Young people think of it very differently.

They're thinking, like, I may never have a bank account, like, in the way that my parents did. You know, who wants to go to like some bank branch on the corner and have like a paper checkbook? It just feels so antiquated. Your phone is your wallet. That's where I want to make payments and just earn a living and like if I want to put out cool content, like get paid for it. There's a future future here where, like, Coinbase could be people's

primary financial account.

What's up, everybody? Welcome to Boardroom Talks. Today I'm sitting with founder and CEO,

Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. Brian, welcome to the boardroom. Yeah, thanks for having me.

For you, when you look back at not just the last seven years, but the whole 10-year run I think it's been for Coinbase and all the wins and all the losses and all the great successes, do you ever have a chance yourself as a founder to step back and just look at what you've built and created? Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, I want to thank you guys for taking a bet on us early you know we were scrappy little company in San

Francisco and it was kind of incredible to get support from big names you know famous

people that at that time so appreciate the support yeah I mean there are definitely

moments a lot of a lot of building a company

is just being in the daily grind of things, you know, and you're trying to solve whatever the

biggest problem is. And it can kind of get you down sometimes because, you know, your job as

a manager or a leader or CEO, usually like 80% of stuff's going pretty well. And then some

stuff's going okay. And then there's like the 5% of things which are on fire, their crises, their problems, you know, people aren't getting along, whatever regulatory compliance issue, you know, whatever it is. And that's the kind of thing you have to deal with every week. And so sometimes you get to the end of the week and you're like, oh, my God, like this, the whole thing is not working. Everything, everything's broken. And then, you know, you go hang out with your friends on the

weekend. They're like, oh, I heard about all this cool stuff Coinbase is doing. You're like, really? You know, you have to kind of remind yourself of it sometimes. So it's kind of like that, that cliche, you know, people overestimate how much they can get done in a year and underestimate how much they can get done in a decade but if you zoom out you've made incredible

progress over the long term and if you just work really hard for a couple years, you'll barely make a dent in anything. I know you worked early on in your career at IBM, at Airbnb. Was the goal always to start your own business in some way? I remember I was graduating from college and I asked my advisors like, you know, what do you think I should do?

I kind of thinking maybe I want to start a business.

And they were like, well, you know, the best way to start a business, you got to go join

a company that's successful and get some experience.

And so they suggest that I go join a few companies and certainly working at Airbnb helped

a ton some of

the other big companies I joined didn't really teach me that much about startups at all

but it took me a while to kind of build the confidence and realize that all right I

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