E93: BASE Creator Jesse Pollak - Why Most Crypto Traders Lose (And What to Do Instead)

30:39And then if you're a user, you're, depending on where you're born or where you live, going to have different access to apps. If you have an Android phone, you can't access the iOS apps. If you have an iOS phone, you can't access the Android apps. If you aren't a United States citizen, you're not going to be able to access the United States financial products. And depending on where you're born or where you live, that's going to lead to massive disparities in what you actually have access to, the apps you have access to. And so what we're building with Base is a new global app store that is built so that developers can build and operate on an open platform where they make the money, where creators can put their content on chain, and they make the money.

31:17And where anyone, anywhere, regardless of who they are, regardless of where they're born, regardless of what phone they have, has access to the same apps. And we're still in the very early days of that app store, just like in the early 2000s is the early days of the iOS app store, but the potential for us building a global app store and a global economy that brings everyone in and that puts everyone on a level playing field and gives them tools that let them do things with money and let them do things with their creativity and let them do things with the way they're building businesses that make it 10 times faster, easier, and more accessible to build and to create and to use.

31:53That is what base is. And that is the platform of on-chain and crypto and what the thing that base is a part of. Hey, when shift happens, family. Time to toast our partner, Devin. They're taking luxury wine to the blockchain with their super fun concept called Uncorked to Earn. Buy your favorite wines, enjoy unique experiences, and get an airdrop each time you open a bottle with your friends. Cheers to Devin for bringing transparency, authenticity, and exclusivity to the fine wines industry.

32:27What's your base aha moment? Why did you launch base and not any other business or project that you could have done in the space? Yeah, I mean, we went through four different ideas before we launched base. Four. Yeah, yeah, four. Which one? The first one I pitched to our exec team in late 2021 was give me a billion dollars and 60 employees and i'll turn coinbase into a dow that was the first one um they were like no like that's get out of here try again um then second one was kind of derivative of that but a little different the third one was uh we built a kind of like uh just like an app marketplace which is kind of similar to what base i mean you'll see there's commonality but we built this idea of like labeling different apps so that you could have kind of like an on-chain registry of all the different apps that existed.

33:23So then you can do other things with that. Then we kind of realized, oh, in order to have an app store, we need identity. So we build a bunch of stuff around identity, which now actually just has kind of like reemerged as base names. And then the third thing that we did was like, oh, maybe we can do like advertising on top of this identity and marketplace stuff to help apps get more reach, which kind of looks like the on-chain content network. And I'd say the aha moment for base was we tried all of those things. And every single time we started building one of those things, we ran into the same problems, which were like, oh, we want to build this identity product on chain.

33:54How do we make it work at the scale of Coinbase to reach 100 million users? And how do we make it work really easily and intuitively with the Coinbase product suite? And at the time, it couldn't. Even today, the products, we're just getting to the point where everything works really well together. But after seeing that kind of happen again and again and be the biggest blocker for us actually being able to move on these product things, we kind of had this aha moment after we launched an internal testnet where we were like okay we're gonna make it easier for developers at coinbase to build on chain by giving them a toolkit and giving them a place we called it base net or originally was called coin net and then we changed it to base net and i think once we like connected that thought of like oh maybe we need a platform in order to enable these products then it was like boom let's build a platform to make it easy for coinbase to come on chain and then if we're building a platform to make it easy for coinbase to come on chain let's build a platform to make it easy for everyone to come on chain and that's base and then the really i think powerful thing is we you know from the beginning like we knew what it was in our hearts but we didn't know where to start we had this idea we're like oh there's like this app store thing it's like kind of there it's like oh in order to absolutely have the identity like we're kind of feeling the different parts of the elephant um if you know that like whatever it's like the blind man feels different parts of the elephant they're all like it's whatever it's hard to tell from one from the trunk or the foot or whatever it is um and then i think once we had base now we're almost speed running it like the rest of the elephant it's like oh now we have base okay great let's launch base names boom base names live oh apps are gonna need names too like let's get base names for apps so apps can get base names so we can help them label their contracts and give them rewards and you know do all these things that they need to do on chain in a trusted way now we have apps well what if we give them more distribution that's the on-chain content network we can now give apps distribution across 30 million monthly active users like that sort of um kind of like building up from the ground i feel like we kind of had to start at the top and we like worked our way down trying to figure out what it was and then we got to base and we're like okay now we have our platform and now we're gradually building our way back up until all the systems are there and all them work really well together and i think as those things kind of come together it's going to be this platform that the rest of the world can come on chain with and where you will have kind of like you know done the through line um to figure out all the little bits and pieces and make them really tight and work seamlessly together, then everyone else is going to benefit from that kind of like smooth, seamless, easy to use experience that we're going to pay.

36:20So it makes a lot of sense actually what you're saying, which is like we use Coinbase first as a kind of test and then we go outside, right? Yeah, exactly. But there's one thing I thought about, which probably if I think about it, there's many other people who think about it. Which is, is there not something sort of paradoxical in Coinbase, a Nasdaq listed and fully regulated company, launching or at least being associated to the launch of a platform to scale Ethereum, which is the worst decentralized supercomputer? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if ironic is the right word, but paradoxical.

37:01I don't know paradoxical is right where i do think that there's uh an inherent tension though in that which is that you do have a large uh kind of like centralized off-chain legacy company which of course is a crypto company but if you look at the business that has predominantly made coinbase successful it's you know a centralized business that's custodial it's regulated that um uh you know happens predominantly off-chain um that thing kind of incubating and launching a decentralized centralized L2. Now, that is the stated roadmap of Ethereum, right? Like, Ethereum is like, we're going to scale through L2s.

37:34And one of the ways that's going to happen is you're going to have a lot of different players who come in and kind of open these platforms. But there is still that tension between, oh, decentralization and L2 and open and permissionless environment, and then kind of like centralization and kind of corporations and nutritional. And I was actually DMing with something about this on Warpcast the other day. They asked me, it's like, what do I think about that. And what I think about is that it's the greatest strength and it's the greatest risk. You know, like the greatest strength because you have A, this incredible first customer where it's like if you can solve the problems that Coinbase is a 4 ,000 person public company has on chain, that's a really good playbook for them going and solving it for like every other Fortune 500 company.

38:12And if you can leverage the distribution and the efficiency and the scale and the resources of Coinbase, that's a really powerful platform for aggressively growing and kind of proliferating this new way of building. And so huge strengths that kind of sit there. On the flip side, if you get lost in the sauce of centralization and you think about this thing, oh no, this is just, it's just a centralized product, then you actually, I think, miss out on the upside, which is building an open global on-chain economy. Because an open global on-chain economy is not going to be controlled by one company.

38:47It's not going to be controlled by one country. It has to be decentralized because that's the only way you can actually get the level of neutrality in the system that would make it so every country could participate. And so every corporation could participate. Every person, regardless of where they're born, could participate. And so I think there will be a natural inclination with things that look like this to almost get to a local maxima, which is like, if we think about this thing as a traditional product offering from a corporation, what's the best we could do? And I think the exercise with base and the exercise with managing the strength and risk is figuring out how do you not get sucked into that local maxima?

39:23And how do you instead strive for the global maxima, which is a global economy, which has to be built on a decentralized platform? And I think what is going to be inherent in that is a loss of control and a loss of centralization, a lack of centralization. And I think really, you know, this goes back to one of the questions you had earlier. But like the only reason I think that this is even remotely possible is because we're doing an incubating base inside of a company with the founder CEO who's believed in crypto from the very beginning of crypto. Because on the day we launched the base test net, I got a message from Brian Armstrong at 11.50 p.m.

40:00And he's like, hey, Jesse, great job. Three things. First off, like you haven't even shipped the main net. So like don't get too ahead of yourself. like go and deliver value like you have to serve customers and the second second thing is you have to decentralize because if we do not decentralize this thing all of this will be for naught and we will have wasted our time and energy we will have brought kind of like the the worst parts of what we're trying to solve for with all of our work into the thing that we ourselves are building and i think that sort of leadership and that sort of messaging from the top uh combined with i think the belief and conviction and commitment that we've had from the beginning on base around building us an Ethereum L2 so we could bootstrap on Ethereum's decentralization from building on the OP stack.

40:44So every single contribution we make is open source and anyone can benefit from it. All of that then combines to at least give us a shot. And I think a very good shot at actually being able to kind of pull this thing off and balance those strengths with the risk and make sure we actually get to the decentralized endgame. That's so interesting. And the other day I was talking with the co-founder of Sui. It was basically ex-Facebook people who built Libra, right? That didn't work out. And one of the main reasons it didn't work out is because people were not trusting them because Facebook, data, right?

41:18And so in that case, people are saying, hey, ethos of crypto, decentralization, Coinbase, centralization, we don't trust you. Yeah. We don't trust you. But that's why it's so important to make this message that you said, right, From Ryan, much more kind of out there since day one. But the first reflex you might have, even that I have naturally, myself, right? Without being too close to the matter, it's... Do I trust them to have the best intention for the industry? Totally, yeah. And I mean, it's the thing we... Like, actions will speak louder than words, right? And if you look at our actions thus far, we have explicitly said we're going to be decentralized.

41:58and then we've delivered milestones, you know, every quarter since then, since the beginning of the launch, we just launched fault proofs on testnet. That's going to be going live soon. The security council making progress on multi-proofs in stage two. And there's a lot more work. So I, you know, we're just going to let our words, I mean, we're just going to let our actions speak for themselves. And we're just going to keep telling people this is the plan and then delivering on the plan. What's your biggest criticism of the Bayes ecosystem today? Biggest criticism of the Bayes ecosystem today?

42:30I mean, I don't know if it's a criticism of the base ecosystem, but as I thought about kind of like, what do I want to see from base builders as we head into the second half of this year, there's really like three things. The first is like, I think in crypto a lot, people can get kind of lost in the sauce and we just need to focus on building things that people want. Actually, you know, like if we were a normal company going through Y Combinator, like that would be the first thing that all of us were drilling into our heads. It's like build something people want and talk to customers and make sure they actually want it.

42:59But I think in crypto, we can sometimes just get so kind of confused by the economic incentives and the tokens and the, you know, like game theory and all these things. And we can lose sight of the fact that like we have to build something people want. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is we have to make it really freaking easy to use. And I think historically we've had kind of this mindset of, oh, this is good for crypto. But if we're really talking about building a new global on-chain economy, like the next generation of the internet, it can't just be good for crypto. It has to be better than every online product that exists today.

43:31Otherwise, people aren't going to switch to it. And so we finally have the infrastructure that can enable us to do that. There's still pieces that we need to put together to finalize it. But smart wallets plus base names plus L2s. You have this package that can let people build really powerful consumer products. And now we need to like leverage that package, refine it further and just deliver the best products, period. And then the third thing is I think that like each of us has a like almost like a moral responsibility to take time out of our day every week or every month to go bring new people on chain.

44:04And like do the work ourselves, almost like missionary work of telling people about this new economy and telling people about how it's going to upgrade these systems that are broken. Because I think, A, like that's how we do it. Like literally it's a viral thing. You know, we have to go get people on chain. Otherwise, no one's ever going to get on chain. But then B, through that work of telling people and through that work of explaining to them and practicing, how do I communicate this to my mom? Or how do I communicate this to my grandparents? Or whatever. Like, you learn so much about are you building something people want?

44:35And is it really easy to use? And that's, like, the only way we're going to make good enough products that this actually works. So, you know, I'm saying those three things, you know, I guess maybe it is a criticism. Not because we're not doing it like, you know, we're doing a horrible job. I think base is actually probably doing a pretty good job relative to the broader ecosystem on this stuff. But in order for us to build a global economy that like brings billions of people on chain, like you can't just be like, oh, this is like pretty good. You know, it has to be like, no, we did this better than anyone else.

45:11like we made things people want better than anything else we made it easier to use than anything else and we made it so that we actually hustled our butts off to go and get everyone in the world to use it and so that's what i want to see very refreshing to hear actually yeah and someone very practical like that uh i'm kind of smiling because the next two or three themes are exactly what you mentioned so we'll go deep into that but first regarding base still i saw this crazy chart the other day from token terminal basically running away from the rest of the layer twos. So you are you said right, I'm kind of have this criticism, but you guys are going so fast.

45:51Why? Yeah. Well, first off, like, I will just say about all the data, like, I think there's a lot of there's a lot of charts that people share. And there's a lot of spam and weird activity that happens on chain. And so what we are focused on is building great products. and we try not to get lost in the noise or the sauce or the hype around how great we're doing like i don't care it is still day one when you look at these charts and you look at the scale of what we need to do to bring the world on chain like we're not even 0.1 of the way there literally we have to do 10 000 x to get to the scale of the internet today and so i'm like i'm not that interested in the comparisons to other L2s.

46:37I'm not that interested in the idea of us competing with other L2s. What I'm interested in is competing with online and making it so on-chain is 10x better, 100x better than online, and then bringing all the world's users into this new on-chain economy. And so that's kind of the starting point. Now, I think in terms of what's working on base right now, I do think it goes back to some of the themes I was just talking about. We have said from the beginning, we're not going to get caught up in, you know, playing games, doing incentives, like making things that distract from our focus, which is building products that people want, whether it's us building a great developer platform that developers want, because it's easiest thing to use, and gives them the most powerful tools for building these new on-chain apps, or it's us supporting apps that are not doing crazy incentive games to, you know, token price or whatever, but instead are just building great products that solve real problems for everyday people or businesses.

47:35Like that has been the focus from the beginning. And we've set up systems, both like social systems and incentive systems and reward systems that reward that behavior. You know, we have this meme of like build and you will be rewarded. We have this meme of like stay based, which is like working hard and being optimistic and pushing boundaries with creativity. We have these three things of building something people want and making it really easy to use and onboarding new people like all of that is almost like a cultural definition that we are collectively doing as an ecosystem to center us on what matters which is just putting in an ungodly amount of hard work over the next decade or a few years or whatever however long it's going to take to make incredible products that everyday people love and that bring the world on chain and i think that that's gone through to the builders in the base ecosystem and i think it's led to some pretty incredible products coming out of the base ecosystem that people actually want to use and then that has its own knock-on effects about people using the platform and you know there being more activity and it being a place that people actually want to come and spend their lives and yeah that's what it's all about you mentioned the incentives and you kind of mentioned tokens right So instead of asking the classic when token question, let's be practical and critical about tokens.

48:55I saw a tweet the other day by Kato AI saying, Bayes is absolutely cooking. Arguably, the highest growth projects are Bayes, Polymarket, Pum.fun, and none of them have a token. Do you think that the three fastest growing crypto projects not having a token is just a coincidence? I don't think it's a coincidence. I think, I mean, I said it, I think that tokens, like, first off, I think that tokens and, like, crypto, like, on-chain governance structures are going to be incredibly powerful tools, like, from first principles. What we're seeing happen is you have the historical way of organizing human beings and organizing human beings working together that has been defined in like legalese written by lawyers.

49:46It's incredibly slow. It's incredibly expensive. It's incredibly hard to change. And what's happening now is we're building new systems and software on chain that let us do the same things like a thousand times more efficiently. And that's leading to DAOs and tokens. And there's a lot of failures and a lot of mistakes and a lot of learnings. But over time, that is going to lead to massive efficiency gains. And those are going to be way, way outperforming traditional organizations, even if they have a lot of the same shared structures over time. So that's first principles thinking. Incredibly important innovation, lots of growth and upside that will come from it.

50:22Now, I think one of the most perverse and negative things that's happened on chain over the last five years is that people have put the token ahead of the product. and they've said, oh, the first thing we're going to do is launch a token or we're going to launch a product. And then like, even if we don't have product market fit, we're going to launch token. And I mean, like if you analogize it and obviously tokens are different than, than equity and all these things, but like, if you analogize this to a, um, you know, like early stage startup being like, we're going to launch product. And then like a few months after we launch our product, even though we don't have product market fit, we're going to go public and get public shareholders who are going to like breathe down our necks and like have public governance where people are going to be able to participate and have a public price that every single one of our employees is looking at and like deciding their worth on whether it's going up or down.

51:14I mean, like literally it's incredibly toxic and incredibly like negative for actually making great products. And so I think when you're looking at these products like Polymarket or Base and you're seeing, oh, like they don't have a token yet and they're still being successful. I think it's almost like a proof of that, right? It's like, if you ignore the token noise and you say, we're actually just going to focus on building the best fricking product. And sometimes it's going to take years. I mean, Polymark has been working for five years and base, you know, been working for two years, but like, it's going to take years.

51:46Just like starting a company, it takes 10 years. Like almost all companies are like, the average time is 10 years before you go public or get any exit. Like that focus and rigor and relentlessness of like, we're just going to do the hard work to make this product great. I think that that's what leads to good products. And it's what leads to making the right decisions. And it leads to not getting distracted by all this free money, which is not free money. It's actually really expensive money because you pay in your distraction and you pay in dilution. You pay in all these different factors. And so I, yeah, again, I think this is incredible innovation, but the industry has gotten just too caught up in it.

52:30And if we all just go back to basics and we think from first principles, but like, what's it going to take to build products? Like, we're going to be so much better. And I think we're going to see so many more successful products. And then, of course, we can figure out, OK, now that we have a ton of great products, how do those products use these new technologies and tokens and governance to do great things? But that should be like, that should be like a set. That's the next step. First, you got to build a great product. But I could even argue that if you are there, you have a great product or a set of great products that actually are generating you cash, right?

53:03And profits. Why would you even launch a token? I mean, I think it's, I think it depends on how you think about it, right? Like, A, I think they're going to be on-chain structures that basically let you like take a traditional corporation and restructure it on-chain and have all of the structuring of it on-chain, the governance of it on-chain, it'll just be way more efficient. It's going to be cheaper. It's going to be faster. It's going to be easier. It's going to be more global. And so I think that's one thing. I also think that we're seeing really innovative new models emerge, like the DUNA in Wyoming.

53:31I don't know if you followed the DUNA, but it's a new legal framework that folks have been working on in Wyoming that's a decentralized, unincorporated nonprofit association that basically lets you do things like have fully on-chain governance with an entity that can do like with staking do like cash dividends and still have that thing kind of like governed in pursuit of like an overall mission that's defined in the DUNA. And like that's a really interesting new concept. And I think it could apply really nicely to some of the networks that we're seeing emerge where they do have this kind of like, you know, mission that's, you know, like kind of a nonprofit mission, but they also have cash flows and you want to be able to let people participate in order to earn cash flows.

54:16And so I think a lot of the kind of like distortion around tokens right now is A, driven by like people just getting fixated on money because that's what humans do. But then B, driven by a lack of regulatory clarity in the United States and beyond, where we basically said, we do not like, we're going to apply these frameworks from the 1930s to this massive technology shift and transformation in how we can build people systems and economic systems. And that's like pushed us to these really weird shapes and edges that like distort what we're actually trying to do and have us optimizing for regulatory instead of actually like what's going to get the right governance outcomes.

54:57And that's led to this, like those two things have led to like a world where you just don't have that many good models but i think that's going to change i think we're getting into a much better place regulatorily globally and in the united states slowly but surely i think we're seeing people try and learn and like fail and learn and that's giving us a lot more data and then i do think we're seeing kind of the re-emergence of a set of really principled founders who are saying like we're just going to build great freaking products on chain and like we need more of those people and my gut tells me that over the next few years we're going to see this convergence where you will have the regulatory stuff clarify you will have kind of the noise get sufficiently like clear to everyone that's toxic and bad and then you will have this kind of founder group that has done it the right way where they've said we're going to build great products we're going to spend years building those great products and then at some point later this decade we're gonna get to the point where it's like, boom, now all the regulatory stuff is really clear.

55:54We have a bunch of really incredible products and we've learned all of the stuff that doesn't work. Now what do we do? And then we're just going to cook. And like, these systems are going to work so well. And so I don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but I do feel like we're kind of entering this next era of crypto that's going to look a lot more rational and principled and is going to reward the people who are rigorous about how do we just focus on building great products? Focusing on building great products.

56:24and explaining the value proposition to the world. Yeah. I recorded the conversation on Friday with Hunter Horsley. Yeah. Who was in touch. Love Hunter. And he said exactly that. He said that he was actually very annoyed and frustrated with the crypto space today because we are extremely bad at communicating our value proposition to the real world. Yeah. He said there's a few companies, Coinbase is one of them, doing incredible work at simplifying everything. And you're actually sharing very regularly videos of, I even saw one with the liquid death. Yeah. There is all this kind of very simplistic video to explain to people, hey, what is this thing?

57:10Yeah. But most of the people in crypto don't understand that that's so important. Yeah, it's so important. And so Hunter said, we should be able to answer the following three questions or we'll never truly see crypto go mainstream. So let me ask you those three questions. And you kind of mentioned some of them before. We'll see what he says. How is crypto good for humanity? Crypto is good for humanity because we have a bunch of legacy systems that are tens or hundreds of years old that are incredibly inefficient, incredibly expensive and incredibly slow. And they make it incredibly painful for everyday people to manage their money.

57:52They make it unfair for creators who bring so much value into the world and aren't rewarded for it. And they make it hard for small businesses and other entrepreneurs to do their best work in their businesses. and crypto gives us an opportunity to build a new next generation of the internet that's going to upgrade all of those systems and make it so those everyday people have access to best-in-class financial services regardless of where they live, that creators get to put their creativity on a platform that actually gives them the value and lets them own it long term, and that small businesses and entrepreneurs have the tools that let them build generational businesses at 10x cheaper 10x faster in a 10x better way and if that isn't good for humanity like i don't know what to tell you but it's a pretty it's a pretty incredible moment right and just like we saw the internet transform the world in the early 2000s as we went from offline to online we are in the middle of the next transformation as we go from online to on-chain and it's going to lead to massive increases in innovation and creativity and freedom and it's just gonna take a lot of hard work from all of us to actually make it happen.

58:59Great. Okay, one down. Second question. How can my mom benefit from crypto? I mean, it depends who your mom is. But some ways my mom loves crypto now. She loves it. She has her wallet. She mints things on chain. She loves create collecting. But some ways that I've seen my mom benefit. One is like a lot of moms love art and creativity. And now there's a lot of art and creativity on chain. And so getting Zora or rodeo and figuring out, hey, is there content here that I'm interested in? And then minting to directly support those creators with micropayments. Super easy. A lot of moms love food. There's a great new app called Blackbird, which is in 400 restaurants in New York and expanding around the country.

59:37I use it in New York. You can go, you can get a better dining experience where you tap check-in, you can pay whatever you want, you can pay with crypto, and you're not only going to have a great dining experience, but you're going to actually have a better experience for the restaurant because they're going to pay lower fees and they're have a better margin, which lets them operate more successfully. Another way your mom could use crypto, maybe your mom doesn't live in the same country as you. And it's probably a pain in the butt for you to send money to your mom or your mom to send money to you or your mom to send money to your friends or your mom to get money when she's traveling.

1:00:06And on chain with crypto, you can have global free payment rails that connect you instantly to your mom or your friends or your family, regardless of where they are. And it's literally instant and it's literally free. And And that is incredibly different than the normal, oh, you got to pay someone in Europe from the United States. That's going to take three to five days. It can cost$35. If you're paying someone from Mexico to the United States, the average remittance cost is$45. $45. If you are an average American who moved to this country with family outside of the country, and you are working a minimum wage job where you are earning$8.50 an hour,$8.50 an hour, and you work 40 hours a week and you want to send some of that money back to your family and then you have to pay$42 to send that money to your family?

1:01:01I mean, what is crypto good for? We're building new systems that serve the people. I mean, I get fired up talking about it. I love it. I can't say it. I'm like, come on!

1:01:17How do I use crypto? How do you use crypto? You can go to wallet.coinbase.com. That'll get you a wallet in less than five seconds. You put in your biometric. You can use that wallet to send money to anyone in the world. You can use that money to mint creativity on chain. You can use that wallet to go to your local coffee shop and buy coffee. There's now tens of coffee shops in the United States and globally that are starting to accept USDC because instead of paying 3 % in fees, 3%, which for the average small business, their margin, their entire margin is 3%. And right now they pay 3 % in fees.

1:01:50So if you got rid of those fees, you can double their margin. With USDC, you can accept USDC for free. You can go to acceptusdc.com. If you're a small business, if you're a coffee shop owner, you can go to acceptusdc.com and we will help you accept USDC for free. And then if you're an everyday person, you can go to your favorite coffee shop and you can pay with USDC. The energy in the room is pretty amazing. I do bring a lot of energy. It's one of the things that I have a lot of energy. I love it. It brings us to the next topic, optimism. Yeah. Optimism is a moral duty. I love that. Brian just tweeting bangers on a Sunday.

1:02:31These are the words from Brian Armstrong, the founder and CEO of Coinbase. How can someone cultivate optimism, especially in an industry like crypto, where people either become cynical and leave because they got too wrecked. Yeah. Or stay but become cynical optimists. So they're only half optimists, right? Because they got very wrecked, but just not enough to leave. Maybe they love the pain, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that like the best thing, crypto specifically, probably the best thing you can do for being an optimist is like not focus your time and attention on trading. like if you focus your time and attention on trading you're in a pvp game where almost certainly you're gonna lose in some major way like it's it's bad for your mental health like and that's not to say that people don't love trading and it's not a great thing but like for most people it's not gonna be positive ev for you economically and you're it's gonna suck up so much of your mind share because you're gonna be looking at these price charts that you have no control over and so i think the biggest thing that i think in crypto a lot of people i would like to see and that could shift people towards optimism is figuring out what you can control and figuring out what's going to be the way that you make an impact on the world.

1:03:46How do you find that kind of sphere of influence? And then how do you just put your head down and make progress every day? And what I found is that if you can build a habit of being able to make progress, even if it's small progress, even if it's just building your following or making your product incrementally better, that habit is something that can then kind of like turn into optimism. Because if you see, oh, over the last week I made X progress and over the last month I made X progress, then you can kind of extrapolate that out and you can say, whoa, look at how far I'll be in a year. Look at where I was a year ago and look how far we've come since then.

1:04:21And that kind of like relative perspective, I think that is a thing that then grounds you in, oh, we can make change and we can make the world a better place. We can change this small thing. And if we can change a small thing, It can change a bigger thing and they can change an even bigger thing. And so finding that thing that you really love and care about. And then also that it's actually in your sphere of influence and focusing your attention on that so you can make an impact. It's probably the most important thing you can do, especially in crypto. I was talking today with a friend of mine who is now just got accepted in the accelerator of the third wave.

1:04:56Yeah. And he was like, I'm talking to the founder CEO. It's crazy how if you're trying to build something, you can talk to anyone. I was like, of course, man. That's the beauty of crypto. And that's what motivates you a lot, right? You're like, in the other kind of web to work much harder, right? You're not going to talk to Mark Zuckerberg, but like in crypto, if you're trying to contribute and people feel that you're here for the right reason, which is build and not just trade or be a kind of parasite of the market. Yeah. People will welcome you with open arms and you're going to feel like, holy shit, like I...

1:05:28I'm part of that. I'm part of it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is, look, I get hundreds of DMs every day. And I try and reply to as many of them as I can. I've actually replied to almost all of them. But the ones that I spend the most attention on are the ones where people are building things. And if you can, in like 240 characters, be like, here's what I'm building. Here's the progress we've made, the impact that we've had. And here's how we need some help. as long as that thing that's help is like remotely within my control or i could like get someone else to help you with it i'm gonna do it because if you're building something on chain right now and you're really bringing a builder mindset like i want you to be successful and i'm willing to take my time and energy to help you be successful now that's very different i get a lot of other messages that's like this meme price went down or like you know this like why did you blah blah blah you know like can the dev do something yeah can the dev do something i'm like i'm not interested i'm not going to reply like that's not a good use of my time and it's probably not a good use of your time either like if if if you're fixated on the pure prices of things you should ask yourself like what can you build that will make an impact yet people's emotions are completely following We're weighing prices, right?

1:06:43Crazy. Completely. You tweeted a month ago, people were saying Bayes was dead. Now the same people are saying Bayes is the best thing since sliced bread. Remember, it's never as bad as it seems and it's never as good as it seems. We put our heads down, keep building and stay Bayes. Always. Always. In crypto, we go from it's over to we are sold back every week, right? and it's always linked to the prices. How do you deal with the crazy emotional rollercoaster that is inevitable when you build a project in this space? Yeah, well, if that was the first time I've heard someone read that tweet out loud, and I didn't realize it, but I loved that I rhymed dead and bred.

1:07:32It's great. It's great. But, I mean, that quote is, that's a Brianism. Like, that came from Brian. Like he sent that email to the company. Like, you know, I've been through three, I think three bull markets or two and a half bull markets at Coinbase. And I feel like at some point in every, like the peak of every bull market and the bottom of every bear market, Brian sends an email to the company that's like, hey guys, it's never as good as it seems. It's never as bad as it seems. Every six months. Like just reminds us, you know, like share price down, share price up, never as good as it seems, never as bad as it seems.

1:08:07And I think that that, I mean, it goes back to what we were just talking about. It's the builder mindset, like particularly when it comes to prices, it's not in our control and it's not going to matter on the long, long term. What matters is are we building products that make a difference, that serve our customers, that make the world a better place, that make people's lives easier. And if we get wrapped around these like volatility movements, if we get distracted by it, it's not going to help us build the best products. And so just regrounding ourselves and doing that, like, you know, almost a little bit of stoicism where it's just like, don't get lost in the sauce.

1:08:43It's the third time I've said that. I'm realizing it's like, don't get lost. Right. It's so easy to get distracted. And if you can figure out how to tune that out and tune into, am I making the right decisions today that can help me make my product better? Am I focused on the right things? Like, am I doing the hard work? Am I really making an impact? it's just it's gonna feel so much better and you're gonna not be nearly as like volatile emotionally which is also just gonna feel way better and you're applying that to business but it's very it's the same in life right same in life you have the life pendulum sometimes you really feel like shit but like if you feel like shit probably you're gonna feel better yeah in the future if you feel amazing probably you're gonna feel less good right so yeah that's how life works that's how life works yeah it's just about like how do you stay even-keeled and calm and present and you know just kind of treat every moment as just a little special snowflake you know like this is this moment and maybe it feels really euphoric but it's just another moment in long life what's the toughest moment you've ever experienced in your life wow that's a hard transition the toughest moment i've ever experienced in my entire life huh um

1:10:17um i mean there's a lot of there's some personal ones um which maybe i'm not going to share but But I would say, I mean, the one that comes most recently to memory is like work and personal related. But last summer, so literally right as we were launching BASE, I mean, so first off, the first year of building BASE from 21 to 2022, it's really challenging. We wasn't building BASE. We were trying to figure out what we were doing. I was meeting with Brian, CEO and the chief product officer every other week. And they were like, so do you have the innovative new thing? And I was like, creating slide decks Sunday night for my Monday meeting, being like, I need to put something.

1:11:03Like, what? I don't have it figured out. I didn't smoke enough wind to have the clarity. I need to smoke more. No, not that. But I was like, you know, it was literally a year of like, it was like a year of being like, I don't know what the frick I'm doing. Like, I don't have the answers. And these people think I'm going to have the answers and I don't have the answers. I keep trying things and they keep failing. They shut down the team. So that was really bad. I was very anxious for the whole time. Is it not what, is this not what entrepreneurship is? I mean, it was, yeah. People think that you have things figured out, but you're like trying to make something happen, right?

1:11:39And at some point, you're trying to build the momentum of something. And at some point it starts And then, but like people don't realize how much even the best entrepreneurs don't have everything figured out, right? Totally. Totally. Yeah. And so that was the first year of BASE. And then I kind of like found BASE. And I was like, oh, now I know what we need to build. Like, you know, clicks. Like once we had the first prototype internally, it was like, oh, I see it. Like I see that this can be a really big deal. but then from late 2022 to when we launched the main net in august of last year i that was probably like the most like anxious stressed period of my life um and i also i don't think i've ever worked harder in my life because i felt like we were on a really fast clock like i really wanted to get this thing out into the world because it felt like i just saw it all happening i was like i want to be there but then also there's something about launching something like base where it's a multi-sided marketplace like an ecosystem where you kind of what you're getting like you need to get the flywheel spinning right like you need the momentum to get going and that's not something that like you can like i could just do like i didn't have the inputs instead i needed like dependencies like i needed all the different apps to come i need the infrastructure forum and i needed like coinbase to do the right integrations and i really felt like for like from when we started building in November to August.

1:13:01I was working really, really hard. I really wanted this to be successful. And I felt like I was like trying to almost like bear hug all of the pieces that needed to be in it. And like, it's almost like throwing a party. Like you're throwing a party and you're like, you invite all your friends. And then like the night before, I get incredible host anxiety. You're like, is anyone going to come? Is it going to be a fun party? And I felt that for like nine months. And throughout, like as the intensity of that started increasing and as um i started working harder and harder particularly as we got into summer um and we'd like try and get it on dates like i stopped eating i was nauseous all the time i was anxious i lost like 15 20 pounds um like i couldn't concentrate on other things like i was finding that i was being really like pessimistic and negative and we launched base and you know beginning of august and like 10 days 15 days after we launched base i was still kind of the same place with my wife we we were going on a vacation to be with my family and we were driving it was a long drive my wife was kind of like we were talking about other stuff but my wife was she was kind of like she kind of basically had an intervention for me she was like look like this isn't okay it's not working for you you're not okay you're not healthy um it's not working for me like this is not okay like you're not present like you're not doing this and that was a real wake-up call for me like I was not I wasn't okay and so I kind of got through on-chain summer that August and I took a week off um and I like had to do kind of a reset for myself you know I like started going to a therapist again I started um uh you know like meditating and doing a bunch of other things you know working out more um uh and I gradually got got like you know I'm doing a lot better I'm doing good right now but it was it was this interesting contrast of a like we launched it was a super successful launch but like for me as a leader and then i was it was the worst i've ever felt in my entire life and i was like waking up every morning being like i don't know how to get through the day like how do i feed myself to not feel like i'm gonna pass out you know there's days like there's literally days during that where i was like i would get off a meeting and i would go and curl up on a on my couch like in a ball because i was so nauseous i couldn't eat anything and i couldn't do anything other than just like lie there and try and sleep so i didn't feel what i was feeling and i don't know having that having that like contrast between like everyone else being this is so awesome and then me being in it and being like this is so awesome and like trying to be positive jesse and like exude energy and all these things while like inside i was like i'm done like i don't know if i can make it that was i mean recent memory that's definitely the hardest that's the hardest thing so you were telling me about this moment where everything was doing great on the outside but from the inside you were kind of i mean it's pretty much a difference of burnout right like yeah um have you ever felt like giving up um i mean i think at that point in time i mean i needed that wake-up call for my wife and i'm glad i'm glad she did it and it was very helpful and i feel i mean i feel so much better i'm so happy today versus nine months ago whenever ago i guess a year ago now um but even during that period of time there was definitely parts of me where i was like i don't know if i can do this anymore but it wasn't like i'm gonna i want to give up versus like a year prior like we were in the idea phase i thought about quit i mean i had to get talked off the ledge of quitting like by my wife and by some colleagues that i worked with i'm just like i don't know if i can do this and i just don't know if it's worth it like it's So like, especially in the early days where you're just trying to find product market fit.

1:16:45And in that context, like it wasn't even like someone gave me an investment and then I had to give like a board meeting every quarter or something like that. It was like, no, I was meeting with like public company exec team every other week reporting on like, had I innovated the thing yet? And that was just like such not a good environment. It eventually got to the right outcome. But that was really an environment where I was like, I just don't know if I can do this. I don't know how long I can do this. um so that's probably the closest i felt like giving up but i don't know i'm pretty resilient i'm pretty resilient motherfucker like you know like you you you're not gonna like this it it's pretty it runs pretty deep um i i work really hard i really believe in myself i really believe what we're doing in what we're doing with face and with crypto and i'm kind of like i'm just gonna give this everything i possibly can yeah within the confines of you know being a good partner and you know being good human being so i think it's amazing that you're opening up like that and i because most people might not think about it but everybody's a human right yeah and everybody's struggling especially in the beginning of a company so hard and i think people underestimate estimate how hard it is and even how the very successful people went through all these moments.

1:18:03It's normal, right? To doubt. And as I was telling you before, you opened up about a few really key things. Had the JSON from Blockworks opening up about, you know, again, they raised, he said, I'll raise 12 million. It's not that much, but valuation, whatever, 130 million. And they're seen as one of the big, big media empires in crypto. probably going to get much bigger. But he's like, hey man, I have this thing I've never talked about because I was always scared to talk about it. But I have these cluster headaches which happen every year, multiple times a year. And it's just like, I'm just, sometimes I'm on a meeting and I have to get this shot because I'm just falling on the floor.

1:18:43And then I spend a couple of weeks, I can't even do anything. I'm just in my bed. And so, but I'm still making it, right? It's still possible. But I have this site that I don't talk about. I'm scared about it. but i think most people go through i mean different type of batches right it's normal it's human just human beings trying our best with a lot of imperfections and flaws and challenges and just trying our best we just talked a lot about one of your biggest passion crypto there's another one that you have taking pictures yeah i would say it was i was people love saying that because it's on my website i would say it used to be more of a passion less so today i'd say i most of my um content creation is in the form of tweets like that's i've i've i did picture i took photos for a long time i was a photographer um not like a super serious one but i like had a camera and i read about photography and I figured out how to take photos I have some nice photos but um I don't feel called to it in the same way I feel called to speaking you know and like writing and so I find that like my real the place where I have my best creativity and the best thought is in written in the written form so I write a lot um but mostly internal docs I don't publish that much like I don't have a I used to have a blog I wrote a blog for a long time but um i i i haven't in a long time and i think that's because a lot of my energy is going into internal communications for like the team and you're trying to set vision all those things but i i tweet a lot a lot a lot a lot um i saw that i saw that i was like preparing that i was like ah usually i go through a few tweets and i'm like this is an anger this is a anger and i'm like i spent the last five minutes calling and i'm still only two days ago what the fuck yeah yeah it's a little crazy um and it's you know it's it's really crazy um but you know it's working it's working for me and are your tweets a kind of like summary of these internal notes that you take a lot of time yeah yeah a lot of the time it's like i'll have an idea and that will be an internal x like thing that i'll start and then i'll also tweet some like version of it um or like i've started doing every friday now i publish a little video like i it's my to-do list every Friday it's like record a video and share it on Twitter and I just think like what do I what's top of mind for me and like what's important and then I'll record a little like screen share video where I talk through things and I'll publish it on Twitter and so yeah I'm I actually think this is one of my strengths and one of our team's strengths is we're we have a very like we're very good messaging clarity like we have a very clear mission a very clear strategy the work that we do ladders up to that strategy and mission and then i'm relentless in like hammering it every single opportunity i get you know like how many times have i said basis mission is to build a global on-chain economy that increases innovation creativity and freedom like every meeting that we have that's a team meeting we open and this i learned from brian as well we open with the mission the vision and the strategy every single team meeting same thing and people you know people like they tune out sometimes but man you just in order to get anyone to understand or remember like you try to say things so many times um and that's kind of how i feel about twitter like twitter you know from for for my team i'm in slack with them i'm doing meetings with them but for the base economy like most of the time those people don't have any like touch points with me they're not in meetings with me but if in order for us to build the best version of base like we all have to do it together like i can't do it alone our team can't do it Everyone has to do it together.

1:22:28And in order to get all of us working together in the right way, we need to be thinking the same things, we need to be believing the same things. And the best way to accomplish that is by having me be relentlessly communicating, here's what we're doing, here's what we're doing, here's what we're doing, here's how this new thing fits in, here's how that new thing fits in, here's how all these pieces come together to let us accomplish our mission over the next five years.

1:22:51What's something you believe in that most people would not agree with? Yeah, I mean, the like obvious one is that like on chain is going to eat the Internet and everything will be on chain in the next five years and billions of people will be on chain. Five years. Yeah, I think I'd be surprised if it took longer than that. Yeah, I mean, I think I think people often connect crypto to the Internet and they're like, oh, like crypto is following the trend of the Internet. Now, the difference with crypto and the Internet is that the Internet, in order to get global distribution, it had to deploy hardware everywhere.

1:23:23You literally had to run Fiverr and get phones in the hands of every single person. That's a long deployment cycle. You had to get point of sale systems into every business in order for people to accept credit cards. With crypto, it's all already there. We have the internet. The internet's there. And so all we're talking about is a switch of the apps. Like we're upgrading the system. It's like we're installing the software update on all of our computers. And that, when you look at how fast consumer products can go viral, like TikTok went from zero to 700 million users in a few years. like that's we're going to hit the inflection point where like the technology is good enough and the user experiences are good enough and the products are good enough where we're going to start seeing viral social products on chain and it's going to be like bam bam bam bam bam bam and then the whole world's going to be on chain and so i think that people have been kind of lulled into like a little bit of like slow complacency by the first 10 years of crypto and in the next five years it's going to change very dramatically and then we've now entered the window like we are in the window where someone out there right now is building a billion user on chain app i don't know who it is i don't know where it's gonna show up first but someone's building it because the technology is finally ready you took over the next five years what's your biggest prediction for next 12 months next 12 months um i think that within the next 12 months and i i was um i was we just launched this thing called base names um which is you know like it's your on chain identity it's like one name lets you do everything um and we were talking about it with kind of coinbase like leadership group which is you know people over like a certain level of seniority at the company about 200 people in there um we just gave an overview here's what base names is here's how you can claim your base name and alicia haas who's our cfo has been at the company for five years um she you know listened and everyone's excited and you know doing lots of little clapping emojis and then you know she gets off the she she raises her hand and she's like okay jesse last summer you told me to do on-chain summer and get cb.id name and install the coinbase wallet app and this summer you are telling me to get a base name and a new smart wallet but the smart wallet doesn't connect to the coinbase wallet app and the base name and the cb.id are different like why is this confusing and why are we telling people different things than last year.

1:25:42And what I said was last year, we went in with the products that we thought were going to help people get on chain. And what we learned was if you have to install a mobile app in order to get on chain, it's minimum of five minutes and you're going to lose people. And we learned that if you had an identity that was not really on chain, you lost a bunch of interoperability. So you can actually get the best form of the identity that could have verifications and social stuff built into it. And we also learned that the L2s weren't cheap enough. It was still too expensive. You know, like people were building and way too expensive for everyday people.

1:26:15And so we took those learnings at the end of last year and we said, okay, let's go solve those problems. And we built a smart wallet and we built base names and we scaled base 10X. And now we have this new next generation of products, which like took all the learnings from the first generation of products and put them on chain. And all of them individually are really powerful, but they're not working together. and they're also not seamlessly transitioning people from the old way it was to this new way of what it will be that will be super powered. And I think within 12 months, all of those pieces will work together and it will be not only the best consumer experience of any financial or any login app experience ever, it will also be the best developer experience for people who are building apps because when these pieces work together, low cost L2s, smart wallets that are infinitely programmable and then base names that give you a single on-chain identity that can have all of your information, all of your social graph, all of your KYC if you want to share that in a private way.

1:27:15That will make it so developers can integrate one line of code and out of the box, they can get an interface where they can pass anything to it. They can say, hey, do this transaction and the smart wallet combined with the base name will figure out how to do it. and just execute, whether it's a mint or buying a physical good or whatever it is. If you need the user information, if you need KYC, if you need shipping information, it's all going to be behind one facade. And it's all going to be packaged in this private, secure, easy to use interface that you set up by just doing a fingerprint. Takes less than 10 seconds.

1:27:49And that combination of the most powerful login for developers ever, that's 10x better than existing OAuth, and has built-in identity information and payment information and shipping information and KYC information combined with the most powerful user login ever, that means you have one account with all your money that works everywhere, that's totally global and that's incredibly cheap and easy to use. That is what's gonna enable the next generation of on-chain products. And today we have all the pieces because we spent the last nine months building those pieces. And the next phase that we're gonna execute on in the next 12 months is putting the pieces together and making them so they just work so freaking good that everyone's like, holy crap this is 10x better than anything else i've ever done and i don't think other people quite see it yet um but i have been working on this for you know a decade now and in the last two years really focused on this specific problem and we are so close we just need to do the hard work to get the final 10 which if you're an engineer and you're like listening to this like the final 10 is always the hardest but we're gonna nail the crap out of it it's gonna be an incredible experience the one-liner of this podcast is i sit down every week with the most based people in here till i think that was a pretty fucking based conversation so yeah i wanted to thank you so much first for doing that making almost two hours of your time yeah thanks for having me thank you for this amazing energy and thank you for working so hard every day to make the world a better place yeah well thanks for uh making us get here today guys a lot of fun thank you