E161: Coinbase Founder: The Crazy Journey Of Building A $100 Billion Company: Brian Armstrong

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

FlightStory

Society & Culture, Business, Education

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2022

⏱️ 105 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brian is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, a company thats reached highs of a valuation of $100 billion. After an adolescence and youth searching for independence where no one could be his boss, he’s come a long way, but he’s realised he’s had to change a lot too.

Before anyone had heard of Bitcoin, there was Coinbase. Taking a punt on an industry no one knew and no one understood, Brian quit his lucrative career to be his own man. No one encouraged him. No one. He’d told the idea to hundreds of people before someone told him it could work.

In this conversation, Brian brought a wisdom and a nuance about how to run and build a business like very few conversations we’ve had on this podcast. If you want to know how the best in the world take an idea from drawboard to $100 billion, this is the story of how it happened.

Topics:

What made you the person you are today
Lessons learnt from my first business
How traveling shaped me
Working for AirB&B and what made it successful
The mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make
How to build a sustainable company
How to incentive your team to take risks
My journey starting Coinbase
Mistakes & key learnings when starting up
Leadership lessons
Fake news and dealing with it
No politics in the workplace
Hiring the best people & layoffs
What are the ingredients in your happiness recipe

Brian Armstrong:

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong

Thirdweb:

https://thirdweb.com/

Watch the episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Sponsors:

BlueJeans - https://www.bluejeans.com/

Huel - https://my.huel.com/Steven

Crafted - https://bit.ly/3JKOPFx

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Everybody I talked to you actually thought it's a bad idea.
0:01.8	Like any reasonable person would have quit.
0:03.8	I was filled with self-doubt.
0:05.0	And then Coinbase was valued at a billion dollars crazy.
0:08.2	Ryan Armstrong, CEO, co-founder of Coinbase.
0:11.0	The largest US cryptocurrency exchange.
0:13.5	I saw a technology as a way to try to have a big impact
0:16.9	on the world.
0:17.8	If the thing that got you started in the first place
0:19.4	was like fear, like fear of never being important
0:22.0	or fear of never feeling fulfilled,
0:24.3	you're just gonna give up.
0:25.4	Cryptocurrency is the biggest transformation of money
0:28.1	since the invention of paper.
0:29.6	Coinbase was being deemed the most trustworthy brand in crypto.
0:33.0	It tipped at a certain point from like,
0:34.8	oh, this growth is really good too.
0:36.9	Okay, things are getting a little crazy here.
0:39.0	If you kind of more than double a company in a year,
0:41.2	you're really gonna start to see a lot of stuff break.
0:43.6	Morning, Coinbase just telling employees in an email
0:46.1	that it plans to lay off 18% of its workforce.
	...

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