A prime example is ResearchCoin. A separate foundation, the ResearchHub Foundation, created ResearchCoin, and we’ve adopted the use of ResearchCoin on ResearchHub to help reward members of the community and to facilitate moderation. In the event ResearchCoin is listed on various crypto exchanges, including Coinbase, I want to share a few details to make sure the community understands what precautions have been put in place to ensure there are no conflicts of interest, and ensure that ResearchHub is building for the long term.

All assets that get listed on Coinbase go through our Digital Asset Listing Group (DALG) committee. This committee reviews every asset that gets listed on Coinbase from a legal, compliance, and cybersecurity perspective. I am not a member of the DALG, and so have no voting authority on which assets get approved for listing. If any meetings were to come up at Coinbase where ResearchCoin was discussed, I would make sure to recuse myself to avoid any accidental influence. My affiliation with ResearchHub was disclosed to our board, and I trust the rest of the Coinbase team to reach the appropriate conclusion in any review process that may take place, given their experience reviewing hundreds of assets at this point.

The full analysis that the team performs on each asset is beyond the scope of this blog post, but one key fact that I want to highlight here is that ResearchHub and its owners (including me) have never sold ResearchCoin.

Some participants in ResearchHub who have helped contribute content to the ResearchHub site have earned ResearchCoin as a reward token, and they are the folks who may choose to sell ResearchCoin if it becomes more liquid. If ResearchCoin is listed on Coinbase or other exchanges, the value of it may change considerably. Due to the small supply, it may even be quite volatile or reach prices that do not reflect its true value (however one were to estimate that). As with any crypto purchase, I would encourage anyone thinking of buying ResearchCoin to exercise caution in this situation, and not to buy ResearchCoin without fully understanding it.

It’s important for me to let folks know publicly that I have no intention of selling ResearchCoin in the near term, whether it is listed on Coinbase or any other exchange. In fact, I’m committing to never sell ResearchCoin for at least four years from the date of this post.

I figured it would be a good idea to publicly share the precautions taken to make sure everyone is aware. My hope is that ResearchHub and ResearchCoin will be good for the world in terms of helping accelerate scientific research, and that I can help set it up for long term success.

Tl;dr: Our core thesis is that greater adoption and usage of cryptocurrency will increase economic freedom in the world, because crypto solves many of the shortcomings of the current financial system that hinder economic freedom.

Team,

Every quarter at our company All Hands, we review our Mission (what we’re trying to achieve) and our Strategy (how we’re going to get there). One question I often hear from employees is: “How does cryptocurrency create more economic freedom in the world?” This is a great question, so I wanted to share my thoughts with all of you.

First, a refresher: Economic freedom is a composite measure of 12 factors. It quantifies the rights of people to control their own labor and property in each country and globally. Economic freedom varies dramatically across the world, and while our economy is increasingly global, the government of any single country has significant control over the financial and economic freedoms of its people. Low economic freedom in a given country isn’t always due to malicious activity (e.g, fraud, oppression, etc) — it’s often due to mismanagement (poor monetary and fiscal policy) or simply bad infrastructure.

Crypto and economic freedom

The question to ask is: How can we build a global economy where anyone with an internet connection can participate, where property rights are enforced, and where money preserves its value? Crypto is the solution. Crypto can’t directly improve every facet of economic freedom (e.g., tax policies and government spending), but it can improve most of the underlying drivers (see below).

Why is crypto so uniquely positioned to increase economic freedom? Because it has these inherent properties:

Crypto is an open, global network

Crypto networks are open, removing the barriers of borders. It allows every person in the world to transact on shared networks, in the same way they communicate on a shared network (the internet). More importantly these networks themselves are not controlled by governments that can use their monetary systems to hinder economic freedom (and prosperity). This design principle leads to more open markets and increases trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, and monetary freedom.

Crypto enforces property rights

Property rights allow people to save their income, grow their wealth, and plan for the long term because they know the fruits of their labor are safe from unfair seizure or theft. Before crypto, your confidence in property rights was a function of the trust you had in your government and its respect for the rule of law. With crypto, anyone can acquire and grow their wealth without intervention from trusted 3rd parties like a government or a bank, or fear that their wealth could easily be seized. Property rights are also about the ability to enter contractual agreements. In some areas around the world, a contract has little value, because you can’t be confident in its enforcement. Smart contracts move enforcement from the courts to the blockchain, enabling gains from specialization and commercial exchange.

Crypto is unbiased

Crypto networks are often pseudonymous (or even anonymous). They don’t care where you live, what your race or gender is, or who you voted for in the last election. Unlike the current financial system they are inherently open and unbiased. Anyone with an internet connection can create a wallet, get paid in crypto, spend in crypto and accrue wealth in crypto. Service providers like Coinbase do have compliance programs as required by law, but we don’t control access to all crypto and we don’t own the network. Anyone can access crypto networks through other providers if we make a bad decision, or are forced into bad regulation. In addition, self custody wallets like Coinbase Wallet provide an ever greater degree of freedom when it comes to financial inclusion.

Crypto enables mobility

As I mentioned above, there are important components of economic freedom that cryptocurrency can’t directly benefit (e.g., government integrity, tax policies, fiscal health, etc.). However, cryptocurrency does provide the conditions for mobility by reducing switching costs, allowing people to both accrue wealth and bring it across borders. Cryptocurrency is the ultimate embodiment of the power of the individual, by significantly reducing the barriers to emigration / exit, and thus increasing economic freedom.

Conclusion

As you can see, cryptocurrency can impact many of the factors that lead to more economic freedom. It can both help build better-functioning economies in countries with less economic freedom, and make it easier to emigrate to a better life. This is why our core thesis as a company is that greater adoption and usage of cryptocurrency will increase economic freedom in the world.

Technology is the longest lever we can pull to improve the human condition. At its core, cryptocurrency is a technology breakthrough that allows us to build a more free and open financial system that enables the rights of people to control their own labor and property. It is the best tool that exists to advance our mission of increasing economic freedom in the world.

What does this mean for Coinbase? Crypto is in many ways still nascent. It’s still hard to use, crypto networks are plagued with scaling challenges, and the economy built on top of crypto infrastructure is in its early days. Our strategy and roadmap is geared towards solving these challenges: We’re focused on building easy-to-use products that abstract away the complexity of blockchains, and we’re building the primitives of a functioning financial system. We still have a long way to go, but the future is bright.

How crypto enables economic freedom was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of our mission to increase economic freedom in the world, we’ve been thinking more about how we expand our products internationally. To get 1 billion people using crypto through our products, we will need to have much broader reach in more countries.

I recently caught up with the WhatsApp founders because I wanted to get their perspective on how WhatsApp became so pervasive globally. Almost anywhere you go in the world, even in remote places, you will see billboards and kiosks with businesses listing their WhatsApp number as the main way to contact their business, in addition to individuals using the product regularly. How did they do this? And more importantly, how can Coinbase do for payments what they did for messaging? This is what it will take to build a truly global economy.

Here are the main lessons they shared with me:

1. Develop good global accessibility and empathy

Reduce barriers to entry (such as in onboarding). Instill strong localization that feels natural in native languages. Make the product work seamlessly in adverse environments (low/intermittent network connectivity, old devices, etc). Understand that not everyone is affluent or an expert. Understand that people may use your product differently due to cultural norms (Brazil used a lot of voice messaging, Arabic nations used a lot of broadcast messaging). Learning from your users is key. They will guide you to what to build.

2. Partner with key players

There is an interesting anecdote of WhatsApp history where they signed a global marketing relationship with Nokia. The writing was on the wall for Nokia’s demise but at the same time, they had the marketing heft to put the WhatsApp logo all over the world. It was a big win for WhatsApp. In addition, they signed key deals with phone OEM manufacturers to get WhatsApp pre-installed on a number of devices.

3. Don’t overly fixate on one market

WhatsApp never focused on the US or India or Mexico or Brazil exclusively. They focused on building a global product and global process. Their strategy was more “breadth first” rather than “depth first”.

Conclusion

At Coinbase we will be thinking about these lessons to see how we can further accelerate our ambitious international expansion goals. How could our app perform better in low connectivity environments? What equivalent partnership deals should we be pursuing? How can we reduce friction in onboarding or to make payment? Etc.

There is a piece of the puzzle here for us that is different from WhatsApp: we need the blockchains to scale several orders of magnitude to reach this many users globally. Coinbase to Coinbase transactions are fast (because they’re off chain) today, but on chain transactions are still much too slow. We are spinning up a new Protocol Team of engineers at Coinbase to work on the underlying blockchains, including layer 2 solutions, to see what we can do to help accelerate this.

It will take a number of parts of the company and industry coming together to build a new more fair, free, and efficient financial system for the world. But when we’re successful it will have far reaching implications.

Lessons from WhatsApp on international expansion was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every few years we take another look and see if we can improve the communication of these core tenets. Why? Because they inform almost every decision we make at Coinbase. “Does this help us achieve our mission?” is one of the most common questions we ask ourselves. This is how we ensure the decisions we make and products we ship are helping to drive our mission forward.

One of my philosophies around building a company is that you have the opportunity to stick only a few key messages in people’s heads about what you’re trying to achieve in the world. There are too many other brands in the world for people to remember much more than that. In this vein, we recently rolled out a simplified set of artifacts that describe Coinbase, with the goal of distilling each to their core.

Here is how we define them:

1. Our Mission: What we’re trying to achieve in the world
2. Our Strategy: How we are going to get there
3. Our Culture: How we hire and work together

If people only remember one item, it should be our mission.

Mission

Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world.

Why economic freedom? Economic freedom is a global indicator that is clearly defined and has been measured for decades. It is a composite metric, assessed both globally and for every country, that looks at a variety of factors like property rights, stability of currency, ability to start the business you want and work where you want, free trade, corruption, etc.

Economic freedom is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for human progress. Societies with greater economic freedom have higher life expectancy and GDP growth, less war and corruption, better treatment of the environment, and higher income of their poorest 10%. Higher economic freedom correlates with the kind of societies that we all aspire to create.

The problem is that economic freedom isn’t growing fast enough; the trend over the last 25 years has been a very gradual increase. Our job at Coinbase is to bend the shape of this curve upward.

When I first read the Bitcoin whitepaper back in 2010, I realized this computer science breakthrough might be the key to creating more economic freedom. The current financial system is rife with high fees, delays, unequal access, and barriers to innovation. In many countries, citizens don’t have access to sound money, a functioning credit system, or even basic property rights. I realized that we could use cryptocurrency to create sound financial infrastructure in every country around the world.

Cryptocurrency can provide the core tenets of economic freedom to anyone: property rights, sound money, free trade, and the ability to work how and where they want.

At Coinbase, we are laser focused on increasing economic freedom, because we believe that this is how we can have the biggest impact on the world. Everyone deserves access to financial services that can help empower them to create a better life for themselves and their families, and Coinbase is tasked with making this future a reality.

Strategy

About five years ago, I wrote the Coinbase Secret Master Plan that outlined the four phases I envisioned cryptocurrency going through on its path to reaching 1 billion users. We have made incredible progress towards this plan, with >50M verified users on Coinbase, and more using other crypto products.

If our mission of increasing economic freedom is what we’re trying to achieve, then our strategy represents how we’re going to get there. This revised framing reflects where we are in the evolution of crypto 5 years later, and what we think the next 5+ years will look like.

Our strategy has 3 pillars:

CRYPTO AS AN INVESTMENT

Crypto investing remains our core business and it’s the foundation of growing the cryptoeconomy. Investing is the first use case for every crypto holder and user, and we are the world’s most trusted onramp. We will continue focusing on:

1. Adding new assets: Ramp pace of asset addition, ultimately offering every reputable cryptocurrency to our users (read: not a scam, or illegal).
2. Institutional infrastructure: Building advanced trading tools professional traders are used to in traditional markets; building out the critical infrastructure and prime brokerage services to bring access to crypto markets to institutions of all sizes.
3. International expansion: Grow the reach of crypto, enabling safe and easy to use onramps in every country we can legally operate.

CRYPTO AS A NEW FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Crypto investing was the first use case, and it is bootstrapping a large and growing network of crypto holders. As more users hold crypto, new products will be built to help them use their crypto. Coinbase will offer financial services that are powered by modern crypto infrastructure, including:

1. DeFi: Safe and easy-to-use onramp to emerging decentralized finance use cases, accessible from the Coinbase app.
2. Payments: Tools to send and receive fast, cheap, and global payments, as well as tools for any merchants or businesses to accept crypto.
3. Earning: Unique opportunities to make money in crypto native ways, including staking (participating in network governance) and airdrops for completing educational tasks and incentives.
4. Borrowing/lending: More open, and more fair access to credit, as well as additional opportunities to earn yield on assets.

Our centralized products will continue to play a critical role in the growth of the cryptoeconomy. Over time, we expect DeFi (decentralized finance, built on open protocols) to outpace CeFi (centralized finance, including first party Coinbase products). We embrace decentralization, and will build products to make interacting with new DeFi as easy as we do our own first party products.

CRYPTO AS AN APP PLATFORM

Finally, crypto companies and protocol teams are driving new innovations and products beyond financial use cases. Coinbase will invest deeply in discoverability and usability of third party products in the cryptoeconomy, and make crypto as easy to use as it is to buy:

1. Surfacing apps: Enable our users to discover new applications and networks in our core product.
2. Externalizing shared services: Externalize our robust crypto infrastructure to non-crypto native organizations, making it safe and easy for anyone to interface with the cryptoeconomy.
3. Investing in the cryptoeconomy: Provide financial support for new compelling projects and teams through Coinbase Ventures that we think can help increase crypto adoption or otherwise further our mission.

Culture

Our mission and strategy are the what and the how, but building a world class company starts with building a high performing team. Our #1 priority is attracting and retaining top talent, which is why we are constantly working to build a culture to enable our team to do the best work of their careers. Our culture is the foundation of how we hire, and promote, and we’ve described it in detail in this document.

If you’re passionate about our mission, strategy and culture, come help us build the cryptoeconomy.

Our Mission, Strategy and Culture was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re seeing crypto quickly mature from its initial use case of trading bitcoin to the trading of thousands of new assets, and the adoption of new use cases like Decentralized Finance (DeFi), NFTs, smart contracts, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and more. Much of this is relatively new and there are challenges to using it, but I see it as the future of where this industry is going. In the same way we helped people access Bitcoin for the first time in a trusted, easy way — we need to do the same for the decentralized cryptoeconomy.

The uses cases are here

For years, people at conferences and journalists would ask me, “Where are the use cases?” We’re finally seeing a wide range of emergent applications and products get traction. From NFTs, to a broad array of new dApps (decentralized apps), the cryptoeconomy is growing at an incredible pace, and I think this will continue to accelerate. Like the internet, or the mobile app stores, we’re seeing developers rush into the space to use these new tools to develop innovative use cases that we couldn’t have imagined before.

The opportunity for Coinbase

Our centralized (CeFi) products will continue to play a critical role in the growth of the cryptoeconomy. But the decentralized cryptoeconomy will also be a major area of growth. With all of this new innovation coming to crypto, we have a massive opportunity to give our customers access to these new products and features. Here are some of the ways we’re going to tackle this:

1. Bring more assets to Coinbase, faster: A few years ago we developed a rigorous process for evaluating new assets to list on our exchange (analyzing legal, security, compliance, and other risks). This process has been essential to responsibly growing our offering to date. But we need to move faster. We need to treat asset issuers as the very important customers they are, rolling out the red carpet, and courting them, and promptly responding to their inquiries. The goal is to list all legal assets and empower users to make their own risk-adjusted decisions.
2. Crypto is global, and we need to be too: Coinbase was founded in the US in 2012. We’re now a global company, with our products offered in >100 countries. We need to move from shipping products that cater only to the US (or UK/EU) to shipping products that work globally. This will increase the number of people who have access to our products and further our mission of increasing economic freedom in the world.
3. Build the crypto app store: Apple didn’t attempt to build every app for the iPhone, it empowered developers and gave mobile users an easy way to access new innovative apps. We need to do the same in crypto. There is now 10s of billions of dollars of economic activity running on dApps, and a new trend coming out every three months. We’ll work to give our users easy access to all of this from the main Coinbase product.

Here are our next steps

Improve our asset addition process

1. Reduce the burden on asset issuers: We’re simplifying inputs onto our legal review from 70 questions to 12 questions that get at what most raises concerns under the law. We’re also working through optimizing our Compliance and Security reviews.
2. Create an “experimental” zone for new assets: We need to be able to support new assets, but there may be additional risks for these networks (e.g. low liquidity, bugs in the code, etc). Because these assets often come with more risk than long standing and tested assets like Bitcoin, we need to make sure we are disclosing these risks to our customers appropriately, and enabling them to make educated decisions.
3. Move towards approving most assets for store/send/receive: We may not be able to trade every asset on our centralized exchange (for regulatory reasons), but we believe we can enable access to most assets for basic wallet functionality

Have an International-first mindset

We put a huge amount of effort into working with regulators in the US, UK, EU, etc. which has generated an enormous amount of value for customers in these regions, but it can also lead to products that are hyper focused on the western world. We’re going to flip this approach on its head by shipping more products in international markets on day one, while still partnering with regulators in more established markets to ensure our products are compliant with their local rules. This is also better aligned from a mission point of view, because sometimes international markets are even more in need of the economic freedom that crypto can provide.

Embrace third-party interfaces and self-custody

Soon any app built on decentralized crypto rails will be accessible to users of the Coinbase app. Our customer’s wallet and identity should seamlessly integrate into any of these apps. Part of this change will be embracing new wallet technologies, including those that allow for safe and easy self custody. In the future you will have the option to do self-custody of your crypto, right in the main Coinbase app.

Conclusion

The crypto industry is changing rapidly. The products that the most crypto-forward people are using today will be used by mainstream customers in a year, and by institutions a few years after that. We need to start integrating them today. Coinbase has shown that it can be a great crypto 1.0 company. Our next step is to show that we can be a great crypto 2.0 company.

This effort all ties back to our mission, which is to increase economic freedom in the world. Many of the most innovative use cases in crypto are being created in decentralized apps. By fully embracing this trend we can put crypto in the hands of more people around the world and thereby increase their economic freedom.

If these challenges excite you, please join our amazing team and come help build the cryptoeconomy.

Embracing decentralization at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We published the first version of our culture doc in July 2019. Today’s update has many of the same themes. It’s important to occasionally revisit and refresh these organizational artifacts to see what’s working, what’s not, and where we want to be in the future. The most significant change in this version was incorporating our four company values. We regularly heard questions about how our values were different from our culture doc, but the distinction never felt major. Our values are deeply ingrained in our culture and are important guideposts for how we work, hire, develop, and promote. With this update, there is now a single document describing how we work at Coinbase and what we value in our people.

I hope sharing this document will reinforce the importance of building the culture to our current employees, attract new employees who want to work in a culture like this, and inspire other companies who are working to build unique cultures of their own.

Clear communication

We are direct and succinct. We share information efficiently, improving collaboration and productivity. We practice active listening.

Efficient execution

We have a bias for action. We complete high quality work quickly. We focus on the 20% of work that will get us 80% of the impact.

Act like an owner

We take 100% responsibility for achieving the mission. We seek to improve all aspects of our company even in ways that are not explicitly part of our job. We run through brick walls.

Top talent

We take extraordinary measures to have exceptional people in every seat. We ask whether each candidate will raise the average on the team before making an offer. We cast a wide net, to attract candidates from every background, focusing on both skill and culture alignment. We actively coach and develop. Unremarkable performance gets a generous severance package.

Championship team

We are a winning team, not a family, and have high expectations for performance and delivering results. We’re stronger together so we choose to focus on what unites us, and not what divides us. We have an intense work culture, and are regularly pushed out of our comfort zones. We take rest seriously, to improve productivity over the long term. Coinbase should continually earn employees’ commitment and, likewise, expects employees to earn their seat at the company.

Continuous learning

We’re humble, and value learning over being right. We embrace delivering and receiving candid feedback, and see every setback as an opportunity to learn. We are crypto-forward, work hard to understand the evolving crypto landscape, and incorporate what we learn into our work.

Customer focus

We are deeply focused on solving our customers’ problems with technology, by enabling them to acquire, store and use crypto. We strive to be the easiest to use, most trusted and most secure platform. In every decision we make, we ask, “How does this create more value for our customers?”

Repeatable innovation

We are builders, leveraging technology to improve the world, constantly shipping ideas vs just discussing them. We know that companies must continually reinvent themselves to avoid stagnation. We have a high tolerance for failure, investing 10% of our resources in venture bets that are uncomfortably ambitious.

Positive energy

We are optimistic about the future and determined to get there. We co-create solutions instead of choosing blame and criticism.

Mission first

‍Our mission is ambitious and important. We don’t engage in social or political activism that is unrelated to our mission while at work. We seek to make the workplace a refuge from division, so we can stay focused on making progress toward the mission.

Culture at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As Coinbase and the cryptoeconomy grow, we’ve seen more interest from the media, government, and the general public in our business and in crypto overall. This increased awareness has been great. Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, whether in traditional media, social media, or by public figures.

This doesn’t always come from negative intentions. Our business, and crypto, can be difficult to understand, and often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process. At other times, misinformation comes from people pushing their own agenda, or from those who have a conflict of interest.

This is not unique to our business or industry of course. Every company experiences this to some degree, and it can be incredibly frustrating.

So how should companies respond to misinformation?

The choices

Option 1: turn the other cheek

The most common advice you’ll hear from PR firms and boards is to work behind the scenes to correct misinformation, but never engage in public fights. This might mean working with journalists to fact check a story, or to send internal emails to employees when misinformation is spreading on social media.

Pejoratively, one could call this the pacifist’s approach. Yes, you’re taking regular beatings from a bully, but don’t fight back. Just focus on building a great product and helping the industry grow, and everything will work out in the long run.

On the surface, this approach makes a lot of sense. Why pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, or with internet trolls who have too much time on their hands. After all, most of your customers probably never see the misinformation, and it can just draw more attention to respond publicly. Companies should never lose focus on the primary objective: building great products.

On the other hand, it can be very damaging to a company’s brand to let misinformation spread unchecked, and working through third parties to share your side of the story rarely is effective. You might, at best, get a short quote in a narrative that someone else controls.

If you look at companies like Facebook, they suffered enormous brand damage when traditional media coverage of them went south (although their business metrics seem to be unaffected). Accurate or not, traditional media has a conflict of interest when covering this topic, as they are in the process of being disrupted by tech. Yet to a large degree, Facebook turned the other cheek and didn’t respond or point out this conflict.

Option 2: fight

The opposite end of the spectrum is to actively fight back. Any time someone posts false information about your company, it’s war. Come out swinging and never back down.

This is a legitimate strategy that some companies have engaged in. Amazon’s recent responses to Andrew Yang or Elizabeth Warren are in this direction, along with FedEx’s CEO aggressively pushing back on a story they found inaccurate. And Peter Thiel’s takedown of Gawker may be the canonical example.

The advantage of this approach is that you are standing up for yourself. The downside is that warfare can be time-consuming, taking your energy away from building. You need to be prepared to go all the way, and it needs to be in line with your brand. There is an old quote which says “never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it”.

Option 3: publish the truth

I believe there is a reasonable middle ground between these first two options, which is to simply publish the truth, in a thoughtful and respectful way, and build a direct relationship with your audience. Companies no longer need to go through biased intermediaries to communicate with their customers and stakeholders. They often have equal or greater reach via their blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or through their own product. In many cases, the only organization that knows what really happened is the company itself.

Tesla is a great example of this middle ground approach, in their Most Peculiar Test Drive blog post. Other examples include Apple debunking the claims of a cover piece or our own post correcting facts in the New York Times. These examples take a reasonable middle ground of trying to just share the facts.

This “fact check” approach is not about antagonizing or embarrassing others, but simply sharing what happened through your own channels. It also means sharing the good along with the bad, with radical transparency. Companies are often reticent to share negative facts, in their inherent desire to look good, and therefore also have a conflict. To become a source of truth, companies will increasingly need to be comfortable sharing facts which paint them in a negative light as well. There is nothing like sharing mistakes, to build trust.

Every company is becoming a media company

Traditional media has been a powerful source of accountability for centuries. In more recent years, social media has as well, as any individual can share what is actually happening. The power of both these institutions is staggering, and they serve an important function. But traditional media and social media each come with a healthy dose of misinformation, and I believe people’s trust in these institutions has been in decline in recent years.

Companies are now emerging as a third source of truth, and can create accountability when misinformation is spread via other channels.

Amazon and Netflix built their own studios, Hubspot acquired the Hustle, a16z is going direct, Stripe has Stripe Press, and many more tech companies are quickly ascending the stack from mere “content marketing” to full-on media arms, complete with editors-in-chief and original content. As Balaji Srinivasan points out, this is the mirror image of legacy media corporations hiring engineers and declaring their aspiration to become world-class tech companies. There is no distinction anymore between app, distribution, and content — everyone is going full stack.

What we’re launching

Today we’re announcing a section of our blog called “Fact Check”. We will use this section of the blog to combat misinformation and mischaracterizations about Coinbase or crypto being shared in the world.

We’re seeding the Fact Check section of our blog with these articles:

• A response to misinformation about the effect bitcoin mining has on the environment
• Some social media misinformation that spread on our executive share sales
• An old post we did rebutting misinformation in traditional media on an employee matter
• A more recent post we did correcting false statements by folks in government and industry about illicit activity in crypto

Currently, these fact checks have been more reactive, responding to misinformation in the news as it happens. However as we build this out, we will get more proactive in helping dispel myths in the crypto space in order to be a powerful source for people just coming in and learning about the cryptoeconomy.

We will continue to update this section of our site over time and when new misinformation appears that is materially incorrect and being distributed broadly.

Here are a few guidelines we’ve created for ourselves in publishing Fact Check articles:

1. Be respectful, don’t antagonize.
2. Assume ignorance over malice, unless proven otherwise.
3. Share our mistakes just as candidly as our successes.
4. Don’t respond to everything.
5. Don’t get distracted from the main goal: building great products.

There is too much misinformation in the world for us to respond to everything. A lack of us posting should not be considered an indication that an external statement is true. We will only tackle misinformation that reaches some materiality threshold.

The future

In the future, we will need to move beyond fact checking, and start creating more of our own original content to communicate with our audience, and tell the stories of crypto that are happening all over the world. Many of these stories are not being told by traditional or citizen journalists. Fact checking is still largely reactive, but we need to move to a more proactive stance on content creation to have a true media arm.

Distribution of our content will happen through podcasts, YouTube, our blog, Twitter, and every other channel we own. But in the future, it will also likely move to more crypto native platforms, like Bitclout, or crypto oracles. Long term, the real source of truth will be what can be found on-chain, with a cryptographic signature attached.

Conclusion

Many readers have probably experienced the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: you read an article about something where you have first-hand knowledge, find it to be half true at best, and then turn the page to the next post/article and resume assuming it must be true. It takes this happening a number of times to change one’s estimates of what they are reading on every topic.

Crypto is a rapidly emerging space with growing attention and focus on it right now. Unfortunately, with this attention comes a lot of misinformation that is damaging, not only for companies like Coinbase, but for the space broadly. We want to do our best to ensure that when a customer, a regulator, or another important stakeholder is doing their research on crypto that they’re seeing information that is accurate and objective.

Over time, my prediction is that more and more companies will go direct, building their own media arm, while remaining focused on their primary goal of building great products. The tools for distribution have become democratized, and every company can become a source of truth.

Announcing Coinbase Fact Check: Decentralizing truth in the age of misinformation was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week, I shared that Coinbase is a mission focused company. The post received quite a bit of attention, and sparked a lot of debate about how companies should operate.

We subsequently decided to make a generous exit package available to any employee who didn’t feel they could be on board with this direction. Today, I sent the following email to the company. Hopefully it sheds some light on how it has unfolded.

Hi team,

I wanted to send you a follow up now that the deadline has passed for people opting in to the exit package.

I know there have been many difficult conversations happening to help clarify what our apolitical culture means in practice. It’s been great to see the whole team come together to reach understanding here, and support each other through it. It’s not easy to get through, but I think it will result in us having a stronger and more united team.

I also want to acknowledge that we could have done a better job bringing the Operating Group and managers along on this clarification of our culture so everyone was prepared before it went out to a wider group. Our practices will continue to evolve as we grow as a business, and we’ll work to do a better job on this in the future.

Many of you are probably curious about the outcome. I wanted to share that about 5% of employees (60) have decided to take the exit package. There are a handful of other conversations still ongoing, so the final number will likely be a bit higher. For those of you who have decided to move on, I want to thank you for your contributions to Coinbase and we wish you the very best. And for those of you who are opting in to the next chapter, I want to thank you for your trust and commitment to this mission. I’m excited to build the future with all of you.

I’ve heard a concern from some of you that this clarification would disproportionately impact our under-represented minority population at Coinbase. It was reassuring to see that people from under-represented groups at Coinbase have not taken the exit package in numbers disproportionate to the overall population. We’ll continue to keep a close eye on this to ensure we are building a diverse, inclusive environment where everyone feels they belong.

Finally, I saw a few misconceptions pop up in public responses. And I know many of you have had friends and family read various articles and send them your way. I thought I would take a minute to address a few of them.

Isn’t crypto inherently political?

Yes, we are ok being political about this one particular area because it relates to our mission.

Do employees have to pretend politics don’t exist?

No, we support each other through tough times and also have conversations about recent events like any team. We have just made a decision to not engage in broader activism as a company outside of our mission.

How will I know what counts as political?

We recognize it’s a blurry line, and ask that employees use good judgment. Our goal is not to look for violations, but rather to support employees in adapting to these clarified expectations.

Does Coinbase just stand for making a profit?

No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work. Growing revenue and profit is the only way we will be able to grow our team to build all the things that are needed to accomplish the mission. And we need an environment that is welcoming to everyone to attract and retain team members.

Hopefully these clarifications help clear up any remaining misunderstandings. To help create the same clarity for our external audience and prospective candidates, I’ll be posting this email to the Coinbase blog a bit later today. If you still have questions or would like to discuss further, I encourage you to reach out to your manager, HRBP, or me directly.

While having team members leave is never easy, I think we will emerge as a more aligned company from this. From time to time we need to rearticulate and clarify our cultural norms as we continue scaling. I’m excited to be moving forward as #OneCoinbase to pursue our vision of economic freedom for every person and business.

Thank you,
Brian

A follow up to Coinbase as a “mission focused” company was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyone is asking the question about how companies should engage in broader societal issues during these difficult times, while keeping their teams united and focused on the mission. Coinbase has had its own challenges here, including employee walkouts. I decided to share publicly how I’m addressing this in case it helps others navigate a path through these challenging times.

In short, I want Coinbase to be laser focused on achieving its mission, because I believe that this is the way that we can have the biggest impact on the world. We will do this by playing as a championship team, focus on building, and being transparent about what our mission is and isn’t.

Play as a championship team

During difficult times I think it’s important to go back to the guideposts we’ve established, like our culture doc, mission, and values.

One of the tenets of the Coinbase culture doc is to play like a championship team. What does this mean?

• Be company first: We act as #OneCoinbase, putting the company’s goals ahead of any particular team or individual goals.
• Act in service of the greater mission: We have united as a team to try and accomplish something that none of us could have done on our own.
• Default to trust: We assume positive intent amongst our teammates, and assume ignorance over malice. We have each other’s backs.
• Focus on what unites us, not what divides us: We help create a sense of cohesion and unity, by focusing on what we have in common, not where we disagree, especially when it’s unrelated to our work.
• Sustained high performance: As compared to a family, where everyone is included regardless of performance, a championship team makes a concerted effort to raise the bar on talent, including changing out team members when needed.

Through this lens, we start to have a glimpse of a solution. A championship team wants to win, and every teammate is willing to make sacrifices to achieve that. They have each other’s back, and focus relentlessly on the long term goal, avoiding distractions.

Focus on building

There are many places that a company can choose to allocate its limited time and resources. There is never enough time to do everything, so companies need to choose what change they want to see in the world and focus there. It can take decades to move the needle on large global challenges.

At Coinbase, we say that we are focused on building. What does this mean? It means we are going to focus on being the best company we can be, and making progress toward our mission, as compared to broader societal issues.

We focus on the things that help us achieve our mission:

• Build great products: The vast majority of the impact we have will be from the products we create, which are used by millions of people.
• Source amazing talent: We create job opportunities for top people, including those from underrepresented backgrounds who don’t have equal access to opportunities, with things like diverse slates (Rooney rule) on senior hires, and casting a wide net to find top talent.
• Fair talent practices: We work to reduce unconscious bias in interviews, using things like structured interviews, and ensure fair practices in how we pay and promote. We have a pay for performance culture, which means that your rewards and promotions are linked to your overall contribution to the mission and company goals.
• Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.

We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission:

• Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
• Non-profit work: We will do some work here with our Pledge 1% program and GiveCrypto.org, but this is about 1% of our efforts. We are a for-profit business. When we make profit, we can use that to hire more great people, and build even more. We shouldn’t ever shy away from making profit, because with more resources we can have a greater impact on the world.
• Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.
• Political causes: We don’t advocate for any particular causes or candidates internally that are unrelated to our mission, because it is a distraction from our mission. Even if we all agree something is a problem, we may not all agree on the solution.

Of course, there are exceptions here around internal employment matters, whistleblowing, etc. And we want all employees to feel safe disagreeing on the work itself. Candor and debate are core to a healthy team, where it is safe to disagree. We consider these to be related to our mission.

Why are we mission focused?

It has become common for Silicon Valley companies to engage in a wide variety of social activism, even those unrelated to what the company does, and there are certainly employees who really want this in the company they work for. So why have we decided to take a different approach?

The reason is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division. We’ve seen what internal strife at companies like Google and Facebook can do to productivity, and there are many smaller companies who have had their own challenges here. I believe most employees don’t want to work in these divisive environments. They want to work on a winning team that is united and making progress toward an important mission. They want to be respected at work, have a welcoming environment where they can contribute, and have growth opportunities. They want the workplace to be a refuge from the division that is increasingly present in the world.

Change happens in the world only when a smart, talented, group of people come together to focus on a hard problem for a decade or more. Many companies never stand the test of time, because they decide to dabble in unrelated efforts, and distract and divide their workforce in the process. Paradoxically, by being laser focused on our mission, we will likely have an even greater impact on the world, through our products and growing customer base.

Lastly, it would go against our principles of inclusion and belonging to be more of an activist company on issues outside of our core mission. We have people with many different backgrounds and viewpoints at Coinbase, and even if we all agree that something is a problem, we may not agree on how to actually go solve it. This is where there is a blurry line between moral statements and politics. We could use our work day debating what to do about various unrelated challenges in the world, but that would not be in service of the company or our own interests as employees and shareholders.

What is the scope of our mission?

Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world. This is difficult and important work, and every employee at Coinbase signed up because they are excited about this mission.

I realized at some point this year that many employees were interpreting our mission in different ways. Some people interpreted the mission more broadly, to include all forms of equality and justice. It makes sense if you believe that economic freedom is not possible without equality for all people. Others interpreted the mission more narrowly, believing that we were trying to create infrastructure for the cryptoeconomy, and that yes, this would create more equality of access for all people, but we weren’t trying to solve all forms of inequality in the world.

The narrower interpretation is how I intended the mission to be understood. I don’t think companies can succeed trying to do everything. Creating an open financial system for the world is already a hugely ambitious mission, and we could easily spend the next decade or two trying to move the needle on global economic freedom. We will keep building the most trusted and easiest to use financial products that help people access the cryptoeconomy, so everyone can get the benefits of this new technology and we can bring more economic freedom to the world.

A clear agreement

At the Q3 all hands meeting this past week, I shared with the company the above clarification of our culture and mission. These types of clarifications are needed periodically, as almost every year there will be some sort of event which tests the culture. My goal is to create clarity for all employees going forward about how we’re going to operate. I suspect the vast majority of people will be excited to proceed in this direction — after all, the mission is what we all signed up for and is what Coinbase is uniquely positioned to achieve as a company. But for some employees, working at an activism focused company may be core to what they want, and we want to prompt that conversation with their manager to help them get to a better place. Life is too short to work somewhere that you aren’t excited about, and we’re happy to make that a win-win conversation.

We’ve clarified this new agreement in some new internal communication guidelines that we published in the last month, but in summary it says:

We won’t:

• Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
• Expect the company to represent our personal beliefs externally
• Assume negative intent, or not have each others back
• Take on activism outside of our core mission at work

We will:

• Fight to get on the same page when we have differences
• Support each other, and create team cohesion
• Assume positive intent
• Put the company goals ahead of our teams or individual goals

Of course, employees should always feel free to advocate around issues of pay, conditions of employment, or violations of law, for instance. Hopefully the above sets some clear guidelines.

Conclusion

These are difficult times, and every CEO I know is trying to figure out how to lead through it.

I recognize that our approach is not for everyone, and may be controversial. I know that many people may not agree, and some employees may resign. I also know that some of what I’ve written above will be misinterpreted, whether accidentally or on purpose. But I believe it’s the right approach for Coinbase that will set us up for success long term, and I would rather be honest and transparent about that than equivocate and work in a company that is not aligned.

We need to do a better job of being authentic about who we are, and hopefully this blog post is a first step in that direction. We are an intense culture and we are an apolitical culture. We’re also committed to making Coinbase a place that creates incredible job opportunities and a welcoming environment for people of every age, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

With a strong, united culture, we can build a company that changes the world. At Coinbase, that culture means staying focused on our mission and being the best company we can be. I believe this is how we will have the greatest impact. With this clarity, hopefully everyone can make an informed decision and we can move forward as #OneCoinbase.

If you want to work at a company like this, please check out our careers page.

Update: I’ve posted an update on how this culture clarification played out.

Coinbase is a mission focused company was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hire builders
We hire people who are passionate about creating new products with technology. We look for entrepreneurs who are comfortable with ambiguity. We prefer to work with people who actually execute toward ideas, instead of just coming up with them. When the creative moment strikes, we try not to let big company process get in the way or slow them down.

Today, I want to expand on this concept, and flesh out what it means to hire builders, so that people thinking of joining Coinbase can make an informed decision.

What do I mean when I say we want to hire builders?

At the root, builders create value in the world instead of taking or destroying it. They help build companies and make products, because they want to improve the world. When builders make things people want, not only do they solve customer problems, they also create jobs, grow the economy, and generate wealth in society.

Builders love working on important and ambitious missions. They know that the only way to accomplish a mission like this is with relentless focus. They try to ignore all of the other things that can distract a company, and keep the team united toward this goal, with everyone rowing in the same direction. They want to know how their work connects to the mission, and try to maximize the percent of their time that goes to delivering customer value.

Builders are pro technology. They recognize that science and engineering are some of the best levers we have to improve the world. In every industry, including education, financial services, healthcare, entertainment, energy, and more, the greatest improvements we’re seeing are coming from technology. Technology is what can help solve the world’s biggest problems, from climate change to improving education. Technology also drives down costs, making expensive initial prototypes eventually cheap enough for everyone. Builders are technological progressives: they believe that by investing in science, engineering, and technology we can create a better world.

Builders are inherent optimists. They believe the future will be better, and they have a plan to get there. They recognize that, over the arc of history, the human condition has improved dramatically, and that this trend can continue, when smart, dedicated people come together to build solutions. They recognize that “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world….[and] indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Builders are supportive of others who are trying to improve the world. They recognize that it’s easy to be a critic, but it’s hard to build something new that really helps people. They celebrate people who attempt the impossible and stumble, instead of trying to tear them down or belittle them, because they know how difficult it is to build.

Builders are unusually resilient and determined. They move from one setback to the next with enthusiasm. They know that it took Thomas Edison many attempts to create the light bulb, the Wright Brothers many attempts to achieve the first powered flight, and NASA many attempts (and human lives) to reach the moon. They have the audacity to believe they can achieve the impossible, and pick themselves up, even after repeated failure. They manage their own psychology to keep morale high, especially when the going gets tough.

Builders work hard. They want to join winning teams where sustained high performance is expected from everyone, because they recognize this improves their chances of building something great. And they also work hard because they love it. They find it incredibly fulfilling to work on something that matters. At the same time, they know how to rest and avoid burnout, to improve their productivity and creativity over the long term.

Builders care about profit because a company without profit is less likely to accomplish its mission. More capital means a company can hire more builders to come join the team, and it is an important measure of whether customer value is really being created. They also want to own a piece of the businesses they help create, not only so they can create wealth for themselves and their families, but also so they can invest it in the future.

Builders care about responsibility to society. They only want to build products that are good for humanity, and minimize negative externalities. But they recognize that this is complex: the things people want are not always what is good for them, and any tool can be used for good or bad purposes. They know that they always have to be able to look themselves in the mirror, and believe they are net contributing to society. They don’t believe in taking shortcuts that would temporarily increase profitability. They optimize for the long term goal.

Builders believe in creative disruption and free markets. They want the best product at the lowest price to win, as determined by the customer, to accelerate progress in society. They don’t want any handouts and they don’t want entrenched incumbents to have an unfair advantage. They want their product to survive solely based on whether customers vote for it with their dollars.

Builders take a global perspective because they want to improve the lives of as many people as possible. They know that focusing on the largest market, say the U.S., may only allow them to reach 4.3% of the global population. With technology improving distribution and lowering costs, builders are increasingly able to have a global reach.

With this understanding of builders, my hope is that people can make a more informed decision about whether Coinbase is the right place for them. It takes a wide variety of people to come together and make a company like Coinbase work. We have many roles and opportunities, but we all share some of these values around how to make a contribution to the world.

The mission of Coinbase is to create an open financial system for the world. This is no small task. It’s going to require dedicated focus for many years to come, and there will be many milestones and setbacks along the way. For those who join the team, they will know that they put a dent in the universe, and helped create economic freedom for millions of people around the world. Please check out our open roles here.

Who should join Coinbase: Builders was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.