The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Brian Armstrong reads as The Visionary because he committed to making cryptocurrency accessible to ordinary people long before institutional legitimacy arrived. He founded Coinbase in 2012, when regulators were hostile, banks were sceptical, and Bitcoin carried a fringe reputation, then held conviction through brutal market cycles and took the company public via direct listing in 2021.
“One thing is, I've done a lot of reps on hiring at this point. So Coinbase has about 5,000 people. Probably the first 500 people or something maybe in that range.”
“That is the top papers in each category in each month, or whatever. And people want to put that in their wall in the lab. So I do think we need to sort of change, I don't know, like the traditional folks in academia or science would probably think this is a crazy idea, but I think we need to change the culture to not celebrate getting pub…”
“Or a company you can go to to like, hey, shut this thing down. Even if everybody who's working on Uniswap today stopped, the Uniswap smart contract would continue to operate on the Ethereum blockchain.”
“No silver bullet, there's a bunch of lead bullets, right? So it's like, you know, one thing we do is we just have good test suites, right? So you're testing every piece of code that goes out. That's like just common good best practice, but it's particularly important in financial services.”
The David Rubenstein Show: “Brian Armstrong”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE