Relentless
01:21:25 · Brian Armstrong, Ty Morse
[01:21:25] S0: You know, in terms of hiring people or in terms of For example, [01:21:29] S1: Elon is like, we're gonna go to Mars, and we're gonna go build the Mars base. And the proof of having a Starship actually land back and get caught is like a massive just, oh my god. This is actually happening. They're able to do something that no one else... You've never seen it before. Yep. And it changes the way that you think.
01:21:46 · Brian Armstrong
[01:21:46] S0: Well, you're right. I think, like, all successful people, you you wanna sort of leave a trail of these remarkable moments, good work, basically, that people can see, and it's self evident. Right? It could be... It could show up in revenue numbers. It could show up in stories like that when I told about rebuilding our cold storage system in sixty days. Sometimes there's really iconic moments. Right? Like like Starship landing or getting caught in the, you know, the mecha arms or whatever. Right? In hardware, sometimes those are... It's a little easier to see, like like an Anduril drone, like, blowing something up or something. Right? Like, that's that's proof of work that's, like, nice and a really nice visual. Sometimes in software, you don't get quite like those killer moments, like, with hardware that you... So you have to show it in numbers. I think you can show it quantitatively, like this graph is going up. You can also show it anecdotally with, like, let's talk to this person who is able to, like, send money to a home to their family without, like, paying 10% fees, right? So you wanna touch both, like, the quantitative brains out there and the emotional brains and, like, get a message for everyone in that. And... Yeah. And I I... That's one way to think of it.
01:23:03 · Ty Morse
[01:23:03] S1: On that same kind of note, the idea of, like, emotion and touching people's... You know, touching people emotionally, making them feel things, how how do you actually do that? Like, what what is going through your head when you're saying this is the message or thing that I want someone to feel? Here's how do you go actually go about doing that?
01:23:21 · Brian Armstrong
[01:23:21] S0: Well, I think I'll give you an example, which is for us, our mission is increasing economic freedom in the world. We need to make that tangible to people and have them feel something about it. Right? So we often end up talking about how money is really freedom. Right? Like, if you want to be able to go where you want to go, create the companies you want, have freedom of transportation and congregation and movement, like, you need money to be able to do that, and money has been getting less free over time. Right? There's more intermediaries that can block transactions. The value of your currency might be getting eroded due to inflation. There's a lot of people in the world who have their assets, like, frozen or seized or, you know, their things get blocked for various reasons. And if you have a sense of, like, agency in the world and the ability to accomplish what you wanna do with your own hard earned money, like, freedom... Or I should say money is an important tool to have freedom on as well. So that's part of what we're doing at Coinbase is, like, giving people financial freedom and economic freedom with these tools and with crypto that's updating the financial system. And we try to do this through some of our brand advertising at times where we'll tell people stories about what it means to break free and live outside the matrix and not be an NPC and be able to actually have control of your own life and keep the upsides of your labor and try to create a better life for you and your family and your community. It's a luxury that we have in certain ways, but most people in the world don't have. And so those are... That's an example of, like, touching on the emotional aspect of what we're building, not just literally, you know, our transaction time went from one hundred and twenty milliseconds to twenty milliseconds. Like, that's selling the data. You also have to tell the story about what it's actually creating in the world.
01:25:19 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:25:19] S1: Do you know the logic behind this or the reasoning behind this set? [01:25:22] S0: Well, I think you said it was Game of Thrones. Right? Is it the bank? What is it? The... Not the iron bank. [01:25:26] S1: The iron bank [01:25:27] S0: of bronze. Okay. [01:25:28] S1: But, basically, the idea was I came across this idea that you've shared, which is, you know, Coinbase is trying to update the financial system. And I thought to myself, even before, like, Lulu reached out, I was thinking to myself for probably, like, two months ish, and then she randomly text me on Twitter. And she's like, do you wanna do an interview with Brian Armstrong? And I was like, yes, but only if we can do it under these conditions, which was like in a bank vault on top of the world's largest Bitcoin. And and she thought that was funny and wasn't totally serious, and then, you know, here we are. But my goal with this was basically showcase what old finance looks like Mhmm. And also, like, celebrate the reason, you know, for founding Coinbase, which is basically to buy Bitcoin and kind of marry the old with the new. Right? So it's kind like a baton passing. [01:26:09] S0: Yeah. I mean, I should be asking you how to, like, tell the story in a way that resonates with people emotionally. Like, I... You're you're bringing together a lot of key pieces of it here. So thank you for putting this this cool vision together. I mean, that's made out of granite, I'm told. [01:26:23] S1: Marble. [01:26:23] S0: Marble. Okay. [01:26:24] S1: Yeah. It's gonna be in your house if you want it. It's yours now.
01:26:24 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:26:24] S1: Yeah. It's gonna be in your house if you want it. It's yours now. [01:26:28] S0: We might put that in our office, actually. I think that would be sick. [01:26:30] S1: I was trying to create a full statue of Satoshi, but the problem is is, like, people won't intuitively get Satoshi. Yeah. And so I was like, well, what's the next best thing? And I was like, we could create a massive Bitcoin. [01:26:38] S0: Yeah. [01:26:38] S1: I think the best for... Like, the best founders are able to figure out how can I, like, build a company where at any given moment, I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm, like, setting? You know, extending the the goal post out so that you're on this, you know, infinite game. How are you kind of designing today so that you have those future milestones where you're really excited to wake up in the morning and tackle them?