E148: Coinbase Founder: How I Built The Largest Crypto Exchange to $100 Billion in 9 years

26:52Anyway, we were having all these conversations. So as it got closer to maybe it's not, I do want to do my own thing at some point, it became more of a conversation about, okay, how and when and how might it happen in a way that leaves the company in a good place. So to his credit, he kind of waited until Coinbase and the crypto markets were on a big upswing. And he's like, okay, the company is just crushing it right now, me departing is not going to like harm the company in any way. And then he actually helped the company have a new founding moment, I would say, where it went from really Fred and I running the company together, making most of the decisions to, okay, it's Brian, a CEO, but let's build a real leadership team or executive team around him.

27:38And that kind of helped the company, I'd say, professionalize and have a new founding moment. And some early incarnations of that. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. It's hard to build an executive team and get it to all gel together. But the foundations of it got in place, which helped Coinbase become a public company. So I thought you handled that very well. You mentioned I was... I should say one more thing too, which when the hardest part was when Fred and I had to get in front of the company and make the actual announcement. And I tell this story sometimes where normally it's speaking in front of the company, I wasn't getting that nervous.

28:12But when I had to go up there and and tell everyone that Fred was leaving. I suddenly, I don't know if you ever had this moment like where you're sort of doing a public speaking thing or even in front of like 10 people or something. And my heart was racing, my palms were sweating. Actually, sometimes you get like a shot of adrenaline and your logical brain is kind of like, oh my gosh, like calm down, like try to just act normal. But your body is just like getting nervous. I could feel myself getting nervous as I was gonna go up there on stage. And I was like, why is my leg shaking? Like I'm messing this up.

28:47I need to appear confident in front of the company. And I remember telling the company that Fred was leaving and my voice actually cracked. Like I sounded like going through puberty, like a 15 year old or something. And I was like, oh, this is so embarrassing. And we got through it and, you know, everyone's just processing the news and they were like, everyone was fine. Basically everyone was fine. Like maybe a day later, we were all just back to work. but that's the kind of experience that makes you grow as a leader is like go do the scary things, go do the hard things and then I think if I had to do it again it still wouldn't be pleasant but I wouldn't be as nervous Do you have another moment like that to share?

29:25That's like the absolute most tough moment in the history of Coinbase Yeah, I mean there's a lot, so that's the thing about starting a company is like, you know, there's that expression like it's like chewing glass and staring into the abyss, you kind of have to do hard things all the time that are outside your comfort zone. And look, there's a kind of, I don't know, like masochistic maybe version of myself that's like, I like doing things that are hard because it makes me better over time and that's how you grow. But yeah, like every week there's something like that that's difficult, right? Like I have to have a hard conversation with somebody about letting them go or that they're not, they need to step up on this or that we actually can't go buy this company and here's why.

30:12And we're shattering their dreams or whatever. Or it's getting sued by the federal government and congressional testimony, having a terrible article come out about you in mainstream media that millions of people read, having a cybersecurity event where you lost$100 million and you have to pay this back and then go publicly and own it and like, you know, introspect about what we did wrong. Like there's, there's a number of hard things that happen in running a company. And like the mission first blog post I put out, you know, about being an apolitical company and that upset people all over the world.

30:49I've never, if you've never had like a million people upset with you at the same time, you know, that's a rare thing. Most people go through their whole life and never, you might have one or two people mad at you, but like to have a million people mad at you at the same time, that's a new experience.

31:03Builds character.

31:08How do you accept a co-founder's departure without feeling that you are here working for his bags or his shares while he's going to tackle the next big, big, exciting thing, which probably for most founder, I mean, for probably every founder, the most exciting thing is this first part. but then you're like, my co-founder is leaving, I'm at the helm, I can't leave. I'm still working for his bags while he's the one going to have fun. Yeah, well that's very true. I mean, so actually vesting of shares is an important thing, right? And actually I think the standard vesting people do in Silicon Valley is typically over four years, but that's for employees.

31:50And actually I think Fred would agree with this too. So we've subsequently invested in other companies and stuff. I think for founders, you should actually do like 10 year vesting. It's very rare. Any project worth doing is going to be barely getting started after four years. Like it takes a long time to get these ambitious companies off the ground. So I think for founders, you should do longer vesting periods. And then if you're a founder who has vested their full shares, I think it's totally reasonable to go to the board at some point and say, I want a new grant. And as you get to be a bigger company, there's like compensation committees and all kinds of diligence and governance you can do around this.

32:30But I mean, there's even like lawyers out there who will represent you as a founder to negotiate with the board if you want to do these kinds of things. So, you know, I think it's just like anybody, you need to feel like it's a hard job. So you need to feel like you are participating in the upside. And some founders actually, even if they've fully vested, they feel like, all right, I still own whatever it is, 10 % of the company. But like if the company doubles or triples, I have major upside. And so it's a personal choice for everyone, I would say. Quick one. I want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible.

33:05Thank you, Treasurer. My favorite cold wallet to store my crypto and make sure I sleep well at night. If you want to order a Treasurer wallet and sleep well at night too, you can use my promo code WSH10 to get a 10 % discount. Big thank you to Bitwise Asset Management for backing today's conversation. Bitwise is a crypto specialist asset manager with more than$15 billion in client assets across 30-plus crypto solutions, including ETFs, index funds, alpha strategies, staking, and more. However you like to invest in crypto, Bitwise has something for you. Thank you to our friends at SWE for supporting this show.

33:40SWE is a scalable layer one blockchain that's fast, secure, and affordable, built by previous Facebook developers, and that delivers the benefits of Web3 with the ease of Web2. Thank you to Story Protocol, the IP layer of the internet, for supporting today's conversation. Story is building an open system for creators to register, manage, and grow their IP on-chain. Whether you're building words, stories, or characters, Story Protocol gives you the tools to protect and expand your creative universe. To support this show, please check the sponsor links in the description down below. How did you get so fascinated by the world of Bitcoin and the blockchain?

34:21Well, I think there's a few things if I look back in my life that primed me to be really excited about it when I first read the Bitcoin white paper in December, 2010. So one of those was that I studied computer science and economics. So that's the perfect kind of intersection of crypto. I was also reading a lot of books about free market economics, right? Like Milton Friedman. And I was reading like Ayn Rand books, like Atlas Shrugged. And there's a great TV series that Milton Friedman actually created, I think, in the 80s called Free to Choose. You can watch it on YouTube. But there's kind of these like libertarian ideas like around how do you have sound money?

35:00How do you have basic property rights for everyone? How can free market economics and capitalism actually produce the greatest prosperity, including for everyone in society, including the poorest people in society? So I was very much a believer in this idea. I had also spent a year living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, like I mentioned. So I had seen a country go through hyperinflation. Most people who have only lived in the developed world or like the United States don't really have a deep appreciation of that. And then I also was an early employee at Airbnb. So I had seen how they were trying to move money to 190 countries or 180 countries around the world.

35:32And it's just a very broken, slow system. There's delays. There's high fees. It only works in certain countries. So I kind of had this fundamental view that the global financial system is not very efficient. Number two, most people in the world actually don't have access to good financial services, whether that's currency where the value can't be inflated away or the ability to get a loan or even basic property rights in many cases where people's wealth has been confiscated. And so when I read the Bitcoin white paper, I kind of couldn't stop thinking about it because it captured my attention really in a deep way.

36:09This was kind of like the internet, global decentralized network, but instead of removing information around, this was removing value. And so anybody with a smartphone could in theory have economic freedom, right? Like sound money where the wealth couldn't be in like property rights, maybe engaging in a more global economy. So like the idea just very much resonated with me kind of on the freedom front. And then the thoughts that went through my head were more like, okay, well, is it actually going to work? Is there going to be some flaw found in the cryptography? Is the government going to come try to shut it down?

36:41And as I slowly reasoned through it, started to work on some prototypes, that's what led me. I went to some early Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco. This is what led me to start tinkering with a prototype on nights and weekends, which eventually became Coinbase. And I applied to Y Combinator and all these things. So I had to develop my confidence around it a little bit of like, okay, I think maybe I could do something here. How long did you need to build this confidence to say, I'm going all in now? that early? I'd say it took me... I mean, I read the Bitcoin white paper December 2010, and I think Coinbase incorporated in July of 2012, so it took what is that, like a year and a half-ish or something?

37:21So it took me a while to build the confidence. I had a lot of self-doubt about it at the time because I thought... I talked to some of my smart friends about Bitcoin, and they were like, I don't really get it. Why would somebody trust this? and the thing that really convinced me to really try it was I'd read a lot of the Y Combinator essays that Paul Graham had written on the internet and when I got accepted to Y Combinator the first time I applied I didn't get in the second time I got in and they gave me 150k check to like say all right go quit your job and work on this and that gave me the confidence to say all right I'm going to quit my job and really try this for at least a few years and see if I can get it to work.

38:00The first time you applied at Y Combinator, you didn't get in for the Coinbase idea or was it something else? Well, I guess actually the full story is the first time I applied was with a tutoring company that I had started, which was a prior company, which ended up being like a base hit. It wasn't very successful. Then I initially applied with the Coinbase idea and I didn't have a co-founder or anything like that. And I think they invited me to interview, but I deferred for another six months because I didn't have a co-founder or anything. And then I reapplied six months later and then they said, come and interview.

38:39And that's when I went in. So yeah. Creating more economic freedom in the world. What does that mean to you? Yeah, so economic freedom is this really interesting concept that economists look at. But I guess from just like a visceral level, what it means to me is around self-sovereignty. Like it's your money. You should be able to do whatever you want with it. And the way economists would define it is they'd say, okay, can the value of money in this economy, in this country be eroded by inflation? Or is there sound money? Can people engage in free trade? Can they start a company? Do they have access to financial services?

39:17Do they have basic property rights? Or can their wealth be taken away from them? And this might all kind of sound like, I don't know, high level philosophical principles, but just at a gut level, if you exist in a society where you spend a lot of time, you work hard, you try to do something good, and all of the upside can be taken away from you at a moment's notice, which unfortunately happens in many parts of the world, what's the result of that? you're just not going to try that hard, right? You're just going to kind of keep your head down, try not to upset any of the powers that be. And it's actually a necessary condition for progress in society to have a high trust society with rule of law, property rights, that everyone has economic freedom.

40:00And now the beauty of crypto is that anybody with a smartphone, which is increasingly everyone in the world, can have economic freedom, right? If you can just have especially self-custodial wallets. That's why they're so powerful, right? If you can remember a 12-word phrase, or now it's more even like biometrics driven, you can store your own wealth in a way that nobody can steal it from you. And it's portable. You can move to another country without your wealth being seized. You can participate in a global economy. And that's not even to mention all the downstream things like just payments being faster and cheaper and prediction markets and all that, which we can get into.

40:34But economic freedom is a necessary condition for civilizational progress. And we can actually bend the curve of economic freedom globally with crypto technology and mobile apps. You mentioned people working so hard and all their life and everything can be taken away so quickly. I would argue that even, I mean, we're here in the US, but in developed countries,

41:01people work very hard. Things are not necessarily taken that quickly, but it's taken slowly. And crypto is an answer to that. Yeah. It can happen slowly too. You're right. The insidious part about inflation, for instance, is that it actually harms the poorest people in society. People don't realize that. I mean, maybe you understand this well, but just to say it, if you're wealthy and you live in Turkey or Nigeria or Argentina, you can put your money into something that's inflation resistant, right? Like real estate or gold or Bitcoin. Maybe you can even have a US brokerage account to buy S &P 500 or something.

41:45But poor people can't get access to those things. They can't buy real estate. They're just holding cash. And so it's literally, it's a regressive tax. Normally we have like a progressive tax system where wealthy people pay more. This is the opposite of that. It's a regressive tax system. It taxes, it steals wealth from the poorest people in society to fund government programs that, you know, typically are not really voted on in a democracy. It's like, it's like someone has their finger on the dials that they can just print more of their own money. It steals wealth from the poorest people in society.

42:16And then you get all this kind of bad, bad behavior in governments. So it's a really, really insidious thing. And actually democracies around the world are struggling to figure out how to avoid deficit spending and inflation, the incentives are not aligned in many of these places to have a balanced budget, right? Which I think is a fascinating topic. And one of the big things crypto and Bitcoin especially is doing is it's shifting the power from governments to individual people. And it's a check and balance on deficit spending. Because if these fiat currencies continue to inflate, people are just going to flee to Bitcoin in times of uncertainty.

42:53and that is a great thing for individual rights and democratization of financial services. Absolutely. It's a competition on the monopoly of money that governments and central banks have that create a big problem, not only rich people get richer because they have the assets, but your asset price inflation, which is completely fucked up because the poor people cannot buy the asset and will never be able to. But also you have the actual inflation. if you just look at the COVID money printing in the US and you come four or five years later and look at the prices of things, just coffee, food, basically people who don't have assets just get double screwed.

43:36Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Inflation is a funny word because people mean different things when they say it. On the one hand, it just means the prices of things going up. On the other hand, it means literally increasing the money supply, like just printing more money out of nothing, which also makes prices go up, But prices can go up for other reasons too, like supply and demand or foreign trade issues or whatever. But yeah, I think of it, when I hear inflation, I think the primary cause of inflation is just people printing more money, right? The government printing more money. There are other things that can affect prices, but if you just stop printing more money, a lot of those other effects are just smaller in my view.

44:16You have the definition for true cryptology? There are a few big orgies from the Bitcoin world and the Silicon Valley that have been very vocal more recently about privacy. What's the role of privacy and of projects like Zcash, for example, in creating more economic freedom in the world? Yeah, I think privacy is incredibly important, especially in our financial lives. That's some of the most sensitive data, right? right up there with maybe, I don't know, your health information or something like that. It's actually kind of amazing and surprising to me that crypto has gotten as big as it has, where people say it's pseudonymous, right?

44:59It's like all the transactions, including the amount and the timestamp and everything is happening on a public ledger. Now, your name is not attached to it, but the addresses are all public. So if you go do KYC somewhere or someone de-anonymizes is one of those things, they can often de-anonymize the next transactions down the chain, right? So in a way, it's actually kind of surprising how much growth crypto has gotten, even with that sort of default open nature. Now, some of the projects that came out early, like Zcash or Monero or something that were very privacy focused, like Monero in particular, I think it attracted, because it was like 100 % private, the early adopters were people who were doing nefarious things.

45:41So it created this kind of perception issue about like, well, isn't this just majority bad actors, right? Or illicit activity. Now, I don't know if that's true or not in those cases, but sometimes perception is reality, right? From like, I don't know, legislators or law enforcement or whatever. And so my view on this is that privacy is very important. We need to get it in crypto. And the way I think it's going to happen is you're going to start with these chains that are default open, like Ethereum or like some of the layer twos like Base or Solana and all these. And there's going to be an optional transaction type that is private.

46:18That way, you can say, hey, look, 99 % of the chain is legitimate activity. There's now legitimate people also using private transactions. And it might cost a little bit more gas fees, but it's actually very similar to when the internet started. It was all HTTP. And then it moved to HTTPS. And I don't know if you remember back in the early days, of the internet, people would say, oh, HTTPS is slower. The protocol is slower. But eventually, people just moved. Almost the entire internet runs on HTTPS now. It got faster over time. The computers got faster. The cryptography got faster, whatever. Browsers got better.

46:55And so I think that's what's going to happen. We actually acquired this company called Ironfish to go work on private transactions for base earlier this year in 2025. And so that team is really talented. They've been making good progress. And yeah, our goal is essentially to get like a private transaction type in base where anybody can pay it. It's probably going to be a slightly higher gas fee, but then it's a private transaction. And we'll see where more and more of that activity happens. You're the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. What is Coinbase? If you had to explain it to my mom. I have to say my mom, because often they tell me, the guests are like, yeah, my mom is an engineer.

47:36So she can understand. My mom is not an engineer. She's retired now. She was an HR manager in a Swiss cosmetic brand. She's not technical. Yeah. Well, I think what I would say to anybody getting into crypto for the first time, I'd say Cremebase is the easiest way to buy, store and use crypto, right? Now underneath, there's a lot of details behind that, right? we were a custodian or exchange. We increasingly do payments. We can help you get a loan. We can help you use a credit card and suspend crypto. I think people over time are increasingly thinking about, can I use Coinbase as a replacement for my bank?

48:19It's just better financial services. And even people who, they don't even necessarily care too much about crypto, the technology. They're just trying to send money to their family somewhere in the world without crazy high fees, right? Or, or get a loan to start a business or raise money for something. Right. So there, I think increasingly there's going to be people who just, just in the same way that like you and I, maybe we're not like electrical engineers who understand everything about electrons and like electricity, but we can use a light switch. Right. Or a lot of people don't understand how the internet protocols work like HTTP, but they can share a photo with their friend on WhatsApp.

48:57right? So that's how we have gotten, that's what we need to do and what we are doing to make crypto more usable over time is just, it's the best way to get access to financial services. It doesn't matter to most people. If we're going to have like a billion or more people using crypto, most of them won't understand or care about the technology for technology's sake. They just want better financial services. You started Coinbase in 2012 when Bitcoin was worth $6. 13 years later, Coinbase is worth$100 billion. It's listed on a NASDAQ. You did it the hard way. There's other examples in the industry that took some shortcuts that were also very successful.

49:38What does it take to build the biggest section in the world by following the compliance route and taking no shortcuts? Yeah. Well, it's definitely a longer-term endeavor. Going and talking to regulators in any sort of new field, it takes a lot of work, right? Usually regulators and legislators, they don't move very quickly, right? But they do eventually act. So in entrepreneurship, it's always tricky. You need to get started with something to get a product out there, get feedback from the market. But you also need to demonstrate good faith effort that you're trying to follow the rules, even if the rules are not entirely clear.

50:16So we'd often would ask ourselves this question of like, okay, the law is unclear on this point, but what can we do to show good faith effort to, even if it's not required to do something that we think might be required in the future, or at least a reasonable person would look at it and say, in the absence of clarity, they did something reasonable. So that's the kind of, even just simple things like being based in the U S you know, not trying to go to some haven offshore, or like I would just, I'd put a suit and like go talk to these people early on. And sometimes they had no idea what we were doing.

50:48And they would ask me questions like, isn't this all just some video game, you know, or some banks would, I would try to, we were trying to get banks early on and they would, some of them would say, well, we do not work with crypto companies. Like we would never work with a crypto company. You know, so there's some people they're just stuck in, their mind is not open to these ideas. And so you have to kind of meet them where they are, do your best to create a sense of legitimacy. And what I often found was like, if people had just looked at us on the internet and they didn't know who we were, they were highly skeptical.

51:17This early on, I'm talking like 2013, 14, 15. And, but once they met us in person, they suddenly trusted us more. Right. And I think they could get a sense of hopefully me and other people, Fred and other people on the team that like, okay, these guys are, maybe they're earnest and they're young and they're a little naive or something, but they're not bad people. They're trying to do something good in the world. And so there's no substitute for that face-to-face interaction of just get in the room, try to be legitimate, try to be helpful, be on time, have good manners, maybe wear a suit when it's called for.

51:52And then, you know, eventually we had to really build a policy muscle as the company got bigger because we encountered other forces in government that were actually anti-crypto. We can talk about that too. I wanted to ask because you said one of the big assumptions there was we're doing things that the law is not clear. We're doing things that we think a reasonable person on the other side will think, oh, these guys are not bad or they thought about this. They've been thoughtful. but this makes the assumption that the other people are reasonable yeah it turned out not all of them were reasonable yeah so it's funny you know there's some quote about that where first they ignore you then they laugh at you and then they think it's a threat and then they accept you and they you know so we said we as crypto went through these cycles of ups and downs initially they were kind of laughing at us or ignore or just ignoring us entirely they're like this is some toy, we don't have to pay attention.

52:48Suddenly it flipped in a few of their minds where it went from this is a toy, we can ignore it, to this is a threat to the entire financial system in our way of life. For some people, it really got under their skin. And two of those people that we realized over the last, this is like maybe two or three years ago, were Elizabeth Warren, who she's a senator in the United States, who in my view believes that the government should run all financial services. And she had a lot of influence in regulating banks and trying to pressure them through extrajudicial means, I would add, to debank certain industries that she didn't agree with politically, even though she couldn't get those rules passed through Congress and a democracy.

53:29She found a backdoor to kind of pressure them by having appointed certain regulators. And she viewed crypto as a threat to that. This is my own view, at least, of her motive. And so she helped appoint an SEC chair, Gary Gensler. And from what I was told, kind of encouraged him, hey, be very aggressive and try to kill this crypto thing. And maybe I'll consider you for treasury secretary in the next term. That was what I was told at least. So we suddenly started getting very bizarre behavior from the SEC, which is a federal agency in the US, where we would kind of go meet with them and put on our suit.

54:10And we met with them maybe like 30 times and we would ask them these, hey, we'd love clarity about the rules because our lawyers are looking at it and we don't think it's clear the way the law is currently written. You're the regulator. Can you just put out some clear rules and we'd be happy to follow it? Maybe everybody follows level playing field. It's great. And we'd get these very strange responses back like, we're not going to tell you that. Talk to your lawyer. And I realized at some point in these meetings that his enforcement team was just taking notes of everything we were saying and we'd go in and meet with them.

54:41And then we got essentially an enforcement letter like the next couple of days indicating that they wanted to sue us. And so there was no good faith effort to actually just publish the rules. I realized that they just viewed this whole industry as something they wanted to get rid of unlawfully. And I realized at a certain point that if we don't push back on this, the whole industry, at least in the US could just be neutered or killed. right? And we weren't doing anything wrong. I felt a responsibility to defend our customers' rights. There's something like 50 million Americans had used crypto at this time, roughly.

55:16And politically, it was something the American people wanted. But this small group of activists within the government were trying to unlawfully kill it. And I realized that we as an industry had to accumulate political power. We had to get organized. We had to get some of those 50 million people to actually raise their hand and say, we want to elect pro-crypto candidates and we want to vote out of office anti-crypto candidates. And so that's what Coinbase really tried to help do. I mean, we funded this 501c3 called standwithcrypto.org. We got about 2 million people to raise their hand and say they want to elect pro-crypto candidates.

55:48We put up scorecards for every member of Congress going into the election of like A through F. We looked at all their public comments, all their voting record on crypto. And what we did was we made it a political reality that it was politically risky now to be anti-crypto because that's what the American people wanted, which is democracy working, by the way. We also donated money to Fairshake, which is a super PAC. And there's various things that we did, put out a whole bunch of policy papers. We actually sued the SEC as well because they violated certain parts of the Administrative Procedures Act.

56:22I can get into that if you want. But long story short, I feel very proud of that And actually when I go talk to our customers, they often, this is the biggest thing they thank me for it. I say, thank you for standing up to these people and defending our rights. And it turned out to be like a huge brand building moment for Coinbase. So that was an interesting experience. The crazy thing is you're building a business. It's already freaking hard. Then there's these volatile markets, these crazy bear markets. It's very hard. and then on the top of that you need to do all this shit

56:57how do you I mean there's this meme never kill yourself right you've been doing this for 13 years multiple bear market multiple bull markets crypto prices going down 90 % plus lots of people hired fired the US political system against you the banks against you your co-founder leaving an IPO and another drawdown in the stock price of more or less 90%. And then all these problems to solve on the top, just to make the comp... I mean, it's not even your core business, right? How do you last so long as a founder without killing yourself?

57:42Well... I don't ever give up. uh, Elon said that once in an interview, that was a great, great line. Um, I think, I think it's actually really important in entrepreneurship to just have unreasonable amounts of determination, right? And I'm, I don't think I'm always like the smartest guy in the room. Like, I don't think I'm like the most, have the best brilliant ideas. I'm not like the best fundraiser ever, but I do have pretty extraordinary levels of determination. And I kind of don't care how many times something doesn't work. I'm going to get to that goal if I want to do it. And I'm very flexible on how to get there.

58:27I'm stubborn on the goal and I'm very flexible on how to get there. So if I come up against a brick wall, I'm going to find a way to jump over it. I'm going to dig a tunnel under it. I'm going to drill through it. I'm going to build an airplane or whatever to fly around it. So like, there's always a creative way if you're persistent and determined enough. And I actually think that's why determination is probably this. If you had to pick one quality in entrepreneurship, that is the most important one. The other, there's lots of other ones that help, but being unreasonably determined is a very important part of that.

59:01And some, some mornings I wake up and I have to get myself into that mindset. It doesn't come naturally, right? There's some mornings I've woken up and I've like, everything sucks. It's not working. why am I even doing this? I just want to go back to sleep. What do you do when you feel like that? Or what did you do when you felt like that? Yeah. Well, okay, so this might sound funny, but one thing I would do is type into my phone David Goggins into YouTube.

59:34And he, I mean, he's just one of many people, but he has some great videos about, he's just like, if you have a bad attitude, like, you know, stop being a little B-I-T-C-H or whatever and just get going. And if you need motivation in the morning, like it's a great way to go. The other thing I would say I did was that, I mean, anybody will get burned out if you just, if you're just working all the time. Right. So, I mean, there's some, I don't know, super inhuman people out there, but for me, there were times where I was just overdoing it. I was like working too much without a break and I, you, anybody will get burned out and depressed.

1:00:07So the solution is like, Sounds simple, but it's hard to do in practice, which is go exercise, go get outdoors in nature, go hang out with friends and family and go laugh and have some wine at dinner with your friends or whatever. And you know what? In 48 hours, you're probably going to feel better and you can come back to work. It's not the end of the world. But I saw a lot of entrepreneurs actually that started companies around the same time I did. And many of them burned out. Like they didn't have the longevity. Some of them had very unhealthy things that happened too. Like they gained a bunch of weight.

1:00:47They lost a bunch of weight. There's times where the stress will actually manifest in very, you know, you'll get like crazy back pain or like all kinds of things will show up. And so you have to make it sustainable. It can't just, for maybe like a year or two, you can like just all out sprint and burn the candle at both ends. But if you, you have to turn it into like a sustainable pace at a certain point and realize that this is not some temporary like situation I'm in. This is my life now. Like I want to be doing this for my whole life and building things. And so you have to invest time with friends and family, get enough exercise, get enough sleep, find time to, you know, meditate, read a little bit in the evening, do sauna, like whatever it is you want to do that have a minute to like disconnect from all of it like get all the anger and stuff out of your ruminations out of your head so you can have a good night's sleep these are easy to say and hard to do so i have gotten a lot more rigorous over time about the basics right which would be like sleep exercise and nutrition i think that helps but it's there's still mornings where i wake up and i have i have a bad attitude and i gotta you know listen and David Gargans.

1:01:59Told me a little bitch.

1:02:04What's one really bad moment? It was probably earlier in your founder journey where, because there's this kind of founder denial, right? You're just doing this thing, this thing, this thing, and you might start to have like some depression or anxiety or back pain or whatever. You think, it's okay, tomorrow is going to go away, right? I just continue. What's one moment where like you kind of, I don't want to say almost broke down, but realized, holy shit it's not gonna go away if I don't do something about it well there's two stories that are coming to mind I mean one is that actually I remember at one point I was having like a lot of back pain and I thought initially maybe I was like I needed a new mattress or something like I needed a I think I was having some like ergonomic issue and I was trying I actually bought like a new mattress.

1:02:54I was trying all these things, but nothing I could do that made it go away. And then at that time, I think I had like 12 or 15 direct reports because like one of the leaders had left and I was managing the whole team. And I shifted from having like 12 or 15 reports to going down to like four or five. And suddenly all my back pain went away. And I realized, oh, okay, this is, it's psychological. And the stress that that was causing me was like showing up in these in these weird ways and so that stress and that pain or that whatever is manifesting it's there to tell you something that needs to change so it has a lot of wisdom i guess you don't want to just like take a bunch of painkillers and ignore it it's it's there telling you trying to tell you something valuable so for me it was like i mean to be honest i'd say like every every couple years at coinbase i remember feeling like burned out like building companies is hard it.

1:03:46And every couple of years, I'd start to feel kind of burned out and I'd realize, okay, something has to change. Usually it's like, you need to delegate something major and stop doing it. You need to totally change the way you're doing something. There were certain things that held onto early on that I was like, well, the CEO has to do this. For example? Cool. Like an example was running the leadership meeting every Monday. I felt like, okay, well, I have to put the agenda together and lead this meeting and be in charge and tell people. And at some point I realized, actually, my chief of staff can do that and be the facilitator of that meeting.

1:04:30What I want to do is really like, or the president or the COO or someone else can do that. I really want to participate in that meeting. I want to be sitting there very thoughtfully, hearing all the information about this tough decision we have to make. And it's fine. I'll render a decision at the end of the meeting or at the end of the day, think on it a little bit. But I don't need to be the one, quote unquote, facilitating or running that meeting. That was not my place. That's the place I feel like I was adding the most value. And that was just an example. Now I feel actually more comfortable running those meetings when I want to.

1:05:03But at time it was like very it was stressing me out so it's an example i talked to jesse pollack as i said before the creator of bays on this podcast a year ago yeah and he told me about the first year of bays yeah and how he was so burned out that he had to go to sleep after 30 minutes meeting he had to go to sleep like for four hours during the day and then this happened multiple times yeah but he was he was not sure if mentally or physically he could basically make it he was saying like Brian is waiting I think it was every week or every two weeks we're basically waiting for like some news that was going on and he was like shit I don't have anything to tell him and so

1:05:45I mean he actually said that his partner was very helpful in that moment to like help him keep going many people are entrepreneurs who read your story online or watch this podcast probably dream of being you what do they not know or understand about what it truly means to be you?

1:06:08Well, I think I'm pretty transparent. I hope people can get a sense of who I am. It's not any big secret, but I guess the big thing that I would push my younger self or maybe other people to consider is that many people are doing something, but it's not their ultimate idea or vision. They are afraid to jump into the unknown and try something that crazy or that ambitious. A lot of entrepreneurs come to me and they tell me in a quiet moment, they'll say, well, yeah, someday I think it'd be really cool to do X and Y, but right now I'm working on X. And sometimes I wonder, why aren't you just doing the big thing, the ambitious thing?

1:06:51And they have a good reason. They're like, well, I need to make a little bit of money first, or I need to build my reputation first. But what a lot of people don't realize is they should actually just go for more ambitious ideas. And this is something I've had to learn from myself too over time was that it's about like limiting beliefs and confidence, right? Like early on, I had tried starting like a couple of companies like this tutoring company. I remember I just wanted to get to like a couple hundred thousand dollars of revenue to be able to pay myself and own a small business. Like that was my goal.

1:07:27And I remember I was reading like a book or something one day and I was like, what do I really want? And I was like, well, what if I could start a billion-dollar tech company? That would be crazy. And I had no business dreaming something that big. I had never even started a company worth$1 million, much less a billion dollars. But I would kind of write that goal down almost every day for a number of years and think about what would that be like? What would I have to do? And it caused me to take certain actions, right? I moved to San Francisco Bay Area, and then I started applying to Y Combinator and chingering to these prototypes.

1:08:02And something like seven years after I wrote that goal, Coinbase had over a billion dollar valuation. And then I started thinking, okay, what's the next goal? I got to think bigger. Maybe someday we can have a billion people using our apps to access this open financial system. So I started to think, I actually think it's important for people to try more ambitious ideas. It's actually a little bit easier to go after ambitious ideas because it attracts other really smart people to you who want to work on something important that matters. And it has to be something where if it works, it really matters in the world.

1:08:43It has a positive downstream impact. It's something you can be proud of for your whole life. I think people are often thinking too short term as well. They're like, I don't know, I'll do this for two years or three years and I can get the product to the market and maybe I'll make some money. But I mean, tackle things that are more ambitious that you would be willing to work on for a decade, two decades, three decades, if it really started to show progress, right? Because anything really ambitious worth doing is probably going to take at least a decade. And I think, anyway, that's a lesson I've taken away.

1:09:14And as I've gotten older, I've tried to think about big goals like that. And you have a limited amount of time here. Many people don't actually do the thing that they really wanted until their deathbed you know like steve jobs kind of famously like worked on the iphone he knew he knew he was dying right or hal finney right if you believe he was involved in bitcoin which he may or may not have been he was on his deathbed when he finally did his best work and so you kind of have to almost create this mindset of like if i only had six months left to live like what would i do why don't you do it now and uh that's a that's a hard thing to do most people never even consider it.

1:09:50I was talking with Avishal from Electric Capital the other day, and he said, the problem today is exactly that. He said, there's enough technology, there's enough talent, people are smart enough, but they don't realize it. The biggest thing that is missing is people with self-belief who go after these big things. People are scared. Yeah. And for what it's worth, I actually think you can change your own beliefs, right? It's actually healthy to have semi-irrational beliefs in some ways, right? There's that great quote about whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right. It might be totally silly or irrational to believe that you can do something.

1:10:37Maybe you can make fusion energy work. Maybe you can make brain-machine interfaces work. Maybe you can cure aging. Maybe you can create a new country in the world that has more economic freedom, right? Maybe you can start whatever it is you want to do.

1:10:56Self-talk is important, right? Like if you're telling yourself every day, like, oh, you're not smart enough, you're too slow, like you're not good, you don't have enough energy, you're too old, like whatever your limiting belief is, you're going to eventually believe it. So I often will try to do that. I mean, I try to be very conscious about my own self-talk. I talk to myself sometimes where I write stuff down in my journal or whatever. I'm like, yeah, you can do this. You have lots of energy. You have lots of time. You have lots of whatever resources. You can actually decide to be a happier person.

1:11:26I think Abe Lincoln or someone said that. It was like people are roughly as happy as they decide to be. And so you can choose what you want to focus on. Do you want to choose to focus on the things that, like resources that you have, appreciations that you have? Or do you want to choose to focus on the negative? and left to our own devices, our brains will default to the negative or 50-50. And so you have to kind of consciously choose and make like a habit out of focusing on the more positive parts. What's something that you still believe you can't do or you're afraid of?

1:12:02Well, I think given enough time, which, you know, we all have finite time on the planet, It's probably why I co-founded and invested in a longevity company. But given enough time, I think I maybe could help do anything. I don't know. But I'll tell you something I am afraid of is I still am afraid of hurting people. I'm conflict avoidant. This is something I've been trying to get over from my childhood, or I don't know where it comes from. But like whenever I have to deliver bad news to somebody or, you know, it creates a lot of anxiety in me. Like I ruminate on it. It causes like, you know, I can feel it.

1:12:44And that's, you know, there's a positive aspect of it too. You don't just want to be like unintentionally hurting people or something like that. Right. But I also think that if it's the right thing to do, I don't want it to just destroy my week or something. Usually, it doesn't do anything that bad. But even I will feel the fear about it, and I'll do it anyway. So it hasn't held me back tremendously. But I wish I just didn't feel that fear. That would be something I'm working on. You think you can do almost anything? there's also things that you were wrong about but that ended up or turned out to be I mean you were wrong but turned out to be amazing successes for Coinbase can you give me an example yeah well I think it's there are lots of examples like that where the first time we tried something it didn't work and so I was wrong and then I'm okay with that it just means you try it again and you see if that works and if that doesn't work you try it again and you do that a hundred times, eventually you get something to go through.

1:13:51So there's lots of small examples like that. Like the first time we tried expanding into Japan, it didn't work, we had to shut it down. Or the first time we tried having an OKR system, objectives and key results in the company, it didn't work very well. We had to try like three or four iterations. A lot of small examples. I'll give you maybe a bigger one.

1:14:11I initially thought as an entrepreneur that you just follow the rules and then you don't really have to engage with the government, right? This kind of going back to the policy conversation we had earlier. And I actually really didn't like the idea of going to spend a lot of time with politicians or in DC. And I was like, oh man, I really, I mean, I'll do it if I need to, but like, I really want to work on the product and the engineering and like, can't we just follow the rules and then we don't have to engage with the government? And I realized at a certain point that that was quite naive for the reasons we talked about, because even if you're not interested in the government, the government's interested in you.

1:14:45And there might even be people who try to weaponize the lack of clarity in the rules to attack you. And so I had to learn to love policy work, for lack of a better word. And I think now we're in a much healthier place on that. We've built up a lot of skillset. And it's actually allowed me to turn my time and attention back to innovating in product. And we need to make sure we're building on chain and bringing all these assets. We're doing the everything exchange now, all this cool stuff. But that was an example where I was pretty hesitant reluctant to really embrace that idea for a while and i think it hurt us you said before that you worked at airbnb yeah i want to quote the other brian who you know very well from airbnb as i became a ceo i started leading from the front at the top of the mountain but then the higher you get to the peak the fewer people there are with you no one ever told me how lonely you would get and I wasn't prepared for that.

1:15:46On the day of our IPO we reached a hundred billion dollar validation. I remember after going public I was like oh my god. There is this like amazing exaltation. It was amazing. Like I'd gone to the mountain and then I woke up the next day and my life was exactly the same. I'm alone, I wake up, I put on my sweatpants, I go onto my iMac and I have like 10 to 12 hours of Zoom meetings and I just don't really have much of my life outside of work. My work was my life. These are the words from Branceski, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Coinbase has a pretty similar story to Airbnb with an IPO near$100 billion.

1:16:31How did you feel during the IPO day and the day after the IPO day?

1:16:40yeah well there's actually a great documentary called coin uh which filmed that day and so people can go watch it if they want to and it shows me on that day it was during covid which i think maybe airbnb was during covid too which is why he's talking about the zoom and the sweat pants and all that um but yeah we we were not ringing the bell at the nasdaq uh we were i was just in my own home, you know, virtually engaging with media and things. And yeah, it was, it was kind of like a surreal moment where, you know, I look back on it now as kind of like a milestone in my life. And it was a much bigger deal has actually looking backward than at the time.

1:17:16It just felt like another fundraise. And I actually didn't feel very much that day. You know, I was, you're just, you're tired, you're busy, you're, you're doing a million things. I didn't really stopped to think about it that much. But what really started to make it resonate for me more emotionally was like the hundreds or maybe like I think over a thousand people like became millionaires on that day, like employees and investors. And I got so many messages from people telling me about how it had changed their life, like that I had created this and they allowed their family to buy a home and they were first generation this and that.

1:17:54And so it actually had a major like emotional impact over me looking back on it over time and it's something I'll never forget um but yeah at the time it was almost surreal like I didn't feel that much and um I think if I were to zoom out on what Brian Chesky is talking about there I mean he's right it can be lonely as you go as the company grows and you know early on at Coinbase we were like a small team and I think I was just like one of the people and we were all like friends and there was something that happened maybe when we were like a couple hundred people or beyond where I remember I showed up to a happy hour one time and everyone kind of got quiet.

1:18:31They're like, oh, like, and it was like, oh my God, like the CEO's here. Um, and I was, I was, that was the first time I realized, oh, like it's weird. It's, it's, it's like, it's weird when I, I'm kind of like the buzzkill when I show up to the party. Um, so one thing that I did that might be helpful to other people, cause I was working a lot and just growing the company and, you know, you, you can have some kind of a really good relationship. A lot of, a lot of employees and people to work with you. They're actually great relationships, but they are fundamentally different because if you're their boss, right?

1:19:03So one thing I did was I actually just, I decided I need to have like a stronger friend group of other founders. And I reached out to maybe like 10 founders who, these are just people who, when I interacted with them, I was like, oh, it's interesting. I learned something. It raises my energy to be around them. And maybe like seven of them showed up or something out of the 10. And I just decided, I was like, hey, we should just like meet once a month and go to dinner. Maybe once a year, we should like do a trip or something. And it became this friend group that actually has been adding, has added a lot of value to my life.

1:19:39I think hopefully to theirs and everyone's, we talk about work, we talk about personal stuff. And so it's been like a great friend group, you know, I think that's useful for people to do some some some people might call this like a mastermind group or something i don't know but you can learn from each other about building companies but a lot of it's like more personal stuff than just friendships so i was always somebody who i don't know i didn't like naturally keep in touch with people or build friends because you know i'm always just so busy with stuff unless i scheduled it like okay every month we're gonna hang out um and once a year we're gonna go on a trip unless i scheduled it it just didn't happen organically and so that was a way for me to make sure and then of course like you know build your own family so friendships family and then work and i think that and that's a good community you mentioned before the ipo day where you were basically locked in and not really thinking about what's going on right yeah are you able or do we even care today about taking some time sometimes some time to look back and say oh wow, we did this, we achieved this, or is it something you don't do?

1:20:47I don't like to look backwards as much. Most of the time I'm thinking about the future and then the present, I need to get something done. Then I go back to the future because I'm excited about the future. Once in a while, I think back on the past and I allow myself to feel appreciation for those moments because they're amazing. But I don't like to dwell on the past too much because I feel like it might hurt my motivation a little bit, right? It's like there are people when they get older in life who I think they mostly just want to go around and collect awards and be mentors and go on boards and teach the next generation.

1:21:23That can all be very fulfilling as well. And I don't fault anybody who wants to do that. For me, I still feel like I I feel like I have a lot left to do, so I want to keep building. And so I'm trying to stay hungry, stay foolish, as Steve Jobs might say, and keep trying things that are a little crazy, a little more ambitious, outside my comfort zone. So that's been fun for me to help get some other companies off the ground as well in ambitious areas and try to stay sharp on the frontier. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Yeah. When is the job done for Brian? Never. I mean, I hope I get to do this building companies for a long time, my whole life.

1:22:09It's not like some end goal I have in mind, right? If I was just trying to make enough money to retire, I could have done that a long time ago. So I think that this is something that people don't really actually understand sometimes about entrepreneurs. They're not doing it for just personal enrichment, right? It is nice to accumulate capital. It allows you to allocate money to other things you care about. Maybe you could help this cause or start this company. Capital is useful to go allocate it and get things done in the world. But at a certain point, it's less about personal consumption. You can still have a nice house or whatever.

1:22:44But it's not mostly about personal consumption anymore. So I think I will feel happiest if I'm trying to build something even till the day I die, hopefully. Yeah, absolutely. regarding personal consumption. I was with Paolo from Tether a couple of weeks ago in the studio and had a bunch of my team in there and he came with his arm shoes and his Tether t-shirt and a Garmin watch. And some of the team were like, and basically sleeps five hours a night, wakes up every hour to check notification because of Bitfinex. And that's his life. And they were saying, okay, What you said before, people don't really understand, right?

1:23:29You're saying, I can't believe this guy is just with his tether t-shirt and with his Garmin watch and with his own shoes there and he's working so much when he has all this money. They don't get it. They don't get it. Totally. You mentioned before that relationships is an important part. I read this. I don't own a car or a wash or any of that stuff either. But I think it is useful to have like a nice house and maybe just to get work done, it's useful to have like plane travel that can be very efficient and maybe a driver, things like that. But for like personal consumption, I'm not too big on it.

1:24:15So you don't own a car? No car, no watch, a house? Yeah. You do? Yeah. To live in? Yeah. I mean, I've heard that a lot, actually. It makes so much sense. Why would you? It's a Telegram founder, Pavel, who just says, I have a few hundred million dollars in cash and in Bitcoin, and I don't know anything because I want to focus on what I'm doing, and I don't want to have my brain thinking about other things or other investments. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do like the minimalist lifestyle of that. It's funny. I remember I was talking with somebody at one point, and they were like, well, you need an insurance policy for like the things in your home.

1:24:58And let's like list all the valuable things. And I was like, the most expensive thing I could think of was my laptop, which was like, you know, I just keep my laptop in my backpack. And they're like, really? Like that's, I was like, yeah, I have some clothes, like some like black t-shirts and my backpack with a laptop, but I don't know, you know, like there's a TV on the wall, I guess, like someone could take that i don't know you have the same t-shirt 10 times 20 times yeah i pretty much wear the same thing every day at least while i'm working it's just similar um and it makes it easy to pack and uh you know once in a while on the weekend i'll wear i'll put on a suit when i go to dc or something i'm not like religious about it i don't mind wearing other things if it's fun but like just for practicality i like doing the daily uniform yeah

1:25:49I read this really cool tweet the other day about being a male founder and how it's hard to find a girlfriend. The hardest part about being a male founder in my experience is finding a girlfriend or partner that understands the short-term gains that we're foregoing and the long-term optimization game that we're playing. Most women expect to have most dates paid for, their vacation covered, and their partner to have the time and the most important thing, emotional bandwidth to support them. Somebody they see as a reliable provider is completely understandable. But as founders, every dollar saved is additional runway for the company.

1:26:28We budget down to the same because our life's work depends on it. Every 100-hour work week slightly increases the odds of success. At this stage of life, we're both cash poor and time poor. and brain bandwidth poor, which for the relationship is probably the most important thing. Betting everything on the hope that one day it all works out, that one day we'll be sitting on generational wealth, the kind most men only dream about. I read these two quotes from Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir. The first one is about emotional bandwidth and social life. He's saying, I never met someone successful who had a great social life in their 20s.

1:27:07The second one is about having a girlfriend. I never had a girlfriend. Before Pernantera, I was too poor. Now I'm too rich.

1:27:17You got married in 2024 in your early 40s. What's the answer or one answer to being a founder trying to change the world and still managing to find the right partner and build a relationship, which is almost a full-time job too? Yeah, well, big question. um you know i certainly don't claim to have all the answers here but i can just tell you what's worked for me i mean i think it's important to work hard and have like a mission that you're on and do something that makes you fulfilled in the in your work but also make time for your personal life right and whether it's a man or woman or anybody it's just you know you want to have a partner that supports you in that that can also push you to be better where you need to or maybe compliments you on things that you're not as good at.

1:28:07And that's what we're all looking for. So I, yeah, I think like anything, you have to invest in it if you want, invest time in it, if you want it to grow. And so that's true of work. It's true of your family. I hope, and I want to be somebody who can have a great business life and personal life. And that's my goal. And I'm going to, we won't, you know, check in with me in 50 years. We'll see how I did. Is there a moment in your life, because I've been talking to a bunch of founders, obviously, and there's this common thing, which is the emotional bandwidth, right? I just don't have the bandwidth.

1:28:43I can just focus on this business, and there's a trillion problems at the same time, there's employees to pay, and then there's clients not paying on time, and all this stuff, right? Cash flow problems. And so it's kind of easy to just think, I'm just going to postpone this relationship thing, because my life is so hard already. and I cannot really be mentally present for someone else. Is there a moment in your life where you said, you actually forced yourself to say, now I really need to be more serious on this other thing? Because if I'm, because I could just, because life flies, right? Time flies, especially when you work so hard, and you could just end up being 50, 60, and single, and multi-billionaire, but alone.

1:29:31Yeah, I mean, I'd say in the early days of Coinbase, especially I was just working 14 hour days sometimes seven days a week not always but it would have been harder I think for me to have like a more serious relationship at that time so it did take Coinbase to get to a certain level of maturity where I felt like I could have some bandwidth to start to think about these other things and yeah just like anybody I think it was a partly a function of age partly a function of my own maturity like all kinds of things had to come together. And I do know some people that are billionaires and they are kind of lonely and they're older.

1:30:10And so, you know, but it's a choice, right? They can choose at any age to find a partner and invest time in it. People have all kinds of things going on where they don't want to do that or, you know, it's not my place to judge. But yeah, for me, I think I feel more steady in a long-term committed relationship. And it's incredibly additive to my life. And so it helps me focus on work even more. You tweeted, every entrepreneur I know thinks the fundraising process is broken. Why capital formation should be on chain. It's more efficient. The process is fairer for both sides, much more transparency.

1:30:52Can you explain? Yeah. Well, lots of things are coming on chain, right? Every asset class. And that's partly what Coinbase is up to now. We're trying to make it easier for people to trade, not just every crypto asset, but stocks and prediction markets and commodities and energy. And so it's just a natural evolution of this where capital formation or fundraising is going to come more and more on chain. We saw early versions of this with like the ICO craze, right? Now we're getting a little more regulatory clarity. And like everything that Coinbase does, we try to make crypto trusted and easy to use.

1:31:24We can probably build a simple product in this space that helps anybody come and do that, right? And we have about half a trillion dollars of crypto stored on the platform now from investors, retail and institutional. They want to invest in these things. So we have a great network effect we can put in front of them, these opportunities. So we recently acquired a company called Echo, which is doing great in terms of on-chain capital formation or fundraising. We also acquired a company called Liquify that does on-chain capital management or cap table management, I should say. And so we're thinking about how to best integrate these over time.

1:32:00And in my perfect world, there's a button in the app for any company and entrepreneur who wants to come in and say, help me form a company, maybe on chain, and then set me up with a Coinbase business account. and then I want to press the button to raise money, you know, and we can help them put out their pitch and their material and maybe deal with all any of the compliance or regulatory pieces, the securities piece, if that's part of it, and then market it to investors and boom, the money's in their account. They get back to work. In the traditional way that this happens in startups, it's super inefficient.

1:32:38Like every tech entrepreneur I know, when they go through a fundraise, it takes like three months out of the year. You have to be totally focused on it. You things, lots of no's. When it finally happens, you're chasing people for wires, like there's millions of dollars in legal fees. It's just like, it's all consuming and very inefficient. And so this could be done much more efficiently on chain with lower fees, faster, more global participants. That's what we're going to try to help people do. There's a big event early this year, the Trump launch. And I mean, on the top of onboarding, I think around a million people into crypto.

1:33:19It showed the power of on-chain, everything on-chain, and then you have an app where you can buy with Apple Pay, the coin. And then all these exchanges that are centralized offer Trump, but later on, and people already kind of miss a lot of the opportunity. Yeah. For me, it was actually the moment that I really, like my aha moment with on-chain, I was like, holy shit, now I understand. And I went, I would say like almost further and I just thought, is Coinbase or is Binance or is Bybit cooked? What's the role of centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, Bybit in a world where everything is moving on chain?

1:34:03Yeah, so we believed for a long time that it's moving more on chain, trading, payments, all wallets. So we've been investing in this heavily. I think not only is Coinbase not going to be disrupted by it, we're going to be a leader in this. So an example is in the main Coinbase app, we've now integrated decentralized exchanges, right? So we went from having maybe a couple of hundred assets trading on the centralized exchange to, I think it's now over 40 ,000 assets available through decentralized exchanges. It'll be millions soon. And from a customer point of view, it's seamless. They can trade the asset and whether it's on a centralized exchange or decentralized exchange, sometimes they don't even need to know.

1:34:44They can't see it if they want to, but from their point of view, it needs to quote unquote just work. So now when assets become available, they don't have to go through some longer listing process on Coinbase. They're available in the app. So that's an example. We also have a self-custodial wallet that is totally on chain, right? That's what used to be called Coinbase wallet. It's now the new base app. and that's still in beta, but we have about over a million people on the wait list and it'll be coming to general availability soon. But if you want to do it like an app that's entirely self-custodial, 100 % on-chain, that's what we're building with that.

1:35:21So we're all in and then moved on-chain. What's the end game for Coinbase? The end game is that we have a billion or more people accessing the open financial system through our app every day. they have access to sound money instant global payments for less than a send they can trade any asset they want it becomes like a bank replacement for them over time all their financial services and their brokerage replacement everything all financial services can happen through one app and we increase economic freedom in the world because anybody with a smartphone can get access to it are you happy i i think like i'm like reasonably happy i mean i i'm actually like i'd say i'm pretty fulfilled which to me is a different word i i feel like i'm on my path in the sense that i'm doing work that i think i'm good at i'm i feel like i'm contributing some value in the world i'm always trying to contribute more like it's that's always a good thing to check on, you know, how can I be doing more, creating more value, doing something useful?

1:36:31I feel, sometimes I feel, um, stressed and burned out. Um, but that's also means you're growing, right? Like if, if I didn't feel stressed at all, I think I would feel really bad about that. Right. So you want to have, you want to be like 20 % outside your comfort zone every week or day, not like 300 % outside your comfort zone where you might be too stressed out or anxious all the time. So I'd say I feel pretty fulfilled and I feel like I have my health. I have a good community around me, family, friends, and I have work that's meaningful to me. And I have access to resources to get things done, like an incredible abundance of that.

1:37:18And so I can get access to almost anybody who I want in the world to try to build things. I have capital to allocate to things. So I feel very fulfilled. What's the impact of being worth billions of dollars on fulfillment? Honestly. Yeah, honestly. I think having access to wealth or being a billionaire, it allows you to get more things done. So it doesn't really change your happiness much. I I think if you're earning less than$100 ,000, if you're not sure where your next meal is going to come from or you can't afford medicine or something, these can be actually very, I think, lowering of people's happiness scores.

1:38:02But I would say I'm roughly about as happy as I was when I was an early employee at Airbnb or whatever. I had a couple thousand dollars in my bank account or something. I'm about the same level of happiness. And that was a good life then, by the way. yeah, just, you know, living in the United States makes you, you know, I had a great tech job and whatever. I was already a winner, right? So in the global sense. So I felt about the same happiness then as I do now, but I'd say I feel much more fulfilled now because I feel like I am contributing more. I feel more comfortable with my own skin. I feel like I have more experience.

1:38:39I have more ability to get things done just by calling people and working together with people, reputation, and I have more resources to get things done too. I think some people,

1:38:51they're a little bit like turned off by this idea of like, oh, I'm not doing this for the money or something, right? But then I kind of ask them, well, what are your goals? What do you want? And they'll usually tell me like, well, I would really love to build a park in my neighborhood or I would really love to make clinical trials more efficient in biotech or whatever they tell you, right? I really love the arts or something. And I'm like, well, capital would help you do that. If you had access to more capital, you could create a park in your neighborhood very easily or endow some school or create an advocacy or organization for whatever you want.

1:39:28So I actually think that's the great thing about capitalism and why I'm excited about free markets is that if you do something of value to other people, they will give you money in a free exchanging society only if they want the thing you've, the thing you created has more value than the money, right? Like, and then if that will accumulate capital, that means you can then allocate more capital. And then if you don't do useful things, you will lose capital. And so it's this beautiful kind of self-correcting system, which it gives more capital to people that are making good decisions. And it takes capital away from people who are making bad decisions.

1:40:08And, you know, there are exceptions to this right sometimes someone might sell an addictive product right or like there's tragedy of the commons like there are exceptions to this i don't want to claim that capitalism is perfect but it's like the least bad system than any other of the other ones we've found because incentives are aligned to try to help your fellow people like not out of um just pure love but also self-interest and you can rely on everyone to at least care about that to some degree so yeah that's my answer so money is more like a kpi or benchmark on whether i'm doing things right in terms of value creation for the world than anything else yeah it's a way to kind of keep score in the game and it gives you resources to go get other things done what's one thing that you're holding on to but you know that you should let go off

1:41:01well i'd come back to what i said earlier about being afraid of hurting people or like maybe my the fear of being upsetting people and just being disliked and i you know i still will get there eventually but sometimes it takes me longer and it really causes me a lot of anxiety so i would love it if i could let go of that somehow have you done something to get better at that because it's probably affecting i would say probably firing yeah makes it terrible probably breaking up if you're in a relationship that are not good for you? Yeah. Those are good examples. Yeah. I mean, I would say the current way that I've tried to do it is just, if you do enough reps of anything, you'll get better at it, right?

1:41:45Like if you're afraid of public speaking or doing an interview like this, if you do it a hundred times or a thousand times, you're going to be less nervous about it. So there is a exposure therapy version of this where you just keep doing it. And I think as I've gotten older and done more difficult things like that. It is making me a little more resilient to it. So I think that's good. You know, there's probably some deep therapy work or something that might help, but I don't know. I've read books on it and things like that. I think I'm getting there over time. Have you ever considered or done therapy?

1:42:18Well, yeah. I mean, actually, early on at Coinbase, especially, like I had never managed anybody. And I remember talking to our board and saying, you know, maybe I should get an executive coach or something. And what they explained to me at that time, Fred Wilson on our board, it was like, well, there's lots of different types of executive coaches. Some of them are people who've started a business before and they can coach you on a lot of tactical stuff. Other ones are basically therapists and they'll kind of put you on the couch and talk about your feelings and your fears and anxieties and whatnot.

1:42:44So yeah, as Coinbase was growing, I had a handful of exec coaches that I worked with and there's not one that I'm working with now, but I do feel like I have a group of other founders and mentors and the board itself who I can call for advice and they are incredibly helpful on those dimensions. What does the voice in your head tell you every morning when you wake up or every night when you go to sleep? Well, usually by default, I just have a lot of things going on in my brain and I'm processing the day. I'm I'm pissed off at what somebody said or what I forgot to say. I'm mad at myself for not handling something or saying something better.

1:43:31Or there's some competitive situation or some journalist or some regulator. So I'm just thinking about all these things that are ruminating. So I have to kind of, in the evenings, I really try to wind down, allow my brain to be quieted. So I will just read a book for a while or put my phone away and meditate a little bit or go for sauna or something like that. And I'm not consistent about any of these things, but I try to do some routine that really quiets my mind. And then I can have peaceful sleep and really, really get rested. right and just like anybody if there's something i see right before going to bed that irritates me or i'm working working working i go right to bed i sleep terribly am i my i'm just having all these like stressful dreams the whole night you know so i have to really try to calm myself for like an hour and then yeah in the morning i wake up and sometimes i'm like oh i have an idea i could do this right or other days i wake up and i'm and i'm again pissed or ruminating about something right And I have to use that morning routine, which for me is like stretching, exercising, listening to podcasts and audiobooks.

1:44:55That's the morning routine I go through usually most mornings that helps me get my mind right for the day. Tell me one thing that you learned in the last 20 years that I can take with me for the next half of my life.

1:45:15one of my favorite lessons is that action produces information so paul graham i think said this and i repeated it before but if you're unsure what to do just do anything that even if it's the wrong thing it will produce information about what you should be doing and most people get stuck in this analysis paralysis of what about this and that and then just start you know like host a dinner with some friend call someone to talk about it choose a name for this project write a paragraph and put it on x or send it to you know there's something you can do just to start the ball rolling and and moving and what's the next step that you can do right now and it'll take you to the next one and the next one like step Step into the unknown and just take the initiative and that'll produce information which will tell you what you should be doing instead and that'll be on to the next step.

1:46:19What's something you believe in that most people would not agree with? um

1:46:38well okay here's one i um i recently invested in an embryo editing company and uh i the reason i did that is that embryo editing is controversial but i can explain what that is Oh, this is that, you know, a lot of people do like IVF today and they have different embryos that they have available and they do pre-implantation genetic testing and they sort of choose the one that they want to implant and everything. I think that we're going to be in a future here in, I don't know how many years, 10 years or more, where you can actually start to make a small number of edits, maybe starting with a single base pair.

1:47:20and there's actually like three or four hundred million people today living with genetic disease a lot of these are rare genetic diseases um this is a controversial topic for many reasons but one reason is that there's somebody who uh huzhen kui i think his name is in china kind of edited some some babies and did it in maybe like not the most scientifically responsible way one might say to put it mildly and it created i'd say like a setback for the industry but i think if you if you fast forward, if this technology can be de-risked and shown in a laboratory research environment to be done safely, whether that's with mouse embryos or in a research environment to mitigate the risks, I think that it would be a powerful way to eliminate a lot of diseases or at least mitigate risks.

1:48:09Like APLE4 is a single base pair edit that is, I believe, preventive for Alzheimer's, right? And so, or there's PCSK9 is like a single base per edit that would be protective against heart disease, right? And so there's hundreds of millions or billions of people out in the world who have certain protective things, some that don't. And I think everybody wants to have healthy children. And it may actually end up in a world here in 10 or 20 years where it's viewed as it'll flip from being like crazy and irresponsible to do it. It'll flip to being kind of crazy and irresponsible not to do it. Because if you could give your child the best chance of a healthy life, why wouldn't you do it at a certain point?

1:48:49Now, there's a lot of steps between here and there that would have to happen for that technology to be de-risked and be done again in a safe and trusted way. So I think the research should start now and then without someone starting it, it'll probably wouldn't get there. So this is mostly for disease prevention? yeah how do you prevent this from becoming i'm a crazy mother saying i want my kid to look like this or to be like that and then they basically edit uh it's possible but probably one day will be they edited their future kid to be exactly how they want it to be yeah well we don't have the ability to do that now uh so you know could it get there in the future it's possible and i think you know in many ways actually parents are choosing how their children look by who they decide to have kids have kids with and they choose their partner right there's all kinds of things you're choosing um in that regard and and we actually choose all kinds of things about our kids how they turn out like what school they go to or what nutrition they have and so i think that this will be one other factor now some people might make bad choices on that just like in a way that they might choose to send their kid to a school that's not very good or feed them unhealthy food, right?

1:50:06But ultimately, we live in a free society. People, I think, should be free to make some bad choices. But ultimately, I don't know, in a society, they'll have to be... We as a society will have to understand what the rules and limitations are around that from a regulation point of view. Thank you, Brian. You're welcome. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for working so hard day and night for more than 13 years to help our industry move forward. for doing all these things that you probably didn't want to do. Happy to do it. Happy to do it. It's been fun. The crypto industry would certainly not be where it is today and I wouldn't either without your super hard work, grit and resilience.

1:50:48Thank you. As you probably know by now, I host some of the biggest names in Bitcoin and crypto on my podcast. But a lot of the best stuff never makes it on air. The Shift newsletter is where I share that raw behind the scene alpha. The insights, stories and lessons straight from my guests that you won't hear anywhere else. If you want the real insight take on Bitcoin and crypto, join my newsletter, The Shift, in the description down below.