How Brian Armstrong Built Coinbase

21:52We're not going to give you the license. And we said, well, what if we were storing dollars? We're doing that too. Can we get the license for that? So it was such an interesting meeting of 50 different states with their own culture and everything and trying to understand, get them to understand what we were doing. That was just one random example. A lot of it was the people stuff. It's like, okay, these two teams aren't getting along. So do we fire this one or this one or both? Because they're just refusing to work with each other. Or I'd say the personnel decisions were some of the harder ones.

22:23How did you sort that in your mind and get better at making those personnel decisions over time? I think the first thing was we had a real scarcity mentality for a while about people. And I think to a large degree, that's healthy. If you find great people, you have to really work to retain them. but we were such a scarcity mindset because we started, it was hard to get anybody to join. And we were in the midst of this kind of like zero interest rate phenomenon in Silicon Valley where every engineer was getting like five offers from like Google and Meta. And like, you know, we were this little startup.

22:52And so, you know, we were kind of walking on eggshells in some ways. And this actually created, I think, a bit of a negative cultural environment in Silicon Valley for a while, led to some of that employee activism and stuff. But, you know, we were so afraid of losing anyone that I think once we shifted a little bit, like the zero interest rate phenomenon went away. We became a remote-first company, so we have access to pools of talent in much larger segments of the world. And it allowed us to really have a healthier relationship, I think, where we said, we want the right person and the right job.

23:21And if someone's not living the values or they're not collaborating well with their colleagues, we just had less tolerance for that and we were able to make quicker decisions. I find it interesting that you worked at Airbnb directly before Coinbase. and the way that they initially figured out monetization was Brian at like South by Southwest stays with a host and forgets to pay over the course of like three separate nights. He committed that he was going to bring the money the next day, forgets to pay, bringing the next money the next day, forgets to pay. And at the end, the host thinks that basically the founder of this platform is freeloading off of it.

23:58And I find it funny because the way that Coinbase initially figured out monetization was also this obvious thing that was basically, what if you could just buy Bitcoin? And that wasn't the first version of the product that you released. Do you see any similarities in the story of Coinbase and Airbnb in that way? Well, I mean, working at Airbnb, I definitely internalized a lot of lessons. That story I actually had not heard about Airbnb. But I think there is something common amongst those two things, which is you have to just get started with anything and it's almost certainly the wrong thing, but that's okay because this action produces information idea, right?

24:36Like if just launch the first thing you can think of and then in the act of doing that, you will see what you should have done. And if you don't, most people fail is they actually never take the first step. They actually just, they're stuck in analysis paralysis or they're too risk averse and they never do anything. So you have to be willing to take these steps into the unknown and just try the first thing that comes to mind and then iterate Do you have any other really good examples of times where you took action when you think other people might not have? Actually, internally at Coinbase, for a long time we had just a retail product, and most people know us for that.

25:10But today we actually have a very large institutional product for crypto as well that does trading and custody and financing and all kinds of things. It's the leading product in the institutional space. So there was a moment there where we were thinking, all right, institutions are going to come into crypto. So maybe we should try to launch something here for custody and trading. And we went and talked to a couple startups out there that were working on this. And we got really close to actually buying one of these companies as a way to kind of start the team. And for whatever reason, it didn't quite work out with that company.

25:42And I remember thinking, we just need a bias for action. And I kind of set this crazy, it was like a Friday or Thursday night or something like that, when this team kind of told us, nah, we don't want to take your offer to be acquired. And I was like, Monday, we're launching our institutional product. And people were like, what are you talking about? Like, this is going to take like six to 12 months to build it, the version one. And I was like, no, we're launching a V1 on Monday, like, because this company turned us down, you know? And I was kind of like, fuck them. Yeah, I was a little pissed about that.

26:13And so we basically threw together a landing page, like a marketing page. We started to sketch out what some of the backend might, Because we had built a lot of stuff that could be repurposed. And Monday morning, like we announced it and it had like a page where you can, all you could do was come and sign up and be, you know, express interest. And then we went and hired like the right person to go kick it off and run it. We had more like in our New York office, we had more people with institutional connections. We tried a bunch of things, which totally flopped. Like we initially went after the biggest institutions in the world, the biggest, you know, like Goldman Sachs and like BlackRock or whatever.

26:48Yeah. And we were so unprepared for it. Like we basically failed by going after the big ones. So then we totally changed our strategy. We went after the smallest institutions, like two person hedge fund, or like a couple of crypto traders or whatever, and family offices. And so we started to land some minnows. And then we got our like, our cybersecurity systems got way better, and our audits got way better. And like we learned how to do a sales process with institutions that were like multi-year long. And then we ate like a bigger fish and a bigger fish. And eventually we landed BlackRock and, you know, like the biggest financial institutions in the world.

27:23So that was just an example of me. It's like action, just like, let's just move and launch and then iterate from there. And if you're not embarrassed by the first thing you launch, you know, it's you waited too long. Recently, we got back from New Zealand. We're recording with Peter Beck at Rocket Lab. And as soon we have a little bit of a fun experience there where as soon as we arrived, we realized that we didn't have some very critical document that we apparently we were supposed to have because ChatGPT didn't tell us that we needed it. And so they immediately confiscated our gear at Customs.

27:53And basically no one was helpful. No one knew the process for getting our stuff back. We were told that it was going to be at least five days, maybe up to three weeks. Our shoot was in 36 hours. And over the course of the next like 24 hours, we just pulled all these different strings, you know, had like a backup of maybe we can rent gear, all this stuff. But eventually we figured out that if we just quote unquote semi-bribed the right government person, and things could just unlock and get our gear back immediately. And we did that, and we got our gear back and did the shoot. Has there been any examples in the history of Coinbase where there was a completely unknown map, and you just made up the rules?

28:28Yeah. Well, I want to state for the record that we have never engaged in any bribery, just to put that out there. But there are a lot of cases where the rules are undefined. That is definitely true. There's actually a lot of areas of the law that are unclear. Like, if you go get legal advice, and they'll say, it depends. Like that's actually a very common answer from lawyers. So it's always a danger. Like if you wait for perfect clarity, you know, you're just never going to get anything done. Because sometimes that comes only after the fact, like five or 10 years later, you'll get, you'll see legislation get passed.

28:58Like we're finally seeing it passed now in the crypto space. But if you also go off and do something that is like unethical, whether it's legal or not, that is going to come back to bite you. So there are a lot of times where you have to make risk judgment calls, right? And, you know, you often, the first test I always ask myself is, do I feel good about it? Like, would I feel good? Let's say this whole thing got leaked or whatever. And, you know, do I feel good about it? Would I stand, like, this was the right thing to do for customers or for the country or whatever it is. And so first is like that kind of look yourself in the mirror test, which I think is important.

29:35And then you have to say, okay, well, there's gray area in the law. It's unclear. What are the actual penalties if someone in this case gets litigated and it goes against us? What's the upside? Is there this? If it's like 100 million revenue potential and there's a 20 % chance we get fined$20 million. I'm like, that's a good trade, right? Now, if there's a 20 % chance that you're going to get fined$10 billion and that could be existential to the company, then you probably shouldn't do it, right? So these are the kinds that you always have to look at the upside and the downside. I mean, it sounds simple, but a lot of people don't do this.

30:10You go into a meeting, this often happens, you go into a meeting and someone's just like, I don't know, this is really risky because like X and Y and Z. I'm like, okay, those are risks. There's also a risk that we just don't do this and we completely miss the market. And, you know, it impacts our market cap by$10 billion. So like, I actually think you're creating that risk. And like, so you have to reframe it in their mind of like, you're not just mitigating these risks, you're actually creating risks. Like there is a risk that this company becomes irrelevant and dies, you know, because we're being too conservative, right?

30:42So you have to balance all the risks, not just look at myopically at one set of risks. And this is actually a rare thing. A lot of lawyers aren't good at this. The best ones are, you know, a lot of lawyers, they actually only think their job is to protect the company from some kind of case coming against them. Like, believe me, there's worse things in the world than having like some litigation happen, like which is the whole company dying or becoming irrelevant or just never mattering. Like that's, that is worse than getting a lot, you know. So, you know, litigation is just like a part of business.

31:13Like you have to sometimes go to the courts to figure out what the rule is because the law is not clear and that you create, you need to create legal precedent through litigation. Like that is actually an important part of how our system works. So I think some people don't quite get that sometimes and they think their job is to mitigate litigation. And I actually think it's to take intelligent risks that create the outcomes you want and look at the ROI. It's almost like being a forcing function for clarity. Yeah. And there's times where if we're not getting clarity from the law or Congress, it's important to go to the courts.

31:44Like that is a, you know, checks and balances. This almost kind of reminds me of the Uber Lyft scenario where like initially Uber was just doing like limos and black car service, all this, and then Lyft comes along and just opens it up to basically everyone. And then Uber for a while doesn't copy. And just because of that, they could get litigated, all that. They don't copy and they just lose market share and lose market share. And eventually they just say, fuck it, we have to do this or else we're going to lose. And then only then the courts start working through. What was it like seeing that play out since it feels similar to the situation that you've experienced?

32:20A lot of the crypto companies got traction being outside the US. And in some ways that was a huge advantage for them, right? Because they did feel like they could take more liberties, not follow US law, even though sometimes, oftentimes US customers were actually using them through VPNs or otherwise. And so that was a pretty valid strategy, I would say, to get big fast. And then now the question is, can they try to clean it up later? Just because we were based in the US and I didn't want to live outside the US or go to jail, I was like let's do it the legitimate way that was also a valid approach and it allowed us to land many of the largest institutions and be the trusted provider so we consistently see our brand as the most trusted in crypto that allows people to store more crypto with us and we plug more products into that it's a nice flywheel that's very defensible i think the trend that we're seeing now is toward regulatory clarity in the us in europe in asia everywhere really and so in that environment i think coinbase wins right like in a regulatory clarity environment we are the trusted option.

33:21It doesn't mean we don't have competition. Others that did more of a get rich or die trying approach are now going to try to clean it up. And so we are, just like any industry, we're in competition with them. And competition makes us better, actually. And as regulatory clarity has emerged, we're seeing lots of other fintechs and traditional financial service companies that are not in crypto now enter into crypto and start to use crypto rails. So that's definitely increased the amount of competition, but the TAM is also just getting much, much bigger. So our goal is stay the most trusted crypto brand, store more crypto than any other company in the world, which we currently do today, plug more products into those deposits, which makes it sticky, and use the proceeds of that to reinvest in trust and growing.

34:01And if we see, as I believe is going to happen, like the financial system continues this transformation to running more and more on crypto rails because they're faster and cheaper, more global. I don't see a reason why we shouldn't be the leading company in the world doing that, But it's going to be thousands of companies coming in and doing that, which is why we provide kind of products and services for them as well, like through Coinbase developer platform and et cetera, et cetera. How do you think about like building a very trusted brand over time while maybe short term taking a bunch of decisions that could potentially like increase growth?

34:35But because you don't take that action, you will be trusted over, you know, in the long run. So trust can come from a lot of different things, right? It can come from having great design. It can have customer support. it can come from being based in the US and being a public company. It can, with public company standards, it can come from people knowing who the CEO is or feeling like they know who it is by listening to podcasts or whatever, like where people are relatively open and transparent like this, as opposed to hiding behind like corporate speak or traditional comms. So there's like a personality marketing aspect of companies now where people want to know who the CEO is.

35:09What do they stand for? What are they like? What do they do in their free time? So trust can come from all of those things. Now, there are times where, you know, we're very tempted to, like, our competitors are listing something that's like illegal or highly risky. And it's a revenue opportunity. Like you said, like, it's like, okay, we're watching these things grow. And our regulators are saying, you can't do it. Or maybe we do like a cybersecurity audit. And we're like, this thing could blow up at any moment. Do we really want to expose our customers to it? And there's a lot of hard calls like that, that we've had made.

35:39And meanwhile, our customers are often kind of yelling at us saying like, oh, you guys are so slow. Like, how could you be the last one, you know, to list this? And so sometimes I think we get it wrong and sometimes we get it right. You know, is it like a damned if you do damned if you don't situation? Sure. I mean, yeah, if you if you lean in too early and the thing blows up and customers lose money, like 100 percent, they're going to be suing us, not that other thing that just blew up because, you know, we have deeper pockets and maybe that thing's bankrupt. Right. So that you have to always look at that from a litigation point of view.

36:10But they're also going to say, if we wait too long and it didn't blow up, like, okay, and it got more legitimized over time, why were you so late? And so that's fine. I'm not complaining. I mean, that's what it means to be in the arena, like leading companies. You got to take preponderance of input from all parties, make the tough calls and live with it. You've got this line that I heard in the David interview, you where you said if something is like critical to furthering the mission of the company, you can get excited about almost anything, whatever that thing is. What have been the things that most people would never get excited by, but that you have and gotten really good at to further the mission of Coinbase?

36:49Yeah, well, a lot of things. You know, part of my job is like quite fun. And other parts of it is just it's like, that's a that's a grind, man, like that. That's going to be brutal, right? But yeah, you can define, you can derive some sort of satisfaction or fulfillment from it by, it's for a greater, a greater purpose, right? I think an example would be in the first five years of Coinbase, I probably interviewed 5 ,000 people, all right? Like maybe three or four interviews a day for whatever, most of the days of the year, and then five years of that. So I was so burned out on interviewing people at a certain point, like I was, you know, that was rough.

37:28You know, another thing would be, like, I initially was really reluctant to kind of go engage on policy work and meeting like members of the government and various state or like federal level. And my view was like, I just want to build great products and like, follow the law. And then like people, I don't have to engage with the government. Like that was sort of my, in hindsight, kind of naive view. But it turns out anything that gets big enough is going to intersect with the government and you have to go work with them and help them understand it and like really treat it seriously. And there's a lot of like really interesting people in government.

38:01Some of them are really smart. Some of them are kind of crazy. Some of them are big personality. It's just like in business or anything. And so I actually over time managed to derive like some level of enjoyment like from that, I have to say, I mean, in a way, because like you said, it's helping advance the mission and it's helping get things done. Now, I don't want to be like so focused on policy and get like all these policy wins that we have to actually make sure our products are great too. So I'm always trying to find the right balance. But that would be another, like flying to DC all the time is like not something I initially thought I would kind of enjoy.

38:29And like part of me actually kind of enjoys it now. I think I've built some great relationships there. If you've had to think about like the full picture of Coinbase and what it takes for the company to win over time, what have been areas like going into politics and basically building those relationships that you didn't even realize were part of the game going in and you had to learn that? Some of the ones that I've thought about, like there's a fundraising skill set. there's a storytelling skill set, which we started talking about at the beginning. There's a recruiting or sales skill set. And part of it is really just about good judgment about what people want in products.

39:07And we try lots of ideas, not all of them work, but we try to get more right than wrong. And you have to take inventory of what are your skill sets and passions? What is the company uniquely able to do? What are things it's not good at? And then you're kind of like a surfer out there on the water and you're looking for waves coming in, you know, and like, ooh, that's like a new technology trend is happening or this unlock happened or this thing's got cheaper. This law just got passed. And so you're kind of looking at the waves and you have to kind of spot a wave coming. They're like, oh, that's a good one.

39:39I'm a paddle for it and like then you like really lean in and you know shoot your shot um there's times where i felt like we missed a wave like that and we were chasing to catch up to it and then we missed the full power of that wave you know just to torture the analogy swimming after a tsunami yeah yeah yeah so you know that's every year you're trying to make sure you try to you have a couple bets and you're trying to catch a couple waves and you're not going to get all of them and once in a while you get like a really great set and it's just a good day um other times you get your ass handed to you.

40:10So I was thinking about this last night, couldn't sleep at all before this interview, basically got like two hours of sleep between two and 4am this morning. But at the same time that prediction markets are becoming a thing, we also have this like proliferation of AI generated content. And I was finding it interesting that like this seeker of truth, which is this new thing, or this mechanism is happening at the exact same time that the truth is becoming less and less obvious, and like less and less clear. How do you kind of think about prediction markets and AI-generated content and that sort of thing?

40:40Well, I think there was this initial panic or fear about AI-generated content and like, we wouldn't know anything was real. That argument always seemed like a little funny to me because if you grew up on the internet, you're very used to seeing things that are not true. Yeah. I mean, or just bad takes on Reddit or whatever. And now I think it's kind of been like a total nothing burger like you see you see ai things and like sometimes they're pretty funny and sometimes like you know they're really dumb and sometimes you see something you're like is that real and then there's actually a community note or a bunch of discussion people saying no it's not but this would this is the thing it is real behind it so i actually think it's like not only not only is it totally fine it's actually like great i think the world is more interesting because we are getting like the barrier to do creative content has gone down and so we see more satire, we see more things that are funny, whatever.

41:35So I'm not worried about AI slop. I think that it's fine for our democracy and everything like that. And then it's interesting your tie into prediction markets. I mean, prediction markets are a really good signal of what is true in the world or going to be true. I think it's much higher signal than say like traditional polling, which can be biased or certainly like mainstream media. So I do think prediction markets have a positive externality in the world of just helping people try to get truth about, is the straight of Hermuz or whatever going to be open in a month? That's an important thing for a lot of companies.

42:09So prediction markets create a lot of value for that. I actually think that in a strange way, AI agents might be useful to resolve prediction market contracts, because if you set up a contract today, you have to put the resolution condition as typically like, okay, of these three traditional media companies, if two or three of them or whatever report that this person won the baseball game versus this one, then it resolves. And there's a human being typically behind the scenes, like checking to see if that CNN published this thing. To me, that's less reliable than say, you could say an AI agent, you could say, okay, between Gemini, Grok and OpenAI, I'm gonna ask on this date, at this time, I'm gonna ask all three of these agents who won the baseball game respond with a single answer.

42:51And if at least two of three agree, that is the answer. And so an AI agent can actually have like a preponderance of evidence across the whole internet and resolve that, I think, more truthfully than one media organization, let's just say, in an extreme case. So anyway, I think there is some intersection there, but I'm glad AI agents are, I think overall on net, like AI agents are going to help us establish truth a lot more in the world and so will prediction markets. I think it's just like the next evolution of the internet and the internet was really good at expanding truth. People forget you get like biased or untrue answers from when you ask humans a lot too, right?

43:27I mean, this is that kind of like we were talking earlier about simulating that person's brain in your brain. But when you go ask the person that question, like they're bringing all kinds of biases, misinformation. They're like, oh, I want to seem like I know the answer to this, even if I'm not 100 % sure. So like we all we already live in a world where you have to be a little skeptical. And so I think AI agents so far are like exceeding the average human bar. So I think it's net positive. I think it's really easy to hold other things to a way higher standard than you hold yourself. Yeah. If you had to look at the way that you operate Coinbase today, and then you looked at your actions versus maybe a set of your peers like Sam Altman or Brian Chesky or Joe Gapia, someone else, would run their company, what do you think they'd be surprised by?

44:15Hmm. Well, there is a common set of tactics that I think many of us use, right? It's like, we'll run an exec meeting and we do an offsite every quarter and we try to typically use OKRs. But I think there are some differences. I'm trying to think like at Coinbase, the one that might surprise them the most. I mean, the most surprising thing has been some of these decisions that we made, right? About being apolitical in the workplace, like suing the SEC. I think most of those CEOs you mentioned probably wouldn't have done that unless maybe there's a situation where they would have, but it probably wouldn't have done that.

44:48Under duress. Yeah. You know, and I think those are all great CEOs, by the way. I've learned a lot from all of them. Like Chesky had a great thing with his founder mode, right, that he put out, which I think articulated a lot of his philosophies. One thing we've done as a result of that is we've started hosting twice a year product showcases, like to really package up everything we worked on and tell it to the world. So yeah, I've learned a lot from each of those folks. And most of the things they would be saying are good practice to run the company, I would probably do as well. You mentioned that the thing that you probably fear the most or think about the most is trying to design Coinbase so that it's an environment where employees have the latitude to go pursue almost like many businesses inside of the main business instead of just going off on on their own, and you try to structure everything so that that can work.

45:36How'd you kind of come to that philosophy? And then how do you actually implement it? Yeah, so for folks who don't know, we have something internally called Next Bets. And twice a year, we have a panel where anybody in the company can come in and pitch and say, I think we should be building this. And I have one or two people that want to work on it. And you don't have to get a yes from everyone on the panel. That would be a committee where one no means nobody does it. You don't have to go to your boss, your boss's boss, your boss's boss, all the way to the CEO. That's also a committee in another forum where one person's no kills it.

46:06And my fear was from reading things about like, you know, Wozniak, Steve Wozniak at HP, like he went famously and went to HP and said, I think we should build a personal computer. They said, no, he left to found Apple. And so your best people, even junior people on the team can really be on the frontier, like coming with great ideas. Not all of them are going to be great, but some of them are really great things. And so what we've done is we've created this next bets program twice a year, they can come in and pitch, but they only need to get one yes. So of the panel, there's different product group leaders who each have their own budget.

46:37They can decide to fund it out of their own budget. There's folks like myself, some young engineers, like, you know, our president, CFO, et cetera. And so if you get any one of them to decide they want to fund it, you're green lit. And it's kind of like coming in and pitching an internal set of venture capitalists. So that's what we modeled it after is if you go pitch 10 venture VCs and you get one term sheet, you can go move forward. So it lowers the bar for these ideas to be tried. Now, we also want to make sure we don't lose focus at Coinbase. We can't just like fund everything willy nilly, right?

47:09We use what's called like 70-20-10 resource allocation. So 70 % of the resources are on like our core business, which has a certain definition of a scale and profitability. Make sure you keep the main thing, the main thing, you know, 20 % are on these adjacent or strategic that have reached a certain scale, but they're not profitable yet. And 10 % are on these venture bets, the next bets, which are typically very small teams, like two or three people, small amounts, but they're really kind of crazy high potential ideas where it's okay if they don't work, but if the ones that do work could be really massive.

47:44And that's just been fun. I mean, it's just fun, like both because I get to go work with a lot of these next bet teams and they're like just these really brilliant, high potential young people. and I get to work directly with the CEO and other people in the company. And then we get to try a lot of really innovative ideas. And yeah, USDC came out of that. The base blockchain came out of that. There's a really cool one we'll probably announce in a couple of weeks. So yeah. One of the founders that I interviewed recently, he basically is a pro drone racer. So he used to be like the world champion drone racer.

48:14He said, when I first started the company, it was because I love making drones and now I don't make any drones. I created this thing and now I've live with it. Was there any moment where you were building the company and realized, oh my God, I haven't been doing the thing that I actually love for a while and like reevaluated your entire life and how you're operating to make sure that you're having fun? I really loved programming, right? And coding. And in the early days of the company, I kind of built the first version of the product and was coding a lot of it. So there were parts where I felt a little regret about like not getting enough time to do that.

48:46But I also felt like really the thing that motivated me about it was building things was that you could have an impact in the world. You could to start to build cool stuff. And actually, I didn't have to be coding to do that. Organizing a team of people and coordinating fundraising and all these things are another form of building. Now, recently, I have started to get a little bit back into coding just because of the AI tools getting so great, which is really fun. But yeah, I mean, there were certain points along the way where I would say I got burned out, right? For sure. I mean, starting company is a grind, right?

49:17And there's a lot of people I know who they do it at an unsustainable pace or something about it, like really stresses them out. And they just it's just unsustainable. Like they they gain a bunch of weight. They lose a bunch of weight. They can't sleep at night. Like and it's fine. There's going to be periods of stress, but you also need periods of renewal. Like how do you get it to be like a marathon pace, not a sprint? So I'd say every couple of years, I've been building Coinbase about 13 years now. every couple of years, I'd say I hit a patch of burnout or I was just like, oh man, this sucks.

49:48And I'm exhausted or like whatever, something wasn't working. And usually, you know, what you have to do is change something about it, right? It's like delegate part of it, stop doing something, hire someone to do that who actually is better than you at it, you know, be okay with your ego saying, only I should be the one doing that, but oftentimes it's your ego talking, right? And it's like, maybe you don't have to do that. Like, like put someone, have someone do it who's better than you at it and let go of that. Right. Or there's different variations of it. But I also, you know, you don't want it also.

50:23It's not supposed to be like building a company is not supposed to be fun all the time. Like it's kind of like if you're playing a video game. Right. And it's just like every level was easy. You're just like clicking buttons like it doesn't it has to be like hard and difficult enough to be fulfilling. Right. So I think sometimes people start to be like, well, man, I made I have a little bit. of success and I started to make some money and man, why am I dealing with all these problems, right? But it can also just be very unfulfilling to like sit on the beach literally or metaphorically. And so I think it's important to still be in the arena and playing the game and like trying hard stuff.

50:56And some days you're gonna be like, that was exhausting and sucked. And other days you're gonna get some wins on the board and you're gonna look back on it over a period of a decade and you say like, that was fulfilling, hopefully, right? Like I tried to do something big and important in the world. It didn't go exactly how I thought. Some stuff was harder, some, but we actually ended up having a pretty big impact. So that's fun. And I hope I get to, in the broader sense, right? And I hope I get to do that for a long time. Crypto companies have one very unique trait that almost no other company has, which is they're effectively public from day one.

51:27And what I mean by that is as soon as you founded Coinbase, you have this like real time ticker that is Bitcoin, that is kind of saying, here's how hot the industry is at any given point. And because of that, you see these like violent cycles up and down from the beginning. What makes you uniquely suited to absorbing and experiencing pain and just staying at it? Well, you're totally correct. We did have a lot of that volatility before even being a public company. And I mean, there was periods of like three years of crypto winter, where I remember like 30, 25, 30 % of the company quit. And it was just like, they think it's over.

52:01And I'd go do interviews with like journalists and they'd be like, so now that crypto is over, what are you going to do next? So yeah, what is it about my personality? I mean, well first of all I think it's like anything you know if you get more reps on it you start to it doesn't affect you as much right so it's kind of actually kind of funny like the bitcoin price just recently came down from about like 125 to like 60 or something now it started to go back up again and part of me was was like man that was like a pretty mild winter you know like I think everybody everybody kind of lost their mind for a bit and we saw all the same tropes come out.

52:35But part of me was like three months. That was it. Like, you know, I've been through like three year crypto winters. Like, and so anyway, I think that the winters are getting a lot more mild now, which is good. I'm a pretty like emotionally, I'm a pretty steady person. Like, I don't think I feel high highs the way that some people do. But I also don't feel the depths of the lows. It's a more moderated sine wave or something. And, you know, I can kind of like develop a routine where every morning it's like, I just try to get after it, you know? And usually when I wake up in the morning, I was like, I'm kind of tired and like this thing sucks.

53:12And, and, you know, I kind of have to like get my mind right in the beginning of the day. And I have like a routine for that where I'd like do some exercise and like, you know, write down what I want to get done and sort of dust myself off and be like, all right, let's get ready for battle. Actively just say no phone for the first like 30 minutes or like after a workout or something like this? Well, I think it's better to like what I try to do. I'll tell you what I try to do and then what actually happens in practice. What I try to do and happens probably 50 percent of the time is that I'm just listening to, I would call it like positive learning development stuff in the morning.

53:48So it's like podcasts, audio books, which I can usually ingest those like on a, you know, some multiplier. But faster than reading, actually. most people are better reading than listening. I'm better at listening than reading. But I, so I started off the day trying to ingest something inspiring, like educational. And then, yeah, like at a certain point, usually the day gets started and you kind of jump into the flow of things. I also try to start the day really with the things that are the most important for me to get done and then dip into like the flow of whatever it is, like X or Slack or something like that.

54:22That doesn't happen every day. Some days it's like you wake up and there's someone you have the only time you can call them is like in the morning while you're working out and I do like calls in the gym sometimes too so that's interesting I don't know if you used to hike a lot or still hike a lot but what has been the role of hiking and like getting your mind right and thinking longer term and and these sorts of things yeah I actually think just generally like movement of your body is good hiking has the benefit of it being in nature too. So there's good studies on this where it's just like nature and a little exercise is like very positive for all kinds of things like health-wise but even psychologically.

55:01I think there's actually some study I've read where like there was like people recovering in a hospital room and one group of people they like had a window to look at a tree or something and then another group of people they went on walks outside and they even did like a control test where one group of people, they had to go outside in a wheelchair. So they weren't allowed to walk, but they were allowed to be in nature and come back. So they were kind of trying to tease it apart of basically like, is it the movement? Is it the nature? Do you have to and just like see a tree or do you have to be amongst the trees?

55:33They even remember the tree. Yeah. I think even one of them, they like had a paint, like it was just had like a picture on the wall of a tree. It didn't even, it wasn't even a real tree. And like that even had a positive benefit. Like it was something like if you're people recovering in a hospital room and they even had like a picture of a tree, it actually helped. Maybe the reason why people are so happy around Christmas time is because they have a tree in their house. Yeah. I mean, anyway, so anyway, I don't remember the exact study results, but the TLDR, I think was like all of them help. It's like movement helps any kind of nature, even if it's apparently it's like a picture of nature, all these kinds of things help.

56:05So, you know, we're, I think a lot about how we're really just like primitive organisms that are running this software that's like 200 ,000 years old. It has like from an evolutionary point of view, our psychology has not changed that much. Like the same software that was us running around as these little tribes on the savannah is basically the same thing we have today, but we also have a neocortex that can like learn things in the modern world and whatnot. So you kind of have to take care of like the primitive parts of your mind and body at times. And so for me, that's just like, yeah, it's movement, it's exercise.

56:38It's getting in nature. Hiking is just like a very nice way to like knock that out without a bunch of fuss about like, you know, scuba diving. It's like, there's like a lot of gear you have to bring and everything. But if you just need to like consistently knock it out, that helps. There's this idea of wartime CEO and peacetime CEO. And I feel like, especially in crypto, there's this nice oscillation of wartime, peacetime, wartime, peacetime. Yeah. Do you enjoy when everything is going well? Or do you enjoy kind of when there's something that is like this absolute top priority where if you don't get it done like today or this week or this month, everything's fucked.

57:16Like which part of the cycle do you enjoy the most? You know, I used to think that I was better as a peacetime CEO, but I think that's not true. It's actually totally flipped. I think it's wartime all the time. And I actually realized that I like wartime. It took me, that's probably a change that happened over the last 10 years or something, or the last first five years of Coinbase, where initially I think I was a little conflict-averse, and I was just kind of like walking on eggshells and let's just build, and that had a time and place. But there's a real sense of motivation and urgency that comes from more time.

57:51I actually think competition makes us better as a company. Definitely, I find it very energizing and motivating. It can make you really pissed in certain moments too, but it's actually very energizing. And sometimes when... And there isn't any kind of conflict or war going on. I get a little bored and tired. I'm just like, ah, like what's, you know, it seems like nothing's blowing up right now. And I could use a good crisis. Now, somebody might say you're just running on cortisol all the time. And there could be an element of truth to that. But, you know, I try to balance it with the things we talked about of like exercise and like, you know, have a wind down routine in the evening.

58:30So it's not just like burning yourself out, like by literally being fight or flight, like 24 seven. But I like, and I should clarify, I don't want to be like doing conflict for conflict's sake. I think that that's just destructive. But if you see something that. A clear problem that needs to be solved, something to fight after, like fight for. Yeah. Like if you don't speak up and say something about it, like then you're failing as a leader, I think. So yeah, wartime is great. I actually, I love conflict. There's this wonderful line. I was listening to a podcast with Jessica Livingston and Brian Chesky probably a year and a half ago.

59:06And he was talking about how during March, in eight weeks, 80 % of the revenue disappeared. And he said, the worst companies are basically destroyed in a crisis. Decent companies survive the crisis. The best companies are defined by the crisis. I think that's probably the same thing for CEOs as well, those companies. What have been the biggest defining moments of crisis for you? Yeah, well, I talked about some of them with Mission First and SEC and everything, and this market structure legislation has been a nice, good debate where I think we're getting to a good outcome. But I'll tell you maybe an interesting early war story that sticks with me on letting a crisis be a defining moment, right?

59:49So this was relatively early on in Coinbase's history. I think we were maybe three or four years in, and we had built this initial custody system for crypto. And the number of users was growing so rapidly that the amount of money we were storing live on the server was also growing very rapidly. And there was a dangerous moment where I knew that if we got hacked based on this amount that was growing like every week, there was within like 60 days, the amount was growing fast enough where if we got hacked, then we would be insolvent. It'd be like more money than in your bank account. Yeah, yeah. So it'd be game over, right?

1:00:28And you're always just trying to like, how do you not die and make it to the next step of the game? So if you just don't die sometimes in business, like that's enough to succeed because everyone else dies. And so this was a moment where I didn't really know how to build. I mean, I studied computer science. I'd taken a class in computer security, but I was not like an expert in cryptography or anything like that, right? And we didn't have that many people in the company yet. It was either, it was pretty, still relatively small team, relatively junior team. So as I often do when I'm trying to like figure it out, I think like who would I know in the world that could help with this, right?

1:01:02So I called two people and they were both cryptography experts. Actually, one of them was Zuko who later created Zcash. One of them was this guy, Ryan Lackey, who's like a security professional, really interesting dude. And I called both of them and I said, we need to build this next generation cold storage system to store a ton of crypto. Number one, what's the right architecture to build it? And they gave me their opinion on that. And then I said, number two, like, how long do you think it would take to build it? And both of them said something like, this would take a team of 10 people about two years to build it.

1:01:35And I was like, well, we have about 60 days, you know, and by the way, it's like, really just like me and this one other guy, like, we, you know, we don't have like a big team. And, and so they were like, wow, that sounds like really challenging, you know, but like, let me know if I can help. Good luck. And so this was one of those kind of crisis moments where it could have ended the company, but it actually turned into a defining moment because what we did was we sat down and this was like myself and Charlie Lee and Craig and a couple other early employees. And we said, we're not going to be able to do like a perfect system that a giant company would be able to do, but we can do a pretty good system.

1:02:08And a lot of engineering is trade-offs, right? It's like, okay, what would get us 80 % of the solution for 20 % of the work here. The remaining 20 % that's not there, can we live with that? Can we mitigate that risk? How might we mitigate it? And so we actually sat down within like three or four or five days, we had designed like what we thought was their next architecture. We started to go and code it up. We then had the challenge of trying to transfer all of the old system into the new system. And I remember as we were racing the clock towards this 60-day mark, we were all like pretty sleep deprived.

1:02:40And if you study how accidents happen in history, Like the Exxon Valdez spill and even the Challenger explosion. And like a lot of these things can be traced back to sleep deprivation as one of the contributing factors. I mean, Brian Johnson literally has this graph where it's like decision-making quality over the course of a day. And it's just. Yeah. Yeah. So I remember, you know, we were sitting there and we were about to like, okay, we need to do the initial transfer into this new system. And let's do a small amount. Like let's transfer like$1 or something. And I remember I was like, we need to pair, we're gonna sit side by side and pair program every single keystroke because we're both sleep deprived and we need to check each other's work.

1:03:21It's kind of like co-pilots in the airplane, you know, you like double check the work. And so we transferred like a dollar and we waited to confirm that. Okay, nothing exploded. Let's do a hundred dollars. Let's do a thousand dollars. Let's do a million dollars, you know? And I remember we started this migration. We're like, okay, let's go home and like sleep for a little bit and make sure and come back. And we started transferring like really big numbers. And every one of those was scary because like if one of them had gone wrong and there were a bunch of hackers trying to break into our systems at this time, you have to remember, like we didn't know, could one of our laptops have malware on it?

1:03:56So we were doing some of the key signing like totally offline, disconnected from the internet with these like brand new laptops we had just brought out of the bag that we were pretty sure had not been compromised, you know, like this kind of stuff. And so it was nerve wracking. And we got it all transferred like nothing blew up. And I just remember being like so relieved. And we just went home and finally slept like 12 hours. The main lesson of that from my point of view was that, number one, I look back on that as one of the most important moments in my career, right? It showed me that we were capable of more than we thought.

1:04:29On shorter timelines, we were able to do great work. And, you know, I'm really proud of it too. And so now there's been many stories like that inside Coinbase where different teams have risen to the challenge. And, you know, I often find like sometimes teams are really scared if you go in there and you're like, OK, we need a solution to this within this amount of time. And they're like, why are you know, why is everything so urgent? Why are you cracking the whip, Brian? You know, like like not everything is just like a made up deadline. You know, this is like so. And look, there is an element of truth to that.

1:04:58Like some things require a great craft and you don't want to just be like if you force everybody to do artificial deadlines, you'll get like really shoddy product coming out sometime. So there's a lot of truth to that. But it's also true that people are capable of more than they think. And the problem will expand to the amount of time that you give, right? And so it's great if you like come up with a goal. And even if you don't hit it exactly, the fact that you had that goal means you're going to be a lot closer to it than you would have otherwise. So yeah, there's moments like that that we're defining that required us to make it a defining moment of the company, our finest hour instead of our end of the company.

1:05:35With podcasting, it's kind of this magical thing where for this shoot, this is a huge thing that we have to pull off and we have a deadline. And it's very clear because your schedule is it's either you're here and there's something or there's nothing. And it's the same thing when I was interviewing Peter Beck. He said if rocket launches didn't have the payoff of seeing the rocket actually go up and work, no one would work on it because it just sucks most of the time. How do you think about like trying to find those critical like milestones almost where you can rally the entire company? You know, you can't have even if you manage 500 billion dollars, eventually it gets boring.

1:06:10So you have to kind of create here's the next here's the next goal. Here's where we're marching next. Yeah. How do you constantly try to find that next marching post? Yeah, well, that's part of what was so great about like the moon landing is that it had such a clear moment defined in everyone's mind. Visually, it's like did the guy walk on the moon or not? Like, you know, if you did it and it was a big one. Most companies don't have that, right? And so most companies are on some kind of cadence, like they're putting out a new car every two years or like a piece of software is like shipping continuous updates every week now, every day.

1:06:39And so one thing we try to do is have like an operating cadence to the company where, for instance, now twice a year we're doing these product showcase events. And so those are great moments to like, you know, ask everyone like, OK, that thing is six months away. Let's write the headline. Like, what do we want to be able to announce on that day for our customers? And then it's like everyone can rally behind that. And even things which launched a few months earlier, we still haven't told the world about it in an adequate way. We need to package it up. So those tend to be like great milestones. You know, you can do like annual planning processes and OKRs and quarterly business reviews and things like that.

1:07:14But I think like having those public moments helps rally teams. Part of the reason why I was initially thinking doing a crazy set and costume design and all this stuff is because of some of the things that you've done publicly to communicate better with your shareholders and stakeholders. Yeah. One of the things that I saw like a month ago was a earnings call where I saw like Subway Surfer underneath and I was kind of blown away when I saw that. It's very interesting. Over time, like what have you learned on a communication side and like how to communicate what you're working on and why you're working on it?

1:07:45Yeah, well, I think one thing I've learned is that the world is so noisy with all these ideas. People really, you're lucky if you can install one idea in their head about what you're up to, right? And so you have to make it a lot simpler than you think. Sometimes people get up there and they say, well, we're kind of trying to do this. We're also trying to do that. And it's part of this broader thing here. And so a lot of this is kind of comms 101, but you can kind of boil it down and say, you know, what are our priorities this year? It's one, two, and three. Like try to only have three, don't have five, you know?

1:08:17And don't like, every time you say it, try to say it in the exact same way, the exact same words in the same order and make it shorter. You know, like if there's a difference between saying something that's like six words versus two, like the two is a little easier to stick in people's minds. And if you want to get, if you want to stick in people's minds, it helps if they hear it multiple times, but it helps if they hear it from multiple different people. It helps if they hear it in multiple formats. So they might hear me say it on a podcast or at a company town hall, but they might also see it posted in Slack in writing or an email.

1:08:49And they might not just hear it from me, but they might hear it from their manager or like, you know. So it's really about like how do you install those ideas in people's heads? And it's the same thing for like from a customer or external comms point of view, not just internally. How do you make it digestible and simple and memorable? and then people can, if you pull like a random person on the street, like, what do you know about this company? I was like, oh, don't they do X? And you'd be surprised sometimes because you're trying to put out all this complicated stuff. And the only thing they can remember is, oh, that's like the place you buy Bitcoin.

1:09:20You know, it's like, so you have to really, you have much fewer opportunities to store these ideas in people's heads than people think. Yeah, I remember this. I think it was a story about Steve Jobs and I forgot who the other guy was, but it was Steve was trying to explain like a computer or something. And there was a whole bunch of different ideas. and this guy, you know, turn to Steve and he wads up all these pieces of paper and he takes like five pieces and he throws them at him and Steve doesn't catch any of them. Um, and then he wads up one and he just throws it at him and he catches it immediately and it's easy.

1:09:48Yeah. And that I think is kind of the same idea around ideas. It's like, it's very easy for people to digest one thing. A physical demonstration can stick in people's minds in a brilliant way too. That's, that's a great point. Have you ever done any physical demonstrations other than a massive of Marvel Bitcoin? Well, I remember, for instance, we had one product showcase where we were announcing all this stuff, and I thought, oh, this is gonna be the big headline. This is gonna be the... And it turned out everybody just really liked the Coinbase credit card that launched. And partly it was because I think on video, we were just like, yeah, look at this.

1:10:19And then they could hold it, and then they saw it, and they're like, oh, it looks really cool. And it's like a physical artifact stuck in people's minds. You've got this idea where if you're trying to come up to speed on any industry, whether it be like longevity or something else, you'll basically get a group of the best experts that you can find in a room like a dinner together and talk with them. How do you kind of think about coming up to speed on just Coinbase? Like when you're thinking about entering some new industry or doing some new thing, how do you rapidly get that mental model in your head of what good looks like and what you should be going after?

1:10:49Yeah. So I think that being able to convene some people for dinner is underrated. I mean, it sounds simple, but a lot of people don't do this. They're sitting around thinking like, man, I wish that I could create a company in this space or do a great podcast or make a great film or whatever they're trying to do. And you can read a bunch of stuff on the Internet. You can read books like that's great as a starting point. But there's something magical about reaching out to whoever you can get to show up, even if you're early in your career or later or whatever, and just say, hey, I want to talk about this.

1:11:25You're interested in it. like, will you come to this dinner? Because think about that. Like, it's actually much, it's much harder to call somebody randomly and be like, do you want to co-found this thing with me? Right. Or like, do you want to make a film with me? And they're like, no, I'm already making films. Like I don't, I do my own, you know, but people will say yes to a dinner more easily than they will say yes to like, I will, I will leave what I'm doing in the world and come, you know. And it's also more interesting than sometimes just reading books. Cause like books are written typically about stuff that's already happened.

1:11:53And you might have to read like for eight hours, is like read a book to get like, oh, there's one nugget in there that's relevant to me. But in a dinner, in a captive setting, you can actually, you know, direct it to where you want to go. And so you get, it's a lower threshold for people to say, yes, okay, I will come to this dinner. There's other interesting people there. And you can really just go around the room and ask everybody, you know, what do you think is the most exciting thing happening in this field right now? Or whatever, whatever you want to talk about. And most of the stuff you hear people talk about, you'll be like, I know that one, or that's not interesting to me, or this person's bad at communicating or whatever.

1:12:22And you're kind of, honestly, you're kind of evaluating each of them a little bit like, who raised your energy the most? You know, who might, could I see myself working with? And then you'll see like a little piece of the puzzle here and a little piece there. And sometimes you leave the dinner, you're like, I was a waste of time, nothing interesting happened. Other times after a week or two, you're like, somebody calls you back and like, you know, that dinner made me think of this. And you said this, but I actually think the other piece is this. And so something starts to happen in the world when you convene a group like that.

1:12:50Yeah, I've seen examples of that now where, you know, you can actually really make progress towards starting a company just by hosting a dinner. It's like a very lightweight step for people to start to make progress. I also kind of love that because it's a little bit, the whole action produces information. There's also this other idea of like action produces action. And so if you just kind of are the activation energy for some new idea to be spread and some new gathering to happen, that can just be like the first domino in a sequence of other dominos. Well, I did that recently. I started thinking about, you know, gene therapies are getting like more and more prevalent.

1:13:22And I was like, who's actually working on genetic editing of embryos, right? Like this is a controversial topic, but like for disease prevention, most Americans are for it. It's taboo. So like most people would be afraid to do it. But these in my entrepreneurial brain, I'm like, okay, there's an opportunity there. It's like clearly something that could benefit the world, but people are afraid to do it. That's kind of my sweet spot, you know? And that was the first thing I did. I was like, all right, let's organize a dinner, you know? and reached out to a bunch of scientists, people that had interest in this.

1:13:53I actually put out a Google form on X and like, I think like 120 people applied. And my chief of staff helped me like screen a bunch of them. We invited a bunch of them from different parts of the world. Hosted a couple of dinners like that. And actually like two companies came out of it. One of them I invested in. So that was just a recent example. You have this idea of basically wanting to make sure that the people that are going to work directionally on what Coinbase could evolve into, stay inside of Coinbase and do it internally at the company. For the companies that aren't going or completely different missions and should be started as separate entities, how do you decide who to back, why to back them, what missions to focus on?

1:14:30Well, I mean, I should mention inside Coinbase, we have the NextBets program I mentioned to do internal innovation, but we also do external innovation. I mean, so we have Coinbase Ventures, and if employees want to leave to start companies, we'll often put a check in there too. So we're open to all of those. And oftentimes it makes sense to do it internally because you get the distribution of the Coinbase. But if it doesn't make sense, if you want to leave, we're also supportive of that. So then just more broadly, your question about how to decide who to work with in these other areas. Like if it's not related to crypto or financial services at all, I've done some as a separate company.

1:15:05And how do you decide who to work with? It's a lot like who to hire as well. It's like, you're looking for people that are high agency, great communicators, high integrity. They raise your energy when you meet with them. They're bringing new ideas to the table. Part of it is like just going off of excitement. It's like when you meet with one of these people and you're like, that would be awesome for the world. And this is a fun and interesting conversation. I kind of want to have more of conversations like this. Yeah, let's put a check in and see what happens. Like it can literally be that simple.

1:15:36Because if you're excited about it, other smart people are going to be excited about it. that is like half the battle to just getting the right group of people in the room to sometimes go try something really ambitious and fun and crazy. I've seen multiple interviews where you talked about going on a week-long vacation. And I kind of want to know, at what point does Brian Armstrong decide to go on that week-long vacation? And then how does your psychology change from the first day on the beach to the seventh day where you feel the anxiety of wanting to get back to work? Yeah, well, this is one of those things about like making it sustainable, right?

1:16:10To be able to do this for the long term. So I actually, I schedule four weeks a year in advance. They're scheduled because if you just kind of wait, oh, I'll go when there's time. There's never like a good time. So you kind of have to schedule in advance. And some of those weeks, it's just like it's the Christmas holiday or something. Other weeks, it's I'm going to some conference or something that's like kind of work, but kind of not. Other ones, I'm like truly the other two, I'm usually taking like a real vacation, like family and stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's true that my psychology is like really messy on some of those trips, actually.

1:16:43Because sometimes at the beginning, I'm like, I'm exhausted. Like, this would be a good moment to like take a break. But usually within like two to three days, I start to get anxious that I'm like not. I actually kind of want to start thinking about work and doing different things again. and I will often end up reading a bunch of interesting stuff, calling random people about ideas and starting to think about the future and come back with better ideas, right? So that's kind of the purpose of vacation, but honestly, like sometimes half the vacation, I don't know, the way that some people do vacation is you wake up early and you go on this, to this museum and this touristy thing.

1:17:27I actually really don't like doing, I don't like doing touristy stuff. I hate tours. Yeah. So what I usually do is I like sleep in, go to the gym, have an amazing brunch, maybe do like one hike or thing like that for the day. But the rest of the day, I'm just, I have like quiet unscheduled time where I'm just like reading interesting things, calling people, thinking about the future, writing, writing ideas down. So I use it as a moment to, yeah, like, I guess, yeah, think about what to do next. What's been the best thing that's come out of one of those vacations? Well, I mean, again, an example is what we just talked about, actually, like the embryo editing dinner kind of came out of that.

1:18:09It was just like, I was just reading a ton of stuff about this and is it ready? And I was calling random people and like, why has nobody tried this? Have they tried this? Did it work? Did it not work? Like, really? Why is, you know, these are the kind of conversations I was having. And then I was like, all right, I just got to do a dinner next. So kick that off, kick that ex-post off. And that's an example. But it's really just kind of following your nose. Like whatever you get excited about and go read about and then see if you want to take some action. You've mentioned multiple times in this conversation this idea of finding people and like surrounding yourself with people that give you energy, just kind of like light your fire.

1:18:43What's been the best way that you have found those types of people? So part of it is just like in a normal recruiting function, you can have people that are aligned to what you want and they can go and source a bunch of people and they can bring filter and then bring the top people in. So that's like a normal hiring process. I think that you can also try to attract entrepreneurial energy into the company by doing the things I mentioned, like next bets. And if someone leaves, like Coinbase Ventures will maybe put a check in. So cultivating a lot of the people that raise them energy the most are really entrepreneurial, right?

1:19:16They're like high agency builders trying to create the future, like all the stuff that you're putting out on this podcast and teaching people how to be relentless. It's like that is such a critical skill set. So it's attracting entrepreneurs into the company. Actually, I think like three or four of the executive team now are founders that got acquired in. And that's been like really fun to work with. I think the other way you can do it is like putting out the bat signal, right? which is like basically on social media or X or your blog or whatever, podcast, wherever you want to. I think in any given time, you should be blasting out the things that you're most excited about in the world.

1:19:53And then the right people will sometimes pop up and find you. And you got to give them an opportunity to do it though by saying publicly what you're interested in. So that's probably the other way. These dinners, it can turn into dinners. It can turn into like, if you're just randomly in some city, like go meet with these people, go give a talk somewhere and say something contrarian, but right, and see who shows up, these kinds of things. I kind of want to touch on this idea of proof of work. Yeah. Money is the ultimate proof of work, by the way. It's like, literally, you did a bunch of hard stuff and you got money.

1:20:27And then it's like, anyway, proof of work. So something that I've kind of recently come to the conclusion is the proof of work is just like one of the most valuable things in the world and most people under prioritize it. And so proof of work is not only that you did like not only take action and do things, but also share the thing that you did. And it's kind of funny how far you can get by literally just like the first interview that I ever did was over Zoom and it looked horrible and I didn't know at all what I was doing and my computer battery overheated and shut off and all this stuff. And now we're recording this two and a half years later, two and a quarter years later.

1:21:02And we've gotten almost to the best in the world on some metrics in that time. And we'll keep on going. It's been amazing, the access. You're doing something right, for sure. Thank you, Brian. How do you kind of filter for that proof of work and make sure that not only are you saying, this is what we're going to go do as a company and this is what I care about, but also this is what we are doing, have done? You know about in terms of hiring people or in terms of... For example, Elon is like, we're going to go to Mars and we're going to go build the Mars base. and the proof of having a starship actually land back and get caught is like a massive just, oh, my God, this is actually happening.

1:21:41They're able to do something that no one else, you've never seen it before. It changes the way that you think. Well, you're right. I think like all successful people, you want to sort of leave a trail of these remarkable moments, good work, basically, that people can see and it's self-evident, right? But it could show up in revenue numbers, could show up in stories like that when I told about rebuilding our cold storage system in 60 days. Sometimes there's really iconic moments, right? Like Starship landing or getting caught in the mecha arms or whatever, right? In hardware, sometimes it's a little easier to see like an androal drone blowing something up or something, right?

1:22:24That's proof of work that's a really nice visual. Sometimes in software, you don't get quite like those killer moments, like with hardware that you, so you have to show it in numbers. I think you can show it quantitatively, like this graph is going up. You can also show it anecdotally with like, let's talk to this person who is able to like send money to home to their family without like paying 10 % fees, right? So you want to touch both like the quantitative brains out there and the emotional brains and like get a message for everyone in that. And yeah, that's one way to think of it. On that same kind of note, the idea of like emotion and touching people's, you know, touching people emotionally, making them feel things.

1:23:10How do you actually do that? Like what is going through your head when you're saying this is the message or thing that I want someone to feel? Here's how do you go actually go about doing that? Well, I think I'll give an example, which is for us, our mission is increasing economic freedom in the world. We need to make that tangible to people and have them feel something about it. So we often end up talking about how money is really freedom. If you want to be able to go where you want to go, create the companies you want, have freedom of transportation and congregation and movement, you need money to be able to do that.

1:23:51And money has been getting less free over time. There's more intermediaries that can block transactions. The value of your currency might be getting eroded due to inflation. There's a lot of people in the world who have their assets frozen or seized, or things get blocked for various reasons. And to have a sense of agency in the world and the ability to accomplish what you want to do with your own hard earned money, like freedom, I should say money is a important tool to have freedom on as well. So that's part of what we're doing at Coinbase is like giving people financial freedom and economic freedom with these tools and with crypto that's updating the financial system.

1:24:32And we try to do this through some of our brand advertising at times where we'll tell people stories about what it means to have to break free and have like, you know, live outside the matrix and not be an NPC and like, be able to have actually have like control of your own life and keep the upsides of your labor and try to create a better life for you and your family and your, your community. It's a luxury that like we have in certain ways, but most people in the world don't have. And so those are, that's an example of like touching on the emotional aspect of what we're building, not just literally, you know, our transaction time went from 120 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds.

1:25:12That's selling the data. You also have to tell the story about what it's actually creating in the world. Do you know the logic behind this or the reasoning behind this set? Well, I think you said it was Game of Thrones, right? Is it the bank? Not the Iron Bank. The Iron Bank of Brothers. But basically, the idea was I came across this idea that you've shared, which is Coinbase is trying to update the financial system. And I thought to myself, even before Lulu reached out, I was thinking to myself for probably two months-ish. And then she randomly texts me on Twitter and she's like, do you want to do an interview with Brian Armstrong?

1:25:44And I was like, yes, but only if we can do it under these conditions, which was like in a bank full on top of the world's largest Bitcoin. And she thought that was funny and wasn't totally serious. And then here we are. But my goal with this was basically showcase what old finance looks like and also like celebrate the reason for founding Coinbase, which is basically to buy Bitcoin and kind of marry the old with the new. So it's kind of like a baton passing. Yeah. I mean, I should be asking you how to tell the story in a way that resonates with people emotionally. You're bringing together a lot of key pieces of it here.

1:26:18So thank you for putting this cool vision together. I mean, that's made out of granite, I'm told. Marble. Marble, okay. Yeah. It's going to be in your house if you want it. It's yours now. We might put that in our office, actually. I think that would be sick. I was trying to create a full statue of Satoshi, but the problem is, is like people won't intuitively get Satoshi. And so I was like, well, was the next best thing. And I was like, we could create a massive Bitcoin. I think the best for, like the best founders are able to figure out how can I like build a company where at any given moment I'm having a lot of fun and I'm like setting, you know, extending the goal posts out so that you're on this, you know, infinite game.

1:26:52How are you kind of designing today so that you have those future milestones where you're really excited to wake up in the morning and tackle them? Well, okay. So we have the things that we're excited about right now, like let's say next three, four years. And I'll try to touch on like the big long-term picture. So there's a few things we're focused on right now. One is the everything exchange. So every asset class is coming on chain and it's going to be stocks and commodities and crypto and prediction markets and FX and everything is now going to trade like 24 seven globally democratized access.

1:27:23And I think that's the future of all trading and value exchange. Okay. Then we're seeing stable Coin payments just take off in a massive way. That's the second big use case for crypto. So we're making a bunch of investments there. And now you can send money instantly anywhere in the world for less than one second, anywhere in the world. So that's powerful. And we're going to see AI agents start to do a lot of machine to machine payments and a bunch of cool stuff's happening there. And then we're seeing that more of crypto in the financial services is moving on chain into to these like decentralized protocols, like decentralized exchanges, DeFi.

1:27:58And that's a big, with our self-custodial wallets, these allow us to operate in more emerging markets. Like how do we get a billion people on chain? I think we're gonna have to be self-custodial wallet. This is like our base app and what we're doing at base chain. And so those are like our three big priorities right now. And I think long-term, you know, the mission of the company is really about increasing economic freedom in the world. So how could we actually like bend the curve on economic freedom in a bunch of these countries? because everybody has a smartphone now, they have access to the internet.

1:28:26Now they have access to sound money, global payment system. They can invest in assets, get access to like high quality investment assets. They can get a loan. They can do capital formation to start a business in a way that's much more efficient. I think ultimately, like we're kind of unbundling money from the state, if you will. And I think there could actually be eventually communities, cities, societies, countries, like this is kind of the network state idea, where actually governance might get updated, where I think there could be physical territories, different places in the world that are pro-freedom, special economic zones, if you will, things like Prospera, which we're an investor in, that are actually like the governance from a voting point of view is done on chain.

1:29:14Land rights is all carved up and tokenized. So like title exchange and all these things are more efficient, mortgages. And the entire economy kind of runs on blockchain. And I think that would be a cool longer term vision of like, I hope we get to make like a crypto city or some special economic zones in the US that would really unlock innovation. It's not just for crypto, by the way. I actually think we want these sandboxes of innovation for lots of things like in biotech, like how do we run accelerated clinical trials like Operation Warp Speed, but like do it all the time. How do we have a special economic zone to develop a nuclear power or fusion energy, like in a way that doesn't get blocked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, right?

1:29:53Or a place where you can just build data centers unfettered, like you don't have to follow a federal law, but within that sandbox, like you can do much faster iteration or drone deliveries. Like there should be a bunch of these special economic zones. They worked really well, like in Shenzhen and China and Dubai and Singapore, Hong Kong, the US should have a number of these. That would be fun to really work on. And can you imagine like dropping into some kind of like, it would be like a weird, like a Tokyo and you know, the 100 years from now, like it'd feel like a different - Like cyberpunk. Yeah.

1:30:24It would feel like a very different culture, like Burning Man meets like Tokyo or something. And you could drop in there and feel what it's like to be in a city or a society that really is not encumbered by so much red tape. If you look at Zipline, They kind of took the same model where you can imagine Africa is like a special economic zone where suddenly you're able to fly the drones without the FAA worrying about it too much. And they did exactly what you're kind of describing except for over there where they basically just gathered a bunch of flight time and data. I think they had like 50 million flight time miles or flight miles before they even went and did their first flight in the US commercially.

1:31:01And FAA just basically went over there, looked at their data. Kenya, I think, was laughing at them because they were like, this clearly works. And we've been using it for the last 10 years. And what are you guys doing? And then they came back and suddenly they're operating. I think they've got their third major hub just turning on now. But I think that's kind of like countries is kind of the special economic zones right now. You're right. I mean, Zipline is an amazing company. And you're right. I mean, it's great that Rwanda allowed them to be that special economic zone. Rwanda is kind of like the Singapore of Africa.

1:31:33Not Kenya. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they might be in Kenya too. But anyway, these special economic zones have been very helpful. And it's a shame that they had to like leave the US to do that. I mean, we should have those in the US as well. This is something that I've never heard someone in crypto talk about. I've never heard you talk about it. The Silk Road 2013. What was it like operating a crypto company as that was getting raided? It's like shut down. you know at that time um we were always trying to make crypto more legitimate right and unfortunately like crypto did attract a variety of people that were doing scams and different things um mount gox had blown up you know that that was like a setback for about a year it really put a chilling effect on the industry but we knew that the technology had a lot of potential and this was like a blip on the radar and so we just wanted to power through it so i at that time in San Francisco, I remember there were people telling me about how they were using Silk Road.

1:32:32And actually, one of the security guys on our team, he actually sold some brownies on Silk Road just to test it out because we wanted to understand it. And people kept messaging him, like, are these magic brownies? And he's like, no, they're just regular brownies. Do you want them or not? My mother's recipe. Yeah, exactly. And so he was trying to just learn about it because we thought this could be a better way to do all kinds of commerce on the internet. So you know, they were selling mostly illegal drugs, but we wanted to understand it a little bit better. So employees were testing it in a legal way.

1:33:04But I remember seeing the news come out that Ross Ulrich had gotten caught and he was sitting there right in San Francisco. Like he was at, I guess, like a public library when he got caught. And it was like, you know, it was like right down the street from where I live or something like that. Right. So in a way I was like, wow, San Francisco really is the center of innovation, I guess, in all ways, at least at that time. Now, I think it's decentralized a bit. But, you know, part of me was also like, man, I get where he's coming from, like, as, you know, kind of like a libertarian minded thing.

1:33:35It's like, you know, do you own your own body? Like, yes. Okay. Should you be able to put anything you want in your own body? I guess. Like, I get the libertarian argument. But he also, you know, we live in a society of laws. And he was like, very clearly breaking the law. So there was all these claims, The story just got weirder and weirder, right? Because it was like claims of this assassination marketplace, which is very unclear if that ever really happened. I don't think it did. It's a good story. Yeah. And then the federal agents were corrupt that were investigating him. I mean, it just got weirder and weirder.

1:34:04And so anyway, it was another one of those early days of crypto that what I've noticed is that anytime there's a new technology trend, it attracts like kind of outlier people at the beginning. It can be like really entrepreneurial people who are ready to go commercialize it. It can attract like sometimes bad actors or kind of crazy people. And this is true of lots of technology. I mean, technology is just a tool, right? Fire can be used to like heat your home or burn down a home, right? And what I often see is that people like in society are just fearful of new technologies. But I think that technology is like unapologetically net positive as is capitalism.

1:34:45and all these things. So I think that we have to like lean in on technology and actually try to use it for good. It's arguably the thing that has helped humanity the most, even going back to like invention of the wheel and fire or like the shoes on our feet are technology, eyeglasses are technology. And they become more commonplace in society over time. But our lives are immeasurably richer today than they were hundreds of years ago where people died of disease and they were cold and they were hungry. And a lot of these problems have gotten better in the world. It's all due to technology. So I actually think if you want to improve the world, you should lean in and try to create companies with technology.

1:35:28You can run for office or something like that, but I think the highest ROI way to improve the world today is to start technology companies. It's ironic. I've thought a lot about capitalism, and I think I'm the most capitalist person I know. And counterintuitively, I've created effectively a nonprofit where we basically create as much goodwill as possible and give it away for free and try to make things as legendary as possible, just maximizing for basically love and people like brand over time. You don't sell ads, right? There's no ads. There's no sponsorships. This podcast is operating at a loss.

1:36:01I mean, you're investing a lot in it. Do you want it to be positive from a profit point of view? Or do you think it's actually – I don't know. Are you post-economic? You're just ready to give back to the world to create more companies or like what's what's the what do you want to do? It's funny because it's all about the timeline, right? Like how what timeline are you operating on? And most people will say most people, they read lots of books and study lots of great founders. They'll say, like, I'm a long term thinker. I'm longer term oriented. And I've actually never explained this on camera ever.

1:36:30But if you actually think about what that means to be actually long term oriented, you can create like each one of my interviews, I think, is worth about 100 million dollars to me. And it's$100 million that I can't capture today, but it's something I can capture eventually. And it may be$100 million that's created in the world. People go start more companies or they work on more important missions or these things. And it's like the first domino. And that just kind of butterfly effects out. But if I am just basically able to make the best thing possible, then continue doing that, continuing leveling up over time.

1:37:03You'll just create this network effect of, well, just goodwill and serendipity. And the vast majority of people will, like almost everyone that comes in contact with Relentless will get some value from it if they like it. And then I will never ask for anything in return. And then there will be a few people where they just like love it so much that they're just compelled to like help it and want it to continue. And if you, my thinking is effectively like that tsunami metaphor is you just want to create as much momentum as possible. And if you have enough, it's this flywheel that won't stop. So this is a way to achieve that.

1:37:37But yeah, I mean, you literally might help create thousands of companies. And then I think you're right. It's important to just like give value and not like you don't have to like necessarily require it immediately, some compensation. But some of those companies are going to come back and they're going to want you to invest. They're going to want you to help get their message. Something is going to go to good is going to come out of it. So yes. And that's the that's the funny thing about ads is I think of them as like basically you're harvesting the goodwill that you created. And so if you really want to maximize for goodwill, you just say no.

1:38:05And you just say like has there ever been a single scenario where I was watching a video and I liked the ad in the video Like it added to the content and I haven't come across a single one except for between two ferns If you've ever watched Zach Alphagate. What was the ad though? I don't remember the ad. He was interviewing Hillary Clinton And then it's like a you know Kind of like a bit and it's like a five-minute video and mid interview He says and just a quick ad break and it was a Donald Trump ad and that was hilarious like that added to the comedy was very funny yeah on a slightly more serious note you seem to me to be a very disciplined person like what is your biggest vice what is the thing that you can't stop doing even though you know it's bad for you i think you're right i actually have become quite disciplined as a way to make work sustainable over time so when i'm in work mode i i can be a little bit rigorous about these things so So, you know, I really wear like the same thing every day when I'm in work mode.

1:39:00I try to get up at the same time, do the same exercise. I vary the exercises, but do exercise and then get after it. And like, so even what I'm eating, you know, you can get very efficiency-focused and optimized, which I like in terms of, especially once you have a little bit of money, you can have a driver, you can have every meal made for you, like making sure your macronutrients are dialed in. like you can really go pretty far with this. And I think that's good. I also think there's times like on the weekend, or if I'm taking time off, you know, my family or whatever, I'm just like, try to not be so rigorous all the time.

1:39:38So, you know, wear something crazy or fun or whatever. So I definitely try to balance that a little bit. But I'd say overall, I'm pretty disciplined. You're asking what my advice is. I mean, I mean, I do think actually like work is a form of addiction, right? I would say like, I probably have a healthy degree of workaholism. Okay. So early on, I thought of what it is actually, I think early on, I found that my brain was just like very drawn to certain like video games and, you know, like Starcraft 2 or Polytopia, or some of these things where you're like, collecting resources and building things and harvesting and moving to the next thing and like or managing an economy and managing the growth of the civilization sort of thing yeah actually the game civilization highly addictive to my brain where it was like that was one of the only times in my life where i was like the sun would be coming up and i'd still be playing i'd be like oh shoot like i have to go to class in a few hours or whatever um so what i realized is like okay if my brain is just like hyper drawn to like certain things before i can become fixated on it how do i channel that into something positive in the world because I didn't necessarily want to become like a pro StarCraft player or something like that, although that's fine if people want to do that.

1:40:49But I wanted to like try to say, okay, what could I, how could I do this to try to build something cool in the world? And so actually business does a lot of that same thing in my brain that the game Civilization or StarCraft does, where you literally are like you're harvesting resources, investing it in a new thing. There's some competitive aspect of it, but you can actually, you can win. And anyway, the timelines are longer in business. Like you might invest in things which take years to pay off, decades even. whereas the game can give you like a quick hit but I've noticed like I just feel a little guilty or lazy like if I'm if I'm playing games too much then I'm like why don't I actually try doing this in the real world which is like the ultimate game you know and so I think that's been a healthy reframe but I you know just the final thought I had on this is like I actually think a lot of people are born with um predispositions to different addictions uh and unfortunately a lot of them are like the unhealthy ones that we think of right and like drugs and alcohol and like whatever, social media and all these things.

1:41:44So, you know, I think some people are lucky enough to be born with an addiction that outputs some kind of value in society. And like, and part of that is luck, but it's also, you can try to take the things which are vices and turn them into strengths in some cases. I don't want to say everybody can do that. That sounds like it kind of trivial, trivializes it. But I think in some cases you can take something that your brain is unhealthily drawn to and try to channel it into a positive thing. Like there's a doctor I was talking to recently, he's like, I have OCD, and it's like really detrimental in my personal life.

1:42:14But, you know, he's a dermatologist. So like in his, in his professional life, it's like a huge asset, like his patients love it. He has so much attention to detail, like, he'll make sure everything little thing is perfect or whatever. So you can try to channel these weaknesses into strengths. I find that so funny, to say that, because like for a vice, that might be you're consuming a bunch of content, you're watching a bunch of movies, a bunch of shows. And I was thinking to myself as we were building this probably a week ago and we were just setting everything up, I was like, I have got to be the only person that's ever prepared for an interview by watching Game of Thrones.

1:42:48Watch the first three seasons of prep. And then we did a bunch of it, you know, let's do a bunch of your interviews. And then you don't have to know that much. It's interesting to see how people spend their time. Because normally I would think it's absolutely nuts to build this sort of set for something like this. But then you just look at how people spend their time and it's like they clearly love stories they love to see real things yeah have you ever watched band of brothers no okay great tv show hbo anyway i i feel like i've learned a bit about business from watching that show strangely enough because there's certain moments where you have to like go deliver hard news to this person that like they're not going to be the one leading it leading this invasion and their their their skills are needed elsewhere right which is kind of a polite way to say them, like you're not up to the job or going and telling like this group of people, you know, I'm about to ask you to do something which is terrible and unthinkable, but you need to get it done.

1:43:44Like, and like, so as a younger person kind of watching the show, I remember watching it and thinking like, wow, okay, that's how you have that conversation. That's a moment of leadership. How would you say it? And like, you don't want to be like, you know, you're not in a movie in real life, so you can go too far with these things, but there are certain scenes of like negotiation and films where I'm like, I remember watching that and Game of Thrones has lots of stuff. I don't know if there was a specific one I took inspiration from, probably not, but yeah, Band of Brothers is great. You should watch that.

1:44:11This was my initial idea was copying like what I'd imagined the 17th century Rothschild's bank might look like. Yeah. But then I was like, this is a very clear example that like, I searched up the Rothschild's and I was like, there's no obvious, like this is the set for it. And it's just such an obvious set in Game of Thrones. But we're not gonna go so far as like me offering you a bank loan on camera. There is too far. Yeah. By the way, the modern day banks in a digital economy with crypto, they actually look like distributed sets of data centers. And the data centers have like biometrics and people with guns guarding them and like cool things like that too.

1:44:48So this is - That's pretty badass. Yeah, like the old school physical vault is kind of fun. but in a digital world, it's data centers and armed guards and biometrics. In the Coinbase doc as well, Fred's parents were talking about him just playing video games for hours and just not being able to pull him away from video games. Did you guys bond over video games? Somewhat, yeah. I mean, we would play Halo sometimes late in the evenings and stuff, but honestly, Fred is too good at most video games. It's not fun. Yeah. There's always winning and there's like, you never win. We would play like three on one with him versus in Halo and he'd still crush us instead of certain and he's like so competitive that he's like he wins and then He's not he just rubs in your face and stuff So like I realized at a certain point we had to I actually told him at one point I was like for the relationship.

1:45:37We're only gonna do co-op games going forward. So yeah, we need to win together Yeah, he hated that he's like what's the point if you're not competing and like, you know taking people's souls or whatever Fred also had another thing when I was talking with him. He said, you are the king of never leaving a meeting without next steps. Yeah. Why do you do that? Yeah. Well, I mean, meetings can be like really inefficient and ineffective if just a bunch of people come in without a clear objective and you talk about a bunch of stuff and no clear decision is made. And so you just all leave and then you go, nobody follows up and does anything.

1:46:10Right. So oftentimes we'll be sitting there in a meeting and there's like a hard call and everyone's, you know, I try to just prompt the room with that. Right. What are the next steps? What are the action items? This is one of my favorite things to say. He's right. And we actually try to write them down and look at them in the meeting. Oftentimes people are like, oh, cool. Like, I think we got it. And we'll follow up. I'm like, do you got it? Like, let's look at it on the screen right now or in person. Who is going to do what by when, right? And it's like, sometimes people write these things that are a little bit too wishy-washy for my taste where they're like, follow up on this press release or something.

1:46:45and I'm like, what does follow up mean? Like that's a very weak word, right? Like, do you want to publish it by this date? Do you want to - Review it? Yeah, like what is, let's make something more concrete. And so, and then it has to, you have to identify who as well. Who's the DRI for this? Other times people are like, I don't know, we're all gonna kind of work together on it. I'm like, no, you can all give input, but there's gotta be one person who owns this. So we literally sit there and what is the person's name? What do we want them to get done? And what's the target date? And then if we don't leave the meeting with that, it wasn't a useful meeting.

1:47:17Is this something where you actually track it on, like you say, okay, X person said why they were going to do Y by X, you know, Z date? Or is this something where I know, I don't think Elon actually keeps track, but this is exactly what he'll do too. Is he'll like sit around a table, hear the company updates from all the different people, and then they'll each tell him what they're going to do. And as long as all those things are hit, there's no issue. And if there isn't, you know, and he just keeps it in his head. And apparently that's like one of the things that he's best at is just keeping a whole bunch of different names of people and what they've said they were going to do and by what date.

1:47:51So this is a great point because I've tried to play with this as well. There actually is in the latest template that we use. So you're recording what did you get done last time versus what you said you were going to do. Then you talk about what do we want to get done next time. That's where you fill in the action items. and I have never found a perfect system to enforce the tracking, meaning like what did we decide in this meeting? Who's going to get what done by this date? And like let's actually lock it into some database or something that they can't edit it later. And then when they come back the next time, it's like this system is producing, here's what they said they were going to do.

1:48:27It can't be like edited retroactively. We're not that rigorous. These are typically documents that that somebody could, they could delete a line. And honestly, would I remember all of them? Maybe not. I mean, I think I have a good general sense of what people are agreeing to. And I can always go look back at the history of the document. A lot of times you can actually use AI now to basically give you, just say, look at all the things that we agreed in the prior meeting and then does it match what's here? And so we're playing right now with getting AI generated summaries of what were the things we said we were gonna do and did we do them and who and what and by when.

1:48:59So I think AI can help with this, but I've never been able to get it super rigorously tracked. I think it's more of like, yeah, I'm trying to keep it in my head as best I can. Is there any areas of the business that you actually want to remain not entirely analytical and slightly fuzzy? Yeah, I mean, you can definitely over process, make too much process around these things. So an example would be, you know, this past year, I think we acquired like 10 companies or something. And we looked at probably 50. I didn't look at all of them, but the team did. and there was a point where I was like, we need to have a structured way to look at these deals.

1:49:37Like what is the revenue multiple and what do we think is the upside potential and give me a one to five score on like synergies and like the cultural differences and the risks or whatever. And so we almost have like a pipeline of deals and we can have some sort of apples to apples way to look at like, okay, this one is like a premium to our multiple, a discount to our multiple, like sort of common things. But I realized at a certain point that might be useful as like a first pass, but you're missing the forest to the trees if that's the way you look at these. Like a lot of it comes down to like, are the people great?

1:50:12And do you think there's something you can really build together that's going to be like a 10 or 100x? Like whether it's a 10 or 15x multiple in revenue is kind of like less relevant than what can you actually build together and does it feel right? Like, is that like, oh, yeah, that's a hell yes. Like, you know, maybe you overpay for that deal. It doesn't really matter. Yeah, this reminds me of Steve Jobs and like Apple reacquiring Steve Jobs for, you know, half a billion dollars or whatever it was. And there was, you know, Next was doing whatever Next was doing. But effectively, they bought Steve Jobs for half a billion dollars.

1:50:44And the value that was created at Apple after Steve Jobs came back was worth many, many, many multiples of that. And if you were trying to look at any of the normal traditional, you know, revenue, that sort of thing, metrics, you would have come to the wrong conclusion. That's a great example. You do oftentimes end up buying a company for a single person or a couple founders. And that's rough because it pisses people off sometimes on your existing team who are like, man, I don't make that much money. Like, what does that mean? Should I quit and go do it? And it's like, well, you could, but you also have to quit and build something like successful and then maybe you get acquired back.

1:51:18But, you know, I think that it can oftentimes, those are the ones that are surprising to people sometimes. A great person can be worth a lot. When you look back on the acquisitions that worked out the best and you kind of like do a blended, here's all the net results of this acquisition, is the very best acquisitions in Coinbase history the ones where you had a founder that turned into an executive and is just an absolutely killer executive at Coinbase now? And it's not even like forget what the company was actually doing. It's just that one person. Yeah, those have definitely been some of the best ones, the people aspect of it.

1:51:51and there's been others that I think have been big wins on the product as well, but they all came with great people now that you mention it. Yeah, I think you're right. It's a good heuristic. All right, let's end it on the United States was on a gold standard until 1971. Then things decided to change, flipped a little bit. Now we're moving, I think, towards a Bitcoin standard. Tell me about that. Yeah, well, I think a lot of people, they feel like our current financial system is just clearly the best thing and it's been around forever. and it hasn't. I mean, if you study the history of money and like now Ferguson has a great book on this, our current monetary system where we have all these central bankers in different countries around the world is really started around 1971 when Nixon went off the gold standard.

1:52:34It's scary because if you look at the history of civilizations, when they disconnect their currency from hardback commodities like gold, they tend to overprint, they have high inflation, they eventually lose the reserve currency status. And so there's a big open question now about how America is going to survive or thrive or whatever in the next coming decades. Now that it's not on a gold standard. And democracies around the world are struggling with these deficit spending and high inflation, including the US at times, although I think this current administration has gotten a lot of the inflation down, which has been really great to see.

1:53:12So in one sense, stable coins and crypto are just further strengthening the dollar in every way. They're exporting the dollar over the world and creating a lot of demand for US treasuries. And I think that's like an incredibly positive thing. And then I think Bitcoin, I think of it as like a check and balance on deficit spending for the dollar. If we can keep the dollar inflation relatively low and deficit spending relatively low, then I think the dollar will remain the reserve currency and it'll thrive. And like, you know, in America, a world where America is free and dominant, I think is a pretty, is a better world than some of the alternatives.

1:53:47But I also think that if people, whether the United States or other countries lose that discipline, fiscal discipline, Bitcoin is the new gold standard. And this is probably a contrarian view, but I think that the economy is, and the financial system is shifting. It's being updated in real time. Bitcoin is provably scarce. It's decentralized. It has some of the properties of gold, but it's also better than gold in that it's more portable and divisible. And we now have like a great store of value in Bitcoin. We also have a great medium of exchange with stable coins. And crypto is just going to keep updating the whole financial system.

1:54:24And that's the key transformation that Coinbase is leading.