Brian Armstrong – The Future of Crypto

There are a lot of people out there who are starting to get this uneasy feeling. 'What is going on with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve? Does this really make sense? It seems too good to be true. You're just going to print all this money, and somehow it's all going to be okay?' I think they're looking for an alternative system that they can trust. In cryptocurrency, there's nobody who has their fingers on the dials who can manipulate it for their own benefit. There's only ever going to be 21 million bitcoins—nobody can really go in and change that, and that's, so far, stood the test of time (10 years or so). The US dollar is increasingly—they're not feeling like they have that same level of trust.

That's why I always try to tell the team and other people, 'Don't get caught up in the hype. If you want to try something with this [crypto & Bitcoin], put 1% of your assets into it, and just don't touch it for 10 years. Don't put in any money you can't afford to lose. This is a new thing. Just think long-term.'

Basically everything in a company comes back to people ... You think, 'Well, we need to be profitable. How do you become profitable?' You got to have a good product people want. 'Well, okay, how do you have a product people want?' You got to hire great people to build that, and build a great team, and get them to be aligned towards the same thing.

This is actually an essential skill set of founders—you need to make sure you don't burn out. Take vacations, exercise, and take care of your health—all that stuff. And you got to make sure that you cultivate this mental toughness or resiliency because building a company is basically just moving from one setback to the next with enthusiasm.

The greatest risk is not taking one. A lot of people in life—they have ideas. 99% of people talk about ideas all the time... but they don't actually go do anything about it.

Starting a company is definitely an emotional roller coaster, and I have a lot of respect for founders—even when they fail—because it is such a tough thing.

I'm not a big fan of slide decks. When I go to product meetings & product reviews and people are showing me slide decks, I get really nervous. What is the customer going to see? Just show me the thing the customer is going to see, whether that's the clickable prototype or the actual implemented feature.

I think most people think about cryptocurrency as something that people trade kind of speculatively right now, or they've heard of Bitcoin, but they don't know about any of the others. To me, that's actually missing the long-term potential. For Coinbase, our mission is to create an open financial system for the world.

You can actually get on a plane and fly to Australia faster than it takes you to send money there.

I actually think cryptocurrency plus the smartphone is kind of the secret that we can use to inject economic freedom into countries all over the world.