Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best…

Harry, it’s a pleasure as always to rejoin you. I’m so glad we can reconnect on this.

So, originally, when I first kind of came to The Valley, it was because I loved technology. I just so wanted to be a part of what was happening. And I always tell people that Yahoo at the time was the place to be in terms of everything interesting happening in the consumer Internet. I think a lot of people find that hard to believe these days, sadly, but it was the epicenter of everything. And the cool thing about that was that it meant that the best and the brightest people were there.

It meant that we were doing incredible work. For example, as a junior analyst, I got to work on that original Alibaba deal for Yahoo and the Flickr acquisition and to work with people like Jeff Weiner and then to acquire people like Stuart Butterfield. So that was the beginning of my career in Silicon Valley. And I’ve been, you know, to several places, but that was the formative part of my career. At that point, I realized I need to do this thing, and I I wanna be around entrepreneurs and founders my whole career.

That makes me happy.

So I was at LinkedIn for eight years. I was there when it was 400 people. When I left, it was 13,000 people. I was there when it was private. I was there when it was public. And then when it was acquired by Microsoft. And it was such an amazing journey and such an incredible experience. I learned so much from Jeff and Reid and and others at the company. But I honestly felt like I wasn’t learning anymore, and I felt like I was kinda getting too comfortable.

And I think that those are the moments in your career where you gotta kind of, like, look at yourself and say, is there something more? Am I pushing myself in to learn more and more? And there were weirdly a bunch of head of corp jobs at that time. And listen, if I’m going to leave this comfortable place, I don’t wanna do it for something that is exactly like the experience I just had at LinkedIn. I don’t wanna go to another type of LinkedIn. I wanna go to something that I think could be the next technology frontier because I wanna, again, push myself a little bit to get out of my comfort zone.

And a friend from a16z, Jamie McGurr, came in and he was talking about, like, a bunch of opportunities in the a16z portfolio. And I told him, I was like, you know what? The only one I wanna talk to is Coinbase. I had this weird feeling even though I wasn’t really into crypto at the time. And I met with Brian Armstrong. I had tingles down my spine. He was talking about the future of money, the future of the financial system, the future of what we think of as the app store these days.

I was like, I have to be a part of this. It’s been the most incredible experience. I think it’s been a lot of high highs and low lows because crypto is a very volatile sector. I’ve learned so much along the way. It’s just it’s been incredible.

It’s a great question. First of all, I think Brian Armstrong, our founder, is the key to this because he is very kind of calm and even keeled and balanced regardless of how the market is. One of his pieces of advice to me was, like, never get too excited when everybody’s exuberant and everybody wants to get into crypto, and never get too down when people are looking at you like you’re insane for being in this space or at this company. Just keep an even keel. Look to the future, keep focusing on the mission, and just don’t get distracted by all the noise.

It’s much harder to do than to actually say that. But I think once you’ve weathered, like, a crypto winter, you are ready for anything. And that’s what I’ve been through here, and so it’s it’s been a great experience that way.

That’s true in life. Yeah.

First of all, the one two punch of Reid and Jeff, I think they were an incredible combination with Reid being this very strategic visionary who could kind of see the future and would have these hypotheses on sectors and companies just kind of wanna contribute the big ideas. And then Jeff being this incredible operator who came in and was very product driven, but also just an incredible business person, incredible inspirer. And so just at the top, I love that combo. And I think in some ways, Brian and I mimic that in terms of he sees the future, and I try to help him implement that future in an operational way.

In terms of, like, specific things, I think the thing with Reid that I learned a lot about that in terms of your own personal career path, career paths are never straight and kind of up into the right. They’re bumpy. And what you’ll have is sometimes you’ll have a situation where you’re taking on a lateral move. But if you take on that lateral move and you crush it, you could kind of take things exponentially higher than you would have if you had just been kind of slow and steady up into the right.

And so his whole thing about figure out what your competitive advantage is and then build your network and take intelligent risks. And that’s what I think I did with Coinbase. I don’t think it was an obvious decision three and a half years ago to join Coinbase. Those are the types of things that I learned from him. On the Jeff side, I swear to you, I probably pull from my Jeff toolkit once to twice a week, and I write a top of mind every Friday to the whole company.

And and, like, I feel like I inundate them with lessons from LinkedIn and Jeff. But a couple of the things that I think are, like, really important were Jeff was just so religiously focused on the culture, outlining the mission, the vision, the strategy, the culture, and how it all ties together. And I think that that’s the blueprint for how you get people aligned towards goals. You know, in Coinbase’s kind of thing, we’re focused on a mission of increasing economic freedom in the world. And then when we think about that, we think, okay.

How do we line the strategic pillars up to that? And goes to how do we create a new form of investment? How do we think create a new form of financial system? How do we create a new form of app store? And then all of our OKRs and goals tie to those things. So you can see that then as that ties together, it helps employees no matter how fast you’re scaling, think about what they’re doing and how it contributes to the overall mission.

So it’s weekly and to the entire company. One of the things that I think happens in a remote first world, although I I started doing this before we went remote first. I started doing this when I was promoted to COO, is that you can get disconnected from people. I really wanna be able to share something that is top of mind. I remember Angela Ehrsam, who was formerly at Apple and Burberry. She came to talk to us once at LinkedIn, she was talking about how she was trying to think about how she got her message to the Apple employees when she first came, and she felt all this pressure.

And, ultimately, she was like she was with her kids, she saw them recording stuff on their phones. And she’s like, oh, I’m gonna send a message to the employees through my mobile phone because that that’s as aptly as you could get, right, every week. And so in my own way, I write something to the company. Sometimes it’s about how we just hit our goals and how proud I am of the company. Sometimes it’s about a piece that I read that’s just meaningful to me, and I’ll share it with the company.

Recently, my father passed away, and I I actually wrote a very kind of raw note to the company. It was unusual for me because I’m very private. But what I learned in that moment was that in these select moments where something really matters to you and you kind of show yourself to be vulnerable, you create so much connection with people. I got so many amazing notes from employees who kind of honestly were surprised that I put myself out there like that and felt a deeper connection with me as a result of that.

So I learn a lot in the top of minds even beyond just writing them for the company.

They feel the need to because they have FOMO, and they see Corp Dev happening. They there’s obviously the market is really robust right now. They feel like they should be able to use their stock and cash for m and a. However, I’ve seen this movie many times. The thing I would say is make sure you really want a Head of Corp Dev, you know, at the pre IPO level. And I was very wary of this when I got reach outs from LinkedIn after, you know, when I was leaving.

I pressure tested this with Brian because I really wanted to make sure if I was gonna come over to head up Corp Dev at Coinbase that Brian genuinely wanted to do m and a. What I found is that founders like the idea of m and a, but in many cases, what they’ll do as they kind of unpack m and a and do due diligence is they’ll say, you know what? Actually, we can build this ourselves. We don’t necessarily need to buy it. And so I’ve just seen this too many times where they hire the head of Corp Dev, but the head of Corp Dev doesn’t actually get to do any M and A.

And so that’s fine if you want kind of like a general athlete strategic person to just work on anything strategic and kind of deploy themselves into projects. But you can have an unhappy combination if you’re not truly ready for m and a and you hire, you know, the big guns for it.

So they’ve been talking about it. Have they been talking to their board about it? Is the board ready to make some big moves? Are they gonna just do small acqui hires, which is totally fine? Talent is a great way to do m and a. But in that case, you probably don’t need, like, one dedicated senior head of Corp Dev. What would be examples of the targets that the founder would dream of? Are those top of mind for the founder? Are they top of mind for the product and engineering teams?

And this is totally fine for most companies. Many companies just do this stuff, and then they go into it and they’re like, hey. Wait. I could build this for much cheaper. In some cases, they can. In some cases, they can’t. But they have to have that honest conversation before they hire that big role.

I really like the interview process at Coinbase. We have our own way of doing things. We’re a very fast paced culture. There is no interview longer than thirty minutes. We have a panel of people. We generally try to keep that panel no more than five people who actually interview the candidate. For a senior role, we obviously make exceptions. And after they go through that panel, we might expose them, for example, to a board member or to who are relevant or just pressure test that with other people that they might work with or the teams that they may be inheriting to make sure that there’s, like, a cultural and and chemistry type of fit.

We try to do a system where each of the different interviewers has a different topical area so that we can make sure we’re not repeating the same questions. Or, for example, maybe you interview somebody and you got the spidey sense that there’s an issue with the way that they wanna do something that you think might not be a fit and you didn’t get enough time. So then when you pass the baton to me to take on my interview with that person, you’re gonna say, Emilie, can you just double check and dig in deeper on this specific area?

So we try to be really thoughtful about how we do that. Finally, we actually have a presentation part of our interview process, and this is the hallmark of Coinbase. And I can tell you a lot of really amazing senior people kind of have a hard time with the presentation. It’s twenty minutes of presentation. It’s ten minutes of q and a. We see three different questions. So an example would be, tell us about a particularly challenging m and a assignment that you were given. What didn’t work, what did work, and what you learned from that?

That would be one of the questions. Or show us how you showed resilience in your career or personal life or whatever. We wanna see how they present. We wanna see if there’s depth to what they’re saying. We wanna see if they’re a person who communicates in the style of a Coinbase employee. There are all these different things that we get out of it. When we have the q and a, do they actually answer the questions in the way that we’d like to hear answers? And this is a great way for us to kind of figure out.

It’s kind of pressure testing if they’re gonna be successful in the Coinbase environment. It’s also a great way for them to say, you know what? I opt into this, and I’m gonna do the hard work to try to get this job.

For Coinbase, one of the most important things is gonna be about clear communication. And, you know, it sounds so mundane. People ask me, what is your top value? I often say clear communication. The reason I think it’s clear communication is because the hallmark of successful people at Coinbase is they are excellent presenters. They are excellent communicators. They are pithy. They’re strong. They get their message across. The reason this is so important is because we have so many things we’re doing. So you have to be able to cut through the noise, and you need to be able to get your point across easily and quickly to be inspiring.

And, like, another example is we do everything in Google Docs. If you and I have a conversation and make a decision about something, we document it in Google Docs because I don’t wanna say in a year from now that I misread you in the room and I remembered it this way. We can look back at the Google Docs and say, Harry recommended this for this big decision. Oh, okay. Now I have it in in Google Docs. Sorry. But back to your original question. I wanna know that you’ve actually done m and a.

I wanna know that you’ve done the whole span of it from acqui hires. How do you think about talent acquisition? How do you think about the multiples that you will pay for talent acquisition and how that impacts the existing team and what they’re compensated? And how do you navigate that with the HR team and with the existing, you know, product and engineering teams? I wanna know that you’ve done the next level of this, which is basically integrating smaller features of products. You know, you might see an example of a product that’s out there that you wanted to build in the product road map as a feature.

Right? How do you integrate that? How do you think about that? How do you think about integrating the team and the technology? Then how do you think about a large acquisition? Is it purely a financial game? How do you think about those types of things? How to experience it all parts of of the spectrum on that? That would be something that would be most important for the head of Corp Dev that they’ve seen it all and that they know how to navigate all those different things because it’s very different.

It’s very different. And finally, the most important thing to me with Corp Dev, and this is the reason I’ve been in Corp Dev my whole career, and I love it so much. I love being around founders. Right? So I’m the business person, a little boring, but I’m inspired by founders. And I I get energy out of them, and I hope they get energy out of me. I wanna know that founders freaking love you and that they would just do anything for you and that they wanna work with you.

The way that I have seen this manifest in my own career is that a lot of the entrepreneurs we acquired at companies that I’ve been at before then go on to found other companies after they leave the the acquiring company. And I hope usually, I’m one of the ones they turn to for angel investment because we’ve built such a good relationship. I wanna know that you have really strong relationships with them throughout the whole lifetime of their careers.

Mike Volpe, who was famously that Head of Corp Dev at Cisco during the heyday of Cisco M and A, he once said something to me, which I never forget. He said, never get the right deal, get the right company. And I think that that really holds true today. We’re seeing multiples that simply don’t make sense. And so at the end of the day, you have to kind of park that and say, okay. The market is frothy. Multiples are frothy regardless of whether for M and A or just general trading.

And if I want this company, getting it now is probably the right thing. If I believe this company is gonna have escape velocity, that’s the right thing. If you look back at the acquisition of Instagram, for example, or the acquisition of YouTube, if you look at the press around that time, it’s crazy. Right? The press is like, how could they pay that for YouTube? How could they pay that? There’s all this litigation. And what’s there? They have Google video or Instagram. $1,000,000,000 for a company with no revenue?

I mean, so you have to be able to take those bets. And that’s what’s really hard, I think, for people to get excited about during the time. But when you look back at those seminal m and a acquisitions of all time, they obviously paid for themselves many, many, many times over.

So the way to fail the recipe to fail in m and a is that it’s the Head of Corp Dev and the CEO who make the decisions. Right? It has to be deeply integrated into the process of how product and engineering work at the company. So what you start with is what is the product road map? Okay? And that is the foundation of everything. Based on the product road map, what is existential to us, and what are the things that we think we might be able to amplify and massively accelerate through m and a?

There may be a reality where there don’t exist targets, in which case you just keep building. And there may be a reality where there are truly amazing targets, and they might be really expensive, but they could massively accelerate the product road map. So how do you manifest that into a process? You make sure that you have some type of decision making process where there’s one decide. Right? And the decision maker could be the head product. Of It could be the CEO. It could be me. It could be anybody.

But what you do is you codify this into a document. And the process that I love is called a rapid. I learned it from Jeff Weiner. It’s a Bain thing. And you have somebody who actually formally recommends the r. You then have somebody or two people who agree. Usually, you’ll have the recommend be the product person or the head of product or the head of engineering, and then the agree will be, you know, me and the CFO. Then you have the p, perform. Who’s gonna actually have to make sure this is set up for success?

The people on the product and engineering teams and other teams who have to contribute to this. Are there people that we need to get any type of input from? That the I input. Perform and input are often the same thing. And then the the decide. One decide. We’re not a committee. We’re not a consensus based culture. There has to be one decision maker at the end of the day. If you have the right people as part of that rapid, you’re gonna be so buttoned up about how you can run fast on making quick m and a decisions that actually have the right inputs in writing at the time that you need them to.

And that’s how we do all of our m and a.

This is where, in the early days, the CEO should probably be the ultimate decide. However, the beauty of the rapid is the CEO or the decide is on any of this can take a look at all the feedback. Right? If there’s a big red flag, if the chief technology officer says, listen, I think this technology is crap. I don’t know why we’re doing this in the document, then the CEO can weigh that stuff, and then you can have a conversation in the room and and say, let’s go through this rapid.

What are you concerned about with the technology? Why are there dissenting opinions in the room about this stuff? Do we feel that we’re being overly unfair because this is a startup and maybe they weren’t built for scale? You find that all the time culturally. Like, you get some engineers who might say, well, they should have built for a 100,000,000 people. Well, come on, guys. They have 1,000,000 in funding. What were you expecting? So you kind of unpack this stuff. And if there’s truly lingering doubts at the end of the day, again, you codify all this.

And then the decide can make a really good decision. At the end of the day, it actually becomes easier to make these decisions. It’s very rare that there’s a a big issue because when you codify it out all and then you have a really mature conversation about it, you can get to a place where either people kind of feel like, okay. I understand the risks and I’m willing to take them on. Or you know what? It feels like these are risks not worth taking at this moment.

And so let’s pass on this for now and let’s keep an eye on them. Let’s build a relationship. And over time, maybe we can do this in the future if they could throw up.

If you have incentive misalignments with a Rapid, then you generally probably have a political culture. And it’s not about a Rapid. It’s about people feeling like they need to do certain things in the room to get their stuff done. Brian Armstrong, there’s no political culture here. And I don’t just mean that about his apolitical post. I mean about you don’t lobby people on the side. You don’t have this thing where you talk about to somebody in the room one way and then after they leave the room, you say another thing.

He stamped that out. And I think it’s so important culturally. What we do is we have this really interesting system called problem proposed solution. It’s a PPS. It’s a one pager. And the way that we do this is maybe I’ll say, I have maybe an issue with you and your org, or I have a concern about something about the way we’re doing something. And I’ll say, okay. I’m gonna write this out. Problem. Harry, I think you’ve made some really risky bets with your venture investments. Proposed solution.

Maybe we can talk about this. Maybe we can go through the next three and just make sure we’re calibrating about what the right level of risk is here. It sounds kinda crazy, but it allows you to have conversations with people that everybody has these things. We all judge everything that’s happening in a company at any given time. If you have a norm of writing these problem proof of solutions and the exec team ourselves probably write, you know, two to three a week, you have this culture where it’s okay to be like, hey.

I feel like there’s something, like, not going great in this, and I wanna help you solve it. It’s a great structure. And that’s how we, I think, also get rid of this political culture in the company.

Yeah. So the most successful heads of Corp Dev are going to be self starters. By the way, this is true for anybody at Coinbase, I hope at most startups. Nobody’s gonna tell you what to do. I remember even at LinkedIn when I came there and, like, you know, Jeff obviously knew what a Head of Corp Dev was, but most of the company didn’t know at the time. You have to just be a self starter. You have to figure out where there are problems in the company and how you can help solve.

And that might be related to Corp Dev, but it might not. Right? It might be a strategy piece that you have to help with. It might be an area that the product team needs to kind of investigate. You gotta plug yourself in to wherever there’s open opportunity. That’s how you’re gonna succeed at any startup. Right? That’s the way they work. The head of Corp Dev, in addition to that, they should come in and they should start figuring out with the product and engineering teams, where are the areas where m and a are gonna truly amplify and accelerate what we’re doing.

And how can I get you insights? Oh, did you know this company is now at this number of users? Did you know that they’re doing this? Did you know that this is the product I’ve met? The whole thing about Corp Dev is you’re external facing person who can get invaluable insights if you have amazing relationships with the whole ecosystem. You can help those startups in the ecosystem figure things out. Maybe I can tell them, hey. I know that you’re dealing with this infrastructure scaling problem. We have the same thing two years ago.

Let me introduce you to one of our engineering heads to help you think about that. It’s all a relationship game. And then over time, as you build these relationships and bring these insights in, it all kind of benefits everything that you’re doing, and then you can kind of think about the things that might amplify the road map. That’s what you wanna do.

COO to me means I am here to create the absolute best environment for product and engineering to ship everything they need to ship as quickly as possible because we are a product and engineering led company. So Brian and our chief product officer and our head of engineering work together to create the product road map of our dreams. And I own everything that helps create that environment to get that shipping as quickly as possible. That might mean that we need to help clear a regulatory hurdle. It might mean that we need to get really good about customer support for premium customers.

It might mean that we need to do amazing BD deals. It might mean that we need to do amazing Corp Dev deals. Whatever it is on the operational front to help amplify. That’s my job.

Coinbase is a very complex company. It’s very different from LinkedIn in that sense. Or Coinbase has a portfolio of different products, and 70 of our resources are devoted to core, 20% are devoted to adjacencies, and 10% are devoted to venture bets. Right? And we have a lot of products. There’s a lot of companies who say focus, focus, focus, focus, focus. We gotta optimize, optimize, optimize. Coinbase is a completely different type of company. We’re saying we think that crypto is gonna take over the world. We think the total addressable market is massive.

And so we are going to take major bets in this space because we’re not gonna play safe. We’re gonna take intelligent bets because we think that there’s so much opportunity here. We are going to play in brokerage, in exchange, in custodian, in wallet, in commerce. We believe those are opportunities, and we have a lot more opportunities. We have no dearth of opportunities. So then as the COO, when I’m thinking about how do we resource these things, how do we keep people who are working on these initiatives focused and shipping these great things, it’s a lot to juggle.

You have to be really good at multitasking, and you have to be really good at shifting context from meeting to meeting day to day.

It really comes down to that seventy twenty ten framework, and this was something that we modeled after Google. Ultimately, the core business is the business that funds the rest of the business. It’s the thing that we are known for. It is the foundation of who we are. We have to make sure that our resources, our time, and our energy are focused on that core trading experience for consumers and for institutions. The 20% is strategic adjacent bets. So for example, we didn’t have a custody offering some years ago, but we recognize that custody was incredibly important to enhancing the value prop of everything we do because crypto assets are digital.

It’s not a paper certificate that you own this asset. We have to protect and safeguard those assets. We recognize that that was very strategic to us. We started with nothing. We are now the largest crypto custodian in the world. That was a venture bet that became a strategic adjacency. That’s 20% of our resources and our mind share. And then 10% venture bets. We believe that there are massive opportunities in the future. They may feel crazy. They may feel wallet was an example of this, and now we think wallet is incredibly strategic to us.

So that’s the way that we do this. We make sure that we have a process where every quarter, we have quarterly business reviews. We talk about those things. We make sure that we’re ensuring that these resources and the time spent are kind of mapping to those. That’s the best methodology that I have for that.

The venture 10% that I’m talking about is actually organic. In addition to that, we have Coinbase Ventures. And Coinbase Ventures, I think, is gonna prove to be I mean, obviously, I don’t wanna kind of sound overly exuberant here, but I think it’s gonna prove to be the kind of linchpins to the whole company and the whole crypto ecosystem over time. And I I think it’s gonna be amazing from both financial return perspective as well as an ecosystem perspective. When I joined three and a half years ago, I talked to Brian.

I said, I think we should do Coinbase Ventures. And he was like, I totally agree. I’ve been thinking about this. I said, okay. So what do I do? And he’s like, write a blog post. So I wrote a blog post. I sent it to him that day. He was like, I love it. And I was like, okay. Now what? He’s like, what do mean? He’s like, ship it. Literally, that’s how it happened. And we now have more than 200 investments. If you look at the portfolio of Coinbase Ventures investments, it’s swoon worthy.

It’s like just some of the most amazing crypto companies in the ecosystem with some of the brightest, best founders of our time. And I think that the model that we have is so radically different from everything else there on the market. It is true to crypto in the sense that it’s truly decentralized. We do not have a dedicated person on Coinbase Ventures. We have crypto first, amazing talent at the company who do this nights and weekends in addition to their day jobs because they love it so much.

We do not have a dedicated fund. We use cash off our balance sheet. We don’t have to answer to LPs. We don’t have this crazy back office who’s managing all this. We’re just doing this again as a labor of love. And I think that it’s an incredible testament to crypto and to Coinbase, and it makes me super fired up.

Yeah. We get that a lot.

So first and foremost, we believe that we have an obligation as a company to see thousands of companies in the crypto ecosystem flourish and bloom, and we wanna be a part of that. We feel an obligation as one of the crypto OGs to help fund that. That is truly one of the goals. Two, financial return. No doubt. We feel very comfortable that that will manifest very quickly as it already has. Three, most most important at the end of the day. When you have a robust portfolio of companies in the crypto ecosystem, you derive amazing insights and intelligence that you would never otherwise have.

We can see how things are trending. What’s peaking? Why? What’s dying? Why? And it helps us be better crypto first people generally. If you think about crypto, we believe that crypto is going to be a technology that is much like the Internet was decades ago. This idea that you have exposure to some of the most important companies in the ecosystem and can kind of have all of that exposure through this vehicle, it would be like back in the day, Yahoo or Google having been exposed to Facebook, Instagram, like, been able to seed investments in all these different interesting companies back in the day.

So I think it’s just such a special thing for us.

When you’re growing really fast as a startup, you quickly wreak havoc on the organization when you go from ten, twenty, a 100, a 2,000, 5,000 people. People who used to be able to go up to the CEO in the hallway and ask for a decision suddenly panic because they don’t know how to get things done. In fact, it’s probably the number one question I get from people who are interviewing with Coinbase. How does decision making get made? And the reason they’re asking this is because they are so confused by the bureaucratic processes at their company that they so wanna make sure that they’re not joining another completely messed up company in that regard.

This is where I come back to the RAPIDS. You know, I’m sure people at our company are like, oh my god. Stop talking about the RAPIDS. The RAPIDS are a great vehicle for us because it is very clear how a decision gets made. And we’re not gonna have any of this passive aggressive BS behavior where we’re gonna stew on a decision. We’ll say, oh, we’ll get back to you, and then we never get back to somebody on decision. It is very clear. We have the recommend.

We have the agree, the perform, the input, the decide. We label whether or not this is going to be an existential decision, a la type one and type two decisions by Jeff Bezos. So is it something where it’s irreversible once you make the decision, or is it something that’s lighter weight? If it’s a lighter weight decision, we wanna actually empower delegates to kind of be on the rapid as opposed to always tapping into the executive team for those decisions. Right? And then if it’s more existential, if it’s more irreversible, you wanna kinda make sure that it’s escalated, that rapid has the right people on it.

We also try to get these decisions decided in a week. So once we actually have the formal rapid written, we’re committing to getting back to these folks in a week. So, again, you’re not, like, lingering. You don’t have this weird dynamic where these poor employees are like, oh my gosh. Like, is anybody ever gonna tell me this? And that’s how you stamp out all of that weird behavior that I think exists in big companies.

It’s really hard, and I think that this is probably a topic that’s under discussed in the world right now because you don’t wanna create a culture of complete risk mitigation all the time. You want people to take intelligent risks. I think that what the whole goal of the rapid is, is that when you start to see decision making patterns, and this is like a Reid Dahlia concept, you’re gonna be able to kind of spot people who have good insights over time. Harry, you recommended that we do this a year ago on The Rapid, and we actually decided against it.

But you were right. We should have launched this product. You were totally right. I can start having a data track record and tracking the kind of insights of people who are on the team, who are the up and comers and the movers and shakers. And that allows me to then empower those people who turned out to be right more than not. That’s how you do this, but you’re not gonna be able to start with that. You have to build that over time. What’s

I think it comes back to prioritization. I think we have the best system we have for prioritization given the complex portfolio that we have. But I think that when you’re looking at a company, you have to be comfortable with a company that either ships a ton of different products or a company that is laser focused on one and optimizing the hell out of that one product. For example, if you go to a, like, a mature SaaS company, they’re gonna be focused on a completely different set of problems than a high growth company in the crypto space like Coinbase.

And so for us, it’s about making sure that we calibrate the right type of talent that’s gonna be successful in that environment. Jeff Weiner was really, really fervent about this thing. Talent is always gonna be your number one operating priority. That is true of any company in the world. And the right talent for a mature SaaS company is not gonna be the right talent for a Coinbase employee. I will often ask people that I’m interviewing, what other companies would you interview at? What other companies are you inspired by?

Now no offense, but if they say something like IBM, which I’ve definitely had, they’re not gonna be a fit for Coinbase. If they say SpaceX, I have a good feeling that they’re kind of on that path of somebody who could be really successful and excited about being at Coinbase.

Harry, I feel like you have exposure to our exec meetings right now because we talk about this so much. Coinbase is going to have a distinctively different view on this than many other companies. Brian started the company with Fred Ehrsam, and their big thing was, I wanna see you ship code in the first week, okay, to an engineer. And I think that that cultural norm is something that reverberates today, which is to say, I wanna see you ship stuff from the day you get here. None of this hemming and hawing.

None of this I need to get up to speed. We’re gonna try to help create the best environment for you to onboard. But if you don’t figure out how to ship stuff really fast, you’re probably not gonna be successful here. We don’t kinda spend a bunch of time stewing about strategic frameworks and this and that. We’re gonna wanna see real action. And that means that if you really don’t do something amazing in the first thirty days, you’re probably not gonna be a fit here. And it’s actually the most compassionate thing to say, you know what?

Bad on us because we probably didn’t realize this. Bad on you. And let’s part ways amicably now and not kind of have this thing where there’s a, you know, dead man walking kind of vibe going on. So to that end, we send a form to the managers and we say, is this person on track or not on track within the first thirty days? And that’s how we help compassionately manage out those who are not performing.

I think that that’s probably right, to be honest. I think that you kinda just know you’re tricking yourself. Now if you’re not providing the right environment, if you’re not providing the right tools, if you’re not providing the right onboarding and manager to kind of help this person get up to speed and get successful, then that is on the company. But you have a doubt, like, this person is just probably not gonna be right, and I made the wrong hiring decision. You can imagine it is so much better to just have that honest conversation with them sooner rather than later.

Right? They don’t wanna be the person that everybody feels like is gonna be set up for failure, the most compassionate thing to do. And so I think that this is kind of Netflix y in a sense, and I think that Netflix has done a really good job about making sure that it’s a win win for the person who has to depart and the company itself. There’s this other thing that just this is my pro tip for, like, people who are having a hard time being delivering, you know, performance reviews and so on.

Everybody hates a performance review. Everybody does. Right? You know, Stuart Butterfield, he was like, oh, I hate giving feedback. I hate performance reviews. There’s a quote where he was like, horses smell fear. Okay? We all go into these performance reviews, right, as a manager, and we kinda were like, Harry, you did this really well, and you did this really well. And then it’s like, we all know we’re waiting for the constructive part. Right? But we, like like, we all have this stupid model that we use where we’re just like, okay.

So now, Harry, I need to give you this feedback. And I get choked up, and I get worried about how to do it. And then you, as the horse, smell my fear. So here’s my recommendation. Just go in and just jump to, Harry, we gotta talk about this because you’re not gonna be successful here unless you can nail these three things. I start with the hard stuff because everybody dreads it on both sides. That’s my recommendation to you. Like, don’t fear it. Jump into it, and it always lands better than you think it will.

Exactly. Just go to it. Just go to it. Yep. Just jump right in.

I go back I’m a fiction person. I love The Secret History. I love books about outsiders, I think, because I always felt like I was an outsider.

Biggest weakness is I’m incredibly sensitive. Very, very sensitive person. Biggest strength is derives from that. I can read the room. I can spot talent really quickly. I know who I wanna work with and who I want to be on my team because I can read the room. I try to use that weakness as a way to understand people and to influence people.

I think it goes back to what we were saying about feedback. Everybody dreads giving the constructive criticism. And so I give the advice about jumping into it, and at the same time, it’s still painful.

That, man, this is going to be a volatile, bumpy ride. Buckle up, lady.

I mean, this sounds so cheesy, but I’m thinking London because that’s, like, my favorite city. And I’m thinking just be you.

We are in probably inning one. We have a lot more exciting stuff ahead of us. I think the sky’s the limit. I think that digital assets are gonna change the way that people think about their own economic empowerment and the digital transfer of value. I just think there’s so much ahead of us. And what I care about most is making sure that we have people who are genuinely fired up about the mission, who are here to play the long game and not be in it to make a quick buck.

Because the thing with crypto is because it is a form of money, you can sometimes get people who are excited about that part of it. So the future for me is just making sure that we build the most world class team to take us further and further into that incredible journey.

Harry, it is always a pleasure, and I love speaking with you too. So great to reconnect.