If you don’t want your employees to be highly opinionated and engage in ownership politics, perhaps you shouldn’t hire smart people (who tend to be opinionated and think a lot) and hand them shares in your company (hence turning them into co-owners)?

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...