Relentless
00:56:55 · Ty Morse
[00:56:55] S1: There's this idea of wartime CEO and peacetime CEO. And I feel like, especially in crypto, there's this nice oscillation of wartime peacetime, wartime peacetime. Yeah. Do you enjoy when everything is going well, or do you enjoy kind of when there's something that is like this absolute top priority where if you don't get it done like today or this week or this month, everything's fucked? Like, which part of the cycle do you enjoy the most?
00:57:19 · Brian Armstrong
[00:57:19] S0: You know, I used to think that I was better as a peacetime CEO, but I think that's not true. It's actually totally flipped. I think it's wartime all the time, and I actually realized that I like wartime. It took me... That's probably a change that happened over the last ten years or something in the last... First five years of Coinbase, where initially, I think I was a little conflict averse, and I was just kind of, like, walking on eggshells and let's just build. And, you know, that had a time and place, but there's a real sense of motivation and urgency that comes from wartime. I actually think competition makes us better as a company. It definitely... I find it very energizing and motivating. It can make you, like, really pissed in certain moments too, but it's actually, like, very energizing. And sometimes when there there isn't any kind of conflict or war going on, I get a little bored and tired. I'm just like, ah, like, what's... You know, it seems like nothing's blowing up right now, and I could use a good crisis. Now somebody might say you're just running on cortisol all the time, and there might... There could be an element of truth to that, but I, you know, I try to balance it with the things we talked about of, exercise and, like, you know, have a wind down routine in the evening. So you... It's not just, like, burning yourself out, like, by literally being fight or flight, like, twenty four seven. But I like... And I should clarify. I don't wanna be, like, doing conflict for conflict's sake. I think that that's just destructive. But if you see something that A
00:58:46 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[00:58:46] S1: clear problem that needs to be solved, something to fight after... Like, fight for. [00:58:49] S0: Yeah. Like, if you don't speak up and say something about it, like, then you're failing as a leader, I think. So, yeah. Wartime is great. I'll actually... I love conflict. [00:58:58] S1: There's this wonderful line. I was listening to a podcast with Jessica Livingston and Brian Chesky probably a year and a half ago, and he was talking about how, like, during March, in, like, eight weeks, 80% of the revenue disappeared. [00:59:11] S0: Mhmm. [00:59:12] S1: And he said the worst companies are basically destroyed in a crisis. Decent companies are... You know, survived the crisis. The best companies are, like, defined by the crisis. Yeah. I think that's probably the same thing for CEOs as well of those companies. What have been the biggest, like, defining moments of crisis for you?
00:59:12 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[00:59:12] S1: And he said the worst companies are basically destroyed in a crisis. Decent companies are... You know, survived the crisis. The best companies are, like, defined by the crisis. Yeah. I think that's probably the same thing for CEOs as well of those companies. What have been the biggest, like, defining moments of crisis for you? [00:59:29] S0: Yeah. Well, I talked about some of them with, you know, mission first and SEC and everything, and this market structure legislation has been a nice, like, good debate. Like, we're... I think we're getting to a good outcome. But I'll tell you maybe, like, an interesting early war story that sticks with me on letting a crisis be a defining moment, right? So this was relatively early on in Coinbase's history. I think we were maybe three or four years in, and we had built this initial custody system for crypto, and the number of users was growing so rapidly that the amount of money we were storing live on the server was also growing very rapidly. And there was a dangerous moment where I knew that if we got hacked based on this amount that was growing, like, every week, there was... Within, like, sixty days, the amount was growing fast enough where if we got hacked, then we would be insolvent. [01:00:24] S1: It'd be, like, more money than in your bank account.
01:00:25 · Brian Armstrong
[01:00:25] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So it'd be game over. Right? And you're always just trying to, like, how do you not die and make it to the next step of the game? So if you just don't die sometimes in business, like, that's enough to succeed because everyone else dies. And so this was a moment where I I didn't really know how to build. I mean, I I studied computer science. I had studied... Like, taken a class in computer security, but I was not like an expert in cryptography or anything like that. Right? And we didn't have that many people in the company yet. It was either. It was pretty... Still a relatively small team, relatively junior team. So as I often do when I'm trying to, like, figure it out, I think, like, who who would I know in the world that could help with this? Right? So I called two people, and they were both cryptography experts. Actually, one of them was Zooko, who later created Zcash. One of them was this guy, Ryan Lackey, who's, a security professional, really interesting dude. And I called both of them, and I said, we need to build this next generation cold storage system to store a ton of crypto. Number one, what's the right architecture to build it? And they gave me their opinion on that. And then I said, number two, how long do you think it would take to build it? And both of them said something like, this would take a team of 10 people about two years to build it. And I was like, well, we have about sixty days. And by the way, it's like really just like me and this one other guy. Like, we don't have like a big team. And and so they were like, oh, that sounds, really challenging, you know, but, like, let me know if I can help. Good luck. And so this was one of those kind of crisis moments where it could have ended the company, but it actually turned into a defining moment because what we did was we sat down, and this was like myself and Charlie Lee and Craig and a couple other early employees, and we said, we're not going to be able to do like a perfect system that a giant company would be able to do, but we can do a pretty good system. And a lot of engineering is trade offs, right? It's like, okay, what would get us 80% of the solution for 20% of the work here? The remaining 20% that's not there, can we live with that? Can we mitigate that risk? How might we mitigate it?
01:02:24 · Brian Armstrong, Ty Morse
And so we actually sat down within like three or four or five days, we had designed like what we thought was their next architecture. We started to go and code it up. We then had the challenge of trying to transfer all of the old system into the new system. And I remember as we were racing the clock towards this sixty day mark, we were all, like, pretty sleep deprived. And if you study how accidents happen in history, like the Exxon Valdez spill and even the Challenger explosion, a lot of these things can be traced back to sleep deprivation as one of the [01:02:52] S1: contributing factors. Mean, I Brian Johnson literally has this graph where it's like decision making quality over the course of a day, and it's just... Yeah. Yeah.