"everybody i talked to actually thought it's a bad idea like any reasonable person would have quit i was filled with self-doubt and then coinbase was valued at a billion dollars crazy brian armstrong c..."

"bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] brian i when i read through people's people's stories they're sometimes reall..."

"great question um one of the less obvious reasons probably is that i was an introvert i just wasn't really very good with people i didn't really have that many friends you know as a young person i was..."

"there's lots of different types of ceos there's not just one mold there's people who love marketing people have operations people who love sales people and then there are engineer ceos um so that's on..."

"that were out of your control that happened to be the case that also aided to that um trajectory yeah i mean there was a lot of things that went right so i was in a home with loving parents that were ..."

"it for a couple years and it doesn't work you go back to a company and you it's often viewed as a badge of honor um that you've tried to start up you have this entrepreneurial dna you're somehow more ..."

"glimmer of it that i had was in high school and i i had started building some websites and i remember as a senior in high school i went on this retreat and uh i had i do remember having this thought l..."

"just just listening to you speak there my my brain was telling me that because i was trying to make this link between why being an introvert led you to technology and then also having this sort of des..."

"yeah i basically decided okay if i'm in this interested in computers my parents were supportive of this of course there was like community college classes and i went to go try to take some of those cl..."

"more like stumbled into it yeah i mean so as a college student my roommates and i were always trying to think about how to make extra money and i went around and i was looking at these on-campus jobs ..."

"website for this to connect even more people maybe try to expand it to other schools you know eventually over a period of a couple years this this idea just kept evolving and we started to think about..."

"we were trying to take like a 10 fee by matching these people and we were basically trying to do all the payments through our website like billing and you know with a 10 fee and what would happen ofte..."

"it it feels like such a pain to shut it down or such a bad thing so i was like what if what if i were just to put everything on autopilot you know we're not gonna be involved in any of the payments th..."

"anything else that you learned from that seven-year first you know kind of messy startup that of key philosophies for you today in coinbase i mean i think one of the big realizations i had in starting..."

"one thing what about airbnb so you went and worked as a in the product team at airbnb yeah yeah i was a technical product manager which basically meant i wrote some code and i tried to be a product ma..."

"um so anyway it gave me a front row seat into that it probably gave me a little bit of a sense of confidence too because i had never studied abroad or really um lived in a foreign country by myself wh..."

"another brazil to thailand or something and seeing this um i think it was textiles or something like this san francisco incubator or new york-based incubate where they were building companies and i wa..."

"out what you wanted to do with your life as if there's some kind of system there yeah i don't know if there's a perfect system but i mean i read this book by seth godin called the dip yeah i don't kno..."

"now i was like why do i live in buenos aires i should go to where the the center of tech entrepreneurship of silicon valley you know that's happening all over the world now silicon valley is kind of d..."

"in the case of business um and inspiration and enablers um for this long-term vision i have and i spent some time in san francisco myself about three years and when i come back to the uk and when i go..."

"it had a really magnetic culture even at 40 people they had they were clearly onto something it had they had found product market fit it was growing quickly um and i learned a lot there they had a rea..."

"powering through it so i learned that too i hear a lot of um entrepreneurs who have your same enthusiasm to be an entrepreneur the enthusiasm you've expressed there when you leave um argentina and you..."

"want to feel important or something we're talking about um how part of this sort of introverts dilemma is you can feel significant personal significance by creating something that has significance in ..."

"once that hole is filled in your heart i guess you have to transition to being motivated out of like joy or love or something more positive not like running away from fear and anger or you're like you..."

"the job like i'm been doing it 10 years and i hope i can do it another 10 it's and it's still fun because i've been able to delegate why do you have to make that transition away from fear and maybe in..."

"describing me when you say that so yeah the company for seven years but it felt like i was doing it um involved it wasn't it wasn't voluntary meaningful struggle it was i can't let this thing go down ..."

"the business in some way shape or form but it's like yeah that's helped make it sustainable other things i've done i've had um a lot of executive coaches different executive coaches i have one now you..."

"actually an important skill to learn so okay so that's kind of how to like you know go hard for the long term but don't burn out um then i think companies also need to have repeatable innovation so wh..."

"know never let us become complacent try to disrupt ourselves before somebody else does and just keep building the next thing the next thing the next thing like that's that's what keeps a company excit..."

"risks and to do those those 10 bets that might end up being the the next aws or the next you know kindle or whatever in the case of amazon yeah you're right so i think that it's a the natural tendency..."

"um you know i think some of this has to come from the founder i don't know i don't know if there's any other way like the problem is um if you look at public companies that have that are founder-led t..."

"what is third web third web makes it really really easy to build web through applications and today's guest is one of the most famous ceos and founders in web3 and we actually have a really strong rel..."

"let's get back to the episode you read this um the white paper satoshi's famous bitcoin white paper pivotal moment for you sparks interest and intrigue while you're at um airbnb you do something which..."

"my personal time and it was hard it sucked i mean i was like tired after a full day of work it's like 7 p.m but this is where that some of that determination comes in right and i was like okay well my..."

"i probably did that for like a year year and a half to try to build the prototype of what would become coinbase um and then i applied to y combinator they they eventually accepted me and wrote me the ..."

"really buckling down they find this source of energy and so you know find whatever that is for for you like the listener out there and um and then go hard at it you know finish your book like launch y..."

"like 2010 time frame and you howled i guess i was like 29 yeah something like that um so what i was trying to do i had read the bitcoin white paper and i was like okay this is a decentralized protocol..."

"smartest friends about it and they were like i don't really get this bitcoin thing it sounds like a scam honestly right so that they didn't that was not reassuring um and then i went to a couple bitco..."

"i heard that you um in in applying for y combinator you wanted to have a co-founder you met someone quickly and then it didn't last more than like four weeks or something yeah exactly um yeah so i was..."

"it was very touch and go i mean i i was like well my co-founder thing didn't work out um i don't know like i'm just going to try my best here but like this i was like this has like a pretty high chanc..."

"is my guess on that point of co-founders yeah um i read that you eventually sort of interviewed 50 odd co-founders to try and find the right one for what would become coinbase what were you looking fo..."

"success it's almost like putting out the bat signal like um if you have like half of an idea you can't just like be talking to your friends about it you got to put it out on a blog post or like a prot..."

"and so i was like okay let me go try to make a simple buy button so when people sign up they can actually get some bitcoin into their wallet and it turned out that was a very hard thing to do you had ..."

"make as a company in those first five years that you in hindsight go damn that's a that's a key learning yes i think if i were to go back and do it again there's a few things i might have done that wo..."

"don't you go do all the external facing stuff and what's the thing that would really excite you like you know he did a lot of the fundraising like he was really representing the company in the way you..."

"this up you know like because i'm supposed to be projecting confidence and like no it's not a big deal we're gonna get through this and i'm just like coming across like this pre-pubescent kid you know..."

"they have to build trust and oftentimes the team is often like kind of dysfunctional until like they go through enough together so we had some good blow-ups there um there was some executives like lef..."

"offsides and stuff but yeah there were some learning pains there when when crypto went through that first well not the first but that real that sort of 2017 bull run where everything was going up how ..."

"and so yeah we started i started walking around with like a security guard um we had like some over exuberant customers it was it was weird tell me about that because i was i was thinking we've had so..."

"but um you know i i don't want to overstate it like it's not i don't it's not like a huge burden on my life i i feel i feel safe and i'm able to keep functioning and stuff like that um yeah another th..."

"is true right like reality you have to zoom out to kind of look at reality but one thing i realized um was that i felt this overwhelming pressure as ceo was like oh shoot like every every week i've go..."

"lesson for me how did you do you've been through you know these crypto winters and your company got so big that you know it went public and then when you become a public company and you're almost seen..."

"it like sugar it's it's addictive and can you consume it in small quantities responsibly and like eat a couple bites of dessert or something like yes but um you have to be really careful because basic..."

"i i understand all of that um as i was saying to you before we start recording i became a dragon dragon's den so i got much more scrutiny than i've ever got from headlines i'd read about my family tha..."

"even that could happen like so man and there's like what else is like not accurate in the new york times or pic pick any other you know fox news like whatever you know even one of the ones that really..."

"of pr we moved into this world where they're now glass boxes the world can see inside all of your employees have smartphones and they can take pictures and write reviews and so organizations now um ha..."

"thought about this a lot and i'm not sure i have the perfect answer but um so i think there's a spectrum so on one side of the spectrum like you said you can actually zuckerberg is somewhere in the mi..."

"turn down 95 of media um i i really want to talk to people like that are doing what new media right like like this like podcasts or um or youtube or really just have conversations with people that i t..."

"yeah so you never know if you're doing the right thing right um one argument would be that this is just unnecessary i could have ignored it and um there was people who never even saw it and there was ..."

"workplace yeah this is a big conv i've had conversations this week with my companies where they've talked about coinbase and the example you've set because of things that have happened over the last c..."

"just even a tech thing it is it is more pronounced certain places in the world it's not it's not a broad thing geographically it's it's very pronounced in some cities um especially in the us but i gue..."

"people and they were like no like if if that's how you feel there's probably a bunch of other people the company who also feel that way and like you started this company you don't need to go they need..."

"if you want good revenue property and you make good products if you make good products you have to have good people build them so it's actually everything comes back to people um so yeah i mean it's i..."

"company you said about growing too fast i i saw you post recently that you you've grown the company too fast over the last couple of years and that you were having to cut back about 18 of the workforc..."

"that we did the right thing i am so excited to announce our new sponsor for this podcast and that is blue jeans by verizon for any of you that aren't already familiar with blue jeans they are a video ..."

"right and then relationships account for a lot of happiness i think um family like romantic leave personal friendships so um i mean it's kind of it's i'm like almost 40 and i think i'm thinking at som..."

"hmm give you some time well i mean one kind of um contrarian view that i have that i think most people would disagree with is that um i think a lot of regulation is well intentioned and it actually ca..."

"thank you brian thank you i can see why your podcast is so successful you're really unique and amazing interviewers so um i really enjoyed the conversation that was great thank you i had a few words t..."