Coinbase CEO Tweets ‘Quit and Find a Company You Believe In’
forbes.com
forbes.com
Brian Armstrong wouldn’t have gotten very far with Coinbase if it was just him, on his own. Companies with this sort of management either blow up (RIM) or end up stagnant and dysfunctional (Facebook). He will end up alienating all of the people who he needs to resuscitate his company; moreover the sort of weird, semi-nuts people who create all of the great stuff in our industry (e.g. von Neumann) won’t go anywhere near his company.
Coinbase may be the centralized crypto exchange with the lions’ share of liquidity today, but there’s no guarantee they’ll even exist in an industry that evolves past its shitcoin phase. Maybe he thinks he can single-handedly navigate this transition on his own; let’s see. Clearly, the market doesn’t think so — pretty ironic that he’s a market-maker who ignores market signals…
Edit: I want to note that this tweet is toxic and disturbing on so many levels… It’s also comical given the history of our industry and the Traitorous Eight.
https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1535305081...
"[...] But our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private."
Like seriously? In a thread where he’s publicly criticizing the actions of his employees, he really has the chutzpah to point to some corporate "value" about expressing grievances privately?
And after taking a grievance public, it seems somewhat unreasonable not to expect a public response?
Though often, companies don’t respond publicly, and that might be wiser. And responding on Twitter seems like a bad move compared to a blog post or press release? But many people can’t help themselves.
I'm decidedly split on this one. There are circumstances that warrant disclosure, even in spite of agreements to secrecy. I think everyone is better off for knowing about the Pentagon Papers or Snowden leaks, or the massive fraud pulled off by Bernie Madoff.
aka web3's SBF
They had a nice IPO, but I hope you sold at the top.
If you look at other technology frontiers that were to eventually mature, many of the pioneering brands that were very well known at the time became just a mention in the historical narrative.
I think one can make a fair argument that there’s a long road ahead and that Coinbase’s future will have much to do with their positioning (product, partnerships, sticky user capture) and little to do with their brand.
Oh, wait...
I don't find it particulary nasty and know nothing about cb's culture.
Yeah what a failure that was! In the same realm of failures such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and AT&T
Facebook has reached the maximum extension it can possibly have , they stopped just before being subject to DOJ breakup lawsuit like Microsoft, IBM and AT&T before them.
I am sick and tired of this narrative of Facebook being a failure, just because you can't get rich via buying the stock and waiting for capital appreciation anymore doesn't make it a failure.
It's a company making 100+ billions in sales per year with basically no physical infrastructure and amazing margins still.
Their future isn't guranteed but nobody's is.
It is in fact the first and the fastest company founded in the 21st century to reach $1TN valuation. Tesla Inc. came second to that. I don't think anyone else can say that. Maybe that is also failure as well?
> I am sick and tired of this narrative of Facebook being a failure, just because you can't get rich via buying the stock and waiting for capital appreciation anymore doesn't make it a failure.
The company is still profitable after all these years, scandals, fines etc and they still are doing fine. The death of the company has been greatly exaggerated and for those who don't want to hear it, I'm afraid that they (Meta) is still going to be around for another decade.
I am pretty political ( and I'd be happy to debate you to death and then go for drinks with you.
I've worked in woke leftist companies all my life (most, if not all, tech places are). Most of my friends don't agree politically with me, I dated people who were my political arch-nemesis. I had brilliant coworkers I enjoyed working with, with whom I shared zero political ideas.
I still have to meet someone I consider smart on the workplace that can't detach his political beliefs to the task at hand.
Those political activists types were always busy organising committees and chatting on slack instead of delivering features. I wouldn't hire them (independently from their politics).
Well now crypto is ‘legitimate’ and Coinbase has to compete with big players. They’ll probably stick around but their market share will continue to decline. Not much growth there, writing is on the wall.
Facebook still one of the largest tech companies, and the largest social media platform, and messaging.
better off reading the original thread
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/15353049437284147...
That's a pretty funny statement given that the "mission" of the crypto world is an explicitly political one, overlapping significantly with extreme libertarian and anarchocapitalist movements.
An ancap idea would be to create a private bank which creates a currency and back it with real goods.
Anyway crypto would be at best a technical solution to a political problem (government existing) and you'll never fix a political problem with technology alone.
Stock ticker AABB, and others.
The third tweet in the thread literally says: "Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!"
Do you know what "click bait" means?
Yellow journalism at it’s finest.
That doesn't make the title click bait.
>Yellow journalism at it’s finest.
Yes, we should only use unbiased sources, like the words of the CEO who oversaw an 80% drop in share price and whom the employees are trying to oust, who starts his thread with "This is dumb".
>That doesn't make the title click bait.
It does. Sensationalism and misleading headlines designed to drive an emotional response are considered click bait too.
I went through something similar at a much more ethical company where the CEO absorbed public criticism and addressed by hosting all-hands and taking direct, unfiltered questions from employees and never said shit in public. People who were really being unreasonable got fired, several key people who sympathized with the dissenters quit as is their prerogative at any point. The ones who stayed really wanted the company to succeed and leadership very well knew it and respected it. Armstrong is very clearly saying "This is my company, not yours" which is technically true, but anathema to millenial ethics and I'd argue anathema to the founding principals of crypto.
Mind you, this is all happening at a company that produces actual value as a top priority and isn't a just a platform to extract rents from suckers.
Seems like Armstrong is really shooting himself in the foot here by running to Twitter and posting his brain dump on the petition. Also, I think he's painted himself into a corner over time by doing the same thing on other occasions in reaction to other internal matters at his company. He really ought to follow the advice he himself gives in the original thread: praise publicly and criticize privately. It's actually great advice but it applies to everyone.
Otherwise, I find I don't actually have much of an opinion about who's right here. I just find myself thinking, "If I were him, I'd just stay clear of Twitter."
I feel like Elon Musk is another example of someone who wouldn't seem nearly so much like a jerk now if he could have just kept his mouth shut half the time.
Let’s not just shrug and say “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of options.”
That is, making a union doesn't enable you to transform all aspects of a company, like "The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure" or "The failure of the Coinbase NFT platform".
These were the first two items listed in the erstwhile no-confidence letter.
Just like the free-software movement that wanted to remove all non-free software from existence, some of those folks instead joined the likes of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta and they have a nasty and vile history of unethical practises which are just a nasty as Coinbase who were also being involved with VCs pumping and dumping on retail.
But are we trying to find angels here? The pattern is the same. They DO NOT care and they will NOT change. So it is pointless expecting them to.
So if you don't like them you are free to leave, just like you were free to join them in the first place. Or be a founder at your own company.
Their stock is down 83%, the company has a hiring freeze, and the CEO is begging employees to quit. Seems like there's a non-trivial chance that if they keep with their current trajectory the company will simply cease to exist.
The company's owner was in prison within a couple years for financial fraud.
Unfortunately, I think we have a large contingent of people like yourself that haven’t been thru a deep downturn and have grown used to the endless perks that have been thrown at tech employees and think it is normal. You should expect the power dynamic in the labor/employee relationship to shift quickly to employer as macro conditions continue to deteriorate.
In other words, don’t expect your next employer will let you bring your dog to work.
You know what? Quit and find a company you believe in. I wouldn't want someone that doesn't believe in what they're doing working for me, and I wouldn't want to work for a company who I don't believe in. Don't get me wrong, our economy is in shambles, the world is falling apart, today is March 833rd 2020, our collective stress levels are at an all time high and only rising, and we're all out of the mental juice to handle both being alive at work and also job hunting: do it anyways, go find a job that is actually fulfilling to you.
Don't let shitty companies rob you of being actually successful in the ways that matter to you. You gotta live with yourself and what you've done, and the only person that cares about you is you. Your employer does not, and never will, give a shit about you.
Here though, I wonder if it is truly possible for employees to make the same suggestions internally.
This is an anonymous list of grievances, attempting to use some cryptographic signature solution to show support without revealing who supported.
Even taking out the proposal/demand for resignations, I wonder if the product suggestions can be made to any effect, internally.
Many, including myself, admired this company because many of our smartest peers were joining in droves. Thought of Coinbase as their dream job. It is clear that that is no longer true.
Therefore when they say that they survived a crypto winter before, what they miss is that they previously had many that rooted for their success. I hope they hold no illusion this time.
WTF? Am I reading Forbes or some old MySpace page?
Way to not proofread your shit at a major publication and put an automatic back button in the second paragraph.
TD;DR
Too dumb didn't read it.
[0]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...
It's essentially a blog platform, and has been for a while.
I'm not sure why that matters in regards to the content of the article, though.
Sometimes it slips through!
Mayhaps, just mayhaps... People are starting to realize the money is going to flow wherever some small number of people want it to, and are realizing that the only way to counter the perceived misallocation is from the inside?
Or mayhaps, they found the Company and the Work, but the Executives are the ones who don't fit? Bottom up pressure is a bitch, ain't it?