Coinbase is a mission focused company
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
I think this article is a well articulated viewpoint and I hope that more companies move in this direction. There is a reason why for all those years that it was considered a social faux pas to discuss politics and religion in polite company and especially at work, the potential for division, hurt feelings and retaliation can very easily cause deep irreconcilable schisms in even the most talented workforces.
I just hope that this doesn't however transform into something more insidious, a way to muffle very important voices for change with respect to diversity at tech companies, though I have a sinking feeling that it will
You win some. you lose some I guess.
i don’t know how you separate it from politics when it was literally born out of the failures of government to protect us from the global financial crisis.
When you do this the laser focus on the mission stsys near the surface: You can't address all the political elements by building or lobbying from within your team, but you can say "our study shows that..." and thus create the environment for another group to act upon, while not doing every suggested thing yourself because the dependencies needed will take you off mission. It's coherent with the idea of decentralizing decision making.
https://www.chaum.com/publications/Security_Wthout_Identific...
And I would would not be surprised if you found the management team at Coinbase to be compromised of some Trump supporters buying into a Faustian bargain of using him to rubber stamp libertarian friendly policies.
Quite a lot of SV tech-bros, especially in the investor and fintech community fall into this pattern, e.g. Peter Thiel, Palmer Lucky, etc
People always talked about their heterosexual families and brought their cis sexual identities to work. Then others asked for the same allowances.
People always acknowledged white culture at work. Then others asked for the same allowances.
I don’t think business culture changed so much as politics started to question business culture.
I watched how people acted like the "worst case scenario" would have been an opposition party getting a tie in the electoral college and not the landslide that occurred. For that party's re-election campaign I am seeing the same conjecture, modeling worst case scenarios about a "slim electoral college victory".
So instead I just placed undervalued bets on prediction markets for a nice payday. Peter Thiel essentially did the same thing, on a bigger scale and reaped disproportionate benefits.
People should just focus on the company's mission statement. I am glad more companies are taking a page out of Netflix's old culture document, dissolving the "we are family" bullshit in favor of a championship team aspiration.
Have found this to be the trend in general or the trend for supporters of certain parties/ideals only?
oh in my experience, definitely one sided against trump and anyone who voted for him.
All that was before physically dangerous public health policies. Now not just jobs and employees, but their grandparents too.
- Making business pay for healthcare
- Making business take political stances
- Making business responsible for caring for the sick / needy / orphans / etc.
Let business make maximum money and distribute it to employees and owners, then let everyone who received money deploy it to their favored interest groups / politicians / activisms / social programs / charities / etc. Much less conflict in regards to business - thinking about them, working for them, differing theories about their role in society, etc. Businesses provide value and earn profit for doing so.
And for things like healthcare, let government handle it, why we let business pay for healthcare in USA is so absurd.
So Coinbase has a good model - stop wasting the whole day getting worked up about political arguments and shaming each other for perceived slights. You can do that after-hours on Twitter and FB as much as you like.
There is a broader philosophical idea being put to work here: your professional life and your personal life should be able to be separated.
That goes both ways: let me "leave" work when I'm done, but also ask employees to "leave" their personal lives when they're at work.
But this just sounds like 1) an excuse to fire people and 2) a warning to never talk about politics at work.
Some employee or a group an employees decided they didn't like one of Coinbase's client because of their political affiliation and wanted to kick them out because they think they have a say as to who Coinbase should do business with and who they shouldn't.
If it is really the case then, I'm actually surprised Coinbase management had the balls to put out a statement like that, in a era where activists deem "inaction as complicity".
Are we? the fact that a CEO has to remind their employees that they are working in a business and this isn't some college campus makes me think we aren't.
If you're focused on the company mission yes. If you're spending your time and energy on other goals, particularly when that involves trying to get other employees to spend their time and energy on other goals, nah the new hire will be beating your capacity on day one just by not being as much of a net negative.
My guess is that they realized dealing with the shitstorm once is cheaper (in terms of the damage it does) than dealing with smaller shitstorms constantly.
"many employees were interpreting our mission [of creating an open financial system for the world] in different ways. Some people interpreted the mission more broadly, to include all forms of equality and justice. ... Coinbase has had its own challenges here, including employee walkouts."
Because cryptocurrency has a lot of non-liberal people of various kinds, the culture war could be hitting Coinbase even harder than other companies.
i think it would be hard to talk about crypto without constantly talking about regulators, governments, central banks, etc etc etc
Just because something is political doesn't require you to take a stand on every other political issue.
It takes courage to make a statement like this in the current political context. I have found the crypto industry in general to be more open-minded than other subsets of tech
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_e...
People that need their company to match unrelated causes to them, quit! Go live as a pauper or maintain your subsidized life making room for people that want a job or want to also focus on the laser guided mission!
Trade unions or other examples of worker self management are the way to push these kinds of politics. Not all unions need to be the teamsters run by Jimmy Hoffa, the modern white-collar union would and could hardly represent it.
> We won’t:
> Debate causes or political candidates internally when unrelated to our mission
> Expect the company to represent our personal beliefs externally
> Assume negative intent, or not have each others back
> Take on activism outside of our core mission at work
I wish more companies would take this position. I go to work to build great things and work with great people, not to talk about identity or partisan politics.
It's hard for me to imagine any topic of discussion internally at Coinbase that is not political. Often in these situations, defense of a status quo becomes "non-political", while any suggestion that a better method might exist for doing something (especially regarding custody of assets precisely designed to be beyond state control) is "political".
This is not necessarily a _bad_ thing, but in this world it is impossible to be apolitical. The only thing you can be is okay with the status quo.
Everything is not identity politics or partisan politics. "Everything is political" is the very definition of newspeak and it's sophistic.
Of course people will come out of the woodwork to talk about how "my very existence is political" or some other nonsense. Ie. exactly the kind of thing I'm glad Coinbase is banning at work.
> In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Every time we decide to act or not act in the public sphere, it has political implications. That doesn't mean it's specifically partisan or identity politics, but it is nonetheless political. Choosing not to speak up about something is just as much a political decision as choosing to speak up.
[1] https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
This isn’t a cause I’d want to spend any time on, but it is trying to make a change.
In the end, few of us can be Nelson Mandela. We rage against social injustice, but in the end we still expect to be paid and sleep under a roof we own. So, in a sense, all of us are "okay" with the status quo, up to a certain degree. There's no shame in knowing your own limit.
In fact, operating in the status quo has absolutely no bearing on approval of the status quo.
However, everyone still has a right to engage with society in the manner that they choose. Expecting everyone to analyze every action for political ramifications is simply unrealistic. On balance I suspect my political views align with the people I work with, but I explicitly prefer not to discuss politics at work.
As a progressive, it's easy to imagine this from the progressive side: corporations could be powerful agents of change with the goal of moving society forward. However, there's certainly a nonzero number of atheist and progressive folks who work for Hobby Lobby. "But they should just work somewhere else!" you say. Why? And what if they can't?
A conservative Christian can work side-by-side with a progressive atheist at a great company and change the world together. That's the power of liberal capitalism.
Coinbase are pioneers of custodial, KYC-first, users data trade and espionage (IRS scandal) approach to crypto which harms ecosystem deeply, making non-custodial solutions more vulnerable to chain analysis and regulations.
Coinbase is philosophically a bank, not a crypto provider.
And they hired people who put DreadPirateRoperts into jail which say a lot too.
I will never forgive Coinbase for pushing so hard for centralizing Bitcoin by increasing the block verification time for nodes. I'm happy though that Bitcoin withstand their attack.
So thanks, but no thanks for this message about building a better world.
"Indeed, Black demonstrates with great precision that the godlike owner of the corporation, Thomas Watson, was impervious to the moral dimension of his dealings with Hitler's Germany..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
I have a friend who is a high level Google VP that is very active in advocacy for people less represented at Google and in the world, what I assume people here are referring to as identity politics (I'm VERY interested in hearing if there is a distinction I'm missing). It just occurred to me, maybe he, as a Jewish man, feels like he has seen this kind of thing before, and felt he needed to take a stand.
Mr. Miyagi once said: "Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle ... sooner or later you get squish like grape."
The same Google that was planning on launching in a country with slave camps for Uyghurs Muslims?
To put it bluntly, hiring a few black people does not make up for Project Dragonfly. I guess the VP you're talking about has decided who's where on the diversity chart, according to his approval of Google's behavior.
Edit: oh, you are saying in China. Isn't that whataboutism? Maybe I'm doing the same thing?
It seems like Google does permit internal debate, and fires people when their views are too damaging for the culture. I really, really doubt a lot of people had strong opinions about going into China, and lost to other opinions. That seems really healthy at least.
Coinbase seems like it is saying: no internal debate permitted on political things, just purely discussed on whether it makes financial sense.
To me, Coinbase seems really lazy.
After all, what work is being done when you spend hours a day arguing about policy minutiae with co-workers?
>We are a for-profit business. When we make profit, we can use that to hire more great people, and build even more.
Not what for profit means at all.
Either a for profit organisation or a not for profit organisation can reinvest profit to expand operations. In fact given the inability to do the first item, that's pretty much all not for profits ever choose to do with it. Sure they could maintain level of current service and reduce revenue, but none really choose to. Never seen one with a "no longer taking donations, we're good" page up.
So given those two things, it's nonsensical to say
>We are a for-profit business. When we make profit, we can use that to hire more great people, and build even more.
However it gets even more ridiculous given that neither profit status nor expansion were the core topic of the post. The author didn't need to mention nor try to justify the for profit status of the organisation. So they went out of their way to shoehorn this nonsense line in for no reason.
If you want to crypto, if you want privacy don't use Coinbase.
You can always use LocalEthereum to buy ETH anonymously and then transfer to a private wallet
https://decrypt.co/40685/electronic-frontier-foundation-call...