YouSaid · the spoken record

Emilie Choi

lines on the record
44
first
2021-08-23
most recent
2021-08-23
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “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 going to 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “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 want to 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I go back. I'm a fiction person. I love the secret history. I love books about outsiders, I think, as I always felt like I was an outsider”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Was like, oh, I hate giving feedback. I hate performance reviews. There's a quote where he was like, Where's this smell fear? Okay. We all go into these performance reviews, right? As a manager and we kind of 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 got to talk about this because you're not going to 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think that that's probably right, to be honest. I think that you kind of 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 going to 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 want to be the person that everybody feels like is going to be set up for failure. The most compassionate thing to do. And so I think that this is kind of Netflixy 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 delivering performance reviews and so on. Everybody hates a performance review. Everybody does, right? Stuart Butterfield.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Now, no offense, but if they say something like IBM, which I've definitely had, they're not going to 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “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 mature SaaS company, they're going to 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 going to be successful in that environment. Jeff Wiener was really, really fervent about this thing. Talent is always going to 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 going to 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?”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Really hard, and I think that this is probably a topic that's under discussed in the world right now because you don't want to 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 Ray Dalio concept, you're going to 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 going to be able to start with that. You have to build that over time.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Never get back to something on decision. It is very clear. We have the recommend, we have the agree, the perform, the input that decide. We label whether or not this is going to be an existential decision. I'll 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 want to 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 or if it's more irreversible, you want to kind of 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 going to tell me this? And that's how you stamp out all of that weird behavior that I think exists in big companies.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “When you're growing really fast as a startup, you quickly wreak havoc on the organization when you go from 10, 20, 100, a thousand, two thousand, five thousand 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 that their company that they so want to make sure that they're not joining another completely messed up company in that regard. This is where I come back to the rabbins. 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 going to have any of this passive aggressive BS behavior where we're going to stew on a decision. We'll say, oh, we'll get back to you.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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 want to 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”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Venture 10% that I'm talking about is actually organic. In addition to that, we have Coinbase Ventures. And Coinbase Ventures, I think, is going to prove to be, I mean, obviously, I don't want to kind of sound overly exuberant here, but I think it's going to prove to be the kind of linchpins to the whole company and the whole crypto ecosystem over time. And I think it's going to be amazing from both a financial return perspective as well as an ecosystem perspective. When I joined,”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It really comes down to that 70-2010 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 in our mindshare. And then 10% venture bets.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Who are working on initiatives focused and shipping these great things, it's a lot to juggle, have to be really good at multitasking, and you have to be really good at shifting context from meeting to meeting day to day.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “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 got to optimize, optimize, optimize. Coinbase is a completely different type of company. We're saying we think that crypto is going to take over the world. We think the total addressable market is massive. And so we are going to take major bets in the space because we're not going to play safe. We're going to 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”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “COO to 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 roadmap 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 learner 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Is you're an 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 roadmap. That's what you want to do.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “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, and I hope at most startups. Nobody's going to tell you what to do. I remember even at LinkedIn when I came there and like, you know, Jeff obviously knew what ahead 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 got to plug yourself into wherever there's open opportunity. That's how you're going to succeed at any startup, right? That's the way they were. 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&A are going to 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 met? The whole thing about Corp.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Of writing these problem proposed solutions. And the exec team ourselves probably write two to three a week. You have this culture where it's okay to be like, hey, I feel like there's something not going great in this. And I want to 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “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. Political post. I mean, about you don't lobby people on the side, you don't have this thing where you talk about 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 going to 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 kind of 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,”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Becomes easier to make these decisions. It's very rare that there's a big issue because when you codify it out 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 throw out.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “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 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 100 million people. Well, come on, guys. They have 1 million 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...”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I learned it from Jeff Wiener. It's a bane thing. And you have somebody who actually formally recommends the acquisition, 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 going to 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 an input are often the same thing and then 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 going to be so buttoned up about how you can run fast on making quick M&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&A.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So, the way to fail, the recipe to fail in MA 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 roadmap? Okay, and that is the foundation of everything. Based on the product roadmap, what is existential to us and what are the things that we think we might be able to amplify and massively accelerate through M&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 roadmap. 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 of product. 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Think for people to get excited about during the time. But when you look back at those seminal MA acquisitions of all time, they obviously paid for themselves many, many, many times over.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Mike Volpe, who was famously that head of Corp Dev at Cisco during the heyday of Cisco M&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&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 going to 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 billion for a company with no revenue. I mean, you have to be able to take those bets. And that's what's really hard.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Coinbase, one of the most important things is going to be about clear communication. And 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “It's also a great way for them to say, you know what, I opt into this and I'm going to do the hard work to try to get this job.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “With that person, you're going to say, Emily, 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 20 minutes of presentation. It's 10 minutes of Q&A. We seed three different questions. So an example would be tell us about a particularly challenging M&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, whatever. We want to see how they present. We want to see if there's depth to what they're saying. We want to 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&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 going to be successful in the Coinbase environment.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “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 30 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, 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 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 want to 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “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 going to just do small aquares, which is totally fine. Talent is a great way to do M&A. But in that case, you probably don't need like one dedicated senior head of Corp Dev. What would be examples of the target 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “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&A and you hire the big guns for it.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “They feel the need to because they have FOMO and they see Corp Dev happening. 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&A. However, I've seen this movie many times. The thing I would say is make sure you really want ahead of Corp Dev, you know, at the pre-IPO level. And I was very wary of this when I got reachouts 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 going to come over to head up Corp Dev at Coinbase that Brian genuinely wanted to do M&A. What I found is that founders like the idea of M&A, but in many cases what they'll do is they kind of unpack M&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&A. And so that's fine if you want.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “It's weekly and to the entire company. One of the things that I think happens in a remote first world, although 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 want to be able to share something that is top of mind. I remember Angela Erendz, who was formerly at Apple and Burberry. She came to talk to us once at LinkedIn and 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. ultimately she was like, she was with her kids and she saw them recording stuff on their phones and she's like, oh, I'm going to send a message to the employees through my mobile phone because that is 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 actually wrote a very”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “You could kind of take things exponentially higher than you would have if you had just been kind of slow and steady up and to 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...”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “First of all, the one two punch of Reed and Jeff. I think they were an incredible combination with Reed being this very strategic visionary who could kind of see the future and would have these hypotheses on sectors and companies just kind of want to 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 mimicked 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 Reed that I learned a lot about that in terms of your own personal career path, career paths are never straight and kind of up and to 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,”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “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 the space or at this company. Just keep an even kill. 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 been a great experience that way.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Z portfolio, and I told him, I was like, you know what? The only one I want to 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.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “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 I was private. I was there when I 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 Reed and others at the company. But I honestly felt like I wasn't learning anymore. And I felt like I was kind of getting too comfortable. And I think that those are the moments in your career where you got to 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 bunch of head of corp jobs at that time. And listen, if I'm going to leave this comfortable place, I don't want to do it for something that is exactly like the experience I just had at LinkedIn. I don't want to go to another type of LinkedIn. I want to go to something that I think could be the next technology frontier because I want to, again, push myself a little bit to get out of my comfort zone. And a friend from A16Z, Jamie McGurk, came in and he was talking about like a bunch of opportunities in the A6.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “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 Flickrick acquisition and to work with people like Jeff Wiener 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 want to be around entrepreneurs and founders my whole life.”

    2021-08-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source