that yeah i think there's a lot of truth to that you just you notice there's like some big issue in the world or some you know schlep you had to go through i think people call it right sometimes you're like uh man that was such a pain someone's gonna have to do this and then weeks go by and you're like maybe i should do it i just solved it for myself maybe others need the same thing solved i wanted to ask you about you know crypto and bitcoin in particular attracted you you had to be a part of a fringe to accept it that early but then even within that fringe there were ideas that were not useful or turned out to be wrong you know one of which i think was being totally anonymous or pseudonymous at all times and you had to sort of make you made a different decision for yourself very early i'm curious because that's like to create a fringe within a fringe that became coinbase um yeah i mean there was there were a lot of cypherpunks kind of at those early bitcoin meetups that i went to and of course satoshi was anonymous and so i think some people were of the opinion we're all going to do 100 anonymous here and i i don't have any issue with that i think actually the future is probably pseudo anonymity or kind of like on reddit you have a username you can declare bankruptcy and create a new one your reputation goes away too but i think that's probably going to be the future but for starting a company it's kind of different than what an individual might want right and i i knew that if this company was going to ask people to put in their credit card or their bank account or to store their crypto then it wouldn't be okay for me to be anonymous right i also just kind of went through the thought exercise which was okay if this thing is small it can probably fly under the radar no one's going to care but if i don't want to build a small thing i want to build a thing that like helps the whole world use crypto so we can create more economic freedom and all this so if this gets to millions of people there's no way i can be anonymous like i you know i i knew from enough from reading kind of about the history of paypal and working at airbnb doing this money movement stuff that there's regulation involved and like i was not willing to sort of be on the run and never come back to the united states or something like that i was like i have friends here i have a family here i want to be i need to do this like above board from day one if i'm gonna do it and so i felt like i wanted to create all of these credibility indicators actually about the company even when it was very tiny design is a little thing you know how support works i even remember having on the about page i had like press at and like sales at and like random email addresses and i was like the only person's company so i was trying to create and like yeah news articles and putting my actual name who's who created it and putting it on my linkedin and so they can go read about my background and i'm not trying to hide here i'm not trying to be anonymous and getting into y combinator getting certain investors like these were all little credibility indicators that started to accumulate to help us i think break through some of the noise you sort of used a way of thinking that was if we get there we're going to need to have this right and so you had to sort of presuppose you could get to millions of users and then work backwards from there totally that i think is actually relatively rare for a lot of people like they sort of don't focus on the outcome they sort of and believe that they can get to the outcome they focus on looking like a startup and that's sort of like just the beginning part of it it's like that you know that's putting the cart before the horse in a lot of ways yeah well there's probably a way to take that too far which is like if you're so worried about having this beautiful product and everything's perfect and you never launch in the first place right so startups do kind of have to fake it till you make it you can't be too precious about it but yeah if there's an opportunity to create some kind of legitimacy along the way certainly take it i think i mean even going earlier you know technology and software and computers have treated both of us incredibly well what was your like first computer and first interaction with just you know tech period well i feel very lucky on that front because i i grew up in a home where my mother actually worked at ibm she would take me to work at some times and i got to see computers and we got some of like the early ibm 386 and 40s 486 pcs in the home this was kind of growing up in the bay area in california and so that was pre-internet but you know i learned how to use like dos and play little games on the computer and things like that at a pretty young age and i think it wasn't until the internet happened i remember we first got dial up internet and then dsl and everything that i really started to get excited about it and i started to try to learn how to make html and web pages i remember reading this book on like how to learn java in 21 days and i was probably like in eighth grade or something and i completely didn't understand any of it and i like completely failed you know to understand it but i then i got html and i was like alright html is simpler i can learn that first that happened exactly i mean that book yeah and then html in that order actually really yeah totally that's so funny and barnes and noble like it's like go to maybe we ran into that where was this in california this was in san jose california see right down the street in fremont yeah i mean there was something very special happening right there in the world at that time and i remember um yeah actually the very first job i had in high school there at the library there was like somebody put a piece of paper on the wall saying they wanted like an intern to help develop their website and so it was this guy's garage in san jose kind of a cliche startup thing and that was my first job in high school i was you know making a little bit of money trying to build his website and it was a remarkable moment in time historically um looking back that i we were in that primordial soup and you know i meet people now who they grew up and they had never even seen a computer they saw maybe i saw a photo of one in like a magazine or something and then they they knew they wanted to be in computers and they applied to college and they got in and they started they got a computer science degree having never even seen a computer in real life which was is kind of amazing but i guess yeah i feel very lucky to have had early access to it it's the bicycle for the mind as they say yeah yeah and there was something about it like frankly i was a very shy kind of awkward kid i was not good with people and so i just i liked being on a computer by myself and reading books and it felt kind of exciting to use it and i remember the first time in high school i had a little bit of a glimmer of like i didn't really know what i wanted to do with my life you know i was i was learning all kinds of things i was like taking some music lessons and i was studying doing all the stuff in high school whatever and i remember making this website in high school it was actually a friend of mine he and i were trying to like resell computer hardware or something we had like a paypal account and we made a simple website and i remember i went to sleep one night i woke up in the morning and like the little hit counter was like 500 people had visited the website while we were sleeping and i was like that's the coolest thing ever because it was almost like a superpower like i was asleep but something i created was helping serve the world in 500 people even which is which i could never do one-on-one and so that gave me this such a kind of like a rush and i remember going into college and thinking i think i kind of want to do something in like business and computers or something i mean the crazy thing now is well you know even thinking about this video is going to be interesting because there might be hundreds of thousands of people who watch it and then can you like visualize right now being in a stadium with like 200 000 people or something like that it's yeah you know it's kind of insane it's like the printing press of our day to give to give distribution you know the internet changed all of our lives in terms of that just connecting people and having such an impact on anything you do and create and then now i mean it's actually the internet is eating money and you have created one of the like you know one of the keystones of that and so i don't know where do we go from there how crazy is that that we live we get to live in this time when money went from this you know row locked thing in a database someplace to something that is actually distributed and yeah you know sort of everywhere and not owned by a single entity yeah i mean i think people under appreciate that just how powerful that could be to kind of take what the internet did for information sort of democratizing it anybody could publish and do that for money because you know before the internet it's like there was all these gatekeepers publishing information was expensive it's like you needed to convince some studio executive to be on your your tv show or get a gig at a radio station that broadcast to a thousand miles or a newspaper was you know these incredibly powerful institutions and so suddenly anybody could do that and so people think money pretty much works today in some ways it does i can swipe my credit card or whatever and buy a coffee but in other ways it's we're stuck in the area era of radio television and newspaper and if we just make it so seamless where anybody around the world can participate in this global economy and payments are instant and they're global and they're cheap and they're fast like i think just so much is going to be unlocked from that and you can see little glimmers of it like in china for instance they have wechat right and wechat payments are really seamless you can do micropayments they're instant they're pretty much free and we see all these little business models just flourishing on wechat and that's just one country it's a large country but it's one country so what would happen if we can connect everybody in the globe onto a payment system like that i mean you're talking about like orders of magnitude i think of potential kind of unlocked i mean it feels like we are in they're like sort of in my mind three different revolutions happening if we time travel back to 2012 when we first worked together and sat and you told me like hey bitcoin is going to be worth you know 50 60 000 i mean who knows where it is when people are actually watching this you know it might be millions by then who knows right i guess i just wouldn't believe you yeah but that seems like the first revolution and then the second one is you know you could argue defy so and then the third i mean you've talked about this it's probably just decentralized all organizations social media and maybe government and yeah there's sort of all three of these things all happening simultaneously yeah i think people still haven't fully appreciated yeah the different phases of crypto they're still thinking about it most people if they've heard of crypto are still thinking about bitcoin as kind of like gold digital gold okay so it's some kind of like an investment you can make and some scarce thing and um that's really like phase one was like crypto as this new investment category and then now we're seeing with defy like the second phase crypto as a new financial system and all these pieces getting reinvented there with like lending and insurance and stuff like that exchanges all being recreated in a decentralized way and then the third phase is probably crypto as this new internet application platform um which could be creating new identity systems new like social media could get reinvented there like you were saying governance whether that's startups being recreated with like their cap tables or even governments in some voting like in all kinds of ways could be reinvented so i mean research like with research hub yeah i mean that's a good example where it's a startup that is creating a token to try to bring together a community and it's like what if you know the early people listing their homes on airbnb could have gotten a percentage of ownership in the company or the early drivers on uber right um i think there's a lot of companies today like the standard model most silicon valley companies do is like they issue an option pool like 10 or something and like they give those to the employees so and then they reissue the option pool as more employees come in there's probably going to be i think companies in the future where they issue an option pool for employees and then an option pool for the customer base because both are helping build this new thing and you'll both basically like you know the board will re-up both of them whenever they run out but you'll end up with these new companies that are both owned by the customers and the employees and the investors and so it'll be kind of enabling new things like that yeah i mean research hub for instance is fascinating i mean i i think you wrote the one of the blog posts that posited what what research hub could be yeah i was just i've been helping that project get off the ground kind of my free time which is fun it's helping me understand better like what is a crypto startup of the future really going to be like i think about that and think about um what research organizations do and you know and these are some of the biggest most important most prestigious institutions out there and then here's basically a decentralized autonomous organization that is a website that also has a coin but then what's more important than just the coin is how people interact you know how things get funded and what gets funded and how does that actually push forward human knowledge kind of like financial services we talked about was kind of mired in this bureaucracy and like legacy systems and i think scientific research is kind of very similar in that regard and it's very archaic the way that you know a paper paper gets submitted to a journal and like a journal takes a year to review it and you have some random three people you don't even know who peer review it and maybe get accepted to this journal and by the way you have to pay the journal to submit your paper and they charge the people reading it and it's basically just a pdf and you know why isn't you know scientific research happening more like open source software at that speed we saw a glimpse of that happening during covid where people just started because of the urgency they started putting out their research on social media and you'd get peer reviews the next day on twitter or medium or whatever so i think that's the future this whole this whole idea of like getting a current the currency of academia is kind of citations and i think it should actually be um driven by something like research coin that's like if you're creating breakthrough innovation or you're just helping um curate or answer questions or many ways that you can contribute to research you should be accumulating a piece of ownership in um something for that like the people who are making these breakthrough innovations like crispr or whatever it's like they should be billionaires in the way that startup founders are so there's this big gap between like academic research and then once in a while a breakthrough idea will like leap over into being commercialized and a lot of a lot of wealth generation happens in startups when things are commercialized like frankly coinbase is an example of that i read a research paper written by stosh nakamoto i thought this is a great idea i could probably help commercialize this and a lot of the wells got generated over here but the people writing the research papers aren't generating the wealth and so their fake currency is these citations and there's no reason that needs to be the case like why isn't a lot of research just published with some kind of a license it's like hey if you want to commercialize this give us one percent of the revenue for the first 10 years or you know and it's basically there should be just a button that's like license this yeah you know whereas today you have to go to these tech transfer offices at universities and there's like this total tons of lawyers and bespoke processes and it's like let anybody just start doing the research and let anybody license it who wants to go commercialize it like there needs to be a well-oiled path between those two worlds i think i i guess i'm just struck by how different decentralized autonomous organization run by software designed by like a deist creator you know like someone who uh thinks about the needs of all the stakeholders and people involved and then like writes code that then can sort of put put like the right situation in place where like magic can happen like in in research hub's case what we hope is that research hub helps create like a whole wave of innovation and like pushes forward human knowledge and i i think it'll do it you know i think that we will have like a generation of einsteins you know maybe in 10 maybe 20 you know so but i do like probably sometime during our lifetimes you know that that can can and will happen maybe less and less in the auspices of a university and maybe more and more in something totally decentralized like this totally yeah i mean i think about youtube right it's like youtube started off and people would put like cat videos or like copyrighted material or whatever it was like kind of not taken seriously but now youtube is so big it's like it's honest it's better to have like you know 100 000 subscribers on youtube than it is to have your own tv show on nbc or something like i don't i don't watch nbc but i watch youtube all the time right so i think similarly when you make these new systems like it could be a dao or research hub or whatever you know a lot of the early participants they're a little quirky they're a little weird they're on the fringes right they're probably not going to be in research hub's case like some tenured professor with like 30 years they might be a grad student who's like kind of new in their career who decides they want to take a bet on it and by the way a lot of the most active users on research hub are kind of like grad students and phds that are earlier in their career so we're getting kind of stuff that's not being talked about sometimes in mainstream academia um i don't know i mean dows are an interesting thing so the governance component makes sense for for a dow and you can kind of have like money go in and proposals go into the dow and people can say all right i vote yes on this one the money should go here and there but i was when i was creating you know helping create research hub i was thinking like what is the like how is the how's the actual product gonna get built right because the dao is a kind of more esoteric concept high level and so we have research hub a corporation which is it's actually called research hub technologies is the corporation and it is a technology vendor to the dow so the dow can have a vote and like decide to allocate money to this vendor which is a c corporation which actually you know builds the website and the app and like data pays the aws bills and stuff but it is a technology vendor to the thing which is the real company so to speak is the dao and so i don't claim to have this all fully figured out but i'm i'm experimenting more in this area because i do think daos are going to be really important in the future and a lot of the just like you know all this case law had to get figured out around like a delaware corp and that jurisdiction the new the new jurisdiction is online right and i think daos are kind of like the delaware c corp of the cloud which is where a lot of like the future is being built so the dao is almost like the real thing in my mind and a delaware c-corp just happens to be like a technology vendor that's providing services to it yeah it reminds me of the time yuri milner came to speak at yc and of course people asked him why did you invest in facebook and he said that all of the world is reforming into a global brain yeah that's kind of what the internet is yeah and then when you when you think about a dao that is actually i mean i guess it's a synapse or ax i mean it's sort of like a protocol for different cells in you know this global brain to work together that's not like centralized command and control yeah i mean people talk about like you know in science fiction there's like these hive minds and stuff like that and i mean i think the internet is kind of turning human human race into kind of more of a hive mind because just think i like look at like the number of whatsapp or signal groups that i'm in and like the number of links that get sent every day and compared to three years but three years ago or even a year ago and it's like it's kind of increasing increasing so the information sharing amongst all these people in little groups or in large groups is it's just going up and up and so it is almost like we're creating a hybrid brain of some kind reading like some biologists and stuff they talk about how human beings are like 90 you know chimpanzee and 10 percent ant or honeybee type colony mind interesting we do have kind of a hive mind aspect to us like if you ever see like a bunch of people at a party dancing like all in unison or we people do like yoga where they're all moving in in unison and even it's very natural like in our bodies we can right you know viscerally feel that experience right it's like we even in companies they do rituals like that sometimes where everybody will do like a stand-up meeting and we're like a little bit like an ant colony or honey honeybee nest or whatever but um we're all so different i mean what do you think about this when i think about decentralization uh you know it does stand sort of against tyranny in a lot of ways you know when you think about tyranny you think about command and control and then they're just you know the the worst things in perhaps human history come from like hubris or like to you know too much control and then you know one of the salient artifacts of a decentralized autonomous org is that you can fork it yeah and like if if like the creator of the dao no longer serves the the wishes of the stakeholders it's actually a lot easier like there are way fewer modes and then that might actually be really good for humanity yeah totally i mean biology from boston has this great talk on this like um i think it's called silicon valley's greatest exit but it's about the concept of voice versus exit but yeah if you can fork code or you can fork a dao um that's very powerful and you know i think about this for coinbase too because in some ways we're building this very centralized command and control top-down thing in a decentralized world and so you know i think there's some checks and balances against that which is good for instance you know we're using the open crypto protocols so if people decide they're unhappy with coinbase someday they can take all their crypto off coinbase and put it somewhere else there is a kind of um freedom for people to leave which creates a great sense of accountability we're also kind of we're making it easy for people to store their own crypto i actually think self-custody of crypto is going to be a big deal in the future like we got it is already today but it's going to be even bigger in the future and we we got started with people custody and crypto on coinbase there's still majority of people who come to us and institutional customers they don't want to store their own crypto it's too scary but with things like coinbase wallet we're making it easier and easier there's like over a million people using it now that are like storing their own crypto and that's even more decentralized which i really like so we're going to keep investing in that and you know i'm thinking about that too it's like how do you create a company that stands the test of time and i'm not planning to go anywhere but someday if i pass away or whatever it's like how do you make sure that company has good values and makes good decisions and so these are all really hard problems which i don't feel like i have all the answers to but yeah i think you have a new initiative is it called a coinbase 10 10 yeah yeah so coinbase 10 which is taking 10 of your time and resources yeah yeah and then resources and actually working on totally new things perhaps like self-custody that at the moment seem maybe far off but now is really pretty core to what the product will be and is yeah that's great i'm glad you brought that up so yeah actually coinbase wallet our self-custody wallet and um chromebase commerce and other things we've created have come out of that 10 bucket and when we were smaller as a company a lot of those were really just coming from me it's like i got excited about something and i was like let's make a team to go do it but what i realized is that as we got bigger um it can actually be dangerous if i'm like the gatekeeper or the bottleneck to um creating these new kinds of applications and so there's actually even been instances where people inside coinbase like entrepreneurial people have a lot of entrepreneurial employees they've come and pitched me and been like hey i think we should build this or i think we should build that and i've either said i don't think it's a good idea or we don't have time right now whatever they've left and those have become huge companies right totally and so i think it's we're at a size now it's at we actually modeled it a little bit like after y combinator and um things like that where you know i don't want to have like a committee where you have to have 10 people say yes like that's basically the opposite of innovation there's a lot of a lot of innovative stuff is kind of contrarian so you need 10 believers there should be 10 people who just go in and like this is going to be it yeah yeah so anyway that's what we're doing with the 10 things like we're hosting our own little internal thing where if you're like one two or three employees or whatever and you you think this is a cool thing you want to spend your time on you can pitch it to us um you know if we there's a couple options right we're open to any option like if if you want to stay at coinbase have your coinbase salary in equity then you can keep that and we'll but we'll own it it's a coin based product if you want to leave and work on it um you know coinbase ventures will invest other investors initialized can invest any money i'd love to um yeah and there's even maybe hybrid versions of that too like who knows i'm open to various ideas so i'm trying to make sure we're a company that has innovation happening all the time now and it's not stifled by us being too big or too bureaucratic or like me having to think something is a good idea because at this point i'm pretty sure i'll miss out on like the next big thing there's so many cool things happening in crypto i mean that's awesome you know i think that a lot of people who would be in your shoes and are in your shoes are like i've made it and then instead what i'm hearing is like this is actually a place to create the next thing what goes through my head is like you know i think that there's a strong chance that the things that a billion people use in the future they'll all be you know crypto native they might be daos and then the coinbase to me sounds like one of the best like if you don't have an idea already and are a great you know builder coinbase is actually the place to go because that's going to point you in the people networks the capital networks and then give you the like culture and know-how to actually build the future that both of us want yeah i mean i hope that's the case i i wanted to be an entrepreneur and i i had a tutoring company had started it didn't really work and so i shut it down basically and sold it um well i sold it i didn't shut it down um but then i joined airbnb and so airbnb was like on a it was doing well it was growing and i i learned a lot and i met interesting people and that really helped me when i did have the right next idea i went did coinbase and that really helped me and so i've tried to create coinbase in a similar way which is that i think anybody who they want to create a company at some point or they just want to be a part of building something great inside coinbase like we want to welcome all those people and i would you know check out coinbase.com careers it's a great place to build not only like a career in crypto but to learn the entrepreneurial skill set and you could either get it funded internally or leave and do it and like we're totally happy either way there's this video that i'll probably overlay on here that i'm like very obsessed with that like is my my visual for sort of what you just said so it starts with uh someone opening a bell pepper and taking one seed and putting it in the ground and then you see like this time lapse of like a new plant sort of just grow out of the ground and like you know blossom and then it bears more bell peppers yeah and then and then the cycle repeats yeah and i'm like this is sort of the thing that you know you've done and like can sort of keep doing actually totally i mean yeah when i when i look back on like what was the thing i'm most grateful for in my life it's probably a couple people you know like you being one of them who kind of when i was kind of didn't have anything any credit to my name or whatever but i just had this goal or dream and it was like somebody took a bet on me and that actually enabled me to do what i wanted they saw the potential before i maybe even saw it myself so i think that's what we wanted to kind of try to recreate is like how can we do that for a whole bunch more people and especially once you know a lot like a lot of employees at coinbase have recently gotten some liquidity and um you know how do you put capital to good use it's like my my belief about the world is that um prosperity comes from innovation and like innovation basically comes from uh there being more freedom in the world uh to go try new things with science and technology and so if we have had some success here like how do we pay that forward how do we show people like this is something anybody can do right if they're determined enough or they want to go you know do some variation of it it doesn't have to be nothing's exactly how i did it everyone's going to have their own path but like go try it probably the first one won't work i mean i tried creating probably 10 different startups in my life um coinbase was by far the one that worked the best but like eight of the nine other ones failed and one of them was like uh rounded to like basically zero but it didn't completely fail so it's like try something try anything it almost certainly won't work but you'll learn something try something else it almost certainly won't work try it again like um and you know go go get a job somewhere and learn for a while and do it on nights and weekends or like whatever you need to do and if people keep doing that and actually believe it's possible and have like some role models then i think a lot of more startups will get created the crazy thing when i sit down and think about it is like when i first wrote you know one of the first checks for your seed round i i didn't really know that was probably one of the first maybe five or six seed checks that i'd ever written that's awesome i actually didn't know that i thought you were like some like super experienced angel no no definitely not i mean i had paid my credit card off uh maybe like the year before yeah i had to sell some secondary to ashton kutcher's just so that i had money to like pay for my wedding yeah and then i got hired at y combinator and um literally i had never done it before and then obviously nine years later um i am only super emboldened by this experience because not only can like you know any great builder build something that touches a billion people but i mean you can just keep doing it actually like we can actually keep making more and more of it happen and it's the most growth mindset thing that exists on the planet actually totally i mean that's that's like the really crazy thing is in some ways okay we've just had this really great outcome with the direct listing and everything but it's not the end it's actually like we're like one percent of the way into this thing because now that i you know i think a lot of people misinterpret this actually there's like there's a lot of negativity out there sometimes about like oh billionaires and like it's greedy and what it well there's once you like have a place to live in food and stuff like there's not that many things you can spend money on and so how are you gonna allocate that capital well hopefully you're going to allocate it towards helping build more things which will create more jobs and more economic growth and like most of the people that i know that have gotten some amount of liquidity whether from coinbase or other things in life they're actually like they're not buying lamborghinis or anything like that they're actually like trying to think about how they can pay it forward whether that's philanthropy or starting new businesses like both are really good ways to help the world man i don't know where else we can and i mean this is like yeah i hope this is the first of many times honestly i mean every time we get to hang i learned so much and then honestly just seeing how you're just continuing to grow you know coinbase is like one percent it's like the progress bar and this is one percent if this is one percent like good god what you know what will happen in the next 10 years i mean yeah fantastic well hopefully it's it's all like fun it's just fun to build stuff and so um i'm sure not everything that i try will go well and like i hope if i have some certain amount of money put away that i just don't need to worry about like you know my kids going to college or whatever then i can take big risks with the rest of it and we'll see what happens i think it's just it's fun we'll try a lot of stuff and hopefully we can all with be on team hume and help things get better yeah i like that brian thanks man thanks for hanging out thanks gary [Music] wow

Channel: Garry Tan

Views: 149,912

Rating: 4.9615965 out of 5

Keywords: Garry Tan, Garry Tan vc, initialized capital, Garry Tan initialized, Garry Tan initialized capital, Silicon Valley vc, sf vc, a16z, Andreessen horowitz, best Silicon Valley vcs, Brian Armstrong, coinbase IPO, Coinbase ceo, coinbase ceo interview, Brian Armstrong interview, billionaire interview, startup ceos, fireside chat, coinbase crypto, bitcoin interviews, bitcoin billionaires, startup ipo, how to use coinbase, how coinbase started, fred ehrsam, fred coinbase

Id: UpbGbKQsTjc

Length: 44min 16sec (2656 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ecomihomie]

yes disclaimer no mention of ecomi tho lol