Brian Armstrong, Coinbase

Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange and one of the most recognized names in the digital asset industry. Armstrong founded Coinbase in 2012 alongside Fred Ehrsam, launching out of Y Combinator with a simple but ambitious goal: to make Bitcoin easy to buy, sell, and store for everyday people. At a time when acquiring cryptocurrency required navigating technically complex and often unreliable platforms, Coinbase offered a clean, accessible interface that brought mainstream users into the space for the first time. Under Armstrong's leadership, Coinbase grew from a consumer-focused Bitcoin wallet into a sprawling financial infrastructure company serving retail investors, institutional clients, and developers. The company expanded to include a professional trading platform, a self-custody wallet, a layer-2 blockchain called Base, and a suite of developer APIs. In April 2021, Coinbase became the first major cryptocurrency exchange to go public in the United States, listing directly on Nasdaq in a landmark moment for the broader crypto industry. Armstrong has been one of the most vocal advocates for bringing cryptocurrency into the mainstream, pushing for clear regulatory frameworks that he believes are essential to unlocking the full potential of a crypto-based global economy. He has been equally focused on building a company culture centered entirely on that mission, encouraging employees to leave outside politics at the door and concentrate on the work. Beyond Coinbase, Armstrong co-founded NewLimit, a longevity biotech company focused on extending human healthspan through epigenetic reprogramming. He writes and speaks regularly about the future of money, decentralized finance, and the long-term potential of a crypto-based global economy — positioning himself not just as a company builder, but as a champion for a more open financial system. Join newsletter: https://www.davidsenra.com/newsletter Episode show notes: https://davidsenra.com/episode/brian-armstrong Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ HubSpot: https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Crypto Power in DC (00:00:25) Market Structure Clarity (00:01:39) SEC Lawfare Origins (00:05:49) Suing the Regulator (00:09:09) Winning the SEC Case (00:11:11) Long Term Founder Mindset (00:12:20) Autism and Focus (00:15:04) Mission First Company Culture (00:21:10) Rebuilding From Scratch (00:23:05) Follow Your Nose (00:25:20) From Side Hustles to Coinbase (00:30:07) Argentina and Bitcoin Spark (00:32:33) Airbnb to Coinbase Nights (00:36:25) Finding a Co-founder (00:37:35) YC Without a Co-founder (00:38:41) Finding the Perfect Partner (00:40:18) Losing Money Per Trade (00:41:23) Support Backlog Chaos (00:43:29) Banking and Compliance Gauntlet (00:47:47) Raising Fast to Survive (00:51:36) Mission Values and Inspiration (00:57:54) Hiring for Spikes (01:02:14) Centralized vs Decentralized (01:05:51) From Bitcoin Wedge to Super App (01:07:59) How Coinbase Runs Today (01:11:00) Decision Speed and Risk (01:12:43) Internal Venture Bets (01:14:46) Funding Ideas Internally (01:15:18) Coinbase Marketing Experiments (01:16:56) Internet Native Shareholder Updates (01:21:58) Media Diet and Going Direct (01:26:47) Building a New Industry (01:31:44) Starting New Limit Longevity (01:36:17) CEO Stress and Routines (01:40:59) AI Agents at Coinbase (01:44:35) Base App Explained (01:46:47) Other Bets and SEZs (01:49:21) Closing Thanks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

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

• 0:07Speaker 01

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

• 0:25David Senra?

  What's the key moment for the market structure?

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Well, the crypto industry has been working for a long time on getting in the Senate. A whole bunch of people have been trying to get this piece of legislation passed. In the House, it was called the Clarity Act. In the Senate, they're drafting their own version of it. But it's essentially clarifying this question about which of these crypto assets are commodities versus securities. And you know, someone might say, well, why does it matter? It matters because in the United States, we have two different federal regulators, the CFTC and the SEC. The CFTC regulates commodities, the SEC regulates securities. And so it turns out in the past, this ambiguity about where crypto assets sit between the two federal regulators, that lack of clarity was really weaponized by Gary Gensler, the former SEC Chair, and Elizabeth Warren, and people like that who tried to, in my view,

• 1:11Speaker 01

  unlawfully kill the industry in the United States. So in other countries where we operate, like in the UK or in Singapore, they only have one federal regulator for financial services. So they actually don't care whether these are commodities or securities. It's a totally parochial issue in the United States. That's kind of like this turf war between two federal agencies in the past. So anyway, we just decided we need to get legislation passed by Congress to clarify once and for all which of them go in which bucket so that in future Gary Gensler couldn't come in and try to kill the industry.

• 1:39David Senra?

  So what was the lawfare that we're trying to do?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so it's a long story, but you know, essentially, this was around like the 2020, 2021 timeframe. Coinbase, we decided we want to become a public company. We had been operating for about nine years at that point. And we went in and went through the normal process with the SEC. You have to describe your entire company, how it works, you know, how do we decide which assets to list, which do we not list? At that time, we wanted there to be a path to have crypto securities be traded. A simple way to think of it is a Security is like a way to raise money for a company that you want to start. A commodity is something that's decentralized, kind of like oil or gold or copper or something like that, right? So Bitcoin is decentralized. Nobody controls it. Everyone pretty much agrees Bitcoin is a commodity. But there were people issuing tokens which were raising money for different projects

• 2:26Speaker 01

  they were doing that were in various stages of decentralization. So was it a commodity? Was it a security? And then Gary Gensler, the SEC chair at that time, my understanding is that, you know, he and Elizabeth Warren essentially decided they wanted to use this to curtail the crypto industry. And if you want to know why. Why? Well, OK. So Elizabeth Warren is, you know, in my view, she's a socialist. She believes the government should be running all financial services. And she had essentially found a way to bypass Congress and have a lot of influence over financial institutions, like big banks. And she did. How would she get that influence? Well, she would appoint regulators that could essentially go in and pressure the

• 3:09Speaker 01

  banks to do things that Congress had not necessarily authorized. So under the Constitution, you know, only Congress is allowed to make laws. But the regulator is given some discretion about how they implement those laws. So you can imagine, let's say you're a bank and you have, you know, your bank regulator and they come in, this is, they can choose to, you know, lose your paperwork and not approve something for 90 days or two years or five years, or they can, you can have a good relationship with them and they can approve things. So let's say they come in and they start to ask you, hey, are you guys serving crypto companies? And you say, well, yes. And they say, well, you know, that's not illegal per se, but we're going to have a lot of questions about that in the next exam that we do of your bank.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  We have deep concerns about the risk that this might introduce. You know, suddenly everyone inside the banks getting the message real loud and clear like, ooh, maybe they don't like us doing this. Now, is it illegal? No. But the bank's regulators, if they say jump, you sometimes want to say, how high, right? And this was the kind of extrajudicial pressure that Elizabeth Warren was able to create on banks. She did it, by the way, in a bunch of other industries too. Like she got them to stop giving loans to like oil and gas and. You know firearms industry and some things that she like her own political agenda, basically. So she got kind of her hooks into these banks, had a lot of influence over them. Suddenly crypto comes along, which is a new system operating outside of that.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  And she didn't like it too much. And so she asked, my understanding, this is kind of what other people in the Congress told me, is that she asked Gary Gansler to go hard on crypto and like try to really curtail it in the United States. And that's what he did. He created a bunch of lawfare, essentially. Like, we'd go in to meet with him. We did maybe 30 times we met with the SEC after becoming a public company, where they allowed us to become a public company. And, you know, we'd say, hey, we're here. We'll tell you anything you'd like to know. Just tell us what are the rules. We're here to like, we're trying to build this industry in America. You tell us the rules, we follow the rules. That's how it's supposed to work. And they would say, we're not going to give you any advice. Go talk to your lawyer. And then the next day, like, enforcement action would arrive. And we'd

• 5:15Speaker 01

  say, what can you show us in the law? What you think we've done that's wrong? Like, no, we're not going to do that. Like, you need to comply, like, basically delist all of these assets, or we're going to sue you. And so at a certain point, we just said, okay, let's go to the courts and find out. Who initiated the legal action? Them or you? It was actually both. They created enforcement action and initiated lawsuit against us. We actually sued them proactively because they had violated another part of the law called the Administrative Procedures Act, where they're required, actually by law, to engage with the industry to promulgate rules. And they had failed to do that. Wait, how many companies sue their regulator? Very few. So this, this actually gets into like, one of the big themes of, you

• 5:58Speaker 01

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

• 6:42Speaker 01

  do these things haphazardly, or... You know, but you do, there are moments where you have to stand up and sue the regulator or the government and they'll actually get the right outcome.

• 6:53David Senra?

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

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:56David Senra?

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

• 7:01Speaker 01

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

• 7:21David Senra?

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

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:25David Senra?

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

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:30David Senra?

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

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:52David Senra?

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

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Founder mode, I guess, you know?

• 8:01David Senra?

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

• 8:13Speaker 01

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

• 8:42David Senra?

  This happened after your republic?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:44David Senra?

  So you accumulated resources, your company has a lot more resources.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:47David Senra?

  If this would have occurred before, would you have had the money to fight it?

• 8:50Speaker 01

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

• 9:16David Senra?

  On that one thing.

• 9:17Speaker 01

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

• 9:58David Senra?

  One of the things I love most about the conversations I have with Brian Armstrong is how focused he is on making the best possible product he can for his customers. Obsess over customers is a maxim that is repeated by Jeff Bezos, and you definitely see that with Brian. It also is the same trait that I see in my friend Kareem, who is the co-founder and CTO of Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Kareem is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance today. Kareem is obsessed with crafting a high-quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers. Ramp has one of the most talented technical teams in finance, and they use rapid relentless iteration to make their product better every day. In the last year, Ramp has shipped over 300 new features.

• 10:42David Senra?

  Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers and automate as much of your business's finances as possible. Many of the fastest-growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on Ramp. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how to help your business save time and money today. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers. Get started today by going to ramp.com. Where did you get this long-term perspective from?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I think it was from trying a bunch of short-term things and then... Realizing that I started some companies like in college and I realized that everything's difficult, right? And it doesn't even if you're running like a sandwich shop or something like it's it's difficult. Like you have to find people who, you know, employees don't show up on time and the food and the vendors and the margin compression because there's like a million other sandwich shops like. And so if you're gonna do something, you might as well, it's gonna take you like a decade or two or three, like to really start to have an impact, you might as well pick something that you care about. It's like the really big thing, you know, it always bothers me a little bit when I talk to entrepreneurs and they tell me that the thing they're working on. And I'm like, okay, what do you really want to do? Like,

• 11:58Speaker 01

  my big thing is I really want to do this. In their mind, it's like a little too ambitious. It's a little too difficult. They need more capital. Part of me is thinking like, man, you should just go for that now because it's gonna, you could spend the next two decades of your life working on this thing you're just talking about now. And you might as well work on the thing that'll actually have a major impact if it's actually if it works.

• 12:16David Senra?

  So are you optimizing for impact?

• 12:19Speaker 01

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

• 12:31David Senra?

  You keep saying that. Yeah, we've talked enough. You're, you're not autistic to me.

• 12:35Speaker 01

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

• 12:40David Senra?

  Well, let's talk about this.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:42David Senra?

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

• 12:45Speaker 01

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

• 12:55David Senra?

  I'm introverted for sure, but I'm introverted too.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:58David Senra?

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

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I think I'm somewhere on the spectrum. You know, I've taken some online tests and things like that. And there, there are things like where, you know, I have difficulty like reading people's faces and emotions sometimes. And, you know, I kind of can get overstimulated by like loud sounds and lights and, you know, so there's kind of classic signs like that, but it's not debilitating at all. And I actually find it to be like, it is, it's a strength in a sense that like. I can just endlessly focus on interesting work, almost. Like, for 12 hours a day, I just find it to be, I wouldn't say effortless. It depends, depends on what kind of work I'm doing. Like, if I'm, if I have to just do a bunch of, like, 12 hours of people management, hard conversations, like, that's pretty taxing.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  But if I'm just, like, writing code or reading things on my computer, or just, like, digesting cool content on the internet, I can just do that endlessly. So there is, like, I wouldn't say you have to be autistic to have that, but there's certain things like that, I just find it endlessly fascinating.

• 14:02David Senra?

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

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yes, that's, so that's the other thing, which I don't know if this is an autism spectrum thing, but it, yeah. I, I think more, some people are, like, a little more concerned with social cohesion or what other people think. And so there is a part of me that's just, like, if I see something that's just wrong and not in line with what I want to accomplish long-term around, you know, civilizational progress and these things, it's, I don't, I don't care being disliked. I don't really care that much about being disliked for it. And I know that it'll piss people off. So there are a handful of things like this that I've done in Coinbase, which I think people consistently remarked to me, like, wow, that was really unique. And to me, it didn't seem that unique, but, like, this Mission First blog post I put out, where we said the company's gonna be apolitical during, you know, 2021, all that madness, or suing your regulator, right?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  These are things which most people probably wouldn't do, because they're, they're afraid of being disliked. And I, it's not that I like being disliked, it actually causes me a fair amount of stress, too. But I don't let that stop me from doing what I think is the right thing.

• 15:04David Senra?

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

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:18David Senra?

  You read it today, it's fairly innocuous.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:20David Senra?

  But back then, I remember the response, people were going crazy.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really funny. If you go look at it now, it's like, what's the big deal? I mean, it's kind of a boring blog post in some ways, right? But yeah, at that time, I feel like there was this mass hysteria or something that had like taken over the country. I mean, the George Floyd thing had happened, people were COVID had happened, so people were isolated. They weren't getting in person as much with folks and feeling a sense of, hey, we're all on the same team. We trust each other. And increasingly at these town halls that we would host as a company, usually people would ask questions about like our products and our competitors and regulators. And then we increasingly would be getting these questions about social issues happening in the world. In this case, like police brutality with George Floyd, but all kinds of things like, you know,

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Middle East or whatever, gun control, you know? And we, it became almost like, I realized there was this element within the company that really wanted to get in front of the company with a microphone and like, see if they could make the executive team squirm somehow. And, you know, we had this culture of this open mic thing, but I realized that later, we actually don't really do that. We just have people pre-submit questions. And if we think, we take hard questions, but if they're like just way off topic or someone's pet issue, we just don't, we don't entertain that. It's, we don't allow one person to kind of derail 3,000 other people. So it was in that context that the company was going through this. And somebody at a town hall asked the question like, are we going to support Black Lives Matter at Coinbase?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I basically said, I don't know enough about it, but I'll look into it, like move on to the next question. And they kind of held the mic and they said like, that's not good enough. I need to know if we at this company are going to stand for this or not. And I said, I don't know. I'm not, I haven't looked into it, right? And this erupted in Slack and basically 300 employees did a walkout in protest. If you remember at this time, like every company in America was posting pro BLM statements. So I'd never had a walkout of employees at the company before. I didn't even know what that meant. They all just kind of closed their laptop in a remote environment, I guess. Wait, so wait, are these, this is not in person? This was all remote during COVID. Okay, so the walkout is close my laptop. Yeah, but we were like. Go from my bedroom to my living room now. Yeah, yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And I was like, okay, this is weird. I mean, as a CEO, I'd never had, I felt like I had the confidence of the company or whatever. And now people are saying they don't, they refuse to work at this company based on my comment. And I found this very confusing, actually, maybe a little of that autism spectrum. I was like, I'm confused. Like, this company has nothing to do with police brutality or anything, you know? What is going on here? And we kind of got in the room as an executive team. And I asked them a few questions like, hey, people are very sensitive in this moment. They need to feel reassured about where their leaders stand. And I was like, what does BLM even stand for? You know, I don't, and like, we went and looked into that. Later I found out, by the way, that they support defunding the police and like all these other things. It was not a very simple answer.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I didn't really know what to do. So after about 48 hours or so, we put out a statement and we said, okay, I guess we support equality for all people and all these things. And people came back to work, but I felt something was deeply wrong. I felt like I had compromised something about myself and I didn't understand what was happening. And so I started to go talk to a bunch of employees in the company and read a bunch of these books, like Jonathan Haidt's book and others. And which is the Jonathan Haidt book? Something of the American mind, the Coddling of the American Mind, I think. He was talking, he basically talks about how in these college campuses, there's like these training activists in these college campuses. And it's now spilling into the workforce. And they feel that their job is not to like join a company and advance its mission.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  They felt like their job was to join a company and hold it, hold truth to power and like hold it to account for these broader societal issues and actually reform the company as an activist. I essentially started drafting this blog post and I said, I don't, we're not going to do that here. You know, like. We're not going to be a company that just tries to jump into whatever the current hot social issue is and make a bunch of feel-good statements without actually doing anything. We already have an important mission, which is increasing economic freedom, and it takes decades of work to try to make an impact on something that big. So let's stick to the thing that we think is important in the world. And outside of work, people can do whatever they want. You can go protest, you can be left or right or whatever. But just inside the workplace, we're not going to be political. We're just going to focus,

• 19:47Speaker 01

  unless it has to do with our mission, crypto and economic freedom. Then we'll be very political, engaging for litigation and things like that.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So I knew it was going to piss some people off. And I, actually, some people, when they read the draft post before I sent it, they said, like, "Do not post this." They begged me not to post it.

• 20:04David Senra?

  People inside your company? You sent it to, like, other founders?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Inside the company.

• 20:08David Senra?

  Okay.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:08David Senra?

  Did you send it to anybody outside Coinbase?

• 20:12Speaker 01

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

• 20:19David Senra?

  Okay.

• 20:19Speaker 01

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

• 21:04Speaker 01

  beforehand. We didn't know. We thought maybe 50% of the company would resign or something. It felt like that was...

• 21:09David Senra?

  What would have happened at that time if 50% resigned?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  We would have built it all back, you know? And this is actually a very important point, because... I think that there's a big difference between like a founder and a and a presider of a company, right? Like, I I know that I could build it back because I started it when it was just me on a laptop. Right? And I and I was there when it was 10 people and 100 people and 1,000 people. And if we need to go from 2,000 to 1,000, that's not a big deal to me. You know, I could go back to being on my laptop again if I had to, right? And there's actually, there's this great Lee Kuan Yew speech that he gave. He was the founder of Singapore, you know? And I guess he was dealing with a a strike that was happening, I think, from the air traffic controller or the airline or something like that. But there's this great speech, if you Google Lee Kuan Yew, um, iron, iron in veins. You know what I'm talking about?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  And he, he basically, he says, like, in this speech, it kind of gives me chills every time where he's, he's like, you know, I sat across the table from them and they were threatening to like shut down the airline and everything. And he said, get back to work. And, you know, or, and like, I will not allow you to bring this country down. And if you don't do it, I'm prepared to rebuild it all from scratch again. And he said, anyone who rules Singapore, you know, has to look, look at me and know that I have iron in my veins. Like, I will rebuild it all from scratch, right? And so I was watching like videos like that. And I was like, this is what, this is what I need to do as a leader. Like, it was very, it was very inspiring.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  So there are moments like that, um, that you have to stand up and say, we're going in this direction. And if you don't, if you're not on board with it, it's okay, you can leave. But we're going this way, that that's leadership.

• 22:52David Senra?

  There's two interesting things that popped out in what you just said. I want to go to the long term. Again, you have this long term orientation. You mentioned multiple times on the blog post, you're like, we're trying to change, literally change the world. And that's going to take multiple decades. Want to go to that one second. But I like how you said, you're like, I was confused. Like, what is going on here? So you're not, your first instinct, when you're confused, you start reading books, you start talking to people. What do you do to try to, to like, to essentially alleviate the confusion? Because you're like, oh, I don't know what's going on. I'm going to read Jonathan Haidt's part, for example.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the above. I mean, I read books and books are amazing. I think sometimes you can take reading like, you know, as you know, it's like read for eight hours to get to that one part. Oh, that's the key insight, you know? So actually calling people, I think is faster if you have access to them especially. Earlier in my career, I didn't have access, but now I feel like I can get access to more people. And it's often just a shortcut. Like if you know the right person to call who's been thinking about that or working on that for 10 years, they can explain to you in 30 seconds what you need. Oh my gosh, like that's the connection, of course. Like so. Yeah, that's exactly what I do and I just am following my instinct a lot of the time. Like a lot of, a lot of your job as CEO is, you know, your day can just get infinitely scheduled and you're just like trying to hire the right people and go talk to investors and build,

• 24:03Speaker 01

  you know, go to product reviews and stuff. But once in a while, you just need to follow your nose. If you're like, something's bothering me, you know, it's like, I bet you're kind of always ingesting information and once in a while, you're just like, something feels really off over here. Like this team doesn't, this team is rudderless, like going in no direction, or I don't trust what's going on with over here, like, you know, in this policy thing. And you can just go digging, you know, and occasionally you find things and you can add a lot of value.

• 24:30David Senra?

  When you say follow your nose, is this intuition?

• 24:34Speaker 01

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

• 24:52David Senra?

  I was actually surprised. One of my favorite conversations I've had so far for the show was with Toby Luque.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:57David Senra?

  Me and you talked about him at lunch and like, I always say he's like your favorite founder's favorite founder, like the amount of people that really admire the way he thinks and the way he's built his company. And you would think like this German engineer, you know, it's gonna be all data driven and like, he just talked about like visualization and like,

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Affirmations.

• 25:14David Senra?

  Affirmations, yeah, exactly. All intuition. It was actually surprising. It's one of the most fascinating things about this conversation. So explain the difference you thought about when you were starting the companies before Coinbase. Cause you had this long-term orientation almost from the beginning of Coinbase, but you lacked that in the other businesses that you were starting before that?

• 25:32Speaker 01

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

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Tim Ferriss had a big thing on this. Yes, there was the four hour work week, like that whole thing. I was kind of thinking about it even before that, but the four hour work was definitely that. The first company I really started in college was this tutoring company because I had been tutoring high school kids while I was in college to make extra money. And like working at the, working at the library, you got paid, I forget, it was like seven or eight dollars an hour. But if you were tutoring high school kids, you could make like sixty dollars an hour. I was like, this is crazy. So I was tutoring kids for a while and then, and then I realized I could match my other college students with other high school kids. And I, so I built like this simple web app, which was like a tutor finding tutor matching service called University Tutor.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And I was basically building this in college with like another friend of mine, a roommate. I didn't think about it from first principles. It wasn't like, I wasn't particularly passionate about tutoring or education. I was just trying to make some passive income essentially and scale it, right? And so it would have never occurred to me at that moment to like, I didn't have the wherewithal to zoom out and say, you know what? We need to become an interplanetary species. I should make rockets or you know, or like, I was like, what are you talking about? Like I've never, you know, I'm just trying to make like, go from sixty dollars an hour to like have ten of my friends be hired by their, you know, get, get jobs too. So, you know, I went through that process. The tutoring company is its own little story.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  And then, you know, I tried a couple of other ideas like that after college too. Like I had a couple of like, I got like these rental houses in Houston and I was like refurbishing them. And I was trying to do, build like a little real estate investment thing. I was doing a bunch of stuff. And at some point, I actually, I remember I read this. Book by Seth Godin called The Dip. I don't know if you've ever seen that book.

• 27:57David Senra?

  Yeah, I read it a long time ago.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's actually like pretty simple book. I don't know if it would do anything for me today. But at the time when I read it, it was a pretty powerful idea. And he he basically was just saying, you know, there's a big dip between being a beginner and and like the top of your field where you make, you know, the top 1%. And like, most people quit in the middle because it's not fun after you're a beginner. There's just like 10,000 hours and all these kind of things. And I remember thinking, do I really want to be doing real estate in like 10, 20 years? I was like, no. Do I do I do I care enough about education? Or, you know, I was like, I don't think that either. So I I was I literally had like a piece of paper I was writing. What are the things I am passionate enough about where I would do it for the next 20 years? Even if even if I saw a little or no success?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  And the only thing I could right I could think of was like tech entrepreneurship. That was like the only thing I could really think of. And so that was a very clarifying decision where I decided, all right, I need to move to Silicon Valley because that's where tech entrepreneurship happens. I need to shut down all the other stuff I'm doing because those are just little short term games. I sold off all these little rental rental properties. And, you know, within a few years of that decision, moving to Silicon Valley, Coinbase had been founded. And I think within seven years of that decision, Coinbase had a billion dollar valuation. It was like a huge direction and change in my life. It's just like, I know what's the big thing is long term and I'm going to just go all in on it. And all the decisions led to that.

• 29:20David Senra?

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

• 29:28Speaker 01

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

• 30:13David Senra?

  Why did you go to Argentina?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Well, Women? No. Okay. No, sadly, no, but it was, um, I needed some adventure. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And so I just, I had never traveled alone. And so I basically just went abroad and like tried to put myself outside my comfort zone. I had never been in the military. I'd never traveled, I'd never like traveled abroad by myself. Um, I was kind of just reading a bunch of books and like, I mean, I need to go travel the world and like see, find, find what I'm trying to do with my life. And You went to Buenos Aires? Yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah. Argentina is a beautiful country. Yeah, it's, well, it's, I learned from an economics point of view, like Not like that. I meant the physical beauty. Well, so it ties together because, you know, my understanding is actually around the year 1900 or so,

• 30:59Speaker 01

  like, like more than a hundred years ago, I think in 1908, it was like one of the top 10 economies in the whole world. It was called the Paris of South America. Yeah, it was like the first Latin American country that had a train station. You can see it in these historic buildings. They had like massive wealth, right? From beef and copper and all these things. And then over a period of like a hundred years of bad economic policy of essentially like socialist policies of them, the government like stealing wealth from the people while claiming to help them. It's now like the 100th richest economy in the world. It's from like top 10 to 100th. And so I was down there kind of reading, you know, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and seeing how hyperinflation had like decimated this entire country. And everyone was pessimistic about the future.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And these once grand government buildings were just in these like states of decay, you know, with like cracks and IV and graffiti on it and stuff. And, you know, this was like around that moment where I was like, okay, the next thing I do, it needs to be something I'm passionate about for the long term. And within a year or two of that, I had, I read the Bitcoin White Paper. That captivated my attention. And then I think This is around, so Bitcoin White Paper published end of 2008? Yeah. You read it? December 2010. Okay. Yeah. I'd just come back from Argentina, so I was in the Bay Area deciding I wanted to be in tech entrepreneurship. I read the Bitcoin White Paper December 2010.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I'd gotten a job at Airbnb, actually, and I was seeing how money movement was happening with them, all these different countries. And that's when I started working on the prototype for Coinbase, nights and weekends.

• 32:33David Senra?

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

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Legacy payment rails. So in the US and Europe, it was a little simpler. You could use bank transfers and so they were accepting payments in, then they had to pay out to the host. In many of the countries where they operated, like in Latin America, there would be some local cash pickup service. That you could, kind of like a Western Union, but it was different ones in different countries. And they typically had very high fees, like 7% to 12%. I remember we were trying to send payouts into, I think it was Ecuador or one of these countries. And we were reading, there's like a little oligopoly of like two companies that do this and that, you know, in the region. And we were like, how much money shows up on the other side? Like, what are your fees?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And we were reading through their documentation, we're like, we have no idea how, it's basically like a borderline corrupt thing. And we basically just decided to send $100 and we found somebody there, like, how much money showed up on the other side? Just to like, give us some rough sense so we could tell the customer how much their payout was going to be. I mean, it gave me such a visceral sense of like how broken the global financial system is. It's like each country has its own little proprietary set of oligopolies. And imagine if like the internet worked like this, right? It's like, oh, I want to load a webpage from, you know, another country. And they're like, you pay a high exchange fee and it comes in like a different language, you know? And you have to wait seven days or whatever.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  I realized, due to a couple of these experiences, like the Argentine experience with hyperinflation, the Airbnb experience, and reading some of these books, that like, the world would benefit from a global financial system that was, you know, fast, cheap, permissionless, decentralized, so there was no small group of people who could be corrupt or like, put their fingers on the dials to manipulate it. And so that was what I was thinking about as I read the Bitcoin White Paper for the first time.

• 34:30David Senra?

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

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:51David Senra?

  And then you start working on Coinbase nights and weekends?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:55David Senra?

  Okay.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Great summary, by the way. Yeah, so.

• 34:57David Senra?

  I kind of do that for a living.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is where a little bit of that hustle and drive came in because, you know, I was working long hours at Airbnb. They were like rocket ship company. I was learning a lot, really amazing team. And, but I really wanted to build something new for my next company. I still wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I'd work till like 7:00 PM at Airbnb, come home, eat a little dinner, and then from like 8:30 to midnight or something like five days a week, I would work on my startup. And, you know, you always have to be very careful. You have to do it on your own separate laptop. Don't do it on company time or company property. Make sure it's separate. But, you know, I used my own laptop and I, sometimes on Sundays I'd work, you know, as well, right? I'd sort

• 35:45Speaker 01

  of take one day off. But I was just grinding and I was like, okay, well, I didn't know where to start. So you kind of just have to start with anything, right? So first I went and talked to a friend of mine I went to college with. We built this little Android app for Bitcoin, a Bitcoin wallet. I realized once we shipped that, we had done it the wrong way. I tried to, I tried to recruit him to like leave Google and be co-founder with me. He wasn't ready to do that. So I started working on another prototype that was more of a cloud-based Bitcoin wallet, which eventually became Coinbase. And I had to re-implement like a whole Bitcoin node in Ruby, just to try to get it to hook up to my database, you know, and all these things. So I was just doing this like nights and weekends while occasionally trying to find a co-founder, you know, and going on these co-founder dates.

• 36:25David Senra?

  Why did you think you needed a co-founder?

• 36:27Speaker 01

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

• 37:03David Senra?

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

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's like Wozniak and Jobs, right? Jobs was clearly the one that had more impact over a long period of time, but there probably wouldn't have been an Apple without Woz in the early days.

• 37:33David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  You never know exactly. And I will say, in my case, I tried to find a co-founder for about a year and a half and failed. And so I eventually got the app live and got into Y Combinator, and there's a whole story there.

• 37:46David Senra?

  Did you get into Y Combinator as a solo founder?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  So this is another interesting story. But I actually applied with this guy, Ben Reeve, who had created blockchain.info, which is now blockchain.com. And he had never heard of Y Combinator, but I convinced him to fly from the UK. We met, had a coffee, and then we went into the interview, which, by the way, is a bad idea. You should really co-found with people you've known for a long time. So, anyway, we got accepted somehow under that premise. I don't think we mentioned probably that we didn't know each other that long, or it didn't come up in the interview or something. We didn't hide anything. But, anyway, it became clear within like three months that it was not going to work. And so with the help of YC, I kind of went, I had a hard conversation with him about that, and I went through the program solo.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Anyway, long story short, we went through Y Combinator, raised the seed round at the end of it. And I was lucky enough to have Fred Ursom reach out to me. And he became the first person who I really started working with on it unofficially. And then it just started going really well, very complementary skillsets. And I asked him to co-found, and so he became the co-founder of Coinbase. And I actually don't think Coinbase would have succeeded without Fred. Like, if you look at the subsequent three, four, or five years, there was a lot of near-death experiences, and he was just an absolute killer. And so it was that pairing that allowed us to really get to product-market fit and off the launchpad into orbit, if you will.

• 39:18David Senra?

  Brad Jacobs has started eight separate billion-dollar companies. He said, "I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life, and they all have one thing in common: they think differently than most people. All of them, to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails." What Brad noticed is that great business leaders are pattern spotters. But you can't spot patterns if you can't see all of your data. Most businesses only use 20% of their data. Why? Because 80% of customer intelligence is invisible. It's hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. That's where HubSpot comes in.

• 40:03David Senra?

  With HubSpot, all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. This is important because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com. There were some funny stories from the early days of Coinbase. I've heard Fred identified that you guys were losing money on every single Bitcoin transaction.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yes, that is true.

• 40:27David Senra?

  How did that happen?

• 40:28Speaker 01

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

• 41:13David Senra?

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

• 41:16Speaker 01

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

• 41:21David Senra?

  What was an example of a near death experience?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so an example of a near death experience was, I think we had, we had raised maybe the series A or something like that. Yeah. And we had found product market fit. So there were a lot of people using the site every day. And, you know, we, we were having this huge backlog of customer support inquiries, like where it'd be like every night from like 9:00 PM to midnight, we would just try to answer support queries because we hadn't, we didn't have a customer support team. And, well, we were slowly trying to build it, I should say. Anyway, so we had like 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 backlog of these customer support tickets and people were getting very angry about all of this.

• 42:08David Senra?

  Because you couldn't respond?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:10David Senra?

  I was one of those people.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Okay. You were early, early on Coinbase?

• 42:13David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, apologies for the lack of customer support response.

• 42:17David Senra?

  To the point where I was like looking up, like I had a bunch of Bitcoin on there. I was like, there was an issue. And I was like, what is the address? Like, I'm gonna have to fly to San Francisco because these people won't respond to my email.

• 42:27Speaker 01

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

• 42:43David Senra?

  And back there, they had to be weirdos, like the people that are into crypto back then were not your normal people.

• 42:48Speaker 01

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

• 43:08David Senra?

  Because back then, it was the only place where you could buy Bitcoin with a credit card, right? Like you could use-

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, or a bank transfer.

• 43:15David Senra?

  A bank transfer, right?

• 43:16Speaker 01

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

• 43:24David Senra?

  Were you the first crypto company to do that?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  In the US, yeah.

• 43:27David Senra?

  In the US, yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:29David Senra?

  How did you get the bank partnership?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  So that's its own whole story. I mean, by the way, there was other near-death experiences around cyber events and things like that we can talk about if you want.

• 43:38David Senra?

  Yeah, I would.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  But on the bank side, yeah. So, okay, this is another interesting story where we... Okay, believe it or not, the first version of the Coinbase app, actually, you couldn't buy or sell Bitcoin. I thought we were making a wallet for payments on the internet. And so you could store Bitcoin, you could make Bitcoin payments. And this prototype went out and I remember like a couple hundred people signed up on, off of Reddit or something like that. But the app was not retaining users, right? And what they teach you in Y Combinator is like, go talk to customers, get feedback, and then build the product. And talk to customers and build the product and just do that on repeat. And don't get distracted by any other bullshit, like going to conferences or whatever. So I remember I emailed like three of these people who'd signed up and I was like, hey, I built this app, can I get on the phone with you?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And in the first few conversations, I was like, I noticed you didn't come back to the app. And the guy was like, yeah, I mean, the app was pretty cool, but like I just don't have any Bitcoin. And I remember something kind of clicked in my head and I was like, well, if there was like a buy button in the app, would you have bought it here? And it sounds like ridiculous in hindsight, but at the time, this was like market research, right? And he's like, yeah, probably. And so I was like, okay, we gotta make a simple way for people to just buy it here. It's not like you go to a separate exchange and then put it in your wallet for actually daily utility or something. And so then I was like, okay, we gotta make it possible to get bank transfers hooked up, kind of like PayPal or debit cards. And I remember calling like these different banks and saying, hey, I want to get integrated into the bank network in the ACH. It's called ACH in the US.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  And these banks were either like, what the heck are you talking about? Like, I've never heard of this thing. It sounds like a scam. Or some of them who had heard about Bitcoin, I remember like hung up on me, you know? They were like, we do not work with Bitcoin companies. Like bam, slamming the phone down, right? And-

• 45:28Speaker 01

  So I went to the partners at Y Combinator. Actually, one of them was like Sam Altman at the time. He was running Y Combinator and Gary Tan was there. He was helping me and Paul Bukai and these various folks. And I remember they said, well, why don't you go talk to Silicon Valley Bank? Like, we help. We Silicon Valley Bank opens bank accounts for lots of Y Combinator companies. We have a good relationship there. So they kind of warmly introduced me to the right person. And they were kind of like, these guys are probably crazy, but we like to help Y Combinator. So let's see what we can do. And they ran it through their compliance team and their compliance team came back and said, we think you might be what's called a money transmitter, which means you need to have a license in the United States. And I remember getting on the phone with them and they were like,

• 46:11Speaker 01

  well, we can't open this account for you unless you can prove to us that you're not a money transmitter or you have to get a money transmission license. And the money transmission license I researched was like, it was going to cost $5 or $10 million and take about three or four years. And I'd only raised about 600K right now. So I was like, that's not good. But they also said, well, if you have some legal argument that you're not a money transmitter, maybe we would allow you to get started. And I remember going to a couple of law firms and one of them agreed. He's like, there are some arguments that you could make that you're not a money transmitter. It's a little bit of a gray area. And he was like, I'll write you a legal opinion saying, subject to the following terms, that you may not be a money transmitter, but it's going to cost $30,000 for this like five-page piece of paper.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And I thought, at the time, I thought this was crazy. You know, we'd raised like $600,000. I was like, $30,000 for a piece of paper, you know? But I was talking with my advisors at Y Combinator and they were like, well, if this allows you to get the bank account open and you can start to test your product idea, like, do it, you know? So I paid this guy the 30 grand. We got the account open. I wrote all the code myself to do like ACH integrations. And you have to FTP these files to the bank. And it's like this kind of antiquated system. And it launched and it had product market fit. And it just was, then it was like, instead of pushing a boulder uphill every day, it was like the boulder was rolling down the hill and you're chasing it as fast as you could.

• 47:33David Senra?

  So you could buy Bitcoin through ACH, through a bank transfer?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:36David Senra?

  Could you use credit cards back then or no?

• 47:38Speaker 01

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

• 47:42David Senra?

  Okay, so even that with just the bank transfer?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:45David Senra?

  Flooded with customers.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and started to get some very anxious calls from the bank at certain points, too, because as they were like, you guys have raised $600,000 and they're like, every day there's like $550,000, you know, because we debit these customer accounts to get the money, but we had to pre-buy the Bitcoin. And so we had this cash flow issue where like, we were basically using our entire balance every day just to service the current demand. And they, and I remember the guy from the bank called me kind of frantic. He's like, if you just have one error, like your whole, you're insolvent. And by the way, they're, they might be on the hook for it, too. We might be like, negative a million dollars and just be insolvent, and then the bank's on the hook for it. And I remember the guy told me on the phone, he's like, you need to go raise money, like, right now and get

• 48:31Speaker 01

  more money in your account, or like, we're not going to be able to continue to serve you on this ACH network transfers. Like, you were in this tiny little sandbox, but now you're suddenly growing like a weed. And, and I remember we took this graph of like, the daily buys. It was just up and we didn't even have a pitch deck or anything. And we just went out and in like, a week, raised the next round and got like, $25 million deposited in the account.

• 48:56David Senra?

  With a graph?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because we ordinarily, I wouldn't recommend that, but we were sleep deprived and it was, that's all we had time to do. So we just went and we, yeah, we showed them a few pieces of data and we're like, this is an up and right graph of demand and the bank's going to close our account in like, two weeks if we don't get some.

• 49:15David Senra?

  That $25 million was from A16 and Ribbit?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  The Series A was from Union Square Ventures and Ribbit.

• 49:21David Senra?

  Okay.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then A16Z was the B.

• 49:24David Senra?

  Okay.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:25David Senra?

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

• 49:28Speaker 01

  That was, that was, yeah.

• 49:30David Senra?

  Okay.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Union Square Ventures and the.

• 49:31David Senra?

  Was it Mickey?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know him? Okay.

• 49:34David Senra?

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

• 49:35Speaker 01

  He's great.

• 49:36David Senra?

  Yep. That sounds like something he would do.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, he was a Bitcoin believer for a long time before that.

• 49:42David Senra?

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

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yep. Venezuela.

• 49:47David Senra?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:48Speaker 01

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

• 49:57David Senra?

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

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:04David Senra?

  And how long did you, did you think that was going to be like, the totality of the business? Were you already thinking about product extension back then or no?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  First, I knew there was a lot of ways to die along the way, so I was just trying to get the simple thing working. I mean, we had hackers trying to break into our systems. We had engineers quitting because it was overwhelming and there was too much stuff. We had, they were getting paged in the middle of the night, like three times every night, trying to keep the website up. These banks might just turn us off and we go out. So there was all kinds of, I was just trying to survive the next few months often. In the back of my mind, I knew that if we could get this thing to scale just on the first product, there's all kinds of things that this could disrupt. I mean, that's what I got excited about when I first read the Bitcoin white paper. It was like, this could be a new kind of financial system for the world that's global and fair and decentralized,

• 50:56Speaker 01

  more free market oriented. Anybody with a cellphone could have access to good financial services, participate in global economy, like the government couldn't erode all their wealth via inflation, like what happened in Argentina. So I knew that there was high potential for this eventually, but there wasn't too much time to think about that. We were just, there was a lot of sleep deprivation and long hours and just trying to survive to the next three months.

• 51:20David Senra?

  And how long did that period last? Was this a couple of years?

• 51:23Speaker 01

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

• 51:36David Senra?

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

• 51:41Speaker 01

  There was a book called PayPal Wars, which talked about the early days of PayPal. And it's actually pretty remarkable, if you go back and look at what Peter Thiel and Elon and Max Levchin, all these guys were doing, David Sacks, they actually had many similar ideas to Bitcoin. They were trying to create a decentralized form of money that could be permissionless, global on the internet. It, you know, because of the history of the company and how it got acquired by eBay and a lot of the people left, it ended up being more just like a checkout alternative with credit cards and stuff. But actually, having worked at Airbnb, that, that, that actually gave me a good picture into what was possible as well. Because in college, you know, I went to school at Rice University in Houston, amazing school, I loved it. And, but it didn't really have like a startup environment. It wasn't like Stanford or something.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  And so I had never really seen a successful startup from the inside. I had tried doing my own startup, which didn't go super well. And inside Airbnb, it was like, it was like some magic was happening. Like they'd caught lightning in a bottle and thing was growing like wildfire. They were, the way that they hired people and had this really high bar for excellence and design, the way they did decision making, like a lot of things I got to see working there. And then I, and then I kind of said, okay, um, I, before in my mind, I had it kind of put on a pedestal. I was like, wow, there's like some crazy geniuses that are doing all this kind of stuff. And there's something amazing about working with getting in the room just so you can see how people work. And it, it doesn't mean that they're not geniuses. I think those guys are brilliant. It means like I got

• 53:08Speaker 01

  to see it and it demystified it and it made it feel possible that I could try to do something a little bit similar. Right? And so there's a couple of companies like that. I mean, nowadays I would say, you know, certainly like the level of ambition like that Elon has and these things are very inspiring. I've tried to take bits and like parts from Google, Amazon. Um, I've, I've sort of been a student of lots of these companies and tried to take the best.

• 53:30David Senra?

  Anything from history?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I really liked the Wright brothers. They're, they're cool. Um, you, you, have you ever done an episode on it?

• 53:39David Senra?

  Yeah, episode 228.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  You remember that? Wow. Okay.

• 53:42David Senra?

  The book by David McCullough.

• 53:43Speaker 01

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

• 53:45David Senra?

  Incredible.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Incredible. Yeah. I love these kind of just like big problems like that, that humanity, you know, you know, that it's kind of crazy, but it's possible and someone's going to do it maybe in the next hundred years. And there's a few, there's a few things like that, like, um,

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Longevity, we can talk about that, like in the biotech space, you know, fusion energy.

• 54:08David Senra?

  The Wright Brothers is crazy because that was like a centuries old problem.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:13David Senra?

  Like, humans have been trying to figure out how to fly for centuries before these two brothers in Dayton, Ohio, if I remember correctly, that essentially solved a centuries old problem with the modest profits of a bicycle shop.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:25David Senra?

  And what was fascinating about them is like, most of them, I mean, they had a ton of competitors that had more credentials, more financial backing. And I think in David McCullough's book, if I remember correctly, like, they solved human-powered flight with like $1,500.

• 54:39Speaker 01

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

• 55:02David Senra?

  So going back to where we were in the story, you're like, okay, I just need to not die.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:06David Senra?

  I have something working as if I just don't die.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:08David Senra?

  I can figure out other products or, you know, a way to go to business in the future. Were you thinking of any other, like, any other specific way about like, I want to build a company this way?

• 55:21Speaker 01

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

• 55:52David Senra?

  When did you arrive at the mission?

• 55:54Speaker 01

  I don't remember the exact year, but it was at least a few years in, we started to really think about it. And, you know,

• 56:02Speaker 01

  For me, it was not just like getting people to use crypto or something. It was like, what's, well, why, why, why do we want that? And it was because it was, it was enabling everybody to own their own wealth in a way that couldn't be taken from them, go try to attempt more ambitious things in, in, in life. It was kind of like a foundation, like basic property rights is what they'd call it in economics, right? And if you had sound money, basic property rights, low friction to try new things in the world that might benefit people and actually be able to keep the upside of it, you'd have more people trying, attempting this. That very much appealed to me. We sort of take this for granted in the United States that, you know, usually like the money's just not going to get taken out of your bank account or something like that. But in many places of the world, that's not true, right?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  There's people like where the government will actually do seizures. The cypriots actually did this recently in the past where they like took a bunch of money out of everyone's bank accounts to like cover debt. There's refugees that have to flee borders in various times in history where all their wealth gets confiscated. There is so much bureaucracy and corruption in places like Argentina to even start a company. It's like, it's a huge black market and there's just, yeah. So, and, and by the way, people can't, they can't get access to loans or anything like that. Like, you know, one, one of the major ways people build wealth in the United States is you buy a home, you get a mortgage. Only wealthy people can really buy real estate in Argentina because you can't get a mortgage, you have to pay cash.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  So there's all kinds of ways that this is just pernicious and it, it like decelerates progress essentially. So I was trying to think of a pithy way to articulate that and I wrote down, you know, this increase economic freedom in the world mission. And, you know, it's a little wonky. Sometimes people don't know what exactly it means and they have to go read about it. But it does encompass what we're trying to do and I think crypto is the best technology to increase economic freedom.

• 57:54David Senra?

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

• 57:59Speaker 01

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

• 58:16David Senra?

  Why did it have to be outbound at that point?

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, crypto was like a very niche thing. Like, we were not a hot company at Y Combinator. We went to the demo day that they do where we raised like the six, raised the 600K seed round. But there was lots of companies that raised like multimillion dollar rounds and beyond. Like, we were kind of middle of the pack somewhere, maybe a little below in terms of how hot the company was. So the only people we managed to actually convince to invest or to join the company were people who had already gotten excited about crypto for some reason. And then they met us and they're like, okay, this is semi-legit at least. Like, they've gone through Y Combinator, they have this product that's working, they've had some early investors like Union Square Ventures. And so we got some of these, like, the first five or 10 people who joined were like crypto zealots who just thought we might be a good company to bet on.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  As the company got bigger, you know, we hired recruiting teams and the whole, the whole thing. We were competing with big tech in San Francisco, which was, you know, during the zero interest rate phenomenon, it was like fiercely competitive. We eventually broadened, opened other offices, hired some remote workers. Hiring is its own whole topic.

• 59:23David Senra?

  Yeah, well, I'm curious, like, have you found any other? I talked to my friend Kareem, founder of Ramp, about this. Daniel Ekstender of Spotify, they both think about it in the same exact way, where they hire for spikes.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:33David Senra?

  One of the benefits of being a founder-led company is, you know, big companies try to manage to the middle. They don't want the high highs or the low lows. And Daniel and Kareem are both like, no, I want the best, the person that is the best in the world at this one tiny little thing, and that's all I want them to do. And I'll deal with their usually, you know, excessive or extreme personality traits on the other side of that.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, that's like, we were looking at people's past work. And not necessarily like their resume or, you know, if they just, if they showed up in the interview and it was like, wow, I learned something. I left the interview with more energy than I went in. They're like a very efficient communicator. And then they can point to things that they've done, which are like real outliers of success. We're like, oh, that's awesome. Or maybe we've seen their work previously. These are people who we would hire. I mean, there's many examples of this, like, you know, you talk about some of their personality quirks and like Balaji Srinivasan is like this genius guy who was our CTO for a while. And he, he like did so many amazing things and he's like very eccentric.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Actually, the very first hire at Coinbase was this guy, Olaf Carlsson, we, outside of Fred and I as the co-founders. And we were trying to hire this customer, someone to come in and run customer support because of the backlog I mentioned. And I remember it came down, there were two finalists. One of them was this guy who had run a team at Google AdSense. And on paper, he was like, this guy that worked at Google is like, he'd run a big team of like 20 or 30 people. I was like, very credentialed, but you just, in the interview, it was just like, it was kind of low energy and like not exciting for some reason, even though on paper he was like super qualified. And Olaf came in and his prior job was he was a lumberjack. Literally, he had just graduated college, he had written his, he wrote his thesis in college on Bitcoin.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  And then he did this kind of like walkabout sort of spirit quest thing where he went for like a summer and it was like he was a lumberjack. So he came in and he looked like super disheveled and, you know, he, he like threw on some like ill-fitting suit he'd bought like on the way to the interview or something. Cause he only owned like lumberjack clothing. But the guy was just like super bright, super passionate, super young, super hungry. And we're like, screw it, like, let's just give this guy a shot. Like it's, it's, it's gonna be, it was just exciting to like talk to him about crypto and he crushed it. So he, by the way, he, he went on and founded like a, he's like a billionaire, he's created like a crypto venture fund. So like, these were the kinds of bets that we wanted to make. They were people who were entrepreneurial. We've had a lot of good success with that.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  And I know Toby talked about that recently on the podcast too.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  And they were people that were just like, high agency, smart.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Get shit done, even if they were totally unqualified in paper. And those were some of our best hires.

• 1:02:14David Senra?

  So I was reading a ton of the Bitcoin subreddit back then.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19David Senra?

  Like around this time. And am I wrong? Weren't you getting like a lot of shit? Because, you know, everybody's like, this is decentralized. And you're like, well, no, I'm like actually trying to build like a real business here. Like.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30David Senra?

  Did you have an issue getting talented people to work for you? Like because you were kind of, this is, you might be autistic. You might be right. Cause now you're interested in this like weird Bitcoin thing way before other people are. And then not only that, you're like bucking the trend in this weird subculture too.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so people did often ask that. They're like, well, isn't the whole point of Bitcoin to be decentralized? And I was like, yeah, it uses a decentralized protocol. We just want to make it easy for people to access it. So you can choose to use our company, but you could use any company. Like as opposed to, let's say Visa, like the only way to access the Visa network is through one company, Visa. You know, but like email is a better analogy. Email is a decentralized protocol, but you can use Gmail or Outlook or whatever. So at least there's like choice. But even going beyond that, um, cause for years we heard that as a criticism. So we said, all right, let's make a self custodial wallet too. Like if you want to custody your own crypto and not have to trust us at all, we're going to put out a wallet for that. And so we have a successful product now too on our self custodial wallet. I think both are important.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  The centralized product gives people a lot of ease of use. Like if you forget your password, your money's not gone, that kind of stuff. And it also allowed a lot of big institutions, like most of the money in the world is that like something like 80 or 90% of it's all tied up in financial institutions. It's not retail people. And so when we went and met with institutions, we were like self custodial wallet. They thought like, that sounds super scary. We're not going to do that. So they wanted these kind of enterprise grade custody solutions. And we've been very successful building those kinds of things for like banks.

• 1:04:02David Senra?

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

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:45David Senra?

  Yeah, it's funny because there's like a parallel here. When Steve Jobs had that observation, he's like, well, the first things we're making it apple for hobbyists. But he's like, the, he's like, if the amount of people that want to like put together their own computer, it's like if, as opposed to the ones that want to go to the store. Like if you just treat it, he called it like the appliance. He's like wanting to make a personal computers like appliance. It's like that market is a thousand times bigger.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08David Senra?

  And why it being millions of times bigger, actually.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11David Senra?

  But his idea was like, the easier I make it, the bigger the market gets.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  I think that's, that's right. And it's fine, like a lot of these products start off with hobbyists who love the tech for the tech's sake, and they want to take it apart. But ultimately, what crypto is going to do is just going to update the financial systems. People have better financial services. Many people are going to use it without even knowing they're using crypto. They're just going to say, I don't know, I just want to send money to my family abroad or whatever. And instead of paying 11% at Western Union, I just wanted to arrive instantly for free or whatever. And like, they're going to use stablecoins for that, right? Or if they want to get a loan and it's just using DeFi, it's like cheaper, lower rate, and they can get approved in 30 seconds. It's like, that's easier than calling a bank and filling out all these forms, right? So Coinbase's app actually has evolved, I mean, fast forwarding to modern day. Like we are now, you can trade any type of asset, not just crypto assets.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  You can trade stocks and commodities and prediction markets. And then you can get a loan, you have a Coinbase card, you can spend. We're just trying to build better financial services now. And actually, like, that's where you start to get into like multi-trillion dollar market.

• 1:06:11David Senra?

  Yeah, you call it the what, the everything app?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  The everything exchange, yeah.

• 1:06:14David Senra?

  Everything exchange, yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:19David Senra?

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

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  I felt like more and more of the economy was going to run on Bitcoin because it was just faster, cheaper, more global. I couldn't have foreseen all of the things that happened. I didn't foresee stable coins. I didn't foresee prediction markets. I just knew that we had a foothold with something everybody really like Bitcoin turned out to be the best performing asset class of the last decade. And so a lot of people wanted to buy it and hold it. We were the easiest way to do that. That was a wedge into the market to start to then update all kinds of financial services.

• 1:07:02David Senra?

  And that's how you thought about it?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  I didn't have a complete picture of that from day one. I think that would be intellectually dishonest for me to say that I knew exactly how that was going to play out. But I had a, I knew that the potential of it went way beyond just like buying Bitcoin or something. I was like, this could power the global economy because it's just better than like having certain countries printing their own money or like super high fees in each country. Like we need a native financial layer to the internet that's truly global and decentralized. And like a bigger and bigger share of GDP could run on that over time. I knew it was massive. I just didn't know exactly how it would play out.

• 1:07:35David Senra?

  Hey, real quick, I've started a newsletter for this podcast that you might find interesting. The newsletter shares five of my favorite quotes from each episode, along with behind the scenes photos with the guest. The first of these newsletters goes out next week. I'll share my five favorite quotes from the Daniel Ek episode, along with some of the photos with Daniel and I. To sign up, just go to davidcenter.com/newsletter. That's davidcenter.com/newsletter. So how do you think about running the company now? How is it organized?

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Well, there's lots of ways you can answer that question. So I have a really amazing president and COO, Emily Choi. She really is an amazing operator, allows me to focus on a lot of the managing the product groups. Like I'd say I'm a pretty product focused CEO. She's operationally focused and it's an amazing combo of skillsets. I actually think a lot of enterprise value can get generated when you pair like a technical founder with a great operator, right? Because if you have just an operator, they can make the company very, very efficient. You know, this sort of stereotypically, everyone's different, right? But if you imagine like only an operational leader. The company will run very efficiently, but they won't, they'll miss their next wave of innovation or something, right?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  And if you have only a founder, sometimes they blow the place up because they're like every, they're always trying to do some crazy new thing, right? And so I think there's a really healthy balance of those two things. And you, there are other companies where traditionally like Zuckerberg and Sheryl or Sam Berger, you know, whatever kind of classic thing you want to look at. I'd say even at Google, there was probably Eric Schmidt and Larry kind of played that role, right? And with Sergey. So there's examples like that in history, I think. Anyway, it's generated a lot of value for Coinbase to have Emily and I both there.

• 1:09:13David Senra?

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

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:22David Senra?

  You don't mind it?

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. There was times where I felt like, um, man, it's like draining to like go to, go to DC and I have to communicate with all these politicians. I actually don't mind it now in a weird way. It's, there's so many interesting people in DC. There's like big, big personalities in.

• 1:09:36David Senra?

  Okay, hold on, we gotta, we gotta go into that because you said that earlier and I was like, I gotta ask him about this.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:41David Senra?

  That is shocking to me.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43David Senra?

  That you find them interesting.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Well, here's, one thing I learned about my motivation is that I can get excited about anything that helps advance the mission of the company forward. Right? Like there's times where if you look at what I'm actually doing, it's like really not fun, like grind and stuff. It's just like, oh, like review 300 resumes or something. Or, um, there was a moment where we like, we didn't have the right finance leader and I was like going to all these meetings with accountants and stuff. And I was like, I took a class in college on accounting, but I'm like not an accountant by any stretch of the imagination. And, you know, I was like, if this is what is necessary at this moment to get the financial statements to a state where we can close this round or whatever, it's generating value in the company.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  So I try to derive my sense of motivation from that. And a lot of times the thing I'm doing is like, actually like the gnarliest problem in the company. It's like, oh, these two teams are super pissed at each other and both the leaders are threatening to quit. And, you know, or I have to go shut down this whole thing and like, we're going to lay people off or whatever. Like usually it's the worst thing you're trying to cycle, you don't want to wake up and do. But I find a sense of, um, it's not, I'm not a masochist about it. Like a lot of times it's draining, but I derive a sense of fulfillment from it of like, okay, this is moving the ball forward. At least I did something useful today.

• 1:11:00David Senra?

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

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that's a great, actually Elon frames what is the limiting factor at any given time? And I go dive deep on that. That is a very great principle. I'd say the last thing is just, we try to push down decision-making in the org, right? It's hard, it's hard to do, but that's like make clear DRIs of each of these different things. And just try to amp up the pace of execution, right? I've just, it's hard to do as the company gets bigger because you have more stakeholders and all this. But it's like, okay, a single decision-maker, push it down.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  And just give people short timeframes, like knock out a decision, unblock this, go, go, go. And I try to be a little bit of like

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  the pace car for that and provide risk tolerance to the organization when needed. Like, let's say somebody comes and says, hey, I think we should try this thing. And it's a kind of a crazy idea, but if it worked, it'd be amazing. I like, it'd be like a 20x outcome, but it has like a 20% chance of success, which you should take that bet all day long. But most companies are risk averse. They won't, they won't do something that has a 20% chance of success. And I'm like, go for it. If it fails, it's on me, you know? And I try to just give people like air cover for those things. So that's, that's a little bit of like the decision-making, how we do that.

• 1:12:15David Senra?

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

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  I mean, just the fact that we have like, you know,

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

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

• 1:12:43David Senra?

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

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  How so? What do you think?

• 1:12:50David Senra?

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

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01David Senra?

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

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's true. The cost to get a V1 running is now much, much lower. Yeah. And we are seeing that internally. Now, to see something through is still, you know, intense amounts of work. But yeah, we think a lot about resource allocation where you can have like a two or three person team try these ideas internally. And then if it, only if it starts to work and hits key milestones, like then do you do the series A, you know, internally? So we try to treat it a little bit like venture capital. And the hard part- Is this the language you use inside the company? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Like, one of the key things we did actually

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  So you'll need to get one yes if someone wants to fund it out of their budget, which is, yeah. And there's actually been examples where I voted no on something. It turned out to be a massive success. And an example of that is like USDC, which is the stablecoin. I actually embarrassed to admit, I voted no on that idea. Luckily, somebody else funded it out of their budget. And it's, I think in 2025, we did like 800 million revenue off it or something. It was, so it tells you, you know, sometimes good ideas can come from anywhere. It's like, actually, you know, reading about Steve Jobs and Wozniak, that Wozniak, whatever, he went to his employer, HP, and told him, hey, I think we should make a personal computer. They said no, and then he left to found Apple. So- Many such cases. Yeah, I always have a little- Sam Walton tried to give away the idea for Walmart. They said no. Yeah.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  So I always have a little bit of that fear in the back of my mind of like, there's brilliant young engineers inside Coinbase. I want to make sure they can come pitch and somebody, even if it's not me, funds it. How much time do you spend on Coinbase marketing?

• 1:15:22David Senra?

  Are you interested in it all? You guys are doing very unique things around marketing.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for noticing that. I mean, I wish I could take more credit for that. I actually think it's the team entirely.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  You know, they come and show me the things that they're doing. And I definitely, the only thing I'm doing is I'm trying to give them air cover to try crazy stuff. And basically, whenever they show me something like, "That's awesome." Like, run with it, you know? And whereas I think most organizations would be like a little too cautious or hesitant. But yeah, what they're doing with like putting QR codes in the Super Bowl, or they just did this karaoke thing at the Super Bowl, or, I don't know. They're trying more ambitious ideas, which I like.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  It's also, a lot of marketing now is, it's actually more like content on the internet than like your typical brand ad running on TV. And, you know, just like a very simple thing actually was, I remember we were putting our earnings calls, you know, as a public company, you put out your earnings. They're usually kind of dry and boring, like these analysts tune in, listen to these calls. You're on like a conference call. It was using this like really ancient technology and this ancient vendor that we were using. And I remember I was always so bored on these earnings calls. I was like, "Man, how do we spice these things up? Just do something more interesting." And I remember some of the people on the finance team were like, "Brian, just like, stay on script. It's supposed to be boring. Like, just report the numbers.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Like, that's all we're doing here." And I was like, "No, like, this is a marketing moment. We're supposed to be selling some stock, right? Let's go out and tell the story, you know, of the company." And so anyway, just in like this recent earnings, we put together like a pitch deck, kind of like we were going and pitching when we were a private company. And I was like, "I want to just like run through the deck and like make a video of me." And then we put it on the website and one of the guys on our marketing team paired it. Have you seen those videos, like vertical video where?

• 1:17:17David Senra?

  I saw this.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Like the guys running through the game, collecting coins.

• 1:17:21David Senra?

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

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so that's like, we have these like young internet native marketing people. They're not like, you know, the people who made ads for Coca-Cola or something. They're just like, they're just like people who've lived their whole life on the internet. And meme, like meme, meme culture and all this kind of stuff, right? And I mean, somebody could reasonably say, well, Brian, are you trying to turn the company into a meme stock or something? And I'm like, no, not really. I think we're building something very serious and important as like an institution that's going to stand the test of time. But we do need to get the word out in the way that people actually consume content today. And frankly, I, I, I think our shareholder letter is brilliant. I get a lot of good feedback on it from like the biggest funds at Fidelity and all these kind of folks.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  So I'm glad we're putting out a shareholder letter, but 99% of people aren't going to read our shareholder letter. They're going to see some clip on social media about the company and that's kind of how they're ingesting their information. So how do we speak in an internet native way? And that is marketing.

• 1:18:28David Senra?

  Everything is marketing.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, content, I mean, everything's.

• 1:18:30David Senra?

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

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47David Senra?

  So you gotta like, you want to save their soul, you gotta get their attention first. You gotta get them in the door first.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well said.

• 1:18:53David Senra?

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

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a great point. Actually, Bezos did that too, right? He's got some bangers, Buffett.

• 1:19:29David Senra?

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

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42David Senra?

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

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:11David Senra?

  I think Bezos was teaching his very interesting philosophy.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15David Senra?

  And searching essentially using that's like almost like a tuning fork to like, I'm putting this out and the right shareholders for me and this weird strategy I have will respond to this information.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26David Senra?

  I wonder if you could do the same, though?

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:49David Senra?

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

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  and the Bezos analogy on the shareholder letters. Those guys went deep. That was actually, that was very atypical.

• 1:21:45David Senra?

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

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  out of the company through a traditional journalist who's going to bring their own bias and filter to it. You know how many founders have been telling me that recently?

• 1:22:55David Senra?

  Yeah. Why do you arrive at that conclusion?

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  There's like a long history of this, going back to like, you know, yellow journalism and-

• 1:23:46David Senra?

  Joseph Pulitzer.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:23:48David Senra?

  Because people give me shit because I don't read the news at all.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52David Senra?

  Like I just read old books and then talk to founders now. Like that's essentially my entire media diet. And then L L Ed, like talking L L Ms.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59David Senra?

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

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22David Senra?

  And more exaggerated.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. What did Hearst say, like you provide the photos, I'll provide the war or something? Yeah, and so, anyway, I think most people have become aware of this now, like the trust in traditional media is kind of at all time lows. So luckily, things have moved on. I, you know, anyway, I think it's, social media has its own challenges too, about misinformation and whatnot, but at least like you can just go direct and put out whatever you want to say and people like it or don't. It's fine. And then, you know, I think it's good to talk to new media as well. And anyway, that was a formative experience. And I actually think it was very liberating in a way. I actually, I think everybody at some point in their life should get New York Times to write a hit piece on them.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Because you stop fearing it and you start realizing, okay, I'm just gonna do whatever I think is the right thing to do now. Because there's not like some terrible thing that could happen to me anymore. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, once they try to, once they try to do it and it doesn't do anything, you realize, oh, okay, I'm not trying to optimize for optics here or doing something that looks like, that looks good. Why don't I actually just do the thing that I think is good, regardless of how people perceive it? And that's very liberating. I hope more people experience that.

• 1:25:35David Senra?

  When did you go through that?

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  It happened in many small ways as Coinbase was growing. Like, we'd see articles come out that was like, what? That's not, that's not right. What are they talking about? And they wouldn't post a correction. It was just like, sometimes you get these calls from journalists that were like, I'm posting this in four hours, like, will you comment? They were like, what? This is totally false information. What are you talking about? So it was just this kind of annoying tax that was always happening on the company. But what really, I think, radicalized me on it was post that mission first blog post. Like, several organizations, but the New York Times in particular, I remember they, they basically put a team of people, I was later told by insiders, they're like, go just, go dig up dirt on this company and write negative articles about them. They had, they had the headline written before they even had found anything. And they wrote articles kind of implying that we were like racist

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  and we were like, you know, underpaying certain minorities and things. False, it was false information. And, you know, that, that just like, this basically was like, pissed me off. And I was like, okay, I don't really want to, they're not engaging in good faith. Like, these are, they're so biased, they don't even realize it. And they have some political agenda. It's not really, it's not really journalism. It's like a political propaganda company or something. So that was frustrating. And yeah, it shifted my point of view to go direct.

• 1:26:47David Senra?

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

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:32David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:45David Senra?

  And then they confront your Davos and wave their finger.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Then you win. So we're, we're at stage three, they're, they're now, there's a little bit of fighting happening, but actually, honestly, most of the big banks and financial institutions are embracing crypto and like, five, five of the, you know, G-SIB banks in the world, the largest banks are working with us now on crypto integrations. If you look at their LinkedIn posts, they're all hiring crypto and people, product managers and engineers. So it's working, it's, and we want to work with all of them, this is like a little blip on the policy radar, that's just a little negotiation happening. Peter Thiel says, you have to be contrarian but right to be an entrepreneur. So you have to be comfortable looking stupid for like a long time. When I was calling those banks and saying, hey, we want to, we're a crypto company, you want to do this, and they would hang up on me. Or, you know, I'd go pitch the 30th venture investor and get a no.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Or the, you know, the 1,000th employee we tried to hire, or whatever, like, you, we're willing to be misunderstood for a long time, and then you slowly start to have these breakthroughs. And a lot of the best, you know, if you look at like Uber, you know, they were fighting for a decade to just be like, yeah, it's actually better and safer than a cab, and entrenched interests were fighting them, right? Or Airbnb with the hotels, you know, self-driving cars, like, everything that's truly innovative and breakthrough is going to upset an entrenched incumbent, eventually intersect with the government, and just piss off some, some segment of the population who kind of are like, how dare you question the status quo, you know? And.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  The Wright Brothers, I mean, when they came out with the airplane, nobody believed them for like for years. I mean, you, you know, you read the biography. They went to the United States government, or like we have this, we've created flight, you know, they thought it'd be celebrated and they were like.

• 1:29:27David Senra?

  They had to go to Europe.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they went to Europe.

• 1:29:29David Senra?

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

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it didn't wasn't there was that famous quote from the War Department, they said, we see no military application for the airplane. And 40 years later, it won World War II.

• 1:29:44David Senra?

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

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51David Senra?

  The first person to actually buy it for the military.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:04David Senra?

  Yeah, but for them, so they're, they're creating an industry and a company.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08David Senra?

  But they actually didn't create the most successful company.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:30:12David Senra?

  In that industry where you did.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:17David Senra?

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

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so not to torture this analogy too much, but I think of Wilbur and Orville as kind of like inventors. The equivalent in this case would be like Satoshi Nakamoto or someone like that. Brilliant, um, you know, whoever they are, there's actually, there's an interesting documentary coming out on this soon. You know, whoever those people are, they're probably like innovators, scientists. I don't consider myself really a scientist, I'm more of like an engineer and entrepreneur, so I recognized early what was happening with the invention of Bitcoin, but I didn't, I didn't invent Bitcoin myself. You know, I did not discover flight like the Wright Brothers, so. I always had a lot of respect for people that are like, you know, Edison and these people, right?

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Like, because they're actually on the frontier of making scientific breakthroughs. Who knows? Maybe this would happen at some point, but I don't think I'm going to be the person to make a scientific breakthrough. What I am going to do is have an instinct or a nose that like something interesting is happening here and it's created an opportunity and I can go commercialize it with a really successful company.

• 1:31:34David Senra?

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

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53David Senra?

  You want to talk about this?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So, I mean broadly, I want to accelerate civilization with progress in the world. That's kind of my personal mission. So I think economic freedom is foundational to that with crypto. When Coinbase went public, you know, I got some liquidity from that. I was also just thinking like, okay, what are the other big problems in the world like in hard tech, not just software, that might require more capital that I could try to help with? And I started thinking, you know, so the big ones in my mind were like AI and crypto are probably the two biggest right now. Then of course there's fusion energy, brain machine interfaces, space. And I felt like, okay, there's good teams working on all of these and I'm not sure what I, unique I have to add. The other biggest one I thought of was longevity.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Like, how do we start to reprogram our own biology to enhance what it means to be human at some point? So I started hosting these dinners. I didn't see teams working on that that I thought were credible. In fact, you know, the longevity space has had like a lot of snake oil type stuff. It's like pretty, you know, attracted some unsavory characters, a little bit like crypto.

• 1:32:55David Senra?

  For centuries.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:57David Senra?

  For centuries.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  For sure. I reached out to a couple of friends of mine who had done, they were biotech CEOs or PhDs and... Started to host some dinners. And this is a good way just to learn too, is like, try to see if you can convene some of the top people in the room and just go around the table and ask them, what's the most interesting thing on the horizon that's underfunded or under invested in? We had hosted a couple of these dinners, was lucky enough to do this with a friend of mine, Blake Byers, who eventually we co-founded this company with. And one of the topics they told us about was epigenetic reprogramming, which is the ability to reprogram cells and you can restore function they had when they were younger. There were some early breakthroughs that had happened in different labs. One example of this was Shinya Yamanaka, who won the Nobel Prize for reprogramming skin cells into stem cells.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  I think he got that in 2005, if I'm not mistaken. And so I started to feel a little bit about epigenetic reprogramming, like I did about Bitcoin when I first read about the Bitcoin white paper. And I was like, hey, how deep does this rabbit hole go? And if you can actually reprogram cells, it turns out our cells are much more plastic than people realized, you know, what could be possible with that? And so through a series of these dinners, I met, we met the other co-founder, Jacob Kimmel and Greg Johnson, and created this company. It's called New Limit, and it's a longevity company, searching for novel therapies that can reprogram your cells to restore function they had when they were younger. So it's been going about three or four years now. We've demonstrated successfully reprogramming human cells for the first time to restore function.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  It's a discovery platform that's testing tens of thousands, eventually millions of hypotheses in high throughput screens across lots of different cell types. It's using AI to prioritize those screens. And the first drug candidate's going to go into clinical trials probably next year. So it's gone faster than I thought, actually. I committed 100 million of my own money to it, to hope to help it get off the ground. And it subsequently raised more money from others as well. And I thought it was going to be like a pure research thing for maybe five, six years, or who knows? It turned out the scientific progress happened a bit faster than we thought, and we're ready to go to clinical trials now with the first drug candidate. Hopefully, there'll be three, four, five drug candidates over the next five years. Do you think you'll continue to start more companies? I do, yeah.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:37David Senra?

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

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Oof, that's a tough question.

• 1:35:44David Senra?

  Let me tell you why you think about it. Let me tell you why I asked, because I was shocked when I was talking to Toby.

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:48David Senra?

  He's like, he says something, I think it was on the episode, that if AI, like the advancements in AI weren't happening right now, he thinks he wouldn't be the CEO of Shopify anymore.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:10David Senra?

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

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:36:12David Senra?

  After, let's go there next.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:14David Senra?

  So let me forget.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  I want to continue to be Coinbase CEO for a long time.

• 1:36:17David Senra?

  Do you like being CEO?

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:55David Senra?

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

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  I think this is a very important topic because a lot of founders, like the other founders that were in my YC batch that I went through, I saw many of them like burn out within three, four years. They would either, it manifested in lots of different ways. Some of them would gain a bunch of weight, some would lose a bunch of weight. One of them, like had, they were like, had hair falling out. I was like bald before starting company. But like, they were like, literally clumps of hair were falling out because of the stress. Some of them got like addicted to prescription drugs, like, oh, so. Dealing with stress as a founder is actually a very important topic because you need to eventually, you can burn the candle at both ends for a period of years, but.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Eventually you'll burn out and you need to make it sustainable to have the impact you want to have over a period of many decades, hopefully. And so, yeah, the kinds of things that I baked in as a routine. And there were, I'd say every couple of years, I felt like I hit a patch of burnout, right? And I had to change something up. So I either have to like delegate more, stop doing some piece of what I was doing. Having fewer direct reports and then have a routine around like sleep, exercise and nutrition, basically. And some form of like, you can call it meditation or prayer, whatever you want. But in the evening, you can go to the sauna, right? Or in the morning, you can just sit there and meditate for one minute or whatever it is.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  And I have a pretty strict routine when I'm in work mode around like sleep, exercise, what I eat. And then just like wind down time in the evening. And then, you know, on the weekends, I mix it up and I'm like, not so strict about things. But I even just wear the same thing every day, right? So I'm pretty rigorous about that. And I mean, I basically am just in this routine of get enough sleep, wake up, lift heavy things and do zone two cardio and like. Meditate for a few minutes and then get after it. What's your wind down time at night though? It's basically like. Wine and lovemaking?

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  No, it's, don't look at screens would be the main, the main thing, right? Like you're, if you're, if you're, if you're looking at work stuff on your laptop or your phone and like even something you just glance at for a second, it can like piss you off. And then if I try to just go right to sleep after working, I have like stressful dreams about work and I just don't get well, well rested. So there does have to be like, I think a period of time to. How long is this wind down time? Oh, like an hour. Okay. Yeah. Before bed? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And you can read, watch stuff, sauna.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Whatever. Yeah.

• 1:39:35David Senra?

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

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:39David Senra?

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

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Well, Coinbase is my full-time job, so it's like 99%.

• 1:39:51David Senra?

  Yeah, I mean. If you looked at how you're spending time between the two companies.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:40:23David Senra?

  I talked to.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  Sorry, I should say scientist and business person. Yeah.

• 1:40:26David Senra?

  I talked to Paul Merlucky about this because that's something I asked him. So we have three companies. He's like, no, I really have like one. He's like 99% of my time is on Andorol.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34David Senra?

  And then he said something fascinating. He's just like wakes up every day and tries to think of like the highest leverage thing he can do for that company.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41David Senra?

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

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

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

• 1:40:59David Senra?

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

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:41:17David Senra?

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

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Both. We're using vendors. We have a lot of custom models internally as well. We're testing different use cases. For instance, around like compliance automation, we're building a lot of stuff in-house.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Design totally, you can really quickly rapidly prototype stuff and get it out there. We're even using it in within our finance function and like, you know, to do FPNA and build models and things like that. So it's widely, even like decision making in the company. The key was getting a lot of our data ingested, like all the Google Docs and the Slack messages and the GitHub commits and the Salesforce. And now you can ask it really great questions like, what should I be more aware of as CEO? And it's like, did you know this team is not aligned on the strategy? I was like, actually, I didn't know that, you know? So this is something you build yourself. There's a team internally working on this and there's a couple of vendors. So there's one called Libra Chat that's open source. You can connect all your internal data to.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  There's other vendors out there like Glean and Slackbot and different. We're testing three of them or so right now. Gemini is doing a bunch of stuff like Google. So we're testing all of them to see which ones employees gravitate towards, basically. That's, I would say, current best practice amongst a lot of tech companies, not super unique to crypto. The thing that's more unique to crypto is that these AI agents are increasingly needing to do payments to get work done. And we're giving them all stablecoin wallets. So you can imagine like in the traditional financial world, like you and I can go get a credit card or something where we have to be identified as a human. But if you're an agent trying to get work done, you either have to bug your human every time to like, will you approve this purchase?

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Or if you want to increasingly these agents, you can tell them to go do this like overnight or the next two, you know, the next hour, week, whatever. And get work done, like they might need to spin up AWS resources or get through a paywall on the internet to read some research paper. Or, you know, buy a domain name or whatever, spin up a marketing program. Like if you really want to treat them like, almost like their own digital employees, they need to have like a corporate card kind of thing. And traditional corporate cards can't be issued to non-human entities. And so we're giving them stablecoin wallets. They're doing a lot of machine to machine payments. This is all very new in the last few months, but it's been getting a lot of traction.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  So that's, that's pretty exciting. We built a couple of tools that allow any agent to get a stablecoin wallet inside it. How are you using them personally? AI agents?

• 1:43:42David Senra?

  Yeah, agents, any kind of tools?

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:43:58David Senra?

  It just came, did you see the tweet today?

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:44:35David Senra?

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

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39David Senra?

  I've watched the presentations, I've talked to you about it. I'm still confused.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

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

• 1:44:59David Senra?

  Was this the tapping thing?

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  Well, you could double tap to buy any post. Yeah.

• 1:45:04David Senra?

  I understand that, but then like then each post almost like had like its own market cap, but then what happens?

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Well, it was interesting. So there was also, every post had its own coin and also every creator had its own coin. It was optional for the creator. But what happened is if you bought a post, some of the economics would flow back to the creator. And we thought maybe each post would have like this up and down, like it would have residual zero value. It turned out like many of the posts had a couple thousand dollars of value or something at the terminal end of it. And people were thinking of it as a way to, I guess, reward and thank the creator, but they also own some of the creator coin. Long way of saying, I think something is going to work in this space around. They call it social phi or like, you know, these kinds of social media tokens.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  I don't think that the tokenomics has not quite been figured out yet where it needs for the people, you know, investing in them.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  It needs to have some sort of durability to like the, you know, they have to believe, okay, David Senra is going to continue to make great content into the future and he's relatively undiscovered now, but he's going to be much bigger and it's kind of like, you know, a company or something. And they would want to own your creator token and there'd be some value and maybe like a revenue stream would accrue to them over time, depending on your ad revenue. You'd have to come up with something like that, that I think is a little bit more durable. In the current incarnation, it wasn't quite there in my view. So we tried it as an experiment, didn't quite work. The app is since pivoted to really just be more focused on like trading and being like a self custodial version of the Coinbase app. So we're starting with that for now, but I do think something in the social token space will eventually work.

• 1:46:47David Senra?

  What else has been on your mind outside of Coinbase and is it New Limit?

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, New Limit. Yeah. Well, you know, there's another project that I invested in and helped get off the ground called Research Hub, which is trying to accelerate scientific research. They're trying to find novel ways to be able to raise, like the funding problems in science are like a whole thing and replication is an issue. I can talk about that if you want. I think, you know, I'm making, through my family office, I'm making various investments in like companies that I think are doing innovative stuff on the frontier. I think sometimes about what are the other big ideas that could really unlock progress, right? One other idea I'm interested in is actually like special economic zones in the US or elsewhere, where there's such a, there's such a morass of red tape, both federally and

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  state and local, to try to innovate sometimes that it's hard to get off the ground, right? Like the, that money transmitter license thing is an example that I mentioned where you need to like, you need like five or $10 million just to get the licenses. And I, you, sometimes entrepreneurs can find a creative way around these things in the early days, but for instance, like, look at like, I don't know, nuclear energy, right? It's, it's basically impossible to get like a nuclear power plant. I shouldn't say impossible, it's very difficult right now. And if you had these special economic zones, like, actually, China's been very successful at this. They have, like Shenzhen is a special economic zone essentially, right? Or like Hong Kong, or in the UAE, they have these and There's been examples of these around the world that have been unlocked a ton of value.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  My ideal world, you'd have like 10 plots of land, like take federal land in the US, and designate them as special zones. So you could have one that's, hey, this is, in this sandbox, you can iterate on nuclear reactor design in this one little area. You know, we're good. Okay, maybe something bad will happen, but it's contained in this, in this area. We need to be on our front foot and like innovate there. Or have another one for, for biotech, like accelerated trials, or another one for crypto, or another one for drones. They're just like drones flying all over within this zone, you know, outside of traditional FAA rules, and like allow people to really innovate and build startups. And if they get a product working through that rapid innovation in a, in a regulatory sandbox, they can then go apply for the, the license federally

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  and then serve the rest of the US market. But the problem is, it's like, it's such a high barrier to entry to even try to get started in some of these markets with these new technologies. Anyway, I think special economic zones could be cool. I might work on that at some point.

• 1:49:17David Senra?

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

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate it.

• 1:49:25David Senra?

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