ワシントンがCoinbaseを殺そうとしたとき——ブライアン・アームストロング

How much of your job is building political power as an advocate for like the crypto industry?

What's the key moment for the market structure? Well, uh, the crypto industry has been working for a long time on getting in the Senate, a whole bunch of people been trying to get this, uh, piece of legislation passed. Um, in the House, it was called the Clarity Act. In the Senate, um, they're drafting their own version of it, but it's it's essentially clarifying this question about which of these crypto assets are commodities versus securities. And, you know, someone might say, well, why does it matter? It matters because in the United States, we have two different regul federal regulators, a CFTC and the SEC. The CFTC regulates commodities, the SEC regulates securities. And so it turns out in the past uh this ambiguity about where crypto assets set sit between the two federal regulators that lack of clarity was really weaponized and uh by Gary Gendler the former SEC chair and Elizabeth Warren and people like that who tried to in my view unlawfully kill the industry in the United States. So in other countries where we operate like in the UK or in Singapore they only have one federal regulator for financial services. So they actually don't care whether these are commodities or securities. is a totally uh parochial issue in the United States that's kind of like this turf war between two federal agencies in the past. So anyway, we just decided we need to get legislation passed by Congress to clarify once and for all which of them go in which bucket so that a future Gary Gansler couldn't come in and try to kill the industry.

Well, okay, so long story, but um you know, essentially this was around like the 2020 2021 time frame. um Coinbase. We decided we wanted to become become a public company. We had been operating for about nine years at that point and we went in and went through the normal process with the SEC. You have to describe your entire company, how it works, you know, how do we decide which assets to list, which do we not list? Um at that time, we we wanted there to be a path to have crypto securities be traded. Simple way to think of it is a security is like a way to raise money for a company that you want to start. A commodity is something that's decentralized kind of like oil or gold or copper [snorts] or something like that, right? So, Bitcoin is decentralized. Nobody controls it. Everyone pretty much agrees Bitcoin is a commodity, but there were people issuing tokens which were raising money for different projects they were doing um that were in various stage stages of decentralization. So, was it a commodity? Was it a security? this and then Gary Gendler uh the SEC chair at that time um my understanding is that you know he and Elizabeth Warren essentially um decided they wanted to use this to curtail the crypto industry and if you want to know why

How would she get that influence?

It was actually both. They created an enforcement action and initiated lawsuit against us. We actually sued them proactively because they had violated another part of the law called the administrative procedures act where they're they're required actually by law to engage with the industry to promulgate rules and they had failed to do that. Wait, how many companies sue their regulator? Very few. So [laughter] this this actually gets into like one of the big themes of you know um I don't know like me as a CEO like I I want to try to always do the right thing and I have a very long-term perspective like I'm trying to create an important outcome here in the world which is around increasing economic freedom in the world. So you know in the short term I knew this was going to hurt our company. A lot of public market investors they just this company is suing its regulator. I'll just wait and see. I'm not going to buy that stock you know. [laughter] Um actually a lot of people I talked to at that time they were like do not sue the SEC. Like this is a bad idea. But I but I did I actually talked to a couple other financial services CEOs who had sued the SEC and won. And so I I knew it was possible. You know, it's a little bit like um you remember when SpaceX was trying to get that contract with the government?

Okay. So when you're deliberating on whether to do this or not?

What's the time frame? Is this a couple days, a few weeks? Like how fast do you have to make this decision?

yeah, we made a made a call.

founder mode, I guess. You know,

Yeah. And I have a long-term perspective on it, too. like if it's going to be short-term pain for a few years while we're going through this, but it allows the industry to actually be built in the United States and help create more economic freedom, which is the mission of the company, then I'm fine with that. You know, I feel like personally, I'm well off. Like I I'm I'm in this at this I don't have to work a day of my life. I'm doing this because I actually want to achieve the outcome at this point. And so it wouldn't have helped me achieve the outcome uh if we'd let this regulator unlawfully kill the whole industry in the United States. That would have just been a setback from my point of view.

Yeah. So you have accumulated resources. Your company has a lot more resources. If this would have occurred before, would you have had the money to fight it?

on that one thing.

You keep saying that. We've talked enough. You're you're not autistic to me.

Yeah.

cuz trendy and cool now. [laughter] No, it's actually like, you know, that's a good way to get a venture check is like to be on the spectrum. Um I mean, we're not raising money, but uh

Yeah.

Um I think I'm somewhere on the spectrum. You know, I've taken some online tests and things like that and there there are things like where, you know, I have difficulty like reading uh people's faces and emotions sometimes and you know, I kind of can get over stimulated by like loud sounds and lights and you know, so there's like kind of classic signs like that, but it's not debilitating at all. I actually find it to be like it is a it's a strength in the sense that like I can just endlessly f like focus on um interesting work almost like for 12 hours a day I just find it to be I I wouldn't say like effortless it depends depends on what kind of work I'm doing like if I'm if I have to just do a bunch of like 12 hours of people management hard conversations like that's pretty taxing but if I'm just cons like writing code or write reading things on my computer or just like digesting cool content on the internet. I can just do that and endlessly. So, there is like um any I wouldn't say you have to be autistic to have that, but there's certain things like that. I just find it endlessly fascinating.

Yes, that so that's the other thing which I don't know if this is an autism spectrum thing, but it Yeah, I I think more some people are like a little more concerned with social cohesion or what other people think. And so there is a part of me that's just like if I see something that's just wrong and um not in line with what I want to accomplish long term around, you know, civilizational progress and these things, it's I don't I don't care being disliked. I don't really care that much about being disliked for it. And I know that it'll piss people off. So there are a handful of things like this that I've done in in Coinbase which I think people consistently remarked to me like, "Wow, that was really unique." And to me, it didn't seem that unique, but like this mission first blog post I put out where we said the company's going to be apolitical during, you know, 2021, all that madness or suing your your regulator, right? These are things which most people probably wouldn't do cuz they're they're afraid of being disliked. And I it's not that I like being disliked. It actually causes me a fair amount of stress, too. But I don't let that stop me from doing what I think is the right thing.

You read it today, it's like fairly innocuous,

But back then, I remember the response. People were going crazy.

what's the big deal? I mean, it's kind of a boring blog post in some ways, right? But yeah, at that time, um, I feel like there was this mass hysteria or something that had like taken over the country. I mean, the George Floyd thing had happened. people were covid had happened so people were isolated they weren't getting in person as much with folks and feeling a sense of hey we're all on the same team we trust each other and you know increasingly at these town halls that we would host as a company usually people would ask questions about like our products and our competitors and regulators and and then we increasingly would be getting these questions about um social issues happening in the world um in this case like police brutality with George Floyd but all kinds of things like you Middle East or whatever, gun control, you know, and we it became like almost like I realized there was this element within this in the company that really wanted to get in front of the company with a microphone and like see if they could make the executive team squirm somehow. Um, and you know, we had this culture of this open mic thing, but I realized that later we actually don't really do that. We just have people presubmit questions and if we think we take hard questions, but if they're like just way off topic or someone's pet issue, we just don't we don't entertain that. it's we don't allow one person to kind of derail 3,000 other people. So, it was in that context that the company was going through this and somebody at a town hall um asked the question like are we going to support Black Lives Matter at Coinbase? I basically said, I don't know if know enough about it, but I'll look into it like move on to the next question. And they kind of held the mic and they said like that's not good enough. I need to know if we at this company are going to stand for this or not. And I said I don't know. I'm not I haven't looked into it. Right. And this erupted in Slack and basically 300 employees did a walk out in protest. Um, if you remember at this time like every company in America was posting proBLM

Wait, so wait, are these are these this is not in person?

Okay. So the walk out is close my laptop.

going go from my bedroom to my living room now.

Something of the American mind, the Codling of the American Mind I think. Yeah. He was talking he basically talks about how in these college campuses there's like these they're training activists in these college campuses and um it's now spilling into the workforce and they they feel that their job is not to like join a company and advance its mission. They felt like their job was to join a company and hold it hold truth to power and hold it to account for these broader societal issues and actually reform the company as an activist. I essentially started drafting this blog post and I said I don't we're not going to do that here. You know, like we're not going to be a company that just tries to jump into whatever the current hot social issue is and make a bunch of feel-good statements without actually doing anything. We already have an important mission, which is increasing economic freedom. And it takes decades of work to try to make an impact on something that big. So, let's stick to the thing that we think is important in the world. And outside of work, people can do whatever they want. You can go protest, you can be left or right or whatever. Um, but just inside the workplace, we're not going to be political. we're just going to f unless it has to do with our mission crypto and economic freedom, then we'll be very political and you know engaging for litigation and things like that. So, I knew it was going to piss some people off. Um, and I actually some people when they read the draft post before I sent it, they said like, "Do not post this." They like begged me not to post it.

Uh, inside the company.

Yeah.

Um, I might have sent it to the board or someone like that. I'm not sure if I sent it to anybody out. I think I might have told a few of my friends what I was up to, but they didn't read the post.

Yeah. And yeah, and so uh I decided to do it anyway and I I knew people were going to upset and so we put out this we said anybody who's not okay with this new direction, you know, I basic I had failed to create alignment in the company about where we were going and I was kind of walking on eggshells around whenever people would ask me this. So it people were confused about where where we stood and there was maybe like it felt like 50% of the company was was against this but I think in reality it was like one it's a very vocal 1% minority and there was other people who were sympathetic to that cause anyway we put out the post and I said anybody who's not aligned with this new direction we'll give you a good ex severance package um you can fill out this form and accept it by Friday or something and 5% of the company took the exit package we we were having bets beforehand we we didn't know we thought maybe 50% of the would resign or something like it felt like that was

We would have built it all back, you know, and this this is actually a very important point because I think that there's a big difference between like a founder and a and a presider of a company, right? Like I I know that I could build it back because I started it when it was just me on a laptop, right? And I and I was there when it was 10 people and 100 people and a thousand people. And if we need to go from 2,000 to 1,000, I that's not a big deal to me. You know, I could go back to being on my laptop again if I had to, right? And there's actually there's this great Lee Kuanu speech that he gave. He was he's the founder of Singapore, you know, and I guess he he was dealing with a a strike that was happening, I think, from the air traffic controllers or the airline or something like that. But there's this great speech if you if you Google Lee Kuanu um iron [clears throat] iron in veins, you know which one I'm talking about. And he he basically he says like in this speech, it kind of gives me chills every time where he's he's like, you know, I I sat across the table from them and they were threatening to like shut down the airline and everything. And he said, get back to work and you know, or and like I will not allow you to bring this country down and if you don't do it, I'm prepared to rebuild it all from scratch again. And he said, "Anyone who rules Singapore, you know, has to look look at me and know that I have iron in my veins. Like I will rebuild it all from scratch, right?" And so I was watching like videos like that. Um, and I was like, "This is what this is what I need to do as a leader." Like it was very it was very inspiring. So there are moments like that um that you have to stand up and say, "We're going this direction and if you don't if you're not on board with it, it's okay. You can leave, but we're going this way." That that's leadership. There's two interesting things that popped out in what you just said. I want to go to the long term. Again, you have this long-term orientation. You me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me mentioned multiple times in the blog post. You're like we're trying to change literally change the world and that's going to take multiple decades. Want to go to that one second. But I like how you said like I was confused like what is going on here? So you're not your first instinct when you're confused you start reading books, you start talking to people. What do you do to try to to like to essentially alleviate the confusion because you're like oh I don't know what's going on. I'm going to read Jonathan Heights book for example.

When you say follow your nose is this intuition?

Yeah.

affirmations. Yeah, exactly. All intuition. It was actually surprising. It was one of the most fascinating things about this conversation. So explain the difference you thought about um when you were starting the companies before Co Coinbase because you had this long-term orientation almost from the beginning of Coinbase, but that you lacked that in the other businesses that you were starting before that.

What What year was this?

Were you reading Tim Ferrris?

Yeah, I read it a long time ago.

I I remember I did think that. Yeah. because I had tried a couple of these other ideas that were kind of um they were they were difficult and I wasn't actually passionate about it. And so you a lot of entrepreneurship you're just like moving from one setback to the next with enthusiasm or whatever. There's that Winston Churchill quote. So I was like okay if I'm I realized how hard it was to do those businesses. So I was like the next thing I try I need to make sure it's something that I'm like I'm really into for the for a lifetime right and I had been reading a lot of um books like like Milton Friedman about economics and um like Ein Rand and stuff and I was like okay I was it was getting kind of into these like free market like libertarian ideas and I was also living in Argentina for a year that was a whole piece of the story where I got to see like a hyperinflation country and

with women.

Okay.

And um Yeah,

Yeah, it's Well, it's I learned e from an economics point of view like

I meant the physical beauty.

It was called the Paris of South America.

this is around so Bitcoin white paper published end of 2008.

Okay.

So wait, how did they move money to all these different countries back then? Then

Okay. So you have you're you're building like your personal philosophy about like economics and what's important there. You know that you want to dedicate yourself to tech entrepreneurship as far as like what your career is cuz you're going to be passionate about that. You want to do something for a long term. And then you're also seeing this real life problem of trying to send money into all these disparate uh you know economies and countries.

And then you start working on Coinbase nights and weekends.

Great summary by the way. Yeah. So

Well, the main reason was that I had read a lot of Paul Graham essays from Y Comator and you know, I was I was I really wanted to get accepted into Y Com. It was like the top incubator. it still is in Silicon Valley and Paul had these great essays and one of them had talked about how you know if you look at Huelet and Packard and you know Larry and Sergey and um you know there are exceptions but more often than not like great founders like running building a company is just so difficult it helps to have people with some complimentary skill sets so just to improve my chances of like getting to Y cominator if nothing else and the company eventually succeeding I was trying to find the right person

Well, you know, long like it's like Wnjak and Jobs, right? Like I Jobs was clearly the one that had more impact over a long period of time, but there probably wouldn't have been an Apple without W in the early days.

You know, you never know exactly. And um you know like I will say in our in my case like I tried to find a co-founder for about like a year and a half and failed and so I eventually um got the app live and got into Y cominator and there's a whole story there.

So this is this is another interesting story but I actually applied with um this guy who Ben Reeve who had created blockchain.info which is now blockchain.com and we sort he had never heard of white commentator but I convinced him to fly from the UK. we met, had a coffee, and then we went into the interview, which by the way is a bad idea. Um, you should really co-ound with people you've known for a long time. So, anyway, that we got accepted somehow under that premise. Um, I don't think we mentioned probably that we didn't know each other that long or it didn't come up in the interview or something. We didn't hide anything, but um anyway, it became clear within like 3 months that it was not going to work. And um and so with the help of YC, I kind of went, you know, I had a hard conversation with him about that and we I I went through the program solo. Um anyway, long story short, we went through white com raised the seed round at the end of it and I, you know, I was lucky enough to have Fred Ersome reach out to me and he became uh the first person who I really started working with on it unofficially and then it just started going really well. very complimentary skill sets and I asked him to co-ound and so he became the co-founder of Coinbase and I I actually don't think Coinbase would have succeeded without Fred like if you look at the the subsequent three four or five years there was a lot of like near-death experiences and he is just an absolute killer and so it was that pairing that allowed us to really get to product market fit and like off the launch launch pad into orbit if you will. Brad Jacobs has started eight separate billion-dollar companies. He said, "I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life, and they all have one thing in common. They think differently than most people. All of them, to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails." What Brad noticed is that great business leaders are pattern spotters. But you can't spot patterns if you can't see all of your data. Most businesses only use 20% of their data. Why? Because 80% of customer intelligence is invisible. It's hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. That's where HubSpot comes in. With HubSpot, all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. This is important because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com.

Yes, [laughter] that is true. How did how did that happen? I mean, the simple version of it is that I I was a computer science major um and I studied economics and computer science. Fred studied the same thing, but he had gone into work in finance after college. he went to go work at Goldman Sachs as an FX trader and I was working as a software engineer/ entrepreneur, failing entrepreneur. Um, so I had more of like that engineering brain. He had more of like that finance trader brain. And so when he came in and started to analyze all of the flow of funds um on every trade, he was able to map that out. And due to like certain time risks and things, he he actually was correct that he map that out and it was just a set of conditions which I was not as familiar with. So, um, that was a great example of just him adding value in the first probably three weeks we worked together.

No, that one wasn't near-death. It was just getting the right um business model and fe

Well, okay. So, an example of a near-death experience was um I think we had we had raised maybe the series A or something like that. Yeah. And we had found product market fit. So there were a lot of people using the site every day and you know we we were having this huge backlog of customer support inquiries like where it would be like every night from like 9:00 p.m. to midnight, we would just try to answer support queries cuz we hadn't we didn't have a customer support team. And um well, we were slowly trying to build it, I should say. Anyway, so we had like a,000 2,000 5,000 10,000 backlog of these customer support tickets and people were getting very angry about all of this because you couldn't respond.

I was one of those people.

I don't know. I mean it was once in a while Fred would actually go answer the door holding like a golf a golf club and you know like usually it was somebody who was like man why didn't my crypto hit my wallet and then we were like sometimes we'd write people like a physical check and like okay you need to leave the office anyway that was the first time I'd really experienced having tens of thousands of people angry at you at the same time

Yeah. or a bank transfer

Yeah. Once we managed to get that bank partnership set up and an easy way to buy, sell in the US. I mean, we were we had instant product market fit and it was just like trying to keep up with the demand.

in the US? US. Yeah.

How did you get the bank partnership?

um, by the way, there was other near-death experiences around cyber events and things like that we can talk about if you want, but on the um on the bank side, yeah. So, okay, there's another interesting story where we, okay, believe it or not, the first version of the Coinbase app actually, you couldn't buy or sell Bitcoin. Um, I thought we were making a a wallet for payments on the internet and so you could store Bitcoin, you could make Bitcoin payments and this prototype went out and I I remember like a couple hundred people signed up off of Reddit or something like that, but the app was not retaining users, right? And what they teach you in Y Cominator is like go talk to customers, get feedback, and then build the product and talk to customers and build the product and just do that on repeat and don't get distracted by any other like going to conferences or whatever. So I remember I emailed like three of these people who had signed up and I was like, "Hey, I built this app. Can I get on the phone with you?" And in the first few conversations, I was like, "I noticed you didn't come back to the app." And the guy was like, "Yeah, I mean the app was pretty cool, but like I just don't have any Bitcoin." And I remember something kind of clicked in my head and I was like, "Well, if there was if I if there was like a buy button in the app, would you have bought it here?" And it sounds like ridiculous in hindsight, but at the time this was like market research, right? And he's like, "Yeah, probably." And so I was like, "Okay, we got to make a simple way for people to just buy it here. It's not like you go to a separate exchange and then put it in your wallet for actually daily utility or something." And so then I was like, "Okay, we we've got to make it possible to get bank transfers hooked up kind of like PayPal or debit cards." And I remember calling like these different banks and saying hey I want to get integrated into the the bank network in the AC it's called AC in the US. Um, and these banks were either like, "What the heck are you talking about? Like, I've never heard of this thing. It sounds like a scam." Or some of them who had heard about Bitcoin, I remember like hung up on me, you know? They were like um they're like, "We do not work with Bitcoin companies." Like bam, like slamming the phone down, right? And um so I went to the the partners at Y Combinator actually uh one of them was like Sam Alman at the time. He was running he was running uh Y Combinator and like Gary Tan was there. was helping me and these Paul Bukite and these various folks and I remember they said um well why don't you go talk to Silicon Valley Bank like we help we Silicon Valley Bank opens bank accounts for lots of Y cominator companies we have a good relationship there so they kind of warmly introduced me to the right person and they were kind of like h these guys are you know these guys are probably crazy but we like to help Y cominator so let's let's see what we can do and they ran it through their compliance team and their compliance team came back and said we think you might be what's called a money transmitter which means you need to have a license in the United And I remember getting on the phone with them and and they were like, "Well, we can't open this account for you unless you can prove to us that you're not a money transmitter or you have to get a money transmission license I researched was like it was like it was going to cost 5 or 10 million and take about three or four years. And I'd only raised about 600k right now. So, so I was like, "That's not good." Um, but they also said, "Well, if you if you have some legal argument that you're not a money transmitter, maybe we would allow you to get started." And I remember going to a couple law firms and um, one of them agreed. He's like, "There are some arguments that you could make that you're not a money transmitter. It's a little bit of a gray area." And he was like, "I'll write you a legal opinion saying subject to the following terms that you may not be a money transmitter, but it's going to cost $30,000 for this like fivepage piece of paper." And I thought at the time I thought this was crazy. You know, we we'd raised like six $600,000. I was like, $30,000 for a piece of paper, you know. Um, but I was talking with my adviserss at Y Cominator and they were like, well, if this allows you to get the bank account open and you can start to test your your product idea, like do it, you know. So, I paid this guy the 30 grand. We got the account open. I I wrote all the code myself to do like a integrations and you have to FTP these files to the bank and it's like this kind of antiquated system and uh it launched and it had product market fit and it just was then it was like instead of pushing a boulder uphill every day it was like the boulder was rolling down the hill and you were chasing it as fast as you could.

Could you use credit cards back then or no?

Okay. So even that with just the bank transfer. Yeah. Flooded with customers. Yeah. And started to get some very anxious calls from the bank at at certain points, too, because as they they were like, "You guys have raised $600,000." And they're like, "Every day there was like $550,000, you know, because we we debit these customer accounts to get the money, but we had to pre- buy the Bitcoin." And so we had this um cash flow issue where like we were basically using our entire balance every day just to service the current demand. And they and the I remember the guy from the bank called me kind of frantic. He's like if you just have one error like your whole you're insolvent. And by the way they're they might be on the hook for it too. We might be like at negative a million dollars and just be insolvent and then the bank's on the hook for it. And I remember the guy told me on the phone he's like you need to go raise money like right now and get more money in your account or like we're not going to be able to continue to ser serve you uh on this a network trans transfers. Like you were in this tiny little sandbox but now you're suddenly growing like a weed. And um and I remember we took this graph of like the daily buys. It was just an up and we didn't even have a pitch deck or anything. And we just went out and in like a week raised uh the next round and got um like $25 million deposited in the account with a graph.

that 25 million was from A16 and Ribbit.

Okay.

Yeah.

That was that was Yeah. Union Square Ventures and

Yeah. [laughter]

Yeah. Yeah. I spent a time with them. I like him a lot.

That sounds like something he would do. Yeah. Well, he was a Bitcoin believer for a long time before.

Yep. Venezuela.

The people who had seen hyperinflation countries kind of got it right away. The people who had only spent time in the United States were like, why would anyone use a new a new kind of money, you know?

Yeah. And how long did you did you think that was going to be like the the totality of the business? Were you already thinking about product extension back then or no? First I I knew there was a lot of ways to die along the way. So I was just trying to get the simple thing working. I mean we had hackers trying to break into our systems. We had like engineers quitting because it was like just overwhelming and there was too much stuff. We had they were getting paged in the middle of the night like three times every night trying to keep the website up. um there you know these banks might just turn us off and we go out. So there was all kinds of just I was just trying to survive like the next few months often you know in the back of my mind I I knew that if we could get this thing to scale just on the first product there's all kinds of things that this could disrupt. I mean that that's what I got excited about when I first read the Bitcoin white paper was like this could be a new kind of financial system for the world um that's global and fair and decentralized more free market oriented anybody with a with a cell phone could have access to good financial services participate in a global economy like the government couldn't erode all their wealth via inflation like what happened in Argentina so I I knew that there was high potential for this eventually but like there wasn't too much time to think about that we were just there was a lot of sleep deprivation and long hours and just trying to survive to the next 3 months.

Yeah. I mean, I'd say like like four like four or five years in I I got to we were at a place where I felt like I could take um you know I could take a week off and not the place wouldn't blow up or something.

Yeah. I mean, I really like the Wright brothers. They're they're cool. Um, you you have you ever done an episode on?

You remember that? Wow. Okay.

Yeah. I think that's the one I read, too.

the right brothers AI

like humans have been trying to figure out how to fly for centuries before these two brothers in Dayton, Ohio, if I remember correctly, that essentially saw a century old centuries old problem with the modest profits of a bicycle shop. Yeah.

Yeah, it was some really tiny amount of money. And there was people funded with like 200x as much money. But yeah, I mean I I get very passionate about like going after what are the big ideas like that that people could go after and um I think it's actually worth everybody writing some of those down periodically and then see which one grabs you and you think you have something unique to contribute and just like go for it. That those are the the big exciting ideas. So going back to where we were in the story, you're like, okay, I just need to not die.

Well, there was a few things I was thinking about. I mean, one was articulating a mission, right, that could be bigger. Um, writing down the values of the company, which we can talk about. Actually, we didn't do this maybe till we were a couple hundred people because or this all happened organically in the beginning. It was just who we were hiring and the the culture sort of formed organically, but after we got a little bigger, we started to think about, right, let's formalize it. I wasn't going to be able to be in every single interview indefinitely, right? So, okay, the values, the mission.

I don't remember the exact year, but it was at least a few a few years in. We started to really think about it. And, you know, for me, it was not just like getting people to use crypto or something. I was like, what's why do why why do we want that? And it was because it was it was enabling everybody to own their own wealth in a way that couldn't be taken from them. Go try to attempt more ambitious things in in in life. It was kind of like a foundation like basic property rights is what they'd call it in economics, right? Um and if you had sound money, basic property rights, low friction to try new things in the world that might benefit people and actually be able to keep the upside of it, you'd have more people trying attempting this. that very much appealed to me. We sort of take this for granted in the United States that you know usually like the money is just not going to get taken out of your bank account or something like that. But in many places of the world that's not true, right? Um there's people like where the government will actually do seizures. Um the Cypress actually did this recently in the past where they like took bunch of money out of everyone's bank accounts to like cover debt. There's refugees that have to flee borders in various times in history where the all their wealth gets confiscated. There is so much bureaucracy and corruption in places like Argentina to even start a company. Um it's like it's a huge black market and there's just Yeah. So and and by the way people in can't they can't get access to loans or anything like that. Like you know one one of the major ways people build wealth in the United States is you buy a home you get a mortgage. Only wealthy people can really buy real estate in Argentina because you can't get a mortgage. you have to pay cash. So there's all kinds of ways that this is just pernicious and it it it like decelerates progress essentially. So I was trying to think of a piffy way to articulate that and I wrote down you know this increase economic freedom in the world mission and um you know it's a little wonky sometimes people uh don't know what exactly it means and they have to go read about it but um it does encompass what we're trying to do and I think crypto is the best technology to increase economic freedom. How were you recruiting talent back then? And were you sitting in on every single interview?

Why did it have to be outbound at that point?

Yeah. Well, I'm curious like have you found any other um I talked to my friend Kareem, founder of Ramp about this. Daniel, founder of Spotify. They both think about it in the same exact way where they hire for spikes.

One of the benefits of being a founder company is, you know, big companies try to manage to the middle. They don't want the high highs or the low lows. and uh Daniel K are both like, "No, I want the best the person that is the best in the world at this one tiny little thing and that's all I want them to do and I'll deal with their usually, you know, excessive uh or extreme personality traits on the other side of that."

and not necessarily like their resume or um you know, if they just if they showed up in the interview and it was like, "Wow, I learned something. I left the interview with more energy than I went in. They're like a very efficient communicator. Um, and then they can point to things that they've done which are like real outliers of success. We're like, "Oh, that's awesome." Or they maybe we've seen their work previously. These are people who we would hire. I mean, there's many examples of this like, you know, you talk about some of their personality quirks and like biology of Austin is like this genius guy who was our CTO for a while and he he like did so many amazing things and he's like very eccentric. Um, actually the very first hire at Coinbase was this guy Olaf Carlson Wei outside of Fred and I as the co-founders and we were trying to hire this customer someone to come in to run customer support because of the backlog I mentioned. And I remember it came down there was two finalists. One of them was this guy who had run a team at Google AdSense and on paper he was like this guy worked at Google. He's like he'd run a big team of like 20 or 30 people. I was like very credentialed, but you just in the interview it was just like it was kind of low energy and like not exciting for some reason even though on paper he was like super qualified and Olaf came in and his prior job was he he was a lumberjack lit literally he had just graduated college. He had written his he wrote his thesis in college on Bitcoin and then he did this kind of like walkabout sort of spirit quest thing where he went for like a summer and was like he was a lumberjack. So he came in and he looked like super disheveled and you know he he like threw on some like ill-fitting suit he'd bought like on the way to the interview or because he only owned like lumberjack clothing. Um but the guy was just like super bright, super passionate, super young, sup super hungry and we're like screw it. Like let's just give this guy a shot. Like it's it's it's going to be it was just exciting to like talk to him about crypto. And he crushed it. So he by the way he he went on and founded like a he's like a billionaire. he's created like a crypto uh venture fund. So [laughter] like these were the kinds of bets that we wanted to make. They were people who were entrepreneurial. We've had a lot of good success with that. I know Toby talked about that recently on on the podcast too. Um and they were people that were just like high agency smart get done. Um and they even if they were totally unqualified on paper and those were some of our best hires.

did you have an issue getting talented people to work for you like because you were kind of this is you might be autistic you might be right because now [laughter] you're you're interested in this like weird Bitcoin thing way before other people are and then not only that you're like bucking the trend in this weird subculture too. [laughter] Yeah. I mean, so, um, people did often ask that. They're like, well, isn't the whole point of Bitcoin to be decentralized? And I was like, yeah, it uses a decentralized protocol. We just want to make it easy for people to access it. So, you can choose to use our company, but there you could use any company like as opposed to, let's say, Visa. Like, the only way to access the Visa network is through one company, Visa, you know, but like email is a better analogy. Email is a decentralized protocol, but you can use Gmail or Outlook or whatever. So, at least there's like choice. But even going beyond that, um, because for years we heard that as a criticism. So we said, "All right, let's make a self-custodial wallet, too." Like if you want to custody your own crypto and not have to trust us at all, we're going to put out a wallet for that. And so we have a successful product now, too, on our self-custodial wallet. I think both are important. Um, the centralized product gives people a lot of ease of use. Like if you forget your password, your money's not gone, that kind of stuff. And it also allowed a lot of institutions like most of the money in the world is that like something like 80 or 90% of it's all tied up in in financial institutions. It's not retail people. And so when we went and met met with institutions and were like self-custodial wallets, they they're like that that sounds super scary. We're not going to do that. So they wanted these kind of enterprisegrade custody solutions. Um and we we've had we've been very successful building those kind of things for like banks. That decision was based on the response of the market or is that a decision you made before and then brought that decision to the market. The one around in institution specifically was based on conversations with them. Yeah. And the the retail customer though I would say that was made prior to customer that was like my intuition. So we've got to make this simple simple and easy to use and trusted and um the average person is not going to know how to run like a self-custodial wallet on their laptop. Um the tech has gotten better and better where like account recovery and these things are now possible but at the time it was very scary like if you lost many people had this happen sadly like if they lost their password or something trying to custody their own bitcoin it was it was gone. There's many many many sal stories about that. Yeah, it's funny because there's like a parallel here when um Steve Jobs had that observation. He's like, well, the first things we're making at Apple, they're for hobbyists, but he's like the he's like if the amount of people that want to like put together their own computer, it's like if as opposed to the ones that want to go to the store, like if you just treat it, he call it like the appliance. He's like wanting to make a personal computers like appliance. It's like that market is a thousand times bigger. I wanted it being millions of times bigger actually. But his idea was like the easier I make it, the bigger the market gets. I think that's that's right. And it's fine. Like a lot of these products start off with hobbyists who love the tech for the tech's sake and they want to take it apart, but ultimately what crypto is going to do is just going to update the financial system so people have better financial services. Many people are going to use it without even knowing they're using crypto. They're just going to say, I don't know, I just want to send money to my family abroad or whatever. And instead of paying 11% at Western Union, I just want it to arrive instantly for free or whatever. And like they're going to use stable coins for that, right? or if they want to get um a loan and it's just using DeFi, it's like cheaper, lower rate and they can get approved in 30 seconds. It's like that's easier than calling a bank and filling out all these forms, right? So, Coinbase's app actually has evolved. I mean, fast forwarding to modern day like we are now um you can trade any type of asset, not just crypto assets. You can trade stocks and commodities and prediction markets and then you can get a loan. You we have a Coinbase card. You can spend we're just trying to build better financial services now. And actually like that's where you started to get into like multi- trillion dollar market.

The everything exchange. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. This is not like a plan from the beginning. Like Bezos had the everything store. That was the code name of Amazon in Dehaw like in the hedge fund that spun out. So he kind of had that master plan at the beginning even though he started with books.

uh Coinbase. Correct. I felt like more and more of the economy was going to run on Bitcoin because it was just faster, cheaper, more global. I didn't I couldn't have foreseen all of the things that happened. I didn't foresee stable coins. I didn't foresee prediction markets. Like I I just knew that we had a foothold with something everybody really like Bitcoin turned out to be the best performing asset class of the last decade. And so a lot of people wanted to buy it and hold it. We were the easiest way to do that. That was a a wedge into the market to start to then update all kinds of financial services. And that's how I didn't have a complete picture of that from day one. That I think that would be intellectually dishonest for me to say that I knew exactly how that was going to play out, but I had a I knew that the potential of it went way beyond just like buying Bitcoin or something. I I was like, this could power the global economy because it's just better than like having certain countries printing their own money or like super high fees in each country. like we need a we need a native financial layer to the internet that's truly global and decentralized and like a bigger and bigger share of GDP could run on that over time. I I knew it was massive. I just didn't know exactly how it would play out. Hey, real quick. I've started a newsletter for this podcast that you might find interesting. The newsletter shares five of my favorite quotes from each episode along with behindthe-scenes photos with the guest. The first of these newsletters goes out next week. I'll share my five favorite quotes from the Daniel E episode along with some of the photos with Daniel and I. To sign up, just go to davidcenter.com/newsletter. That's davidcenter.com/newsletter. So, how do you think about running the company now? How is it organized? Well, there's lots of ways you can answer that question. So, I have a really amazing president and COO, Emily Choy. She uh really is an amazing operator. Allows me to focus on a lot of the the managing the product group. Like, I'd say I'm pretty product focused CEO. She's operationally focused. And it's an amazing combo of skill sets. I actually think a lot of enterprise value can get generated when you pair um like a technical founder with a great operator, right? Because if you have just an operator, they can um make the company very very efficient. You know, this sort stereotypically everyone's different, right? But if you imagine like a like only an operational leader, the company will run very efficiently, but they won't they'll miss their next wave of innovation or something, right? And if you have only a founder, sometimes they blow the place up because they like every they're always trying to do some crazy new thing, right? And so I think there's a really healthy balance of those two things. And you there are other companies where like traditionally like Zuckerberg and Cheryl or Samberg or you know whatever kind of classic thing you want to look at. I'd say even at Google there probably Eric Schmidt and um Larry kind of played that role right and with Sergey. So there's examples like that in history. I think um anyway it's generated a lot of value for Coinbase to have Emily and I both there

Yeah. And I and I don't mind going and doing some policy, you know, try to get legislation passed.

Yeah. I there was times where I felt like um man, it's like draining to like go to go to DC and I have to go meet with all these politicians. I actually don't mind it now in a weird way. It's there's so many interesting people in DC. There's like big big personalities and

Yeah.

I like that idea like you're essentially searching for bottlenecks in the company.

What other elements of the company you think are like a reflection of your personality as a founder? I mean just the fact that we have like you know four or five product groups like that's probably a little bit of the reflection of my like I I always want to build new things almost to a fault and I actually we have a lot of good systems in place to be rigorous about okay let's re resource allocation is very important that you don't want to get too spread too thin but I I keep having like ambition to go build new things in new categories in the age of AI that actually might be like more valuable how what do What do you think? Because if you have all Yeah. If you have all these ideas and like usually you'd be constrained, you know, by time or resources or actual physical people to go and implement all these ideas coming out of your head.

And now you have, you know, on tap on on demand intelligent like co-workers.

is this the language you use inside the company.

Really? So, you almost inverted it. Yeah. I always have a little Yeah. So I always have a little bit of that fear in the back of my mind of like there's there's brilliant young engineers inside Coinbase. Um I want to make sure they can come pitch and some somebody even it's not me funds it. Um Yeah, thanks for noticing that. I mean I wish I could take more credit for that. I actually think it's it's the team entirely. Um, you know, they they come and show me the things that they're doing and I I definitely the only thing I'm doing is I'm trying to give them air cover to try crazy stuff and basically whenever they show me something like that's awesome like run with it, you know, and whereas I think most organ some some organizations would be like a little too cautious or hesitant. But yeah, what they're doing with like putting QR codes in the Super Bowl or they just did this karaoke thing at the Super Bowl or I don't know, they they're trying more ambitious ideas which which I like. Um it's also a lot of marketing now is it's actually more like content on the internet than like your track your typical brand ad running on TV. And um you know just like a very simple thing actually was I remember we were putting our earnings calls you know as public company you put out your earnings they're usually kind of dry and boring boring like these analysts tune in listen to these calls you're on like a conference call it was using this like really ancient technology and this ancient vendor that we were using and I remember I was always so bored on these earnings calls I was like I was like like man how do we spice these things up just do something more interesting and I remember some of some of the people on the finance teamwork like Brian just like stay on script it's supposed it's supposed to be boring like just report the numbers like that's all we're doing here and I was like no like this this is a marketing moment we're supposed to be selling some stock like let's go out and tell the story you know of the company and um so anyway just in like this recent earnings we put together like um a pitch deck kind of like we were going and pitching when we were a private company and I was like I want to I want to I want to just like run through the deck and like make a video of me and then um we put it on the website And one of the guys on our marketing team paired it. Have you seen those videos like vertical video where the guy like the guys running through the game collecting coins? Yeah. And so that's like we have these like young internet native marketing people. They're not like you know the people who made ads for Coca-Cola or something. They're just like they're they're just like people who live their whole life on the internet and me like meme meme culture and all this kind of stuff, right? And I mean somebody could reasonably say, "Well, Brian, are you trying to turn the company into a meme stock or something?" And I'm like, "No, not really. I think we're building something very serious and important as like an institution that's going to stand the test of time, but we do need to get the word out in the way that people actually consume content today." And frankly, I I I think our shareholder letter is brilliant. I get a lot of good feedback on it from like the biggest funds at Fidelity and all these kind of folks. So, I'm glad we're putting out a shareholder letter, but 99% of people aren't going to read our shareholder letter. They're going to see some clip on social media about the company and that's kind of how they're ingesting their information. So, how do we speak in an internet native way? And that that Yeah. Content. I mean, everything's It's like you got like you want to save their soul, you got to get their attention first. You got to get them in the door first. How do you compose your shareholder letters? Cuz I'm going through this right now. I just reread Warren Buffett shareholder letters since the last one is out. But that was the best marketing that he ever [clears throat] did. And the amount every year, each year took them about 7 months of him and I think her name is Carol Lumis going back and forth Yeah. So, that's a great point. Actually, Bezos did that, too, right? He's got some bangers. Um Buffett But I think those are probably the best technology company shareholder letters Yeah. I mean I think that um those guys are putting in a level of um craft into those like and you know partly was a product of their time. I think the way people consume this has changed as we talked about. Our shareholder letters are are good. I think they're like really just reporting the numbers primarily right now. So, they're kind of written for analysts whereas I think the Bezos and the and the Buffett one might have been written for more like teaching people about business. Yeah. and searching essentially using that as like almost like a tuning fork to like I'm putting this out and the right shareholders for me in this weird strategy I have will respond to this information. I wonder if you could do the same though. I don't know my philosophy in it. I I think what I want to try is actually going through for me the medium of just talking through a deck and like getting me talking about it can be a little bit easier. There is something powerful about forcing yourself to sit down and really distill it to like in writing which can be clarifying. So that Yeah. Like I don't want to just like read I'm not reading the deck but I want to tell you it'll help me clarify my thinking like okay here's the mission of the company. What are we building? We're just building better financial services with crypto. How do we measure our progress on that? here's our key metrics. You know, it's growing trading volume, market share, and it's and it's like the transaction volume, and the assets on the platform. We have a whole theory about how we're growing that as the most trusted brand. And then, okay, you can also just go through a bunch of objections people commonly would bring up, right? And like, okay, let's have a slide and address that and that and that. Um, and then you can take submitted questions, too, and you can kind of riff on those. I think that that's a good format for us to play with. But um you're bringing I hadn't really thought about the Buffett and the uh Bezos analogy on the shareholders. Those those guys went deep. That was actually that was very atypical. If you think about like what it did for his reputation, the fact that then he got access to proprietary deal flow as a result of that. So if you don't feel people are reading the shareholder letters, how do you think they're consuming information about public companies then? you know how many founders have been telling me that recently? Why do you arrive at that conclusion? you know, one of the like formative experiences I would say as a CEO was that um Because people give me because I don't read the news at all. Like I just read old books and then talk to founders now. Like that's essentially my entire media diet. And then like talking to LLMs. Did you read Joseph? Like who invented yellow journalism? Just read anything that's happening now derived from those two especially in America. Those were the two most influential and powerful, you know, people in media and they literally changed the way that newspapers and the written text came out to make it intentionally more salacious. Yeah. Yeah. What what did he Hurst say? Like you provide the photos, I'll provide the war or something like Yeah. And so anyway, I I think most people have become aware of this now. Like the trust in traditional media is kind of at all-time lows. So, you know, luckily things have moved on. I you know anyway I think it's social media has its own challenges too about misinformation and whatnot but at least like you can just go direct and put out whatever you want to say and people like it or don't it's fine and then um you know I think it's good to talk to new media as well and um anyway that that was a formative experience um and I actually think it was very liberating in a way I actually I think everybody at some point in their life should get the New York Times to write a hit piece on them because you stop fearing it and you start realizing, okay, I'm just going to do whatever I think is the right thing to do now because there's not like some terrible thing that could happen to me anymore. Like it doesn't matter. Like once once they try to once they try to do it and it doesn't do anything, you realize, oh, okay, I'm not trying to optimize for optics here or doing something that looks like that looks good, why don't I actually just do the thing that I think is good regardless of how people perceive it. And that's very liberating. I hope more people experience that. When did you go through that? It happened in many small ways as Coinbase was growing. Like we'd see articles come out that was like, "What? That's not that's not right. What are they talking about?" And they wouldn't post a correction. It was just sometimes you get these calls from journalists that were like, "I'm posting this in 4 hours. Like, will you comment?" They were like, "What? This is totally false information. What are you talking about?" So, it was just this kind of annoying tax that was always happening on the company. But what really I think radicalized me on it was post that Mission First blog post. um like several organizations, but the New York Times in particular, I remember they they basically put a team of people, I was later told by insiders um they're like, "Go just go dig up dirt on this company and um write negative articles about them." They had they had the headline written before they even had found anything. And they wrote articles kind of implying that we were like racist and we were like, you know, underpaying certain minorities and things. False. It was false information. And um you know that that just like this basically was like pissed me off and I was like okay I don't really want to they're not engaging in good faith like these are um they're so biased they don't even realize it and they have some political agenda. It's not really it's not really journalism. It's like a political propaganda company or something. So that was frustrating and yeah it shifted my point of view to go direct. You had a unique experience because you're building a company but you're also starting at the very beginning of an industry. I think like the I was thinking about you earlier today. I was like the analogy is kind of uh that that's sticks in my mind. It's like the early uh American automobile founders. It's like I have to learn how to build a car company but we're building an industry simultaneously or like if you start a software company today like you're not building the software industry. The software has been around. It's a really good point. I mean Henry Ford, you probably know about it, right? It's like when the cars came out and then there people were like freaked out about your cars are going to scare the horses, you know? [laughter] Yeah. So so as not to like scare the horses. and then they confront you at Davos and wave their finger in front [laughter] they had to go to Europe they were doing these demonstrations on like this guy's field in Ohio and almost there'd be like three people watching them Yeah. Didn't wasn't there was that famous famous quote from the war department. They said, "We see new no military application for the airplane [laughter] and 40 years later it won World War." If I remember correctly, I haven't read the book in probably six years. I I should reread it again and do another episode on it, but I think it was like the French government was the first the first person to to actually buy it for the military. for them. So they're they're creating an industry and a company but they actually didn't create the most successful company. In that industry where you did well Wilbur died prematurely I think from like I forgot uh consumption or maybe turerculosis. I forgot what it was. It died like 45. or will live for a lot longer. But there was basically they created the industry and one of the first few companies, but then they were overtaken in a way that you have not been. Yeah. I mean, Edison was obsessed with commercialization though. He said that uh he didn't want to invent anything that didn't sell and that sale is proof of utility. He has a great line on that. So you have your mission on Coinbase, but you said your natural inclination is to work on multiple things, right? Yeah. Yeah, sure. So I I mean, broadly, I I I want to accelerate civilizational progress in the world. That's kind of my personal mission. So I think economic freedom is foundational to that with crypto. When Coinbase went public and you know, I got some liquidity from that. I was also just thinking like okay what are the other big problems in the world like in hard hard tech not just software that might require more capital that I could try to help with and I started thinking you know so the big ones in my mind were like AI and crypto are probably the two biggest right now then of course there's um fusion energy brain machine interfaces space um and all I felt like okay there's good teams working on all of these and I'm not sure what I unique I have to add the other biggest one I thought of was longevity like how do we start to reprogram our own biology to enhance what it means to be human at some point. So, I started hosting these dinners. I I I didn't see teams working on that that I thought were credible. In fact, you know, the longevity space has had like a lot of snake oil type stuff. It's like pretty um you know, attracted some unsavory characters a little bit like crypto Yeah, for centuries Do you think you'll continue to start more companies? Do you think Coinbase is the last company you'll be CEO of? Yeah. Yeah, I was surprised to hear him say that too. I I heard him say that. We haven't talked about that. We need to talk about this. I I want to continue to be co Coinbase CEO for a long time. When you're having these like very stressful times in your life based on work, what do you do to like decompress or to like take time away? What What's your wind down time at night, though? in love making. [laughter] How long is this wind down time? Okay. Before bed. Okay. Yeah. what's the distribution of time between Coinbase and your other company? Yeah. Well, when New Limit was just getting started, I was I was spending um more time with them, like 5 10% of my time, but um and you know, I I jump in whenever needed, but I'm I'm primarily an investor and a board member there. And then I'm helping with some of the operational pieces and helping them raise money and things like that, but sorry I should say scientist and uh business person. Yeah, Even if it's stuff he doesn't want to do which is very uh interesting. Yeah. So, how is AI changing the way that you're working in Coinbase? are you building your own tools or you're using other people's tools? there's a team internally working on this and um there's a couple vend so there's one called Libra chat that's open source you can connect all your internal data to there's other vendors out there um like Glean and Slackbot and different um we're testing three of them or so right now Gemini is doing a bunch of stuff and Google so we're testing all of them to see which ones employees gravitate towards basically that's I would say current best practice amongst a lot of tech companies not super unique to to crypto. The thing that's more unique to crypto is that um these AI agents are increasingly needing to do payments to get work done and we're giving them all stable coin wallets. So you can imagine like in the traditional financial world like you and I can go get a credit card or something where we have to be identified as a human. But if you're an agent trying to get work done, you either have to bug your human every time to like will you approve this purchase or if you want to increasingly these agents you can tell them go do this like overnight or the next two you know the next hours week whatever and get work done like they might need to spin up AWS resources or get through a payw wall on the internet to read some research paper or you know buy a domain name or whatever spin up a marketing program like if you really want to treat them like almost like um their own digital employees they need to have like a corporate card kind of thing and traditional corporate cards can't be issued to non-human entities and so we're giving them stable coin wallets um they're doing a lot of machine to machine payments all very new in the last few months but it's been getting a lot of traction um so that's that's pretty exciting we built a couple of uh tools that allow any any agent to get a stable coin wallet inside it um AI agents or well I've been using claude and codeex a little bit just to like learn the develop the current development tools. I've been spinning that up locally on my laptop just to make sure I understand the current best tools the developers are using. Kobe actually writes a lot of code uh still in production. Yeah. Yeah. I I dabble, but I do not write that much code in production. I have to admire him for that. As a CEO, the main thing I use it for is research essentially of just like, okay, help me understand this and this how this works and then draft this for me. And internally with these data data report repositories now connected in I can use it for um decision- making and um we actually like we use a decision-m framework and there's a row now for the AI agent to write write in their input and it's like kind of nice to compare it to the other people on the team. Those are the primary ways that I use it today. Yeah, Okay. Okay. Well, the simple way to think of it is the base app is the the self-custodial version of Coinbase. We launched a new version of it recently, which frankly it was kind of polarizing. Like we put it out and it was trying to do something kind of novel on the social uh front and I don't think it quite worked. We got like a bunch of feedback from the community about that. Well, you could double tap to buy any post. Yeah, Well, it was interesting. So there was also there every post had its own um coin and also every creator had its own coin. Um it was optional for the creator. Um but what happened is if you bought a post some of the economics would flow back to the creator and we thought maybe each post would have like this up and down like it would have residual zero value. It turned out like many of the posts had um a couple thousand dollars of value or something at the at the terminal end of it and people were thinking of it as a way to I guess reward and thank the creator but they also own some of the creator coin. Long way of saying I think something is going to work in this space around um they call it social or like you know these kind of social media tokens. I don't think that the tokconomics has not quite been figured out yet where um it needs for for the people, you know, investing in them. um it needs to have some sort of like durability to like the you know they have to believe okay David Senra is going to continue to make great content into the future and he's relatively undiscovered now but he's going to be much bigger in the it's kind of like you know a company or something and they would want to own your creator token and there be some value and maybe like a revenue stream would acrew to them over time depending on your ad revenue or you'd have to come up with something like that that I think it's a little bit more durable in the current incarnation it wasn't quite there in my view so we tried it as an experiment didn't quite work. Um, the app is since pivoted to really just be more focused on like trading and being like a self-custodial version of the Coinbase app. So, we're starting with that for now, but I I do think something in the social uh token space will eventually work. Yeah, New Limit. I love the idea of just lowering the barrier barrier of entry to innovation, entrepreneurship. Brian, this was awesome, man. Thanks for taking the time to do it.