00:34:56 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Armstrong
[00:34:56] S1: Are you having fun with all of this? [00:34:58] S0: Oh yeah. Mean, AI is making everything exciting right now. I think we're living in a golden age and, you know, it's part of the really exciting thing is we get to go build the financial infrastructure for this agentic economy. Most people, I think, today think of AI as like, oh, I just talk to one agent at a time, and maybe I ask it a question about my investment account or something. But in the future, you're increasingly gonna talk to one agent. That agent is gonna orchestrate hundreds of thousands of other agents. It's gonna pay for goods and services with companies that it needs to engage with to get work done on your behalf. And so, we need a new financial infrastructure for that. That can do very small amounts, very frequent amounts, where every AI agent can actually have its own financial account that doesn't have to go through a typical AI agents don't have a piece of government issued paper with their identity, and they can't fill out a CAPTCHA and all these things, so they're gonna need a new way to pay and have a financial account, and that's what we've built at Coinbase. [00:36:03] S1: How are you staying on top of everything? Max Levchin said that he's reading research papers. I interviewed Sebastian from Klarna. He's vibe coding and going on demos most of the time. How are you staying on track of everything on top of all the regulatory hot takes for crypto?
00:36:23 · Brian Armstrong
[00:36:23] S0: Yeah. Well, I mean, I have started writing some code again using AI agents. I test out the tools every few months, make sure I can ship a few pull requests and, like, still get in get in the weeds. But the other thing that I'm doing is I'm really just taking we have some of the best tech talent in the world, and some of these folks are I just go around and talk to all different teams. Some of them are creating a brain for their team where all the context of that team is getting updated continuously. So every time, like, a new lesson appears, whether from an AB test or customer feedback or an incident happens or anything like that, it's like the collective knowledge of that team just keeps getting updated in the brain of that team, right, in GitHub. Usually these are in markdown files. And we're gonna start to do that on more and more teams, and eventually you're gonna have be the intelligence of the whole company coming together, like the aggregate of all of these different team pieces of knowledge. Right? And that's what allows the AI agents to get smarter when they go build the next feature. And you have to it's like a shift in mindset where, you know, let's say that it creates a draft pull request for some new feature, and it's not quite perfect. Your instinct typically would be to go in there and actually edit the pull request to make it better. But what you wanna do is actually update the context, the brain that generated it, and say, okay, when you one of these, do it in this slightly different way. Don't forget about this. This is important, and have it rerun itself and generate a brand new one, and only when it one shots it perfectly, then do you ship it, because now you've encoded the thing that it missed in the brain for all future teammates and all future pull requests, and so it's a slight shift in how teams need to think about building the recursive self improvement of that brain over time, and not just editing the work of the AI itself.
00:38:19 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Armstrong
[00:38:19] S1: So I was just in Paris, I was visiting Alex from Deal. He says he loves you, and that you're a great customer. [00:38:26] S0: Yeah. [00:38:27] S1: But he was really curious how you split roles with Emily. [00:38:31] S0: Well, Emily Choi, yeah, she's the president COO at Coinbase for anybody who doesn't know. And I'd say she and I are a really great compliment because, a lot of value gets created in companies, I think, when you have founder energy and a really strong operator. If you have only founder energy, sometimes it's a little erratic and things go wrong. If you have only operators, I think you can have a very well run company, but it might be more incremental or not have as much innovation, and Emily and I, honestly, we can each do both, but we like to play to our strengths, and so, yeah, we really had kind of like a second founding moment with Coinbase, because Coinbase got co founded with Fred Ursson, who's still on the board, and he's hugely responsible for the early success of Coinbase. And we had a second founding moment, I think, with Emily, and that's what's allowed Coinbase to generate a ton of value. She's also just like a talent magnet. I mean, she's really great at just recruiting the best people in the world to all kinds of different functions we have. [00:39:26] S1: She seems like a total badass. [00:39:28] S0: She is. [00:39:29] S1: She seems pretty cool. [00:39:30] S0: Yeah, I think she's the best operator in the industry.
00:39:30 · Brian Armstrong, Molly O'Shea
[00:39:30] S0: Yeah, I think she's the best operator in the industry. [00:39:33] S1: We also just saw Kat. And so like how, okay, this is a fair question on the whole AI lens of things. AI has like a horrible brand right now. People are very pessimistic against it. You built a company in a highly regulated speculative environment, but have made it legitimate and trusted and cool. And like, by the way, your marketing still crushes. Like, I think I tweeted this out months ago because you guys did the Super Bowl ad, which was super fun, and then you did the earnings calls, which had, like, the subway racer kind of things, which were really fun. So how would you take what AI is is kind of branded as today, and, what would you change about that and the storytelling around it?
00:40:19 · Brian Armstrong
[00:40:19] S0: One thing I kind of learned over time was don't apologize for what you're doing. Have an opinion about the world, how you're improving it, and what you want to see the future. And there's gonna be lots of people out there with their own agendas. They're gonna try to build their own status by trying to tear you down. I think the AI companies, they've been a little bit first, there's too much fear mongering. Right? Like, this is gonna take everyone's jobs, and you should come regulate us. I I don't think that's helpful or necessary. And then I think that, if I were in their shoes, would just be a little bit more unapologetic about it. I'd be like, look, we're building this because we think it's going to be an incredible benefit to humanity and everyone can have their own AI tutor. You can have good mentor, can have a therapist, you can have a better doctor. For anybody sitting there saying that, I already have a great doctor. Would never use an AI. You're sitting there from a position of privilege. Many people in the world don't have the best access to the best doctors of the world, and, like, these AI agents are gonna create a world of abundance. And so we're going forward. And, you know, if you don't like the product, you don't have to use it. Right? It's, like, it's literally that simple. That's the approach that I would probably take, and I think at Coinbase, there's many times where we had to really stand up for our values even when it was unpopular. And maybe there was some bad actor in crypto, or maybe the SEC was, trying to kill the industry in The US and we had to sue them, and actually, went we won that case. Right? Or the Mission First blog post, or even with the Clarity Act that's going through Congress now, we see, like, the bank lobby trying to push back against that and say, oh, it's so dangerous. And they're just, they have a conflict of interest because they're trying to protect their own business model. Right? So we're always gonna stand up for what we believe is right. It doesn't mean you're not open to feedback. Like, if there's people who have your best interests at heart, I think you should be listening to that. But if there's people out there who just have their own agenda and they're trying to, you know, don't don't do any virtue signaling.
00:42:29 · Brian Armstrong, Molly O'Shea
Don't just try to optimize for optics of like, how do we look good into the world? Mhmm. People can see through that, and it actually backfires. I think you should just have an opinion, stand for it, and don't apologize. [00:42:42] S1: You mentioned this in a interview you did with David Sundra, where you were talking about the New York Times hit piece. And you said that you think everybody should have a New York Times hit piece. What did that teach you? What happened there by the way, for the people who don't know the context?