Relentless
01:45:18 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:45:18] S1: There's, like, always winning, and then there's, like, you never win. [01:45:21] S0: We would play, like, three on one with him versus... In Halo, and he'd still crush us instead of certain... And he's, like, so competitive that he's, like, he wins, and then he's not... He just rubs in your face and stuff. So, like, I realized at certain point, we had to... I I actually told him at one point, I was like, for the relationship, we're only gonna do co op games, going forward. So... [01:45:40] S1: Yeah. We need to win together. [01:45:41] S0: Yeah. He he hated that. He's like, what's the point if you're not competing and, like, you know, taking people's souls or whatever? [01:45:46] S1: Fred also had another thing when I was talking with him. He said, you are the king of never leaving a meeting without next steps. Yeah. How how... Why do you do that?
01:45:58 · Brian Armstrong
[01:45:58] S0: Yeah. Well, I mean, a meetings can be, like, really inefficient and ineffective if just a bunch of people come in without a clear objective, and you talk about a bunch of stuff, and no clear decision is made, and so you just all leave, and then you go... Nobody follows up and does anything. Right? So oftentimes we'll be sitting there in a meeting and there's like a hard call and everyone's... You know, and try to just prompt the room with that. Right? What are the next steps? What are the action items? It's one of my favorite things to say. He's he's right. And we actually try to write them down and look at them in the meeting. Oftentimes people are like, oh, cool. Like, think we got it, and we'll we'll follow-up. I'm like, do you got it? Like, let's look at it on the screen right now or in person. Who is going to do what by when? Right? And it's like sometimes people write these things that are a little bit too wishy washy for my taste, where they're like, Follow-up on this press release or something. And I'm like, What does follow-up mean? It's a very weak word, right? Do you want to publish it by this date? Do you want to... Review it? Yeah. Let's make something more concrete. And so... And then it it has... You have to identify who as well. Who's the DRI for this? Other times, people are like, I don't know. We're all gonna kinda work together on it. I'm like, no. You can all give input, but there's gotta be one person who owns this. So we we literally sit there and what is the person's name? What do we wanna get them to get done? And what's the target date? And then if we don't leave the meeting with that, it wasn't a useful meeting.
01:47:17 · Ty Morse
[01:47:17] S1: Is this something where you actually track it on... Like, say, okay. X person said y... They were going to do y by x, you know, z date. Or is this something where... I know... I don't think Elon actually keeps track, but he... That's... This is exactly what he'll do too. Is he, like, sit around a table, hear the company updates from all the different people, and then they'll each tell him what they're going to do. And as long as all those things are hit, there's no issue. And then if there isn't, then it... You know, and he just keeps it in his head. And he's... Apparently, that's, like, one of the things that he's best at is just keeping a whole bunch of different names of people and what they've said they were gonna do and by what date.
01:47:52 · Brian Armstrong
[01:47:52] S0: So this is a great point because I've tried to play with this as well. I... The... There actually is in the latest template that we use. So you're recording what did you get done last time versus what you said you were gonna do. Then you talk about what do we wanna get done next time. That's where you fill in the action items. And I have never found a perfect system to enforce the tracking, meaning like, what did we decide in this meeting? Who's going get what done by this date? And like, let's actually lock it into some database or something that they can't edit it later. And then when they come back the next time, it's like, system is producing... Here's what they said they were gonna do. It's... It can't be, like, edited retroactively. We're not that rigorous. These are typically documents that somebody could... They could delete a line, and, honestly, like, would I remember all of them? Maybe not. I mean, I I think I have a good general sense of what people are agreeing to, and I can always go look back at the history of the document. A lot of times you can actually use AI now to, like, basically give you... Just say, look at all the things that we agreed in the prior meeting, and then, like, does it match what's here? And so we're we're playing right now with getting AI generated summaries of, like, what were the things we said we're gonna do and did we do them and and who and what and by when. So I think AI can help with this, but I've never been able to get it super rigorously tracked. I think it's more of, like, yeah, I'm trying to keep it in my head as best I can.
01:49:06 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:49:06] S1: Is there any areas of business that you actually want to remain not entirely analytical and slightly fuzzy? [01:49:13] S0: Yeah. I mean, you can definitely over... Too much process around these things. So an example would be, you know, this past year, I think we acquired like 10 companies or something, and we looked at probably 50. I didn't look at all of them, the team did. And there was a point where I was like, We need to have a structured way to look at these deals. What is the revenue multiple and what do we think is the upside potential? And give me a one to five score on synergies and the cultural differences and the risks or whatever. And so we almost have a pipeline of deals and we can have some sort of apples to apples way to look at, like, okay, this one is a premium to our multiple, a discount to our multiple, like sort of common things. But I realized at a certain point that might be useful as, a first pass, but you're missing the forest through the trees if that's the way you look at these... Like, a lot of it comes down to, like, are the people great, and do you think there's something, you can really build together that's gonna be, like, a 10 or 100x? Like, whether it's a 10 or 15 x multiple in revenue is kinda like less relevant than what can you actually build together, and does it feel right? Like, is that like a, oh, yeah. That's a hell yes. Like, I would... You know, maybe you overpay for that deal. It doesn't really matter.
01:50:30 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:50:30] S1: Yeah. This reminds me of Steve Jobs and, like, Apple reacquiring Steve Jobs for, you know, $500,000,000 or whatever it was. And there was, you know, NeXT was doing whatever NeXT was doing, but effectively, they bought Steve Jobs for $500,000,000. Yeah. And the value that was created at Apple after Steve Jobs came back was worth many, many, many multiples of that. And if you were trying to look at any of the normal traditional, you know, revenue, that sort of thing metrics Yeah. You would have come to the wrong conclusion. [01:50:57] S0: That's a great example. You do oftentimes end up buying a company for a single person or a couple of founders, and and it... That's rough because it pisses people off sometimes on your existing team who are like, man, I don't make that much money. Like, what does that mean? Should I quit and go do it? And it's like, well, you could, but you also have to quit and build something, like, successful, and then maybe you get acquired back. But, you know, I I think that it can often... That's... Those are the ones that are surprising to people sometimes. A great person can be worth a lot. [01:51:25] S1: When you look back on the acquisitions that worked out the best and you kind of, like, do a blended, here's all the net results of of this acquisition, is the very best acquisitions in Coinbase history the ones where you had a founder that turned into an executive and it's just an absolutely killer executive at Coinbase now, and it's not even... Like, forget what the company was actually doing. It's just that one person.