Relentless
01:43:12 · Brian Armstrong
[01:43:12] S0: know? Have you ever watched Band of Brothers? No. Okay. Great TV show, HBO. Anyway, I I feel like I've learned a bit about business from watching that show strangely enough because there's certain moments where you have to, like, go deliver hard news to this person that, like, they're not gonna be the one leading it... Leading this invasion, and their their their skills are needed elsewhere. Right? Which is kind of a polite way to say them, like, you're not up to the job. Or going and telling, like, this group of people, you know, I'm about to ask you to do something which is terrible and unthinkable, but you need to get it done. Like... And then, like... So as a younger person kinda watching this show, I remember think... Watching it and thinking, wow. Okay. That's a... That's how you have that conversation. That's a moment of leadership. How would you say it? And, like, you don't wanna be, like... You know, you're not in a movie in real life, so you can go too far with these things. But there are certain scenes of, like, negotiation in films where I'm... Like, I remember watching that. And Game of Thrones has lots of stuff. I don't know if there's a specific one I took took inspiration from. Probably not. But, yeah, Band of Brothers is great. You should watch that.
01:44:12 · Ty Morse, Brian Armstrong
[01:44:12] S1: This was... My initial idea was copying, like, what I'd imagined the seventeenth century Rothschilds bank might look like. Yeah. But then I was like, this is a very clear example that... Like, I searched up the Rothschilds, I was like, there's no obvious... Like, this is the set for it. And it's just such an obvious set in in in Game of Thrones. [01:44:29] S0: Yeah. [01:44:29] S1: But we're not gonna go so far as, like, me offering you a bank loan on camera. There's... There is too far. Yeah. [01:44:35] S0: By the way, the the modern day banks in a digital economy with crypto, they actually look like distributed sets of data centers. Uh-huh. And the data centers have, like, biometrics and people with guns guarding them and, like, cool things like that too. So this is That's pretty badass. Yeah. Like, the old school physical vault is kinda fun, but in a digital world, it's, yeah, it's data centers and armed guards and biometrics. [01:45:00] S1: In the Coinbase doc as well, Fred's parents were talking about him just playing video games for hours and just not being able to pull him away from video games. Did you guys bond over video games? Somewhat. Yeah. [01:45:09] S0: I mean, would play, like, Halo sometimes, like, late in the evenings and stuff. But, honestly, Fred is, like, too good at most video games where it's just... It's like It's not fun. Yeah. He's [01:45:18] S1: There's, like, always winning, and then there's, like, you never win.
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.