Relentless
00:03:10 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[00:03:10] S1: Don't dwell? [00:03:10] S0: Yeah. Don't dwell on the past. Like, if you take a loss or like this thing didn't go your way, it's like, okay, what could I have done better? Boom. And then just get after it again and keep moving. And there are, like, lots of people who are introspective at times. So I think, you know, like anything, you could take it probably to an extreme. In my experience as an entrepreneur, I was always just, like, biased toward action, and that would most things I tried didn't work the first time, but I was just kind of stubborn and didn't care about looking stupid, and I would just kept doing it over and over again. And you... Eventually, you rack up enough lessons where something kind of halfway works, and then it really starts to work. And even to this day, like, you're not trying ambitious enough things where it might fail, then you're, you know, you're holding back and you're not fulfilling your full potential. So I tend to bias toward action like that. There are moments where I also sit down and I try to think about, okay, what could I have done better in that moment and, like, you know, do a little journaling and stuff, but then just the next day, just get after it, like, and don't reflect too much on the past. [00:04:07] S1: What was the last decision that you made where you kind of made a very big judgment call to just get after it?
00:04:13 · Brian Armstrong
[00:04:13] S0: Well, there's been some big calls in Coinbase's history that I think accidentally ended up sort of defining our brand. Right? One of them was this mission first blog post where we decided, actually, we're not gonna do political social activism in the workplace. We're just gonna focus on the mission. At the time that came out, that was controversial and surprising, and, you know, people thought 50% of the company was gonna quit. It turned out to be a lot less than that. Five. Yeah. And then another one was we actually ended up suing the SEC, a very contrarian thing to do as a public company CEO. Most people told me not to do that, but the SEC chair at that time was, in our view, kind of unlawfully trying to kill the whole industry in The United States, and we felt like we had to preserve the industry in The United States to get at least to a better place, and we ended up winning that lawsuit. Even this current market structure legislation is being debated for crypto today. You know, we're unafraid to stand up and say... Like, there was a draft that got put out there, which we we said, actually, we think this would be bad for crypto. Here's the things that we see as issues, and I think we were very respectful about it and and defer to the... All the hard work that the people are doing to to make that go forward. But I I think we're unafraid to stand up and just say what what we think is true if we see something that's messed up. And sometimes that riles people up. Sometimes I think it's our finest hour because it helps us define... It shows courage. And people... Actually, of our customers, when they see me in person, they'll come up and say, thank you so much for standing up for this or that or that. It's like the thing that I get the most positive feedback on that really gives people affinity to the brand and and what we stand for. So it turned out accidentally to be like our best marketing moments or brand moments, even though they were the kind of thing like a more risk averse CEO probably would never do.
00:05:53 · Ty Morse
[00:05:53] S1: Are those types of bets and being willing to take that risk something that you learned and got better at over time?
00:05:59 · Brian Armstrong
[00:05:59] S0: Yeah. So I think all leaders or people in these positions, you have to develop this judgment over time, which is because as an entrepreneur, sometimes you have a lot of contrarian ideas. Like my default is kind of to question everything from first principles, and that can really piss off your teams where it's like, Why are we using this HR software? This thing sucks. Like, we should just build our own. At some point, you're like, Okay, let's pick the top few things that we wanna focus on and do really unique contrarian stuff. And the rest of it, let's, you know, take the off the shelf solution. So I do think you can be contrarian to a fault, and you really have to pick your battles. It's also like if you're building an executive team and a board and, like, people around you that are these, like, really brilliant people with their each... Their own skill set, you know, there's a balance where you want them to be able to come to you and and tell you, Brian, that's too crazy. Like, don't don't do that one. Or Brian, I I think you're wrong on this. Here's the thing you're missing. So they have to be able to, like, have enough trust to be able to tell you when you're being an idiot. But they also have to trust you enough where once in a while, if you're like, I get... I hear what you're saying, and I I wanna do it anyway. And then they're like, okay. Let's go that way. And they have to be able to... Willing to follow you into battle. And so I think that's like a balance that lots of employees and executives are thinking about at any given moment. And there's been times where I'm pissed because nobody agrees with me, and I force it through, and then I regret it later. Right? And there's been times where I forced it through, and it was the best choice. So that just comes from being in the arena, getting enough experience where you start to trust your instincts versus question it.
00:07:30 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[00:07:30] S1: I've noticed that if you want people to give you feedback, you have to actively give them the ability to do so. So you can't just expect them to come out and say something that they're feeling in most cases. You have to kinda, like, pull it out of them at first, and then over time, it becomes easier to pull it out. What's your kind of process for building that trust when you have some new partner? [00:07:49] S0: Yeah. It's really true. I think that it's really hard to get truth out of people, especially if you're their boss. Right? There's actually a lot of instances where I think people are afraid to tell me things within the company even though I actually would appreciate it or I try to go out of my way to recognize people publicly who were willing to disagree and they were right, or there's things that I was wrong on, and I try to surface those examples. But you don't want it to be just like a big complaint inbox, like flowing upward. You also need to be directing the company. And so I think of it as a balance. It's like, how much are they applying pressure to you and how much pressure are you applying to them? And it should be, I don't know, roughly equal. If you're just a top down dictatorship, you're probably missing out on a lot of the value of all the smart people that you've hired, and that's a bad strategy. But if you're just sitting there with like, I'm on this feedback listening tour, There's times in the past where I think I went too far with that, where I was just like, all right, everyone has a lot of emotions. Like, let me go around and
00:07:49 · Brian Armstrong, Ty Morse
[00:07:49] S0: Yeah. It's really true. I think that it's really hard to get truth out of people, especially if you're their boss. Right? There's actually a lot of instances where I think people are afraid to tell me things within the company even though I actually would appreciate it or I try to go out of my way to recognize people publicly who were willing to disagree and they were right, or there's things that I was wrong on, and I try to surface those examples. But you don't want it to be just like a big complaint inbox, like flowing upward. You also need to be directing the company. And so I think of it as a balance. It's like, how much are they applying pressure to you and how much pressure are you applying to them? And it should be, I don't know, roughly equal. If you're just a top down dictatorship, you're probably missing out on a lot of the value of all the smart people that you've hired, and that's a bad strategy. But if you're just sitting there with like, I'm on this feedback listening tour, There's times in the past where I think I went too far with that, where I was just like, all right, everyone has a lot of emotions. Like, let me go around and [00:08:46] S1: We're gonna do a healing circle? [00:08:47] S0: Yeah. Trust falls or whatever. I mean, that was a failure of leadership as well. So every day you're finding that balance. [00:08:54] S1: Have there been any other really big moments where you tried to lead in a certain way and then you realized only in hindsight that that was an absolutely terrible decision and, like, course corrected?