- A couple of my friends were like,
"I don't know why you're into this.
It seems like a scam."
There was periods where I felt like,
"Am I crazy?"
'Cause I just couldn't help myself.
- 'Bitcoin is a digital currency.
It just sounds so silly, but maybe its not.'
- I was an employee at Airbnb,
I couldn't stop thinking about Bitcoin.
I had a lot of self-doubt about it at that time
'cause, again, my friends thought it was weird.
You almost had to have like a computer science degree
to understand it.
So there's these things like private keys,
and if you lose them, your money's gone.
If you wanna send a payment in crypto-
kinda cybersecurity thing-
-where someone's trying to hack your stuff.
And it was all very clunky and hard to use.
But the thing that I loved about it
was that it's accessible to everybody in the world.
And I eventually said, "You know what?
I've got to try building something in this space."
- The global financial system
banks, and other institutions prone to inefficiency
and sometimes even corruption.
Brian Armstrong built Coinbase
to increase access to a new world economy—
the crypto economy.
The company took off.
- 'Coinbase going public this Wednesday
through a direct listing.'
- Coinbase is now valued at
and has made Brian a leading voice in crypto.
But what happens when you go from being a disruptor
to building an institution?
This is a show about founders challenging the status quo.
- It turns out to build an entirely new economy for the
world, you can imagine is a big, crazy, ambitious mission.
I spent some time working at Airbnb,
and one of the most difficult things they had to solve
was how do you move money around the world,
to all these countries?
There was often very high transaction fees.
So you'd lose like 6% in a transaction.
And then there was also delays.
Sometimes it's like seven days to move money.
But it doesn't really need to be that way.
I mean, think about it, if you send an email
or a WhatsApp message or something,
it arrives instantly,
it'll go everywhere in the world,
it's free.
What we haven't seen is a financial system
that works like that.
- On October 31st, 2008,
a pseudonymous person or group of people
named Satoshi Nakamoto released
the Bitcoin white paper into the world.
It laid the vision for a sort of digital money
that removed the middleman from financial transactions,
and was governed by code.
Not people.
- When I read that Bitcoin white paper, I thought,
"Wow, this could be a more fair and free and open
payment system for the world."
But frankly, it was kind of an intimidating thing
that people didn't know how to get access to.
- In the early days, Bitcoins were lost and stolen,
exchanges were shut down.
It was a new frontier that was complicated.
- And so, I would start to think about
how could this protocol be easier to use?
How could I make something that helped it grow?
- So Brian set out to make a simple way
to buy, own, and sell Bitcoin
in hopes of improving access and adoption.
- I saw online that there was a Bitcoin meetup.
Some people were like computer science PhDs.
Other people were like the true diehard crypto-anarchists.
It was like a very odd group of people.
- I first met Brian on the internet, on Reddit.
When I saw the prototype he had built,
I assumed it was a team of five people.
And then, lo and behold, I sit down and meet this guy.
and it's just one guy.
- You know, Airbnb was doing really well at that time,
so it was kind of a big thing to leave.
I was kind of like dreading calling my parents,
and telling them, "Yeah, so I quit my job to do a startup,"
and having them, "Oh my gosh, like,
what are you going to do about healthcare or whatever."
- Despite the unknown, Brian and Fred partnered up
to launch Coinbase in June of 2012.
It was pretty rough in the beginning.
- Building a company is basically just like
moving from one setback to the next, with enthusiasm.
Sometimes the website would go offline, and so
I was like on pager duty, right? So I'd get woken up like
sometimes two or three times a night.
- We literally worked out of a two-story apartment.
We had a venture capitalist over
for an early fundraising meeting.
This guy walks out of the shower in a towel,
and we sort of went like, "Oh yeah, don't worry about
that guy, he's moving out next month."
- It was stressful because we were starting
to store people's money, and this was a very beta product.
We put a big banner on the app that was like,
'Do not put any money in here that you are unwilling to lose.'
I remember calling some of my friends
in the cybersecurity world;
I was like, "Okay, how can we build this system?
And it needs to have this security properties."
He said, "I think it will take probably like five to ten
people, two years to build it."
And I was like, "We have maybe two and a half weeks.
And I'm the only one."
- Between 2014 and 2017, Bitcoin's value was stagnant.
But then the price skyrocketed nearly 10x in five months.
Bringing a flood of users into Coinbase with it,
they weren't prepared for, and it didn't stop.
Employees worked around the clock to meet the demand.
By 2020, Coinbase grew to 43 million users,
and was storing $90 billion worth of their assets.
- I realized at a certain point we were creating this
bridge between two worlds, the crypto economy
and there was the traditional economy,
which allowed a huge amount of fiat money in the world
to begin to flow into the crypto economy.
- Despite its volatility, crypto's value was growing.
It was starting to become an accepted form of payment.
But in 2020, a divide within Coinbase
would test Brian's leadership, and present him with
one of the hardest decisions of his career.
- Before starting Coinbase I had
never managed a single person.
Now we have 3,000 employees
and we're growing very quickly.
There was periods where I felt like,
"Wow, I'm in way over my head."
- We were growing really, really fast,
and everything broke down.
Like it was just communication, everything.
It was just really hard.
And you could see, you could see the tension.
- In the past, corporations typically stayed
quiet on political issues.
Today, many argue they shouldn't.
That in fact, it's their moral obligation to speak out.
In the wake of George Floyd protests,
a contingent of Coinbase employees argued exactly that,
demanding that Coinbase make a
sustained public commitment on this issue.
- And frankly, it became a little
uncomfortable for me as a leader because
I was being asked about like these
really difficult subjects happening in the world,
which, you know, I'm equally concerned about,
but they weren't related to what we were all here to build.
And so the thing that culminated was
at a certain point, a large number of employees
got frustrated enough where they walked out.
They were trying to utilize the place that the company
had in society to try to tackle all these other issues.
I realized, you know, I just don't agree with that.
- The divide within Coinbase
caused Brian to assess his ability
to lead the rapidly changing company.
- Either I shouldn't be CEO and I should leave,
or they probably need to go.
- In company building, you have these moments
where you can choose to kind of hold hack
from what you think is the right thing for the culture,
or you can actually just rip the bandaid off and say it.
- I finally said, "You know what?
I started this company, and I think we're on a path
to do something really good in the world,
and I need to realign the company and get everybody
back rowing in the same direction."
- 'He made his views pretty clear in a blog post this week;
Armstrong says Coinbase quote,
"Won't debate causes or political candidates internally,
and will not engage in things
unrelated to their core mission."'
- I was like almost on the verge of tears
giving this presentation because I knew that
it was gonna hurt people and all these things.
- About 5% of Coinbase's employees left in response,
taking an exit package the company created for them.
Brian's decision put him and Coinbase at the center
of the very type of contentious,
unending political debate he was trying to avoid.
- You know, I never thought that anybody
would actually hate me for what I'm doing,
and like how much people are going to have an opinion
about everything you do and how much it sucks.
- Was it scary to wonder like if the solution was you leaving?
- Very much so, yeah, it was definitely scary.
Coinbase went from this thing, which people kind of
discounted it, they were like, "This is a toy,
like it doesn't really matter," to suddenly it's like,
now we're sort of building an institution.
- 'It has just opened up for trading,
$381 for a 100 billion dollar valuation.'
- Cryptocurrency was created to disrupt the formal
institutions that govern money,
but to reach the mainstream,
crypto needs to become its own institution.
And that has thrust Brian and Coinbase into the
unlikely position of advising governments and regulators
looking to navigate this new frontier.
- What we're really seeing with crypto is,
it's the birth of this new economy.
- Crypto currently accounts for less than 5% of the world's
money, and it's not without its risks.
But with widespread adoption, it could increase
access to things like venture capital for startups,
especially in the developing world, become a hedge
against inflation and make the world financial system
more efficient and equitable.
Many think the impact of this technology
could be as significant as the invention of the internet.
- I want to live in a world where
there's a global payment system,
where everybody can access something that's more fair.
It's really about economic freedom
and just freedom in general.
What's great about Coinbase having some success now
is that we have more and more resources to allocate
to help 'Team Human' advance a little bit,
and try to do something important in the world.