Relentless
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?
01:26:59 · Brian Armstrong
[01:26:59] S0: Well, okay. So we have the things that we're excited about right now, like, let's say next three, four years, and I'll try to touch on, like, the big long term picture. So there's a few things we're focused on right now. One is the everything exchange. So every asset class is coming on chain, and it's gonna be stocks and commodities and crypto and prediction markets and FX, and everything is now gonna trade, like, 20 fourseven globally, democratized access. And I think that's the future of all trading and value exchange. Okay. Then we're seeing stablecoin payments just take off in a massive way. That's the second big use case for crypto, so we're making a bunch of investments there. And now you can send money instantly anywhere in the world for, like, less than one second, right, anywhere in the world. So that's powerful, and we're going to see AI agents start to do a lot of machine to machine payments and, like, a bunch of cool stuff's happening there. And then we're seeing that... We're like, more of crypto in the financial services is is moving on chain into these, like, decentralized protocols, like decentralized exchanges, DeFi, and that's a big... With our self custodial wallets, like, these allow us to operate in more emerging markets. Like, how do we get a billion people on chain? I think we're gonna have to be self custodial wallet. This is, our base app and what we're doing with base chain. And so those are, like, our three big priorities right now. And I think long term, you know, the mission of the company is really about increasing economic freedom in the world. So how could we actually, like, bend the curve on economic freedom in a bunch of these countries? Because everybody has a smartphone now. They have access to the Internet. Now they have access to sound money, global payment system. They can invest in assets, get access to, like, high quality investment assets. They can get a loan. They can do capital formation to start a business in a way that's much more efficient. I think ultimately, like, we're kind of unbundling money from the state, if you will. And I think there could actually be eventually, communities, cities, societies, countries.