Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — The Art of Relentless Focus, Preparing for Full-Contact Entrepreneurship, Critical Forks in the Path, Handling Haters, The Wisdom of Paul Graham, Epigenetic Reprogramming, and Much More (#627)

“The greatest risk is not taking one.”
— Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Coinbase. Founded in 2012, Coinbase is building the crypto economy—a more fair, accessible, efficient, and transparent financial system enabled by crypto. Coinbase serves over 103 million verified users, 14,500 institutions, and 245,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries. In April 2021, Coinbase listed publicly on NASDAQ as COIN.

Before founding Coinbase, Brian served as a software engineer at Airbnb, where he focused on fraud prevention. Before Airbnb, Brian founded and was CEO of UniversityTutor.com, an online tutoring directory and a subsidiary of Johnson Educational Technologies LLC. Brian also previously served as a consultant for the enterprise risk management division at Deloitte & Touche LLP. Brian has a BA in computer science and economics and an MS in computer science from Rice University.

Over the last three years, Coinbase has worked with ten-time Emmy®-winning filmmaker Greg Kohs on a documentary about cryptocurrency and Coinbase. COIN is now available on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo on Demand, and other platforms.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

Brought to you by ShipStation shipping software, Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Helix Sleep premium mattresses.

The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Listen onApple Podcasts

Listen onSpotify

Listen onOvercast

#627: Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — The Art of Relentless Focus, Preparing for Full-Contact Entrepreneurship, Critical Forks in the Path, Handling Haters, The Wisdom of Paul Graham, Epigenetic Reprogramming, and Much More

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep! Helix was selected as the best overall mattress of 2022 by GQ magazine, Wired, and Apartment Therapy. With Helix, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering 20% off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim.

This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. Do you sell stuff online? Then you know what a pain the shipping process is. ShipStation was created to make your life easier. Whether you’re selling on eBay, Amazon, Shopify, or over 100 other popular selling channels, ShipStation lets you access all of your orders from one simple dashboard, and it works with all of the major shipping carriers, locally and globally, including FedEx, UPS, and USPS.

Tim Ferriss Show listeners get to try ShipStation free for 60 days. Just visit ShipStation.com/Tim!

This episode is brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.

Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health.

Want to learn more about Web3 and crypto? Listen to my podcast episode with Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant, in which we discuss what the smartest people do on the weekend, solving proof-of-work problems, the real promise of Web3, why NFTs are more than the sum of their JPGs, how skeuomorphic design can be applied to Web3, why it’s still the early days of decentralization, the pros and cons of crypto regulation, how DAOs work and what they can offer to society at large, and much more.

#542: Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Brian Armstrong:

Twitter

Watch COIN: Amazon | iTunes | Vimeo on Demand

SHOW NOTES

[05:46] How Brian’s first book idea became a blog.
[07:21] Brian’s time in Buenos Aires.
[13:39] Present-day economic warning signs.
[16:13] Coinbase beginnings: from genesis to the Buy Bitcoin button.
[20:35] Influential human beings, books, and documentaries.
[23:15] Core principles learned from early startup days.
[26:39] Favorite Paul Graham essays.
[28:12] Controversy: Coinbase becomes an apolitical, mission-focused company.
[37:11] Cultivating resilience to resistance as a leader.
[44:57] Competition.
[46:51] What crypto skeptics and crypto bulls each get wrong often.
[49:30] Main use cases for crypto.
[50:18] Making the case that crypto is still in early days.
[54:55] Novel crypto ideas Brian thinks will prove worthwhile.
[59:57] Lessons learned from the launch of Coinbase’s NFT marketplace.
[1:03:44] How Coinbase is addressing NFT security.
[1:05:34] “Not your keys, not your crypto.”
[1:10:56] Self-improvement.
[1:14:14] Learning biology basics from a tutor as an adult.
[1:20:03] The goals of NewLimit.
[1:27:32] What is ResearchHub?
[1:31:41] How open bounties work.
[1:33:25] What excites Brian most about science today?
[1:36:52] Brian’s billboard.
[1:38:24] Parting thoughts.

MORE BRIAN ARMSTRONG QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Talk to the customer, iterate, talk to the customer, iterate.”
— Brian Armstrong

“We weren’t even trying to make a company. We were just kind of trying to learn this stuff in the evenings in our free time.”
— Brian Armstrong

“If I have to come in every day and be put in front of the hot mic and have to answer all these crazy things that I don’t have an answer to, that’s not what I signed up for. I want to build cool stuff with technology that changes the world. That’s what I’m good at.”
— Brian Armstrong

“Honestly, if you don’t have a competitor—people are naturally tribalistic—you’ll sometimes see tribes start to form inside the company and people start fighting each other, so it’s actually better to have something outside the company that you’re struggling against.”
— Brian Armstrong

“It’s never as good as it seems, never as bad as it seems, in crypto.”
— Brian Armstrong

“They teach you in PR training to pivot the question to the one you wish was asked.”
— Brian Armstrong

“If I just think about all the biggest challenges that we have in the world today, I think science and technology are pretty good hammers to swing at those nails.”
— Brian Armstrong

“The most valuable companies in the world are when we cross-pollinate a true scientific innovation with someone who can go commercialize it.”
— Brian Armstrong

“The greatest risk is not taking one.”
— Brian Armstrong

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Related and Recommended

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s how we’re gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you’re rude, we’ll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)

8 Comments

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

Mostyn

1 year ago

The episode is great (as usual, thanks Tim!) but needs editing around 1:33:23 as Tim asks a question about Research Coin that is not answered. The editing seems to go straight into the end of the answer, with Tim saying “OK, got it’.

Admin

Team Tim Ferriss

Reply to Mostyn

Thank you, Mostyn. And thank you for the kind words for Tim.

What gets dropped is Brian’s saying, “Yeah, that’s correct.” You can hear it in the YouTube video found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvoUW7LRsew at timestamp 1:31:52.

Best,

Glad to know about Brian Armstrong. I really like his quote what he said in his interview about crypto. will definitely see his podcast.

Summer

Hi, Tim!
After listening to your interview with Brian Armstrong, I thought I’d send you the link to Bob Reselman’s easy to understand article about the Diffie-Hellman security key.
https://thenewstack.io/the-essentials-of-using-an-ephemeral-key-under-tls-1-3/
And also want to mention a book called “Green Think” by Rick Fedrizzi, “How profit can save the planet”.
Thank you for your work, Tim!
My life is better with you in it.
Sincerely,
Summer LaWarre

John Bauman

So, OK, I’m ready to admit that I’m an ignoramus when it comes to cryptocurrencies, but where were the questions about money laundering and the generally massive boon to criminals that cryptocurrency has become? And how about some explanations about how cryptocurrency is going to help anyone else, other than speculators? How does cryptocurrency do anything other than increase the already gigantic chasm between the haves and the have-nots? This interview just felt like hype, hype, hype, suck-up, suck-up, suck-up.

konr

Reply to John Bauman

Unfortunately you’re absolutely right. I fear that a lot of this stuff has just become rich people blowing smoke up each other’s rear ends. Cryptocurrency does a LOT of harm that needs to be directly addressed by people like this and I’d have expected Tim to at least somewhat probe on that. Not to mention the idea that all the problems of crypto have been largely ignored by popular proponents of blockchain technology, usually citing the “greater good” of decentralisation as a big enough reason to do so… but then they use centralised platforms like Coinbase and advocate for a merge in Ethereum for example that fixes some things, does not to other things and completely messes up the decentralisation part. It’s almost as if their views are more profit or hype driven than anything.

Reply to konr

Criminals are never going to stop finding ways to skirt around the law. I’d argue that nonstop money printing to solve every economic problem is doing more harm than cryptocurrency is. You guys both sound really old.

Mike Parsons

Hi Tim, Thank you for creating the brilliant content and helping me, people all around the globe to gain more knowledge. As a regular consumer of your podcasts, I have realized that most of the questions you ask applies to your own ongoing subjects & concerns in your various ventures and personal life which is good. However I would appreciate if you could broaden the spectrum a bit more. Just a recommendation to make the already brilliant content, even more helpful. Thank you.